Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

While waiting for him at the drugstore, she picked up some more film for Tommy’s cameras, and she has been whiling away the time here at the mine, in and around her desultory sketching (a lot of thick black lines), photographing the mine tipple, hoist wheel, and abandoned equipment, rusting freight cars, signs and graffiti, the limp tattered windsock over the grimy brick office building, the bloated water tower. She has also taken a shot or two of the confrontation over on the hill and of the tent at the edge of the camp where the dynamite blast happened, but mostly she has stayed discreetly out of sight, not wanting to draw attention to herself. A.k.a. the Antichrist. They are crazy, and they have guns. Anyway, now that she is no longer Professor Cavanaugh’s research assistant, her interest in all that weirdness is fading. Christianity is quite simply a shamanistic cult of monumental stupidity, chicanery, and willful self-delusion. A legacy of the infantile origin of the species. She should stop worrying her head about it. Let it swallow its own tail.

The old coal tipple, rising high into the brightening sky above her, is more appealing, a giant contraption of scaffolding and pulleys and ramps and what looks like a seedy, quirkily designed hotel squatting like an old dame with lifted skirts over three parallel railroad tracks. How did this thing work? The mined coal went onto a conveyor belt and was lifted up into those shed-like buildings, where the rocks and rubbish were separated out and the coal screened for at least three different sizes, finding its way down chutes into the train cars below, the obvious corresponding anatomical appurtenance functioning, as it were, in triplicate. From loose to constipated. Thus, the anthropomorphizing of the world, both in the way we read it and the things we make for it, the stories we tell about it. Mother Earth and Father Sky. She has learned that the Mount of Redemption, long before it was called that by the Brunists, was known by the miners as Cunt Hill because of its cleft ravine under the rounded belly of its summit. If this is an obscenity, so were the primitive Mother Earth folktales she read in college. And, well, they were, of course. Dirty jokes that have evolved into our world religions.

Over on that exposed lady’s tum, now catching a sunbeam or two, things are becoming more agitated. The aroused cultists, inheritors of those elaborated dirty jokes, have crept forward and stand face to face now with the policemen and Tommy’s father. They still sing their Christian soldier songs, marching in with the saints now (oh, when the moon turns red with blood, they’re singing cheerfully, I want to be in that number…), though from here it’s just a thin cacophony, more like children yipping on a playground. A phalanx of armed men in farm boots and suspenders encircles them, either for protection or to arrest them. All of this is apparently on live TV, with helicopters hovering overhead. Some of the cultists watch the helicopters apprehensively. What are they thinking? That they might be agents of the Rapture? Or of the Antichrist? Their famous Great Speckled Birds? Is this funny? Only if madness is. She takes another picture of the people on the hill, framing it between tipple support posts to shrink it to its rightful dimensions. Two yellow backhoes sit off to one side like grazing dinosaurs. Tommy’s father is having a fierce argument with the sheriff, pointing his finger at him. He is an unhappy man, Sally supposes, and in a mood to take no shit. Stacy called Sally on Sunday to say goodbye and to apologize for what happened. She sounded like she’d been crying. Maybe she hadn’t stopped since the night before. Both she and Tommy’s father had tearful faces when they stepped out of the motel room, looking stricken and washed out under those awful corridor lights. She said she never finished that French novel Sally loaned her but she knows it must have ended badly. She’s leaving it for her at her rooming house. Stacy had talked about going away during their drive over to the river town a couple of weeks ago. It’s the sadness, she said then. Staying or leaving, the sadness is the same. Sally didn’t understand it then. Now it’s her own metaphysic.

