Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Yea, Lord, punish the wicked!”

“Bring the light!”

“No! Cain’t you hear? It ain’t him!”

“Yes, it is! Praise Jesus! He’s come back!”

“Just like He promised!”

Joshua was introduced to the gathered ecstatics as friend and disciple Jumping Jehoshaphat—“His father was a king!”—and his knees turning to jelly, he cracked his lips in a quivering imitation of a smile, pleading with his tearing eyes not to shoot. The man had released his elbow. He could run, but he couldn’t run. He could only hold on. “Can we go now?” he whimpered into the man’s armpit, but the man, after waving off the doubters and announcing to himself and the hillside what he is going to do — devils are part of it! — began unleashing his mad beatitudes. The language was familiar, but in the way nonsense in dreams is somehow familiar, and Joshua found himself grasping once more at the hope he might still be sleeping on the bus ride in. When the fellow in plaid shirt and suspenders who was riding the bus with him (so long ago!) removed his billed cap, stood his rifle on its stock, and started singing, “God sees the little sparrow fall, I know He loves me, too!” the man in the robes sang back (his singing voice was not divine), “Damned are the fallen sparrows for they shall be eaten!”

“Lord, save us! Don’t let us be eaten!”

“Shut up, you fools!”

“Hear me now! You must leave this wicked place! Go forth, be fruitful, and multiply!”

“He said we are leaving this wicked place!”

“Save us, Lord! Take us to the Promised Land!”

In the distance, smoke rises from where the town must be — or have been — as warplanes swarm and explosive thuds resound, and it occurs to Joshua that the man beside him might really be who he says he is, that the Christian end times he always believed in — or believed he believed in — are really upon them in all their monstrosity after all, and that he is standing amid the Holy Remnant. But then the man says: “Verily, I say unto you, blessed are ye that have seen, and yet have not believed!” and though he can’t think why — he can’t think at all! — Joshua feels certain this is not right. He knows all the songs (that scary Sunday School tune “Too Late, Too Late!” is now pounding through his tormented head), but he has never been good at quoting the Scriptures. Understanding the varieties of human discourse is something he is good at, and he knows that, at such a critical moment, he should be employing — and urgently! — the analytical one in search of efficacious action but that mode has abandoned him and all others — even prayer! — as well. He is paralyzed with fear, fear and confusion, his mind turned to a hot burning coal (he is standing on black chips of coal, the whole hill may be made of nothing but coal; his feet are burning, too), even as his belly turbulently liquefies. Once able to hold several contrary notions in his head at the same time and act separately on each, Joshua can no longer hold one thing in his mind at the same time and could not act on it if he could.

A young white-robed fellow with long golden curls like someone out of a storybook steps forward and says: “I’m sorry, but that is not what Jesus said.” A hush falls. The boy seems to have everyone’s respect. Perhaps there is hope. There is another creature pasted to him like a pop-eyed Siamese twin, or else Joshua is seeing double. He may be. His eyes are misted over with tears and sweat. It is stiflingly hot. It’s as if the torrid Bible lands have been transported here, or they there. His chest hurts. His feet hurt. He has a stitch in his side. His corduroy suit suffocates him. He envies that other boy perched over across the way on that strange rickety structure (a carnival ride?) with his shirt off. Probably a boy. “He said: Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

“I know, young man. I already said that. A long time ago. I am saying something else now. The old has passed away, as I have also said. The new has come.”

“But if you are who you say you are—”

“I say nothing. The words are yours.”

Houndawg is also hurting. He can hardly walk, but he can still ride, his bike a kind of wheelchair operated mostly by hand. He once traveled with a pegless guy, a paraplegic shot up in the war. The guy taught him a few tricks that are useful now. None for stopping the pain, though. Hacker promised him meds from the hospital and drugstore raids, but he hasn’t shown up out here at the Brunist camp. Teresita said she heard a lot of gunfire on the way out of town and she doesn’t think the poor dude made it. There was a supercharged moment back there when Houndawg felt about as alive as he’s ever felt, but it has sputtered out with the pain. Not running on all barrels either. A kind of fading in and out, like a loss of compression. Fever probably. His leg has a wrecked, ugly look and he leaves it mostly hidden away in his pantleg, not to be sickened by the sight and smell of it. And now Kid Rivers is talking about a head-on assault on the hill. Wherever the Kid goes, Houndawg will follow, the Kid being pretty much what’s left of his fucked-up life, but he hopes he doesn’t do that. Catch them by surprise, he says. Roar at them from all sides at once. The Big One’s with us, he says. The Kid believes that. Even if “us” is only these six, all that remain of the Wrath of God. And anyway, you never die. The comicbooks tell him so. Cubano and Littleface and Spider and all the rest aren’t really dead. “They’ll be back, man.” Houndawg doesn’t think so. Another notion from the Kid’s strips: the Legions of the Holy Dead joining the living in the final battle against the Forces of Evil. Houndawg heard him talking to himself one night and asked him who he was talking to. “Face. He’s there, man. He’s still there.”

Who is the Big One? In the Kid’s scheme of things, best Houndawg can tell, it’s the Devil. The one who lost the first War of the Gods and now wants his own back. Which makes them all players on a bigger stage than the one Houndawg was cast for. In reality, the Gods’ battleground looks a lot like Nat Baxter’s hometown, the combatants his family and friends, imagined enemies. And who he wants now, of course, is his old man. His ass still smarts from all the whalings he took as a kid, and he wants his own turn. But the others have been up on that stony rise above the camp with their binocs and have seen everyone over there on the mine hill armed to the molars. They’d be so many birds at a turkey shoot, as Brainerd says. Unless they could get in behind the mine buildings unseen and hit them suddenly from the blind side. That’s Chepe’s idea. But how would they do that? It’s all so naked over there. Unseen is a fantasy. Chepe himself looks like a fantasy today, dressed in bright colors as if for a party. Tight shiny pants and one of those lacy faggot shirts from south of the border the color of hot piss. He’s been brilliant, though. Fearless. The Kid reminds them that he still has the two Brunist tunics saved from the day they buried the nitro here at the camp a couple of months ago, and there are a few sticks left. Someone could strap them around his body, he says, wear the tunic over the top, walk into their midst over there as a fellow believer and give them all a grand send-off into the Promised Land. The others glance Houndawg’s way. He’s half-dead anyway, they’re thinking, so why not? Because he’s no Juice or Sick or Rupe; he wouldn’t be as old as he is if he were. And he doesn’t buy the immortality wheeze. He leans on his good leg and waits them out. Then Deacon comes up with an idea that might work. Steal one of the campers left behind here and take the nitro in canvas bags around to the back side, climb the hill in the tunics and mingle with the believers, leave the shit with long fuses lit and drift back to the wheels again. “Have to be somebody they don’t know,” Brainerd says. Which excludes Houndawg and the Kid. So Houndawg nods and says he likes the idea. Chepe and Teresita don’t fit in with the white trash over there and Deac is not of a size to pass unnoticed. Brainerd has just volunteered himself.