The Lonely Polygamist (8 page)

L
ook closely and you’ll see: in this house there is trouble. There has been trouble here for a good many years, though you’d hardly know it by appearances. The children, rambunctious as always, scamper and gossip and play, the mothers busy themselves making dinner, and the father—where is he, anyway?—labors somewhere in the outer precincts of the backyard.

No, nothing obviously the matter. If you didn’t know any better you might think: domestic sweetness, familial bliss. But look a little closer, get right up close, and you can’t miss the off-kilter rituals, the sorrows nursed in isolation, the back-door transactions, the mini-dramas of dread and anxiety and longing. At this very second, for example, you’ll find Daughters #2 and #3 in an upstairs bedroom, hatching a plot of revenge on Daughter #5 for being a kiss-up and a tattletale and exposing their respective crushes on two of the best-looking boys in the valley, while Daughter #5 herself is curled up in her hiding place under the stairs, trying to stanch the most recent of her spontaneous nosebleeds, which she believes to be divine punishment for impure thoughts and questionable intentions, and because of which she has become a tattletale and Miss Goody Two Shoes in hopes of getting on God’s good side. In the woodshed you’ll find Son #4 weeping bitterly and eating his own earwax. In the front room is Daughter #10, right out there in the open, sitting alone on the lavender Queen Anne divan, talking openly, idly to her dead brother, Son X, while two of her living brothers, Sons #11 and #6, aim their homemade rubberband guns at the back of her head and count: one, two, three. And maybe, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice Mother #2 slipping into the hall bathroom the second it comes open to give her wig a quick adjustment and stuff her latest and rather unpredictable roll of stomach fat under the band of her pantyhose—she wants to look good for her man tonight!—and coming back into the kitchen, letting out that braying laugh with which she tries to hide large and complicated feelings.

The house, a gothic Victorian with a jagged roofline and a three-story tower fashioned from blond sandstone, makes proud display of its odd-shaped rooms and narrow hallways and tilting staircases—an architecture that, despite Mother #1’s every attempt to suppress such things, encourages factionalization and secrecy and disorder. Away from the warm bright center of the house where the mothers try to outdo each other in the kitchen, there is a shadow world of disputed territories and black-market economies, a shifting and complex geography of meeting places and neutral zones and sour little crevices and dusty pockets where children go to steal a few desperate moments of solitude.

Mother #1 has done everything she can to battle such chaos, to sniff out any hint of sloth or insurrection. Not that anyone cares or notices. Not that anyone expresses any gratitude at all for the way she endeavors daily to improve these children’s souls, to clean up their diction and straighten out their morals and impart to them an appreciation of their divine legacies, their celestial bloodlines. Not that anyone, including the adults who sometimes share the house, pays any attention to the dozens of placards she has made using her self-taught calligraphy skills, placards that feature suggestions, warnings, reminders, and admonishments placed in strategic locations around the house:

On the front door: Please Remove Shoes

Below the doorbell: Ringing Twice May Be Necessary

In the foyer: Please Place Shoes in Shoe Box—Neatly and Quietly

Above the foyer light switch: Turn Off Light When Not in Use

And so on as you make your way through the house. The upstairs bathroom, known as the Black Hole of Calcutta, requires eight placards all by itself:

On the door: Please Keep Locked When Occupied

And under that one, another: Please Respect the Privacy of Others

Under the toothbrush rack (which features nine toothbrushes lined in a neat row, each plastic handle bearing its owner’s name in the same Edwardian script): Remember: Use Only Your Toothbrush and Your Toothbrush Only

Next to the toilet paper holder: No More than Four Squares Per Use, No Fewer Than One

On the wall next to the tub, under a plastic blue egg timer on its own ceramic shelf: Showers Two Minutes Maximum

Above the toilet: Lid Down When Not in Use

And below that: Boys, Lift Seat When Making Water

And below that: Boys, AIM!!! Please and Thank You

At the top of the stairs on the wall of the landing there is a large black-and-white portrait of Brigham Young, his meaty face pressed into a frown of dire warning, as if to say: Don’t even think about it.

You cannot take five steps in this house without being reprimanded or corrected or warned, without being reminded that rules and laws are what separate us from the worst aspects of ourselves and are all we have to keep sin and ugliness and anarchy at bay—and that is exactly how Mother #1 would have it. No one in this house has any idea, but Mother #1 is well and personally acquainted with sin and ugliness and anarchy, and she has come to know that rules and commandments and laws, if you hold to them fast and believe in them with your whole heart, can save your life and maybe even your soul.

