Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Wait a minute, you can’t leave me!

Of course I can. I am already on my way. Electric shocks, drugs, needles in the brain: who knows what terrible scourgings they have in mind? The baths probably aren’t as much fun as the ones we’ve had either.

But what will I do? Who will I be?

You will be what’s left when I am gone. You have to admit it wasn’t a perfect arrangement. No man can serve two masters, as they say.

As you said, you thieving sophist. But where will you go?

Who knows? The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head…

There are NO VISITORS and RESTRICTED AREA signs posted on the taped-up hospital doors, but Ted Cavanaugh speaks with the staff, checks the admissions lists at the nurses’ stations, looks in on employees, bank clients, people he knows. Too many. Some are in isolated intensive care; others have already been sent home. Some have died. In general, a scene of controlled chaos. More or less controlled. Rooms full. Loaded gurneys in the corridors. A lot of moaning and crying. Medics and nurses rushing about, strangers mostly, volunteers from the towns around somewhat lost but getting the job done. Many of the victims are out under Red Cross and army field tents on the hospital grounds and in the parking lot; he makes a mental list, will visit them before returning home.

Where he will be watching over Irene on his own tonight. When he stopped in on his way in from Deepwater, where he’d stayed until the mine hill was cleared and secured, he found Tommy alone with her, Concetta and her friends off doing their grieving — the whole town is grieving — and he promised to relieve him as soon as he has finished his hospital run. Ted told Irene a bit of what had happened at the bank, leaving out most of the details so as not to upset her, and what she said was, “Well, dear, you should be more careful.” He saw by the snaking of the cord that the phone had been back in her room. Tommy said it was some friend and they were praying together in her new R.C. fashion. Meaning that conniving prick from their college days is still calling her. It was too early for a drink, but he poured one anyway. Tommy said that while one of Concetta’s friends was still in the house, he had gone back to the bank as Ted had asked, and had found the office broken into and ransacked. “I think I surprised someone because I heard noises at the back and found the security door open back there. It’s locked up again now, but probably too late.”

No doubt in Ted’s mind who it was. On a television screen over one of the nurses’ stations, he sees him now, taking credit for overseeing the emergency operations in the unexplained absence of the mayor. Some fear, he says, that the mayor might have been killed in the powerful blast at city hall, where the search for survivors goes on. Nick knows damned well that the mayor has absconded and he may know where he is, may have been in on it. On the car radio driving here: a news bulletin from the city, where they have apprehended an armed criminal at the international airport said to be a man named Giorgio Lucci from West Condon, driving a stolen official vehicle and suspected of grand larceny. Rumors of mob connections. Ted knows Lucci. Town loafer, no scruples, no brains. A fall guy. Nick tells the reporter now that the city is applying for federal disaster relief funds, and the governor has personally assured him that emergency state funds will be made immediately available to them. He mentions in passing that Marine veteran Charles Bonali, “one of the heroes of the police intervention at the mine hill,” has been appointed to the city force as temporary replacement for the murdered officer Monroe Wallace. Never knew Monk’s real name before. That’s what obituaries are for. Get to know somebody. Certainly he has gotten to know Nick Minicozzi. When the crisis is over, Ted has work to do. And he will do it. Kirkpatrick makes a cameo appearance. Ted heard the governor on the car radio complaining about the local corruption, arrogance, and incompetence that had forced the state to step in to prevent total anarchy. He lamented the local failure to heed his constant warnings about the perversion of traditional Christian values by a conspiracy of militant extremists with known communist histories. Now, however, they are showing images of the two small children killed during the shelling of the church camp, the only known victims, and he is more subdued. All he can say is that the camp was a closed-off area; the reporters who went in there were breaking the law.

Gus Baird, the Rotary president and travel agent, is on one of the gurneys in the corridor. He looks pretty far gone, but he winks at Ted and Ted grins and winks back. Gus is humming weakly. “Smoke got in my eyes,” he wheezes. “You’ll be all right, Gus.” Gus shakes his head, winks again. “Something deep inside,” he warbles faintly, a joker even in extremity, “cannot be denied…”

Doc Lewis comes down the corridor, stripping off translucent gloves, and instructs a couple of nurses’ assistants to wheel Gus into the emergency room where doctors are waiting for him. Lewis fills him in briefly on who’s dead, who’s not, who’s likely to be. “Not sure how long the old generator will hold out. We’re beginning to move many of the less critically wounded to other hospitals around.”

“Not been a great day.” Ted realizes he has been thinking in tight abbreviated phrases. Like a lot of song lyrics. And repeating himself the way songs do. Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold… “One thing out at the mine hill, M.L., really got me down. There was a lot of shooting going on and people were getting killed. And down at the foot of the hill were all these people from town. Our fellow citizens. Cheering loudly whenever one of the cultists fell.”

Lewis nods grimly. “I know. We’ve received phone calls from people saying we shouldn’t be doctoring them, they deserve to die.” M.L. looks as exhausted as Ted feels. He’s ready to call it a day. Nothing to eat since breakfast. Go home, put a couple of steaks on the grill for him and Tommy, open a fifth of sour mash. Another way of communing with the higher powers. “By the way,” M.L. says, “they brought in some preacher they picked up on the hill named Jenkins. Not from around here. But he mentioned your name.”

“Jenkins! Christ! Our new minister! Forgot all about him! Where is he?”

“I’m going that way. I’ll take you to him. I can’t find anything physically wrong with him except that he’s incontinent and rather badly bruised, probably from getting trampled on. But when we try to stand him up, he just falls down again.”

On the way in, a nurse passing by shakes her head sadly at the doctor. “Mr. Baird,” she says.

Jenkins is a pale puffy young fellow with startled wet eyes and unwiped mucus on his upper lip. Looks as if all his blood has just been sucked out of him. Damp, funky smell. Ted tells him he’s sorry he wasn’t there to meet him when he arrived, but it’s not clear that the man registers anything. He is trying to say something, but it’s inaudible. Ted bends down, asks him to repeat himself. “Don’t…” Still can’t quite catch it. The man stares at him as if at his worst nightmare. Ted closes his right ear with a finger, leans in with the left ear to the man’s lips. “I don’t think…” Reverend Jenkins whispers faintly, “…I want the job.”

When Sally Elliott finally pulls herself out of the culvert in the ditch, dusk is settling on the camp behind her, and on the mine hill across the way, fast falling the eventide. She is stiff and sore, her knees are banged up, her breasts are raw from sunburn and the grit she’s been lying in, her throat and lungs are raspy from wood smoke. But she’s still here. Wasn’t confident she would be. She’s not hungry, but her belly is so empty it hurts. When she fell from the tipple, she dropped her notebook, cameras, T-shirt, backpack, banged her knees and most everything else, but the fall probably saved her life, the bullets dinging off the tipple supports above her. She crawled frantically toward her bicycle behind the mine buildings, expecting the worst, fearing they might come over after her, but by then there had been a massive explosion like a bomb had been dropped, and they were shooting at each other. She had apparently been forgotten. Her knees were shaky, but she was able to pedal away from the mine, always keeping the buildings between her and the cultists and not looking back, heart pounding, until she reached the old county road. That in turn, heading home, carried her past the shiny pea-green bump she’d seen from the tipple. Smoke was rising from the camp. She should have kept going.