The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Angela is on the phone to her friend Ramona, who has upset her by letting her know that Tommy was seen leaving the Fourth of July picnic Saturday night with Sally Elliott. She can’t believe it, but Ramona says everyone saw them. “She’s just an ugly smartalecky slut,” Ramona says. “It only shows how desperate he is.” Is that supposed to make her feel better? Ramona says her dad has had to go to the mine hill this morning because something is happening again. There was a big explosion at the mine on Sunday when some of them blew themselves up and now a lot of people are hurrying out there because they think it might be like five years ago. “You know, like, wild?” Well, not Angela. It was nice of Mr. Ferrero to bring them eggs for breakfast, but she doesn’t really like eggs, and she’s starving. Now that the rain’s nearly over, she’ll take a bath, put on makeup, and go to town for something more filling. Maybe Stacy will be in Doc Foley’s drugstore and she can ask her a private question about what a miscarriage is really like in case she has to try to describe one. Well, not in case. That’s what she’s going to have to say, or something like it. White lies: her days now seem full of them. She’s running out of money but feels certain she’ll soon get her job back when Mr. Cavanaugh realizes how unfair he has been and how much he needs her. She tells Ramona she has to go, that she has an appointment at the bank and needs to get ready for it.

  White lies. It’s how Bernice Filbert thinks of the stories she tells the bedridden Mr. John P. Suggs. They began with the best of intentions. She didn’t want to tell him that his friend Sheriff Puller had been murdered and in such a gruesome way, fearing it might give him another brain attack. This morning he asked why the sheriff has not come by, and she said, “He did. But you was…sleeping.” So she also hasn’t told him about the motorbikers and Ben Wosznik getting blown up either because it’s all part of the same story. And she certainly hasn’t let him know about the changes at the camp since Ben died, because she knows that would really upset him and he might stop giving them money. So Ben is still at the camp and everything is as it always was, except for the hosts assembled by Abner Baxter at the outskirts, which oppress them daily. Ben hasn’t come to visit because he needs to stay to protect the camp and also because he has a bad summer cold he doesn’t want Mr. Suggs to catch. She hasn’t said what day it is. Maybe it’s still the Fourth of July. She can revise the story of the Fourth a little and then tell it like it’s a new one, just happening; he won’t know the difference. As for Sheriff Puller, maybe he had to resign and move somewhere else. Or maybe he also had a stroke, or soon will have. Eventually he could also die heroically saving the camp from the Baxterites. It depends on what happens next. There’s no one left to tell Mr. Suggs otherwise, except that unpleasant McDaniel fellow, his mine manager, and she can have Mr. Suggs fire him for siding with Abner’s people and send him away. She has a cousin who could do that man’s job at the mine, and without scowling all the time. When that fat city lawyer with the yellow slicked-down hair comes back, the one who is being so helpful, they’ll have a chat about it. She hopes he will admire her strategy.

  Now that her foul-mouthed brother-in-law has been jailed, there’s a bedroom free to rent at their house; the hospital is expensive so home care might be the right thing. The hospital could loan her all the things she needs like blood pressure monitors and specimen bottles and bedpans, and the theropests could come by her house to exercise him. At the hospital, they sit him up and walk him around, but nothing’s working, his feet just bend back and drag along on his toes. If she can find someone to help lift him, they could hire her extra for that task. At least he is swallowing his own food now if it’s mashed up, and the hospital has a home catering service that Mr. Suggs can afford. That would cut her own food bills down, too, because he doesn’t eat much. He is alert a couple of hours each day, but otherwise, he appears confused and strange grunting and whining noises come out of him, as if he were speaking in tongues, and maybe he is, or else he sleeps. In his alert moment this morning, after inquiring about Mr. Puller, Mr. Suggs asked her in his laborious eye-blinking way to tell the sheriff that he should put some pressure on those drunks who invaded the camp by telling them they were under suspicion for the murder of those two fools in the garden shed, which happened that same night, and get them to implicate Baxter and his followers in everything that happened. All this thinking and blinking tired him out pretty fast. Leaving the hospital on her way out to the camp to check on Elaine, Bernice bumps into her friend Maudie, the head nurse, and tells her about the Hungarian exorcist turning out to be an abortionist and getting chased off by Clara. Maudie shrugs and says, well, it’s a kind of exorcism and it would probably have been a healing thing to do.

