by Brady Udall
The gospel taught that in the resurrection the diseased and broken would be made whole, but he didn’t want to see her again in a perfect, glorified state, he wanted her as she was in his memory, her left arm folded up like the wing of a bird and her mouth full of small, crooked teeth, her lopsided face alive with sudden grins and sly glances. He wanted to smell the sour-milk tang of her breath and to hear her bright, shrieking squawks as he called to her from the front door. He wanted to hold her again and feel in the way she pressed her cheek against his chest her forgiveness, her sweet and uncomplicated love.
Here, alone in the cab of his truck, there was no reason to hold it all in, this grief which had become indistinguishable from every other part of his life, which had subsumed the stress and anticipation and terror of the last twelve hours, and he let go a few coughing sobs that came out in spasms. He sniffed and gave the steering wheel a hard shake. In his blubbering he must have taken his foot off the gas because he heard honking and looked in his rearview to see a line of cars backed up behind him. He was doing thirty-five in a no-passing zone on an interstate highway. He pressed down on the accelerator, but he was on an uphill grade and the engine seemed to gulp and then surrender when it engaged the extra weight of the trailer. The first to pass him was a woman in sunglasses driving a Mustang convertible. She bared her teeth and gave him the finger as she went by, but she must have gotten a look at his wet, ruined face because she turned her eyes away and sped by with the blinkered expression of someone who has just witnessed something intimate and shameful.
For no reason he could think of the story of Jonah and the Whale came into his head. He had first heard it one sticky fall morning at the Holiness Church of God in Jesus’ Name, sitting in the rough cypress pew next to his mother. The Reverend Marvin J. Peete had been cycling through his weekly routine, which involved warbling snippets of gospel standards into the microphone with the husky whisper of a nightclub crooner and then suddenly barking out terrifying declamations of Repentance! and Apocalypse! and Blood of the Lamb! But on that day his voice lowered and he began to tell a story about Jonah, the man who had disobeyed God and as a result had been swallowed by a “great and terrible fish.” Golden, his copper hair slicked back and his necktie arranged at the base of his Adam’s apple in some overcomplicated sailor’s knot, sat up and listened. According to the Bible the Lord had “prepared a large fish to swallow up Jonah”—the word “prepared” indicating the whale was not a punishment from God, but a gift, an opportunity. While Golden liked this idea, he liked even better the description of Jonah’s time inside the whale, which was spent, according to the reverend, praying and singing canticles while perched on a giant kidney under festoons of intestines and trembling stalactites of whale mucus. Reverend Peete might not have had a solid grasp of marine mammal anatomy, but he made up for it with his descriptions of the glistening liver upon which Jonah made his bed at night and the wash of spiky and tentacled sea creatures, dead and alive, foaming around the prophet’s legs while he implored the Almighty for mercy. It took three days, apparently, for the great fish to tire of having his kidney used as a bean bag, and when Jonah was vomited up on the beach, Reverend Peete nearly gave himself in to an apoplectic fit with the glory of this moment. He cried, “Oh Jonah! God’s reluctant servant! Look at him there, washed up on that foreign shore! Half blind and tangled up in seaweed and whatnot. And that horrible smell? It’s Jonah, people, covered with fish parts and digestive juices and so forth. It’s pathetic old Jonah, pale and wrinkled like he’s spent the weekend in a pickle barrel, blinking and looking around at the sand and the water and the tropical greenery and all that dazzling light after so much darkness. Imagine it, people! The ocean breeze in the nostrils, the sound of the surf and the wind in the palms. Imagine the wonder. The humble gratitude. Oh praise be my king on high, can you hear Jonah say it? Imagine the grace, the sweetness of that second chance.”
Golden had felt it then, the beauty of that moment, and he felt it now, thirty-some years later, driving out of the deep river gorge and onto the wide face of a plateau shadowed by a field of brilliantly lit clouds. He had escaped the belly of the whale. He was bruised and battered, covered in dust and blood and infested with fleas, but he was returning home, where he allowed himself to imagine a bountiful and untroubled future, back in the bosom of his family.
