Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  “I know.” There was nothing else either of them could say, so Miller paid and left. Lem’s brother, Tuck, killed in the mine disaster—about all they were able to bring out were his head and feet—had played a great center field with them for six or seven years. There were others, too, too painful to think about. Lorenzini and Calcaterra. Their pitcher Bill Lawson, whose widow had been in and out of the cult. Mario Juliano. And Bert Martini with one arm gone now. Martini caught and Miller had known one-arm catchers before, and he hoped to rehabilitate the old guy. But it was going to be a pretty glum season. Man. Down with spring.

  Inside the hospital, the white was perhaps a little whiter, but past that there was nothing to let you know spring had got turned on outside. Miller picked up the traffic list. Seven admitted, five released: even the batting average was bad. He went back, took the elevator up to second. As he stepped out, the first thing he saw was Happy Bottom’s happy bottom. Her back was to him, her head down studying the diet and medications lists, and she was absently pinching through her skirt to tug down the legband that forever gaped upward. A useless effort, he had told her, being able to prove that the band’s natural position, given all stresses, was exactly five picas above her thigh’s best wrinkle. So what? she would say, and, turning from him, tug it again. “Now, how did you know I was coming?” he asked.

  Her hand twitched away in reflex as her head came up, then stroked back toward its tugging cranny, again pincered the white skirt. Her arm relaxed, the hand sagging, pulling the taut skirt yet tauter. She turned then to look at him. “Oh,” she pouted, “I thought it was one of the doctors.”

  A bell rang and a light came on down the corridor. “Say, I can’t stay,” Miller said. “I just dropped up a second to—”

  “Post office is in room 24-A,” she said with a challenging smile, and left him to go answer the patient’s signal, switching her hips not too subtly at all. He could almost hear the old barrel organ root-toot-tootling away.

  Of course, he should just wait here since he wasn’t going to stay, but he didn’t, wandered instead down to 24-A, empty as he had supposed it would be. He leaned back against the bed, waited, a few fantasies flowering from the root below.

  Happy entered, glanced back behind her, eased the door shut. All those M’s, my God! M for mountains. She met his smile with one of her own, approached, everything moving at once. M for everything moving at once. “At last!” she growled. A wisp of sandy hair poked out under her nurse’s cap. “You are in my clutches! The Black Hand strokes again!”

  Miller grinned. “Mother,” he complained, “you forget the gravity of the situation. Men are dying!”

  She smiled up at him. Her breasts had that rare muscular thrust that made them look, from above, like a pedestal for the head. Or a platter. “Dying indeed. You’ve been around those awful morbid people too much, Tiger.”

  “They’re not morbid, they’re ecstatic.”

  “Listen, I saw that poor boy Bruno. He had so many scars on and around his unfortunate joint, it looked like he’d been rebuilt there by a quack plastic surgeon.”

  “Who, Giovanni? You mean he had some accident—?”

  “You bet, accident. Whoever flayed him, flayed by patterns. Or maybe he used a knife. He was a real curiosity out here. All the nurses took turns with his baths to get a look. Of course, as soon as he was strong enough, we couldn’t get near him.”

  “Really?” Miller laughed. He’d guessed as much, but now he had information he hadn’t known otherwise how to get. “Who bathed him then?”

  “His sister.” If she caught his inward jolt, she gave no sign of it. “And as for dying, well, nobody tries any of that funny business up here unless I let them. Of course, on off days, why, I don’t really care. I just forget and they drop off like flies.” The platter punched his chest as if to roll his own head upon it, and, below, her hipbone curled in to knock once. Enough. “Tiger, there’s thirty-six people up here whose lives depend on you!”

  “Hand,” he grinned, “you’re even blacker than I thought.” And, as if in thanks for that, as her mouth dampened his grin, her hand trickled in a liquid gambol down his spine to midthigh, then back up the front where a wild demand had stirred. “But there’s no lock on that door,” he whispered, her lips biting his words.

  “I’ve got the key to the upstairs X-ray room, and it just happens to be time for my break. Won’t be anybody up there all morning.” There was spring light in her smile and a glitter in her eyes’ mischief that chased all phantoms, even the most recent, while from his fingertips, pressed urgently into the soft swells that had won her her name, there radiated a message of scorn for the highflown moralizing of his morning walk and a sense of cosmic pandemonium that made him laugh. “We shall take inside pictures and sell them secretly to zee leetle boys,” she murmured. “We shall make a meellion!” He didn’t know if she meant dollars or pictures, but knew better than to ask.

