Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

The throbbing paeans of the crowd within, seined but not trapped by the auditorium’s drafty walls, washed over the old Dodge in the parking lot like surf, gathering ascendancy over the Randolph Junction radio station which had begun to fade and grow fuzzy. For Angie Bonali, the shouting was both exotic and paternal, a distant tidal bath of freedom, and a proximate refuge if she needed it. …

I been gatherin’ flowers from the hillside ,

To wreathe around your (ground? ),

But you’ve (fade) ( baby, I’m knockin’ on your … )

( The flowers?) have all withered down …

As they, chests heaving, leaned apart, she gazed up past his dark head, burred and ridged like a goat’s, to the tattered roof of the old car. Under the tatters, in daylight, there was rust; now, behind them, there seemed only cosmic space. She closed her eyes. A width, less than three inches, of damp fragile nylon was all that kept his fingers out, and even now threatened to become less her buckler than his gauntlet. “It’s nearly eight,” she guessed, gasped. “Don’t you think we’d better — better go — see the game?’’

He sighed and gazed, pleasantly pained, down at her lips, full and appealing, as she knew, and now slightly bruised. Their psi plunged shut once more, her fist snarling eagerly in his cropped hair, his pawing savagely in her bared thighs, butting her body against the spiny fish that wriggled and plunged in his lap …

(fade in) … were in bloom,

I shot and killt my darlin’

(static) be my doom (all of God’s children

seem to gather there) to wreathe around your …

“Please!” she sobbed.

“Angie!” he pleaded, freed his own hand a moment to tug hers down across his chest. She buried her face in his shirt, her hand at the buckle without strength. “Oh hell!” he snapped, and flicked her skirt down over her thighs.

She whirled away, sat up, stared out the fogged-up windows. “What is it!” Her heart pounded with the discovery of real place around her. The people were streaming out of the auditorium.

“What’s going on?” he asked irritably, hand clinging to her knee in rote strategy.

“Is the game over?” She couldn’t get her breath.

“Can’t be,” he said. “It just started.” He flipped the radio dial, looking for the West Condon station.

The crowd, protoplasmic, flooded through the double doors and inundated the parking lot. Lamps on poles and swerving car lights made the onrushing mass seem translucent, unbodied. As individuals, nearing, emerged from it, Angie rolled down the window and called out, “What is it?”

“Number Nine blew up!”

The radio crashed on, piercing her breast. “We repeat: All persons other than doctors, nurses, and members of mine rescue teams are urged to remain in their homes. Bulletins will be—”

“Hey! You got room?”

“Sure!” shouted the boy with Angie. “Get in!”

Angie slumped forward to let the three squeeze past her into the back seat. Her bruised lips against her knuckles cried sin! as her father’s loved presence invaded the Dodge.

“Hey, Angie! Was your Dad on tonight?”

“Yes,” she whispered, but she was already crying. Oh, Daddy! I’m sorry!

Parked at the outer edge of the lot, the advantage was all theirs, but even then they soon found themselves bumper to bumper on the old road out to the coalmine.

The three men jerryrigged a stretcher with brattice canvas and hustled Ely Collins into it. They’d been too long about it. The gas was so dense now, it felt like their goddamn clothes were floating free from their bodies. Strelchuk remembered Bruno, didn’t see him anywhere. “Hey Bruno!” he shouted, but got no answer.

“Come on, goddamn you, Strelchuk!” Jinx Pontormo cried, so nervous his old Italian voice squeaked like a boy’s. “I have enough of your jackass games!”

“Bruno, we’re going!” Mike called, but they were already on the move as he said it, Pontormo leading, fat round shoulders hulled forward in an anxious charge on the void ahead, Strelchuk and Juliano bearing the old mechanic on the cloth between them. With his buddy Collins nailed to the earth and maybe dying, Bruno had cut out to save his own skin — if he got in a hole, he goddamn well deserved it. “Jerk must have gone on,” Strelchuk muttered, covering his vague sense of guilt.

She felt, as in dreams, to be running without gaining ground, willing acts she could not perform. Iron to its metal stand. Plug out. Around the far thrust of the ironing board. Through the wilderness of looming chairs, stirring pamphlets, whipped laundry. Past the pleading eyes stuck on the walls. Over cracked linoleum to the wooden basement stairs. Down half of them, knees feathery. “Ma!” Basement was lit hollowly by unsmoked bulbs. Her Ma was singing and didn’t hear her. “Ma!” The washer churned like someone choking. “Mal”

Her Ma glanced up from the machine, thrust another armload in, and walked over to the stairs. “Cain’t hear nothing with that machine going,” she explained. Her arms were scabbed with suds.

“It’s the mine, Ma!” Elaine said. She didn’t know how to act. She feared what might happen when her Ma knew. “It’s blowed up, Ma! I jist heard it on the radio!”

But all her Ma said was, “Git your coat, child,” and turned back to unplug the washer. “And don’t fergit your boots!” she called back over her shoulder. But later, as they ran along together toward the Deepwater road, Elaine saw it was her Ma who forgot hers.

Like ravens fly the black messages. By radio, by telephone, by word of mouth. Over and through the night streets of the wooden town. Flitting, fluttering, faster than flight. Crisp January night, but none notice. Out hatless into the streets to ask, to answer, to confirm each other’s hearsay. Women shriek and neighbors vulture over them, press them back into shingled houses with solicitous quiverings. Three hundred are dead. They all escaped. God will save the good. All the good men died. Flapping. Flustering. Telephones choke up. Please get off the line! This is an emergency! Below the tangled branches of the gaunt winter elms, coatless they run, confirm each other’s presence. No one remains alone. Lights burn multifoldly, doors gape and slap. Radios fill living rooms and kitchens, leak into charged streets, guide cars. The road to the mine is jammed. A policeman tries to turn them back, but now they approach in a double column and there is no route back. Everything stops. All cars hear the heatless music, the urgent appeals, but nothing yet is known. Down roll windows and again the ravens flit.

After supper, Eleanor Norton had performed her usual exercises but received no messages. Wylie was out on a house call. She curled up on the living room sofa to wait for him, catch up on some back readings in the Phaedrus myth. She heard noises in the street but was so absorbed in her reading that she barely registered them. “He would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.” But the noises persisted. They entered and scratched their alarums on her emptying page, scraped on the nerve ends of her living tomb. She looked about her, put the book down, stepped out on the front porch. The temperature had dropped and the hard chill had a dampness to it. Cars were roaring and rumbling out of driveways. Everyone was out in the street, shouting at one another. Something about a shift. The noise of radios at full volume crackled into the restive street. The mine had exploded! Hundreds were dead or trapped!

Trembling, Eleanor groped behind her for the front door, fearful for one freezing moment it might not even be there, spun herself back into the house, pressed the door shut behind her. Even there, her shoulders to the door, the street havoc reached her, menacing. The radio! She turned it on. Boyish voice, taut and urgent. It was true! She felt weak, adrift, beset with a terrifying thought from some dark and uncleansed corner … betrayal! She had not been told! Oh no! no! she cried over and over, striking blows at her suddenly willful ego, a misunderstanding, must be! She turned on all the lights in the house, then took her journals to the kitchen. One essence! she cried, but was not reassured.