by Brady Udall
The only thing Golden could hold against Nels Jensen was that Nels, in nearly every way, made him look bad. He had a successful business, four happy wives and eighteen children who lived in a single three-story mansion with all the latest in features and design, including a restaurant-style kitchen and an intercom system that allowed the inhabitants of the cavernous house to keep track of each other’s whereabouts at all times. The house even had a complaints box in the foyer, all tricked out with a tidy pile of scrap paper and a pencil affixed to a string.
Whenever Beverly praised the Jensen family—which she seemed to be doing on a regular basis these days—Nola would always be sure to remind Beverly that she was sure Nels Jensen had room in that big mansion of his for another wife, and Beverly would always give Nola a look that said, I would love to join the Jensen family, if only to get away from you, and Golden would find himself thinking that if he ever became delusional or foolhardy enough to outfit one of his houses with a complaints box, it would need to be about the size of a refrigerator.
Before the closing prayer that afternoon, Uncle Chick asked if Golden had any questions, seeing as how he had been out of the loop for a while. At first, Golden shook his head, and then he thought of something. “Does anybody know how to get gum out of hair?”
The apostles looked at him with their mouths open: could he be serious? This was a question for homemaking day at Relief Society, not for the esteemed members of the Council of the Twelve. Apostle Russell nudged Apostle Throckmorten and wondered aloud if maybe this was the sort of thing that filled your head when you stopped coming to council meetings.
“Little crankcase grease’ll get gum outta just about anything,” mumbled Apostle Dill, suddenly screwing his face up in embarrassment at having revealed himself as a man who might know such a thing. He sighed, added, “But then, you know, you got the problem of what to do with the crankcase grease.”
On their way out, Uncle Chick appeared next to Golden, asked him how the job was going, how close he was to finishing. They stepped from the chapel doors into a cool wind scented with sage and ozone that rifled their clothes like a hundred expert hands.
“Getting there,” Golden said, praying Uncle Chick would not bring up the subject of Maureen Sinkfoyle and her unresolved marital status. “Next month or two, looks like.”
“We miss you around here, you know,” Chick said.
Though Golden wasn’t sure what “we” Uncle Chick was referring to, he started to say that he missed being here too, but Uncle Chick launched into one of his coughing fits, each cough a dull axe biting into wet and rotted wood. Chick, who had spent much of his twenties and thirties underground breathing the bad air in gypsum and molybdenum mines, had been fighting emphysema for thirty years, but only now did it seem to be taking a toll on him. Up close, in the clear afternoon light, it was difficult to miss the pallor of his skin, the bruised eye sockets behind the dark glasses, the shaking hand that pressed a handkerchief to his lips. In the week since Golden had last seen him he seemed to have developed a slight tremor of the head.
Seeing Uncle Chick like this only made the realization hit harder: he was letting the man down. With the Prophet incapacitated and confined to a wheelchair, Uncle Chick had spent the last two decades doing everything in his power to keep the church together and thriving, but the job seemed to be getting the better of him: membership was down, many of the faithful having defected to more strident sects or succumbed to the temptations of the world, and the few newcomers were mostly like Nels Jensen, who came in wanting to change everything, who wanted fresh leadership, a new vision for new times.
“You’d think an outfit like ours could only get bigger,” Uncle Chick had said once, a wisp of sadness in his voice, “but this one just keeps on shrinking.”
And where had Golden, Uncle Chick’s most reliable ally, been during such difficult days? Locked away inside his own grief and guilt, and lately, off in the wilds of Nevada, mingling with lowlifes and prostitutes and pining after his boss’s wife.
Uncle Chick, it seemed, had made the mistake so many others had when it came to Golden Richards: he’d given him his faith and trust.
In a gesture of sympathy, Golden attempted to pat the old man on the back, but Uncle Chick tried to push Golden’s arm away and the two men ended up temporarily entangled, and both, for their own reasons, too tired to do anything about it. They stood like that for a moment, gazing out over the valley toward black cliffs in the distance, leaning on each other like two prizefighters in the clinch, looking to buy a little time. Uncle Chick let go a gargling sigh, releasing his hold on Golden’s wrist, and pushed himself toward the dirt parking lot, where one of his wives was waiting to drive him home.
Over his shoulder he said, “You just finish that job, all right? You finish it fast as you can, and come back where you’re needed. We can’t wait on you much longer.”
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
After the drive home from church, Golden pulled up next to Old House. He circled around back, hoping to steal a few minutes of solitude in the Doll House before the Summit of the Wives commenced at four o’clock sharp.
He found four-year-old Sariah, still in her Sunday dress, in the backyard alone. She was squatting next to the back steps, carefully scooping gravel into piles with an old spatula.
“My daddy,” she said matter-of-factly, without looking up at him. She picked up a pebble, considered it closely, tossed it aside as if it didn’t match her expectations.
“Your mama know you’re out here?” Golden said. “It’s cold for you without your coat.”
