The Lonely Polygamist (54 page)

In their shadowed bedroom that smelled of stale sunshine, she looked up at him, eyes glimmering with an eerie vulnerability that made the bottom drop out of his stomach. She said, her voice airy and slight, “He’s gone?”

Golden nodded. “He’s not coming back.”

“He told you, didn’t he. About me.”

Golden considered denying it—denial was his best and dearest friend these days—but this was a lie he knew he could not carry off just now; his own face, he was sure, had already revealed everything. “He told me, but Bev, listen to me, I don’t care. I’m sure he told you what I’ve been doing—what I’ve been building this whole time.”

Beverly shook her head. At the moment, Golden and his petty indiscretions weren’t really registering with her. And while he should have felt some relief for this, as well as for the fact that Ted Leo had not revealed anything about Huila, what he was experiencing was a strange, lurching sense of vertigo. He had been relying for so long on Beverly as the only immediate source of stability in his life that seeing her like this—diminished and uncertain, ambushed by a past she thought she’d left forever—gave him the sense that there was nothing solid under his feet. Even in the midst of everything, he’d been operating, as he had for years, under a single, standing assumption: that if all else failed—and it probably would—Beverly would be there to save him. He would go to her and confess everything, prostrate himself before her and plead for mercy. Either she would go Old Testament on him, kick him out, banish him to someplace far away and unpleasant, or, as she had done any number of times before, she would swallow her anger and deep disappointment in him long enough to take care of everything. And then she would hold it over him for the rest of his living days.

He tried to sit, realized there was in fact nothing underneath him, and at the last moment shifted his weight to the side so that his wide behind landed with a
humpf
on the corner of the bed.

“Bev, don’t worry about it, please, it doesn’t matter, I myself, I’ve done some things—”

In a thin, toneless voice that seemed to belong to another person, she told him she had worked in “that place” only a few months. Her Uncle Victor had been injured working construction under the table, and to buy groceries and pay off his medical bills she had, in her desperation, gone for the quick money.

“Before that I’d always been a good girl,” she said. “Mass every Sunday, daily rosary, all of it, but I was stupid. I thought I could cheat God, get us out of debt and then make it all disappear with confession and a few Hail Marys. But it was the worst thing…” Here she trailed off, her gaze falling to the floor. “And your father was the one who got me out of there. After Uncle passed I had nowhere else to go.”

“No, please, you don’t have to explain a thing,” he said, desperate not to hear any more. Certainly there was a part of him that wanted to hear it all, every detail, to make a list of each man she’d been with—Ted Leo included—so he could track the bastards down and smother them in their sleep. And no, the irony of such a feeling at this moment in his life was not entirely lost on him. But mostly he stopped her because he didn’t want to be responsible, didn’t want to pity or second-guess her, didn’t want the burden of her secrets and sins to be added to his own. It was selfish, of course it was, but then so were most all his thoughts and choices these days. Besides, he knew the rest of Beverly’s story, because it was his story too. His father, with his money and influence and irresistible gonzo charisma, had saved her. He had invited her out to Virgin, where she would be offered a great gift: the chance to walk away from her previous life forever, to toss aside her stained and tattered self as if it were nothing more than an old sock meant for the rag box, to be cleansed and redeemed, to be chosen as one of God’s special few.

“You don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” he said, worrying a loose thread on the hand-stitched bedcover with his big fingers. Unable to resist the urge to make his own confession, to relieve the pressure on his conscience just a little, he added, “I’ve been doing some things, you know, that I’m not so proud of lately.”

At this, she looked up at him. “You were building one, not
working
in one.” And he was heartened by the bit of steel that had come back into her voice. But it was only temporary. She coughed twice into her fist and seemed to go a shade paler. She whispered, “I’m sorry,” and he said, “No. I don’t care. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

She sighed. “It should.”

“Then it does,” he said. “But I still love you.” It felt good to say this—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d made such a claim—eight, ten years ago, probably, before he knew any better. And it came to him that something peculiar was going on:
I love you
. What could have possessed him, especially during these uncertain times, to utter such potentially destabilizing words to three of his wives in as many days?

She did not respond, but seemed to relax a little, her shoulders dropping an inch or two. She would not look at him now. He noticed, as if for the first time, the mole under her left ear, the trace of down along the hinge of her jaw. She was the most familiar person in the world to him and therefore had always been that much harder to see.

Slowly she began removing the hardware from her hair, clips and barrettes and chopsticks and pins, placing each implement carefully on the top of the bureau, her springy iron-gray locks loosening, then falling around her face. She said, “I think I need to lie down for a while,” and while Golden could not remember Beverly ever having taken a midafternoon siesta as long as he’d known her, he said,
Yes, of course, I’ll take the children so you can have some quiet
. Unsteadily she rose to her feet. He stood and offered his hand and then she did an amazing thing: she accepted it. She grasped his wrist and leaned in to him, letting her weight rest against his, and for just a moment, before she pushed away, it felt very much as though he were holding her up.

F
ROM THE BUS STOP HE HUFFED ALL THE WAY HOME, DID ALL HIS
chores as fast as he could, and wandered into the kitchen swaying around like somebody with a bad case of cancerous malaria. He had to do a little sick-person moaning and bump into a chair for Aunt Beverly, who was standing at the sink coughing, to notice him. She asked him if he was all right and he licked his lips and said in a weak prisoner-of-war voice that he couldn’t hear her very well, that everything sounded far away. She touched his forehead, which was hot and sweaty because after chores he’d done like a hundred jumping jacks behind the chicken coop until it felt like he would faint or his arms would fly off his body into the weeds.

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.