by Brady Udall
At the time, the advice had meant very little to the Father, but now it makes perfect sense. Except, honestly, the part about the big picture. He has no idea what the big picture is. At the moment, the only picture that matters is the one in front of him: his children in riot, his wives preparing to roast him on a spit.
Here is the big picture:
1. The Father has feelings for his boss’s wife.
2. His own wives are giving up on him.
3. His family is falling apart.
4. His finances are drying up.
5. He has a condom in his wallet and large clump of gum in his pubic hair.
6. He has no idea what to do about any of it.
As the children flow past, he tries to name them as they go, a game that distracts him a little, calms his mind. In this house, naming has become something of an obsession; the naming disease, as Mother #4 calls it, this is where it began. First, there had to be a way to differentiate it from the original house, so it became Big House, which immediately created the need to designate the original; this sort of naming and setting apart, this is how languages begin. As the family grew, they required a new language to distinguish groups and territories: the First and Second Twins, the Three Stooges, the Pink Bathroom and The Black Hole of Calcutta, the Big Kitchen and the Small, the trio of Big House washing machines which, for some reason, work under the aliases of Winken, Blinken and Nod.
In a life so vast, in a family so forbidding, there must be ways to cut things down to their proper size. Such a life cannot abide individuals, only groups, and if you are not a member of a group, if you are on your own, well then, God help you.
Mother #2 gives the Father a smart slap on the shoulder, which startles him out of his trance. The wives are all looking at him, wanting his input. He lets his attention wander for a few seconds and suddenly they are terribly interested in him, in what he has to say. He rubs his eyes and asks them to repeat the question, he didn’t hear it clearly as he would have liked. Mother #4 gives him a look and Mother #2 puts her two index fingers behind her head like donkey ears, a secret sign the Mothers have been using for years to indicate when the Father is being a Jackass.
Mother #1 asks the Father what’s wrong and he shrugs, and when Mother #2 asks him why he is moping he says he is not moping, which is what people who are moping tend to say. He glances down at the agenda, hoping to come up with a pertinent comment, when, in answer to a prayer he had not yet found the courage to offer, the phone rings. It is Sister Barbara, bless her soul, informing him there is a problem with one of his rental houses, a real emergency.
An emergency? the Father prompts, loud enough that the wives can hear.
Sister Barbara tells him it’s the old Victorian in Mexican Town, and the renter said the house was collapsing and if someone doesn’t show up right away he is going to call the fire department.
Collapsing? the Father says. Oh dear.
He thanks Sister Barbara a little more effusively than the situation may warrant, then hangs up the phone, which he holds out to his wives as if to say, What do you want me to do?
Mother #1 tells him that he can’t go, no way, that they have to finish this, that it can wait until they’re done, but the father keeps repeating the word emergency as he searches the mantel for his keys.
Mother #1 orders him to sit down and the Father says, But it’s collapsing!
Our house is collapsing! shouts Mother #1, and though everyone knows she’s speaking metaphorically, a couple of the wives and a few of the children glance nervously toward the ceiling. Mother #1 stands up as if to block the door, and the father has his keys now and is edging toward the foyer, saying he’ll just go check things out real quick, he’ll be right back, they should go on without him. He steps into his loafers and scoops up Dog #1, who from somewhere in the basement heard the jingle of keys and has arrived at the Father’s side as if by teleportation. All the wives are standing now and the Father turns quickly, almost in a panic, and fumbles with the doorknob. Outside he bounds down the porch steps, a weird little laugh rising in his throat, and hustles across the gravel driveway to his pickup.
24.
NESTOR AND THE OLD LADY
GOLDEN’S RENTALS CONSISTED OF SIX HOUSES, A COUPLE OF DUPLEXES and an old glassworks that at any one time housed between three and eleven illegal immigrant families. His father’s real estate empire, bought with the last of his uranium money, had once been vast, at least three times as big as what he had now, but one by one Golden had sold off a house or commercial building when things got a little tight, such as the year when four babies were born, Josephine had to be flown to Los Angeles to have surgery on her fused spine, and Rose-of-Sharon totaled the family van. Over the past year and a half he had been tempted to sell any or all of his remaining units, but the real estate market was so bad he would have been throwing money away. These days rent money was all that kept his family fed.