“I’m fine,” she said, exasperated. “I’m trying to get these rocks together, if you don’t mind.” Four years old and had her mother down to a T. She was Beverly’s youngest, brown-eyed and feisty, even more self-possessed, it seemed, than the rest of Beverly’s girls. He tried not to think about what kind of trouble she might cause in the coming years.
She looked up at him. “Are you going to stay here with us?”
“I’m staying tonight. Tomorrow I have to go back to work.”
“Yes,” she sighed. “I know.”
“I don’t like going away, honey, but I have to.”
“I have to do things too,” she said, indicating her piles of rocks, “and it makes me so tired.”
Golden eased down into a squatting position and helped Sariah get her gravel piles arranged just the right way. From the very beginning he’d always played with the kids. Wooden blocks, mud pies, pillow forts, it didn’t matter, he was always in the middle of it, especially during those early years, living the childhood he’d never had.
It seemed that she forgot about him for a good minute or so, singing a jumble of songs and making spit bubbles, as she created her own gravel configurations with the spatula. He felt a slight sting of resentment about being so blatantly ignored, but then she looked up, smiling as if she’d gotten the better of him, her fine brown hair falling down over one eye, and he was struck by how much she looked like her older sister Glory, dead now almost three years. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, but his eyes watered anyway and his daughter sensed something. She stood up, staring intently at him, and rested a chubby hand on his knee. “Daddy?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Are you mad at me?”
Pierced to his heart, he said, “Oh no, honey. No. Your daddy loves you.”
“I know,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She held out the ruffles of her dress, snagged with dead leaves and sticks, and tilted her head. “It’s because I’m so pretty.”
He wanted to pull her to him, to feel the compact heft of her against his chest, to smell her sweet breath, to tell her that he would never let her come to harm, but he held still, paralyzed by his love for her.
“I’m not mad at you either, Daddy,” she said. “Mama’s not mad either, too.”
“Well, I hope not.” He stood and, as he did so, stole the briefest of kisses, brushing his lips
against her shining hair. She glanced around and batted at her head as if bothered by a fly.
He held out his hand to her. “You want to come in with me? I don’t think you should be out here all alone.”
She took her time deliberating. She looked up at the sun, placed her finger in her nostril for a moment. Finally, she said, “Where’s Cooter?” It was a stalling tactic all the smart ones learned; when you didn’t want to do something, ask a question. When confronted with a question that has no good answer, change the subject.
“Cooter’s in the back of the pickup eating his food,” he said. “We can go see him after dinner.” Though Beverly had not gotten around to putting up a sign about it, it had recently become official: Cooter had been permanently disinvited from Old House.
Sariah sighed again. It was clear she believed her existence to be an especially difficult one.
Golden held out his hand. “You coming in with me?”
She blew a raspberry of disgust, took his hand, and they went inside together.
TWO UNHAPPY PEOPLE
The following Wednesday night, in the darkened cell of his Airstream, he had nothing better to do than stand next to the three-quarter-sized refrigerator with his pants at his ankles and a flashlight trained on his penis. A half hour ago the generator had run out of gas, which meant he had no lights, no stove, no radio—nothing but darkness and a flashlight. After a long drive from Vegas and an entire afternoon spent fighting with the drywallers over who was responsible for the two thousand dollars in leftover gypsum board, he did not have the energy to do anything about it. Instead, he felt happy enough to stand in the dark and consider the gum in his pubic hair, which had not broken down and crumbled away after repeated shower scrubbings, but now had separated into three separate pellets, shiny and grayish and connected with threads of gum as hard and brittle as spun glass. Lately, this had become a habit: pants down, staring at the gum, wondering at the mystery of it and trying to come to a conclusion as to its symbolic significance. He had been taught, and he tended to believe, that there was meaning in everything, that God’s will could be found in the details too often missed by the inattentive—but this detail, and God’s part in it, had him stumped. He took the largest part of it between his fingers and was thinking about pulling it out with one mighty rip, once and for all, when something scraped against the side of the trailer.
He started, dropping the flashlight and falling back against the refrigerator, which caused the entire trailer to rock to the side. He pulled up his pants and opened the door, but it was a cloudy night with the rumble of thunder in the far distance, and he could make out nothing except the humps of sagebrush and mesquite against the faint radioactive glow of the PussyCat Manor on the other side of the hill. He found the flashlight and pointed it out into the night, but its dim beam had little effect beyond a few feet.
“Mr. Golden?” came a voice.
He swung the beam around and aimed it south, where Huila, half concealed behind a juniper tree, peered into the light and turned, poised as if to run.
“Huila!” Golden said. “Yes, it’s me.”
She walked up, clutching the collar of her sweater to her throat. “Ay mi Dios!” she said. “I thought you was gone, and I was walking and saw a light in there, in your little house. I thought somebody was stealing—”
“Oh no, it’s just me,” Golden said. “The generator went off, so I don’t have any light, just this flashlight.”
For some reason—maybe it had to do with the darkness—they were whispering at each other.
