The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  Rose was not the only one who seemed to have been fundamentally altered by the events of the past few days; what to make of Beverly, sitting in the waiting room with a lost, almost bovine cast to her eyes, some sternness in her broken, watching One Life to Live in the company of a large Filipino family? Or of Golden, who came and went with his fearfully puffy face and raccoon mask, the cords of his neck pulled tight with anger or irritation, slamming doors and making gruff noises like a shambling revenant who had left his old mild and deferential self behind?

  No, very little made sense anymore. On her way back to the hospital from Virgin Trish had stopped off at a used book store to pick up a few Harlequins for Rose, thinking she could use a little distraction, something to lose herself in for a few hours. She left the stack of books on the bedside table, hoping it wouldn’t bother Rose that Trish knew her badly kept secret, and when she came back she found Rose on one side of Rusty’s bed and Beverly on the other, both so absorbed in their books—No Place for a Lady and The Bride Wore Spurs, respectively—that neither could be bothered to look up when Trish entered the room.

  Through all of this only Nola seemed to have managed to keep a grip on herself. She gave back rubs and pep talks to children and adults alike, handed out loose change for the vending machine and reminded them all, with her bursts of high-octane chatter and her ability to cry and laugh with equal vigor, that while all the moping and mournful whispering was understandable, it sure as heck wasn’t doing anybody any good.

  It was Nola who called Trish into Golden’s room the morning after he had been admitted. With the encouragement of some pain medication, he had slept through the rest of the day and the following night. Once up, he groaned and stumbled around half blind like a bear just out of his winter den. There was a tiny nurse shouting at him to lie back down, he could not leave without being given clearance by a doctor, and Nola was doing her best to direct him back to his bed, but he was having none of it, crackling loudly in his paper smock and tangling himself in the IV tube, letting it be known that he wanted to be left alone. He wanted to go see his son. He wanted to know where his pants were.

  Even when Sheriff Fontana arrived carrying a canvas knapsack, Golden did not calm down. He ripped the IV needle out of his hand and complained to the sheriff that someone had absconded with his shoes. The sight of her husband shocked Trish; in his severely undersized gown, with his ripening face and pathetically pale and mottled limbs, he looked like he had aged twenty years and lost as many pounds.

  “Maybe you’d like to rest easy for a minute,” the sheriff suggested. “I’ve come to talk to you about your boy.”

  Immediately Golden quit agitating. He slumped back onto the bed and waited for the news.

  Sheriff Fontana, creaking like an old wooden bridge, explained that their search of Old House and the grounds of the Spooner place had turned up a few things. He opened his sack and displayed the items they’d found hidden in the closet of the boy’s bedroom: three battered homemade notebooks, stapled together from stacks of cheap composition paper, a spool of fuse cord, several canisters of black powders—a couple of them nearly empty—a Luden’s tin full of magnetized iron filings, a few comic books, a magazine called Ukrainian Lovelies, a partially gnawed Bit-O-Honey, some loose rocks and rusty nails, a paperback copy of Improvised Explosive and Incendiary Devices for the Guerrilla Fighter, and a few items that had gone missing from the various houses in the last couple of months: a small quartzite Mayan figure from Trish’s mantel, one of Rose’s embroidered pillowcases, a silver serving spoon that had once belonged to Beverly’s grandmother, and several bras of various colors and sizes.

  “Bit of a pack rat, this one,” said the sheriff dryly. “Among a whole lot of other things, what you’re looking at is the ingredients for a pretty serious firecracker and pointers on how to build it.”

  Golden gave one of the canisters an idle shake. “He did this…himself?”