The house in question was the one his father used to call, with a certain smirk in his voice, the Old Lady: an 1896 Victorian built by a criminally optimistic Mormon businessman who intended to turn southern Utah into the citrus and cotton capital of the world. In its time it was as opulent as any house in these parts, with a steeply pitched roof, gingerbread bracketing and high mullioned windows. Along with a few other houses, an old glassworks and a quaint but useless gristmill, it made up a pleasant little settlement once known as Jericho, but which now was known to the imaginative locals as Mexican Town.
Golden drove slowly down Mexican Town’s single dirt road, hitting the brakes whenever he saw a child, even if the child happened to be sitting on the front step or looking out a window. To the mangy dogs, and there were a lot of them, he paid no attention.
He passed several tarpaper shacks, long featureless houses that had once served as turkey coops, a couple of old red sandstone bungalows, a scattering of travel trailers in a barren cornfield, the brick glassworks surrounded by broken plastic toys and defunct vehicles, and at the very end on a small rise the Old Lady, who, thankfully, was still standing. At one time this had been a lush spot at a bend in the river, but after the floods of 1938, the river jumped its banks and began to carve a new channel nearly half a mile away, leaving the cottonwoods and Navajo willows to wither and the inhabitants to abandon the settlement for the comforts of St. George.
Golden pulled up into the front yard next to an old Wonder Bread truck with the words ¡LOS JODIDOS! painted bright and violent red on one side. There was no one out on the lawn wringing their hands, no smoke rising, nothing to indicate a catastrophe of any sort. He felt the distinct twinge of pleasure at having gotten away with something.
He turned to Cooter, who had regressed with his obsessive licking, and was back in his Swingin’ Baby Timmy underwear. “You stay here,” he said. “If you’re good maybe I’ll come back and let you out.”
A pack of frisky renegade dogs, which had followed the truck down the road, circled and yipped at him as he made his way up to the house. He was about to knock on the side door when he heard a noise out back, where Nestor and several of his cohorts—mostly Mexican men with long hair and colorful clothing—were lounging on creaky antique chairs and an old bleached-out horsehair divan. To Golden’s eye they looked like a scaled-down Mexican version of the Hell’s Angels, with a Caucasian hippie and a chubby Ute thrown in for good measure. Across the yard, another group of men with their T-shirts rolled up to their chests stood smoking and affectionately patting their own bellies.
“Jefe!” Nestor called. “El Jefe has arrived, just as we knew he would.” Nestor stood and received Golden with a formal stiff-armed hug and a firm handshake. For as long as Golden had known him, Nestor had been this way: polite as an Englishman.
“Jefe and his many disciples,” Nestor said, gesturing to the dogs. Golden made a little kick at one of the dogs, which ducked out of the way with a nonchalant expertise. He said, “I got a call.”
“Yes, certainly,” Nestor said, sitting b
ack down, and taking a sip of something from a jelly jar. “Yes, I see.”
Nestor was short and stocky, the only one of the lot with his hair oiled back in the traditional style. He had a handsome, dour face that shone like a full moon when he smiled. Nestor was a musician, and an intermittently successful one, apparently. He was on the road much of the time, with his own band or sitting in with other musicians, and when asked what kind of music he played, he would say, “Every kind. All kinds. The people ask for it? Nestor will play it.” Along with being a vocalist of some range and power, Nestor played the drums, the steel guitar, and, on special occasions, to the delight of certain drunken crowds, the chain saw.
“A drink?” He gestured with his jelly jar. “Sit down and enjoy a nice day in the out-of-doors?”
From somewhere in the house came muffled shouting, followed by a sustained banging.
“There’s nothing wrong with the house?” Golden said.
Nestor looked back at the house as if he had forgotten it was there. “Oh yes,” he said, giving one of the dogs a rub on the head. “Hmm. Yes.” He drew back his hand and looked at it. “I believe this dog has fleas.”
