Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

There are lights in his rearview mirror. Another lover headed home? No, four lights. Two lovers, then. He’s leading a parade of returning lovers. The lights do not seem to resolve into headlamps, spreading apart and drawing together again. Stacy has been introducing him to marijuana. Is it already affecting his brain? Probably just more tired than he thought. He slaps his cheek and looks again. He sees a fifth headlamp and knows now what they are. Before he can hit the accelerator, they are all around him, in front of him, behind him, roaring along beside him, five black-leather-jacketed motorcyclists, their metal jacket studs glittering infernally in the headlights, their ratty hair flying. They weave patterns around him, taunting him with obscene gestures and icy maniacal grins. One of them looks foreign, Hispanic. He pulls up alongside, spits on his window, smashes the side mirror with his gloved fist. An empty bottle caroms off his hood and windshield. On their jackets: skulls and crossbones, crosses, American flags with daggers in them, dragon-like serpents, the name WARRIOR APOSTLES. It’s unreal, a nightmare — indeed, he feels almost as if he has fallen asleep in the motel and is having an anxiety dream about getting home again. They continue to crowd him as if trying to slow him down, force him to the shoulder. They probably mean to rob him, even kill him. All right, team. Fuck this. Huddle time. The scrawniest one leans down and smashes out his left headlamp with a heavy wrench. Another roars up on his right and takes out one on the other side. The tail lights are going, too. He hits the brake, hard, forcing the two at the back into a spin, then, leaning on the horn like a war cry, barrels forward, head ducked, through the narrow space between the two peeling bikers in front. Driving a hole in their line. He hears the scrunch of metal against metal. Something thrown cracks his windshield. Not a lot of pickup in this cumbersome machine, it’s a moment when he’d love to have the old manual gearshift back, but it does have power and he knows he can eventually outrun them. He only hopes they are not armed, or, if armed, don’t shoot. And that, with only one dim left on the ditch side, he can stay on the black seamless road on this moonless night. It’s like running the sideline to the end zone blindfolded.

When the banker reaches his house, he takes a moment to catch his breath, calm down. He’s absolutely furious. He’ll call Chief Romano, get him out of bed. The sheriff, too. Tell them he wants action and now, goddamn it. This is an outrage. Those shits should be run down tonight, captured and jailed. Or hung, preferably. He would personally like the pleasure of taking a sledge hammer to their fucking motorcycles. The innocent citizen strikes back. The more or less innocent citizen. He will have to explain what he was doing out on that road. Well, business meeting, possible investors, job interviews, etc. Could those guys follow him here? Do they know who he is, how to find him? He listens for the sound of their bikes, but the night is silent. To be safe, he puts the Lincoln in the garage, though not much worse could happen to it. Maybe he should leave it out in the driveway as bait and wait for them with his rifle. He could shoot them and they’d never be missed.

Inside, his mind still gripped by the hellish racket of crunching metal and shattering glass, he finds that Irene has taken a turn for the worse. “We didn’t know where to reach you,” Doc Lewis says, stepping out of the bedroom. Bernice Filbert is in there, sitting by the bed, head bowed, holding Irene’s hand, her white head scarf curtaining her profile, spectacles dangling on a chain beneath her chin. They seem to be praying together. “We called the club…” “Sorry, M.L. An appointment. Lasted longer than I expected. And I got attacked on the way home.” “Attacked?” “Motorcycle gang. They smashed up the car. I was lucky to get away. How bad is she?” “She’s better. I gave her some morphine. Should settle her for the night. She should be in the hospital, you know, where we can monitor her.” “Irene’s pretty determined on that subject. And I tend to agree. Don’t want her to die in hospital. She belongs here at home. With me.” Lewis nods. He looks tired. Probably got dragged out of bed. A good man. Living proof that there are good men. The sort that, by who they are and what they do, ease despair. Something Stacy, expressing her love, once said about him. He didn’t deserve it (love’s like that), but Lewis does. As for the Sunday drive, forget it. What was he thinking of? “Should I call the kids?” “Not yet. Her heart’s strong and her will seems intact. She could live on for months still. Let’s see how she’s doing tomorrow.” “Bernice said she was so lively earlier.” “Flush of euphoria probably. Often precedes a crisis.” “Thanks for coming out, M.L. How about a nightcap?” “Well, that’s kind, but…” “I need something to crank me down. Join me. The car’s in the garage, go take a look. I’ll let Bernice go home and say goodnight to Irene. Be with you in a sec.”

