Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Tommy Cavanaugh’s hastily assembled, ragtag West Condon Fourth of July parade turns the corner out of Third, nearly two hours late, and heads up Main Street in the glittering sunlight toward the patient citizenry. Not much to do in this town. This is something to do. They can wait for it. Sally steps out of her “Four Freedoms” tee shop to watch it go by and wave a manikin limb at Tommy. Leading it is the West Condon mayor, riding in the back seat of Tommy’s bright red convertible, the expression on his face that of a man listening to a dirty joke. He is accompanied by a supporting convoy of other area bigwigs and followed by a marching band of high school kids — long on drums, short on horns — tootling away at what is probably supposed to be “Stars and Stripes Forever,” or maybe it’s the high school marching song or even “White Christmas.” Next comes the heaving and yawing “New Opportunities for West Condon” float with young girls in swimsuits hanging on for dear life, and behind it whooping police cars, ambulances, and fire engines, and finally all the marching groups Tommy has lined up, some with their own drum corps, from churches, unions, civic and social clubs, businesses, scout troops and sewing circles, including an armed mob carrying a CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS banner and some Italian neighborhood heavies led by Angie Bonali’s uniform-shirted brother Charlie, who busted Tommy’s nose and is supposed to be in jail but isn’t. They also have a banner: KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS VOLUNTEER DEFENSE FORCE, it says. Also armed. People with childish ideas and grown-up weapons out to ruin the world. Tommy told her he had talked the sheriff into riding a white horse in the parade, but apparently he chickened out. Or maybe the horse did after seeing the sheriff. She once read in a pop psych book that parades were scarcely disguised representations of thrusting penises, drum majorettes at the tip wearing high plumed hats like French ticklers and twirling their batons in cocky foreplay, but on this dead street that would amount to a kind of necrophilia.

The corpse, however, is well-dressed for the occasion, with tricolor litter bins, ribbons on the lampposts, flags hanging from shop fronts, and a red-white-and-blue stripe down the middle of the street. Even the potholes have been filled in, if only with loose gravel. Sally has helped clean up and paint the empty Main Street stores for this weekend of rent-free entrepreneurialism, mostly taken up for rummage and bake sales, so-called arts and craft shows, charity drives, and town boosterism displays, and she has claimed this old once-bustling women’s clothing store for her own showroom, celebrating freedom from pulpit, flag, marketplace, and FROM THE CULTURE OF WILLFUL IGNORANCE — which more or less includes everything else and is the theme of her current work-in-progress. This she has reshaped into “Living with the Cretins,” in which she describes the town and nation beyond as a vast terminally Christianized loony bin, entering it into the first annual West Condon Fourth of July essay contest. The only other entry, no doubt at Tommy’s urging, was by that dweeb Babs Wetherwax, “Why I Love My Country.” Ah yes, let me count the ways. Sally got second prize, which was more than she expected even with the limited submissions. Boobs will read her winning essay at the bank-sponsored Independence Day picnic this afternoon; Sally has not been invited to do so, but she may read her own anyway.

On the shop walls and in the front window, she has pinned up hand-printed poster-sized quotes from the Founding Fathers — Jefferson, Adams (THIS WOULD BE THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, IF THERE WERE NO RELIGION IN IT), Washington, Franklin, Madison — and such patriots as Tom Paine and Albert Einstein and Susan B. Anthony and Ambrose Bierce, all gathered for her Cretins essay, plus her own notebooked gems of wisdom (THE ENLIGHTENMENT: WHO HIT THE OFF-SWITCH?), even a few of her fiction fragments (literature! yay!). She put all her old unwashed T-shirts up for sale (once published, you don’t repeat yourself), spreading them out on tables made of planks on sawhorses, and inked up some new ones for the occasion, including variations on her Four Freedoms and ones bearing messages like Mark Twain’s SACRED COWS MAKE THE BEST HAMBURGER and H. L. Mencken’s DEEP WITHIN THE HEART OF EVERY EVANGELIST LIES THE WRECK OF A CAR SALESMAN. The clothing store used to have a bargain basement where her mom always shopped and down there in the murk she found some broken manikins — headless torsos, loose heads, scattered hands and feet — and she used them in the window to model her shirts. Filthy creatures and grotesquely battered, but perfect for the occasion. She put the heads on the floor of the window, chins propped by their feet and gazing up admiringly (or abashedly, who could tell?) at the headless bosoms in their amazing tees, and she twisted the waists on some of those that had them so that they wore their bottoms at the front, then inscribed upon the glossy cheeks her own parodies of religious and patriotic clichés. When Tommy saw it, he said: “You’re just trying to get people mad at you,” and she agreed with him.

After the parade has stumbled past, her friend Stacy Ryder comes in, showing off a white ceramic elephant with its trunk broken off that she says she found in a white elephant sale and couldn’t resist. “I mean, how often do you find just what you’re looking for?” She’s wearing shorts and a cut-off shirt that shows off her midriff. The sort of body that breaks hearts. “‘Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man,’” she says, reading one of the pinned-up placards. “Did Thomas Jefferson really say that?”

“Who knows what anyone said in the past? I can’t tell you what I said yesterday. But it’s in the history books, whatever history is. Jefferson was definitely no mindless Christian, though, nor were most of the founders. Different country then. Before the cults took over.”

“My Puritan forebears should have sunk off Plymouth.” She pauses in front of one of Sally’s story fragments taped to the wall. “‘A Place Called Suicide.’ I hope you’re not thinking of going there…?”

“No. A response to that shoe store guy.” When they offered up the empty Main Street stores for temporary occupation today, nobody wanted that one. “I’m only a tourist, taking pictures. That’s why I turned it into a place. So I could do that.” There is a place, not so much at the center of the city as inside the center of the city; it is a place children cannot discover, though adolescents sometimes stumble upon it in their anxious posturing. That’s the line Stacy is reading now. Maybe she shouldn’t have tacked it up. But publishing it on the wall like that led Sally to another line she’d scribbled at the bottom: True travelers do not even see the boundary notices, but are there before they realize they have set out. Which will lead to another, already formulating itself in her head. She could never go to such a place, it’s not in her nature, but the story can.

“When I was learning to ride a bicycle,” Stacy says, “my mother always insisted I ride on the left, facing the traffic, so I could see what was coming. The way she put it was, Stay off the suicide of the road.” Stacy smiles her smile, but a kind of sadness settles in. She doesn’t think Stacy is going to stay around much longer. She picks up a rose-colored shirt that reads SUPPORT ATHEISM: A NON-PROPHET ORGANIZATION and holds it up in front of her. “Hah,” she says, “it’s my lucky day. Perfect thing for the bank floor. How much?”

“Given the slogan, I could hardly charge you for that one.”

“I was thinking of it more like tithing.”