The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  “How now?” Royal said.

  Golden knew the key was to be inserted into a hole or slot somewhere within arm’s reach but he couldn’t locate a likely spot.

  “You’re telling me you’re eighteen, a southern boy, and you don’t know how to get it down the road?”

  “Nineteen,” Golden said. “I’m nineteen.”

  “Okay then, right,” Royal said. “Yep. I get it. I get it now. Son don’t know how to drive because Daddy’s not around to instruct him. See? Even a fool like me will come around eventually. Well, let’s do it, then. That key, it goes in the ignition. There on the steering column. No, other side. Now the clutch. Right there on your left. Push down. With your foot, goddamn it. Now give the key a turn.”

  The starter whinnied and screeched, and after Golden negotiated what amounted to a seven-point turn in order to get the car out of the driveway, they lurched out into the road, gears grinding, engine revving frightfully, new tires chirping with every touch of the brakes. Royal was a terrible teacher and Golden a worse student; the father’s instructions started out as firm suggestions that turned quickly to mild cursing and then to shouts of “No, oh no goddamn no!” when the car swerved off the road and nearly took out a couple of boys waiting for the school bus. The son, so big he looked like a teenager stuffed into a child’s pedal car, rode the brake and grew damp with sweat, flinching and jerking the steering wheel every time his father called, “New gear, new gear!”

  Eventually, the road straightened out and Golden managed to keep the car from drifting off it. Royal took advantage of this lull to fill Golden in on the things his letters had left out. “You know how I got rich and famous and all that, but I didn’t write what happened afterwards, I didn’t want to upset your mama.” He told Golden that after he’d made his fortune he’d carried on a life of such base sin and debauchery he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it in the light of day. “Let’s just say I was a hot-blooded man with too much money living in Las Vegas and leave it at that,” he said, staring out the passenger window with what might have been a touch of wistfulness, as if his past life continued on in some parallel trajectory beyond the clouds. After two solid years of drinking and women and not much else, he’d hit bottom, and that’s when Uncle Chick found him drunk and bloodied and stumbling along the crumbling margins of Highway 89 after losing control of his prized 1949 Vincent Black Lightning and running off the road into a thicket. “It was God’s doing, see, I was wandering in the desert, literally and, you know, otherwise, and Uncle Chick saved me. Good Samaritan, et cetera. Brought me home where I belonged.”

  Golden risked a glance at his father, who was staring at him intently, and he realized that besides the deep creases in his tanned neck and the thinning hair of his temples, there was something different about him: he had a look in his eye. A spark, a glint that gave him the aspect of someone moved by forces beyond his control.

  After Golden pulled the car back toward the center line—it was like it was trying to run itself into a ditch—Royal went on, explaining how he’d accepted God’s call, how he’d read the Book of Mormon (“sorta like the Bible, only with more sword fights”), and eventually become baptized and dedicated to the plan of salvation, which included the holy covenant of plural marriage, the only means by which man might ascend to the highest levels of the Celestial Kingdom.

  Even though Royal’s letters had mentioned finding God and becoming a new man, it was still disconcerting to hear his father, a person who’d always considered God a nuisance and killjoy, talking like this. But Golden wasn’t listening very closely, anyway; his focus was on keeping the car between the white and yellow lines. He found this was easiest to do by keeping it in second gear and holding a steady rate of speed of fourteen miles per hour.

  When the road turned from asphalt to chalky red dirt, Royal, increasingly annoyed at his giant son’s skittishness, had Golden turn the car around.

  “Now,” he said suddenly, “tell me about your mama, how she’s doing and all that.”

  “She’s fine,” Golden said. He thought of her sitting at the kitchen table, completely alone now, that ashen, lost look on her face, and he wanted to cry.

  Royal didn’t press for any details, just nodded, pointed out a hawk at the edge of the road, peeling the coat off a roadkill jackrabbit. Like somebody asking a neighbor how their weekend had gone, Royal said, “And how ’bout you? How you been?”

