Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“Shoot another one, Tiger!” they cried.

Miller laughed, but knew when to quit. Still felt the knot in his legs from that short tight jump. “Let’s see you guys try it,” he said, and he left them excitedly imitating him.

As luck would have it, it was Eleanor Norton, not Marcella, who met him at the door of the Bruno house. Unprepared for her and with no excuse for being there, he said lamely, “Looks like good weather for tonight’s trip to the hill, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied, reluctantly admitting him. He recognized a growing distrust in her, especially since his photographing Baxter’s assault night before last. He knew his days were numbered, was a little surprised he had lasted so long — well, people accepted what they wanted to accept, and they wanted to think the city editor was on their side.

“How’s Giovanni? Will he be able to go out?”

“He’s doing well, but I don’t think we’ll risk it.” She sighed, rubbing her medallion. “It’s a delicate business, Mr. Miller.”

He agreed with that solemnly, and they passed through the meeting room and dining room into the kitchen. Giovanni’s door was closed, but he pushed away the thought that crowded in, accepting what he wanted to accept. Ralph Himebaugh was in the kitchen. Logs and papers were spread on the kitchen table. Ralph muttered a greeting. Another reason why Eleanor had come to distrust him, surely. Miller had always got along with the man, but, in the new context of the cult, Ralph could only hate him, whether he was being sincere or not. And now that Ralph had fallen victim, like the rest, to the informal harassment campaign on in town, he seemed to suggest he saw Miller as the man who had let the word out. A glance out the kitchen window into the backyard: Marcella was out there, mourning clothes off and now into a starchy yellow dress, bright as the bright day. She was working a small plot of earth, garden or something. When he glanced back at Mrs. Norton, he saw she was watching him. Himebaugh, too. Well, screw ’em. He smiled blankly, then, without excuses, walked out back to the girl.

The small yard was barren. Garbage pails by the back door. Small twisted fruit tree, fruitless, where Marcella sat now, back to him, on a stool. Wire incinerator in front of the alley. Fenced on one side, open to the neighbors on the other. This was his stage and something in the challenge from the kitchen, the warmth from the sun, the tug in his calves, the rumpled delicacy of her seated figure, made him shrug off caution and strut it like a cock.

The soft pulsing fine-boned feel of her shoulders — knew it, enjoyed it, even before his large hands wrapped them. The dress was fresh and crisp to the touch. She gazed up smiling — delighted, but not surprised. He had never succeeded in surprising her. Some way of divining his presence, split second of presentiment. He relinquished her shoulders, knelt to inspect her garden. They laughed at its seed-package keepers with dandelion heads, though Miller’s perverse eye turned them right side up and saw something else there. His gaze traced the expressive tapering of her right forearm, resting on her crossed knee, the bone-bent turn of her wrist, the fragile fretwork of veins, fingers smudged with earth. They talked nonsense, but under that sun out on this stage with that fragrance in the soil, anything else would have sounded pretentious. Anyway, he was watching her, curious about himself. If his artless inspection troubled her, her poise and easy gaiety gave no sign of it. The poise, that was part of it. The gaiety. And her eyes, brown, doelike, yet bright and awake, and eagerness there, and love for him. But he’d seen that intense gaze, been loved before, and painlessly had turned his back. Still, there was something there, in her eyes. Sensitivity, yes, and intelligence, though he’d hardly challenged either enough to prove them. He felt then, watching her eyes and warmed by the sun, a flicker of exaggerated tones and comforts from a distant innocence of his own — yes, the innocence, the astonishing uncomplicated ingenuousness that gave her such a nice clean sphere to live in, all harmony, and with him at dead center, that must be it. And it was what had been troubling him all day, even in the heat of that frantic bull-like assault on the X-ray table: that his own motivations had become fragmented, that Marcella and Happy, the newspaper and dead buddies, West Condon and East Condon, baseball, sociology, saviors, and sex, all existed isolated under uniquely different legal systems; Ellie Norton’s seven aspects hardly covered the field. And now, unexpectedly, he had knocked up against a simple yet all-embracing view whose every action was a direct manifestation of it. Purity. Saint’s eyes. And, goddamn, he had a yearning to share it. He glanced down at the seed-package soldiers. Back to the garden. He had spent a decade rooting it out of himself, and here, happily in hell, he’d wandered right back to the gate.

He stood, feeling weak, and she stood to face him, sun bright on her upturned face. He realized that the decision was actually already made, had been made long before, and this was only a ritual: drawn to her sphere’s center, he had long since agreed to stay. There now remained for him only to redescribe the sphere itself for her, make a few holes and let real air in; and relearn himself the integrity and continence that belonged to her view of him. He asked her to have dinner with him tonight, and she, radiant, accepted. The scene, the moment, called for an embrace, but the old cock was feeling himself public again. He was, too. A glance back at the house revealed Mrs. Norton and old Himebaugh posed rigidly in the window: stony-faced American Gothic. They had come for lunch, Marcella said, smiling apologetically, and she had to get it ready. Would he stay? Something told him he should, but he hesitated to face those two, couldn’t run the risk yet of a direct showdown in Marcella’s presence. He told her he had to get the paper out if they were to have dinner together, walked her to the back door.

Eleanor and Ralph were waiting for them. Marcella, smiling, slipped on by them. “Don’t forget the wirecopy tonight,” Ralph snapped, drumming a metal rule on his knuckles. Himebaugh had decided the evening paper was neither soon enough nor comprehensive enough for his purposes, now demanded the teletype copy in its entirety every evening.

“And please, Mr. Miller, no photographs tonight,” said Mrs. Norton bluntly, fingering the gold disc.

“No, of course not,” he said. “I’m sorry about the other night. I thought I was being a help. But, if you like, I’ll bring the negatives and turn them over to the group.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she said, but there was no melting there. He left before they could progress beyond these petty complaints to the real thing that was irking them. Off to Mick’s. For charred hamburgers.

The blossoming spiritual affair between Ralph Himebaugh and Eleanor Norton was, to be sure, one of the more fascinating products of the cult. And it was odd, because under ordinary circumstances, they would probably never even have spoken to each other. Both avoided others, were excessively polite and formal when necessarily in public. She, childless and middle-aged, was a good teacher, but uncompromising and not a popular one. He, a bachelor a few years her senior, was a brilliant file cabinet lawyer who avoided cases that must come to court, and Miller could never remember having seen the guy do more than tip his hat and mutter a delicate “hello” to a woman. But a disaster had thrown them together, two innocents surprised in a fever, and now their logbooks, their respective systems, were drawing their timid souls together in holy intercourse. In fact, their two systems did fit together in the mating posture, one embracing from above, the other reaching up from below. The funny thing was, though, Ralph’s system was the one on the bottom.