The Lonely Polygamist (32 page)

Afterward, they would venture out into the deadly apocalyptic wasteland, everything black and smoking and burnt to a crisp, and Rusty would say, “It’s really sort of beautiful in its own way, don’t you think?” and Aunt Trish would squeeze his hand, which was her secret way of agreeing with him. They would visit Old House and Big House and the Duplex, which were all just piles of ashes now, and Rusty would bow his head and say, “Such a terrible shame,” and they would all nod their heads and take a moment of silence and then go back to the bomb shelter and play Monopoly and drink alcoholic beverages until way after bedtime, because what did rules matter now, anyway? After a few days, when Aunt Trish had gotten over her daughter and everybody else getting blown to bits, she and Rusty would take off their clothes until they were nude and start doing some serious kissing and maybe even sexual relations in their own private section of the bomb shelter, because they loved each other and then there was the survival of the human race to think about, wasn’t there?

He took the book from the waistband of his jeans and held it out to his mother. “It’s a present. For you. I didn’t have time to wrap it, but I got it special, it was hard to get, but I wanted to give you a present, because you never get good presents.” He wiped the book on his jeans because his hands had gotten it all sweaty.

“I know you’re upset—” his mother started to say, but he held the book out to her so she had to take it. She put it right up to her nose to see it in the dark and when she read the title and got a good look at the cover, she said, “Where did you get this?” Her voice was suddenly all high and crazy. “Why did you give this to me?”

Something had happened to his mother’s face. Her eyes were black and shining and her lips shook. He took a step back. He raised his arm to point at the closet, let it drop back against his side. “It’s a present?” he said. “I got it for you.”

“You take this,” she said, waving it at him. She wouldn’t look at him now. “You get it out of here. You’re not supposed to be here. You want me to call your father? You want me to tell Aunt Beverly?”

His face stung and his throat closed up. He swallowed and tried not to cry, but it was already coming. What a gyp! He started to do the hiccup thing where he could hardly breathe. “I’m not,
uh…uh…uh…taking
it,” he cried, shuddering and gulping. “It’s not
fair.
” He was really bawling now. Trying to stop only made it worse, and he started making the snorking sound every two seconds and going
uh-huck uh-huck uh-huck
. Why was he such a big effing bawlgut? Why did he have so much spit in his mouth?

“Please, Rusty, please,” his mother said. “I don’t want you to get into more trouble.”

“It’s a
present
!” he choked.

“Don’t,” she said. “Please.”

He said, “It’s my special
birthday
!” but it sounded more like somebody gargling a bucket of spit.

She put her head back on the pillow. “I can’t anymore.”

He backed up to the doorway. He waited, but she didn’t say anything. “It’s me, Rusty,” he said. “The deputy marshal?”

He waited, but she was quiet. “Mama?”

“Okay,” she said, as if she’d just been woken up. “I’ll see you…soon.”

He stood in the doorway and waited some more but she had put the earmuffs back on and closed her eyes. He let the door shut and looked at it for a while. He sniffed, he gulped, he went,
uh-huck, uh-huck
.

He stopped crying when he thought he heard his mother say something, but it was only Aunt Nola downstairs yelling at somebody. He put
To Love a Scoundrel
down his pants. He went down the hall, past Herschel, who was still holding his invisible dollar, down the stairs and past the clicking dryers and then he was outside and on his bike and pedaling like a madman, but at the place where the driveway met the road he stopped. He looked around. There was nowhere for him to go.

I
T ALL STARTED ON A SWEET SUMMER DAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE
twentieth century, a perfect day for a picnic. The unblemished sky, the stand of fragrant ponderosas stirred by a mountain breeze as warm and steady as an oceanic current. The day was perfect, and so was the picnic, which Beverly had planned to the last detail: a broad gingham cloth spread with cinnamon bread, fresh-squeezed orange juice from a thermos, croissants, sugared ham, slices of melon, a few wilting sunflowers arranged in a porcelain vase. Golden in his silk tie and gabardine suit jacket, she in her tea-length gown of cream
peau de soie
. The whole thing a vision, a scene from a movie, just as she had always wanted.

They had been married less than an hour. Down the mountain, in a small opening in a stand of old ponderosas, a piece of black basalt stone thrust up at an angle out of the pine needles, furry at the base with lichen, long and flat on top like a narrow table. According to the Prophet, this was a sacred place where Book of Mormon prophets had come to make their blood sacrifices and hold counsel with the Lord. Though it was a rough forty-minute drive from Virgin, this was where many of the binding church ceremonies were held, and despite the bullet-riddled
NO HUNTING
sign that had come to look like an antique cheese grater, the place felt as hushed and spiritual as any chapel built by human hands.

The ceremony had been simple: in his guttural, failing voice, the Prophet had instructed the couple to hold hands, facing each other across the stone, which he called the altar. Then he pushed himself up out of his wheelchair, Uncle Chick at his side, and found a sturdy spot in the dirt with his cane. His body trembled like a tuning fork, lightly and without cease. He proclaimed his authority, granted by the ancient priesthood of Melchizedek that stretched back to Moses and Adam. It was just after dawn, and sunlight came through the trees in broad, dusty bands. As he pronounced them man and wife, almost growling with the effort of it, Beverly stared hard into Golden’s eyes, as if daring him to blink. He smiled apologetically, sighed, and blinked several times in succession. His face, stark in the morning light, was the picture of terror.

There was no ring, no vows. It was over before it began.

For a fundamentalist wedding, it had been a sparsely attended affair: Uncle Chick and the Prophet and a few chosen church members who’d been coerced to make the drive. Beverly had no family to speak of, and none of Golden’s had come. His father had passed away eight months earlier, and his mother, back in Louisiana, had no idea what was happening because he’d had the good sense not to mention it to her.

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 stumbling 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.