The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  But of all Roy’s victims, Golden Richards and his new bride were special. Like Nola Harrison and a few hundred other unfortunates, they found themselves in Roy’s path when he was young, his cloud still dense and potent and close to the ground. As he swept over the crest of Mount Pennell, the newlyweds were in the preliminary stages of consummating their marriage. Beverly had thoroughly fed Golden, reduced him to jelly with an expert massage, and was now nibbling at his downy earlobe. Somewhere in the middle of the massage Golden had noticed the cloud overhead, but it didn’t seem worth bringing up, really, it would have been impolite to interrupt Beverly, intent as she was on her work.

  The wind picked up, rustling the grass, lifting up the edges of picnic cloth. Only when the cloud moved across the sun, blotting out its light like an eclipse in high speed, did she look up. Golden assumed it was just another summer mountain thunderstorm, nothing at all to worry about, let’s try to ignore it why don’t we, but Beverly knew better. This cloud was not the dull-metal gray of a thunderhead, but composed of several shifting colors: purplish black at the center bleeding to red and brown and then dull ocher around the edges. It boiled over the last ridge, full of strange, sparkling bits of light, and came in low through the trees.

  “My God,” Beverly said, words that startled Golden, both because it was a sin to use the Lord’s name in vain—a sin he had never once heard a church member indulge in—and because she said them so naturally.

  She stood and pulled at his arm, but he resisted, he was enjoying this picnic way too much, couldn’t they just wait it out?

  “Get,” she said, yanking hard on his wrist, “up!”

  Just then they both smelled something chemical and the air turned to acid in their noses and throats, making them gasp. A gust of wind pelted them with dust, blinding them for a moment. Mostly by feel, Golden scooped up the blanket with all the food in it and they ran. Down the hill, through the stand of ponderosas, and along the narrow two-track in the grass, the wind coming in hard bursts, pushing the swirling smoke on top of them, covering them instantly with ash. They stumbled along, coughing and waving their arms as if under attack by insects, until they found the car.

  Golden could not locate his car keys. Typical Golden. Pawing at his pockets at the most critical moment. Everything went black and for several seconds he could no longer see the car or the ground itself. He was overwhelmed by an intense heat, an instant fever on the skin, and Beverly called out, “Oh God, hurry!”

  They could not have been in a more unfortunate spot: inside the cloud’s dense core, a cloud within a cloud thronging with billions of careening microparticles throwing off gamma and beta rays with celebratory abandon: Roy’s dark, hot little heart.

  Golden managed to get the door open and they tumbled together into the front seat. Inside, the car was calm, deep-cushioned, cool. Even though they were out of the cloud, Golden’s skin continued to burn, and he clawed at his shirt and hair. “What is this?” he said, and they looked at each other: both covered head to toe with a pewter soot. Despite themselves, they laughed. Golden rubbed his eyes. His mouth was full of a gritty paste that caked around his teeth and heated the back of his throat. He croaked, “What the heck is it?”

  “It’s the bomb test,” Beverly said, already removing her precious, ruined dress. “We need to clean ourselves off.” Beverly knew there was some danger from the bomb fallout; she had heard rumors about dead sheep and AEC government men roaming the area with Geiger counters. What she couldn’t have known was that in those few seconds it took for Golden to find his keys, she had inhaled thousands of particles of plutonium oxide, some of which had already settled into the lining of her lungs and begun their slow, steady assault, radiating the surrounding cells until one day, twenty years from now, those cells would begin to mutate and multiply, growing inside her like a secret wish.

  Once she had helped Golden off with his shirt and pants, she dipped a clean portion of the picnic blanket in a jug of melted ice and went to work wiping the dust from his body. First, she went at the nooks and crannies of his face, the hollows of his eyes and his nostrils and the fine creases of his neck, and then moved down to his chest and arms. The cold water on his skin brought him out of his shocked state and it struck him that they were both in their underwear and she was touching him. He had never seen her body before, not like this, and he was pleased with what he saw: generous breasts and that curve of hip and the shallow dimples above her knees.

