The Lonely Polygamist (46 page)

“Hi there,” she said.

He said,
“Buenos tarde, muchacho.”

“What are you up to?”

“Sitting here. Don’t feel like dealing with the jerks out there.”

“What happened to your face?”

“Gale.”

Trish nodded in sympathy. “You say something to rub her the wrong way?”

“She and Novella think this is their bed now.” He gave his head a slight shake. “This is my mom’s room. She’s coming back soon and I’m going to keep her place. This is where I’m sleeping tonight.”

“Looks like you ran them off.”

“For now.” The boy shrugged. His eyes were liquid and dark and he blinked slowly. “They’ll be back.”

“I’ve got some clean sheets here,” she said. “You want to help me make up the bed?”

Rusty rolled off the bare mattress and together they pulled away the bedcovers and laid out the sheets, pulled the corners tight. Rusty wore extra-snug-fitting pajamas with mismatched tops and bottoms that would properly fit someone two or three years his junior. Whenever his hands weren’t busy with something else he kept one or both positioned over his groin.

“Visited your mom today,” Trish said.

The boy looked at her and waited.

“She’s doing really well,” Trish said. Which was a lie. Since she’d told one already, she decided it couldn’t hurt to throw in another. “She asked about you, how you’re doing.”

The truth of it was that Rose had improved since being admitted, but was still incapable of carrying on a normal conversation, as if the very act of speaking words, or committing the brainpower to call them up, were too much for her. She took little interest in the goings-on at home and repeatedly looked past Trish’s face to watch a game show on the wall-mounted TV.

Trish thought of what Nola said after they admitted Rose: “Poor Rosie, just too sensitive to live in the world, much less this part of it. She can’t stand for a
door
to slam because it might mean somebody is mad at her.”

“What did you tell her?” Rusty said, taking a seat at the edge of the bed.

She sat down beside him. “I told her you were doing just great. I told her what a good piano player you are and what a fine time we had at your birthday party.”

For just a moment, so fast you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t paying close attention, he gave her a pleased look, one that betrayed an innocence so touching her throat tightened. Then he glanced away, his features retreating into an expression of ragged world-weariness. He looked so pathetic sitting there, wounded and lonesome in his too-tight jury-rigged pajamas, not to mention the dirty sanitary napkin taped to his head. She put her arm around his shoulders and gave him a squeeze.

Slowly he let his head come to rest against her shoulder and snugged his arm around her middle to return the embrace. With her fingers she arranged his damp hair, smelled the residue of Ivory soap and kerosene still on him, and then she felt him shift a little, press his arm around her a little more tightly, and slowly roll his hips to press himself into her thigh.

“Okay,” she said, “enough of that.” But he didn’t move; he had locked himself onto her like a ravenous tick. She could feel his hot breath on her collarbone and his arm had moved up so that it rested just below her breasts and she couldn’t be sure, but it felt like, yes, definitely, he was grinding his groin against her hip.

“Hey!” she said. “Stop that. Come on.” But still he held on until she levered her forearm between them and pried him loose. He released all at once and fell back onto the bed. He sat up quickly, turning his face away from her, shoulders hunched.

In a small voice he said, “I know you don’t like me.”

“Oh Rusty, you know I like you plenty. But you can’t—” And here she fell speechless, unable to articulate in that moment, to this child, the difference between appropriate affection and forbidden, irrational desire. She wondered if she was to blame for this, wondered if in her own desperation—a desperation that was not altogether different from his—she had given him the idea that something like this might be what she wanted.

“It’s okay,” he said, shaking his head. Then he looked up at her, his face touched again with the flicker of innocence she’d seen a few minutes before. “I don’t care if you don’t like me.” He shrugged, shook his head again. “I’m used to it. But I know who likes you.”

“What?” she said. “Who likes
me
?”

“Yeah,” Rusty said. “June. He likes you and he’s, like, your age and everything.”

“I know that, Rusty, but—”

“He thinks about you all the time. At night, when nobody else is around, he wishes he could be with you. He’s in love with you. He thinks you’re a fox.”

