Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Have to stay hard, too. Keep the purity. He had a soft spot for that old man. Thought they had an understanding of a kind. Made him too easy to con today. The old guy was trying to kill him and he couldn’t see that. Couldn’t see until it was too late how he was aiming straight at the old Warrior Apostles, who were down there in that field with Junior and the Collins bitch that day they did her. Four guys got killed because of that soft spot. Five. The old man got another of the Apostles at his old farmhouse, but he never knew it. Nat thought he knew that old man and what he was capable of and what not. Wrong again. Came close to making the same mistake with Royboy the night they brought the wrath down upon the sheriff. He didn’t have much choice, but Royboy did everything they asked him to do and more. He said he wanted to join their gang; he hated his old man and wanted to get out of this dump. He didn’t have a bike, but he’d steal some money and get one. Nat was tempted. He had known Royboy since grade school. They were in the same church. Their fathers were close and he knew what Royboy meant about hating his hardass old man and believed him. But he’d played slingshot war games in the street with Royboy, and because of that he knew him to be a bit slithery, and a coward when it came to a showdown. And now a loose-mouthed drunk. They were into something deadly serious here and they couldn’t risk a betrayal. “Do we let him go?” Toad asked. “No,” Nat said. “He’s just going to shoot at us or turn us in.” He was looking straight into Royboy’s eyes as Sick brained him from behind; together, they stuffed him in the trunk.

And then last night he nearly went soft on those young kids. The Wrath surprised them when they turned up at the state park. They were still frantically trying to get back into their clothes. Everyone had a good laugh about it and made remarks about the girl’s body, which was less than perfect. The two of them apologized sheepishly and hurried away, heading for the parking lot, obviously scared. Big Deacon watched them go and said, “We better not let them leave the park.” “We can’t kill everybody,” Nat said. Deacon smiled his beardy smile. “Yes, we can.” Probably he saw the hesitation on Nat’s face. “I mean, it’s Last Judgment time, right? Timer’s running down. We’re just only giving these nice kids a head start to glory. And if we don’t, we gotta leave here now.” Nat didn’t say anything, so Deac nodded at Rupert and Sick and they drifted off together. Everything is God’s will, Deacon likes to say. Even when that everything is something Deac has done or is doing. Great is the wrath of the Lord, he says with his Santa Claus grin, bringing the hammer down.

Rupert acts like a crazed rich man, talks like one, and maybe he is or was a rich man. He was riding with the Crusadeers, but he’s a pal of no one. The legend that trails after him is that he murdered his parents and burned their house down. He wears carefully knotted ties over colored T-shirts, shaves and trims his moustache and sideburns every day, files his fingernails, has swastikas tattooed on his biceps — which Houndawg, who considers himself a patriot, complained about. Religious exercises for Rupe are like doing calisthenics. Like Nat, he is a believer in the War of the Gods, says it’s why he stayed when the others left, but they don’t seem to be gods out of the Bible. “Nothing in this universe lasts or is meant to last,” he says in his precise tight assed way. “We are the gods’ agents, fulfilling the destinies they have assigned us.” Sick’s real name, the only one they know, is just the number he wears on both bony shoulders: 666. The number of the Beast. They took to calling him Sick for short, partly because he’s even more psycho than Juice, and it stuck. A glazy look and a fixed grin with clenched teeth, not so chummy as Deacon’s. Topknot wagging on top of his shaved head like a clownish hat. He and his pal X were survivors of a destroyed gang looking for a new connection, when the Wrath picked them up. Their old gang called themselves Avengers or Avenging Angels. Not clear what happened to the rest of them, Sick being too spaced out to be intelligible, X never speaking, just making guttural noises, an unshaven black-browed guy in raggedy black clothes, his staring eyes set wide on his cheekbones like they belonged to two different heads. What does X stand for? “It stands for I never learnt his name,” Sick said, “and he’s not talkin’.” Some of the mystery was cleared up when Hacker told them X’s tongue had been cut out. Sick said he didn’t know how that happened. By the time they first ran into Sick and X, Nat had already changed the name of the gang and they had fashioned new patches, and Sick said he admired the name and it suited his religion. It was Deacon who had suggested the change, just after he joined them. He said Warrior Apostles was too much like kid stuff and Nat agreed. They were already wearing tats like “The Burning Wrath” and “Rod of His Wrath,” and they were into something bigger and deeper. Something final. A great slaughter, like the Bible says. The sort vividly illustrated in the Eternal Forces comic. So Nat proposed The Wrath of God and nobody was against it. Deacon was especially pleased and from then on made sure whatever Nat wanted, he got. Their patch, which still has a mine-pick cross in a circle, also now has a fist with a bolt of lightning in it. When they added Spider to the gang, everybody got a fist and lightning bolt on their skin. Took to wearing upside-down crosses in the right ear. Rewrote their jacket studs. Swore fresh blood oaths.

The damp’s bad in here under the giant rocks, but the fire feels good, for the sudden rain which caught them on their way here has brought a chill to the day, more felt in wet clothes. There’s a nice smell, too. Chepe Pacheco in his blue-red-and-yellow headband and embroidered Mexican shirt is frying up green bananas. No idea where or when he picked them up, but they’ve all learned to like them. Nat is not completely stripped down like Deacon, who is still strutting around naked, reciting apocalyptic lines from the Bible (he claims to have once been a preacher, also an actor, a politician, a university professor, a lawyer, an auctioneer, a faith healer, a carny barker, and he may actually have been some of those things), but he has hung his dripping high-collared leather jacket from a jutting rock and his shirt is off and near the fire next to Deacon’s, drying out. Red hair is sprouting on his chest now, as if having been shaved off his head it had to find someplace else to grow. His old man has chest hair like that, going gray now. The only guy in the gang carrying a clean dry change is Rupert, who has a bagful of colored T-shirts and loud ties to go with the satin-striped black pants he always wears. Right now it’s a canary yellow shirt under a green and lilac tie. During house burglaries, Rupe likes to find an iron and press these things, then leave the hot iron plugged in and face down on the ironing board. His style is the very opposite of his pal Brainerd, who hasn’t changed clothes or shaved or washed since the day he joined up. He says he doesn’t think he has any socks left below the ankle, that they’ve just rotted away in there, but he hasn’t taken his old muddy farm brogans off to check. City dude and mountain man. Hard to say which is meaner, though. Brainerd claims to know about a Colorado ghost town they could all go to after this is over. If he can be believed. He’s a folksy bullshitter, now into a tall tale, thumbs in his suspenders, about a wild man of the woods who thought he was a bear and in most ways became a bear, and who was finally tracked down by his scat, which wasn’t bearlike, and was caught in a net and used in a circus sideshow until one day he clawed himself to death.