The Lonely Polygamist Part 33

All he knew for sure was this: there had been some sort of explosion. Even though his memory had edited out this fundamental fact, the evidence was there in his still-buzzing left eardrum, in the way the sound of the blast had awakened all of Old House and some of the neighbors, in his son's ruined face. Who or what was responsible for the explosion was the more difficult problem, but as he puzzled it over, shuffling through the possibilities like a stack of paint chips, he could reach only one reasonable conclusion: Ted Leo. Somehow Ted Leo and his band of scuzzbuckets had discovered Huila's hiding place, and had set off some kind of explosion in an effort to scare or to harm. This made a certain kind of sense, especially taking into consideration Ted Leo's elaborate and often obtuse ways of making a point, but what had Rusty been doing there? And what about the ostrich? In his weakened, fuzzy-headed state, Golden was ready and willing to consider the possibility that the ostrich, with its smug air and cold yellow eyes, was itself responsible, that it was some kind of evil totem, the embodiment of a primordial curse that existed only to bring doom upon the Richards family, to steal away its children, to maim and mock and drown them, that it was, in fact, the source of all their suffering and strife, and he ground his teeth together in grim antic.i.p.ation of what he would do to that ostrich when he got home.

He sat up, pressed his knuckles into his eyes. What was wrong with him? He shook his head in an effort to straighten out his thinking, and succeeded only in making himself more dizzy. No, the ostrich had had nothing to do with it. It could only have been Ted Leo. Ted Leo, who had already threatened him and his children in half a dozen ways, who had denigrated and belittled and bullied him, who had abused and exploited Huila for going on eight years, who had humiliated the seemingly invincible Beverly by dredging up the black mud of her past and throwing it in her face, and, worst of all by far, who had stolen the future and maimed the body of his innocent son.

Ted Leo. Golden mouthed these words, rolled them across his tongue like the medicinal, old-fashioned lozenges of his youth, tasted the bitter satisfaction of knowing that this time there really was someone else to be held to account, to be punished, that for once he would not have to shoulder the burden of responsibility alone.

A nurse came to tell them they could see Rusty. She took one look at Golden and asked if he needed something to calm him, a mild sedative, perhaps. He declined with a stiff shake of the head, but when he stood up and attempted a few steps, the muscles of his legs began to quiver, the edges of his vision darkened, and he wished he'd taken the nurse up on her offer. He put his hand on Nola's shoulder, as if to comfort or a.s.sure her, but if she had not been there to prop him up on the long trek down the hall to the ICU he would have fallen to the ground in a heap and stayed there.

They washed their hands in a steel basin, the nurse helped them don cotton surgical masks, and before Golden was ready, before he had a chance to try to convince himself that he was strong enough, that he could handle this, they were led into a room where Rusty lay propped up in a bed, splayed out as if caught like a spider's prey in the web of wires and tubes. It was worse than he could have imagined. The upper half of the boy's head-including both eyes-was covered in bandages, while the skin of the lower half was so bruised and swollen it looked less like a face and more like an overripe melon left too long in the field, shiny and discolored and ready to split.

Golden shook his head, heard himself moan. In that dark room, with the IV bag filtering the light of the single lamp and throwing shimmering filaments across the ceiling, he gathered his shirt into both fists, rolling the fabric over his knuckles until it tore.

All the way down the hall, following Nola with his hand on her shoulder as if lame or blind, Golden had prayed. Lifted by a moment of desperate hope, a lurch of faith he didn't know he was still capable of, he had pleaded with G.o.d to wipe away everything the doctor had told Nola and Beverly, to make all of this a misunderstanding, a horrible mistake. He prayed in a way he never had before, without the formal constructions he had learned in church, without the thees thees and and thous thous and and Our Heavenly Fathers, Our Heavenly Fathers, and as he stood at the door, unwilling to cross the threshold just yet, he begged, letting the words rise out of him without sound: and as he stood at the door, unwilling to cross the threshold just yet, he begged, letting the words rise out of him without sound: Please, I will do anything, I will give anything, let him live, let him get better, make him better, I will give anything, my own life, everything I have, please, please. Please, I will do anything, I will give anything, let him live, let him get better, make him better, I will give anything, my own life, everything I have, please, please.

