The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  When he settled back into bed, he noticed Beverly had not moved. He listened to the clock tick, the ponderous workings of his own lungs. Finally, he gave in. He turned over and spoke meekly into the darkness, “Is there something wrong?”—but her eyes were closed, her breathing even, her arms tucked neatly at her sides.

  He watched her for a solid minute, waiting for movement, any sign at all, and then put his mouth to her ear. “Good night, Oldie,” he whispered. She didn’t grin, she didn’t so much as flinch.

  A HOLE IN THE GROUND

  Out at the job site, Golden called Nola to inquire how best to get gum out of hair. He had thought the gum would have disintegrated on its own, but now, a week after he’d discovered it, it seemed to have hardened into a lump of glassy plastic that yanked on the sensitive hairs of his groin with every step he took.

  “So you have gum in your hair,” said Nola in her playful, let’s-have-a-little-fun tone. Nola, of all his wives, was the easiest to talk to; she was rarely jealous or needy and never failed to say exactly what she meant. For the last two or three years—ever since Glory’s death, really—she’d been trying every trick in her considerable book to jolly him out of the funk he was in.

  “Yeah,” Golden said. “A little. In my hair. In the hair on top of my head.”

  “Now how’d that happen? You don’t chew gum, do you?”

  “Me? No. Somebody else. A kid in a car…I was out by the highway and a kid in a car, in a convertible, threw his gum at me and it stuck in my hair.”

  Nola let out a honk of laughter that made him wince. “Why was there a kid throwing gum at you?”

  For a moment he did nothing but listen to the sound of the bad connection, the squeaks and hisses of the ionosphere. What had ever possessed him to call Nola? He could have talked to Rose-of-Sharon, who had become so remote and withdrawn lately her whispery voice barely registered over the phone line, but certainly she would have given him a few tips without any fuss, and Beverly would have lectured him, but probably would have kept it to herself.

  “I don’t know,” Golden said. “Kids these days. Terrible. I’m glad it was gum and not something else.”

  “What kind of gum is it?”

  “Well, you know, Dubble Bubble or one a them, I think. Juicy Fruit. Something along those lines. Why does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t, honey, it doesn’t.” She laughed again. “You know I just like to have the facts.”

  After several more rounds of questioning having to do with the age and attitude of the gum-thrower and what kind of car he was driving, she finally got down to the important stuff. “The first thing you can try is ice. It never works, but try it anyway. The next thing is peanut butter. That works sometimes, but almost never. Rub it in there and see what happens. The foolproof method is get out your scissors and start cutting. Works every time.”

  “I don’t have any scissors.”

  “You’ve got peanut butter, don’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then break out the Skippy, buster, and get to it.”

  There was a knock at the door of the trailer and Golden looked up to see the smiling face of Ted Leo framed in the dusty glass panel. In his early sixties, Ted had a nearly full head of unnaturally chestnut hair and a chest-and-belly combination that jutted out over his belt like a threat: Clear the way or get dumped on your ass. On his fingers and wrists he wore the gaudy ornamentation of a once-poor man who now considered himself a person of means.

  Though Golden was grateful to Ted Leo for giving him a job when he most needed one, it was often hard to overlook the fact that the SOB and his unpredictable moods made his working days a misery. He had a brittle, childlike temper that showed itself at the most unlikely or trivial moments, and when he wasn’t angry, an overbearingly chummy style that made you nostalgic for the temper tantrums. He had once taken an eight-pound sledge and knocked down most of a framed-in wall because he wasn’t happy with a door placement, but when Golden once called him, hands trembling, to tell him their electrical contractor had fled the country under threat of arrest for statutory rape, delaying the whole project by at least a month, Ted Leo simply told Golden to take care of it, he had more important things to do.

  As Leonard had once observed, the only thing you knew you were going to get from Ted Leo was that you never knew what you were going to get from Ted Leo.

  A few days after Golden won the bid for PussyCat Manor II, Ted Leo had taken him on a driving tour of his many land and business holdings: the PussyCat Manor I; the local weekly, called The Valley Cryer, which was mostly letters to the editor, advertisements and brothel coupons; a small ranch that seemed to feature nothing but miniature horses; the Stop-n-Drop Truck Stop; a defunct copper mine that one day, Ted Leo claimed, would produce a fortune in gold.

