by Brady Udall
“Okay, then,” his father said. “Why don’t you go ahead and put those away. We’ll see about getting you some new undershorts, but you’ve got to try harder to keep the rules and respect other people’s property. Aunt Beverly says—”
“Meep meep,” Rusty said, which is robot language for, Aunt Beverly is not my mom, and this isn’t my house, and it isn’t fair.
His father’s huge eyebrows went up and he opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out.
“Zzzzt zzzzt,” Rusty said, which is robot language for, I’m lonely and I’m mad and why does everybody hate me?
“What is this?” his father said. “What are you doing?”
“Beep bop boop,” Rusty said, which is robot language for, please help me, you are the only one who can do it, I want to go home.
His father had a hard time pulling himself out of the broken bed, but when he walked over to where Rusty was sitting, Rusty thought that maybe he had been able to communicate using simple robot language, that maybe his father would let him go back home, or if not, at least he might pat him on the back or give him a hug and say, It’s okay, Sport, don’t worry, things are going to be all right.
What his father said was, “I just don’t know why you have to act so dang weird.”
His father left, and Rusty stood behind the closed door, listening to him thump down the stairs and then hit his head on the low ceiling at the landing, which happened every time. Then his father was gone and everything was quiet. Rusty stared at the closed door.
“Meep meep,” he said.
10.
A PEEPING TOM
OF COURSE, HE HADN’T VENTURED INTO THE PUSSYCAT MANOR TO check up on Leonard Odlum at all. He’d braved the hookers and the piles of dildos and Miss Alberta for one reason only: hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman he’d been carrying on with for most of the past month. Carrying on? He didn’t know how else to describe it. Though there had been only limited physical contact, and he wasn’t entirely sure what her name was, it was possible that what they were doing could be described as an affair. Affair. The word itself made his tongue go thick in his mouth, his heart surge with a strange voltage.
Whatever they were doing together, he knew one thing: it wasn’t right.
It had started innocently, as all affairs, Golden assumed, do. The first time he’d seen her was at Salt Pond, a spring-fed watering hole circled by basalt boulder fields and stands of cattail. Ted Leo had told Golden he wanted to incorporate the pond into the overall plan of the new brothel, call it Lovemakers’ Lagoon or Cuddlers’ Cove or something equally corny, and string some lights and build a little dock for fishing and canoeing and moonlit orgies, but for now it was still a shallow pond where foxes drank and cows wallowed in the summer.
The pond was where he most often liked to take his walks after a long day of work. He had little interest in spending time with the crew—who generally hung around their motel playing cards or spending all their money at one of the two bars in town—and his own home away from home, a twenty-year-old snail-back Airstream travel trailer parked on a rise a half mile from the construction site, was so small he could not lie in its lumpy berth without bending his knees or stand up in its six-by-eight kitchen without knocking his head. So he walked, usually following the game trails and up around the pond or down into the sandy arroyos until the charcoal twilight came on and clouds of bats emerged from unseen caves and crevices in the earth to take over the sky.
For several days in a row he’d been seeing the same coyote at the pond—bushy with a distinctive rust-colored pelt and a slight limp—and he had taken to leaving it an offering of food on top of the same boulder before going back to his trailer. That first night the coyote went nowhere near the piece of jerky he’d left, keeping a close eye on him as it trotted off into the lowering dusk, but when he came to check the next morning the jerky was gone. Anything could have swiped it, he knew, a bobcat, a fox, an owl, another coyote, but he liked to think it was his special coyote. A few days afterward, when he spotted the coyote making its way along the ridgeline, he left two Slim Jims on the same boulder and retreated to a stand of junipers three or four hundred yards to the south. It took nearly half an hour for the thing, after much sniffing the air and indecisive pacing, to race up, snatch the meat sticks in its jaws, and go streaking across the sage plain toward the test site, occasionally looking back over its shoulder, a definite spring in its step, as if it had gotten away with something.
