The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  “Haven’t decided.”

  “Just to tell you?” Nelson said. “I ain’t going to mention none of this to nobody. And I’m not just saying that because you got that gun.”

  They made eye contact and Golden surprised himself by nearly laughing, a bubble of noise rising in his throat that had no business making it into the open. He swallowed it down and let himself sink into the seat springs, shuddering with relief, and then the feeling turned on him and his throat closed up again, a black fluttering passed through his chest, and he had to brace his hand against the dashboard. He said, “He hurt my son.”

  “Your who?”

  Golden gave a brief, poor explanation of the events of that night, asked Nelson what he knew.

  Nelson shook his head. “That wasn’t Ted Leo, no. He’s done some things, but a bomb or something, no, that don’t make no sense. I’d know.”

  “He was going to shoot me, with this gun.”

  “Nuh-uh. He was just scaring you, hey? The whole thing, the coyotes and the bunker, that damn couch, all this. He’d never shoot nobody. No guts, all show, that’s Ted Leo. And you ain’t the first one. Crazy as he is, the man’s a fucking kitty cat. And now somebody’s called his bluff.”

  “He thinks I stole his wife.”

  Nelson grunted, sighed. “You think he did all this ’cause he cared about her? You think? You embarrassed him, that’s all, and you ain’t the first. She’s been working out how to leave for a long time. He treated her terrible. I’m glad she got away. You hadn’t come out here and busted up his place, he’d a gotten bored with you sooner than later.”

  Golden considered for a moment the depths of his misapprehensions about the world he thought he knew. Could it be that for Huila he had been nothing more than just a way out, a means of escape? Before he finished asking himself the question it occurred to him how easily she could be asking the same about him.

  For a time they watched the paling sky. One by one the clumps of sage revealed themselves like puffs of smoke rising out of the earth, everything one distinct shade of gray against another. Wind whistled around the pickup’s antenna, rattled against the windows, but in here it was a distant, comforting sound.

  “Looks like you’re bleeding out of your ear there.”

  “A lot?” Golden touched his ear.

  “Not too bad,” Nelson said. “Damn. You really leave him in that hole?”

  Golden nodded in disbelief. “I did.”

  Nelson sniffed, smiled. He sat there for a while, cupping his giant belly like a Buddha statue in somebody’s garden. He said, “Your boy, he’s gonna be all right?”

  Golden remained motionless, as if he hadn’t heard the question. Then, almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” Nelson said. He listened to the wind. “What I could tell, you got a nice family.”

  “I do,” Golden whispered.

  “Big family,” Nelson said. Golden nodded.

  “Don’t know how you do it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Something in Golden’s vision shifted, the stark world beyond the windshield going fuzzy and indistinct as the picture hanging from the rearview mirror came into focus. He found himself looking at the bright, hopeful face of Nelson’s daughter—what was her name? Mary? Marlene?—and Nelson followed his gaze and they were both staring at the picture as if mesmerized, two big men looking into the eyes of one little girl. Something welled in Golden so strongly his voice failed when he spoke: “Don’t ever let her out of your sight.”

  “No,” Nelson whispered.

  “Don’t ever,” Golden said. “No.”

  They were quiet a long time. Nelson asked what they should do. There would be a patrol along in the next few minutes. Golden asked if Nelson would mind driving him back to his pickup.

  “And Ted Leo?” Nelson set one big paw on the vibrating bakelite shift knob.

  “You can let him out or leave him down there to rot, it’s up to you,” he said. “But you do let him out, tell him I’m keeping this gun of his, just in case.”

  39.

  THE CONFESSIONS OF GOLDEN RICHARDS

  EARLY THE MORNING AFTER IT HAD HAPPENED TRISH DROVE OVER TO Forest Glen to pick up Rose to take her to the hospital in Las Vegas. They did not speak the entire trip, crammed together into that small car like astronauts, the sun breaching the horizon behind them, the pink, dawn-washed desert floating by. Of course, there was great concern over how Rose would handle this new shock, but she walked with a certain hunched purposefulness across the hospital’s parking lot, resisting Trish’s offer of a steadying hand. At the nurses’ station, she was the one to ask for directions. In the room, where Rusty lay hidden beneath a webwork of bandages and wires and tubes, she addressed the sight of her maimed son with a calm that Trish, who stood behind her weeping, on the verge of hysteria, could never have managed.