“I threw a stick,” she said. “To scare the thief!”
“Well, you scared me,” Golden said.
She stood near the bottom of the steps and he was bent at the waist to be able to stick his head out the trailer door, like someone about to disembark a plane. Because he‘d had no time to button them, he was holding his pants up with his hand. He asked her to give him a moment and he shut the door, fastened his pants and cast around frantically in the dark for his boots. When he met her again outside and inadvertently shone his flashlight into her eyes, the look on her face, carved into simple planes by the yellow light, told him there was something wrong. He could not be sure, but it looked like she had been crying.
He asked her if she would like to sit down. He took his place at one end of the Barge, she at the other.
“I needed to get out,” she said, “but I’m sorry to be always coming here.”
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “I like the company.”
They were quiet for a time, on their opposite ends of the couch. Because he could not really see her, he had to suppress the urge to point the flashlight at her and click it on, to be able to know what to say, to read something in her face.
“It’s dark out here, isn’t it?” he said. “I wish—” And then he had an idea. A fire. He would build a fire. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. With his failing flashlight he ventured out into the scrub, breaking off twigs and snapping branches from stunted piñon pines that were more like bushes than trees. If she wondered what he was doing, she had the good manners not to ask. Wood-gathering made him feel useful and manly and every branch he picked up he broke over his knee with a splintery cracktch! whether it needed breaking or not. The flashlight batteries completely dead now, he wandered in the dark, tripping over rocks and groping along the ground for dead wood, fighting with the bushes not yet ready to give up their branches. It took him only a couple of minutes to get a good fire going, but when he looked behind for Huila’s reaction, he found the Barge empty.
“Huila?” he said, his voice tinged with panic.
Just then she moved into the ring of firelight dragging a large juniper branch, which she dumped unceremoniously into the middle of his carefully constructed Boy Scout–style campfire. She sat back on the couch and now, in the flickering glow, he could see that something clouded her face; she kept her chin tucked into her neck and would not look at him.
“Are you okay?” he said.
She wore the same green sweater from last week and she wrapped it more tightly around her chest. Her wet eyes reflected the firelight and she made an almost imperceptible shrug.
She said, “I am not happy.”
I am not happy. Those four words formed what had to be the clearest and sanest sentence he had ever heard anyone utter in all his life. For so long he’d been living and working among unhappy people—in the last few years, after what might have been a decade-long renaissance of flummoxed contentment, he had once again become one of those people—and yet none of them, himself included, had ever had the grace or courage to express it as a simple truth, rather than as an excuse for something, or a complaint.
She told him that earlier today she had spoken by phone with her aunt in Guatemala. From the few things that Ted Leo had offered at dinner the other night, Golden knew Ted Leo and Huila had met in the hill country north of the capital, where Ted Leo was a Christian missionary and Huila, as Ted Leo put it, “a simple peasant girl, barefoot and beautiful.” What Golden didn’t know, and what Huila told him now, was that she had left behind her only child, a then-two-year-old boy named Fredy, whose father had run off to the gold mines of Brazil, leaving Huila in the middle of the night without so much as a goodbye, never knowing that he’d conceived a son. Fredy—her voice quavered when she said his name—was nine years old now, and sick: tuberculosis, the doctors at the clinic said. He would need six months of treatment at a sanatorium to have a chance at recovery.
She produced a wallet-sized snapshot from somewhere inside her sweater and handed it to Golden. The boy in the picture was chubby-cheeked, straining not to smile, with the sweet eyes of a girl.
“He’s beautiful,” Golden said. “You can’t go be with him?”
She shook her head. “Ted Leo won’t allow it.”
She told him that she and Ted Leo had an arrangement: he gave her a monthly allowance of four hundred dollars, a sum that not only cared for Fred
y and the aunt who looked after him, but also her bedridden grandfather, her uncle’s family, and her cousin, Leti, who was attending secretarial school. In return he asked only the undying devotion of a pet dog; she cooked his meals, cleaned his house, kept his bed warm, and, most importantly, never complained, never required anything of him except an occasional thank-you, and doesn’t that taste wonderful. She was, as Ted Leo liked to tell people, the perfect Christian wife: pure, faithful and not the slightest bit uppity. The kind of servility only to be found in the third world anymore, and such a relief after a long day spent dealing with a pack of smart-mouthed American hookers.
Golden said, “If you need money…”
She shook her head. “Ted Leo will pay, he always pays.” She looked at the picture and her eyes clarified with tears. “But Fredy is sick. I am his mother.”
In just a few minutes the fire had burned down to a pile of coals that flared and smoked with every slight breeze. Golden felt the urge to inch his way across the Barge, to offer a word of comfort or a hand on her shoulder, but he didn’t dare. They sat in silence until she said, “You have children?”
Golden thought about it for a long time. The only truly appropriate response to that question was a big dumb grin and a Do I ever! But with Huila, he was supposed to be playing the part of a normal man, a man who lived in a single house with one wife and no more children than could fit comfortably in the back seat of a Buick.