Now she truly was speechless; she opened her mouth but nothing came out. She took a moment, made another try: “He told you this?”

“No,” Rusty said. “I just know. People know things. Like I know that you like him, too.”

“Now wait. I’ve had him over to fix a few things—at the house—you know that, but there’s nothing else.”

She added, “That’s all there is to it.”

“Don’t worry,” Rusty said. “I won’t tell anybody. You don’t have to worry.”

And with that he crawled under the covers, laid down his bandaged head on the clean pillow and closed his eyes.

“There’s nothing else,” Trish said, but Rusty only pulled the blanket up to his chin and sighed. He began to snore in an odd, snuffling way that made her wonder if he was faking. Trish leaned forward, finally, and shut off the lamp; though it was barely after suppertime the boy looked like he needed his sleep.

She moved to the bedroom door, pausing to check on him one last time. His eyes were open now, watching her, and in the dull light from the hallway she could see in his chubby jowls and puffy lips the features of her own son, Jack, and she felt her heart catch and squeeze. She went to him, sat beside him on the bed, and when she gathered him into her arms there was nothing wrong or awkward in the way they grabbed each other and held on.

“I do like you, you know,” she whispered. “You’re not
nearly
as bad as everyone says.”

She felt him soften, some rigidness leaving him, and when she let go of him he fell easily into his pillow. She arranged the covers on top of him, and by the time she closed the door behind her he was already asleep.

A NOTE IN THE DOOR

It was eight o’clock by the time she got away, exhausted and glad, for the first time in a long time, to be alone. Amazingly, Faye had asked to spend the night at Big House with all the others. When Trish had left her there with Nola to go to confront Golden, Faye had apparently struck up some kind of alliance or friendship with Fig Newton. When Nola reported this upon Trish’s return, Trish dismissed it as wishful thinking, said she’d believe it when she saw it with her own eyes. Tonight, she had: the two girls sharing looks across the room, Faye at her spot on the divan being coy and unapproachable until Fig Newton drew her into a game involving secret messages written on folded gum wrappers and tossed across the room, and then they were following each other around the house, hatching plots and whispering in each other’s ears and laughing behind their hands like best friends or, better yet, sisters.

In her warm little car with the radio playing, Trish thought she was happy to be alone until she pulled up into her driveway and was faced with the sight of the duplex, so starkly empty, the lawn so weedy, the windows so black. She was already mulling the idea of returning to Big House armed with a cheery excuse (sorry, forgot my jacket!), ready to lose herself again in the din, to witness her only child coming out of her very thick shell, to have the opportunity to tuck in two dozen bathed and sweet-smelling children, one by one—when something caught her eye. A white envelope tucked inside the screen door.

Though the note had obviously been composed to affect a casual tone, each individual stroke of each individual letter seemed to have been designed with a jeweler’s precision. The paper was heavy bond, creamy and thick, and every word, letter and line lay exactly equidistant from the one adjoining, as though the whole thing had been produced according to strict industrial standards, using protractors and slide rules. On the bottom half of the page was a map that depicted the route from her house to his, with to-scale buildings, roads and landmarks, along with comprehensive directions, penned in perfect miniature script, at every juncture or bend in the road.

The gentle sincerity of the words, the care with which they had been put on the page—the
hope
in them—constricted her chest with a sudden ache. She read the note twice more, folded the thick paper, and, feeling not a little self-consciously like a love-crossed heroine in a romance novel, touched it to her cheek.

T
HE CALL CAME JUST BEFORE BEDTIME. HE TOOK IT ON THE KITCHEN
phone and, because he had some idea about who it might be, he wrapped the long cord around his forearm several times with the grim determination of someone about to rappel into a deep gorge, stepped into the walk-in pantry, and shut the door behind him.

“You read the Bible, Brother Richards?” Ted Leo said.

“Hello?” Golden said. “Who is this?”

“Please, this act you’re putting on won’t get you nowhere. Now I asked you a question. You ever read the Bible?”

