The Lonely Polygamist (24 page)

T
HE BOY WAITS AT THE WINDOW. FOR THE THIRD TIME IN AS MANY
days he has been grounded, confined to his room except to eat his meals and go to school. Though he hates this house and everyone in it, he has come to enjoy sitting on the old radiator, no one but him, waiting and watching.

His father was supposed to have been home for dinner, but dinner is over and he is nowhere to be seen. The house is in a state of anticipation, the children monitoring the windows, checking and rechecking, wanting to be the first to spot the pickup coming up the drive. Up here, the boy has an advantage. He will be able to see the father before anyone else—if he wanted, he could be the first at the door to greet him.

Unlike the others, the boy doesn’t usually get worked up over his father’s infrequent homecomings, but today he has something to show. The children of the house always have something to show: a piano solo or a poem about clouds, crocheted mittens or a dolphin carved from soap. The boy never has anything except dumb art projects from school or his report card, which he generally prefers to keep to himself. But today, for once, he has something.

PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL ON FITNESS
–

H
EREBY CERTIFIES THAT
Rusty Richards
HAS ATTAINED THE PHYSICAL FITNESS AND PROFICIENCY STANDARDS OF THE 7TH GRADE AGE GROUP AND HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE PHYSICAL WELL-BEING OF OUR NATION.

To earn such a certificate, seventh-grade boys are required to run a mile in fewer than ten minutes, do fifteen push-ups and sit-ups and at least one pull-up. The boy cheated on the mile (ran three laps instead of four), only did push-ups while the coach was watching, and did thirty sit-ups just for the heck of it because even though he is a blubber-gut, the boy can do sit-ups all day long. It was the pull-up that was the problem. Because everyone in the gym made a point of coming to watch, you could not cheat the pull-up. Apparently there was something terribly entertaining about watching fat boys and weaklings nearly kill themselves to perform a single pull-up. And even worse, as far as the boy was concerned, Coach had declared that if you failed to earn your certificate you wouldn’t pass gym, which meant you would fail the seventh grade and be forced to relive its miseries all over again.

The boy was third to last. The only two behind him in line were two extreme fatties who had hung back until the bitter end, hoping to be saved by the end-of-period bell or a miracle fire drill.

To save himself the humiliation, the boy said to Coach,
Can’t do it
, and Coach cupped his hand behind his ear as if he hadn’t heard correctly.
CAN’T?
Coach boomed, giving everyone a crazy, wide-eyed look as if this were the most astounding word he’d ever heard.
CAN’T
, Coach said, was not in his personal dictionary.
CAN’T
was a word for Democrats and war deserters.
CAN’T
, Coach said,
has no place in his gym, or in the US of A and its sovereign territories, for that matter. So get your goldarned butt up to the bar and give it your best goldarned shot.

The boy stepped up on the little stool and grabbed the bar with both hands and hung there for a few seconds, doomed. He decided he wouldn’t even try, would just hang there feeling sorry for himself until Coach told him to get off. But something happened: he started to get mad. He was mad, of course, about Coach turning his pull-up into a larger spectacle than it otherwise would have been, but then he started to think about his sorry life, his bad haircut and foot odor problem, about how everyone in Old House teased and badgered him, called him names like Busty Rusty or whispered,
Ree-Pul-Seeeevo!
whenever he came into the room, how Aunt Beverly wouldn’t talk to him or look at him for an entire day and then during family prayer would make a special point to ask Heavenly Father to help the boy come closer to Christ and improve his self-control. He thought about his father, who barely knew his name, who not only ignored him but his mother as well, his mother who was spending more and more time up in her dark bedroom instead of trying to bring the boy back to Big House where he belonged, and right there, hanging from a bar in front of everyone with his gym shorts threatening to slide down, the boy nearly wept with rage, his head hot, his mouth filling with spit, and he realized he was pulling himself up, nearly halfway already, his arms burning and fingers cramped, and somebody cried,
Go! Go! Go!
and somebody else shouted,
Don’t strain your girdle!
because this was Coach’s favorite saying and it was one of the few insults you could use in class without getting into trouble. And then, for some reason, an image of his Aunt Trish passed through the boy’s mind, her long neck and shampoo smell and full bust stretching the fabric of her sweater, and he began to plead with himself,
No boner, please, please, no boner
, because of all the bad things that had ever happened to him, a boner while attempting a President’s Council on Fitness pull-up just might be the most tragic. He was able to fight off the boner successfully but in the process lost some of his momentum, which only made his face get redder, his whole body shaking as if electrified, his eyes bulging dangerously from his head, and, lifted by hot gusts of fury and lust and frustration, he made one last pull, groaning and grimacing and straining his girdle so badly it felt like his intestines might fly out of his butt like paper streamers.

