by Brady Udall
The engine idles for a moment, then hiccups into silence. A car door opens, shuts. There are voices, but another vehicle coming along the road—Gilbert Handrick’s flatbed, by the sound of it—drowns them out. Straining, he hears nothing but the conspiratorial rustle of the dry grass under his window. At this moment his wife and children may be in mortal danger, subject to all the dire possibilities he has just imagined, but does he rush out to defend them, does he so much as steal a peek through a crack in the wall to see who has come calling? No, sir. He draws his knees and elbows in close, as if to will himself smaller, and concedes this simple truth: he is not capable of protecting them, he never has been.
Now there are footsteps on the gravel at the side of the house and then along the path of shattered lava rock edging the driveway. They come deliberately and ever so faintly, like footsteps echoing through an empty corridor in a bad dream. Amazingly, instead of following the path around the house to the backyard, they seem to be making their way across the muddy field toward him. He hears nothing for a few moments, and then there is the snapping of dead weeds not twenty feet away and he is clutched with such a spasm of anxiety he nearly tips over his jelly jar and, in the scramble to keep it from spilling, rears up, ramming his head into the five-foot ceiling.
In the silence that follows, he holds his head and counts his heartbeats, unable to breathe. There is a rustling and then boom…boom…boom someone is knocking on the door with all the casual malice of the big bad wolf. The Father waits, clinging to the child’s hope that to be blind to danger is to be safe from it, believing that if he can wait long enough without moving or breathing, whoever is out there will disappear, that all of this will go away, forever.
The knocking comes again, and he can’t stand it anymore, he takes a great, lung-rattling breath and pushes open the door.
36.
A LITTLE HARMLESS COURTSHIP
HE FOUND HIMSELF STARING INTO CLEAVAGE. AT FIRST, IN HIS CONFUSION, he could not make sense of what he was seeing, and so continued to stare, like a lizard in a trance, until the person to whom the cleavage belonged called out, “Brother Richards?”
“Yes?” He did not duck his head under the lintel of the child-sized doorway to find out who was speaking—he was too busy trying to come to terms with the curious display in front of him: generously freckled cleavage, polka-dot rayon shirt, and a plate of yellow cupcakes, all framed in the doorway like an art-student collage.
“Hello?” said the woman. “Everything okay out here?”
It took a moment for his addled mind to identify the distinctively shrill voice of Maureen Sinkfoyle. For a year and a half he’d managed to sneak out here more or less undetected and now Maureen and her cleavage, on the premises for the first time that he knew of, had tracked him down in less than two minutes.
“One of your little girls said you might be back here somewhere,” Maureen said. “I heard a noise and, well, I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“Not at all, not at all,” Golden said, finally mobilized sufficiently to bend himself at the waist so he could get a look at her face. “You just startled me a little.”
Maureen sported a beauty mark, which appeared to be natural, and a great thundercloud of unconvincing auburn hair, which did not. Golden couldn’t be sure, but he thought he could detect on her upper lip the faint shadow of a mustache. She smiled at him with such expectancy, holding out the cupcakes, that he had to resist the urge to invite her in. With great care he set the jar of mescal behind the milk crate and proceeded to maneuver his bulk through the doorway, a complicated process that ended with him losing his balance and stumbling out onto the muddy ground. He gathered himself, suddenly dizzy, and stiffened his spine in an effort to keep from teetering.
“What’s this?” Maureen said, nodding at the Doll House. “Some kind of project?”
Golden regarded the old playhouse as if he were laying eyes on it for the first time. With its half-shingled walls, its spidery, spray-painted X’s, its buckled plywood gone silver with age, it looked like a prop from a B-movie horror picture about homicidal dwarves.
“Yeah, a project,” Golden said. “I’ve been working on it for a while now.”
Maureen held up the plate of cupcakes. “Just a little token of my appreciation.”
“For what?”
“For taking a look at my water heater.”
Golden stared at her, not following, and suddenly he was teetering. In order to stay upright he had to take a quick step back, dipping at the waist like a flamenco dancer, and in an inspired move pretended he was doing so to swat away a particularly aggressive mosquito.
