The Lonely Polygamist (33 page)

Nobody had ever invited her to do anything, especially not a boy, especially not in the middle of the night. She was chubby, with a sweet, honest face and eyes that creased shut when she smiled.

Her sister’s fancy Christmas sweater, which bore the crocheted likeness of a winking puppy, was still twisted around her chest, and she’d managed to lose one of her shoes. The night before had started so promisingly: she had snuck out of her house and waited by the stop sign, where Everett picked her up in his father’s old International. They’d driven around for a half an hour in the dark, .30-30 shells and empty antibiotic bottles rolling around on the floor. They listened to the radio. She stole sideways glances, trying to catch his eye. Though she hadn’t paid much attention to him before, she decided that she liked him, that she had all along. He was not the most popular or good-looking boy around—he had protuberant eyes and he smelled like horse liniment—but he was popular and good-looking enough for her.

He had pulled the truck over in a stand of junipers and they’d stared out the windshield together, listening to each other breathe. When he talked, he stuttered, and his hands kept themselves busy folding and refolding an old ag brochure until it fell apart in tatters. It took him a good five minutes to ease over the seat next to her. “I guess we’ll kiss,” he announced, and that was what they did, awkwardly butting heads and arranging themselves so he could take one of her breasts in each hand and rotate his wrists like he was calibrating dials. She heard a noise from the bed of the pickup, but assumed it was a ranch dog, and anyway she was busy wondering how far she would let this boy take her. He reached up under her sweater which, to her surprise and his, brought not so much as a mild protest. Just as he was figuring out the double clasp on her bra she heard what sounded like suppressed giggling. The truck rocked on its springs and two faces appeared at the back window, leering and hooting.

Two boys, Noel Cotcherly and LaVagen Humphries, bounced and howled in the pickup bed, and by the way Everett scooted away from her instantly, sneering and grinning back at his buddies, she knew this was some kind of joke, these boys had been watching everything.

“Wabba zabba!” shouted Noel Cotcherly, flexing his eyebrows. “Nyuk nyuk nyuk!”

She was too shocked for anger or embarrassment. Everett was backed up against the driver’s-side door, blinking at her in terror or glee, she couldn’t tell. She wanted to say something but her throat had closed tight. She reached around on the floor and threw the first thing she found—an empty Copenhagen can—at Everett’s grinning face. Then she got out of the pickup and slammed the door behind her; it was all she could think to do.

The truck pulled away into the darkness, wheels spinning, and the boys in back mooed like cows.

She had been walking for hours now, eyes closed, listening to the rasp of her feet against the fine red dust of that place. Behind her eyelids dim shapes billowed and swelled. She was feverish, disconnected from her body, which seemed to contract and shrink until she felt herself inside it once again, bitter and small.

She did not see Roy’s great flash that lit up the heavens, did not hear the boom minutes later, did not notice the growing light of dawn or the malignant cloud that came over the horizon and tailed her like a slinking dog. Only when she felt a prickling on the back of her neck did she open her eyes and look back, and when she saw the cloud, already on top of her, it seemed nothing more than a manifestation of the dark churnings inside her head.

She thought nothing of it at all until her skin began to burn. She was already coated with a layer of fine ash that had gotten into her eyes and mouth. She tried to run her way out of it, moaning and digging at her stinging eyes, until she skidded into a ditch and covered her head with her arms, praying out loud for forgiveness, begging God to spare her, to let this avenging angel pass her by.

When she got home, she ignored her mother who frantically called up the stairs after her, wanting to know what had happened, where she’d been. In the washroom she looked at herself in the mirror: still covered with soot, black as a demon, her eyes so frighteningly white. With a bar of soap she scrubbed her face and neck and then worked at her scalp and her hair. Her hair—brown-red and lustrous, always her best feature—sloughed off like wet cardboard in her hands.

Nola had always been known as a serious, even secretive girl, but from that day on she would play the clown, wearing her funny homemade wig, hamming it up, deflecting attention by inviting it, taking nothing seriously ever again.