  Marcella sits on a stool under the scrawny apple tree in the grassless backyard, her hands full of damp dirt, the sun on her bright yellow back. Before her: a plot of troubled earth, about four feet square, marked off from the world’s vague extension by four corner stakes and a piece of wrapping string. Four or five sticks poke up in the plot like its first people, broad-shouldered, wearing empty seed packages, but headless. The gaiety of their uniforms delights her, but what will express the joy they think? She spies a clump of new dandelions in Rosalia’s yard next door. She picks a few, punches little holes in the tops of the seed envelopes—really the bottoms, for they are upsidedown, of course—and inserts the dandelion heads. She laughs. The fact is, Marcella doesn’t exactly believe in the cataclysm. At first, she had some doubts about her brother even, for she had never confused love with worship. But she has grown greatly in these few weeks, has discovered the true solidity of truths she previously only suspected, or thought might just be creatures of her own inturned foolishness. For example: that Jesus is not salvation, but only a single path among many to a higher condition that ultimately must even exclude him. Or: that true knowledge is the discerning of pattern, and wisdom is its right interpretation. She has been greatly helped by them all. By Eleanor and by Mr. Himebaugh, even by Clara. And most of all by Justin. Though silent, apart, calm, singular, he is yet at the heart of the Plan, moving with hidden fingers, fulfilling with unspoken words, gentle, responsive, aloof from the human frailties of the group. Justin is—in a sense—their priest. She feels it. Perhaps they all feel it. She thinks of his silence as like the ardent silence of the sun, his apartness as like the enfolding apartness of the stars, his calm like the contained explosions in her chest. But the cataclysm: well, it’s a matter of definition. God is terrible, but as beauty is terrible, not horror. So, if she prepares the earth for Him, even four little square feet of it, it is not to deny His coming, but to affirm the love that motivates Him.

  Impulsively, his Saturday edition thrown shoddily to bed, Miller decided to go see Marcella. Go see her now, while his seed machine, old despot, was utterly drained of need, and make up his mind about that thing once and for all. Without the Chevy and the panel out, he had no choice, walked over. Didn’t mind. Loosened him up and gave him time to think. It was a little brazen, this midday visit, but there were few ignorant now of his involvement with the cult and, therefore, with any or all women in it. That was the trouble with this goddamn village, there was just no way to let an affair ripen on its own, it inevitably got put on a stage to be applauded, hooted, laughed at, or second-guessed. Even the high school kids suffered this kind of daily intrusion—how long had he known, for instance, that Ted Cavanaugh’s boy Tommy had been taking little Sally Elliott, Jim’s daughter, out to the ice plant several times a week? Only guy in town who refused to listen to that rumor was Coach George Bayles, who was afraid if he acknowledged it, he’d have to bench Tommy for breaking training and lose every game left on the schedule. Miller had in recent years resigned himself to pickups in roadhouses and distant dance halls
—had the advantage they were usually young—but he was growing away from secretaries and phone operators, had trouble setting up anything worth more than a second listless event.

  He passed the Lincoln School yard where a gang of youngsters were playing basketball. Lot of pushing, elbowing, fumbling, shouting. Found himself unconsciously trying to pick out the ones that might have promise. The ball escaped them, trickled out of bounds. A fat boy chased it, and the others let him. “Hey! Hi, Tiger!” shouted one of them, one of his carriers down at the plant. “That’s Tiger Miller, the baseball player!” the kid shouted at the others.

  “We know it,” said the fat boy irritably, then turned his hungry smile on Miller. “Take a shot, Tiger!” he called, and heaved the ball. Three bounces. Miller reached down for it. Felt good in his hands.

  “From way out here?” Miller asked, grinning. “I don’t think I can make it.”

  “Aww,” said the fat boy, and the others joined in. “C’mon, Tiger!”

