The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  Aunt Beverly didn’t even get suspicious. She gave him a cold washcloth to put on his forehead and said, “Why don’t you go rest up in your room,” and he climbed the stairs doing a version of the Honk Job, saying, yes, yes, yes, because he was Rusty the Guerrilla Fighter, and no one could stop him.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon up in the Tower building an Improvised Explosive Device. He did not have a cardboard tube, but found—improvised!—an old Wilson tennis ball can that would work fine. Just like June had shown him, he took his time, spreading out all his items together on the closet floor—Safety First!—and then dumped in the plastic baggie of Potassium Nitrate and canisters of Red and Green Flash Powder into the can, nodding like an extremely intelligent scientist amazed at his own scientific advancements, and then to top it off he dropped in the two blasting caps, why not, he was going the distance. He cut out a circle of cardboard, punched a hole in the middle, slipped the fuse through the hole, and capped the can, sealing it up with half a bottle of rubber cement. To make sure he was doing it right he checked Improvised Explosive and Incendiary Devices for the Guerrilla Fighter, which was filled with complicated diagrams for things like the Whistle Trap, the Bangalore Torpedo, the Magnifying Glass Bomb, and the Exploding Pen, all of which would one day come in handy for a guerrilla fighter such as himself but right now were really not all that helpful.

  In the section called “General Tips,” it said, Any glue can be useful to the guerrilla bomb-maker, but rubber cement, it must be said, is the bomb-maker’s best friend. Use liberally but care must be taken at all times, because of extreme flammability. Rusty liked that, extreme flammability. Just to be sure to achieve extreme flammability, he slobbed on another layer of rubber cement.

  That night he went without his supper. He stayed up in the Tower, pretending to be sick, because if he sat downstairs with all the a-holes at the dinner table he might not be able to keep himself from smiling, and for once in their pathetic lives they might use their tiny rodent brains to figure out what he was up to. He didn’t mind being hungry for one night because this was the end for him at Old House, he knew it, this was his last night in Alcatraz.

  One more time he let himself imagine the incredible BOOM, the shooting colored lights, the whole sky lighting up like the Fourth of July and World War III and New Year’s Eve put together, and everybody looking out the windows and running outside to see what the heck that was, and what would they find? You guessed it. His father the Sasquatch caught in the act, sneaking around the Spooner house hugging and holding hands with some black-haired lady who was very definitely not his wife.

  Which made him think of his own mother, he couldn’t help it, who was right now in a hospital surrounded by oldsters and lunatics, and here was his father walking around hugging some Mexican chick no one’s ever seen before? He tried not to think about that part of it, because it made his stomach twist.

  What a dickhead he’d been to think any of his other plans would work. Fighting Aunt Beverly or convincing his mother or Aunt Nola to let him come home would never work, who was he kidding. None of them, not even the all-powerful witchy-woman Aunt Beverly, could change anything, not really. His father was the only one. It was his father who had the power, who connected them all. You take his father out of the picture by showing everyone what a cheater and a liar he is? No more family. It was simple. You take away his father? No more monkey net.

  He should have understood this because it had already happened to the Sinkfoyle brothers. Their father got excommunicated for running around with some hippie lady who wasn’t even a Christian, and while everybody was saying, Oh, those poor Sinkfoyle children, oh, those poor Sinkfoyle wives, Chet and Dan, the redheaded Sinkfoyle brothers, were explaining to Rusty in Sunday School how effing great it was, how finally they got to live in their own house, have their own rooms and eat Corn Nuts and watch TV anytime they wanted because they were on their own now and their mother had other things on her mind. It’s the best! they said. We’re having the time of our dang lives! Sure, their new house was an old junky trailer out on the landfill road and their mother spent most of the day bawling into her pillow in her bedroom, but still.

