Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

He saw Jones bulge out of the Salvation Army canteen up to his left, hulking face expressionless except for the eyes, falling away with their familiar as-though-pained squint. Miller waved; Jones nodded. Miller stopped to shake a miner’s hand, wish him luck, offer a smoke — and caught sight of something off to his right. Stared a moment, strangely moved, then thought to get a photo.

Up at the canteen, Jones stood waiting, looking like a great stone Buddha that had just stood up for the first time in eighteen thousand years and felt like hell for doing so. “What do you think?” Jones asked. “Gonna put the old bitch to work tonight?” Jones had a professional greed for special editions.

“Maybe. If something happens.” Miller, feeling guilt for having turned out so late, meant that remark to imply coming any sooner would have been a waste of time. “I’ve alerted Carl and the boys, put Annie to the task of digging up what bios she can on the six.”

Jones grunted, sipped coffee, thin brows arching up away from the brown heat. “We’ll know soon. Chigi’s team is down there. Is twenty-five bucks okay?”

“For what?” Miller’s mind was on doughnuts and coffee and the girl he’d seen. He reached in his trenchcoat pocket for a pack of smokes, absently pulled the woolly cap out instead. Looked at it, blanched, stuffed it back.

Jones, fighting back a grin, drank down his coffee, spat out the last mouthful, crushed the paper cup in his squabby hand and pitched it at a scrap barrel, missing it by a yard. “I offered it to Chigi for a firsthand story, if there’s one worth telling.”

“Sure, cheap at twice the price.” Miller lit a cigarette, dropped the match to his feet, stood on it. “Who’s the girl with the shawl?”

“The one you been taking pictures off?” Jones shook his head and sighed, grinned. “Hang tight.” He padded a few yards away, hands rammed into his broad misshapen topcoat, conferred briefly with a miner, padded back. “The name is Bruno. She had a brother on this shift. One of the rubber bag cases the FBI had to identify. But, apparently, she doesn’t buy it.”

“Bruno,” Miller repeated mechanically. He stared off toward where the girl stood, darkly turned into herself, yet somehow radiant, some distance away from anyone else, a young girl, probably not much more than nineteen or twenty, under an olive-colored shawl — well, not a shawl, of course: a blanket.

The watertower—“DEEP” is what she reads of the familiar eponym — beats its silvery breast against the lightening sky like a proud but headless colossus. The cast of the sky is constant, immaculate, innocent of any raincloud blemishes: sober homochrome white, except for the singular phosphorescent eye of the sun, a cutout cemented to this side of the sky. It is a soft sky, a papyrus sky, on which, at this moment, a single black bird, a crow, inscribes silent indecipherable messages, erasing them as he goes, flapping his ragged wings in an occasional fury of punctuation. Thin efforts of gray soot struggle upwards from dying slag heaps — the earth striving to keep back light — but they disappear into the vastness of the arching overwhite. The infinite absorbing the finite, and, mercifully, without ridicule. Below: all is gray. The color of: transition. Marcella watches the woman running toward her, clutching her broad skirts with one hand, waving wildly the other, watches the multitude of expanding faces pivot toward her as though a button has been pressed, watches the sudden crushing mass against the portal, watches them fall back as the door swings open, watches the woman gasp for breath — yes! how she wishes to tell! “It’s your brother!” the woman cries when she is able. “Yes, I know,” says Marcella .

Big Pete Chigi emerged, blinking, trailing a smoky dust, ahead of the stretcher and let fall the bolt: “Bruno. We were too late for the others.”

Bodies mashed at the portal. No one seemed to understand. “Who is it?” they cried. “How many?”

Miller, in the press, held the speedgraphic high over his head, sighted by guess, caught the prostrate figure of Giovanni Bruno being carried out, Father Baglione, the Catholic priest, coal-smudged and helmeted, following. Mine supervisor Barney Davis. The company doctor.

“Collins?” they cried.

“Juliano?”

“Dead. Dead. Dead,” said the exiting miners.

Miller saw a white face amid the blackened: Jones. Good man! Saw Chigi turn aside, glance over at Miller, then slip away with Jones. Bruno! Not even on the list!

Bruno! Miller changed film over his head, pivoted just in time to see the girl, her head still covered, standing isolated and as though unaware, about thirty feet away. Miller elbowed free of the mob, sighted hastily, but just as he fired, a Salvation Army woman thrust her broad ass in the way. He cursed aloud, sidestepped toward the waiting ambulance. They were easing Bruno into it. The girl started forward and he raised his hand.

“Pardon me, miss!” he said, and punched the shutter, just as the blanket settled to her narrow shoulders. He reloaded and said, “My name is—”

“I already know it, Mr. Miller.”

“Can you—?”

“I’ll be at the hospital with my brother.” She spoke briefly with the ambulance driver, and he jumped out to clear a way for her. Inside, in the back, Giovanni Bruno stretched unconscious. Father Baglione and a couple miners had crowded in. The miners clambered out, let the girl replace them. And they were gone. Miller had forgot to get a second photo.

Someone jostled him hard, nearly knocked the camera from his hand, and a voice said, “I seen Tuck, Paw!” Miller lifted the speedgraphic steadily, focused, recorded the tall silent grief of the two men, Lem Filbert and his Dad, both in miner’s clothes though both had left the mines, both with damp black faces.

Miller got Barney Davis aside, asked about Bruno.

“I don’t know, Miller. We found him knocked out, up on a ledge, away from the others. Like they didn’t know he was there or something.”

“What shape is he in?”

“Terrible. Should be dead of afterdamp like the others.” Davis eased off his helmet. His burry white hair was black from just above the ears down. Miller offered him a cigarette, lit it for him. Davis had a way of gazing off like a movie hero contemplating the sunset as the curtain falls.

“What do you figure?”

“Luck.”

“What about the others?”

“They’d been dead awhile.” Davis gazed off.

“You going to reopen, Barney?”

“Can’t say. Probably. Haven’t thought about that yet.” He flicked his smoke’s ash with one finger nervously. “Oh, by the way, you seen any of the Collins people out here?”

“His daughter.” Miller glanced around, spied the Nazarene group at prayer, but Elaine was not among them. “Looks like she’s gone.”

Davis stuffed his fingers into his shirt pocket, came out with a small scrap of paper. “I picked something up down there. Maybe you’d like to deliver it.” He handed it to Miller. “Found it by Ely Collins’ hand. One of Collins’ legs was gone, apparently something had fell on it and broke it off. Looked like he’d been dead for some time.”

Miller read the scrap, pocketed it, smiled. “Thanks, Barney, that’s great.” Took a couple informal shots of Davis.

“Fair shake on the coverage, Miller.”

“Sure, Barney. As always.” Davis meant the company was not to be blamed for the disaster and he was not to be blamed for the delay in reaching the trapped men, but Miller played no sides, took favors like Collins’ note in stride and let the chips drop. “Come by the office tomorrow or Tuesday, we’ll have a talk.”

Davis nodded and gazed off.