Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Her mother and Emily Wetherwax are sitting on folding chairs far enough from the speakers not to have to pay them much attention, having a smoke together, apparently having made up after what happened out at the lakes. A quiet moment of ciggyboo time, as they have called it ever since high school. Which her mother has never left. She’s still that popular, carefree ball of fire called Frisky. Her own personal dreamtime. Which she revisits at every opportunity. Her dad’s tanked as usual, but still staggering along, grinning idiotically and raising his hip flask to all he meets, mugging emotions. The Court Jester. He’s especially good at stupefaction. Mothers and fathers, though lovable, are only useful up to a point. After that, they can go. She made the mistake of saying that to Tommy one day while they were cleaning out the vacated downtown shops together, still trying to rescue him from the plot he’s been written into, and he called her a heartless bitch and said his mom and dad were the two most important people in his life and always would be. Wherein, alack, lies his eventual ruin. She was about to entertain him with the story of her parents and the Wetherwaxes getting drunk at their midsummer picnic and swapping partners, and all the funny anguished things she heard her mom saying on the phone to Emily Wetherwax the next day, but decided not to. In her effort to score with him, she has told him too many things. They wouldn’t be springing Giovanni Bruno on the cultists tomorrow, for example, if she hadn’t let him know about Darren’s symbolic burial plans. Of course that’s why Tommy has taken such a patient interest in what she has to say. He has been pumping her for information to pass along to his dad, using her much as she has been using Billy Don, and what’s worse, she has been aware of it all along. Feeling guilty, and a bit pissed off, she told Billy Don about Operation Resurrection this afternoon while they were back at their cars having their afternoon snack, Billy Don being too shaken by the reopened grave to stay in there for their picnic. “What? Bruno? He’s alive?” “Keep it to yourself,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t. It’s like writing “to be continued” at the end of a story that’s already over.

On the way out of the cemetery, Billy Don asked her a lot of earnest questions about life and death and how she manages it all without religion. She answered him the only way she knew how, but she was aware that what had begun as a kind of larky soda fountain game was becoming more like a responsibility, and she wasn’t sure she wanted that. Who is she to unlock the mysteries of the universe? Strip an innocent kid of his fantasy consolations? “Well, you know,” she said finally with a little shrug. “The truth, Billy D. Nobody has it all. My ears are open.” But because she couldn’t help herself, she went on to say he should leave the camp, that he was never going to figure things out in there. And without knowing exactly why, she suddenly feared for him. Maybe it was the bikers coming back, or Darren’s craziness, or all the weird frightening things that have been happening, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and pressed it on him. “Billy Don, I want you to do me a big favor. I’ve only got this twenty, but I want you to take it and go fill up your car and go back home, or go find those kids in Florida, whatever, wherever, but as far away from here as possible. Right now.” He turned pale and gave her a look through his shades — two looks if you count both eyes — that could mean only one thing and shook his head and said thanks, but, well, she probably wouldn’t understand, but he had to stay.

Nobody’s innocent, she least of all. Remember that.

She sees Tommy over by the popcorn machine, leaning over Babs Wetherwax, peering rakishly past his plaster nose cast down the kid’s cleavage. Sally has stopped by the house to put on a fresh tee (one of the free NOWC shirts, the C inked into a circle with a smiley face and an exclamation mark after) and one of her dad’s throwaway white shirts, for its protective sleeves, open and tails out. She grabbed up some blankets, all the money she could find, and the last of her stash, saved for just this occasion; she even remembered the insect repellant and the cameras she borrowed. She has picked out a good place over on the slope to watch the fireworks, private enough to allow for the joints but with an open view of the sky, but she may lose the night after all. Some time ago, in a biology course she took for her science requirement, she came across the word “neoteny” and she wrote it down in her notebook. Adults of a species looking like juveniles and though retarded (as one might say) thought of as cute, and therefore more likely to get fucked. The way a lot of dogs get bred. The way American guys like their girls. Small, soft, fuzzy, dimpled, helpless, confused, naïve. Big eyes. Little noses. White baby teeth. Plucked pubes. A little tongue to tickle you with. Neotenic. At the same time, they like big motherly tits. The Hollywood starlet image. Boobs Wetherwax.

