Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“Post office is in room 24-A,” she said with a challenging smile, and left him to go answer the patient’s signal, switching her hips not too subtly at all. He could almost hear the old barrel organ root-toot-tootling away.

Of course, he should just wait here since he wasn’t going to stay, but he didn’t, wandered instead down to 24-A, empty as he had supposed it would be. He leaned back against the bed, waited, a few fantasies flowering from the root below.

Happy entered, glanced back behind her, eased the door shut. All those M’s, my God! M for mountains. She met his smile with one of her own, approached, everything moving at once. M for everything moving at once. “At last!” she growled. A wisp of sandy hair poked out under her nurse’s cap. “You are in my clutches! The Black Hand strokes again!”

Miller grinned. “Mother,” he complained, “you forget the gravity of the situation. Men are dying!”

She smiled up at him. Her breasts had that rare muscular thrust that made them look, from above, like a pedestal for the head. Or a platter. “Dying indeed. You’ve been around those awful morbid people too much, Tiger.”

“They’re not morbid, they’re ecstatic.”

“Listen, I saw that poor boy Bruno. He had so many scars on and around his unfortunate joint, it looked like he’d been rebuilt there by a quack plastic surgeon.”

“Who, Giovanni? You mean he had some accident—?”

“You bet, accident. Whoever flayed him, flayed by patterns. Or maybe he used a knife. He was a real curiosity out here. All the nurses took turns with his baths to get a look. Of course, as soon as he was strong enough, we couldn’t get near him.”

“Really?” Miller laughed. He’d guessed as much, but now he had information he hadn’t known otherwise how to get. “Who bathed him then?”

“His sister.” If she caught his inward jolt, she gave no sign of it. “And as for dying, well, nobody tries any of that funny business up here unless I let them. Of course, on off days, why, I don’t really care. I just forget and they drop off like flies.” The platter punched his chest as if to roll his own head upon it, and, below, her hipbone curled in to knock once. Enough. “Tiger, there’s thirty-six people up here whose lives depend on you!”

“Hand,” he grinned, “you’re even blacker than I thought.” And, as if in thanks for that, as her mouth dampened his grin, her hand trickled in a liquid gambol down his spine to midthigh, then back up the front where a wild demand had stirred. “But there’s no lock on that door,” he whispered, her lips biting his words.

“I’ve got the key to the upstairs X-ray room, and it just happens to be time for my break. Won’t be anybody up there all morning.” There was spring light in her smile and a glitter in her eyes’ mischief that chased all phantoms, even the most recent, while from his fingertips, pressed urgently into the soft swells that had won her her name, there radiated a message of scorn for the highflown moralizing of his morning walk and a sense of cosmic pandemonium that made him laugh. “We shall take inside pictures and sell them secretly to zee leetle boys,” she murmured. “We shall make a meellion!” He didn’t know if she meant dollars or pictures, but knew better than to ask.

Marcella sits on a stool under the scrawny apple tree in the grassless backyard, her hands full of damp dirt, the sun on her bright yellow back. Before her: a plot of troubled earth, about four feet square, marked off from the world’s vague extension by four corner stakes and a piece of wrapping string. Four or five sticks poke up in the plot like its first people, broad-shouldered, wearing empty seed packages, but headless. The gaiety of their uniforms delights her, but what will express the joy they think? She spies a clump of new dandelions in Rosalia’s yard next door. She picks a few, punches little holes in the tops of the seed envelopes — really the bottoms, for they are upsidedown, of course — and inserts the dandelion heads. She laughs. The fact is, Marcella doesn’t exactly believe in the cataclysm. At first, she had some doubts about her brother even, for she had never confused love with worship. But she has grown greatly in these few weeks, has discovered the true solidity of truths she previously only suspected, or thought might just be creatures of her own inturned foolishness. For example: that Jesus is not salvation, but only a single path among many to a higher condition that ultimately must even exclude him. Or: that true knowledge is the discerning of pattern, and wisdom is its right interpretation. She has been greatly helped by them all. By Eleanor and by Mr. Himebaugh, even by Clara. And most of all by Justin. Though silent, apart, calm, singular, he is yet at the heart of the Plan, moving with hidden fingers, fulfilling with unspoken words, gentle, responsive, aloof from the human frailties of the group. Justin is — in a sense — their priest. She feels it. Perhaps they all feel it. She thinks of his silence as like the ardent silence of the sun, his apartness as like the enfolding apartness of the stars, his calm like the contained explosions in her chest. But the cataclysm: well, it’s a matter of definition. God is terrible, but as beauty is terrible, not horror. So, if she prepares the earth for Him, even four little square feet of it, it is not to deny His coming, but to affirm the love that motivates Him .

Impulsively, his Saturday edition thrown shoddily to bed, Miller decided to go see Marcella. Go see her now, while his seed machine, old despot, was utterly drained of need, and make up his mind about that thing once and for all. Without the Chevy and the panel out, he had no choice, walked over. Didn’t mind. Loosened him up and gave him time to think. It was a little brazen, this midday visit, but there were few ignorant now of his involvement with the cult and, therefore, with any or all women in it. That was the trouble with this goddamn village, there was just no way to let an affair ripen on its own, it inevitably got put on a stage to be applauded, hooted, laughed at, or second-guessed. Even the high school kids suffered this kind of daily intrusion — how long had he known, for instance, that Ted Cavanaugh’s boy Tommy had been taking little Sally Elliott, Jim’s daughter, out to the ice plant several times a week? Only guy in town who refused to listen to that rumor was Coach George Bayles, who was afraid if he acknowledged it, he’d have to bench Tommy for breaking training and lose every game left on the schedule. Miller had in recent years resigned himself to pickups in roadhouses and distant dance halls — had the advantage they were usually young — but he was growing away from secretaries and phone operators, had trouble setting up anything worth more than a second listless event.

He passed the Lincoln School yard where a gang of youngsters were playing basketball. Lot of pushing, elbowing, fumbling, shouting. Found himself unconsciously trying to pick out the ones that might have promise. The ball escaped them, trickled out of bounds. A fat boy chased it, and the others let him. “Hey! Hi, Tiger!” shouted one of them, one of his carriers down at the plant. “That’s Tiger Miller, the baseball player!” the kid shouted at the others.

“We know it,” said the fat boy irritably, then turned his hungry smile on Miller. “Take a shot, Tiger!” he called, and heaved the ball. Three bounces. Miller reached down for it. Felt good in his hands.

“From way out here?” Miller asked, grinning. “I don’t think I can make it.”

“Aww,” said the fat boy, and the others joined in. “C’mon, Tiger!”

Miller sucked the ball with both hands to his forehead, his old shot: believed in thinking the ball into the basket. Hell of a long distance at that, though. He relaxed, brought the ball down hard against the pavement, half step forward, ball eased up against the palm of his right, the impact that converted mere force into a subtle control system, and as the ball’s momentum pushed his hand up, his left glided up, struggling against the bind of his trenchcoat, to guide — thrust off the asphalt with the calf muscles, felt old muscles snap awake, at jump’s peak, ball at the brain, shoved himself back to earth again. The ball arched away— fffft! — didn’t even touch the fucking rim going through. Hah! Only the stiff clock of his leather soles batting thinly on the asphalt whipped him back out of the stadium to this present scene, where small boys cheered the old baseball player who ran the town newspaper.