The Lonely Polygamist (55 page)

O
NLY LATER WOULD GOLDEN REMEMBER MANY OF THE DETAILS. DURING
the weeks and months afterward they would come to him at unexpected moments—in the middle of a conversation or the half sleep of early morning—bits of memory and disconnected sensation, broken images creeping into the dark corridors of his mind through back entrances and trapdoors: the swirl of feathers, the flash of light like a splinter lodged in his eye, the vibrating moon, the cold water of the river shocking his hands, the smell of burning hair.

It was the second night Huila had spent at the Spooner home. The first night they had both been too jittery to talk, to say or do anything in a coherent way, so they walked around the house holding hands and whispering awkward half phrases like AWOL teenagers sneaking around under a swollen moon. The second night, Golden decided, would be different. He planned to talk to her, really talk, to finally get down to business. They could not go on like this, he would tell her, trying hard to keep the whine out of his voice, he couldn’t take it anymore, it was that simple, something bad was going to happen, it was only a matter of time. Either they were going to go through with it, they were going to run away together, or they would have to face up to everything they had done, stop sneaking around and accept the consequences. So this was his plan: they would talk, in a very serious and adult way, and once and for all she would tell him what to do.

They were walking around the west side of the house where Sister Spooner kept her collection of birdbaths, bird feeders, birdhouses and other bird-related paraphernalia, when Golden heard something. A metallic rattle, a low grunting. His throat seized and he put his arm in front of Huila to stop her. He imagined a shadowy figure waiting to ambush them, maybe more than one, maybe Todd Freebone or the stranger from across the street at the bank, or Ted Leo himself. He waited, listened, heard nothing more. He peeked around the corner of the house and what he saw confused him: a boy crouching over something in the dirt, and behind him the ostrich, out of its pen and bearing down on the unsuspecting child, its yellow eyes irate and shining.

Golden stepped forward to shout, to try to intercept the bird or ward it off, and it was here that his memory would falter. Afterward, he wouldn’t remember hearing anything: one moment he was reaching out, about to shout, and then he was on his knees, clutching the side of his face, a burr of pain deep in his ear. He would not remember screaming at Huila to run, but later she would tell him that he had done exactly that. He would remember the spangles of colored light that dazzled his retinas—making it impossible for him to see clearly—and imagining that he had been shot or clubbed over the head or otherwise attacked. He scrambled to find the boy, blinking hard, but his left eye registered only hazy red starbursts and the right one didn’t seem to be working at all until he saw, through a pall of smoke, what he took to be a pile of garbage topped by a small guttering flame. It was very close, nearly at his feet, and he was about to step over it when he realized that it was the boy, that the boy’s head was on fire. He groaned—a sound of pain that came from somewhere very deep—and the next thing he knew he was running with the boy, who felt, gathered against his chest, like nothing more than a pile of smoldering rags.

Later, one of the things that Golden would find hardest to forgive himself for was the fact that he didn’t know, as he stumbled toward the river, exactly who he was cradling in his arms. It was his child, he knew that much. He just didn’t know which one.

Even after he’d doused the boy in the freezing water and gotten a look at his face, the top half of which was bloody and pitted beyond recognition, the skin charred, much of the hair on top of the head burned away, still he couldn’t tell, and he would later wonder if he simply didn’t
want
to know, if in its shocked state his mind had refused to speculate, to consider the names and possibilities, searching instead for some other, more acceptable outcome: that he was mistaken, that this was not his child at all but belonged to someone else entirely, someone stouthearted enough to withstand a blow such as this, someone wise and resolute and strong, a man of faith, a good father, someone not at all like him.

INTO THE DARK

Golden parked in the farthest corner of the PussyCat Manor parking lot, next to the dumpsters. The last time he was here, six or seven weeks ago—a period of time that now seemed like a span of years—he had claimed this very spot. It had been a sunny, clear morning, he remembered, and he had sat here slumped behind the wheel of his pickup, worrying, dithering, unable, as always, to come to a decision, wondering if he had the guts to walk though the brothel doors.

