The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  As the roar of the motorcycles fades away, the lady in the flesh-colored smock comes staggering out of the back door of the church and throws herself into the back seat. “Oh my God!” she cries.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s happening?”

  Young Reverend Jenkins has difficulty finding his voice. When at last he is able, he wheezes: “Could you just drop me off at the bus station, please?”

  Georgie’s mother slams the door in his face, but when she sees him waving the bills at her she opens it again. “Are you in trouble, Giorgio?” she asks, peering out at the mayor’s fancy black car.

  “No, Mama, my ship’s come in, just like I told you. But I won’t be seeing you for a while.” She reaches one claw out for the money—“With interest,” he says—and he blows her a kiss through the tattered screen door—“Ciao, bella!”—and bounces down the steps back out to the limo. He has just popped in behind the wheel when a loud explosion rocks the neighborhood and the church bells stop ringing. “Hey! That mighta been our church!”

  “Their church, Georgie. We don’t live here no more. Now let’s get the fuck outa here while we still can! We’ve wasted too much time already. And don’t go near the goddamned mine. Head over toward Wilmer on the Waterton road, pick up the highway at Daviston.”

  The Waterton road, a route (alas, poor Ruby) Georgie knows all too well. But they’re already too late. Traffic approaches from both lanes, horns blaring, lights flashing, sirens wurping. Un ingorgo. They both swear simultaneously in their separate tongues. “Tieniti le palle!” Georgie shouts, and he throws on the brights and jams his foot down on the accelerator, heading straight at the oncoming traffic, dipping down at the last second into the muddy ditch, then racing along the edges of it, swooping from one side to another at top speed not to get stuck in the muck in the middle. Kicked-up mud, sticks and stones rattle on the underbody. Suddenly, just ahead: a culvert! Trees on the right, double lane of traffic up on the left! But they’ve reached the back end of the wrong-lane file, or almost. Georgie swings up onto the road at the last possible moment—“Eight ball into the top corner!” he cries—picking up a ding on the last car’s bumper and a scrape off the culvert (in his imagination, la bella Marcella is showing her ass or else it’s the Virgin Mary’s and he is worshipfully kissing it), and they’re on the way.

  “Fucking Christ!” the mayor gasps, turned stone white. “Hope I packed some spare pants!”

  The West Condon police chief, Dee Romano, trapped in the traffic heading into town on the Waterton road, has just witnessed the amazing maneuvers of the mayor’s limousine, the madly grinning Georgie Lucci at the wheel, the terrified mayor sitting rigidly beside him, gripping the dashboard with white knuckles, and he wonders if he has just seen Castle being kidnapped. Some shit Dee’s city cousins are up to? Dee, leaving the mine hill a few minutes too late to avoid the jam-up, has cut cross-country to a less-used road but found himself sucked up in a noisy congestion of police cars, ambulances, fire engines, and ordinary traffic—the latter headed in the contrary direction, the drivers utterly confused by the horns and bleating sirens. Except for a crossroad or two, there are no pullovers on this old road, just ditches to either side, so when cars stop in panic, everybody stops. His fault. He has called them all here. Only the state police motorcycles, weaving through the snarl, are getting through, and Dee flags one of them down, asks for a ride in, turning the squad car over to Louie Testatonda. “We’re going to the Catholic church,” he shouts in the state trooper’s ear. He has just been on the squawkie to Monk Wallace back at the station, learning that the bikers have not only blown up the power plant and phone exchange, but the rumor reaching him is that they’ve also attacked the radio station and the hospital, done some serious damage to the National Guard at their high school bivouac area, and now seem to be targeting the churches. “St. Stephen’s?” “Yup, purty sure,” Monk said. “Big noise summers over there.” Now Dee calls back to let Monk know he’s hitching a ride in with a state trooper and to ask him to send somebody over to ask his cousin Gina Juliano if she knows anything about the mayor. “Send who?” Voice thin. Can hardly hear him. “I’m all alone here.”