  He did what he could to reciprocate, making awkward swipes at her chest and ribs with the cloth and soon she was on top of him and he couldn’t distinguish the hot blush on his skin from the fever-warmth rising in his blood. She was kneeling now, facing him, and he knew there was a very good chance they might kiss, which he wanted to be prepared for: he fumbled the water jug into his hands and took a swig to wash down the grit in his mouth. What he swallowed then was not simple dust and sand, but dust and sand infused with microparticles of magnesium and cobalt and iron—the radioactive remnants of Roy’s detonation tower—that would eventually be absorbed through the walls of his intestines and into the bloodstream, where they would circulate through the body and finally set up camp in the outer wall of the prostate. There they would linger for most of his life, irradiating his reproductive cells even as they were produced, splitting a chromosome here and there, warping his genes. Golden and his compromised DNA would produce twenty-six healthy children, it was true, but also seven miscarriages (the first only five months into their marriage), three stillbirths, and one broken little girl named Glory, the apple of her daddy’s eye.

  The damage wouldn’t end there, of course; when it comes to humans, pain and suffering are passed through the generations like that unfashionable Christmas gift nobody wants: disease and mutation, anger and despair, failures of intellect and character, all of it genetic damage in one way or another, all of it nothing less than the curse of the father upon the child, a curse inevitably repaid in kind.

  Of course, Golden was in no condition to entertain even the most basic existential questions—he was about to have sex. Beverly was straddling him now, moving against him, her rising breasts giving him little chucks on the chin. He was back in a state of shock: the only breasts he had seen before were the overworked dugs of tribal women in National Geographic. His back itched and he was burning up and his balls ached, which he decided was probably normal in a situation like this. Though he didn’t know it, he had waited his entire life for this moment: nearly two decades’ worth of suppressed libido and rage, a stark loneliness made all the worse by a deficit of human touch: he was ready to explode.

  With a practiced motion, Beverly guided him inside her. For Golden, the feeling was of complete dislocation, the collision of pleasure and pain resulting in something close to oblivion. He went faint for a second, and then came to, his mouth open in an expression of blind awe. His body stiffened and he managed to whimper two words that would later cause him to grind his teeth with embarrassment: “Oh jeez.”

  It lasted only a few shuddering moments: over, like their wedding ceremony, before it began. But that didn’t matter, they would have their entire lives together to get things right. Roy was already moving on, lifting off the mountain and into the low jet stream, leaving the windows coated with soot and the interior of the car in grainy darkness. Golden and Beverly listened to each other breathe, to the sound of the wind rocking the car on its springs. He let his large hands roam all over her and she kissed him tenderly on the mouth. They were young and pretending to be in love. This was all a very long time ago.

  23.

  BIG HOUSE

  In this house there is chaos. Not your everyday sort of entropy, the kind that swells and intensifies before inevitably settling back into orderliness—the warehouse fire that rages and dies, the storm that blows itself out—but chaos of the endemic variety, the kind that expresses itself not only in the full-throated shouts and erratic movement of children who refuse to be counted, in the snarls of
will and purpose of the husband and wives, but in the very walls of the house itself, dented and pocked as if someone had gone after a renegade mouse with a hammer, in the finger-and face-smudged windows, the knots of hair clogging every drain, the beds in disarray, the broken clocks and temperamental doors that only the initiated can open, in the poor, swaybacked piano with the half-eaten apple secretly rotting inside its case, in the burned-out lightbulbs and hidey-holes that offer protection to the scam artists and gossipmongers who ply the halls, and in all the broken spaces of the house, ragged and piebald and worn, littered with stacks of paper and battered toys and drifts of unidentifiable objects that speak of the vast and sometimes terrifying manyness of things.

  The kind of chaos that begets itself, over and over again, until it becomes a kind of order, a way of life.

  Today it is Sunday afternoon, the Summit of the Wives, and there is the Father, in the middle of it all. The wives have just gotten started arguing about something—powdered milk, by the sound of it—and at least half of the children are swooping around the racetrack like a tribe of Visigoths on the attack. Mother #2: Oh, gag.

