The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  City hall is a heavy stone building, often called “the Fort” for not much leaks in from the world outside nor is much distributed to it, but Gina can hear beyond its thick walls the muffled sound of helicopters and motorcycles and sirens. Is something happening? A distant boom rattles the windows. Could be a last clap of thunder, but you never know. It has been quiet in Mr. Castle’s office for a long time, and Gina decides to risk the mayor’s anger by knocking and telling him that the phone is not working and she has to go to the hospital to be with her cousin Concetta Moroni because Concetta’s father-in-law has died. Whenever she says something like that her boss always says it’s like everyone in town is one of her cousins—here he usually adds in a few swearword modifiers—and that’s very nearly true, at least in her part of town. Her own children would be related to her in some way even if she hadn’t given birth to them herself. She gets no answer and knocks again, louder this time, and calls out his name. Still nothing. She can hear running footsteps out in the corridors, doors slamming. She fishes her key out of the desk and opens his door: no one there. They must have left by the other door, the one at the back that leads out into the hall where the men’s room is. The mayor was upset about what was happening out at the mine hill; maybe that’s where they went. Or they’re out there in the street where the noise is. But he could have let her know. If the President had called, what would she have told him? Well, that it was turning into a nice day here and he should come for a visit, she could show him around. The children will be at the pool by now, so with the mayor away and phones and power out, the afternoon is hers. The furniture store is having a summer sale, which is more or less a continuation of their winter sale. Maybe she’ll make an offer on that pretty stuffed chair in the window with the orange-and-green flowered pattern, give her daughter the old red one now that she’ll soon be setting up a home of her own. Paychecks are late this month, probably because of the holiday, but her credit is good. Desperate as they are, they’d probably sell it to her even if she had no credit at all. Then she’ll go pick up some nice hamburger and fresh buns and a bag of charcoal and marshmallows to roast and have a picnic supper tonight in the backyard. Invite Aunt Delfina and her daughter’s boyfriend, get him thinking in the family way, only hoping Aunt Delfina doesn’t chase him off. The President is welcome to join them. He can wear Mario’s old “Mister Good-Lookin’ Is Cookin’” apron and grill the burgers. If she has time, she could haul the old baby crib out of the basement and clean it and repaint it. Decorate it with little colored stickers from the dimestore. She’ll drop by there on the way home, and at the same time she can buy some more blue yarn (she’s betting on a boy). The booties and bonnet are almost done; she can start a matching jacket. There’s lots of time. She picks up her needles and knitting but, just as she tucks them in her bag, there is a sudden flash of light—

  The blast rocks the Fort, followed closely by other thunderous bursts, one on top of another, as if in imitation of the fireworks finale on Saturday night: the fire station, the post office, the police station. There is shouting, screaming, the rush off the street for open shop doors before they’re slammed shut, the crackle of gunfire peppering the gaps between explosions. Shopkeepers throw themselves down behind their counters, motorists press their accelerators to the floor, arriving reporters and cameramen turn on their heels, abandoning their equipment. Storefront windows shatter, streetlights and neon signs are blasted away. Somewhere a dog yips frantically. “God is good!” shouts a mountainous undershirted man astraddle a motorcycle bearing official government plates as he speeds away from the exploding courthouse. Grinning a wide, whiskery grin he roars past the Chamber of Commerce offices, shooting out its plate-glass windows. A fish-eyed biker in fluttering black rags rolls down Main Street, the near-naked girl behind him splashing gasoline from a can on the hoods of all the cars and pickups they pass. They are followed by a strange glassy-eyed creature in red boots, loin cloth, and feathers with a wagging topknot rising from his shaved painted head, bearing the Number of the Beast tattooed on his bony shoulders and wielding a flaming torch he touches to the cars the girl has doused, setting the whole street on fire, mini-explosions counterpointing the larger ones. “Five minutes!” shouts a motorcyclist in a black stocking mask, as he takes aim at a bald chubby man in a stained butcher’s apron rushing from the barbershop