Tonight it was dark, blustery, an hour or two before sunrise, and he did not dither. He climbed out of the cab and rummaged through the bed of the pickup, looking for his axe handle, the one he’d bought ten years ago, shortly after the episode with Ervil LeBaron in which he’d broken out Ervil’s taillights in front of the entire congregation and had become, briefly, a minor hero who some had already placed their bets on as the One Mighty and Strong, come to redeem the world and save them all. Heady days those had been, full of such hopes and expectations, and he hadn’t thought twice about acquiring his own personal axe handle, to keep in the bed of his pickup, just in case. Of course, he had known he was not the One Mighty and Strong, or anything close to it, but that didn’t stop him from driving over to Lamont Bros. Hardware and splurging on the deluxe model—a hickory Harvistall with a nice grain and heft to it—for the outlandish price of $5.99. He placed it in its special spot in the bed, right behind the rear window on the driver’s side, and in those nine intervening years had never picked it up again.

It was still here in the truck somewhere, he was sure of it, probably buried under a pile of survey stakes or copper elbow joints. He cast around in the cumulus of broken tools and fast-food wrappers and snarls of baling wire, finally locating it by feel, snared in a tangle of a shorted-out extension cord. He held it up to the negligible light. It was nicked, dinged, weathered a splintery gray, and stained at the butt end with what looked to be spilled antifreeze, but it would do.

Walking across the parking lot, he felt weirdly clear-headed, charged and alert, which made little sense considering the night he’d had so far. It had been only a few hours ago that the two volunteer firefighters, twin brothers Ronnie and Donnie Gundersall, showed up within minutes of Beverly’s emergency call, and with a deft competence belied by their scruffy facial hair and matching Lynyrd Skynyrd concert T-shirts, checked Rusty’s vital signs, loaded him into the makeshift county rescue van and, with a spinning of tires and scattering of gravel that may have been excessive under the circumstances, headed off for the hospital in St. George. Before they’d gone, Ronnie told Golden that the sheriff had been called and suggested Golden wait around to talk to him, but Golden wasn’t about to wait for anyone. He jumped into his pickup and, with Beverly and Nola in the station wagon not far behind, drove with his foot mashed on the gas, the only thought in his head that if he drove fast enough he might be able to beat Ronnie and Donnie to the emergency room.

At the hospital he was told Rusty was already being transferred to a Life Flight helicopter bound for University Medical in Las Vegas. Without waiting for his wives or speaking to anyone else, Golden got right back into his pickup and drove on, following I-15 through the winding gorges of Arizona and then across the moonlit desert plains of southern Nevada, his momentum stalled only by the old GMC’s aversion to uphill grades, and the interminable fleets of sixteen-wheelers that seemed to clog the highway this time of night. Entering the great bowl of light that was Las Vegas in search of a sign that would point him in the direction of University Medical, he became disoriented, driving through intersections and over medians like someone who had never seen a stoplight or executed a left-hand turn in traffic. On the dark, humming highway he had been on a kind of autopilot, some part of his mind insisting on nothing but motion and progress, but now that progress had stalled he felt himself unmoored, swamped under by the tide of light and human noise, and in one black moment the horror of what had happened rose up in him with such force he heaved forward against the steering wheel, knocking the air out of his lungs. The pickup coasted for another twenty feet, hopped against the curb and stalled. Golden evacuated the cab for the sidewalk and, in front of an audience of singularly unimpressed bar-hoppers and motorists, vomited onto the base of a towering desert palm.

He would not remember getting back into his truck, or how he managed to find the hospital after what must have been another half hour of dazed wandering. He walked through the glass doors of the hospital and kept walking as if he didn’t know how to do anything else, down one hall and then another, past people sleeping on plastic benches and small families carrying on their grim vigils and, finally, into a room full of desks and filing cabinets where a short Hispanic man was busy humming to himself and mopping the floor. The man looked up—he had a kind, generously creased face, and Golden went right to him. He tried to explain, to say,
I’m looking for my son
, but his voice was useless, ragged, as if he’d spent the last couple of hours screaming himself hoarse. The man smiled, seeming to understand perfectly, and then the room narrowed and darkened, and he felt himself toppling into the man’s waiting arms.