But, of course, it had been too little too late, and whatever sc.r.a.ps of hope and faith he had carried into that room crumbled instantly to ash. If there was an answer to his prayer, here it was, in the form of this burned and broken child who, as anyone could see, would not be getting better, would not go on to live any sort of life, would probably not survive the night.

Beverly and Nola did not hesitate, they went right to him, murmuring over him and stroking the bare skin of his arms, ignoring the nurse when she told them not to touch or get too close, while Golden hovered near the door, his face turned toward the wall, trembling with fury.

He set his jaw against it, tried to fight it off, but it had him now, the old childhood rage, come to claim him once again. It had been stalking him for years, ever since his days of sitting at the attic window in Louisiana, listening to his mother run through her repertoire of moans and sighs, waiting for his father to come home. The anger always took him by surprise, welling up suddenly from some fissure that reached all the way to the core of him, and he always did his best to resist, to run from it or tamp it down or wait it out until it dissipated into useless vapors. But now he did not fight it; he let himself fill with its heat until every cell and corpuscle had turned brittle and he was nothing more than a body of hot gla.s.s, poised to shatter at the slightest touch.

He jerked open the door and fell into the hall, joints locked stiff, struggling to breathe. After a while Nola and Beverly emerged, fixing him with their standard looks of resignation and pity. Once more he had given them reason to be disappointed: in his faint heart, his frailty in the face of crisis. Back in the waiting room, they embarked on a subdued discussion over when and how to give Rose-of-Sharon the bad news, and Golden was not once consulted or asked for his input; they seemed to have forgotten he was there. So they didn't notice when he walked away, his head and shoulders held so still he seemed to be floating, down the hall and through the automatic doors and into the early morning dark.

THE p.u.s.s.yCAT MANOR It was very late, even for a brothel, and there were only four girls working the parlor: three sitting at the bar, chatting with the graveyard bartender, and the fourth dozing on the crushed velvet davenport in the center of the room. The bartender, bald as a seal except for a pair of lamb-chop sideburns, was busy blending the girls a celebratory end-of-shift margarita, which was why none of them heard the electric chime indicating a visitor had walked through the double-gla.s.s doors.

Letting his feet settle into the ultra-s.h.a.g carpeting, Golden took a moment to consider his options. Nothing had changed since the last time he was here: the place still glowed with the soft, burnished light of a Buddhist shrine, still smelled like cigarette smoke, hair spray, and overhandled dollar bills. What first caught his eye was the long row of liquor bottles, three or four ranks deep and gleaming like organ pipes, arranged on the shelf above the mirror. Only when he had started forward across the expanse of crimson carpet did the bartender look up.

"Whoa, buddy," he said as he shut off the blender, the color draining from his face. "Wait a second, now."

Golden paused, not at the bartender's warning, but at the sudden flash of movement to his left. There was someone else behind the bar he hadn't yet noticed, someone large and rumpled and dirty who seemed to be brandishing an axe handle.... Golden peered suspiciously at this obviously deranged person for several seconds before realizing that he was looking into his own reflection. On another night, under different circ.u.mstances, he might have chuckled at his routine gullibility, but tonight he greeted himself with an expression of such seething reproach he felt a chill go through him. No wonder, he thought, the girls at the bar were scooting away from him in horror. He looked like a shambling, humpbacked minotaur, eyes bright with suffering, encrusted with mud up to his waist, shirt streaked with blood, and hair matted at the sides of his head in a way that suggested horns. He skirted the far end of the bar and, with something like pleasure, raised the axe handle and delivered a blow to the center of his own face.

Sounding a single clamorous note, the mirror leapt off the wall in several large pieces and hundreds of smaller ones. The girls screamed, the bartender yelped and dove for cover. Golden moved on to the gla.s.sware, then the glittering column of liquor bottles, and for a moment it was like a small thunderstorm was blowing through, chunks of gla.s.s raining down like hail, running cloudbursts of whiskey and rye and rum leaving in their wakes a rising alcoholic mist that burned the nostrils and stung the eyes. Temporarily blinded and swiping expensive bourbon from his eyebrows, Golden stumbled toward the most obvious source of light in the room: the jukebox, from whose depths rose the moaning baritone of Teddy Pendergra.s.s. Golden took a wild swing, missed the jukebox entirely, then connected on his second try, the tip of the axe handle lodging in the wire mesh that covered the speakers. Teddy Pendergra.s.s chirped, his voice warping, and when Golden yanked the axe handle free the needle skipped, condemning Teddy to some R&B purgatory to wonder, over and over again, why he was alone again tonight, all because of some silly fight.