“Digalo!” cried the blind keyboard player, who went by the name of Blind Emilio. “No tenemos todo el dia!”
“Joda a tu madre, Emilio!” Nestor called back, and they all commenced to curse each other in Spanish. Nestor sidled up and spoke to Golden in a hushed, confidential way. “These are bad men. These are very stupid men with small penises. You know their kind.”
The men went from shouting to laughing in an instant and Nestor shouted back at them, “Mujeres sin nalgas!” and they all laughed some more.
“I don’t want you to be angry,” Nestor said to Golden.
“Angry?” Golden said. “Have you ever seen me angry?”
Nestor thought about it. “There is always a first time.”
He led Golden into the kitchen and down the stairs into the dim, windowless basement, where there was a pool table and a collection of dinged aluminum kegs turned over for use as chairs. From above came the shouting and banging he had heard earlier.
“So you see,” Nestor said.
At first Golden didn’t see much of anything. Possibly he was distracted by the hundreds of beer cans and bottles stacked on every horizontal surface, or maybe it was the posters and calendars, dozens of them, of women in bikinis and tube tops, oiled up and smudged with grease and clutching wrenches or blowtorches, ready to go to work. It took him a moment to notice the way the entire ceiling sagged low over the pool table, as if some great weight were pressing down from above. Then he saw that the ten-by-ten wood beam that was supposed to bear the weight of much of the house had been cut in two, half still bolted to the floor, the other on the floor in a thin bed of sawdust.
“It’s bad?” Nestor ventured a glance at Golden, his hand on his chin. “Maybe?”
Golden put his arm across Nestor’s chest and backed them slowly toward the stairs. The house creaked and shifted slightly, releasing a small shower of dust.
“Who?” Golden said, the word itself a plaintive, confused sound. “Who would cut the beam?”
“Oh, those putos outside, of course,” Nestor said. “They are playing pool, and you know, the beam is in the way, it has been in the way for some years and sometimes you have a shot in your brain, a beautiful shot that is prevented by that beam, it has happened to me on many occasions, but today it happened to that fucking culero Richard, he wanted to make the most beautiful shot of his life, the shot of all time, so he cut the beam. With my performance chain saw, no less. I think he was probably, you know, a little drunk.”
Carefully, they made their way back up the stairs. “We have to get everybody out of the house,” Golden said. “Is there anybody in here?”
“Maybe that is a small problem,” Nestor said. “Please follow me.”
Just off the kitchen was a narrow hallway, down which they carefully tiptoed. They stopped in front of a closed door. Nestor put his lips to the door and inquired, “Lardo?” and suddenly there was a pounding, and somebody shouted, “Sacarme de aqui pinche idiotas malditos!” Which, translated loosely, means, “Get me the fuck out of here, you motherfucking idiots!”
“Lardo.” Nestor offered Golden a thin smile. “He is not happy.”
Golden tried the doorknob but the door wouldn’t budge.
“You see the problem,” said Nestor. “All the rooms on this side, all the doors are stuck.”
Golden stood back. “The house has shifted a little, I think, pushed the doorframes out of plumb. Can’t he get out the window?”
“It’s the bathroom. Lardo was in the tub doing sexual relations with his lady when this bad thing happened. There is only one small window and Lardo is not a thin man.” He lowered his voice and made a face. “His lady, she is not thin, also. I do not want to think about how they managed in the tub.”
Golden pushed on the door again. “Are they okay in there?”
Nestor shrugged. “I told them to have some more baths, do some sexual relations, it does not have to be a bad time. Why so much yelling and hitting things? Just tell us what we need to do, Jefe, and we will do it. We do not want the house to fall down. It’s a good house. You will not have to raise a finger. And we will forever thank you from our hearts.”
Outside, where it was safe, Golden explained what they needed: a ten-ton jack, two if they could get them, and a steel beam at least eight feet long.
With a felt-tip pen Nestor wrote these items carefully on the smooth skin of his forearm. He tapped his head with the pen. “I see how you are thinking, Jefe. A steel beam that can withstand the pinches Mexicanos and their chain saws. Very good.”
