The Lonely Polygamist (16 page)

She waited in the dark bathroom, her mind blank, until there was no more sound, not even of the bed complaining under Golden’s nearly three hundred pounds. She opened the door and walked through her compact house, her eyes wide, as if new rooms might miraculously present themselves. When finally she slid into bed next to her husband—asleep, of course, sputtering, whistling through his nose—he stirred, rolled over, and rested his hand on her hip.

She waited, poised for a change in his breathing, for him to move closer, to press his body against hers, but his breathing slowed and he began to snore. His hand was warm and heavy, and though it wasn’t much, she knew she was going to have to learn to accept what she was given, no matter how small.

W
HEN GOLDEN RICHARDS WAS NINETEEN AND BY EVERY MEASURE STILL
a boy—one who built model battleships and took a glass of warm milk every night before bed—he made the first real decision of his life: he abandoned his mother. That was how he would always think of it: a betrayal, a defection, an escape. One May morning he woke up before dawn and snuck away, limping across the town square in the muggy dark, with nothing but a knapsack of clean underwear and a plane ticket to Las Vegas.

Upon his arrival, he did not receive the hero’s welcome he had expected. A small, dour Mexican man met him at the airport with a cardboard sign that read
ROYAL SON
and drove him, without a word, to the house in Utah, where he waited two days for his father to return from a business trip. The Mexican man’s wife, a cheerfully fat woman named Tita, fixed his meals and cleaned up after him, and he did little but sleep and wake occasionally to stumble around the house and its grounds, his eyes raw and full of grit, trying to acclimate himself to the dry air, the alien landscape, the constant blast of light.

The house was like nothing Golden had ever seen: a red-brick Victorian with steep gables, mullioned windows, blond limestone detailing and a three-story turret that looked like it had been transplanted from the castle of an Austrian duke. The house was more museum than domicile, filled with booty from Royal’s desert expeditions: giant glittering geodes, moqui marbles, amethyst cathedrals and back-lit fluorescent minerals lined up along oak shelves. Earlyman spearheads and Fremont rawhide shields, meteorites and Anasazi baskets filled with beads. A beaver skull half encrusted with rose quartz. The jawbone of a megalodon. And the pièce de résistance: the calcified femur of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
weighing half a ton and displayed on a giant table carved from yellow sandstone embossed with fossils of whiskered prehistoric fish.

If the interior of the house confused him, he could make even less sense of what lay outside: a huge, blank sky hovering over a landscape of wild chockablock colors: flat-topped mesas of black basalt, the white, crosshatched elephant hide of Navajo sandstone, ocher cliffs streaked with desert varnish, distant trembling blue mountains covered with pygmy forests of piñon and juniper, the gypsum-rich hills, candy-striped red and yellow and orange.

After a few expeditions into the backyard and over to the river, which at this time of year was a silver ribbon cutting a channel through a bed of crimson sand, he admitted to himself that this place scared him. He preferred to stay inside and, when he wasn’t asleep, positioned at the window way up in the tower where he could see everything, watching and waiting—this feeling of clenched expectation so familiar he almost welcomed it—for his father to come home.

When Royal arrived, he did so piloting a shiny new car. It was the morning of Golden’s third day out West, the sun edging over the eastern cliffs, drawing long shadows that moved like living things across the knurled landscape. From his window, Royal watched his father get out of the car and stand next to the lilac hedge that flanked the gravel driveway.

“Where is he?” Royal shouted at the house. “Where’s my Goldy?”

Golden didn’t move. He was almost nauseous with the confusion and uncertainty of what he had done, of this sudden turn his life had made.

Besides the gray cowboy hat tipped back on his head, his father looked, from this distance, like the person who had left him ten years before: a short man who made himself large with a sharp, flashing smile, every word accompanied by dramatic gestures of arms, hips and head.

“Hey!” he cried, moving toward the house. “Wake up! Goldy! Look what I brung!”

When they met on the front porch his father took a step back and laughed. “Whoa, hold on now, lookit here. Make way for the Jolly Green Giant.”

It was the kind of thing one of the bullies at school might have said.

“Come on,” Royal said, his arms held wide. “Come on now, right here.”

Golden went to his father, bent down to embrace him. He smelled his cologne—something sharp and musky—could feel the pleasant rasp of his whiskers against his own soft cheek, and decided that even though it wasn’t the reunion he’d planned or hoped for, it was good enough.

