Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

On his way over to Lem Filbert’s garage to hunt down some wheels after a fortuitous cheeseburger and beer at Mickey DeMar’s Bar & Grill, Georgie Lucci stops in at Doc Foley’s corner drugstore to check out the centerfolds in the magazine rack. It is a glorious April day, first of its kind, the sun’s popped at last, he has money in his pocket, the birds and flowers are doing their hot-ass spring thing — it is a day in short for draining the old coglioni, for having one’s ashes hauled, as they say in the Land of Oz, and Georgie is many moons overdue. His last fuck wasn’t even one, just a tired blowjob in the front seat of his city taxi by an aging whore— una troia turpe , as his long-gone old man used to call his mamma while belting her about — which he had to pay for. He’d even make a play for the scrawny snatch behind the soda fountain, but he’d probably have to order something and he hates anything with cow milk in it and has a philosophical objection to spending money for coffee. He loosens the staples and slips the centerfold out of the magazine (if he wins a pot some day, he’ll buy a camera and take up photography), tucks it under his jacket, and with a wink at the big-eyed jugless kid who has been watching him, strolls out into the sunshine.

It has been shitsville since his vomitous predawn return on Sunday, un merdaio di merda as his dear babbo liked to put it when speaking of his beloved family, but things have at last turned around. For the past two days he has been mostly slopping around in the cold wet weather looking for a job, getting nothing better from it than a sore throat. The post office, the lumberyard and iron works, the strip mines, the bowling alley, the flour mill, the power stations, the bars, the gravel pits. Niente. Main Street is like Death Valley. That scarred-up war vet who runs the bowling alley and talks out of a hole at the side of his mouth could be elected its beauty queen. Shops boarded up, jobless guys hanging about in the pool hall and barber shop trying to stay dry, the streets potholed and littered with garbage. No trains, few buses, newspaper now just a print shop, the old hotel looking like a war casualty. Even the bus station pinball machines have been permanently tilted. His old mine manager Dave Osborne apparently got suckered into buying the shoe store from the new mayor when he got elected, and Dave, gone gray, looked twenty years older. Georgie figured there were worse things to do than tickle young girls’ feet and peer up their thigh-high skirts, but Dave just shrugged when he asked and gazed off into the wet gloom beyond the shop window. He looked in on his late cousin Mario Juliano’s widow Gina at the mayor’s office in city hall, and she snorted when she saw him and said he must be crazy, no one who leaves this town is ever stupid enough to come back. At the Piccolotti Italian Grocery Store, the kid now running the shop laughed in his face. “Fucking highway supermarket’s killing us,” he said. “Go try them.” He did. Offered himself up as a stockboy, bagger, delivery boy, whatever. The manager wouldn’t even talk to him. He stole some razor blades and a candy bar and left, wondering what the fuck had dragged him back here. He should have got back on the overnight bus the same day he arrived. Nothing has happened here since he left, nothing good anyway, and nothing ever will.

His mother was startled to see him when he turned up back on Easter morning in his filthy wet rags, as big a surprise as Christ crawling out of his tomb and about as fragrant. “Where have you been, Giorgio?” she asked. “I thought you was dead.” She fixed him some breakfast after he’d showered while he rattled on about the high life in the big city, but then when she saw he was broke and jobless, she started putting everything back in the refrigerator and cupboards again and cursing him for being un imbecille, un testone stupido , same way she used to curse his old man. Another hand-me-down of a sort, his life story. She had shrunk up some since he had last seen her and had retreated into widowy black, though when Georgie asked if the old fellow was dead, she just shrugged and curled her lip and said she had no fucking idea, or Italianisms to that effect. Georgie was just a teenager when the evil old bastard took off, heaving a few chairs around and giving his mammina a thorough walloping on his way out the door. Except for his kid sister, all his other brothers and sisters had by then vanished over the horizon, and his sister was soon to follow, running off with a stock-car driver, but Georgie, pulling on his old man’s abandoned boots, went down in the mines and was still there a dozen years later when Deepwater blew up, convincing him it was time to change careers. The only brother Georgie knows anything about is the one who became a priest and who still sends his mother a little pocket money now and then. Georgie saw a lot of stag movies up in the city, his favorite being one about monks and nuns having an orgy on the altar in a monastery chapel, and watching it, he couldn’t help thinking somewhat enviously about his brother, though as best he remembers him, he was never very interested in ficas. Georgie discovered that his mother, poor thing, still distrusted banks and hid her money under her mattress, which helped him get through the next couple of days while he beat the streets like a puttana, looking for work. The old lady makes him feel guilty all the time anyway, he figured he might as well give her cause. And it’s just a loan; he’ll put it all back with interest when he hits a lucky streak.

Which may have just begun. Making his rounds this morning, he dropped by the police station to see Dee Romano, whom he’s probably related to in some bastard way. Playing pinochle up at the Legion last night (not part of his lucky streak), he had learned that Old Willie had been losing what few wits he had (as Cheese Johnson said, “Old Willie has lost his marble…”) and had been retired from the force, and though everybody at the table and no doubt half the town were applying for the job, Georgie decided to throw his own tattered sweat-stained cap in the ring. As he had expected, the chief, who had locked him up a few times in the days of his dissolute youth, only snorted at this prospect, but agreed to put him on his list of volunteer deputies in case of future need and suggested he go visit Mort Whimple at the fire station, he might have something. This cheered him up. He had always wanted to be a fireman, ever since he was a little kid. But Whimple said no chance, he was facing probable layoffs of his underpaid part-timers as it was, all he could offer him was a cup of coffee. Never say no. They sat in the sun by the firehouse door and gabbed about the disaster and the crazy evangelical doings back before Georgie left town, when Whimple was the town mayor, Whimple shaking his grizzled jowls and saying he couldn’t wait to get his fat butt out of the fucking Fort and back here to the fire station. He had eyes too close to his big nose, one a bit higher than the other, giving him a clownish look that made everything he said seem funny. The chief filled him in on the town’s nightlife—“After the Dance Barn burned down, whaddaya got? A coupla sleazy roadhouses, the old Blue Moon, and the Waterton whorehouses…”—and said that probably the worst thing he could do if the town were burning down was try to save it. Georgie spun him a line about the good times up in the city, hinting at important family connections and a debilitating sex life. Why didn’t he stay? Well, you know, dear old mammina, all alone… Whimple seemed interested in that and asked about other folks in the neighborhood, and then got up and announced it was time for his weekly visit to the crapper. “But stay in touch, Georgie,” he said. “If something turns up, I’ll let you know.”