Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

The hospital stood on its vast acreage, distant from West Condon’s center, under a bright glitter of stars. Eleanor examined them hastily: all seemed in order. A glance at her watch told her Leo, invisible, was ascendant, not the most favorable of signs. Wylie panted along at her side, opened the hospital door for her.

Unhappily, Marcella and her brother were not alone, additional proof to Eleanor of the sudden gathering of malign forces, particularly since the intruder was a newspaperman, Mr. Miller of the local paper. She knew him not at all, but one glance warned her to be on guard. Her life had been so often disrupted by newsmen, she had come to regard the trade as itself an inherently evil one. He seemed courteous and intelligent, but a cruelty lurked at his mouth’s edges, and his smooth face’s manly mask did not conceal the ravenous gleam of his dark eyes. Yes, yes, she knew him. She spoke idly, stalling for time. What was she doing here? Hah! let him wonder to the end of his days! She sensed that he already had reached the girl and she was in danger. Yet, there was a well-disposed order to the man: she would watch and wait.

Wylie engaged Mr. Miller in aspects of the precomatose phase of carbon monoxide poisoning, and Eleanor, tense, but concentrating her tension in the grip on her damp handkerchief, asked Marcella about her brother.

Marcella looked at Eleanor’s glasses, at her graying hair: “You must be the lady my brother has been asking about,” she said.

Eleanor caught her breath. Her sore throat contracted. They went in. Apparently he slept, but then his eyes opened. When he saw her, he nodded, raised one hand weakly in recognition, dropped it, Marcella left them.

“Am I to call you Giovanni?” she asked. He nodded. “Giovanni,” she continued, seeking the direction, “from whence came you?” He did not reply. His eyes closed. “Giovanni!” she whispered anxiously — she must hold on to it! — “Giovanni!” Again his eyes opened. “Giovanni, did you come a great distance?” He nodded. “From another aspect?” He hesitated, then nodded. He trusted her! She licked her lips, tried to grasp the difficulties the other faced in communicating to her, kept her unwavering gaze locked on his. “Have you … have you any messages?” He did not reply, but continued to stare at her. So tenuous! She swallowed and felt them at her throat. “The white bird,” she ventured, “does it signal … a new life?” He nodded. “May I come often?” Again the nod. “There is time then!” she whispered, and at his nod a great relief washed over her. With time, she could do it. She felt the malignant bodies disperse and retreat.

Reentering to stand beside her, the girl Marcella watched. She seemed undisturbed, somehow even pleased. Wylie, she noticed, had also come into the room. The newspaperman was gone. Giovanni Bruno seemed weary, but she wished a confirmation with witnesses present. “Are you the One who is to come?” she asked. He nodded, shut his eyes. In a moment, he was sleeping. But it was done. Eleanor looked at Wylie and at Marcella, and saw that they had understood. In part, at least. The burden was lighter.

“One a them cutters makes the goddamn bugdust fly around like grass outa a electric lawnmower,” said Vince Bonali. In the mine, voices rose and fell peculiarly, bouncing off a face of coal here, disappearing down a channel there, going dead where it was dry, echoing near water. Miller walked in a slight crouch, the hunching slump of the adolescent feeling his new height: there was headroom down here, but it had to be taken on faith. Always, out in front, the roof seemed to cave downward. The lamp on his head, like the illuminative middle eye, shot its dull beam wherever he looked, was as jittery as his head was, steadied on nothing unless he could hold still, and that, plus the helmet’s weight, was giving him a stiff neck.

“What? The climb? Well now, Senator, that’s due to the slant in the layers. In these parts, they always dip toward the northwest.” Under the shelling of the miners’ bitching, Davis remained outwardly calm, gathering influence over the know-nots of the inspection party.

“I see. Uh, the northwest.”

“That’s right. If the seam is known to slope, why you always put the shaft in at the slope bottom. That way, the loaded cars run to the bottom of the shaft under their own weight and are pulled back up empty.”

“Oh yes. Very good.”

Any goddamn topic to free the mind’s eye from the hovering mass. There were splits in the roof, carvings, grooves, it was oppressively close, always tested Miller’s nerve, had since his first visits as a boy, but more so today in this mine that had seen so much violence, heaps of rubble here and there, an all too plentiful evidence of falls: Chicken Licken’s panic. He knew Ox Clemens’ urge to have a smoke, caught in this black hive of tight deep stalls, found his own fingers more than once at his emptied shirt pocket. On edge, he got a distorted view of things. The shadows pitched by the whitewashed timbers turned into black crucifixes. The equipment, pieces of wood, cable, rubble heaps, wallowed in their own shadows like mangled bodies, and he kept hearing falls, seeing dead ends ahead, smelling gas. As they pushed on, they encountered increasing disturbance, whole rooms spilling out their insides, fractured timbers, the men uneasy, feeling the roof, knocking at it gently, only Big Pete Chigi seemingly unconscious of the threat, wallowing and plunging like a big fat seal, willing to carry the earth above on his nose like a ball, if need be. Heavy equipment lay upended, cables swooped like streamers at a dance, chatter from several corners crisscrossing, varying in volume.

“… was sunk and put down in the coal in 1923. The coal was shot up on the solid, brung from all the …”

“No, we don’t use powder, always for a long time now we been employing compressed air, what you call …”

“… a slab there which should oughta be took down or else timbered.”

Names. Guys Miller had known, had interviewed, gone to school here with, guys he played baseball with in the summer. Bill Lawson. Tuck Filbert. Mario Juliano. There was still a sick sweet smell down here.

“… and I was standing there in the engine room, see, when the fuse on the …”

“… gas and smoke, bodies bleeding at the mouth and nose, but they wasn’t no other signs of …”

“Who? Bruno? No, we come on him and the others back there a piece, Tiger. I’m sorry. I thought you noticed.”

“Lemme see here the …”

“Well, yessir, that’s the rock dust. You don’t see it so clear on account of how it is coked over from the explosion.” Pedantic precision to Davis’ delivery in the effort to score as the present authority. Had his Dad sounded like that? “How’s that? Well, it’s usually mostly limestone. Should be the same specific gravity so as to rise in suspension with the coal dust, light in color to reflect light, nonhygroscopic so it don’t ball.”

“The pattern is always the same in these gassy mines,” the engineering professor in the party explained. “An accumulation of methane, ignition, usually by sparks off faulty machinery or by smoking, the explosion confined or extended in scope, depending on the effectiveness of the rock dusting.” No, that was his Dad, right to the point.

“What rock dusting?” Bonali’s voice came through loud and clear. The whole walk he had been edging in his gripes, but Davis had kept the inspectors’ ears, and Bonali himself, in spite of his reputation, seemed edgy, overcautious.

“Any inspector ever been down in this mine, they’ve bragged on the place looking like the inside of a goddamn hospital, Vince.”