Likewise, no one in this house would have any idea that Mother #3 has her own inner life, small though it may be. Mother #3, more than anyone in the family, is easy to miss. She speaks, if she speaks, second or third or fourth. You can walk right past her, as her own children often do, without seeing or noticing a thing. One of the children, Daughter #11, has started a rumor that has been picking up steam among the under-seven segment of the domestic population, that Mother #3 is disappearing, fading in and out, flickering into nothing at inopportune and often comical moments, like a ghost in a black-and-white cartoon. For so long she has asked for nothing, required nothing, taken nothing, only given. It is the story of so many mothers in this small valley and, for that matter, in the larger world that she has heard so much about. It’s very simple: she has given too much, and now there is very little left of Mother #3.

From the kitchen she calls for someone to bring up some potatoes from the cellar but, as usual, no one pays her any mind. So she goes down herself, and comes upon the Three Stooges in their customary spot next to the old industrial boiler, practicing some native sport that seems to involve kicking each other repeatedly in the behind.
Boys,
she says, gathering the potatoes from the bin,
boys, boys.
But they go on as if she weren’t there, kicking, guffawing, groaning in mock or possibly real pain. The Three Stooges love each other dearly—anyone can see that—and they demonstrate it by slapping, tripping, and choking each other silly. They are inseparable, these three, except when they are separated, which is most of the time, when Stooges #1 and #3 go home to Big House, and leave Stooge #2 behind to pine after them, jealous of the life they share without him. Stooge #2 is a born worrier, and his worries tend to center on an uncertain future in which he and the other two stooges will be separated for good. He is only seven years old, but he knows about things like jobs and death and marriage, things that could steal him away from his brothers and them from him, and the thought of these things only makes him punch and kick and squeeze them harder, sometimes with such force he worries he might one day truly hurt them.

Upstairs in the kitchen Mother #3 hands Mother #4 a bowl of washed potatoes and wordlessly they begin to peel. After so many quiet nights spent in her small duplex, Mother #4 still marvels at the great wash of sound that never recedes, only falters for a moment and then rushes back like a stiff breeze coming off the sea. Even in the midst of all this commotion she knows none of it really belongs to her, and marvels at the strange fact of her dearest wish: to be part of it, to give in to its distractions, to find herself the owner of a life lived rather than a life endured. And then she looks into the face of Mother #3, worn smooth and almost featureless, with moist eyes that can’t settle on anything more than a heartbeat at a time, and she knows this is a very dangerous wish. She could so easily become Mother #3—or Mothers #2 and #1, for that matter!—and she wonders what it is she wants, exactly, what in heaven’s name has brought her here.

Mother #3 takes the peeled potatoes to the stove, leaving Mother #4 to look out the window at the broad gray shapes of dusk. Mother #4 can’t help it, she searches the backyard for any sign of her husband. She wants him to be out there in pooling dark, watching her. She wants him to know how lost she is.

Where, then, is this husband, exactly? You can be certain he is not paying any attention to the house. If he were, he’d see that in the dark it looks radioactive, full of careening particles, the chaos of warm bodies. He’d be more than a little threatened, and rightfully so, by so much heat and light.

At this moment the Father is hiding, as usual. His secret lair is the ground floor of the Doll House, a ramshackle two-story playhouse made of plywood and cedar shakes whose construction he abandoned three years ago after the death of Daughter #9. After the funeral he boarded up the windows, except for the small one that faces west, put a padlock on the tiny door, spray-painted several black
X’
s on the walls and ramparts, and condemned it, declared it off-limits, henceforth and forever.

When he’s at Old House and wants to be alone, which is most of the time, he sneaks out here (he keeps the key to the padlock on a retractable janitor’s key ring) and squats on a milk crate, his head occasionally bumping the splintery ceiling, his face framed by the small window that looks out across the river to the Spooner place. Often, he engages in a long-distance staring contest with an ostrich who patrols his territory with a haughty air, like a retired industrialist who has nothing left to do but admire all he owns. One day—and he has fantasized about this in great detail—he wouldn’t mind going over there and breaking the thing’s neck.

This spot, this is where he was sitting when it happened. He doesn’t know what he’s doing here now, doesn’t know if it’s self-punishment, or escape, or a refusal of time’s passage. Some part of him, he knows, will be sitting here all his life.

It used to be that when he was alone like this he talked to God: What am I supposed to do? Please tell me what to do. But since Daughter #9 has been taken from him he has kept his silence.

