The Lonely Polygamist (43 page)

They stopped behind the PussyCat Manor at the makeshift dock where the brothel accepted its bulk shipments of liquor, food, and dildos. Ted Leo went inside and came back holding an envelope and a sheet of paper. He said nothing to Golden, and they drove on, up the hill right through the construction site, where most of the men stopped to stare.

At Golden’s trailer, Ted Leo did not get out of the cab. He rolled down the window and waited for Golden to climb down out of the bed and come to him.

“I don’t make it a practice to trust anybody,” he said in a low voice, staring out the windshield, “but you I trusted. I trusted you because I was dumb enough to think that a man who claims the title of Christian, a man married to four women, with a crowd of children to protect and feed, a man with all that to lose—why would a man like that do this to me? Last night when I found my wife out at the hot springs, I knew something was wrong. I went back, and followed your tracks—barefoot tracks, wandering all over the damn place—right back to this trailer, right to your front door there, and still I had trouble believing it. I made a few calls, and come to find out what a fool Ted Leo is. People around have seen you two together, taking romantic walks and carrying on on that couch, seems like I was the only one not to know. And I realized my mistake. Somebody like you, you have everything and you’re not satisfied. You want more. You want what doesn’t belong to you, you believe you’re entitled to it all. You’re exactly like your piece-of-shit father.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Leo,” Golden said. “I don’t know what else to say.”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I don’t want to hear from you again. I considered putting you away forever, but you’re not worth the trouble it would take to put a bullet in your head. Turn the other cheek, the Good Book says. Well, consider my cheek turned.” He handed Golden an envelope with a check for three-quarters of the amount he owed him, and had him sign a cancellation of their contract, a document that permanently ended their business relationship henceforth and forever.

Golden touched the tender knot at the back of his head, checked his fingers for blood. He whispered, “And Huila?”

Something hardened in Ted Leo’s eyes. His arm banged against the door as if he had a mind to step out of the truck and give Golden another beating. He said, “Don’t you ever say that name again. Don’t you ever think it. Now go away and don’t come back.” Before he rolled up his window he turned his head to address Nelson. “And Nelson’ll have a little something to send you on your way.”

Nelson got out of the truck and ambled around the front of the pickup. He gave Golden a small, apologetic smile and Golden opened his arms slightly as if to receive a farewell hug or a nice parting gift. With a short, brutal stroke, Nelson brought his fist up into Golden’s diaphragm. He made a sharp, wheezing gasp, and collapsed to the ground, opening and closing his mouth and arching his back like a fish on the deck of a boat.

Nelson knelt on one knee and loosened Golden’s belt. “There you go, okay, breathe, that’s good, relax now.”

Golden let his head fall back, looked up at the bleached-white sky, felt like he was suffocating.

Nelson put his head down close to Golden’s. “Do what Ted Leo says, he means it, okay?”

“Okay,” Golden wheezed.

“He knows people. A few worse than me.”

“Thank you,” Golden managed.

“Okay then,” said Nelson. “You’re welcome.”

And they drove away, kicking up a column of dust that followed them down the hill to PussyCat Manor. Golden lay in the dirt for a long while, trying to learn how to breathe again, trying not to think about what would come next.

BELLY OF THE WHALE

After Ted Leo and Nelson had left him lying in the dirt in front of his trailer, he took fifteen minutes to gather himself and did the only thing left: collected his belongings from the work trailer, packed his things into the Airstream and drove away. With a pang of regret he left the Barge sitting alone in the yellow sand, an artifact for the ages, and drove past the work site, thinking it best not to say anything to anybody, to disappear and let gossip take care of the rest. But Leonard, who had a knack for being in the middle of everything, called out from the entrance of the new brothel where he was helping to install the great oak doors. He ran to intercept Golden’s GMC.

“Where you going all loaded up?”

“I’m leaving, Leonard. Somebody else will take over for the last leg, maybe you. Tell the rest of the men goodbye for me. I’ll try to get you on the next one.”

It cheered him just a little to see how stricken Leonard looked by this news. He grabbed Golden’s forearm. “What happened?”

“Ted Leo and I had a falling out. That’s all. He gave me my walking papers.”

