The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  She enters the office with an application needing his signature. Displaying upright bank floor demeanor, knowing she is being watched. No eye contact. Only her flush gives her away. Deep into her throat. And the bluesy tune she is humming between closed lips. One of theirs. What is it? Hah: Baby, Knock Me a Kiss. Ted hopes his grin looks more like a boss’s approving smile and flips the top page of the application over as though studying it. “It’s okay, Mr. Cavanaugh,” she says crisply. “Just sign it before my knees give way.” She leaves primly, as though faintly exasperated, but twitches her hips slightly at the doorway like a backsided wink. What has he just signed? He doesn’t know. Happy as a pup. Another of their songs.

  One condition of surrender: give up his obsession with the cult. He can do this. The world’s a crazy place, as unmanageable as economic cycles. Let it be. Suggs moved his heavy yellow backhoes onto the mine hill Friday, began chewing up the hillside. An outrage. There are pending legal actions, even their ownership of the hill is in question. It was like a dare: stop me if you can. Ted had learned they were having some kind of ceremony over there yesterday, the laying of a cornerstone or something. There must be a way. Stacy pleaded. Don’t let it spoil our weekend. He hesitated. For a moment he felt that football in his hands again, had his fingers on the laces. But he smiled, shrugged, booted it out of sight. Felt good. That game’s over. Whistle blown. With Tommy, Concetta, and her widow friend Rosalia sharing the home care duty, Saturday was a night in the city (“important meeting with investors”), yesterday a long drive in her car, a walk in the hills. Wet but beautiful. Maybe their most beautiful time together so far. They drove leisurely over into the next state, where they could wander around, hand-in-hand, unafraid of being recognized, then, somewhat more urgently, back to the motel. They got caught in a downpour between the parking lot and the room, so they shed their wet clothes, showered together, and spent a couple of delicious late afternoon hours in each other’s arms, lit only by the soft forgiving light flowing in through the wet windows and falling upon them like a kind of benediction. Divine sanction. What divinity, he couldn’t say. The days are long now. They dressed by that light for supper.

  Nick Minicozzi drops down from his office upstairs, closes the door behind him when he enters. He has news. John P. Suggs is in the hospital. Intensive care. Catastrophic stroke. In a coma. Not expected to pull through. The Collins girl is there, too. She has apparently been starving herself to death. A kind of hunger strike against God for not bringing on the Second Coming, or something. And six men are in jail, charged by the sheriff with various crimes against the Brunist encampment. Apparently their power and phone lines got cut over the weekend. One of the arrested, a young guy, has a bullet wound, and another is Reverend Abner Baxter.

  Even before he has fully absorbed it all, Ted is reorganizing his campaign. Breakthrough! He and Suggs have been playing “king of the hill” all spring and the coal baron has been beating him at every move; Ted had all but abandoned the field. Now things have suddenly changed. Pat is a stubborn autocrat, has no partners, only employees, disdains lawyers. It should be easy to tie up his headless empire in litigation, bring an end to the Brunist nightmare. And they seem to be fighting among themselves, making it even easier. He and Nick review all the legal actions they’ve been taking. Nick promises to follow up aggressively. Put on the blitz. “Especially hit hard on the money and property issues.” Maybe they can not only wrest the Deepwater land away from them, but might even repossess the camp itself, reactivate it now that it’s fixed up. Summer camp for the whole area.

  “Who manages Suggs’ mining company?”

  “The site boss is a guy named McDaniel. Not from around here.”

  “See if you can reach him. Tell him he has to get those backhoes off the hill today or risk impoundment. Launch a suit that would force them to refill all the holes and trenches they’ve dug. And let him know you’re doing it.”

  Even as he talks with Nick, he’s on the phone. Getting the word out. Fashioning moves. Power plays. He makes one-on-one appointments with all the members of the West Condon Ministerial Association. Books announcement times with Rotary and the BPW, the Masons, the Knights of Columbus. The Fourth of July is coming up. In years past, they held an all-county parade here in town. Could revive that. Find some famous guests—like a pro ballplayer or a movie actor—try to lure the governor down. Book a carnival, organize picnics and ball-games, hold raffles, throw a spectacular fireworks display. Theme of Unity. Progress. New Opportunities for West Condon. Bring in that city group buying the old hotel. The Italian-American angle. Brighten up Main Street. Restore the community spirit. He asks the NOWC steering committee to meet Wednesday in the old Chamber offices. Starting late. They need six months, have one. Have to work hard at this.