Golden heard yelling now, more women screaming, several voices calling out in alarm, "Bruno! Bruno!" which was either a code word for danger or the name of someone who they believed might come to their rescue. But it didn't matter to Golden; nothing was going to stop him as long as he had this angry, burning hurt in the middle of his chest and there were still items belonging to Ted Leo to be broken. After he'd kicked over the jukebox, putting Teddy Pendergra.s.s out of his misery, he attacked the grand piano. He couldn't have said why, but he hated this piano more than he hated anything or anyone in his life. He raked the axe handle across the keyboard twice, chipping the keys and producing two clanging, gothic chords that made the windows rattle. He was about to knock aside the prop that held up the piano's lid, already savoring the great whooping clap it would make, when someone grabbed his elbow, yanking hard, and then the weight of another body landed on his back, an arm grappling his neck. He struggled and spun, lost his balance, veered into a wall, but they held on, breathing gusts of steam into his ear. He staggered forward, despite the two men hanging off him, one of whom seemed to be trying to choke him to death, the other who had found a way to reach around and punch him repeatedly in the face, and went on with his business, managing to free his right arm long enough to take out the ceramic statue of Venus de Milo with one swing and put a cleft, and one more for good measure, in the four-by-six oil painting of the wide-bottomed lady of the evening with a grape between her teeth.

As Golden lurched past the doorway hung with strings of gla.s.s beads, Todd Freebone burst through it in nothing but tube socks and a towel clutched around his waist. He shouted, "What the fu-" but was interrupted when Golden, with a lucky sideways chop of the axe handle, caught him full in the mouth. Todd Freebone dropped his towel and slumped against the wall, groaning, "s.h.i.t, man!" One by one he spit several b.l.o.o.d.y teeth into his cupped palm.

It was Miss Alberta, finally, who put an end to it all. Golden saw her out of the corner of his eye, her head full of fat pink curlers, holding in front of her what looked to be a long yellow cattle prod. "Stop this nonsense right now!" she scolded, as if she'd caught a cla.s.sroom of third-graders misbehaving, and without further ado pressed the tip of the prod into his ribs. A hot electric spasm jerked him upright, he dropped the axe handle, and the men fell off him. He bent at the knees to retrieve his weapon but his arm had gone numb, his fingers stiff. Golden sensed a presence behind him and as he started to turn, Miss Alberta said, "Anytime now, Ernest, Jesus Christ," and something crashed into the back of his head and he pitched forward, his vision filled with starbursts and blazing sparks.

He lay facedown in the s.h.a.g, splayed like someone floating in the middle of a warm summer pond, feeling quite comfortable except for the seam of pain at the back of his skull. Somewhere a door slammed, the sound of footsteps making the floor vibrate lightly against his chin, and as he slowly began to sink into deeper, darker waters, he heard Ted Leo's voice: "Well look at this. Put down that phone, Coral, put it down. We don't need to involve the police, go back to your rooms, girls, just a drunken customer, nothing to worry about, I think we can take care of him ourselves."

A DREAM OF ESCAPE Golden came to on his back, staring up in vacant wonder at the tilted dome of a star-blown sky. He had never truly noticed the night sky this way, seeing as if for the first time the individual bodies themselves, their particular hues and intensities, and beyond them whole galaxies like ghostly blooms of dust layered one on top of the other, the distances between them vast and growing as he watched. Only after several minutes of rapt astronomical observation, accompanied by a gentle rocking that made him feel as if he were laid out on the deck of some creaking old boat, did he think to wonder where he was. His hands were secured behind his back-this fact suggested gradually by the sharpening throb in his shoulders and wrists-and the familiar smells of dog and oil and dried blood told him he had been in this place before, and not all that long ago. His concussed brain took its sweet time circling around to the conclusion that he was in the bed of a moving pickup. Nelson Norman's pickup, he decided, finally. And just like that he understood how he'd gotten here, and where it was he was being taken.

