The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  “I’m already on the waiting list.”

  He released a deep, shuddering sigh and she could feel the heat of his breath on her legs.

  She had already begun to stroke his hair and tell him everything would be all right when she remembered she was supposed to be so irate with him, so deeply and irretrievably vexed that she had resolved to take the drastic step of writing him a letter. She wanted to kick herself; she was so easy! But what else is there to do, she asked herself, when your husband puts his head in your lap like a frightened child, except to stroke his hair and tell him everything will be all right?

  She might have carried on this argument with herself for quite some time if Golden had not begun to act even more strangely: he started to nuzzle her. While she’d been arguing with herself, her fingers had strayed from his hair down the collar of his shirt to the warm, fuzzy skin of his back, and in response he began to press his face into her inner thigh, then into her belly, and the next thing she knew that big head was slowly and erratically making its way up her torso, like a loosed balloon rising fitfully through the branches of a tree, grazing at her neck and chin as it went, and then, with a suddenness that made her mind go blank, he was kissing her on the mouth.

  It had been so long since she’d been kissed, truly kissed, like she was being kissed now. She gave in to it, pressed herself against him, but something stopped her: there was a strange taste to his mouth, sweet and sharp, something she remembered from her high school days wrestling with boys in the cabs of pickups much like this one. She pulled away.

  “Wait, wait,” she said. “Have you been drinking?”

  “What?” he said. “Drinking? Drinking what?”

  “Alcohol,” she said. “Booze. You taste like it. You smell like it.”

  He stared at her for a moment, his eyes wide and bloodshot. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the mouthwash I’ve been using. Sorry if my mouth tastes bad.”

  He began to turn away but she wouldn’t let him; she didn’t care. She didn’t care if he’d been drinking. She didn’t care if he’d been shooting heroin. No, she didn’t even care if he was distant and unavailable and possibly impotent. She cared only that he was with her, doing this, right now. She was easy, she realized. She required so very little, and when something good came her way, how glad she was! She grabbed him by the neck and pulled him toward her. Little by little she slid her body underneath his, grabbing the stick shift for leverage, and once she had one of her legs pressed between his she thought she felt something down there, a stirring, a sign of life and hope, and though it might only have been her imagination it gave her such a thrill she kissed him with a fierce, wet heat, squeezed him until he gasped, believing that it would be all right, all right for both of them, if she could just take him in the house with her and make love to him until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “The bedroom,” she gasped. “No room in here. The bedroom will be better.”

  She led him stumbling into the house and deposited him on the bed. In a giddy panic she rushed into the hall to close Faye’s bedroom door, made a detour into the bathroom for some deodorant—she hadn’t showered in two days—and when she got back to the bedroom, panting and wild and nearly psychotic with hope, there was Golden, curled up in the middle of the bed, asleep. Though she’d left him alone for no more than thirty seconds he looked as if he’d been sleeping for hours: his mouth gone slack and his chest heaving with deep, even breaths.

  “No!” she shouted, and clapped hard twice right over him as if he were a puppy about to soil a rug. “No, no!”

  With a groan he fought to lift his head, eyes rolling and lips smacking, then relaxed, falling back into sleep with swift and enviable ease. She clapped her hands again, hard, just to feel the sting. For a moment she wished fervently that she owned a gun.

  She went into the kitchen and retrieved the pen she had thrown earlier. She added a few sentences to the letter she had already started, slashing each word into the paper. Before she left, she propped the note between the sugar bowl and saltshaker so it could not be missed.

  Dear Golden,

  There are so many things I want to tell you, but I have never really known how. ONE OF THEM IS THAT YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE! THE LITTLE GIRL SLEEPING IN THE OTHER ROOM IS YOUR DAUGHTER, IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING. DON’T THINK ABOUT LEAVING UNTIL I GET BACK.

  T

  P.S. this is bullSHIT!

