by Brady Udall
19.
NO ORDINARY SLEAZEBALL
THE FIRST TIME SHE CAME, GOLDEN WAS ASLEEP ON THE BARGE. HE liked to stretch out on the old orange and brown plaid dinosaur and doze for a while before retiring to his trailer, which was about as roomy and comfortable as an iron lung. He brought the Barge out here after Sister Barbara, his part-time secretary at the office back in Virgin, refused to come to work unless he got rid of it. The couch’s signature tuna smell, she claimed, was activating her migraines. So instead of hauling it out to the dump where it belonged, he’d brought it to Nevada and set it out in the dry desert air, which so far had done very little to dispel the fishy odor. Made with enough lumber and hardware to construct a footbridge across a Peruvian crevasse, the Barge had been rained on once, suffered a few direct hits from the local crow population, but had held up nicely otherwise. Golden figured that if he left it in this isolated spot and someone came across it, say a couple of centuries hence, it would be in much the same shape, though one could hope the fish smell might be gone by then.
Tonight, he had himself spread out the entire length of it, with his head on one arm and his toes touching the other. Still damp from his evening shower and with nothing to do but watch the sun set golden and smoky over the distant mountains, he closed his eyes to listen to the mild desert breeze, napped a little, woke up briefly at the call of a mockingbird.
He’d hardly slept since learning Weela was Ted Leo’s wife. He’d been puzzling it out, going over every angle, and he’d been able to convince himself, mostly, that this new development was a good thing, a blessing. Maybe even God’s way of looking out for him. She was off-limits to him now, even more so than when he thought she was a prostitute, and he would have to forget about her and get back to the things that mattered: finishing this job, getting his business out from under the threat of bankruptcy, and focusing on his family.
And so, feeling just a little bit virtuous and exceptionally clean—he had succeeded, finally, in washing every trace of peanut butter out of his private area—he had sunk into the worn springs of the couch intent on a round of fitful dozing under the wide Nevada sky before retiring to his bunk for the night.
He woke up to the sound of footsteps. He was sure it was Leonard, who sometimes got bored with perusing pornographic magazines and playing poker down at the motel with the other men, and showed up at Golden’s trailer wanting to throw a Frisbee or show off a few of his self-taught tae kwon do katas. It had turned dusky, the sky still molten at the edges, and in the gray light he could make out a shadowy form about a hundred yards off, coming up the shallow rise.
Golden sat up, yawned. “Leonard,” he called. “That you?”
Not until she stepped out of the sagebrush about thirty yards off could he see who it was. “Allo?” she said.
“Yes?” he said. “Weela?” The word sounded ridiculous in his mouth, and he said it again under his breath as a kind of practice. He got to his feet, then sat back down, unsure of how to receive her. He was wearing an old work T-shirt, cut-off sweats, and his hideous flipperlike feet—malformed from years of wearing too-small shoes, covered in bunions and terrifying to look upon, especially for the unprepared—were in plain view.
She smiled and held out an aluminum pan covered in tinfoil. He jammed his feet as far into the fine desert sand as they would go. She wore a denim skirt, a rough green hand-knit cardigan, and her hair in a single thick braid. “The other night, I made too much food,” she said, eyes lowered. “So I bring this.”
He made swimming motions with his arms in the struggle to extract himself from the collapsed cushions of the Barge, and once he’d made it onto his feet there was an awkward exchange involving the transfer of two potholders along with the pan. To be this close to her made him a little dizzy, and he tried to come up with something to say, something that would keep her from turning around and going back home.
Suddenly he needed to sneeze, and his nasal spray was nowhere in sight. He rubbed his nose, looked back at the trailer, grimaced, and then made a reluctant gesture toward the Barge. “Would you like to have a seat?”
Like just about everything else in his life, the Barge embarrassed him, but once they’d settled down on it (she took the middle cushion, which seemed significant), he felt grateful to have it; its generous proportions offered ample space for two respectable people to sit and converse comfortably without having to worry over questions involving propriety or decorum. Even better, they could accomplish this out in the open, nothing to hide, for God and all the world to see.
