Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

He’s just drying off, thinking about this, when Wayne Shawcross comes running in. “Ben! It’s the police! She ain’t here, but they’ve come to arrest Sister Debra!”

“They put a full-court press on Fleet, Dad. Fleet said Charlie picked up a pear and ate it with his mouth open while leaning on him. He was pretty sure Moron and Grunge and the others were pocketing other stuff from the store, but Charlie was wearing his brass knuckles and had all his attention. When he told Charlie the pear cost a quarter, Charlie tossed the core at him and told him to keep the change and try to keep his arms from getting broken.” They’re on the fifth green, Ted putting for a par. Tommy is understandably struggling with his swing today, trying to see with blackened eyes past his smashed and bandaged nose. They’re not keeping score. They’re having the conversation they missed at the Loin on Wednesday, when Tommy ended up in hospital. Tommy has been telling him now about a phone call he got from young Piccolotti after Charlie Bonali and his gang, including Concetta Moroni’s badboy son, visited his Italian grocery this afternoon, threatening him with dire consequences to body and business if he didn’t join his Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force and contribute to arming it. “They also call themselves the Dagotown Devil Dogs, Fleet said.”

“Devil dogs. Old wartime nickname for Marines. Probably reliving his days in the military.”

“Well, that’s another thing, Dad. Charlie was only in the Marines a few weeks before he went AWOL. Something Angela once told me. He ended up doing brig time and getting busted out with a dishonorable discharge.” Nick only said Charlie had military experience. But he must have known. When he gets back to the clubhouse, he’ll call Nick and Dee and demand Charlie’s immediate arrest. Now. You’ve got sixty minutes. Ted sinks his putt in spite of hitting it too hard, but after two tries and another long lie, Tommy gives up and picks his ball up.

“And that thing they have about the Corpse, it’s like they’re queer for each other, just like fucking priests and the corpse of Christ.” The ex — U.S. Marine recruit Charlie Bonali is treating members of his newly-formed Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force to afternoon beers in Hog’s Tavern, a dark little bar in the Italian neighborhood once popular with coalminers but now a little-used relic of times past. Hog Galasso has been dead for over a decade, but subsequent owners have seen no need to change the name, nor for that matter to clean it up or improve its reputation. The Hog is what it is, a local legend and landmark, scarred and rank and joyless. Charlie picks up his bottle and sucks long from it, looking like he might bite the top off and eat it, then signals for another. “They’re like a mob of sick monks who whip themselves all the time just to show how holy they are.” At the request of his enrapt younger comrades, Charlie, popping his knuckles for punctuation, is recounting his brief unhappy life in what he calls the “Marine Corpse” with its “little tin soldiers in toy uniforms.” “They’re always horsing around, grabbing each other, and the ones who don’t touch, they’re often the weirdest of them all, vicious little jerkoffs who get their kicks out of seeing other guys get their balls twisted. Killing for them is a kind of faggoty flirting with the Corpse. Trying to make out.” Charlie belches fulsomely, examines his fingernails, polishes them on his unbuttoned blue police shirt. He is being arrested today but only laughs about it. “For me, killing people is just a job. It’s no different from stepping on ants. And I like having a piece in my hands. Makes me feel like I am who I am. I’ve erased a few suckers, had to. That’s why I’m back here for a while. There was a hood on the south side of the city working for the Old Man who decided to set up for himself. He said he didn’t see any need to continue the partnership any longer, they could just be friends. So the Old Man sent me and some other guys in to waste him, make him a lesson for others. Now I got nothing against this motherfucker, it’s just a matter of politics and territory, like in the last war the old farts are always bragging about. The dude had trouble with piles, and he went to a private clinic every so often to get his asshole doctored. We ambushed him there, only it turned out he’d been expecting us and had brought a lot of artillery with him and we were the ones who got ambushed. The shit was really flying. Talk about getting your ass reamed! But one thing I’d learned from the Corpse was to stay cool and keep a steady finger. Soon as I saw the receptionist was not at her desk, I just ducked out of sight, snapped my Sten onto automatic, and then at the first lull, stepped back in and blew them all away. They were shooting back, but they missed. They were trying too hard, like the sarge used to say. Six of us went in there, but only three of us got out, and one of them was badly shot up. I carried him out on my shoulder and later him and the other guy told the Old Man all that had happened. I was a hero. I mean a real hero. Those candyasses back in the Corpse would have shit green to watch me. So I got a rep now, I got respect. The Old Man smiles when he sees me. The other big guys aren’t so sure. They think I might try to take their place someday.” Charlie smiles a crooked smile at the rigid glassy-eyed faces smiling back. “And, hell, they’re probably right.”

Reverend Konrad Dreyer of Trinity Lutheran, home from his pole-fishing excursion to the lakes with his two small sons (they have caught three little sunfish the boys will share at supper), is seated in a lawn chair in his sunny backyard, which is also the church’s backyard, a stack of books, his briar pipe, and a pitcher of fresh lemonade on the table beside him. The boys are off to the city swimming pool with his wife; he has this delicious late afternoon to himself. All around him: the green lawn he has nurtured, the flowers and fruit trees he has planted. Butterflies. Songbirds. The midsummer sun is still high in the sky and warm — warm enough for T-shirt and shorts, but not yet smotheringly hot as it soon will be in the weeks ahead. On his return from the lakes, his wife told him about the suicide of the shoe store man and said that Police Chief Romano called and wanted him to please call back, and he did so. Officer Romano said the deceased listed his religious preference as Lutheran and he wondered if the Reverend knew him or his family, as they were looking for possible surviving relations. Connie said, sorry, the man was not a member of his congregation and he did not know him. That’s not surprising, he was not known as a religious man, the police officer said, but he had received a request from the secretary of the United Mine Workers local asking if Trinity Lutheran could host a memorial service for the man as they regarded him highly and wished to honor his passing, and Connie said that they could and that they should call him personally to schedule it. During summer vacation time, activities at the church dwindle, it should not be a problem.

In tomorrow’s sermon, it is his intention to take on some of the more contentious issues being raised by faddish theologians: the death of God; the supposed fabrication of a Jesus who never was by way of ancient mystery cults and pagan spring deity myths; the invention of Christianity by Paul and the later gospel writers, none of whom knew Christ (if he existed); the contrary “truths” hidden in the Apocrypha, suppressed by the church fathers; Herod’s slaughter of the firstborn; the myth of John the Baptist; the “dubious” legends of the Virgin Mary, and so on. Thus his afternoon’s stacked reading. He will not argue separately against these naïve opinions but will rather contest the appropriateness of approaching the sacred by way of profane reasoning. In his early days at university as a philosophy major, before Augustine and Aquinas led him into theology and eventually the ministry, Connie, thinking he might have talent as a writer, took a memorable English course in which the professor convinced him that well-made fictions were true in ways that history and scientific formulae were not. Amusingly, the professor used the “Three Little Pigs” story as an example and actually made a kind of theology out of it. This concept of lies that were truer than truths corresponded nicely with his own belief in the “spirit” of history as opposed to history’s supposed facts and made him feel at one with what he was even then calling “the creative force of the universe.” It helped him to see that myths were not falsifications of history, but rather a special kind of language for grasping realities beyond time and space, realities of the eternal order, and to understand Christianity as the gradual shaping of a sustaining human vision, one impervious to the aberrations of history and the pretentious intrusions of misguided scholars. As such, it is true, even if it is not “true.”