He awoke on a gurney in the hall, a portly, freckled nurse looming above him. She said, “Back to the world of the living, are we?” With a nurse’s cheerful competence she shone a penlight in his eye, fitted his arm with a blood pressure cuff, all the while asking what his name was, if he knew what day it was, if he had, in the last twenty-four hours, ingested alcohol or drugs. Again, he tried to speak, to make his identity and intentions known, but he seemed to have fallen mute: when he opened his mouth the only thing that came out was a wet, interrogative grunt.

The nurse noted this on her clipboard, and was pumping up the air-pressure cuff with forceful contractions of her meaty fist when a commotion down the hall drew her attention. She turned her back on him and proceeded to carry on a long-distance conversation—which consisted mostly of waving arms and dramatic shrugs—with another nurse on the other end of the long corridor trying to maneuver a large bleeding man in a wheelchair who was shouting about the motherfucking bastards who’d stolen his Gold Toe socks. Golden thought about the friendly janitor he had apparently just fainted upon, and hoped he had not done the man any lasting harm. The nurse continued ignoring him and Golden decided that, as comfortable as that gurney was, he couldn’t wait around any longer. He sat up, tested his feet against the floor, and started in the opposite direction, taking the first left he came to, the blood-pressure apparatus still dangling from his arm. It wasn’t long before he found Beverly and Nola, who shared a small, out-of-the-way alcove with a few plastic chairs and a coffee vending machine. They rushed to him, their hair wild and eyes bloodshot, clutching the necks of their nightgowns. The sight of these two women, their familiar smells, the weight of their palms on his wrists, brought him out of the fever dream he’d been having and fully into himself: he was suddenly aware of his own creaking mass, the smells of gunpowder and blood and river mud rising off him, the cold, clenched fist of his heart constricting with dread at the news he was about to receive. His wives asked him the same series of questions they’d been asking for years: What was wrong with him? Where had he been? What had taken him so long?

Even though he didn’t speak or respond in any way, they must have been able to read the expression on his face, the single question contained in it, because they both stopped at once and Beverly nodded. “He’s alive.”

Golden felt his equilibrium give. He pivoted and sat down hard. For the moment, this was enough. His muscles and joints turned to liquid and he thought he might slide right off the chair and onto the floor.

But, of course, it wasn’t that simple—nothing ever was. Nola sat down next to him, and in hushed tones gave him the rest of the news, which had been delivered by the lead surgeon only a few minutes before.

Rusty had been rushed into emergency surgery the moment he arrived, but once the doctors had opened up his head and had a look around, they quickly put down their scalpels. There were too many metal fragments embedded too deeply; if they tried to get at every one they would end up doing more harm than good. So they had removed several of the larger, more accessible fragments, and cut away a portion of his skull to accommodate the swelling of the brain. There were other, less dire injuries. The boy’s left eye had been destroyed, as had most of his right hand. He had suffered third-degree burns to his face and scalp. His chances of survival, the surgeon had told them, were poor at best. Once he was transferred into the ICU they would be allowed to see him.

The wives gave Golden a few seconds to let this sink in. They watched him, waiting for a reaction, for some kind of explanation, but he gave them none, simply sat there in the white hum of the waiting room, sporting the blood-pressure collar strapped around his biceps and gripping his knees as if he might otherwise fly into pieces.

Nola, who was wearing a man’s denim jacket over her nightgown, along with a pair of mismatched rubber irrigation boots, carefully removed the collar from his arm and placed it to the side. She gripped one of his hands in hers. Normally, it was Beverly who would have taken the lead in a situation like this, but Beverly sat across from Golden looking strangely vacant and withdrawn, as she had for the past couple of days. Nola hunkered down in front of Golden in an attempt to make eye contact, as if she were trying to induce a confession out of a grade-schooler, and asked the question Beverly had shouted at him from the porch as she watched him wade with Rusty across the swollen river, the question the Gundersall brothers had asked as they knelt down beside the boy to check his vital signs: “What
happened
?”