The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  Stacy Ryder does not confuse dreams with reality any more than she confuses Alaskan goldmine stock with blue chips. Nevertheless, she is aware that dreams can leak into the real world and warp it the way that intangibles can infect the balance sheet, color investment. God is such a dream; a nightmare, really, an inherited liability from the infantile origins of the race. But love, too? A culturally sanctioned delusion layering raw unlovable instinct? Reason says it may be so, but maybe reason is the real dream stuff, the vaporous detritus of instinct no less than love is and of less intrinsic value. Such are her thoughts as she awakes alone on a sunny Saturday morning in the tower in which she is kept by love. Her dream was about loneliness, as is her waking. After the disruptions of the past two days, they will at last be together again tonight, though she knows her lover’s presence, even here in this bed, will not completely take the loneliness away. In anticipation of his imminent absence, it may even make it worse, though there are moments—of tenderness, of sexual union—when love’s illusions seem almost like realities, moments when time pauses, and the loneliness evaporates. Such a state, only partly made of orgasm but rarely without it, is what she strives for. Except for these ephemeral moments of ecstatic communion, however, love and the objects of love do not quite coincide but exist only as tantalizing possibilities. This, roughly, is her theology.

  She is grateful that, in spite of everything, he kept his Thursday date. Even if only for an hour. He was in need of comfort, and though she felt the abyss between them (so much of his life she can never share), this was good, too, as he unburdened himself of his sorrow and fury, while, straddling his chest, she kneaded his brow and temples. The lovemaking that followed was more of consoling empathy than of passion, but sweet in its aching intensity, and she felt blissfully at one with her circumstances. Though her lover lives a life from which she is largely excluded—their own love less like life than theater, this generic motel room its principal stage, they two gifted strangers cast for parts in a show destined only for a short but brilliant run—she has grown accustomed to it and sometimes wonders if entering into his larger life would deepen their love or end it. If love is a fantasy, better that it be played out in fairytale spaces in allotted patches of time apart from time.

  That Thursday morning had begun alarmingly. Her boss and lover had met her young friend Angela at the bank door, and handing her a final check, had brusquely dismissed her. Only later, called in for a brief “business meeting,” did Stacy learn why. “The doctor said he’d only seen nasal trauma that serious after car wrecks, and then the vic tims were usually dead.” Angela’s vengeful brother Charlie. Wearing brass knuckles. “My son said the sonuvabitch was in his police uniform, fully armed, driving the squad car.” He was soon on the phone to his lawyer, the police department, the mayor, pounding his fist on his desk as he spoke to them. His rage was understandable, but it unsettled her for the rest of the day, and only when he embraced her that evening and whispered that he loved her and needed her did her anxieties begin to fade.

  He has much to do today, but will still join her for dinner. Meanwhile, after she has showered and breakfasted, perhaps she will drive over to that pretty river town on the bluff, where he took her two months ago and where he said he loved her and she said the like. A day of deepening mutual investment. A mortgaging of the heart. Angela will be free today, poor girl, and were things not as they are, she might ask her along for company. Angela could probably use a friend. Not to be, though. Angela gave all of herself, but never freely. Possession: the dark side of love.

  She hates him. She loves him. She wanted to kill him, but she’s so very sorry about what her brother has done. She wishes she could care for him, show him the depth of her love: that he could say such things and she could still forgive him in the spirit of her religion and of the Holy Mother, universal emblem of compassion, and could love him, even with his face such an ugly mess, and sacrifice herself for him. “You make me want to die, Tommy,” she told him on the phone, “but I’ll live for the sake of our baby.” Her body under the thin white sheet does indeed look somewhat like a corpse in its winding cloth. If Tommy were to come in and see her, lying lifeless, it would break his heart. And then there suddenly appeared before me… Imagining him there at the foot of the bed, gazing down upon her, Angela V’s her legs and smoothes the sheet down around her body that this last tragic sight of her might be seared into his memory. As she closes her eyes, she can see his brows drawing together in that agonized expression that overtakes him at the moment of climax, the deep sigh of contentment he always releases replaced now by a groan of sorrow and remorse, and she presses the sheet into her crack with one finger to remind him of what he is missing and will now miss forever. He will never find anyone like her again. So young. So purely in love. So passionate and giving. So beautiful. That stupid Wetherwax twit doesn’t even come close.

