Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

When it’s his deal, to do Bert a favor he calls seven-card stud. “I seen Guido Mello today. He’s not a happy man,” he says, passing out the hole cards.

“Well, he up and married the Sicano girl, the one who was never quite right in the head, and one a their kids has a medical problem. Some sympdrome or nother. So he’s sorta lost his sense a humor.”

“Sicano? The one we all banged on the Hog pool table one night?”

“The same.”

“Oh man. Well-buttered buns.” A memorable night. Used to be a popular neighborhood spot, Hog’s Tavern, but Hog Galasso is long dead and it has fallen on hard times. Dark and foul-smelling. A few ancient habitués like those he saw tonight. But back then he was still just a kid working his first mine shift, getting tanked in there with some older guys from his section, when one of them went out and came back with the Sicano girl, and Hog locked the doors. The pool table got knocked permanently ajar by what happened afterwards; you had to know how to play the slope. “What’d he go and do that for?”

“Il Nasone never had lotsa options amongst the ladies.”

“He says Lem has turned out to be a hard man to work for.”

“Who ain’t? He should try that tightwad cocksucker Suggs for a spell.”

Cokie and Steve, he learns, have got on part-time at one of the strip mines, but when he asks, he’s told don’t even bother — old man Suggs and his hardass mine manager are not partial to Italians. “They only like to abuse their own kind.” Cheese and Buff also got hired out there, he’s told, and then fired — Cheese for his fuck-off wisecracks, Buff for trying to organize the workers — and they add to the asshole portraits of J. P. Suggs and his site boss, a surly black-bearded gun-toting church going westerner named Ross McDaniel. “McDaniel hates everybody and everything. He’s one of them guys that if his feet don’t carry him fast enough to where he wants to go, he’s apt to shoot them off.”

“He believes the Bible should be the constitution and law of the country, and wants to execute everbody who don’t agree with him.”

“Never seen a guy with a lesser sense a humor,” Cokie says.

Buff lights up. “There was a day we’d of strung up guys like him.”

Several of them have been out to the hospital to see Big Pete Chigi, who has black lung and is breathing his last through respirator nose plugs, and he hears about Ezra Gray, who was in Red Baxter’s section and got out of Deepwater okay, but then went down in another mine a state over and got crippled in a roof fall that killed three other guys.

“Yeah, I seen him — broke his fucking back. He’s on rubber wheels for the duration. Ez was working non-union, so no comp or insurance. A hotshot lawyer talked him into filing suit, but the owner faded away like he never was. Like he disappeared into the paperwork or something.”

“Same as what happened here. The ruthless dickheads.” Buff slaps his cards. “C’mon, Georgie, cheer me up. Goddamn make me something. Send me down sixth street singing.”

“Fulla potholes, sixth street.”

“Ez is completely off his nut now. One a them Brunist types. He travels some with Red Baxter, I hear tell. Out there ranting about the end a the world and all that.”

“Is old Ez back? Is he out there at the camp?”

“He’s in town,” says Steve, “but I never seen him in the camp and he’d be hard to miss.”

At first Georgie thinks Steve might have got mixed up with those crackpots somehow, but it turns out Suggs has been helping them rebuild the camp, using his own workers for some of the heavy jobs, so both Steve and Cokie have been putting in time out there. It’s not clear what old man Suggs is getting out of the deal, but they’re pulling their normal paltry wages, so no complaints. “So what’s going on out there in the woods?” Georgie wants to know. “Are they wearing any clothes?”

“We ain’t sposed to talk about it,” Steve says, “but, yeah, leastways by day. We don’t stay past quitting time, so I don’t know whatall they get up to, but it’s too fucking cold to go round bareass even if you’re rolling round a lot. From what I could see, they’re mostly just only working their butts off, fixing the place up. Generally I didn’t reckanize no one nother than Ben — ole Ben Wosznik, y’know — him and Ely’s widder. They kinda run things. And also Willie Hall’s out there. Willie and big Mabel.”

