Excerpt from The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Arnold took off his hat, which had been destroyed by one of Wicked Joseph's hooves, peered at it for a second and put it back on his head, where it clung like a clump of old moss. He pointed to his broken right shoulder, which slumped a good two or three inches below his left. "Looks like I broke my shoulder bone here and I was wondering what would be the chances of you helping me out. My rig's got a manual transmission and I need someone to help me shift so's I can make it to the hospital. The doctor over there with the hair sticking out his ears said I could do some damage to myself if I don't get there this very instant."

Arnold was doing his very damnedest to sound like a cowboy.

This time my mother glared at him with her oily-black eyes, hoping to scare him off, but Arnold Kessler Mint was not the kind of person who knew how to take a hint. He pressed on: "Anyhow, I got this gift certificate—it's worth fifty dollars and I'll give it to you if you'd help me out." He paused, rubbing his bad shoulder. He couldn't stop smiling. Finally, he said, "Fifty dollars is a lot of money."

My mother didn't take long to decide; even though she thought Arnold was the strangest person she'd ever met, fifty dollars was a lot of money, more than she would make in her three days at the rodeo. She thought of the dresses she could buy, the nice shoes—she thought about getting herself a pair of sunglasses like Marilyn Monroe wore in Some Like It Hot. My poor mother wasn't aware that the gift certificate was for a feed and tack store.

With his good arm, Arnold guided my mother out to the parking lot, opened the door to his old, dented Ford, and helped her in. Down the road they went: Arnold, my father, worked the pedals and the steering wheel and Gloria, my mother, shifted. Exactly nine months and two days later I was born.

THE AMBULANCE

A GLOWING-WHITE mailman weeping over a boy with a broken head leaking blood and spinal fluid out of his ears, a throng of Apaches standing back at a safe distance, an old grandmother off to the side in the hackberry, already beginning her funeral wail, two fat crows in a tree full of blue-and-white cans presiding over it all: this is the scene Ed and Horace Natchez, twin brothers and tribal ambulance volunteers, came upon when they pulled up in the makeshift reservation ambulance. Ed and Horace lived only a quarter of a mile from Grandma Paul's house, and they were pissed off that there hadn't been enough open road for them to really get that ambulance hauling ass.

It should be noted that what Ed and Horace were riding in was not a true ambulance. It was actually a huge black Dodge van the tribal police had recently confiscated from a group of German hippies who had been caught selling marijuana from the side of the highway. Nobody had gotten around to painting it yet, and there was no money in the budget to outfit it with modern emergency equipment. All it had was an oxygen tank, an emergency field kit no bigger than a bass fisherman's tackle box, and a World War II army stretcher someone had found in the cellar of the elementary school. It wasn't much, but as could be said about most things on the reservation, it was better than nothing.

Ed and Horace had only minimal training, so when they got their first good look at me, they came to the same conclusion everybody else had: the boy with the mailman's clothes wadded around his head was a goner. They didn't even bother with any pulse-taking or pupil-checking, they simply pried the mailman's hands away from the boy's shoulder and gently put the limp body on the stretcher, which, in its time, might have transported wounded boys on the battlefields of France or Okinawa.

"Hey, will you guys bring me back a pack of Pall Malls from Globe?" Emerson Tuskogie asked. Emerson had to shout to be heard over Grandma Paul's wailing.

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.