The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  He would not remember getting back into his truck, or how he managed to find the hospital after what must have been another half hour of dazed wandering. He walked through the glass doors of the hospital and kept walking as if he didn’t know how to do anything else, down one hall and then another, past people sleeping on plastic benches and small families carrying on their grim vigils and, finally, into a room full of desks and filing cabinets where a short Hispanic man was busy humming to himself and mopping the floor. The man looked up—he had a kind, generously creased face, and Golden went right to him. He tried to explain, to say, I’m looking for my son, but his voice was useless, ragged, as if he’d spent the last couple of hours screaming himself hoarse. The man smiled, seeming to understand perfectly, and then the room narrowed and darkened, and he felt himself toppling into the man’s waiting arms.

  He awoke on a gurney in the hall, a portly, freckled nurse looming above him. She said, “Back to the world of the living, are we?” With a nurse’s cheerful competence she shone a penlight in his eye, fitted his arm with a blood pressure cuff, all the while asking what his name was, if he knew what day it was, if he had, in the last twenty-four hours, ingested alcohol or drugs. Again, he tried to speak, to make his identity and intentions known, but he seemed to have fallen mute: when he opened his mouth the only thing that came out was a wet, interrogative grunt.

  The nurse noted this on her clipboard, and was pumping up the air-pressure cuff with forceful contractions of her meaty fist when a commotion down the hall drew her attention. She turned her back on him and proceeded to carry on a long-distance conversation—which consisted mostly of waving arms and dramatic shrugs—with another nurse on the other end of the long corridor trying to maneuver a large bleeding man in a wheelchair who was shouting about the motherfucking bastards who’d stolen his Gold Toe socks. Golden thought about the friendly janitor he had apparently just fainted upon, and hoped he had not done the man any lasting harm. The nurse continued ignoring him and Golden decided that, as comfortable as that gurney was, he couldn’t wait around any longer. He sat up, tested his feet against the floor, and started in the opposite direction, taking the first left he came to, the blood-pressure apparatus still dangling from his arm. It wasn’t long before he found Beverly and Nola, who shared a small, out-of-the-way alcove with a few plastic chairs and a coffee vending machine. They rushed to him, their hair wild and eyes bloodshot, clutching the necks of their nightgowns. The sight of these two women, their familiar smells, the weight of their palms on his wrists, brought him out of the fever dream he’d been having and fully into himself: he was suddenly aware of his own creaking mass, the smells of gunpowder and blood and river mud rising off him, the cold, clenched fist of his heart constricting with dread at the news he was about to receive. His wives asked him the same series of questions they’d been asking for years: What was wrong with him? Where had he been? What had taken him so long?

  Even though he didn’t speak or respond in any way, they must have been able to read the expression on his face, the single question contained in it, because they both stopped at once and Beverly nodded. “He’s alive.”

  Golden felt his equilibrium give. He pivoted and sat down hard. For the moment, this was enough. His muscles and joints turned to liquid and he thought he might slide right off the chair and onto the floor.

  But, of course, it wasn’t that simple—nothing ever was. Nola sat down next to him, and in hushed tones gave him the rest of the news, which had been delivered by the lead surgeon only a few minutes before.

  Rusty had been rushed into emergency surgery the moment he arrived, but once the doctors had opened up his head and had a look around, they quickly put down their scalpels. There were too many metal fragments embedded too deeply; if they tried to get at every one they would end up doing more harm than good. So they had removed several of the larger, more accessible fragments, and cut away a portion of his skull to accommodate the swelling of the brain. There were other, less dire injuries. The boy’s left eye had been destroyed, as had most of his right hand. He had suffered third-degree burns to his face and scalp. His chances of survival, the surgeon had told them, were poor at best. Once he was transferred into the ICU they would be allowed to see him.

  The wives gave Golden a few seconds to let this sink in. They watched him, waiting for a reaction, for some kind of explanation, but he gave them none, simply sat there in the white hum of the waiting room, sporting the blood-pressure collar strapped around his biceps and gripping his knees as if he might otherwise fly into pieces.

