Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“Hey, whatsa matter?” Georgie asked. “You shit your pants back there?”

Vince had been noticing the smell, too. At the streetlight, they looked: all over his ass. “Jesus, there must have been something by that tree where I sat down,” he said. He took a branch from a tree and scraped off what he could. Mello and Lucci laughed like idiots and made dumb cracks about it.

The rest of the way back to their neighborhood, of course, they talked about the fire and the hand. “You think you know what the fuck is happening in the world,” Vince told them, “and then suddenly you find out there’s a lot more going on than you ever guessed.” They both agreed. They were pretty shaken up too. They talked about the mayor fainting away and Widow Collins going off her nut and about the end of the world and Bruno.

“Hey, you remember when we stole that wine?” Mello asked.

Lucci laughed. “What wine?” Vince asked.

“Once when we was kids,” Mello said, “we stole a case of communion wine outa the church. Me and Georgie and Mario Juliano and his brother and a couple other guys. There wasn’t nobody else in the place except for Bruno. He was a kind of Father’s helper back then.”

“Jesus!” snorted Lucci, “you remember how he puked all over the Father?”

Vince laughed with the others. “You mean on the priest?”

“We talked him into going with us,” Lucci explained. “He hung back but you could see the poor sonuvabitch was lonesome and wanted to go, so we sorta dragged him along.”

“We took the wine out to the outdoor basketball court,” Guido said, “and opened it. Mario Juliano had snuck some alcohol outa chem lab just in case we couldn’t get the wine, and now he slipped a load into Bruno’s wine.”

“Christ, he got happy as a fucking lark,” laughed Georgie. “And five minutes after that he was out on his ass!”

“Then we went and told the Father,” said Mello, “and he went out and found old Bruno stretched out in the middle of all that stolen wine. He tried to bring Bruno around—”

“And that’s when he got puked on,” Georgie said. They all laughed. It was good to have something to laugh about. “The Father really gave that poor bastard hell. I don’t think he ever showed his face around the church again!”

Etta had already gone to bed when Vince got home, but he woke her up to tell her about it. He couldn’t get over how that hand had been missing the little finger just like his own, and he repeated that detail several times over, until Etta told him he’d better try to forget about it. He was too tired, too excited, too shaken up, and he slept badly, but his dreams were pretty good. Several times he was in Italy with his Mama and she was very grateful. Some problems about how he got there, or how he would get Etta and the kids over, but it seemed like all of these would get worked out. That morning, he got up with Etta and Angie and went to Mass.

He calmed down, but the hand kept haunting him. Like somebody was trying to tell him something. Like maybe his days were numbered or some goddamn thing. He tried to keep busy and when the good weather kept up Monday, he crawled back up the ladder to pick up where he’d left off with his paint job. But Sal Ferrero, his arm still plastered up in the cast, dropped by, having missed the fire, and Vince came down to tell the story. He tried to explain about the hand, but Sal only laughed. “Go ahead and laugh, you bastard,” Vince said, “but I got a feeling if I go back down in a mine, it’s gonna get me, that’s all.”

Sal told him about his boy Tommy making sergeant in the Air Force, and asked how Charlie liked the Marines. “He’s only wrote us once,” Vince said. “He said he managed to get his ass in a sling right off the first day, but they were gonna let him come home Easter anyhow. That goddamn wise-off. He’s lucky they don’t flog anymore.”

“Charlie’s okay. He’ll make out.”

“Yeah, Sal, that’s what I’m afraid of. Anyhow, he finally admitted there was worse food in the world than his old lady’s cooking.”

“That’s a helluva grand thing to say. I suppose Etta loved that, being compared to the—”

“Shit,” Vince laughed, “she bawled like a baby. And now she don’t talk about nothing except Easter.”

Etta brought them out a couple beers and joked about them being loafers and they both ought to break their necks instead of only their arms. Sal kidded back it was anyways better than breaking the old universal digitary, wasn’t it? and Etta went back in laughing her big laugh.

Then, over the beers, he and Sal started chewing over the old days, about how it was to be an immigrant kid in a place so loose and without any history, about the almost daily fights with the Polacks and hillbillies and Croats, nobody understanding anybody else, about how the old folks were always saving up to beat it back to the old country, how really it kind of scared them over here sometimes, and about how the Klan started up when they were just kids, he and Sal, and all that rum and Romanism crap and the stinkbombs they set off in the church.

Sal related again how his old man came out of a tavern one night and ran into a whole goddamn mob of hillbilly Americans fitted out like spooks, and how they took him out to a tree and said they were by God going to string him up, and they even tossed a rope over a branch before they finally let the poor guy go. The hillbillies stripped him and chased him bare-ass down Main Street with firecrackers and shotguns, a real goddamn party. And then Vince told Sal again how he and Angie Moroni and Bert Morani stood off seven goddamn sonsabitches out back of the high school one night after football practice, and how Bert got clobbered with a piece of lead pipe and died. “Jesus, Sal!” Vince said. “I’m the only one left!” The idea sent a windy chill through him and called up again the specter of the black hand.

Sal started in then on how it was down in the mines in the old days, about the crazy things he and Ange and Vince used to do down in those gassy deathtraps, not an ounce of goddamn sense, and so on. He and Sal had talked about these things hundreds of times, so now Vince just sort of tuned out. He sat there on the soft earth in front of his car, his back to the front fender, sipping the cool beer, smoking the cigar, feeling a little drowsy in the noonhigh sun, staring up at the front of his house. Bright yellow here on the front side, sun beating off it, ground out front turned over, the little picket fence, white and cheerful.

“You know, Sal,” Vince cut in suddenly. “I’m just for the first time in my goddamn useless life getting to feel like I live here!”

Sal stared up at the house too then. “It sure has took us a long time to come home, Vince.”

They sat there staring awhile, finishing the beer, and listening to the sparrows fussing over their heads. Finally, they stood, shook left hands on account of Sal’s fractured right, and Sal walked off, both of them saying they sure were damned glad they had had this talk, and how things were bound to work out for them in the end.

But then, goddamn it, the next afternoon he stopped by the garage where Guido Mello and Lem Filbert were working, and he got depressed again! Lem had got out of the mine just in time, and the only occasion he’d gone back down was to help with rescue parties in January. He’d come on his brother Tuck pasted up against the roof by a buggy, split clean in two, and since then he couldn’t talk enough about what a rotten job coalmining was, and how any man had to be a fucking idiot to go down in one of them fucking holes just so some fucking out-of-town rich bastard out in the East could live it up on fucking twenty-dollar dinners and hundred-dollar whores. Sure made a man feel pretty sick of being what he was, okay. Vince told Guido and Lem that he for one had seen his last of it, he was through. Lem said that at last he was getting some fucking sense, and Vince went away from there feeling just pretty miserable, because he knew it was all a goddamn lie. Lem and Guido were just young guys, hardly in their thirties, they didn’t know what it meant.