  Golden looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He was sitting in a spectacular new car with his rich and reformed daddy at his side, the sun coming up to expose the wild beauty of a place he once believed existed only in books and magazines, and yet he felt unaccountably sad, gripped with a desolation he could barely comprehend. He turned away from his father and with his voice breaking said, “I haven’t had much of a life so far, Daddy.”

  His father was silent for a few moments, which Golden was grateful for. Then he said, “Well come on, you big fucking crybaby, Jesus, stop feeling sorry for yourself why don’t you, you’re on your way up.”

  Golden only nodded at this rebuke, though he felt something pulse through him, an urge to take his cramping hands off the wheel and give his father a violent shake. For some reason, this made him think of something his father had said a few minutes earlier.

  “What’s plural marriage?”

  “Now there’s a good question,” Royal said. “Don’t be afraid to ask more when you feel like it. It means marrying more than one wife. That’s what men in the church are expected to do. And by the way, sorry for the cursing. That’s one of the hooks the devil’s still got in me.”

  “You have other wives?” Golden said, his focus diverted from his oversized right foot, allowing it to weigh on the accelerator. “Besides Mama?”

  Royal laughed. “No, not till the church thinks I’m ready, and your mama has to give a divorce, which she’s not being altogether cooperative about. I haven’t told her about all this church business, so this is between you and me, understand.”

  The engine was revving again, pulling the car forward with an almost animal impatience.

  Royal pointed to the house coming up on the left. “This’ll be our stop. Might want to slow her down a little.”

  Distracted, and still a little fuzzy on the finer points of turning, Golden yanked the wheel hard without so much as touching the brake pedal. The Thunderbird skidded sideways across the gravel driveway and Golden overcorrected, sending the car over a shallow berm and into the lilac hedge. There was the painful shrieking of branches against the car’s windows and new paint job, and a throng of sparrows lifted off in a single chittering cloud. The engine died and Golden looked blankly at the windshield, which showed a tangle of flattened leaves, while Royal gently investigated his nose with both hands.

  “Well,” Royal said, “that’ll have to be the end of that.”

  “Why do they want you to marry more than one wife?” Golden said, still gripping the steering wheel as if the car might decide on its own to start up and take off again at any second. A cloud of dust from the driveway had rolled in through the open windows and stung his eyes. “Why would God want somebody to do that?”

  “Ah son,” Royal said, eyeing the spot of blood he had wiped from his nostril, “it’s complicated. Most folks think it’s about sex, but that ain’t it at all. If a man wants sex, well, I don’t have to be the one to tell you there’s easier ways to do it than marrying someone. God wants us to live the Principle, mostly because it’s a hard thing to do and it makes us better for it. And one other thing. This world is full of righteous women, good-hearted women, am I right? But how many good men? Righteous men? Just about none. Couple here and there, maybe. The numbers are outta whack, and that shouldn’t mean all the good women out there should have to settle for a bad man. It’s basic arithmetic is all it is.”

  Golden thought again of his mother, saw in his mind the image of her that defined his childhood: tucked between the wall and kitchen table, gray-faced in her faded
housedress, staring into space, paralyzed with bitterness and loss. Was she simply a good woman who settled for a bad man? Was she nothing more than a victim of arithmetic?

  He looked at his father, who stared meaningfully back, his scorching violet eyes lit with a mysterious voltage.

  “So…” Golden hesitated. “You’re one of the good men?”

  A smile spread across his daddy’s face. He said, “I am now.”

  ALL IS WELL

  The Virgin Valley: two crumbling volcanic ridges between which a series of small, no-account towns hugged the river, each with its single Mormon chapel and scattering of pioneer homes and failing businesses surrounded by alfalfa fields and orchards of peach and apricot, the entire valley crisscrossed with barbed wire separating neighbor from neighbor, herd from herd, irrigated farmland from giant dusty squares of unwatered ground. To the west the Pine Mountains floating blue and cold in the distance, and to the east the fanged and scalloped horizon of the Vermillion Peaks, shifting color and shape with the motion of sun and clouds.