  Then it’s off to the police station and jail, the hospital, see where the pieces lie. On the way out the door, his glance meets hers, sees the flicker of disappointment. The fool for love has lost his way again. He shrugs, shakes his head. Sorry. Can’t help it. Have to do this.

  “Numbers,” Sally Elliott says, blowing smoke out over the porch railing, clouding the day. Ostensibly, she’s here to borrow Tommy’s cameras for a wedding she’s been asked to photograph. “Mathematics.” It’s Monday, his day off from the pool. Summer coming all over itself. Angela is working at the bank, he has the whole sweet top-down day out to himself. Maybe, first thing, once he’s got rid of Sally, he’ll drag Fleet Piccolotti out of his family sausage shop to go shoot some baskets or throw a ball around. Pete’s down on life, a side of him he didn’t see back in high school. It probably wasn’t there. Marriage, family have infected him with it, shopkeeping has. No easy cure, but sinking a few might cheer him up. “A kind of wizardry built on the void. Starts with zero the way religions start with God. Neither exist, but you can build a whole system.” She’s trying to impress him with what she knows about the Brunists, mostly things she’s learned from that wall-eyed kid with the droopy handlebars. If he can be trusted. Is she fucking him? Probably. There’s a bit of a breeze. He can hear the flag flopping about lightly above the porch roof. Traditionally it was Tommy’s duty to raise and lower it every day, but now he and his dad are both busy and preoccupied, so it stays up. When it comes down after Labor Day the house looks naked without it. Like it has lost its loin cloth or something. “Add in fantasy calendrics, a mysterious voice in a ditch, magic numbers and prophetic tombstones, and anything can happen, anything can be true.”

  He knows she’ll turn all this into a thumbnail history of Christianity. She can be pretty funny, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what the joke is. Well, she reads books. Her T-shirt is about all he’ll read today. He doesn’t even know many who do read, not for fun. She may be the only person in town. Those he has known up at college were mostly pretty boring. Couldn’t throw a ball or shoot the shit in an ordinary sort of way. Sally’s different, but then she’d probably be different even if she didn’t read books. On the porch table with their coffee cups and her ashtray are some old newspapers, one of which Sally says is the final edition of the West Condon Chronicle. She has explained all the pictures. He glanced at them. Ancient history. Vaguely remembered some of it, though at the time he wasn’t paying all that much attention. Did remember that black hand. The Claw. A lot of sick jokes about it back then. All this info-gathering began with his telling her he was thinking about going on to grad school in sociology and using the Brunists as dissertation material. That was months ago, while he was still up at school. Now he’s thinking more about law school, but she only laughed when he told her and has carried on as before. Well, she’s lonely—it gives her something to do.

  “Now Darren has come up with a new idea,” she says, lighting up again. “The preacher husband of the woman who founded the cult was killed in the mine disaster. They’re apparently going to rebury him under one corner of their new church, and Darren wants to dig a hole on the other side and ask for Bruno’s body back from wherever it
is to put there.”

  “Bruno’s dead? I didn’t know that,” he says. He’s only half listening. He’s wondering if he should take up pipe smoking.

  “Meanwhile, he wants to fill the coffin with a tunic, a mining pick, and his seven sayings.”

  “His seven sayings,” Tommy says, repeating her without thinking about it. A mistake. She goes on to quote them all and explain them, offering a few wiseass variants of her own.

  The grass is high after the recent rain. Needs mowing. He owes his old man that much for his Bing Cherry gleaming in the driveway. Dandelions popping up everywhere, too. Have to behead the randy little suckers before they go to seed. His first sex: blowing dandelion seeds, impregnating the neighborhood. It’s fun, but what’s disappointing is the sad little nubbin that’s left at the end, the wilt that overtakes the stem. Doesn’t stop you from picking another, though, and having another blow. Maybe he should go for a drive today. Pick up a girl, someone new. A hand job on the highway with the top down, a fuck in the fields. He calls his new machine his Bing Cherry because, one, they’re his favorite fruit and nearly as delicious as pussy, and two, being a poet at heart, he likes the connection to bang, bung, bong. But the car is actually more the color of pie cherries. Which are also delicious. His Cherry Pile? Fleet calls it, or him, Il Cardinale. He sometimes now calls him Holy Father. Sourly. Fleet’s more like a sour cherry.