This sudden wash of satisfaction caused him to squeeze too hard and he felt the air go out of his father with a wheeze, and then came a faint popping sound. His father fell away from him, clutching his side. Doubled over, he coughed and raised his head, wincing. “
Hoooh
,” he said, blowing out his cheeks. “Hah. Guess you could say I deserved that.”

From his shirt pocket he took a ring with a key on it and tossed it into Golden’s chest. “See that car? It’s yours. Just drove it in from St. George. Let’s go see what she can do.”

It was a beautiful thing, a black 1956 Ford Thunderbird with portholes in its white detachable hardtop. Golden slid in behind the wheel and held the key up to his face as if the tiny letters engraved on it might offer some instruction. He turned to his father in the passenger seat, who was still gently palpating his ribs. He said, “I don’t know how to drive.”

“How now?” Royal said.

Golden knew the key was to be inserted into a hole or slot somewhere within arm’s reach but he couldn’t locate a likely spot.

“You’re telling me you’re eighteen, a southern boy, and you don’t know how to get it down the road?”

“Nineteen,” Golden said. “I’m nineteen.”

“Okay then, right,” Royal said. “Yep. I get it. I get it now. Son don’t know how to drive because Daddy’s not around to instruct him. See? Even a fool like me will come around eventually. Well, let’s do it, then. That key, it goes in the ignition. There on the steering column. No, other side. Now the clutch. Right there on your left. Push down. With your foot, goddamn it. Now give the key a turn.”

The starter whinnied and screeched, and after Golden negotiated what amounted to a seven-point turn in order to get the car out of the driveway, they lurched out into the road, gears grinding, engine revving frightfully, new tires chirping with every touch of the brakes. Royal was a terrible teacher and Golden a worse student; the father’s instructions started out as firm suggestions that turned quickly to mild cursing and then to shouts of “No, oh no goddamn no!” when the car swerved off the road and nearly took out a couple of boys waiting for the school bus. The son, so big he looked like a teenager stuffed into a child’s pedal car, rode the brake and grew damp with sweat, flinching and jerking the steering wheel every time his father called, “New gear, new gear!”

Eventually, the road straightened out and Golden managed to keep the car from drifting off it. Royal took advantage of this lull to fill Golden in on the things his letters had left out. “You know how I got rich and famous and all that, but I didn’t write what happened afterwards, I didn’t want to upset your mama.” He told Golden that after he’d made his fortune he’d carried on a life of such base sin and debauchery he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it in the light of day. “Let’s just say I was a hot-blooded man with too much money living in Las Vegas and leave it at that,” he said, staring out the passenger window with what might have been a touch of wistfulness, as if his past life continued on in some parallel trajectory beyond the clouds. After two solid years of drinking and women and not much else, he’d hit bottom, and that’s when Uncle Chick found him drunk and bloodied and stumbling along the crumbling margins of Highway 89 after losing control of his prized 1949 Vincent Black Lightning and running off the road into a thicket. “It was God’s doing, see, I was wandering in the desert, literally and, you know, otherwise, and Uncle Chick saved me. Good Samaritan, et cetera. Brought me home where I belonged.”

Golden risked a glance at his father, who was staring at him intently, and he realized that besides the deep creases in his tanned neck and the thinning hair of his temples, there
was
something different about him: he had a look in his eye. A spark, a glint that gave him the aspect of someone moved by forces beyond his control.

After Golden pulled the car back toward the center line—it was like it was
trying
to run itself into a ditch—Royal went on, explaining how he’d accepted God’s call, how he’d read the Book of Mormon (“sorta like the Bible, only with more sword fights”), and eventually become baptized and dedicated to the plan of salvation, which included the holy covenant of plural marriage, the only means by which man might ascend to the highest levels of the Celestial Kingdom.

Even though Royal’s letters had mentioned finding God and becoming a new man, it was still disconcerting to hear his father, a person who’d always considered God a nuisance and killjoy, talking like this. But Golden wasn’t listening very closely, anyway; his focus was on keeping the car between the white and yellow lines. He found this was easiest to do by keeping it in second gear and holding a steady rate of speed of fourteen miles per hour.

When the road turned from asphalt to chalky red dirt, Royal, increasingly annoyed at his giant son’s skittishness, had Golden turn the car around.

“Now,” he said suddenly, “tell me about your mama, how she’s doing and all that.”

