Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

To while away the time on their way to the airport and out of the state and country, Georgie Lucci and the mayor have been trading whore stories. Which when real mostly depress Georgie, so he has been inventing a few bigcity yarns, borrowing on the plots of blue movie queens like Nellie Nympho and Red-Hot Ruby. “Ruby lipsticked her asshole and jiggled it around, and with your hands bound behind your back you were supposed to kiss it before poking it. It was like bobbing for apples.”

The mayor’s laughter booms. “You’re fulla shit, Georgie, but your stories are better than mine. Christ. Since I got married, the occasional cheap whore is all I’ve had. Of course, all women are whores, so I guess that’s all I’ve had or coulda hoped to’ve had. And I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had a good one.”

“I could introduce you to a few.”

“Nah. What I need is some child sex slaves. They tell me Brazil is full of them. Dime a dozen. Ever fuck a little kid?”

“Not since I was one myself.”

“Your kid sister or little cuz, you mean. Rec room romps when mommy’s away. That don’t count and can mess you up. I’m talking about sex market specialties. Clean, dressed, and prettily packaged consumables.” Maury Castle’s loud grating voice and nasty imagination are getting under Georgie’s bark. “Like buying choice baby lamb in the meat market.”

“Not my style, I guess. I go more for the fleshy bargains.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I married one. Beachball britches. Ever think about getting married, Georgie?”

He hesitates. Shouldn’t talk about this with a guy like Castle. “Yeah. Once.” He seems to see her bent over a water fountain. His high school sweetheart. In a pleated skirt. Or a crisp yellow frock. Actually, in nothing at all. Her sweet little buttocks. His hand between them. Her terrible vulnerability. “She was…different.” The way she looked up at him after he’d saved her from that newspaper fuck. So intense, so giving, a whole-body look, total surrender. But so still…

“What happened? Cold feet?”

“No.” Can’t stop himself. He’s fucking starting to cry. “She died.”

“Jesus, Georgie, sorry to hear that.” That night out at the Brunist camp, the night of the bees and the fireworks when he was trapped and being shot at and he was pleading for mercy from everyone from God to Lady Luck — she was there. She was Lady Luck. He remembers this clearly now. “She probably did you a fucking favor, though. Did you get in her pants before she kicked off?”

What a question. He hates this filthy sonuvabitch. In his mind’s eye, though, there were no pants he could get into. She was like Eve. Spread for him. La bella… “No. We were saving it for…you know…”

“Big mistake. Unless somebody else dicked her, the poor little cunt died without ever getting laid. What kinda fucking life is that? You owed it to her. You let her down.”

Coglione. Maybe he should spin the car in front of a big semi so it gets hit broadside on the passenger side. But he might get hurt himself. And even if not, how would he get away with the pile of cash in the back seat? This vehicle is what he’s got.

The fire chief has reached the town center with his exhausted crew and has half a dozen volunteer fire trucks from the towns around at his disposal, but water pressure from the sabotaged hydrants is low and some incautious units have suffered demoralizing casualties. It is a hot day, hotter here. They beat the small fires out or smother them with foam. A few of the larger ones are brought under control in city hall, the post office, and the fire station itself, but in the untenanted Main Street shops, the liquor store, the furniture store and pawn shop, the surging flames rage unchecked, spreading now from building to building, and torched cars and trucks, no longer worth saving, are allowed to burn themselves out. The police chief’s hunting dog — retrieved from one of them and half-blind, its coat on fire — immediately attacks its rescuers and must be destroyed. Crews lift the dead off the street and deposit them temporarily on the tables of the bombed-out pool hall and on the sorting-room floor of the demolished post office, where they are covered with gray canvas mail-bags, all of it recorded by grimacing television and radio reporters, many now wearing combat helmets and kerchiefs over their faces. Ambulance teams gather up the wounded and wheel them urgently off to the city hospital, guided by local townsfolk jumping aboard to accompany friends and relatives.

The banker, his face marked by flying debris when he rushed toward the bank at the moment of the final blast, grabs one of the ambulance crews and together they stretcher out the injured from the bank. Among them: Archie Wetherwax’s wife Emily, pinned under a fallen desk. The Rotary Club president, Gus Baird, in bad shape, midriff bubbling. Tommy’s young friend from the Italian grocery, out cold, his face bloody, his wife wailing over him. Also the acting sheriff and his wife, looking bruised and stunned though both on their feet, the wife staring blankly, muttering to herself, shrinking from everyone, even her husband. Smith must have left the mine about the same time Ted did but somehow beat him back. Smith tells him about Piccolotti’s heroism and personally organizes an ambulance for him. Those who can walk are helped to police cars, which are also filling up with wounded off the street. Ted has a word of encouragement for each. For the moment, the dead in here are left in the rubble where they lie, ambulance blankets tossed over them. With a gaping hole where the front door used to be, the place is vulnerable to looting. He’ll have to secure the tills and vault, gather up everything of value and lock it away in his office. Nail something up over the shattered windows and block off the door.

He’s just starting the lockdown when Dee Romano stops in to check out the damage. He kicks at what’s left of the bomber in tux pants, gives a terse angry report. Monk Wallace is dead. The mayor’s secretary, Dee’s favorite cousin. Others at the post office, county courthouse, hospital, phone exchange. A nephew from the power plant hospitalized with a bullet in his lungs. The mayor? He’s gone, fled or kidnapped. Dee tells him what he saw out on the Waterton road, mentioning in passing that no one employed by the city has been paid yet this month. Father Baglione, he says, is in critical condition at the hospital. The church was dynamited, people killed and maimed. His second cousin, Timo Spontini, was shot down in the parking lot. Apparently the old priest defended the church with sheer bravado, facing the bombers on his own with bells and incense. Ted lights up, offers the chief one. The chief shakes his head. “None of this woulda happened if them goddamned holyrollers had not come back here,” he says through clenched jaws. “But I’m taking care of that.” He says nothing more when asked, just glares coldly. Ted likes Romano, trusts him, but feels a new distance between them. Almost as if Romano blames him somehow for the attack on his church. Ted thinks back on the scene at the mine hill. “Wait a minute,” he says. “You mean, Charlie Bonali’s gang?” Romano leaves him without reply.

Ted glances at his watch: barely past noon. Can it get any worse than this? It can get worse. He knows what Bonali is capable of. And the Brunists are in league with Suggs’ rightwing militia. He saw something of a battle scene dress rehearsal this morning. Will he have to go out there again? How can he not? But who will care? Ted has never known despair, too much of a fighter for that, and a dogged believer in the prevailing power of the right, but standing there in the ghastly ruins of his family bank, he’s at the edge of it. He has never thought of God as the Almighty but as something more mysterious than that. The ground of all being, as someone has said. Something like that. Well, the mystery has just deepened. A young teller lies a short distance away in a scatter of bills and coins. Daughter of friends of his. Might have been Stacy, had she still been here, so he has to be glad she’s gone. But he has lost her just the same. Lost his wife, his son, and now his bank and all these innocent people. He has failed them. He has called the plays and none have worked. The bank is insured, of course. But is it covered for this kind of madness? Does it matter? Does he really want to reopen? He realizes how easy it is for lives to have bitter endings and is determined not to let that happen. This town is a mess, but it’s his town and he can’t walk away from it. He will not let himself be defeated, even when victory is hollow. That’s what he tells himself, in the old way, team captain up against it, back to the goal line, standing firm, jaw a-jut, shoulders braced. But his heart is sinking. Fuck it, he thinks, wiping the tears away with his sleeve. It’s finished. Then he feels an arm around his shoulder. “C’mon, Dad,” his son says. “Let’s clean this up.”