That night, the banker dreams about the bikers. Only, it’s not a nightmare. He’s riding with them, matching their cool smiles with one of his own. The sun’s shining and they’re out on the open highway, blazing along. Nothing exists except the roaring machine between his legs and the exhilarating sensation of freedom as vast as the limitless landscape. No goal to reach, just the joy of life itself. One of the bikers pulls up alongside him. It’s his fraternity brother, the one teaching up at business school. He has an ecstatic expression on his face. “This is beautiful,” he shouts, and the banker agrees. The scenery is streaking past. “But once you get one of these things going,” his fraternity brother asks, his expression metamorphosing to one of terror, his bike beginning to shimmy, “how do you get off?”

When they arrive like returning heroes after their exhausting all-night journey, anticipating warm embraces, they find the steel gates at the end of the access road open, the camp abandoned. There are some trailers parked in a field with THE COMING OF LIGHT stickers on their bumpers and other evidence of recent occupation — in a cabin up from the main lodge, there are dirty dishes and muddy jeans, and the beds are unmade — but the atmosphere is one of a spooky emptiness. It reminds Franny of their father’s pictures of the Rapture, which she used to think were photographs: the saved taken bodily up to Heaven dressed in wispy gowns like shower curtains, clothes left behind in castoff heaps. No fat people ascending. Which suits her fine. Her father wonders aloud if there has been a raid on the camp, everyone arrested. Maybe the Persecution has begun again. That suits her not at all. Franny Baxter is sick of being hated and chased about and wants to hear nothing more about the abuse of prophets and the suffering of the righteous. She hates her name that draws such bad feelings to it. She wants to be a nobody quietly living a nothing life in nowheresville, believing in nothing except her own crummy nothingness. She sure doesn’t want to be back here. Their father has been in a state of repressed fury for days now, and sometimes not so repressed: little Paulie has been whacked and swatted so many times this week, he can do nothing but scrunch up and snivel all the time. Not that he’s capable of much more at his best, she thinks, though Paulie himself dreams of more. Like burning down the world and everything in it, for example. While roasting marshmallows over the flames. And he’s not a nobody. He’s Nat Baxter’s brother. And he is going to be a Warrior Apostle. Nat promised him. They will cut him and mix his blood with theirs and together they will fight the war of the gods. Nat and Littleface have shown him pictures. The Apostles have roared here ahead of the rest and gunned their motorbikes up the hill to take over the high ground, and Paulie now follows after on foot. Amanda goes to tell her father what the others are doing, but he is standing in the big house, staring at all the folding chairs and the things on the wall and thinking about something. There’s a big man on the wall, looking like God when He’s mad. She is afraid, as she always is, it’s all so frightening. Her oldest brother Junior meanwhile is on a come-and-see reconnaissance mission. Down in the trailer park, he finds the doors all left open as though their occupants had fled without time to lock them. Junior looks for Elaine Collins’ trailer: he guesses the biggest and newest one, and he is right. For five long punishing years, he has been dreaming about her and about this moment. At times, it has been all that has kept him going, kept him believing. Their passionate togetherness in Christ, their dream of sainthood. He thinks she might be waiting for him in her bedroom, but she is not. In her underwear drawer, he finds his letters to her. And a man’s leather belt. He leaves the letters, takes the belt and a pair of panties. In the kitchenette, he discovers an old cookie tin, too old to have cookies in it. Guessed right again. He pockets the bills, leaves the change. There’s a shotgun near the back that’s tempting, but too big. In a drawer behind it, though, he finds a handgun. When he returns to the camp, his father is just coming out of the lodge with a frown on his face. Nothing new. He always has a frown on his face. Their mother has not left the car, the sad old thing. She just sits there, staring into space. Nat, from overhead, shouts down, “There are a lot of people over on the mine hill!” That seems to cheer their father up. “Then we shall go there,” he says.