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 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." 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 b.u.t.ton several times, and when he dropped it, acted for all the world as if it hadn't happened. Thirty seconds pa.s.sed 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 p.e.n.i.ses encased in shrink-wrap plastic.

"I generally like to stand," Golden said, stepping to the side. Anyone caught hanging around in a wh.o.r.ehouse, he thought, deserved exactly this.

"Oh, the darn d.i.l.d.os d.i.l.d.os!" 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 d.i.l.d.o d.i.l.d.o, which had lodged in his brain and blocked his flow of thought. d.i.l.d.o d.i.l.d.o. 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 d.i.l.d.o 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 p.u.s.s.yCat 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 s.e.x talk-not to mention the ever-present and extremely s.e.xy cartoon cat-made the men h.o.r.n.y. 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 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-p.u.s.s.y 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."

Before Miss Alberta was finished, Golden was already backing out of the room like a crab. When he got to the doorway, he clapped on his hard hat, which was, he realized, the exact color of some of the d.i.l.d.os. "I didn't know there were rules for things like this, or I wouldn't have asked."

Miss Alberta took off her bifocals and slumped into her chair with a sigh. In an instant her tone changed from judgmental and severe to oversweet, as if she were speaking to one of her moon-faced grandchildren. "Honey, that's quite all right. Not everybody's up to speed on wh.o.r.ehouse ethics these days. You finish that nice new building for us, and don't worry too much about your men. What we do, it helps men, it relaxes them, makes them happy." She opened a cupboard, pulled out two containers: one a ceramic candy dish full of homemade b.u.t.ter toffee, and the other a blown-gla.s.s chalice over-flowing with little disks packaged in shiny foil. Polite gentleman that he was, Golden selected one of each.

"If you'd ever like to come back," said Miss Alberta, "remember to bring that condom with you, we're requiring them now, and we'll take good care of you. If not, might as well have one of my toffees. They're better than s.e.x anyway."

Outside, the bleached afternoon light blinded him; even in March the shock of heat and sun was like being hit across the forehead with a shovel. He walked out into the parking lot, blinking and grimacing, until he could see well enough to locate his pickup. He got behind the steering wheel and Cooter jumped into his lap, wiggled his entire body with excitement.

Golden stared at the shiny package glinting in his hand like a polished doubloon. The only other time he'd seen a condom up close was at the tribal fair in Page, Arizona, several years ago. He'd been waiting in line for snow cones with eight or nine of the kids when Donald Mifflin, a roofing contractor Golden had worked with on a couple of projects, walked up and cried, "Why lookee here! Hey-hey! If it ain't the great Golden R.!" Donald Mifflin was of the species of construction man for which Golden had little tolerance: the fat and hairy and loud kind, the kind full of hale bravado and endless lines of bulls.h.i.t.

"So!" shouted Donald, gesturing with his corn dog to the crowd of sweating, impatient children. "All these nippers belong to you?"

Golden gave a noncommittal chuckle; he had learned long ago not to engage strangers or acquaintances about his family situation.

"Seriously now," said Donald. "They all yours?"

Golden looked down at the kids, who stared back up at him, waiting patiently for him to claim or disown them.

"Ehhh." He sighed. "Yep. All mine."

Donald held up his corn dog and, mouth screwed up in concentration, dug into his back pocket for his wallet-on-a-chain, from which he extracted a small square packet of green foil and handed it to Golden. On the packet was printed in ribbons of cursive, Gentleman's Best! Gentleman's Best!

"What is this?" Golden said.

Donald looked around meaningfully at the children, stepped forward, and in a whisper just quiet enough for everyone within a fifty-foot radius to hear, said, "This, my friend, is so you don't go f.u.c.king yourself out of a spot at the dinner table."

With that he gave Golden a clap on the back, a wink and a nod to the kids, and shambled off in the direction of the b.u.mper cars.

Though Golden had never heard anyone in the church address the topic of condoms specifically, The Evils of Birth Control was a subject taken up often and at length. Birth control was high wickedness and pure selfishness, an abuse of mortal agency, a corruptor of men, a destroyer of civilizations. It poisoned the fountains of life, made mockery of G.o.d and all His commandments, the most fundamental of which was to multiply and replenish the earth. The condom, then, in its shiny little wrapper, was the embodiment of worldly vice, the ant.i.thesis of everything for which the church and its proudly prolific members stood.

That afternoon at the county fair Golden had tossed the thing into the nearest garbage barrel as if it were the maggoty remains of a mouse.

But today, in the hot cab of his GMC, he considered the gold foil package for a long time. On the front it said, A PleasurePlus Prophylactic PleasurePlus Prophylactic, and on the back, For the Pleasure of Sensual Living For the Pleasure of Sensual Living. After a while he noticed he still held, in his other hand, the toffee he'd sheepishly fished out of Miss Alberta's bowl. He offered it to Cooter, who sucked on it thoughtfully for a few seconds, rattling it around in his teeth, before giving a shudder and spitting it out onto the seat.

