Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Whereupon Jesus pats her in a shockingly familiar way and says, “I have no choice, beautiful lady. I am who I am. Take courage! I will return again unto you, as is said. Come then, Mr. Jenkins,” he adds, stepping down from the podium and taking his arm. “Off we go! Just a closer walk with me!”

“I was just… I was just humming that!”

“Of course you were. Let us set forth now to sow our tidings, short of wholly glad though they be!”

At the car (church bells are ringing somewhere, like a movie soundtrack), Joshua’s companion pushes him in, slams the door, and hops into the driver’s seat. He pulls his gown up over his bony knees and reaches for the key miraculously waiting in the ignition. By now, Joshua has not the faintest idea who the man is or if he is just a man. He cannot really believe he is Jesus Christ — that’s absurd — but at the same time he finds it wondrous that a man of the first century knows how to drive this contemporary machine, a skill Joshua himself has not yet mastered. As though reading his thoughts, Jesus — or his impersonator — says: “If God had been the big deal they say He was, I could have ridden into Jerusalem in one of these instead of on a damned donkey! Right?”

They are about to pull out when four motorcyclists, three men and a woman, roar up in front of the church. Two of the men go running inside, then come running out again. As they watch in amazement, they are discovered. “Down!” Jesus commands and hauls him roughly below the dashboard. Bullets smash through the windshield. There is a loud crack like a thunderclap and fragments of glass strike the car, followed by louder thumps. “It is not Being that is ineffable,” Jesus remarks, uncorking a bottle he has conjured from under the driver’s seat and taking a long thirsty drink before offering it to Joshua, who can only shake his head helplessly, “but Becoming.”

As the roar of the motorcycles fades away, the lady in the flesh-colored smock comes staggering out of the back door of the church and throws herself into the back seat. “Oh my God!” she cries.

“Yes?”

“What’s happening?”

Young Reverend Jenkins has difficulty finding his voice. When at last he is able, he wheezes: “Could you just drop me off at the bus station, please?”

Georgie’s mother slams the door in his face, but when she sees him waving the bills at her she opens it again. “Are you in trouble, Giorgio?” she asks, peering out at the mayor’s fancy black car.

“No, Mama, my ship’s come in, just like I told you. But I won’t be seeing you for a while.” She reaches one claw out for the money—“With interest,” he says — and he blows her a kiss through the tattered screen door—“Ciao, bella!”—and bounces down the steps back out to the limo. He has just popped in behind the wheel when a loud explosion rocks the neighborhood and the church bells stop ringing. “Hey! That mighta been our church!”

“ Their church, Georgie. We don’t live here no more. Now let’s get the fuck outa here while we still can! We’ve wasted too much time already. And don’t go near the goddamned mine. Head over toward Wilmer on the Waterton road, pick up the highway at Daviston.”

The Waterton road, a route (alas, poor Ruby) Georgie knows all too well. But they’re already too late. Traffic approaches from both lanes, horns blaring, lights flashing, sirens wurping. Un ingorgo. They both swear simultaneously in their separate tongues. “Tieniti le palle!” Georgie shouts, and he throws on the brights and jams his foot down on the accelerator, heading straight at the oncoming traffic, dipping down at the last second into the muddy ditch, then racing along the edges of it, swooping from one side to another at top speed not to get stuck in the muck in the middle. Kicked-up mud, sticks and stones rattle on the underbody. Suddenly, just ahead: a culvert! Trees on the right, double lane of traffic up on the left! But they’ve reached the back end of the wrong-lane file, or almost. Georgie swings up onto the road at the last possible moment—“Eight ball into the top corner!” he cries — picking up a ding on the last car’s bumper and a scrape off the culvert (in his imagination, la bella Marcella is showing her ass or else it’s the Virgin Mary’s and he is worshipfully kissing it), and they’re on the way.

“Fucking Christ!” the mayor gasps, turned stone white. “Hope I packed some spare pants!”

