Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

All Strelchuk could see was smoke. “Bruno!” he cried, “we gotta make a run for it, man!” But he heard some voice back of him and he hollered out, “Who is it?” There was topcoal and rock down everywhere, timbers smashed like matchsticks and rails twisted up, power gone, a roiling scummy dark — and then he saw old Joe Castiglione with a piece of timber stove clean through him and Tuck Filbert smack up against the roof, his head upsidedown staring down at him, his eyes open, and blood dribbling out his big square jaw. “My God! who is it?” Strelchuk screamed, the goddamn smoke clawing his lungs to shreds.

“Here,” a wretched thin whisper said. “Collins.”

And there he was, the poor goddamn bastard, his right leg pinned between the floor and a dislodged timber. “Preach! Jesus, man, you — but don’t worry none! We’ll get you out okay!” he cried. “It’s me, Strelchuk, buddy! We’ll make it!” But God Almighty, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Collins’ whole leg must have been no more than a quarter-inch thick from the knee down. Terror gripped Strelchuk and made him shake.

Thrust up by a whistle burst, lifted by the taut jack of forced silence, the ball leans over its zenith, sinks briefly, then springs from a finger’s jar toward the Tucker City basket, into the hands of a black-jerseyed West Condoner. A roar. A bounce. A pass. Gyrating patterns as fingers trace spiraling fences around the black-trunked bodies. Drive. Retreat. Pass. Jump. Shot.

Parked in an unlit corner of the lot outside the West Condon High School auditorium, the two received the Word:

She is spreadin’ her wings for a journey ,

And is goin’ to journey by and by ,

And when the trumpet sounds in the mornin’ ,

She will meet her dear Lord in the sky!

They had switched the radio on to keep up with the ball game, underway not a hundred yards distant, but, waiting for the old coils to warm, had become distracted and failed to tune it in. Instead, American evangelist messages of love, death, and chiliasm, transmitted through the nose all the way over from Randolph Junction, leaked into the old Dodge and dribbled recklessly over their young Italian-Catholic lust. It reached their indrawn senses, now rendered in five ways tactile, as curtains of alien irrelevance, permissive because it constrained in the wrong inflections; the glow of the radio was a distant worm that warmed them….

When He comes descendin’ from Heaven

On the clouds that He writes in His Word,

I’ll be joyful, preparin’ to meet Him

On the wings of that Great Speckled Bird!

Their bodies formed a convoluted “X,” the figure of a Greek psi , he seated, boy’s unchastised legs pushed forward under the dash, she curled across his lap and facing him. By thrust and retreat, they advanced their investigations: the circuit established by their mouths, his hand prowled into the rustle of her skirt and petticoat, while her hand rubbed and clawed his neck, proxy for the stalk wedged against her underhip; parting to breathe, they fell motionless, only their eyes pursuing the game, keeping it alive. Yet, though their hands and mouths pressed forward, toppling old resistances, dispersing ancestral phantoms, they had no clear idea of what the next inch would bring. If Angela Bonali’s defloration was to be the consummation, neither of them guessed it.

For a long time, the smoke was so thick Eddie Wilson saw nothing else in the beam of his headlamp. He prayed into the radiant cloud for deliverance from despair. He tried to think of Brother Ely assuring him of his soul’s state of grace. He should have told Ferd Clemens he could use the dog. He didn’t mean to hunt this weekend. He prayed that he be saved from greed and covetousness. Then, slowly, grotesquely, a crushed human shape emerged on the floor at the ray’s end: Tommy Catter, his buddy, staring at him from under an overturned pit car. Tommy’s lamp was shattered. Eddie prayed that Tommy’s sins be forgiven and prayed for his own salvation, and, hoping only to see his wife Betty once more, closed his eyes.

Strelchuk had thrust all his weight onto the timber that pinned Ely Collins’ leg, but there was no budging it. That idiot Bruno was in a state of shock and no good to him at all, and Strelchuk cursed him. Then somebody coughed, deep thick old man’s cough, not like Bruno, and Strelchuk spun: saw two headlamps wavering through the smoke! “Hey! Who is it? Strelchuk here! Who’s there?” Jesus, he was damn near screaming!

“Juliano,” said one of the lamps, and the other, still gagging, said, “Jinx, Mike! What the goddamn is happened?”

“This wasn’t no plain fall!” Mario Juliano said.

“No, there was a shock before. Something went off.”

And Jinx Pontormo cried, “Hey! We got to get the hell out of here!”

“Wait!” Strelchuk shouted. Choking so he could hardly breathe. “What do we do with Collins? He’s pinned here by a timber!”

“Listen, if we don’ get out of this merda,” shouted Jinx, “it ain’t going to matter none who is pinned and who ain’t!” He flashed his headlamp all around and said: “It seem to me like it thins out toward the west! Maybe we can get out by old Main!”

“But we can’t leave Preach here!” Strelchuk yelled. He was miffed that Pontormo was making to leave him. “Come on, you two bastards give me a hand!”

“All right, goddamn it!” snapped Mario Juliano. “Where the hell is he?” They went back and turned their lamps down on him. “Jesus Christ, he’s in a bad way!”

Mario helped and they tried again to work the timber off Collins’ leg, but it couldn’t be done. It had all five hundred feet of mother earth piling down on it. Pontormo came and tried to help too, didn’t relish heading off by himself, the old man was scared, they were all scared.

“Barney? This is Dave Osborne out at the mine. You better come out. I think the southeast section blew up.”

The night mine manager, though pierced through with a dread that, oddly, made him want to giggle, reached out calmly, reached down calmly, brought them up, brought them out here.

“Something awful has hit down here!”

“I know. Little trouble. Come on up.” Told them how. But he didn’t tell them what. Didn’t want them to lose their goddamn heads.

“Bonali here. Been trying to get you. What the hell has happened?”

“Take your crew due north up Main, Vince. Due north. You hear? Bring them up the number two shaft.”

“Jesus, Osborne, that’s over five miles!”

Superintendent. Mine rescue crews. Sections north of the shaft. Radio station. Expanded, making the phone system one with his own, his messages throbbing through its channels with impulses of action. His mind mapped out the possibilities, and, as when a boy pulling the toy train switches, he synchronized the movements, then opened all the circuits.

Collins was moaning something horrible. His face was black and cut from smashing into the cinders, and it was all screwed up with pain. His hands clenched dirt. He was praying. Then he twisted his neck and looked, white-eyeballed, up at Strelchuk, and he said in a fragile faraway old voice, “Mike! Git a ax!”

Strelchuk gasped. Jesus, I can’t do it, Preach! he cried, but only to himself, and he went hobbling over the chunks of coal, banging his helmet on the broken roof, stumbling over the rails, and found his own hatchet just inside third north. He grabbed it up and came running back. Juliano and Pontormo had already started to move away, Bruno blindly following their lights. “Don’t you goddamn bastards go away and leave me!” he screamed, and he thought for God’s sake he was going to cry. They turned back, Pontormo swearing like a bishop, and Strelchuk said, “It’s the only thing. If we leave him, he’ll die. You and Bruno grab his arms and hold him so he don’t jump or get them in the way, Jinx. And, Mario, take a grip on his other leg there.” His voice was high and squawky; he didn’t recognize it himself.