The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  Sally hands him the hotdogs and sodas so she can pause to light a cigarette (she notices the matchbook is from some motel out on the highway; she doesn’t remember where she picked it up but sees its ending up in her pocket as serendipitous) and recounts for him the story of the garage fire and Lem Filbert’s crazed assault on the fire chief, which she says, according to her father, had to do with some sort of racket at city hall that Filbert was resisting. “Really, it’s all pretty comical, in a dark torturous sort of way.” When she asks about the reported lovers’ suicides at the camp, Billy Don says it was actually a double murder, probably by the woman’s husband who has disappeared. That was what Ludie Belle said, though he didn’t see them himself. “It was, you know, that night…” He says they talked about burying them on the back side of the Mount of Redemption where the dog Rocky is buried, but there were objections that they had died in sin and it wouldn’t be right to have them lying right next to the new tabernacle temple, so the sheriff organized a burial over at Randolph Junction, alongside that old lady who died a couple of months ago.

  “The one whose soul I snatched,” Sally says.

  “Yeah. A lot of people still believe that.”

  Later that night of the murders, Billy Don tells her, after he’d got back from the lakes, there was an assault on the camp by a gang of drunks, but they made the mistake of bowling over some beehives in the dark. Sally laughs and says, yes, she saw a couple of them the next day at Franny Baxter’s wedding, sick with hangovers, badly beat up, and covered head to toe with bee-stings—the groom included. “The best man apparently overslept and missed the wedding altogether. One of the guys, whose face was so puffy with bee-stings he was almost blind, had his skinny arm in a new white cast, on which others in the wedding party were posting lyrical obscenities. The writing bug can hit you anytime, anywhere. Then, during the ceremony, the groom threw up all over the bride’s gown and passed out and had to be laid out on the sofa. I was supposed to photograph all that! Franny and her sister-in-law just giggled through it all like it was the funniest thing that ever happened.” To keep the conversation lighthearted (they’ve reached the edge of the old burial ground with all its forgotten dead, and its shadowy melancholy is what they’re both feeling), she tells him about the Blue Moon Motel singers who were there to sing hayseed love songs and who entertained everyone with a funny parody of “Frankie and Johnnie” that they made up on the spot, with lines about the bees and the Blue Moon brawl, and he asks if she knows what has happened to them, because they were Brunist Followers and always sang at their prayer meetings, but they seem to have left town. She doesn’t.

  When Billy Don leads her to the grave in question, it is more or less as she first saw it: open, empty, overgrown. But now there’s a pile of fresh dirt nearby. Billy Don seems genuinely spooked, his mouth agape beneath his droopy handlebars, his eyes behind their dark lenses even less focused than usual. “I saw it! It wasn’t like that!” he whispers, and she nods. “It was completely full, like there was a body in it!” She drops her smoke between her feet and steps on it, thinking about this. “Must be Darren,” she says. “He’s playing games with your head.”

  One’s destiny in smalltown middle America: Death by submersion in a pot of boiling clichés. This great nation, under God… Is this what Jefferson and his coauthors had in mind? Sally has returned too early to escape the last of the Fourth of July oratory. All these self-styled, high-minded, sober, hardworking, patriotic, decent Christian swindlers. Billy Don told her that some of the Brunists believe that America is literally the New Jerusalem, and after they’re raptured they’ll all celebrate the Fourth of July there with God and His angels. “Nobody has never handed nothing to this town. We don’t have mountains or oceans or famous buildings like a Awful Tower. I guess all we got is the corner bus station. But what we have got is quality of life. We got heart!” Hizzoner has the heart of a weasel. And the brain of a lizard. “If we got problems we can put ’em right on accounta this is America! People all over the world envy us what we got here! Right here in West Condon!” Much as they might want to believe it, people would have long since walked away from the mayor’s horseshit, but Tommy has scheduled the raffle draw at the end of it all so as to keep them hanging in, clutching their little ticket stubs.