  Golden, drinking water by the gallon and rubbing his sun-stung eyes, worked up and down the valley, framing, rough masonry, ditch work, you name it—anything that required a strong back and no skill. He lived in his daddy’s house, worked for his daddy’s construction company, but saw very little of him; Royal was a busy man. Having burned through most of his uranium profits during his Las Vegas years, he used what was left to buy real estate all over the valley and to start up Big Indian Construction, named after his first uranium claim. He worked all day negotiating contracts and submitting bids, and in the evenings would attend something called School of the Prophets, where the male hierarchy of the church would meet to discuss doctrine, read scripture and debate vital matters such as the exact date of the Second Coming and whose responsibility it was to pump out the church house’s outdoor toilet. Even though Royal had been baptized only a year, he had been ordained a member of the Melchizedek priesthood and, once he began taking wives, would be called to the Council of the Twelve, an order of apostles of which there were currently a grand total of nine.

  The only thing Royal and Golden did together, besides an occasional meal and attending church, was bomb-watching. Every few weeks before dawn they would drive up to Royal’s favorite overlook on Egyptian Butte and wait for the great white-green flash to expose in an instant the whole broken desert plain, horizon to horizon. Once the mushroom cloud had gone up, lit from within by extraterrestrial fires, Royal would give his head a slow shake, overcome. “Oh look at her,” he’d say, his voice moist with reverence, as if looking into the sweet face of a long-awaited newborn. “Isn’t she a beaut.”

  At his own expense, Royal had gutted and renovated the sixty-year-old sandstone church where the group’s meetings were held, and his tithing amounted to more than that of all the other members put together. Unlike the valley’s Mormons who peopled the towns along the river, the members of the Living Church of God, who mostly lived on farms and compounds at the eastern edge of the valley, did not hold positions of power, sat on no boards or councils, had nothing but their little church on the hill and each other. They were generally poor, hardscrabble, and suspicious of outsiders of any stripe—so suspicious there was wide consensus among them that Royal was a spy from the government, somebody sent by Hoover to take notes, write names, and call down an FBI raid that would send the men to prison and the women and children into the care of Social Services. But with Uncle Chick’s assurances, and Royal’s easy southern manners and open wallet, the people came to believe he was exactly what Uncle Chick said he was: an angel, of sorts, sent from on high. There even began a whispering that this strange little man with the bright eyes might be the One Mighty and Strong, come to redeem them all.

  Which left Golden at a loss to explain his own presence. Who was the giant with the sunburn, and what did he want? He was obviously no government agent—too big to blend in, with the openmouthed expression of an idiot—and nothing about him suggested he had been sent by a higher power; truly, there was something more disturbing than suspicious about a six-foot-six man whose pants were too short. Shoulders hunched apologetically, strangled by the checkerboard polyester tie his father knotted for him, he would sit in the back of the chapel those first few Sundays with the latecomers and crying babies, and do his best to make sense of Uncle Chick’s sermons, which seemed to be dedicated to a single central theme: that this world, and most of the people in it, were all going to hell in a very large handbasket.

  In late July, Golden helped his father and some of the other men erect an old canvas circus tent on the grass field next to the church. Uncle Chick had bought it from a bankrupt Hungarian circus that had washed up in St. George, and while it wasn’t exactly the holy tabernacle of Old Testament times, it served well enough as the main meetinghouse for a few months while the renovations were under way. Now, on Pioneer Day, which celebrated the arrival of the first Mormon pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley, it would serve to shelter a congregation of double the usual 150: family and friends come from afar to help celebrate, and some of the independent polygamists who lived in the surrounding country: families who lived by their own theologies and rules, but who liked to escape their desert compounds and socialize once in a while.

  The circus tent was not an ideal venue for a spiritual meeting; it was almost unbearably stuffy and smelled of moldy hay and ancient elephant farts. The canvas walls, which bore the ink-stamped name of the manufacturer—Sarasota Tent and Sail—every ten feet, were mildewed and stained, the fiber ropes frayed and untrustworthy, and in the smallest breeze the whole thing flapped and creaked like a sailboat gone to seed. But on this particular summer Saturday evening, filled to bursting with freshly scrubbed worshipers and lit up with the low sun like a giant Chinese lantern, it seemed almost too exotic and far-fetched a place for the dour fundamentalist proceedings about to take place under its roof.