to try to douse the flames on an old beat-up Dodge coupe parked out front; he doesn’t get that far. A dark stocky woman and a goateed biker with goggles, both wearing coalminers’ helmets, leap off their motorcycles and smash their way into the corner drugstore, the woman covering for the man—there is a great crashing and tinkling of glass as she fires away, the mirror behind the soda fountain falling like a melting glacier—while he strips the shelves behind the pharmacy counter, dumping everything into his leather backpack. Out on the street, one of the burning pickups circles about, unbraked and driverless. It careens over a curb, caroms off a corner street sign and mailbox, and piles into a furniture store, setting it alight. At the liquor store, where the staff has taken refuge in the cellar, racks of bottles are tipped out and shot up and a lit cigarette is flicked into the mix. An elderly man in carpenter’s overalls emerges from the hardware store with a shotgun, takes aim at the begoggled cyclist speeding away from the drugstore, the buckshot thudding into the rider’s leather backpack, clanging off his mining helmet. The man turns to duck back into the store, but the masked rider following behind on a ghostly gray motorcycle draws a revolver from a hip holster and does not miss. He brakes to a stop, takes two-handed aim, fires five more times. “Four minutes!” he yells. The first out-of-town police units to arrive encounter heavy fire and the occasional hurled stick of dynamite. Even when taking cover, they find themselves being shot at; it takes them just a moment, but too long a moment for some, to discover the sniper up in the top floor of the town’s derelict hotel: an elusive gunman in a golden guayabera and tight pants, colorful headband, who appears and disappears tauntingly from window to window as if there were a dozen of him, shouting out what are probably obscenities in a foreign language, then firing from where least expected. The troopers return fire but without conviction, staying hunkered down. A great many sirens can be heard approaching from all directions. They can wait until those guys get here. They were told there was trouble here, but nothing like this. The cyclist with the painted head, topknot and feathers smashes a ground-level window of the hotel with his rifle butt and springs lithely through with his weapons and backpack. An unmarked helicopter swoops low, drawing high-powered rifle fire from a biker with a gray braid. It lurches, continues to try to fly like a wounded bird, slowly loses altitude. The biker fires again, then swivels, leaning on his good leg, to aim at a second helicopter wheeling past overhead. More come clappety-clapping in from the east, where the county airport lies. Several attackers try to force their way into the First National Bank, kicking at the locked door, shooting at the lock, losing patience as time ticks away. The masked biker swings up, black head with eyeholes blackly framed by his high leather collar. He seems to be everywhere at once. “Three minutes!” he shouts, and hauls some packs of dynamite from the silvery saddlebags draped over his back fender and tosses them to the others. The acting sheriff has thrown himself down behind some trash cans in the back alley as bullets ricochet off the brick walls overhead and he now picks his way hurriedly down the alley, scuttling close to the walls, toward the bank’s rear service door, hoping one of the skeleton keys on his key ring will open it. Inside the bank, the city manager, having abruptly dismissed the disgruntled client when the first blast was heard in the street and snapped at the women for not having warned him, races up the back steps to arm himself and to prepare for possible flight. The bank is solid and should be safe, but if he has to leave, there are things he must destroy or take with him. And opportunities may arise. The first emergency fire truck reaches the blazing street. It is met with rifle fire and a dynamite pack tossed through the cab window. The pool hall is hit. An Itali
an social club. When the movie house is dynamited, its antiquated marquee drops, biting the street like false uppers, letters flying like broken molars. Inside the nearby bar and grill, its walls pocked with the bullets that have crashed through the front window, they hear someone frantically banging on the back alley door, but after the loud overhead crash a few moments before—half the ceiling plaster fell: “Holy Christ! We’re being bombed!” the dimestore owner wailed, scrunched down behind a table he had tipped over to hide behind—they are afraid and shrink back. The proprietor, hearing a woman shrieking, ignores the pleas of his customers and opens the door. It is the wife of the former Chamber of Commerce secretary. “Is Jim here?” she cries, staggering