Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Not much. Italian Americans. With money. I think one of them is from a family that used to live here twenty, thirty years ago.”

“What family is that?”

“I’ll ask.”

“Unh-hunh. Nick, did the Roma Historical Society have anything to do with the hiring of Charlie Bonali?”

A guy comes in. Vaguely familiar. He’s wearing some kind of scarlet desert smock with blue robes. He announces himself as Jesus. Yeah, that’s probably who he looks like all right. “Son of God? That one?”

“Verily, my friend. The same yesterday, and today, and forever. All hail. But what is this? None of your shoes have laces!”

“Yeah, it’s a kind of plague. One your old man didn’t think of.”

“I count it more a parable, whose meaning as yet escapes me, though I will search for it.” Jesus points down at his feet, one sandaled, one bare. “Behold my feet,” he says.

“First thing I noticed when you came in.” Dave shows him one of his hand-painted CLOSING DOWN SALE signs, not yet up on the front door. “Perfect timing. First two pair free today.”

“I was hoping only to match the one I have.”

“All out. There’s been a run on those things. My entire stock got wiped out in a single day. Must be the weather. But I may have just the ticket. What size is your foot?”

He lifts the bare one to look at it. “I’m not sure. It belongs to someone else. But nine and a half, I’d judge.”

“I think you need to wash that foot, no matter who it belongs to.”

“Well, it has had no rest. If you will wash it, my friend, I will make you a disciple, for he that humbleth himself shall be exalted, as I myself, in a foreign tongue, have been erroneously quoted as saying.”

“That’s mighty generous, pal. I appreciate your pitch, but it’s not my line of work. Nor discipling neither, which is strictly against my principles. But, here, try these on. What do you think?”

Not far away, in the city firehouse, Georgie Lucci is pleading with the fire chief: “C’mon, Mort. Be a buddy, goddamn it. Lemme drive the engine in the big parade.”

“With your record, Georgie, I wouldn’t let you drive my kid’s tricycle, if I had a kid and he had a tricycle, which, thank God, I don’t and he don’t.”

“Is that a long way round of saying yes, Mort?”

They are drinking Mort Whimple’s double-strength coffee, Georgie sweetening it with the hair of last night’s mutt. Another big one tonight: Stevie Lawson’s bachelor party. Have to get braced for it. They’ve already dipped into Steve’s sister-in-law’s gift to them, which accounts for this morning’s hangover, but there’s plenty left. They’d hoped to book the Blue Moon Motel for the party, but he and Steve have been banned from there and they’ve got bouncers now, and besides, they’re dead broke and limited to the bottles of cheap rye supplied by Tessie, so it’s a B.Y.O.B. drift about town tonight. At least they’ll be welcome wherever they go.

Mort fills him in on all the raunchy new songs those hillbillies have been singing out at the Moon, songs about whoring in buses and trailer camps, a jukebox-killer sex maniac, and a new one called “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” which Mort says so shocked the locals they couldn’t even clap or hoot afterwards, they all just sat there with their jaws gapping. But after a moment of dead silence everybody started hollering for them to sing it again. “The old beauty I was with started blubbering and couldn’t stop, like it had just happened to her. I never heard nothing like that before, not in mixed company.”

“That’s pretty wild,” Georgie says, sucking up coffee and wondering if he can hit Mort up for a plate of bacon and eggs over at Mick’s. The pressure’s off him now that the mayor has canceled his reelection campaign in the Italian neighborhood, but it also means most of the commissions have dried up. “I gotta hear that.”

“Well, tune in the radio tonight. They’re going live. Some big-ass record company is turning up. They’re headed for the big time.”

When Vince Bonali sees Sal Ferrero arriving with a bag of eggs and a plucked chicken, he nearly breaks into tears again, so he lurches to his feet, bites down on the cigar, and growls: “Hey, Sal. What the hell. Come for the goddamn wake?”

“Yeah, soon as I heard, Vince. That’s rotten news. What’s up anyway?”

“Oh, nothing special. Angela’s fired and probably knocked up, Charlie’s suspended and may get sent to the pen, and the bank’s taking my fucking house away. I’m out on the street, Sal. Other than that…”

“Jesus, don’t cry, Vince. Look, I’ve brought some eggs. Had any breakfast?”

