Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

On a slight rise on the way into what he knew when a boy as the Presbyterian No-Name Wilderness camp, within view of the artificial bump of land their little movement grandly called the “Mount of Redemption,” Pach’ Palmers stops to take a leak beside the panel truck that is his present home. It’s his first time to see that goddamned mine hill since the day he got arrested on it. When he came back to West Condon after his release a couple of years ago, looking in vain for Elaine, he was able to pick up the old Chronicle delivery van, and once he got it running, he headed out here. But he turned back at the edge of town. He was starting up a new life. It seemed like bad karma, as Sissy would say. What a crazy time, what a crazy day. Life does throw up some fucking doozies. That one cost him a stretch in the slammer. Pach’ lifts his cock and aims his stream toward the Mount, wishing he could piss away that awful day, the worst day of his life.

What was he really thinking that day? Did he think the end of the world was coming? That Jesus was going to come flying down out of the storm, superhero cape flapping, and whisk them all off to Paradise? He was so hot for Elaine’s body, he didn’t know what he was thinking. He was holding on to her hand, hoping to find some place they could at least kiss, last chance and all that, but they were on a barren hillside with one sick rickety tree, surrounded by freaked-out Jesus worshippers, the whole world watching, and nowhere to go. And, anyway, there was no budging her. Elaine was completely lost to the insane moment and stood there in the rain, her tunic pasted to her skinny body, rain and tears streaming down her face, looking out on the crowds or else up into the sky. Down at the foot of the hill, those they called the powers of darkness were massing up, including all the reporters and photographers and state cops, and overhead: the mind-rattling yak yak yak of police helicopters. All their own people, showing off all they had in their wet flimsy tunics, were praying, singing, crying, and flinging themselves about in holy fits, their tunics turning black and brown in the mud. It was pretty arousing. He had a massive hard-on impossible to hide under his soaked tunic, which not even fear of the impending apocalypse could shrink. He was able to bend his underwear elastic band down over the head, and belt it in somewhat with the rope they all wore at the waist, but it kept slipping, and when it did it stuck out a mile. He thought: Well, Jesus, here I am, take me, sins and all. Then the town newspaper editor showed up. Mr. Miller. The guy who’d pretended to be a friend and fellow believer, but who’d turned on them like Judas. Exposed them. Made them look like dumbass jerks. Everybody said he was why Bruno’s sister went crazy, why she’d died in the end. So he was a killer, too. They were all charging down on him. The Antichrist. Or the Antichrist of the moment, anyway. He let go of Elaine’s hand and joined them. It was something he had to do. He remembered pummeling the guy there in the pouring rain, hitting him over and over, wishing he could kill him, the girl’s corpse somehow bouncing around in the middle of it all, pointing her blue arm at everybody. The guy’s clothes got torn off, and in the end Pach’ was pounding a lifeless naked body dressed in mud and blood. People were jumping on it. Somebody had an ax. Pach’ thought they had killed him. Only some time later did he learn the poor sonuvabitch had somehow survived. Elaine’s mother had had something to do with it. He was grateful for that. He was sorry about what he’d done. Doubly sorry, because when he went looking for Elaine again, he found Junior Baxter whipping her with a switch, and he laid into the spongy tub of shit — second time that spring, throwing him into the mud and punching him with both fists — only to have Elaine start clawing him and scratching him and throwing her nearly naked body down on Junior to shield him and screaming at Carl Dean to go away, go away. And with that, he lost it. He turned and pitched himself like a howling maniac at the advancing state troopers, taking down a couple of them before they all piled onto him. He was sent up to detention for six months for that, though he doesn’t remember anything after seeing Elaine’s little body on top of fat Junior with blood all over his stupid face.

