The Lonely Polygamist (20 page)

T
WO MILES NORTH OF HIS LITTLE AIRSTREAM HOME AWAY FROM HOME
lay the Nevada Test Site, fourteen hundred square miles of emptiness, a void on the map: swales of sagebrush that went on forever, alkaline flats and deep arroyos and strange accretions of glassy slag in the distance, fields of crater-pocked hardpan edged by yellow sandstone bluffs streaked white with the guano of raptors and bats. On his late afternoon walks he would often climb the big north hill to a hummock of broken rock and look out over the expanse, a tingle in his legs as if he were standing at the edge of a cliff. When the clouds were right, low and moving fast, the heat rippling up off the mineral-green dust and bending long bands of smoky sunlight, the desert looked like what it had once been not so long ago: the bottom of a vast prehistoric sea.

At night he heard strange atmospheric whisperings, saw impossible lights that gathered and skittered across the surface of the darkness. The government had banned open-air testing years ago, but continued in its cheerful, efficient way to set off blast after blast underground. More than once he’d been brought out of sleep by a welling tremor, a roar that could be felt more than heard, clutching his pillow in terror, the blood stalled inside his heart.

It was hard not to be reminded of those early mornings he had spent with his father watching the bomb tests: a single flash against the dark sky, the incandescent cloud with its roiling platinum core, the delayed thunderclap. More and more, walking the game trails just a few miles from the wasted ground where these blasts were unleashed, he was taken by the feeling that things were spiraling in on him, everything he had left behind was in front of him again, his old life, his old self, it was all circling back.

And yet nothing was familiar, everything strange. He had ten thousand things to think about, a worry for every second of the day, but the only subject that truly interested him was Weela, and why he hadn’t seen her since their embrace in the pond.

He’d spent what little spare time he had after work scouring the gullies and cracked riverbeds, venturing far out into the rocky wastes, but there was no sign of human life, only the obnoxious ravens, the coyotes who barked at him from distant ridges and then sat on their haunches and stared, as if waiting for him to leave. During his lunch break he would take up a position in a copse of dense mesquite behind the PussyCat Manor, where he spied on hookers sunning themselves topless in deck chairs or barbecuing with a hibachi, laughing and carrying on, once chasing each other through the brush screaming and arguing over, as best Golden could gather, a blow-dryer. He had even gone so far as to venture into the mysterious confines of the PussyCat Manor itself, hoping to catch the glimpse of Weela—he wanted only to know that she was okay, that nothing bad had befallen her—but all he’d gotten for his trouble was a piece of hard toffee and a condom, which, against all his better judgment he kept tucked safely behind his Visa card: a symbol of hope or self-delusion, he didn’t know which.

Strangely, not seeing any sign of Weela in or around the PussyCat Manor had cheered him. Maybe she was not avoiding or ignoring him, maybe she was sick or on some kind of vacation (prostitutes took vacations, didn’t they?). He told himself he didn’t care if she didn’t like him or had no interest in him anymore, he only wanted to know that she was safe and that he might have the chance, once more in his life, to hear that laugh of hers again.

To Golden, it seemed that Weela’s sudden disappearance was one more in a series of strange events precipitated and possibly created by that not-so-innocent embrace in the pond. First was his reckless foray into the forbidden confines of the PussyCat Manor, and then there was the long weekend at home in which he’d had some kind of argument or standoff with every one of his wives, in which the kids came at him in relentless waves, and everything he did or said seemed exactly and perfectly wrong, though he couldn’t have said why. And then, driving back to Nevada early Tuesday morning after spending an awkward night with Trish, he’d felt a strange pulling sensation in his groin. The more he shifted in his seat, the worse it got, and he stopped off at a truck stop near Littlefield to see what the problem was. Standing in front of the urinal in the men’s room he pulled down his underwear to find that he had an unreasonably large
something
tangled in his pubic hair. “The heck?” he said, prodding the object, which appeared to be a wad of gum. He was spreading the hair with his fingers, trying to make sense of this new development, when he felt a presence next to him.