in. The scar-faced man squatting in one corner with a tray over his head points at the body on the floor. She screams. The body stirs. “Hello, dear,” it says. Pushing in behind the woman before the proprietor can slam the door limps a grimacing man, fierce with rage, and the others duck behind their tipped tables again. There is a tumbler of vodka on the bar, its ice melted, sitting alone in its evaporating puddle like a minor miracle amid the shattered glass, and the man grabs it up and tosses it down, slams the tumbler back on the bar, explaining when he can get his breath that he’s the pilot of the helicopter that has fallen on their roof and he thinks his leg is broken. “Those assholes were shooting at me! I don’t shoot anything except pictures for fuck sake!” The bank’s owner has at last fought his way through the clogged traffic, has parked behind the smoldering ruins of the bus station, and is making his way on foot toward the center, rifle in hand, when an out-of-town police car stops him, the officers pointing weapons at him, ordering him to drop his gun. He does so, tells them angrily who he is. “We’re just losing time, goddamn it!” They ask for identification. “No, it ain’t damp squibs,” one of the bikers in front of the bank door is grumbling, a shaggy hayseed with yellow teeth, the fingers on his right hand in a splint, suspenders holding his pants up, “it’s the fucken matches.” A tall mustachioed man dressed in satin-striped tuxedo pants, a dazzling red T-shirt and a black silk tie, swastikas on his upper arms, produces a silver cigarette lighter. The sirens encircling the town are now as loud as the roar of the motorcycles in the center. Two military helicopters with multiple machine gun and rocket mounts have appeared and are hovering overhead, adding to the racket. Radio contact is established with them and they are asked by the police units on the ground to try to take out the sniper in the derelict hotel. The acting sheriff is pinned down on the back steps of the bank in a shootout with the masked motorcyclist, who is firing at him from behind the corner of the building, when he suddenly hears someone approaching from behind. He wheels round to blow the attacker away but sees in the nick of time that it’s a young unarmed man in a grocer’s apron with his hands raised. “My wife’s in there!” he gasps. “Mine too,” says the sheriff and tosses the kid his rifle. “Cover me!” In an instant, the kid is across the alley in a doorway, firing at the masked biker, driving him back. But none of the keys on the sheriff’s ring seem to work. “One minute!” the masked man calls out, pulling away from the alley fire fight. “Mufflers on!” A scrawny unshaven straw-headed fellow with one arm in a sling ambles down out of the Legion Hall, where he has spent the night on the floor. Grinning his gap-toothed grin, he surveys the scene through the scrim of his piercing hangover. Biggest fucking bonfire he has ever seen, hairy dudes on motorbikes storming around, raising hell, bodies here and there like bundles dropped by rag merchants. Not far away, there’s a man under a flaming store awning sprawled beside a prehistoric shotgun. He picks it up. Not easy to fire the thing with one arm, but he figures he might as well shoot a few people because that’s what’s happening and why not. There’s a guy up a telephone pole watching the action down below. He shouldn’t be up there. He gets him in his sights, imagines the fall (slow-mo, like in the movies), but does not pull the trigger. This old shotgun probably has such a kick it could break his other shoulder. Anyway, it’s not his nature. “Bang!” he says and laughs, lowering the gun. The Woolworths under the Legion Hall is shot up and abandoned, the door agape, small fires erupting, so he goes in and raids the candy counter for breakfast, helps himself to a change of underwear and bright purple and green socks with white toes and other useful and redeemable items. As the police chief reaches the station, too late to be of help to his duty officer, the police and emergency vehicles he called in from other towns are beginning to arrive in large numbers and overhead the army helicopters are firing round after round into the old hotel. Along the way the chief has come upon the state trooper who gave him a ride in, his throat slit, his motorcycle missing. He watches as a patrol car driven by a friend of his from the next county blows up less than half a block away, and he spies the missing motorcycle, in its saddle a huge bearded man in a strapped undershirt and leather vest, now pulling away from the blast: a big target, but he gets off only a couple of shots before the street is rocked by a tremendous explosion on the bank corner, a signal for the city manager up on the second floor to head down for the back door, on the