Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

The Hole is accustomed to an early crowd and shuts down early, leaving a long night ahead. Some will meet up at a club bar, others in a neighbor’s kitchen or over a bridge or poker table. Many will retire with a drink to a recliner chair in front of the box. A few, choosing to rough it, will head out to the roadhouses or take in a bit of country music at the Blue Moon Motel.

Sheriff Tub Puller is passing that popular Saturday night establishment and he decides to wheel through the parking lot to see who’s up to what. Looks like a full night. Tub is returning from a Christian Patriots meeting out at John P. Suggs’ strip mine offices, and he is feeling righteous and closely engaged with the way the world works and well equipped to do important deeds. Tub doesn’t share the religious beliefs of most of the other Patriots, preferring not to think about any life after this one, mainly because no matter what comes next it’s always a rough passage, but he is patriotic and he loathes Romanists and niggers and kikes and feels at home with Suggs’ militia. They look up to him as a big man and a leader. And he’s not just an immovable mass, he’s a good marksman, too; people have to admire that. If Tub Puller shoots at somebody, he hits them where he wants to hit them. Suggs’ mine manager, Ross McDaniel, is the only one who can beat him at target practice, and that’s all he can beat him at, except maybe the hundred yard dash. McDaniel is an outsider brought to town by Suggs and even Tub is a little afraid of him. There’s a rumor that his past targets might have included FBI agents and tax collectors and even a sheriff or two. Suggs knows Tub is not a very religious man, but he is cool about it, and Tub can appreciate where Suggs is coming from and respects it. Probably, in the end, he’ll find his way there as well, for it’s a hard, tough religion and the lines are clearly drawn and it has a certain manly appeal.

With a little help from Suggs’ deep pockets, Tub has been putting together a volunteer police unit to deal with emergency situations in the county, and the core of it has been recruited from the Patriots. In fact, they are more or less the same thing. There haven’t been any emergencies, but there are a lot of people around here who don’t see eye to eye, so there are apt to be, and Suggs wants him to be ready. The church camp sect is one of Suggs’ pet projects, and Tub’s troops have already been called out there a couple of times to defend it. Some of his most reliable volunteers belong to that group. Tub’s deputy Cal Smith is an evangelical, close to some of those people, and should fit right in, and for a while he did help out at training sessions, but since Red Baxter’s return, he has begged off, using his family duties as an excuse. Baxter was their section boss in the mine. A man born angry. Tub could go along with the loudmouth’s gobpile oratory back when it was about hours and wages, but then he got religion and became a rancorous pain in the ass. Suggs plainly hates the man and wants him run out of here. Smith, however, came from a family of pentecostals and only got closer to Baxter when Red shifted his hatred from bosses to sinners. In the mine, Tub was a shotfirer, using compressed air cylinders like dynamite to bring down walls of coal, a hazardous job, and Smith was his partner and driller. They hardly ever spoke to each other, but they were a team, so when Tub got elected sheriff, he appointed Smith his deputy, a good man to have at your back when there’s dangerous work to be done. Now he’s not so sure. There’s been trouble at the camp since Baxter’s return. If a line gets drawn, he may find his deputy standing on the wrong side of it.

Tub spots the Cavanaugh station wagon in the Blue Moon parking lot. The college kid’s probably here. He’d love to haul the smartass in for whatever, smoking marijuana or fucking a minor or something. His old man is a target of Suggs’ fury, one of many, and Tub shares his dislike for the banker. For all bankers, for that matter. Fat cats living off the sweat of others. When mines shut down and men are thrown out of work, these are the ruthless decisions of the money-maggots. But Tub is not a vengeful man. In fact, he has few emotions at all beyond a cold scrupulous hatred of a more general sort, and as for the kid, he’d feel out of place going in there in his uniform and shiny boots unless he had specific charges and an arrest to make.

He’s about to roll on out of the lot and back to his West Condon office when he sees them: three overdecorated motorcycles parked back in the shadows. They’d heard a distant growl tonight during the Christian Patriots’ military exercises that was probably them and Suggs had turned his dark scowl on him. Since the break-in and theft at the mine, Suggs has been in a rage about these out-of-town shitheads. So he knows now he has something to do. He could disable the bikes. Or impound them. But he might need help for that. They could come out any minute and they’re probably armed. It’s a Saturday night, and Smith will be hard to find, and the guys who were at the Patriots will be scattered. But no problem. He can handle this on his own. There’s a small secluded pull-off within view of the motel that he often uses to catch drunks and speeders leaving the motel, and after checking in with his radio operator, he pulls in there and turns off his car radio and douses his lights.

Cubano, Littleface, and Juice are sitting at the bar, knocking back whiskeys with beer chasers. Their pals Nat and Houndawg, who have stayed back at the base with Runt, are angry about it, but Juice and Cubano — penned up so long they’re going stir-crazy — decided they needed a social moment before hitting the road again tomorrow, Lit-tleface joining them to try to keep them out of trouble. And the sheriff is right: they’re armed. The place is a miserable dive and the two country singers don’t amount to much, but the Warrior Apostles dig the tunes, Juice bobbing his head to the beat and snapping his fingers, Littleface meditating on the lyrics, which are making him feel sentimental about his life on the open road and about his pals and about his country. And besides, though they’re cut off from the Brunists now, they saw these two yokels doing their act out at the mine hill and so they think of them as in some manner their own people.

There’s a tough, beardy guy sitting alone at the bar dressed in leathers with APACHE painted on the back of his jacket. Might or might not be what his jacket says. Short stocky guy, kind of a buttless tube, losing his tread on top. Worn dusty red cowboy boots with buckled straps over the insteps and tooled scrolls up the sides, pinetrees on the front, which give him class. What class he has. He isn’t flying colors, but he looks solid, so they ask him anyway, and he says no, he thought about buying a bike before he got sent up, but when he came out of the can, he went looking for four wheels, not two, needing something he could live in, sleep in, carry his shit around in. Juice tells him he admires his boots and he asks Juice if he ever did any time — he looks like a guy he’d seen up at the state pen. Juice says not in this part of the country, and asks, “What’d you get sent up for?”

“Laying into a buncha cops.” Can’t help but admire that and they all have another round. They ask him what he’s doing here. “Chasing a woman.”

“Not worth it, man.”

“I know it. Bad shit. It’s over. Moving on tomorrow.”

“Yeah? So are we. If you weren’t stuck in a cage you could join us.”

“Where you headed?”

“Don’t know. But it’s like them two croonies there are singing, ‘They’s always a bus goin’ somewheres.’” They ask what happens next for him and he says he doesn’t know either, but there’s another war brewing, and if they’ll take an ex-con, he may join up. He feels like killing a few people.