  “So now, after what’s happened, they’re into their Hatfields and McCoys mode. Emily Wetherwax told my mother on the phone that Archie is out at the camp this morning repairing the phone lines that got cut. Electricity’s off, too. He called her from up a pole somewhere and said there’d even been some shooting over the weekend.”

  All in all, it’s a wacky story, no doubt at least partly true. No wonder his dad wants to get rid of those wombats. The one image from her story that sticks in his head, even though it was probably made up, is of that redheaded fat boy dressed in nothing but girl’s panties and dumped at his preacher father’s feet like spoiled meat. Hi, Dad. Guess what? He and the girl were apparently in high school at the same time, both of them a couple of classes behind Tommy. She’s a miner’s kid, like Angela, but he doesn’t remember her. Probably not his type. Though she was evidently Ugly Palmers’ type, at least to the extent of gangbanging her with the others. Just as well the asshole didn’t turn up at Lem’s garage that morning; Ugly has just got uglier and was likely looking for an excuse to get into a fight.

  “What if,” Sally says, stubbing out her smoke, “all the madness is buried in the language and you can’t get it out?”

  He’s not sure what she means (that voice in the ditch?), but as he finds himself staring at her FAITH is BELIEVING WHAT you KNOW AIN’T so T-shirt, he says: “In lines like that, you mean?” She stretches the shirt out away from her tits as if reading it for the first time. No bra under there. The shirt collapses back over her nipples, which are the sexiest thing about her. If Angela were wearing it, to read it you’d have to walk those hills a letter at a time. Though she never would. Not much wit in that girl. “Where do you find those funky tees, Sal? Different one every time I see you.”

  “I make them. But they don’t hold up well in the wash.”

  “You made that up, too?” he asks, pointing.

  “No, that’s Mark Twain. Or at least he got credit for it. Goes back to the Greeks, I imagine, or more likely the Babylonians. Or the guys before them who didn’t have anybody writing down what they said.”

  “Great. Mark Twain. You’ve finally named someone I’ve read.”

  “Huckleberry Finn?”

  “No, I couldn’t get through that one. Tom Sawyer.”

  “A kind of role model, I suppose.”

  “I did think of him as pretty cool. And we had the same name. I especially liked the snuggle with what’s-her-name in the cave. Lights out, pissing herself with terror, ready for anything. When you’re ten years old, that’s pretty hot stuff.”

  “You must have still been in your Tom Sawyer phase when you tried to scare the pants off me with that end-of-the-world line back in high school.”

  “Did I? Hah. Did it work?”

  “Yes, it got me to praying. I was still in my Aunt Polly phase.”

  “You know, they always said that though Tom seemed like a rascal, really he was innocent. But that’s not true. Really he wasn’t.”

  “No, neither was Becky. They were both just dumb.”

  Ted pulls a chair up at the mayor’s table in Mick’s Bar & Grill and orders up the usual. Mumbled greetings around. His fellow civic leaders. They’re a sorry lot, for the most part, but they’re what he has to work with, and he somehow has to mold them into a team. Several of them are on the NOWC steering committee and he lets them know, over his bowl of thin flavorless soup and a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, about the meeting on Wednesday to work up new plans for the Fourth. “It’s not a sure thing, but Governor Kirkpatrick is out on the hustings that day and said he’d try to fit us in.” What the governor actually said was, “It’s an election year, Ted. You’ve got problems down there. I don’t want them to rub off on me.” But he also needs Ted’s annual contribution to his campaign fund, so he didn’t say no. Mort Whimple, the fire chief, wants to know what the hell hustings are, and Elliott from his perch at the bar says muddily that it’s where you graze sheep. “You know,” he sings, raising his highball glass of iced gin, “‘Home, home on the hustings…!’” Maury tells him Jim’s workweek is now down to an hour a day, and that one not worth much. “The governor offered up some ways the state might help us out and he would use the occasion to announce them.” What Kirk suggested was that they were looking for a location for a maximum security prison. It would take some selling. Doesn’t exactly enhance the neighborhood, but it adds jobs. Ted replied that this was a good place for it. There was an available work force and they could also help fill it.

