by Brady Udall
In the bathroom he put his hands on his hips and regarded the toilet.
“This the one?” he said.
He took out his tape measure, experimentally pressed its lock button several times, put it back into its little holster.
“Okay then,” he said, “this might take a while.”
The only reason he had any idea what to do about a clogged toilet was because he’d seen his father trying to unclog the one in the bathroom on the second floor of Old House, the bathroom that Aunt Nola called the Black Hole of Calcutta. He wasn’t sure why it was called the Black Hole of Calcutta, all he knew was that it was damp and dark and smelled like mildew, and that the toilet had a mind of its own. His father had tried to fix it many times, but there was something about the gigantic ceramic water tank that you emptied by pulling a chain, and the old pipes in the house that made it belch and mumble and groan, sometimes in a way that sounded like talking.
At least Aunt Trish’s toilet, Rusty was pretty sure, didn’t have anything to say, which would make it a whole lot easier to deal with. He uncoiled the plumber’s snake and fed the end of it into the hole. He’d seen his father do this at least twice, but he couldn’t remember how far the snake was supposed to go down the hole. He fed it in slowly, delicately, as if he were feeding something that might try to bite him.
Faye stood next to her mother and said, “What’s he doing here?”
“He came to fix the toilet.”
“That’s Dad’s job.”
“If only Dad were here to do it.”
Rusty looked at Faye and she stared him down until he had to glance away. He laughed and made a huge snork, which he tried to cover up by pretending to cough, which made him cough for real.
Aunt Trish asked him where he got the tools and he told her from the service truck his father kept in the old chicken pens. “That truck is full of tools, you should see it. There’s like some kind of huge jack-hammer in there.”
“Well,” Aunt Trish said, “I’m glad you didn’t have to bring that with you.”
He laughed again, which produced another snork, but this time he didn’t care.
He’d fed the snake in about two feet and it didn’t seem like it would go any farther. The water, now exactly level with the lip of the bowl, trembled ominously. He said, “I think we’ve got something here.”
“That’s a nice shirt,” Aunt Trish said, and Rusty couldn’t think of anything to say, so he said, “Indeed.” He stole a glance at Faye, who had managed to disappear without a sound.
Because he didn’t have a nice shirt of his own, before coming over here he had swiped one of Parley’s, a long-sleeved button-up with a big collar and prints of motocross riders doing wheelies all over it. Where Parley had ever gotten such an incredible shirt Rusty had no idea. It was made of some kind of silky material that rubbed against his belly and produced instant static electricity that crackled all around him every time he moved.
He rotated the handle on the crank twice, giving off a slight crackle. He paused dramatically, as if listening for something only an FBI agent could detect. He gave it two more violent cranks and…nothing. What a gyp! He looked at his tool belt, which was starting to pull his pants down to dangerous levels, wondering if there was something in it that could help him. Maybe he could stick his hand down the hole? Pull out whatever was in there with some pliers? Would that be an act of bravery or something a stupid dickhole would do? He looked at Aunt Trish, whose arms were folded in a way that made it hard to get a good idea what her boobs might be doing. She was smiling at him in a nice way and he had to look down because he knew he was staring. He put a little more pressure on the snake and cranked the handle like crazy, again and again, giving it everything he had until he was sweating from his butt crack and generating enough electricity to power a Christmas tree.
“All right, then!” Aunt Trish called, which made him stop. “Looks like we’re going to plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“A plumber. Our only choice.”
Rusty looked at her dumbly, as if the word plumber were foreign to him, which was entirely possible. Though she’d meant it as a joke, she wondered if there was even such thing as a plumber in this valley. Generally, the people here did not rely on professionals; they were the professionals. They fixed their own cars, machined their own parts, raised their own food, birthed their own babies. If they didn’t know how to do something, there was always a neighbor, someone down the road, who did. She imagined the scandal it would cause if she paid some bumbling fatso to do a job her husband could do in two minutes, if only he came around once in a while, if only he acted like he cared. She imagined the outrage, the gossip, the attention: Beverly’s indignation, Nola’s amazed delight, Golden’s bewilderment, his slow recognition that she would not be taken for granted, that she had needs, that she mattered. Such a pathetic little fantasy, but she couldn’t deny the small spasm of pleasure it gave her.