  Her mother and Emily Wetherwax are sitting on folding chairs far enough from the speakers not to have to pay them much attention, having a smoke together, apparently having made up after what happened out at the lakes. A quiet moment of ciggyboo time, as they have called it ever since high school. Which her mother has never left. She’s still that popular, carefree ball of fire called Frisky. Her own personal dreamtime. Which she revisits at every opportunity. Her dad’s tanked as usual, but still staggering along, grinning idiotically and raising his hip flask to all he meets, mugging emotions. The Court Jester. He’s especially good at stupefaction. Mothers and fathers, though lovable, are only useful up to a point. After that, they can go. She made the mistake of saying that to Tommy one day while they were cleaning out the vacated downtown shops together, still trying to rescue him from the plot he’s been written into, and he called her a heartless bitch and said his mom and dad were the two most important people in his life and always would be. Wherein, alack, lies his eventual ruin. She was about to entertain him with the story of her parents and the Wetherwaxes getting drunk at their midsummer picnic and swapping partners, and all the funny anguished things she heard her mom saying on the phone to Emily Wetherwax the next day, but decided not to. In her effort to score with him, she has told him too many things. They wouldn’t be springing Giovanni Bruno on the cultists tomorrow, for example, if she hadn’t let him know about Darren’s symbolic burial plans. Of course that’s why Tommy has taken such a patient interest in what she has to say. He has been pumping her for information to pass along to his dad, using her much as she has been using Billy Don, and what’s worse, she has been aware of it all along. Feeling guilty, and a bit pissed off, she told Billy Don about Operation Resurrection this afternoon while they were back at their cars having their afternoon snack, Billy Don being too shaken by the reopened grave to stay in there for their picnic. “What? Bruno? He’s alive?” “Keep it to yourself,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t. It’s like writing “to be continued” at the end of a story that’s already over.

  On the way out of the cemetery, Billy Don asked her a lot of earnest questions about life and death and how she manages it all without religion. She answered him the only way she knew how, but she was aware that what had begun as a kind of larky soda fountain game was becoming more like a responsibility, and she wasn’t sure she wanted that. Who is she to unlock the mysteries of the universe? Strip an innocent kid of his fantasy consolations? “Well, you know,” she said finally with a little shrug. “The truth, Billy D. Nobody has it all. My ears are open.” But because she couldn’t help herself, she went on to say he should leave the camp, that he was never going to figure things out in there. And without knowing exactly why, she suddenly feared for him. Maybe it was the bikers coming back, or Darren’s craziness, or all the weird frightening things that have been happening, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and pressed it on him. “Billy Don, I want you to do me a big favor. I’ve only got this twenty, but I want you to take it and go fill up your car and go back home, or go find those kids in Florida, whatever, wherever, but as far away from here as possible. Right now.” He turned pale and gave her a look through his shades—two looks if you count both eyes—that could mean only one thing and shook his head and said thanks, but, well, she probably wouldn’t understand, but he had to stay.

  Nobody’s innocent, she least of all. Remember that.

  She sees Tommy over by the popcorn machine, leaning over Babs Wetherwax, peering rakishly past his plaster nose cast down the kid’s cleavage. Sally has stopped by the house to put on a fresh tee (one of the free NOWC shirts, the C inked into a circle with a smiley face and an exclamation mark
after) and one of her dad’s throwaway white shirts, for its protective sleeves, open and tails out. She grabbed up some blankets, all the money she could find, and the last of her stash, saved for just this occasion; she even remembered the insect repellant and the cameras she borrowed. She has picked out a good place over on the slope to watch the fireworks, private enough to allow for the joints but with an open view of the sky, but she may lose the night after all. Some time ago, in a biology course she took for her science requirement, she came across the word “neoteny” and she wrote it down in her notebook. Adults of a species looking like juveniles and though retarded (as one might say) thought of as cute, and therefore more likely to get fucked. The way a lot of dogs get bred. The way American guys like their girls. Small, soft, fuzzy, dimpled, helpless, confused, naïve. Big eyes. Little noses. White baby teeth. Plucked pubes. A little tongue to tickle you with. Neotenic. At the same time, they like big motherly tits. The Hollywood starlet image. Boobs Wetherwax.