Golden swallowed, said, “Parts.”

“Parts? Well, that’s nice. Parts. Maybe that explains something. Maybe you just haven’t read the right
parts
, that’s why you’ve gone and fucked up so bad. Me, I’ve been spending a little time with the Good Book here, trying to get my head straight. You know what parts I’ve been reading?”

“I wouldn’t have any idea—”

“How ’bout I recite a couple of these parts for you?”

“Mr. Leo—”

Ted Leo cleared his throat. “Here’s a part: Proverbs six twenty-nine. ‘
So he that goeth in to his neighbour’s wife; whosoever touches her shall not be innocent.
’ We can probably assume that’s one of the parts you missed along the way, right? And you probably skipped the one comes just after, ‘
But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding; he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul. A wound and dishonour shall he get; and his reproach shall not be wiped away. For jealous is the rage of a man: therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance
.’” Breathing heavily through his nose, Ted Leo hummed a little tune of outrage. “Which means, Brother Richards, that you are in for a world of very bad things.”

In the darkness of the pantry, Golden searched the dimly glinting rows of canned peaches and bottled beets for some excuse or threat or apology to make this go away. He considered the irony of having a brothel owner reading biblical passages in condemnation of adultery, but decided it wouldn’t be in his interest to comment.

“You still there? I hope so, because this is something you’ll want to hear. This morning I was all ready to leave the vengeance part up to the Almighty, turn the other cheek, like the Bible says. I let you go. I let you deal with your own soul. But now my wife has disappeared, along with money from my safe, and a reasonable person can only come to the conclusion that you are responsible. Stealing, Brother Richards. Apparently, that’s another part of God’s word you need to catch up on.”

“I haven’t stolen anything, Mr. Leo,” Golden said, his throat so tight he had to force the words out. “I’m sorry that I was…
inappropriate
with your wife, but there was no adultery and no stealing. No stealing and no adultery, that’s for certain.”

“You miss the parts about lying too, Mr. Richards? You ever
heard
of the Ten Commandments? I’m starting to think you haven’t read the book at all, that’s what I’m beginning to think.”

“Please, just tell me what you want me to do.”

“Well, that couldn’t be more simple. I want you to return what’s mine, and I want you to do it in person, so you can apologize to me face to face, for real this time. By four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. If that doesn’t happen, let’s just say you’ll be sorry.”

“I don’t have anything to return to you, Mr. Leo, I don’t know anything, I don’t have anything.”

“And when you come,” Ted Leo said, as if Golden hadn’t spoken, “bring your Bible along, maybe we’ll sit down and underline some passages together.”

BACK INTO THE WATER

Earlier that afternoon, when Huila had stepped out of the Airstream and tried to hug him, did he return her embrace with a lover’s passion and whisper into her ear that he was so happy to see her, that he would protect her, that everything would be all right? Not hardly. When she put out her arms, ready to collapse into him, he took a step back and said, “I have fleas.”

This confused her, of course, but there was no time to explain. They were shielded from view of Old House, but he could already hear the
whap
of the screen door and the voices of children come out to meet him. He hustled her back into the Airstream and jumped back into his pickup. Alvin was on the porch holding up a homemade contraption made of paper and sticks that might have been a kite, and the First Twins were already running across the lawn to ask for money or lodge a complaint. He cranked the ignition, threw the transmission into reverse, and gunned the engine. “Forgot something!” he called, the pickup and the rattling trailer hurtling backward through a cloud of dust. “Be right back!”

At considerable speed he drove east along Sand Creek Road until he realized he didn’t know where he was going. He pulled off next to the river and killed the engine. He got out of the pickup and at a safe distance regarded the Airstream warily. Nothing moved or shifted or made a noise. Had he just hallucinated Huila coming out of the trailer? In his depleted state, it wasn’t something he could rule out entirely. He waited for a few seconds, took a breath, yanked open the door.