  Wayne returns with dire news. The police have Elaine. “They said she was a-slickerin’ herself with a belt down in the rough nigh to where all the bodies was found, and they’re arrestin’ her for indecent exposure and takin’ her in for a medical.” Wanda Cravens and Hunk Rumpel have come to say goodbye. Without a word, Hunk walks away toward the creek and a few minutes later he returns, carrying Elaine, looking like an unstrung puppet made out of sticks, her eyes starting like an animal caught in a trap, her skinny little tummy bumping out under the soaked tunic pasted to it like she swallowed a mushmelon. Hunk doesn’t say how he got her, but they suppose they’d better get out of here fast. They can already hear the choppy crackle of helicopters somewhere in the sky. More troops will be coming in. Everything will get closed off. Glenda says not to wait for her at the meeting place, that she may have to stay. So many children to care for, it might be easier here, and she’d have to leave one of her two campers behind unless Uriah or Hovis returned to drive it for her. Those two West Virginia fellows aren’t back, nor Billy Don either, but the rest can’t wait, they’ll have to join up later. Mabel agrees to ride in Clara’s trailer to keep an eye on Elaine. Wayne says he hopes it’s not really the Rapture and they’re not dragging Clara and Elaine away from their own salvation, but Ludie Belle says, “God ain’t stupid. He’ll know where to find us.”

  Which is how it is that Billy Don returns from his call to Sally Elliott to find everyone gone. No matter. Tucker City is in a different direction; it would only have confused them to see him turning off. He doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say to Sally, but something like he’s never known anyone like her before, meeting her has been the most important thing that’s ever happened to him, and he doesn’t want their friendship to end. He has her phone number but not her address, which he plans to ask for and also for her permission to call her from time to time. He may tell her he loves her, but he hopes he won’t blurt that out because he doesn’t think it’s something she wants to hear. But he does love her. He knows that, has known it for a long time, and his chest is tight with the thought of leaving, even if only for a short time. His immediate plan is to drive up to his cabin now that everyone has pulled out and throw a few things in the car before taking off, but the car won’t start. Seems completely dead. He’s about to step out to see what the matter might be when Darren appears at the window. “What are you doing here? I thought you were headed over to the Mount.”

  “I am. Some people are walking. I have time. But I can’t let you leave, Billy Don.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t let me?” Billy Don pumps the gas pedal again, turns the key. Nothing.

  “It won’t work. I disconnected a few things.”

  Billy Don slumps back against the car seat in exasperation. “You’re crazy, Darren. You’re really crazy.”

  “I love you, Billy Don,” Darren says, and he starts to cry. Then he takes something from inside his tunic and points it at him.

  Though it’s drizzly still, the sky is finally brightening, casting a pale but mostly cheering glow on the wet black streets and brick fronts of quiet downtown West Condon. What businesses remain are opening and city hall is filling up, as are the pool hall, the post office, and the drugstore booths and soda fountain. The pawn shop has its customary “Sales Only” sign
on the front door and may or may not be open. Most of the temporary Fourth of July weekend shops on Main Street have been emptied out or abandoned, but a few first-time entrepreneurs, having faint hopes and little else to do, have decided to linger with their “antiques” and knitted goods and homemade jams, so long as no rent is charged. Faint hopes: the town’s weak but stubborn motor. Gus Baird, the president of the West Condon Rotary Club, having had no new travel or insurance business for over five months now, spends the morning in his office, planning tomorrow’s club luncheon meeting, hoping to run into someone there who wants to get away for a week or two before the summer ends. At the liquor store they restock the shelves and bins after the usual Fourth of July run on beer and cheap booze; drier times ahead, though it beats owning a grocery or a clothing store. Down the street, Linda Catter’s first beauty shop customer is due in thirty minutes and Linda tidies up the premises for her. One of her blue-hair trade. Not really blue. An old Italian widow who likes orange hair, and gossips endlessly about people Linda doesn’t know. Bernice calls Linda from the Brunist Wilderness Camp office to say most everybody has cleared out. They seem to have gone over to the Mount, as if something was about to happen. She’s going over to take a look. Linda hopes that if it’s the Rapture, they don’t forget her stuck here in her beauty shop. Certainly, the graves seem to be emptying out, just like it says in the Bible. After work, if today lasts that long, she should go check where her husband Tommy has been laid to rest. Maybe he has stopped resting. Not far away, Enos Beeker, haunted still by the shoe store owner’s public suicide, uses the slow day to take unseasonal inventory at his hardware store. Thanks in large part to the new cut-price D.I.Y. store out at the highway shopping center, not much will have changed since the last one. He is grateful that most of his aging stock is at least not susceptible to rot, a daily problem for young Pete Piccolotti, manager of the family grocery store, especially after the long weekend. Pete bags up the refuse that only days ago represented vendible goods and sets out the fresh breads and sausages his parents have made. His role in life. Mind the shop. He and Monica have had another row this morning. He’s not ready for the second kid. He shouldn’t have said what he said, but he’s getting sick of the dead-end life he lives. Not much in the till. Have to send Monica waddling over to the bank for some rolls of change, hoping (faintly) for the occasional cash-paying customer. Over there, one of the first customers this morning (along with Gabriela Ferrero, who is trying to organize a small loan to cover the funeral of her father, who died last night in hospital) is Pete’s pal Kit Cavanaugh, the banker’s son, who is emptying out his account, taking the bulk of it in travelers’ checks. He tells them, when they ask, that he’s going to Paris. “Oo la la!” one of the girls says, and everyone giggles. They tease him about his papier-mâché nose. He looks off in the direction of his dad’s office and is told his father got an emergency call and has gone out to the mine hill.