“Lard on stale bread, Sal.” He’s not talking, he’s croaking. “You can’t beat that at the Ritz.”

“Well, come on then, buddy, let’s scramble up the eggs. I also snuck out some bacon. I’m starved.”

At the stove, stirring the eggs with a fork while Vince brews up a pot of weak coffee from the last grains in the can, Sal says: “Listen, Vince, I can take out another loan on my house, and me and Gabriela, we can cover you for a few months and see if we can’t get this sorted out.”

“No, it’s not the mortgage. They’re after me, Sal. I won’t let them drag you down too.”

“Well, at least let me talk to Gaby’s cousin Panfilo. He’s a pretty good lawyer. Maybe he can fight this thing.”

“For free?”

“Sure, for free.”

Though he knows nothing will come of it, that somehow cheers him up, and he carries his coffee and plate of bacon and eggs out to the porch, feeling like he’s getting control of his life again. This is my house, asshole. My whole life is in it — just try to take it away.

Dreamers often remark on the vividness of their dream worlds, which are not perceptions but are very much like perceptions (where does all that stuff come from?), and at the same time on their instability, their dissolving boundaries, their lack of continuity. John P. Suggs is not a dreamer, as he has often said, but were he, he might describe his waking life as like one. Lights come and go. Sounds and talk make little or no sense; it’s like spinning a radio dial. The people at his bedside fade into one another. His personal nurse will be speaking to him in her yattery way and she will grow a beard and become his surly mine manager. This is not what really happens — he knows that, he’s not crazy — but it’s the way his damaged mind is processing the random fragments that it registers. His own thoughts are no better. He hears himself thinking things he doesn’t understand himself. He’s never quite asleep, nor awake, either. But he has these moments of lucidity, and he has to use them. He and the camp nurse — she’s not completely stupid — have worked out a rudimentary eye-blink code. Voiceless, he must act; there is much he must do, and the only action left him is instruction. He waggles his working finger, his call for attention. She pulls a chair up to his bedside with pencil and paper in hand.

Down the corridor from Mr. Suggs and beyond the double doors in the women’s wing, Clara Collins-Wosznik slumps despondently outside her daughter’s room, consulting with the doctor on his morning rounds. He talks too fancy for her troubled mind, but she nods her head at whatever he says. While he is talking, they wheel a dead body by, sheeted head to toe. Clara says a little prayer for the dead person, for herself, for Elaine. Were the doctor not here, she would drop to her knees. So much sadness in God’s world. It is getting her down. She has been able to resume her leadership duties at the camp, working several hours a day in the office in and around trips to the hospital, catching up on the budget and inventory and essential letter-writing, restoring all the weekly practices such as Bible study and Evening Circle, which had somewhat dropped away in her absence, and meeting with all the people out there individually to plan out the rest of the summer, but the old energy and concentrated attention are not there. She feels like a prisoner of her own creation, able to do what’s demanded of her but no more. It’s still only morning and she’s dead tired. She knows it’s just from worrying and told the doctor so when he remarked that she did not look well and would she like to visit him for a check-up, maybe some blood tests, an X-Ray? She said she didn’t have time; she’d pick up again soon enough when Elaine started getting better. What she’s most distressed about this morning is that the poor child has been put back on the feeding tube again, her hands strapped to her sides, ankles in shackles, head in a kind of brace, and that ugly coiling thing snaking out of her nose like her innards are being pulled out through her nostrils. It is an image to rival the worst of the punishments of the Last Judgment. Ben, who has been somewhat distracted and not his old easygoing self, said in the office last week that maybe they just ought to spare her this suffering and leave it all in God’s hands, that they can’t keep on feeding her that way forever. She was upset by this and told him so, though she knew he was in deep pain, loving the child as if she were his own, and fearing for her. Truth be told, Clara has had similar thoughts and did not object when they stopped using the tube for a time to see if Elaine would go back to feeding herself or at least allow herself to be fed, and she was not sure she wanted the tube back if she didn’t. There’s a nurse out here who has been able to talk to the girl a mite and she did get a few spoonsful down her, but then Elaine clamped her jaws shut and that was that.