Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Bo’s boss, West Condon Chief of Police Dee Romano, sits alone at the back of the bomb-damaged St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, trying to imagine an alternative career and seeking divine counsel in the matter, when his lieutenant Luigi Testatonda, returning from a check on his family, piles in heavily beside him, settles his cap on his lap, and informs him that another big one has gone off out at the mine hill and it has reportedly set off a lot of reckless shooting. He has a worried look on his sad moony face and Dee says, “It’s not our territory, Louie. We’re not going out there.” The worried look is nodded away and Louie busies himself with wiping his brow with a handkerchief and muttering a few prayers for the dead and dying. Of which they have seen their fill, need see no more. After organizing the volunteer units, they have toured the temporary downtown morgues in the post office and pool hall, where they said goodbye to what was left of their colleague Monk Wallace; have visited the various outlying targets, including the devastated National Guard bivouac area at the high school gym, where army medics, flown in by helicopters now sitting on the football field, are tending to the wounded and tagging the dead; have checked in on Father Baglione at the city hospital and some of the others who are out there. Dee’s nephew is pulling through, though he’ll have to give up smoking. The old priest is still touch and go. They have made consolatory house calls to the Juliano, Vignati, Spontini, and Lombardi families, most of them related, by one womb or another, to the Romanos. There were others, but they were both drained and could bear no more, so they stopped by to see that Dee’s family was all right (large ingathering at the house, general state of mourning, wife organizing a vigil for the priest), and then he let Louie drop him off here, giving him the patrol car to go look in on his own family. Shock and worry, Louie says when Dee asks, but no calamities. His daughter hiked out to the hospital when she heard about the Bonali girl getting shot, but they turned her back. Only letting in immediate family. Ramona keeps picking up the dead phone, he says, listening for the dial tone to return. The early afternoon sun casts a bright dusty beam through the shattered rose window much like those often shown in pictures of saints, or the Virgin at the Annunciation, or the boy Jesus astonishing the elders in the synagogue, the sort of beam that makes you feel that, if you walked into it, you’d be transported straight up to Paradise. The only trouble is, it’s falling on the blood-stained crater in the floor, not so much a welcoming beam as an accusing one. Step into it, you might get fried. The main impression it gives, though, is of the messy nothingness that it is beamed upon. Man’s life on earth: there has to be something more, or it’s not worth living it.

The doctor and nurses have come to Angela Bonali’s room to take the bullets out. It’s not that her case is urgent, they say — the bullet went deep and hit her hip bone, but there’s no breakage or spinal damage — but that the operating room is in constant use and they need her bed. There are casualties coming in every minute, and from what they could see on the TV outside, there are soon going to be a lot more. She can hear the gurneys with their squeaky wheels constantly rolling by. The doctor says there will be a small scar but she should think of it as a beauty mark, and she is able to smile shyly at that. Once it stops hurting, it will be fun to show it off. Really, she’s lucky. Her friend Monica Piccolotti stopped by for a moment earlier. In tears. Pete’s head is wrapped, blindfolding him, and Monica can’t bring herself to tell him that he won’t notice any difference when the bandages come off. That made Angela cry, and Joey hung his head. Pete saved Monica and their little boy and their unborn baby, and Monica said that for the first time she really understood what marriage was all about and why it was ordained by God. She would love Pete now forever, and take care of him until they were in Heaven together and Pete could see again. Pete saved the life of Sheriff Smith’s wife, too, and the sheriff has been in and out of Pete’s room ever since, praying over him in his intense Protestant way, though now they say he has left for the mine hill again. Where something awful is happening.

“Somebody blew himself up along with a bunch of others and now they are all shooting at each other and there are bodies everywhere,” Joey Castiglione says when he comes back after they’ve bandaged her up. He’s trying to be cool but his voice is shaking. Because the emergency generator still runs the hospital, all the TVs are off, except the one at the nurses’ station, and while they were digging out the bullets, Joey, who most people out here think is her brother, left the room and joined the crowd clustered around the set there. “It’s really gross, Angie. I saw some people down on their knees praying and they suddenly just keeled over!” Angela hopes she didn’t know them and is glad her dad is here at the hospital and far from trouble — and Joey, too. He says she ought to see it, but no, there are some things it’s better not to look at. When bad things happen on the TV, even when it’s just a made-up movie, she always closes her eyes or leaves the room. People go crazy, especially around other crazy people, and you can go crazy watching them. Joey also said some things about religion that she didn’t want to listen to. A Baptist preacher out there in the hallway now is blaming everything on the sins of the town and has got people into an emotional prayer meeting right in the hallway, and that’s the sort of thing, Joey says, though less politely, that gives him stomach cramps. Joey thinks he saw her brother Charlie right in the middle of everything. Well, Charlie was made for trouble, he can take care of himself. And if he can’t she’ll be sad, but mostly because her dad will be sad. Charlie is a total pain, and she doesn’t want him to die, but she does wish he’d just go away and stay away. His latest idea was to take her to the city and make money with her in an evil way. Angela told him he was the most disgusting person she ever knew and he only laughed and popped his gum in her face.

When people die — and when you almost die! — it makes you think about things, so she and Joey have been having a very intimate conversation about how short life is and what it all means, and though neither of them have mentioned marriage, it seems like that is what they have been talking about. Joey is not any taller than she is and has the knobby Castiglione chin, and she’s not sure she really loves him, certainly not in the my-heart-stood-still way, but she has always felt easy around him, in some ways he has been her best friend ever since they were little, and she knows he would do his best to make her happy. They could go visit the fountains of Rome on their honeymoon and have their marriage blessed by the Pope, even if Joey’s not very religious. That’s what she finds herself thinking. But then, out of the blue, he says something that makes her cry. He says not to worry about the kid she is carrying, he’ll help her take care of it, and she breaks down in tears and tells him the truth but begs him not to tell anyone else. “I’ve made such a fool of myself, Joey!” she weeps. “I’m so embarrassed!” He smiles. “Hey. It’s okay,” he says. He kisses her. It’s awkward, with her lying face down and her sore bottom in the air, but she likes it. Not a lot. But enough. The word “comforted” comes to mind. Like in some romances she has read, though usually about older women. She feels comforted. And now, if anyone asks, that stupid girl from the drugstore, for example, who is also somewhere here in the hospital with cuts from the broken mirror which crashed down, she’ll tell them she is dumping that jerk Tommy because she has found true love with Joey, who is not such a spoiled selfish egomaniac and is ten times a better lover.