  Ted Leo told Golden he had one last thing to show him, a secret, so long as Golden could keep a secret, wink wink. They took a vague dirt road heading north along the eastern boundary of the Nevada Test Site. The man driving was Ted Leo’s hulking henchman, an Arizona Papago named Nelson Norman. Golden, as a member of the relatively exclusive Fraternity of Very Large Men, welcomed Nelson as a brother and equal; though he had barely met the man and knew almost nothing about him, he was inclined to like anyone who knew what it was like to move through life so conspicuously. And Nelson was nothing if not conspicuous. With his expansive, neckless torso and powder-barrel legs, he had the bursting, overgrown quality of a prizewinning pumpkin. His head alone, topped with a neat black brush cut, must have weighed in at forty pounds, and Golden had to wonder, as they drove along the fence that stretched north and south into separate infinities, how Nelson ever managed, with those stubby dinosaur arms sticking out of his torso at a forty-five-degree angle, to button his own pants.

  Without warning, Nelson gave the steering wheel—which was partially buried in the cushion of his belly—a hard yank to the left and expertly surfed the big Chevy cross-country over swales of sand and rabbit brush. To Golden it felt very much like fighting through rough seas, and to keep the nausea at bay he focused on the picture of a little girl attached to a string of rosary beads and hung from the rearview mirror. She had a full head of glossy black hair and big liquid eyes so bright and full of wonder that to look into them gave him a warm ache in his throat.

  “Yours?” Golden asked over the roar of the engine, and Nelson nodded. “Marjorine. Three years old.” He glanced at the picture and Golden caught a split-second expression of intense fatherly pride that disappeared as quickly as it had come, replaced by the default mask of professional boredom.

  Nelson slowed a little to guide the truck down into a sand wash and then they were driving along the dry, rock-littered riverbed, bouncing against each other like dice in a cup, Ted Leo in the middle and taking the worst of it. They stopped when they came to the Test Site fence, a standard chain-link ten-footer topped with three rusted strands of barbed wire that spanned the steep banks of the arroyo just above their heads.

  Nelson rolled out of the cab to pull away piles of dead brush and they drove directly under the fence, the snipped-off ends of the wire screeking on the pickup’s roof, and proceeded up the wash for another mile or so. They climbed out of the wash onto a broken plain of creosote and biscuit-colored sand and walked a few hundred feet until Ted Leo gave the order to stop.

  “Isn’t this place restricted or top secret or something?” Golden said.

  “For some people,” Ted Leo said, checking his watch. “A patrol comes along that ridge every thirty minutes, so don’t get your undies tied up just yet. Years ago I did a tour here, back in my GI days, saw a good number of the big ones, you know, Hardtack, Dirty Harry, Upshot-Knothole. Got friends up and down the chain of command, and if they ain’t my friends, well, more likely than not they owe me a favor or two. So there’s nothing at all to worry about. Now.” He stepped back and gestured to the expanse of sand and brush that curved away toward every horizon. “See anything?”

&n
bsp; Golden made a show of looking around and said that he didn’t see anything of note.

  “Try again,” Ted Leo said.

  This time Golden made no effort to humor the man. “I’m not seeing anything.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Nothing. I don’t see anything.”

  “Give you a hint. Look under those pontoons you call your feet.”

  Golden looked down. Under his boots was nothing but the pebbly outer territories of a defunct anthill.

  Ted Leo accepted a shovel from Nelson, who had it at the ready like a bored nurse assisting a routine surgery. Ted Leo nudged Golden aside with his hip and began pushing sand around with the shovel. There was a scrape and a clink, and Ted Leo made a delicate eight-step ritual out of hitching up his avocado polyester golf slacks and lowering himself to his knees. With the reverential patience of a dedicated archaeologist he pushed and dusted and flicked away the crumbling clumps of sand until he had revealed a steel hatch door fitted with a crude latch-handle fashioned from one-inch rebar.

