The fragrant Chester K. Johnson, chronically unemployed ex-coalminer, odd-jobber, smalltime thief, cardsharp when sober (not often), and unregenerate wiseass, contrarian by nature, rises, bearing the scars of many battles, from the stinking beat-up sofa in the American Legion Hall above the Main Street dime store where he has spent the morning after an all-nighter so heavy it has obliterated all memory of the day that preceded it. Perhaps there was a poker game up here at dawn; he doesn’t recall. His empty pockets provide no clue, whereas a coin would be something like positive proof and also token for a coffee somewhere. The place is filthy but not so filthy as his own wretched waterless and powerless dirt-floor hutch at West Condon’s hardscrabble edge, wherethrough have drifted, along with the multitudinous vermin, some three generations of Johnsons, if his restless fucked-up clan can be measured by generations, he the last of known whereabouts, known to him anyway, default inheritor of the family estate.
He stumbles off to take a leak and to check in the cracked mirror the hair on his face, which he scrapes off about once a week to stop the itching, the nearest thing he has to a calendar, the days otherwise passing without remark. He decides it can wait another day or two. When did something of sustenance last pass between his broken teeth? Nothing chewable comes to mind, his daily nutrition mostly provided these days by the froth of fermented grains, and that rarely of his own purchase. In short, he is hungry or probably hungry. Maybe he’ll hitch a ride to Waterton. There are a couple of doddering whores over there, including the sister of one of his old mine buddies killed out at Deepwater, who have taken him on as a sort of charity case, and who may be willing to stir up a pot of beans and rice for him when they see his sad condition. Also, he can get his monthly bath and still be back in time for Georgie Lucci’s stag party tonight for Stevie Lawson. Tomorrow, Stevie is marrying one of the Baxter girls, the fat ugly one, though the poor dingdong, who has the brains of a turnip, doesn’t seem to know how it’s happened. The thought of married life makes Cheese queasy, though he’d happily marry anybody’s mother if she’d cook for him and wash and mend his clothes and give him a bit of money for booze and women.
Down on the painfully bright street he finds a lot of people milling about—too many, the town cops among them (what the fuck is going on?)—so he ducks down an alleyway, figuring he might as well check out the trash cans behind the Pizza Palace for a scrap of breakfast, and there encounters a bearded midday drunk in fruity gold slippers, a blue bathrobe, and a hiked red nightshirt pissing against a wall. He’s so crocked he thinks he’s Jesus Christ. “Behold, our belly’s like wine which hash no vent and’s ready t’burst iz wineskin!” he declares, letting fly. Chester Johnson knows this legendary personage primarily by way of his own fulsome and frequent curses, pronounced through his missing teeth as Cheese-us Christ, whence his nickname, his customary unwashed state also playing its part. “Where am I?” the drunk asks confusedly. “’Iz brick wall looks f’miliar.” He leans forward, knocking his forehead against it, leans back. “Hah! Must be wunna the fourteen shtations. Back onna glory trail…!” What is he talking about? No idea. He looks like he might have escaped from that religious zoo out at the church camp near Deepwater. Which means he’s open game. “It hash been said the ’vents of my life reveal the mind of God,” he goes on, talking too loud as drunks do and sweeping his free hand through the stagnant alley air with its heaped-up rubbish and overloaded trashcans. “Look about’n wonder!” As he splashes against the wall, Cheese considers rolling him, but he sees the sucker has no pockets in that smocky thing and his legs under it are bare; might be a lark and a way to get the day started, but there would be no profit in it. It’s like the loony is reading his mind, though, because the next thing he says in his thick-tongued slur is: “So, whish are you, my friend? Good thief’r bad?”
“Huh, gotta be the bad one,” Cheese replies with his usual loose grin, feeling vaguely threatened by something beyond his ken but wondering at the same time if there might be some fun to be had in this, a story to carry with him to Waterton as entertainment for the girls. As an old carny barker uncle who took up preaching as a hustle once told him: Jesus Christ, buster, is the hottest fucking freakshow on the midway. Always envied that uncle; his women, his money. “Ain’t never been a good nuthin nor never aimed t’be.”