The pressure continued to build inside his head, and he tried to ward it off by studiously refusing to think about it and then shaking his head in abject denial, but it came anyway: a big, furious chop of a sneeze that rocked him backward and sounded out over the quiet hills like a gunshot. Weela flinched, but seemed to recover herself quickly.
“God bless you,” she said.
He rubbed his nose. “Sorry about that, Weela, I didn’t mean to scare—”
“My name,” she said. “Huila. Weela, no. Ooo-eee-la, yes.” She crouched and wrote it out with her finger in the sand. HUILA
“Ooo-eee-la.” It sounded like the call of a bird. “It’s pretty. I’m sorry I’ve had it wrong all this time.”
She pointed at the trailer. “This is your home?”
“Oh, this thing,” Golden said. “It’s my home away from home, I guess.”
And just like that they were making small talk. For so long he’d gotten little more than silence out of her, and hearing her speak felt like a privilege. They talked about the construction project, about what it was like to live in a brothel (“Not good,” she said, shaking her head). He asked her why she sometimes washed her clothes in the pond and she explained that Ted Leo, instead of buying her a washer and dryer of her own, insisted she use the community appliances in the brothel’s common area, where she was always running into the hookers with their extravagant underwear and shrieking laughter. So she went up to the pond every once in a while to get away, to wash a few clothes in peace, even though the water of the pond was not exactly clean.
“Ted Leo,” she had said, laughing, “he says sometimes, ‘Why do I have this dirt in my pockets?’” and Golden felt an undeniable stab of pleasure at hearing her mimic her husband’s froggy voice.
And then she said something that flummoxed him: “Your wife. Does she miss you all the time you are here?”
He’d assumed Ted Leo had told her about his lifestyle, which was one of the reasons he felt so gratified for the kindness she had shown him; most women outside the church, he’d found out over the years, were not at all agreeable to the idea of polygamy, or those who practiced it. Men, on the other hand, never failed to be intrigued.
Six years ago he’d been audited by the IRS, and his case agent was a plump, flirtatious woman from the Phoenix field office, who touched his arm when she talked and made him feel giddy and uncomfortable at the same time; the entire process seemed more like a date with an old girlfriend than an IRS audit. At the end of their first meeting she went over his list of deductions, and she spoke with the tone of a mother scolding a naughty child.
“Sixteen dependents, Mr. Richards! My goodness, you’ve been quite a busy man!”
Golden bunched up his shoulders. “Hee,” he said.
“But I’m having a problem with some of the birth dates here. Three of them fall within two weeks of each other, in the very same year. There must be a mistake?”
“No mistake, ma’am.” He knew the three birthdays she was referring to. They belonged to Wayne, Martin, and Boo, aka the Three Stooges, whose births marked a grim and trying chapter in the Richards family history. They had all moved into Big House together for a few weeks with the idea that a mass consolidation would make everything easier, but with all the wives in either the last stages of pregnancy or the aftermath of a difficult birth, Golden, with the reluctant assistance of a couple of the older girls, was left to be nanny, cook, maid and discipl
inarian. Instantly the place fell apart. Children ran wild, scavenging whatever food they could find and splitting up into guerrilla factions that carried out raids on each other, finally sectioning off and declaring different parts of the house their own sovereign territories. The Three Stooges, it turned out, were all cranky, colicky, insomniac, or some perfectly evil combination of the above, and the never-ending late-night shriek-a-thon was enough to break the most hardened prisoner of war. To escape the noise, the other children called a temporary truce and set up camp in the basement, leaving Golden to make bottles, change diapers, and spend hour after midnight hour with one newborn or another braced against his shoulder, doing anything and everything—sometimes including taking one or two of the little buggers out back to set them on top of the vibrating swamp cooler—in the all-out quest to induce a burp.
The IRS agent pushed her reading glasses onto the bridge of her nose and had a closer look at his return. She said, “Then how on earth…?”
“I’m the husband to the, you know, mothers.”