THE CURSE OF THE FATHER

Roy continued on, stalking the countryside, sowing his swarms of radioisotopes like seeds: cesium 137, which infiltrates the fleshy tissues; strontium 90, which masquerades as calcium and goes directly to the bones; iodine 131, which has a particular fondness for the thyroid glands of children. Born of raw cataclysm, the ruin he would deliver now was of a variety more delicate, sophisticated: he would coat the roads and pastures and reservoirs with his radioactive powder, cling to homemade undergarments drying on clotheslines, drift like dream-dust through open windows to settle in bassinets and couch cushions and cracks in the floorboards. He would inhabit this place and its people like a ghost. He would insinuate himself into the food chain and into the bodies of the hapless tenants of this land, and he would hide there, in their muscles and brains, breaking them down with exquisitely measured patience, day by day sipping at their bones’ marrow, setting their nerves to smoldering and fouling their blood, allowing them all the while the privilege of watching their poisoned children wither to nothing, and only when he had his fill of their suffering would he usher them quietly, mercifully, from the precincts of the living.

Such sorry little towns and their rugged, hopeful people! So brave in their suffering, so proud of their ruined offspring, lined up each Sunday in the Row of Angels, each one a visible punishment for a thousand hidden sins.

Of course, he wasn’t going to waste all his charm on these rocky backwaters; Roy had places to go. Salt Lake City, Fort Collins, Rock Springs, Gillette, and over the border into Alberta, where he would drop a nice dose of fallout on the Fort Defiance Wiener Roast and Founders Day Parade. Apparently unimpressed with Canada, he would circle back, buzzing the outskirts of greater Duluth, taking on moisture on his tour down the Mississippi River and releasing a thunder burst of irradiated rain over Chicago’s South Side. Nearly two days after his detonation, Roy would leave the continent with one last gift; in an irony that would be lost on history, he would unload three minutes’ worth of radioactive hail on Washington, D.C.

But of all Roy’s victims, Golden Richards and his new bride were special. Like Nola Harrison and a few hundred other unfortunates, they found themselves in Roy’s path when he was young, his cloud still dense and potent and close to the ground. As he swept over the crest of Mount Pennell, the newlyweds were in the preliminary stages of consummating their marriage. Beverly had thoroughly fed Golden, reduced him to jelly with an expert massage, and was now nibbling at his downy earlobe. Somewhere in the middle of the massage Golden had noticed the cloud overhead, but it didn’t seem worth bringing up, really, it would have been impolite to interrupt Beverly, intent as she was on her work.

The wind picked up, rustling the grass, lifting up the edges of picnic cloth. Only when the cloud moved across the sun, blotting out its light like an eclipse in high speed, did she look up. Golden assumed it was just another summer mountain thunderstorm, nothing at all to worry about, let’s try to ignore it why don’t we, but Beverly knew better. This cloud was not the dull-metal gray of a thunderhead, but composed of several shifting colors: purplish black at the center bleeding to red and brown and then dull ocher around the edges. It boiled over the last ridge, full of strange, sparkling bits of light, and came in low through the trees.

“My God,” Beverly said, words that startled Golden, both because it was a sin to use the Lord’s name in vain—a sin he had never once heard a church member indulge in—and because she said them so naturally.

She stood and pulled at his arm, but he resisted, he was enjoying this picnic way too much, couldn’t they just wait it out?

“Get,” she said, yanking hard on his wrist, “
up!
”

Just then they both smelled something chemical and the air turned to acid in their noses and throats, making them gasp. A gust of wind pelted them with dust, blinding them for a moment. Mostly by feel, Golden scooped up the blanket with all the food in it and they ran. Down the hill, through the stand of ponderosas, and along the narrow two-track in the grass, the wind coming in hard bursts, pushing the swirling smoke on top of them, covering them instantly with ash. They stumbled along, coughing and waving their arms as if under attack by insects, until they found the car.

Golden could not locate his car keys. Typical Golden. Pawing at his pockets at the most critical moment. Everything went black and for several seconds he could no longer see the car or the ground itself. He was overwhelmed by an intense heat, an instant fever on the skin, and Beverly called out, “Oh God, hurry!”

They could not have been in a more unfortunate spot: inside the cloud’s dense core, a cloud within a cloud thronging with billions of careening microparticles throwing off gamma and beta rays with celebratory abandon: Roy’s dark, hot little heart.

