The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint Read online

  “False alarm,” Art said finally, and we descended together into the swampy air of St. Divine’s.

  THE FIRES OF HELL

  A HOT THURSDAY night in April, and Ismore and Edgar were the only ones awake. On Barry’s regular visiting night Jeffrey was usually bright-eyed and fidgety, his face putting off a low-wattage glow of expectation, but tonight he was twittering peacefully, absolutely nightmare-free.

  I rubbed my urinal puck between my palms and occasionally looked over at Ismore, who was glaring at the ceiling like he was willing it to fall in on him. After awhile, I noticed an orange flicker lighting up the window and climbed off my bed to have a look. Across the dark plain the smelter was pulsing with bursts of light and what looked like magma ran down the black heaps in thick, slow-moving rivulets. Through one of the large open doors I could see sparks flying and a sudden orange flare like fireworks going off, and here came more molten slag, farther along the line, snaking down the piles. The sight made a thrill run through me, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake Art; he was sleeping just as peacefully as Jeffrey, his lungs creaking like an old screen door.

  Instead of getting back into bed, I paced the tiled floor of the room, my guts roiling. Occasionally I peeked out the door to see if Night Nurse was at her station, but the hall was dark and silent, the whole hospital unnaturally quiet.

  “Eat shit,” I said to myself as I paced, “eat shit, eat shit, eat shit.”

  I ran my fingers along the keys of the Hermes Jubilee, held the urinal puck cool against my face.

  “That’s good, that’s real, real nice,” Jeffrey croaked in his sleep.

  Five seconds before I felt the vibration of Barry coming up the fire escape, I knew he was there. Unlike the other times he had come up, there was no clang clang clang, only the slightest trembling—the fire escape would make more noise than that in a light spring wind.

  I stood frozen at the window for a minute, then turned and hunched over so my face was right next to Art’s. “Wake up,” I said, waving the urinal puck directly under his nose the way I’d seen the nurses use smelling salts on fainters in the Dungeon. Art stirred a little and I put my hand on his scarred jaw, moved it around until his head popped up. He seemed to struggle with all the muscles in his face to open his eyes.

  “Edgar?” he said, his bloodshot eyeballs rolling in their sockets, trying to focus.

  “Barry’s coming up right now,” I told him, my voice a hiss. “He told me he’s going to take me away. He said he’s coming to get me.”

  Art seemed to see me for the first time. He said, “Go, get in your bed. Hurry now.”

  I was pulling my covers up when Barry’s form appeared on the fire escape. He slid the window open as far as it would go and gingerly stepped in, as graceful as a cat. He had an army rucksack slung over one shoulder, a yellow flashlight in his hand.

  He looked around the room, sidled over and sat on the edge of my bed, started pulling things out of the rucksack. “Ready to go?” he said brightly, not bothering to whisper.

  I looked at Art, who hadn’t moved.

  “Don’t worry about them,” Barry said, grinning. “Look at ’em sawing logs. I made sure a couple of sleeping pills got into their after-dinner meds. Here, put on these clothes I got for you. Are you ready to hit the wide-open highways? Man, this is exciting!” Barry was wearing a silk jacket with a dragon stitched in gold thread on the back. When he turned the dragon writhed and coiled in the indefinite light.

  Busy pulling socks and pants and bright new hightops from his bag, he didn’t notice Art slide off his bed and stand up as straight as he could manage, his back to the window, his small, bent form lit by the flickering orange glow.

  “Get away from the boy,” Art said.

  Barry didn’t even turn around, just sighed and leaned with both arms against my bed, shaking his head, as if this was something he had been expecting all along. “Art, this is none of your business. Go back to sleep and we won’t have any problems.”

  “You get away from that boy now.” Art took a step closer.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Barry said, stuffing the clothes back into the bag. When he began to slide his hands underneath me to lift me up, Art was on him, clamping onto him from behind, both arms locked around his waist, dragging him to the floor. Barry pitched to the left, arms flailing, trying to twist away until both he and Art crashed together into the foot rail of Jeffrey’s bed, pulling down Jeffrey’s IV bottle, which bounced once on the mattress and crashed onto the floor, its clear liquid spreading out into a thin puddle that reflected the murky shapes in the room like a mirror.