  PLYG KID

  The directions, of course, were perfect. Even in the dark, in the fog, she had made her way to June’s place without a wrong turn or missed landmark, as if he were sitting right next to her, pointing the way. She had been expecting a small bachelor’s house, maybe a single-wide trailer, but not this: two Quonset huts, both lit from within, sitting in the middle of a wonderland of sandstone buttes and pinnacles and hoodoos turned eerie and animate in the slow churn of fog.

  She knocked on the door of the first. Under the bulb in a ceramic socket that served as a porch light was hung a carefully hand-painted sign in yellow and green: HOME SWEET HOME. The sight of which gave her such a pang in her heart she had to pause to take a breath.

  When there was no answer she tried the next Quonset hut, flanked on one side by an impressive display of rusted matériel: air tanks and brush hogs and manual implements of every description, coils of chain and wire and conduit stacked on wooden pallets and an old yellow bulldozer napping under a blanket of khaki canvas. Coming from inside the building was a rhythmic thumping and though she gave the door a good knock she got no response. She peered through the dusty window and could make out June sitting at a table next to the back wall, operating what appeared to be an old-fashioned sewing machine.

  She opened the door, stuck her head in and called his name. He looked up, startled, and groped for his glasses on the table until he realized they were still strapped to his face. He stared uncomprehendingly for half a second, and when he broke into a wide, stunned grin she couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Just came to check up on you,” she said with an air of mock authority. “Worried about you all alone out here in this nasty fog.”

  Now that he was standing she could see he was dressed in some kind of uniform, a charcoal waistcoat with brass buttons and blue-gray trousers piped in black satin. On his feet: bright green nylon running shoes. He seemed to realize what he was wearing the moment Trish did; he brought his hands up to his chest as if to cover himself, then sighed and let them fall back to his sides.

  “This must look, uh, pretty weird,” he said.

  “I guess it depends whose side you’re on.”

  “Confederate, of course. Because, you know, I’m a rebel.”

  “I’d say so, by the looks of those shoes.”

  He explained that collecting Civil War paraphernalia was one of his hobbies, and that because it was impossible to find shoes from the Civil War, he was attempting to make his own. He held up a flap of leather run through with heavy yellow thread. “Doesn’t seem to be going too well, really, but, yeah, I hope that’s a…a good enough explanation for why I’m out here at this time of night in a getup like this.”

  Which seemed to be an invitation for her to explain what she was doing here in the middle of the night in a getup such as hers; for the fifth time since leaving the house she berated herself for not having the presence of mind to change out of her sweatpants.

  “I hope you don’t mind me coming out here,” she said. “I don’t think I properly thanked you for all the nice things you’ve done, and I guess I felt like I needed to talk to somebody.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t mind, not one bit.” He waved the piece of leather in his hand. “Just out here making a mockery of history.”

  “For someone who doesn’t know how to make shoes, you write very good directions,” she said. “On a night like this I could have ended up in Canada.”

  He showed her around the shop, stuffed to the gills—very neatly, of course—with every sort of industrial tool, fabric, powder, and ins
trument imaginable. He pointed things out very generally, as if slightly embarrassed by the accumulated scale of it, and then showed her around his living quarters, quite homey, with plaid curtains and fruit in a bowl and a brown-and-white cowskin spread out in front of a cheerful little potbellied stove.

  He tried to duck into his bedroom to remove the uniform and slip into something more comfortable but she asked him not to. “A man in uniform, you know,” she said, and even though she wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by this he blushed so hard you could see the glow through his beard. Once he’d recovered his composure he opened the front door and, like the officer and gentleman he was, showed her out.

  “And last but not least there’s the pièce de résistance,” he said, in an accent that sounded vaguely German. “Or, you know, however you say it.”

  He helped her up a hill of sandstone scree that shifted and trickled under their feet, the fog now indistinguishable from the night itself. She had no idea where they might be going and could see almost nothing except the great mass of rock in front of them that looked like a giant hole scissored from the dark billowing fabric of the sky. Trish tripped and June turned to take her hand and pull her up.

