Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Tommy gazes at her thoughtfully with his discolored eyes. He’s probably not seen a lot of action since he dropped Angela and had to get his busted nose repaired. It has been a hard week and he’s tired and it shows. “Sounds just about right,” he says. Her heart’s pounding. She hopes it isn’t making her tee bounce. Like in the cartoons. She feels like a cartoon. Goose Girl. Thump thump. She snaps a cigarette out of a rumpled pack and lights up again, trying to hang loose, as the boys say. “Dad has called an emergency meeting of the NOWC committee with the chief and the acting sheriff, and I still have to run the raffle and a couple of races, make sure the stage mikes are working, and play a game of ball on one of the teams Fleet has put together. But by the time they light up the sky, if we’re not all dead, I’ll be ready to cool out.”

They meet at a pull-in near the path to the old abandoned municipal cemetery. Sally has ducked out of the town picnic, hoping to miss all the patriotic bunkum, go back after it’s over with stash in her pockets and a better tee. Billy Don wants to show her the filled-in grave, the one that Darren holds to be an otherwise inexplicable signal that the Rapture, or something like it, has begun. Or maybe he only wants to get her alone in a dark place. Billy Don is alarmed when he sees the garden spade she has brought along and he stops in his tracks, so she shrugs, winks, and tosses it back in the car, gets out the sandwiches and sodas she has picked up at the picnic.

They haven’t seen each other since their interrupted midsummer swim at the lakes two weeks ago, so on their walk down the overgrown path through the woods to the buried graveyard, both of them in shorts and having to pick their way carefully past all the thorns and scratchy bushes and poison ivy, they fill each other in on the recent town and camp news. Billy Don tells her that he was one of those who found the sheriff. The guards on night duty last night said they saw a fire over near the mine from up on Inspiration Point, but it died down and they figured it was probably just a brush fire or kids getting off to an early start on the Fourth, and decided to wait until daylight to go over there, especially since they’d been hearing motorcycles again and were worried that that gang might be back. So after breakfast Billy Don and some of the other fellows armed themselves and drove over — and came driving right back again to call the deputy sheriff on the office phone. They didn’t open the trunk, only heard about that later. Billy Don says there’s a lot of anxiety at the camp because of the loss of their two most powerful protectors, first Mr. Suggs and now the sheriff, and because of the possible return of the bikers, though Darren thinks these are just further signs of the looming End Days. “You know, the horsemen. In the Bible. Those bikers. It was your aunt who saw the connection.” Billy Don tells her about Aunt Debra’s arrest, what Colin said in front of everybody. No wonder Aunt Debra seemed so shattered. Billy Don says Colin is “a mischievous liar.” Colin in turn now calls him Judas and screams accusations at Billy Don every time he leaves the camp. He is Darren’s little buddy, and Darren has moved over to Colin’s cabin. To take care of him, he says. Actually, that’s the best part. Darren has taken his worktable with him and Billy Don now has the cabin to himself. He is turning it into a proper church office, he says, so they can close the other one and finish the men’s restroom. After that, well, he doesn’t know… He casts a sideways wall-eyed glance her way.

Sally hands him the hotdogs and sodas so she can pause to light a cigarette (she notices the matchbook is from some motel out on the highway; she doesn’t remember where she picked it up but sees its ending up in her pocket as serendipitous) and recounts for him the story of the garage fire and Lem Filbert’s crazed assault on the fire chief, which she says, according to her father, had to do with some sort of racket at city hall that Filbert was resisting. “Really, it’s all pretty comical, in a dark torturous sort of way.” When she asks about the reported lovers’ suicides at the camp, Billy Don says it was actually a double murder, probably by the woman’s husband who has disappeared. That was what Ludie Belle said, though he didn’t see them himself. “It was, you know, that night…” He says they talked about burying them on the back side of the Mount of Redemption where the dog Rocky is buried, but there were objections that they had died in sin and it wouldn’t be right to have them lying right next to the new tabernacle temple, so the sheriff organized a burial over at Randolph Junction, alongside that old lady who died a couple of months ago.

“The one whose soul I snatched,” Sally says.

“Yeah. A lot of people still believe that.”

Later that night of the murders, Billy Don tells her, after he’d got back from the lakes, there was an assault on the camp by a gang of drunks, but they made the mistake of bowling over some beehives in the dark. Sally laughs and says, yes, she saw a couple of them the next day at Franny Baxter’s wedding, sick with hangovers, badly beat up, and covered head to toe with bee-stings — the groom included. “The best man apparently overslept and missed the wedding altogether. One of the guys, whose face was so puffy with bee-stings he was almost blind, had his skinny arm in a new white cast, on which others in the wedding party were posting lyrical obscenities. The writing bug can hit you anytime, anywhere. Then, during the ceremony, the groom threw up all over the bride’s gown and passed out and had to be laid out on the sofa. I was supposed to photograph all that! Franny and her sister-in-law just giggled through it all like it was the funniest thing that ever happened.” To keep the conversation lighthearted (they’ve reached the edge of the old burial ground with all its forgotten dead, and its shadowy melancholy is what they’re both feeling), she tells him about the Blue Moon Motel singers who were there to sing hayseed love songs and who entertained everyone with a funny parody of “Frankie and Johnnie” that they made up on the spot, with lines about the bees and the Blue Moon brawl, and he asks if she knows what has happened to them, because they were Brunist Followers and always sang at their prayer meetings, but they seem to have left town. She doesn’t.

When Billy Don leads her to the grave in question, it is more or less as she first saw it: open, empty, overgrown. But now there’s a pile of fresh dirt nearby. Billy Don seems genuinely spooked, his mouth agape beneath his droopy handlebars, his eyes behind their dark lenses even less focused than usual. “I saw it! It wasn’t like that!” he whispers, and she nods. “It was completely full, like there was a body in it!” She drops her smoke between her feet and steps on it, thinking about this. “Must be Darren,” she says. “He’s playing games with your head.”

One’s destiny in smalltown middle America: Death by submersion in a pot of boiling clichés. This great nation, under God… Is this what Jefferson and his coauthors had in mind? Sally has returned too early to escape the last of the Fourth of July oratory. All these self-styled, high-minded, sober, hardworking, patriotic, decent Christian swindlers. Billy Don told her that some of the Brunists believe that America is literally the New Jerusalem, and after they’re raptured they’ll all celebrate the Fourth of July there with God and His angels. “Nobody has never handed nothing to this town. We don’t have mountains or oceans or famous buildings like a Awful Tower. I guess all we got is the corner bus station. But what we have got is quality of life. We got heart!” Hizzoner has the heart of a weasel. And the brain of a lizard. “If we got problems we can put ’em right on accounta this is America! People all over the world envy us what we got here! Right here in West Condon!” Much as they might want to believe it, people would have long since walked away from the mayor’s horseshit, but Tommy has scheduled the raffle draw at the end of it all so as to keep them hanging in, clutching their little ticket stubs.