She peered at him over her reading glasses, and it began to dawn on her: he was not just some ordinary sleazeball off the street who’d fathered sixteen children by several different women and had the unbelievable brass to list them all on his tax return. He was actually married to these different women, at the same time. You could tell by looking at him: the homemade chinos, the flannel shirt, the believer’s haircut. He was one of those.
She gripped her pen like a weapon and pushed away from the table as if he might make a move to grab her. He leaned back and put his hands in his pockets to show her he was just as harmless as the next guy, but she fled the room, and the next thing he knew he had a new agent, a man with a bristle cut who gave Golden the hairy eyeball and said he wanted only one-sentence answers to his questions and no lip. By the time the audit was over Golden owed the IRS an extra three thousand dollars.
But Huila, apparently, had not yet been given any reason to view him as a sexual maniac or an exploiter of women. As far as she was concerned he was just your average guy with one wedding ring and one wife to go with it. He was normal, was what he was, and for him normal was a condition so rarely experienced it felt exhilarating, maybe even a little naughty.
So when she asked if his wife missed him, he answered like any normal man with normal thoughts and a normal life might: “Oh, she misses me to death, you know, but I guess she’ll have to find a way to make do.”
Huila laughed—a cute, childish sound like a burst of hiccups—and Golden was beginning to think this business of being normal was highly underrated.
He asked her where she’d been the previous week—he hadn’t seen her on his daily walks. She explained that they had gone to Las Vegas, which meant that Ted Leo went out and conducted business and gambled while she stayed in their condominium watching soap operas.
“I would rather be here, I think, but Ted Leo is the husband, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I mean, I think I know.”
There ensued the awkward silence of strangers in an elevator. She patted the cushion a couple of times and stood up. “So I will go. Ted Leo will be back soon.”
He stood, still holding the pan, grinning like an idiot. Before he could think of anything to say, she said, “Bye-bye,” turned, and walked back down the hill.
When the idea struck him that he should at least say goodbye in return, it was too late, she was much too far away, already dissolving into the winking dusk.
He took the pan into his miniature kitchen, where he studied the potholders—both handmade and decorated with cross-stitched roosters—and then peeled away the tinfoil to find baked ziti on one side and lasagna on the other. Though she’d said these were leftovers, the pasta looked and smelled freshly made. He found the only clean utensil available—a splintery wood mixing spoon—and took three or four bites of the still-warm, delectable ziti before he realized, with a small zing of terror in his heart, that he couldn’t eat any more: for the first time he could remember, he had lost his appetite.
THE COUNCIL OF THE TWELVE
At home that weekend Golden attended Council Meeting for the first time in two months. Traditionally it was held on Wednesday nights, but because of Golden’s difficult out-of-town schedule Uncle Chick had given the okay for a special session on Sunday afternoon. Even though the special meeting was billed as a favor to Golden, for him to be able to get up to speed on church business and fraternize with his fellow apostles, Golden knew the truth: Uncle Chick was worried that Golden was losing his standing and influence among these men and—because Golden was Uncle Chick’s staunchest supporter and, by the reckoning of some, his heir apparent—that Uncle Chick was losing something as well.
The meetings were held in the narrow, cramped room behind the chapel, and the men all gathered around a rickety banquet table, hunched over their arms as if the ceiling were slowly lowering itself upon their heads. Weak afternoon light filtered through the single small window, giving the room, with its rough stone walls and subterranean chill, the feel of a monastery prayer chamber or a cell on death row. Generally they took care of church business in the first half hour, spent another half hour debating doctrine and scripture, and spent the rest of the time commiserating—which is to say, complaining in communal fashion—about their exhausting and absurdly complicated lives. More than anything, coming to council meeting was the best excuse available to get away from the wives and children for a couple of hours.
Though these meetings had never been the highlight of Golden’s week, he had begun to miss them. It was reassuring to be among men who understood the daily struggle of keeping mouths fed and bodies clothed, of being forever and always on the spot, of bearing up under the weight of their dubious authority with any grace at all.