“My water heater?” Maureen said. “I know you haven’t been able to make it out yet, but this is just to say thank you. In advance.”
Golden remembered now: she had cornered him at church two weeks ago to complain about her failed water heater, which conveniently led to a rehearsal of complaints, both specific and general, about how difficult her life had become since her husband left her. In an effort to distance himself from the piercing feedback-whine of her voice, he had promised to swing by when he had a moment. He knew her pursuit of him was sanctioned by Uncle Chick, most likely with Beverly’s blessing (she’d been mentioning Maureen in conversation with some regularity now, and even Trish had gotten word that something was afoot), but Golden was too distracted by his life sliding completely off the rails to give a damn. So he had made a promise out of cowardly convenience and, just like most of his promises these days, forgot it not ten seconds after it was made.
She turned her face toward the river. “Tried to get my boys to help, but their dad never taught them a thing, and anyway I can’t control them anymore, now that I’m alone…” Her voice broke—a sound like a small rodent having its neck wrung—and when she looked back at him her eyes were moist. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t come here to do this.”
Golden could hardly make himself look at her: in her thrift-store dress and muddy sling-back shoes, she was a textbook illustration of a cast-off, someone tossed aside in favor of the new, the fresh, the less complicated. She stood in his faint shadow, running on her last fumes of hope, nothing left to offer but cleavage and cupcakes.
In an attempt at comfort Golden put his hand on her forearm and with enterprising speed she stepped right up to him, nearly into his arms, squashing the cupcakes into his belly and pressing her cheek against his sternum to have herself a little cry. Lightly patting her back with both palms as if playing the bongos, he looked out over the swell of her hair and saw Naomi and Josephine watching from the back porch, Alvin spectating from behind the dusty glass of a bedroom window. Golden shrugged at them and wagged his head as if to say, I have no idea what’s going on here, but they did not respond, just continued watching with looks of worry and fascination as he did his best to disengage himself from Maureen Sinkfoyle’s soft but insistent grasp.
THE VILLAIN, THE VICTIM
For the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, he drove around in a state of mild shock which eventually transformed into a pleasant numbness as he stole a series of tiny sips from the jelly jar under his seat. He stopped in at the office and the bank, pretending to work, pretending his life and its steady routines would carry forward on their fixed and predictable trajectories. He had lunch at the Rhino’s Horn, spent twenty minutes talking gas prices and high school football with DeLayne Woosley in front of the post office, and in all that time did not notice anything out of the ordinary: no smiling Todd Freebone, no strange men in strange cars trailing him or keeping watch from safe distances. As the day wore on he began to tease himself with the hope that maybe Ted Leo had given up, that he had made his point and had grown bored with this game, that instead of spending his considerable time and resources looking for a disaffected common-law wife he’d never cared much about anyway, he was moving on to more profitable interests.
This feeble hope, like the doomed baby sparrow kept temporarily alive on drops of
sugar water, met its swift and brutal demise when Golden pulled up into Old House’s drive and found his way blocked by Ted Leo’s champagne Lincoln Continental with the spare tire built into its trunk. Golden surprised himself by barking out a bitter, cathartic laugh as he stared in wonder at the car’s severely elongated brake lights, the Nevada license plate, the bumper sticker that said THE PUSSYCAT MANOR * WE’LL MAKE YOU PRRRRRRRRR. Ted Leo was sitting on Beverly’s rocker, pushing himself back and forth, happy and unmolested, on the shiny silver tips of his boots, smoking a cigar.
Golden’s existential crisis in the Doll House must have purged all the fear and anxiety right out of him, because other than a mild surprise, he felt almost nothing at the sight of Ted Leo grinning expectantly on his front porch, no panic or anger or high alarm, only the wearied resignation of a man at the end of his rope, ready to be done with it all, and the sooner the better.
