A Cuddly Toy Read online

  “I know, I know,” said Ariella, exhaling pot smoke. “But listen, is it okay if I take them? At least with me they’re safe until you get yourself a new house.” She paused. “Which you will do someday.”

  “Right,” I said, not too reassuringly.

  I hung up, but kept drinking, pondering on the unjust and crooked divorce law in this country. Kelly and I had lived in Aurora, Colorado, a no-fault state. It didn’t matter that she’d caught me in flagrante with someone in our actual bed. In my defense, I’d thought Kelly was visiting her mother in Denver. I know, I know, that’s no excuse. But I was following my lusty instincts, testing my own boundaries. How it turned out should’ve been a beacon instructing me that my instincts had been wrong.

  Never ever. Ever. Do that again.

  Now I was the one stuck in the King Arthur Inn in Quartzsite. The Magic Fingers in the bed did not assuage my pain. I tried one time, one time, to enact a closely-held fantasy of mine, and my wife dispossesses me. She had evicted my ass so fast I had to return in a few days to get clothes my laptop.

  I thought she’d get over it. She didn’t.

  Now I missed Kelly. Thirteen years of a fairly happy marriage, down the tubes because I’d stupidly reached out, unable to bear the sense I was missing out in life, riddled with FOMO. I indulged in a longtime dream of mine, but you know what?

  I did not regret it!

  It had been heaven for a few brief minutes. The reality was better than my wildest imagination, a hundredfold. Every inch of my body was on fire as I rolled and indulged and released my inhibitions like I never had before. Sucking, delighting in every taste, movement, sensation. Who could find fault with that? What else was a man to do if he finally admitted, at age thirty-nine, that he was bisexual?

  The next day was even worse. Back in the Salomé Range, I found a tailings pile that nearly broke my Geiger counter. It sputtered so furiously it nearly unscrewed the bolts holding it together. I felt ridiculous eating my bologna sandwich, turned into a pile of Wonder bread mush by too much mayonnaise. It was the only halfway edible thing at the local market. It was that, or peanut butter. A total eclipse was about to sweep the valley, and I had no shades, much less a telescope.

  Impotent and inconsequential, my mind was pretty much a blank by the time a cowboy rode up.

  He tipped his slouch hat. “You a scientist?”

  “Sure am,” I said wearily.

  “Building more houses?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He pointed at the pile that stretched like an ice floe toward another mesa, stacked like a birthday cake in different pastel. “Dis material. Dey used it to build a lot of our houses. You a house builder?”

  “No, scientist. How did they use this material for houses?”

  He shrugged. He was one of those ragged, dark Navajo—Diné, they called themselves, The People—usually seen hanging around trading posts smoking weed, drinking hairspray, eating the Pringles and bologna the Bureau of Indian Affairs handed out. The hip lingo for young people was to say da sheep, da television, da truck. Everything was dis, dat, dere. “Cousin-uncles have told me they mixed sand with dis crushed rock and it makes good cement for da floor.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Sh’yeah, right. Why would I kid? Anyone could take sand from here. We used the powder to fertilize tomatoes and melons. Used it out on the alfalfa fields.”

  “You’re kidding.” It slowly sank into my enfeebled brain. These People were rolling around in atomic waste. “You’re kidding!”

  He frowned fiercely. His horse skittered and nearly bucked him off, as wild as he was. “Why would I kid? We used it to build our school. In our church—”

  “There’s a church?” It was too much, of course, to expect a Jewish temple out here in the wild, wild west. But suddenly, for all my sins, I wanted a church. Yes. I’d confess to God everything! I’d talk about the contamination, the cattle drinking from liquid poison, the tomatoes sending radiation into people’s lungs, stomachs, bones.

  “Yeah. St. John’s of the Desert. Right off 95 at da crossroads with 72 to Vicksburg.”

  “St. John’s of the Desert,” I repeated, packing up my stuff as the moon’s shadow started taking bites out of the desert below.

  “Very good pastor, Father Moloney. Very cool guy. But he’s out looking at da eclipse.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll wait for him.”