So on this particular late February day, after a long afternoon of haggling with a pair of shrill, finger-jabbing county inspectors over a misplaced sewer line, he hiked up the shallow rise to the pond, hoping for nothing but some solitary quiet and the possibility of a glimpse of his coyote. Instead of a coyote, what he found was a woman, a small, dark-skinned woman, up to her thighs in the water of the pond. The sun had just gone down and the sky was a murky silver darkening to lavender near the horizon. The air was still and cool and the pond was like a perfect little mirror under the greater mirror of the sky, and the woman stood ten feet from the shore, in the middle of her own reflection.
Golden, a hundred yards away, hunkered next to a boulder furry with orange lichen, could only see her black hair and brown arms, but something about the way she stood, her fingertips brushing the pond’s surface, the tilt of her head, made him hold his breath. Though it was a warm day, he imagined how cool the water must have been, the oozing silt of the pond bed covering her feet. He imagined her feet: little brown feet with perfect toes. He embraced the boulder and held it tight.
She moved just out of view and Golden stood, looking side to side like an outlaw, and crept across a field of smaller boulders, hoping for a better look. Anyone seeing him there, burly and furtive in the half-light of dusk, might have been put in mind of a bear lurking at the edge of the watering hole to see what might come to drink.
It seemed she was talking to herself. She shrugged, held her hands out as if to say, Who knows? and then turned suddenly to look behind her as if she knew someone was there. He ducked, fell backward on his butt and scuttled in reverse until he was sure he hadn’t been spotted. He jogged back to his trailer, feeling as if he were on the brink of something.
Every day after work he took the same walk, loitered nervously behind the same stand of boulders.
She came again a few days later. This time she did not go into the water but stayed at the edge, trying to skip rocks, yelping with pleasure when she succeeded. She wore some kind of traditional white dress with pineapples and bananas stitched onto it with yarn. It was not sandal weather—a cold front had moved in, kicking up a persistent breeze—but here she was in leather sandals, the first day of March, her brown legs exposed. He found the sandals unaccountably alluring. For over twenty years now he’d lived in the Virgin Valley, a place of summer heat and constant sunshine, and had not once in his memory seen an adult woman or man there wear sandals or high heels or clogs—he had never seen so much as a flip-flop. People there, even in the worst heat, wore sensible, blocky shoes or boots that covered up, if there were such things, the comeliness of ankles, the sexuality of toes.
For a moment he indulged in a sour pang of shame. He was spying on a woman, probably a prostitute, and thinking about her feet. That she was likely a prostitute, he decided, made her less threatening. She was not someone he would ever find reason to talk to or be around, no one he could feel anything for except a safely distant fascination.
One warm Tuesday evening, the thick clouds suspended over the eastern horizon gone bronze with the disappearance of the sun, he decided to take a walk. There would be no more spying, no more entertaining questionable thoughts about this poor woman’s toes. If he happened to see her, he would say hello and move on, an upstanding citizen out for an evening stroll, a man of pure heart and clean mind.
Instead of creeping and ducking as before, he walked casually, openly, around the largest boulder, on which was spray-painted WEED MAKES ME HAPPY, and looked do
wn to find her there, kneeling at the water’s edge, the pond purple with dusk. His blood surged and in a panic not to be seen he toppled forward, groaning, on top of a mesquite bush.
Even though he was poked all over by the stickery branches of the bush, he kept still. Her back was to him, and she was hunched forward, pushing and pulling at something in the water. She straightened up and in a single motion peeled the T-shirt she was wearing over her head, revealing a smooth expanse of skin divided by a white bra strap. The bush stabbed him unmercifully along his chest and neck, his bad knee began to throb, but he did not move. Each breath came long and shallow, and his mind did not register a single impulse until the thought came, No, this is not right, and that was when he felt a hand rest firmly on his shoulder—a hand that, as far as Golden knew, might have belonged to a vengeful and very unhappy God.
“What we lookin at here ’zactly?” Leonard whispered into his ear.
“Leonard!” Golden said through clenched teeth, craning his neck around.