  Mother #1: We can at least give it a try.

  Mother #2: You ever tried it? Horrible. You never know when you’re going to get a lump, and when you do, you think you’ve swallowed a cockroach.

  Mother #1 gives Mother #2 a cold stare, which Mother #2 returns, as she always does, with an aggressively cheerful smile. Mother #1: It’s not that bad. You have to mix it well.

  Mother #3, whispering into her lap: It’s pretty bad.

  Mother #1: It is not that bad.

  Mother #4: And the kids won’t like it, there’ll be a revolt.

  Mother #1: The kids will do as we tell them.

  The Father, in a stupor at the head of the table, has missed the last two summits and is paying dearly for it now. The wives are angry at him, which is evident in the way they have agreed, despite their innumerable differences, to ignore him. He sits forward in his chair, straining to arrange the muscles of his face into an expression that suggests attentiveness, wondering how he’ll make it through the next two hours. Nodding meaningfully at nothing in particular, he sneaks a glance at the Official Summit Agenda, which informs him there are sixteen items still up for discussion, and he can’t help it, he closes his eyes and whimpers a little in anticipation of the suffering ahead.

  For weeks the wives have been telling him the family has reached a crisis point, and though he has been gone enough that he doesn’t know every detail, he knows things have gotten bad. In the past couple of months, especially, the houses have grown increasingly clannish, their grudges and rivalries dragged into the open for all to see. The ongoing feud between Mothers #1 and #2 has escalated into a series of almost daily skirmishes waged at meetings like this one, during Sunday dinners and Family Home Evenings, through the channels and byways of church gossip, along telephone lines. The children of the respective houses, never terribly fond of one another in the first place, have followed their mothers’ leads, needling and teasing each other, closing ranks and marking off territory, even the young ones taking sides in disputes beyond their understanding.

  By increments they are approaching an agreement: to abandon the mass illusion of themselves as a happy, God-fearing family, bound together for all eternity by obligation and love.

  Today, in protest against a series of slights and insults from some of the girls of Big House, Daughters #2 and #3 have refused to show up for Sunday dinner, which is precedent-setting, and made all the more remarkable by the fact that Mother #1 has allowed it. In response, Mother #2 has released a few of her oldest from Summit babysitting duty and allowed them to watch TV in the basement (an enormous no-no on the Sabbath) with the volume cranked high, mostly because she knows how much it will annoy Mother #1.

  It will only get worse, the Father knows, this is only the beginning. At the moment the wives are bickering about carpooling and the cost-to-pleasure ratio of powdered milk, but another quick glance at the Summit agenda tells him that shortly they will be moving on to more serious matters, such as how to apportion the family’s dwindling finances or whether they should continue sharing weekly meals or celebrate birthdays and holidays together, which is simply another way of asking themselves if they want to go on pretending to be a single loving family or give up the charade and move on. Because the Father is in attendance (for once!) they’re planning to put it all on the table: the impossible scheduling conflicts, the out-of-control sibling rivalries, the lack of leadership and example, the separate laws of engagement, the spousal fatigue. They’re going to try to force him to make decisions, to take sides, which will only focus the spotlight on him more brightly, bringing them around, of course, to the same, irrefutable conclusion: that he is the one responsible for this mess they’re in.

  The Father, knowing he is probably already a little pale, holds his stomach and assumes the posture and stricken countenance of a sick person, looking to his wives for pity, but they pay him no mind. Some of the older children continue watching TV in the basement, dinosaur screams and torture-chamber noises wafting up the stairs, and the younger ones, having already splintered into various bands, come whooping around the racetrack, slapping the walls and speaking in tongues. Mother #2 laughs too enthusiastically at one of her own jokes, Mother #4 presses her temples with her thumbs and Mother #1, coughing into her fist, looks around the table as if deciding who to kill first. And where is Mother #3? There she is, holding her blue earmuffs carefully in her lap, ready to clap them on at a moment’s notice.

