Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Resign? What do you mean ‘resign’? Damn it, you can’t do that, Maury.” Ted doesn’t like to be called at home. The ring can awaken Irene, doped up as she is, and set off a bad night. “I’m going to try to get you some help, but we can’t have any instability while we have all these problems. What’s the matter?”

“Well, for starters, some asshole up in the city with a scary accent is trying to stop me from campaigning in Dagotown.”

“You get his name?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t even wanta know it.” When Castle speaks, the phone can be set down in one room and heard in the next. “And wait till you see our likely next cop. Know Charlie Bonali?”

“I know his father. Should be all right.” He’s had too much to drink and dozed off in front of the television, this jarring intrusion further souring his sour mood. It’s a good thing the telephone separates them, else he might do serious damage to the stupid ass. Lem Filbert has been blunt about him. A crook. It’s something he should get on top of. Soon. Outside, a fat moon is rising. Another sort of call. “His sister works for me in the bank.”

“Yeah? How’d she get that job, Ted?”

“If you mean, did she have big-city sponsors, the answer is no. There was an opening, she was the most qualified applicant.”

“Yeah, well, I got a feeling that’s gonna be her badass brother’s case, too.”

“Hey, Tommy. Saw your mom’s wagon in the drive this morning and knew you were back. Is everything okay?”

“I shouldn’t even be talking to you. I don’t want you ever in my car again. You are totally weird.”

“I know it.” Sally grins, thinking about the surprise that butter-bags must have got when Riding the Hood’s ruby bullet landed in her lap, and writes: Another first in the history of armed warfare. “Those religious people out on the hill apparently think I’m some kind of diabolical fiend in league with Satan.”

“They’re damn right.”

“If they weren’t all so stuck in their beefcake fantasies, they’d say I was the Antichrist, but that’s too big a deal for a woman. You remember that wall-eyed kid out there with the pilot shades and cute hangdog look?”

“Sure. What awful thing did you do to him?”

“I bought him an ice cream sundae. He snuck away from the camp and met me over in Tucker City. At first he just wanted to warn me that I’d been demonized by the cult and that I should stay away from the camp for my own health, while at the same time trying to talk me into pulling on one of those nighties and becoming a member.”

“What did you do to get so famous?”

“After you left Sunday, I got those two boys to invite me up the hill. Research for Professor Cavanaugh, you know. I got lots of notes for you, but I never quite fit in, I don’t know why.” She pauses to let him make a wisecrack about that, thumbing through her notebook and coming on that cartoon of Sleeping Beauty with the beard and boner and inked-in phone receiver. When he passes (he’s probably scratching himself and yawning, pissed off by the call), she says, “And then a really creepy thing happened. While I was still talking to an old lady there at the tent, she winked at me and died. I freaked out and took off down the hill, and now they all think I sucked the life out of her.” She liked that old lady. She’d felt blessed by her.

“And after that they still want you to join up? I thought it was that kind of outfit. Bunch of whacked-out vampires. You should fit right in.”

“Poor Billy Don is pretty mixed up.” Well, that hangdog look: he fancies her, give the boy his due.

“Billy Don?”

“That’s the boy’s name. When I said no thanks, he switched and made it clear he wanted out himself. It was getting too intense, he said, too unreal. His buddy Darren, that’s the other one, apparently obsesses over the end of the world day and night, and it’s beginning to drive Billy Don nuts.” She understands that — it’s hard to live around crazy people, especially when they don’t know they’re crazy — yet she almost envies this fascination with cosmic mysteries and wishes it didn’t all seem so ordinary to her. She stubs out her cigarette. Maybe she should take up astronomy. She adds sunglasses to the bearded sleeper, and while Tommy makes what might be nose-blowing noises on the other end, writes: Beauty comes on a sleeping Prince Charming, lance in hand, and wonders whether or not she should wake him up. How will he behave when he has to give up his wet dreams? It might leave him with nothing to hold on to, so to speak. “He said he really wanted to get on that bus to Florida — you know, the one all those kids with guitars came on — but things are a mess at the camp after the bikers trashed it, and he couldn’t let his pal and Mrs. Collins down just when they needed him.” Beauty’s own life in the world has been something of a mixed bag, as they say out in the briars. Why drag poor Charming into it? Like her father, he’d just be completely baffled and get drunk all the time. “Also, I think Darren made a play for him and he wasn’t ready for that.”

“Oh yeah?” Tommy perks up at that. “What’d he say?”

“One night he woke up and Darren was touching him.”

“Yeah, well, did he like it?”

“I don’t think he did. I think it scared him a little.”

“But what did he do?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He liked it.”

The telephone table is full of tiny black burn marks where her father — in one stupor or another, or maybe in a pique because of phoned abuse — missed the ashtray. He’s in deep trouble, she knows, with Tommy’s dad. He’s going to lose his job, and then what will they do? It’s not fair. He can’t help it if he’s about as clever as a broken pump handle and can only mimic the world in his friendly stupidity. He’s the sort of guy who uses a whiskey-flavored toothpaste, a Christmas gift from his friend Archie Wetherwax, and has a cigarette lighter that plays “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which is his idea of high culture. Her mom is smarter — she’s been known to read a bestseller or two and professes to adore Chopin’s “Moonlight Sonata”—but she has been completely warped by this dumb town. “So how’s your mom doing, Tommy?”

“About the same. If anything, when she’s lucid, she seems better. More feisty. I’m home because dad had to fire the home care nurse and needs a break. Bad fucking story.”

“What happened?”

“Can’t say exactly. But it seems the woman stripped her out. All Mom’s savings. The woman is one of those crazy cultists, it turns out, and I think they got it all. Dad’s shattered by it. But it’s also fired him up. He’s getting up some kind of community action committee again, and he says he’s going to throw the book at those freaks. That’s what he’s working on now down at the bank. Mom is teed off about all of this, of course, and not easy to get on with.”

Growing up, Sally saw a lot of Tommy’s mother. Their mothers often took them to the park or pool together. Back when the brain was just warm mud and didn’t hold on to much, so it’s all pretty dim. But she always remembered his mother as a sweet, passive creature, very quiet and unassuming. Pretty, even when she got older. Sally’s mom always did all the talking. “It’s sad, Tommy. Getting old is sad. How about if I drop by for a Saturday morning toke? I can say hello to your mom and give you my notes from last Sunday.”

“Not today, Sal. I’m about to take a shower, get the day going. And then I’ve got company this afternoon.”

For some reason, doodling, thinking about Christ’s multitude of foreskins maybe, she has given the sleeping prince a second dick. Give Beauty a kind of kisser’s on-off switch. And if she gets mad, she can bite one off and still have one to play with. Tommy’s, if memory serves, is circumcised. This memory comes not from the ice plant — she went blind that night — but from hairless childhood. To play it safe, she draws one with a foreskin, the other without. That way he’ll be good to go, no matter which way it swings in the afterlife. “Well, let me know, professor,” she says, trying not to sound hurt or angry, but no doubt sounding hurt and angry. “I’m only a phone call away.”