There she was, sitting on the floor, her arms clasped around her knees, head down. She did not look up for a moment, and when she did he could see that her face was pale, her eyes bloodshot and wet.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what to do!”

“No,” he said. “It’s okay.” He climbed into the trailer and sat on the floor in front of her. He put his hand out and she took it. He said, “Did he hurt you?”

She shook her head. When she was angry or excited, her English quickly went south and she tended to make up the difference with hand gestures and sound effects. “No. But he break everything. Window! Television!
Kish! Bwkish!
Crazy. Shouting,”—here she threw her arms around her head, miming a wild throwing motion and general craziness—“breaking, throwing everything,
loco, loco
.”

Golden nodded. “He is definitely not real happy.”

She looked up at him. “He hurt
you
?”

“No,” Golden said, but his hand immediately went to the twin knots at the back of his head. “A little.”

“I’m sorry,” she said plaintively, “I’m sorry.” She took his hand and pressed it to her lips.

He said, “He didn’t kill me, that’s a plus.”

She laughed and scooted closer to him, kissed his wrist and forearm, pulled herself even closer, swinging her legs over his so that she was straddling his waist. She shivered and put her cheek against his chest. He didn’t bother to mention the fleas again—at this point they didn’t seem all that relevant, even though it felt like they had successfully established an outpost in one of his armpits and were making a meal out of the tender flesh around his belly button. He put his nose into Huila’s hair and inhaled deeply.

He said, “What are we going to do?”

She pushed back from his chest and leaned back so she could look him fully in the face. “Maybe…” she said, her eyes growing wide, “maybe we go away. We have a car. We have a house”—she gestured grandly at their present accommodations—“and I have money.” Here she patted the leather bag at her hip. “Everything we need. No more bad things. We go away to be happy.”

During all the time they had spent talking about their lives, about their respective sadnesses and frustrations and their desire for escape, this was a subject they had never quite breached—the question of running away together. For most affairs, this eventually becomes the most fundamental of questions, the only one that matters:
Do we love each other more than the lives we already have?
It is the question that hovers in the background of every secret phone call, flavors every tryst with the heady possibilities of apocalypse and renewal; and it is the answer to that question, or the lack thereof, that so often dooms an affair to failure. But Golden and Huila had been taking their sweet time working up to it, just as they had in every other aspect of their relationship; it is a generally accepted rule of modern affair-making that you must have sex once or twice before addressing the question of whether or not you will run away together. But now the process had been speeded up for them considerably, and Golden, less than two hours after acknowledging to himself and to his God the errors of his way, after rededicating himself to his family and his way of life, and after offering his deepest, most humble gratitude to the Almighty for rescuing him from the belly of the whale, was seriously considering wading right back into the water.

Maybe, he thought, they should have sex right here, right now, and then they could move on without delay to the question of running away together.

She looked up at him, waiting, smiling, hoping. Even with her bloodshot eyes, her lower lip swollen and a little raw from nervous biting, he found her beautiful. How could he say no to her?

He paused. He said, “I think it’s something we should probably think about.”

The smile didn’t leave her face, but some of the hope did. She looked around. “Think? How much time do we have to think? Where are we going to think? Right here?” A flea launched itself from the tip of his ear—
ping!
—and landed on the sleeve of her dress; luckily, she was too focused on him to notice. He reached out as if to place an affectionate hand on her shoulder and flicked it away with his finger. “No, I have an idea. I think I know where you can stay.”

And so, with her tucked safely in the Airstream, he drove her the ten miles to Mexican Town.

THE TODD FREEBONE EPISODE

The following day he went about his business as if nothing were out of the ordinary. He checked in at the office, looked over some bid possibilities, had lunch with Nola, drove to St. George to visit Rose, who had very little to say to him except that she was feeling better and would be home soon. She did look a little better than last week, but not by much: her hair needed washing, the skin of her face and hands had gone strangely translucent, her eyes clouded with a wet fog. And this horrible place they had her in, with its damp cinder-block walls and strange odors and its corridors full of people who could have moonlighted as extras in a zombie film. It was no consolation to her or anybody else that this was the best he could afford.