  Miller sucked the ball with both hands to his forehead, his old shot: believed in thinking the ball into the basket. Hell of a long distance at that, though. He relaxed, brought the ball down hard against the pavement, half step forward, ball eased up against the palm of his right, the impact that converted mere force into a subtle control system, and as the ball’s momentum pushed his hand up, his left glided up, struggling against the bind of his trenchcoat, to guide—thrust off the asphalt with the calf muscles, felt old muscles snap awake, at jump’s peak, ball at the brain, shoved himself back to earth again. The ball arched away—fffft!—didn’t even touch the fucking rim going through. Hah! Only the stiff clock of his leather soles batting thinly on the asphalt whipped him back out of the stadium to this present scene, where small boys cheered the old baseball player who ran the town newspaper.

  “Shoot another one, Tiger!” they cried.

  Miller laughed, but knew when to quit. Still felt the knot in his legs from that short tight jump. “Let’s see you guys try it,” he said, and he left them excitedly imitating him.

  As luck would have it, it was Eleanor Norton, not Marcella, who met him at the door of the Bruno house. Unprepared for her and with no excuse for being there, he said lamely, “Looks like good weather for tonight’s trip to the hill, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she replied, reluctantly admitting him. He recognized a growing distrust in her, especially since his photographing Baxter’s assault night before last. He knew his days were numbered, was a little surprised he had lasted so long—well, people accepted what they wanted to accept, and they wanted to think the city editor was on their side.

  “How’s Giovanni? Will he be able to go out?”

  “He’s doing well, but I don’t think we’ll risk it.” She sighed, rubbing her medallion. “It’s a delicate business, Mr. Miller.”

  He agreed with that solemnly, and they passed through the meeting room and dining room into the kitchen. Giovanni’s door was closed, but he pushed away the thought that crowded in, accepting what he wanted to accept. Ralph Himebaugh was in the kitchen. Logs and papers were spread on the kitchen table. Ralph muttered a greeting. Another reason why Eleanor had come to distrust him, surely. Miller had always got along with the man, but, in the new context of the cult, Ralph could only hate him, whether he was being sincere or not. And now that Ralph had fallen victim, like the rest, to the informal harassment campaign on in town, he seemed to suggest he saw Miller as the man who had let the word out. A glance out the kitchen window into the backyard: Marcella was out there, mourning clothes off and now into a starchy yellow dress, bright as the bright day. She was working a small plot of earth, garden or something. When he glanced back at Mrs. Norton, he saw she was watching him. Himebaugh, too. Well, screw ’em. He smiled blankly, then, without excuses, walked out back to the girl.

  The small yard was barren. Garbage pails by the back door. Small twisted fruit tree, fruitless, where Marcella sat now, back to him, on a stool. Wire incinerator in front of the alley. Fenced on one side, open to the neighbors on the other. This was his stage and something in the challenge from the kitchen, the warmth from the sun, the tug in his calves, the rumpled delicacy of her seated figure, made him shrug off caution and strut it like a cock.

  The soft pulsing fine-boned feel of her shoulders—knew it, enjoyed it, even before his large hands wrapped them. The dress was fresh and crisp to the touch. She gazed up smiling—delighted, but not surprised. He had never succeeded in surprising her. Some way of divining his presence, split second of presentiment. He relinquished her shoulders, knelt to inspect her garden. They laughed at its seed-package keepers with dandelion heads, though Miller’s perverse eye turned them right side up and saw something else there. His gaze traced the expressive tapering of her right forearm, resting on her crossed knee, the bone-bent turn of her wrist, the fragile fretwork of veins, fingers smudged with earth. They talked nonsense, but under that sun out on this stage with that fragrance in the soil, anything else would have sounded pretentious. Anyway, he was watching her, curious about himself. If his artless inspection troubled her, her poise and easy gaiety gave no sign of it. The poise, that was part of it. The gaiety. And her eyes, brown, doelike, yet bright and awake, and eagerness there, and love for him. But he’d seen that intense gaze, been loved before, and painlessly had turned his back. Still, there was something there, in her eyes. Sensitivity, yes, and intelligence, though he’d hardly challenged either enough to prove them. He felt then, watching her eyes and warmed by the sun, a flicker of exaggerated tones and comforts from a distant innocence of his own—yes, the innocence, the astonishing uncomplicated ingenuousness that gave her such a nice clean sphere to live in, all harmony, and with him at dead center, that must be it. And it was what had been troubling him all day, even in the heat of that frantic bull-like assault on the X-ray table: that his own motivations had become fragmented, that Marcella and Happy, the newspaper and dead buddies, West Condon and East Condon, baseball, sociology, saviors, and sex, all existed isolated under uniquely different legal systems; Ellie Norton’s seven aspects hardly covered the field. And now, unexpectedly, he had knocked up against a simple yet all-embracing view whose every action was a direct manifestation of it. Purity. Saint’s eyes. And, goddamn, he had a yearning to share it. He glanced down at the seed-package soldiers. Back to the garden. He had spent a decade rooting it out of himself, and here, happily in hell, he’d wandered right back to the gate.

