The Lonely Polygamist (39 page)

He went into the dining room and cut off a big hunk of cake. “Take this.” He held it out to Jame-o. “And good luck to you.”

There were some complications getting the cake through the doggy door without it crumbling all over the place, but Jame-o got most of it, cupped in his little raccoon hands, and started eating it right away. Rusty went back upstairs to check the windows. A vampire was at one of them in the Little Boys’ room, at the top of a ladder, working at the latch with a screwdriver, which was weird, because did vampires use hand tools? Rusty thought about opening the window and giving the ladder a push, but decided that would only make them madder.

He went down the hall and stood at the door of his mother’s room. He hadn’t planned on going in there to snoop. A little while ago, before he had tried to blow out all the candles in one breath, they told him to make a wish, and this was what he had wished: that he could learn to be a good person, that he could improve his behavior so that he could come back to live in Big House, that his mother would come home soon. And now look what had happened. Look where he was now.

He stepped into the dark room and crawled onto the bed and smelled his mother’s pillow for a while. He listened to the shouts outside, the pounding of doors and rattling of windows. If it weren’t for all the noise, and for his heart going crazy in his chest and the pain in his stomach and his jiggling leg and the tears running down the sides of his face into his ears, he might have been able to take a nap.

Since becoming a good person and improving his behavior was down the tubes for today, he got up and snooped around in the closet looking for
Tropical Night
or
A Stranger Comes Calling
or, he hoped,
Lust on the Moors
. He wanted to do a quick read of some of the good parts, to cheer himself up, but the books were gone. All of them. He looked in the lamp table and under the bed, wondering if she took all the books with her, if it meant somehow she wasn’t coming back, and the pain in his stomach got stronger. He went through his mother’s drawers, the tears really coming now, and for one second and one second only thought about trying on her underwear.

He heard a scraping noise and a shriek, which he figured was somebody falling off the ladder. He went into the Big Girls’ room and looked out the window. Most of them were still attacking the house, but a few of the little ones had lost interest and were throwing rocks at Dwight Eisenhower. After a minute somebody saw him and shouted, “There he is!” and they all looked up at the same time like a bunch of monkeys tangled in a net.

Just look at them: Aunt Beverly with her witchy-woman stare turned on full blast (which was having no effect on him whatsoever), the bucktoothed Sasquatch in his dumb DAD hat with his mouth hanging open, Aunt Nola having her fifth or sixth hot dog, Aunt Trish looking as mysteriously beautiful as the Comanche Bride, and all the kids laughing and jostling, having the time of their lives.

As much as Rusty hated to say it, these were not vampires, these idiots were his family. They were his family and they were the reason he wasn’t at this very moment doing the Honk Job at the Skate Palace. They were why he was being held against his will at Old House. They were why he sat by himself at the cafeteria in school. They were why the kids in his class had started calling him Piggy the Plyggy, and ruined his self-esteem. They were why he was mad all the time. They were why his mother had a nervous breakdown and disappeared. And they were why he was not the good and nice and honest and handsome person he was supposed to be.

He opened the window, he had something to tell them, but right away they started yelling at him.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“You’re a dead man!”

“
Ree-pul-seeee-vo!
”

“Open the door or we’re calling the
sheriff
!”

“You’re ruining the party!” (To which Rusty replied in a whispered voice only he could hear, “Am I? Am I
really
?”)

“Hurry, I gotta use the bathroom!”

Rusty looked down at them sadly. He shook his head. He said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

He didn’t know why he said this, only that it was what a good person who was trying to improve his behavior might say. He could have shouted at them the phrase Old Man Ridnour with the eye patch used to yell at them from his front porch when they walked home on their way from the bus stop,
Gaze, you sons-a-bitches, gaze!
He could have thrown things out the window at them, such as Aunt Nola’s wigs or all their toothbrushes or Pauline’s new bras, or maybe he could have pretended to toss Cooter out the window, just to hear them gasp. But he didn’t do any of these things. He was going to tell them something. He was going to tell them that he was sorry. That it had been just a big birthday joke, no hard feelings. He was tired of fighting Aunt Beverly, tired of fighting everyone. He was going to tell them that he was sorry and that he was going to try harder to be a good person and improve his behavior, but just as he was clearing his throat and swallowing back the tears that were rising again, Parley and Nephi, who had finally managed to get the window open with their screwdriver, tackled him from behind.

