The Lonely Polygamist (5 page)

FOR MY WIFE MALKE AND MY SON GOLDY BOY THIS IS ROYAL HERE I AM CHANGING MY WAYS BELEVE IT OR NOT I AM NO LONGER SIMILER TO THE ANIMAL ON THE FRONT OF THE PITCHER CARD IT WILL BE BETTER I PROMISE I WONT LEAVE YOU NO MORE YOUR TRUE HUSBEND AND DEDDY ROYAL

That afternoon, after they went downstairs and had Dr. Darkly put a few stitches in Golden’s lip free of charge (he’d nearly swooned at seeing Golden’s mother looking so flushed and beautiful), after Golden had bathed, dressed in clean jeans and button-up shirt, after his mother had herself changed into a red skirt and white cardigan, they sat down to a meal of warm milk and bread and ate their fill while taking turns reading the postcard and then finally propping it up against the sugar bowl so it was like they were having dinner with a hound dog in a straw hat. Golden couldn’t stop looking at his mother, who had become the most beautiful woman in the world, and she couldn’t stop picking up the postcard, looking over it again and again, as if there were something she might have missed. The rain never stopped, and finally his mother said, “I’d like to be alone for a while.” He climbed the stairs to his attic room, sat in his place at the window overlooking the square, and waited.

GOLDEN’S DADDY

For three years the postcard hung thumbtacked to the wall above the kitchen table, a place of honor normally reserved for a life-sized tablet-shaped cardboard replica of the Ten Commandments with an inset eight-by-ten photo of the Reverend Marvin J. Peete in his
Let’s-all-get-ready-to-cast-out-some-demons!
pose. The postcard, a cruel joke, marked the end of Royal as they knew him; it was the last correspondence they had received, the last sign in the world that Golden’s daddy had ever existed.

For a long time Golden had been trying to work up the courage to tear it off the wall. For him, it represented everything that was bad in his life: his stretched-to-their-limit secondhand clothes, his smelly attic room, his lack of friends, his extravagantly depressed mother. Every time their power was shut off, every time the Ladies’ Aid Society showed up at the door with a box of donated canned goods, singing hymns coming and going so the entire town knew he and his mother were charity cases, he blamed his daddy. He blamed his daddy for their leaky roof, for the hives that attacked his legs and back, for the mice in the walls, for the sleazy men who often showed up at the door asking if his mother wanted to make a little money on the side.

By the time he was a teenager, he had developed an active imagination, which was devoted almost exclusively to arranging satisfying ways for his father to die: choking on peach pits, toppling off balconies, getting zapped by lightning or torn to tatters by wild boars. And it didn’t always happen by accident either; sometimes Golden took him out from a distance with a crossbow or pushed him into the path of an oncoming stampede. When people around town tried to comfort his mother by theorizing that Royal had died under mysterious circumstances (instead of running off on her as everybody, including Golden, assumed), it didn’t bother Golden a bit; if his daddy was already dead, then it wouldn’t hurt him at all if Golden went ahead and ran over him a few times with a loaded cement truck.

The fall Golden turned sixteen he started both football and school. The new high school coach, Coach Valardi, had seen Golden standing in line at the drugstore and wondered why a boy of such glorious heft and dimension was not on the team. For years, the school board had allowed Golden to stay at home with his mother, had advised the sheriff not to enforce the truancy laws because his mother was a difficult woman with a frail constitution and a mortal case of the nerves and it would serve everyone if her son was allowed to stay home and keep her company. Coach Valardi convinced them that the football team, having won only three games in four years, needed Golden more than his mother did.

Accompanied by Principal Wiggins, and by Reverend Peete for moral support, Coach Valardi sat on the front room couch and made his case while Golden listened from the top of the attic steps. The coach spoke about the thrill of competition, the character-building aspect of sports, etc. When he started to run out of ideas the reverend stepped in and recited a few Old Testament verses that didn’t have anything to do with anything. Golden’s mother, mostly out of a disinclination to let the reverend down, agreed to let her son go.

Outside, at the bottom of the stairs inside the yellow mist of a streetlamp, Principal Wiggins pulled Golden aside for a just-us-men conversation.

“How old you say you are, son?”

“Sixteen.”

“Your mama’s kept you well fed, we’ll give her that much. Sixteen, I’d guess that’d put you in, oh, tenth grade or so. Can you read?”

“Yessir. A little.”