  Why does it matter? Because Sally loves Tommy. Something she used to write in her high school notebooks then tear out in embarrassment, only to write it again. Not knowing what she meant by it. Not knowing now. Something to do with that last night at the ice plant. Meaning has to do with language. That didn’t. No brain at all then, just body. Bare and burning. Her heart’s in her mouth and her clothes are shorn. Says Boy Blue to Peep, come blow my horn. She was so scared, she started praying. The way she was then. Scared but desiring him—or desiring something—so much it hurt. Nothing like it since, really. In her masturbation fantasies, it’s always Tommy, and more or less as he looked to her that night in the back of his father’s car. Just a boy. Boy Blue. Pale, lean, luminous. In his fever, so enraptured by what he saw, enrapturing her; no one has ever looked at her—even if he only was looking at it, not her—like that before or since. His erection a shared magic between them. Right in front of her nose. First real one she’d ever seen up close. He seemed to want her to do something with it, but she didn’t know what. Sniff it? At his urging she took hold of it, surprised at how cool it was. Well, and then more. But not quite enough more. She lights up another cigarette, cursing herself.

  …but then he leaves her alone and she goes home, dragging her tail behind her.

  Blue never calls Bo Peep again, though he knows where to find her…

  And so the rest of the day goes, a catalogue of familiar disappointments, the author retreating after each into her notebook. Dog with her bone. She doesn’t win the raffle and has no luck at bingo. Her best chance is the sack race, but she would have been the only contestant over four feet tall, so instead she referees it and gets everybody mad at her while Tommy puts the make not just on Boobs but a whole flock of bleating neotenics, some of whose bells, she knows, he has already rung, to speak in the classical tongue. Love is a sack race, she writes, in which not all sacks are equal. Tortoise truth: the hare always wins.

  She needs a friend, goes looking for Stacy, but with the food gone, she’s gone, too. Smart. Smarter than Sally, who could leave but can’t.

  The ballgame starts late and lasts less than an inning, ends badly. Baseball on the Fourth: as emblematic as hotdogs, beer, and car crashes. She sits on the grass with Monica Piccolotti and her baby, figuring that it gives her her best shot at crossing paths with Tommy, close as he is to Pete, and has to listen to the entire catalogue of the joys of marriage and motherhood while Monica feeds, burps, changes (turns out it’s a boy), powders, nuzzles, bounces the kid. Also about how cruel Tommy has been to poor faithful Angela, especially after what he’s just done to her. Sally doesn’t know what that is, but she can guess. Did Tommy have Biblical knowledge of cute little Monica Sabatini? Probably. They used to call her Teeny—Teeny Sabatini—but no longer; Lotta Piccolotti’s closer to it. The worst thing is what has happened to her complexion. Love’s production line: high-maintenance baby-machines and the redesigning of mothers. Helplessly desiring what you can’t possibly want. Evolution, not as fact, but as faith. That it’s going somewhere. A promise forever withheld through the ceaseless tumble of new generations. In the first inning, two of the first three batters get on base, mostly due to bad fielding, and Tommy, swinging one-handed as the big guys agree to do, hits a home run. Using his golf stroke. Is that fair? The fielder is actually back far enough, but she drops it and then can’t find the ball in the high grass. Tommy walks around the bases, encouraging the girl, but the throw never even reaches the infield. Tommy’s team scores two more before the little kids at the bottom of the lineup strike out. Tommy, pitching underhand in the bottom of the inning, gets the first two out on balls hit back to him. But her dealer, Moron Moroni, swinging with both hands, smacks a ball that bounces between the little third baseman’s legs and would have hurt if it had hit him. Moron slides into second, feet high, bowling over the beer-bellied Cox kid, standing there picking his nose and waiting for the ball to be thrown to him, and a fistfight breaks out. This is of more interest to the watching crowd, some of whom move toward the field to join in with cold grins on their faces. Another popular Fourth of July tradition. It frightens her, and that’s another disappointment. It’s the human comedy, so why isn’t she laughing?

  Tommy and Pete hurriedly exit the playing field, pulling some of the little ones out with them, Tommy remarking as he strides by that he needs a fucking beer, Pete offering him one from the cooler in the trunk of his car over at the parking lot. Monica throws her kid over her shoulder and apologizes, saying she’d better go keep an eye on the boys that they don’t get into trouble, and leaves her. Down on the field, the fight ends when Angela’s brother steps into it, slugs a few, and leads his troops out before the cops turn up. Should she wander over to the parking lot and invite herself to a beer? She shouldn’t.

