Excerpt of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall
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Chapter One
THE MAILMAN
If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was
seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing
else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in
God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or
another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a
United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San
Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.
It was a typical July day, ten o'clock and already pushing
a hundred, the whole world lit with a painful white light. Our house was
particularly vulnerable to the heat because, unlike the other HUD houses on the
road, it was covered with black tar paper—the siding had never been put on—and
there were no shade trees, not even a bush to block the sun. There was an old
lightning-struck cottonwood in the front yard, a charred skeleton of a tree that
offered no shade at all until my mother got into the habit of hanging beer cans
from its charred branches with fishing line. The beer cans—there were hundreds
of them, and more than a dozen new ones being added each day—would make a
peaceful clanking when a breeze came up, but they never did much to keep the
house cool.
When the mailman stopped in front of our house that day my
mother was in the cave-like darkness of the kitchen polishing off breakfast
(four Pabst Blue Ribbons and half a way of ice cubes) and Grandma Paul was out
back under the bear grass ramada in her traditional skirt and Mickey Mouse
sweatshirt, grinding acorns and managing not to perspire. I was outside
somewhere poking around in the weeds by the side of the road, or maybe wreaking
havoc on a hill of fire ants—I guess it doesn't really matter where I was or
what I was doing.
What matters is that the mailman, a small bird-boned man
with sweaty orange hair that looked like the inside of a pumpkin, put his jeep
into park and went to have a word with my mother. What matters is that during
the time he was gone, something—God only knows what—compelled me to crawl
under that jeep. Maybe I saw something intriguing under there—a page from a
catalogue or a stray hubcap—or maybe the purple rectangle of shadow under the
jeep seemed like a good place to cool off. I have to wonder: is it possible that
seven-year-old Edgar, with his perpetually drunk and heartsick mother and his
disappeared father—not to mention his crazy witch of a grandmother—might
have considered suicide? Is it possible that Edgar, seven years old and tired of
it all, simply laid down his head under the tire of that jeep and waited?
From the little I know of my life until then, it's not a
possibility I could rule out entirely. Even with my less-than-ideal childhood,
one of the small regrets I carry around with me is that huge parts of that boy
are lost to me forever; I have a broken, leaking memory of him at best. I guess
this wouldn't bother most people—who remembers what seven years old was like
anyway?—but for me, obsessed with memory, with facts, with history on the
smallest scale, obsessed not only with the whys but the simple whos and whats
and wheres, it is a nagging absence, like the gap a knocked-out tooth leaves. I
know more about total strangers than I do about seven-year-old Edgar; I'll never
know what his favorite TV commercial was or where he hid all the worthless
knickknacks he collected or what he feared most when he had to visit the
shithouse in the middle of the night. I'll never know why he crawled under that
jeep.
I do know, though, what happened when the bird-boned
mailman got back behind the steering wheel of his mail jeep, released the
emergency brake and stepped on the accelerator. When he felt the jeep labor
against some resistance—maybe he thought it was a bump or a rock in the road—he
gave it a little more juice. The back end of the jeep rose up sharply, dropped
back down, and the engine died. The mailman got out to investigate and when he
saw my little body under the bumper of the jeep, my face mashed into the gravel
of the road, blood already seeping among the shards of black rock as if welling
up from a place deep underground, he screamed so loud that the dogs in the
vicinity, most of them hairless renegades used to the worst and loudest kinds of
shouting and drunken argument, howled in terror.
Excerpted from The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by BRADY UDALL.
Copyright © 2001 by Brady Udall. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in
writing from the publisher.
