Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

The Nazarene preacher Abner Baxter, made jealous it would seem by the loss of some of his own congregation, had been the first to make the cult public by his open denunciation of it. Squat red-maned head butted forward, copy rolled up in his freckled fist like a truncheon, he had invaded Miller’s office one afternoon, accompanied by two of his flock — introduced to Miller as Mr. Roy Coates and Mr. Ezra Gray — to deliver a formal handwritten repudiation of the “false prophet Giovanni Bruno” and the “sorcerers and impostors” who surrounded him. His thunderings on apostasy and women—“Women they gotta keep silence in the churches! they ain’t permitted to speak out, like the law says! Anything they need to know, Mr. Miller, let them ask their menfolk!”—had made it clear he saw Sister Clara as the real marplot behind the heresy. He had raged there in the darkening office to the clacking rhythm of the wireservice teletypes and the distant thump of old Hilda the press, his stubby legs set martially apart, his two lieutenants now conciliatory, now indignant, now sinister, now apologetic. If Miller had been tempted to drop the project, it was Baxter who removed the temptations. Even Jones, watching on deadpan from his desk, had had to admit he was impressed. The office girl Annie Pompa, moonface blanched to a pale olive, had stood stunned in the doorway, staring at this exhibition as though at green-skinned monsters from outer space, had squeaked in fright as the three men had wheeled suddenly — in mid-damnation, as it were — to bulk out past her. In a half-faint behind her desk afterwards, plump hand pressed into the sponge of her bosom, she had been voiceless, able only to shake her fat head fearfully, as though to affirm that the world was, in truth, in danger.

The heady spring weather today whetted Miller’s appetite for baseball and golf, for the feel of damp grass as he knuckled a ball and tee into the earth or fielded a bunt, for different places he’d been on different spring openings, even for West Condon in the spring, but the old West Condon with track meets and pickups and late evening ball games, tennis and Indian rubber, picnics, bonfires, furtive assaults under burred blankets that scratched agitatingly on the uncalloused flesh — whetted, in short, his underappetite, and, truth to tell, he was hungry enough. Here, the cult had robbed him utterly. At Bruno’s house, neither he nor Marcella were left alone five minutes now. As their chief scribe, his presence was required at all times and at every break he got set upon by one or another of the factions, each seeking to convince him of their own peculiar point of view. All knew it without understanding what they knew: he was the only one present without convictions.

As for Happy Bottom, well, she was impatient and surely she tempted him, but he just didn’t have the time free. Trouble with that girl was that the act was no five-minute project with her, it was an epoch. Sometimes it almost seemed to him there was something suicidal about her leap into bed: a hot mole. Not that she looked like one — nor sounded like one: her Judgments gave him as much pleasure as he got these days. Still, he wasn’t able to make a whole kingdom of a mattress, and that was the kind of circle she seemed to chart for him. And, what was more to the point maybe, he wanted to stop lying to Marcella. Her total ingenuous belief in him gave him a kind of responsibility he hadn’t had before: didn’t especially want it, but he couldn’t help but recognize it. Commitment was a real thing to her, solid as a door, specific as a threshold, and so, unavoidably, had become so for him as well. He knew that weaning her away from the cult and her brother would not be easy, but he meant to try, and he knew the consequences of success, knew and accepted them. In fact, goddamn it, they even appealed to him.

She skips, singing, to the bathroom, peeling off her pajamas, shedding old skins. Everything new, everything clean, and, for the day, a bright yellow frock with the rustle of spring in it. Rebirth! Water splashes in the tub, exciting her, sunlight splashes on the floor. And then, just as she’s stepping into the tub, Mr. Himebaugh walks in, looking ill—“Oh, I’m sorry, dear!” he says. “That’s all right,” she smiles, ducking down into the tub, and he leaves .

Father Jones sat, fat polyp, alone on a stool in the hotel coffeeshop, belly butting the bar, before him an oval platter stained with egg yolk and dusted with toast crumbs. Jones sometimes ate as many as eight fried eggs in a morning. Miller flung his hat onto a wall hook, took a stool one removed from Jones to give the man elbow room, and they exchanged dry grunts of recognition. “Pecan waffles, Doris,” Miller said to the woman who wandered blearily behind the counter. She poured a cup of coffee, bopped the counter with it before bringing it to abrupt rest in front of him, thrust a grubby hand into the pecan jug, which still contained the crumpled cigarette package Miller had thrown there five days ago.

Cup at mouth, hat tipped back, eyes asquint, Jones said, “Lucky you happened in just now. Strange as it must seem, I was just contemplating as how, now that we’ve copped all the goddamn prizes being passed out this season, you’d probably be anxious to give your old Dad here a fortnight off. See, my poor old Mother is ailing, and—”

“Jones, don’t kid me, you never had a mother,” said Miller, pouring the coffee in the saucer back into the cup and sheeting the saucer with a paper napkin. “I will say, though, your appetite sure seems to have gone to pot from all the overwork.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Whoo! I feel awful.” Jones sagged.

“How many eggs did he eat this morning, Doris?”

“Same as always,” she said and poured stringy batter on the waffle iron, rained upon it broken pecans. “All we had.”

Miller laughed. “Okay, it’s a deal. But give me just four or five weeks more. Until this Bruno thing is over.”

“What? Haven’t you laid that chick yet?”

“Jones, that gang is full of women, and I can only handle one at a time,” Miller said, as Doris, dropping the lid of the waffle iron, turned a puffy eye on them. The lid lifted, batter bagged out and dribbled, turned hard. “In fact, you can help me out if you’ve got a couple minutes free tonight.”

Jones lit a cigar, grunted interrogatively.

“I haven’t been able to get good pictures of the group yet, but tonight may be a good time. They’re going to meet out at that little rise next to Deepwater Number Nine. You know it?”

“Yeah. Cunt Hill.”

“What! Are you serious?”

“Somebody told me when we were out there for the disaster.”

“But how did it get a name like that?”

“Looks like one. The east, or belly, slope is gradual, and there’s even a slight abdominal dip before the last pubic rise — Stretch out there on the bar, Doris, and lemme show—”

“Not me,” grumbled Doris. “My slope ain’t gradual,” and she slapped her belly, making them laugh.

“Then, on the west side,” Jones continued, “it drops off sharply into a grove of trees at the edge of the mine buildings. But it only really got its name, I understand, when the company for some goddamn reason cut a clearing in the middle of all that vegetation, went digging for something or other, and left an incredible gash right in the old alveolus of love!”

“Right in the old olive-oilus of love!” exclaimed Doris. “What the hell is that?” She left them, shaking her head, to continue her mindless wandering behind the counter, smudging a clean glass here, dropping bread on the floor there.

“This fissure is now the repository of used condums, thrown there, it is said, in the belief that such oblations prolong the potency of the communicant.”