He rolled onto his side to take the pressure off his arms, rested his head on the bald treads of a spare tire; there was nothing to do now, he decided, but enjoy the ride.

This grew increasingly difficult as the road grew rougher and his mind cleared, allowing his body to a.s.sert its various pains and infirmities. A hard wind had begun to howl, tossing the occasional handful of sand into his face. Soon his arms were cramping, the edges of his vision sparkled with nausea, and the lurching of the pickup kept his swollen and tender head bouncing in rhythm against the spare tire. He was given thirty seconds of relief when the pickup eased to a standstill, someone got out of the driver's side to conduct some mysterious business, and then they were moving again, the sound of dead vegetation screeching against the pickup's sides and the chain-link fence of the Test Site pa.s.sing slowly a few feet above his head.

When they stopped ten minutes later, Golden was in agony; the bones of his arms felt like they might pop from their sockets, his stomach sloshed with hot bile, and an old steel toolbox had managed to clatter inch by inch across the pickup's bed and lodge itself against his hipbone.

"Nice ride?" Ted Leo shouted as he jerked open the tailgate. He grabbed one of Golden's ankles, Nelson came around and grabbed the other, and with the well-timed teamwork of a magician and his trusted a.s.sistant, they yanked him from the bed in a single smooth motion so that the first thing to hit the ground was the back of his neck. Ted Leo told him to get up, and he rolled around, moaning, trying to find his breath, until Nelson hooked him under the armpits and hauled him to his feet.

Ted Leo, decked out for this late-night adventure in track pants and a gold silk kimono, reached into the glove box and came out with the long-barreled Luger that Golden had seen before. The pistol had reputedly been owned by Al Capone, and Ted Leo was fond of brandishing it when he was angry, or if he was in a good mood, showing it off to guests and friends as one of his most cherished possessions. He made a show of checking the clip and then slamming it back home with a loud ka-chick ka-chick. He accepted a shovel from Nelson, told him to stay with the pickup, and gave Golden a stiff jab in the spine with its blade. "March, soldier. Double-time. We don't got all night."

It did not occur to Golden to fight or run. Even if his hands had not been secured snugly behind his back, he wouldn't have had the focus or energy to use them; even if his legs were not weak to the point of shaking, his bad knee grinding with every step, there was nowhere for him to go. The fury that earlier had filled him so completely, that had carried him from Las Vegas on its combustible fumes and released itself upon the unsuspecting furnishings of the p.u.s.s.yCat Manor, had now burned off, leaving him flattened and spent, a hollow man walking meekly to his fate, leaking smoke and ashes at the seams, nothing left in him but surrender.

The wind came at them hard, pushing down out of the atmosphere in rhythmic bursts, raising walls of sand the two men walked through like spirits or ghosts. A startling patch of crystalline night sky would reveal itself for a moment, then disappear behind a black sheet of dust. Almost instantly Golden's eyes and throat were caked with grit, his ears filled with hissing particles. Feeling nothing but the occasional jab from Ted Leo's shovel when the wind blew him off course, he bowed his head and walked.

Just when Golden thought they had been separated, that he was walking alone into the roaring darkness, Ted Leo shouted for him to stop. Ted had a penlight, which he clenched in his teeth, and he sc.r.a.ped around in the dirt with his shovel, the dragon st.i.tched into the back of his kimono whipping and writhing in the indefinite light. Even in the midst of a windstorm in the bitter hours of night, Ted went about this business with a kind of top-of-the-morning enthusiasm, as if everything were going perfectly according to some master plan. When the shovel rang out against metal, Ted Leo looked up and grinned like a jack-o'-lantern around the glow of his penlight.

He shouted something, but the wind swallowed every word. He was attempting to make some kind of speech, his eyes aglow, the black stalks of his lacquered hair lifting stiffly from his scalp. He kept on, gesturing with the shovel, but Golden could make out none of it; his head was filled with a crackling static that rose and fell. At some point Ted Leo realized his message, probably something cribbed from an old Jimmy Cagney movie-or maybe it was another lecture about the government's atomic testing program-was not getting across. He stepped up and shouted into Golden's face, "First off, okay, you're going to tell me where she is! That's what's gonna happen first!"

She. All this time, and Golden had not given a single thought to Huila. For a moment he saw her face, got a whiff of sandalwood in his nose, and felt a pang. He was glad to know she'd gotten away, that Ted had not yet found her. Now all he could do was hope she had found somewhere safe to hide.