“Billups said you’s wantin’ a talk to me. Saw you come out this way, so I followed. When I saw you fall in this bush I thought you’d had some kind of, you know, fit, I’d come over here to find you swallowin’ your tongue or someth—Now wait a second here.” Leonard seized as if he’d swallowed his plug of tobacco. “Is this a nude woman we’re looking at?”
“You need to leave right now, Leonard. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Damn me and my shitty eyesight!” he cried, trying to blink his eyes into better focus. “There is a nude lady down there!”
Golden tried to shush him, but it was too late. The woman had turned around, holding her arms against her chest.
“She see us?” Leonard said. “Does she have nice titties?”
Golden grabbed Leonard just above his skinny elbow, a sudden anger in him that blurred his vision, and squeezed so hard that Leonard opened his mouth wide in grimace, his silver fillings flashing.
“Watch the spit cup!” Leonard cried.
“Go on now!” Golden said with false cheer, as if talking to a child.
“All right, damn!” Leonard shook his arm loose and rubbed it tenderly. He stood slowly, backing up, and waved in the direction of the woman by the pond.
“Hello there, ma’am!” he called. “We’re just out here mindin’ our own business!”
Golden stood too, made a halfhearted wave, and began to shuffle down the hill toward the other side of the pond. “Out for a walk!” he called. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” He was looking intently at his own feet, but out of the corner of his eye could see the woman grabbing the shirt to cover her chest and then straightening up as if she might run. She looked so frightened he felt compelled to say something.
“I was just, ah, walking, out for a walk,” he said, pointing up the hill from where he’d come. “I didn’t know anybody’d be here. Please don’t be scared.”
Using one hand to hold her shirt against her chest, she used her other to scoop up a pile of wet clothes at her feet, but when she turned to step off the rock several items peeled off and fell in the water.
“Ay!” she cried, stomped her foot once, and let the rest of the clothes drop at her feet.
“Can I help you?” Golden said, moving cautiously forward, his palms out, to show her he meant her no harm. “I’m sorry for scaring you.”
She looked him in the eye for the first time, and he was close enough to see her broad Indian face and small, flat nose, her full lips. She was short—at least an inch or two under five feet—and sturdily built, her skin a swirling of brown shades, as if her pigment had not been properly mixed. He slowly, nonchalantly covered his overbite with his hand—from her angle his front teeth must have hung over her like a store awning.
She turned her back to him and quickly pulled her T-shirt back on. He automatically cast his eyes downward and noticed a pink brick of soap at the edge of the rock, and ribbons of suds separating on the surface of the water, and it finally occurred to him that she was not here to bathe, as he’d first thought, but to wash clothes.
When she turned around and gave him another hard look, he said, “My name is Golden Richards. I’m a nice man.”
To show her just how nice he was, he stepped out into the pond, the water up to his calves, to retrieve an article of clothing that was threatening to float away. It turned out to be a bra, a beige, industrial-sized thing with heavy-duty straps and half a dozen hook-and-eye fasteners—the kind of bra worn by grizzled triage nurses in war zones. He held it up for a moment, at a loss, and solemnly handed it over.
Something moved at the base of the boulder field and he looked over the woman’s shoulder to see Leonard hiding behind a mesquite bush. He was grinning like a maniac and giving Golden the thumbs-up.
Despite Leonard’s poor eyesight, he must have seen the hot glare Golden directed his way; spit cup held high, he immediately jumped up and began tiptoeing up the path in the exaggerated pantomime of a burglar.
Golden turned his attention back to the woman, who, luckily, had not noticed Leonard but was fixated on Golden’s feet. His size-sixteen work boots, full of water and covered in gray muck, were leaking all over the ground like two foundered oil tankers. He shifted in them and they made a rather lewd noise: squitt.
“My shoes,” he said. “They’re wet.”
She looked up at him and her face seemed to open wide for a moment, her nostrils flared, and she laughed.
That laugh. It made his skin tingle with heat, gave him the taste of something sweet in his mouth. It was an easy laugh, high-pitched and musical, a sound people would pay to hear.
He helped her collect the rest of her clothes and, with nothing left to do or say, gave her an awkward version of a military salute and staggered up the slope toward the boulders, the sound of his wet boots heard long after his lumbering form had melted away into the dim landscape: squitt, squitt, squitt, squitt.