  “Should have brought a flashlight,” he said. “Usually the light from the stars is enough out here.”

  She didn’t let go of his hand until they were on solid ground. His fingers were so thin compared to Golden’s, his skin papery and warm. He kicked around, searching for something, saying, Just a second here, one second, where the heck is it, and then the mechanical sound of a switch being flipped and light, in broad bolts and bands, shining out from inside the rock.

  “Ha!” she said. “What is this?”

  “It’s the shelter I’m building,” he said. “I thought maybe I mentioned it.”

  “You said a bomb shelter,” she said. “I was thinking one of those concrete bunkers you put in your backyard, like everybody else around here has.”

  There were two arched entrances, both twelve feet high and one hundred feet apart from each other, each projecting a column of yellow, nearly opaque light deep into the fog. They stepped into the first chamber, skirting heaps of pulverized sandstone, while June explained in some detail the purposes each room would serve, his plans to drill two-hundred-foot boreholes from the top of the butte for ventilation, the challenges of wiring and plumbing, how the whole thing, once there were doors on it, would be a comfy sixty-eight degrees all year-round. But Trish was hardly listening. She was taken in by the negative shapes blasted and chiseled out of the rock, the ceiling vaulted and ribbed like a cathedral’s. At the top, a lighter salmon color bled into a crimson painted with bands of ocher and brown near the floor. Even though it was a damp, cool night, the walls glowed with a sense of warmth and security. She put her hand on the stippled face of the stone and was surprised to find it cold.

  “It’s beautiful, June,” she said, still looking up. “Calling it a shelter seems a bit modest, don’t you think? Feels…safe in here, which I guess is the whole point.”

  “Well,” he said, trying to hide a pleased smile and then, as if he just couldn’t help himself, “it will withstand the fallout from a nuclear blast or direct strike by a five-ton ballistic missile.”

  “Which is good enough for me!” she chirped, sounding a little crazed, even to her own ears. He took her through a narrow unlit corridor and into the second chamber, this one more finished than the first, with all kinds of niches and shelves and cubbyholes hewn into one wall, as if he were planning to carve an entire kitchen, down to the sink and utensils, out of sheer stone. They sat on a bench June had cut into the far wall; Trish settled in and decided it was about as comfortable as one of the pews at church, which wasn’t saying much.

  “You said in your note that we may have more in common than we realize,” Trish said. “I was wondering…I guess I was wondering what you meant by that.”

  “Ah, you know, just being a little mysterious, hoping you’d come out on a foggy night to ask me about it,” he said.

  “Took the bait, didn’t I.”

  “No! No, really, it’s wasn’t bait. All I meant, yeah, is that I know a little about your…your lifestyle, you know, about the Principle. Because I’ve lived it.”

  Trish laughed. “You have?” She pretended to look around and wondered aloud: Where were all the wives? The screaming kids, the piles of dirty diapers and overdue utility bills?

  “I grew up in it,” he said. “In the Principle. Down in Short Creek, you know. Most of my family is still there.”

  “You’re serious,” she said, skeptically.

  “I am,” he said, seriously.

  “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

  He shrugged, played with the brass buttons on his cuffs. “Never came up, I guess, just like you haven’t told me anything about yourself, really. Anyway, I was nervous talking to you, you’re the first woman I’ve had a regular conversation with in a long time. It was easier talking about swamp coolers.”

  So they talked. For two hours they sat on that hard shelf of rock and compared their personal stories of hardship and woe: he told her about being raised in Short Creek, the biggest polygamist community in the United States, and how at the age of seventeen he’d been exiled, torn from the bosom of his family for the crimes of listening to music and fraternizing with the opposite sex. She told him about the boxcar she’d grown up in, the nightly family dinners by the light of the hearth fire, her father’s death, which put an abrupt end to the strange fairy tale of her first twelve years and landed her in Reno, Nevada. While Trish was in her senior year of high school June was doing construction work in Winslow, Arizona, getting drunk every night and living out of his car. While June was in Vietnam blowing up munitions dumps and collapsing Vietcong tunnels and smoking ungodly amounts of dope, Trish was losing her own little domestic war against depression and grief and her controlling ex-husband.

