Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

Though he had never seen her before this disaster, Miller knew her: she was the disconcerting epilogue to all his high school eroticism here, his fatuous taste then for the dumb poppy that ran to seed with the first tentative wound. In spite of the intoxicating touch of their taut adolescent bodies and the fragrant heat of the sweaty prefatory scramble, the conquest was always a comedown — in the end, they laid for want of imagination. Freeing himself was painful, but seldom difficult: curiously, they had usually led him to the next one. They married for the reason they laid, and when the famous bane of progeny poisoned it for them, there was nothing left — a few empty infantile motions and instincts, absently clung to. They peopled West Condon, these pricked flowers of his, and getting used to them was his first hard work on coming back here. Often they had recognized him, even those like this one he had never had, and something persistent in them had seemed to freshen briefly. It was illusory, of course; not even they knew what it was. He had blundered a few times before he had learned to see past that false rebudding — maybe the will to blunder had been part of what had brought him back here — and each indiscretion had punctured his privacy with the nuisance of mild scandal. He had learned to look elsewhere, out in East Condon generally; they watched him here.

Jones showed up, after all. Jones was his salvation: his dogged attending to the task made the silly game almost pleasurable. A slow copywriter, but a genius out in the field: always in the right place at the right time, and he always knew everything. A real find. But then, of course, Jones had found him. Blond stubble frosted the man’s pale jowls and his small creased eyes were marshy with blood vessels. The blond wiry hairs that fringed his upper face below the hat gave him a moronic look. “You look like an advertisement for the black death, buddy,” Miller told him. “Sure you don’t want to call it a night?”

“And miss all the fun and glory? I’m okay.” He patted a topcoat pocket that bulged with a fifth. “What’s the story?”

“Fifty-six cadavers up and tagged. Two rubberbag cases. Forty to go.”

“That makes ninety-eight, one down. They find somebody?”

“Yeah, they found Willie Hall working on a rescue crew. Turns out he didn’t show up for work Thursday night and nobody noticed.”

Jones grunted. Miller drank off the coffee and whiskey. Cold. Nearly made him gag. He crumpled the cup, took aim at a scrap barrel across the length of the tent, fired. Deadly. The Tiger. He turned to find Mrs. Cravens at his elbow. “You wouldn’t be goin’ inta town, wouldja, Mr. Miller?”

“Well, yes …”

“D’ye mind?”

Miller glanced up at Jones, attempted to suggest a shrug of total indifference, but saw it only added to Jones’ deadpan amusement. “I suppose not.”

Night’s damp had deposited fog and the drive in from the mine was painfully slow, cramped at his shoulders. The fog came at him in waves, curding into a dense bright mass, then suddenly tearing like tissue. The road’s dirt ruts were frozen hard and jagged. Occasional gray hulks in the ditches to the right and left reared as monuments to Thursday night’s crises.

The woman beside him, in a show of weariness, slumped against his shoulder. Of course. It disgusted him, yet in spite of himself, he started picking up messages from below, and there was a stirring there. She was too obvious and there was a cheap-soapiness about her, but he was oddly agitated by the cushiony feel of the thick sweater with its bright WC—“Water Closet,” said Lou Jones — and the yellow glow of her knobby adolescent knees in the light of the dashboard. He tried to put his principles in order and found, in short, he had none. He felt overworked and unrewarded, tired of the game he played, the masks he wore. West Condon, community of Christians and coalminers, and he its chronicler: if they were mad, how much more so was he? So, screw them; when in hell, do as the damned do. Besides, it was almost thirty miles to the nearest roadhouse, and what would he find? Maybe nothing at all, arriving so late; at best some pimpled telephone operator or listless store clerk. As for scandal, Jones would be sure to make something of it no matter what he did now, so what difference did it make? The Chevy plumped out of the ruts onto asphalt. As though jostled, Mrs. Cravens slipped down, tumbling her hands and face into his lap and deciding the issue once and for all, bringing a few curses of his own down upon his head.

Miller reached home about five, staggered into the shower. He was nearly blind with fatigue, eaten up with a vague sense of betrayal, though of whom or what (prudence?) he couldn’t remember, and drunk as a skunk to boot. “Let us all learn,” he said aloud in the shower, raising Montaigne from the dead, “from stupidity.” His next station was the bed, but, fallen there, he found that the room leaned and turned, and remorse troubled his imaginings. He decided he must be hungry, went to the kitchen to check the refrigerator. Not much there. Punched open a can of beer. Hair of the dog. Cockroach skittered out from under the refrigerator. He jumped to stamp on it and spilled the beer, got squashed cockroach all over the sole of his foot. “Do not despair,” he said drunkenly to the roach as he scraped it off on the edge of a cardboard box used as a wastebasket, “for our Lord Jesus has changed the shape of death.” He thought about maybe frying some bacon for a sandwich, but the fryingpan reeked of onions he’d burned in it several nights ago. So he had a peanut butter sandwich. Again. On stale goddamn bread. Took it to bed with him. He sank, forgetting everything, awoke moments later with a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich and an earful of telephone alarm. Nauseous, he crawled across the bed, dragged it off the hook. “The number you have just dialed has been disconnected—”

“You’re home.” It was Lou Jones. Something in the tone said that Jones had been calling for some time.

“West or east, home’s a beast.” Miller hung up, took a bite of sandwich. The phone rang again. He tried to figure out what the bastard’s angle might be. He picked it up: “Jones—”

“They’ve found some maybe live ones.”

“What!” Miller stirred, propped himself on an elbow. “Have they got them up?”

“Not yet, but they know where they are. Found a T-shirt tacked up with six names on it and arrows drawn.”

“What’s the matter they can’t—”

“Big fall in the way. They figure it must have come down after they bratticed themselves off.”

“Do they know who—”

“Well, besides Lee Cravens,” Jones said wryly, hesitating a moment to allow the blade to twist, “there’s Ely Collins, Mario Juliano, Paul Minicucci, Guido Pontormo, and Michael Strelchuk.”

Miller slumped back into the pillows. Oh man. “I’ll be out.”

The veterinarian Dr. Wylie Norton sat in the kitchen in his pajamas, sipping coffee and milk and waiting for Sunday to dawn. Upstairs, his wife Eleanor slept fitfully. Perhaps none in all West Condon had escaped suffering this raw January weekend, but this was little consolation to Wylie, who had hardly slept and saw worse times ahead. Others, after all, would sooner or later adjust, but not Eleanor. Therein lay her greatness, to be sure, yet … Wylie sighed and sipped. He hoped only that, whatever happened, they would not have to move again. They had had to change towns eight times now in the past fifteen years, and the frequency seemed to be accelerating. They had left Carlyle to come here to West Condon just a year ago, and they had only been in Carlyle fourteen months before that. Just long enough for him to get a small practice established, begin paying off debts, then — knock! knock! — the inevitable committee.