by Brady Udall
“Do you know how long it’s been since you and I had a nice one-on-one conversation?”
Golden shook his head. This was one of the things that annoyed Golden most about Ted Leo: this asking of questions, one after the other, in a way that seemed incomprehensible until Ted Leo finally got to the point. Before he bought the brothel and became what amounted to a glorified pimp, Ted Leo had run a successful evangelical ministry somewhere in the jungles of Central America. Golden imagined this was how Ted Leo converted the locals: asking a series of seemingly unrelated yes-or-no questions until they had unwittingly agreed to be baptized.
“Do you enjoy a good lasagna?” Ted Leo asked.
Golden had to admit that he did.
“And do you have big plans on your social agenda for this evening?”
With a pained look on his face Golden said, “Don’t think so.”
“Then why don’t you come over to my place for dinner. Seven o’clock. My private residence is in the back, as you know. Don’t go through the front door or my girls’ll jump your bones and not let go.” He winked. “Been a slow week.”
That night, Golden sat in Ted Leo’s living room, hair plastered to his forehead and fingernails scrubbed clean, doing his best to carry on a polite conversation with two hookers. Janine, a disturbingly thin woman with huge silver hoop earrings and ribs like lobster traps, sat to Golden’s left sipping wine and adjusting her wig, while Chalis, the plump blond girl who looked no older than sixteen, was telling them how living next to a feedlot in New Mexico her whole life had turned her into a dedicated vegetarian.
“God, those poor cows!” she cried. “Do you know how much they suffer so we can enjoy our burgers and hot dogs and all that?”
Golden allowed that he didn’t.
“I mean, lying around in their own filth, waiting to die.”
“Life in a nutshell!” said Janine, already drunk, raising her wine-glass to the ceiling.
The two women were there, Golden had learned, because they were top performers for the month of February—they had hosted more “parties,” as they called them, brought in more money than any of the other girls that month. Their reward was a $500 bonus, a brass plaque, and a private homemade dinner with the great Ted Leo himself. The girls had asked what Golden had done to deserve this honor and he allowed, once again, that he had no idea.
Golden sat on an ostentatious wicker chair shaped like the throne of an Oriental monarch, waiting patiently for his ass to break through the seat. The room was carpeted in deep maroon shag and appointed with oversized furniture that seemed to have ambitions beyond the faux-wood-paneled walls that confined it. Above the fireplace was a framed picture of Ted Leo, wearing aviator shades and smiling like a madman into the camera while putting a hard squeeze on one of Billy Graham’s hands. He had arrived late from his round of golf and was now in a hall bathroom with the door open, audibly slapping at himself in the shower and singing “To dreeeeeam, the impossible dreeeeeam,” in a way that brought to mind the screeching of a saw blade.
Golden sipped his warm 7UP—he had turned down offers of whiskey, vodka and champagne—and tried not to think about how he was missing his walk to Salt Pond. It seemed to him now that if he could see Weela one more time—hear her laugh again, just once—he could find the strength to endure the unpleasant situations of his life, such as this one.
“To fiiiight,” Mr. Ted Leo strained above the spray of hot water, “the impossible fiiiiiiight!”
“Sheez,” said Chalis. “You think he needs a lozenge or something?”
One of the things adding to his discomfort—beyond Mr. Ted Leo’s singing and the ominous creaking of his chair and the way the two women were speaking past him and giving each other looks as if he were a wino who had wandered in from the railyard—was that his privates were covered in peanut butter. Before he’d come to dinner he’d decided to shower first—a big mistake, it turned out—and then spent twenty minutes applying slippery ice cubes to the lump of gum in his pubic hair, which had hardened, finally, to the consistency of prehistoric amber. After he’d melted six ice cubes with no effect except to shock his genitals into puckering submission, he moved on to the peanut butter. He worked a large dollop into the area, his giant blunt fingers making a mess of it, and as he stood hunched over in the kitchen of his tiny trailer, the lightbulb on a wire knocking around his head, his pants around his ankles, performing an act that suddenly seemed deeply deviant, he felt a stab of shame, wondering what string of bad decisions in his life could have led to a moment such as this.