THE ONE MIGHTY AND STRONG
He had been caught spying on a strange woman and had attempted to redeem himself by handling her personal underthings. Any way he looked at it, it was a relationship that should have ended before it started. And yet, there they were, the next evening, trading shy waves from a distance, and the next, wandering along parallel game trails that meandered through the creosote and rabbit brush, as if it were a normal thing for the two of them, in all this limitless space, to come across each other time and again.
Twice he’d stopped and tried to make conversation, asking how her day was going, what she thought of the rain last night, but she wouldn’t look him in the face, much less speak to him. He tried out his limited Spanish, which seemed to get her attention, and after a complicated Tarzan-Jane routine she finally spoke a word: Weela. Her name: Weela. Or that’s what Golden deduced, anyway. It felt like he’d won a prize to get this much out of her. The moment she said it she seemed to blush and quickly turned to walk back in the direction she’d come.
At night, locked in the coffin of his little trailer, he would say it aloud, and the sound of it—Weeeeeeeela—panged him with pleasure and dread.
He did everything he could to stop what was happening. He quit going to the pond every day, tried not to plan his day around her—he certainly had more important things to think about—but the fact was that thinking about her was a luxury, a bliss. It pushed all the important things out of his mind, made him, for a few minutes out of every hour, happily distracted.
It was true: he’d had about all he could stand of important things. He was tired of the big decisions required of him every day, the momentous, life-altering occasions that happened, in this family, at least once a week: the baptisms and birthdays and anniversaries and graduations and band recitals and church plays and 4-H shows. He didn’t want to hear about whose junior league basketball game he’d forgotten, or what parent-teacher conference had been missed. He didn’t want to see another overdue utility bill or tax notice, didn’t want to take any more phone calls regarding feuding wives or
love-sick teenage daughters or biblical plagues of chicken pox or pinkeye or flu that were always lurking just out of sight, waiting to bring the family to its knees. More than anything, he was at his limit with the strain of keeping the entire enterprise a secret. For eight months he’d told his wives and everyone at church that he was building a senior citizens’ center out in Nevada—a senior citizens’ center!—and every time he went back home, he was sure the word had gotten out, the jig was up, he’d been discovered; for the last six months he’d come home every week, stepping delicately, head bowed, waiting for the hammer to come down.
And it wasn’t as if his job—building a brothel on the edge of nowhere for a man prone to ugly temper tantrums and bouts of hysterical grandstanding—was doing anything to reduce his anxiety. Ted Leo had hired him, Golden found out after his bid was accepted, because Ted knew his father back when Ted was an army corporal stationed at the Nevada Test Site and Royal Richards was a minor Las Vegas celebrity, the humble uranium miner from Louisiana who’d struck it big. Though Ted had characterized the relationship as a friendship, it became clear to Golden, as time went on, that Ted resented Royal for his unearned fortune and renown, and was now, almost thirty years later—with Royal dead of a brain tumor and Ted still very much on this side of the grave and living what he called his “great God-given American dream”—taking it out on Royal’s son, who wanted nothing to do with any of it. At first Ted was friendly in his loud, despotic way, but it wasn’t long before he’d show up at Golden’s work trailer in a screaming, hair-tearing rage over why the septic tank was being put where the swimming pool was supposed be (Ted had not mentioned a swimming pool until that moment) or berate Golden over the phone for twenty minutes about the price of copper pipe. He was fond of calling Golden a “big old pussy” or a “horse’s ass” and had once taken his most prized possession—a German Luger he claimed to have been owned by Al Capone—from its special drawer in his office desk and brandished it all over the work site, apparently because he wasn’t happy with the way one of the framing crew had taken the Lord’s name in vain. He would yell and carry on, demean Golden in every conceivable way, and then return ten minutes later and, as if none of it had ever happened, regale Golden with tales of spiritually fulfilling days as a Christian missionary in Guatemala, or invite him out for an afternoon of male bonding in the form of carp fishing.