Now, in this secret place, he allows his mind to go wherever it wants. Tonight, for instance, he is thinking about tomorrow morning, how he will wake early when the house is asleep and load up his pickup and make the long drive to Nevada. He considers how easy it would be to blow right on by the Highway 19 exit to continue on toward someplace where the living is free and easy, where there is no one to please and the obligations are few. He knows he is capable of such a thing; he has done it once already, abandoned one life for another.

He has been engaged in this kind of thinking for many months now, but lately his thoughts have centered on a woman, a dark-skinned stranger, and somehow for him she has come to comprise—in her short, muscled legs and her braided hair and her bright laugh—his desire for release, his dreams of escape. He believes, in a way that he doesn’t fully understand, that she might be the one to save him.

Tonight, the darkness has swallowed everything except a bright wire of gold along the horizon. The Father watches the wire grow thinner and finer until it disappears, leaving behind a residue of lavender and blue. Very faintly, as if from some kinder and simpler time, the voices of his children rise out of the murky dusk, reminding him that there are things to do, that he has responsibilities of a certain kind, that he is, whether he likes it or not, the Father. The voices are louder now, calling for him to come in. He loves these children. He does, he loves them so much. He looks out the window. He stays a little while longer.

T
HE PUSSYCAT MANOR SAT JUST OFF STATE HIGHWAY 19, ITS TINY
patch of lawn a perfect, unnatural green in the middle of this high desert plain. The brothel was an old ranch house with three different mobile homes attached at odd angles, giving the structure the aspect of a train wreck’s aftermath. The sign out front—
PUSSYCAT MANOR—GIRLS GALORE
—featured an extremely curvy cartoon cat in lingerie stroking its own tail and purring in blinking pink neon:
PRRRRRRRR.
Eleven o’clock in the morning and the parking lot was two-thirds full.

Slumped down in the front seat of his pickup, parked in the back corner of the lot next to a pair of dumpsters, Golden watched customers of all stripes—sweating tourists, businessmen, a couple of pimple-faced Marines—come and go. He’d been sitting here half an hour, wiping the sweat from his brow, taking toots off his Afrin while Cooter snoozed peacefully against his thigh. “If you’re going to do it, do it,” Golden suggested to his reflection in the rearview mirror. “If you’re not, then get back to work.” Apparently, this bit of self-motivation did the trick. He waited until the coast was clear and hustled across the parking lot, wincing at the hard light and clutching at his thighs to keep his keys from jingling in his pockets.

The parlor of the PussyCat Manor, dim and cool as an underground chamber, smelled like cigarette smoke and money. The only true light came from a hanging lamp in the corner and the neon beer signs flickering over the bar. Everywhere you looked, there were half-dressed women: some lounging on the red velvet sofas, a couple standing in the faint glow of the jukebox, deliberating over the selections as if studying a sacred text, and one, a striking black girl with glitter in her afro, sitting at the white baby grand in the corner and tapping out “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” with one finger.

Golden walked through the door and all the women looked up at him. He blinked and turned to leave.

“Come back here, honey!” cried the black girl. “We ain’t gonna bite you, not less you pay us to!”

The other girls shrieked with laughter, and one of them intercepted him before he could make it outside. “Come on, why don’t you give yourself a minute,” she said. “We’re all very nice and you can take your time deciding.” She was a rosy-faced blond girl wearing a pink kimono open to her navel.

Golden took a breath. “I’m not. It isn’t. I don’t have anything to decide.” Defeated, and knowing he would be unable to make himself any clearer than that, he chose a spot on her forehead and stared at it with conviction so as not to risk a glance at her cleavage.

She took him by the elbow and guided him toward a hallway whose entryway was hung with strings of clicking glass beads. They passed through the beads, which raked at Golden’s hair and slithered across the bridge of his nose and around his shoulders. With her hand on his arm like that and those breasts swaying at the edge of his vision, he would follow her anywhere.

Finally, at the end of the hallway, after passing a series of doors from behind which came all manner of odd and startling human noises whose nature he didn’t care to speculate on, Golden was able to wrest his elbow from her grip. “I’m the contractor on the new building.” He held up his yellow hard hat for corroboration. “I’m here to see Miss Alberta.”

“Miss Alberta’s the matron here,” the girl said. “She doesn’t see men, not anymore.”

Golden sneezed twice, loudly and furiously, and a female voice from behind one of the doors called, “Bless you!”

“I’m not here to
see
her,” Golden whispered to the girl. “I’m here to talk. To her. The owner, Mr. Ted Leo, told me she’s the one to see when he’s away.”

“You sure you don’t want anything else?” the girl said. “Since you’re working for Ted Leo, we’ll give you a deal, two for one or throw in something a little extra.”

