The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  As he steps into the bath, Wesley is thinking about Bergson’s notion that all our perceptions are outside us in the things we perceive, not inside us. Connie Dreyer used it to illustrate the difficulty we have in glimpsing Being through the unreliable scrim of Becoming, which is the world of our sensations, but not the world itself, since our perceptions can never equal the perceived. The only way to see Being truly is by way of direct intuition or inspiration. Revelation. Connie’s defense of faith by way of the likes of Plotinus, Augustine, that Areopagite character. Wesley was able to chip in a remark about John Scotus Eriugena, about whom he had once written a pretty good B-minus paper, but his heart was not in it, as his inner Christ has more or less disabused him of all notions of uroboric wholes common to these flaky Platonic dreamers. Faith, Connie said, is a kind of power: the power to appreciate revelations, which are facts in a way that what we call facts are not. Though one can reason about revelations, they are not a matter of reason but are simply received. In the way, Wesley asked, somewhat testily since he was not being taken seriously, that he has received his indwelling Christ? Connie puffed on his bent briar and said he was thinking of something a bit more abstract and all-encompassing. But the point is (his buttocks are now kissing the hot surface), Bergson uses the sensation of light as his demonstration of the distance between us and our own perceptions, seeing being the closest of the senses to thinking, and as Wesley sinks gratefully into the tubful of hot water (Jesus says: Yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!), he concludes that there has been too little thought about the contiguous and instantaneous tactile perceptions of the flesh, which in the case of a hot tub bath anyway, come close to being the same as the perceived. And, if not, does that place our flesh outside us as well? The whiskey, he feels, is making him quite brilliant.

  His route into the manse was via its nether regions, though not by choice. They had changed the locks, both front and back, but not the padlock on the old cellar door. Such a door on his father’s farm led to their tornado and bomb shelter, and Wesley as a boy often used it as his hideaway. He kept secret provisions there in the way of candy bars and jawbreakers, and he did so here in the manse as well: a bottle of bourbon on the pantry shelves behind the paint tins, still nearly half full. While he was down there, he switched on the electricity and the hot water heater. The door at the top of the stairs was secured only with a hook and eye, easy to snap with a little push.

  While he waited for the water to heat up, he strolled the darkening manse, stripped of all small and personal items, though still with most of its furniture, some covered with sheets, while outside the fresh rumbles of thunder drew nearer. The eggs, he saw, were gone from the kitchen walls, but not the yellow stains they left. No glasses, so he drank from the neck of the bourbon bottle, Jesus cautioning against it, lest he be filled with drunkenness and unable to find his way out of here and back to the studio again. “Well, you are right,” Wesley said. “I won’t have any. You may have it all.” And he tipped the bottle back, Jesus remarking, with no little irony, Hah! the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it? Although everything in the manse was familiar, it was also unfamiliar, for his life had changed and was still changing and bore no relation any longer to these ancient philistine spaces. He could find no towels, but he pulled an old sheet off an easy chair which will do just fine.

  The whiskey has indeed put Jesus in a mellow mood, that and Wesley’s decision that they will, yes, return to Prissy and the studio. Jesus is now humming an old church tune, “Where the Healing Waters Flow,” though he seems to be turning it into a kind of torch song: “O, this precious, perfect love! How it keeps the heart aglow!” Women were always important to Jesus and they are important to him now. His intimacy with prostitutes, whose sins he forgave as if they were not sins, got him in trouble with the Pharisees, and his ministry was benefacted by faithful women of means, all women who loved him one way or another. Some bathed his feet in their tears or splashed spikenard on his head, others just hung out with him like love-stricken camp followers. If two lie together, then they have heat, Jesus has said in his ecclesiastical style, speaking from within Wesley’s recumbent body on the studio exercise mats that serve there as their bed (now here in the hot bath Christ has fallen blissfully silent), but how can one be warm alone? From Magdalene, his favorite, he expelled seven demons, and what he said about it was, Yeah, that was a lot of fun. We got on well. And now it is Priscilla. Wesley does not wholly understand his mission, but he knows that Prissy and her studio are part of it. That became transparent to him on his walk today through this hostile wilderness of a town in which he cannot survive alone and from which he cannot alone escape. For the moment he and Jesus are safe here in the manse, for outside a violent storm is brewing and no one will be out in it, but sooner or later they will have to brave it and make their way back to their mirrored refuge and to its peculiar rhythms. Which can be pretty strenuous. He sleeps a lot when Prissy’s not around, just getting over when she is. Sleeps well. Better than he ever slept before.

  Priscilla found Wesley’s inner Jesus, whether real or imaginary (imaginary, she assumed then—symbolic, perhaps a way of expressing his prophetic insights), pretty disconcerting at first. Even with his head between her legs, Wesley would go on talking to him, describing what he saw there or arguing with Jesus’ instructions about what to do with his hands or reciting passages from the Bible about perfumes and kisses and gardens (“His branch shooteth forth in his garden” was one of his favorites, his or Jesus’—it was hard to tell). But over time she has come to believe in this Jesus and to wish to please him and to desire him just as she desires Wesley, even if it does make their mating dances feel a bit like group sex. It also raises paternity issues. She is only a week late and she can be irregular, but she just knows through an inner knowing that cannot be denied. Her tender breasts tell her so.