He’d barely had time to wipe the excess peanut butter off with paper towels before he had to leave to be able to make it on time for dinner, and now, trying with the concentration of an acrobat to keep his weight perfectly distributed so the wicker would not give way, it felt as if everything in his groin, including his thighs, was stuck together with glue.
When Ted Leo finally emerged from the bathroom, he did so in a towel held tight at the waist. He had a perfectly round belly and skin evenly covered in thick gray fur still sparkling with drops of moisture. “Girls, you being nice to Brother Richards out here?”
Both girls shrugged and continued to ignore Golden. Clearly, they were not happy about him crashing their exclusive dinner.
Ted Leo winked at the girls, winked at Golden. This was another thing Golden didn’t like about the man: he was always winking at everyone, and Golden couldn’t understand why.
“These girls,” Ted Leo said, “look at them. This one”—he gestured toward Janine—“sexy and mean as a wildcat, and this one”—he held both arms out to Chalis—“just like the girl next door.”
“Yeah,” said Janine, giving her cigarette a single, delicate puff, “if you happen to live next door to a whorehouse.”
“Ha-ha!” Ted Leo roared. “Yes, yes, yes!”
He gave Golden a good-natured slap on the back and then turned back down the hallway, singing, “To fiiiggght the, impossible fiiigght—”
He’d taken only two or three steps before he stopped, pivoted, and lifted his nose to the air.
“Hey now,” he said, “what smells like peanut butter?”
A NONTRADITIONAL MAN
Dinner was already on the table by the time Ted Leo, aglow in a green kimono embroidered with tiny Japanese lords and geishas engaged in complicated sex acts, ushered his guests into the dining room. Without a word he bowed his head and held out his arms until everyone joined hands and he proceeded to say grace. During the prayer, which Golden hardly heard a word of, Ted Leo absently rubbed the knuckles of Golden’s left hand with his thumb, while on the other side, Janine gripped Golden’s left index finger, squeezing in rhythm as if milking a cow.
“Ah, yes, thank you for these good young girls, Lord, for their hard work and positive attitudes, keep them fresh and pretty and free of disease, and the same goes for Brother Richards here, in a manner of speaking, you know what I mean, who is honest and works hard just like the rest of us.”
The table was laid out with an impressive spread: lasagna and baked ziti, breaded eggplant, cucumber salad and slabs of steaming garlic bread. Golden wondered where it all came from; though there’d been no sign of a cook, he thought he’d heard pots banging and running water in the kitchen.
While Ted Leo launched into a one-man conversation about one of his favorite topics—the unusually high number of coyotes in the area, and the many interesting and enjoyable ways to kill them—Golden dedicated his full attention to the food. Even though he’d spent most of last weekend at home, he’d gone without a decent home-cooked meal for at least a week. Last Saturday night had been Rose’s turn to cook. This time, she had decided to try a dish that had become fashionable among the women of the church: meat loaf with Lipton onion soup mix. Rose, who did not have any of the Lipton mix and figured soup was soup was soup, mixed several cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle into the ground beef. The result looked and tasted like a mass of earthworms encased in a brick of steaming i
ndustrial sludge. Golden, at the head of the table and always the first served, had gagged a little when a lump of it was spooned onto his plate, but the children sighed and went at it.
This meal, though, was so good he made a grateful low whimpering with every bite. He had become so intimately involved with the food he caught only the tail end of Ted Leo’s story about a group of university feminists from Seattle who picketed the brothel and protested the exploitation and degradation of women by lining up at the entrance of the brothel parking lot and chanting, Hey you! Hey! Hey! Get a date the regular way!
“Brother Richards,” Ted Leo said. “Folks in the outside world and their traditional lifestyles, they just don’t understand people like you and me, am I right?
Golden, whose mouth was busy with two forkfuls of ziti, nodded, though he wasn’t sure what Ted Leo might be referring to.
Janine gestured with her drink at Golden and asked Ted Leo, “So is he a brothel guy too?”
