The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  “How old you say you are, son?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Your mama’s kept you well fed, we’ll give her that much. Sixteen, I’d guess that’d put you in, oh, tenth grade or so. Can you read?”

  “Yessir. A little.”

  “Can you do your sums?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Well, all right, then,” Principal Wiggins said, clapping Golden on the back. “The tenth grade it is.”

  In the classroom, sitting like a teenager stuck in a first-grader’s desk, Golden was no success, but he was happy. He could barely follow the lessons, flubbed assignment after assignment, took his lunch by himself in the cafeteria, walked the hallways gawking like a tourist, hiding his overbite with his hand. He had an acne problem and a wispy blond beard that no one had taught him to shave. He offered friendship to everyone who would speak to him, but found no takers. He was slow, good-natured, and, because of his size, a target of jokes and pranks of all sorts: wet willies, a roadkill armadillo in his locker, fake love notes written by the boys in the back row, Vaseline on the toilet seat. Happily, he moved from one humiliation to the next; anything was better than sitting at home with his mother.

  Football wasn’t nearly so complicated. He ran where he was told to run, knocked down whoever got in his way. Every night he spent an hour puzzling over the playbook before he moved on to his homework. It was easier now to forget about his father; he had other things to think about. He was way behind, with a lot to learn.

  On a Friday night in the fall of his senior year, in the third quarter of a blowout loss to the Gledsden Hellions, Golden broke from the huddle and, as he ran to the line of scrimmage, looked across the cinder track to see his father leaning against the chain-link fence. The man was too far away for Golden to make out his features exactly, but he had the dark hair and flashing smile, the easy slouch with one leg crossed over the other, and even wore the kind of western-style shirt his daddy favored.

  Golden stood in the middle of the green field, the lights overhead so bright they cast no shadow, and he felt nothing close to anger or hate, but a burst of adrenalized joy, the same feeling he’d had when he was three, sitting at the upstairs window, the first one to spot his father’s pickup come rattling around the square.

  My daddy, he thought. My daddy.

  He was about to raise his hand to wave, but Coach Valardi screamed from the sidelines, “Goddamit, Richards, get up to the line!” When Coach raised his voice he sounded like a housewife yelling at her kids from the back porch. “Get your big ass moving! Ahh! They gonna hit us with delay of game!”

  Later, Golden would not remember getting into his three-point stance, or what the play was, or if he had executed his blocking assignment correctly. He would only remember coming out of a pile of bodies and seeing the ball come loose, bounce once, and land at his feet. At that moment it seemed that his life, which had felt like a sour disappointment just a few minutes before, was a long gradual wave cresting at this moment, and he scooped up the ball, held it softly to his chest, and ran like he never had before.

  He felt a few bodies bounce off him and fall away and then he was charging down the sidelines toward the end zone, with Coach Valardi shrieking into his earhole and one of the opposing players—a skinny cornerback half his size—running alongside, trying to drag him down by the shoulder pads. He grunted, made an unsuccessful swipe at the cornerback with his forearm, and about eight yards from the orange cone someone came in at him low and hard and his left knee buckled sideways with a snapping sound that traveled through his skeleton like an electric current and reverberated inside his skull. The pain was a bucket of scalding water dowsing his body, but he was able to keep his feet the last few yards, his ruined knee grinding with each lumbering stride, until he tilted forward and fell headfirst into the end zone as if diving into a pond, his face mask digging a furrow in the soft turf.

  He turned over on his back, groaning, his face covered in sod. If the crowd was cheering, he couldn’t hear it. He tried to prop himself on his elbows to look for his father, but his eyes were full of dirt. Now he could hear shouting, could feel his teammates slapping his shoulder pads, trying to pull him up. He pushed them away, shucked off his helmet, lay back down, and smiled.

  My daddy.

  A MAN IN A MAGAZINE

  The man was not his father, of course, but a college scout from Tuscaloosa who had come to check out Junior Franz, the star tailback from the opposing team. It was a disappointment that struck him as low as he’d ever been: Golden’s football career was over and, because of a staph infection he contracted after knee surgery, so was his academic career. He spent the rest of the year either bedridden or in the hospital, and never attended another day of school.

