The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  “How could I forget? That loony lawyer we spooked.” A glorious night of masquerades and theatrical revelry (they were shitface spirits from another world), and then a would-be gangshag with an old buddy’s widow and a drunken brawl, ending up in handcuffs down at the station with newsguys’ flashbulbs popping. He, Vince, Cheese Johnson, and Sal Ferrero—though Sal had fallen away before the end. Georgie thought it was all hilarious, but Vince had big ambitions back then and that night fucked it for him. He turned bitter and weird after that, and it all ended in a daylight raid on the old lawyer’s house while everyone else in town was out at the mine waiting for the end of the world and playing bingo. Their aim was looting, plain and simple, but the house was empty. Mostly empty. What Georgie remembers is all the dead cats. “I spun by Lee Cravens’ old place a little while ago. Looked like nobody lived there. Whatever happened to old Wanda?”

  “How the hell should I know?” It is clearly a touchy subject. Not much prospect of a second beer. Bonali has got his sulk back and is giving him a look like he wishes he were dead. Georgie glances at his wrist as if he had a watch there. “Well, shit, I better get the car back. I’ll drop back and see you again soon, Vince.”

  “If you do, bring your own beer.”

  “Well, lookit what’s fell down the shaft,” says Cheese Johnson when Georgie walks in. Cheese is sitting at a card table with old Cokie Duncan, Steve Lawson, Buff Cooley, Georgie’s cousin Carlo Juliano, and one-armed Bert Martini. Some kind of whiskey bottle on the table. Drained. Collecting cigarette ash.

  Georgie has made the usual rounds, but it’s midweek and drizzly, the lush spring day having turned cold and windy again, it is doornail-dead all over town, and still too early for the roadhouses. He has never seen streets so empty. Like some kind of nightmare movie. Even the bowling alley and the Legion Hall, where he’d found two of these guys last night, were deserted. Meeting of the geriatric society in Hog’s Tavern: the old union boss Nazario Moroni, who once punched him when he caught him with a pack of cigs in his mine jacket, and a couple of others of like vintage, including a senile cousin of his nonna, others unknown or aged past recognition. Watching a small mute TV hanging behind the bar. Or more like the TV was watching them. The Eagles Social Club was his last shot. “I was wondering where all the action was.”

  “That you, Georgie? You must of forgot your hair somewheres. What drug you back to town?”

  “Too much tail up in the city, Stevie. It was making an old man outa me. Had to come back for a rest cure.”

  “Well, you come to the right place. Sure won’t find no tail up here.”

  “I’m disappointed, Coke. I figured you’d be amenable.”

  “Listen at the nasty fella with his city ways!”

  “Talk like that,” Bert Martini says, shaking his head. Bert lost his left arm in the mine accident, the one he used to catch baseballs with, so even in draw poker he leaves his cards face down on the table, tipping up their edges briefly to read them, then tossing his quarters into the pot with the one hand he has left in life. “Sign of how bad the times is got.”

  “You mean, when you’re up shit creek,” Buff Cooley says, “Georgie’s what you find at the other end.”

  There is faint laughter at his expense and he grins his grin. “You turned up just in time, Giorgio,” his cousin Carlo says. “I could use that five bucks I staked you Sunday.”

  “Lemme see if I can win it back, cugino. What’s the game?”

  “Dealer’s choice, stud or draw, nothing wild. Cap’s three raises, limited to a quarter each.”

  “A quarter!”

  “If that’s too high we can lower it.”

  “This ain’t the big town, Georgie.”

  “Okay, high rollers. Deal me in.”

  He’s keeping up a brave front, but Georgie’s earlier euphoria has drained away. Visiting Bonali was a real bummer, and the betrayed promise of spring weather hasn’t helped. A new front has moved in like a kind of sudden sickness of the air and there’s even talk of snow. April fool. What little he’s eaten (there’s an empty pizza delivery box on the next table still giving off a spicy aroma, reminding him how hungry he probably is) hasn’t set well, nor has the hip flask of cheap rye he has polished off; he should have picked up some antacids in Doc Foley’s this morning when he was in there. Worst of all, he has come to the sinking realization that he’ll never get enough money together to pay for Ruby, cheap date as she is. Certainly not up here. Even if he took all these guys’ money, there’s not enough between them for a pair of windshield wipers. Which he has discovered is among the old tart’s many urgent needs. Had to drive her with his head out the window during the showers. For all his bravura, he does wish he were back in the city. He misses the action, even if it’s an action from which he was mostly excluded for lack of the wherewithal. All he has here that he didn’t always have up there is a room to sleep in out of the weather, and the price for that is his old lady’s ceaseless scorn and fury. Which can get worse. He can only hope she has not looked under the mattress yet.

  “All I’m saying is that for the mine company fat cats the disaster wasn’t nothing more than one bad hand,” says Buff, picking up on some conversation Georgie interrupted. These guys are all survivors of the explosion that blew out Number Nine’s innards and closed it down, and they’re still grousing about it five years later. And using the same lines. It’s like time’s stood still here. His life had been shit in the city, but not this bad. He borrows a cigarette from Bert and lights up with Cokie’s lighter. Buff’s real name is Bill, but when he was younger he was a wild man during union strike action, whooping it up like a rodeo rider, and they started calling him Buffalo Bill, which got shortened over time. “They pocketed their winnings, quit the game, and went home, or wherever they go to get their fucking done, and left the workers holding an empty kitty.”

