Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“What do you mean, you can’t let me?” Billy Don pumps the gas pedal again, turns the key. Nothing.

“It won’t work. I disconnected a few things.”

Billy Don slumps back against the car seat in exasperation. “You’re crazy, Darren. You’re really crazy.”

“I love you, Billy Don,” Darren says, and he starts to cry. Then he takes something from inside his tunic and points it at him.

Though it’s drizzly still, the sky is finally brightening, casting a pale but mostly cheering glow on the wet black streets and brick fronts of quiet downtown West Condon. What businesses remain are opening and city hall is filling up, as are the pool hall, the post office, and the drugstore booths and soda fountain. The pawn shop has its customary “Sales Only” sign on the front door and may or may not be open. Most of the temporary Fourth of July weekend shops on Main Street have been emptied out or abandoned, but a few first-time entrepreneurs, having faint hopes and little else to do, have decided to linger with their “antiques” and knitted goods and homemade jams, so long as no rent is charged. Faint hopes: the town’s weak but stubborn motor. Gus Baird, the president of the West Condon Rotary Club, having had no new travel or insurance business for over five months now, spends the morning in his office, planning tomorrow’s club luncheon meeting, hoping to run into someone there who wants to get away for a week or two before the summer ends. At the liquor store they restock the shelves and bins after the usual Fourth of July run on beer and cheap booze; drier times ahead, though it beats owning a grocery or a clothing store. Down the street, Linda Catter’s first beauty shop customer is due in thirty minutes and Linda tidies up the premises for her. One of her blue-hair trade. Not really blue. An old Italian widow who likes orange hair, and gossips endlessly about people Linda doesn’t know. Bernice calls Linda from the Brunist Wilderness Camp office to say most everybody has cleared out. They seem to have gone over to the Mount, as if something was about to happen. She’s going over to take a look. Linda hopes that if it’s the Rapture, they don’t forget her stuck here in her beauty shop. Certainly, the graves seem to be emptying out, just like it says in the Bible. After work, if today lasts that long, she should go check where her husband Tommy has been laid to rest. Maybe he has stopped resting. Not far away, Enos Beeker, haunted still by the shoe store owner’s public suicide, uses the slow day to take unseasonal inventory at his hardware store. Thanks in large part to the new cut-price D.I.Y. store out at the highway shopping center, not much will have changed since the last one. He is grateful that most of his aging stock is at least not susceptible to rot, a daily problem for young Pete Piccolotti, manager of the family grocery store, especially after the long weekend. Pete bags up the refuse that only days ago represented vendible goods and sets out the fresh breads and sausages his parents have made. His role in life. Mind the shop. He and Monica have had another row this morning. He’s not ready for the second kid. He shouldn’t have said what he said, but he’s getting sick of the dead-end life he lives. Not much in the till. Have to send Monica waddling over to the bank for some rolls of change, hoping (faintly) for the occasional cash-paying customer. Over there, one of the first customers this morning (along with Gabriela Ferrero, who is trying to organize a small loan to cover the funeral of her father, who died last night in hospital) is Pete’s pal Kit Cavanaugh, the banker’s son, who is emptying out his account, taking the bulk of it in travelers’ checks. He tells them, when they ask, that he’s going to Paris. “Oo la la!” one of the girls says, and everyone giggles. They tease him about his papier-mâché nose. He looks off in the direction of his dad’s office and is told his father got an emergency call and has gone out to the mine hill.

Faint hopes. Giorgio Lucci wears the town signature pasted on his mug. A goofy loose-jawed grin that won’t go away whatever the circumstances. It used to infuriate the old man when he was beating him. He’d keep yelling at him to wipe it off while he pounded him, trying to wipe it off himself with slaps to the face, but he would have had to break his jaw, and even then that might have just wired it in place. When Georgie meets other people, they grin back. Raising always: faint hopes. This morning, waking on the Legion Hall sofa, sickeningly hungover from cheap skull-crushing hootch, he can hardly lift his head and his bloodshot eyes won’t focus. But he’s still grinning. He had to sleep on the broken springs. The high life. He kicked semicomatose Cheese Johnson off the sofa, but then had to let Cheese have the cushions. That’s okay. He couldn’t stand their stink, inflated over the years with a million drunken farts. Not sure who got the best deal. Pointless anyway, because Cheese has rolled off them and is sleeping amid the butts on the wooden floor, his broken arm across his chest, hand of the other clutching his filthy crotch. Another grinner, Cheese. But with fewer teeth. More malice to it. Not everyone grins back. His cast is so begrimed with obscenities, inscribed there during bolts of inspiration by his pals, that it looks like he must have spent the last few weeks down cleaning out the pits with it. Should be fumigated when it comes off and donated to the Smithsonian. Georgie steps over him and staggers off to take a somewhat painful leak. He has avoided Mick’s Bar & Grill since Mort Whimple left hospital — the fire chief hangs out at Mick’s and is mad enough at Georgie to kill him, blaming him for the blaze at Lem’s garage and all that happened to him afterwards, despite Georgie’s protestations of complete innocence — but today has to be an exception. He has a desperate need for coffee and he hopes (always hopeful) Mick will give it to him on credit, or for free, just because he likes his grin.

He has awakened from a dream that was partly about Marcella Bruno. They were back in high school and she was leaning over the water fountain, her pleated skirt falling over her hips, between her legs. Georgie stepped up behind her, and though he’d never even said hello to her before, ran his thumb up the crack of her ass, just for fun, because he was always known as an easygoing misbehaving wiseacre with quick wrists, no reason to take offense, and she turned around to see who was doing that. To chew him out, he supposed. But her face was the face of a person long dead, with exposed bone and teeth and tatters of decomposing flesh and bulging eyeballs. All he could think to say was: Whoa. Not feeling well? He was grinning and she was grinning, but it was not the kind of grin you like to see. He had the idea, in the dream, that this grim apparition had something to do with his sick hangover, like so many of the confusing and headachy scenes that had gone before in a night that was not sleepless but that had no sleep in it. The thought worked because then she was normal, not dead, or at least not showing it, and they were walking through the old neighborhood. Heaven’s not a place, you know, she said. It’s just wishing. He thought that might be a come-on, all he had to do was pop back with the right line, something about angels maybe (she’s one!), but they were in front of St. Stephen’s and she said she had to go in. And then she was gone. They were holding a funeral inside. Hers? Couldn’t be sure. Didn’t want to know. He left there, and next thing he was on a baseball field. It was his turn to bat. But the bats were all too heavy. He knew if he could find one he could lift he’d get a hit and win the game. He told himself: Don’t forget to wish. Heard his old lady echo before sending him off to school: Don’t forget to wash. And woke up. And washed. Wished.