“Can you do your sums?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Well, all right, then,” Principal Wiggins said, clapping Golden on the back. “The tenth grade it is.”

In the classroom, sitting like a teenager stuck in a first-grader’s desk, Golden was no success, but he was happy. He could barely follow the lessons, flubbed assignment after assignment, took his lunch by himself in the cafeteria, walked the hallways gawking like a tourist, hiding his overbite with his hand. He had an acne problem and a wispy blond beard that no one had taught him to shave. He offered friendship to everyone who would speak to him, but found no takers. He was slow, good-natured, and, because of his size, a target of jokes and pranks of all sorts: wet willies, a roadkill armadillo in his locker, fake love notes written by the boys in the back row, Vaseline on the toilet seat. Happily, he moved from one humiliation to the next; anything was better than sitting at home with his mother.

Football wasn’t nearly so complicated. He ran where he was told to run, knocked down whoever got in his way. Every night he spent an hour puzzling over the playbook before he moved on to his homework. It was easier now to forget about his father; he had other things to think about. He was way behind, with a lot to learn.

On a Friday night in the fall of his senior year, in the third quarter of a blowout loss to the Gledsden Hellions, Golden broke from the huddle and, as he ran to the line of scrimmage, looked across the cinder track to see his father leaning against the chain-link fence. The man was too far away for Golden to make out his features exactly, but he had the dark hair and flashing smile, the easy slouch with one leg crossed over the other, and even wore the kind of western-style shirt his daddy favored.

Golden stood in the middle of the green field, the lights overhead so bright they cast no shadow, and he felt nothing close to anger or hate, but a burst of adrenalized joy, the same feeling he’d had when he was three, sitting at the upstairs window, the first one to spot his father’s pickup come rattling around the square.

My daddy
, he thought.
My daddy
.

He was about to raise his hand to wave, but Coach Valardi screamed from the sidelines, “Goddamit, Richards, get up to the line!” When Coach raised his voice he sounded like a housewife yelling at her kids from the back porch. “Get your big ass moving! Ahh! They gonna hit us with delay of game!”

Later, Golden would not remember getting into his three-point stance, or what the play was, or if he had executed his blocking assignment correctly. He would only remember coming out of a pile of bodies and seeing the ball come loose, bounce once, and land at his feet. At that moment it seemed that his life, which had felt like a sour disappointment just a few minutes before, was a long gradual wave cresting at this moment, and he scooped up the ball, held it softly to his chest, and ran like he never had before.

He felt a few bodies bounce off him and fall away and then he was charging down the sidelines toward the end zone, with Coach Valardi shrieking into his earhole and one of the opposing players—a skinny cornerback half his size—running alongside, trying to drag him down by the shoulder pads. He grunted, made an unsuccessful swipe at the cornerback with his forearm, and about eight yards from the orange cone someone came in at him low and hard and his left knee buckled sideways with a snapping sound that traveled through his skeleton like an electric current and reverberated inside his skull. The pain was a bucket of scalding water dowsing his body, but he was able to keep his feet the last few yards, his ruined knee grinding with each lumbering stride, until he tilted forward and fell headfirst into the end zone as if diving into a pond, his face mask digging a furrow in the soft turf.

He turned over on his back, groaning, his face covered in sod. If the crowd was cheering, he couldn’t hear it. He tried to prop himself on his elbows to look for his father, but his eyes were full of dirt. Now he could hear shouting, could feel his teammates slapping his shoulder pads, trying to pull him up. He pushed them away, shucked off his helmet, lay back down, and smiled.

My daddy
.

A MAN IN A MAGAZINE

The man was not his father, of course, but a college scout from Tuscaloosa who had come to check out Junior Franz, the star tailback from the opposing team. It was a disappointment that struck him as low as he’d ever been: Golden’s football career was over and, because of a staph infection he contracted after knee surgery, so was his academic career. He spent the rest of the year either bedridden or in the hospital, and never attended another day of school.