“Ee-yep,” Rusty said, assuming the casual stance of a professional: hip out, thumb hooked into tool belt. “I think I might know somebody who can help. I think I can probably take care of it.”
“Really, honey, it’s all right. Your dad will be home in a few days…”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said and shrugged immediately, as if to excuse himself for being rude. He didn’t like her to call him honey; it was a word she used for four-year-old Sariah or one of the Three Stooges.
He pulled the snake out of the toilet, wrapped it around his torso, checked his tools. Aunt Trish put her hand on his shoulder. “Thanks so much for your help, Rusty, you’re a true gentleman. If you’d like to hang around for a few minutes I’ll make us some instant pudding. I think I’ve got some graham crackers.”
As far as Rusty was concerned, instant pudding and graham crackers with Aunt Trish was as good as it could possibly get, better than cherry popsicles on a yacht with Wonder Woman, plus she had touched his shoulder and called him a true gentleman. But some kind of romantic instinct, maybe one he had picked up from his favorite book, To Love a Scoundrel, told him that it would be best not to wear out his welcome. The Scoundrel never hung around for instant pudding and graham crackers. He always gave the sexy duchess a quick kiss on the mouth and then jumped out the window, holding on to his wig and landing safely on a haystack going by in a cart.
“I have things I have to do,” he said as mysteriously as possible. It was true: he had plans, people to talk to. “Maybe a rain check on the pudding?”
“A rain check,” Aunt Trish said. “You can cash it in anytime.”
15.
CIRCLING BACK
TWO MILES NORTH OF HIS LITTLE AIRSTREAM HOME AWAY FROM HOME lay the Nevada Test Site, fourteen hundred square miles of emptiness, a void on the map: swales of sagebrush that went on forever, alkaline flats and deep arroyos and strange accretions of glassy slag in the distance, fields of crater-pocked hardpan edged by yellow sandstone bluffs streaked white with the guano of raptors and bats. On his late afternoon walks he would often climb the big north hill to a hummock of broken rock and look out over the expanse, a tingle in his legs as if he were standing at the edge of a cliff. When the clouds were right, low and moving fast, the heat rippling up off the mineral-green dust and bending long bands of smoky sunlight, the desert looked like what it had once been not so long ago: the bottom of a vast prehistoric sea.
At night he heard strange atmospheric whisperings, saw impossible lights that gathered and skittered across the surface of the darkness. The government had banned open-air testing years ago, but continued in its cheerful, efficient way to set off blast after blast underground. More than once he’d been brought out of sleep by a welling tremor, a roar that could be felt more than heard, clutching his pillow in terror, the blood stalled inside his heart.
It was hard not to be reminded of those early mornings he had spent with his father watching the bomb tests: a single flash against the dark sky, the incandescent cloud with its roiling platinum core
, the delayed thunderclap. More and more, walking the game trails just a few miles from the wasted ground where these blasts were unleashed, he was taken by the feeling that things were spiraling in on him, everything he had left behind was in front of him again, his old life, his old self, it was all circling back.
And yet nothing was familiar, everything strange. He had ten thousand things to think about, a worry for every second of the day, but the only subject that truly interested him was Weela, and why he hadn’t seen her since their embrace in the pond.
He’d spent what little spare time he had after work scouring the gullies and cracked riverbeds, venturing far out into the rocky wastes, but there was no sign of human life, only the obnoxious ravens, the coyotes who barked at him from distant ridges and then sat on their haunches and stared, as if waiting for him to leave. During his lunch break he would take up a position in a copse of dense mesquite behind the PussyCat Manor, where he spied on hookers sunning themselves topless in deck chairs or barbecuing with a hibachi, laughing and carrying on, once chasing each other through the brush screaming and arguing over, as best Golden could gather, a blow-dryer. He had even gone so far as to venture into the mysterious confines of the PussyCat Manor itself, hoping to catch the glimpse of Weela—he wanted only to know that she was okay, that nothing bad had befallen her—but all he’d gotten for his trouble was a piece of hard toffee and a condom, which, against all his better judgment he kept tucked safely behind his Visa card: a symbol of hope or self-delusion, he didn’t know which.
