The Lonely Polygamist (36 page)

Huila was different simply because he—
he
—had chosen her and she, by some miraculous coincidence, had chosen him.

Which only increased the pressure on him, somehow. He felt like he might lose her forever, might lead a sad life full of regret if he couldn’t do this small thing, a brief kiss on a romantic moonlit night by the light of the fire. It was Huila, in the end, who rescued him. She took his hand in hers, gave it an affectionate squeeze as if to say,
It’s okay, don’t worry about it
, and that was all he needed; he forgot about his buck teeth and his possibly stale breath and his propensity for producing too much saliva when he was nervous: he leaned in and kissed her for a good long time.

FIRST DRINK

Golden leaned back in his chair and wondered how he could formulate any of this in a way Nestor might understand.

“I’ve got a problem,” he said. “A pretty big one.”

“Very good.” Nestor rubbed his hands together. “I like the big ones.”

“You can’t tell anyone, Nestor. It would ruin me. Forever.”

Nestor frowned the frown of someone deeply offended. “I can’t tell anyone, that’s what you say? Who? Who I am going to tell? Lardo and his lady? These dogs? Nobody here cares about your problems Jefe, I promise you, except for me.”

“I have been seeing…another person. A woman.”

“Yes, a woman, good.” Nestor nodded encouragingly.

“I mean, you know, somebody my wives don’t know about.”

Nestor raised his eyebrows, and then abruptly threw out his hands as if to dismiss the whole thing. “We are sexual people, where is the harm? We are
men
! Do not apologize for being a man.”

“I’m not really talking about sex here.”

This appeared to confuse Nestor. “We’re not talking about sex?”

“No.”

“But we’re talking about a woman?”

“Yes.”

Nestor pooched his lips, only marginally reassured. “And now, what is the big problem?”

“This woman,” Golden said, “is my boss’s wife.”

“Oh my shit.” Nestor put his face in his hands.

Golden toed the dirt with his boot. “And I think I love her.”

Through his hands Nestor groaned, “Oh my fuck. Big, big fuck.”

“And she’s from Guatemala.”

“Oh-my-fucking-God-shit.”

Nestor smacked himself on the forehead, stood up, walked around in a tight circle and sat back down. “She’s from Wah-teh-
ma
la?” Golden nodded.

“And she’s your boss’s woman, and you love her?”

Golden shrugged.

“Oh my
shit
.” Nestor shook his head, both impressed and dismayed, which was more or less how Golden felt about it himself.

“Maybe you are right,” Nestor said. “Maybe this is a big problem.”

“For me it is.”

Nestor looked up and smiled. “You know what they say about the
hijas
from Wah-teh-mala?”

“No.”

“Hmm, maybe you don’t want to know.”

“Maybe not.”

“They say they can fuck the stink off the devil himself. That’s what they say.” He smiled to himself, quickly glanced up at Golden. “But probably this does not apply to your particular lady.”

Nestor left for a moment and returned with two jelly jars filled with amber liquid. Immediately Golden held up his hands to decline but Nestor slapped the hands away and pressed the drink into one of them. “You drink a little, there is no harm. You are sneaking about with your boss’s woman and you won’t have a little mescal? Come on, Jefe, please. You are helping us with our big problem”—he gestured to the house, which, from this angle, seemed to have shifted on its foundation the tiniest bit—“and we will help you with yours. This is the first step, to relax. You are sitting there like you have something very unpleasant up your
culo
.”

Golden took the jar; he was not one to say no twice. He sniffed its contents: not too bad. In fact, it smelled like nothing at all. He had never had a drink, not so much as tasted alcohol of any kind. It was a little late, he thought, to be thinking about all the things he’d not done in his life.

He took an experimental sip, which went down as smoothly as a mouthful of liquid Drāno. His throat clenched and he shuddered with the burn of it.

“Aha!” said Nestor. He gave Golden a questioning look. “Ah?”

Golden blinked and opened his mouth to let out some of the fumes. He croaked, “It’s terrible.”

“Yes!” said Nestor, grinning brightly, taking another enthusiastic drink. “Yes it is.”

FAMILIES ARE FOREVER

Forty minutes later a small Toyota pickup arrived, transporting five Mexicans and a long steel beam, which Golden was brought around to inspect. Though he had had maybe three tiny sips of the mescal, barely enough to register in the jelly jar that he had drunk any at all, the ground felt soft under his feet. He could see immediately the beam was at least four feet too long. He grabbed a hacksaw from his work truck and told them they would have to cut it to eight feet. He then went inside to double-check the measurement, and he realized that the beam, even cut to eight feet, would not fit down the narrow back-and-forth stairs. He skirted the outside of the house, looking for a window or some kind of opening, though he knew there was none. How had they ever gotten a pool table down there? He came around the south end and, sure enough, there was a patched-up section of the sandstone-block foundation, about six feet long.