Leonard nodded, closing his eyes with an air of profound intellectual comprehension. “Because you was fucking his wife, ain’t it.”

Golden looked around at the men who had stopped their work to watch. He settled his gaze on his hands gripping the steering wheel. There was still coyote blood on one of his knuckles. He said, “I didn’t.”

“Sure you did,” Leonard said. He gave his boss an awkward half hug through the pickup window and whispered gently into his ear. “Don’t worry, chief, happens to the best of us.”

For a moment Golden stared blankly into Leonard’s bright little eyes. “Thank you so much, Leonard,” he said, and put the truck into gear.

Golden drove away then, Leonard in his rearview waving with his whole arm as if from the rail of a departing steamer, and pulled out onto the highway. He passed the PussyCat Manor going slowly, staring straight ahead as he went by. Up the hill he pulled onto the gravel margins of the road for one last look. On the construction site they were pinning up chicken wire for the stucco, and then it would be mostly finish work, painting and carpet and trim. The whole thing would be done in a month and he would not be there to see it. He was proud of the work he’d put in—it was a well-constructed building, the biggest he’d ever done, but he would be glad, he thought, not to see it finished, not to have to think about it again.

He couldn’t help it: he scanned the hills behind the site. He couldn’t see the pond from here, and he imagined Huila there, wading in the shallows, the water at her ankles. He tried not to think about what might have happened between her and Ted Leo. A hot breeze pushing his hair around, he scanned the landscape for any sign of her. And then, feeling like a coward, like somebody running from a fight, he drove away for good.

During the drive home, the midday light crowding the shadows into the deepest fissures of the canyon walls, his thoughts began to stir and chase themselves through the foggy depths of his exhaustion. He experienced a series of impressions and images his jangled mind presented to him at random: Huila’s breasts suspended in the inky water of the hot springs, Trish’s hand on his as she lay next to him in the dark, the coyote biting at its own hindquarters and spinning itself into the ground, one of Ted Leo’s white loafers flashing in his peripheral vision before burying itself in his ribs, the black air of the cave pressing against his face, the sour smell of his own fear, on him even now. His first coherent thought was that he had just escaped certain doom. Five years ago he had been hauling a load of cinder block on Highway 89 west out of Kanab in a sudden thunderstorm and had hit a pool of water, sending his truck out of control and into a slow roll down an embankment. The centrifugal force had wrenched open the driver’s door and yanked him clear with such force he’d been separated from his hat and one of his shoes. He had no memory of hitting the ground, only of standing up covered with mud and finding himself—except for a sore shoulder and forearm embedded with bits of gravel—in perfect working order. He stood there weak-kneed and delirious in the rain, nothing to do but look around and palpate his bones, amazed.

And that was how he felt now: weightless, hollowed out, like an apple skinned and cored, but more than anything else lucky to be going home, his body and soul compromised but still intact. He had escaped not only Ted Leo’s righteous anger, but the punishments, both earthly and eternal, if he’d made love to Huila. He shivered to think who he’d be if that had happened: not just a liar and a coward and a sneak, but an adulterer, someone unworthy of the sacred Principle, no longer fit to hold the sacred offices of husband and father. He would have had no future in the church or with his family, and none with Huila, that was for sure. For so long he had been dreaming of a release such as that, and now all he felt was relief that it hadn’t happened. He would have lost everything and returned to where he had started: lonely, lost, with no one to love and nowhere to go.

He would have liked to believe it was God who had rescued him. He wondered: Could God have been responsible, somehow, for arranging the gum to end up in his pubic hair, which had prompted him to shave himself, the embarrassment of which had kept him from having intercourse with Huila? God was supposed to move in mysterious ways, but this seemed a little much. Still, it was comforting to think that, after everything, God might be looking out for him.

Something stung at the backs of his eyes and he began shaking his head and then he said it out loud, “No, no.” No, it wasn’t God—he was fooling himself even considering such a notion. It wasn’t God or some divinely placed gum that had saved him. It was Glory, and nothing else. Since the day of her death, he had wanted to give up or let loose, to get drunk or throw some kind of existential tantrum as a way of showing what he thought of a God who allowed innocent children to come into the world to suffer and then die early and horrible deaths, but the possibility that all things might be restored to him, that the tragedies of this existence might be made right somehow, that Glory might be waiting on the other side, had kept him, as they said so often in church, holding fast to the iron rod. His faith in God and heaven had always been weak, but he believed in them now, if for no other reason than belief in them offered the possibility to be with his daughter again; he believed because to do otherwise would be to consign her to oblivion.