Strangely, not seeing any sign of Weela in or around the PussyCat Manor had cheered him. Maybe she was not avoiding or ignoring him, maybe she was sick or on some kind of vacation (prostitutes took vacations, didn’t they?). He told himself he didn’t care if she didn’t like him or had no interest in him anymore, he only wanted to know that she was safe and that he might have the chance, once more in his life, to hear that laugh of hers again.
To Golden, it seemed that Weela’s sudden disappearance was one more in a series of strange events precipitated and possibly created by that not-so-innocent embrace in the pond. First was his reckless foray into the forbidden confines of the PussyCat Manor, and then there was the long weekend at home in which he’d had some kind of argument or standoff with every one of his wives, in which the kids came at him in relentless waves, and everything he did or said seemed exactly and perfectly wrong, though he couldn’t have said why. And then, driving back to Nevada early Tuesday morning after spending an awkward night with Trish, he’d felt a strange pulling sensation in his groin. The more he shifted in his seat, the worse it got, and he stopped off at a truck stop near Littlefield to see what the problem was. Standing in front of the urinal in the men’s room he pulled down his underwear to find that he had an unreasonably large something tangled in his pubic hair. “The heck?” he said, prodding the object, which appeared to be a wad of gum. He was spreading the hair with his fingers, trying to make sense of this new development, when he felt a presence next to him.
Two urinals over a sunken old geezer in a Hawaiian shirt regarded Golden through a pair of thick-lensed glasses. He gave Golden a good once-over, shook his head and, holding up his unbuckled pants with both hands, shuffled sideways to the farthest urinal down the line.
Golden said, “Hey, no, I’m just—”
“Minding my own business here!” the man called, careful not to look Golden’s way again. “Let’s just all mind our own business, why don’t we!”
Golden faced the wall and fiercely attempted to urinate so as to demonstrate he was here to use the facilities for their intended purpose, but on such short notice couldn’t work up a stream.
On the drive to the construction site he scoured his faulty memory, but couldn’t come up with a likely scenario by which a huge wad of gum might have ended up in his pubic hair. Sure, he’d had an odd encounter with Trish the night before, in which she’d fed him leftovers, taken him to bed, gotten naked, pinned him down, tickled him and pulled his pants around his ankles, only to get upset and lock herself in the bathroom. Just one more baffling episode in a life that had become full of them. Strange as it was, it didn’t explain where the gum had come from (Trish, as far as he knew, didn’t chew gum, and he was sure she didn’t have any in her mouth when they’d kissed). He decided the gum’s origins didn’t matter nearly as much as what it represented: that he was not in control of his life, that at any given moment of the day he had no idea what was happening to him. He was a man with a crush on a prostitute, a condom in his wallet, and gum in his pubic hair—what could it all mean?
All he could say for sure was he had come to Nevada to escape, to embrace a solitary life, but with Weela gone, he had been overtaken with a loneliness that verged on desperation. At home, his children and wives gathered around for scripture reading, he felt, more piercingly than ever, that his existence was a sham, something quickly assembled for the sake of a photograph. During the long weekend in Virgin he was not allowed an idle moment: he spent several foggy hours in priesthood council before and after church, changed out the shocks on Trish’s Volkswagen, drained silt from all three of Big House’s water heaters, suffered through a Rose-of-Sharon Sunday dinner (her special undercooked chicken with a side of Ritz-cracker-and-cauliflower casserole), chopped wood, took in three junior league basketball games and two band concerts, attended the Sunday afternoon Summit of the Wives, in which he had to referee a complex dispute over the yearly distribution of hand-me-down clothing and which lucky children might be in the running for a new pair of shoes, failed to repair a broken heat pump in one of his rental houses despite two hours of knuckle-busting, lost a forty-five-minute-long argument with Nola at midnight, in bed, about Beverly’s handling of the family finances—and over that entire long weekend there was not a single minute in which the dark-skinned woman of mystery did not assert herself into his waking mind. Even as he conjured her face and replayed her laugh over and over again in a looping reel, another line of thought ran like a crackling cross-current against the flow: Was it possible that right now, somewhere far away and lost in the particulars of her own life, she could be thinking of him?