Ted Leo laughed. “Not exactly, my dear,” he said, giving Golden a double-wink. “Not exactly.”
After Golden had cleaned up half a pan of lasagna, most of the ziti and the last heel of garlic bread in the time it took the two girls to drink a glass of wine and pick at their salads, Ted Leo asked, with something of a skeptical tone, if Golden wanted any dessert. “Well,” Golden said, leaning back in his chair in a show of reluctance, and then giving up on the act immediately, “I think I could go for some, yes, some dessert, I think I definitely want some dessert. For sure.”
“That reminds me,” Ted Leo said, “there’s somebody I’d like you all to meet.” He clapped his hands at the side of his head like a flamenco dancer, and shouted, “Querida! Dessert for everybody!”
A woman appeared in the entryway holding a pan of orange custard. She was short, almost stocky, wearing a simple white dress and her hair in a bun. Golden had sneaked another bit of eggplant, which was now lodged securely in his throat. He held his breath and resisted the urge to cough or choke.
It was Weela, looking shyly around the room, her gaze about to alight on Golden. Ted Leo stood and gave her a fatherly kiss on the forehead.
“Say hello to Huila,” he said, “my lovely wife.”
16.
APOCALYPSE TOMORROW
INSTEAD OF RIDING HIS BIKE ALL THE WAY TO JUNE’S HOUSE, WHICH would have taken a long time and given him a serious case of butt pain, he let the air out of his back tire and started walking along the road looking sad. A flatbed pickup blew right by and he knew he wasn’t trying hard enough, so he thought about his own funeral, which he often did to make himself feel better. He could see his family gathered around his shiny, complicated coffin, his mother sobbing and kissing his handsome face with his hair all nice and slicked back, his father shaking his big head and saying, Why? Why? Why? while all around the mothers and the brothers and sisters wailed and wept and asked each other how they could go on after treating him so badly, how could they ever forgive themselves? He got a lump in his throat and his eyes got a little watery, and wouldn’t you know it, right then an old bat in a station wagon stopped and said, “Need a ride?”
Luckily the old bat, who had yellow-white hair and smelled like a cigar, didn’t know him. He gave his flat tire a sad look and sniffed a little and told her he lived out on Water Socket Road and she said, “Get in, you poor little duffer.” And just like that she’d loaded up his bike and dropped him off at June Haymaker’s mailbox. Because of the flat tire he had to walk his bike down the dirt road to June’s place, but it was all downhill, and when he got to the Quonset huts he called out, “June! June! Wherefore art thou, June?”
But no June. He knocked on the door of Quonset Hut #1 and when nobody came to the door he let himself in. It looked pretty much the same as the last time he’d seen it, except there were two bananas on the table, which he took his time eating. He opened the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen, checked out the bathroom and the bedroom, where he discovered a small stack of magazines under the clock radio. “Mmm,” he said, “and what do we have here?” Russian Bride. Thai International. A Foreign Affair. Ukrainian Lovelies. Magazines packed with hundreds of black-and-white photos of women craning their necks and pooching their lips out: Name: Alanska Age: 41 Height: 5’9” Weight: 110 lbs Hometown: Minsk. Hobbies: Cooking, Cleaning, Sexy Cuddling. Not all the pictures had boring statistics next to them. Some of the women had questions next to their pictures like, Where is the Masculine Man of My Dreams? or Will I Offend the North American Women Because I Am Not Overweight?
Rusty liked the cover of Ukrainian Lovelies the best because it showed a woman wearing a bikini and fingerless leather gloves. He felt a little sorry for the woman because the bikini did not fit her very well, and there was a bruise on her thigh, and what were those gloves for? Even so, the picture made things happen in his pants, which wasn’t saying much because just about everything made things happen in his pants. He slipped Ukrainian Lovelies down the back of his underwear against his rear end. This was how he often stole comic books from Platt’s Market and he knew from experience that his sweat would make the cover stick to his skin and eventually leave a smeared image of the Ukrainian chick on his butt cheeks, the thought of which made some things happen in his pants.
He was going through June’s sock drawer when there was a boom from somewhere outside and the whole Quonset hut vibrated.
