Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“Hey, Kit! What’s worse than your old man with a jag on?”

Tommy thought. “I don’t know. Your girl with a rag on?”

“Naw!” the guy howled through the laughter. “Your old lady with a jig on!”

Tommy laughed with the others, but he didn’t like the joke. He was sensitive about “old lady” jokes ever since his Mom had got humiliated last year in the newspaper. It had really made his Dad sore, because he thought at first Tiger Miller had done it on purpose, and here he had been the one who had brought him back to West Condon in the first place and then to pull a rotten trick like that. Tommy had been badly upset by the event, since three of the people he loved the most were involved, but finally it turned out that Tiger probably wasn’t at fault.

Actually, though none of his buddies knew it now, Tommy had received his nickname upon Tiger Miller’s return to the town. He was about eleven or so when Tiger came home, and everybody said then that Tommy was going to be just like him, and they started calling him Tiger’s Kitten. Now it was plain Kit, and when anyone asked, he would say it was the girls who had started calling him Kit Carson, the Irrepressible Explorer. After graduation, he looked forward to playing on Tiger’s baseball team in the area semipro league. Even though Tiger was a pretty old guy now, he was still the best first baseman in the league and a regular.400 hitter. Tommy was glad he had learned to play shortstop, because they would have a chance to play together.

Tommy noticed Sally Elliott over by the vacated Sunday school building, staring over his way. “Excuse me, men,” he said, catching the wadded program and flipping it back into the guy’s crotch, “but my services are in demand.”

“Hey, Kit,” one guy whispered, “you getting some of that?”

“Well, uh, let’s say I’m looking into it.” He strolled out of their laughter and over toward the girl. Wow, just seeing her standing there so awkward heated him up — he hoped it wasn’t going to show. Man, it had to happen soon! And she was so nice, there was something really soft and great about her. If only she had known the score, and he — well, he knew what it was that held him back. Sometimes he envied those poor bastards with their nobody fathers. Man, they could do it in full public and it wouldn’t matter.

Charlie Bonali, making laborious toilet, listened to his old man in the living room bitching and moaning about his bad luck. Well, he was a goddamn failure and he wouldn’t admit it. Just about everybody Charlie knew was a failure and that was the goddamn truth, a bunch of saps. Everywhere he looked, nothing but saps. And his old lady was even worse, trying to drag him off to Mass and yap-yapping about the horrors of hell. Charlie had skipped Mass this morning and had had to take a lot of guff off her and he was still sore about it. Man! he’d sure got dropped by a pair of squares! Showered and shampooed, Charlie stood naked in the bathroom, rolling on deodorant and applying cologne. He cocked his dark brow and curled his thick lip down. “You handsome fucker!” he said and flashed a white toothy smile. Held it. Looked closer. Yeah, they needed brushing again.

Saps. God, the place was rotten to the core! Pray, pay, and get blown to hell. Jesus, when would they ever learn? Take the disaster. Okay, so his old man got out, but what the hell was he doing down there in the first place? And old Ange. There was a smart one. Thousand laughs, punch in the ribs, knew all the answers. Now he rots, burned black to the bone. Smart, very smart. And now what was Charlie’s old lady saying? That Uncle Ange was lucky: he’d been to confession the Sunday before. Charlie nearly laughed out loud. He could hear old Ange himself say it, it was Ange’s favorite line: “Lucky, my lily-white ass!” It was hard to figure. A dumb guy gets nailed up on a goddamn cross, and they all think that’s so great, they want to get up there and hang with him. What a bunch of misery-loving nuts! Man, that was one line Charlie Bonali was not going to stand in! He didn’t even know if he could stomach another Easter season around this dump. He had cleaned his fingernails and toenails with a brush in the bath, and now trimmed them with a clipper. He had one foot up on the stool, his bare ass to the door, when his kid sister Angie knocked.

“Aren’t you out of there yet?” she demanded. “You’re worse than a girl!”

“Come on ahead, if you’re in such a hurry,” he shouted back. He hoped to hell she would, she’d shut up then, and he stood a little straighter just in case she did.

“Not with you in there!” she huffed and went away.

He sighed, put his foot down, filed his fingernails. The old man was howling about all his hard work in the mines having brought him to nothing but a big fat dead end, a favorite crybaby routine of his these days, and how there was no justice in it. The old man was very hot on justice and injustice, and thought a man should get what he worked for. Jesus God, he was dumb.

Charlie fingered tonic into his wavy black hair, devoted ten careful minutes to a strand-by-strand arrangement of it. Damn hairline was edging back, he was sure of it. Work, my Jesus. Well, Charlie could tell the old man things. If a punk weighed in at a hundred pounds, could he play tackle on a varsity team? Hell, no! And take it from a big man. Some guys had it, some didn’t. So much for justice, old man. Now, the guys that had it, the smart guys, how did they get it? By being tough. None of your bellyaching about justice, man. If the other guy was born dumb or weak or sick or poor or old or unlucky, well, fuck him. Make him work for you, make him kiss your ass, that was the message from the cross. Charlie flexed his meaty shoulders, smashed his fist into his palm. Yeah, man. Snapped his fingers, the old sign for action.

He brushed his teeth, leaning up against the lavatory. The sleek pressure of the cold enamel delighted his rod and groin. As he looked down to spit, though, he saw that his belly ballooned out over the lip of the sink. Goddamn beergut, he was going to pot. He stared glumly at that pale bag, shaggily coated with curly black hair. Another sign of the bad times. All he did now was drink beer and sometimes pick up some middle-age stuff in one of the joints. They had to know a lot of tricks or he couldn’t even pop off, he was so depressed. He had to get out of here. Nearly all his buddies who graduated with him last year were gone now, and the ones who’d stayed were in worse shape than he was. The new high school kids looked like little babies, like that bitchy little runt of a sister of his, and the upper-class girls acted scared of him. Jesus, he was looking like an old man, that’s what. He sucked in his gut and whacked it hard with the butt of his hand. Have to toughen up, goddamn it! He whacked it a couple more times, then looked away irritably as it sagged again.

He pulled on his clean T-shirt and repeated the ritual of the comb. Couple of his buddies had joined the Marines. Shit, that sounded pretty stupid, but maybe he ought to, too. Something to tide him over until he found his way to the top. If he hung around here any longer he was going to go off his nut. By God, why not? He’d do it, he’d join the goddamn Marines and get away from his old man and his old lady, away from the bitching and nagging and away from the mines and West Condon and God and all his fucking paraphernalia. He flashed the smile. Yeah, man. Then, reluctantly, he pulled on his shorts.

Thou didst crush the head of the wicked ,

laying him bare from thigh to neck…

One difference between Nathan Baxter and his father, now the Reverend Abner Baxter of the Church of the Nazarene, was that while his father believed in the eventual redistribution of all property equally to all people (or anyway all saints), no matter how it had to be accomplished, and as Jesus Christ, he preached, had intended, Nat Baxter recognized no property rights at all. “Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it.” At the high school gymnasium the Sunday of the mine disaster, Nat’s eye saw and coveted a beautifully gnarled black hand that lay, carbonized and unattached, among the bodies and other refuse, and, covertly, his hand grasped it, stuffed it in a paper sack.