“Who knocked out the foundation here?” he yelled, but he was all alone on that side of the house. Feeling bold, he stalked around to the front and, with a slightly shrill schoolmarm timbre to his voice, shouted, “Who on
earth
busted out the foundation back here?”

Everyone stopped talking and laughing, Jorge stopped hacksawing, and they all looked at each other. “What foundation?” Nestor said. “We didn’t bust no foundation.”

“Then how did you get the pool table into the basement?”

They all looked at each other again, eyes wide, and started to laugh. Blind Emilio, who was holding an extended tape measure, had a high, sharp laugh—
ah-hee-ah-heeeeee!
—which caused everyone else to laugh that much harder.

“He is Sherlock Holmes!” Jorge said. “He has discovered our lies!”

“Or Kojak!” said somebody else, which made everyone laugh harder.

Golden had to admit it: he liked these people. He liked them a lot. And he didn’t care that they’d knocked out part of the foundation or that the Old Lady might collapse on herself at any moment. He told them to get a pick and punch out a hole in the patched-up section so they could get the beam through, and hurry up about it.

He had meant to supervise the cutting of the beam, but five minutes later he was back on his chair under the dead cottonwood, jelly jar tucked between his thighs, eating some kind of spicy stew from a pie tin. With the oncoming dusk the place had taken on a carnival atmosphere: children chased a soccer ball and Blind Emilio played a child-sized accordion, which induced much third-party harmonizing and crooning, and Cooter, who someone had let out of the cab of the pickup, raced wild circles around the town dogs, nipping at their ankles and showing his teeth, oblivious that he was the only one among them wearing underwear.

“What are we eating here?” Golden asked Nestor, who was dancing with a stout middle-aged woman in apricot spandex tights. “
Chivo!
” Nestor called over the music. “You know, goat! Perlita here, her recipe!”

Golden held up the pie tin to indicate how much he was enjoying it. In fact, it was a little too spicy for him—sweat had beaded up across his forehead and temples—but it was so delicious he couldn’t stop shoveling it down. As he scooped up the last bite, he took a moment to consider how far afield he’d come: not four hours ago he had been in church, blessing the sacrament and reading scripture in suit and tie, and now here he was drinking homemade liquor and eating goat with a bunch of devil-may-care Mexicans.

Some of the men called to him to inspect the hole they’d made in the foundation, and he carefully sat forward in his chair, feeling around with his feet to locate the ground before he tried to stand on it. After a deliberate trek across the backyard, what he found was not the small, inconspicuous hole he might have preferred, but one nearly three feet wide and two feet high. “
Bueno?
” said Guillermo with a workingman’s pride.

“
Muy bueno
,” Golden sighed. “Let’s go ahead and get the beam in there.”

They went around to the front, where a crowd had gathered next to the
¡LOS JODIDOS!
tour bus. At first Golden thought, because of the yelling and whistling, that it was a fight of some sort, but it turned out to be Cooter attempting to mount one of the female dogs. This particular dog was smaller than the others, but still larger than Cooter, who had given up his mounting attempt and now had his forelegs locked around the dog’s hips, his muzzle pressed into her hindquarters, his hips pumping away at one of her back legs. There was much applauding and encouragement, and Cooter began to look around, bug-eyed and clearly embarrassed at this turn of events, but unable to stop himself.

“Behold,” said Jorge, “life in its glory.”

“Who took off his underwear?” Golden said. He considered going in and pulling Cooter away, sparing him this public shame, but at this point he really didn’t want to get involved.

“He was in distress,” Nestor said. “Perlita thought he needed to relieve himself.” He motioned toward Cooter. “Clearly, she was correct.”

Grinning shyly, Perlita handed Golden the Swingin’ Baby Timmy undershorts, which he stuffed like a handkerchief into his shirt pocket. Perlita’s flashing smile, her lustrous black hair, brought Huila to mind in a way that made him go light-headed.

Nestor came up and stood next to Golden. “Hmm,” he said under his breath, “you think the girl-dog might be from Wah-teh-mala?”

Together they checked on the hacksawing, which was progressing slowly because Jorge and the thin drummer—Golden thought his name might have been Ronnie—spent most of their time arguing about what kind of saw stroke was the most efficient, and who had been guitarist for Three Dog Night before Al Cinder.

