Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Enos Beeker, the hardware store owner, asks him now if he’d heard about Pat Suggs’ brain attack, and he tells them he’s just come from the hospital. “He’s out of intensive care and into a private room, but he has taken a crippling hit.” When Doc Lewis emerged from Suggs’ private room, Ted caught a glimpse of his former home care nurse, Bernice Filbert, dressed something like a World War I battlefield nurse, at Suggs’ bedside. Bernice started when she saw him and hurried to close the door again. He glared at her, smiling coldly, as though to suggest she’s in for it. And she is. Without Suggs’ help, she’s headed to prison for embezzlement and grand larceny. Burly plaid-shirted man with a thick black beard in there, too. Maudie, a nurse he knew from his own high school days, passed by and told him that was Mr. Suggs’ strip mine boss, Ross McDaniel. “Hardshell libertarian,” she said, inventing another sect. A cute freckle-faced kid back in school with a nice body who put out generously, something of a legend at the Baptist summer church camps out at No-Name, now as wide as she is tall, her dry hair thinning out, her freckles spreading. Still cheerful, though, as she always was, with a flair for the soap-operatic. Learned from her about the Collins girl. “When they brought her in, she looked like a skeleton with tissue-paper skin stretched over, and she’s still bad off. She’s trying to die. Has to be force fed.”

He passes on some of this to the klatch in Mick’s. Not all of it. Shaping the news to his purposes. Including in, including out. The way newspapers and news magazines work, inventing history. Something Miller said, some years ago. Probably in here, over a charred hamburger. He sure did that, damn him. His invented history is still being spun out. Miller did what he could to ruin this town and should have been tarred and feathered on his way out. Ted sometimes misses him, though.

Doc Lewis told him that Suggs had emerged temporarily from his coma, but the stroke was very severe. He asked if Ted knew of any surviving heirs. He didn’t. A complete loner, far as he knew. Pat is mostly paralyzed, he learned, though he can twitch his left hand. He can open and close his eyes, but his face is frozen and he has trouble swallowing. No speech, but all the involuntary behaviors are apparently functioning, and though it’s hard to be certain, deep down inside his insensible shell he still seems more or less alert. So far. As with earthquakes, there’s always the fear of aftershocks. Was he a heavy drinker? “He used to be pretty wild, but he got religion. Now I hear he’s a teetotaler.” Lewis nodded at that. “We’re starting rehab immediately, but the prognosis for recovery is not good.”

Rehab is what Main Street needs, too, but same prognosis. It’s a depressing sight out there. “We’ll have to get rid of those boarded-up shops for the visitors on the Fourth, Maury.” The mayor says sourly that it sounds like a job for the city manager. Ted expects that and ignores it. “Open them up free for craft and art shows, antique sales, club displays, get the shops that remain to put welcoming signs up for the holidays.”

“Dave Osborne’s already got started,” says Gus Baird, the travel agent and Rotary president. “I dropped in Saturday and found him braiding all the shoestrings in the store into a single long strand. Very colorful. Says he has a birthday coming up and he’s making decorations for the party. The strings are gone from all the shoes in the shop, including the ones in the window. Open boxes everywhere. Even the strings from the shoes he was wearing were gone.”

The klatch finds that pretty funny. Ted has known for some time that Osborne is in trouble. At the hospital this morning, he was thinking that if Suggs died he might try to acquire the strip mine operations and move Dave out there to manage them, mining being more in his line of work. But he’s evidently too late. He makes a mental note to drop by. He asks Mick for lemon meringue pie, hoping it’s less than a week old, and that causes another explosion of hee-hawing laughter. He asks what’s the joke and is told the story of Robbins getting slapped in the face with a slice of that pie by Prissy Tindle. Elliott clambers down off his stool to do a rubber-kneed hip- and head-wagging imitation of her performance, one hand on the bar to keep his balance. When he lets go to swing his hand through, he loses it. Hits his head on the way down, but doesn’t seem to feel it. “Hoo hah!” he says from beneath the stools. “Crazy stupid cunt,” Burt grumbles amid all the laughter. He still doesn’t see what was funny about it, but everyone else does, including Elliott, still braying down on the floor. Beeker says he saw Prissy driving through town with a long-haired beardy guy who must have been Wes Edwards, but you’d never have recognized him. “Dancing with the dork,” croons Gus Baird, rolling his eyes. Ted says his probable replacement, bright young fellow named Jenkins, would be here right after the Fourth. “We can put him up in the manse, Gus, get him used to his new home. His first pastorate. May take him a while to adjust.” Elliott meanwhile has been hauling himself laboriously to his feet, grunting and farting, and he gets a round of applause when he succeeds, which he acknowledges by raising his arms and falling to his ass again and having to begin all over.

When Tommy arrives home after work on Wednesday, feeling down, the old priest is just leaving. His mom’s latest holiness whim. Concetta and Rosalia are there, looking smug. He’s just had trouble at the pool with Concetta’s kid and his dickhead cronies. The town’s bummed-out failures. There used to be mines to send them into. Now the only occupation left is street bully. The girls like to pretend to be drowning so Tommy will come out and rescue them, hug them to safety with his arm around their bosoms. He has sometimes played along, good practice, until some of the guys started imitating them, falling into the pool and floundering about comically, crying out “Help! Help! Tommy!” in falsetto voices. He tells them he’s like God, it’s up to him who lives or dies, and they’re definitely not worth saving. Today, though, Moroni’s evil buddy, Grunge Grabowski, doing the falsetto routine, threw little Buddy Wetherwax into the deep end — and Buddy can’t swim. He dove in and dragged Buddy — snorting and choking and beating on him blindly with his little fists, protesting all the way that he didn’t need to be saved — over to the edge of the pool, where Babs, his big sister, squatted, waiting for him, her legs spread suggestively, a few curly auburn hairs peeking out at the swimsuit leg seams. So Tommy had to throw Moroni and his pals out. “Yeah? Let’s see you try, scumbag,” Moron snarled, cocking his fists, his buddies hovering close by. “Nah,” Tommy said. “Not my job. I’ll let the police do it. That’s what they’re paid for.” And he went over to the emergency phone on the pole next to the lifeguard chair. With that, Moroni and his gang left, but not before Moron threatened to be waiting for him when he left the pool. He could handle Moroni, but probably not all of them, so he went ahead and called Chief Romano to tell him there might be trouble, it would be good to have someone just hanging around at closing time, and old Monk Wallace turned up and slouched at the fence, eyeing the girls and spitting into a tobacco tin.

“What’s up with the priest, Mom?” He and his father both like Concetta’s cooking and neither really care what religion his mother adopts next. There’s no more money to squander, she can fly off to Heaven by any route she chooses. Tolerant flexibility is one of the advantages of being a Presbyterian. The priest has left behind a faint musty old man smell. “Been showing him your photo albums?”