H
E HAD FOUND THE NOTE SLIPPED UNDER THE DOOR OF THE AIRSTREAM
and read it six or seven times before he nudged shut the door with the heel of his boot. He drew the heavy brown paper, torn from a grocery bag, under his nose. He thought he could detect next to the smell of old lettuce a faint whiff of her sandalwood perfume. Except for the time she had jotted her name in the sand, he had not seen her writing before. The letters were blocky and slanted to the left, with hooking flourishes at the end of every stroke. Her lush penmanship, like everything else about her—the way she tasted, smelled, spoke—was an enthralling and novel loveliness, something he wondered how he had ever lived without.

He read the note twice more. The word
besos
gave him a little tingle of delight, and the
H
, an endearing stroke of intrigue, gave him a sense of deep privilege to be playing a role in the kind of high drama the rest of the dull and indifferent world could not possibly understand.

He got back in his GMC, drove the half mile to the office trailer, and called Trish. He had promised her he would be home by dinnertime; if he left right now he would arrive only three hours late.

“Trish,” he said, and before he could formulate a likely excuse she cut in with a sharp, vehement, “
Damn
you.”

He waited; it was one of the many good pieces of advice Uncle Chick had given him:
In moments of aggravation, wait ’em out. Don’t engage. Don’t get mad. Don’t look ’em in the eye. Let ’em calm down, say your piece, and then run for it.

He waited, but it became increasingly apparent that she was not going to give in. The silence on the line was hard, aggressive, and he felt the weight of it as a hand against his chest, pushing him back.

“Trish?” he said. “It’s not as bad as you think. I’ll be there noon tomorrow. I promise. I’ll reschedule with Nola. We’ll go out to eat tomorrow night. You and me. I promise.”

The silence deepened. Golden bided his time by guessing how long decorum required him to wait before he could hang up.

“I can’t stand it anymore,” she said, finally, in a cold whisper. “I’m not going to sit around waiting for you like this. Okay? Okay. That’s it. So I’ll see you soon.” A click, and the line went dead.

On his way back to the trailer Golden puzzled over the conversation for only a minute; after all, he had a date tonight, and he would need to get ready.

Along with excitement at the delicious prospect of meeting Huila in a few hours, he felt a hot little pellet of anxiety expanding in the pit of his stomach: it was here. They had been working up to it all week and now Huila, with an invitation to the secret place she had mentioned to him a time or two before, had made it more or less official: they were going to have sex. Over the past week, with Ted Leo away on a business trip and Huila giddy with freedom, her eyes like two sparkling lights, they had progressed from chaste kissing and nuzzling in the cab of his pickup, parked in the shadows behind the Frostee Kween down the road, to teenage-style groping and rolling on the Barge.

“Making out,” Golden had told her, almost in wonder. “That’s what we call it, that’s what we’re doing. Making out.”

“Making out?” she said, the single line between her brow deepening. “Not making love?”

“Technically,” he said, temporarily befuddled by his native tongue, “making
out
is, you know, what you do
before
you…make…or it depends, really, you don’t have to—” and she gave him a quick kiss to put an end to such a useless lecture.

“I like what we are making,” she said. “I don’t care what it is.”

Golden was also quite satisfied with all they were making—the whispering and kissing, the light petting, the weight of her breasts against his chest, her fingers in his hair. All the tenderness and affection he had found increasingly impossible to give his wives, he offered to her.

But it was becoming obvious that Huila was not satisfied with mere tenderness. Last night, during a ten-round bout of snuggling and French-kissing on the aft decks of the Barge, she had swung one leg over his hip, her foot locked behind his knee, her skirt pushed up on her thighs, and the heat of her crotch pressed against his. He stiffened, turned to the side just a little, and she immediately relaxed her grip on him, put her cheek against his neck, and there was an embarrassed silence in which they each waited for the other to move, to make some apology or explanation.

