The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  The early morning light is leaking through the thick overcast sky. The camp will be stirring soon, but there’s still time to swing by the lodge on his way out to make himself a couple of sandwiches from the camp kitchen. His week’s wages, so to speak, well earned. When he turns off the motor and steps out of the van, he is struck by the moist dead quiet all around him, and it takes him back to Sunday mornings here at church camp all those years ago, when he’d rise before everyone else and walk into the more remote regions of the grounds to commune directly with God or nature or just with himself as he was then, green and hopeful. Suck up the morning dew. Jerk off. Deep into the summer, there’d be the sweet smell of vegetal decay, the ground hard underfoot, the promise of a hot sun; now it’s softer and denser than that, the greens brighter against the creosoted cedar cabins, even in the gray light—or because of it. There were no postlamps or phone lines then. Looks almost like a small mountain village now, nestled in the trees like something out of a storybook. The minister’s wife has planted a flower garden in front of the cabin next to the lodge that she and Colin are using and it’s in full flower, and there are other sprinkles of color in the high grass, mostly the yellows and whites and pale blues of flowering weeds, which he’s running through now, not knowing when he started, his heart pounding, a cry, a scream, shredding the silence, sounded like his name, his old one, the one she knows him by, racing past the cabins into the wet valley beyond, over tree roots and fallen branches, slashing through the shadowed ferns and sedges at the edge of the creek and splashing down into it in a single bound, stumbling on the stones there, turning his ankle, dropping to his knees in the water, everything slowing down, seeming to, his movements thickening as if in a dream, a terrified yowling, but pressing on, scrambling laboriously up the other side through the shrubs and brambles, losing his footing and sliding back down, clambering up on all fours, headed, he knows now, for that wild place where he used to spy on the minister’s wife, the patch of meadow in the woods, where he can hear voices, stifled laughter, tearing through the thorny forest undergrowth, crashing at last into the clearing, where he expects to find his old nem esis Junior Baxter, and does, but not as imagined, two guys in leather pinning him down on his back, that wild-eyed loudmouth biker and a fierce burrhead, orange fuzz on top, must be Junior’s kid brother, their knives out—are they killing him?—Junior gagged with the biker’s blue dew rag, naked but for what look like girls’ cotton panties stretched over his fat gut, his face bloody, mouth agape, maybe already dead, no sign of Elaine but a scatter of tunics that makes his heart sink, the biker and Junior’s brother rising to meet him, and then he hears her, or hears something, sees her, must be her, a pale naked thing back in the trees, two other guys rushing out from there, the spic and an older guy, blades flashing in their fists, it’s the fucker who set the fuzz on Face, cries the wild-eyed one crouched over Junior, and he knows that to get to Elaine he will have to go through them. His handgun’s back in the van. All he has are his fists. Nothing to do but meet what comes next…

  II.7

  Sunday 3 May

  Debra has left her panties in the woods but there’s no going back to get them now. No going back there ever. It was her favorite place in the world, but she is afraid of it now. She sits in her nursing chair with the slashed velvet seat cuddling a distraught Colin, trying to stop her own crying because she knows it makes him cry, wishing she could seal up this cabin and never leave it. Debra has always been known for her cheerful optimism—Wesley himself used to say she came right out of a Hollywood movie—and even when times were difficult she could always see the positive side, but now she feels utterly destroyed, sunk in that slough of despond she once read about in a book in college and didn’t really understand. In fact, it was just a joke—Wesley’s joke, really. Let poor Christian Pilgrim into your slough of despond, he would whisper, back when he would still whisper such things and do such things, turning it into just a wet sticky place, not a dreadful condition of the soul. Such a place as cannot be mended, the book said: the joke after her hymen broke, thought funny then, terrifying now. An abyss has opened up and nothing is funny. Colin has stopped sobbing but is still trembling like a frightened rabbit, like the little bunny she once had as a child, the one her mother said died of too much loving, and she strokes his silky hair and presses his head against her bosom, which always calms him, trying, as her own tears flow, not to let her chest heave and set him off again.

  The day had begun so peacefully, well before dawn. Her worries—about money (it is all gone), about the threat of having to leave their cabin, about Colin’s daily ups and downs and the personal conflicts in the camp which upset him so—had seemed to drop away and a great contentment stole over her, as often happens when she is close to nature, which for Debra is the same thing as being close to God. The sky was overcast. There was no moon and the streetlamps had been turned off at midnight. She felt invisible as she slipped past the cabins and down through Bluebell Valley accompanied only by birdsong, the ground soft underfoot from the recent rain and the padding of long grasses. Instead of crossing the creek by one of the wooden bridges, she decided to take off her sandals and wade over, her toes and the soles of her feet scouting the rocky bed before taking each step like little prowling animals nibbling at the unseen stones. It was deeper than usual and there was an arousing rush of current against her ankles. She paused in the middle, and gathering up her skirt, knelt to scoop up a palmful of water, sipping a drop or two, then washing her face with the dampness that remained, feeling like an ancient priestess performing her holy ablutions. She prayed simply that nothing ever change, her prayer directed to the tender night more than to any being, then stepped on across and slipped her sandals on again. There was a small incline on the other side, and though it was pitch black in there under the trees, she seemed to know exactly where to plant each foot, and she felt full of grace as she rose up it.