Ted Leo waited for a response, but Golden simply stood in the swirling dust, the cuff of his pants caught in the spines of a fat little barrel cactus, mute. He wasn't sure if it was in some kind of protest against the horror of what had happened tonight, or if it was nothing but simple shock, but he had found himself unable or unwilling to speak, and in this silence, this refusal of words and their potential for harm, he had provided himself some small but necessary shelter.

"What's this?" Ted Leo shouted, his voice straining. The wind blew his kimono out with a crack, reversed, snapped it tightly around him again. "You just going to stand there, you big dumb Mormon jacka.s.s, and let me shoot you and put you in this hole?" He pointed the penlight into Golden's face. "Did you think you'd come all the way out here, after all you've done to me me, the embarra.s.sment you've caused me me, thinking you're going to break up my place, you're going to hurt me me, and then you're just going to stand there looking at me like that?"

Golden gave a slight shrug; Ted Leo seemed to have summed up the situation quite nicely. Grasping the handle of the shovel with both hands, Ted Leo let the penlight drop, and in its residual glow Golden could see that Ted Leo's cheerful mood was well on its way to abandoning him; his face had gone dark, his neck pulsing against its delicate gold chain. His big plan, apparently, was not working out as he'd hoped; he figured they would come out to this ominous location, he would give some kind of show-stopping speech made of equal parts Mafioso bromides and obscure scriptural references, and Golden would tell him everything he wanted to know before falling on his knees and, in a most pathetic and satisfying way, begging the great Ted Leo to spare his life. But Golden was not cooperating and this windstorm was turning out to be a problem; Ted kept having to blink sand from his eyes and spit it from the corners of his mouth as he spoke. For Golden, it felt like small victory to be able to see, and have a part in, Ted Leo being angered to the point of apoplexy one last time.

Because he caught a stinging gust of wind to the face at just the right moment, he did not see the blow coming. Luckily, the head of the shovel glanced off his shoulder before it rang against his left temple, sending a hard rattle through his skull and pitching him sideways. He staggered, but did not go down. If the tone of his voice was any indication, this made Ted Leo even angrier.

"You think this is funny?" he shouted, his voice cracking and singing in two different pitches. He was gripping the shovel as if he might take another swing. "You think any of this is funny?"

Golden straightened, his head still chiming. Strangely, the blow seemed to have cleared his mind a little, as if counteracting the effects of the coldc.o.c.king that had been administered to him earlier. He felt something sharpen in his chest, a quickening of the lungs, and when he looked into the purple shadows of Ted's contorted face, he remembered why he had come out here, and what he had failed so far to do: make this man pay for the harm that had been done to his boy, to his family. He had a harsh, metallic taste in the back of his mouth like a memory of the smell of Rusty's blood, his burning hair and flesh, and something at the center of him wobbled and tipped, spilling the last dregs of anger into his veins. He lurched forward, jerking wildly at the cords holding his wrists, and even as he shuddered through one final spasm of grief and rage he realized he did did have something to say, though he wasn't sure what, exactly, and when he tried to speak what came out was nothing but mangled noise, something raw and shredded and torn up by the roots. have something to say, though he wasn't sure what, exactly, and when he tried to speak what came out was nothing but mangled noise, something raw and shredded and torn up by the roots.

Ted Leo's eyes widened and he took a step back, shielding himself with the shovel, his expression changing in a second from angry, to frightened, to mocking.

"What's this?" he shouted, cupping his hand to his ear. "The man speaks. Say again, please?"

With this last bit of exertion Golden had drained himself thoroughly. He was tied up, wrung out, impotent in the truest sense of the word, and the only thing left to him now was to lodge a complaint, to let Ted Leo understand the suffering he'd caused. When he spoke, the pain in his throat made him dizzy: "You hurt my boy. My son son."

"Oh, I haven't hurt anybody," Ted Leo said brightly, "and I've had no reason to hurt anybody until you came along." In ill.u.s.tration of his point he flipped the shovel around and with an awkward over-hand motion drove the handle-end deep into Golden's solar plexus. While Golden was doubled over, gasping to recover his breath, Ted Leo busied himself-nearly at Golden's feet-opening the bunker's metal hatch. The first breath Golden was able to negotiate into his lungs was so full of the spoiled, dead air of the bunker that he gagged and launched into a new fit of choking.

