The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  Tub spots the Cavanaugh station wagon in the Blue Moon parking lot. The college kid’s probably here. He’d love to haul the smartass in for whatever, smoking marijuana or fucking a minor or something. His old man is a target of Suggs’ fury, one of many, and Tub shares his dislike for the banker. For all bankers, for that matter. Fat cats living off the sweat of others. When mines shut down and men are thrown out of work, these are the ruthless decisions of the money-maggots. But Tub is not a vengeful man. In fact, he has few emotions at all beyond a cold scrupulous hatred of a more general sort, and as for the kid, he’d feel out of place going in there in his uniform and shiny boots unless he had specific charges and an arrest to make.

  He’s about to roll on out of the lot and back to his West Condon office when he sees them: three overdecorated motorcycles parked back in the shadows. They’d heard a distant growl tonight during the Christian Patriots’ military exercises that was probably them and Suggs had turned his dark scowl on him. Since the break-in and theft at the mine, Suggs has been in a rage about these out-of-town shitheads. So he knows now he has something to do. He could disable the bikes. Or impound them. But he might need help for that. They could come out any minute and they’re probably armed. It’s a Saturday night, and Smith will be hard to find, and the guys who were at the Patriots will be scattered. But no problem. He can handle this on his own. There’s a small secluded pull-off within view of the motel that he often uses to catch drunks and speeders leaving the motel, and after checking in with his radio operator, he pulls in there and turns off his car radio and douses his lights.

  Cubano, Littleface, and Juice are sitting at the bar, knocking back whiskeys with beer chasers. Their pals Nat and Houndawg, who have stayed back at the base with Runt, are angry about it, but Juice and Cubano—penned up so long they’re going stir-crazy—decided they needed a social moment before hitting the road again tomorrow, Lit-tleface joining them to try to keep them out of trouble. And the sheriff is right: they’re armed. The place is a miserable dive and the two country singers don’t amount to much, but the Warrior Apostles dig the tunes, Juice bobbing his head to the beat and snapping his fingers, Littleface meditating on the lyrics, which are making him feel sentimental about his life on the open road and about his pals and about his country. And besides, though they’re cut off from the Brunists now, they saw these two yokels doing their act out at the mine hill and so they think of them as in some manner their own people.

  There’s a tough, beardy guy sitting alone at the bar dressed in leathers with APACHE painted on the back of his jacket. Might or might not be what his jacket says. Short stocky guy, kind of a buttless tube, losing his tread on top. Worn dusty red cowboy boots with buckled straps over the insteps and tooled scrolls up the sides, pinetrees on the front, which give him class. What class he has. He isn’t flying colors, but he looks solid, so they ask him anyway, and he says no, he thought about buying a bike before he got sent up, but when he came out of the can, he went looking for four wheels, not two, needing something he could live in, sleep in, carry his shit around in. Juice tells him he admires his boots and he asks Juice if he ever did any time—he looks like a guy he’d seen up at the state pen. Juice says not in this part of the country, and asks, “What’d you get sent up for?”

  “Laying into a buncha cops.” Can’t help but admire that and they all have another round. They ask him what he’s doing here. “Chasing a woman.”

  “Not worth it, man.”

  “I know it. Bad shit. It’s over. Moving on tomorrow.”

  “Yeah? So are we. If you weren’t stuck in a cage you could join us.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Don’t know. But it’s like them two croonies there are singing, ‘They’s always a bus goin’ somewheres.’” They ask what happens next for him and he says he doesn’t know either, but there’s another war brewing, and if they’ll take an ex-con, he may join up. He feels like killing a few people.

  They nod knowingly and Littleface says he tried to get into the airbornes but he flunked the physical. Just as well because there was a sergeant there who kept calling him Porky because of his hairiness and he knew he’d end up wanting to shoot that sonuvabitch more than the enemy. Cubano says he might like to fight to get his own country back some day, but he’d have to do it alone because he can’t stand taking orders from anybody. Even his compañero, Houndawg—El Profesor—sometimes gets under his skin. Juice volunteers himself and the rest of the Warrior Apostles to help Cubano out if he decides to have a try, hoping some people there speak Christian English and not that weird spic noise that Cubano lets fly when he’s cussing his bike out.

  “So, hey, good lookin’, whadja think?”

  “It scared me a little. Especially those lines about back o’ the bus gropes, rhyming with showing young boys the ropes and chasing lost hopes.”

  “Them was your lines, Patti Jo.”

