Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Inspired by the baseball talk and the lush weather, Georgie takes a run out by the high school athletic fields, first closing the glove compartment door on the top of the centerfold so that it dangles there to cheer him on his journey. He has done a lot of driving up in the city, that being mostly what he did except jerk off, and it feels good to get back behind a wheel again, and on mostly empty streets and roads where he can open up. The old crate makes a lot of clunky noises, has no pick-up at all, the gear shift is tricky and the steering wheel is pretty loose, but what it has, he knows, is presence. In it, he is somebody, and, window down and arm out the window, he blows kisses and tips his cap to all he passes to let them know he knows it. He decides to name the fading beauty after one or another of his favorite blue movie characters like “Nympho Nellie” or “Sadie Sucker,” but finally, given her colors, settles on “Red-Hot Ruby,” who, as he recalls, also had a big thrusting creamy ass and lipsticked her anus. It was an old black-and-white silent, but they’d gone to the trouble to hand-color the lipstick red. It jiggled around going through the projector, like the rear end of this old car on a rough road.

He is in luck. The boys are having their first practice of the new season. He stops, keeping the motor running, to jaw with the coach for a minute. He volunteers his services to help the kids with their hitting, while they gather around to admire Ruby. Georgie could never field a ball for shit, but he was a natural with any kind of stick in his hand. He had quick wrists, could watch a pitch until it was nearly across the plate, then whip the bat around like a fly swatter, and the coach remembers that and says, sure, come along any time. Georgie, waving goodbye, feels like this day is turning into the best day of his life.

After that, he rolls around the periphery of the town, the centerfold’s raised culo flapping merrily in the breeze, checking out the motels and roadhouses that the fire chief mentioned for later on. “Big night tonight, baby,” he says, rapping the dash. “Gonna get it on! ” He passes, chattering away to Ruby, or else to the centerfold, they’re an agreeable blur in his mind, the Sir Loin steak house and abandoned drive-in movie, the sleazy old love-cabins motel which charged by the hour, the driving range and country club, a few golfers already out enjoying the first real day of spring. He’s joining the in-crowd, maybe he ought to take up the game, pick up a few bucks once he’s got the knack. He swings into the rootbeer stand with the intention of offering his bod to the short-skirted carhops, but there’s not a one looks older than thirteen, so he blows them kisses and rolls on out, passing the new shopping center, new when he left town, the turn-off to the gravel pits and old swimming hole, the road to the Waterton whorehouses, and the burned-out ruins of the old Dance Barn where the big bands used to come and where they served anyone who could see over the bar. First got his cork popped by the hand of another under the table in a hard wooden booth in there, the hand belonging to a girl just fifteen years old like his green young self. At the time, he didn’t really know what came next, or if he knew, didn’t know how to make it happen, so he lost out with that chick. Never mind. Many more to follow. Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them sigh.

He pulls into a filling station to add a few dollars of gas, patting Ruby’s provocative rear end while he’s got the pump in her (a patch of deep rust back there, he notes, like some kind of fatal crotch disease), and sees by the gauge it’s just a drop in her bottomless bucket. Ruby’s the deep throat kind of girl — he could run through a pile pretty fast just keeping her juiced up. He cruises the strip of car dealers, most of them closed down, their vast lots vacated, but still flying their faded flags and streamers, then Chestnut Hills, the cheap prefab developments built mostly for mining families at the edge of town where there are no hills, no chestnuts, looking for who knows what. Some broad from the past probably. A lot of scabby abandoned houses, muddy yards, old cars and trucks on blocks. Potholes that jar the dust out of the ceiling fabric. Then it’s the rich folks’ side of town with their big houses and flagpoles and fancy shrubbery — though even they are looking pretty seedy and uncared for, and there are FOR SALE signs on some of them — and finally, after a clanking cap-waving spin down Main Street and a kiss blown to his new employers at the Fort, on past the white RR XING signs, over the rusty unused rail tracks, and into his own neighborhood. “Home, baby,” he tells Ruby. Mostly painted frame houses in various states of dilapidation, many of them multifamily, overcrowded and depressed, but comfortingly familiar and welcoming in the warm afternoon sun. He tours all the houses where former girlfriends once lived, letting Ruby show them what they’ve been missing. Probably all married now, swarmed round with brats and gone to fat or worse.

He spies Vince Bonali rocking on his front porch with a beer in his hand, and, as Ruby’s been getting overheated, he pulls over to the curb to let her calm down and invites himself up past the molded cement Virgin foot-soldiering the muddy front yard, thinking he might be able to hit his old faceboss up for a buck or two of gas money. He is an understanding guy. They have been through a lot together, had some great old times. He would do the same for Vince. He’d heard that Vince had sunk pretty low after his wife kicked off, and he finds him so, a morose old musone, too grumpy even to stand up and shake his hand, but after commiserations and family talk and a few reminiscences about the old section, Vince lightens up enough to offer Georgie a beer and pop another for himself. Vince is wallowing a dead cigar in his mouth. “Want me to try to light that mess for you?” “Nah. If I smoked it, I’d have to buy another and I don’t have the dough. Eating it, it lasts longer.” He turns his pockets inside out in demonstration before settling heavily back into the rocker. There went that idea. Vince nods toward the car. “Pick that piece of faggot junk up in the city?” “No. Here. Just shopping. Giving it a trial run. Gotta go turn it in soon.” “Made a pile up there, did you?” “Well, hit it lucky a coupla times, but—” “You know, when I first seen you coming, Georgie, I had the funny idea you were looking for a handout. What a laugh that woulda been. All the spare cash in this town is at the bank. That’s where this comes from,” he says, holding up the beer. “That guy at the bank’s supplying you?” “No, Angie. She works there. She buys the groceries now. She gives me an allowance, Georgie. A fucking beer allowance. You’re drinking up part of my weekly allowance.” That makes him feel just great. What is he supposed to do? Give it back? It doesn’t even taste good anymore.

“You were smart to get your ass outa here, Georgie. Look at me.” He does. The old man is staring morosely at his missing finger joint. He’s got about as much life in him as his sodden cigar. “I haven’t had a goddamn day’s work since they shut the mine. It’s been a long, hard five years. And it’s gonna get worse. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing back here.” He can’t use his little mammina line, Vince knows better, and he doesn’t want to suggest to his old faceboss (he’s still the boss) that he has been in any kind of trouble (he hasn’t really, other than the everyday). So instead he tells him about his new job as a fire inspector, thinking to earn a little respect. Vince snorts and shifts his wet cigar to the other side of his mouth. That thing really is disgusting. “They’re using you, Georgie. It’s a shakedown racket. You remember old man Baumgarten?” “The dry cleaners?” “Yeah. He was asked for a contribution to the mayor’s so-called campaign fund, and when he didn’t come across, he got a visit from the fire department. They found a lot of things wrong. So he fixed them. They found some more things wrong and he fixed them again. He was reminded that it was costing him more to comply with the regulations than to cough up the campaign fund donation. Still, he wouldn’t go along, so one night his business burned down. The inspectors said it was faulty wiring and he’d been warned, he couldn’t even collect on his insurance.” “No shit.” Georgie’s good mood is sinking as the sun sinks. It’s clouding up and there’s a cold wind. It was a mistake to come up here and let this sick old man bring him down. “Robbins is in on it, too, right?” Georgie nods glumly. He really doesn’t want to hear any of this. “It was those two guys who dropped us in the shit five years ago, you remember that?”