“Come sit back down,” Nestor said. “Have some more food and drink while we wait.”

“I’ve got to get home,” said Golden, making a sour face.

“You can’t go now, before we’re finished.” He pointed at the house. “You leave now and it will be on your head.”

Golden didn’t bother to argue—he followed Nestor around to the back, took up his spot under the cottonwood. Evening was falling and you could hear the cooing of doves who sat at equidistant intervals on the telephone wires. Even Lardo—placated by goat stew and a bottle of mescal passed through the high bathroom window—had quit his banging and complaining. Golden sighed and settled in. How lovely to sit under the lowering sky, the dead grass whisking his ankles, with springtime coming on and a feeling in his heart of imminent disaster.

Such a feeling could not last; as hard as he tried not to, Golden pictured his family back at Big House, waiting for him around the dinner table, faces pinched with expectation, the wives grim and perfunctory in their duties, the younger children circling back to the front window so as to be the first to spot him coming up the drive. He could see the framed needlepoint above the mantel,
Families Are Forever
, and wondered if the slogan was meant as a promise or a threat.

He took up his jelly jar from its place under the chair and held it up to the pink western sky, took a small sip from it, shuddered. He really ought to go—they were waiting for him, they always would be. He sat back. He took another sip.

T
OGETHER THEY WATCHED IT BURN ALL THE WAY DOWN. JUNE HAYMAKER,
wearing a starched and pressed flannel shirt under his Dickies overalls, held on to the top wire of the fence with both hands and gave the fire his full and solemn attention, as if watching a ritual of profound cultural significance. Trish stole a few card-player glances at him, noticing the way the distant flames burnished his sharp cheekbones and flickered in miniature across the tear layer of his eyes.

Twenty minutes before she had been in the house reading her trashy book, so fully entranced she didn’t notice the wind whipping up, the sky deepening, the old red cedar at the side of the house creaking at its roots. Only when her eyes began to ache from the words on the page dimming and bleeding into each other did she look around. Thunder rumbled. A handful of rain spattered against the window. Trish liked thunderstorms, but she was annoyed at this one for rousing her from the dream (a ridiculous dream, but a dream nonetheless) of the book she was reading, for depositing her squarely back into her life. The phone rang once, a fretful little ring, and she was further annoyed by the way her heart rose at the sound—somebody was calling!—and at the way it then seized with disappointment when she realized it was only a phantom call, electricity on the lines. Quite suddenly she was angry—not merely annoyed—at her self-pitying self, at the circumstances that brought her to be so easily angered and annoyed and susceptible to self-pity, at the shiny absurd book in her hands as well as the fact that she was enjoying it so much, and when she heard the thunderbolt hit, the walloping crack that registered like a blow to the skull and the small bones of the spine, she thought for a moment it was the sound of her accumulated frustration and anger being released into the world in a single charge.

For a moment she didn’t breathe. She tried to turn on the lamp but the power had gone out. Only when the city fire station blared its distant siren and was answered on cue by the entire local dog population did she get up to have a look around. The fire was already well on its way, edging along the roof line of the old swaybacked barn that sat in a fallow, weed-choked field a few hundred yards to the north of the duplex, the same barn she looked at every day while doing the dishes. It had become such a familiar part of her surroundings she had stopped noticing it at all, except once in a while on Friday or Saturday nights when it filled with the laughter and catcalls of drunken teenagers—sounds that made her nostalgic for a wild, heedless adolescence that had never belonged to her. She always assumed the teenagers and their cigarettes would eventually burn the thing down, but it appeared God had beat them to it.

Brother Gunther, her widower neighbor, informed her one day over the fence that the barn was not a barn at all but a turn-of-the-century winery. “They called it the wine house back then, and for miles around, see, there was nothing but orchards and vineyards.” Brother Gunther, well past eighty and about as talkative and social as a department store mannequin, was brought instantly to life by the subject. His left eye caught a spark—his right was hidden behind a flesh-colored adhesive bandage–-and he waved his arthritic hands along the horizon. “Can you see what I’m saying? Climate and soil were perfect for it and Brother Brigham, a practical man if ever there was, told them not to worry about the Word of Wisdom, just go ahead and make wine. Good wine. Grape wine, plum wine, pomegranate wine, we made it all. I was a boy then. Picked the fruit of the vine. Had a nip or two of the good stuff, I won’t lie to you. A paradise, it was, like Palestine in Bible times. And now look. Weeds and empty fields and garbage and young people using Brother Brigham’s wine house for making whoopee and smoking their drugs.” He let out a quick, rattling sigh as if he’d taken a weak punch to the belly. “We’re a sad, sorry bunch, the lot of us.”

