Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“How could I forget? That loony lawyer we spooked.” A glorious night of masquerades and theatrical revelry (they were shitface spirits from another world), and then a would-be gangshag with an old buddy’s widow and a drunken brawl, ending up in handcuffs down at the station with newsguys’ flashbulbs popping. He, Vince, Cheese Johnson, and Sal Ferrero — though Sal had fallen away before the end. Georgie thought it was all hilarious, but Vince had big ambitions back then and that night fucked it for him. He turned bitter and weird after that, and it all ended in a daylight raid on the old lawyer’s house while everyone else in town was out at the mine waiting for the end of the world and playing bingo. Their aim was looting, plain and simple, but the house was empty. Mostly empty. What Georgie remembers is all the dead cats. “I spun by Lee Cravens’ old place a little while ago. Looked like nobody lived there. Whatever happened to old Wanda?”

“How the hell should I know?” It is clearly a touchy subject. Not much prospect of a second beer. Bonali has got his sulk back and is giving him a look like he wishes he were dead. Georgie glances at his wrist as if he had a watch there. “Well, shit, I better get the car back. I’ll drop back and see you again soon, Vince.”

“If you do, bring your own beer.”

“Well, lookit what’s fell down the shaft,” says Cheese Johnson when Georgie walks in. Cheese is sitting at a card table with old Cokie Duncan, Steve Lawson, Buff Cooley, Georgie’s cousin Carlo Juliano, and one-armed Bert Martini. Some kind of whiskey bottle on the table. Drained. Collecting cigarette ash.

Georgie has made the usual rounds, but it’s midweek and drizzly, the lush spring day having turned cold and windy again, it is doornail-dead all over town, and still too early for the roadhouses. He has never seen streets so empty. Like some kind of nightmare movie. Even the bowling alley and the Legion Hall, where he’d found two of these guys last night, were deserted. Meeting of the geriatric society in Hog’s Tavern: the old union boss Nazario Moroni, who once punched him when he caught him with a pack of cigs in his mine jacket, and a couple of others of like vintage, including a senile cousin of his nonna, others unknown or aged past recognition. Watching a small mute TV hanging behind the bar. Or more like the TV was watching them. The Eagles Social Club was his last shot. “I was wondering where all the action was.”

“That you, Georgie? You must of forgot your hair somewheres. What drug you back to town?”

“Too much tail up in the city, Stevie. It was making an old man outa me. Had to come back for a rest cure.”

“Well, you come to the right place. Sure won’t find no tail up here.”

“I’m disappointed, Coke. I figured you’d be amenable.”

“Listen at the nasty fella with his city ways!”

“Talk like that,” Bert Martini says, shaking his head. Bert lost his left arm in the mine accident, the one he used to catch baseballs with, so even in draw poker he leaves his cards face down on the table, tipping up their edges briefly to read them, then tossing his quarters into the pot with the one hand he has left in life. “Sign of how bad the times is got.”

“You mean, when you’re up shit creek,” Buff Cooley says, “Georgie’s what you find at the other end.”

There is faint laughter at his expense and he grins his grin. “You turned up just in time, Giorgio,” his cousin Carlo says. “I could use that five bucks I staked you Sunday.”

“Lemme see if I can win it back, cugino. What’s the game?”

“Dealer’s choice, stud or draw, nothing wild. Cap’s three raises, limited to a quarter each.”

“A quarter!”

“If that’s too high we can lower it.”

“This ain’t the big town, Georgie.”

“Okay, high rollers. Deal me in.”

He’s keeping up a brave front, but Georgie’s earlier euphoria has drained away. Visiting Bonali was a real bummer, and the betrayed promise of spring weather hasn’t helped. A new front has moved in like a kind of sudden sickness of the air and there’s even talk of snow. April fool. What little he’s eaten (there’s an empty pizza delivery box on the next table still giving off a spicy aroma, reminding him how hungry he probably is) hasn’t set well, nor has the hip flask of cheap rye he has polished off; he should have picked up some antacids in Doc Foley’s this morning when he was in there. Worst of all, he has come to the sinking realization that he’ll never get enough money together to pay for Ruby, cheap date as she is. Certainly not up here. Even if he took all these guys’ money, there’s not enough between them for a pair of windshield wipers. Which he has discovered is among the old tart’s many urgent needs. Had to drive her with his head out the window during the showers. For all his bravura, he does wish he were back in the city. He misses the action, even if it’s an action from which he was mostly excluded for lack of the wherewithal. All he has here that he didn’t always have up there is a room to sleep in out of the weather, and the price for that is his old lady’s ceaseless scorn and fury. Which can get worse. He can only hope she has not looked under the mattress yet.

“All I’m saying is that for the mine company fat cats the disaster wasn’t nothing more than one bad hand,” says Buff, picking up on some conversation Georgie interrupted. These guys are all survivors of the explosion that blew out Number Nine’s innards and closed it down, and they’re still grousing about it five years later. And using the same lines. It’s like time’s stood still here. His life had been shit in the city, but not this bad. He borrows a cigarette from Bert and lights up with Cokie’s lighter. Buff’s real name is Bill, but when he was younger he was a wild man during union strike action, whooping it up like a rodeo rider, and they started calling him Buffalo Bill, which got shortened over time. “They pocketed their winnings, quit the game, and went home, or wherever they go to get their fucking done, and left the workers holding an empty kitty.”

“What did you expect?” says Bert with a shrug. “Them was the cards we was dealt.”

“At least you got your disability pension, Bert,” Steve Lawson says. Like Georgie’s cousin Carlo, Steve lost a brother in the explosion. Steve sees Bert’s quarter and raises.

“That makes me the lucky one, hunh?” says Bert, waving his stump.

“Put that thing back in your pants, Bert,” says Cheese, meeting the bet and asking for a pair, “and stop showing off.”

“We’re halfway through our fucking lives and whatta we got?” Georgie says, repeating Guido Mello’s line.

“Well, the clap,” says Cokie Duncan. “Hemorrhoids…” Cokie once had a wife, but she ran off during a stretch on the night shift so long ago no one around here remembers her anymore, Duncan included. Cokie was Bonali’s assistant faceboss in Georgie’s crew and on the night of the disaster was left in charge when Bonali went looking for a phone. Georgie was sure Bonali was not coming back and they were all going to die if they just stood there in that black smoky furnace, so he and Wally Brevnik took off on their own. It was Georgie’s intention to claw his way out by his fingernails if he had to. They went through some rough stuff, but Wally had a cool head and they eventually reached the top and already had a cup of spiked coffee in their hands by the time the rest of the section came up. All but Pooch and Lee. Names on a T-shirt.

The best card in Georgie’s rainbow hand is a ten of diamonds, but after Buff Cooley drops his two bits in, he raises a quarter, pretending to want to throw in all he’s showing, and it is not so much a bluff as an act of frustration, wanting desperately for something to happen, any goddamned thing, even a fight. Betwise, not smart. After drawing blanks, he tosses, and Carlo wins the little pile of coins with low triplets, Georgie’s dwindling roadhouse reserve now diminished by his contribution to it.