  Nola, who was wearing a man’s denim jacket over her nightgown, along with a pair of mismatched rubber irrigation boots, carefully removed the collar from his arm and placed it to the side. She gripped one of his hands in hers. Normally, it was Beverly who would have taken the lead in a situation like this, but Beverly sat across from Golden looking strangely vacant and withdrawn, as she had for the past couple of days. Nola hunkered down in front of Golden in an attempt to make eye contact, as if she were trying to induce a confession out of a grade-schooler, and asked the question Beverly had shouted at him from the porch as she watched him wade with Rusty across the swollen river, the question the Gundersall brothers had asked as they knelt down beside the boy to check his vital signs: “What happened?”

  And Golden answered her now as he had answered them then, though he ended up only mouthing the words: I don’t know.

  I don’t know. These three words composed the simplest, safest answer he could give; he was in no state to be offering explanations, to himself or anyone else. But he knew also that they were a denial, even a lie, a cheap and convenient way of absolving himself. Because if he was willing to give the whole thing even a little thought, if he backtracked even briefly along the lines of cause and effect, he was certain he would find himself, as he always did, the one to blame.

  All he knew for sure was this: there had been some sort of explosion. Even though his memory had edited out this fundamental fact, the evidence was there in his still-buzzing left eardrum, in the way the sound of the blast had awakened all of Old House and some of the neighbors, in his son’s ruined face. Who or what was responsible for the explosion was the more difficult problem, but as he puzzled it over, shuffling through the possibilities like a stack of paint chips, he could reach only one reasonable conclusion: Ted Leo. Somehow Ted Leo and his band of scuzzbuckets had discovered Huila’s hiding place, and had set off some kind of explosion in an effort to scare or to harm. This made a certain kind of sense, especially taking into consideration Ted Leo’s elaborate and often obtuse ways of making a point, but what had Rusty been doing there? And what about the ostrich? In his weakened, fuzzy-headed state, Golden was ready and willing to consider the possibility that the ostrich, with its smug air and cold yellow eyes, was itself responsible, that it was some kind of evil totem, the embodiment of a primordial curse that existed only to bring doom upon the Richards family, to steal away its children, to maim and mock and drown them, that it was, in fact, the source of all their suffering and strife, and he ground his teeth together in grim anticipation of what he would do to that ostrich when he got home.

  He sat up, pressed his knuckles into his eyes. What was wrong with him? He shook his head in an effort to straighten out his thinking, and succeeded only in making himself more dizzy. No, the ostrich had had nothing to do with it. It could only have been Ted Leo. Ted Leo, who had already threatened him and his children in half a dozen ways, who had denigrated and belittled and bullied him, who had abused and exploited Huila for going on eight years, who had humiliated the seemingly invincible Beverly by dredging up the black mud of her past and throwing it in her face, and, worst of all by far, who had stolen the future and maimed the body of his innocent son.

  Ted Leo. Golden mouthed these words, rolled them across his tongue like the medicinal, old-fashioned lozenges of his youth, tasted the bitter satisfaction of knowing that this time there really was someone else to be held to
account, to be punished, that for once he would not have to shoulder the burden of responsibility alone.

  A nurse came to tell them they could see Rusty. She took one look at Golden and asked if he needed something to calm him, a mild sedative, perhaps. He declined with a stiff shake of the head, but when he stood up and attempted a few steps, the muscles of his legs began to quiver, the edges of his vision darkened, and he wished he’d taken the nurse up on her offer. He put his hand on Nola’s shoulder, as if to comfort or assure her, but if she had not been there to prop him up on the long trek down the hall to the ICU he would have fallen to the ground in a heap and stayed there.

  They washed their hands in a steel basin, the nurse helped them don cotton surgical masks, and before Golden was ready, before he had a chance to try to convince himself that he was strong enough, that he could handle this, they were led into a room where Rusty lay propped up in a bed, splayed out as if caught like a spider’s prey in the web of wires and tubes. It was worse than he could have imagined. The upper half of the boy’s head—including both eyes—was covered in bandages, while the skin of the lower half was so bruised and swollen it looked less like a face and more like an overripe melon left too long in the field, shiny and discolored and ready to split.