  Four men are carrying the old priest out of the church and loading him gingerly into Vince Bonali’s car, Vince’s son Charlie giving the orders, just as Dee swings up on the back of the trooper’s motorbike. Dust and smoke are still roiling out of the double front doors like escaping demons. “There’s more people hurt inside,” Charlie shouts, and two or three guys go running in.

  Dee sends the state trooper into the town center, tells him how to find the police station. “If you have to shoot, shoot to kill,” he says.

  “Where’s the goddamned ambulance, Romano?” Charlie wants to know.

  “I don’t think it is no more. Monk told me the hospital got hit too, and things are burning there. There’s some rescue vehicles on the way from towns around, but it’s a mess out there on the roads. What happened to the Monsignor?”

  “Got here just too late. Old Bags was trying to win the war on his own and got badly shot up. Don’t think he’ll make it. Those holy-rollers out there on the mine hill were a diversionary tactic, dragging everybody out so as to give their fucking death squad free rein here in town. You can see that now.” Maybe, maybe not. Dee has still not linked up the bikers with the cultists in his mind. Sometimes it seems just the opposite, though admittedly there’s a family connection. That sonuvabitch Baxter. “We did reach the cunt with the explosives before he could set them off and were beating the shit out of him, and we had two or three of his buddies pinned down up in the loft when some motherfucker in a stocking mask popped up from behind the altar and set off the dynamite with gunfire. Blew the fucking hell out of the place. That did it for their bomber pal and two of our people, and there’s others badly hurt in there.” Dee peers in at the murky devastation. Bodies, a lot of wreckage. He can see that the rose window has been partly blown out. He should take control of this, but what’s happened here has happened, and he’s wondering where those godless bastards have gone now. Into town probably, unless they’ve shot their wad. They’re bringing out another victim, still alive, moaning, badly hurt. Old one-armed Bert Martini. “He was brave as hell,” Charlie says, “but he’s short another peg now and will have to play pinochle with his teeth. Besides the asshole who got turned into hamburger there were at least three others. They got away when the explosives went off, but one of them made the mistake of trying to get back to his bike. His body’s over there to the side. There’s another stiff out back. Hate to tell you, I think it’s your cousin Timo. There may be more. Coming in, we saw a chopper tailing somebody out of town, coming our way. We figured it might be one of those cocksuckers and we laid in wait for him. It was. You could tell by all the shit on his bike. He tried to surrender and kept crossing himself to show he was supposedly a Catholic. Didn’t do him any good.”

  “You mean, you shot him?”

  “He got shot.” Charlie cracks his knuckles, gum snapping in his jaws. “Like it or not, Romano, you’re gonna need guns. You gotta deputize us, give us the legal authority to bring them fuckers in—dead or alive.”

  “I got state cops here now.”

  “You don’t own ’em.”

  They won’t like it. Cavanaugh especially. But to hell with them. Survival, goddamn it. He nods—“Twenty-four hours,” he says—and as Charlie goes loping off to rally his troops, he radios Monk to warn him that the bikers may be headed into town. He can see helicopters hovering there. “Somebody has to get here and get all these people off the streets,” Monk says.

  “I just sent a state trooper your way, Monk. Keep an eye out, and lots more reinforcements are coming,” Dee says. “Did you get hold of Gina?”

  “Gotta go. I think I’m gonna get busy here.”

  “Monk…?”

  “Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled,” Jesus says as he drops young Reverend Joshua J. Jenkins off at the darkened bus stati
on. Joshua bangs on the locked door. His precious books! Not far away, he hears the roar of approaching motorcycles. What he feels is the icy chill of the void. Where books are useless. Help! His hat flying, he goes running after the car, now a couple of blocks away, waving his arms frantically—it’s like one of those dreams where he’s trying to hurry through a sea of mud—desperately hoping Jesus can see him in his rearview mirror.