  Barry was the first to his feet. He had two fistfuls of Art’s gown and with a great groan he swung him around and let go, heaving Art into the wall. There was a moment of silence—Art didn’t move and Barry bent over, his chest heaving—and then Art was up again, bull-rushing Barry with his head down, his arms held wide.

  What a strange sight to see Barry, a giant, oversized baby, battling Art, an old child-sized man, as they slipped and clutched at each other between the beds. Edgar, filled with the rare adrenaline of violence and fear, clapped his helmet on his head and began winging whatever he could get his hands on—urinal puck, crayons, bedpan—and slinging them into the middle of the melee.

  Barry and Art went to the floor again—the broken glass cracking and grinding underneath their knees and elbows—and now Barry had a solid advantage, straddling Art’s torso and twisting his bad arm until Art roared like an animal, his oiled hair breaking loose and flapping over his face. Once I was all out of small objects to throw I didn’t even think about it. I lifted the Hermes Jubilee off my night table, positioned myself at the bottom of my bed and heaved it over the edge. One corner of it clipped the edge of my mattress, which altered its trajectory so that it caught Barry square in the small of the back, making a horrible ringing noise as it rolled onto the floor, a noise that left me with a pang of instant regret.

  Barry arched his spine, yelping in pain, which gave Art the opportunity to turn and deliver a forearm shot to Barry’s throat that made him go to the floor face-first, slumping in on himself like a man made entirely of rubber. Art then proceeded to deliver a series of short, vicious rabbit punches to the side of Barry’s head, the bones of his fist making a hollow popping noise against Barry’s skull. I could see that all the hurt and anger was coming out with those punches, and he delivered them with a satisfied ferocity, with a zealous light in his eyes, like a preacher pounding the pulpit. He didn’t seem to tire, showed no signs of stopping, until Night Nurse, scolding and piping wildly about patients needing their rest, burst through the door, slid a foot or two in the IV fluid and landed on her ass.

  There were a few seconds of silence before Jeffrey turned over in his bed, yanked his blanket up around his chin and groaned, “Jesus it’s hard to sleep around here.”

  I was amazed to see Barry, after lying as still as a corpse, push Art away, stand up and make a barking series of coughs, trying to get air in and out through his damaged windpipe. As he stumbled for the window, he looked over at me for a moment and I could see pieces of glass stuck in his chin and cheekbone, the dozens of tiny cuts inflicted by Art’s knuckles. His ear—swollen and raw as a fresh pork cutlet—was bleeding two thick lines of blood down his neck.

  Barry didn’t bother trying to climb through the window, just dove through it headfirst, his pants catching and ripping on the latch, his feet clattering against the sill as he pulled himself through. There was the wild clanging of the fire escape as he bounded down it and the squeal of tires as he sped off into the flat darkness, heading, it seemed, straight for the smelter, where lava flowed and burned in the darkness like the fires of hell.

  “Don’t you ever come back here!” Art roared out the window, his face the twisted, flickering orange of a devil’s. “You come around this boy again and I will kill you dead!”

  LEAVING ST. DIVINE’S

  MY GOING-AWAY party, though sparse
ly attended and about as festive as a funeral wake, was the only going-away party for a patient anyone at St. Divine’s could remember. “God help us with all the hubbub you’ve caused around here,” said Nurse Lovett, who had red valentine lips painted over her regular lips, “but it looks like we’re going to miss you.”

  Along with a few other nurses and some orderlies looking for free cookies and punch, Sue Kay was there, as was Mrs. Rodale and Jeffrey, who was sweating and suffering as usual in his wheelchair. The cafeteria ladies had made a cake for me on which was written ¡VAYA CON DIOS EDGAR! in mangled pink icing and there were a couple of bowls of pastel butter mints that were so hardened and chalk-like the partygoers had no choice but to spit them into napkins or directly into the empty aluminum garbage can, which every so often rang out with a hollow, ricocheting ga-gong. The party was held in the old chapel (now used for staff meetings), which was a spacious, high-ceilinged room with a crucifix so far up the wall that in all these years since the government had taken over for the Catholic church, nobody had the ambition or daring to climb up there and pull it down. So while we drank watery punch and picked the slabs of hardened icing off our pieces of cake, a bloody, battered Jesus looked down on us in pity from His cross.