Golden was too mortified to say anything, ashamed of his own cowardice. He wanted her so much, hated for her to think that he might not want her, but he was afraid. If he made love with Huila his life, as he knew it, would be gone. He would be stripped of his priesthood, his good name. His wives would leave him and be joined to righteous men of God who took their covenants seriously, who were strong and resolute, men like Nels Jensen, who could handle the Godlike responsibilities that came along with multiple wives and dozens of children. He would be left with nothing, and he wondered why the thought of this did not bother him nearly as much as it should.

Now he removed from his wallet the condom Miss Alberta had given him a few weeks ago:
A PleasurePlus Prophylactic.
He had kept it well hidden, swaddled in a car wash coupon and sandwiched between two defunct credit cards. Out in the light, its gold wrapper glinted balefully like a ring in a fantasy novel, imbued with the power of ancient and obscure gods. This weightless trifle in his hand, he knew, could tame the potency of sex, limit its consequences, which to Golden’s way of thinking deserved nothing less than awe. He didn’t know if he had the courage to make love to Huila, didn’t even know, exactly, how a condom might be put to use in the event that the big moment came, but he did know this: he liked the slogan written on the back.
For the Pleasure of Sensual Living
. Yes, he liked that very much.

He returned the condom to his wallet and stepped into the tiny bathroom, took up his razor and the can of cream, and began to ready himself. For the moment, in his cozy home away from home, he felt safe, but there was calamity ahead, and he was already nostalgic for what he had, for what he would surely lose.

TWO FOR COURAGE

The scissors—enormous heavy-duty all-purpose shears, salvaged from the rusty dregs of his pickup’s panel toolbox—had never been intended to cut hair, but they would have to do. He sat on top of the toilet seat, deliberating, talking to himself in terse murmurs, the bathroom so small his jutting knees prevented the door from shutting. After experimenting with ice, peanut butter, and Crisco, he had decided to allow nature and time, which he had been led to believe could obliterate anything, to take care of the gum in his pubic hair. But nature and time, as always, had not been cooperative: there was still a large and very obvious wad tangled on the left side, along with several nasty satellite nuggets, like Jupiter and its moons (which he had created by trying to tease the gum apart) embedded at different depths in the left quadrant of his pubic zone. The right quadrant was bushy and robust, possibly in need of a trim as long as the scissors were out and his pants were down, but the left looked like it belonged to a diseased sexual deviant, or possibly a leper.

He held his breath and snipped carefully around the largest gum pellet, which came away with some difficulty, snarled in its own bed of hair. He had never really noticed before how appallingly hairy he was, or how the hair on his head and arms was a coppery blond while the fur of his torso and legs was reddish brown, and darker as you got closer to the center of things. He began cutting out the smaller pieces, having to go deep here and there, all the while giving himself a running pep talk:
Okay, right there, yes, you got it, watch it, watch it, careful, darn it, easy, easy, okay, there it is, nice one, nice, yes, good, good, good
.

With all the curly tufts of hair drifting to the linoleum you might have thought he was shearing the wool off a buffalo.

Knowing it would be bad, he checked his work with a hand mirror: he looked like he’d contracted a case of the mange. He stood up, tossed the mirror into the sink, shuffled in a circle (nearly tripping over the pants bunched around his ankles) to release some tension, sat back down. He was going to have to trim
all
of it down, even it out so that the bald spots wouldn’t be so noticeable. He went back to work, grimacing with strain, the shamefulness of it, taking extreme care not to inflict on himself an injury for which he would be hard-pressed to come up with an explanation. He finished, took up the mirror again, and his mouth sagged open, releasing a sad little groan. Instead of camouflaging the bald spots, the aggressive trimming had only made them more evident. He reached for the razor and can of Barbasol. He regarded both items as a suicidal man might a loaded pistol.
No choice
, he told himself.
You have no choice.

