by Brady Udall
But in the soft air of this early morning, numbed by the labor of digging and the sheriff’s casual talk, he felt blessed with a bit of peace. The sheriff, who liked a good story, was telling Golden about some of the more colorful polygamists he’d met in his time. There was Calvin Eyre, who declared his desert compound its own sovereign nation and asked the sheriff to set up a one-on-one summit with President Johnson. “And then there was ol’ Ross Sudweeks, you remember him, never held a regular job, hardly a dime to his sorry name, but he’s got five wives and four thousand children and they all live on welfare and daily trips to the dump. Happiest herd a potlickers you ever seen. One time I was out there delivering Christmas turkeys for the Kiwanis Club—I took nine of ’em out there and I swear I don’t think it was enough—and come to find out Ross had married him another one, a cross-eyed single lady with three kids. I had to ask. ‘Why do you do it, Ross? What in God’s name you thinkin’?’ You know what he said?” Here the sheriff paused to heave a stone over the lip of the grave. “‘Safety in numbers.’ That’s what he told me, winking like it’s the best secret in the world. I never forgot that. Safety in numbers.”
Another half an hour and they had dug so deep they were having a hard time pitching the dirt out without having it slide right back in. The earth down here was clayey and moist and riddled with pockets of white quartz. “So,” said the sheriff, measuring the top edge of the grave, which was just about even with his eyebrows. “We got an escape plan or what?”
“You go on ahead,” Golden said. “I’ll help you out and then I can finish up. I’m taller than you, I’ll get myself out one way or another.”
“If not,” the sheriff said, “we’ll know where to find you.” He tossed his shovel out and turned to face Golden. Their eyes met and they stood like that for a moment, two men in a hole. Golden felt his throat thicken, the backs of his eyes sting with tears, and the old sheriff stepped forward and gave him a quick, hard squeeze on the forearm to prevent any unnecessary blubbering. “You’re gonna make it, bud, I know you will.”
Golden nodded, took the sheriff by the belt and the back of his T-shirt, and with a grunt and a heave pitched him gently out of the hole.
The sheriff buttoned up his shirt, put his holster back on. He clapped the dirt off his hands and knees. Creaking, he gazed around at the red cemetery dirt bristling with markers and stones. He gave Golden one last look and sighed before turning away.
“Safety in numbers,” he said. “Ain’t no such thing.”
21.
THE MONKEY NET
EVERY DAY NOW HE DID BATTLE WITH AUNT BEVERLY. FROM HER HEINOUS chambers in the laundry room she made her plots, denying him dessert and assigning him extra chores and forcing him to wash his feet daily, plus the house was full of her spies. She grounded him for the dumbest little things anybody ever heard of and made him read the longest scriptures during Book of Mormon Hour, but like the guerrilla fighter he was, he resisted her at every turn, sneaking out when she wasn’t looking and not washing his feet even when he said he had. When she grounded him for writing
on the wall above the toilet in perfectly erasable pencil, did he stay grounded? No way. He snuck out, using his silent walking ability, until her spies discovered him hiding out in the bushes by the river. When she banished him to the Tower for a whole Saturday for the cherry bomb episode, and posted guards by the door so he couldn’t escape, did he cry and pound the walls and beg to be let out? Not likely. He just sat up there watching everything, drawing in his secret notebooks, making his secret plans, his leg jiggling like crazy, laughing at all the dumb a-holes down below, waiting for his moment to strike.
Sometimes, to get him to behave like a normal person—good luck, Sherlock!—she came all the way up to the Tower to talk to him, alone. Which was, seriously, the worst. She read scriptures to him and talked about sin and righteousness.
“The Bible tells us that good can only come from good, and evil from evil,” she said. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“That I’m evil?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“Maybe I’m evil and I can’t help it.” Already his leg was jiggling like crazy.
“No, you’re not evil. My point is that you have to try to be good.”
“Maybe you’re evil, and you don’t even know it.”
