Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Out on the Bonali front porch, Angela’s father, headachy after the late afternoon beers, is talking into the gathering night with Sal and Gabriela Ferrero, mostly about their early married years, and about their working days down in the mine, how tough and dirty it was, Gabriela remembering when Sal would come home with his shoes full of coaldust and looking like a colored man, but how heroic and full of camaraderie those days were, too, and how they are missed now. They have also been talking about Dave Osborne, who hanged himself today, and their pal Big Pete Chigi, who died of black lung, and poor dear Etta, the town’s dead hovering over them as if peering down on them from the chalky face of the moon, and Vince has been reminded of his old high school, mine, and union buddy, Angelo Moroni, how he used to wear his hat tipped down over his nose when he played pinochle, cracking wry one-liners, maybe it’s the tipped lopsided shape of the moon that has brought him to mind, poor old Ange, killed in the mine that awful night like so many good men. And now the foreclosure on this house, the only one he’s ever owned, the one Etta loved so much, he’s getting near to tears again. “Next stop, Sal: a charity old folks’ home. Good night, sweetheart. That’s all she wrote.”

This old family friendship is being perpetuated into the next generation tonight by the two friends’ sons: Vince’s boy Charlie and young Nazario, known to his pals as Moron, who are, along with a half dozen or so other members of Charlie’s newly formed Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force, on a reconnaissance mission at old man Suggs’ strip mine, where the Christian Patriots (fascists!) are holding their bi-weekly pep session, parade drill, and target practice under the instruction of Suggs’ black-bearded mine manager, who sleeps, it is rumored, under a Nazi flag. The Dagotown Devil Dogs, as they also call themselves, have climbed one of the ugly mounds thrown up by the strip mine and are watching the Patriots through a pair of binoculars they pass around. Charlie points his finger at them and makes soft thuckety-pop noises, which Moron and his buddies assume must be the sound of a revolver with a silencer on it. With hushed pow! and pock! sounds they follow Charlie’s lead and knock off a few Christian Patriots with their pointing fingers. When the sheriff comes banging out of the mine office and jumps into his squad car, the Dogs fade coolly into the night.

If it is a night of sudden death and dark omens, it is also a night of erotic festivity. The ecumenical stag party up at the Eagles is now in full swing and has been joined by another dozen or so revelers, few being of a mood on such a sweet summery night to say no to free whiskey and good-humored horseplay. Carlo Juliano has provided an old blue movie about a guy in an antique Model A Ford picking up two girls hitchhiking, but the film has come apart just as the girls were taking their pants down, so they are entertaining themselves by telling about the first time they got laid. High school virgins, Waterton whores, babysitters, stepsisters, friends’ mothers. Georgie Lucci makes up a story that he swears is true about a nymphomaniac nun who took him under her habit when he was eleven years old to show him what she called the pearly gates and insisted on his reciting the Pater noster when she took a grip on him and transported him into Heaven. Just when memories and imaginations are drying up, laconic Cokie Duncan, who has said very little all night while nevertheless holding his own with the bottle, surprises them with a story about taking a sweet young thing out into the fields and just as he’s humping her having her mother show up. “Haw!” snorts Stevie Lawson, slapping his knee. “What’d she say?” “Nuthin. She just went on eatin’ grass.” Which sets everyone off in drunken mooing. They’re having a grand time.

Soon they’ll be moving on to the Blue Moon Motel, where Duke L’Heureux and his partner Patti Jo Rendine, backed up on guitar by the local favorite Will Henry, are at this moment introducing, to enthusiastic cheers in a packed house, a new number written by Duke just this afternoon called “She’ll Let Me Know When It’s Time to Go.” All Duke’s and Patti Jo’s songs have gone down well tonight—“There’s Always a Bus Going Somewhere,” “A Toybox of Tears,” “Trailer Camp Blues,” “The Potholes Down Memory Lane”—and the record company people have taut knowing smiles on their faces, but the hit of the night is “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” which may or may not ever get sold over the counter. No one has ever heard a song like that before — not in a public place. They don’t know if they like it, but they keep asking for it over and over again, as if they can’t believe their ears.

A quieter sort of celebration of the solstice is taking place in the Presbyterian church basement, where Prissy Tindle, after a quick visit home to freshen up and pick up costumes and props and her portable record player and the little rabbit-ear TV from the studio (Ralph was more petulant than ever, she had to push him aside to get into her closet), is mentally choreographing her advertised midsummer night special: The Dance of the Wedding of Heaven and Earth, hoping, after chasing Wesley all over town today, she has strength enough left to perform it. It was originally meant to be performed in the wild by moonlight, but it’s now restricted to their hideout down here in the church basement by candlelight. It’s an all-night dance (though on such a night as this that’s not so long), and while Wesley and Jesus converse quietly but grumpily about the circumstances in which they find themselves, Prissy blocks out the main elements in roughly fifteen-minute segments and considers ways to enhance the performance space, which is mostly a cluttered concrete floor with bare walls, no mats and no mirrors, about which lack Jesus has already complained, whining wearily. It has been a long day for the poor man and his eyes are crossing, so she shortcuts her way to the finale (a majestic moment) so as to get started as quickly as possible, assuming her knack for improvisation will carry her through the unscored middle bits or maybe they’ll just skip them. She is, of course, Earth, and he is Sky or Heaven, which means she will be obliged to dance the climactic scene on her back, so she sets out some dusty sofa cushions for the purpose. But first comes the Setting Sun and Rising Moon Dance, and, using the “Grand Canyon Suite” for dramatic effect and then “Claire de Lune” as a soothing closing movement (she has a yin/yang thing in mind here), she pours into it all the terrors and joys of the day, for the sun and moon also chase themselves about in a fiery manner, never quite finding each other. It is one of her best dances ever, but she succeeds only in dancing her audience and dance partner to sleep just at the most poignant moment, when his own participation is called for. Well, in a way, it’s a relief. She rolls him over on his side to diminish the snoring, and regretting only that she forgot to bring a couple of jars of pickles and peanut butter to get her through the night, curls up beside him, dancing the Dance of the Exhausted Disciple.

Exhaustion has also at last dropped Debra Edwards into a heavy sleep in her hospital bed, that and strong medication. Worried about her unresponsive state of mind, Police Chief Dee Romano called the minister at Trinity Lutheran, which he understood from Officer Bo-sticker was the church being attended temporarily by the pastorless Presbyterians, and said he was sorry to bother him again, but would he be willing to come down to the station to provide some urgent spiritual counseling? Of course. Reverend Dreyer took one look at the woman there on the wretched jail-cell cot and said she was obviously suffering from dangerously deep depression and should be kept in hospital overnight, where she can be kept under medical observation. Her dreams there are of dreaming, with Glenda Oakes sitting at the edge of her dreams like a dark angel and commenting cruelly on them even as she dreams them, so she keeps trying to wake up to be free of the one-eyed harpie, but she cannot. Down the hospital corridor from her, Mr. John P. Suggs — who does not dream, as he says — is suffering his own kind of nightmare: he is trying to think. He has the sensation of being in a large empty house with hundreds of locked closet-sized rooms for which he has no key. Brute strength alone frees him from any one room, only to leave him in another exactly like the first. Bernice Filbert, sitting nearby in a lumpy hospital easy chair, dozing fitfully, can feel his struggle and it translates into her own fragmented dreams as its opposite: the desire to push herself down into sleep, free from the cares of the world; but those cares resist her and will not let her go.