  The sheriff nodded. “Looks like it. You read those notebooks, it comes pretty clear. What we got here, I think, is just a mixed-up boy wanting a little attention.” Golden rifled through one of the notebooks, scanning page after scribble-filled page. Later, Trish would read every word of them herself, something spiking through her chest at seeing her own name written so often and fondly in the boy’s fierce hand, wondering at the level of detail and invention, the spectacularly long and angry lists, the crude but loving doodles of naked eyeballs and swirling explosions and daggers dribbling blood, the plots and schemes of such impressive unlikelihood they revealed a kind of brave and dogged faith. Stung by guilt, she would remember the sheriff’s words—just a mixed-up boy wanting a little attention—and she would realize how culpable all of them were, the whole family, how they had stood by, doing nothing, while Rusty slid away into the abyss. But what would stay with her for a long time to come was the fallen look on Golden’s face as he read, the way his eyes lost focus and his cheeks sagged with the unbearable weight of his failure to preserve and protect his son from his own failures as a father, from failures of genetics and circumstance and fate, from failure itself.

  “What we’ll need now,” said the sheriff quietly, “is to figure out where he got his hands on these things. You don’t have”—he tipped back one of the canisters—“red magnesium flash powder just laying around the house, do you?”

  Golden did not respond, still lost in the notebooks, but Trish and Nola shook their heads.

  “I’m pretty sure I know most of the names in here—family members, kids from school—but there’s one that shows up a few times that I don’t recognize. Any of you know somebody named June?” Trish flushed at the sound of the name, at the recognition that June was almost certainly the source of the bomb-making ingredients, but when the sheriff fixed her with his watery gaze she found herself shaking her head again.

  After the sheriff left, she counted to twenty, excused herself, and ran down the hall, catching him just as he’d donned his felt hat and was pushing through the glass doors into the unreasonably bright Las Vegas morning.

  “I think—” she began, but her throat closed on her and suddenly she wasn’t sure what she’d come to say; it occurred to her that she no longer had a clear impression of who she was or where her allegiances lay.

  The sheriff removed his hat again, tucked it gently against his belly as if it were a sleeping kitten. “Anything you could tell me, that’d be fine. But don’t go rushing to say something you’ll regret.”

  To her, this didn’t sound at all like the kind of thing an officer of the law should say to a potential witness or informant, but, strangely, it was what gave her the encouragement she needed to tell him what she knew. She told him about June: where he lived, about his relationship with Rusty, and that she was certain he had not knowingly supplied the boy with explosives.

  “He’s a good man,” she said.

  “Course he is,” said the sheriff, glancing up at the sun. “I don’t doubt it a bit.”

  A NEW PLAN

  Rusty lasted longer than anyone expected. The doctors had been pessimistic about his chances to survive the night, much less a week, and after ten days they decided he’d stabilized well enough to be transferred to St. George, where the family could carry on their vigil with much less in the way of inconvenience.

  It was the day before this relocation that Golden called a special family meeting at Big House. Nobody could remember a special family meeting being called for a very long time; the family gathered twice a week for the Summit of the Wives and for Family Home Evening—to attempt to muster them all into one place at any other time or for any other reason would have been an act of senseless self-punishment. But this was a new dispensation in the Richards family; everyone was acting weirdly, stepping cautiously and speaking in altered voices, every day arriving empty and strange like an alien craft lowering itself out of the sky.

  They assembled in the family room, the little ones, as had become their habit, standing on the hearth or scaling t
he rock fireplace a few feet so they could get a better view. The only ones not in attendance were Rusty, of course, and Rose, who was still in Las Vegas arranging the final details of Rusty’s transfer to St. George. Golden stood at the margin where the carpet met the linoleum of the kitchen, looking over the room and running through the list of names to make sure everyone was present; you could see his lips move as he whispered each name, could almost hear the singsong tune echo inside his head. And then he went quiet, as if waiting for the chatter to die down, though no one had made a peep.

  Most of his bruises had faded by now, but he still bore the drained and slightly puckered look of a corpse. His pants did not seem to fit him anymore—his belt bunched his pants at the waist—and his normally expressive mouth, with its large teeth always ready to reveal themselves, had fallen into a straight, grim line. He had spent the last week either sitting at Rusty’s bedside or speaking on the phone and going on long, mysterious errands that no one dared ask him about.

