The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  Though Golden was famished now, he didn’t want to disturb the carefully presented food. He nudged a slice of cantaloupe off its plate, nibbled at it in a way he thought might be appropriate. He tried not to yank at his wool trousers, which were making his thighs itch. The sun was in his eyes. He could hear bees buzzing in the grass. He was married now, to a woman he hardly knew, and he was at a loss for words.

  He tried again to situate himself comfortably on the cloth, but ended up in an awkward position with his elbow underneath his ribs and one leg bent at an odd and revealing angle. He groaned a little, rolled sideways; he wasn’t sure how one was supposed to recline on a picnic blanket while wearing a suit.

  “So what do you think?” Beverly asked him. “About how everything has gone?”

  “I don’t know.” His answer came out so quickly she looked startled.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I wish I did. I haven’t had time to think about it. Sorry.” He involuntarily sang out this last word.

  As if to shut him up, she began to feed him. To Golden, this seemed an immensely charitable gesture. She put half a strawberry in his mouth, a wedge of tangerine. As far as he could remember, he had never been hand-fed by anyone, and he was surprised by how pleasurable it was. He was even more surprised by the way Beverly knee-walked her way behind him, peeled his jacket down his arms and began to knead his shoulders and neck. Golden was a deeply virginal human being, one whose first kiss came at the age of twenty with a woman he was already engaged to, one who was so ignorant of sex in general, and his own body specifically, that he had never once masturbated to a successful conclusion, despite several valiant attempts. But even he could tell there was something sexual going on here. He had assumed they would consummate their marriage—he imagined something solemn and brief, like the wedding ceremony he’d just been a part of—in the Polar Bear Inn in Page, Arizona, where they would stay on the first night of their honeymoon trip to the Grand Canyon, but the thought of doing it here, right now on this blanket under the beautiful sky, suddenly seemed like an excellent idea.

  Beverly was so busy with her ministrations, and Golden so busy receiving them, they didn’t notice the smudge of dark cloud that rose slowly over the tops of the trees from the west and began seeping across the pure expanse of sky like an oil slick.

  GROUND ZERO

  Exactly two hours and twenty minutes earlier, two hundred thirty miles to the west, a bomb named Roy had waited for the radio signal that would bring it to glorious fruition. Roy was an atomic bomb, a seventy-kiloton device five times more powerful than the sorry little firecracker that obliterated Hiroshima. He waited in a corrugated steel cab at the top of a heavily lighted four-hundred-foot tower that looked, in the predawn dark, as cheery as a Christmas tree.

  Cradled in a nest of multicolored wires and encased in an aluminum shell about the size of a washtub, Roy hummed expectantly. In those last moments the surrounding desert was hushed except for the plaintive squeal of a young male guinea pig—one of fifty stuffed into small mesh tubes and placed at measured intervals around the tower. The one making the racket had good reason to complain; not only had it been hauled out of its cage and stuffed headfirst into a mesh tube without its customary breakfast, it was the closest of its brethren to Roy, close enough to hear the insistent and deadly hum.

  Over loudspeakers, a droning countdown. Far away, in the blastproof control complex, a series of levers were thrown, a button pushed, and from the tower came a mundane mechanical click—and silence. Inside that silence grew a strobing fluorescence that infused the broken landscape with a soft lavender glow, and then came the great shearing flash, a light so wildly bright and alien it seemed not like light at all but something from deepest space: a cold, brute element, the birth-matter of stars, the silvery essence of every created thing. Soundlessly the glare expanded, lighting up the desert horizon to horizon in a single stark exposure, and in the same instant collapsing on itself, breaking up into a billion needles of light blown outward by a concussion that punched a hole in the atmosphere and shifted the plates of the earth.

  The detonation tower was vaporized instantly, leaving a ghost image of itself standing like a three-dimensional shadow inside the roiling smoke. Everything within a quarter mile of ground zero: a fleet of obsolete tanks; several domed concrete bunkers inhabited by dogs bought from an animal shelter for a dollar apiece (a sedated German shepherd bristling with shunts and wires, a mutt chained in a tub of salt water, a whining Beagle suffocating inside a gas mask); various smiling dummies crucified on poles and postured behind the wheels of ammunition transport vehicles; a half-mile-long train trestle built for the occasion; twelve rabbits entombed in an experimental lead box; a World War II submarine half buried in the sand; and, of course, unlucky guinea pig number one—all ceased to exist in that single bright moment, leaving behind only their anonymous particles sucked up, along with thousands of tons of superheated sand, into a corkscrewing vortex that hung like a tail from the ascending fireball.

  A drone carrying a capuchin monkey named Alice and a dozen white mice flew too low into the boiling cloud and was flash-burned in a cartoon puff of smoke.

  The scientists, miles away behind bombproof glass, knew immediately they had severely miscalculated; Roy was more awful, more viciously destructive than any of their most liberal predictions. They didn’t cheer—they were scientists—but one of them called out, “Raises all around!” and another stepped behind a file cabinet and did a weird little feet-shuffling dance.