  In the week since Barry and Art had brawled in our hospital room, a week full of visits by the police asking questions about Barry’s nocturnal visits and tittering gossip among the nurses and the patients in the Dungeon, a week in which Art, despite his newly bruised ribs and dislocated shoulder, had disregarded the doctor’s advice, packed up his things and gone home to his empty house in the hills, Edgar had lost one of his front teeth. Nearly overwhelmed with nervousness and dread, he grinned as broadly as he could, showing off the new gap in his smile. In one hour a government van would come to pick him up and fetch him to the William Tecumseh Sherman School, where he would stay into some indefinite future.

  The party didn’t last fifteen minutes before the chitchat died down and the nurses began scattering to their rounds. This is when Art, dressed in a natty dark blue suit like an ink stain in the white of the hospital, showed up in the doorway lugging an enormous green suitcase on wheels, the scarred mess of his face a glowing pink, his hair slicked back over his scalp. In his baggy civilian clothes, Art looked so tiny and pathetic I hardly recognized him.

  “Lookit,” he said. “My friend lost a tooth.”

  Jeffrey scowled and nobody said hello to Art except for Sue Kay, who called him sweetie pie and told him he better come get some cake before Delancey got off his morning shift and ate everything in sight.

  Now the room emptied quickly: Jeffrey banging around in his wheelchair and knocking his cast against the doorjamb on the way out, Sue Kay giving me an armful of school supplies from the Dungeon and hugging me so hard my ribs creaked, Nurse Lovett handing me a stack of postcards and making me promise to write. Soon it was me, Mrs. Rodale, and Art, who kept forgetting how bad the mints were and now had three or four of them clicking around in his mouth, too polite to spit them out.

  We went back up to the room. Ismore kept his withering stare locked on all of us while Mrs. Rodale helped me out of my gown and into a stiff new pair of jeans and a store-smelling T-shirt and showed me how to put on and tie the laces of some outsize brogans she had taken from the Lost and Found over at the YMCA. She chattered the whole time, telling me that she and the rest of the agency had checked out everything thoroughly, that Uncle Julius was a good, caring man even though he couldn’t come down to the hospital because he didn’t own a car, didn’t know how to drive, and refused to ride in any motor vehicle whatsoever.

  “They’ll take good care of you up at Fort Apache,” she said, while I loaded my urinal puck, my stacks of paper and my other odds and ends into the duffel bag (another item from the YMCA). “Those are your people, you know.”

  After walking down the halls for the last time, the nurses scurrying over to kiss me on the forehead and pat me on the helmet, everything moving by in a haze, we emerged into the blank white light of the out-of-doors. It was only April, but a hot breath of wind hit us full in the face, sucking at our clothes, lifting up a plume of dust around us and sending it out into the vast, corroded expanse of hills and water-cut arroyos. I felt so light, so unmoored, that if I dropped my duffel bag and kicked off these shoes that felt like mailboxes on my feet, the wind could easily have lifted me away.

  Art asked Mrs. Rodale if he might have a moment alone with me. I followed him around to the other side of an old saguaro growing in a patch of white gravel and he opened up the suitcase, which he had been pulling behind him like a dog on a leash, and showed me what I had dared not ask about, my Hermes Jubilee. He had taken it home with him and retooled the whole thing entirely, replaced its bent arms, fixed the platen which had come loose, and written my name on its side with a metal engraver: Property of Edgar P. Mint. Also in the suitcase were some folded clothes—T-shirts and jeans his daughters had once worn—a large tea jar full of hard candy—“a fella’s got to have his sweets now and again”—and a pile of National Geographics to look at if I ever got bored.

  “I got two things else I want to give you,” he said, squatting down next to me. He pulled out his wallet, out of which he removed a roll of bills. “Tooth fairy asked me to give this to you. She knew you was a little nervous around fairies so she asked me to pass it along.”