“Holy sweet Jesus Christ,” Rusty said. He was really starting to enjoy taking the Lord’s name in vain.
From the porthole window he could see smoke rising into the air above the red sandstone cliffs. He ducked out the back door and climbed up the hill until he could see June leaning against his pickup, watching dust and smoke pour out of a huge black hole at the bottom of the cliff. About thirty feet from the first hole was another hole, bigger and rounded on top, shaped like a cave in a cartoon.
Rusty walked right up next to June, who was still watching the smoke with his mouth open, and said, “Excelente!”
June’s elbow slipped off the hood of the pickup, and he did a hilarious herky-jerk move and nearly fell on his face. He backed up, staring at Rusty, his eyes wide. “Jeez, man! You scared me. Jeez! What are you doing?”
“Stopped by for a visit,” Rusty said.
“I don’t think you should be here.”
“Why not? Are you going to blow up the whole mountain?”
“What? No. I’m building a—It’s private.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea—”
“Come on, June,” Rusty said. “Don’t be such a fag.”
June, in a straw cowboy hat and an old-fashioned flannel shirt, gave Rusty a worried look. Then his face changed, and he started breathing hard through his sunburned nose. “Okay,” he said “Okay. But you can’t tell anybody. Right? It’s going to be my home when I’m finished with it, but yeah, it’s also a shelter. A bomb shelter. It’ll withstand a direct hit from a five-ton warhead or the fallout from a nuclear blast. When I’m done, there’ll be three thousand square feet of living and storage space with a filtered ventilation system, all at a constant sixty-eight degrees.”
“Sweet holy Jesus Christ Almighty,” Rusty said.
June just stood there with a stupid look on his sunburned face.
“Okay,” Rusty said. “What do you say we go have a look around?”
So June showed Rusty the first room, already blasted out of the rock, which would one day, he said, in the event of worldwide nuclear cataclysm, serve as the main storage area, the arsenal and ammunition depot, the staging area to repel any and all enemy attacks, if that, heaven forbid, was what it came to. Inside it was damp and cold and smelled like dirty snow. The second chamber would be the main living area, with a large common room and four smaller ones. They scrambled around on piles of busted rocks and June explained how he drilled the boreholes, filled them with explosives, and brought twenty tons of rock down with the press of a button.
“It’s a lot of work for one guy,” June said, slapping the dust out of his pants, “but I’m making pretty good, you know, pretty good progress.”
“Seriously, June, this is the greatest house anybody has ever thought of,” said Rusty. “This would be a great place for a family to live, right?”
“That’s the idea, I guess. It’s a little much just for me.”
“It sure is. If you want, I could help you and you won’t have to pay me, I work for free.” He began picking up pieces of the broken rock and hucking them toward the mouth of the cave.
“Okay, hey, watch out.” June had to duck to keep from being clocked by one of the rocks Rusty was pitching between his legs like a dog digging a hole. “That’s good! That’s fine! Okay there!”
Rusty stood up, huffing. He had one more rock in his hand and, why not, lobbed it over June’s head, making him flinch. He said, “I could do this all day. You don’t even have to give me water.”
“Yeah, that’s great, but I’ve got an old D9 out there that I can move this stuff around with, it’s a lot easier that way. But sure you can help me. Sure. We’ll find something for you, Lance. No problem. Come on out of here why don’t we?”
“One other thing,” Rusty said. “I’ve changed my name. Don’t call me Lance anymore. My name is Rusty.”
“You changed your name?” With June’s mouth hanging open like that you could count the fillings in his teeth. Rusty counted at least five. “Can a kid do that?”
“It’s just my new nickname, okay? People change their names all the time. Maybe it’s something you should think about.”
June stared at his feet. He picked up a small sledgehammer leaning against the rock wall and tossed it toward his truck.
“I sort of like your name, though,” Rusty said. “Seriously. If your name was Cynthia or something, you know, that would be bad.” He scratched his head and looked around. “So what do you say we get a bunch of your dynamite and blow something up? Do you have, like, a washing machine you’re not using, or an old cow?”