The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  The singers take another break, so Tommy pushes Angela’s hand off his dick and goes to the bar for more drinks. He tries to avoid the bikers sitting there—are these the guys who tried to wreck his dad’s car?—but one of them, the one with APACHE on his jacket, turns to him and says, “Hey, Moneybags.”

  “Whoa, that you behind all that face hair, Ugly? Goddamn, what say, man? What are you doing back in town?”

  “Just making a cemetery run.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Can I buy you one?”

  “Nah. Might end up having to pay interest.”

  Same old Ugly Palmers. But he has aged a lot. Doing time has not been good for him. His mad-dog pals are glaring; Tommy decides this is his last night in the Moon for a while. “Well, let’s get together, man, trade some cock and bull.”

  “Leaving tomorrow.”

  “Coffee or something before you split?”

  “I’ll be stopping by Lem’s garage in the morning. Drop by there if you can get out of Sunday School.”

  Back at the booth, Angela is talking about the crazy man at the bank yesterday, and Tommy tosses in his own Easter anecdote about the mad preacher, which in turn leads them to the Brunists. Tommy starts to tell them about the research he is doing out there as part of his planned doctoral thesis, but the others say it’s a mistake to pay any attention to them, those loonies all ought to be shot after what they did to their church, certainly run out of the county, their hatred reminding Tommy that he’s the only non-Catholic at the table. He has his own beef: those leeches stole all his mom’s money, but he and his dad aren’t saying much about that, not wanting people to think his mom’s not right in the head, while they try to get some of it back. With Concetta Moroni helping out at home now, his dad is able to catch up on some of his business meetings. Where he is tonight. Part of his ongoing effort, he says, to develop the new industrial park. Useless, but his dad keeps trying. Hometown hero. Or maybe he’s just trying to distract himself from his wife’s dying and her bitterness and her religious nuttiness and all that has led to.

  Monica’s mom is babysitting, and they have to get back, they say. “The joys of parenthood,” Fleet says sourly, pulling himself up out of the booth like an old man, and Angela says, “I think it’s great.” Tommy sees that Ugly has his ball cap on and is also leaving. He tosses him a wave and mouths “tomorrow” and Ugly nods back, walks out with one of the other bikers, the funny-faced hairy one with the shirt-button ears. Angela’s hand is squeezing his prick again. “Well, rootie tootie, Kit,” Fleet says in grim farewell, quoting the song they all voted the worst of the night.

  Juice, not trusting that fake Indian in the red cowboy boots, has stepped out to wing a wiz and make sure Littleface is all right. And has stepped right back in again, still putting his dick back. Nods at Cubano who leaves his drink to join him and they push out. “Face went left, the Apache went right, but I seen him flash his lights at a car racing up out of the bushes with its lights off. Wasn’t a cherry top, but I think it was that fat sheriff at the crank and going like a bat outa hell.” If they chase after on their bikes, they’ll be targets, so they quickly hotwire a wooden-sided station wagon parked in the lot and leave their bikes behind. A couple of miles down the road, near a stone culvert, they come upon the car Juice saw, pulled off to one side, its headlamps blazing now. The fat man is standing over something in the field, kicking at it, rifle in hand, a wrecked bike nearby. “Stop the fucking car!” Juice is screaming, but Cubano neither slows down nor speeds up. “Ay, guapo, look at me, not him,” he says quietly. “At me, coño! Don’ show him your stupid face! We just only lovers rolling by, not seeing nothing.” “But, fuck, man—!” “We got our little pistola against his rifle, man, we can’ do nothing here. We go get some hardware and ask Nat what to do.”

  “If you guys had stayed here like I said,” Nat says, his voice breaking, and there is a bad moment between them. Juice and Cubano know they’ve fucked up but cannot bring themselves to say so, though they are hurting and say they are full of God’s fucking wrath and ready to do whatever has to be done. “We can take the asshole. He’s all alone.” “By now he won’t be,” Houndawg says. “There’ll be fuckin’ bulls all over the place. Was he live or dead?” They couldn’t see much from the road, but it didn’t look good, and the fat man was laying into him with his boot. “The bike?” “Looked hosed.” “Was he wearing his brain bucket?” “Yeah, I seen him pull out in it,” Juice says. “There was this so-called Apache fucker in the bar. Asked a lot of questions. I think he was fuzz. It was him signaled the cop in the bushes.” “Whether he’s alive or dead, they’ll have to take him to the hospital,” Nat says. “Yeah, right! We can rescue him,” says Juice, “and blow away any motherfucker who stands in the way!” “Maybe,” says Nat. “If he’s alive. Let’s go get your bikes before the cops grab them. You two come back here and take care of Paulie. Someone may have seen you. Houndawg and me will see what we can find out at the hospital.”