  For ten months he hardly left the attic, took a regimen of painkillers provided by Dr. Darkly, longed for the humiliations and minor thrills of the classroom, and did his best to match his mother’s depression with his own. Except for Coach Valardi, who came to get his football gear back, Golden received no visits from classmates or teachers, no cards or letters offering good wishes. It was as if he’d never been to Mount Oxnard High at all, never had a life outside the dark, mildewy apartment. His mother fed him, changed his dressings, did not argue with him when he told her he planned never to get out of bed again. When she finally had to take the receptionist job Dr. Darkly had been offering her for years, it was a relief to finally be free of her, at least for a portion of each day. Boredom, finally, forced him out of his bed, and as his knee grew stronger he began to make forays downstairs, mostly hopping on his good leg and using walls and furniture for leverage, but occasionally putting enough weight on the knee to feel a satisfying dose of pain. One morning, using the beechwood cane Dr. Darkly had lent him, he hobbled into his mother’s room, a mysterious space that had been off-limits to him for as long as he could remember.

  He stood next to her bureau for a moment, taking in the smell of perfume and cigarette smoke and face cream, and then began opening drawers, where he found unexpected things: candy bars hidden under blouses, a small book called A Man Came Calling, and some lacy underwear, tucked in its own little silk bag, with the price tag still attached, waiting, he would realize years later, for a special occasion that never came. He cast around under the bed, sifted through the linen chest, hungry to find something, he didn’t know what. In the small closet, he rifled through dresses, examined shoes, found a sewing kit, an old girdle, a set of pink curlers, a tin of peppermints. Though he could see nothing on the single high shelf, he groped around, standing on tiptoes, until his hand rested on a wooden cigar box. He knew immediately that this was what he had come here to find.

  Inside the box were letters, five of them, all from his father. Three of the envelopes were addressed to Malke and Golden Richards, but the one on top was addressed to Master Golden Richards in his father’s careless third-grader script.

  GOLDEN BOY YOUR MOTHER IS ANGRY AT ME WICH SHE HAS EVERY RITE SHE TOLD ME NOT TO RITE OR CALL AGIN BUT I WILL TRY ONE LAST TIME HERE IS A PLANE TICKIT COME OUT TO UTAH AND I WILL BUY YOU A MOTOR BIKE OR A ARABIYEN HORSE THATS IT ROYAL

  “What?” Golden said, just to hear his own voice. “What is this?”

  He shuffled through the other letters. All of them had money—one a check for a thousand dollars—these much longer than the one addressed only to him, pages of rambling prose without paragraphs or commas, and one of them was folded up with the glossy pages of a cut-out magazine article titled “Striking It Rich!” On the first page was a photograph of a vast desert panorama, and underneath the caption, Through This Forsaken Land of Towering Buttes and Treacherous Canyons Royal Richards Made His Perilous Way to a Fabulous Discovery! On the third page was a photo of his daddy, standing atop a boulder in a cowboy hat, holding a rifle in one hand and a bubbling bottle of champagne in the other. The caption read, He Fought Storms, Rattlers, Poison Water, and Death Itself to Find His Uranium Bonanza!

  In
three breathless pages the article detailed how Royal, destitute after losing his shirt on an oil-well venture in Alabama, headed west, taking any job he could find to survive: street sweep and bricklayer, stableman and extra on the set of the feature film The Conqueror, where he had a “notable confrontation with screen idol John Wayne.” It wasn’t too long before he, like thousands of hopeful Americans, caught Uranium Fever and headed into the Utah desert with a Geiger counter and a dream. Three years he hiked the arroyos and slot canyons of the Colorado Plateau, finding nothing but scorpions, thirst, sunstroke and failure. He was cursed with mishaps. He lost his truck to quicksand, faced flash floods, blistering heat and perilous electrical storms, was bit by a rattler and lay for three days in the shade of a mesquite bush, hoping to die. Still he did not give up. He spent his remaining money on a scintillometer, a fifteen-pound gadget that registered radiation to a greater depth than a Geiger counter, and struck out on foot into the most treacherous reaches of the Dirty Devil country, ready to strike it rich or die trying.