  Consider, she writes in her notebook: the whole of the human environment as a pedagogic instrument, art as a particular technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of close regard. Why you have to mix it up, keep people on their toes. See everything.

  She thumbs through the notebook and her current mood of disappointment extends to what she has written. The sophomoric silliness of so much of it. The pretension. The self-pity. Those lines she has set down about Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue, for example. She crosses them out in disgust. Then regrets it. Leave it. It is what it is, she is who she is, even in her stupid infantile doodlings. The doodle as a form of meditation. Meditation as process, not product. Books, too. When they become product, they’re dead. Writing is it, not the written. For all her disappointment, she still believes. Language makes and unmakes reality. There’s an unfathomable gap between nature and culture, the infinite and the finite. Only the imagination can even try to bridge it. Its failures are what beauty is. And so on. The litany of Saint Sal.

  As the sky darkens toward showtime, Sally spreads her blanket on the little slope she picked out, though out of the private spot and onto a more public one so Tommy can at least see her should he chance by. She lights up the joint she has rolled and stretches out to watch the stars appear. Tommy vanished from sight some time ago. Probably gone off with one or more of his groupies. Sprawled in his convertible somewhere with a view of the upcoming fireworks. Where they can time their orgasms with the bursts in the sky. In the beginning, she thinks, staring up into that sky (the sheer volume of it!): the fundamental error of giving form to the formless, thus creating time and the perception of space. God’s famous parlor trick. But the notion that light—creation—is “good” will not stand the test of inquiry. Something like that. She’d write it down, but it’s getting dark and she’s tired of writing things down. She has worked at holding the earth together long enough for one day. Time to mellow. Beautiful summer night. New crescent moon like a glossy fingernail, brightening as the dark deepens, becoming a tiny rip in the sky, illumined from behind. On the horizon, the flicker of heat lightning. The birds are still into their nightfall bragging and seduction racket. The crickets and katydids. Crazy about love. Mosquitoes with
grosser appetites. She sits up, already feeling the impact of the weed (whoo, nice), spreads repellant on her wrists, arms, forehead, and the back of her neck, buttons the shirt sleeves and covers her bare legs with the second blanket. She was wondering what would linger long after she left this place. This might be it, not a visual image at all, just the feel of summer. Before lying back again, she rolls a few more joints, her fresh supply courtesy of Moron. Feeling sad. But okay. How she wants it, really. Independence, it’s the day for it, isn’t it? Maybe she’ll just smoke the entire lot and crash out here for the rest of the summer. Dream a little dream of you.

  She has been recording her dreams since she came home from college, cataloguing their peculiarities. Take-home coursework of a sort. Dreamtime 101. Once she’d done it for a while, she found she could make them up, or at least imitate the form. At first she thought it was leading her into something disruptively new, a break from the conventional well-told tales of the day, but in the end it revealed itself as a definable and familiar form of its own with its own set of rules and limitations. Vivid imagery, and just about nothing but. Actions, not language, until trying to describe them. Then, simple declarative sentences, like movie scripts. But little or no continuity, things happening and then not happening. Like the fireworks beginning to explode in the sky above. Pop! this and then pop! that. Linked by as little as trailing color. Sensations of flow, flight, fall, heavy-limbed slowness, mazy disrupted travels. Odd lines of dialogue with hidden meanings. Or not. Lots of family stuff. Abrupt transitions and bizarre juxtapositions. Unstable settings. Sudden breaks and gaps of time and space, casual violence, fleshy landscapes, public nakedness, absurdist reasoning. Spectacularly illogical events that seem completely normal. Strangers you know but don’t know. The threat of the Other. Feelings of powerlessness, vulnerability, masked by illusions of superhuman power, etc. In short, an awful lot like all those creation myths she read back in college, the main difference being that, while dreams are private, myths have been honed for the public marketplace. Invested with intentionality while hiding the original nonsensical flow. Just as the dreams she makes up with words are never as weird as the ones she actually dreams, which often defy inscription. Images in them she could never think up awake, and no idea where they come from or how they get into her dreams. Easy to see, then, how primitive minds would think of them as coming from outside themselves like visions from the beyond. Get doped up and let it flow in. Hello? God talking. First storytellers. Crazy zonked-out dream weavers. Establishing the fatal fetal patterns.