"Get used to it," Ted Leo said. He stood over Golden and gave him a paternal pat on the back. "You're going to be down there a long time."

When Ted Leo removed his pistol from the sash of his kimono and pressed the cold tip of the barrel against the side of his head, Golden experienced no panic or fear, but a spreading numbness, something close to peace. Bent over at the waist and unable to raise the necessary reserves to stand up straight and face his comeuppance, he stared into the perfect black hole in the ground that represented his oblivion, mesmerized by the notion that maybe he hadn't, after all, come out here for justice or vengeance or plain, pleasurable spite, but to realize, finally and in the most complete way possible, his desire for release, his dream of escape.

He closed his eyes and waited. But oblivion seemed to be taking a while. Ted Leo, always one for dramatics, was letting the moment play out, and now it seemed he was talking again, standing directly over Golden's doubled-over form and making some final p.r.o.nouncement, though Golden could hear very little over the wind and the ocean sounds of his own lungs and heart. Something rose in him, some echo or vibration, and before he realized what he was doing he was already mumbling under his breath, his old habitual chant, Emma-NephiHelamanNaomi JosephinePauline NovellaParleySybil Deeanne Emma-NephiHelamanNaomi JosephinePauline NovellaParleySybil Deeanne...and as the names made their way past his lips he felt, as if for the first time, the peculiar shape of each one, their particular syllables attended in his mind by some token to whom each name belonged, a dragonfly barrette, a smile full of missing teeth, a pair of orthopedic shoes, the dusty scent of sun-warmed hair, a nightmare cry from down the hall, an infant's tart breath, and here they came, his children, one after the other-not as a hopelessly long and tangled strand of DNA nonsense-letters, or as a single, pulsing organism (as he had come to think of them lately), ever-growing and demanding to be fed, but as individual bodies and faces appearing behind the gla.s.s of windows and the screens of front doors, waiting, eyes bright, wondering where he was, what was taking him so long to come home.

The names came faster now...GaleAlvinRustyClifton...bringing with them the memories of evenings, not so long ago, when they would squeeze together on the Barge, their heads still wet and soap-scented from their baths, and listen to him recite the made-up adventures of the Flatulent Astronaut or Johnny the Car-Driving Racc.o.o.n. Sweet, soft evenings when he could, if he tried hard enough, still hold them in the circ.u.mference of his arms. When he was still safe from the knowledge of how easily one of them might be lost.

Pierced by a fierce, sudden longing, he reached for them now...HerschelGloryBooMartinWayneTeagueLouise...believing if he could gather them one more time, before it was too late, they might be able to save him.

But, of course, he was too late, he would forever be too late, one step behind, apologies already in hand. He began to stumble over the names, mixing up the order and backtracking to get it right, straining to reach the list's end, to do this one thing right, at least, this one simple, last thing...FigNewtonDarlingJame-o...and now he was no longer speaking the names so much as inhaling them, swallowing them into his lungs and holding them there, his tongue thickening in his mouth, his rib cage creaking as it swelled, unable to withstand the mounting pressures of anxiety and sorrow and regret, and all at once the muscles of his neck tensed so painfully his eyes watered, and with a single great roar of release, he sneezed.

The sneeze jerked him upright and he felt a sharp impact at the top of his head, a moment of luminous weightlessness, and then nothing. It took him some time to understand that his eyes were closed, and that with some effort he could open them. He found himself standing, apparently still alive, in the middle of a great, black silence, his vision full of dying phosph.o.r.escence. He looked around: the mouth of the bunker at his feet, the hunkering forms of sagebrush, and to his right, a small triangle of ozone-blue light, which turned out to be the penlight abandoned in the dirt.

By the fresh new pain at the crown of his skull and the sensation of cold as the wind pa.s.sed over it, he was fairly certain that part of his head had been blown off. But he was still standing, still thinking, which meant either the missing portion of his head was not strictly necessary, or that some alternate explanation was in order.