He had only made a few passes with the razor when he realized that he had done what he always seemed to do when presented with a bad situation: he had made it worse. Much worse. Sure, he could go ahead and shave his entire pubic area, nice and neat, why not, but what would he do with the rest of the thick fur that started at the knuckles of his toes and ended at the top of his back, the hollow of his throat? Either he would have a strange little clean-shaven circle around his genitals, circumscribed by the dark hair of his belly and thighs, or he would have to shave himself entirely smooth, an activity, he imagined, homosexuals and certain Hollywood actors engaged in all the time. In a sudden fit of optimism he resolved to go ahead with the second option—he still had an hour before he was to meet Huila, didn’t he?—until it occurred to him that there was no way he would be able to reach around and shave the coarse pelt off his back or the hairs, which he had never devoted a single thought to until now, on his large sagging behind. And besides, he had only one razor, and it was already going dull.

He hung his head, indulging in a sweet moment of self-pity, and with some difficulty resisted the urge to cry.

Holding his pants up around his thighs so that he could walk without tripping, he shuffled out to his pickup, cast around behind the seat, and came up with the mason jar of moonshine Nestor had pressed on him before he’d driven away from Mexican Town a week and a half ago. “Take it!” Nestor had urged when Golden tried to decline. “You take it, Jefe, you will thank me. But only for emergencies! One sip for comfort, two for courage. Three and down the hole you go.”

Was this an emergency? Golden decided that it was: one in a string of so many that he was becoming accustomed to the alarm bell rattling relentlessly inside his chest. He took a sip, gasped, and then one more. Courage, that was what he needed. He assumed his position on the toilet and grimly went to work.

A quarter of an hour later he had an oval bald spot, glaring white and nicely symmetrical, that shone like a skating rink in a stand of dense undergrowth under the light of a full moon.

GOING UNDERGROUND

They met at the pond and headed west, hand in hand, flashlights swinging in the dark. She leaned against him when they walked a flat unbroken stretch, her black hair shimmering even in the faint starlight.

“Where are you taking me?” he said.

“A secret!” she said, and gave him a little poke in the belly. “A secret is secret.”

He had walked this way many times before, but in the dark it seemed mysterious and strange, and as they moved into margins of the lava field a three-quarters moon began to rise over the low southern peaks, casting every visible thing with the faint greenish hue of tarnished silver. They picked their way down into a sand wash, followed it north for maybe a quarter of a mile, and then tracked along an old leaning fence strung with ancient Crandall barbed wire. Before leaving the trailer, he had tried to dissolve the hard lump of anxiety in his throat with one more drink from Nestor’s mason jar and now he walked along behind Huila with a loose, almost careless gait, caught in the familiar state—something he felt whenever he was with her—between happiness and utter panic.

“You know where we’re going?” he asked.

“May-be ye-es!” she called in a singsong, her teeth a flash of white when she turned. “Maybe no-ot.”

A small breeze swept by, rustling the rabbit brush and swirling up the cuffs of his pants, and the sensation of cool air on his newly shorn privates put a bright look on his face, a hop in his step. Surreptitiously, he gave himself a couple of quick shots of nasal spray.

They came to a thready strip of white canvas tied to one of the fence wires and crawled through to the other side. Huila wandered around, shining her flashlight over a large expanse of ground jumbled with humps of black lava rock in every imaginable configuration until she found what she was looking for. She called to Golden and together they regarded what looked to be a dead clump of sagebrush lodged between two boulders.

“This is it?” he said.

“The secret place,” she said. “It’s wonderful, no?”

He cast his flashlight around to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. “Yeah,” he said. “This is…this is great.”

She laughed. She said, “It’s a joke!” and gave him a playful slap across the shoulder. He liked it when she hit him; unlike Nola, she didn’t seem to be trying to inflict pain. She cleared away the tangle of brush to reveal a kind of door set into the ground at an angle, constructed out of old mining timbers and rusty corrugated tin. She pulled it open, releasing a gentle breath of steam.

“The heck?” Golden said.

Huila pointed her flashlight into the hole, catching nothing in its beam but curling sheets of vapor. He thought of the bunker Ted Leo had shown him inside the Test Site, several miles to the north of here. He wondered if what Ted had told him was true, that underneath this barren desert landscape was a world of tunnels and shafts and man-made caverns and lairs of such a scale that a science fiction movie couldn’t do it justice. “
Listo?
” she said.