“A wise choice,” this alley Jesus says, dropping his skirt and wheeling blearily around to look him over. How did he get so tanked without pockets? He must have a tab somewhere or else he has generous friends. Maybe he could tap into that. “The good thief got locked up for eternity inna Holy Kingdom, a bitter fate. You don’ want that.”
“Hellfire, no,” he agrees, and spits through the gap in his teeth. His preacher uncle laid the whole Jesus story on him, at least the hairier bits, though Cheese remembers only the parts about the flood and the animals, the lady who got screwed by a bird, and then the weird zombie act at the end, which his uncle said was the real zinger and key to his good fortune. People are scared to die, he said, and they’ll cough up anything if they think they can get out of it. He recalls nothing about thieves, but the Jesus character did gather a gang around him, and who knows what they got up to?
Chester is about to suggest, somewhat in jest, that, if Christa-mighty has no objection to a little healthy thieving, they ought to pal up, when the guy, with a wicked grin, says much the same thing (Cheese feels like the fly is open on his brain), declaring they could be “laborers together for God” against “iz ’bominable pit of c’ruption inna pois’nous grip of the moneylenders.” Cheese can go along with that to the extent he understands it, but, holy shit, what the guy wants to rob is the bank. “Come along now! Returning to the people whuzz rightly theirs is not theft! Follow me!”
Against his better judgment, which is generally about the same thing as his worst judgment, he does so, and is led by way of the alleys into the back door of the downtown hardware store. Everyone is either out there among the crowds on the street or on the phone in the office—the store is at their disposal—but before Cheese can fill his pockets with some items of his own, his partner loads him up with a gallon can of black paint, picks up a wide house-painting brush and a screwdriver, and marches him out again. Weaving along tipsily in his golden slippers, he leads them right out onto the sunny street and over to the bank corner, where he pops the lid on the can Cheese is holding with the screwdriver, dips the brush in (“I know, I know, be not anxious!” he mutters, though it’s not clear who he’s talking to) and commences to write across the bank wall and window: HE HATH SWALLOWED DOWN RICHES, AND HE SHALL VOMIT THEM UP AGAIN! He steps back, admiring his authorship, sticks the brush back in the paint. Cheese is a slow reader and is still trying to puzzle it out when he is grabbed by the town cops, Monk Wallace and Louie Testatonda. The drunk is gone. There’s a crowd around, whooping it up, some calling his name.
“Hey, it wasn’t me!” he protests. “It was fuckin’ Jesus Christ!”
“Sure it was,” says fat Louie, gripping his nape like you might a cat.
“And you’re fuckin’ George Washington!” says Monk, handcuffing him.
Never mind. They’re applauding him. He’s a hero of sorts.
Now she can’t stop throwing up. It’s okay. She wants everything that’s inside to come out anyway, no matter how much it hurts. Something has got into her, something evil, and she has to punish the body that let it in in hopes it can be driven away. It’s her own fault, she knows that. Even her Pa has abandoned her in her wickedness. Elaine used to talk daily with her Pa, but she is no longer worthy of him. She prays to him and to Jesus and to God, but she hears her prayers in her head like empty echoes. She must go looking for him and beg his forgiveness. If he loves her, and she believes he does—he must—he will forgive her. But to do that, she first has to die. Only it’s so hard. Elaine has come to realize that crossing over is the hardest thing in the world. The sinful body just keeps fighting back. Her Ma is in the room with her. Her Ma’s husband Ben. A nurs
e. Also the camp nurse. She hates them all, but she knows that the hatred in her heart is not her own, for there is a badly damaged self buried deep inside that loves them more than anything. There is also someone or something else in the room. She can’t quite see it. It’s a kind of shadowy hotness. She hopes it is Jesus or maybe her Pa, but she does not think it is. She thinks it is something horrible. That it is just waiting for her to die, unprotected. Unhealed, unsaved. And therefore unable ever to see her Pa again. Only the camp nurse knows what is really happening and she tells her quietly in her ear what she must do: There is something bad inside her and she must get strong enough that they can get it out while there is still time. Elaine understands: She must eat to die. If it makes her sick, that is only part of her martyrdom; she will welcome it. The thing inside her is resisting furiously, but, with a nod, she agrees to do whatever the camp nurse wants.