double. He slams out, bowling over a man knuckled down behind it, sending him tumbling into the alley. The city manager levels a revolver at his head, but the young man across the alley shouts out: “No! No! It’s the sheriff!” The sheriff has drawn a revolver of his own and all three men have weapons pointed at each other. A blink. Recognition. The city manager jumps down into the alley, a bag and a bundle of folders under his arm, and sprints away while the sheriff and grocer rush into the bank. Outside the front door, which is no more, the masked man shouts: “Time’s up! Forget it! Let’s go! Now!” The tall biker in the black glasses, suspendered tux pants, tie and crimson tee, calmly raises his hand and says in a precise commanding voice: “Go, and may the Big One be with you!” The others hesitate, then leap on their bikes, tearing off in all directions, gunfire chasing them. The man combs his hair and moustache with his fingers, adjusts his black silk tie and sunglasses, and strides into the bank through the floating dust with the stiff erect bearing of a mechanical tin soldier, carrying under his arm neatly tied packages to which he is applying a small blue flame. The banker, freed at last from the bumbling cops, reaches Main Street. A vast devastation, blazing cars and buildings, a scatter of dead and wounded amid the glass and rubble, police swarming in, ambulances, fire engines, helicopters overhead slamming the old hotel with rocket fire, another copter fallen in a rumpled heap on the flat roof of the bar and grill. The tall man in the tux pants and luminous red shirt is just disappearing into the gaping hole where the bank door once stood. Too late and too far away, but the banker fires off a shot anyway. He catches a glimpse of a biker in goggles and miner’s helmet streaking down an alley. Not in a position to shoot at him, but in the street where the alley opens out many are, including the chief of police, white with rage. The biker is gunned down in the percussive crossfire of nearly two dozen armed personnel, all banging away at once, while in the bank the terrified clerks and their customers shrink back from the robotic figure in black glasses who has entered through the hole that was once the front door. “In the name of all that’s holy and all that’s unholy!” he cries out, and like a newspaper boy tossing his folded papers onto front porches, he distributes his lit packages. This is what the sheriff’s wife hears before someone lands on top of her and the world ends around her. As she crumples to the floor—an explosion! another!—she is thinking: They were right! It’s really the end! Her poor children! One lit package is winging its way toward a woman huddled with her howling baby behind the water fountain when it is plucked out of the air by the young grocer and former high school basketball star, leaping high as if for a jump shot, and in the same movement flipped back at its thrower, terminating the assault with a final massive blast. A hot dusty silence descends, broken only by groans. Things are winding down outside, too. The bikers are dead or have vanished. The hotel has fallen silent after the helicopter fusillade. A senior police officer assembles an assault team to enter the building and
they are gathered at the front door, trying to force entry, when the feathered biker with the topknot springing from his shaved red head appears on the damaged roof with an armful of strapped dynamite packets, which, while bellowing out his praise of God—some god, praise of an eccentric sort—he lights and drops on the state troopers and neigh boring town police below, now frantically scattering. The army helicopters, distracted by the fleeing bikers, come clattering urgently back. The biker greets them with an Indian war dance, leaping and howling, beating his bared chest; the helicopters spare no firepower but obliterate him with rocket fire, leaving nothing on the roof except leg stubs in tooled red boots.

  To while away the time on their way to the airport and out of the state and country, Georgie Lucci and the mayor have been trading whore stories. Which when real mostly depress Georgie, so he has been inventing a few bigcity yarns, borrowing on the plots of blue movie queens like Nellie Nympho and Red-Hot Ruby. “Ruby lipsticked her asshole and jiggled it around, and with your hands bound behind your back you were supposed to kiss it before poking it. It was like bobbing for apples.”

  The mayor’s laughter booms. “You’re fulla shit, Georgie, but your stories are better than mine. Christ. Since I got married, the occasional cheap whore is all I’ve had. Of course, all women are whores, so I guess that’s all I’ve had or coulda hoped to’ve had. And I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had a good one.”

  “I could introduce you to a few.”