Golden managed to get the door open and they tumbled together into the front seat. Inside, the car was calm, deep-cushioned, cool. Even though they were out of the cloud, Golden’s skin continued to burn, and he clawed at his shirt and hair. “What is this?” he said, and they looked at each other: both covered head to toe with a pewter soot. Despite themselves, they laughed. Golden rubbed his eyes. His mouth was full of a gritty paste that caked around his teeth and heated the back of his throat. He croaked, “What the heck is it?”

“It’s the bomb test,” Beverly said, already removing her precious, ruined dress. “We need to clean ourselves off.” Beverly knew there was some danger from the bomb fallout; she had heard rumors about dead sheep and AEC government men roaming the area with Geiger counters. What she couldn’t have known was that in those few seconds it took for Golden to find his keys, she had inhaled thousands of particles of plutonium oxide, some of which had already settled into the lining of her lungs and begun their slow, steady assault, radiating the surrounding cells until one day, twenty years from now, those cells would begin to mutate and multiply, growing inside her like a secret wish.

Once she had helped Golden off with his shirt and pants, she dipped a clean portion of the picnic blanket in a jug of melted ice and went to work wiping the dust from his body. First, she went at the nooks and crannies of his face, the hollows of his eyes and his nostrils and the fine creases of his neck, and then moved down to his chest and arms. The cold water on his skin brought him out of his shocked state and it struck him that they were both in their underwear and she was touching him. He had never seen her body before, not like this, and he was pleased with what he saw: generous breasts and that curve of hip and the shallow dimples above her knees.

He did what he could to reciprocate, making awkward swipes at her chest and ribs with the cloth and soon she was on top of him and he couldn’t distinguish the hot blush on his skin from the fever-warmth rising in his blood. She was kneeling now, facing him, and he knew there was a very good chance they might kiss, which he wanted to be prepared for: he fumbled the water jug into his hands and took a swig to wash down the grit in his mouth. What he swallowed then was not simple dust and sand, but dust and sand infused with microparticles of magnesium and cobalt and iron—the radioactive remnants of Roy’s detonation tower—that would eventually be absorbed through the walls of his intestines and into the bloodstream, where they would circulate through the body and finally set up camp in the outer wall of the prostate. There they would linger for most of his life, irradiating his reproductive cells even as they were produced, splitting a chromosome here and there, warping his genes. Golden and his compromised DNA would produce twenty-six healthy children, it was true, but also seven miscarriages (the first only five months into their marriage), three stillbirths, and one broken little girl named Glory, the apple of her daddy’s eye.

The damage wouldn’t end there, of course; when it comes to humans, pain and suffering are passed through the generations like that unfashionable Christmas gift nobody wants: disease and mutation, anger and despair, failures of intellect and character, all of it genetic damage in one way or another, all of it nothing less than the curse of the father upon the child, a curse inevitably repaid in kind.

Of course, Golden was in no condition to entertain even the most basic existential questions—he was about to have
sex
. Beverly was straddling him now, moving against him, her rising breasts giving him little chucks on the chin. He was back in a state of shock: the only breasts he had seen before were the overworked dugs of tribal women in
National Geographic
. His back itched and he was burning up and his balls ached, which he decided was probably normal in a situation like this. Though he didn’t know it, he had waited his entire life for this moment: nearly two decades’ worth of suppressed libido and rage, a stark loneliness made all the worse by a deficit of human touch: he was ready to explode.

With a practiced motion, Beverly guided him inside her. For Golden, the feeling was of complete dislocation, the collision of pleasure and pain resulting in something close to oblivion. He went faint for a second, and then came to, his mouth open in an expression of blind awe. His body stiffened and he managed to whimper two words that would later cause him to grind his teeth with embarrassment: “Oh jeez.”

It lasted only a few shuddering moments: over, like their wedding ceremony, before it began. But that didn’t matter, they would have their entire lives together to get things right. Roy was already moving on, lifting off the mountain and into the low jet stream, leaving the windows coated with soot and the interior of the car in grainy darkness. Golden and Beverly listened to each other breathe, to the sound of the wind rocking the car on its springs. He let his large hands roam all over her and she kissed him tenderly on the mouth. They were young and pretending to be in love. This was all a very long time ago.