  He stood, feeling weak, and she stood to face him, sun bright on her upturned face. He realized that the decision was actually already made, had been made long before, and this was only a ritual: drawn to her sphere’s center, he had long since agreed to stay. There now remained for him only to redescribe the sphere itself for her, make a few holes and let real air in; and relearn himself the integrity and continence that belonged to her view of him. He asked her to have dinner with him tonight, and she, radiant, accepted. The scene, the moment, called for an embrace, but the old cock was feeling himself public again. He was, too. A glance back at the house revealed Mrs. Norton and old Himebaugh posed rigidly in the window: stony-faced American Gothic. They had come for lunch, Marcella said, smiling apologetically, and she had to get it ready. Would he stay? Something told him he should, but he hesitated to face those two, couldn’t run the risk yet of a direct showdown in Marcella’s presence. He told her he had to get the paper out if they were to have dinner together, walked her to the back door.

  Eleanor and Ralph were waiting for them. Marcella, smiling, slipped on by them. “Don’t forget the wirecopy tonight,” Ralph snapped, drumming a metal rule on his knuckles. Himebaugh had decided the evening paper was neither soon enough nor comprehensive enough for his purposes, now demanded the teletype copy in its entirety every evening.

  “And please, Mr. Miller, no photographs tonight,” said Mrs. Norton bluntly, fingering the gold disc.

  “No, of course not,” he said. “I’m sorry about the other night. I thought I was being a
help. But, if you like, I’ll bring the negatives and turn them over to the group.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” she said, but there was no melting there. He left before they could progress beyond these petty complaints to the real thing that was irking them. Off to Mick’s. For charred hamburgers.

  The blossoming spiritual affair between Ralph Himebaugh and Eleanor Norton was, to be sure, one of the more fascinating products of the cult. And it was odd, because under ordinary circumstances, they would probably never even have spoken to each other. Both avoided others, were excessively polite and formal when necessarily in public. She, childless and middle-aged, was a good teacher, but uncompromising and not a popular one. He, a bachelor a few years her senior, was a brilliant file cabinet lawyer who avoided cases that must come to court, and Miller could never remember having seen the guy do more than tip his hat and mutter a delicate “hello” to a woman. But a disaster had thrown them together, two innocents surprised in a fever, and now their logbooks, their respective systems, were drawing their timid souls together in holy intercourse. In fact, their two systems did fit together in the mating posture, one embracing from above, the other reaching up from below. The funny thing was, though, Ralph’s system was the one on the bottom.

  Because they were reading each other’s logbooks—excitedly, voraciously, as though they were lovel-etters—Miller had to take what was for the given moment left over, jumping back and forth in time and between the two authors. The disrupted chronology was no problem in Eleanor’s case, for behind her writings of fifteen years ago there was the same essentially whole ontology that governed her most recent messages; if there was a difference, it was one of gradual growth, greater profundity, a stripping away of early pseudoscientific imagery related to space travel and biological transmutations, and an approach to that kind of all-embracing mysticism that characterized the poets of all faiths. But, read out of order, it was hard to make any sense at all out of Himebaugh’s schemata; their parts arose separately from their several points of origin, founded always in some concrete event in the world, discarded as they curved away from each other, altered, revised with each discovery of new data. Stylistically, Eleanor’s writings changed as a young author’s might, from an early awkward manner whose mystery was provided by broken phrases and harsh juxtapositions, through a florid “literary” period, acquiring finally her present mastery of vocabulary and syntax, a unique, albeit eclectic, style of her own. Himebaugh’s writings, at least those Miller read, covered a much narrower time span, only about four years, though he had disaster clippings that were a lot older, and his writing ways were constant: pedantic, precise, and abbreviated. The only change of note was a gradual adoption of new symbols, shrinking yet more his ever-spare use of language.