Coach, who never cursed in front of the students, shouted,
Holy Christ, son, that’s enough!
and the boy let go of the bar and flopped to the mat. People clapped him on the back, saying,
Good job, good job,
and Thor Erickssen, the third-most-popular kid in the seventh grade, nudged him with his toe and said,
Nice going, whatever-your-name-is
.

Now, only a few hours later, the boy has nearly forgotten all those twisted, uncontrollable feelings, remembers only the glory of the moment, sees only the certificate in his hands, signed by Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America.

He goes to the closet and, from his hiding spot at the back of the unused and difficult-to-reach top shelf, takes down some of his secret things. This is where he keeps his notebooks, into which he empties the messy contents of his head, as well as his other special items, most of them stolen or salvaged: comic books and magazines and canisters of black powder, a crucifix taken from a roadside memorial, a railroad spike, and piece of jasper that in the boy’s mind is a miniature planet over which he presides like a jealous but benevolent god. In this family, nearly all of the children have appropriated some niche or hidey-hole where they can squirrel away their treasured objects, the talismans that embody their most vulnerable selves and so must be protected from the obliterating crowd.

The boy’s notebooks are full of doodles and scribbled observations and endless pages of lists (
7 Favorite Ice Cream Toppings, 12 Best Insect Monsters of All Times
), the longest by far his comprehensive
LIST OF REVENGE
, which he revises at least twice a week and comprises, at the present time, thirty-nine names. One entire notebook is reserved for blueprints and strategies and plans, some minor:

Fake Blood Recipes

• 1. Katchup + water
  
• 2. Elmers + food coloring
  
• 3. Melt red crayons in pot
  

some slightly more ambitious:

How to Get More Popular at School

• 1. take a shower
  
• 2. bell bottoms
  
• 3. hand out candy
  
• 4. mustash?
  

and the one, of course, he has been developing lately, his Grand Master Plan, which he has already put into motion by giving June the picture of his fake mother, and which will take care of his troubles once and for all:

GRAND MASTER PLAN

Rose-of-Sharon + June

+ = Good Times Forever

Rusty + Aunt Trish

To the boy, this makes perfect sense. It is simple and yet complicated, which he believes all good plans should be. He also believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he can bend the world to his will, that he can manufacture a place in it where he will be happy.

Once the boy saw a commercial that begins with a father and mother and their two children walking around the house stiff-legged and grimacing, in obvious discomfort. They each fix themselves a big glass of Metamucil, drink it down, and the next thing you know they’re sitting around the kitchen table, cheerful and unconstipated, eating waffles and having a good laugh. And then the deep, mellow voice of the narrator comes on:
Metamucil: Just One More Regular Family
.

The boy can’t get the commercial out of his head. A regular family. That’s all he’s ever wanted. A regular family that can sit around a regular-sized kitchen table drinking some refreshing Metamucil and having a good laugh. But when he tries to picture his ideal regular family, things get a little odd. His mother is there, of course, happy and full of life in the morning sunshine, and June whistles an old-fashioned melody while making waffles and bacon for the boy, who is dressed, for some reason, in full Royal Canadian Mountie regalia and is grooming his noble steed, right there in the dining room, while he waits for his secret admirer, Aunt Trish, to come downstairs for breakfast in her gauzy nightgown.

That his father does not appear in his fantasy or in his plans for a happier life is not lost on the boy. He tries not to, but most of the time he hates his father, blames him for the sorry state of his life, wants to hurt him in ways that make him scared of himself. Sometimes he has no choice but to put him right up at the top of his
LIST OF REVENGE
at #2 behind Aunt Beverly. But tonight, for these few hours, he is willing to forgive, to suspend his plans and schemes and give his father a chance. For the boy, it is terribly simple: all his father needs to do is come home and remark kindly on the boy’s certificate. It won’t take much, maybe a smile, a squeeze of the shoulder, and the boy will go to bed happy and all will be well.

It is full dark now. When a car comes down the road he can’t be sure if it’s his father’s pickup because all he can see are the glare of headlights. He must wait for the headlights to reach the turnoff into Old House’s driveway, and each time they pass by, keep going over the hill toward town, the bubble of anger in his stomach quivers and swells. Downstairs the other children are madly practicing their piano solos and reciting their poems and arguing over who will get to open the door when the big moment comes. Cars pass, one after another, but the boy keeps his position on the radiator until his butt is sore and his head hurts.