  This was all more than enough—too much—for any one morning, but when Trish came out into the hall Nola took her aside and told her that Golden was MIA. He had been acting strangely, she said, not speaking, something wild in his eyes. She and Beverly had decided he was in shock, nothing more than that, and under the circumstances there were bigger things to worry about. But now he had been gone almost five hours. Sheriff Fontana, who had driven down from St. George to conduct interviews and gather information, made little effort to hide his concern over Golden’s disappearance.

  “Something’s not right here,” the sheriff had said, sipping at a paper coffee cup from the machine, “and maybe we oughta figure it out sooner rather than later.”

  Golden showed up not long afterward, proving the sheriff correct: something was, most definitely, wrong. As he limped down the corridor, people stared or turned away as if they had stumbled on something intensely private; a mother and her two children fled before him and an old lady stepping out of her room called upon Jesus as he passed. Dusty from head to toe, trailing sand from the rolled cuffs of his jeans and sporting a carnation of bloody hair at the back of his head, he looked like someone who had been beaten up, buried in a shallow grave, and unearthed only to be roughed up some more. His eye sockets were bruised, his bottom lip swollen and split neatly down the middle, his left ear caked with blood. If you looked closely you could see a shard of glass glinting like a half-buried diamond in the side of his neck.

  Before they could ask him what had happened, he was intercepted by a fat orderly, who called for a wheelchair and a nurse.

  “Sir!” shouted the orderly, as if Golden were a foreigner or a senior citizen, or some infernal combination of both. “Sir! Stop, please, sir! Right there, we’ve got a chair here for you, have a seat and we’ll take care of you, sir!” Another orderly slipped behind Golden with the chair and together, as if they were all in on the same vaudeville routine, they executed a maneuver that had Golden falling backward in the chair and being wheeled off toward the emergency room, head lolling.

  After some X-rays, a few stitches, and the setting of a broken pinky finger, he was installed in a semiprivate room where Trish and Nola were allowed to visit. They arrived just before the attending physician, who wore his silver hair pulled back in a neat little pigtail, entered the room waving an X-ray exposure around as if it were a Polaroid he was trying to hurry along. His name tag said FULDHEIM, and he was, Trish noted, wearing clogs.

  “Well, Mr. Richards,” he said. “We’ve been involved in some kind of altercation, have we?”

  “Looks like it,” Golden said. In his light blue smock he was laid out on the white expanse of the bed like a halibut on ice. A perfect tonsure had been shaved in the crown of his head, his wound sewn up with thirteen sutures and swabbed with Betadine. His nose looked a half-size too big and had gone a dusky purple around the bridge. Along with the eclectic collection of facial welts and bruises he now wore several bandages of various shapes and sizes.

  “And you’ve already spoken to law enforcement, I take it?”

  “That comes next, I think,
” Golden said.

  “Your injuries are mostly superficial, Mr. Richards, except one.” He held up the X-ray to the overhead light and Trish and Nola gathered in to look. Dr. Fuldheim traced something with his finger, but all Trish could make out was a ghostly opalescence. “That dark line? That’s a hairline fracture to the skull. You were struck with something, Mr. Richards? Some blunt object?”

  “A shovel?” said Golden.

  “A shovel,” said Dr. Fuldheim.

  “Or an axe handle. Could’ve been any number of things.”

  The doctor made a sour face and gave his pigtail a tug as if to confirm it was still attached to his head. “Whatever it was, you are now the proud owner of a grade-three concussion, which will entail your taking it easy for the next while. We’ll keep you here overnight for observation. You’re also dehydrated, possibly malnourished, with a couple of cracked ribs, and the ER nurse noted that you have some kind of burn on your left side. May I take a peek?”

