Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

At the Brunist Wilderness Camp, Young Abner is standing up on Inspiration Point, sometimes also known as the Higher Ground, leaning on his rifle and gazing down in fascination upon the burning cabins beginning to snap and crack, and he asks himself if — should his father die — he is ready to take his place. He decides that he is. Why else has God spared him by sending him here to the camp away from the terrible punishments on the Mount of Redemption? He has much to learn, but he already knows a lot, too. You don’t live all your life with a father like that without it becoming part of you. Since he is all alone here now, he has been reciting out loud some of his father’s famous lines—“The moment of holy retribution and rivers of blood is at hand!” —and, with practice and a little more courage, he’ll be able to sound just like him. “Ye shall set the city on fire!” Also, he’s taller, so he’ll be able to look down on people and not have to shout up at them like his father. He may be called on soon. Since the bomb went off over at the Mount, there has been a ceaseless poppety-pop of gunfire and a lot of people, he can see from here, are falling over, and that doesn’t even count the ones who must have died when the bomb went off. He can’t see his father, so he may already be dead.

Young Abner may have seen the making of that bomb. After Darren sent him back here, he patrolled the grounds, finding little of interest (a pair of cracked sunglasses that he is wearing because they make him feel more heroic, a jar of honey with a homemade label in a cabin cupboard which he ate) and there were still some pesky children running around, so he posted himself up here on the Point to guard the camp as he was asked to do. It’s drier and the chiggers aren’t so bad. He was resting against a tree, half asleep, considering what acts of retribution he might have undertaken had that jezebel’s trailer still been down in the parking lot, and keeping a lazy eye meanwhile on the sky over the Mount just in case something started to happen, when his brother’s motorcycle gang suddenly came roaring in below, guns out and firing into the cabins. That woke him up in a hurry, and he spread himself flat, peeking at them over the edge, his heart banging away at the stones under his chest. He recognized Nat immediately, even though he was supposed to be one of the ones who got killed. The one without a head, they said. Well, he was certainly still wearing it. And bossing everybody like he always does. Who was missing was his other brother, the little one. They left their motorcycles outside the Meeting Hall and charged in like storm troopers, kicking the doors open, blazing away.

After that it was quiet and they stayed in there for a while and Young Abner was just thinking about rising from his prone position and scuttling down the back way while he still could, when two of them came out and started prowling around and he ducked his head again. The next time he got up the nerve to look, there they were, the whole gang, coming up the path to the Point. He had to scramble behind some thick bushes, which were not much protection. Scared spitless, as that wall-eyed boy who worked for Clara Collins used to say. Then the worst possible thing happened: his family has been eating a lot of canned beans lately with the inevitable consequence and it was like the devil had got into his bowels and was just trying to get him killed. But Nat and the others kept studying the Mount through their binoculars and arguing and they didn’t hear it (it was only the softest little poot), so God was still watching over him and answering his prayers. He saw now that Nat was wearing a leather jacket that said KID RIVERS on it in metal studs, and the main thing you’d say about him was that he didn’t look like a boy anymore. But it was Nat. Or at least the head was. Maybe they sewed it onto somebody else’s body. He realized, seeing him again up close, how much he hated him. And feared him. The big one in the undershirt, who looked like Goliath in Young Abner’s Illustrated Bible for Children , had a shiny policeman’s badge on his greasy leather vest, and the others wore bracelets and necklaces and upside down crosses in their ears like earrings. Not all of them were real Americans. Maybe none of them were. Some kind of monster aliens. Young Abner knew he could shoot them. That’s probably what he was expected to do — but what if he missed? He didn’t want to die! And if they weren’t all human, it might not do any good to shoot them. Nevertheless, he kept the revolver Darren gave him pointed at Nat the whole time just in case they did see him there; at least, before they killed him or did other terrible things, he’d be able to get back at his cruel brother for scarring his forehead. Nat shouted and shook his fist in what might have been some kind of prayer but sounded more like cussing, and then at last they all went away.

Young Abner could hardly breathe, and when he crawled to the edge for another look, he saw that they had joined up with a sixth motorcyclist down below, an old crippled guy with a gray braid whom Young Abner recognized from the last time they were here, the one little Paulie was riding with when they left and the only one who looked like he might still be human, and they all went over to the emptied out trailer lot. He couldn’t see well through the trees, but it looked like two fat men got into a fight in which they both fell down, or maybe they were killed by the others; they didn’t get up again. One of the fat men was that big Goliath guy with the police badge. The others started vandalizing the few trailers and caravans still parked there while the old guy with the braid limped back up toward the Meeting Hall. He got some things from a sack that looked like big firecrackers, and he tied them up and settled them into a canvas bag. When the others came up to the Main Square, they were dragging along an older woman with scrawny arms and legs but a poochy belly. They must have found down in the trailer park. Did he know her? Possibly. From the old church. They dressed her in a raggedy Brunist tunic and one of the bikers put another one on like maybe they’d converted and he stowed his motorcycle inside the house trailer he’d driven up from below and the two of them drove away in it. The others stole other caravans and trailers and did the same, but before they left they splashed the buildings and grounds with big cans of gasoline and set everything alight. As they pulled out, he fired his rifle a few times in the general direction of the camp access road just to be able to say he had done what he was supposed to do. He will say they were shooting back, it was a real fire fight, he’s lucky to be here, and he fired a few shots into the trees behind him as evidence of that. He didn’t see what happened to the canvas bag, but now he can guess.

After they were gone and he was alone except for the two dead men, he could pass wind as much and as loudly as he wanted — he thought of it as a kind of exorcism, and God-blessed himself with each ker-blatt! Down in the camp the fires were dying out. One thing Young Abner knows all about is building fires — burning the trash being one of his main chores growing up — so he gathered dry kindling and firewood from the stacks by the fireplace in the Meeting Hall and paper from the church office files and added it all to fires that were still smoldering, crumpling the paper to let the air get through and building little tepees with the wood. He knew that to make big fires you had to start with little ones. He broke up some of the wooden folding chairs and made the tepees bigger with them. Some of the gas cans were not completely empty and he sprinkled what was left over his constructions, and also into the old upright piano in the Meeting Hall, tossing a burning splinter in (there was a sweet responsive whoosh! ), and then he capped the empty cans tightly and left them on the fires just for fun. He also remembered the old creosoted half-rotten boards from the ruined cabins and piled up on the far side of the trailer lot, and though it was hard work, he managed to haul most of them into the Main Square and add them to the cabin and Meeting Hall fires and they caught right away. While passing through the trailer lot on the way to get another armload, he paused to study the two dead men (the bearded one with the police badge was especially scary with his bulging eyes, which seemed to be looking right at him and crying, but crying blood, and with little red blood-worms crawling out of his nose and mouth and ears) and he took out the revolver and shot them both in the head, killing them a second time. It didn’t make much sense to shoot them both if he was trying to take credit, but he did. And that was when the huge bomb went off on the Mount of Redemption, and he hurried back up here to the Point to see what was happening. He saw the black spot where the bomb went off over there and all the crowds that had gathered and saw the helicopters and people shooting at each other and falling over, and he watched them for a while. They looked like white ants fighting black ants.