Behind him a moan rose up-a slow, devastated sound-and there was his alternate explanation, in the form of a half-conscious Ted Leo laid out on the ground wearing a bib of blood, his nose burst all over his face. At this sight the back of Golden's head began to sting more intensely, as if in sympathy for the damage it had caused. Ted moaned again, shifted one leg and, seized by a sudden, almost childish energy, Golden began to dance on his heels, working at his wrists; all along he thought he'd been tied up with some kind of cord, nylon or cotton, but he soon realized that it was nothing more than a few loops of electrical tape. With a sustained application of force he could get it to stretch just a little, a little more, and then he was free.

He cast around until he found the pistol. With a sudden black willingness he stood over Ted Leo and leveled it at his chest. He sighed, swallowed, decided he had a better idea. His hands clumsy and numb, he managed to drag Ted Leo the five feet to the bunker and feed him, headfirst, into its mouth. The folds of Ted's soft belly caught the steel edges, the fine silk of his kimono snagged and tore; it was like trying to force a Q-tip into a keyhole. It took more than a little nudging and tucking, then some outright shoving and tamping before something gave way and Ted Leo disappeared into the inky shadows with such a suddenness it was as if he'd fallen through to another dimension. Golden thought he heard a thud and the echoing word "No" but did not hesitate; he clanged the lid down and cranked the rusted latch.

In the moments he took to gather himself, to work the blood back into his hands and catch his breath, he sensed a vibration beneath his feet, a mournful lowing that quickly rose in pitch, spiking into pleading shouts, formless words that boomed and echoed and were slowly lost to the wind as he limped off into the swirling dark.

TWO BIG MEN, ONE LITTLE GIRL When Golden opened the door and settled into the pa.s.senger-side seat, Nelson Norman did not so much as look his way. For a while they stared out the windshield at the granular light of predawn, an awkward silence between them like two strangers waiting at a bus stop. The cab smelled like stale beer and cinnamon gum, and the only sound besides the scudding wind was the comforting whir of the truck's heater.

"So it's just you then?" Nelson said finally.

Golden gave a slight movement of the head that might have been a nod.

Nelson eyed the pistol that Golden held in his lap. He let a good ten seconds pa.s.s. "You shoot him?"

"Thought about it."

Ten more seconds. "He's still out there?"

"In the bunker."

"Huh," said Nelson. He nodded once. "You going to leave him there?"

"Haven't decided."

"Just to tell you?" Nelson said. "I ain't going to mention none of this to n.o.body. And I'm not just saying that because you got that gun."

They made eye contact and Golden surprised himself by nearly laughing, a bubble of noise rising in his throat that had no business making it into the open. He swallowed it down and let himself sink into the seat springs, shuddering with relief, and then the feeling turned on him and his throat closed up again, a black fluttering pa.s.sed through his chest, and he had to brace his hand against the dashboard. He said, "He hurt my son."

"Your who?"

Golden gave a brief, poor explanation of the events of that night, asked Nelson what he knew.

Nelson shook his head. "That wasn't Ted Leo, no. He's done some things, but a bomb or something, no, that don't make no sense. I'd know."

"He was going to shoot me, with this gun."

"Nuh-uh. He was just scaring you, hey? The whole thing, the coyotes and the bunker, that d.a.m.n couch, all this. He'd never shoot n.o.body. No guts, all show, that's Ted Leo. And you ain't the first one. Crazy as he is, the man's a f.u.c.king kitty cat. And now somebody's called his bluff."

"He thinks I stole his wife."

Nelson grunted, sighed. "You think he did all this 'cause he cared about her? You think? You embarra.s.sed him, that's all, and you ain't the first. She's been working out how to leave for a long time. He treated her terrible. I'm glad she got away. You hadn't come out here and busted up his place, he'd a gotten bored with you sooner than later."

Golden considered for a moment the depths of his misapprehensions about the world he thought he knew. Could it be that for Huila he had been nothing more than just a way out, a means of escape? Before he finished asking himself the question it occurred to him how easily she could be asking the same about him.

For a time they watched the paling sky. One by one the clumps of sage revealed themselves like puffs of smoke rising out of the earth, everything one distinct shade of gray against another. Wind whistled around the pickup's antenna, rattled against the windows, but in here it was a distant, comforting sound.

"Looks like you're bleeding out of your ear there."

"A lot?" Golden touched his ear.

"Not too bad," Nelson said. "d.a.m.n. You really leave him in that hole?"