  Angela Bonali is not one to lie abed, yet she cannot bring herself to rise and face the long empty day. By this time on a Saturday morning she would be up and bathed and preparing herself for her job at the bank, drying and arranging her hair, applying blush, mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, dressing herself with that devotional care for which she is known. Her father (she can hear him now, up bumbling about) opposes her six-day work week, saying she is being exploited, but she loves the bank, would happily work there all her waking hours and for half the money. So different from the bitter prison of this dilapidated house, with its old man smells and bad plumbing and flaking yellow paint and muddy yard. Like a scabby old woman with her makeup cracking. In dirty underwear. She has often imagined Tommy in his father’s office in the sort of tailored suits his father wears, she with an office of her own but mostly out on the bank floor, greeting customers and chatting with the tellers, making it such a happy place that it could not help but prosper and earn her husband’s loving gratitude, and her father-in-law’s too, if he is still with them and has not died of grief or retired to a golf course in some warmer place where they can visit him with the children at Christmastime.

  Christmas makes her think of snow, so she opens the diary she keeps by her bed to revisit their night at the ice plant in April during the freak snowstorm. “I lay panting, my chest heaving, gasping in sweet agony,” she wrote then. It was one of the most beautiful nights of her life. How his hands searched out every inch of her. It was a kind of delirium that sometimes overtakes her again, just thinking about it. “Over and over, my body melted against his in golden waves of passion and love and the world was filled with him!” It was, she was. She remembers the pure clean whiteness of the snow which fell all around them as they lay there in his mother’s station wagon, and which she felt as a kind of divine purification, erasing the black sins of her Dark Ages, which were not sins against God or the Church so much as sins against herself. A pitiless demeaning of her own body, her own precious soul. When she remarked on the beauty of the snow, Tommy said, “Yes, but so short-lived.” She has written that in her diary, because though it was not something she wanted to hear, she is always honest with herself. At least he didn’t say it would soon get dirty. Which in turn reminds her of the Polaroid photo she keeps tucked in the back of the diary. Though they tore up and burned all the photos they took together (or at least most of them; Tommy has done a very naughty thing, unless he was just teasing), this is one she took of him while he was sleeping, stretched out on top of the motel bed, his feet dangling out over the foot, so tall is he, his delicious manliness fallen languidly between his open legs on its lumpy little pillow and nuzzled against one lean muscular thigh. The finger of God. Her only regret is that she did not find some way to get herself in the picture. When she confessed all this to Father Baglione, she did not tell him she kept the photo. She kisses it, hoping Tommy feels a certain mysterious tingle of desire down there as she does so, and tucks it back in its hiding place.

  Tommy left her once when she was young and vulnerable and then returned to her, unable to resist the woman she had become. H
e will return to her again; she has to believe that. Her news frightened him, but he has a noble heart and he loves her, he has said so over and over; he will do what’s right, and when he sees his son—she has already decided it will be a boy—he will be proud and will love her even more deeply than before. Perhaps she was premature in telling him, but she was afraid he was about to leave her, and she didn’t dare to wait. If she is wrong (she is not, she knows, a woman’s body tells her such things), she will say it was a miscarriage, and she will cry over the terrible loss and he will pity her and hold her close and beg for her forgiveness. And she will grant it. Pressing her hand against her belly, she can just feel the little heartbeat.