Golden took out his wallet. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror; what he saw there offered no encouragement or reproach, no shocking news about the state of his soul. He opened his wallet. Slowly, he slipped the condom inside.

7.

NUMBER ONE: DANIEL

BORN DEAD AND FOUR MONTHS PREMATURE, WEIGHING ALL OF ELEVEN ounces and no bigger than her own hand. His skin was a deep, startling red covered with fine blond hairs that cl.u.s.tered in a dense little crop at the top of his head. ounces and no bigger than her own hand. His skin was a deep, startling red covered with fine blond hairs that cl.u.s.tered in a dense little crop at the top of his head.

She delivered him after eight hours of induced labor. They took him away to clean him up and when the young, grimacing nurse brought him back to her, he was not swaddled in a blanket as she'd expected, but laid out on a cold metal pan.

"The doctor said not to touch him," the nurse said, looking away, "or his skin might slip off."

If she had not been so exhausted, so emptied out with anger and bewilderment ever since the moment the doctor had whispered to her, with his papery hand on her arm, that the baby she carried had no heartbeat, she might have climbed off her bed and throttled the dumb girl with her bare hands. She felt herself shaking. G.o.d d.a.m.n it G.o.d d.a.m.n it. Then she said the words out loud, startling herself. "G.o.d d.a.m.n d.a.m.n it." it."

Before this moment she never could have imagined the situation that would cause her to say such a thing out loud, but here it was.

Once the nurse was gone, she cupped him in her hands as if handling an injured bird, and nestled him in the fold of her hospital gown. She could see herself in this boy, tiny and red as a demon though he was: in his prominent forehead and oversized feet. His fingers were tapered-so delicate they were almost translucent-and his miniature lips so cracked and dry that she bent down and pressed her own lips against them as if she might kiss them back into life.

At some point her husband, Billy, came into the room. He was a block of a man, a high school wrestler with a pink cauliflower ear, a sergeant in the National Guard with a fondness for dirt bikes and weaponry, and he practically cowered in the corner behind a meal cart. She remembered what he'd said four days before, when she'd come home from the doctor's office to tell him her news. After he allowed her to sob into his chest, after he squeezed her with his thick arms in a most sensitive way, he'd said, in a flat voice she didn't know if she could ever forgive him for, "It's a stillbirth, Trish. Happens all the time."

A BEAUTIFUL DISCOVERY This was back in 1972, four years before she would escape life with Billy and find her way down to Virgin, where she would become what she promised herself she would never be: a plural wife, one of many jewels in her husband's crown.

She'd grown up in the Principle, in a Montana polygamist enclave called Pinedale, where her father, sixty-two years old when she was born, presided over his six wives and forty children with the solemn beneficence of a biblical king. They all lived in a single compound in a stand of ponderosas: two log homes and six Western Pacific boxcars that had been converted into bedrooms for the children and a few of the younger wives. They raised their own meat and vegetables, sewed their own clothes, pumped water by hand, and each night gathered, like the inhabitants of some medieval village, in the smoky, bustling great room with its river-rock fireplace and thirty-foot table made from a single ma.s.sive tamarack cut lengthwise, to sing and eat and thank the Lord for their good fortune.

When her father died, the family disintegrated instantly. Trish was twelve years old. Four of the wives, along with their children, were absorbed into other church families, while the other two, including Trish's mother, disappeared into the world of the gentiles. With nothing but eighty dollars to her name-her portion of the inheritance-she put herself and her four children on a bus to Reno, Nevada, where she would find work as a casino hostess.

In less than a month, Trish had lost her father, five of her mothers (some of whom had fed her, sung her to sleep at night, diapered her, even breast-fed her) and thirty-six of her sisters and brothers, all of whom she missed gravely, reciting their names in a murmuring singsong: "Michael, Deborah, Ivan, Paul, Sheila, Ricky, Mavis, Joan...Timmy, Keith, Caroline...Pearl, Millie, Wyatt, Dale..." Unlike her children, Trish's mother did not seem to be grieved by these losses. Though nearly forty years old, she had married into the family as the sixth of six wives and managed to bear only four children, which afforded her the status of a hired maid.

"Really, I don't know how I did it all those years," Trish heard her transformed mother explain to an incredulous, pink-haired neighbor in Reno. "I cleaned, I cooked, I scrubbed, I swept, I peeled, I tended, I talked pretty and ate humble pie all the d.a.m.n day long, and what did I get for my trouble? Living in a boxcar boxcar, and sleeping once a week with an old goat and his faulty equipment."

Trish's mother took easily to her new, emanc.i.p.ated lifestyle. She wore heels and skirts, smacked her gum, swore off cooking anything but Swanson tinfoil dinners, and every Sat.u.r.day night went out dancing with friends from work. But for Trish it wasn't so easy. She had never seen a TV, listened to a radio, read a book other than the Bible and Book of Mormon, spoken directly to a boy who was not her brother. The first time she flushed a toilet she fled the bathroom in a panic.