Of course, all of this thinking—an activity he was not widely known to engage in on such an intense or extended basis—did not go unnoticed. Beverly seemed always to be nearby, noticing, the whole of her formidable radar on duty. At Sunday dinner he sat at the head of the table lost in a memory of Weela’s wet cheek against his, when he looked up and saw Beverly standing in the kitchen doorway, watching him. He looked away and thought, Am I smiling? I’m not smiling, am I? Of course he was, and what was worse, he had no right to be: he had just sampled a forkful of Rose’s casserole. He sifted the food in his mouth—and with little effort composed a suitably pained expression—but when he glanced up again, Beverly had disappeared into the kitchen.
That night, they prayed together, kneeling at the foot of the bed, Golden, in his plaid plus-sized pajamas with a split in the inseam, saying, Hmm, and, Uh-hm, and thanking and blessing what-or whoever wandered into his mind. Beverly laid out her own prayer like a lawyer presenting closing arguments; she outlined the family’s many problems, the financial difficulties and spiritual malaise, the sibling rivalries, the strife among sister-wives, and finished up with a plea: “Give this family, Heavenly Father, the leadership and guidance it has been sorely lacking of late, to bring us through our trials, to make us happier and safer, and to one day bring us, together, into Thy care, In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” After which she looked Golden straight in the eye, climbed into bed, and proceeded to ignore him.
It was one of those moments he had become all too familiar with: she was mad at him, and he wasn’t sure exactly why. She’d even involved God, which meant she was deadly serious. He’d learned that actually asking her to tell him what was wrong never got him anywhere in instances like this. It was best to say nothing, to cut his losses, to maintain the dignity of the ignorant. He turned off the lamp, pulled the sheet
up to his neck, and waited for the good-night kiss. Just like their double-prayer at the foot of the bed, the good-night kiss was a two-decades-old custom that never varied: she’d roll over, give him a kiss on the cheek, say, “Good night, Goldy,” and he’d wait a beat or two before rolling over to kiss her and say, “Good night, Oldie,” which at one time had been funny enough to make them giggle—Beverly having three years on him as she did—but was now bedrock ritual and no laughing matter. He listened to coyotes yipping somewhere far up the canyon, settled his large behind into its crater in the mattress, wondered when was the last time they had for-gone the good-night kiss, and could not remember it ever happening.
He did remember some of the other jokes they’d had between them, how she used to tease him gently and he would respond like a bashful, happy child. Sometimes when she was feeling frisky Beverly would turn off the lights and say, Where is my big man, the One Mighty and Strong? She would grope for him in the darkness, until she found him and remarked upon how mighty and strong he truly was. It was unlike her to be irreverent about something so sacred, and this Golden found enormously arousing. It had been years, five or six at least, since they had played that game.
While he stared at the patterns on the dark ceiling, he decided if he did not pee right now he would be up in the middle of the night; his bladder, like every other part of him, was not what it used to be. He slipped into the small master bath, flipped the light, and with an inaudible sigh read the sign above the toilet tank:
Golden, Please Take a Seat
He would admit it, urinating neatly and accurately was not easy for a man of his considerable height and occasional lack of focus, but did that mean he had to sit down when he did it? As always, he took a moment to consider disobeying the placard. Why shouldn’t a man, in his own bathroom, in his own house, be able to pee any way he saw fit? He sighed again, lowered his pajama bottoms and took a seat.