Things that get inside and change everything. Love, for example. Or something like love but less than it and worse than it. The palm reader Hazel Dunlevy sits alone, Mrs. Edwards having taken Colin for a ride, on a little wooden stool in the middle of the sunny vegetable garden staring, somewhat terrified, upon the earth’s ripe vegetal wantonness. Animals, too, they just go at it, can’t help themselves. Those flies: in midair. Men and women are caught between pure divine love and the sinful love that drives all nature. But even God’s love can be excessive, can’t it? Just look what He did to Mary. Is that a sacrilegious thought? She knows he is there before he speaks. A kind of shadow, not his own, that goes wherever he goes. “Well, lookie here,” he says. “It’s little Miss Muffet…all by her lonesome…”
Things that get inside and change everything. Fear. Appetite. The love of Jesus. Of Satan. Of Mammon. For Ben, it is unassuageable rage that has invaded him. Some might say that it is a holy rage and he sometimes wishes it might be, but he does not think that it is holy. It is a hellish black thing that fills him up, fattening itself on all that he once knew himself by. Blinding him, shutting up his ears. But there is nothing he can do except pray and have faith that God will not desert him in his darkest hour. Sitting beside poor little Elaine’s bed, suffering her suffering, he made his mind up. Or it was made up for him. By what got inside. Now, after he drives Clara back to the Wilderness camp to get Elaine’s room ready, he has work to do. The things he has to make he has used but has never made, but the principle is simple. Along the road back to camp, there are a lot of illegal roadside fireworks barns popping up, as usual this time of year. Never been legal, but nobody does anything about it. Should find something in one of them that can be made to work.
“So many things has gone so wrong,” Clara says, as much to herself as to him. “I didn’t never imagine it to turn out this way.”
“No.” Clara’s faith is still intact, as is his, but her will is being tested. And her strength. It’s like something vital has been sapped right out of her. She cries a lot more now, moves more slowly, often with her head down, is tired all the time. The latest bad news is that Hiram and Betty Clegg have been arrested in Florida and charged with something like what got Sister Bernice and Sister Debra in trouble. Has to do with that dead woman’s estate. Mrs. McCardle. Hiram got hold of it through the doddery husband, somehow, but it turns out there are children, and they have brought legal action against them and the church. And it looks like only some of the money ever reached the church. Something has got into Hiram, too. “What does Ely say?”
“It’s been a while. But today I felt him in the room, watching over Elaine. I think it was him. He didn’t say nothing. He was just there.”
What Ben felt in the room was utter hopelessness, but he doesn’t say so. “I’ll drop you off at the trailer,” he says, pulling into the camp, nodding at Hovis at the gate. Hovis draws his fob watch out of his pocket and meditates upon it. “I got some errands to do.”
Wayne and Billy Don are throwing a baseball back and forth in the sunshine in front of the Meeting Hall, and Wayne raises his hand and comes over to get the news about Elaine and to ask about what they should work on next. Ben answers him but feels he is growing distant from all this. Probably what he has just said has only confused the man. He tells Wayne they’ll talk about it later, when he gets back for supper and tonight’s prayer meeting.
Down in the trailer park, little Willie Hall hoists himself out of his heavy, redwood garden chair and comes over, Bible in hand, to tell them about the suicide—“Behold, I seen Absalom hanged in a oak!” he exclaims—and Ben and Clara nod and say Dave Osborne was a good man, it was a terrible thing, they must all pray for his soul, and Clara shows signs of tears again, though she hardly knew Dave. Willie asks about Elaine, and Clara says she’s getting better, they’re bringing her home, and Willie runs off, spouting good-news verses, to tell Mabel.