He walked past the driver’s side of the Continental, where Todd Freebone sat behind the wheel, having himself a nap. As he climbed the porch steps Golden noted that, beyond all reason, Ted Leo was in one of his good moods. In what appeared to be a misguided attempt to fit in with the local yokels, he wore, along with his high-buff cowboy boots, a brown western-style blazer with wide whip-stitched lapels, and a bolo tie made out of a polished hunk of petrified wood. He got to his feet, giving Golden a wide-eyed look of ersatz astonishment, and fairly shouted, “Well I’ll be darned!”
Golden swallowed. “What can I do for you, Mr. Leo?”
Ted Leo practically gaped at Golden, sporting the self-satisfied cat-and-mouse grin of someone who had a secret but wasn’t quite ready to let it out of the bag. “What can you—? What can you do for me? Ha! Now that’s a good one.”
Golden tried to make sense of what was happening here. Beverly’s van was in the driveway, which meant she was home. There was no way Ted Leo could have come up the drive undetected—nobody approached Old House without being noticed by somebody—and yet there was a hush over everything, no noise or activity, as if the whole place were poised for something, holding its breath.
Golden peered through the screen door at the empty hallway and the fear that had failed to show moments before now roused itself, reaching from somewhere deep inside to give his heart a quick little squeeze.
Ted Leo seemed pleased by the change of expression on Golden’s face. “Don’t worry, Brother Richards! Everybody’s safe and sound, for now. I was on my way up to Salt Lake to look at some flooring for the new place, and thought I’d stop by so we could bring an end to this nonsense once and for all—talk about it man to man—and what do you know? Knock on your door here and who, to my surprise, answers but sweet Jeannie with the light brown hair.”
“Jeannie?”
“Your wife. One of ’em, I mean.”
“You mean Beverly.”
“So that’s what she’s calling herself these days. Back when I knew her, when she was working at Madam Pearl’s, she was Jeannie. Oh but you shoulda seen her in her trick outfit! Little Shirley Temple chemise and bows on her shoes. All dimples and innocence until she got you into one of the back rooms, and then, look out! Mmm. We were all disappointed when she disappeared, me and half the male population of Las Vegas, but I should’ve known it was your dad who stole her away. Always took what he wanted, didn’t he? Everybody else be damned. He brought her out here and before he died, I’m guessing, passed her right along to you, which is how you people do things, apparently.”
Ted continued to study Golden’s face as he spoke, growing more pleased with himself by the second. “Didn’t know about any of this, did you? Oh this is rich. Who wouldn’t keep such a secret if they could? Came out here to repent, wash away her sins, start a new life, probably said she was a virgin, right?—lots of whores-turned-virgins running around, I can tell you that—and who can blame her, we all have secrets, am I right, Brother Richards? I mean, your whole existence is a secret. But as for Jeannie-with-the-light-brown-hair, I’m getting it now. From working girl to polygamist wife, it kind of makes sense, don’t it? Fucking for money, fucking for salvation, not a whole lot of difference.”
Golden said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ted Leo got up on his tippy-toes, put his face as close to Golden’s as he could manage. Through the haze of cigar smoke, Golden got a sharp whiff of alcohol, but he wasn’t sure if it was coming from himself or Ted Leo.
Ted Leo wrinkled his nose, frowned. “Are you drunk?”
“No,” Golden said. “Are you?”
For a moment they sniffed each other like two mutts, much too close for comfort, and Golden could see something like shame or uncertainty creased into the corners of the old man’s eyes.
“Don’t I wish!” roared Ted Leo, backing away, stubbing out his cigar on the arm of Beverly’s chair with a distinct air of self-reproach. “And don’t you wish that I had no idea what I’m talking about! If I’m an expert on anything, I guess it’d be whores, right? My wife’s one, right? Right? And I can tell you, that wife of yours—and I’m not trying to flatter anybody here—she was the best I ever fucked.” He waited a beat, jabbed a thumb toward the door and said, “Oh, sorry for the bawdy talk, I know there must be children there, hundreds of ’em, I’m guessing.”
Suddenly Golden’s mind was awash in red light and he saw himself taking Ted Leo firmly about the neck and shaking him like a doll. He looked away from the man’s leering face and said, “You need to leave.”