After Nestor sent his men away for the jacks, the beam, and a case of beer, he invited Golden to sit with him under an enormous dead cottonwood that offered no shade. Soon they were joined by the town dogs, who lay at their feet and lolled around, sniffing each others’ genitals and snarling occasionally. Golden asked about Nestor’s latest shows (Why does everybody love the accordion? No matter how much they ask, Nestor will never play the fucking accordion!) and Nestor asked after Golden’s wives and kids (Fine, Fine, everybody’s doing real good, fine).
Nestor knew all about Golden’s lifestyle and it did not upset him in the slightest. Nestor had a wife and family back in Michoacan, a mistress with two children in Las Vegas, any number of one-night tour groupies-in-waiting, and a select rotation of local girlfriends. Golden had discovered that he could talk to Nestor about things in a way that he couldn’t with the other men of the church, even Uncle Chick. There was no judgment in Nestor, no belief in anyone or anything but himself.
“The work?” said Nestor. “The work is good?”
“Oh, fine, it’s fine, pain in the behind, you know, but going good.”
Nestor grimaced. “Holy God, Jefe, you are a bad liar. You think I can’t see? Look at you. You know you can tell your friend Nestor.”
Golden balanced himself carefully on his rusty lawn chair and breathed out a great soul-purging sigh. He had not come with the intention of talking to Nestor about Huila, but he could feel it building in him, a confession, a release that he sorely needed.
After that strange firelit night, the night she had told him about her son, Fredy, the night he had poured out his heart about Glory, something had given way, some dam had broken. Now, while he was in Nevada, they had been meeting nearly every day. Like giddy teenagers, sneaking around, setting up secret rendezvous under the cover of darkness, driving out into the desert to look at the stars and talk into the early morning. Even so, they’d managed a minimum of physical contact: their thighs touching as they sat on the Barge, her head against his shoulder in the cab of the pickup, his right hand brushing her hip as they walked side by side along the south ridge, his knuckles scorched by the briefest touch. He didn’t know if it was the fear of Ted Leo, the fear of Beverly, or the fear of the Almighty God Who Knew and Saw All, but it took Golden an
other week and a half, after all that build-up, to kiss her.
The previous Friday night, with Ted Leo away in Las Vegas and Golden set to drive home the next morning. They had spent most of the night together sitting on the Barge, staring into the fire, talking. Golden was so drunk with exhaustion he’d taken off his boots and socks, allowed his beastly feet out into the open. He had been rambling on about his fictional wife—a Frankenstein monster constructed from carefully selected negative attributes of each of his four wives (he wanted Huila to understand that, except for when he was with her, he was the owner of an unhappiness to match hers)—when he paused, looked out into the dark night as if he’d lost his train of thought, and said, “All this time, it’s been so hard not to kiss you.”
He felt her go stiff next to him. He’d been repeating this sentence in his head for days, sometimes daring to say it out loud, experimenting with it as if it were his only line in his first Hollywood movie, his one chance at the big time, alternating tone and testing inflection, pursing his lips in a certain enigmatic fashion, knowing all the while he’d never have the guts to utter such a preposterous thing out loud. But here he’d gone and blurted it out like an idle thought that had come to him in passing.
While he waited for a response he felt himself lifting out of his own body, as if in a dream. After what seemed like a long time, she said, “Why don’t you?”
He stared into his lap, anchored to the couch by his own sinking weight. He could not look at her. She had practically given him permission and still he couldn’t do it, couldn’t muster the simple courage, for the first time in his whole damned life, to take a chance, to act without explicit permission.
His problem was simple: he had never learned to take what he wanted, to make the first move. His very life, including his marriages to his wives, his children, his church position, was none of his own doing. His father had brought him to Virgin, set him up in the church and arranged his marriage to Beverly, who, in turn, invited Nola into the family, who then brought Rose-of-Sharon along in a package deal. Only with Trish—who had been more or less forced on him by Beverly—had there been any intimate contact before marriage, and she was the one who had initiated it, wrestling him into submission in the cab of the hearse one night after prayer meeting.