Just before he left he told her, for some reason, that he loved her. He didn’t know why he said it; it was something he had learned, from painful experience, never to voice out loud to any of the wives; as with everything else, they remembered, they compared, they kept score.

“Rose,” he had said, getting up to leave, “you know I love you.” And she had looked up at him and burst into tears.

When four o’clock came he was back at Old House, pretending to fix the sash on one of the upstairs windows. He was caught in a state of suspended animation, scraping the hard paint of the sash over and over until he was digging into bare wood, paying no attention to what he was doing, and it took so long in coming he wondered if he’d missed it, and then there it was: four chimes ringing throughout the house. He imagined Ted Leo at the PussyCat behind his desk or at the bar, himself watching the clock, getting angrier and angrier, thinking of all kinds of ways he was going to make Golden Richards sorry.

Yesterday, when he left Huila with Nestor, he’d told her he would come up with a plan, he would figure something out; he needed time to think, then he would know what to do. But he quickly realized there was little thinking to be done, and nothing for him to do. He could not take Huila back to Ted Leo; she was an adult who could come and go as she pleased. And running away—it was a wonderful thought in the abstract but the reality of it was that he did not think he had the will or the courage for it. What else was there? Telling the cops? Explaining everything to Beverly and begging for her protection? No, as far as he could figure there was nothing left to do but see what Ted Leo had in store for him.

So that’s what he did the rest of the day: worry. He worried cleaning out the wood stove and going over the budget with Beverly after dinner and watching Helaman run the mile relay at a district tournament in Hurricane. Often, his worry seemed to have no content or substance; he idly scratched his flea bites and stared into the middle distance, his head full of choppy static, until somebody or something commanded his immediate attention. When menacing thoughts did intrude, he would banish them by taking up his habitual chant—
EmNephiHelamanNaomi JosephinePaulineNovella ParleyGaleSybilDeeanne AlvinRustyCliftonHerschel GloryMartinBooWayne TeagueFayeLouise FigNew-tonDarlingSariah Jame-oFerrisPet
—until he could get through the list without making a mistake.

That night, he lay in Beverly’s bed and did his best not to toss or roll over, which would set the old bedsprings to ringing. Beverly, of course, knew something was up, but she had never been the kind to jump in and start asking questions; she watched, she waited, she gathered her evidence, and when the time was right, she pounced. It seemed like hours until her breathing evened out and he was able to, with agonizing care and a cramp in his hamstring, roll off the bed and creep out of the room with all the stealth a man of his size could muster. In his red plaid pajamas and flopping work boots, he took a look outside, checked the locks on every door and drove out to Trish’s duplex and then over to Big House, where he scanned the landscape for anything out of the ordinary. It was a windy night, the trees full of new leaves rattling on their branches. Down the road in front of the Pettigrews’ sat an old blue Dodge he’d never seen before, but as he passed he could see it was a couple, maybe high schoolers, making out energetically in the front seat. He had told Nola to be sure to lock the place up tight, had made up some story about a rash of burglaries in the valley, but he found the front door unlocked and most of the windows open.

After securing the house, he sat in the lounge chair in the front room and gave in to another hour of stupefied worrying until sleep, which he’d seen precious little of in the past three days, pressed down on the top of his head like a huge, benevolent hand. He slept for four hours, his heavy chin pressing a divot into the flesh of his chest. The house woke, the kids readying themselves for school, Nola banging pans in the kitchen, a prolonged skirmish breaking out over what kind of sandwiches were going into today’s bag lunches, and Golden did not wake. This was not out of the ordinary; the father of the house was known for prowling around at night and landing in armchairs or love seats or behind the wheel of his idling pickup, dead to the world. The phone rang, the kids tromped past him on their way to catch the bus, sometimes slamming the door behind them, and still he did not stir. Only when the house went completely quiet, a tensed hush that found its way into his dreams, did he startle himself awake, grabbing at the arms of the chair and saying, “Not the fingernails!”