She had wanted to reach over the fence and give his shoulder a commiserative pat, to show just how much she empathized with his view of things, but as fast as it had come the light dimmed in his good eye and he turned without a word and shuffled across the dead grass to his empty house, his flock of hopeful turkeys trailing behind.

Today, when she’d come out to watch the fire, Trish had looked for Brother Gunther at the back of his house. He was nowhere to be seen, but his turkeys, who’d been hiding in the coop during the thunderstorm, spotted her and headed over to see what she might have for them. She had turned to go into the house to get them some potato chips when she noticed June Haymaker standing at the garden gate at the side of the house. He took a half step back as if she’d caught him at something, and gave a shy half wave. The sight of him made her heart leap the way it had when the phone rang.

Though she’d waved him in, he stayed where he was. He explained he’d been in his shop working when the fire call went out over the police band. He’d come as quickly as he could. Watching his hand fiddle with the latch on the gate, he’d said, “I guess I was worried about you—about your house, I mean.” And she stood there smiling bashfully, energetically, her face grown hot with the simple pleasure of being the object of someone else’s concern.

“Well. Glad you’re okay, then.” He jerked his thumb toward his truck. “I should probably be getting home.”

“
June
,” she had said, amazed to hear a slightly coquettish tremolo in her voice. “Why don’t you come on back for a minute? It’s not every day you get to watch something burn to the ground.”

So now they stood at the fence watching the volunteer firefighters turn valves and unspool their hoses. There was a casual, prankish note to the proceedings; the men, most of whom looked, from this distance, to be no more than high school students themselves, shouted good-naturedly and threatened to spray each other before turning the hoses on the fire, which was now burning through the gaps in the partially collapsed roof. The men were in no hurry—this was clear—believing, no doubt, that the loss of this old barn in a weedy field would have no victims. If only they knew about poor Brother Gunther, Trish thought, and the local teenagers he so despised, who would be forced to find a new spot for making their whoopee and smoking their drugs.

“What a bunch of rank amateurs,” June said.

Apparently bored with spraying water on the burning barn, the firefighters began to congregate at the front of it, bunching in together while one of them stood off to the side and pointed.

“The heck are they doing?” June said. “Are they…?”

“Yes, they are, they’re having their picture taken.”

Sure enough, a chorus of
Cheese!
lifted across the field and a flash-bulb went off, and then one more.

“You gotta be kidding me,” June said. “Seriously. I mean. What if that place was somebody’s house?”

“Then that somebody would be looking for a new place to live,” Trish said.

“I’m just glad it wasn’t your house,” June said.

“With this house,” Trish said, tipping her head toward the dumpy old thing, “a raging inferno and a crew of inept firemen might be the best thing that could ever happen to it.”

In fact, Trish’s house, and its dubious state of repair, was what had brought June by several more times after he’d first come over with Rusty to unclog the toilet. He’d rigged up a new motor for the ventilation fan in the bathroom and repaired every leaking faucet in the place, including the outdoor spigots. He was quiet, intense, and almost superhumanly competent when it came to fixing things and improvising mechanical solutions. At first she had him pegged as one of those socially hamstrung introverts with self-administered haircuts who could not connect with the living and breathing world except through their relationship with inanimate objects. But he’d turned out to be sweet, a little goofy, the owner of a sense of humor that showed itself at the most unexpected moments.

No, she had not expected to like him so much. She liked the way he watched her when she spoke, with the humble intensity of a foreign student in a remedial English class, feverishly jotting mental notes, striving, as if his life depended on it, to absorb every rule and nuanced particular of his subject. He was twenty-seven—their birthdays only two weeks apart—but his angular head and sharp Adam’s apple seemed to suggest an older person, one compacted and honed by the trouble of years.

She liked the way he smelled, like old-fashioned talcum powder. She liked how his voice broke when he got excited. She liked, probably more than any one thing, that he so obviously liked her.

And he was not the only one paying her extra attention of late; Rusty had been stopping by the duplex every other day even though he’d been grounded for going AWOL from Old House last week. Beverly had essentially placed the boy under house arrest: he had fifteen minutes to make it to and from school and was not otherwise allowed outside except to do his chores. And yet there he was this past Monday, just before noon, sweating like a coal miner and giving her front door a hearty knock.