  What they find out is that Littleface’s head has been stove in and his neck broken and he is no more. “Do we go shoot a few people?” Houndawg asks. Nat is crying and full of rage. Houndawg can see something of old man Baxter in him. A round blanched look under his shaved head with reddish eyes on fire. But his voice is ice. What he says is: “No. We’ll get him, I swear. Face will be avenged. But right now we do like we said and bury what we got and leave this place. We need numbers. We’ll take in some biker meets, look up Face’s old gang. The Crusadeers. They’ll want to be in on it. Juice’ll know how to find them.” Houndawg nods. “For tonight we can hang on to the wagon. That stuff is heavy, we can use the woodie to haul it, wreck it somewhere after we’ve buried it all.”

  II.6

  Sunday 3 May

  Once, many years ago, standing up here where he is standing now, waiting, then as now, for the buried sun to push away the stone and replay yet again its bloody crawl from the tomb, he had, like that lunatic John the Seer on Patmyass (a little joke of Sissy’s in her nun costume), a kind of holy vision. It was his first year as a Baptist camp counselor. He was still just a kid, but older than most of the campers, and he had found himself suffering the pangs of first love, a bad case of the dizzying pittypat sort unlike anything he’d known before, for a pretty little girl with dark curls and big eyes and a warm friendly smile. Carl Dean was not accustomed to pretty girls smiling at him like that and it went straight to his heart. She was too young—twelve, thirteen, he not much more—but he projected a long ecstatic future together from that summer on. He couldn’t speak of that, of course. He had to show his affection for her in other ways, teaching her things in a big brother way, obtaining special privileges for her, buying her presents like candy bars and craft supplies, even a little New Testament with wooden covers said by the salesman who turned up at the camp to be made from two-thousand-year-old trees on the Mount of Olives (“Jesus may have prayed under this very olive tree, children!”), and she was very attentive and kept giving him deep admiring looks and big smiles, though she never actually thanked him for anything he gave her. He ached to touch her, to kiss her, even just to hold her hand, but he couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been right. There was a line drawn between counselors and campers and he had to respect that, and anyway, even if it had been all right, he didn’t have the nerve. He adored her and was afraid of frightening her or disgusting her. It was enough just to walk beside her on a nature trail and talk in a soft voice. And then one late afternoon, slipping into the camp kitchen for some leftover tapioca pudding, he chanced on her in a clinch with one of the older counselors, a jerk with scraggly chin whiskers who taught Bible study, bark painting, and volleyball. They were pressed up together against a sink in a passionate kiss with his hand between her legs. She was even raising one leg to try to wrap it around the scumbag’s hip. Carl Dean wanted to scream and throw himself on them and tear them apart limb from limb, but he only backed out silently, almost unable to breathe, and returned blindly to his
cabin and fell into his cot with his face to the wall. Where he stayed until the rest of the camp had eaten and prayed and turned in for the night. He couldn’t sleep. Some time after midnight he crawled out and wandered the camp and the roads at the edges for a while, his heart still jammed in his throat, his acne on fire, the sound of their whimpering and grunting in his ears, and then, a little before dawn, climbed up here to Inspiration Point, pulling himself up the path as if dragging himself out of a soul-sucking quagmire. It was sick; they were all sick. He felt an unappeasable anger, a searing hatred, but it was larger than himself. It was a righteous anger, emanating as if from God Himself, he only its instrument, and he understood then that God created sufferers for this very purpose. To bear his anger. To vent it. It was midsummer. The sky was lighter than it is now (it is overcast this morning, dark as night, won’t be much of a dawn), and from up here on the Point he could make out the church camp laid out in the gloom below, the boxy wooden cabins nestled among the trees, as indeed they are now, seen dimly through the budding branches. A deep dank crotch-like odor rising like an evil miasma. And as he peered down on the camp, he felt a strange power, as if, by simply wishing it, he could unleash God’s wrath upon them all, bringing down a great destruction, and all those horrible plagues and woes would start to happen, hail and fire and seas of blood and earthquakes and scorpions like horses, even though he didn’t know what a scorpion looked like when it wasn’t a horse, except that it had a long tail like a coiled whip with a stinger at the end that could paralyze you. And that’s what he wanted: everyone turned to stone. He could not think of a single person in the camp who should be spared. For a moment, though he was only imagining it, it was almost like it was really happening, as if he could actually see the horror—yes!—the camp reddening as if with an inner burning and about to explode (well, the sun was coming up), and all because of that loose little underage twat with the teasing smile; which, now that he thinks about it, was not all that unlike poor Amanda Baxter’s imbecilic grin.

  The sad fact is that he has never known how to read the other sex—a huge failing. They’ve always been a total mystery to him, one of the few left in his life, and given his skepticism about mysteries in general, he should probably let go of this one as well, get over all that dumbass awe and respect for girls that make him such a sucker. He’d thought Elaine was different. And, well, hell, she is different. No snatch-grabbing kitchen clinch for Elaine; no clinch of any kind. She’s married to the fucking sky. He saw she’d changed the moment he laid eyes on her that night at evening prayers under the dogwood tree. For one thing she was staring straight at him, and she never used to do that. Not in hatred, but not like she was glad to see him either. Or like she even recognized him. More like: what is that awful thing? She’s taller now, taller than he is, and skinnier than ever, hunched into herself like she always was, yet at the same time more fixed and sure of herself somehow, less afraid. Or maybe she’s still afraid but accepts now what she’s afraid of. A kind of haunted look. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but when Darren and Billy Don showed him that book of photos from the Day of Redemption (it excited him to see her standing there on the Mount, near naked with the tunic pasted against her thin little body, but it also pissed him off that these guys could look at her like that), he saw again that wondering, tentative, nervous yet wide-eyed and tender innocence that he had loved. It said: Help me, I need you. What he aches for. Gone now. When he looked into her eyes yesterday while making a hash of trying to say goodbye, he saw someone else. Someone who wasn’t someone exactly, but more like one of those religious statues with painted eyeballs. Scorpion-stung.