  The first sinner to visit his confessional this morning, the Reverend Father Battista Baglione knows, kneeling before a crucifix for his morning prayers, will be, as always, the widow Signora Abruzzi. It is she who, seemingly sleepless, brings him at dawn and dusk each day the news of the neighborhood in the form of her confessed sins of ira, invidia, and calumnia. An incurable and cruel gossip. Not always reliable, but always interesting. What his mama used to call una tremenda pettegola. Last night it was mostly about the Vincenzo Bonali family, what is left of it, and their current catastrophes, including violence, lost employment, and mortgage foreclosure caused apparently by the end of the shameful affair between the daughter and the banker’s son—the sordid details of which are all too familiar to him. A child utterly lost to the sins of the flesh but whose heart still belongs to the Church. The widow hinted at a pregnancy out of wedlock and recounted previous salacious episodes in the girl’s life. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry, the widow said as usual in her prayer of contrition. But she is not. The priest adds a prayer for himself—“O Mary, Queen of the clergy, pray for us…”—then rises and enters the confessional to await the orange-haired widow’s newest dispatches. This morning, however, she is not the first; another widow has usurped the honor. A good woman who has served her church, family, and community well, and who has found a new convert for the Holy Mother Church. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she says, then whispers that she has been stealing from her employers. “You must return what you have taken and repent of your sin,” he says sharply. “But they have so much, Father, and we have so little.” “God places such temptations before us, my daughter, to test our strength and our faith. You must do as I say. And you must pray for forgiveness.” He assigns her a stiff penance. Father Baglione’s parish is not blessed with great wealth. He does not want to lose such a valued convert.

  It is in the early morning that Vince Bonali most misses his wife Etta. Even when times were hard—during the long winter mine strike, for example—she always had a hot breakfast ready for him by the time he reached the kitchen. Sometimes little more than her German potato pancakes and homemade applesauce, made from bruised apples she bought cheap, but always delicious and satisfying. He has long since realized that she often did without so he would not go hungry. The thought always makes him tearful and does so now. This house they shared… This morning all he could find was a stale piece of bread which he toasted and buttered with cooking lard, topping it with sugar and the last sprinkle from the dusty cinnamon shaker. Etta would have been proud of his resourcefulness. But he is still hungry. He has taken his morning walk around the block, sum total of his daily exercise. He has opened his last beer and sunk back into his old porch rocker, where he now passes his days, wishing them away. Earlier last week, while things were still going well, his son Charlie bought him a quality fresh cigar, now half smoked, and he tucks it into his jowls, pats his pockets for matches. None. Have to light it at the stove. Later. He remembers when they bought this house. Such optimism then. Good job, union officer, steady pay, low mortgage. Figured on paying it off in ten or twelve years. Handy with tools, he put a lot of time and energy into the place. Rundown now. Never finished that paint job he started five years ago; it all looks the same again. The little picket fence he made lies broken and trampled. The cement Virgin, a Christmas present from Angela, leans in the mud as if losing her footing. Inside, nothing works as it should. No matter. No longer his anyway. He has refinanced it many times over just in order to scrape by and owes more now than the original mortgage. Angie’s job at the bank has protected him. That’s over. He has been notified. Papers are being served. He’s being locked out of his own house.

  On his way out to the car, Ralph Tindle hears banging on the studio door. “Ralph? Ralph? Is that you?” he hears his dear helpmeet call out. He knocks on the door: “Hello? Hello?” “Ralph! He’s escaped! He locked me in! Let me out!” He knocks again. “Hello?” “Ralph! What are you doing? Quickly! He may be in trouble!” He knocks again. “Anybody there?” “Ralph! Please! Don’t be annoying! It’s urgent! I have to find him!” He smiles, locks up the house, and, humming that old Salvation Army tune, “Let Him In,” the frantic banging on the studio door playing in the background, gets in his car and drives away.

  “Eh, cugino, what’s this with our ragazzo? He called. He feels you are not protecting him.”

  “Charlie don’t need protection, he needs discipline. You unloaded a lotta trouble on us. He’s your fucking ragazzo, not mine. You should keep him in line.”