“Not before I get what I came for.” The playful manner Ted Leo had arrived with was long gone. “I’ve given you a chance. The bozos I sent out here to do a simple job turned out to be useless”—he pointed out Todd Freebone, who was now awake and dazedly working his way through a large apple—“which has given you a window of opportunity, and you haven’t taken advantage of it. I’m a busy man, and because of that I’ve been easy on you, but now it’s time for you to tell me what I want to hear.”
“I already told you. I don’t know anything. You had your men creeping around here, harassing my family, and they haven’t found anything. There’s nothing to find. So you need to go.”
“Or what? You going to get violent, Brother Richards? You going to stand up for yourself? Nah, didn’t think so. Your little wife in there, you know, she seemed so surprised that you were working for me, I guess she was under the impression you’ve been spending all your time out in Nevada doing something respectable. Well, hasn’t it been a day of surprises in the Richards family! She ran off before I could tell her about your extracurricular activities with my own wife; I thought maybe we could commiserate on the subject of unfaithful spouses…” His nostrils flared and his jaw tensed. He jabbed a finger into Golden’s chest. “You tell me where she is. Now.”
“I don’t know.”
“You do.”
“Get off my porch or I’m calling the police.”
Ted Leo didn’t seem to hear this last remark. Something like doubt darkened his face and he looked away. “You really don’t know where she is, do you? Is that it? A piece of shit like you, I’m wasting my time, right? She wouldn’t really run out on me with somebody like you, is that what you’re trying to sell me here?” He seemed to be arguing with himself now, and Golden took the opportunity to try to steer him down the steps, get him as far away as possible from his children, his house. Just as Golden grabbed hold of him, Ted Leo reared back and slapped Golden across the face. It was not the stinging slap one rival gives to another, but a blow heavy with weariness and disappointment, like a father might give a wayward son. The two faced each other, both red-faced and staggered, both a little drunk, and, feeling the give of the old man’s flesh under his fingers, the soft fat and hardened tendons of his upper arm, Golden had to wonder: Who was the villain here, and who the victim? Who was wronging whom?
Unable to look into Ted Leo’s watery, bloodshot eyes for one more second, Golden hung his head. “Please leave.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody
,” Ted Leo said, jerking his arm away. “But I will if I have to.”
“Please.”
Ted Leo clapped down the porch steps in his ridiculous boots. He called over his shoulder, “You’re only making this harder, you dumb son-of-a-bitch!”
Shrugging, Golden did not look up. He said, “I always do.”
ROYAL TO THE END
Not yet ready to enter the house, he settled his bulk with tender care on the front steps to think. He knew, without needing any sort of confirmation, that what Ted Leo had told him about Beverly was true. In all the time he’d known her she had barely mentioned her own history, and Golden always assumed this was because she had no time for a past, rife as it was with inconveniences: the childhood hang-ups, the lingering insecurities of high school, the inevitable regrets—none of which serve any purpose except to cloud the mind and forestall the building of God’s kingdom upon earth. She was someone who was so right, so deeply correct in everything she did, that it seemed impossible that anything belonging to her, even her distant past, could be wrong.
She had intimidated him with her icy rectitude since the first day they met. It was less than a week after Golden arrived in Virgin, and Royal had arranged for all of them to have dinner together at the Cattlemen’s Club. Beverly, then in her mid-twenties and possessed of a taut Scandinavian beauty, had been dating his father for a few months and had only just been informed that Royal not only had a wife in Louisiana to whom he was still legally married, but a hulking, socially challenged son who happened to be sitting right across the table, hiding behind his menu.
Instead of taking out her anger on Golden, which some might have been inclined to do, she let Royal have it. For the rest of the night she did not speak a word to him. She was perfectly cordial toward Golden, asking him in solicitous tones how he was handling the dry desert air, about his hobbies and plans for the future, but as for Royal, who vied for her attention with snippets of Mel Tormé and questions about the quality of her food, she had only brief glances of such howling, arctic spite that even the waiter was rattled. Golden had never seen his father so thoroughly and aggressively ignored, and was surprised to find how much he was enjoying it.