So what now? Well, she could go back to college and get her degree. Or at least, now that the door’s open, get laid. God expels Adam, takes a rib out of Eve: new playmate, better design. Adam left to play with himself. She has a writing prof at college who has a lot of faith in her, he says. Is he on the make? Probably. Writers are like that. She can get an education, learn a few tricks. He’s married, but so much the better. He’ll be careful, and there’ll be no residue. She has rather hoped that the sort of love the Lutheran preacher called a “dying to oneself” might happen to her, at least once, in her earthly transit — not mere orgasm, but the legendary madness of love — but too late, she knows now. Back at the ice plant in Tommy’s car, in that moment of frightened adoration (of what? doesn’t matter), it might have been possible, but now irony has gotten in the way. Call it irony. It’s what she has really lost. If her prof starts talking about the future, she’ll find somebody else.

The singing stops, the bombast and bluster. They’re all turning toward the mine road, where what looks like a funeral cortege is arriving. Will the raising of the dead require the mortician’s art to undo what’s been done? For some reason, by morbid association probably, Sally is reminded of that old lady over there last spring who blessed her with a wink and died. She has thought of her as a kind of tutelary spirit ever since. Nothing spooky, just something she has internalized. The old lady’s faith in her. She seems to hear her admonish her now in her elegant, straight-backed way to stop feeling sorry for herself. Grandma Friskin behind her shoulder, nodding her approval. No pains without gains, child. Use them. Sally finds a sunny perch on a step at the backside of the tipple, turns her back on the Cretins, pulls off her tee (feels good; maybe she should take her shorts off, too), lights a cigarette, opens her notebook, blows away the cobwebs, and (and on the third day…) writes: Because you are a writer and this is what you do. It’s fun.

The march to glory has been suspended. All eyes are on the arrival of the governor in his shiny black limousine, other cars and media trucks trailing behind in a procession rolling quickly down the mine road. Limousines are not a common sight in this county. It’s like having an elephant gallop into view, dust and gravel flying. The limousine skids to a stop on top of the charred place in the road and an aide hops out and unfurls an umbrella over the rear door as he opens it, although it is no longer raining. The governor grandly brushes it aside. He can presumably see the banker halfway up the hill, but he strides straight through the mud to Sheriff Smith. The governor has his own television crew following him, security people, his political team. The governor is in neither party nor statehouse mode. He is in his campaign costume: hatless, white shirt with sleeves rolled up, bootlace tie at half mast, open black vest. Boots that servants will clean for him later. Wherever he goes there’s a bright unnatural light on him. Under that light, he calls a couple of his state troopers over to be in the picture, and narrowing his eyes in the heroic manner, his shock of white hair stirring in the light breeze, converses intently with the sheriff and with selected members of the religious group. The impression (for the cameras) is that of a man on the front line, firm-jawed, crisp of manner, in charge of things. Mr. Dynamic.

The banker drops his smoke under his toe and steps down the hill to enter the governor’s movie. The West Condon police chief has come to feel like the banker’s personal bodyguard and he follows at a short distance with his first officer, who moves his bulk slowly but with a certain authority. The chief has received a radio call from Monk Wallace back at the station that, one, the National Guard troops have arrived out at the high school and, two, the power seems to be off all over town. The station and city hall are now running on their standby coal-fired generator. Romano asked him what the hell the soldiers were doing at the high school, they were supposed to be out here, and Wallace said that’s what he told them and they said they’d be there as soon as they unloaded their gear and set up their bivouac area. The chief said he’d better get Bo in to help, but Monk reminded him that when Bo drops off it’s like off a cliff. You only know he’s alive by his snore. He couldn’t hear a train going through his bedroom, much less a phone. As for the power outage, the chief said the storm probably knocked something out, but Monk should call the plant to check. Wallace said he did that, but no one answers. He’ll keep trying. As the banker steps into camera range, the governor looks up with a warm smile of greeting, as if discovering him there for the first time, what a surprise, then switches to an expression of deep concern. The chief could never do that. Why he’ll always be nothing more than a poor cop. “Ted Cavanaugh! I’m so glad you could come, my friend! We’re trying to find a solution to the problem here. Perhaps you can help.”