Why does it matter? Because Sally loves Tommy. Something she used to write in her high school notebooks then tear out in embarrassment, only to write it again. Not knowing what she meant by it. Not knowing now. Something to do with that last night at the ice plant. Meaning has to do with language. That didn’t. No brain at all then, just body. Bare and burning. Her heart’s in her mouth and her clothes are shorn. Says Boy Blue to Peep, come blow my horn. She was so scared, she started praying. The way she was then. Scared but desiring him — or desiring something — so much it hurt. Nothing like it since, really. In her masturbation fantasies, it’s always Tommy, and more or less as he looked to her that night in the back of his father’s car. Just a boy. Boy Blue. Pale, lean, luminous. In his fever, so enraptured by what he saw, enrapturing her; no one has ever looked at her — even if he only was looking at it , not her — like that before or since. His erection a shared magic between them. Right in front of her nose. First real one she’d ever seen up close. He seemed to want her to do something with it, but she didn’t know what. Sniff it? At his urging she took hold of it, surprised at how cool it was. Well, and then more. But not quite enough more. She lights up another cigarette, cursing herself.

…but then he leaves her alone and she goes home, dragging her tail behind her .

Blue never calls Bo Peep again, though he knows where to find her …

And so the rest of the day goes, a catalogue of familiar disappointments, the author retreating after each into her notebook. Dog with her bone. She doesn’t win the raffle and has no luck at bingo. Her best chance is the sack race, but she would have been the only contestant over four feet tall, so instead she referees it and gets everybody mad at her while Tommy puts the make not just on Boobs but a whole flock of bleating neotenics, some of whose bells, she knows, he has already rung, to speak in the classical tongue. Love is a sack race, she writes, in which not all sacks are equal. Tortoise truth: the hare always wins.

She needs a friend, goes looking for Stacy, but with the food gone, she’s gone, too. Smart. Smarter than Sally, who could leave but can’t.

The ballgame starts late and lasts less than an inning, ends badly. Baseball on the Fourth: as emblematic as hotdogs, beer, and car crashes. She sits on the grass with Monica Piccolotti and her baby, figuring that it gives her her best shot at crossing paths with Tommy, close as he is to Pete, and has to listen to the entire catalogue of the joys of marriage and motherhood while Monica feeds, burps, changes (turns out it’s a boy), powders, nuzzles, bounces the kid. Also about how cruel Tommy has been to poor faithful Angela, especially after what he’s just done to her. Sally doesn’t know what that is, but she can guess. Did Tommy have Biblical knowledge of cute little Monica Sabatini? Probably. They used to call her Teeny — Teeny Sabatini — but no longer; Lotta Piccolotti’s closer to it. The worst thing is what has happened to her complexion. Love’s production line: high-maintenance baby-machines and the redesigning of mothers. Helplessly desiring what you can’t possibly want. Evolution, not as fact, but as faith. That it’s going somewhere. A promise forever withheld through the ceaseless tumble of new generations. In the first inning, two of the first three batters get on base, mostly due to bad fielding, and Tommy, swinging one-handed as the big guys agree to do, hits a home run. Using his golf stroke. Is that fair? The fielder is actually back far enough, but she drops it and then can’t find the ball in the high grass. Tommy walks around the bases, encouraging the girl, but the throw never even reaches the infield. Tommy’s team scores two more before the little kids at the bottom of the lineup strike out. Tommy, pitching underhand in the bottom of the inning, gets the first two out on balls hit back to him. But her dealer, Moron Moroni, swinging with both hands, smacks a ball that bounces between the little third baseman’s legs and would have hurt if it had hit him. Moron slides into second, feet high, bowling over the beer-bellied Cox kid, standing there picking his nose and waiting for the ball to be thrown to him, and a fistfight breaks out. This is of more interest to the watching crowd, some of whom move toward the field to join in with cold grins on their faces. Another popular Fourth of July tradition. It frightens her, and that’s another disappointment. It’s the human comedy, so why isn’t she laughing?