  It was supernatural, driving north up 95, chasing the moon’s shadow like a cat chasing a laser pointer. I’d never believed in “woo-woo” explanations for perfectly natural occurrences, but I sure did feel eerie. I didn’t even feel like myself. This is hard to explain, but it was as though I was out of my body. I felt so light, I wondered if my soul had departed. It was well-known that the soul weighed a couple of ounces.

  Then I snorted. “My soul sure as shit has departed. Departed when I signed on to help Oswald Avery.”

  It hadn’t seemed so soul-draining when I’d been married. Avery sent me out on jobs in Nigeria or Brazil, places where I was my own man. I particularly enjoyed leading expeditions into the jungle as in precolonial days of yore. I felt I was living up to my name, Fremont, exploring the rugged hinterlands, hacking through the jungle with a machete. Avery pretty much left me alone. He never questioned my results, particularly when they included great ore discoveries and contracts.

  He was going to question the fuck out of this one.

  He’d ranted and raved over the last one, another uranium mine in Nevada. He wanted me to argue that the high radon levels were the result of natural “background” radioactivity. We argued, he threatened to fire me if I “leaked” the truth, I said I didn’t care, and in the end, my report was stamped FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY. Now, as I shot north on the highway toward the sanctuary of a church, bulldozers and drills were moving into the Nevada mine. Oswald Avery had gotten his way, as usual.

  I never did leak, because that’s when Kelly caught me in bed and the shit hit the fan. Because I wound up living in an Airbnb across town, I threw myself into the gym, into work. I asked for more hours, to be sent on more jobs. Avery liked my new attitude. A bonus came into my bank account before I’d even left for this job. I realized that the feeling of doom eating away at my empty stomach had led me to do the things that would certainly lead to disaster. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Didn’t that mean I knew what my report would contain, no matter what I discovered?

  “Could I fucking sink any lower?” I growled. With an angry flip of my wrist I clicked off the radio. “I might as well go into Tucson and indulge my sick, twisted fantasies at a club. But no, I’m too cowardly to even do that.”

  The church was small and white, that’s all I remember. I raced through the foyer and down the center aisle, calling out. “Hello! Hello?”

  I jammed my butt into a front pew and despaired, weaving my fingers through my hair. I realized I’d “hit bottom,” as they say in AA. Did that mean the only way to go was up? Oh, fuck that. I wanted to wallow in the degradation awhile longer.

  I was surprised when an actual priest entered, wearing a cassock and a white collar, the real deal in the middle of the lonely rez. Only, he didn’t look like the real thing. His long, satiny dark brown hair striped with grey was tied back in a ponytail, for one thing. He couldn’t have been forty. What sort of priest was this? He’d been out looking at an eclipse? Well, just the sort of priest a loser like me would get.

  Afraid of being identified if he saw me later on the rez, I kept my back to him.

  “You are troubled.” His voice was lovely, mellifluous, just as a priest’s should be. Soothing.

  I said, “I need to confess, and I was told you have no confession booth.” What kind of fucking Catholic church had no confession booth?

  “It’s all right. I’m trained in the sacrament of reconciliation with God.”

  So I unloaded on the poor guy. He told me to seek faith in art, something I’d just been thinking the night before. I liked him, I
really did. But I was too riled to bond over Clockwork Orange, which I thought was the best film ever made, and I just kept spewing. Sobbing, really, over my predicament, how I was fucked and stuck between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t confess about my bonus, of course. But the priest seemed to be saying I should stand up to Avery.

  This filled me with terror, frankly. Avery was a cutthroat, ruthless businessman. You were always in danger of being booted, badmouthed, lied about. Avery had a casual relationship with the truth, as we whispered behind his back. He’d lie without guilt, just freely flap his gums about anyone, any situation, any group. Anyone who didn’t suck his ass would be in his crosshairs. The second a job lost money, bam, you were outta there. One of his favorite sayings, and he had a lot of sayings. “You’re outta here.”

  As the priest asked me where the contaminated lake was, I was outta there, too.