  Ted Leo offered to let Golden open it but Golden, sensing a practical joke, declined. Ted Leo yanked open the hatch with such a scripted flourish that Golden stepped back despite himself, but no paper streamers or joke-store snakes flew into the air, no one in a werewolf mask leapt out growling and waving his arms.

  Assuming something of a professorial air by elevating his diction and occasionally gesturing with a stick, Ted Leo explained what they were standing on was a buried test bunker, constructed of reinforced concrete and filled with animal subjects and scientific equipment meant to record the response of these animals to the shock waves and radiation of one nuclear test, dubbed Shot Priscilla (“Seven megatons of pure persuasion,” Ted said wistfully), detonated twenty years ago, exactly a thousand feet from this spot. “The blast collapsed the ventilation system and the dogs and all the other little critters they had in here suffocated, bless their souls. The average person like yourself looks out across this landscape and sees nothing, but underneath our feet are miles and miles of bunkers and shelters and tunnels and elevator shafts, depots and storehouses and control centers. It’ll put a chill down your spine to see it all, to know it’s there, like something out of a science fiction movie. Most of it never to be used or seen again, like this one here.”

  Golden gestured to the hole. “What’s down there now?”

  Ted Leo accepted the flashlight that Nelson had been patiently holding in his pillowy fist.

  “Why don’t you take a look yourself?”

  Choosing not to reveal himself as an unredeemable pansy, Golden edged toward the mouth of the bunker and caught a whiff of its cold, iron-tainted breath. In the beam of his flashlight he couldn’t make out much more than a mass of hanging wire that threw writhing shadows against a concrete wall covered with faint equations and cryptic instructions scribbled in oil pencil.

  “Boo!” shouted Ted Leo, giving Golden a poke in the behind with his stick. Golden jumped as if something had bitten him. Ted Leo roared with laughter and looked back at Nelson to gauge what he thought of this wonderful bit of leg-pulling; if his expression was any guide, Nelson thought nothing of it at all.

  Golden forced a smile, to show what a good sport he was. “Looks like lots of wire in there.”

  “Pretty much, and some leftover equipment, plus the mortal remains of those dogs and rabbits and whatnot. The shitbird scientists—I don’t think I have to tell you how little respect I have for scientists—decided their little tests were compromised, so they salvaged the expensive equipment and had the rest buried. Tidy up, move on to the next fiasco and forget about it, that’s how your tax dollars work around here. Or maybe you folks don’t pay taxes, I don’t know. Anyhow, as far as the brass here is concerned, this little mass grave no longer exists.”

  Golden nodded with somber understanding even though he had no earthly idea why they were out here or what Ted Leo was trying to tell him. Ted Leo, who claimed to have once been a devout Christian and a minister of the word, believed in the power of parable, of the well-illustrated metaphor. He was always trying to send a message of some kind or another—he wouldn’t have wasted his valuable time driving Golden out here just to give him a history lesson—and Golden decided it would be best just to wait it out and hope he spotted the message when it decided to show itself.

  “Sad,” Golden said. “A real shame.”

  “No it isn’t,” Ted Leo said. “Not for me. Of all the real estate I own or will own in the future, this might prove to be the most valuable. Because I’m the only one—besides you and big boy here, and maybe a couple a guys who mustered out years ago and forgot about it—who know it’s here. You with me now?”

  Now Golden was really starting to get confused. He said, “Sure. I see what you mean.”

  “See, if a place is secret, if you’re the only one knows about it, doesn’t that place belong to you? It’s yours, you can do with it whatever you want, you can put anything you want in it, and nobody will ever know. Poof, disappeared, like something on The Twilight Zone. Bugsy Siegel? Would have given his little Jewish soul for a place like this. No more dumping bodies out under a bush for some hunter or forest ranger to find. This place right here is a Mafioso’s wet dream.”

  Golden said, “Bugsy Siegel?”

  Ted Leo gave Golden a hard look. “You telling me you don’t know who Bugsy Siegel is.”

  Golden shook is head.

  “Bugsy Siegel. The man who built Las Vegas.”