“Oh, thank you, my.” Golden’s face bloomed into a third stage of heat. “We’re in the middle of something out on the site, and I really just came to talk to Miss Alberta.”

The girl went in search of the matron and Golden took a leather chair directly across from two women who stared at him openly and whispered to each other without looking away. One wore a garment that looked like it had been made from spare mosquito netting, and the other had on shorts, a cut-off tank top, and glue-on fingernails—each one painted, if Golden was not mistaken, with a miniature likeness of the American flag. Above the couch hung a painting of still another woman, this one fully naked and bigger than life. She was lying on her side on a Persian rug, looking back over her shoulder, a swollen grape between her teeth, her large, old-fashioned behind glowing with an unholy light.

With no safe place to settle his gaze, he looked around the room and pretended to note the sheetrocking job, the doorjambs that were inches out of plumb. He took a pen from his shirt pocket, studied it as if it were an archaeological treasure of profound significance. He turned it over in his hands, clicked the button several times, and when he dropped it, acted for all the world as if it hadn’t happened. Thirty seconds passed and the girl in the mosquito netting picked it up and handed it over. “Dropped this,” she said.

“I’m sorry. Thanks. I’m truly sorry,” he said.

Finally, Miss Alberta showed up, obviously in a sour mood, shouting down the hall at someone named Chester and snapping her fingers at a girl who had fallen asleep on one of the couches. Golden jumped up from his chair with a force that caused it to topple backward.

Except for her showgirl-style fake eyelashes, Miss Alberta looked like any chunky middle-aged woman you might run into at the post office: permed auburn hair, flowery blouse, cheap silver rings on every finger. Behind the eyelashes were hard little eyes like two watermelon seeds.

She leaned back and eyeballed him up and down as if he were a Christmas tree she was considering for purchase. She came right out with an accusation: “You’re the inspector, aren’t you.”

“No,” Golden said. “I don’t believe so.”

“I thought we were dealing with Bennett these days. We have an agreement. You slippery boogers aren’t supposed to show up unannounced.”

Golden explained he wasn’t an inspector, that he disliked inspectors as much as she did. Again, he held out his yellow hard hat as proof.

“Then you’re here for business?”

“Yes,” Golden sighed. “I—”

“Then go sit down and wait your turn like the rest. Big ones like you make us all nervous.”

“Ma’am,” Golden said.

“One wrong move from a lumberjack like you and it’s off to the emergency room for one of my girls. Don’t think it hasn’t happened before. I should start charging by the pound with some of you boys.”

Golden cleared his throat.

The scowl left her face for a moment and she gave a slight grin. Golden’s tongue-tied discomfort, it was clear, was improving her mood immensely.

“So are you going to tell me what you want or should we stand here all day?”

“My name is Golden Richards.” He pointed vaguely toward the door. “I’m the contractor on the new building. Mr. Ted Leo told me in his absence I should speak to you.”

“You might have mentioned that in the first place, Mr. Richards, before I gave you the business. Every day of the week I have to deal with such a lineup of knuckleheads you wouldn’t believe, so you’ll forgive me for presuming the worst, which is the only way to manage things around here. Follow me to the office, where we can have some privacy.” The office, a tiny room stacked with papers, files, and ledger books, was just off the main parlor. “Please,” Miss Alberta said, gesturing to the only chair in the room, upon which there appeared to be a stack of at least a dozen rubber penises encased in shrink-wrap plastic.

“I generally like to stand,” Golden said, stepping to the side. Anyone caught hanging around in a whorehouse, he thought, deserved exactly this.

“Oh, the darn
dildos
!” Miss Alberta cried, as if she’d forgotten to put away her knitting. She scooped them up and dumped them on the counter next to a wall-mounted corkboard filled with thumbtacked notes, receipts and reminders. Pictures of several chubby children—her grandkids, by the beady-eyed look of them—were taped all over the walls. She put on a pair of bifocals and jotted something in one of the ledger books. “We just got a new order and haven’t had time to put things away. Can I get you something? Coffee?”

He shook his head, but not in response to Miss Alberta’s question; he was trying to shake loose the word
dildo
, which had lodged in his brain and blocked his flow of thought.
Dildo
. He mouthed the word and looked up with a start to see if Miss Alberta had seen him. He’d heard the word used once or twice around the work site, but it never really meant anything to him. He’d always figured a dildo was some kind of bird.

“I hope Ted Leo is being civil with you, he can be difficult to work for, that man.”