  On the desert floor halfway between Roy and the scientists who’d made him, sixty soldiers hunkered down in a trench, bent at the waist like supplicants. They had been instructed to hold blast position for ten seconds after detonation—down on one knee, head bowed, right arm hooked tight across the eyes—but a private, a young Lithuanian boy from Scranton with a pronounced widow’s peak, would submit himself to none of this bullshit. His life had been fuck-all since day one and he had no reason to believe it would get any better; he had no plans, no future, only ugly memories, regrets. He decided that now was as good a time as any to stand up and look eternity in the eye.

  While the other men were hunched against the embankment, muttering prayers or elbowing each other like boys in church, the young private stood up out of the trench at the moment of detonation and took it all in: the flash, the fireball, the great luminous X-ray that expanded like a bubble from a child’s wand and showed him his own bones glowing red, the storm of beta particles and emancipated neutrons and other cosmic debris that passed through him as if he were made of vapor. The radiation was a warm, blessed bath, cleansing him so deeply, down to the marrow of his glowing bones, that he thought he might weep: this lovely, helpless euphoria, the warm light, his genitals tingling pleasantly, his heart, so full, stalling in midcontraction—and then the shock wave hit. He had been so enchanted by the healing light, the vision of the rising cloud surrounded by a halo of fire—Terrible and Magnificent Roy!—that he hadn’t noticed the desert floor tilting toward him in a buckling wave, spitting up rocks and dust as it came.

  He was upended, the jolt starting his heart again. A wall of compressed air slammed him in the back as he fell and pressed him face first into the ground while sand and debris rained down in torrents. He heard screaming, and then a roar that obliterated everything, and he believed, hoped, he was dying.

  When he came to he was in pain; his balls ached, his skin tightened with a prickly heat. His head rang. He tried to move and came to find he was partially buried under a drift of hot dust and cinders. He pushed himself up to his feet, swaying, knuckling his eyes. He blinked, and the fear that had eluded him a few seconds earlier gripped him tight. The desert was ablaze: thousands of acres of Joshua trees, creosote and mesquite bushes lit like candles floating on a dark sea. He saw three individual flames moving slowly up a distant hill, but he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. His eyes were fine; what he saw was a coyote and her two yearling pups stumbl
ing up a ridge, their backs on fire.

  Even with his ears plugged with dirt, he could hear an inhuman wailing from somewhere close by.

  What a terrible person he’d been, what a truly sorry life he’d led. He resolved right then: he would be a better man, he would clean up his act, no more boozing and brawling, no more cheap whores. Oh, how his balls hurt! If he’d known any prayers, he would have said one and he would have meant every word.

  Behind him his comrades were picking themselves up, coughing and spitting the taste of burnt metal from their mouths. Someone next to him was sobbing or vomiting. Above their heads the cloud rose steadily on a blue raft of ionized air, the sky behind it billowing like a black curtain. What had seemed so beautiful a few minutes before now struck the private as vile, even wicked: a monstrous Portuguese man-of-war suspended against the dark sky, waiting to sting.

  The sergeant stood in front of them, his eyes wild, shouting incoherently. The private didn’t have to hear well to know what the sergeant was saying: he was telling them to get their squad lines ready, they were moving out. They were to speed-march to ground zero and secure it. These were their orders. The private quailed at the thought, but he was one of the first to line up; from here on he was going to be the type of man who obeyed all orders, who lived by the rules.

  “Stop your fucking blubbering and move out!” the sergeant cried. The sergeant was bleeding from both nostrils, which nobody volunteered to mention.

  They looked out across the scorched expanse in front of them. The desert sand had melted into a glassy green crust that glinted dimly with firelight. If only they could have looked into that dark glass and seen their own futures: sterility, neuromuscular degeneration, paralysis, depression, cancer of brain and bone, the thousand indignities of prolonged suffering, their deaths, much too soon.

  Ignorant as they were, they hesitated. The sergeant ordered them onward and they stepped gingerly, as if out onto a frozen pond, wincing at the delicate cracking noise.

  A LONE GIRL

  Roy, meanwhile, was just getting started. The crest of his robust cloud, still lit from within by pink and amber nuclear fires, had ascended to thirty thousand feet—five and a half miles—into the atmosphere. He moved quickly west across the lunar hills of the great desert, borne aloft by warm air currents, spreading in slow-bloom like a drop of ink in tap water, blocking out the light of dawn. Over the flat-pan playas and crumbling cinder cones burning orange with the new sun, the cloud flattened out as it butted against a rogue crosswind that sent it diving into the canyons and sand washes where wiry free-range cattle smelled something foul on the air and went bucking crazily into the brush. Over Ely and Buck Valley, across the broad Lincoln County Range laced with its ancient, wandering game trails that had been appropriated by humans and their livestock, ever-deepening grooves that crisscrossed the surface of the land like the creases in the palm of an old sheepherder’s hand.

  Walking one of these trails on her way home was a lone girl, nearly lost in the expanse of empty landscape: Nola Harrison, fifteen years old, cold, thirsty, sick with fear and guilt. Nola was a good girl, but last night she had decided to be bad. Everett Eckles had invited her to drive out to Snow Pass to watch the bomb go off. A secret, he’d whispered to her after seminary study, just you and me. It’s going to be a big one.

  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, whic
h 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.