Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

His own will take some work. It’s badly messed up: both eyes blackened, a tooth missing, bruises everywhere, and his shoulder feels like fucking Lem may have busted something when he laid the crowbar on him. Or else he’s just stiffened up from sleeping on a thin mattress on the cold cement floor at the fire station after his old lady threw him out. His nose is running, his crabs are biting, and there’s a clotty feeling at the end of his dick from the dose he picked up on his only foray into feminine flesh since he got back here. Blew his first little lump from his fire department job on her, needing a pro to do the right things, for in his depression he was having trouble getting it up. Turned out the woman was the sister of a guy he used to play baseball with, and though she did what she was paid to do, she was even more miserable than he was and inhabited by this virulent nastiness, which she obligingly shared with him. He’d just been to Big Pete Chigi’s fu neral, where old Bags was doing his Latin thing and the old birds were into their senseless twitter, and he felt like he was dying himself, starting with his shriveled coglioni. Carlo had dragged Georgie out to see Pete in hospital earlier in the week. Hooked up to some kind of green machine that was working his ruined lungs for him. It was hard for him to talk, but he managed to say, “This ain’t no fun, boys. But what can you do? You just keep going on.” And then a couple of days later he stopped going on. You come and you go in this world, but whatever that world was about, it didn’t seem to be about Georgie. It was like big things were happening over his head from which he was congenitally and terminally excluded. Born to miss out. He felt like the little shepherd who had to stop to take a shit and missed the birth of Jesus. He was thinking a lot about Marcella Bruno at that time; those photos he’d seen had a grip on him. Back in high school, he probably saw her with clothes on, but he didn’t remember them and didn’t need to. They might have met here in St. Stephens, he was thinking, sitting there that day among the mourners, all knuckled into themselves and not saying much. In fact, she was probably the only reason he ever went there, to catch a glimpse of her or to bump into her in the nave. She always had a smile for him. Would have had. She was very young then, of course. Some years behind him. Probably why he never noticed her.

The reason he and Steve Lawson are out here at the Moon is to book Steve’s stag party a month or so from now, a lone moment of happiness on the horizon, and to ask those two hillbillies, at Franny’s request, to sing at the wedding, if they promise no religious songs. Georgie has had a beer or two with Duke, talked baseball, women, bad times they’ve been through. When you are sad and lonely and have no place to go, they’re wailing now, call me up, sweet baby, and bring along some dough, and we’ll go honky tonkin’, honky tonkin’ ’round this town. Sounds good to Georgie, and with an optimistic grin he scans the clapping, hooting, and boozing crowd in search of someone who might stand them both a beer while they do their business. But his gaze falls on Pete Piccolotti sitting in a booth with Vince Bonali’s sexpot kid and two others, including that tall guy he’s seen with little Angie before, and his grin withers away. Young Piccolotti runs his family grocery store and it was Georgie’s job today to do his fire inspector routine and hit the boy up on behalf of the mayor’s campaign. Pete told him bluntly what he thought of him, and it wasn’t nice. They got a gun to my head, Pete, I can’t do nothing about it. I just don’t want you to get in trouble. If you put me out of business, the kid said, you’d be doing me a favor. Now get the fuck outa here, dipshit. You’re making me sick. Georgie feels hated and misunderstood and wants to change his life. He’s a good guy, after all, and doesn’t deserve all this abuse. All right. Lem was pissed off about the car, but Georgie explained to him he had to swerve to avoid a little kid on a sled. Out on the Waterton road? At midnight? Yeah, with all that snow there was a whole slew of brats with sleds out there. No shit. What was Georgie doing on that road in the first place? I took a wrong turning because of the snow, Lem. The goddamn window wipers weren’t working. I couldn’t see a thing. That was when Lem picked up the crowbar.

Duke and his woman are really wound up. Something about her is familiar. Looks like she’s been around. Maybe he ran into her up in the city. Comb your hair and paint and powder, you act proud and I’ll act prouder, they’re hollering now. You sing loud and I’ll sing louder, tonight we’re settin’ the woods on fire! The only thing on fire is his crotch. Georgie gives his cooties a scratch, feeling murderous. Like Il Nasone said: halfway through life and what has he got that’s not infectious? His old lady was also a major disappointment, locking the screen door and yelling at him through it. Georgie let her know about all the big connections he’d made in town, how important he had become. But to get anything you had to grease some palms, she knew that, and he was only letting her invest in him. What was the matter? It was just a loan; she’d get it all back with interest. Sure, she said, when the goose pisses, and she told him she’d call the police if he ever turned up at the house again. By then she was screaming and all the neighbors were out on their porches. Vaffanculo, testa di cazzo! Mother love? Forget it. Tonight we’re havin’ fun, we’ll show the folks a brand new dance, that never has been done! Yes, he’d like to dance a new dance, but he can’t see how. He’s completely fucked. All he has left now in his vanishing life are a handful of old jokes that nobody’s laughing at anymore and his memories. Big Ruby, up in the city, bless her splendid creamy lipsticked ass. He thinks of her often. Should never have ditched her. And la bella Marcella. The only girl he ever really loved. The only one who ever understood him. He thinks about her now as he’s last seen her in that photo (he would have busted in and rescued her from that vicious bony-assed scuzzbag, but how could he have known?) and wishes she were with him. I need you, baby, he says. I know, she says, and gently takes his hand. “Hey, whaddaya doin’?” Steve asks.

Tommy Cavanaugh’s old pal and basketball teammate from high school, Pete Piccolotti, is unloading his woes. Business is bad, the supermarkets are eating him up, he’s deep in debt and no way out, that beat-up flunky over at the bar has been trying to shake him down on behalf of city hall, his family grocery store will probably get either closed down or torched, this town is shit, life is shit. Tommy is sympathetic, but he’s also thinking that’s what you get for sticking around here, man, and he’s been telling them about his own plans to avoid the family pressures and get a PhD in sociology and set himself up at a university somewhere far from here, travel around the world on research grants. That upsets Angela, he knows; she wants him right here and in the bank, but she’s trying not to show it and is instead rubbing his cock under the table to remind him of the blessings of hometown life and gushing about how cute the Piccolotti kid is. They are squeezed into a booth across the floor from the singers, he and Angie and Fleet and his wife Monica, who used to be a looker but isn’t now. The lips that used to thrill me so. Teeny Sabatini. Pete played point guard on their high school team, Tommy forward. Fleet and Kit, as they were known then. Fleet was a terrific passer, had great athletic moves, a good jump shot. He could receive a ball and shoot it all in the same move and seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. Though he wasn’t tall enough for the big time, he might have made a college team if Monica hadn’t got pregnant. A cautionary tale. He used to think of Pete as the smartest guy in high school, but the daily grind at the grocery store and getting married so soon, having a kid, have dumbed him down. And he has hardly smiled all night. Now he’s into a really awful rap about putrefaction, Angela having just said she felt so alive tonight, Fleet replying that actually she’s just a dead meat farm, nothing’s really so alive as decaying flesh, which is its natural state. And he goes on to describe all the bruised fruit, clotted milk, rotten tomatoes and raspberries with blue mold, black lettuce, mottled bananas, and stinking gray meat he has to throw out every day at the store, dumping it all in the garbage buckets out back so it can really ball. Monica finally tells him to shut up, he’s being morbid and spoiling the party.