  The article spared no detail on how many ways Royal came close to death: he ran out of food, then water, and came down with arsenic poisoning from drinking river water polluted by a dead sheep. His feet swelled until his boots bit into his flesh, so he spent days wandering deliriously through the desert, barefoot and sun-scorched, with every step losing the will to go on. One morning he woke up and found that the needle on his scintillometer, an obscenely heavy machine he’d been carrying around in his delirium like a ball and chain, was stuck at high register. He adjusted the dial but the needle wouldn’t return to normal. For an instant his head cleared and he looked down at the conglomerate rock beneath his hideously swollen feet. It was ash-gray, instead of the more common rust-red, and riddled with canary-yellow cartonite. The ground he was standing on, the entire ridge as far as he could see, was high-grade uranium ore.

  The will to live, which had earlier deserted him, returned in short order. He was without food or reliable water, his boots were useless, and he would never make it back to civilization on foot. So, after piling a series of rock cairns to stake his mining claim, he built a makeshift raft out of driftwood lashed together with his bootlaces, belt, and scintillometer strap and pushed out into the churning Dirty Devil River. He clung to the makeshift contraption for twelve harrowing miles, grinding against canyon walls, bouncing off boulders, swamping in the rapids, foundering in the pools and shallows, until a rancher found him washed up on a sandbar.

  The last page detailed the finale of this great adventure: after six months of attempting to excavate the mine himself, Royal Richards said what the heck and sold out for two million dollars to the Vanadium Corporation. On the opposite page was a picture of Golden’s daddy, looking handsome in a tuxedo, holding up a bubbling bottle of champagne and brandishing a cigar. Underneath it read:

  ROYAL RICHARDS, TOGGED OUT IN DINNER JACKET, CELEBRATES HIS ASTOUNDING TURN OF FORTUNE!

  Golden stood in the dim closet, dust motes swirling in his vision, unable to do anything but stare at the image of his father, who looked, amazingly, exactly like the man who had left eight years before and never returned. He put the glossy paper to his nose, hoping he might smell his father’s cologne.

  Golden thought he heard a noise outside, maybe his mother coming up the outside stairs. He stuffed everything back into the cigar box and hobbled out into the living room, his breath suddenly coming out of him in gasps. He waited, but heard nothing else. He thought about stepping into the closet to have another look, to read all of the letters, to stare at the pictures again, but he was afraid if he went back into that closet he would take the wooden cigar box down from the high shelf and find it empty.

  He went up to his room, took his place at the window. It’s what he always did when he didn’t know what else to do. For so long he had hated everything he could see from that window, the pathetic little square with its scrubby oak bushes and defunct fountain, surrounded by faded storefronts and cobbled streets crumbling at the edges and cratered with potholes, but now it all seemed alien, strangely beautiful: the fountain and its tattered coat of moss, the broken beer bottles glinting like treasure in the crabgrass, the old peckerwoods snoozing in the heat with their bright straw hats and multicolored suspenders, the leaves of the persimmon tree ticking in the breeze.

  The idea rang in his head like a bell: his daddy was alive. His daddy was not only alive, but a hero, a millionaire, a man in a magazine. Everything, suddenly, seemed possible. He rested his chin on the windowsill. I’m going to leave this place, he thought, understanding for the first time why it all seemed so suddenly beautiful, and I’m never coming back.

  3.

  AN AMBUSH

  WHEN SHE STEPPED INTO THE VIRGIN COUNTY ACADEMY OF HAIR DESIGN, the first thing she noticed was that the women inside—all five of them—wore western-style handkerchiefs around their faces like bandits. The second thing was the scorched-hair smell of a recently administered permanent, which explained the handkerchiefs. Nola, the establishment’s owner and sole licensed stylist, provided hankies spritzed with dime-store perfume to her customers when one of them received a perm.

  “Anything,” she always said, “to keep my girls happy.”

  Trish let the heavy glass door rattle shut behind her, and Nola, who was giving an unidentifiable middle-aged bandit a trim, pointed her scissors at Trish and said, “Stick ’em up, chicky! Your money or your life!”

  Trish tried to laugh with the other ladies but fumes caught in her throat and she gagged.

  “Oh come on,” said a flap-eared crone baking under one of the hair dryers, “somebody get her a hankie before she kilts over on us.”