  The damp predawn air is full of birdcalls. He recognizes many of them but doesn’t know what names to attach to them. Except the robins, which are always first to start the breast-beating, if in fact they ever stop. Earlier, there were crickety sounds, but they’ve gone quiet. Now and then, the burp of a frog down by the swollen creek, where the trickle of water over its stony bed can be faintly heard. Muffled cracking sounds; some animal prowling about down there on the other side of the creek maybe. Once, he heard Colin crying out in the night. Not for the first time this week. Always sounds terrified. Colin finally opened up to him a couple of days ago. In a manner of speaking. Even though he seemed to have forgotten for the moment who he was talking to. Fucked-up boy full of wacky ideas, which some of the equally wacky cultists here take as visionary. He told him about a weird dream he’d had of Jesus on the cross with his dick lopped off and spouting like a garden hose, Colin holding himself all the while so as not to lose what he had. He also said he’d been talking with their old schoolteacher, Mrs. Norton, the flaky lady who lured them into this madness, and when Pach’ expressed his surprise and asked where, Colin said here. She sometimes visits me at night. Oh shit, man, Pach’ said, unable to stop himself. Colin froze, his eyes widening as if in terror, and that was the end of that. Luckily, he has the preacher’s wife to take care of him, though that arrangement doesn’t seem all that healthy either. She keeps Colin penned in most of the time, treats Pach’ like an alien invader with a rabid disease. Someone was moving around down there in the dark. Might have been her. Also a light sleeper.

  He hears a peep that sounds half human. Down in the valley somewhere near the creek. What they used to call Bluebell Valley. Lonesome Valley now, for whatever reason. “Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley” probably. Nobody else can walk it for us. Hell no. Maybe that animal down there just caught its Sunday morning breakfast. The other birds stop their racket for a second, the pause broken by the hoot of an owl. And it occurs to him in that brief silence what he’s been missing: the wail of train whistles, the rumble of freight cars rolling along on steel rails. From the camp you could sometimes even hear at night the loading of the coal over at Deepwater No. 9. Instead, far off somewhere, those motorbikes, probably drifting away. Those trains just another reminder that time moves on, things change, you lose some things, get used to it. Kids born today will never know that they ever went through here. The sky has lightened just enough that he can begin to make out the contours of the mine hill. The Mount of Redemption. He doesn’t want to look at it. Makes him sick. Time to piss and go.

  Halfway down the hill he meets Ben Wosznik climbing up. They have often run into each other in the early dawn hours, Ben still living by his old farmer routines, Pach’ unable to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time, prison having taught him never to lose consciousness completely. Inspiration Point is a place Ben and some of the others often come to pray, and he asks Pach’ if he’d care to join him now. He’d like to tell Ben what he really thinks about prayer and religion, but instead, loving Ben and unable to hurt him, he only says he has to be by himself right now.

  Which leads Ben to ask, “You been up here all alone?”

  “Yeah. Who would I be with?” The question rankles him, hitting a sore spot—hadn’t Ben seen the mess he’d made of things?—but it also troubles him. He woke up this morning from a hangover dream about Elaine in which she passed by his van like a ghost and disappeared, and he wonders now if that was really a dream. “Listen, Ben, I gotta tell you, though don’t tell no one else till I’m gone. I’m moving on. I’m glad I came, and it was great to see you again, but I just don’t feel like I belong here anymore.”

  “Well, I’m real sorry to hear that, son. We was all sorta hoping… If it’s on accounta Elaine, maybe she just needs a little more—”

  “Elaine? She hates me. She told me so. It’s about the only thing she said to me all week. But it’s not just her. You’re about the nicest guy I know, Ben. I wish you were my dad. But I don’t believe what you believe. Not anymore.”

  It’s hard to read Ben’s expression in the dark behind his beard. There’s pained disappointment in it and a kind of old-man bafflement, but also resignation. And affection. “Well, Carl Dean, I hafta hope you’ll come back to us. I’ll pray for you and pray God takes care of you, wherever you are. We’ll miss you, son.” And
he lifts his arms for an embrace. During which, Pach’, trying not to break into unmanly tears as their beards entangle, his own still damp from the shower, thinks: Ben’s a believer, the man can’t think past that. Another week and he and Ben would have nothing to say to each other. Sad. Maybe it was better to have an old man who puts you off the whole idea of dads forever. The kind he had. Then you don’t set yourself up to be let down.