  Golden shook his head, heard himself moan. In that dark room, with the IV bag filtering the light of the single lamp and throwing shimmering filaments across the ceiling, he gathered his shirt into both fists, rolling the fabric over his knuckles until it tore.

  All the way down the hall, following Nola with his hand on her shoulder as if lame or blind, Golden had prayed. Lifted by a moment of desperate hope, a lurch of faith he didn’t know he was still capable of, he had pleaded with God to wipe away everything the doctor had told Nola and Beverly, to make all of this a misunderstanding, a horrible mistake. He prayed in a way he never had before, without the formal constructions he had learned in church, without the thees and thous and Our Heavenly Fathers, and as he stood at the door, unwilling to cross the threshold just yet, he begged, letting the words rise out of him without sound: Please, I will do anything, I will give anything, let him live, let him get better, make him better, I will give anything, my own life, everything I have, please, please.

  But, of course, it had been too little too late, and whatever scraps of hope and faith he had carried into that room crumbled instantly to ash. If there was an answer to his prayer, here it was, in the form of this burned and broken child who, as anyone could see, would not be getting better, would not go on to live any sort of life, would probably not survive the night.

  Beverly and Nola did not hesitate, they went right to him, murmuring over him and stroking the bare skin of his arms, ignoring the nurse when she told them not to touch or get too close, while Golden hovered near the door, his face turned toward the wall, trembling with fury.

  He set his jaw against it, tried to fight it off, but it had him now, the old childhood rage, come to claim him once again. It had been stalking him for years, ever since his days of sitting at the attic window in Louisiana, listening to his mother run through her repertoire of moans and sighs, waiting for his father to come home. The anger always took him by surprise, welling up suddenly from some fissure that reached all the way to the core of him, and he always did his best to resist, to run from it or tamp it down or wait it out until it dissipated into useless vapors. But now he did not fight it; he let himself fill with its heat until every cell and corpuscle had turned brittle and he was nothing more than a body of hot glass, poised to shatter at the slightest touch.

  He jerked open the door and fell into the hall, joints locked stiff, struggling to breathe. After a while Nola and Beverly emerged, fixing him with their standard looks of resignation and pity. Once more he had given them reason to be disappointed: in his faint heart, his frailty in the face of crisis. Back in the waiting room, they embarked on a subdued discussion over when and how to give Rose-of-Sharon the bad news, and Golden was not once consulted or asked for his input; they seemed to have forgotten he was there. So they didn’t notice when he walked away, his head and shoulders held so still he seemed to be floating, down the hall and through the automatic doors and into the early morning dark.

  THE PUSSYCAT MANOR

  It was very late, even for a brothel, and there were only four girls working the parlor: three sitting at the bar, chatting with the graveyard bartender, and the fourth dozing on the crushed velvet davenport in the center of the room. The bartender, bald as a seal except for a pair of lamb-chop sideburns, was busy blending the girls a celebratory end-of-shift margarita, which was why none of them heard the electric chime indicating a visitor had walked through the double-glass doors.

  Letting his feet settle into the ultra-shag carpeting, Golden took a moment to consider his options. Nothing had changed since the last time he was here: the place still glowed with the soft, burnished light of a Buddhist shrine, still smelled like cigarette smoke, hair spray, and overhandled dollar bills. What first caught his eye was the long row of liquor bottles, three or four ranks deep and gleaming like organ pipes, arranged on the shelf above the mirror. Only when he had started forward across the expanse of crimson carpet did the bartender look up.

  “Whoa, buddy,” he said as he shut off the blender, the color draining from his face. “Wait a second, now.”