  A low plywood dais had been built, upon which sat the solemn elders of the church and rat-faced Sister Pectol, who played her portable organ with a funereal air. Golden could see the top of his father’s head just behind the row of apostles; he was there to attend to the Prophet, who sat in the place of honor just to the right of the pulpit in his old-fashioned oak and leather wheelchair. The Prophet, an old man made mostly of thin skin and sharp bones, was recovering from what would be the first of many strokes. By grumbling out one side of his mouth he communicated the will of God through his son, Uncle Chick, who had reluctantly taken over leadership of the church, even though the keys of priesthood authority and mantle of true leadership would not be passed down until the Prophet’s death.

  When the Prophet drooled, Golden’s father was on the job to tidy up his chin with a white handkerchief folded into a square.

  Uncle Chick gave the signal and the organ fell silent. A prayer was offered and Uncle Chick stood, not behind the pulpit as was his normal practice, but next to it, as if to show he had nothing to hide. He cleared his throat violently, “Hargh-arrhmgh!” and in his gruff way welcomed all present and began reciting scripture in a gravelly monotone that sent Golden’s mind immediately to wandering. He looked at his hands, pleasantly callused and nicked from the shingling work he’d been doing all month, and at his tanned arms and the new aluminum Timex watch he’d bought with his earnings, and his thoughts turned to Sylvia Anderson, the chubby seventeen-year-old with braided blond hair and a wet, red mouth who was the talk of the church for her open refusal to marry Brother Billet, a grease monkey and part-owner of Virgin Tire and Automotive.

  Sylvia Anderson had walked up to Golden after church last Sunday and asked him if he’d give her a ride in his new car. Thinking she had a destination in mind—maybe her family had left for home without her—he asked where she wanted to go. She shrugged and licked her lips in a way that commanded Golden’s full attention.

  “How about San Diego?” she said. “You get some of your dad’s money and we’ll drive all the way to California, maybe go to
the beach.”

  Golden sneezed and nodded agreeably, but found himself unable to form words or even sounds; he just nodded and smiled with his lips pursed—Don’t let her see your overbite!—until Sylvia finally turned to leave. Only after she’d gone out the back door of the church was he able to call out after her, “Well, I guess I’d have to get my license first!”

  The humiliation of that moment did not stop him from fantasizing all week about the road trip to San Diego and the possibilities it presented, the potential sleeping arrangements in motel rooms, maybe a little motel-pool skinny-dipping, who could say? He liked to imagine Sylvia in the motel shower innocently asking Golden if he might bring her a towel, and the curving form of her body readily apparent behind the semitransparent curtain…“Argh-argh-harrghk…ahgrrrrrhk!” Uncle Chick fell into an apocalyptic coughing fit only to surface suddenly and rap the pulpit in a way that dislodged Golden from his reverie. “Who do you think you are?” he called in a near-shout, and at first Golden thought Uncle Chick was speaking directly to him, had divined not only that Golden was an interloper, a faithless imposter who had no business in this place, but also that he had been entertaining questionable thoughts about innocent girls taking showers while all around the Lord’s servants worshiped and prayed. “Have you looked into your own heart? Have you asked yourself: Am I worthy? Have you asked yourself: Am I blameless before God?”

  Maybe Golden had missed something, because this seemed like an altogether different Uncle Chick than the one who started the meeting. Uncle Chick, an old doghole miner and part-time scrubland rancher who’d spent some wild years in the navy before coming back into the fold, had never been much of an orator, but tonight he was actually rocking the pulpit, speaking in cadences vaguely Shakespearean, looking down into the audience as if measuring the faith and conviction of each member in turn, including Golden, who tried to hide behind the bobbing gray-haired head of Sister Comruddy. Uncle Chick declared what all in the audience already knew: that these were the last days, that the Second Coming of the Lord was fast upon us, and when it happened, would we be ready?