  Out on the highway, far from West Condon, Tommy Cavanaugh’s silvery spoke wheels are taking him back to his old university town as if by some will of their own, music blasting to beat back irresolution. He feels some regret, but once you start a move you have to see it through, even if it means committing a foul. Running out on his mother bothers him most. For all the religious craziness that has distanced him from her, he knows she is suffering and that he should not leave her. It’s his father’s fault. When he was a kid they used to sit around on street corners or front porches playing the what-if accident game: Suppose you were in a lifeboat after a shipwreck and both your parents fell half-conscious from the boat and were drowning and you could only save one of them, which would you save? He usually joined the others in choosing his mother, but he loved his dad, maybe even more, and was torn more than he wished to show. A rule of the game was that if you waited for more than five seconds to decide, they both would die. In his mind’s eye, he could see them foundering and he always counted the seconds in his head to let his father live as long as possible. To hell with him now; he’ll have to hack it on his own. He tried to reach Sally before pulling out to apologize for his obnoxious behavior at the motel—shouldn’t have left her there, called her what he did—but only got her mother, who said Sally was not at home. Was there a message? There was none. He has met several Army trucks going the other way and now another convoy passes. Out of curiosity he switches to a news station. And, tires squealing, makes a U-turn.

  Signora Abruzzi, reading the movie magazine for the third time, is shocked, shocked! The scandalous lives these people lead! You would think God would deal more harshly with such indecency. Make a public example of them. Thank Heavens for the Last Judgment! Though it’s almost painful to think that they could repent before then and get away with all this sinning. Where’s the justice in that? It makes her angry. A young man in uniform banging in through the beauty shop front door and asking for Lucy Smith startles her. She’s not deaf, he needn’t shout. She tells him that he should mind his manners. Then adds that Mrs. Smith went to the bank with Linda, and he runs out again without even thanking her. What the world is coming to!

  The mayor’s secretary, Gina Juliano, is waiting for a telephone call from the President. The mayor was in early today and more demanding than she’d ever seen him, sending her away on ceaseless errands, asking her to go bring him coffee after coffee which he just let go cold, barking at her if she asked him any questions. He grabbed up the phone whenever it rang and sometimes he shouted into it and sometimes he muttered like he didn’t want to be heard and once she even heard him speaking in a high voice like an old lady. Then that ne’er-do-well Giorgio Lucci, a bad-apple second cousin on her mother’s side, turned up at city hall with his stupid grin smeared all over his face, and the mayor said they had a very important meeting and on no account were they to be disturbed. On no account, sweetheart, he repeated, jabbing a finger at her. It’s that crazy cult out on the mine hill, he said. They’re at it again and he’s having to do something about it. Something big. He told her he was expecting a very important call from Washington—from Number One, he said—so she mustn’t leave her desk for any reason, but he let her go use the ladies’ room before he locked himself and Georgie in his office. When that call comes, that’s when she can knock on his door. What a thrill! She can see why he has been so jumpy. Even though you can’t see people on the telephone, she freshened up her lipstick and combed her hair. She made herself busy at her desk, waiting for the call, but then the lights went out and her typewriter stopped working, so what could she do? There was filing to be done, but she’d have to leave her desk, and he told her not to, so she took up her knitting (a matching bonnet and booties; her teenage daughter has already gone too far, and there you have it) and thought about what she’d tell the President when he phoned. Of course she’d tell him how she admires him and voted for him (though voting is something she usually forgets to do, what difference does it make?), but she’ll also mention her secretarial skills just in case.

  The phone did ring, and her heart jumped, but it was only her friend Francesca out at the hospital, calling the mayor’s office about the power outage. She said she’d tried to reach the power company but no one answered and can the mayor help? Gina said she was sure it was only temporary because of the storm and that the mayor was in a meeting. When Francesca started to tell her about old Nazario Moroni dying overnight, Gina had to interrupt to say that she was really sorry but she couldn’t tie up the phone because the mayor was expecting a very important call. Then the phone went dead and she wondered if Francesca thought she was lying just to get rid of her and hung up on her, so she tried to call back, but, no, it really wasn’t working.