  That the conception almost certainly took place here that night of the freak snowfall, and that by chance or some kind of design beyond her understanding they are back here now, and that there is a storm raging outside as though to hide them from the world, all means that her revelatory May Day dance will probably be different than originally choreographed. A pity she didn’t bring the flowers along, but she left in such a panic, fearing she would lose him to those who mean him harm. And, anyway, they will find a use for them back at the studio, perhaps in a kind of sequel, a ritual confirmation of the miracle (call it that: she had always supposed herself congenitally barren until now); dear Wesley is so responsive and so unflagging, a virility she now attributes in part to his ardent indwelling Christ.

  Now, sitting on the edge of the tub, she watches the dance of his limp penis in the water as she stirs it (somehow the “Moonlight Sonata” seems right for this), dreaming of the future and of the child that will be borne to them all. The moment the mayor mentioned Wesley’s desire for a bath, she knew where he had gone and she worried for him, exposing himself, brave but foolhardy, to such risks in broad daylight, though she appreciated his needs. In the studio there is only a shower and toilet in a corner behind a curtain, put there mainly for her students as a kind of dressing room, the corner having previously been used for a photography studio and so already plumbed, and the water is usually only lukewarm at best and sometimes little more than a trickle. She thought she might have to break a window to get into the manse before noticing the open cellar door and coming straight up here, where she found him sleeping soundly in the bathwater, snoring softly while the storm crashed outside. Is Jesus also sleeping, she wonders, or is he, in some manner, observing her? Just in case, she has taken her clothes off beside the tub, for she knows it pleases him, and she is excited by his pleasure.

  Later, she will bathe Wesley (he has not washed himself, the water is clear, except for where his pipe has fallen into it and created a rather ominous little smudge) and perhaps he will bathe her in turn and she will dry him off and he will dry her off and she will
dance her May Day dance for him and with him, and they will run to the car and she will drive him home through the rain and then they will have to take their clothes off again and dry off again and so on, but for now she is choreographing his awakening. She wants it to be gentle, for he may have forgotten how he came here, and be frightened when he first comes to. As much as anything, he likes her to do a grand plie over his face, cunnilingus being for Wesley—and for Christ Jesus, too—a kind of mystical religious experience (she calls it their “Dance of the Tongues” and it is best when they dance it as a pas de deux, or trois; Wesley is a willing participant in all her dances, though he’s not very athletic or flexible, so this is one of his best ones), but that’s not easy in the tub, and it’s probably not the best way to wake up. No, it will be a dance of the fingertips and she will whisper to him about his greatness and her love for him and she will also speak quietly to Jesus, tell him that she wishes to love him and to serve him and that he must guide Wesley and keep him safely within the sanctuary of the studio, lest he fall into the hands of his enemies. They must be prudent. For soon they will be four.

  II.5

  Saturday 2 May

  Saturday night in West Condon and folks are restless and needful, but money is short and nothing much happens without it. Still, they go looking. The pool hall. The Elks Lodge. The roller rink. The bus station and the rootbeer stand. Neighborhood taverns. Mostly dead. The municipal ballpark. Table tennis at the youth center. With dented balls. Legion Hall. Filling stations. Drag-racing up and down empty pot-holed neon-lit Main Street. Making something out of nothing, trying to, a local skill honed by all the bad years. The young with cars end up at the lakes or the old ice plant or out at the edge of town in the abandoned movie drive-in lot or where the big Dance Barn was before it burned down. Listening to music on the car radio. Having a beer and a smoke. Of whatever. The old church camp on the Tucker City road used to be a beer party favorite, but it’s occupied now by those religious idiot-sticks. Still, if you have nothing else to do, you can always drive by and shout out obscenities and throw bottles over the barbed-wire fence.

  “I don’t have big ambitions,” an unemployed coalminer is grumbling up at the Eagles social club over a friendly game of pinochle. “Eat and shit regular. Fuck a whore wunst a week. That takes money. Not much. But some. Can’t stand to have a whore look down her nose at me. So I need a job.” The other three at table grunt in agreement, sorting their cards. “Have you thought of taking up whoring yourself?” one of them asks, wallowing an unlit cigar around in his jowls. “They tell me there’s a market now.” “They’s probly a age limit.” Now and then something opens up for a night guard or a short-order cook, a bouncer, debt collector, ditch digger. Shit jobs, but always a scramble for them. They hated the mines—the fear, the hard labor, the black greasy filth, the bad hours—but they miss them. They were a team then, union men. Now it’s every miserable cocksucker for himself. There’s work out at the strip mine, but it’s non-union, and Italians need not apply, the owner and his mine manager being militant racists. They’ve organized their own Klan den, though they call it something else, some kind of holy legion or militia. Guys who work for him say old man Suggs keeps a huge horsewhip coiled over a nail in his office; it’s the first thing you see if you go in there to bitch about something.