“What is it you gotta do, Ben?”
“I found some things. They make me figure we’ll likely see more a them biker boys.”
“What things?”
“Just things. Things they’re gonna want back.” Clara gives him a hard look, one mixed of pain and uncertainty. “I love you, Clara, and I love Elaine,” he says, “more’n I ever loved anything in the world.” Then he grins, feeling a little foolish. “’Cept maybe Rocky,” he says.
“Why are you telling me this, Ben?”
“Well, sometimes I keep things too much to myself. I just felt like, whatever, you oughta know.”
She leans toward him and rests a hand on his shoulder. And then her head. “Be heedful, Ben. I need you so.”
Doesn’t make things any easier.
Darren Rector has watched from the Meeting Hall windows as Ben and Clara’s old muddy pickup rolled in. Not long after Mrs. Edwards and Colin, with that scared-rabbit look on his face, rolled out. In Clara’s and Ben’s grave faces he has seen no sign of good news. They are at the edge of cataclysmic events that will impact upon the entire universe, and Ben and Clara are still preoccupied with their little family tragedy. And it is a tragedy, as earthbound events go. Very sad. Poor Elaine is starving herself to death. Doing, as if obliged, the Marcella thing. Odd how exemplars create themselves without ever knowing they are doing this. Perhaps, unwittingly, he is doing so himself. Elaine will receive her reward in Heaven, and Ben and Clara are both good Christian souls whom God will surely take to his bosom, but they are no longer reliable leaders for the end times hard upon them.
Darren has not been standing at the window waiting for their return. He has been watching Wayne and Billy Don playing catch. As though nothing were happening. That peculiar unawareness of most of the world even when at the very edge of the end of things. It’s almost a sign of it. A shying away from looming reality, which is awesome, and from one’s personal responsibility before it. Jesus’ ceaseless reminder, generally ignored, of the need for hourly preparedness. The virgins who kept their lamps trimmed in anticipation of the bridegroom, and those who didn’t. Most didn’t, don’t. That’s the very heart of the story. To be among the chosen, you have to work at it every minute of every day. It’s the ultimate final exam. Billy Don has no excuse. He has been privy to everything. It’s that demonic girl. Well, too bad for him. Darren is learning not to be angry about it. Sometimes he even feels sorry about the horrible fate that awaits his friend. Though not very.
Darren has spent the day devotedly poring through his tape recordings in search of further hints of God’s ultimate intentions, planning his symbolic burial ceremony at the Mount of Redemption, and drafting an urgent open letter to the churches in the form of a mimeographed pamphlet. The letter is ostensibly from Clara Collins as the Brunist Evangelical Leader and Organizer, though in its pamphlet form it does not require a signature. He would show it to her, but he does not want to intrude upon her grief and worry. She has often relied upon him to produce such mailings for the church. The letter speaks of the recent history of the Brunist Wilderness Camp, including the many improvements and increased security made possible by member contributions, the presumed author�
��s warmly welcomed return to the camp headquarters with her husband after their eastward travels (the author thanks the host churches for their kind hospitality), the carving out of the foundations of the new Brunist Coming of Light Tabernacle Church on the Mount of Redemption and the laying of the cornerstone; but it also tells of the ceaseless harassments and intrusions, the unjust legal actions being taken against them, the formation of a sinister organization in West Condon whose stated objective is to crush their movement, the brutal assault (not otherwise specified) upon her own daughter that has left the child at death’s door, the ruthless beating while under police custody of the bishop of West Condon, and the armed attack on the camp, though without naming the perpetrators of the latter, it being Darren’s firm belief that the event was driven by a divinely ordained internal dynamic, its protagonists selected from among those available. The camp has been stoutly defended, the letter says, by the county law enforcement agencies, by Brunist friends in the Christian Patriots, and by their own brave camp leaders, but is ever in need of stalwart and faithful defenders. After writing that line, Darren decided to capitalize Defenders, thereby, he realized, suddenly creating a new category of membership and one that might draw further numbers to this area in case of need.
The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel Page 72