  Golden lifted his arm and the doctor spread open the gap in the smock to reveal a shiny raised welt a few inches above the hip.

  “Dare I ask where this came from?”

  “A cattle prod?” Golden said.

  “A cattle prod,” said the doctor.

  “Give a pretty good jolt, those things.”

  “A cattle prod,” the doctor repeated.

  “I think that’s what it was.”

  The doctor cast an accusatory glance toward Nola and Trish. “And you’re family, I take it?”

  “We’re his wives,” Nola said, showing her teeth. “Half of ’em, anyway. The other two are upstairs.”

  The doctor forced a thin smile, looked at Golden and back to the two women, to see if there was a joke he was missing out on. Clearly, he was dealing with crazy people.

  When Sheriff Fontana arrived, Dr. Fuldheim seized the opportunity to escape into the hall. What relief Trish felt at the sight of the sheriff, who brought with him an Aqua Velva–scented familiarity to this surreal morning, the calming influence of a man in uniform, one who made daily scrutiny of life’s strife and ugliness while managing to hold a steady gaze. If there was anyone who could sort this out, tell them exactly what was happening and why, he could.

  “Ladies,” he said, removing his hat and placing one hand gently inside its crown. His thin face bore all the pits and facets of a roughly napped arrowhead. “I’ll need a few minutes alone with your husband. After that, you can feel free to do with him as you see fit.”

  They went out in the hall to wait, and the only thing Nola had to say was, “A cattle prod?”

  Beverly had come down from Rusty’s room to wait with them when the sheriff emerged. He inquired about Rusty’s condition and Beverly told him that nothing had changed, that they could only wait to see which way he would go. The sheriff nodded, turned his watery eyes on each one of them in turn. He explained that Golden wanted to talk to them one at a time, alone.

  “It’s not my place to say so,” he said, before making his way to the exit, “but I hope you’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I think there’s a good chance he’s gonna need it.”

  One by one they went in to him. Later, they would compare notes, and find that what he told each of them was remarkably consistent. First, he made his confessions: the PussyCat Manor, Ted Leo, Huila, all of it. He explained that, though he had not technically committed adultery and thereby broken his sacred marital covenants, he had carried on a secret relationship with a woman who was not his wife. He had lied, he had coveted, he had lusted in his heart. He had betrayed his wives and his children and, maybe worst of all, had put them in harm’s way; what had happened to Rusty, he believed, was a result of the selfish and shortsighted choices he had made.

  He would understand if they left him, he told each of them, he deserved no less. If they did leave, he would do everything he could to support each wife and her children until she found a better situation. And then he told them how sorry he was. The sorrys, when they started, fairly boiled out of him. He had held up well, if a little stiffly, under the stress of open confession, but when it came to contrition, it was as if he were letting down his defenses and getting comfortable in the presence of an old and beloved friend; he let the sorrys fly. He was sorry for his complacency, his chronic boneheadedness, his propensity for worry and gloom. He apologized for his abdications of duty and authority, his bland and deferential ways, his flaws of character and lapses in judgment too many and comically varied to name. He was ashamed of his financial failings and romantic shortcomings, his jags and silences, sorry for all the lost and forgotten details, the sorrows gone unattended, for his willingness to concede everything and anything for one blessed moment’s peace. But mostly he was sorry, so sorry, for Glory, for losing her and, once she was gone, for not being able to let her go; for Jack, for not properly mourning him; and for Rusty—here his voice faltered, and a look of sharp and crippling pain flashed across his face—for the boy he had never really gotten to know, and never would.

  He gritted his teeth, shook his head. He was sorry, above all else, for how very sorry he was, sorry enough that he would do everything he could not to be sorry for anything ever again.

  When he was finished he looked at Trish and waited. As was customary, she had been the last to take her turn, which meant he had given a version of this address four times now, and though he looked depleted by the effort, pale and shrunken on the white expanse of hospital linen, there was a flat resolve in his eyes she had never seen before; he held her stare and did not look away. Whether this was merely a symptom of his concussion or something more lasting was hard to say.