For another thirty miles he did nothing but steer and look out into the glare of the day. At one point he reached up idly to investigate the goose egg on the back of his head and instead of his own fingers on the tender skin he felt Huila’s—for a dislocating moment he sensed her next to him, felt the heat of her touch and got a whiff of her, a strong but pleasant smell like a new leather belt. As if it had been burned he pulled his hand away quickly, giving his head a hard shake to dislodge the very thought of her, realizing that he would be shaking off such thoughts for a long time to come.
By the time he made it to St. George, the fleas had begun to stir. They’d been laying low, like immigrants getting used to the neighborhood, but now that they’d acclimated, picked up on the local language and customs, they were on the move and causing trouble. Anywhere there was hair, they congregated: in the vast prairies of his chest and belly and the forests that covered his scalp. In particular they seemed to be making themselves comfortable in the crack of his ass.
His crotch, he noted with bitter satisfaction, was entirely flea-free.
They weren’t biting him, thankfully, but they were, almost literally, making his skin crawl, but then, yes, no doubt about it, they were biting him. At some point he had himself going in a full body flex, craning his neck as he desperately ground his butt against the seat, digging into his belly with his fingers or attacking the soft spot behind his ear like a dog, but it was like trying to scratch a thousand small itches at once. For the last few miles he held on by sheer force of will, going a good twenty miles over the speed limit, and when he pulled up into the gravel drive, he skidded to a hard stop, ratcheted down the emergency brake and jumped out of the truck, scratching at himself in a spasm of delicious violence. When this didn’t do the trick, he skipped around the side of the trailer facing the Spooners’ pasture, away from the prying eyes of Old House, and yanked off his shirt, rubbing at the bare skin of his ribs with his fists and forearms and elbows. He had his pants unbuttoned, and was just sliding them down to have a go at his thighs and buttocks when he heard a soft thudding noise, like a turnip rolling in a bucket. The Airstream shifted slightly and he watched, mesmerized, as the trailer’s doorknob, not three feet from his face, began to turn. He froze, and then—very slowly, very carefully—pulled up his pants. The latch clicked and the door creaked open. And there was Huila, in her pineapple dress with a bag slung over her shoulder, terrified and smiling.
30.
TAMPON MAN
AT NIGHT, HE WAITED FOR THE HOUSE TO SLEEP. BY NINE-THIRTY Nephi and Parley were already making wheezy snuzzling noises, bushed after another long and exhausting day of being a-holes, and then the Big Girls in the room below would finally quit their dumb conversations about such fascinating topics as, What are eyebrows for, exactly? or Which is the world’s best shampoo and conditioner combination? and then somewhere deep in the house Aunt Beverly would conclude her dastardly work for the day and the whole place would be quiet, except for Parley’s all-night farting routine.
Since his mother had gone away to the hospital, Rusty couldn’t sleep—not at night, anyway. At school, sitting in his desk, you can believe he slept just great. He slept so great he snored and drooled a big wet spot on the front of his shirt. And even though he heard the whole class laughing all at once like a bomb going off in his head, making him jerk awake and nearly fall out of his seat, he somehow did the exact same thing the next day, with the huge drool spot and everything, which made Mr. Van De Berg ask why did he always have to be such a distraction? as he hauled him by the arm toward the principal’s office. Which was why they called Big House to see if there was trouble ther
e, which was how they found out that his mother had had a nervous breakdown and was in the nervous breakdown hospital, which was why he had to talk to the counselor, a chubbo with green eye shadow.
Okay, then, Rusty. In your own words, why don’t you tell me a little about life at home.
It’s nice.
Nice?
Yeah.
And how do you feel about your mother being sick?
Fine.
Fine, Rusty?
Yeah. Do you want me to talk louder?
You’re not worried about her? Your mother?
No.
And who takes care of you while your father is at work, Rusty?
My aunt.
Your mother’s sister, or your father’s?
I don’t know. She’s just my aunt. She’s not my mother.