Anniversary last Sunday. The nineteenth of April. He might have made it here in time had it not been for a leaky radiator. Just as well not. They were probably all over on that hill again and he would only have repeated the whole mess or made it worse. Five years. Long time ago. Seems like a different lifetime. Fuck, it was a different lifetime. Pach’—he wasn’t called Pach’ then — was an ignorant young dickhead with a susceptibility for big total answers. He was president of the Baptist Youth Group and full of furious opinions (how easy it was to speak of God and Jesus then; they were like pals on the track team, and he was elbow to elbow with them, slapping butts) when his high school reading and writing teacher Mrs. Norton drew him and his friend Colin into her goofball Seventh Aspect fantasies, and then, after the coalmine disaster, they followed her when she got mixed up with the lone survivor, Giovanni Bruno, a weird lunatic like all so-called prophets, one thing following another with a kind of mad irresistible logic. Religion’s appeal, no matter how nutty, to the down-and-out. He knows all about that, having been there all his life. The need for divine intervention to serve up just desserts, give the loveless something to love, cure the incurable, take revenge upon the wicked. Focused, God-sanctioned hatred. Oh yes, he felt all that, sometimes still does. He has an explosive nature; he knows that. He has learned to keep things in check, but as a kid he was just so damned angry all the time. He might have killed somebody and often wanted to. It was what made him let go of Elaine’s hand. He let go of everything when he let go of that hand. Everything. He hated Miller at the time. Now he thinks of him as pretty much the smartest guy he ever knew. Sure dumb of him to turn up out there, though, after all he’d done. Must have been Bruno’s sister who dragged him out. It was her body he was trying to reach when he got set upon. Pach’ can understand that. Same with Elaine now. Why he’s here. Except at least Elaine’s still kicking.

Trying to track Elaine Collins down is mostly what he’s done ever since they uncaged him. The six-month rap became a year for mouthing off and throwing his food on the floor and getting into fights with the other punks in detention, and they gave him another five in the state pen after he blew up and punched a sado guard. Laid the sick asshole out cold, sorry only that he hadn’t broken his neck. They might not have let him go anyway. His fucked-up parents had split and left the cheap development at the edge of town and he had no idea where they were, nor wanted to know, so as a juvenile there was no one he could be sent home to. No other relatives wanted him. He was too ugly. After a row or two in the pen, he settled down into his old camp counselor ways and they finally let him go after a couple of years. He was supposed to keep in touch with a parole officer, but he never did. He boarded a bus and came back here. He couldn’t have afforded the train, were it still running, but it wasn’t. The closing of the coalmines had also meant the closing of the railroads. West Condon itself was like it had always been only more run down, needing a fresh coat of paint. He wasn’t shopping, he was looking for Elaine, but she and her mother had left town along with most everyone else he knew, and, except for vague rumors of Brunist doings around the country, there was not much local news about them, so what he got out of the trip instead was his panel truck. He had wanted to apologize to Miller — tell him he was fucking right, they were all dumbass jerks, right on, man — but the Chronicle was closed. Miller had flown the coop, nothing left on the newspaper premises but a print shop run by an old schoolteacher and track coach he once had. Miller, the coach said, was reporting for network TV, something Pach’ never saw except sometimes in bars. Where no one was looking at the news. The paper’s rural delivery van sat out in the parking lot, its tires flat, battery dead, lights busted out, muffler falling off, hoses and fan belt shot, no shocks at all, but the body was not too rust-eaten and the engine looked repairable. The coach let him have it for a token dollar. A tall, sour ex-coalminer named Lem Filbert had a garage at the edge of town and he hired himself out to him in exchange for a tow, some used parts, a set of retreads, a meal a day, and Lem’s mechanical know-how, serving as night watchman on the side for he was already sleeping in the thing, Lem’s widowed sister-in-law providing him some old bedding. A part-time nurse of some kind who had plucked eyebrows and was so religious she dressed like women in Bible pictures. She joined their group around Bruno at the end, but he didn’t remember seeing her out on the hill that day. Maybe she didn’t want to get her clothes wet. She was the one who told him Elaine’s mother was now married to the singer Ben Wosznik and was doing missionary work somewhere over near the Carolinas, and yes, far as she knew, her daughter was still with them. When he had the van rolling again, he headed east. Lem worked hard and demanded hard work, but he was good to him in the end, filling his tank and stuffing a few bucks Pach’ knew he could not afford into his pocket.