  “I know, but like something left behind was suddenly real again and me right in it. But it helped to be singing it. Made it seem like it mighta happened to somebody else. And in a way it did. That me’s not me anymore.”

  “I’m workin’ on a coupla others. Hope y’don’t mind.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like ‘Trailer Camp Blues,’ fer one. What y’tole me bout bein’ a stake in a poker game. And losin’ your name.”

  “Well, I’m never one to stand in the way of genius, Duke. But I like it when you sing them to me in bed first, like with this back-of-the-bus one. It softens them up a little.”

  “Softenin’ you up is my A-number-one priority, little darlin’. Nigh time fer another set. We got us a handsome multitude here tonight. The beers’re flowin’ and everbody’s feelin’ juicy and singin’ to ’em is halfway like fun!”

  “I suppose after the beers those two kids bought us we owe them that dead mommies thing, but honestly, if I have to sing it or hear it one more time, I’ll throw up.”

  “No, I’ll do ‘Love Me Tender’ and lean right over ’em with it and send ’em runnin’ fer the nearest matteress holdin’ on to theirselves. But right now, I reckon it’s more like time t’rare back’n let fly some honky tonk’n a yodel or two. Unload a swot a whoopee. Sing ’em all, around the horn. Y’notice the fireplug over to the bar, by the way?”

  “Fireplug?”

  “Yeah, short and squat and hard t’pitch to parked on the far stool.”

  “Oh, you mean that Apache fellow. The one who turned up this week at the camp. He knew Marcella. He was there.”

  “Yeah. Wonder what he’s doin’ here, off from the camp, suckin’ up the hard likker like that. That’s some a them rough biker boys he’s with. Looks as how he’s one of ’em, don’t it?”

  “Might be. But he was sure paying a lot of attention when you were singing ‘Take These Chains from My Heart.’ Could be he’s got romancing troubles. He’s wearing a pierced heart tattoo with Clara’s kid’s name on it, but she didn’t appear exactly over the moon to see him. Seems like little Elaine has turned a tad peculiar. They tell me she’s got a whupping fancy. He probably wasn’t ready for that and looks pretty cheesed out. In the next set, let’s do ‘Young Love’ and see what happens.”

  “Give him a desprit case a the roarin’ hurtin’ wanta-git-laid long-gone lonesomes, y’mean.”

  “Maybe. You never know what a song might set off, though. I knew a guy once, this was out in Tucson, as I recollect, or somewhere in the desert thereabouts. A guy who told me he used to ride his own thumb around the country until some rich dude gave him his pickup truck camper for free.”

  “Ain’t nobody gives his truck away free.”

  “I know. This guy was kinda scary and had very strong hands. He had the borrow of me for the night and we were having an oiling-up drink in this highway bar with old dollar bills nailed up on the walls, when somebody played ‘Long Black Veil’ on the jukebox. You know, ‘Ten years ago, on a cold dark night, someone was killed, ‘neath the town hall light…�
��? Well, he got up slowly and walked over there and pulled out a gun and shot that jukebox three times. Then he told everybody to get down on their knees and start praying for theirselves because they were all sinners with murder in their hearts who deserved to die and also to pray for that poor man in the song who was unjustly hung—just like Jesus Christ, he said—and he fired off another shot to make sure everybody was paying attention. So down they went and while they were all fallen on the floor like that, he grabbed me and dragged me out of there and back to his camp, hooting and whacking the steering wheel all the way, and he threw me down and done me every way he could think of. I was working too hard to be scared, but when it was over, he began bawling like a baby, and that’s when I really started to panic and realized I was more religious than I thought I was, and that I totally believed in God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and all the rest of it and just hoped they all had their eye on this poor little sparrow.”

  “Well, hah, somebody musta done cuz here you am.”

  “Yup. But one of the poor cops bought it who came to arrest him.”

  “That’s some story, Patti Jo. Ifn we do sing that ‘Young Love’ song, I sure hope that injun feller ain’t got a pistol, cuz I’d be his damn jukebox, wouldn’t I? Oh. There’s that guy Georgie, jist comin’ through the door. The one who said Marcella Bruno useta be his sweetheart.”

  “Georgie…? Georgie Lucci maybe? It’s been decades, and that ape’s badly beat up. Looks like he’s wearing his elbow on backwards, but it could be him. First guy who ever felt me up. In the church on the back stairs down to the basement. Don’t know what I was doing there. Waiting for somebody to feel me up, maybe. I was just a kid then, eleven or something. I don’t think I’d even got my period yet. He was older, already in high school or near to it, but still, basically, just a bad case of acne in pants. If it’s him, he’s a dumbass loudmouth clown. A total jerk. Marcella would not have let him get within a mile of her. Who’s his pal?”