  So now how could the President get through? She wondered if she should tell the mayor. He said he was absolutely not to be disturbed and he could be very unpleasant if you did something he asked you not to do, but he was also waiting for a call that now could not be made. He is only her second mayor, because she has only been able to work at all since the mine tragedy when her husband Mario died. She liked Mr. Whimple better, but even though Mr. Castle uses bad language and talks very loud, he is easy enough to get on with and often lets her go home early. He is something of a rascal, but they all are. Probably the President, too, if truth be told. She loves the job, but Mario would never have approved. He wanted her to be a housewife and a mother and always to be at home when he wanted her, even though he almost never was there himself except to eat and sleep. They all had to go to Mass every Sunday, even the tiny ones, he insisted on that, too, even though he was sometimes too worn out to go himself. She and Mario spent more than a dozen years together, but though she washed his pit clothes, prepared his dinner buckets, and slept in the same bed with him, she can’t say she really knew him. She keeps a photograph of him here on her desk beside a porcelain statue of the Virgin that he gave her once for her birthday, but it’s a picture of a stranger.

  Gina’s mother was the wife of a coalminer and she always said, Gina, whatever you do, don’t marry a coalminer, but then she did. Well, she was a coalminer’s daughter, it was what she knew, but her mother was right. Gina kept trying to get Mario to better himself and to learn another trade, one that would keep him at home more, but he was not bright or disciplined enough, none of the Julianos are. He wasn’t really good-looking either—he had the meaty Juliano face and big ears—but he was a good football player and that was a big deal back then. It still is. Her daughter’s boyfriend is on the football team. Mario was also a good Catholic boy and when he learned he was going to be a father he did the right thing, and she has always been grateful for that. He was a little resentful about it, though, and didn’t hesitate to play around if the occasion arose; Catholic boys don’t take the sin of fornication very seriously. As she put on weight she could see that she was becoming less attractive to him and had no choice but to slim down or let him look elsewhere, and it was just too hard to lose so many pounds. And besides, she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about having more babies, even if making them had, for a moment that was always much too short, its fun side.

  Mario was one of the seven who barricaded themselves off the night of the mine accident and left an undershirt tacked up outside with their names on it. COME AND GET US, it said. But they came and got them too late and only Giovanni Bruno was still alive, though he didn’t even have his name on the shirt, and that’s why all those people are out at the mine hill today. If they only knew Giovanni Bruno like she knew him, they wouldn’t be making such fools of themselves. Faith is a good thin
g, it never hurts anybody, but it would be better if people all believed the same religion and didn’t keep inventing new ones. The undershirt is in the mining museum up in the state capital. As Mario’s widow, Gina went up there for the presentation, and she was famous for a while and was interviewed on television in her black dress with her children around her. And she did miss him, though mostly because, with the children to raise, she needed his income, which is why, even though she could just see Mario scowling down on her from Heaven, she took this job in city hall, thanks to her cousin Demetrio in the police department and the child-minding help she gets from the family, especially her Aunt Delfina Romano, who never married and always said marriage was the ruin of women. For a while after the disaster, all the younger widows were competing for the same single men, but there weren’t enough of them to go around what with so many getting killed in the mine, it was like musical chairs, and Gina had a weight problem that disadvantaged her. Also three small children. Men don’t get excited about other men’s children. She was briefly wooed by one or two guys who remembered her when she was cuter, but nothing came of it. Her heart wasn’t really in it. Some of her friends did remarry, but mostly those have not been happy marriages.

  It was still cloudy and dark when the lights went out, but now the sun is pouring through the high dusty windows. She’d clean them, at least from the inside, but her boss told her not to leave the desk. Whatever you do, don’t leave the desk! What if the phone came back on and the President rang and she was up a ladder and couldn’t get down in time to answer it? Though maybe all that was just a fib and she might as well go home like the sheriff’s radio dispatcher Tessie Law-son, whom she saw walking through the corridor with her new sister-in-law, leaning into each other and giggling like schoolgirls. They are always laughing together over some private joke or other (now it was something about “taking cover”); it can be quite annoying.