  She avoided the clearing, partly because the two young people sometimes came there, or used to before that strange ugly man who so frightened Colin turned up, and though she disapproved of their behavior, she did not want to seem to interfere with it, circling around through the trees until she found a little patch of pine needles behind some bushes where she could squat for her morning pee. Which she has always thought of, when able to avoid the suffocating outhouse and steal over to her private garden among the waking birds, as one of the most sacred moments of her day. Not the most Presbyterian of sacraments, but she loves it all the more for that very reason. She has sometimes gone there just as dawn was breaking, the sun’s rays slanting gloriously through the thick trees then as though the divinity were joining her there in a kind of blessing. For fear of alarming the other campers, though she is not at all shy, she is forced to do this on the sly. But in the old days, between camping sessions, when the place was empty, depending on whether or not it was the mosquito season, she often wore no clothes at all around the camp, squatting whenever and wherever she felt like, bathing in the creek, sunning in the small meadow or even amid the bluebells and wildflowers next to the access road or right in front of the lodge on the patch of lawn there, putting her body in God’s hands. And sometimes she didn’t even care about the mosquitoes, accepting their stings like little love bites. The camp has never had a serious tick problem, though there is always a risk, adding an edge of danger to these excursions. People think that ticks drop from the trees, but actually they stay close to the ground and latch on from below. She did once get one and she had to bend over so Wesley could pull it out. He was so squeamish. Finally she had to bat his hand away and do it herself.

  She so loved her body then, and Wesley did too, often joining her in the nude. But it never produced anything and Wesley wearied of it and it did start to fall apart and bag on her as bodies always do, and for years since, until now, it has gone largely unappreciated. But that place on the other side of the creek had always been her favorite, her secret corner where she could strip down, even when cam
p was in session, and lie back in the warm summer sun and close her eyes and listen intently to the musical language of the birds and insects, separating out their voices, deducing the meaning of their calls, and she lay so still that once a little wren actually landed on her and walked along her tummy. Colin’s needs and agitations often make this pilgrimage impossible, but this morning she left him sleeping soundly, hugging his pillow, much buoyed of late by the attention paid him by Clara’s two office boys and the general optimism of the camp. In a few weeks’ time there will be a symbolic laying of the cornerstone of the new Brunist Tabernacle of Light over on the Mount for which there are already finished architectural plans, and the camp itself is becoming more beautiful and functional with every passing day. True, there are some who say that such projects make no sense if these really are the last days, but these are mostly people who are never really happy and who just want something for themselves.

  She often leaves her undies back at the cabin, allowing the early morning air to whisper its whisperings without encumbrance, drying herself with her skirt afterwards but, like Colin, she has of late on warmer nights taken to sleeping in her underwear, so she had just pulled on a loose frock as she stepped out into the night, which decision was, as it turned out, dreadfully unfortunate. She had just lowered her panties to her ankles there in the nest of bushes, and bunching her skirt up around her midriff, had started sending a gentle hissing stream into the needles, when she heard hushed men’s voices. There was someone else there in the woods and not far away. She turned off the flow or it turned itself off, stopping as her heart stopped. She was terrified, couldn’t move, couldn’t even lower her skirt. They were grunting and cursing softly and one of them turned on a flashlight for a moment and she saw it was the motorcycle gang. They had shovels and were burying something. A body? It seemed too small for a body. Had they killed another animal? She didn’t see anything after that because she knuckled down behind a thick bush in the little depression there, trying to make herself as small as possible, fearful she was sticking out in all the wrong places, and began struggling, silently, with the tangle of underpants around her ankles, thankful for the racket of the birds covering her own fumblings and rustlings, but, doubled up as she was and stepping on them, she could neither pull them on nor get them off without standing up and making herself known to them. It would be getting light soon. Already she could make out the outlines of things, and she could see her own limbs clearly and knew they could, too, if they looked her way. She was in great danger, and if she had to run she couldn’t. It would be like running in a sack race.

  She doesn’t know how long she stayed scrunched down there, her heart fluttering in her chest like a trapped bird trying to beat its way out, but the dark had been slowly lifting like a kind of dissipating fog and she knew she didn’t have much time. She had managed at last to free one foot so she could run now if her legs would obey her and she took a deep silent breath and prepared to do that. They were faster, she knew, but they didn’t know the woods as well as she did. She figured she had a chance by leading them through the most tangly part. Unless they had guns. Guns! The thought of being shot as she ran refroze her limbs, and she realized she was peeing again, it was trickling warmly down her thighs and into her sandals, doubled under her. She was praying now, not to nature or the night, which was all but gone, but to God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and Mother Mary and all the apostles and disciples to please get her out of this somehow. While they worked, the motorcyclists were insulting one another in what they probably thought of as a manly manner, smoking and spitting and cursing the sheriff and other people and threatening to kill everyone. “Cover it up with dead leaves,” she heard one of them say in a rattly growl. One of them, the one with the childish voice, was called Runt and another Jews or Juice and another Face, though he didn’t seem to be there. Jews or Juice was the one who kept talking wildly all the time, often about the one called Face, and the others were always telling him to shut up or keep it down, which was why she knew his name. The voice that was giving the orders, telling the others what to do and how to do it, made a shushing sound and they all grew very quiet. Had they heard her? Maybe they’d heard her heart, which was thundering in her ears. No. Someone was coming. Through the trees she could see the two white tunics and she knew what would happen next. She wanted to warn them but couldn’t.