  Faint hopes. Giorgio Lucci wears the town signature pasted on his mug. A goofy loose-jawed grin that won’t go away whatever the circumstances. It used to infuriate the old man when he was beating him. He’d keep yelling at him to wipe it off while he pounded him, trying to wipe it off himself with slaps to the face, but he would have had to break his jaw, and even then that might have just wired it in place. When Georgie meets other people, they grin back. Raising always: faint hopes. This morning, waking on the Legion Hall sofa, sickeningly hungover from cheap skull-crushing hootch, he can hardly lift his head and his bloodshot eyes won’t focus. But he’s still grinning. He had to sleep on the broken springs. The high life. He kicked semicomatose Cheese Johnson off the sofa, but then had to let Cheese have the cushions. That’s okay. He couldn’t stand their stink, inflated over the years with a million drunken farts. Not sure who got the best deal. Pointless anyway, because Cheese has rolled off them and is sleeping amid the butts on the wooden floor, his broken arm across his chest, hand of the other clutching his filthy crotch. Another grinner, Cheese. But with fewer teeth. More malice to it. Not everyone grins back. His cast is so begrimed with obscenities, inscribed there during bolts of inspiration by his pals, that it looks like he must have spent the last few weeks down cleaning out the pits with it. Should be fumigated when it comes off and donated to the Smithsonian. Georgie steps over him and staggers off to take a somewhat painful leak. He has avoided Mick’s Bar & Grill since Mort Whimple left hospital—the fire chief hangs out at Mick’s and is mad enough at Georgie to kill him, blaming him for the blaze at Lem’s garage and all that happened to him afterwards, despite Georgie’s protestations of complete innocence—but today has to be an exception. He has a desperate need for coffee and he hopes (always hopeful) Mick will give it to him on credit, or for free, just because he likes his grin.

  He has awakened from a dream that was partly about Marcella Bruno. They were back in high school and she was leaning over the water fountain, her pleated skirt falling over her hips, between her legs. Georgie stepped up behind her, and though he’d never even said hello to her before, ran his thumb up the crack of her ass, just for fun, because he was always known as an easygoing misbehaving wiseacre with quick wrists, no reason to take offense, and she turned around to see who was doing that. To chew him out, he supposed. But her face was the face of a person long dead, with exposed bone and teeth and tatters of decomposing flesh and bulging eyeballs. All he could think to say was: Whoa. Not feeling well? He was grinning and she was grinning, but it was not the kind of grin you like to see. He had the idea, in the dream, that this grim apparition had something to do with his sick hangover, like so many of the confusing and headachy scenes that had gone before in a night that was not sleepless but that had no sleep in it. The thought worked because then she was normal, not dead, or at least not showing it, and they were walking through the old neighborhood. Heaven’s not a place, you know, she said. It’s just wishing. He thought that might be a come-on, all he had to do was pop back with the right line, something about angels maybe (she’s one!), but they were in front of St. Stephen’s and she said she had to go in. And then she was gone. They were holding a funeral inside. Hers? Couldn’t be sure. Didn’t want to know. He left there, and next thing he was on a baseball field. It was his turn to bat. But the bats were all too heavy. He knew if he could find one he could lift he’d get a hit and win the game. He told himself: Don’t forget to wish. Heard his old lady echo before sending him off to school: Don’t forget to wash. And woke up. And washed. Wished.