  And so Rusty waited up in the Tower hungry and happy, imagining a new life in which he had his own room and better underwear, in which his mother would come home from the hospital to take care of him and his sisters and brothers because they needed her more than ever, and they would become a regular family, a family in which no one would make fun of him or call him names anymore because he was a hero who had exposed the truth and destroyed the monkey net, a family in which he would be tolerated and maybe even loved.

  So what the heck was taking everyone so long? It was forever before Parley and Nephi came upstairs to go to sleep, but not before they delivered a few more tampon jokes in his direction. Did Rusty go crazy and try to hit them, which was the usual thing, did Rusty get even the slightest bit mad? No, he just did some pleasant chuckling, saying, Good one, guys, because right now, on this special night, he was filled with kind thoughts toward all creatures of the earth, even Nephi and Parley, especially now that he knew he wouldn’t be seeing much of them anymore.

  When the house was quiet, when Nephi began to wheeze and Parley started releasing his putt-putt-putt sleep-farts into the atmosphere, Rusty took his place at the window. He sat there for a long time. He sat there and sat there and sat there and did not look away once, and after what seemed like hours his head got heavy and he sometimes didn’t know if his eyes were opened or closed, and then there was the crackle sound of his father’s pickup pulling into the driveway with its headlights off and suddenly his eyes were wide open watching Sasquatch climb guiltily out of the truck and sneak off toward the Spooners’.

  From his top-secret location he retrieved a book of matches and his Improvised Explosive Device, which looked like a giant yellow firecracker. Down the stairs he went, out the window, and across the roof, softly calling, Geronimo! as he jumped off the garage, and then he was running barefoot down the driveway going, Ouch! Ouch! Crap! Ouch! because once again he’d forgotten his shoes.

  When he got to the Spooner driveway he began to creep like an Apache who was one with the night, taking the form of fence posts and dead shrubs and breathing only when he couldn’t stand holding his breath anymore. He was like the wind, but not like the wind at all because the wind makes noise and he wasn’t making any, you should have seen him, nobody in the history of the world had ever walked with such perfect silence.

  He listened from the window at the side of the house and thought he could hear voices. He crawled behind the big air-conditioning unit to wait. It didn’t take long. The back screen door whined and when he could hear footsteps and whispering and they were walking around the other side of the house just like he knew they would, he took out his matchbook, got ready to light the fuse, but then there was a banging noise and Raymond was up against the gate of his pen, huffing and stomping his feet, staring at Rusty with those big yellow eyes.

  Shhhh! Raymond! he whisper-shouted as loud as he dared. Raymond! Stop it, dang it! Raymond! But Raymond didn’t listen, Raymond never listened to anyone, and now he was going crazy, butting the gate with his chest, and at any moment Sasquatch and the dark-haired lady would be coming around the house to see what was going on, so he lit the fuse, watched it burn for a minute, throwing off sparks so bright he could feel the heat of them on his neck, and then he ran out into the open and set the Improvised Explosive Device on the dirt next to the back steps and it was going to be so sweet, so very very sweet to see the look on Sasquatch’s face when night turned to day and sudden supernatural thunder woke up everyone in Old House and worlds would collide and secrets would be revealed and life on earth would never be the same again.

  He was creeping back to hide behind the air-conditioning unit with his hands over his ears when something fell on him from the sky. Or that’s what it felt like, anyway. He hit the dirt, rolled over and saw feathers floating
in the air above him and he realized it was Raymond, that idiot, who had jumped the gate and run over him, but he was not even hurt, he had survived, Raymond had just knocked him down and was now all tangled in the Spooner clothesline, flapping his wings and going, urk, urk, urk, which served him right. Rusty looked over at his Improvised Explosive Device, which should have gone off by now, but it just sat there, a little curl of smoke coming out of the top, and he ran to pick it up before Raymond untangled himself and attacked again. He was looking into the tiny black hole where the fuse had disappeared, wondering what had happened, what a gyp, dang it what a big freaking gyp! thinking how dark that hole was, how it seemed to be growing bigger and blacker, when his eyes filled with a white wall of light and inside his head bloomed huge flowers of fire that shot off red screaming meteors and fiery atoms exploding into green stars and shimmering sparkles of gold and blue and oh holy dear sweet jesus lord god it was so beautiful and bright and loud it was everything he could have ever hoped for.

