Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Sixth tee. A climb to it from the green. One can see almost the whole course from up here — much of the old abandoned second nine just below, as well. They’d probably sell off that land if there was anyone to sell it to. After her flubbed first shot, she has still managed to reach the fifth green in fewer shots than her father, whose rage is building once more. Perhaps because the consoling hip flask is empty. Another long “gimme” has gotten them quickly off the green and up here. In the distance, one can just make out the Deepwater tipple and water tower, the top of the mine hill. Treasure Mountain. The foursome behind are growing impatient, leaning on their clubs as though in exasperation. Two holding up four. Her father hooks his drive into the rough again. “Heck fire,” he says, and without looking for his ball storms off down the hill toward the clubhouse over on the far side of the distant first tee. Sally tees up, swats the ball cleanly down the middle, her best drive of the day (does she turn to see if Tommy is watching? she does not), then follows her father clubward.

“Well, I think Dad’s offering her a one-way ticket, telling her that after the miracle she can swim back,” Tommy says.

“It’s that bad?”

“No, it’s that cool. He’s thoroughly pissed at what Mom has done and fed up with her religious yo-yoing, but he can see the humor in it, too.” They are talking about Irene’s fantasized pilgrimage to Lourdes. Sally wonders if they’d see the humor in his mother’s organizing an afterlife affair with one of her old college beaus. The Christian illusion of spending eternity with one’s nearest and dearest: it’s such a smalltown idea. As Grandma Friskin says, What’s wrong with Heaven is your damned neighbors. They are sitting at the bar in the country club’s Nineteenth Hole after the disastrous Jester-and-Goose-Girl-on-the-Links Day, her dad, barely able to stand, having been whisked away by her mother. Archie and Emily Wetherwax offered Sally a ride home later if she wanted to stay, and she did. One place Angela Bonali will never show up. Babs Wetherwax and her gum-popping high school friends are at a table by the window drinking Shirley Temples and casting long giggly glances their way, but they’re no threat. “And he’s pretty sure he’s going to get it all back and send a few people to jail at the same time.”

“I know. Your dad’s being awfully hard on Aunt Debra.”

“The preacher’s wife? Well, as I understand it, she sold church property and kept the money for herself. Most everywhere you go, that’s a crime.”

“I think she gave it to the cult.”

“Same difference.”

That she’s drinking beer at a bar alone with Tommy Cavanaugh is both fortuitous and the result of strategic planning. She borrowed the family car while her parents were at church and drove past the Cavanaugh house. Not only was the tangerine junker in the drive, the new college graduate himself was on the front porch having a late breakfast and listening to something with a big beat coming out of the living room. Babysitting his mom. Though Tommy’s welcome was underwhelming, he didn’t chase her off. In fact, he had a favor to ask. When his dad gets back from church, could she follow him out to Lem’s garage to turn in the rental, give him a ride back? His dad’s buying him a red Corvair convertible with white sidewalls as a graduation present and as consolation for not being able to travel to Europe this summer with some of his fraternity brothers, and he’s picking it up on Tuesday, the Lincoln available to him meanwhile as his dad has little use for it after tonight until an out-of-town business meeting on Thursday. Sally was feeling pretty grotty, still wearing the tee she slept in — her THERE’S A SUCKER BORN-AGAIN EVERY MINUTE shirt from her last ice cream parlor meet with Billy D — but she didn’t want to lose the opportunity. Anyway, they say that cleanliness is next to godliness, and she doesn’t really want to get that close. At the garage, after a ceremonial visit to the remains of Tommy’s mother’s wrecked station wagon, being harvested by Lem for parts, he and Tommy had a conversation about Carl Dean Palmers, Lem showing them Carl Dean’s burned-out van he’d been asked to haul away. “Fucking insane,” was Lem’s judgment about the burning of it. Yes, Lem said, he’d heard from Bernice the rumor about Carl Dean joining the bikers and doing bad shit at the camp before taking off, but he didn’t believe it. Not Carl Dean. Tommy said he didn’t believe it either, but later, riding back with her, he said he did. He also said he’d agreed to join his father in a round at the club this afternoon, which explained her own father’s gloomy gin-and-juice breakfast, he evidently having been bumped from his usual Sunday foursome slot by Tommy. So she decided it was time to do the father-and-daughter thing and ask him to teach her how to play the game, making him promise to stay off the sauce long enough to make it around the full nine — a promise he of course never kept. She showered, changed into shorts and a crisp white shirt — one of her dad’s old ones, only partly buttoned, no bra — and after the abbreviated golfing tragicomedy, here she is. “Well, a crime maybe. But not immoral.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Sure. Crimes are defined by lawyers and politicians. In some societies, ripping off the rich and institutions like churches is not a crime, it’s a public duty. Morality’s a private choice. The custom is to obey the law, but to defy the law can be a moral decision.”

“You think she did the right thing.”

Sally laughs. “No, a moral decision can also be a pretty stupid one.” She has been thinking about morality of late. The pursuit of aesthetic truth as a moral act. Concern with the trivial as immoral. Writing faults as moral failures. She’s aware that some people think of golf in the same way.

Tommy excuses himself to go, as he says, drain the radiator, leaving her with her notebook. She adds his expression to her scheisshaus list along with “shed a tear” and “squeeze the lemon.” On the way back from Lem’s garage this morning, Tommy wanted to know what the bad shit was, and though she probably shouldn’t have, Billy Don having asked her not to, she told him about the bikers and what they did. That was probably a moral lapse. What Tommy wanted to know when she told him was what was the girl doing there in the first place? You think it’s her fault, you mean? she snapped. She loves this guy? What’s going on? Of course, to be honest, she had wondered the same thing and asked Billy Don. He didn’t know.

Billy Don was more upbeat when they last met, another two-sundae lap-up day. Still a lot of gloom and apprehension in the camp, but he also had a funny story to tell this time about the night Darren discovered he was sleeping with a prairie kingsnake. He screamed and ran out of the cabin yelping that the Devil was after him, and that set off Colin next door, and they soon had the whole camp in a stir. One of the men killed the snake and then the camp cook calmed everybody down with milk and cookies. This happened just after they moved into their new cabin, which has given Billy Don a little more breathing space, for Darren now views himself as a prophet and is very full of himself, more obsessed and bossy than ever. Aunt Debra is evidently now helping Darren with his prophesying career, having come up with some quirky notions about the bikers and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse that people are taking seriously, and Darren is now treating her as something of a seer like Colin, who Darren believes is, in effect, specially wired for divine transmissions. Why it is that dangerous schizophrenics are so frequently taken as holy prophets, she replied, is one of those timeless mysteries of the fucked-up human race. She likes to use expressions like that because they always make Billy Don grin sheepishly and duck his nose in his ice cream, glancing about the drugstore nervously from under his brows to see if anyone else has overheard her. She showed him the invitation she’d received to Franny Baxter’s wedding and he said it was news to him. About all he knew about the Baxters was that they are said to be living in a field somewhere.