  Outside, it was a bright morning, the sky a high flawless blue, but here, within the circumference of the pleated privacy curtain, they were caught in a pocket of dim air that smelled of floor wax. He kept quiet, waiting, the bruises around his eyes dark as seawater. Clearly, he wanted a reaction or a response, something, but she had only one question: Who was this person she had married? This man who courted strange women and built brothels in secret and went out to get himself roughed up by the shady elements of the world only to be back in time for breakfast?

  They gazed in speculation at each other, holding the stare until Trish couldn’t stand it any longer. “And what’s her name?”

  “Who?”

  “This girlfriend of yours.” Such a petty thing to say under the circumstances, but in her shock she couldn’t decide if the question came out of anger or spite or simple, plain old curiosity.

  “Huila,” he said.

  “Huila.” She nodded, thinking, How could you not fall for a woman with such a name?

  “And she’s beautiful?”

  Golden nodded. “No,” he said.

  “And you love her?”

  This got him, finally; he looked away, down at the scraped knuckles of his hands, turning them over in his lap as if he’d never seen them before. Much more quickly than she would have expected, he said, “I don’t know. I guess I do, or did. But that doesn’t mean I’ve ever loved you any less.”

  At this, she could only smile; he couldn’t have given her a more perfect, watertight answer. Because this, after all, was the basic truth they all chose to live by: that love was no finite commodity. That it was not subject to the cruel reckoning of addition and subtraction, that to give to one did not necessarily mean to take from another; that the heart, in its infinite capacity—even the confused and cheating heart of the man in front of her, even the paltry thing now clenched and faltering inside her own chest—could open itself to all who would enter, like a house with windows and doors thrown wide, like the heart of God itself, vast and accommodating and holy, a mansion of rooms without number, full of multitudes without end.

  JUST A MIXED-UP BOY

  The days that followed were an exercise in controlled chaos; the wives circulated from Las Vegas to Virgin and back again, trying to keep the houses running, the children washed and fed and on top of their schoolwork, while in the mea
ntime shuttling them back and forth to Las Vegas, in groups of threes and fours, so they could have the chance to visit their brother while he still lived. The doctors, and there seemed to be more of them than anyone could keep track of, agreed on one basic point: Rusty could go at any time. Though they had been able to stop most of the bleeding, and the swelling was under control, the metal fragments still embedded in his brain had done too much damage already and threatened to do more. One of them could drift or shift, causing a new hemmorhage, damaging a part of the brain that controlled a vital function or inducing a catastrophic stroke. As one doctor—a tall, craggy sort who prided himself on his western-style plainspokenness—had explained to Trish: they could do further surgery now, which would almost certainly end the boy’s life or leave him in a permanent vegetative state, or they could wait for the end to come in its own good time.

  Of the wives, only Rose stayed in Las Vegas for the long haul, unwilling to leave her son’s bedside except to use the bathroom and occasionally take a quick meal in the cafeteria; if her child was going to pass on, she intended to be there to see him off. The worry that the shock of this tragedy might push her, once and for all, over the slippery edge of her sanity had quickly vanished; if anything, the opposite had happened. Within hours of arriving at the hospital a bit of color returned to her cheeks, a clarity to her eyes. She asked the doctors about EKG readouts, kept an eye on the heart monitor and IV, and in her quiet way quizzed the nurses over antibiotics and morphine dosages. It turned out that at the age of nineteen she had defied her parents by going off to a nursing school in Colorado, where she spent two years before coming back to Utah to attend to her ailing mother, who refused to see a doctor or set foot in a hospital, who would put her fate in no hands but God’s. By the time her mother died—of a liver condition that could have been easily treated with medication—Rose had lost her scholarship and burned through most of her meager savings. As if it had been prearranged by those mysterious and unpredictable hands of the Almighty, she ended up, just like her sisters and her mother and her mother’s mother before her, a woman of the Principle, a plural wife.