  Not everyone’s completely broke. The Sir Loin steak house, offering weekend specials (also available during the week), does a little business. Enrico’s Palazzo di Pizza does. The chop suey joint out at the shopping center. The movie house with its pocked screen. The bowling alley. The Nineteenth Hole at the country club, which should probably be called the Tenth Hole with half the course long since gone to weed. Many of those eating and drinking in the Hole have played a round or two today and are now talking about their handicaps and missed putts and the deteriorating condition of the course and of life in general. Expressing their disgust at national politics, the injustice of the tax laws. Bemoaning the lack of downtown business. Wondering why, with all the unemployment, they can’t find a decent cook out here. Commiserating with the former secretary of the Chamber of Commerce after the unexpected overnight restructuring of the city organization that has cost him his job. The town banker who engineered this move on the grounds of saving tax money and curbing corruption is not here tonight, being either at home with his terminally ill wife or off on another business trip, so they can speak freely about him and his bullying tactics, even if his motives are impeccable. The former Chamber secretary has not taken this change of fortune well, but the club members are tolerant folk who can put up with belly-aching drunks when there is cause. The bank lawyer, who will be taking over the Chamber duties and others as a kind of ad hoc city manager, was here earlier tonight, but left before the supper crowd arrived. He is a nice young man and will do a good job, but the ex-secretary is a local pal, even if he is pretty useless, and people feel sorry for him, while at the same time feeling sorry for themselves.

  The Hole is accustomed to an early crowd and shuts down early, leaving a long night ahead. Some will meet up at a club bar, others in a neighbor’s kitchen or over a bridge or poker table. Many will retire with a drink to a recliner chair in front of the box. A few, choosing to rough it, will head out to the roadhouses or take in a bit of country music at the Blue Moon Motel.

  Sheriff Tub Puller is passing that popular Saturday night establishment and he decides to wheel through the parking lot to see who’s up to what. Looks like a full night. Tub is returning from a Christian Patriots meeting out at John P. Suggs’ strip mine offices, and he is feeling righteous and closely engaged with the way the world works and well equipped to do important deeds. Tub doesn’t share the religious beliefs of most of the other Patriots, preferring not to think about any life after this one, mainly because no matter what comes next it’s always a rough passage, but he is patriotic and he loathes Romanists and niggers and kikes and feels at home with Suggs’ militia. They look up to him as a big man and a leader. And he’s not just an immovable mass, he’s a good marksman, too; people have to admire that. If Tub Puller shoots at somebody, he hits them where he wants to hit them. Suggs’ mine manager, Ross McDaniel, is the only one who can beat him at target practice, and that’s all he can beat him at, except maybe the hundred yard dash. McDaniel is an outsider brought to town by Suggs and even Tub is a little afraid of him. There’s a rumor that his past targets might have included FBI agents and tax collectors and even a sheriff or two. Suggs knows Tub is not a very religious man, but he is cool about it, and Tub can appreciate where Suggs is coming from and respects it. Probably, in the end, he’ll find his way there as well, for it’s a hard, tough religion and the lines are clearly drawn and it has a certain manly appeal.

  With a little help from Suggs’ deep pockets, Tub has been putting together a volunteer police unit to deal with emergency situations in the county, and the core of it has been recruited from the Patriots. In fact, they are more or less the same thing. There haven’t been any emergencies, but there are a lot of people around here who don’t see eye to eye, so there are apt to be, and Suggs wants him to be ready. The church camp sect is one of Suggs’ pet projects, and Tub’s troops have already been called out there a couple of times to defend it. Some of his most reliable volunteers belong to that group. Tub’s deputy Cal Smith is an evangelical, close to some of those people, and should fit right in, and for a while he did help out at training sessions, but since Red Baxter’s return, he has begged off, using his family duties as an excuse. Baxter was their section boss in the mine. A man born angry. Tub could go along with the loudmouth’s gobpile oratory back when it was about hours and wages, but then he got religion and became a rancorous pain in the ass. Suggs plainly hates the man and wants him run out of here. Smith, however, came from a family of pentecostals and only got closer to Baxter when Red shifted his hatred from bosses to sinners. In the mine, Tub was a shotfirer, using compressed air cylinders like dynamite to bring down walls of coal, a hazardo
us job, and Smith was his partner and driller. They hardly ever spoke to each other, but they were a team, so when Tub got elected sheriff, he appointed Smith his deputy, a good man to have at your back when there’s dangerous work to be done. Now he’s not so sure. There’s been trouble at the camp since Baxter’s return. If a line gets drawn, he may find his deputy standing on the wrong side of it.