It is bedtime now and he has lost count of the cars that have passed—his best guess is six thousand—and his vision is blurry, the lights sprouting strange rainbow colors, and when one more passes, the bubble in the boy’s stomach pops and he is seized by a spasm of rage so intense and electrifying that he misses it when it’s gone. On shaking legs he goes to his closet and from his secret hiding spot takes down a plastic canister, the one with
Green Magnesium Flash Powder
written on the side. He opens it and taps out some of the powder—black, not green—onto the face of the certificate. He opens the window, letting in cool air and the smell of new grass. He can hear a dog barking, the quiet murmur of the river. He takes a match from the book he keeps in his nylon wallet and waits for a staggered line of cars to pass,
one…two…three
. He waits for one more car, only one, he will give his father one final chance, and when the headlights pass by he strikes the match and touches the flame to the corner of his certificate.

It doesn’t burn well at first, so he tilts it down a little and when the sifting powder reaches the flame he is blinded for a moment by the bright green flash. Jerking back, he lets the certificate go into the night, where it catches a cushion of air, flaring and spinning for a moment, and softly the boy says,
Huzzah,
as he watches it circle in the breeze, burning until it is just a husk of glowing ash spiraling into the dark bushes below.

T
HE FIRST TIME SHE CAME, GOLDEN WAS ASLEEP ON THE BARGE. HE
liked to stretch out on the old orange and brown plaid dinosaur and doze for a while before retiring to his trailer, which was about as roomy and comfortable as an iron lung. He brought the Barge out here after Sister Barbara, his part-time secretary at the office back in Virgin, refused to come to work unless he got rid of it. The couch’s signature tuna smell, she claimed, was activating her migraines. So instead of hauling it out to the dump where it belonged, he’d brought it to Nevada and set it out in the dry desert air, which so far had done very little to dispel the fishy odor. Made with enough lumber and hardware to construct a footbridge across a Peruvian crevasse, the Barge had been rained on once, suffered a few direct hits from the local crow population, but had held up nicely otherwise. Golden figured that if he left it in this isolated spot and someone came across it, say a couple of centuries hence, it would be in much the same shape, though one could hope the fish smell might be gone by then.

Tonight, he had himself spread out the entire length of it, with his head on one arm and his toes touching the other. Still damp from his evening shower and with nothing to do but watch the sun set golden and smoky over the distant mountains, he closed his eyes to listen to the mild desert breeze, napped a little, woke up briefly at the call of a mockingbird.

He’d hardly slept since learning Weela was Ted Leo’s wife. He’d been puzzling it out, going over every angle, and he’d been able to convince himself, mostly, that this new development was a good thing, a blessing. Maybe even God’s way of looking out for him. She was off-limits to him now, even more so than when he thought she was a prostitute, and he would have to forget about her and get back to the things that mattered: finishing this job, getting his business out from under the threat of bankruptcy, and focusing on his family.

And so, feeling just a little bit virtuous and exceptionally clean—he had succeeded, finally, in washing every trace of peanut butter out of his private area—he had sunk into the worn springs of the couch intent on a round of fitful dozing under the wide Nevada sky before retiring to his bunk for the night.

He woke up to the sound of footsteps. He was sure it was Leonard, who sometimes got bored with perusing pornographic magazines and playing poker down at the motel with the other men, and showed up at Golden’s trailer wanting to throw a Frisbee or show off a few of his self-taught tae kwon do katas. It had turned dusky, the sky still molten at the edges, and in the gray light he could make out a shadowy form about a hundred yards off, coming up the shallow rise.

Golden sat up, yawned. “Leonard,” he called. “That you?”

Not until she stepped out of the sagebrush about thirty yards off could he see who it was. “
Allo?
” she said.

“Yes?” he said. “Weela?” The word sounded ridiculous in his mouth, and he said it again under his breath as a kind of practice. He got to his feet, then sat back down, unsure of how to receive her. He was wearing an old work T-shirt, cut-off sweats, and his hideous flipperlike feet—malformed from years of wearing too-small shoes, covered in bunions and terrifying to look upon, especially for the unprepared—were in plain view.

She smiled and held out an aluminum pan covered in tinfoil. He jammed his feet as far into the fine desert sand as they would go. She wore a denim skirt, a rough green hand-knit cardigan, and her hair in a single thick braid. “The other night, I made too much food,” she said, eyes lowered. “So I bring this.”