  “What did you expect?” says Bert with a shrug. “Them was the cards we was dealt.”

  “At least you got your disability pension, Bert,” Steve Lawson says. Like Georgie’s cousin Carlo, Steve lost a brother in the explosion. Steve sees Bert’s quarter and raises.

  “That makes me the lucky one, hunh?” says Bert, waving his stump.

  “Put that thing back in your pants, Bert,” says Cheese, meeting the bet and asking for a pair, “and stop showing off.”

  “We’re halfway through our fucking lives and whatta we got?” Georgie says, repeating Guido Mello’s line.

  “Well, the clap,” says Cokie Duncan. “Hemorrhoids…” Cokie once had a wife, but she ran off during a stretch on the night shift so long ago no one around here remembers her anymore, Duncan included. Cokie was Bonali’s assistant faceboss in Georgie’s crew and on the night of the disaster was left in charge when Bonali went looking for a phone. Georgie was sure Bonali was not coming back and they were all going to die if they just stood there in that black smoky furnace, so he and Wally Brevnik took off on their own. It was Georgie’s intention to claw his way out by his fingernails if he had to. They went through some rough stuff, but Wally had a cool head and they eventually reached the top and already had a cup of spiked coffee in their hands by the time the rest of the section came up. All but Pooch and Lee. Names on a T-shirt.

  The best card in Georgie’s rainbow hand is a ten of diamonds, but after Buff Cooley drops his two bits in, he raises a quarter, pretending to want to throw in all he’s showing, and it is not so much a bluff as an act of frustration, wanting desperately for something to happen, any goddamned thing, even a fight. Betwise, not smart. After drawing blanks, he tosses, and Carlo wins the little pile of coins with low triplets, Georgie’s dwindling roadhouse reserve now diminished by his contribution to it.

  When it’s his deal, to do Bert a favor he calls seven-card stud. “I seen Guido Mello today. He’s not a happy man,” he says, passing out the hole cards.

  “Well, he up and married the Sicano girl, the one who was never quite right in the head, and one a their kids has a m
edical problem. Some sympdrome or nother. So he’s sorta lost his sense a humor.”

  “Sicano? The one we all banged on the Hog pool table one night?”

  “The same.”

  “Oh man. Well-buttered buns.” A memorable night. Used to be a popular neighborhood spot, Hog’s Tavern, but Hog Galasso is long dead and it has fallen on hard times. Dark and foul-smelling. A few ancient habitués like those he saw tonight. But back then he was still just a kid working his first mine shift, getting tanked in there with some older guys from his section, when one of them went out and came back with the Sicano girl, and Hog locked the doors. The pool table got knocked permanently ajar by what happened afterwards; you had to know how to play the slope. “What’d he go and do that for?”

  “Il Nasone never had lotsa options amongst the ladies.”

  “He says Lem has turned out to be a hard man to work for.”

  “Who ain’t? He should try that tightwad cocksucker Suggs for a spell.”

  Cokie and Steve, he learns, have got on part-time at one of the strip mines, but when he asks, he’s told don’t even bother—old man Suggs and his hardass mine manager are not partial to Italians. “They only like to abuse their own kind.” Cheese and Buff also got hired out there, he’s told, and then fired—Cheese for his fuck-off wisecracks, Buff for trying to organize the workers—and they add to the asshole portraits of J. P. Suggs and his site boss, a surly black-bearded gun-toting church going westerner named Ross McDaniel. “McDaniel hates everybody and everything. He’s one of them guys that if his feet don’t carry him fast enough to where he wants to go, he’s apt to shoot them off.”

  “He believes the Bible should be the constitution and law of the country, and wants to execute everbody who don’t agree with him.”

  “Never seen a guy with a lesser sense a humor,” Cokie says.

  Buff lights up. “There was a day we’d of strung up guys like him.”

  Several of them have been out to the hospital to see Big Pete Chigi, who has black lung and is breathing his last through respirator nose plugs, and he hears about Ezra Gray, who was in Red Baxter’s section and got out of Deepwater okay, but then went down in another mine a state over and got crippled in a roof fall that killed three other guys.

  “Yeah, I seen him—broke his fucking back. He’s on rubber wheels for the duration. Ez was working non-union, so no comp or insurance. A hotshot lawyer talked him into filing suit, but the owner faded away like he never was. Like he disappeared into the paperwork or something.”

  “Same as what happened here. The ruthless dickheads.” Buff slaps his cards. “C’mon, Georgie, cheer me up. Goddamn make me something. Send me down sixth street singing.”

  “Fulla potholes, sixth street.”

  “Ez is completely off his nut now. One a them Brunist types. He travels some with Red Baxter, I hear tell. Out there ranting about the end a the world and all that.”

  “Is old Ez back? Is he out there at the camp?”