The West Condon police chief, Dee Romano, trapped in the traffic heading into town on the Waterton road, has just witnessed the amazing maneuvers of the mayor’s limousine, the madly grinning Georgie Lucci at the wheel, the terrified mayor sitting rigidly beside him, gripping the dashboard with white knuckles, and he wonders if he has just seen Castle being kidnapped. Some shit Dee’s city cousins are up to? Dee, leaving the mine hill a few minutes too late to avoid the jam-up, has cut cross-country to a less-used road but found himself sucked up in a noisy congestion of police cars, ambulances, fire engines, and ordinary traffic — the latter headed in the contrary direction, the drivers utterly confused by the horns and bleating sirens. Except for a crossroad or two, there are no pullovers on this old road, just ditches to either side, so when cars stop in panic, everybody stops. His fault. He has called them all here. Only the state police motorcycles, weaving through the snarl, are getting through, and Dee flags one of them down, asks for a ride in, turning the squad car over to Louie Testatonda. “We’re going to the Catholic church,” he shouts in the state trooper’s ear. He has just been on the squawkie to Monk Wallace back at the station, learning that the bikers have not only blown up the power plant and phone exchange, but the rumor reaching him is that they’ve also attacked the radio station and the hospital, done some serious damage to the National Guard at their high school bivouac area, and now seem to be targeting the churches. “St. Stephen’s?” “Yup, purty sure,” Monk said. “Big noise summers over there.” Now Dee calls back to let Monk know he’s hitching a ride in with a state trooper and to ask him to send somebody over to ask his cousin Gina Juliano if she knows anything about the mayor. “Send who?” Voice thin. Can hardly hear him. “I’m all alone here.”

Four men are carrying the old priest out of the church and loading him gingerly into Vince Bonali’s car, Vince’s son Charlie giving the orders, just as Dee swings up on the back of the trooper’s motorbike. Dust and smoke are still roiling out of the double front doors like escaping demons. “There’s more people hurt inside,” Charlie shouts, and two or three guys go running in.

Dee sends the state trooper into the town center, tells him how to find the police station. “If you have to shoot, shoot to kill,” he says.

“Where’s the goddamned ambulance, Romano?” Charlie wants to know.

“I don’t think it is no more. Monk told me the hospital got hit too, and things are burning there. There’s some rescue vehicles on the way from towns around, but it’s a mess out there on the roads. What happened to the Monsignor?”

“Got here just too late. Old Bags was trying to win the war on his own and got badly shot up. Don’t think he’ll make it. Those holy-rollers out there on the mine hill were a diversionary tactic, dragging everybody out so as to give their fucking death squad free rein here in town. You can see that now.” Maybe, maybe not. Dee has still not linked up the bikers with the cultists in his mind. Sometimes it seems just the opposite, though admittedly there’s a family connection. That sonuvabitch Baxter. “We did reach the cunt with the explosives before he could set them off and were beating the shit out of him, and we had two or three of his buddies pinned down up in the loft when some motherfucker in a stocking mask popped up from behind the altar and set off the dynamite with gunfire. Blew the fucking hell out of the place. That did it for their bomber pal and two of our people, and there’s others badly hurt in there.” Dee peers in at the murky devastation. Bodies, a lot of wreckage. He can see that the rose window has been partly blown out. He should take control of this, but what’s happened here has happened, and he’s wondering where those godless bastards have gone now. Into town probably, unless they’ve shot their wad. They’re bringing out another victim, still alive, moaning, badly hurt. Old one-armed Bert Martini. “He was brave as hell,” Charlie says, “but he’s short another peg now and will have to play pinochle with his teeth. Besides the asshole who got turned into hamburger there were at least three others. They got away when the explosives went off, but one of them made the mistake of trying to get back to his bike. His body’s over there to the side. There’s another stiff out back. Hate to tell you, I think it’s your cousin Timo. There may be more. Coming in, we saw a chopper tailing somebody out of town, coming our way. We figured it might be one of those cocksuckers and we laid in wait for him. It was. You could tell by all the shit on his bike. He tried to surrender and kept crossing himself to show he was supposedly a Catholic. Didn’t do him any good.”