  38.

  SOMEONE NOT LIKE HIM

  ONLY LATER WOULD GOLDEN REMEMBER MANY OF THE DETAILS. DURING the weeks and months afterward they would come to him at unexpected moments—in the middle of a conversation or the half sleep of early morning—bits of memory and disconnected sensation, broken images creeping into the dark corridors of his mind through back entrances and trapdoors: the swirl of feathers, the flash of light like a splinter lodged in his eye, the vibrating moon, the cold water of the river shocking his hands, the smell of burning hair.

  It was the second night Huila had spent at the Spooner home. The first night they had both been too jittery to talk, to say or do anything in a coherent way, so they walked around the house holding hands and whispering awkward half phrases like AWOL teenagers sneaking around under a swollen moon. The second night, Golden decided, would be different. He planned to talk to her, really talk, to finally get down to business. They could not go on like this, he would tell her, trying hard to keep the whine out of his voice, he couldn’t take it anymore, it was that simple, something bad was going to happen, it was only a matter of time. Either they were going to go through with it, they were going to run away together, or they would have to face up to everything they had done, stop sneaking around and accept the consequences. So this was his plan: they would talk, in a very serious and adult way, and once and for all she would tell him what to do.

  They were walking around the west side of the house where Sister Spooner kept her collection of birdbaths, bird feeders, birdhouses and other bird-related paraphernalia, when Golden heard something. A metallic rattle, a low grunting. His throat seized and he put his arm in front of Huila to stop her. He imagined a shadowy figure waiting to ambush them, maybe more than one, maybe Todd Freebone or the stranger from across the street at the bank, or Ted Leo himself. He waited, listened, heard nothing more. He peeked around the corner of the house and what he saw confused him: a boy crouching over something in the dirt, and behind him the ostrich, out of its pen and bearing down on the unsuspecting child, its yellow eyes irate and shining.

  Golden stepped forward to shout, to try to intercept the bird or ward it off, and it was here that his memory would falter. Afterward, he wouldn’t remember hearing anything: one moment he was reaching out, about to shout, and then he was on his knees, clutching the side of his face, a burr of pain deep in his ear. He would not remember screaming at Huila to run, but later she would tell him that he had done exactly that. He would remember the spangles of colored light that dazzled his retinas—making it impossible for him to see clearly—and imagining that he had been shot or clubbed over the head or otherwise attacked. He scrambled to find the boy, blinking hard, but his left eye registered only hazy red starbursts and the right one didn’t seem to be working at all until he saw, through a pall of smoke, what he took to be a pile of garbage topped by a small guttering flame. It was very close, nearly at his feet, and he was about to step over it when he realized that it was the boy, that the boy’s head was on fire. He groaned—a sound of pain that came from somewhere very deep—and the next thing he knew he was running with the boy, who felt, gathered against his chest, like nothing more than a pile of smoldering rags.

  Later, one of the things that Golden would find hardest to forgive himself for was the fact that he didn’t know, as he stumbled toward the river, exactly who he was cradling in his arms. It was his child, he knew that much. He just didn’t know which one.

  Even after he’d doused the boy in the freezing water and gotten a look at his face, the top half of which was bloody and pitted beyond recognition, the skin charred, much of the hair on top of the head burned away, still he couldn’t tell, and he would later wonder if he simply didn’t want to know, if in its shocked state his mind had refused to speculate, to consider the names and possibilities, searching instead for some other, more acceptable outcome: that he was mistaken, that this was not his child at all but belonged to someone else entirely, someone stouthearted enough to withstand a blow such as this, someone wise and resolute and strong, a man of faith, a good father, someone not at all like him.