“I’m just stopping by to say hi,” he said. It was his lunch hour at school, and he’d ridden his bike the entire three miles, most of the way along the graveled margins of Highway 86, apparently just to say hi. Instead of the standard hand-me-downs, he was wearing a red-and-green checkerboard sweater—which was soaked with sweat down the sides and back—and what appeared to be his Sunday shoes, freshly polished. She didn’t want to imagine the teasing he had endured for showing up at school in such a getup.

“Do they let you leave the grounds for lunch?” she asked.

“Nah, not really, but nobody cares as long as I get back to class on time.” He shrugged, made a swipe with his sleeve at his dripping forehead. “I just came by to say hi.” She invited him in and they shared a quick lunch of cheese toast and leftover pasta salad. He spoke very little but regarded her with a steady, forthright stare. He asked her if she planned on attending his special birthday at Skate Palace next Friday and she told him she wouldn’t miss it for the world.

She shuttled him and his bike back to school, breaking the speed limit the whole way to get him there on time, and let him off at the corner so as not to be seen by the pertinent authorities. Before she drove away he looked up and down the sidewalk, then stuck his head in the passenger window. He said, with utter earnestness, “This should be our little secret, don’t you think?”

They shared a look, she and this boy, and she had to bite her lip to keep from erupting into a giddy, girlish laugh.

Once she was back on the highway, she let the laugh go into the confined space of her car and was a little surprised at how loud and jubilant it was. She knew the whole thing was absurd, of course she did, but she couldn’t deny how such a harmless little caper gave life to an otherwise lifeless day.

And then two afternoons ago she had nearly finished her twice-a-week walk with Faye—except for trips to the cemetery, the girl had to be forced into the out-of-doors—when Rusty appeared at the end of the block on his bicycle. Without ever really thinking about it she had always considered bicycle riding to be an innately frolic-some activity, one that couldn’t be undertaken without at least the appearance of good cheer, but Rusty, head hung low, one arm loosely maneuvering the handlebars while the other hung limp at his side, was doing his best to disprove this theory. He was despondent; his posture said so. His hair was an unholy mess, his shoes were missing and his dirty tube socks flapped freely.

Faye put up a hand to shield her eyes against the lowering sun. “Here
he
is again.” At first he refused to speak. When she asked him what was wrong, what had happened to his shoes, he shrugged and shook his head with the mild desperation of someone who had good reason to believe if he opened his mouth the only thing likely to come out was a whimper or a sob—a feeling she knew all too well.

She led him into the house and seated him at the table. Faye sighed and retired to her prayer cave. It was clear he had already done his share of crying; there were the telltale streaks on his smudged cheeks and the remnants of tears sparkling in his eyelashes. When she asked him if Aunt Beverly knew where he was, he found the wherewithal to speak: “That witchy woman is
not
my mother.”

For some reason this brought a loud, derisive snort from Faye down the hall. “
Faye
,” Trish said.

“All
right
,” Faye called.

“Rusty, honey, I don’t want you getting into any more trouble than you already have. If you want, I’ll drive you home right now and talk to Aunt Beverly. We’ll get this worked out.”

“Oh no we won’t,” Rusty said. “I’m not afraid of Aunt Beverly. Everyone acts like she’s, you know, Genghis Kong or somebody.” He snorted and shook his head. “She’s just a bully, that’s all, that’s all she is. I don’t need any help with her.”

He set his jaw and stuck out his lower lip, attempting a defiant look, but he couldn’t control his sniffing and hiccuping, which undermined the overall effect. Even so, Trish had to admire the boy: no one had ever challenged Beverly this directly, this openly; not Nola, who had been fighting a war of attrition with Beverly for years; not Golden, who received his orders with a
Thank you, ma’am,
and a curtsy; not Uncle Chick, whose decisions and exhortations were widely accepted as the direct and final word of the Lord Almighty—except when they involved Beverly, in which case they were taken as polite recommendations. And certainly not Trish, who was going on twenty-eight and had yet to learn the elementary skill of standing up for herself.

Rusty took a big, shuddering breath and asked to use the bathroom. When he emerged a couple of minutes later he was a new person, his face freshly washed and his hair wetted down and combed straight back in the style of a fifties Hollywood gangster. He had turned both his T-shirt and socks inside out to produce the illusion of cleanliness.

“I was wondering if we could have a word in, you know, private,” he said.

They stepped into the kitchen and he reached around behind his back with both hands and for a moment it appeared he might be trying to pull down his pants. He grimaced, and after some involved tugging and pulling he eventually produced a ratty paperback, which he had apparently been carrying around somewhere inside his underwear. He held it out to her.