  June turned out to be a champion listener; while she did most of the talking, backtracking and interrupting herself to make sure she shaded every nuance of biographical detail, he sat there in his uniform and old-timey spectacles, nodding encouragingly after every other sentence or so, which might have been a little excessive, but how Trish appreciated the effort.

  “And would you look at us now,” she said when she finally ran out of gas, feeling a strange, almost bitter elation at the symmetry of their stories, the way both seemed to have stalled in a kind of emptiness. “I’m right back where I started, living the plural life, and you’re building the most beautiful bomb shelter in the world.”

  He smiled sadly. “Guess I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Nowhere else to go. Pretty sad when you think about it.”

  “At least you have something to show for yourself, right? At least, when everything comes crashing down, you’ll be safe.”

  “Nobody’s safe,” June said, his words echoing softly along the broken walls. “None of us are.” He stared off into the darkness of the next chamber, a thick silence beginning to settle in around them, and Trish roused herself to ward it off.

  “So! Okay then. I have just one question for you now. What music were you listening to?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The music you were listening to, that got you kicked out.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “Neil Sedaka.”

  She let go a laugh that turned into a cough. “Neil Sedaka? ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do’? That guy?”

  “‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do’ is hardly his best work, I mean, really, but yeah, that guy. I found some old LPs and a turntable in my uncle’s basement. I mean, I’d never even heard the radio before, and yeah, Neil Sedaka, I thought he was some kind of god among men, the way he sang. I listened to those records so many times sometimes the lyrics still come to me in my sleep. One of my uncle’s wives reported me to the elders and a few month
s later I was seen talking to a girl who wasn’t my sister. That was the last straw, I guess. With the boys, they’re just looking for a reason to send you away; only the most obedient ones, the connected ones, get to stay—those elders, they aren’t stupid, they know they have to thin out the competition a little, there can only be so many husbands with fifteen wives. Anyway, this girl, her name was Addie Barlow. I was caught giving her a little charm bracelet I’d made out of copper wire. I was seventeen, acting like a twelve-year-old. I didn’t know she was going to be married to the prophet’s brother. I didn’t know anything about anything. The next day my father drove me to Cedar City, dropped me off with thirty dollars and a bag of clothes. I haven’t seen him, my mother, any of my sisters or brothers since.”

  As he spoke, Trish could see in the hang of his jaw and the pleats at the corners of his eyes the deep hurt this had brought up in him. He took off his spectacles, which were fogged with condensation, and wiped them with what appeared to be, by the gray, tattered look of it, a genuine Civil War–era handkerchief. He said, “I was giving her a charm bracelet.”

  “You haven’t spoken to them?” she said. “Not a phone call?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know how many letters I’ve sent—they all come back unopened. I don’t know if my mother’s alive or dead. I’ve driven down there a few times but nobody answers the door, and then the sheriff always shows up to escort me to the town limits. As far as my own family is concerned I don’t exist anymore.”

  What was there to say to that? What was there to say to any of it? Letters mingle souls, she thought. But only when someone bothers to read them. She considered, maybe for the first time, how lucky she was to be able to pick up the phone and call her mother whenever she needed some bad advice. She leaned her shoulder in to June’s, waited until he leaned back. It was the best she could offer.

  He rubbed his nose with the cuff of his sleeve. “The first time I saw Rusty, you know, I knew it right away, I thought: Plyg kid. Clear as day. The way he was dressed, all hand-me-downs and oddball haircut, how he just wanted somebody to notice him, to look at him. And I know he’s going to end up like me, no family, lost, wondering who he’s supposed to be with, what he’s supposed to do.”