  When he mentions inviting the new prospective owners of the old West Condon Hotel to the celebrations on the Fourth, Mayor Maury Castle mashes out his cigar and growls in his P.A. system voice: “The Roma Historical Society. Who are those guys? I got a feeling it was the Roma Historical Society just got us our new cop.”

  Whom Ted has seen this morning over at the police station. Vince Bonali’s loutish son Charlie. Billed hat down over his nose like a Marine sergeant’s, snapping his jaws and fingers, seemingly impatient with the slow pace of justice. Might be useful. Chief Romano is a weak man and things could get rough. Romano’s number two, Monk Wallace, has been on the force forever and is reliable enough, but a slow-moving sort who likes to just sit and chew and watch the world go by. The other two officers are ex-miners, post-disaster charity hires—Louie Testatonda, a soft beanbag of a fellow, and the night duty cop, Bo Bosticker, a drowsy dimwit. They might need a guy like Charlie. By the time Ted arrived this morning, all those arrested Saturday night had already been released by order of deputy sheriff Calvin Smith, pending further investigations by the district attorney. All but Abner Baxter. Romano is holding him on old charges from five years ago, including jumping bail on murder charges and the destructive assault on St. Stephen’s. Dee is still upset about that. Baxter could be heard railing at them from his cell, promising terrible retribution, if not in this world, then the next. When Ted asked what was going on out at the camp, the chief said that Baxter had been evicted a month or so ago over something involving his motorcycle son and his pals. That gang was gone, but the old man remained in the area and was still unloading his usual Bible-slapping crappola in the fields around. What happened Saturday night was apparently part of some kind of feud going on, and it has gotten to the point where they’ve started shooting at each other. One of the Coates boys ended up with buckshot in his backside and according to the sheriff a lot of shots were fired in both directions. Cause enough to close the camp down. If Puller won’t do it, maybe the state will. Ted promised Dee a prosecutorial brief from the city to give him adequate cause to hold Baxter. He’d like to kee
p the preacher penned up and is disappointed the others have been let out. He wonders if there’s some sort of discord in the sheriff’s office and if there’s some way to use it if there is.

  Enos Beeker, the hardware store owner, asks him now if he’d heard about Pat Suggs’ brain attack, and he tells them he’s just come from the hospital. “He’s out of intensive care and into a private room, but he has taken a crippling hit.” When Doc Lewis emerged from Suggs’ private room, Ted caught a glimpse of his former home care nurse, Bernice Filbert, dressed something like a World War I battlefield nurse, at Suggs’ bedside. Bernice started when she saw him and hurried to close the door again. He glared at her, smiling coldly, as though to suggest she’s in for it. And she is. Without Suggs’ help, she’s headed to prison for embezzlement and grand larceny. Burly plaid-shirted man with a thick black beard in there, too. Maudie, a nurse he knew from his own high school days, passed by and told him that was Mr. Suggs’ strip mine boss, Ross McDaniel. “Hardshell libertarian,” she said, inventing another sect. A cute freckle-faced kid back in school with a nice body who put out generously, something of a legend at the Baptist summer church camps out at No-Name, now as wide as she is tall, her dry hair thinning out, her freckles spreading. Still cheerful, though, as she always was, with a flair for the soap-operatic. Learned from her about the Collins girl. “When they brought her in, she looked like a skeleton with tissue-paper skin stretched over, and she’s still bad off. She’s trying to die. Has to be force fed.”

  He passes on some of this to the klatch in Mick’s. Not all of it. Shaping the news to his purposes. Including in, including out. The way newspapers and news magazines work, inventing history. Something Miller said, some years ago. Probably in here, over a charred hamburger. He sure did that, damn him. His invented history is still being spun out. Miller did what he could to ruin this town and should have been tarred and feathered on his way out. Ted sometimes misses him, though.