  Today, in the family room filled with expectant bodies, he did not hem and haw and purse his lips, as was his usual practice when speaking in front of a group. He simply nodded once and gave them the news.

  He had a new plan for the family, he said, a plan he had already put in motion, and he thought it was about time they all heard about it. Earlier that day he had finalized the sale of Old House to that nice little snowbird couple from Canada who had been offering to buy it for years with the idea of turning it into a bed and breakfast. The proceeds of the sale would be used pay off his business debts—to save Big Indian Construction from bankruptcy, essentially—but mostly to fund the large-scale renovation of Big House, which would begin as soon as possible. The plan was to build a three-thousand-square-foot addition onto the south portion of Big House, making it large enough to fit them all under its single roof. He’d done a lot of praying and soul-searching since Rusty’s accident, and decided that if they were going to be a family, a real family who loved and watched out for each other, this was the only way.

  He cleared his throat. He wondered if there were any questions.

  Everyone, of course, was already looking at Beverly, who had been making the plans and decisions around here before most of them were born, who was the source and matrix of every policy and agenda that had ever remotely affected the family’s interests. On some level even the little ones understood this, but it was immediately clear to them, as it was to everyone else, that this new plan, and all that it implied, came as a surprise to Beverly. Just like the rest of them she sat speechless, looking around as if hoping for some kind of clarification, wearing an expression of puzzled shock.

  “You mean,” said Naomi, her voice rising with dismay, “we’re going to be living together?” Golden nodded.

  “All of us?” cried Jame-o.

  “All,” said Golden.

  If, as it appeared, Golden had assumed this announcement would be greeted with a sober acceptance befitting the situation, he was sorely mistaken. A squall of murmuring and moaning raced through the room, and then some of the kids began to cry outright. Only the Three Stooges, who jostled and gave each other five, seemed at all pleased.

  “Mom!” wailed Sybil, the tears already starting. “Say something!”

  For once, Nola was caught speechless. She shrugged, an uncertain grin wavering on her face. Finally, she said, “And we’re all supposed to live where while this renovation is taking place?”

  “Right here, in Big House,” Golden said. “It’s going to be cramped, and we’re going to have to be patient with each other, work around each other, but it’ll be good for us, it’s exactly what we need.”

  Trish, who was standing behind the couch and trying to console a weeping and inconsolable Josephine, made eye contact with Nola, who then shot a look at Beverly. This was entirely new territory for the sister-wives; they had never, as a group, been taken off guard in quite this way; if they were going to protest or make some kind of last-ditch play, it would have to happen now. But they were caught, Trish realized, in a bind of their own making. Long before she had ever come onto the scene, the wives had been pleading with Golden to take control, to embrace his God-given patriarchal authority, to please, for the love of heaven and earth, make a decision once in a while. And now that he had gone and embraced his God-given patriarchal authority in the fullest and most audacious of ways, what was there for any of them to say?

  And what’s more, this new situation might actually work to their benefit, Trish decided, at least for some. Despite the grand bother of it all, the inevitable squabbles and turf wars, the further loss of privacy and individual identity, Nola and Rose would almost surely come out ahead; according to the indisputable bylaws of domestic provenance, Big House was their house, their domain—no matter how many additions were made to it or who came to live under its roof—and if the house was the body and the family its soul, then Nola and Rose would be exercising much more control over the body—and therefore the soul—of the Richards clan in the years to come.

  And if she was willing to look at it in the right way, Trish, too, would be gaining something: a place at the bright center of things to which she could return from the exile of her loneliness and grief, where Faye could learn to be a friend, a sister, maybe even a normal little girl.

  Only Beverly would be losing on every account. Not only would her beloved Old House be taken from her, but many of the perks and privileges she enjoyed as the first and only lawfully wedded wife; in a single stroke she would become a refugee, stripped of all of the entitlements of home, forced to start over in a strange and hostile land. So did she protest, did she fume, did she bring to bear all her legendary powers of persuasion and resolve? Hardly. She sat stiff-backed and mute in her chair like a defendant under the echo of a guilty verdict, hands folded meekly in her lap, as if this were the outcome she expected all along.