He made swimming motions with his arms in the struggle to extract himself from the collapsed cushions of the Barge, and once he’d made it onto his feet there was an awkward exchange involving the transfer of two potholders along with the pan. To be this close to her made him a little dizzy, and he tried to come up with something to say, something that would keep her from turning around and going back home.

Suddenly he needed to sneeze, and his nasal spray was nowhere in sight. He rubbed his nose, looked back at the trailer, grimaced, and then made a reluctant gesture toward the Barge. “Would you like to have a seat?”

Like just about everything else in his life, the Barge embarrassed him, but once they’d settled down on it (she took the middle cushion, which seemed significant), he felt grateful to have it; its generous proportions offered ample space for two respectable people to sit and converse comfortably without having to worry over questions involving propriety or decorum. Even better, they could accomplish this out in the open, nothing to hide, for God and all the world to see.

The pressure continued to build inside his head, and he tried to ward it off by studiously refusing to think about it and then shaking his head in abject denial, but it came anyway: a big, furious chop of a sneeze that rocked him backward and sounded out over the quiet hills like a gunshot. Weela flinched, but seemed to recover herself quickly.

“God bless you,” she said.

He rubbed his nose. “Sorry about that, Weela, I didn’t mean to scare—”

“My name,” she said. “Huila. Weela, no. Ooo-
eee
-la, yes.” She crouched and wrote it out with her finger in the sand.
HUILA

“Ooo-eee-la.” It sounded like the call of a bird. “It’s pretty. I’m sorry I’ve had it wrong all this time.”

She pointed at the trailer. “This is your home?”

“Oh, this thing,” Golden said. “It’s my home away from home, I guess.”

And just like that they were making small talk. For so long he’d gotten little more than silence out of her, and hearing her speak felt like a privilege. They talked about the construction project, about what it was like to live in a brothel (“Not good,” she said, shaking her head). He asked her why she sometimes washed her clothes in the pond and she explained that Ted Leo, instead of buying her a washer and dryer of her own, insisted she use the community appliances in the brothel’s common area, where she was always running into the hookers with their extravagant underwear and shrieking laughter. So she went up to the pond every once in a while to get away, to wash a few clothes in peace, even though the water of the pond was not exactly clean.

“Ted Leo,” she had said, laughing, “he says sometimes, ‘Why do I have this dirt in my pockets?’” and Golden felt an undeniable stab of pleasure at hearing her mimic her husband’s froggy voice.

And then she said something that flummoxed him: “Your wife. Does she miss you all the time you are here?”

He’d assumed Ted Leo had told her about his lifestyle, which was one of the reasons he felt so gratified for the kindness she had shown him; most women outside the church, he’d found out over the years, were not at all agreeable to the idea of polygamy, or those who practiced it. Men, on the other hand, never failed to be intrigued.

Six years ago he’d been audited by the IRS, and his case agent was a plump, flirtatious woman from the Phoenix field office, who touched his arm when she talked and made him feel giddy and uncomfortable at the same time; the entire process seemed more like a date with an old girlfriend than an IRS audit. At the end of their first meeting she went over his list of deductions, and she spoke with the tone of a mother scolding a naughty child.

“Sixteen dependents, Mr. Richards! My
goodness
, you’ve been quite a busy man!”

Golden bunched up his shoulders. “Hee,” he said.

“But I’m having a problem with some of the birth dates here. Three of them fall within two weeks of each other, in the very same year. There must be a mistake?”

“No mistake, ma’am.” He knew the three birthdays she was referring to. They belonged to Wayne, Martin, and Boo, aka the Three Stooges, whose births marked a grim and trying chapter in the Richards family history. They had all moved into Big House together for a few weeks with the idea that a mass consolidation would make everything easier, but with all the wives in either the last stages of pregnancy or the aftermath of a difficult birth, Golden, with the reluctant assistance of a couple of the older girls, was left to be nanny, cook, maid and disciplinarian. Instantly the place fell apart. Children ran wild, scavenging whatever food they could find and splitting up into guerrilla factions that carried out raids on each other, finally sectioning off and declaring different parts of the house their own sovereign territories. The Three Stooges, it turned out, were all cranky, colicky, insomniac, or some perfectly evil combination of the above, and the never-ending late-night shriek-a-thon was enough to break the most hardened prisoner of war. To escape the noise, the other children called a temporary truce and set up camp in the basement, leaving Golden to make bottles, change diapers, and spend hour after midnight hour with one newborn or another braced against his shoulder, doing anything and everything—sometimes including taking one or two of the little buggers out back to set them on top of the vibrating swamp cooler—in the all-out quest to induce a burp.