Two urinals over a sunken old geezer in a Hawaiian shirt regarded Golden through a pair of thick-lensed glasses. He gave Golden a good once-over, shook his head and, holding up his unbuckled pants with both hands, shuffled sideways to the farthest urinal down the line.

Golden said, “Hey, no, I’m just—”

“Minding my own business here!” the man called, careful not to look Golden’s way again. “Let’s just all mind our own business, why don’t we!”

Golden faced the wall and fiercely attempted to urinate so as to demonstrate he was here to use the facilities for their intended purpose, but on such short notice couldn’t work up a stream.

On the drive to the construction site he scoured his faulty memory, but couldn’t come up with a likely scenario by which a huge wad of gum might have ended up in his pubic hair. Sure, he’d had an odd encounter with Trish the night before, in which she’d fed him leftovers, taken him to bed, gotten naked, pinned him down, tickled him and pulled his pants around his ankles, only to get upset and lock herself in the bathroom. Just one more baffling episode in a life that had become full of them. Strange as it was, it didn’t explain where the gum had come from (Trish, as far as he knew, didn’t chew gum, and he was sure she didn’t have any in her mouth when they’d kissed). He decided the gum’s origins didn’t matter nearly as much as what it represented: that he was not in control of his life, that at any given moment of the day he had no idea what was happening to him. He was a man with a crush on a prostitute, a condom in his wallet, and gum in his pubic hair—what could it all mean?

All he could say for sure was he had come to Nevada to escape, to embrace a solitary life, but with Weela gone, he had been overtaken with a loneliness that verged on desperation. At home, his children and wives gathered around for scripture reading, he felt, more piercingly than ever, that his existence was a sham, something quickly assembled for the sake of a photograph. During the long weekend in Virgin he was not allowed an idle moment: he spent several foggy hours in priesthood council before and after church, changed out the shocks on Trish’s Volkswagen, drained silt from all three of Big House’s water heaters, suffered through a Rose-of-Sharon Sunday dinner (her special undercooked chicken with a side of Ritz-cracker-and-cauliflower casserole), chopped wood, took in three junior league basketball games and two band concerts, attended the Sunday afternoon Summit of the Wives, in which he had to referee a complex dispute over the yearly distribution of hand-me-down clothing and which lucky children might be in the running for a new pair of shoes, failed to repair a broken heat pump in one of his rental houses despite two hours of knuckle-busting, lost a forty-five-minute-long argument with Nola at midnight, in bed, about Beverly’s handling of the family finances—and over that entire long weekend there was not a single minute in which the dark-skinned woman of mystery did not assert herself into his waking mind. Even as he conjured her face and replayed her laugh over and over again in a looping reel, another line of thought ran like a crackling cross-current against the flow: Was it possible that right now, somewhere far away and lost in the particulars of her own life, she could be thinking of
him
?

Of course, all of this
thinking
—an activity he was not widely known to engage in on such an intense or extended basis—did not go unnoticed. Beverly seemed always to be nearby,
noticing
, the whole of her formidable radar on duty. At Sunday dinner he sat at the head of the table lost in a memory of Weela’s wet cheek against his, when he looked up and saw Beverly standing in the kitchen doorway, watching him. He looked away and thought,
Am I smiling? I’m not smiling, am I?
Of course he was, and what was worse, he had no right to be: he had just sampled a forkful of Rose’s casserole. He sifted the food in his mouth—and with little effort composed a suitably pained expression—but when he glanced up again, Beverly had disappeared into the kitchen.

That night, they prayed together, kneeling at the foot of the bed, Golden, in his plaid plus-sized pajamas with a split in the inseam, saying,
Hmm,
and,
Uh-hm
, and thanking and blessing what-or whoever wandered into his mind. Beverly laid out her own prayer like a lawyer presenting closing arguments; she outlined the family’s many problems, the financial difficulties and spiritual malaise, the sibling rivalries, the strife among sister-wives, and finished up with a plea: “Give this family, Heavenly Father, the leadership and guidance it has been sorely lacking of late, to bring us through our trials, to make us happier and safer, and to one day bring us, together, into Thy care, In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” After which she looked Golden straight in the eye, climbed into bed, and proceeded to ignore him.