  To be honest, it was his voice that got to me. So tranquilizing, so relaxing, like a good sedative and an old scotch. Maybe it was the Irish lilt, but instead of feeling soothed, I suddenly became even more riled. I wanted to haul back and belt him when he asked about the lake. I turned back briefly as I stormed passionately out, but I was even more taken by the guy. A broad forehead, “noble” as they say. Dark fiery eyes and the strongest, straightest nose I’d ever beheld. Sort of my type, to be honest.

  I hated him and the stupid fucking crucifix around his neck. Why had I come there?

  I sped back to my hotel room, again avoiding voicemails from Avery. Then I had to speed to the liquor store because I was out of scotch.

  Back at “home,” I sucked down so much scotch I must’ve been more than tipsy. I showered off uranium dust and tried to jack off. I was so agitated, so disturbed, I couldn’t even do that right. My fat, uncut Jewish dick was hot and pulsating in my hand as I ran through my mental repertoire of sex dreams. But nothing happened. I couldn’t come. This had never happened to me before.

  Like a baby, I flung myself face down on the mattress. And, again like a baby, I let loose with the most gut-wrenching, rib-cracking sobs. You know the sort where your mouth is wide open, but no sound comes out? You’re just heaving, a tidal wave of tears and snot bursting forth from inside.

  The jiggling mattress didn’t even pause my rampage. All my shaking must’ve knocked something loose, because suddenly the Magic Fingers leaped into action.

  It was an apropos metaphor for my life. The only vibration I was going to get was from a motor that hadn’t been manufactured since the 1970s, whose sole purpose seemed to be to rattle the eyeballs from my skull.

  I returned from a steep hike down from the Marie Curie Mine in an even more remote locale in the Salomé Valley. Rocks from here had been shipped to France where Madame Curie extracted particles of radium, her fresh discovery. Sure as shit, no one had touched a thing since the fifties. I even found a pamphlet about how to duck and take cover from a nuclear bomb. As if putting your arms over your head would help. In a little pocket cave, I found a girlie magazine called Frolic with articles entitled Strip around the World and Battle of the Bikini Queens. I rolled it up and stuck it in my back pocket for future reference.

  There was a strange dot on a little butte down there. Must be some Indian. He wasn’t moving, sitting, I hate to say, Indian style. Wearing a poncho and one of those slouch hats. The closer I got, the skinner he obviously was. He almost looked like a skeleton draped in skin. Working in mines, I’d seen a lot of corpses in my time. At least as many as a cop might see, I imagined. People got stuck down there and died all the time, or they fell in and no one knew. Well, this guy looked like a corpse. Desiccated skin was draped over sharp cheekbones. But even I knew that a corpse wouldn’t stay sitting up.

  The closer I got, the whiter he looked. A very pretty mustang of burnt sienna with a silken black mane was tethered nearby, looking bored, giving me massive side-eye. The guy looked like he was meditating, hands limply on knees. I didn’t want to interrupt some intense conversation with his maker, but it would be remiss of me not to ask what the fuck he was doing in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing. Only a very flat backpack sat on a rock near him. Otherwise, I didn’t even see a bottle of water, so I held mine out to him. I tried to take louder steps in the sand so as not to startle him.

  He didn’t flinch at my steps, so I cleared my throat. “Uh, hello?” No response. “Sir? I thought you might like—”

  With a great intake of breath that made me jump, the guy’s eyes popped open. The horse didn’t seem to care but it sure scared the shit out of me, as though he’d been holding his breath.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  The guy looked up at me. His pupils were so dilated it occurred to me he was on magic mushrooms, the choice of Don Juan Castaneda.

  “Sorry to scare you,” he said. “I’ve been told I have sort of banshee features.”

  I chuckled, getting my bearings back. “It’s not your features. You seemed . . . maybe dead.”

  “My cousin-brother always said, ‘you look like an anorexic monk.’”

  I had to agree. “Something like that. Care for some water? I filtered it myself.”

  He nodded vaguely and accepted my bottle. I took this as a sign that it was okay for me to sit next to him. “Sorry to interrupt your meditation.”

  He smacked his lips after drinking nearly half the bottle. “Oh, it wasn’t that deep. Once I was so deep, I survived three days in the trunk of a Mustang.”

  “In the trunk . . . ?”

