Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“So, what’s exercising you, Kid?” Deacon asks, sitting up. “Say the magic word.”

Nat doesn’t preach. He hates preaching. Anything that stinks of church services. He doesn’t pray either, not in public, just shouts sometimes at the Big One. “I think we got some killings to avenge,” he says now. “They gotta feel our anger.” That’s his way of explaining it to the others. In his mind, those killings have just been part of what’s really happening. The war of the gods. What happens next was always going to happen, with or without the killings. He has his shirt and jacket back on now. He feels older in them. His head is clearer. Vengeance is part of it, of course. The Big One’s way of motivating. He used to imagine being Robin after the brutal torture, disfigurement, and murder of Batman. The rage that would consume him purely put him above the law. That’s what he has been feeling since the murder of Littleface during these long weeks on the road. The wrath. He has a detailed battle plan — who goes where and when, what to do if things go wrong — that he’s plotted out with Houndawg. They’ll start with the power plant and phone exchange. The radio station. Then the power centers, beginning with the schools and churches, followed by city hall, the police, jail, fire station, bank, and businesses. All carefully timed. He has hand-drawn maps with everything marked. Systematically destroy it all. Bring the sick town to its knees, like Deacon says. By his cruelty he will instill fear into the peoples. The dwelling place of the wicked shall come to nought. He had not planned to include the church camp, but after what happened today: it’s another target. It will have to be annihilated. A word he learned only a year or so ago. His old man used it in a sermon. Hated the sermon. Digs the word. A great battle, and he will call upon the dead Warriors to be with them. He gets the maps out of his backpack, spreads them on the dirt floor. He also has marked the overland escape routes via the rail beds the Apostles discovered when they were here last time. But things still aren’t just right. He’s looking for a phrase, or for something to happen. Something does. Baptiste returns. “They chased me. Lots of ’em. And they was roadblocks.” He is excited. They’re excited. “But the weather was bad. They couldn’t send up choppers, and the bike could go fuckin’ anywhere, through any kinda shit. Finally I shucked ’em, left ’em off in the next state somewheres chasing their assholes. If we stay outa sight, they’ll figger we’re long gone.” Flickering grins now on the faces around the fire. They’re a unit. Everything’s cool. “All right,” Kid Rivers says quietly, moving toward the flames, gunbelt over his shoulder. “Here’s the plan…”

This is war. They’re ready for it.

The rain drums oppressively on the Halls’ little caravan roof. It has hardly stopped since yesterday afternoon. Willie came in wearing his visored cap down over his ears and declared, “That selfsame day was all the founts a the deep broke up and the windas a Heaven was opent and the rain was ’pon the earth forty days’n forty nights! Genesis 7:11–12!” And then he went back to his room again. He is terrified by what has happened and will not leave the caravan, rarely leaves his room. Mabel is frightened, too; they are all frightened. Nothing has prepared them for what they saw when they came running back from the Mount of Redemption yesterday. A scene of such horror as to make one’s knees fold. They could not even be sure how many bodies there were, so ruined were they. Poor dear Ben was there, his head shot up so bad he could hardly be recognized. Clara collapsed with a terrible cry when she saw him. Billy Don raced back to the sickbay cabin to get the stretcher and he and Uriah carried her through the sudden storm to her house trailer. At first they thought there were only three bodies other than Ben’s because there were only three heads and six feet to go with the three motorbikes parked by the back road, but there were enough other parts that what was left did not fit into just three bodies. Maybe, someone said, the ones who got away are cannibals. With what they have seen so far, one can expect just about anything, no matter how ghastly.