  INTO THE DARK

  Golden parked in the farthest corner of the PussyCat Manor parking lot, next to the dumpsters. The last time he was here, six or seven weeks ago—a period of time that now seemed like a span of years—he had claimed this very spot. It had been a sunny, clear morning, he remembered, and he had sat here slumped behind the wheel of his pickup, worrying, dithering, unable, as always, to come to a decision, wondering if he had the guts to walk though the brothel doors.

  Tonight it was dark, blustery, an hour or two before sunrise, and he did not dither. He climbed out of the cab and rummaged through the bed of the pickup, looking for his axe handle, the one he’d bought ten years ago, shortly after the episode with Ervil LeBaron in which he’d broken out Ervil’s taillights in front of the entire congregation and had become, briefly, a minor hero who some had already placed their bets on as the One Mighty and Strong, come to redeem the world and save them all. Heady days those had been, full of such hopes and expectations, and he hadn’t thought twice about acquiring his own personal axe handle, to keep in the bed of his pickup, just in case. Of course, he had known he was not the One Mighty and Strong, or anything close to it, but that didn’t stop him from driving over to Lamont Bros. Hardware and splurging on the deluxe model—a hickory Harvistall with a nice grain and heft to it—for the outlandish price of $5.99. He placed it in its special spot in the bed, right behind the rear window on the driver’s side, and in those nine intervening years had never picked it up again.

  It was still here in the truck somewhere, he was sure of it, probably buried under a pile of survey stakes or copper elbow joints. He cast around in the cumulus of broken tools and fast-food wrappers and snarls of baling wire, finally locating it by feel, snared in a tangle of a shorted-out extension cord. He held it up to the negligible light. It was nicked, dinged, weathered a splintery gray, and stained at the butt end with what looked to be spilled antifreeze, but it would do.

  Walking across the parking lot, he felt weirdly clear-headed, charged and alert, which made little sense considering the night he’d had so far. It had been only a few hours ago that the two volunteer firefighters, twin brothers Ronnie and Donnie Gundersall, showed up within minutes of Beverly’s emergency call, and with a deft competence belied by their scruffy facial hair and matching Lynyrd Skynyrd concert T-shirts, checked Rusty’s vital signs, loaded him into the makeshift county rescue van and, with a spinning of tires and scattering of gravel that may have been excessive under the circumstances, headed off for the hospital in St. George. Before they’d gone, Ronnie told Golden that the sheriff had been called and suggested Golden wait around to talk to him, but Golden wasn’t about to wait for anyone. He jumped into his pickup and, with Beverly and Nola in the station wagon not far behind, drove with his foot mashed on the gas, the only thought in his head that if he drove fast enough he might be able to beat Ronnie and Donnie to
the emergency room.

  At the hospital he was told Rusty was already being transferred to a Life Flight helicopter bound for University Medical in Las Vegas. Without waiting for his wives or speaking to anyone else, Golden got right back into his pickup and drove on, following I-15 through the winding gorges of Arizona and then across the moonlit desert plains of southern Nevada, his momentum stalled only by the old GMC’s aversion to uphill grades, and the interminable fleets of sixteen-wheelers that seemed to clog the highway this time of night. Entering the great bowl of light that was Las Vegas in search of a sign that would point him in the direction of University Medical, he became disoriented, driving through intersections and over medians like someone who had never seen a stoplight or executed a left-hand turn in traffic. On the dark, humming highway he had been on a kind of autopilot, some part of his mind insisting on nothing but motion and progress, but now that progress had stalled he felt himself unmoored, swamped under by the tide of light and human noise, and in one black moment the horror of what had happened rose up in him with such force he heaved forward against the steering wheel, knocking the air out of his lungs. The pickup coasted for another twenty feet, hopped against the curb and stalled. Golden evacuated the cab for the sidewalk and, in front of an audience of singularly unimpressed bar-hoppers and motorists, vomited onto the base of a towering desert palm.