  “Ma che minchia…? He’s apprehending a criminal, has to use a little force…”

  “The kid he hit is the lifeguard at the city pool. He was just closing up.”

  “That’s your story, hunh? Don’t sound very helpful, Dee. There was a broad…”

  “A young high school kid. She was the one who—”

  “Sua puttana…”

  “No, he’s been seeing someone else.”

  “Charlie’s sister, right? And he dishonored her. She’s got a bun in the oven and he’s dumping her for this new piece of ass. Hey, it’s a family thing, Demetrio, what can you do?”

  “Charlie was in uniform, armed, driving the squad car, used excessive force—even if there had been a crime, and there wasn’t. He’s got a mountain of serious charges on his head right now.”

  “So, what’s the kid’s price? We can take up a collection.”

  “It won’t work. His father runs the bank here and everything else.”

  “So, all right, we call up the kid’s old man, let him know how expensive this could be for him.”

  “I wouldn’t. He’s a pal of the governor, congressmen, has a direct line to the FBI through some old college buddy. Get him into it, he might have some more questions to ask.”

  “…”

  “Charlie is suspended pending an investigation, but I have to fire him and bring criminal charges. If I don’t, I’ll be out of a job, facing charges of my own, and Charlie will get taken in anyway.”

  “Well. You disappoint me, compagno. Ma che cazzo, maybe we could use someone on the inside…”

  “As I understand it, Nick, they assume Bruno is dead, some sort of mad doctor atrocity or other, and are planning a symbolic burial out on the hill in the next couple of weeks. I figured we’d ask to have him released to us for a day and take him to his own funeral. Things are boiling up again out there, and maybe this will give them something to theologize about for a while.”

  “They don’t usually like to release mental patients.”

  “I think I can get the governor’s intervention on this one. Kirkpatrick has been looking for an excuse to duck out on our Fourth of July parade. This would be a useful tradeoff for him.”

  “There are some risks.”

  “I think we should take them. Now, what’s happening with that sonuvabitch who assaulted Tommy? The girl’s been fired and mortgage papers have been served on the father. Why hasn’t the city gone ahead with a criminal prosecution against the asswipe who’s responsible for all this?”

  “I’m still checking into all the legal issues, Ted. Meanwhile he has been suspended from the police force.”

  “What does that mean? I walked by yesterday and he was still in there.”

  “His movements have not been rest
ricted. If he has friends…”

  “Nick, that’s not good enough. A cop in uniform beats up an innocent civilian: that’s a crime.”

  “Well, I know, but it can be tricky. We can assume he’ll put up a stiff defense. Want to have everything in place before we get involved with the courts. You also asked about getting a parade permit for the Fourth. That’s been done. And the bank picnic will be set up out on the high school football field, with part of the raffle proceeds going to the school’s athletic program. Working out the contract arrangements now.”

  “All right. People will want to use the unoccupied Main Street commercial properties to exhibit or sell things. Let’s offer them small grants for fixing them up. Stick a notice up on the old Chamber of Commerce windows. I’ve put Tommy in charge of the parade and the fireworks. We’ll have a small brass band for the parade made up mostly of school kids from here and the towns around, fire engines and police cars, at least one float built by the New Opportunities for West Condon steering committee, and some marching groups like the American Legion, Knights of Columbus, what’s left of the miners’ union, the Christian Patriots—”

  “Isn’t that J. P. Suggs’ private militia? They’re just the Klan under another name.” “I know, Nick, but the request came through the sheriff’s office, and it seemed better to fold them into the community on the day than to exclude them, especially with Suggs himself out of the picture now. We’ll have an essay contest—what it means to be an American, that sort of thing—and I’ve got people rounding up raffle prizes.”

  “You can probably get a whole bunch of shoes from Dave Os-borne.”

  “Yes, he’s a problem. We have to close that embarrassment down before the Fourth. Wouldn’t want the governor to see it, if he did turn up. I was also wondering if we might make some use of the old hotel? Display the town history in the lobby or something?”