Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Looking. Knowing. Her mantra. Big deal. There are some things she doesn’t want to see, know. Sure. But she can’t stop herself. She always has to look. It’s a kind of systems flaw. She tried not to cry, but when she started, she couldn’t stop. If she had eaten anything all day, she would have been throwing up. Instead, a kind of hiccuppy weeping that was worse than throwing up. Next thing she knew, somebody was shooting at her again, and she threw herself into the ditch. There was an open culvert there and she crawled in, still crying. She heard a bullet hit the car and break a window. Then suddenly there were much louder sounds. Helicopters rattling away overhead, shells exploding. Sirens. The loud crackle of a big fire. The culvert was the right place to be. By the time the shelling had stopped, so had her sobbing. A moment of relative quiet and then a lot of men running past overhead, shouting commands, discovering the car, shouting some more, obscenities mostly, then running on into the camp. Gunfire. Shouts: they found somebody. She stayed where she was.

Eventually they brought whoever it was over to the car and grilled him about the body in it. They called him names. It sounded like they were slapping him around some. He was whimpering and crying out each time they struck him. He was only guarding the camp for his father, he whined. He didn’t do anything; it was the motorcycle gang. They asked him whose bicycle that was and he said he didn’t know. That was probably the creep shooting at her, but he didn’t give her away, she has to give him that much. More likely he really didn’t know who she was or where she was and was maybe afraid, if they did find her, she’d tell them he’d been trying to kill her, or she’d already be dead, and he was in enough trouble already. She could have stepped out and answered a lot of questions for them, but she decided it wasn’t a good idea. Especially being shirtless. There was a conference around the car, some walkie-talkie talk, and then an ambulance arrived and they took the body away and a police car came and took their prisoner away.

There were soldiers in and around the ditch for a while, so she stayed put. Taking mental notes. Thinking about teleological fantasies. The madness of “grand narratives”: history going somewhere. Her theme of the day. Wishing she had her notebook with her. One of the soldiers told a dirty joke, but nobody laughed. They bitched about the smoke, the officers, the bizarre things they’d seen. Life and death got mentioned. Eventually they all left, and as the long summer day drew to a close, it grew dimmer, darkness descending. It seemed safe. She crept out.

They have taken her bicycle. Which means she’ll have to walk home. Probably have to answer some questions. She’ll tell them she ran away into the woods and just kept on going. She won’t say anything about being shot at; fair’s fair. Over the camp, black smoke is rising; still burning. Across the way the mine hill is empty except for a small patrol of soldiers at the foot. It looks sad and worn out. Abused. Cratered. A few abandoned tunics. A lot of wrecked vehicles. The little tree isn’t there anymore. She wonders if her notebook is still over there somewhere under the tipple. Full of unforgettable musings she’ll never remember. She’ll go back tomorrow and look for it. Too tired now. Too tired to walk home, too, and her battered knees are killing her, but she has no choice, and so she sets out, humming along bravely. The darkness deepens…

Car lights. She considers throwing herself into the ditch again. But too late, they’ve seen her. It’s all right. It’s the family car. Her mother. Says she has been looking all over for her. Where’s her shirt? And she starts to cry again. Her mother begins to get a bit hysterical, asks if it was those soldiers, did they do something, should they go see the doctor, which makes her laugh. So she’s laughing and bawling at the same time and completely out of control, which is just about right if you’ve been through the Apocalypse and crawled out the other side.

The first question Mr. John P. Suggs asks when he wakes up in Lem’s bedroom the next morning is: Where am I? Bernice knows what’s coming, all she needs is the W, but she takes her time, lets him work a bit, get his broken wits about him. “A safe place, Mr. Suggs,” she tells him when she acknowledges at last that his eye-blink question has been understood. “Sheriff Puller arranged it through the secret service. Them evil Baxter people, they tried to murder you, but the sheriff he held them off long enough for us to get away.” It is difficult to read his thoughts because his face is so frozen. Distrust? Fright? Gratitude? Mere confusion? “Abner has called his bad biker boys back. You recollect that dynymite they stole? The whole hospital got exploded and a lot of people was shot. But it was you they was aiming at. God spoke to me and I come a-running. We only got out barely just in time.” When she found the Brunist camp empty early yesterday morning, even Clara’s trailer gone, she drove over to the mine hill, where people were massing up at the crossroads. Those two old coalminers from West Virginia waved at her, and then the others did, too, but mostly they were not people Bernice knew. She didn’t see Clara’s trailer or Mabel Hall’s caravan anywhere, but she did see ill-tempered Abner Baxter, and he seemed to be in the middle of things. She couldn’t find a place to park without walking half a mile back, it was still rainy, there were a lot of guns, people weren’t getting on, so she decided to return to the hospital to check on Mr. Suggs. Was God speaking to her? He was. Through Abner Baxter and her distaste for the man and his wrathful elocutions, which chased her off. “Sheriff Puller and his men they killed a lot of them, but them bad boys blowed up the sheriff’s car. That made him mad. You might of heard that.”

At the hospital, she found the doors blocked off by outsiders issuing commands in nervous high-pitched voices, but after she showed them her nursing credentials, they let her in. Near the entrance: an ambulance, still smoking, that looked like it had had a bad accident from the inside out. Which, it turned out, is what had happened, though it was no accident. Blood on the shattered windshield, and blood and wreckage in the reception area, too. A violent devastation. She couldn’t help but be put in mind of all the End Times talk of recent weeks, talk she had a habit of not listening to, and she wondered, just for a moment, if she might regret having left the hill. Later, she learned about her friend Francesca and all the other unfortunate people who were in there when it happened. Two of them were dead and Francesca and a patient who came in with an earache were in intensive care. She describes this horrific scene for Mr. Suggs while feeding him a bite of soft-boiled egg, recounting her passage as if it were still blowing up as she went running through. She found her friend Maudie, the head nurse, on the second floor, dashing about among all the patients being wheeled in. Maudie told her about the bikers’ attack and how they asked for Mr. Suggs’ room and how, thinking fast, she sent them into the room of an old Italian man who had died overnight and that’s who they shot so many times that, as Maudie said, “There ain’t face enough left to name him by.” Bernice tells Mr. Suggs how she got a young doctor to help her whisk him out of his bed and hide him in the nurses’ restroom, even as they could hear Mr. Suggs’ name being shouted out and the boots of the motorbikers clattering up the steps. “That poor nice doctor. He didn’t make it.” She describes the bullets smashing right through the restroom door and walls (Maudie showed her the holes and the pockmarks on the inside) and zinging around their heads. She started to say that they were helped, not by a doctor, but by one of God’s angels. For that, though it certainly probably didn’t actually happen, is what it feels like when she thinks about it, but she’s not sure what Mr. Suggs understands about spiritual beings; he’s only a man, after all, and a businessman at that.