For ten months he hardly left the attic, took a regimen of painkillers provided by Dr. Darkly, longed for the humiliations and minor thrills of the classroom, and did his best to match his mother’s depression with his own. Except for Coach Valardi, who came to get his football gear back, Golden received no visits from classmates or teachers, no cards or letters offering good wishes. It was as if he’d never been to Mount Oxnard High at all, never had a life outside the dark, mildewy apartment. His mother fed him, changed his dressings, did not argue with him when he told her he planned never to get out of bed again. When she finally had to take the receptionist job Dr. Darkly had been offering her for years, it was a relief to finally be free of her, at least for a portion of each day. Boredom, finally, forced him out of his bed, and as his knee grew stronger he began to make forays downstairs, mostly hopping on his good leg and using walls and furniture for leverage, but occasionally putting enough weight on the knee to feel a satisfying dose of pain. One morning, using the beechwood cane Dr. Darkly had lent him, he hobbled into his mother’s room, a mysterious space that had been off-limits to him for as long as he could remember.

He stood next to her bureau for a moment, taking in the smell of perfume and cigarette smoke and face cream, and then began opening drawers, where he found unexpected things: candy bars hidden under blouses, a small book called
A Man Came Calling
, and some lacy underwear, tucked in its own little silk bag, with the price tag still attached, waiting, he would realize years later, for a special occasion that never came. He cast around under the bed, sifted through the linen chest, hungry to find something, he didn’t know what. In the small closet, he rifled through dresses, examined shoes, found a sewing kit, an old girdle, a set of pink curlers, a tin of peppermints. Though he could see nothing on the single high shelf, he groped around, standing on tiptoes, until his hand rested on a wooden cigar box. He knew immediately that this was what he had come here to find.

Inside the box were letters, five of them, all from his father. Three of the envelopes were addressed to
Malke and Golden Richards
, but the one on top was addressed to
Master Golden Richards
in his father’s careless third-grader script.

GOLDEN BOY YOUR MOTHER IS ANGRY AT ME WICH SHE HAS EVERY RITE SHE TOLD ME NOT TO RITE OR CALL AGIN BUT I WILL TRY ONE LAST TIME HERE IS A PLANE TICKIT COME OUT TO UTAH AND I WILL BUY YOU A MOTOR BIKE OR A ARABIYEN HORSE THATS IT ROYAL

“What?” Golden said, just to hear his own voice. “What is this?”

He shuffled through the other letters. All of them had money—one a check for a thousand dollars—these much longer than the one addressed only to him, pages of rambling prose without paragraphs or commas, and one of them was folded up with the glossy pages of a cut-out magazine article titled “Striking It Rich!” On the first page was a photograph of a vast desert panorama, and underneath the caption,
Through This Forsaken Land of Towering Buttes and Treacherous Canyons Royal Richards Made His Perilous Way to a Fabulous Discovery!
On the third page was a photo of his daddy, standing atop a boulder in a cowboy hat, holding a rifle in one hand and a bubbling bottle of champagne in the other. The caption read,
He Fought Storms, Rattlers, Poison Water, and Death Itself to Find His Uranium Bonanza!

In three breathless pages the article detailed how Royal, destitute after losing his shirt on an oil-well venture in Alabama, headed west, taking any job he could find to survive: street sweep and bricklayer, stableman and extra on the set of the feature film
The Conqueror
, where he had a “notable confrontation with screen idol John Wayne.” It wasn’t too long before he, like thousands of hopeful Americans, caught Uranium Fever and headed into the Utah desert with a Geiger counter and a dream. Three years he hiked the arroyos and slot canyons of the Colorado Plateau, finding nothing but scorpions, thirst, sunstroke and failure. He was cursed with mishaps. He lost his truck to quicksand, faced flash floods, blistering heat and perilous electrical storms, was bit by a rattler and lay for three days in the shade of a mesquite bush, hoping to die. Still he did not give up. He spent his remaining money on a scintillometer, a fifteen-pound gadget that registered radiation to a greater depth than a Geiger counter, and struck out on foot into the most treacherous reaches of the Dirty Devil country, ready to strike it rich or die trying.

The article spared no detail on how many ways Royal came close to death: he ran out of food, then water, and came down with arsenic poisoning from drinking river water polluted by a dead sheep. His feet swelled until his boots bit into his flesh, so he spent days wandering deliriously through the desert, barefoot and sun-scorched, with every step losing the will to go on. One morning he woke up and found that the needle on his scintillometer, an obscenely heavy machine he’d been carrying around in his delirium like a ball and chain, was stuck at high register. He adjusted the dial but the needle wouldn’t return to normal. For an instant his head cleared and he looked down at the conglomerate rock beneath his hideously swollen feet. It was ash-gray, instead of the more common rust-red, and riddled with canary-yellow cartonite. The ground he was standing on, the entire ridge as far as he could see, was high-grade uranium ore.