“That’d be a cute pair, butt-nekkid.”

“And Lee Cravens’ skinny little widder with all her brats, she’s there, too.”

“Wanda?” Georgie glances up and catches Johnson’s wink and gap-toothed grin.

“She’s shacked up with some bigass hulk. I mean, really big. A man who’s dragging around a whole heap a excess mollycules. But he can move. I seen him dancing round on the open beams atop the old lodge like a man who don’t know what fear is.”

“He ain’t never been down a mine then.”

Georgie has dealt himself a second king over a pair of eights, and he risks a couple more quarters, but Johnson beats him with a club flush, so even his luck is bad. Buff gets back on the mine bosses again, so to change the subject and lighten things up, Georgie elaborates on some of the tales he has been inventing during his job hunt, including a new one about a highprice hooker named Ruby, red-hot Ruby, using anatomical details from the centerfold he’s had hung in the car all day and personality quirks based on the old junker’s clunky behavior. “Well, we’re just getting warmed up, you know — really shimmying down the road, burning rubber — when her fucking eyelashes fall off and she gets so hot she starts making these really nasty noises down below…”

“Sounds a real beaut, Georgie,” Carlo says, laughing.

“No shit, she was. Even posed for one a them centerfolds. She invited me along for the photo shoot. She said me watching got her hot. Sure got me hot. She was a sight to see. An ass-end to die for! I still have a copy somewhere, I’ll show it to you someday.”

“Hey, speaking a pitchers, show Georgie the ones you got, Cheese!”

Johnson shrugs, reaches into a paper sack, and tosses out a half dozen well-thumbed black and white photographs of two naked people doing a kind of sex manual thing on a leather couch. No hardcore shots and the light’s bad, could be stills from a cheap stag movie, but the guy’s well hung, they’re both good lookers, and the beaver shot with the guy standing over her with a newspaper in his hand like he’s about to swat her with it is good enough to make you want to poke her. Then he looks closer. “Wait a minute. Who is that? Is that Tiger Miller?” They’re all grinning. All except Bert Martini, who says, “You shouldn’t ought to be showing them photos around. She was a nice girl. And Tiger was a pal. When I was in hospital he come by to see me near every day. I figure there’s more here than what meets the eye.” The others laugh at that.

“And that’s the Bruno kid, right? Marcella. The one who got killed. She was in school with me. A young kid, coming in as I was going out. These are a little different from what’s in the high school annual. Where’d you get them?”

“You remember Jonesy, useta work at the newspaper, back when we still had one a them shitrags. We was playing cards and gitting blitzed together up to the Legion the night Jonesy split town. I walked him to his train and he give ’em to me as a see-ya-later present. Plumb forgot about ’em till them apocaleptics showed up agin.”

“Sure you did,” Carlo laughs. “You can tell by all the cum spots on them.”

Something about the photos bothers Georgie. Not just the realization that something was happening back then and he’d missed out. He missed out on plenty. She always had a nice smile, but she was just a kid, he hardly knew her. Her brother was a complete psycho and he supposes some of that rubbed off on Marcella. He doesn’t remember anyone ever dating her. No, it’s something about seeing her so exposed like that. Not so much her naked snatch, he’s seen his share of those, but all the rest of her, so laid open. Georgie has never seen that look on a girl’s face before. She is looking not just with her face but with all her body, her snatch as much a part of her looking as her eyes. Her navel or her toes. Her mouth, half open. So it’s like something terrible is being bared that shouldn’t be seen, something that, once bared, can never be covered up again, and he hates it that these cackling shits are ignorant witnesses to it. And she’s so still. And silent. It’s like she has been spread out to be carved up. Consumed. Well. She’s dead. Must have died right after these pictures were taken. It’s like getting the hots for a corpse. He wants to cover her up. Close her eyes. “Her nutty brother was in my class,” he says, feeling soberer than he wants to be. “Is he out there at the camp now?”