  “Sorry,” Golden said.

  “Lefty Rosenthal, heard of him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anthony ‘The Ant’ Spilotro? The Fischetti brothers?”

  Golden could see that Ted Leo was starting to get worked up; this time he just shrugged.

  “Amazing!” Ted Leo cried. “Your own father, I saw with my own eyes, had dinner one night with Lefty at the Bellagio. I would have given my own left fucking arm to have a sit-down with Lefty Rosenthal, but who was I? Just another little guy, dreaming what it would be like to be a big shot like your old man. Your own father, you see what I’m saying, having words with Lefty Rosenthal, one of the greats. And you don’t even know who any of these people are.”

  “My father never talked about that kind of thing.”

  “Even so!” Ted Leo was fairly shouting now. “How can you not know who Bugsy fucking Siegel was? How! You people just sit around reading your funny Mormon Bible, is that what you do?”

  Golden shrugged again. Short of jumping into the hole at his feet, he couldn’t figure out how to make himself less of a target.

  “Didn’t your father teach you anything?”

  “Not really.”

  This answer seemed to please Ted Leo, at least. He looked at the bunker hole and sighed. “Dear Jesus. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that for somebody like Bugsy or Lefty or Frank, a place like this would be invaluable, see what I mean?” He squatted, still shaking his head, and patted the steel hatch with a kind of wistful fondness. “Nobody could find anything here, because there’s no here here, see? Nothing to find. You’ve got enemies, a place like this could come in handy.”

  He gave Golden a long steady look, waiting to see if his message was having the intended effect. Golden thought about it and said, “I’m not your enemy, Mr. Leo.”

  “Course not!” said Ted Leo brightly. “But things change, we both know that, Brother Richards. And we both know that we have to do everything to protect what is ours. The world, especially this part of it, is full of cheats and liars. And that’s why I chose you to build my palace. I believe you’re a person who, in his own nutty little way, believes in God and doing right by his fellow man. I believe we’re two of the same kind. I believe I can trust you.”

  Golden Richards, as a general contractor, had had many strange dealings with his clients: he had been sued and countersued, he had been bribed and stiffed and conned, he had been asked to accept a flea-bitten male lion in exchange for a three-th
ousand-dollar debt, but nobody had ever threatened, even in the most oblique way, to murder him and hide his body in a secret nuclear testing bunker full of dead animals if he didn’t mind his manners. He wondered if there weren’t already one or two unfortunates interred with the dogs and rabbits somewhere under his feet. If he weren’t so desperate for work, he might have thought twice about working for a man like this.

  “You’ll have nothing to worry about, Mr. Leo,” Golden said.

  “I know, Brother Richards. Why do you think I brought you out here?”

  A LOVELY EVENING

  So while Golden was on the phone with Nola getting tips on gum removal, Ted Leo was sticking his head inside the work trailer, shouting, “Brother Richards!” in his croaking voice. Ted Leo had promised from the beginning he wouldn’t mention Golden’s secret lifestyle to anyone, but yelling “Brother Richards!” every time he saw him did not seem like the height of discretion.

  Golden motioned him in, told Nola that he’d call her back, and hung up. Ted Leo made himself comfortable on the dusty love seat across from Golden’s desk, picked up a roll of blueprints, looked at them upside down before tossing them aside. He wore a yellow guayabera, beige gabardine pants and polished Top-Siders that matched his artificially chestnut hair with their otherworldly shine.

  “Looks like you’ve got somebody working out there, at least,” he said. “With all the mess and equipment you’d think we were trying to rebuild the Colosseum.”

  The man was in as good a mood as he’d ever seen him, but Golden knew to keep his guard up; Ted Leo’s good moods, he knew from experience, could go south very quickly.

  “You can see we’re getting there, Mr. Leo,” Golden said. “We’ve got the new trusses in, and Ratlett is sending a crew back to fix the window casings I was telling you—”

  “Brother Richards,” Ted Leo said, holding up both hands as if to stop an oncoming car, “let’s forget the professional talk for a minute, which we’ll get to soon enough. Do you know why I’m here?”

  Golden said that he didn’t.