Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Angela Bonali wants advice about giving in. “How much have you given in already?” her friend asks. They have decided to drive past the mine hill on the way home from the park to see what’s happening. “Well, just about everything.” “You might want to hold something back.” The hill is still full of tents and little white spots all over it like cotton tufts, but they can see crowds streaming away from the bottom. Maybe everything is already over. Police car lights are flashing. Maybe not. Angie doesn’t care. Tommy really does like to try everything, but she always just wants one thing: Tommy on top of her and inside her, his weight falling on her softly. She loses herself then, and it’s magic. Everything else requires a kind of skill, and that means having to think too much. “Do you? Hold back, I mean?” “No, but I’m not trying to keep a man.”

Angela had just had her second bath of the day and was applying blush and mascara for at least the third time when her friend from the bank called and invited her for a Sunday drive. “I had a date and got stood up,” she said. Her friend is older, nearly twenty-five, but very sexy for her age, and Angela can’t believe anyone would stand her up. But she could think of nothing else to do except have a third bath, and she had a whole afternoon to kill before her big date tonight, so she happily accepted, changing into jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, and head scarf to protect her new hairdo and bouncing out to the car when it pulled up at the curb. Floating on air, she is. They drove over to the park on the river with the giant rocks. Angela felt like climbing up on them all and rubbing herself against them, especially after her friend pointed out one with a little bump on top that looked like a gigantic circumcised peter. “It’s divine!” she said (a sinful thought about the founding of the Church occurred to her and made her giggle and cross herself), and her friend said, “Well, yes, I guess it is.” Angela was just so madly, hopelessly, deliriously in love, and she couldn’t stop talking about it. “It’s just the greatest thing!”

Her friend smiled but did not seem convinced (well, she was having a bad day), so Angie changed the subject and told her the gossip going around that their boss has taken a lover. “I don’t really blame him. His wife is in awful shape.”

“But what if you were not at your best, and Tommy took a lover?”

“I hope I’m always at my best.”

“Speaking of the devil,” Angela says now, though it has been a while since they have done so, and points toward what her friend has just called “that sad little furor” over by the mine hill, where their boss can be seen walking away with the mayor and the police chief. He is very important. The most important person she knows. And he is also Tommy’s daddy, which makes him nearly the most important man in the world. But he does not seem happy. Her friend decides it’s time to drive on, not wanting to get mixed up in all that. “Can you imagine?” Angie says. “Those crazy people want the world to end!”

“I’m sorry,” her friend says.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Talking to myself. I’ve been angry. I’m not angry anymore.” She sighs, winks somewhat sadly at Angela. “I just wish the world were other than it is.”

“Oh, not me! I love it and I never want it to change!”

Priscilla Tindle stops the car at the edge — herself also at the edge of something — of an open field across the way from the mine hill. She has so dreaded this trip, is full of dread still. Distantly, through the trees bordering the field on the other side, they can see crowds pouring away, police lights flashing, can hear the sirens. “Look, Wesley! Something bad has happened! We could get arrested!”

“Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.”

Jesus speaking. “Whithersoever” is a favorite of his. He likes to show off all that King James lingo, Wesley preferring the Revised Standard. She knows why Wesley wants to go there. He has been ask ing over and over and she has always found an excuse, afraid of those horrible people and of Wesley’s horrible wife. He doesn’t know yet about the money, but he wants to get his car back, and his ruined golf clubs, which were in the trunk. He wants to stop the woman from signing anything that would put him in danger. And when that grabby pig cleaned out the manse, she took the orange juice squeezer, and some of Wesley’s favorite old shirts, which that crazy boy has probably inherited, and his hot water bottle, which he needs for his lower back pain, not being quite up to some of Prissy’s routines. Prissy is helping him work that pain away with stretching exercises, but she has pushed him a little too hard and he could really use that hot water bottle now. For the past couple of days, he has been walking around in the sitting position. Her poor dear lamb. Lambs. But as to why his indwelling Christ wants to go to the hill, it’s something of a mystery to her. He says he wants to tell everyone the Apocalypse has already happened, just as he said it would, and this is it, so they should all just go home.

There is a man hurrying toward them across the weedy field. It is the Lutheran minister Reverend Konrad Dreyer. He looks rattled and disheveled and is without the straw boater he always wears. “They’re throwing dead animals around over there,” he gasps. “It’s getting pretty ugly.” This is what she wanted to hear. She offers Reverend Dreyer a lift into town, Wesley thankfully not objecting, and on the ride the minister describes the wild scene he had just witnessed, Wesley listening with a wily, knowing, yet impatient look on his face, a look she has come to dread. “I must say, Wes, it does cause one to reconsider the whole ecumenical movement.”

“Does it? I suppose, Connie, that you believe in the usual Christian notion of a benevolent God working His unfathomable will in Heaven and on earth, with worldly self-sacrifice the path to the Heavenly kingdom, spiritual peace lying on the other side of suffering, the whole idea of immortality being validated by our desire for it, like our desire for food and water.” Prissy is impressed. She hasn’t heard Wesley speak so sensibly since that memorable night she joined him in the bathtub. “That, and the redemptive power of my sacrifice. Christ’s sacrifice. Am I right?”

“Well, that’s a simple way of putting it, but, sure, something like that.”

“Well, all that’s completely stupid. It’s nothing like that. If that’s what you think, you’re as crazy as those people back there.” Oh oh, thinks Prissy. “God’s one tough hardballing cookie, my friend — about as benevolent as cancer. Just look what He put me through. His son, I mean.”

Reverend Dreyer in the rearview mirror looks nonplussed. “Wes, is everything all right?”

“All right? Well, I’ve been driven out of my church and home and made more or less unemployable, they’re trying to get me locked up, my wife has run off with a sick boy to live with those lunatic zealots and has taken our car and everything we owned, I’m reduced to sleeping on the floor in somebody else’s garage, but other than that, sure, everything’s fine. How about yourself, Connie?”

“I’m sorry, Wes…”

“If you guys in the Association had been doing your job, you wouldn’t have let this happen. You would have protected my rights. You’ve let me down.”

“Well, I’d heard…”

“You heard what those pharisaical church trustees, that brood of vipers, wanted you to hear. You have betrayed me to mine enemies, as the Good Book says. You’ve — no, I’m not going to tell him that.”

“What?”