They have all been over to see Clara, one at a time, keeping a vigil. She is much changed, a frail and shriveled shell of herself. Ludie Belle said she looked to be a “pore thing on the down-go,” reckoning her condition to be more problematical than just her present dismay. Bernice is back and has brought along a nurse friend from the hospital to help out, and the nurse said the same and said she must see a doctor. While she was visiting Clara, Mabel looked in on Elaine. The poor child is nothing but a skeleton. The startled look in her big eyes startled Mabel. If she is carrying a baby and not a devil, that baby is not getting nourished. Of course, if it is a devil, starving it might be the right thing. She didn’t know what to say — to Elaine or to Clara, or to Bernice or the nurse either, who said that if the girl really wanted to go, they probably couldn’t stop her. Mabel tried to be cheerful, but she only broke into tears. And prayer. They have all wept and prayed. Since yesterday they have not stopped praying and weeping, for they feel the hovering presence of death and the end of things, and praying is the only thing they can do. As for the weeping, they can’t help it. Mabel’s cards have been foretelling as much, but no one has wanted to believe it. Mabel has not wanted to believe it and has not always told them what the cards were really saying. The acting sheriff, Calvin Smith, was there where it happened because he’d been with them on the Mount and had run back when they did. He said it looked to him like the motorcycle gang intended to blow up the camp but Ben stopped them and it cost him his life. Ben was a hero. A hero and a saint. They have always known that. He apparently shot one of the bikers; the rest were killed in the explosion. Their gang leader died, that devilish middle son of Abner Baxter, the one responsible for what happened to little Elaine. His body was the one without a head, but his motorcycle got left behind when the others ran away. Calvin said that this was the dynamite stolen from the mine. It was a big blast, so he hoped it was all of it.

There are only five of the old regulars here in Mabel’s sitting room this rainy Monday afternoon, all that’s left — plus Bernice, who comes and goes from Clara’s house trailer across the way, and Lucy Smith, who can stay because Calvin is investigating the explosion. They say a second explosion happened at Ben’s old abandoned farm house. A dark fellow thought to be one of the motorcycle gang was killed. Maybe they had been camping out over there. Calvin says there were three or four dozen of them around here yesterday, but they have been scattering and leaving the area. He has been in touch with all the neighboring sheriffs. Two of the bikers had been detained for speeding, but they had paid their fines and, not knowing about what had just happened, the officers had let them go. That won’t happen again. These are things that Lucy tells them. She is paler than usual today and her eyes are red and her hands can’t stop fidgeting. “Calvin’s very brave,” she says softly, beginning to tear up. “But I’m not.”

The thunder and lightning have eased, but the rain keeps pounding down, and sometimes the thunder comes back, too. Unexpectedly, like a blow to the heart, scaring everyone. Rain like this makes Willie’s rheumatism worse and Mabel always gets a bad feeling in her sinuses and bowels. The camp is getting soggy, everything feels damp and sticky, puddles wherever you look. Everything on the other side of the creek is now an official crime scene and no one can go there. They have stretched a tent over the place where it happened. There’s a big hole there, like a bomb has fallen. State troopers have arrived, their sirens howling all night long, and the newspaper reporters and TV cameramen are back, swarming around the tent and the black charred place in the mine road where the sheriff’s car was found. The reporters are almost as frightening as the motorcycle gang, and for all who were here, they bring back the nightmare of five years ago. When it was also storming, as though this were God’s way of decorating His catastrophes. Lucy’s husband and his deputies — mostly Christian Patriots who have been protecting the camp all along, plus these new Defender people — have so far managed to keep these outside forces out of the rest of the camp, but they are also letting some of Abner Baxter’s people in. They are at great risk, Calvin says, and must be protected. It’s the Christian thing to do. He is the sheriff now, what can you say? Most of them are camping out in the lodge or the parking lot, though tents have also begun appearing throughout the camp, especially down by the creek. A lot of them have guns. Abner isn’t here yet, but they say he’s waiting at the edge of the camp for the right time to enter. When Billy Don ran back to get the stretcher, he left the sickbay door unlocked and the Blaurocks have moved in there with their pesky children. “It’s like they’ve walked in right over Ben’s dead body,” Ludie Belle says. They have to be quiet about these gatherings in case the Blaurock woman gets wind of them and barges in uninvited, for that’s the kind of person she is. She claims to have seen Jesus walking around and to have talked with him. That’s almost impossible to believe, but Darren says it might be so. One should not expect human logic in divine actions.