Aunt Beverly turned her head and coughed into her hand. “Rusty, please, could you listen to me for one minute?”
Even though he drove her crazy like this, she tried to talk to him in a nice way and kept her witchy-woman stare turned down low, and sometimes even put her hand on his shoulder, which should have burned like the saliva of a she-demon, but felt kind of nice. Her voice would go all soft and her eyes kind of shiny and she would tell him how very good it would be for him to repent of his sins, how happy he could be if he would give up his bad self and dedicate his soul to God. Rusty would nod and say, Yes, hmm, and sometimes even pray with Aunt Beverly, but after she was gone he would laugh his Scoundrel laugh—ha! ha! haaaa!—and go right back to making his plans.
At church, when his mother had asked Rusty what he wanted for his twelfth birthday, he said all he wanted was to come back to Big House. I don’t want any other presents, he told her, making his saddest funeral face, giving the inside of his left cheek a hard bite to make his eyes water, I just want to come home. She smiled and looked away, which she always did before she told him no. When she explained that he couldn’t come home yet, because his father and the mothers had agreed he needed more time to show he could behave properly, especially since the cherry bomb in the dryer a few nights ago.
Rusty regretted the cherry bomb, even though it made the most incredible sound ever, you should have heard it—Ka Wong!!! He did it because his scientific mind had always been intrigued with this question: What would a cherry bomb sound like if it blew up inside a dryer? And since Aunt Beverly had made her famous Raspberry Trifle Dessert that night, and because he wasn’t allowed to have any because he had called Nephi a dickhole in Sunday School, and because he needed to create a diversion so he could get himself some without anyone seeing, well, the cherry bomb. The only problem was that after it went off and everybody was running into the laundry room to see what the amazing noise was, Louise and her bubble-eyes spied him scooping some of the Raspberry Trifle Dessert into a bowl and hauling butt up the stairs with it. By the time they caught him he’d already finished it off, scooping it into his mouth with his hands because he had forgotten to grab a spoon.
With the cherry bomb, he hadn’t been thinking ahead. He had forgotten it was his special birthday coming up. So he cried a little, to show his mother he was sorry, and said if he couldn’t come home this week, then he’d have to settle for having his birthday party at Skate Palace. Skate Palace was in St. George, and if you were a cool person it was where you went, which was why Rusty had never been there. But he knew all about the row of pinball machines and the loud music and the hot mamas on roller skates. Rusty did not know how to play pinball, or to skate, but he knew one thing: he had disco fever. He had it so bad! Lately he’d been listening to Disco Week with Stu Barrett on his transistor at night, which was how he’d learned that Disco Fever had been sweeping the nation for all these years. And the only cure for disco fever was the Skate Palace in St. George, where you could glide around with sweaty long-haired chicks listening to “Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’” and doing risky disco dance combinations.
Already, Rusty had learned one of the most death-defying disco dance moves of all time. Royce Ramirez at school was the one who told him about it, and because it was super-secret and known only by certain disco experts, Royce showed him for the reasonable fee of a ham sandwich and two apples. It was called the Honk Job, and involved two leg kicks, a bunch of crazy finger-snapping, a knee bend, and then several quick spins that brought you right up next to your dance partner so you could reach out at the last second and squeeze her boobs with both hands.
&nbs
p; “This is probably the most dangerous move there is,” Royce warned. Royce was an eighth-grader but because of his mossy teeth and B.O. complications hung out mostly with sixth-graders. They were behind the dusty curtains in the auditorium that doubled as the school cafeteria. “Seriously, man. You do it wrong, it’s gonna be a real problem. You execute it right, though, with the finger-snapping in all the right places, and you’ll, like, mesmerize your lady, and she’ll let you honk her boobs all night long.”
When his mother found out it would cost twenty-five dollars to rent the Skate Palace for two hours, she said it was a “luxury we can’t afford,” something Aunt Beverly had started saying about eighteen times a day. Rusty said he would start mowing lawns to pay it off, that he didn’t want presents or a cake or anything, that a party at Skate Palace would be good enough for him.