The IRS agent pushed her reading glasses onto the bridge of her nose and had a closer look at his return. She said, “Then how on earth…?”

“I’m the husband to the, you know, mothers.”

She peered at him over her reading glasses, and it began to dawn on her: he was not just some ordinary sleazeball off the street who’d fathered sixteen children by several different women and had the unbelievable brass to list them all on his tax return. He was actually
married
to these different women, at the same time. You could tell by looking at him: the homemade chinos, the flannel shirt, the believer’s haircut. He was one of
those
.

She gripped her pen like a weapon and pushed away from the table as if he might make a move to grab her. He leaned back and put his hands in his pockets to show her he was just as harmless as the next guy, but she fled the room, and the next thing he knew he had a new agent, a man with a bristle cut who gave Golden the hairy eyeball and said he wanted only one-sentence answers to his questions and no lip. By the time the audit was over Golden owed the IRS an extra three thousand dollars.

But Huila, apparently, had not yet been given any reason to view him as a sexual maniac or an exploiter of women. As far as she was concerned he was just your average guy with one wedding ring and one wife to go with it. He was
normal
, was what he was, and for him
normal
was a condition so rarely experienced it felt exhilarating, maybe even a little naughty.

So when she asked if his wife missed him, he answered like any normal man with normal thoughts and a normal life might: “Oh, she misses me to
death
, you know, but I guess she’ll have to find a way to make do.”

Huila laughed—a cute, childish sound like a burst of hiccups—and Golden was beginning to think this business of being normal was highly underrated.

He asked her where she’d been the previous week—he hadn’t seen her on his daily walks. She explained that they had gone to Las Vegas, which meant that Ted Leo went out and conducted business and gambled while she stayed in their condominium watching soap operas.

“I would rather be here, I think, but Ted Leo is the husband, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I mean, I think I know.”

There ensued the awkward silence of strangers in an elevator. She patted the cushion a couple of times and stood up. “So I will go. Ted Leo will be back soon.”

He stood, still holding the pan, grinning like an idiot. Before he could think of anything to say, she said, “Bye-bye,” turned, and walked back down the hill.

When the idea struck him that he should at least say goodbye in return, it was too late, she was much too far away, already dissolving into the winking dusk.

He took the pan into his miniature kitchen, where he studied the potholders—both handmade and decorated with cross-stitched roosters—and then peeled away the tinfoil to find baked ziti on one side and lasagna on the other. Though she’d said these were leftovers, the pasta looked and smelled freshly made. He found the only clean utensil available—a splintery wood mixing spoon—and took three or four bites of the still-warm, delectable ziti before he realized, with a small zing of terror in his heart, that he couldn’t eat any more: for the first time he could remember, he had lost his appetite.

THE COUNCIL OF THE TWELVE

At home that weekend Golden attended Council Meeting for the first time in two months. Traditionally it was held on Wednesday nights, but because of Golden’s difficult out-of-town schedule Uncle Chick had given the okay for a special session on Sunday afternoon. Even though the special meeting was billed as a favor to Golden, for him to be able to get up to speed on church business and fraternize with his fellow apostles, Golden knew the truth: Uncle Chick was worried that Golden was losing his standing and influence among these men and—because Golden was Uncle Chick’s staunchest supporter and, by the reckoning of some, his heir apparent—that Uncle Chick was losing something as well.

The meetings were held in the narrow, cramped room behind the chapel, and the men all gathered around a rickety banquet table, hunched over their arms as if the ceiling were slowly lowering itself upon their heads. Weak afternoon light filtered through the single small window, giving the room, with its rough stone walls and subterranean chill, the feel of a monastery prayer chamber or a cell on death row. Generally they took care of church business in the first half hour, spent another half hour debating doctrine and scripture, and spent the rest of the time commiserating—which is to say, complaining in communal fashion—about their exhausting and absurdly complicated lives. More than anything, coming to council meeting was the best excuse available to get away from the wives and children for a couple of hours.

Though these meetings had never been the highlight of Golden’s week, he had begun to miss them. It was reassuring to be among men who understood the daily struggle of keeping mouths fed and bodies clothed, of being forever and always on the spot, of bearing up under the weight of their dubious authority with any grace at all.