Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Huh, gotta be the bad one,” Cheese replies with his usual loose grin, feeling vaguely threatened by something beyond his ken but wondering at the same time if there might be some fun to be had in this, a story to carry with him to Waterton as entertainment for the girls. As an old carny barker uncle who took up preaching as a hustle once told him: Jesus Christ, buster, is the hottest fucking freakshow on the midway. Always envied that uncle; his women, his money. “Ain’t never been a good nuthin nor never aimed t’be.”

“A wise choice,” this alley Jesus says, dropping his skirt and wheeling blearily around to look him over. How did he get so tanked without pockets? He must have a tab somewhere or else he has generous friends. Maybe he could tap into that. “The good thief got locked up for eternity inna Holy Kingdom, a bitter fate. You don’ want that.”

“Hellfire, no,” he agrees, and spits through the gap in his teeth. His preacher uncle laid the whole Jesus story on him, at least the hairier bits, though Cheese remembers only the parts about the flood and the animals, the lady who got screwed by a bird, and then the weird zombie act at the end, which his uncle said was the real zinger and key to his good fortune. People are scared to die, he said, and they’ll cough up anything if they think they can get out of it. He recalls nothing about thieves, but the Jesus character did gather a gang around him, and who knows what they got up to?

Chester is about to suggest, somewhat in jest, that, if Christa-mighty has no objection to a little healthy thieving, they ought to pal up, when the guy, with a wicked grin, says much the same thing (Cheese feels like the fly is open on his brain), declaring they could be “laborers together for God” against “iz ’bominable pit of c’ruption inna pois’nous grip of the moneylenders.” Cheese can go along with that to the extent he understands it, but, holy shit, what the guy wants to rob is the bank. “Come along now! Returning to the people whuzz rightly theirs is not theft! Follow me!”

Against his better judgment, which is generally about the same thing as his worst judgment, he does so, and is led by way of the alleys into the back door of the downtown hardware store. Everyone is either out there among the crowds on the street or on the phone in the office — the store is at their disposal — but before Cheese can fill his pockets with some items of his own, his partner loads him up with a gallon can of black paint, picks up a wide house-painting brush and a screwdriver, and marches him out again. Weaving along tipsily in his golden slippers, he leads them right out onto the sunny street and over to the bank corner, where he pops the lid on the can Cheese is holding with the screwdriver, dips the brush in (“I know, I know, be not anxious!” he mutters, though it’s not clear who he’s talking to) and commences to write across the bank wall and window: HE HATH SWALLOWED DOWN RICHES, AND HE SHALL VOMIT THEM UP AGAIN! He steps back, admiring his authorship, sticks the brush back in the paint. Cheese is a slow reader and is still trying to puzzle it out when he is grabbed by the town cops, Monk Wallace and Louie Testatonda. The drunk is gone. There’s a crowd around, whooping it up, some calling his name.

“Hey, it wasn’t me!” he protests. “It was fuckin’ Jesus Christ!”

“Sure it was,” says fat Louie, gripping his nape like you might a cat.

“And you’re fuckin’ George Washington!” says Monk, handcuffing him.

Never mind. They’re applauding him. He’s a hero of sorts.

Now she can’t stop throwing up. It’s okay. She wants everything that’s inside to come out anyway, no matter how much it hurts. Something has got into her, something evil, and she has to punish the body that let it in in hopes it can be driven away. It’s her own fault, she knows that. Even her Pa has abandoned her in her wickedness. Elaine used to talk daily with her Pa, but she is no longer worthy of him. She prays to him and to Jesus and to God, but she hears her prayers in her head like empty echoes. She must go looking for him and beg his forgiveness. If he loves her, and she believes he does — he must —he will forgive her. But to do that, she first has to die. Only it’s so hard. Elaine has come to realize that crossing over is the hardest thing in the world. The sinful body just keeps fighting back. Her Ma is in the room with her. Her Ma’s husband Ben. A nurse. Also the camp nurse. She hates them all, but she knows that the hatred in her heart is not her own, for there is a badly damaged self buried deep inside that loves them more than anything. There is also someone or something else in the room. She can’t quite see it. It’s a kind of shadowy hotness. She hopes it is Jesus or maybe her Pa, but she does not think it is. She thinks it is something horrible. That it is just waiting for her to die, unprotected. Unhealed, unsaved. And therefore unable ever to see her Pa again. Only the camp nurse knows what is really happening and she tells her quietly in her ear what she must do: There is something bad inside her and she must get strong enough that they can get it out while there is still time. Elaine understands: She must eat to die. If it makes her sick, that is only part of her martyrdom; she will welcome it. The thing inside her is resisting furiously, but, with a nod, she agrees to do whatever the camp nurse wants.

Things that get inside and change everything. Love, for example. Or something like love but less than it and worse than it. The palm reader Hazel Dunlevy sits alone, Mrs. Edwards having taken Colin for a ride, on a little wooden stool in the middle of the sunny vegetable garden staring, somewhat terrified, upon the earth’s ripe vegetal wantonness. Animals, too, they just go at it, can’t help themselves. Those flies: in midair. Men and women are caught between pure divine love and the sinful love that drives all nature. But even God’s love can be excessive, can’t it? Just look what He did to Mary. Is that a sacrilegious thought? She knows he is there before he speaks. A kind of shadow, not his own, that goes wherever he goes. “Well, lookie here,” he says. “It’s little Miss Muffet…all by her lonesome…”

Things that get inside and change everything. Fear. Appetite. The love of Jesus. Of Satan. Of Mammon. For Ben, it is unassuageable rage that has invaded him. Some might say that it is a holy rage and he sometimes wishes it might be, but he does not think that it is holy. It is a hellish black thing that fills him up, fattening itself on all that he once knew himself by. Blinding him, shutting up his ears. But there is nothing he can do except pray and have faith that God will not desert him in his darkest hour. Sitting beside poor little Elaine’s bed, suffering her suffering, he made his mind up. Or it was made up for him. By what got inside. Now, after he drives Clara back to the Wilderness camp to get Elaine’s room ready, he has work to do. The things he has to make he has used but has never made, but the principle is simple. Along the road back to camp, there are a lot of illegal roadside fireworks barns popping up, as usual this time of year. Never been legal, but nobody does anything about it. Should find something in one of them that can be made to work.

“So many things has gone so wrong,” Clara says, as much to herself as to him. “I didn’t never imagine it to turn out this way.”

“No.” Clara’s faith is still intact, as is his, but her will is being tested. And her strength. It’s like something vital has been sapped right out of her. She cries a lot more now, moves more slowly, often with her head down, is tired all the time. The latest bad news is that Hiram and Betty Clegg have been arrested in Florida and charged with something like what got Sister Bernice and Sister Debra in trouble. Has to do with that dead woman’s estate. Mrs. McCardle. Hiram got hold of it through the doddery husband, somehow, but it turns out there are children, and they have brought legal action against them and the church. And it looks like only some of the money ever reached the church. Something has got into Hiram, too. “What does Ely say?”