“She’s fine,” Golden said. He thought of her sitting at the kitchen table, completely alone now, that ashen, lost look on her face, and he wanted to cry.

Royal didn’t press for any details, just nodded, pointed out a hawk at the edge of the road, peeling the coat off a roadkill jackrabbit. Like somebody asking a neighbor how their weekend had gone, Royal said, “And how ’bout you? How you been?”

Golden looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He was sitting in a spectacular new car with his rich and reformed daddy at his side, the sun coming up to expose the wild beauty of a place he once believed existed only in books and magazines, and yet he felt unaccountably sad, gripped with a desolation he could barely comprehend. He turned away from his father and with his voice breaking said, “I haven’t had much of a life so far, Daddy.”

His father was silent for a few moments, which Golden was grateful for. Then he said, “Well come on, you big fucking crybaby, Jesus, stop feeling sorry for yourself why don’t you, you’re on your way up.”

Golden only nodded at this rebuke, though he felt something pulse through him, an urge to take his cramping hands off the wheel and give his father a violent shake. For some reason, this made him think of something his father had said a few minutes earlier.

“What’s plural marriage?”

“Now there’s a good question,” Royal said. “Don’t be afraid to ask more when you feel like it. It means marrying more than one wife. That’s what men in the church are expected to do. And by the way, sorry for the cursing. That’s one of the hooks the devil’s still got in me.”

“You have other wives?” Golden said, his focus diverted from his oversized right foot, allowing it to weigh on the accelerator. “Besides Mama?”

Royal laughed. “No, not till the church thinks I’m ready, and your mama has to give a divorce, which she’s not being altogether cooperative about. I haven’t told her about all this church business, so this is between you and me, understand.”

The engine was revving again, pulling the car forward with an almost animal impatience.

Royal pointed to the house coming up on the left. “This’ll be our stop. Might want to slow her down a little.”

Distracted, and still a little fuzzy on the finer points of turning, Golden yanked the wheel hard without so much as touching the brake pedal. The Thunderbird skidded sideways across the gravel driveway and Golden overcorrected, sending the car over a shallow berm and into the lilac hedge. There was the painful shrieking of branches against the car’s windows and new paint job, and a throng of sparrows lifted off in a single chittering cloud. The engine died and Golden looked blankly at the windshield, which showed a tangle of flattened leaves, while Royal gently investigated his nose with both hands.

“Well,” Royal said, “that’ll have to be the end of that.”

“Why do they want you to marry more than one wife?” Golden said, still gripping the steering wheel as if the car might decide on its own to start up and take off again at any second. A cloud of dust from the driveway had rolled in through the open windows and stung his eyes. “Why would God want somebody to do that?”

“Ah son,” Royal said, eyeing the spot of blood he had wiped from his nostril, “it’s
complicated
. Most folks think it’s about sex, but that ain’t it at all. If a man wants sex, well, I don’t have to be the one to tell you there’s easier ways to do it than
marrying
someone. God wants us to live the Principle, mostly because it’s a hard thing to do and it makes us better for it. And one other thing. This world is full of righteous women, good-hearted women, am I right? But how many good men? Righteous men? Just about none. Couple here and there, maybe. The numbers are outta whack, and that shouldn’t mean all the good women out there should have to settle for a bad man. It’s basic arithmetic is all it is.”

Golden thought again of his mother, saw in his mind the image of her that defined his childhood: tucked between the wall and kitchen table, gray-faced in her faded housedress, staring into space, paralyzed with bitterness and loss. Was she simply a good woman who settled for a bad man? Was she nothing more than a victim of arithmetic?

He looked at his father, who stared meaningfully back, his scorching violet eyes lit with a mysterious voltage.

“So…” Golden hesitated. “You’re one of the
good
men?”

A smile spread across his daddy’s face. He said, “I am now.”

ALL IS WELL

The Virgin Valley: two crumbling volcanic ridges between which a series of small, no-account towns hugged the river, each with its single Mormon chapel and scattering of pioneer homes and failing businesses surrounded by alfalfa fields and orchards of peach and apricot, the entire valley crisscrossed with barbed wire separating neighbor from neighbor, herd from herd, irrigated farmland from giant dusty squares of unwatered ground. To the west the Pine Mountains floating blue and cold in the distance, and to the east the fanged and scalloped horizon of the Vermillion Peaks, shifting color and shape with the motion of sun and clouds.