Golden shook his head again until a few words found their way out of his mouth: “No. Ted Leo’s been good, real good.”

“And how’s the building going?”

“Fine.” Golden nodded. “Going fine.” The truth was they were weeks behind schedule, he’d lost one of his electrical contractors, and he was having trouble with his in-house crew, which was why he had ventured into the PussyCat Manor in the first place.

“I was wondering if one of my men, his name is Charles Odlum, has been in here. Most people call him Leonard.”

“Can I ask why you’d like to know?”

“I hired all my men on the condition they wouldn’t, you know, frequent the establishment. They’ve been compliant, but I’ve gotten a report about Leonard—”

“You object to the idea of a brothel, Mr. Richards?” she said, her voice whittled down to a fine point. “Maybe you’ve forgotten you’re building one.”

“No, ma’am. I just don’t want it to be a…distraction for my men. They can do what they want in their spare time, but the fact is we’re working on a site with a…an operational brothel on it. You can see the difficulty, I hope. It’s up to me to draw the line on something like this.”

In fact, the brothel had become a bigger distraction than he could have imagined. Though the actual building, just over a shallow rise, could not be seen from the job site, the lighted sign, with its depiction of a busty cartoon cat stroking her fluffed-up tail, was visible at all hours of the day. The brothel, and what went on inside it, was by far the most popular topic of conversation among the men. They referred to it as the Poontang Palace and Ye Olde Nunnery, and speculated endlessly on the girls’ names, their various specialties and physical characteristics, and what might be the highest-priced items on the menu (The Full-Body Tongue-Wash? The Interracial Triple-Team?). Naturally, all the sex talk—not to mention the ever-present and extremely sexy cartoon cat—made the men horny. Some of them, in fact, seemed to be suffering from acute horniness, a horniness raised to elevated and possibly unhealthy levels. Golden did not want to admit to himself that the ban on brothel visits was making it worse.

Last week, for example, Golden had come out of the trailer to find Leonard Odlum humping a trash barrel. Leonard was a hyperactive redneck from eastern Oklahoma with the attention span of a kitten. Never without a cheekful of chaw and his trusted companion, the Dixie cup in which to spit it, he was always bouncing on his toes, performing disco dance combinations and yelling incomprehensible phrases at people who were out of earshot. And on this day, it seemed, he was humping a trash barrel.

When Golden asked what he was doing, Leonard said, “Who? Me?”

Holding his spit cup aloft with one hand and grasping the edge of the empty steel barrel with the other, he thrusted and caressed his crotch against it with an air of abject helplessness, the barrel occasionally making a hollow ringing like a broken church bell:
Tong Tong Tong
.

“Come on, get back to work,” Golden called, weakly. “Before you hurt yourself.”

“I’m on break,” Leonard grunted, “and this is what I’m doing.”

Down at the gate two drivers from the gravel pit were standing next to their dump truck, pointing at Leonard and laughing. Releasing his grasp on the barrel, Leonard turned to Golden, his hips still twitching slightly, holding his spit cup above the fray. Golden took a step back.

“See here?” Leonard said. He looked down at his pants, appalled by what he saw. “Lookit. It just keeps on like this, you oughta be glad I came across this barrel before you showed up.” He walked around in a circle, his twitching crotch leading the way. “You let us at those hookers ever’ now and then, this wouldn’t be happening!”

Golden couldn’t tell if this was all an act or if Leonard was in genuine distress. When Leonard started to reacquaint himself with the barrel again, Golden retreated to his trailer to hide until Leonard was finished. Several other workers had shown up to cheer and whistle. One of them yelled, “I hope the intercourse is consensual, Leonard!”

Now, according to several of the crew, Leonard had moved on from the barrel to the real thing; over the past two days he’d bragged to just about everyone he’d come across that he’d gone over the hill and got himself a hooker named Boutique, who he’d lit up, he’d said, like a High-9 slot machine. He had insisted from the beginning that making red-blooded men like him work in the close vicinity of so much available pay-for-pussy without being allowed to partake was a violation of his basic human rights. “This is America,” he’d yell at anybody who’d listen, “
ain’t it
?”

“I’m not trying to be a bother,” Golden told Miss Alberta, “but I’d like to make sure my man actually came in here before I confront him about it. It would make things easier for me.”

“No doubt it would,” Miss Alberta said. “But we take privacy very seriously here, Mr. Richards, and we don’t make a habit of revealing who our clients are, even when the request has been so politely made by a gentleman such as yourself. If that answer doesn’t suit you, you can take it up with the Supreme Court, or the honorable Ted Leo, who will tell you the same thing.”