  And here, at the head of the table, impossible to miss, is the Father, catalyst to an explosion he can’t control.

  For some time the Father has been trying to suggest to his wives that they have been exaggerating the family’s problems, that they are too close to the action and with the benefit of distance and perspective they would see, as he does, that their family is no different than any other. It has its struggles, sure, its ups and downs, a rough patch here and there, but if they keep persevering there will be better times ahead. He’s repeated these clichés so often he’s nearly convinced himself, but he knows the truth: the family is coming apart.

  The proof of which he witnessed up close last Saturday afternoon. He had been upstairs, fiddling with the broken heat register in the Little Kids’ room, when he heard a shriek he mistook for the distressed cry of a bird, possibly a wounded chicken. He went down the hall to investigate, thinking one of the kids had brought their 4-H project into the house. He paused in the doorway of the Big Girls’ room, confused. What he saw, mostly, was hair. An overturned bureau, a torn lampshade, scattered notebooks, and a lot of hair. Under all the hair were two of his daughters, he wasn’t sure which ones, kneeling on the bed facing each other, grunting and clutching each other’s hair in great double-fistfuls. One of them—Daughter #2, it appeared—reared up, teeth flashing, and dragged the other, who appeared to be Daughter #5, backward with her off the bed. There was more breathy screeching and when they rolled toward him, limbs flying, he backed up to get out of their way. From the safety of the hall he called on them to cut it out.

  Daughter #2 didn’t surprise him—she had always been a bit aggressive and unpredictable, ready to mix it up with the boys or any neighbor girl who dared look at her funny or say the wrong thing. But Daughter #5, Mother #2’s oldest girl, was pure sweetness, a girl who loved everyone openly, without shame, a paragon of generosity and Christ-like love, who was now attempting to ram her sister’s head into the bedpost.

  By now Dog #1 and several of the younger kids had crowded in the doorway to spectate, and the Father was reminded of his fatherly obligations. He pushed past the kids, grabbed Daughter #2 under the armpits, and hoisted her, bucking and kicking, onto the bed.

  Cow! she screamed. Ugly mudhole pig!

  Daughter #5 made a sudden, catlike lunge at her sister, screeching, WITCH! with such ferocity that Daughters #11 and #14 began to cry and Dog #1 bolted for the bathro
om. The Father cut her off, herded her toward the door while she tried clawing her way past him. There was a moment of silence, the girls glaring at each other with naked hate, their faces flushed and slick with tears, their hair wrenched into otherworldly shapes: snags and horns and gnarls.

  For a moment the Father believed he had everything under control, but when he tried to speak the girls started screeching in unison as if he’d cued them. Now the little ones were really crying and Dog #1, down the hall, began to howl, which made it difficult for the Father to make out what the shouting was about, something having to do with Mother #1 withholding money, about Mothers #2 and #3 spreading lies about Mother #1, about Mother #1 trying to control the children of Big House in any way she could, and the Father understood then just how bad it had gotten, that his sweet daughters, on their mothers’ behalf, could be acting out the long-standing conflict between the houses in this way.

  Gently, he tried to shush them. This has always been his role: peace-maker. Since the beginning he has displayed a singular talent for absorbing criticism and nagging, has even become, over the years, something of a punching bag for the wives and children alike, and now that he’d been away so much it looked as if they’d gotten used to taking out their aggression on each other. The girls kept at it, as if he were not in the room at all, and he clapped his huge hands in quick succession—the same thing he did when he caught Dog #1 in the act of urinating on a pile of clean laundry—but this only made them turn their attention his way, and they went from lobbing accusations and threats at each other to shouting rationalizations and explanations at him—who had said what to whom, who had been wronged and how badly—but he stopped them. He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to be responsible for hearing any of it. It was one of the first pieces of advice the Leader offered after he’d married Wife #2 and officially entered the covenant of plural marriage: don’t get involved. Getting involved, the old man advised, means getting more involved, which inevitably leads to further involvement. Let them work out the little things, he said, your job is to keep your eye on the big picture.