It was one of those moments he had become all too familiar with: she was mad at him, and he wasn’t sure exactly why. She’d even involved God, which meant she was deadly serious. He’d learned that actually asking her to tell him what was wrong never got him anywhere in instances like this. It was best to say nothing, to cut his losses, to maintain the dignity of the ignorant. He turned off the lamp, pulled the sheet up to his neck, and waited for the good-night kiss. Just like their double-prayer at the foot of the bed, the good-night kiss was a two-decades-old custom that never varied: she’d roll over, give him a kiss on the cheek, say, “Good night, Goldy,” and he’d wait a beat or two before rolling over to kiss her and say, “Good night, Oldie,” which at one time had been funny enough to make them giggle—Beverly having three years on him as she did—but was now bedrock ritual and no laughing matter. He listened to coyotes yipping somewhere far up the canyon, settled his large behind into its crater in the mattress, wondered when was the last time they had for-gone the good-night kiss, and could not remember it ever happening.

He did remember some of the other jokes they’d had between them, how she used to tease him gently and he would respond like a bashful, happy child. Sometimes when she was feeling frisky Beverly would turn off the lights and say,
Where is my big man, the One Mighty and Strong?
She would grope for him in the darkness, until she found him and remarked upon how mighty and strong he truly was. It was unlike her to be irreverent about something so sacred, and this Golden found enormously arousing. It had been years, five or six at least, since they had played that game.

While he stared at the patterns on the dark ceiling, he decided if he did not pee right now he would be up in the middle of the night; his bladder, like every other part of him, was not what it used to be. He slipped into the small master bath, flipped the light, and with an inaudible sigh read the sign above the toilet tank:

Golden, Please Take a Seat

He would admit it, urinating neatly and accurately was not easy for a man of his considerable height and occasional lack of focus, but did that mean he had to sit down when he did it? As always, he took a moment to consider disobeying the placard. Why shouldn’t a man, in his own bathroom, in his own house, be able to pee any way he saw fit? He sighed again, lowered his pajama bottoms and took a seat.

When he settled back into bed, he noticed Beverly had not moved. He listened to the clock tick, the ponderous workings of his own lungs. Finally, he gave in. He turned over and spoke meekly into the darkness, “Is there something wrong?”—but her eyes were closed, her breathing even, her arms tucked neatly at her sides.

He watched her for a solid minute, waiting for movement, any sign at all, and then put his mouth to her ear. “Good night, Oldie,” he whispered. She didn’t grin, she didn’t so much as flinch.

A HOLE IN THE GROUND

Out at the job site, Golden called Nola to inquire how best to get gum out of hair. He had thought the gum would have disintegrated on its own, but now, a week after he’d discovered it, it seemed to have hardened into a lump of glassy plastic that yanked on the sensitive hairs of his groin with every step he took.

“So you have gum in your hair,” said Nola in her playful, let’s-have-a-little-fun tone. Nola, of all his wives, was the easiest to talk to; she was rarely jealous or needy and never failed to say exactly what she meant. For the last two or three years—ever since Glory’s death, really—she’d been trying every trick in her considerable book to jolly him out of the funk he was in.

“Yeah,” Golden said. “A little. In my hair. In the hair on top of my head.”

“Now how’d that happen? You don’t chew gum, do you?”

“Me? No. Somebody else. A kid in a car…I was out by the highway and a kid in a car, in a convertible, threw his gum at me and it stuck in my hair.”

Nola let out a honk of laughter that made him wince. “Why was there a kid throwing gum at you?”

For a moment he did nothing but listen to the sound of the bad connection, the squeaks and hisses of the ionosphere. What had ever possessed him to call Nola? He could have talked to Rose-of-Sharon, who had become so remote and withdrawn lately her whispery voice barely registered over the phone line, but certainly she would have given him a few tips without any fuss, and Beverly would have lectured him, but probably would have kept it to herself.

“I don’t know,” Golden said. “Kids these days. Terrible. I’m glad it was gum and not something else.”

“What kind of gum is it?”

“Well, you know, Dubble Bubble or one a them, I think. Juicy Fruit. Something along those lines. Why does it matter?”