  Rose-of-Sharon, who was behind the counter studying needlepoint samplers, padded across the tiled floor to a drawer on the other side of the room, pulled out a blue cotton handkerchief, spritzed it with a faux-crystal decanter of Night Passion—a perfume that smelled to Trish like something they might use in a funeral home to improve the odor of a corpse—and carefully, almost tenderly, tied it around Trish’s nose and mouth.

  It was only the second time she’d been in here during the past year and it looked like nothing had changed, not even the identical pair of old ladies with identical perms flipping through old seed catalogs. There were still the ancient Christmas cards and wedding announcements taped to the cracked mirror, the three naugahyde barber chairs in a row next to the black bakelite shampoo sink, the series of white styrofoam heads on a shelf, some of which sported wigs, some of which had gone bald, one of which gazed mysteriously down upon the room through a pair of false eyelashes.

  Nola had been running this place for years, even before she became Golden’s second wife. She had taken a keen interest in hair at age fifteen when she permanently lost all of her own. Her father, a man who managed to support three wives and eighteen children on a bricklayer’s pay, couldn’t afford the extravagance of a wig, so Nola had saved up her egg money and bought a book called The Wigmaker’s Art. With hair donated by her sisters, she practiced making her own extensions, weaves and full-wefted caps, all of which she sold as fast as she could make them. She learned a dozen different styles, even tried her hand at toupees and hairpieces, which turned old bald cowboys into screen idols overnight. The more wigs she made, the more hair she required, and so she began making house calls, offering a cut-and-style free of charge. Plural wives who had not cut their hair in their entire lives were suddenly jumping at the chance to be shorn at the skilled hands of Nola Harrison. Because Nola was engaged in a good cause—there was a significant number of women who had lost their hair to cancer or radiation poisoning or simple old age and needed a good wig—the priesthood council could make only feeble protests. As long as the hairstyles stay modest, none of them Marilyn Monroe haircuts or dye jobs, and the women don’t get into shenanigans like getting their nails painted, then I guess we can go along with it. Within a year Nola saved enough money to lease the old Anderson Building, which at one time had been the T
ender Brothers Drugstore and Café. She dreamed of teaching other women from the valley to cut hair and make wigs, but it turned out she was the only hairstylist and wigmaker this part of the valley needed. Though the academy had never produced a single graduate, it provided, on Tuesdays and Thursdays and an occasional Saturday afternoon, a place where the town women could get a perm, where the plural wives could get a trim or shampoo, where any woman at wits’ end could go to get a break from the incessant demands of children and men.

  “Oh, we’re a bunch of desperadoes, all right,” Nola said now, her eyes as bright as brass tacks above her red bandana, her scissors going snick snick snick, the hammock of fat under her arm quivering. “But we do like to smell pretty.”

  Trish sat in one of the folding chairs along the wall to wait her turn. Next to her, a pile of old magazines a foot high threatened to slide to the floor. She flipped through a finger-worn copy of Life and wondered if a poisonous cloud of hair chemicals might be preferable to a handkerchief soaked with cathouse perfume. She’d come in wanting only a shampoo and trim for her big night tonight, maybe catch up on a little gossip, but now she felt on the verge of vomiting or passing out or both.

  Doing her best to breathe through her mouth, she shuffled through several more magazines until she came upon something unexpected: a Cosmopolitan whose cover featured a heavily made-up woman in ultra-tight tennis shorts and halter top standing in the face of a stiff breeze. Next to her head of feathered, windblown hair was the headline:

  OBSESSED WITH YOUR BREASTS?

  HOW TO DEAL WITH THOSE FEELINGS

  And below that:

  THE CRUEL LOVER: WHY ARE YOU

  DRAWN TO HIM? HOW TO FREE YOURSELF

  FROM HIS DEVASTATING ATTRACTION

  She wondered how long it had been since she’d seen a magazine like this, and how could such a thing have managed to end up in Nola’s reading pile? Flushed with adolescent guilt, she turned the pages filled with underwear advertisements: women in bra and panties having lunch, wearing fur coats, conducting board meetings, gazing thoughtfully out of windows. There was an article called “Alternatives to Bikini Waxing” and a column about the misunderstood affliction known as nymphomania.