  “I dunno. But he looks like one a them jugheads who was tanked up and givin’ everbody a hard time out to the hill a coupla weeks ago.”

  “The one who kept standing up and falling down. Problem tonight is they look too sober. I doubt they got two dimes between them.”

  Two dimes maybe, not much more. Stevie’s making good money, but he hasn’t learned to count yet and he’s got holes in both pockets. It has been Georgie’s task to follow him around and catch it as it dribbles out and help him spend it in a more useful manner. But there’s nothing more in there tonight. After the mayoral yuks, Georgie got compensatory hazardous duty pay for his visit to Lem’s Garage, but that’s also long gone. He winks hopefully at his scruffy potbellied ex-neighbor behind the bar, but the asshole doesn’t wink back. Just glares. Probably Georgie walked out of here one night forgetting to pay. An honest mistake, shouldn’t be held against him. There are some bikers perched there in black leather and ear studs, looking wired and vaguely dangerous, a dark-skinned greaseball among them, hair slicked back in a duck’s ass. Also a very hairy punk who looks like an overgrown dwarf. If you got the money, honey, I got the time, those two rubes up at the mike are singing as though rubbing it in. It’s party night at the Blue Moon Motel. First time Georgie has seen it as alive as this—they even have bouncers on the door now—and though he lacks the wherewithal to throw himself into it, it cheers him up, suggesting to him that, if they can bring this shabby wreck to life, the resurrection of the body is not an impossible crock after all.

  His own will take some work. It’s badly messed up: both eyes blackened, a tooth missing, bruises everywhere, and his shoulder feels like fucking Lem may have busted something when he laid the crowbar on him. Or else he’s just stiffened up from sleeping on a thin mattress on the cold cement floor at the fire station after his old lady threw him out. His nose is running, his crabs are biting, and there’s a clotty feeling at the end of his dick from the dose he picked up on his only foray into feminine flesh since he got back here. Blew his first little lump from his fire department job on her, needing a pro to do the right things, for in his depression he was having trouble getting it up. Turned out the woman was the sister of a guy he used to play baseball with, and though she did what she was paid to do, she was even more miserable than he was and inhabited by this virulent nastiness, which she obligingly shared with him. He’d just been to Big Pete Chigi’s fu neral, where old Bags was doing his Latin thing and the old birds were into their senseless twitter, and he felt like he was dying himself, starting with his shriveled coglioni. Carlo had dragged Georgie out to see Pete in hospital earlier in the week. Hooked up to some kind of green machine that was working his ruined lungs for him. It was hard for him to talk, but he managed to say, “This ain’t no fun, boys. But what can you do? You just keep going on.” And then a couple of days later he stopped going on. You come and you go in this world, but whatever that world was about, it didn’t seem to be about Georgie. It was like big things were happening over his head from which he was congenitally and terminally excluded. Born to miss out. He felt like the little shepherd who had to stop to take a shit and missed the birth of Jesus. He was thinking a lot about Marcella Bruno at that time; those photos he’d seen had a grip on him. Back in high school, he probably saw her with clothes on, but he didn’t remember them and didn’t need to. They might have met here in St. Stephens, he was thinking, sitting there that day among the mourners, all knuckled into themselves and not saying much. In fact, she was probably the only reason he ever went there, to catch a glimpse of her or to bump into her in the nave. She always had a smile for him. Would have had. She was very young then, of course. Some years behind him. Probably why he never noticed her.

  The reason he and Steve Lawson are out here at the Moon is to book Steve’s stag party a month or so from now, a lone moment of happiness on the horizon, and to ask those two hillbillies, at Franny’s request, to sing at the wedding, if they promise no religious songs. Georgie has had a beer or two with Duke, talked baseball, women, bad times they’ve been through. When you are sad and lonely and have no place to go, they’re wailing now, call me up, sweet baby, and bring along some dough, and we’ll go honky tonkin’, honky tonkin’ ’round this town. Sounds good to Georgie, and with an optimistic grin he scans the clapping, hooting, and boozing crowd in search of someone who might stand them both a beer while they do their business. But his gaze falls on Pete Piccolotti sitting in a booth with Vince Bonali’s sexpot kid and two others, including that tall guy he’s seen with little Angie before, and his grin withers away. Young Piccolotti runs his family grocery store and it was Georgie’s job today to do his fire inspector routine and hit the boy up on behalf of the mayor’s campaign. Pete told him bluntly what he thought of him, and it wasn’t nice. They got a gun to my head, Pete, I can’t do nothing about it. I just don’t want you to get in trouble. If you put me out of business, the kid said, you’d be doing me a favor. Now get the fuck outa here, dipshit. You’re making me sick. Georgie feels hated and misunderstood and wants to change his life. He’s a good guy, after all, and doesn’t deserve all this abuse. All right. Lem was pissed off about the car, but Georgie explained to him he had to swerve to avoid a little kid on a sled. Out on the Waterton road? At midnight? Yeah, with all that snow there was a whole slew of brats with sleds out there. No shit. What was Georgie doing on that road in the first place? I took a wrong turning because of the snow, Lem. The goddamn window wipers weren’t working. I couldn’t see a thing. That was when Lem picked up the crowbar.