One of her first and most important discoveries was her own beguiling face. In Pinedale she had been invisible to herself and everyone else, noticed only when she spoke out of turn or did not do her ch.o.r.es fast enough. She wore pioneer-style gingham dresses, hand-me-down work boots, and never felt any compulsion at all to study herself in a mirror (every morning her mother would brush her long black hair and tug it into two stiff braids). In Reno, she was constantly being waylaid by her own reflection: in medicine cabinet mirrors, department store windows, freshly waxed limousines, the chrome toaster on the kitchen counter. Amazed, she'd stand in front of the gla.s.s trophy case at school and consider her pert little nose and pouty lips and gleaming blackberry eyes. She was stunning!-why hadn't anyone told her?

She learned clothes and makeup from her mother's friend, Carlotta, who had worked six years as a showgirl and knew how to apply complex combinations of mascara, rouge, and base in ways that would, according to Carlotta, "set the boys' nuts on fire." Every chance she got, Trish ducked into the nearest bathroom to admire her sooty eyelashes and glowing cheeks, to a.s.sure the integrity of her painted lips and penciled eyebrows.

At school the girls hated her, of course, but the boys never wavered in their attentions-little packs of them vying for the privilege to lean against her locker-even after the girls spread rumors that she was a s.l.u.t, that she turned tricks on weekends down by the railyard. She didn't know how to flirt or engage in small talk, and managed to turn down every offer of a date until she was fifteen, which only thickened the ether of mystery that hung around her. It was bullnecked Billy Paddock who first successfully asked her out. Actually, he sat across from her at study hall one afternoon and told told her that he was going to take her to the Spring Hop on Sat.u.r.day night, that he would pick her up at seven sharp, and that he would be bringing a pink peony corsage in case she wanted to wear a dress that matched. her that he was going to take her to the Spring Hop on Sat.u.r.day night, that he would pick her up at seven sharp, and that he would be bringing a pink peony corsage in case she wanted to wear a dress that matched.

It's how she'd been trained for most of her life: she did as she was told.

After Billy there were other boys. He wanted her for himself but she began to exercise the privilege her looks afforded her: she let other boys tell her what to do. She drew the line at French kissing and petting, but Billy didn't know that. He'd find out about her date with Marty Craig, wide receiver and star of track and field, and work himself into a purple-faced rage. He went out with other girls, feigned indifference, but was always there, watching, making sure she was his for Homecoming, Harvest Ball, Prom-all the big ones. She lost herself in the thrill of infatuation, in the pleasure of a boy's cold hand on her breast, but then the guilt would form like a hard bone in her chest and she would feel G.o.d watching her, the old G.o.d who lived among the tall pines and in the flat pale sky of Montana, and late at night, with the smell of aftershave and cigarette smoke still clinging to her, she would pray, beg His forgiveness and cry until her eyes were aching and dry.

On the last night of her junior year, she let Billy go all the way; a relief, finally, to relent. She closed her eyes and wept the few minutes that it took.

Within a month she discovered she was pregnant. By the time she graduated from high school she was a married woman, the mother of a two-month-old baby girl, washing diapers and ironing shirts in a tract house not much bigger than a Western Pacific boxcar.

NUMBER TWO: MARTINE Not two years after Daniel, a kindly old German doctor, short and stout as a dwarf, delivered the absurd news: after six months of pregnancy she was, once again, carrying a dead baby.

She was so overcome by what this strange little man in a lab coat was telling her that she laughed out loud. "You're kidding."

"No. Nope." He shook his head. "No kidding."

"You're kidding," she said again, though this time in a whisper, the words dropping from her mouth like faint echoes.

"No kidding," the little doctor insisted. kidding," the little doctor insisted.

They ran tests and discovered a simple explanation: she suffered from a condition that clotted the blood, cutting off the flow of oxygen and nutrients through the umbilical cord, a condition that could be treated by a daily pill of baby aspirin. But too late for tiny red Daniel, and now Martine.

She asked the doctor why her first daughter, her living daughter, Faye, who was now four years old, had managed to arrive safely into this world at all.

The doctor shrugged and waved his fat little hand. "I haf delifered over two thousand babies, my dear," he said, "and it is a miracle each time one off them has come out alife and stayed that way. You haf successfully birthed one child. Now that we understand your condition, I haf no doubt you can do it again." He raised his eyebrows. "No kidding."

On a snowy winter evening she delivered the fetus in a haze of painkillers (to take the edge off, the nurses had told her) and, once the labor was over, fell into a weeping, half-conscious sleep. She woke to a blur of light and voices, asking to see her baby, and the nurse informed her that her husband had authorized them to take the fetus and properly dispose of it.