No. I see. Are you happy at home, Rusty? Do you feel comfortable there?
Yeah.
And how have you been sleeping?
On my back.
Okay. I feel like you’re having a hard time opening up to me, Rusty. That you’re not telling me everything on your mind. Can you tell me why that is, Rusty?
Yeah.
Well?
Because you keep saying my name like a thousand times and your breath smells like Lysol.
That shut her up for a few seconds. He could feel, from the way she looked at him, how much she wanted him to tell her everything. She wanted him to tell her that his father was a law-breaking polygamist wingnut with a Moses beard who never took a bath, who committed terrible actions against his wife and his children and didn’t make enough money for all of them so they were forced to make their clothing out of gunnysacks and eat dog food for breakfast. She wanted to hear every little thing about their criminal lifestyle, so she could send the police out to their house to haul Sasquatch off to prison and break up their family forever. “You be careful when you talk to people like that,” Aunt Nola had told him. “They think they’re doing the right thing, but all they really want to do is destroy our happy little dog-and-pony show, to tear it apart. It’s because we’re special.”
Rusty had thought about telling the counselor everything she wanted to hear so she could do exactly what Aunt Nola said she would. But he decided he didn’t need a chubbo who smelled like cough drops to help him. He could do it all by himself.
And that was why he couldn’t sleep at night. He had some serious things to think about. He had some serious planning to do.
Of course, Aunt Beverly would do anything to stop him. She made him come home right home after school and let him outside only to do chores. And her spies were all over him, following him wherever he went, watching, waiting for him to slip up or make a break for it so they could sound the Rusty Alert. So he had started sneaking out after dinner, when nobody expected anything, when everyone else was downstairs doing their music lessons and homeschool projects. He was supposed to be upstairs in the Tower doing his homework—like it was some kind of terrible punishment not to be able to hang out with the jack-holes downstairs!—but all he had to do was crawl out his window and climb expertly all the way down to the garage roof and he was free to ride around for an hour or so, thinking his thoughts, figuring out how he was going to free himself of Old House once and for all.
When Aunt Beverly discovered he was sneaking out again, she ordered Nephi to nail the Tower’s windows shut, which was turning out to be a punishment for everybody up here because of the lack of ventilation and Parley’s night-farting. But it didn’t matter. You could nail shut all the windows you wanted: Old House could not contain Rusty McCready Richards. Aunt Beverly and her spies and her witchy-woman intentions were helpless against him.
Instead of walking down the Tower stairs, which would have made a creaking racket all the way, he sat down on the top step, let himself go limp, and slithered down like a bag of jelly, the back of his head making a soft bump-bump-bump the whole way.
He was unstoppable. He could not be stopped.
At the bottom he did his silent-walking technique—heel…toe…breath…heel…toe…breath—all the way down the hall to the window without a screen. The night-light was on in the Black Hole of Calcutta and he could see his reflection in the hall mirror: a black form with a white rectangle on its head.
Here was the weird thing: the rectangle was, if you could believe it, a tampon. He’d gotten it on his birthday, when he had locked everyone out of Big House and Nephi and Parley had tackled him so hard his head smacked the edge of the windowsill. Because doctors cost too much and were not to be trusted, most people in the church went to Sister Sleigh. Sister Sleigh had once been a nurse in the army and everyone said she knew more about medical science than half the fancypants doctors in Europe and New York City put together. Rusty’s head was bleeding everywhere, which was a good thing, because after he’d locked everyone out of the house and ruined the big party, wouldn’t it be kind of like overkill to punish a kid who already had a major head wound and blood running down his face? Parley and Nephi had brought him out of the house with the little ones screaming, “Look! Blood! Ahh!” and Aunt Nola hollering, “Clear the way, let’s get him to Sister Sleigh’s, Sister Sleigh will take care of him!”
How did Sister Sleigh take care of him? By shaving a big patch out of his hair, stitching up his wound and taping an enormous tampon to his head. This, to Rusty, didn’t seem like very good medical science. He didn’t know there was a problem until he came home and some of the big girls started to whisper and giggle and Aunt Beverly said, “It’s just a sanitary napkin, and it’s serving a perfectly good purpose.”