  “He’s in town,” says Steve, “but I never seen him in the camp and he’d be hard to miss.”

  At first Georgie thinks Steve might have got mixed up with those crackpots somehow, but it turns out Suggs has been helping them rebuild the camp, using his own workers for some of the heavy jobs, so both Steve and Cokie have been putting in time out there. It’s not clear what old man Suggs is getting out of the deal, but they’re pulling their normal paltry wages, so no complaints. “So what’s going on out there in the woods?” Georgie wants to know. “Are they wearing any clothes?”

  “We ain’t sposed to talk about it,” Steve says, “but, yeah, leastways by day. We don’t stay past quitting time, so I don’t know whatall they get up to, but it’s too fucking cold to go round bareass even if you’re rolling round a lot. From what I could see, they’re mostly just only working their butts off, fixing the place up. Generally I didn’t reckanize no one nother than Ben—ole Ben Wosznik, y’know—him and Ely’s widder. They kinda run things. And also Willie Hall’s out there. Willie and big Mabel.”

  “That’d be a cute pair, butt-nekkid.”

  “And Lee Cravens’ skinny little widder with all her brats, she’s there, too.”

  “Wanda?” Georgie glances up and catches Johnson’s wink and gap-toothed grin.

  “She’s shacked up with some bigass hulk. I mean, really big. A man who’s dragging around a whole heap a excess mollycules. But he can move. I seen him dancing round on the open beams atop the old lodge like a man who don’t know what fear is.”

  “He ain’t never been down a mine then.”

  Georgie has dealt himself a second king over a pair of eights, and he risks a couple more quarters, but Johnson beats him with a club flush, so even his luck is bad. Buff gets back on the mine bosses again, so to change the subject and lighten things up, Georgie elaborates on some of the tales he has been inventing during his job hunt, including a new one about a highprice hooker named Ruby, red-hot Ruby, using anatomical details from the centerfold he’s had hung in the car all day and personality quirks based on the old junker’s clunky behavior. “Well, we’re just getting warmed up, you know—really shimmying down the road, burning rubber—when her fucking eyelashes fall off and she gets so hot she starts making these really nasty noises down below…”

  “Sounds a real beaut, Georgie,” Carlo says, laughing.

  “No shit, she was. Even posed for one a them centerfolds. She invited me along for the photo shoot. She said me watching got her hot. Sure got me hot. She was a sight to see. An ass-end to die for! I still have a copy somewhere, I’ll show it to you someday.”

  “Hey, speaking a pitchers, show Georgie the ones you got, Cheese!”

  Johnson shrugs, reaches into a paper sack, and tosses out a half dozen well-thumbed black and white photographs of two naked people doing a kind of sex manual thing on a leather couch. No hardcore shots and the light’s bad, could be stills from a cheap stag movie, but the guy’s well hung, they’re both good lookers, and the beaver shot with the guy standing over her with a newspaper in his hand like he’s about to swat her with it is good enough to make you want to poke her. Then he looks closer. “Wait a minute. Who is that? Is that Tiger Miller?” They’re all grinning. All except Bert Martini, who says, “You shouldn’t ought to be showing them photos around. She was a nice girl. And Tiger was a pal. When I was in hospital he come by to see me near every day. I figure there’s more here than what meets the eye.” The others laugh at that.

  “And that’s the Bruno kid, right? Marcella. The one who got killed. She was in school with me. A young kid, coming in as I was going out. These are a little different from what’s in the high school annual. Where’d you get them?”

  “You remember Jonesy, useta work at the newspaper, back when we still had one a them shitrags. We was playing cards and gitting blitzed together up to the Legion the night Jonesy split town. I walked him to his train and he give ’em to me as a see-ya-later present. Plumb forgot about ’em till them apocaleptics showed up agin.”

  “Sure you did,” Carlo laughs. “You can tell by all the cum spots on them.”

  Something about the photos bothers Georgie. Not just the realization that something was happening back then and he’d missed out. He missed out on plenty. She always had a nice smile, but she was just a kid, he hardly knew her. Her brother was a complete psycho and he supposes some of that rubbed off on Marcella. He doesn’t remember anyone ever dating her. No, it’s something about seeing her so exposed like that. Not so much her naked snatch, he’s seen his share of those, but all the rest of her, so laid open. Georgie has never seen that look on a girl’s face before. She is looking not just with her face but with all her body, her snatch as much a part of her looking as her eyes. Her navel or her toes. Her mouth, half open. So it’s like something terrible is being bared that shouldn’t be seen, something that, once bared, can never be covered up again, and he hates it that these cackling shits are ignorant witnesses to it. And she’s so still. And sile
nt. It’s like she has been spread out to be carved up. Consumed. Well. She’s dead. Must have died right after these pictures were taken. It’s like getting the hots for a corpse. He wants to cover her up. Close her eyes. “Her nutty brother was in my class,” he says, feeling soberer than he wants to be. “Is he out there at the camp now?”

  “Giovanni? Nah, they locked the loony away right after the world ended and he never come out.”

  “He’s dead, I think,” says Steve Lawson.

  “Dead?”