  Golden paused, not at the bartender’s warning, but at the sudden flash of movement to his left. There was someone else behind the bar he hadn’t yet noticed, someone large and rumpled and dirty who seemed to be brandishing an axe handle…. Golden peered suspiciously at this obviously deranged person for several seconds before realizing that he was looking into his own reflection. On another night, under different circumstances, he might have chuckled at his routine gullibility, but tonight he greeted himself with an expression of such seething reproach he felt a chill go through him. No wonder, he thought, the girls at the bar were scooting away from him in horror. He looked like a shambling, humpbacked minotaur, eyes bright with suffering, encrusted with mud up to his waist, shirt streaked with blood, and hair matted at the sides of his head in a way that suggested horns. He skirted the far end of the bar and, with something like pleasure, raised the axe handle and delivered a blow to the center of his own face.

  Sounding a single clamorous note, the mirror leapt off the wall in several large pieces and hundreds of smaller ones. The girls screamed, the bartender yelped and dove for cover. Golden moved on to the glassware, then the glittering column of liquor bottles, and for a moment it was like a small thunderstorm was blowing through, chunks of glass raining down like hail, running cloudbursts of whiskey and rye and rum leaving in their wakes a rising alcoholic mist that burned the nostrils and stung the eyes. Temporarily blinded and swiping expensive bourbon from his eyebrows, Golden stumbled toward the most obvious source of light in the room: the jukebox, from whose depths rose the moaning baritone of Teddy Pendergrass. Golden took a wild swing, missed the jukebox entirely, then connected on his second try, the tip of the axe handle lodging in the wire mesh that covered the speakers. Teddy Pendergrass chirped, his voice warping, and when Golden yanked the axe handle free the needle skipped, condemning Teddy to some R&B purgatory to wonder, over and over again, why he was alone again tonight, all because of some silly fight.

  Golden heard yelling now, more women screaming, several voices calling out in alarm, “Bruno! Bruno!” which was either a code word for danger or the name of someone who they believed might come to their rescue. But it didn’t matter to Golden; nothing was going to stop him as long as he had this angry, burning hurt in the middle of his chest and there were still items belonging to Ted Leo to be broken. After he’d kicked over the jukebox, putting Teddy Pendergrass out of his misery, he attacked the grand piano. He couldn’t have said why, but he hated this piano more than he hated anything or anyone in his life. He raked the axe handle across the keyboard twice, chipping the keys and producing two clanging, gothic chords that made the windows ratt
le. He was about to knock aside the prop that held up the piano’s lid, already savoring the great whooping clap it would make, when someone grabbed his elbow, yanking hard, and then the weight of another body landed on his back, an arm grappling his neck. He struggled and spun, lost his balance, veered into a wall, but they held on, breathing gusts of steam into his ear. He staggered forward, despite the two men hanging off him, one of whom seemed to be trying to choke him to death, the other who had found a way to reach around and punch him repeatedly in the face, and went on with his business, managing to free his right arm long enough to take out the ceramic statue of Venus de Milo with one swing and put a cleft, and one more for good measure, in the four-by-six oil painting of the wide-bottomed lady of the evening with a grape between her teeth.

  As Golden lurched past the doorway hung with strings of glass beads, Todd Freebone burst through it in nothing but tube socks and a towel clutched around his waist. He shouted, “What the fu—” but was interrupted when Golden, with a lucky sideways chop of the axe handle, caught him full in the mouth. Todd Freebone dropped his towel and slumped against the wall, groaning, “Shit, man!” One by one he spit several bloody teeth into his cupped palm.

  It was Miss Alberta, finally, who put an end to it all. Golden saw her out of the corner of his eye, her head full of fat pink curlers, holding in front of her what looked to be a long yellow cattle prod. “Stop this nonsense right now!” she scolded, as if she’d caught a classroom of third-graders misbehaving, and without further ado pressed the tip of the prod into his ribs. A hot electric spasm jerked him upright, he dropped the axe handle, and the men fell off him. He bent at the knees to retrieve his weapon but his arm had gone numb, his fingers stiff. Golden sensed a presence behind him and as he started to turn, Miss Alberta said, “Anytime now, Ernest, Jesus Christ,” and something crashed into the back of his head and he pitched forward, his vision filled with starbursts and blazing sparks.