  Wisely, Golden did not allow more time for his audience to formulate additional questions or commentary; he excused them all, and they scattered into the warm afternoon with wailing and gnashing of teeth, to face the prospect of an uncertain and very crowded future.

  ONLY THE BODY

  Another night, and she couldn’t find her way into sleep. Strangely, her insomnia had nothing to do with the fact that she was sleeping on an army surplus cot that squeaked and groaned pitifully every time she moved; or that her new quarters—Big House’s utility closet—smelled of bleach and old mop and something vaguely mineral and sharp that may have been urine; or that at this moment Cooter, who was used to having the room to himself, was now tucked snugly into her ribs, occasionally stretching to dig his hind paws into her sensitive flesh, snoring and sighing his way through a heedless sleep that made her grind her molars with jealousy. No, what was keeping her awake was her own mind—spinning with the possibilities and decisions of her new situation—and her own body, which felt like a piece of fruit left too long on the vine, swollen with the carefully hoarded juices of a hundred sunny days, wanting only to be plucked and eaten, ready to burst.

  When, in a fit of insomniac exasperation, she threw off her blanket and planted her feet on the cold concrete floor, Cooter groaned and rolled onto his back, making little growls of annoyance at having his slumber disturbed.

  “Keep it to yourself,” she advised, and not for the first time wondered how, after everything, all the strife and sorrow of her life, she had been given this reward: bunking in a utility closet with a flatulent dog.

  As had become her nightly habit, she padded out into the hall to make her tour of the house. She was met first, as always, by the strange sight of her husband, stretched out on the Barge at the edge of the dim dining room. In the chaos and rancor that accompanied the mass relocation to Big House, nobody had given much thought to where Golden would sleep. That first night he had the good sense to spend in the cab of his pickup, where he wouldn’t have to listen to the squabbling and backbiting and on-the-hour outbursts caused by twenty-six irritable children crammed into
a space barely adequate for half as many. The second night, after coming home to find the house in a free-for-all, the children madly circling the racetrack, trying to burn off the stress of their new circumstance, he stepped into the flow of bodies and shouted for them to stop. He decreed that from that day hence there would be no more running on the racetrack. “No more!” he croaked, and because he had spent the entire day long bargaining with subs and crew bosses and haggling with the boneheads at the county offices, calling in every favor he could think of to get this renovation up and running as soon as possible, his voice had gone hoarse, with a raspy bass undertone. He sounded, Nola commented, a little like Johnny Cash. “No more!” he boomed again in his Johnny Cash voice, and the children, frozen in their tracks, stared at him in wonder.

  He gave an order for the older boys to retrieve the Barge from where it had been stashed behind the toolshed after the Todd Freebone episode. He had them place it directly in the entryway to the dining room—where it would serve to block racetrack traffic as well as make the passage from family room to dining room one giant inconvenience—and, after a spartan dinner of cube steak and cold peas, wrapped himself in a scratchy, brightly striped Mexican blanket and fell immediately unconscious in its lumpy embrace.

  The ploy worked for a couple of days until the racetrack’s primeval call proved too strong to resist. By Friday of that week the children were already back to their laps, charged with the pure joy that comes with performing a strictly forbidden act in the company of others, bounding off the Barge’s cushions and arms, doing the Flying Dutchman and the Fosbury Flop, the little ones swarming over the back of it like lemmings off a cliff.

  Their father would never again make so much as a peep about the racetrack. Some mornings, if he did not vacate the Barge quickly enough, the early risers, usually the young ones in footsie pajamas, would clamber over him as if he were nothing but a part of the furniture, and with an expression of pained tolerance he would submit himself to the abuse of their sharp knees or badly groomed toenails as they hauled themselves up by an ear or a handful of belly fat, occasionally using his big head for a stepping-stone.