  Neither of them spoke a single word. There were no preliminaries, they simply turned their backs to one another in turn and smartly lashed each other, she with the razor strop, he with the belt—Debra had seen these things before, did not need to peek out at them to know what was happening. At first the strokes were measured and always, she knew, across the shoulders. But as the tempo picked up, the blows might fall anywhere, especially those of the boy, who seemed inclined to throw himself into it with more abandon. They emitted little grunts and whimpers as they swung, and once the girl—poor little Elaine, punishing herself for sins she could not even imagine—yipped in pain, unable to stop herself, a little squeak like that of a mouse caught by an owl. Whereupon the bikers, laughing cruelly, stepped out of the woods and encircled them, their knives out (Debra was watching them now, peeping through the brush, her heart in her throat). Elaine cried out, and then fell silent. The husky boy in the black leather jacket with the high collar, whom she recognized as Nathan Baxter, though he looked changed, rougher somehow, his head shaved nearly bald, took the belt and razor strop away from them and walloped his brother in the chest with both of them at once, flattening him out and leaving him gasping for breath. They stripped them both of their tunics, Elaine now stonily passive, staring off in another direction, as the older man with a braid sliced her tunic down the front with a knife, the downed boy struggling against them until he got a blow in the face from the razor strop. “Look,” said one of the motorbikers, “he’s wearing his chick’s skivvies. Ain’t that cute?” And they all laughed and kicked at him there on the ground with their boots. “What’ll we do with her?” another asked, and Nathan Baxter said, “Whatever. She’s with the enemy.” “Don’t mind if we fuck your girlfriend, do you, son?” asked the older man, his free hand clutching the girl between the thighs, and Young Abner said in a trembly girlish voice, looking like he was trying to smile and was about to cry at the same time, “She’s not my girlfriend. I don’t give a care what you do with her.” Nathan Baxter took a fistful of his brother’s hair and jerked his head up and laid the blade of his knife against his throat and said, “You got me in trouble, man, with that gun you stole. Maybe we oughta do to you what we done to the dog.” And he drew a red line on the boy’s forehead with the point of his knife. The boy started squealing in a high-pitched voice—“No! God! Please!”—and they gagged him with the blue bandanna the noisy one had been using as a headband.

  This, Debra knew, was her moment to escape, had been, but she was still petrified, the long knives frightening her even more than guns would, and the moment was already gone because two of them were suddenly heading her way, dragging Elaine with them, still brandishing their knives, the noisy one called Juice or Jews or maybe Choose and a dark one with oily black hair who spoke with an accent, and she had to shrink down again, squeezing her eyes shut as if that could turn the world off. She could hear their hooting and sniggering, all their vulgar remarks about how scrawny the girl was as they exposed the rest of her and pushed her to the ground, then their grunts and heavy breathing, the noisy one complaining how tight she was, the other one telling him to break her open with his thumbs or the handle of his knife if he wasn’t man enough to crack it on his own, and there was some dreadful thrashing about and slaps and cursing and laughing, while out in the clearing the gagged boy was whining desperately through his nose and seemed to be strangling and then he was silent. Debra, who could not have seen anything through her tears even if she’d been watching, was trying to stifle her sobs for fear of ending up like Ben’s dog. What would happen to poor Colin if they rolled her head into the campground? The
only thing she had heard Elaine say beyond a single gasp of pain was “Pa…?” which didn’t seem right, but it was what she heard. Lookie here!” The noisy one was back out there in the clearing again without any pants on, his hair flying loose around his head like a nest of snakes. “He whupped her but he never fucked her!” She knew by the sounds behind her that the other one, cursing the child in his native tongue, was taking his turn. Would they kill her when they were done with her? They would. Oh my God. Out in the clearing, the one with the little boy’s voice asked if the girl had hurt him, and the noisy one laughed and said, “Nah, that leaked outa her crankcase, Runt, not mine. A little somethin’ got busted in there.” The older one with the soft rattly voice said, “C’mon, Runt. Take your britches down and I’ll show you how it works.” Those two were now coming her way, too. Debra knew she could not take much more before she lost control and started screaming and it would all be over. The older one and the one with the accent were behind her showing the young boy what to do next, snorting with evil laughter and urging him to keep pushing and pushing, when there was a most horrendous howling out in the clearing like wild savages, maybe the gag had come off the boy, if he wasn’t already dead, and she found herself on her feet, shrieking, bawling, unleashing her own savage howls, ready to die, but nobody was paying any attention, they were all out there in the clearing where there was a lot of yelling and violent cursing going on, only the boy had been left behind, still down between the poor child’s legs, a scrawny redhead, couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, his bony bottom bouncing like a windup toy gone crazy.