Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

The room was overheated, bore that weighted odor of old people, old food, old dust, made Vince recall his Mama the last couple years before she died. Vince only understood about half the Italian. Slipping away from him. The old woman sucked her dry withered lips, spoke of God’s ominous ways, how important it was to be ready at all times, one never knew, un giorno o l’altro , life was brief and inscrutable. Vince nodded gravely, growing sleepy. Si, una bolla di sapone , he acknowledged, a soapbubble, his Mama’s pet commentary on life in this world. Vince fidgeted in the chair to keep awake, covered up best he could, finally had to admit he hadn’t been to Mass in over three years. Tre anni! Ever since the kids had grown up, he said, but, yes, she was right, he figured to get started back, you never knew, any moment, a qualsiasi ora .

“Ecco il momento!” the old woman said, wagging her finger. And as she rattled on, Vince remembered his old blind grandmother telling him about hell when he was a boy. She was an expert on hell. If Vince ever ended up there, he was sure he’d find his way around, she’d imbedded forever in him a mental map of the place. He had nearly forgot, but now he found he was missing not a word of the old lady’s Italian, it was all there, he felt once more the claws on his flesh, the pincers plucking out his nails, foul mouths sucking out his eyes. Rapt but edgy, a boy again, he listened. The dwarfish television set pitched a silent nervous image into the room. Pooch’s old man was nodding off. “Tre anni!” He apologized, thanked her for the wine, left somehow oddly grateful.

But in West Condon’s old housing development, hell lost its charm, turned gray, and he grew old again. Old and tired and cold. He’d got overheated in the Minicucci living room, and the cold was bitter. Get this over with, get home, take a hot bath. Wanda Cravens met him at the tattered screen door with a baby in her arms, toddler hanging on from below. Another kid whined somewhere inside. Never a very big girl, she now seemed more drawn than ever. Must not weigh even a hundred pounds, Vince thought. He felt sorry for her, glad he was bringing some money. He told her what he was there for, and she asked him on in.

Her living room was a wreck of cluttered junk, far from clean, far from warm, winter crawling across the bare floor, cockroaches scrambling alongside the wallboards. It looked more like a house after somebody had moved out than a place someone was living in. Vince found an arm of a waddy chair he thought would hold him, sat down gingerly against it. Wanda dropped the baby and toddler on a ragged throw rug in a corner with the cockroaches, shooed the older one, boy about three or four, on out the door, turned wearily toward Vince. She sure had it tough, okay. With a thin white hand, she pushed back a snarl of sandy-colored hair from her forehead, accepted the check he held out to her. They exchanged only a few words. Her voice was thin, had a hopeless lost distance about it.

“I’m sure you can use it, Wanda,” he said clumsily.

She stood in front of him, a wooden table behind her. She sighed, nodded, then turned around, shoved aside the gray heap of clothes on the table, laid the check down, leaned over to examine it.

Vince tried to come up with a couple remarks about what a swell guy he’d always thought Lee was, dependable and goodnatured, but her dress, the starch out of it, hung with limp descriptiveness over her small hips, and talk about old Lee seemed weirdly irregular. The back of her left thigh touched his knee. “Lee was one of the greatest guys I ever worked with, Wanda,” he said, confused by the silliness of it. “It was a honor …” She leaned further over the table onto one elbow, closed her eyes, rubbed them. Jesus, the poor kid! Her back trembled. Her legs were apart and the dress, folded wispily down the cleft of her buttocks, vibrated gently with her crying. If that was what she was doing. Vince stood up, unavoidably against her, laid his broad dark hand on her back. The bone was right there, hadn’t felt a back like that for years. “I … I guess I’d better be shoving off.” But she butted back against him with a kind of sob, and he thought less about shoving off. His fingers slid to her waist and she curled around like an old routine into his arms, gazed sadly up at him. Her eyes were a little red, but probably from the rubbing, he got the idea right away she was faking it. Thing that surprised him most was how he was staying so goddamn cool. Felt keyed up, okay, but like a spectator caught up in some movie.

Her tiny chest heaved a little against him. “Vince!” she whispered, and it could have meant just about anything. Gentle-boned face, eyes a little close together like old Lee’s, cheeks dotted with mudcolored freckles, mouth a soft thin line with a slight overbite, her teeth a bit — They kissed. Vince yanked her in tight against his hard and heated body, clutched the whole of her ass with one big hand, went grabbing down for the lean thighs, felt the taut flesh snap back at him through the wilted cotton, a tautness he’d nearly forgot in women. Wished he still had the little finger on that hand, felt like he was missing something. She broke away, buried her face in his chest.

He looked down at her hair, coarse and dry like yellowed grass. An act, he thought, but he said, “I’m sorry, Wanda, this is all wrong. Hell, I’m not the kind of guy ever to …” He tried his damnedest to think of old Lee, that swell guy, but just couldn’t bring him well to mind, smelled the hair, odor of sweet soap, reluctantly let go her neat cranny, but she held on to him.

“Don’t leave me, Vince!” she whispered.

“Wanda, listen—”

“Vince, I’m so terrible alone, you cain’t know how it is for me!” That sounded real enough. The toddler had left the baby squalling on its back in the corner, had crawled over to where they stood embraced, and now had a grip on Vince’s pant leg. “Vince, it’s Valentine’s Day!” she whispered into his mouth, then jammed her lips against it, her hand pulling mightily on his fly. He jerked up her dress, drove his hand down between her thighs as the three-year-old banged in through the front door, letting in a sharp gust of winter.

Charlie announced that night he had joined the Marines. They were sitting in the living room watching television, Vince and Etta, and Vince said, “If you’re gonna butt in on the program, why don’t you tell us something important?” Both he and Etta made a lot of wisecracks about the Marines being the right place for a shaggy zootsuit bum like him, and Charlie wised back that at least he’d get a decent meal now and then, and he wouldn’t have to sweat getting nagged at every five minutes. Vince snorted, said he sure had a helluva lot to learn about the Marines. Charlie shrugged, tucked a butt in his mouth, moved out the door snapping his fingers. Vince watched him parade out, then turned to Etta to remark what a useless cocky grandstander that boy was, but checked himself just in time. Etta was crying. “Hey! what’s the matter, chicken? Was it something Charlie said? I’ll go—”

She shook her head. “I don’t care how bad they are, Vince,” she whispered through her tears. “I just hate to see them go.”

Angela came in from her bedroom where she’d been doing her homework. Music from her radio piped in to muddle with the television. “What’s Mom crying about?” she demanded.

Vince stammered a moment before he realized he wasn’t guilty of anything, then said, “Nothing, baby. Go on back to your studies.”

“I believe I have a right to know,” she insisted.

Vince supposed she’d got the line out of some goddamn movie. That girl could get under a man’s skin sometimes. “It’s just that Charlie is going into the Marines, and your Mom—”