Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Giovanni? Nah, they locked the loony away right after the world ended and he never come out.”

“He’s dead, I think,” says Steve Lawson.

“Dead?”

“So I heerd.”

So, Georgie decides, tossing in another losing hand, is this dump. He feels suffocated by the dead. He looks around the table. Even these guys are dead. The whole fucking town is a town of the walking dead, and he’s going to be one of them unless he moves his ass. Besides, if he wants to score tonight, he should get on the road while he still has coin left to operate with. He had thought to invite these guys along, but he really doesn’t want to be around them any longer. He glances at his empty wrist and announces he has a date waiting for him, gotta go. He had made the mistake of tossing some money on the table when he sat down and, as he gets up to leave, Carlo reaches over and snatches up a couple of loose skins. “Now you owe me three,” he says.

“Ruby,” he says, leaning his heavy head against her wheel, “Ruby… what I really feel like doing is shooting somebody.” Georgie is sitting in the Blue Moon Motel parking lot waiting for the old girl to warm up, sucking on the joint the Moroni kid gave him. Soft wet snow is falling like a punchline for the stupid joke that is his life. On the travel office window this morning, he saw a sign advertising holidays at a beach place called Brazil. Where he ought to be. Where he deserves to be. Wherever it is. He’s cold, wearing only a shirt and jacket, feeling miserable. The only way morning’s promise is going to be fulfilled is in a Waterton whorehouse, provided they still exist and he can find an old puttana who will take what little money he — he and his mother — have left. Ever hopeful even in deepest despair, he assumes that, on a shit night like this, they’ll take any trade they can get.

The motel was the last stop on his desperate but futile nightlong quest. For what? Cunt? More than that. Some kind of affirmation is what he was looking for. Some justification. Just a pleasant conversation with some pretty young thing would have been nice. He is full of sorrow and could have used an arm around his shoulder. A soft breast to nuzzle. The roadhouses weren’t completely empty. Worse. Those few out on the crummy night were all juveniles. Drunken teenage high school kids. Boys pissing themselves with their own confused excitement, a few girls going bad. Well, that was all right. Hey, let’s rock. Georgie felt like one of them — he was one of them. But they didn’t feel like one of him. They called him an old pervert. Baldy, they called him. Gramps. In one place, an unshaven kid they were calling Grunge even threatened to take him outside and beat the shit out of him if he didn’t fuck off. He would have welcomed a brawl, but his own team had a membership of one and those red-eyed boys with erections bulging their jeans didn’t look like they would know when to stop. Then a short stocky guy with a fedora tipped down over his broken nose swaggered over and told Grunge to lay off. “Pal of my dad’s,” he said. “You worked out at Deepwater, right?” Georgie acknowledged that he did, and recognizing now the tipped lid, he introduced himself and said he was in the mine the night it blew up and killed his dad. “Been away since then. Just checking out the old haunts. Ran into your granddad today, too. At the Hog. Nonno Moroni’s the toughest bastard I ever knew.” “Yeah. Who I’m named after. But this is a private party, Georgie. Sorry.” “I smell fresh-baked cookies.” Young Nazario smiled faintly, fished out a joint and handed it to him. “On the house. Lemme know if you’re in the market for more. Me or one of my boys will fix you up. With whatever. Ciao.”

By the time he had reached the Moon, he was no longer looking for women; he was happy only to sink into a drunken stupor and let his life end that way. Just as well, for there were no women to be had, unless one of the two couples in the room should have a blowup and leave a partner behind. He had hoped to catch the old girl who used to play a melancholic piano in here, but she had been replaced by one of those twangy hillbilly types, a long loose assembly of bones with some skin on them, wearing a sweaty cowboy hat and a plaid shirt. Boots that looked like they might not have been off his feet since he grew into them. When Georgie took his stool alone at the bar, the hick was singing about dead mommies and daddies, which was a real pick-up. There were two older people in a booth back in a dark corner and a young couple on the dance floor sort of melted into each other, mouths together, the guy’s big mitt on the girl’s plump little ass, the other holding her hand and pressed against her boobs. The Georgie Porgie of old might have cut in on the young stud, he could still show the little cunt a trick or two, but he had taken enough knocks for the night. “…And each night as I wander through the graveyard, darkness hides me where I kneel to pray…” Holy shit. They’re getting off on lines like that? When they parted mouths long enough to go into deep-gaze mode, Georgie recognized the girl from Sunday at church: Bonali’s hotpants daughter. The one at the bank. The boy, who was at least a foot taller, looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Everybody around here looked familiar. It was a kind of curse. Even the bartender turned out to be a punk from the neighborhood, a kid who was in grade school when Georgie was in high school. Only he wasn’t a kid anymore either. Beardy. Already developing a gut. “White dove will mourn in sorrow,” the hayseed whined, and Georgie, though suffering a deep grief of his own, decided if there was one more fucking chorus, he was going to trash the place. Gratefully, the song came to an end, though the lovers stayed in their swaying clinch on the dance floor, grinding away softly. The girl spotted Georgie past the boy’s elbow (Georgie winked, she ducked) and whispered something to the boy and they left, and the older couple soon followed them out. The woman was either a whore or somebody’s wife. If he’d come here earlier, he might have made out. It was when everyone was out of the place that, looking around, you realized how filthy it was.

The singer did an Elvis imitation of “When the Blue Moon Turns to Gold,” apparently the house theme and just for him, for him and the bartender, who applauded, then, setting down his guitar, came over to the bar, to try to cadge a drink maybe, and Georgie told him flat out he hated hillbilly music. “Go fuck a horse,” he said. The guy only grinned faintly out of the side of his mouth and shrugged and said there wasn’t much else he knew how to do except drink and split the beaver, maybe Georgie had a better idea for picking up enough small change to get by. He didn’t. That eased things, and though neither could afford to buy the other a drink, they ended up trading tales, leaning there on the bar, Georgie finding himself telling the truth for a change about his fucked up family and fucked up life, while the singer, who introduced himself as Duke (Georgie gave him his Italian name, just to let him know where he was coming from), told him about the shit life of the country music road circuit, and the even shittier life of the bush leagues. He said, when asked, he used to throw a little, and Georgie said he used to hit a little but could never stay sober enough to go pro. Georgie even got around to telling about the girl who had been killed, the girl who was, he only realized this just now, the true love of his life. “One thing about country music,” Duke said, “is they got a song for ever damn thing that ever went wrong. They ain’t many differnt tunes, but some words is better’n others.” “And some words are worse,” Georgie said and asked him why he was singing that sick mommy and daddy graveyard merda when he came in. “The girl ast for it. It was the third time I’d done ‘White Dove’ for the moony little thing tonight. Probly has to do with the first night she got laid. Most usually does.” Georgie felt warm enough toward Duke by then to ask him if he’d like to join him on a run to Waterton, go give the dog a bone, but Duke said it was still too early, he had to stay on until midnight in case anyone came in. “But I’ll be around. Got no place to go. Drop in agin.”