Did anyone ask him how he was doing? Did anyone wish him a happy birthday? Did anyone even give him a look like, Boy, we’re sure sorry you have suffered a major head wound on your birthday and are forced to wear a sanitary napkin? No. They all just stared at him. The only thing he could hope for now was that he would end up with a killer scar.
Within thirty seconds word had gotten around that Rusty was wearing a tampon on his head. Even the little kids, who had no idea what a tampon might be, stared at him and backed away if he got too close as if he had some kind of contagious tampon disease. Except for his father, who had already gone back to Nevada without waiting around to see if Rusty would survive the night, most of the family was still at Big House. It was getting dark, and they had finished off the birthday cake and torn Dwight Eisenhower limb from limb without him, and were all gathered around getting a load of the tampon on his head. Maybe it was the way he’d locked them all out of the house earlier, or how he’d come out with his face covered in blood, or maybe it was how the front of his new sweater was so bloodstained it looked like he’d had his throat slit by a homicidal murderer, but they appeared scared of him now, especially the little ones. He liked the way they backed away, their eyes wide. He made a little grunt and they cringed. He took a step at them and they flinched. Then he hunched his shoulders and tilted his neck with one eye scrunched up like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and yelled, “Uhhh-wah-hah-hah-haaaaaaaah!”
The girls shrieked and everybody jumped back and the Three Stooges knocked into each other trying to get away. He leapt forward like a cougar after a herd of frightened zebras, and of course he singled out the weak one, who in this case was Jame-o, who would not abandon his Hoover for anything and was trying to drag it like a wounded soldier toward the safety of the kitchen. At the last second Rusty changed directions and lunged at Naomi and Teague, who were trying to make it up the stairs, and he grabbed at their feet and they kicked and twisted, screaming till he let them go. His father was usually the one who came home from work and played the monster, Bob the Zombie, the Blind Octopus, the Man Without a Head, but his father was too busy to play with the kids these days or to pay attention to anyone at all, which made Rusty’s face hot just thinking about what a gyp it all was, so when he growled and jabbered he did it extra loud, the kids scattering like tadpoles in a puddle, hiding behind furniture, screeching and tripping over each other whil
e he ran around swinging his arms and showing his teeth and snatching at anyone who came too close. He had the Second Twins cornered at the back of the family room now and they looked up at him, covering their heads with their hands, and he howled, Uhhh-hoooooooooo! and they shrieked so long and high and with such fear that it sent a weird tingle of satisfaction down the back of his neck. He was Crazy Ape-Guy! He was Tampon Man! Ah-huuuaaa-haaah-haaaaaaah!
The little ones were shrieking too now, some of them crying and trying to roll themselves up in the curtains and begging for mercy, saying, Stop! Stop! Stop! Even Helaman, who wasn’t scared of anything, looked like he was ready to make a break for it at any second. Rusty kept it up, monkey-legging though the kitchen, going, Uh-hungh, uh-hungh, until Aunt Beverly grabbed him from behind, and hugged him close, and said into his ear, “Stop this now, please stop, this can’t go on, you can’t do this anymore,” and he looked up into her face and saw even she was scared of him, even the terrible Aunt Beverly, and he made a sort of laughing sob and let her hug him because it felt so good.
COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS
So why was he, Rusty Richards, riding down the middle of the road on a Big Wheel at midnight? Because he wanted to. Because he was the Tampon Man and nobody could stop him, because he was feeling g-g-goooood! Super-good, in fact, which was weird because for so long everything had been bad. And then, two days ago, they went to visit his mother at the hospital. The hospital was not a white place with white walls and white nurses wearing white dresses and white hats, as he thought it would be, but a brown building with green floors and greasy-haired creeps in pajamas wandering the halls talking to themselves or hunched in wheelchairs staring at their knees.
“This place smells like poop!” Ferris said, and Aunt Nola said, “I think what you’re smelling is the cafeteria.”