Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Y’figger the Lord’s had anything to do with it?”

“He has to do with everthing. All what signs they are — in people’s hands, their dreams, Mabel’s cards or tea leaves — is jist misty windas into God’s mind. Who’s thunka everthing already on accounta He’s perfect’n all-knowin’. It’s all been worked out. Back when time begun.”

“What about this purty little part down here? Is that a winda into God’s mind, too?”

“Has to be. It all is. Think y’kin read it?”

“It says your heart line’n fate line is seriously crossed up, but it don’t matter none on accounta how splendrous it is.”

“Yes. And how sad.”

“Don’t see that part. But here, lemme use my tongue’n turn a page…”

“Oh…!” We are, she thinks, making darkness our home tonight, and a warmth creeps through her, and another shudder. “Yes…”

“It’s suppertime. Hungry?”

“No…”

When Sally Elliott suggested they bring their pizzas out here to the lakes, Billy Don had no objections. Neither did he object to the two six packs of cold beer Sally picked up at the liquor store around the corner. They took Sally’s folks’ car rather than his old pea-green Chevy, which they left parked at a broken meter back in Tucker City to save Billy Don gas money, and he appreciated that. He has appreciated everything. It’s a gorgeous evening, sliding easily into twilight. The lake water is unruffled and the birds are singing and the crickets are doing their hiccuppy thing and the pizza is delicious and he’s pretty sure he is in love, though he’s new to the idea. Probably she could kick him in the shins and he’d appreciate that, too. He has filled her in on the arrest of her aunt Debra, which upset Sally a lot, and her sadness made her seem prettier somehow. Behind a man’s frayed white shirt, open down the front and buttoned at the cuffs as protection against the mosquitoes, she is wearing a T-shirt tonight that says GIVE ME A HUG — I’M AT THAT AWKWARD STAGE BETWEEN BIRTH AND DEATH. He’d like to do that and maybe he will if it’s not too late (it probably is, darn it), but she jokes a lot and he’s not sure she really means it, and he’s even less sure she means it for him. She’s friendly, but not friendly in that way, though maybe it’s just the way she is with everyone and she really likes hugging and is trying to tell him so and he should stop being such a coward. It would help if she wasn’t so smart. Tonight it has been how any dumb notion, no matter where it comes from and especially if it can be pictured, can become what she called a motif (he asked her to spell it) and then get borrowed and used around the world, notions like messenger birds and human sacrifice and magical virgins and holy mountains, which become the common currency of religions everywhere and contribute to the universal madness. Not everything catches on, of course. Back in the Dark Ages, she tells him, they used to celebrate midsummer with cat-burning rituals, and those aren’t so popular anymore. When he tried to change the subject to something more in the hugging line by remarking that he felt like tonight was almost like living in a dream, Sally said that, yes, life was a kind of dream all right, but it’s mostly a dream dreamt by others — the hard thing being to figure out how to wake up. He had told her about Glenda Oakes’ dream interpretations, more or less in the same clumsy sentence, and she said that’s what preachers and theologians were: charlatan dream interpreters.

Now, over pizza and beer at the lakeside picnic table, listening to the crickets and birds, distant boat motors, the occasional floating voices out on the lake, the dry crackle of firecrackers at other picnics, he has shown her Darren’s latest newsletter to the church membership. It’s the copy intended for Reverend Hiram Clegg, which he plucked out of the bagful before mailing them this afternoon. Reverend Clegg has problems of his own right now and is probably even in jail, so they may not even have the right address. “Sometimes I think Darren is completely crazy,” he says, watching Sally read, squinting in the dimming light, “and sometimes I think he’s the only one who knows.”

“Right the first time, Billy D,” she says around a mouthful of pizza and she punches open another can of beer. He sips his slowly, it being the first he’s had since before Bible college; Sally has just finished off, with a wink, her third one. When she calls him Billy D, he doesn’t know if that’s a putdown or a come-on. “The ‘remarkable prophecies of the brilliant young visionary evangelist Darren Rector’ as revealed in all modesty by the brilliant young visionary himself.”

“Well, the letter is from Mrs. Collins. Or, you know, that’s what…”

Sally only smiles, lights up another cigarette, sets it on the edge of the table, and takes another bite of pizza, and with a happy shrug, so does he, trying to keep his moustache out of the melted cheese, and he also finishes off his beer and reaches into the ice for another one. He’s sure she wants him to hug her. “Darren is living in the realm of the supernatural,” she says. “The natural has dying in it, the supernatural doesn’t, it’s as simple as that. Dying is too much for most people. So what are you going to do if you don’t live in the majority’s crazy made-up world? Steer clear if you can and duck when they have guns in their hands. Speaking of which, any more attacks on the camp?”

“No, but everybody’s pretty nervous. Including me. I had the watch last night with Welford Oakes and he said he thought he heard something and told me to sit tight until he got back. I suddenly heard all kinds of noises and thought I saw a whole army creeping around out there in the trees and I mighta fired off a shot but I was hunkered down behind a thick bush and didn’t want them to know where I was. Besides, it mighta been Welford. I thought he’d never come back, and when he did he was smoking and humming to himself and said it was just some animal, rooting around down in the vegetable patch.”

Sally is laughing. He likes to hear her laugh, even when she’s laughing at him. It’s a lot better than making him feel like an idiot just because he’s a Christian. “Would you ever shoot someone?” she asks.

“I think I already did. Just buckshot in his rear, though.”

“Got him while he was running away, hunh?”

“Well, I didn’t know that. It was dark and the bullets were flying and I was hiding behind a tree and shooting backwards over my shoulder.”

Sally laughs again (that wasn’t exactly true, but he wanted to hear her laugh), takes a long drink, then belches noisily like a boy. “Whoo!” she says, and belches again. “I think I need some powdered toenails!”

“What?”

“Powdered toenails. Just the thing for heartburn. Grandma Friskin told me. Like chewing the bark of a tree struck by lightning when you have a toothache and eating twenty crickets with wine to cure asthma.”

“I guess that would cure most anything.” He’d like to know what works for a near-fatal case of raw throbbing horniness. Well, he knows what works…

“Mmm. Listen to the little buggers sounding off. It’s like a mass protest. Maybe they think we took their name in vain.” He’s trying to figure out how to get back to the hugging idea, when Sally rubs out her butt on the sole of her sneaker, scuffs it into the earth, lights up another, and says, “Best folk-wisdom healer of all, though, is water. Especially on a night like tonight. A midsummer night’s dip heals everything.”

“Like baptism,” he says. “Another, what you call it, motif.” The word feels funny in his mouth but he’s glad he can say it.

“Right on, Billy Don. So what do you say, after it gets dark, just for our health, we go for a little skinny dip?”