There was no way his mother could say no. For his twelfth birthday, Parley got to have a bonfire picnic, and for Helaman’s, Sasquatch rented the county swimming pool for an entire afternoon.
Because there were so many people in this family, and all of them had to have birthdays every year no matter what, everyone could not have their own birthday party—that was the family rule. Aunt Nola said if everybody in the family was going to get their own party they would have to start their own birthday cake factory and sleep in their party hats. So they doubled up. Sometimes tripled. The Three Stooges always had their birthday party together and the two sets of twins, and sometimes one of the kids got paired with one of the mothers. Even this way, honestly, you kind of got sick of all the birthday parties.
Like everything else in this family, birthdays were complicated. In this family, you were never free, you couldn’t do anything on your own, because there was always somebody who had a dentist’s appointment or volleyball practice or Deeanne would have one of her epileptic seizures and there went everybody’s Labor Day picnic down the tubes. It was like they were all connected by the same invisible string, this was how Rusty thought of it, and when one person wanted to do a certain thing or go a certain way, they yanked on all the others, and then another person tried to go in another direction, and so on, and pretty soon they were all tangled up, tied to each other, tripping and flailing, thrashing around like a bunch of monkeys caught in a net.
But the twelfth birthday party, for a boy, was not supposed to be complicated. For one day, you were free of the monkey net. You got your own party. You got to choose what to have for dinner. People were supposed to be nice to you. You didn’t have to do chores. You got good presents, instead of the usual ones, such as the plastic croquet set he had received for his eleventh birthday, croquet being the game, according to Helaman, played only by elderly homosexuals and people from France. Twelve was when you received the priesthood, when you became a deacon in the church and were supposed to do things like pass the sacrament on Sunday, paint the houses of the less fortunate, and start being a man. The prophet would put his hands on your head and give you power from God. Rusty wanted to see if he could use this power to cure lepers or control people with the holy power of his mind.
The girls, they didn’t get any power, they could not have the priesthood. For them, their special birthday was when they turned eight, the age they could be baptized in the church. As far as the church went, that was the best they could do.
So he made invitations. You weren’t supposed to invite nonfamily members to birthday parties—“friends are a luxury this family can’t afford,” Aunt Nola always said—but when the kids from school showed up at Skate Palace, hopefully with a present for him, he would shrug like it was impossible to keep all his many friends at bay and say, “Come on in, guys, grab yourself some skates and a root beer!”
At night in the Tower, when he was supposed to be doing his homework, he cut letters and pictures of fire from magazines and pasted them on notebook paper.
R. Richards!!!
B-Day BASH!!!
Disco Inferno!!!
Presents and Gift Certificates Gladly Excepted!!!
Rusty knew that such fiery and mysterious invitations would attract kids from school who wouldn’t normally be caught dead around him, mostly because he was a plyg kid and was bad at sports and had once, in fourth grade, tripped on his traditional Mongolian skirt and fallen off the stage during the performance of Dances of Foreign Peoples and landed on the piano player, Mrs. Biedris, who was something like seventy years old and wore a neck brace for the rest of the year, saying brave things like, “Take your pity elsewhere!” and “Don’t worry about me!”
While he made the invitations he listened to the radio and occasionally got up to practice the Honk Job in the mirror.
Satisfaction, uh-huh, came in the chain reaction
I couldn’t get enough, uh-huh, so I had to self destruct
Burn baby burn, Disco Inferno
Burn Baby Burn, Burn that mother down!
The week before his party, Aunt Beverly had called him into the kitchen and told him that there was going to be no party at Skate Palace.
“Honk job,” Rusty whispered.
“What?” said Aunt Beverly.
“Titty twister,” Rusty said, under his breath. “Witchy woman.”
“I can’t hear a thing you’re saying.”
Rusty raised the volume. “You’re not my mother.”