  Down on the drizzly street, Burt Robbins, owner of the dimestore situated below the Legion Hall, is standing under the overhang at the front door having a smoke with the mayor Maury Castle. They don’t seem happy to see Georgie and they don’t seem unhappy, so he pauses to exchange deep thoughts about the weather. Which is showing signs of improving. They grin back at him because they can’t help it, though Robbins’ grin is more like a sneer. Maybe one of them will buy him a coffee. He mentions hopefully that he’s heading over to Mick’s. They’re talking about the Brunists, who are apparently back on Cunt Hill this morning doing a repeat performance of their famous dance-in-the-mud end-of-the-world thing. People are headed out there. A helicopter clatters overhead, punctuating this news. Might be fun. After coffee. If the weather clears. If his bruised brain heals. If someone will give him a ride. Robbins says they ought to get up another carnival out there, and the mayor lets fly with his sour booming laughter (it makes Georgie’s head hurt) and says that after what happened last time, he couldn’t afford the insurance. The mayor asks Georgie if he knows Charlie Bonali. Sure. Tough prick. Heard he might have been a hired gun up in the big town. Right, says the mayor. The sonuvabitch should be in jail, but he’s being protected. He’s got up a gang now. Bunch of young hardass RC thugs. Making trouble. We might need someone on the inside. The mayor hands him a bill. Say hello to Mick. After you’ve had a bite, why don’t you drop by the Fort and see me?

  Out on the rain-soaked mine hill, Ted Cavanaugh asks his police chief to radio
Monk at the station and have him call the Fort, try to find out where the hell the mayor is. “All these TV trucks and cameras, not like Castle to miss a grandstanding opportunity,” he says. Doesn’t ask the chief, orders him. Like the old army officer he once was. That’s all right. Captain Romano has served worse. He sees the banker as a kind of wounded general trying to rally nonexistent troops. Only four state troopers have turned up here at the hill this morning, and they don’t seem to have any clear orders beyond securing the site of the dynamite blast over at the camp. Dee saw it. Sickening. There are a couple more troopers over there still, but that’s the whole army. Cavanaugh is someone they listen to, though, and when he tells them to block off the hill, they block off the hill. Instead of helping them, the new sheriff and his hayseed militia are shepherding Red Baxter and the crazies from the camp, a lot of drifters and riffraff among them. They are massing up in the mud down below by the scores, singing like their feet are hurting. Not far from the blackened spot on the road where Tub Puller’s car burned with him in it. At least the rain has stopped and the clouds are breaking up in the west, though everyone’s wet and feeling crabby. An unmarked helicopter has been coming and going. Might be army. Or police. Most likely newshounds. Dee has not been informed. Red Baxter is blowing off as usual, punching the air with his fist, the others hooting and hollering in their wild-eyed praise-Jesus way, cheering him on. The blond curly-headed boy who caused them so much trouble out here Sunday is among them with a look on his face like he’s already half-transported, that crazy stringbean son of the woman they arrested clinging to him as though terrified by something. His own wild imaginings, probably. “Ain’t that one a them old picks stole from the mine?” Louie Testatonda asks, pointing at the blond boy. Cavanaugh nods. “Obviously there’s a link.” Locals are also gathering at the edges, not all as idle spectators. Too many guns among them. That cheap hood Charlie Bonali is down there with some of his buddies, nasty grins on their punk faces. The police chief sees this thing playing out in several ways, almost all of them shitty. He has contacted other police forces in the area to let them know they may be needed. Also ambulance services and fire departments, taking no chances. When Wallace radios back, he says as far as they know at city hall the mayor is out at the mine hill. Left some time ago. Monk says he wasn’t sure who told him that. Didn’t sound like Dee’s cousin Gina. More like a squeaky old lady. Probably the mayor himself. Hard to hide that carny barker voice. Dee passes the first part on to the banker, not the second. Cavanaugh, angrily flicking his cigarette several yards away, calls the mayor a loudmouth, yellow-bellied tinhorn, or swearwords to that effect. He is also ticked off at the governor, supposedly on his way here but taking his sweet time about it. Some National Guard units are being trucked in as well, so they say, as yet unseen and unheard from.