On this Sunday afternoon, as he ducked under the doorway, his nose suddenly assaulted by the competing aromas of at least half a dozen aftershaves, the first thing he heard was, “The Golden One!” This from Apostle Coombs, a jolly little man prone to outbursts of good-natured shouting. Apostle Coombs hollered this greeting at every opportunity and Golden had yet to pin down whether the man was using it sarcastically—in reference to Golden’s widely known failure to become the One Mighty and Strong—or if he was simply being friendly in his obnoxious way. Along with Uncle Chick, it looked like the rest of the apostles were already in attendance. Mostly they were men of a certain age, chapped by the weather and dressed in snap-button shirts and suspenders, who looked like they should have been hanging over the rail at a cattle auction rather than fidgeting in this gloomy room, preparing to discuss the sacred business of God’s one true church upon the earth.
Every time they gathered, it was hard not to notice that they were a Council of the Twelve who numbered—since Apostle Barrett passed on last year—only eight.
Because he’d been playing hooky for two months it was, naturally, Golden’s turn to offer the opening prayer. Even as he called on God to bless them with His spirit, to guide them in their deliberations, images of Huila flashed into his mind: smiling shyly as she sat next to him on the Barge, close enough to touch, or picking her way through the glowing rabbit brush toward home, stealing a look back over her shoulder. Even as he thanked God for His generous bounty, for the truth of the Principle that guided their lives, he was in his heart thanking his lucky stars for the aluminum pan and cross-stitched potholders that sat on the kitchen counter in his Airstream, for all they represented, for the excuse they provided him to see Huila again.
No matter how hard he tried, he could not summon the will to pay attention during the meeting. Nels Jensen, as always, was doing most of the talking. Nels was a smiling second-generation Swede who was so thoroughly and annoyingly friendly that no matter how hard you might try it was impossible to work up any real dislike for the guy. He had left the Short Creek church after a doctrinal dispute with the elders there, and after showing up in Virgin only seven years ago he had already established himself as a political and s
piritual force. His humble ambitions—to make more money than any single person in America, to marry as many wives and father as many children as the good Lord would allow, to one day lead the church into the latter days and help usher in the Second Coming of Christ—never seemed calculated, but just a natural part of his person, like his cheerful, rubbery accent or big velvety ears. He was deeply dedicated to Principle, believed in priesthood lineage and direct revelation and the infallibility of God’s sacred texts, none of which, according to him, was anything to be ashamed of. “Do we have to dress like bumpkins and hide out in the weeds like criminals?” he would ask in the reasonable, Scandinavian manner that never seemed to offend any of the bumpkins or criminals in question. “We should be candles on a hill, yes? How can we be ashamed of the truth?”
As the successful salesman of a broad range of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, he knew the importance of advertising, of spreading the word. During council meetings he often wondered aloud why they weren’t more missionary-minded, why they weren’t bringing the world around to their way of thinking instead of worrying all the time what the world thought of them. Someone, usually Apostle Lambson, would bring up the fact that their lifestyle was, technically, illegal, and to go out proselytizing might induce the authorities, as they had in the past, to swoop in, throw the men in jail and leave the women and children at the mercy of Social Services. Apostle Jensen would inquire agreeably if this wasn’t fear and doubt talking, and would Jesus have brought His truth to the world if He had given in to fear and doubt? Apostle Lambson would remind Nels that for all the wonderful things Jesus had accomplished, He did, let’s all remember, wind up getting Himself into some fairly serious trouble.
Uncle Chick, in his smoked-lens glasses and chambray work shirt, always listened to these exchanges with an air of weary patience, as if he had heard it all before, which he had. Patience, along with hard work and obedience and long-suffering, were the virtues Uncle Chick preached, and there wasn’t much point in arguing about any of it. God worked in His own way, in His own time. It was up to you to watch, to wait, and if you were faithful and obedient, His will would be revealed. Uncle Chick was the most practical of men, living in a most unpractical way, and so it was not difficult at all for him to abide Nels Jensen—an obvious threat to his authority, a man who viewed patience as a weakness rather than a virtue—for the simple reason that Nels Jensen paid more in tithing than all of them put together.