“I’m well aware of that.” She looked up from the dishes, trying to burn a hole in his forehead with her witchy-woman lasers. “You remind me of that nearly every time we speak. I thought, though, that I’d do you the courtesy of letting you know what the plans are for your birthday.”
“You’re not my mother,” he said again, mostly because he knew how much it chapped her behind. “And you don’t decide what the plans for my birthday are. It’s my special birthday, and it’s going to be at Skate Palace.”
“You’re lucky you’re going to have a party at all, young man. You’ll get your special party, it’s just not going to be at Skate Palace. It will be better than that.”
Somewhere better than Skate Palace? For seconds Rusty had a crazy hope. What could be better than Skate Palace? Wacky Waters in Salt Lake City? The deck of a battleship?
Aunt Beverly dried her hands. “You’re going to share your birthday party with your father, at Big House.”
“How is that special?” he said. “I’m supposed to have my own party.”
“You’re going to have to think of the family before yourself sometimes—”
His head felt hot and surplus spit was beginning to form in his mouth. “But it’s supposed to be my own party! My own special party!”
“Most people would consider it a great honor to share their birthday party with their father. He’s been away so much that we couldn’t schedule his party on his real birthday, so he’s been very gracious to share with you. No one has ever shared a birthday with Daddy before, so this is a real honor—”
“I am not happy!” Rusty cried. “This is not an honor! This is a major gyp!”
“No need to yell,” said Aunt Beverly. “I can already sense your displeasure.”
“A gyp!” Rusty cried.
“Stop talking to my mother that way!” cried Louise, who had been spying on them from the doorway. “A gyp!”
Rusty made a break for it down the hallway. At the front door he stopped at the PLEASE REMOVE SHOES box but his shoes were nowhere to be found and Aunt Beverly and Louise and probably several other Old House a-holes were breathing down his neck, so he picked up the box, opened the front door and took off across the front lawn to his bike. The box was heavier than it looked, and he spilled a few shoes on the way, but he was able to prop it up on the handlebars. Even though he couldn’t see over the box, he set off down the driveway weaving like crazy and dropping more shoes until he got to the road. Both his socks were coming off and he kept veering off into the weeds and bumping over rocks, but he was feeling better now and he looked back where Aunt Beverly and Louise and Parley and Teague were standing on the front porch
barefoot with their big fat mouths hanging open like a bunch of helpless babies—Help me, I’m helpless!—watching him ride away with their shoes. Buenos tarde, amigos! He reached into the box and one by one started chucking the shoes this way and that like a blind brain-damaged paper boy.
“Disco Inferno, suckers!” he shouted at them as he tore down the road toward Big House. “Burn that mother down!”
THE DEPUTY MARSHAL
Big House smelled like vitamins and basement and hamster cage. It was a smell that gave Rusty a weird feeling in his stomach, like homesickness, which was stupid, because how could you be homesick in your own dumb house?
He had sneaked in through the garage and laundry room with its three angry dryers clicking and rumbling and buzzing away, and there was no one there to stop him. On his way he came across the Second Twins fighting in the hall with Gale, who was dangerous because she kept her nails long and always went for the eyes.
He started up the stairs when Aunt Nola came in behind him, like she’d been waiting for him all along. “And what do we have here?”
“Nothing,” he said.
She told him that Aunt Beverly had called to see if Rusty had shown up at Big House yet. Smiling, she shook her head and said, “In hot water yet again, I see.”
“Indeed,” he said.
“And how are things at Old House these days?”
“Aunt Beverly,” Rusty said, which was all he needed to say.
“Don’t let her get to you, Rusty-boy. Keep your chinny-chin-chin up.”
“I’m trying my best.”
“Of course you are. Now look. Your mother is having one of her spells, so no more than thirty seconds up there. Be calm and don’t get her excited.”
“Promise.”
“Well, carry on,” she said, going back to the kitchen. “For the record, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you.”