Golden nodded in disbelief. "I did."

Nelson sniffed, smiled. He sat there for a while, cupping his giant belly like a Buddha statue in somebody's garden. He said, "Your boy, he's gonna be all right?"

Golden remained motionless, as if he hadn't heard the question. Then, almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.

"I'm sorry," Nelson said. He listened to the wind. "What I could tell, you got a nice family."

"I do," Golden whispered.

"Big family," Nelson said. Golden nodded.

"Don't know how you do it."

"Neither do I."

Something in Golden's vision shifted, the stark world beyond the windshield going fuzzy and indistinct as the picture hanging from the rearview mirror came into focus. He found himself looking at the bright, hopeful face of Nelson's daughter-what was her name? Mary? Marlene?-and Nelson followed his gaze and they were both staring at the picture as if mesmerized, two big men looking into the eyes of one little girl. Something welled in Golden so strongly his voice failed when he spoke: "Don't ever let her out of your sight."

"No," Nelson whispered.

"Don't ever," Golden said. "No."

They were quiet a long time. Nelson asked what they should do. There would be a patrol along in the next few minutes. Golden asked if Nelson would mind driving him back to his pickup.

"And Ted Leo?" Nelson set one big paw on the vibrating bakelite shift k.n.o.b.

"You can let him out or leave him down there to rot, it's up to you," he said. "But you do let him out, tell him I'm keeping this gun of his, just in case."

39.

THE CONFESSIONS OF GOLDEN RICHARDS

EARLY THE MORNING AFTER IT HAD HAPPENED TRISH DROVE OVER TO Forest Glen to pick up Rose to take her to the hospital in Las Vegas. They did not speak the entire trip, crammed together into that small car like astronauts, the sun breaching the horizon behind them, the pink, dawn-washed desert floating by. Of course, there was great concern over how Rose would handle this new shock, but she walked with a certain hunched purposefulness across the hospital's parking lot, resisting Trish's offer of a steadying hand. At the nurses' station, she was the one to ask for directions. In the room, where Rusty lay hidden beneath a webwork of bandages and wires and tubes, she addressed the sight of her maimed son with a calm that Trish, who stood behind her weeping, on the verge of hysteria, could never have managed. Forest Glen to pick up Rose to take her to the hospital in Las Vegas. They did not speak the entire trip, crammed together into that small car like astronauts, the sun breaching the horizon behind them, the pink, dawn-washed desert floating by. Of course, there was great concern over how Rose would handle this new shock, but she walked with a certain hunched purposefulness across the hospital's parking lot, resisting Trish's offer of a steadying hand. At the nurses' station, she was the one to ask for directions. In the room, where Rusty lay hidden beneath a webwork of bandages and wires and tubes, she addressed the sight of her maimed son with a calm that Trish, who stood behind her weeping, on the verge of hysteria, could never have managed.

This was all more than enough-too much-for any one morning, but when Trish came out into the hall Nola took her aside and told her that Golden was MIA. He had been acting strangely, she said, not speaking, something wild in his eyes. She and Beverly had decided he was in shock, nothing more than that, and under the circ.u.mstances there were bigger things to worry about. But now he had been gone almost five hours. Sheriff Fontana, who had driven down from St. George to conduct interviews and gather information, made little effort to hide his concern over Golden's disappearance.

"Something's not right here," the sheriff had said, sipping at a paper coffee cup from the machine, "and maybe we oughta figure it out sooner rather than later."

Golden showed up not long afterward, proving the sheriff correct: something was, most definitely, wrong. As he limped down the corridor, people stared or turned away as if they had stumbled on something intensely private; a mother and her two children fled before him and an old lady stepping out of her room called upon Jesus as he pa.s.sed. Dusty from head to toe, trailing sand from the rolled cuffs of his jeans and sporting a carnation of b.l.o.o.d.y hair at the back of his head, he looked like someone who had been beaten up, buried in a shallow grave, and unearthed only to be roughed up some more. His eye sockets were bruised, his bottom lip swollen and split neatly down the middle, his left ear caked with blood. If you looked closely you could see a shard of gla.s.s glinting like a half-buried diamond in the side of his neck.

Before they could ask him what had happened, he was intercepted by a fat orderly, who called for a wheelchair and a nurse.