Last night, in the hot springs with Huila, when he was just about to throw away everything for a few minutes of bliss, something had stopped him, a chilly presence at the back of his mind, and he understood now that it was Glory who had come back to him for the briefest moment, it was Glory who had saved him.

The gospel taught that in the resurrection the diseased and broken would be made whole, but he didn’t want to see her again in a perfect, glorified state, he wanted her as she was in his memory, her left arm folded up like the wing of a bird and her mouth full of small, crooked teeth, her lopsided face alive with sudden grins and sly glances. He wanted to smell the sour-milk tang of her breath and to hear her bright, shrieking squawks as he called to her from the front door. He wanted to hold her again and feel in the way she pressed her cheek against his chest her forgiveness, her sweet and uncomplicated love.

Here, alone in the cab of his truck, there was no reason to hold it all in, this grief which had become indistinguishable from every other part of his life, which had subsumed the stress and anticipation and terror of the last twelve hours, and he let go a few coughing sobs that came out in spasms. He sniffed and gave the steering wheel a hard shake. In his blubbering he must have taken his foot off the gas because he heard honking and looked in his rearview to see a line of cars backed up behind him. He was doing thirty-five in a no-passing zone on an interstate highway. He pressed down on the accelerator, but he was on an uphill grade and the engine seemed to gulp and then surrender when it engaged the extra weight of the trailer. The first to pass him was a woman in sunglasses driving a Mustang convertible. She bared her teeth and gave him the finger as she went by, but she must have gotten a look at his wet, ruined face because she turned her eyes away and sped by with the blinkered expression of someone who has just witnessed something intimate and shameful.

For no reason he could think of the story of Jonah and the Whale came into his head. He had first heard it one sticky fall morning at the Holiness Church of God in Jesus’ Name, sitting in the rough cypress pew next to his mother. The Reverend Marvin J. Peete had been cycling through his weekly routine, which involved warbling snippets of gospel standards into the microphone with the husky whisper of a nightclub crooner and then suddenly barking out terrifying declamations of
Repentance!
and
Apocalypse!
and
Blood of the Lamb!
But on that day his voice lowered and he began to tell a story about Jonah, the man who had disobeyed God and as a result had been swallowed by a “great and terrible fish.” Golden, his copper hair slicked back and his necktie arranged at the base of his Adam’s apple in some overcomplicated sailor’s knot, sat up and listened. According to the Bible the Lord had “prepared a large fish to swallow up Jonah”—the word “prepared” indicating the whale was not a
punishment
from God, but a gift, an
opportunity
. While Golden liked this idea, he liked even better the description of Jonah’s time inside the whale, which was spent, according to the reverend, praying and singing canticles while perched on a giant kidney under festoons of intestines and trembling stalactites of whale mucus. Reverend Peete might not have had a solid grasp of marine mammal anatomy, but he made up for it with his descriptions of the glistening liver upon which Jonah made his bed at night and the wash of spiky and tentacled sea creatures, dead and alive, foaming around the prophet’s legs while he implored the Almighty for mercy. It took three days, apparently, for the great fish to tire of having his kidney used as a bean bag, and when Jonah was vomited up on the beach, Reverend Peete nearly gave himself in to an apoplectic fit with the glory of this moment. He cried, “Oh Jonah! God’s reluctant servant! Look at him there, washed up on that foreign shore! Half blind and tangled up in seaweed and whatnot. And that horrible smell? It’s Jonah, people, covered with fish parts and digestive juices and so forth. It’s pathetic old Jonah, pale and wrinkled like he’s spent the weekend in a pickle barrel, blinking and looking around at the sand and the water and the tropical greenery and all that dazzling light after so much darkness. Imagine it, people! The ocean breeze in the nostrils, the sound of the surf and the wind in the palms. Imagine the
wonder
. The humble
gratitude
.
Oh praise be my king on high
, can you hear Jonah say it? Imagine the grace, the sweetness of that second chance.”