  Duke and his woman are really wound up. Something about her is familiar. Looks like she’s been around. Maybe he ran into her up in the city. Comb your hair and paint and powder, you act proud and I’ll act prouder, they’re hollering now. You sing loud and I’ll sing louder, tonight we’re settin’ the woods on fire! The only thing on fire is his crotch. Georgie gives his cooties a scratch, feeling murderous. Like Il Nasone said: halfway through life and what has he got that’s not infectious? His old lady was also
a major disappointment, locking the screen door and yelling at him through it. Georgie let her know about all the big connections he’d made in town, how important he had become. But to get anything you had to grease some palms, she knew that, and he was only letting her invest in him. What was the matter? It was just a loan; she’d get it all back with interest. Sure, she said, when the goose pisses, and she told him she’d call the police if he ever turned up at the house again. By then she was screaming and all the neighbors were out on their porches. Vaffanculo, testa di cazzo! Mother love? Forget it. Tonight we’re havin’ fun, we’ll show the folks a brand new dance, that never has been done! Yes, he’d like to dance a new dance, but he can’t see how. He’s completely fucked. All he has left now in his vanishing life are a handful of old jokes that nobody’s laughing at anymore and his memories. Big Ruby, up in the city, bless her splendid creamy lipsticked ass. He thinks of her often. Should never have ditched her. And la bella Marcella. The only girl he ever really loved. The only one who ever understood him. He thinks about her now as he’s last seen her in that photo (he would have busted in and rescued her from that vicious bony-assed scuzzbag, but how could he have known?) and wishes she were with him. I need you, baby, he says. I know, she says, and gently takes his hand. “Hey, whaddaya doin’?” Steve asks.

  Tommy Cavanaugh’s old pal and basketball teammate from high school, Pete Piccolotti, is unloading his woes. Business is bad, the supermarkets are eating him up, he’s deep in debt and no way out, that beat-up flunky over at the bar has been trying to shake him down on behalf of city hall, his family grocery store will probably get either closed down or torched, this town is shit, life is shit. Tommy is sympathetic, but he’s also thinking that’s what you get for sticking around here, man, and he’s been telling them about his own plans to avoid the family pressures and get a PhD in sociology and set himself up at a university somewhere far from here, travel around the world on research grants. That upsets Angela, he knows; she wants him right here and in the bank, but she’s trying not to show it and is instead rubbing his cock under the table to remind him of the blessings of hometown life and gushing about how cute the Piccolotti kid is. They are squeezed into a booth across the floor from the singers, he and Angie and Fleet and his wife Monica, who used to be a looker but isn’t now. The lips that used to thrill me so. Teeny Sabatini. Pete played point guard on their high school team, Tommy forward. Fleet and Kit, as they were known then. Fleet was a terrific passer, had great athletic moves, a good jump shot. He could receive a ball and shoot it all in the same move and seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. Though he wasn’t tall enough for the big time, he might have made a college team if Monica hadn’t got pregnant. A cautionary tale. He used to think of Pete as the smartest guy in high school, but the daily grind at the grocery store and getting married so soon, having a kid, have dumbed him down. And he has hardly smiled all night. Now he’s into a really awful rap about putrefaction, Angela having just said she felt so alive tonight, Fleet replying that actually she’s just a dead meat farm, nothing’s really so alive as decaying flesh, which is its natural state. And he goes on to describe all the bruised fruit, clotted milk, rotten tomatoes and raspberries with blue mold, black lettuce, mottled bananas, and stinking gray meat he has to throw out every day at the store, dumping it all in the garbage buckets out back so it can really ball. Monica finally tells him to shut up, he’s being morbid and spoiling the party.