  He nodded pleasantly. He was becoming more human now. He was a tall gangly half-breed with a very serene demeanor, unlike that sour, surly Diné I’d run into earlier. “It made the trip much more bearable.”

  What? “Are you having some kind of solo journey to the center of your soul, or something of that nature?”

  “A vision quest, yes. Theoretically I should not have taken that water.” He handed me back the bottle.

  “No, you at least need water. That’s not cheating. The reason you have visions in a quest like that is from lack of food. The body can go much longer without food than without water. If you died, that’d defeat the purpose of a vision quest, wouldn’t it?”

  He grinned. Dark brown hair flopped over one eye. He was a manchild of a shorebird, all elbows and knees. “Are you a scientist?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Well, aside from the Geiger counter, someone told of your arrival. He said you arrived at the church all in a tizzy.” He was an odd bird, with oldfangled words like “tizzy.” “Also, our pastor had a vision of his own that you would come.”

  “Your pastor? Father Moloney?” That was the soothing, slick guy I’d sobbed my guts out to, embarrassingly. How many visions did people have around here? What was in the water besides uranium? I’d removed 90-99 percent of it with my filter.

  “Yes, he was very clear that a scientist would be arriving. He just wasn’t exactly sure what the scientist would be doing. What are you doing?”

  “Did he, ah, like the fact that the scientist would be arriving? Or was it more a form of dread?”

  He tilted his head. “It was more like a happy form of dread. He wasn’t sure if you portended glad tidings, or doom.”

  I had to laugh. “I’m not sure, either. My company sent me out here to survey for uranium.”

  “Uranium? Isn’t that what they made atomic bombs from in the forties?”

  “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  He shrugged. “I’m originally from the Four Corners rez, where they did a lot of mining. Near Monument Valley. Are you still using it to make bombs?”

  “I don’t think so. Or if they did, they sure as fuck wouldn’t tell me. It can be used to power nuclear submarines, or ballast for ships and counterweights for aircraft.”

  “This is so over my head. Or maybe it’s the shrooms I took earlier. I’m seeing a whole field of shrooms spreading out beneath that mesa.”

  “You got any more?” Why the fuck not? What did I have to lose?
I could trip on shrooms, have stunning visions, and go tell Oswald Avery I found nothing.

  He patted his poncho. “All I have is Adderall. But it belongs to some illegal minor kid I met at the church.”

  Was he serious? “Listen, I’m worried about you out here alone. Can I accompany you back to the church? That priest, he seems to know a lot about the uranium situation here. Has he been here long?”

  “Oh, yes. He came here about two years ago. He’s been a sheepherder for the lost, just like I’ve been a sheepherder for my sheep.”

  I stood and offered him my hand. “Okay, let’s go. I’m Fremont Zuckerman.”

  “I’m Galileo Taliwood. I’ll have to ride my horse. You could ride double behind me to your car.”

  “Sure.” I hadn’t done that in a few years, especially not behind a real Indian on a real Indian mustang. If I was going to be in this godforsaken valley for a while with no drugs to tide me over, I might as well start getting into the groove of things.

  Being a scientist, that’s what you did. You rolled with the punches.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NOEL

  That was how he came to me. Partially through my subterfuge and partially, I like to think, through divine intervention. A fateful, prophetic fulfillment.

  I was finally able to see him fully for the first time when Galileo brought him to my rectory. He was still worried, harried, his fine soft brown hair messed by the desert winds. But his full lips were set with determination, his sky-blue eyes portrayed empathy, and by his tight faded T-shirt under his windbreaker, I could tell he was deeply jacked.

  But I was luckily accustomed to focusing on the emotional needs of parishioners, so I tilted my head with concern when Galileo said,

  “I found him out by the Devil’s Hole. I know you’re preparing for the fish fry. But he seems to need help.”

  The beautiful scientist shouldered Galileo aside and reached out a hand of friendship. “Fremont Zuckerman.” He introduced himself resolutely, giving me the first of many gifts, the gift of his name. I’d been right—Jewish. And he came to the first, to any, church he could find to unburden himself. That must’ve taken a lot from him.