  I took the money and stuffed it into my underwear; it had been quite awhile since I had worn pants and I guess the whole concept of pockets was something I hadn’t yet locked onto.

  Art looked at me, scratched the stubble on his throat, and then took a long, pearl-handled jackknife out of his boot. He opened the blade, which together with the handle made the knife nine or ten inches long. He turned it over in his hands, the pearl handle giving off different colors, the nicked and oiled blade catching the sun. “My granddaddy give me this knife when I was baptized. I’d like to give it to you, but I want you to promise me something first.”

  I nodded and Art looked me in the eyes, held out the knife in the space between us.

  “If that Dr. Pinkley ever gets near you again I want you to stick him with this, right in the ribs.” He pointed a blunt finger a few inches below his heart to illustrate the spot I should aim for if the time came. “No need to be shy about it, neither. Stick it in there hard as you can, maybe give it a twist if you feel like it.”

  He folded the blade back into the handle and then passed it over to me. It felt as heavy as a tire iron and the rainbow hue of its pearl handle looked to me like the sky of a small and distant world. Following Art’s lead, I lifted up my pant leg and slid the knife into my sock so that it settled all the way into my shoe.

  Now I had my Hermes Jubilee, some money in my underwear and a knife in my sock. I felt better. But I had nothing to give Art in return. Not my urinal puck, I decided, I couldn’t let go of that. I opened the bag Mrs. Rodale had given me and rifled through my clothes until I found it: my tooth. From what Art had told me, and from the wad of money I could feel settling in nicely under my scrotum, I understood that a tooth could be worth a lot of money.

  Art took the tooth, rolled it between his fingertip and thumb. After staring at it for a long time he tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Thank you, Edgar,” he said in a voice thick and hoarse. “You’re a good boy.”

  He held out his hand, with its purpled scars and craggy, uneven knuckles, and we shook. His grip was so tight it hurt, and I felt like the small pain of it might make me cry. I didn’t understand what it was that made my eyes burn, except that his hand was so strong and insistent, squeezing mine. A blast of wind hit us, lifting up the hair on our heads, making me look away. Art pumped my arm a couple of times, like a man drawing water from a well, and then he slowly limped off toward the parking lot, dragging his bad leg behind.

  WILLIE SHERMAN

  EDGAR GETS IT

  IT WAS STILL early in the morning but the sun was bearing down on Edgar like a weight; he sweated and blinked an
d held his arms up against it until a large Indian woman with a face like a ham stepped out from a side door and barked, “Line up, hey! Lines!”

  In the space of five seconds the jostling knot of kids in which I was tangled fell into two lines, boys on one side, girls on the other, and I was left to shuffle in near the back. Every two or three minutes the same meaty woman would stick her head out and yell “Girl!” or “Boy!” and a student would pass through the door—to where I had no idea.

  My first day of school at Willie Sherman and I was about to realize that I was no longer Saint Edgar the miracle-boy, hospital sweetheart, beloved by all, but a walking target, a chicken among the foxes. Not only was I the new kid, so nervous that I bit at the knuckles of both hands until they bled; not only was I a crossbreed, obvious to all not because my hair or skin or eyes were necessarily lighter or differently colored than anyone else’s, but because I had a few traitorous freckles scattered across my nose. I also sported various gaps in my quailing smile—I was now losing teeth at an alarming rate—and a sweat-stained leather helmet clamped securely on my head.

  Any idiot could see that little Edgar had not yet learned the art of blending in.

  Though this was in fact my first day of school, I had been living at Fort Apache for over four months, but that did nothing to lessen my anxiety. When I arrived in April, it was decided that instead of attending classes for only a few weeks, I would wait for the next school year to begin. My Uncle Julius, an ancient, wrinkled man with skin the color and same oily texture of a Tootsie Roll, lived down in the boiler room in the basement of the boys’ dorm. For those first months that is where I stayed, sleeping on a cot and taking my meals—when they came—sitting on a milk crate. It was often like a sauna down in that room, and while I would sweat until I began to drip from my elbows and the ends of my fingers, you could not have found a drop of moisture anywhere on Uncle Julius’ person, even though he wore the same flannel shirt every day, buttoned up to his chin.