Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

The Brunists, he discovered when chasing around after them, had gone big time while he’d been locked up. They had churches all through that part of the country, radio and television programs, billboards and piles of pamphlet handouts, songs on the hillbilly stations, tent meetings said to draw thousands. Hundreds certainly. He saw them, looking for Elaine. The end of the world? Still on. Sometime. Soon. Patience, jackass, patience — that old church camp skit. Back in West Condon, nobody had seemed to know much about any of this. So much happens in this country that no one ever hears about. On their home turf, except maybe for Lem’s sister-in-law, the Brunists were a joke. They’d all made fools of themselves, dancing around half-naked in the rain, waiting for a Rapture, as they called it, that never happened. It was embarrassing. They should have disappeared into jokes the next day, but instead they’re a big religion. Hard to figure. Of course, Jesus Christ: same story. People are weird. Key apparently has been Elaine’s mother. Old lady Collins is a powerhouse and an organizational genius and a saint. Everybody says so. He remembers her as a big, horsey lady with raw red hands, nearly six feet tall, dressed in print dresses and wide white pumps. She had a way of belting out battle cries like some kind of general or football coach and was at the same time given to throwing herself around and bawling like a stuck pig and talking to her dead husband like he was in the same room with her. Pach’ was always afraid of her and knew she didn’t like him very much.

The search for Elaine was mostly fruitless, but he didn’t work all that hard at it either, even obsessed as he was. Something in him kept holding him back. Afraid of what he might say or do, maybe. Especially if she didn’t want to see him, and why should she? So he took odd jobs slinging hash, working on the roads, making deliveries, and wandered about, following their trail, but fell into a funk and backed off whenever it looked like he might be getting close. Went to country bars instead. Got sloshed. Man of constant sorrow. He hadn’t forgotten Elaine’s Day of Redemption betrayal. How could he after what it cost him? But his sweeter memories of her and his hopes of winning her back were what had gotten him through these bad years, so he has kept chasing her even while shying away, fantasizing some kind of future with her and whacking off to the memory of her little body, just as he’d done all through his prison days, just as he is doing now, standing at the edge of a gravel road under the warm April sun, his fist pumping.

He especially liked to think back on that night on the way home from the mine hill with a carload of chicken feathers when he kissed her and grabbed her leg and more besides — and she wasn’t mad after. It was Easter Sunday, a week before the day when the world was supposed to end, though it felt more like the world was just beginning. Wasn’t that the point of Easter? He has had a good feeling about that day ever since, in spite of the stupid Jesus story that goes with it. Colin Meredith was along that night, and they parked on a side street, and by agreement, Colin got out to take a walk. They were coming from a service on the Mount and dressed only in their Brunist tunics and white underwear, and the feel of her flesh through the thin tunic is what he remembers, first her shoulder and armpit (the knotty edge of her little bra), then her leg, then her whole body as he pulled her hard against him, grabbing her tight little bottom through the tunic and cotton panties, her tummy against his, everything twisting and leaping and shivering, the gearshift somewhere in the middle of it all like an extra dick. He scared her, and he was scared too as she began to bawl and get hysterical, and he backed off, apologizing, starting to cry himself and cursing himself for his rough ways. He kissed her cheek softly, whispering his sorries to her, and blinked the lights for Colin to come back, and then, later, as they were walking from the car toward Giovanni Bruno’s house, he told her he loved her, really loved her, and she smiled a trembly little smile — there was a chicken feather in her hair, like a pale flower petal — and his heart lifted. The next day at school, Elaine, tears running down her face, told him Junior Baxter had called her a whore, and he dragged Junior out of history class and thrashed him right there in the hallway in front of everyone and the principal threw him out of school, but Elaine took his hand and said if he had to go, then she was going too, and they walked out of there together, achingly in love, the only time he’d ever loved so hard or felt so loved in all his life.

Well, love. He doesn’t know what it is, only what it isn’t, and what it sometimes feels like. Back then, he was just trying to get into her pants, because he thought that was what guys were supposed to do. Now he knows that’s the least important thing. Everyone and everything fucks. Can’t help it, really. But, love: that’s the rare thing. The hard thing. And not God love, which is just a fake way of loving yourself. Human love. For someone else. Like he loves Elaine, without knowing what it is or even needing to know. Only kind of redemption he knows now, all he can hope for. He pulls over again, gets out, stretches, combs his fingers through his beard, climbs back in, touches his “Elaine” tattoo through his T-shirt for luck, tunes the radio to the local country music station. Why all these highfalutin thoughts? Be cause he is closing in on her once more and all the old anxieties are back. The urge to stop, turn around, and forget it. All along, he knows, it has been like the going was more important than getting there, with the where of the “there” being uncertain enough to give him an excuse always to change direction. Kidding himself. But not this time. For once he knows exactly where she is and knows she’s staying put. He has seen the fresh new sign pointing the way: “International Brunist Headquarters and Wilderness Camp Meeting Ground.” He either goes there now or throws his life away again. “No Trespassing”: that sign, too. Well, forgive us our trespasses, goddamn it to hell. He tosses his leather jacket in the back, takes down the plastic naked woman dangling from his rearview mirror and stows it in the glove compartment, starts up the truck again. Sniffs his armpits — fuck it, have to do. Pops some minty chewing gum in his mouth, which is mostly his way of brushing his teeth. The song on the scratchy old car radio is a religious one, sung by a bunch of young people. Sounds like a live recording not made in a studio. “Wings of a Dove.” He thought he heard the radio announcer, old Will Henry (that dumb rube still there — some things never change), say something about the Brunists, but he may not have heard right through the static.

Elaine is always most on his mind during Easter, and it was Easter morning about a month ago (he would have blamed the coincidence on God, if he still believed in God; instead he attributed it to luck and the way wanting something badly keeps you tuned in to the world) that his trek back here began. He had picked up a kitchen job in a fancy eatery just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in southern Virginia, the trail having gone cold somewhere east of the Smokies, and at work on Easter morning he’d spun the dial looking for some good music. Something about heartbreak and rough traveling, for he’d awakened feeling melancholic, adrift in an indifferent world, going nowhere. Nothing on the radio, however, except fucking church services, one after the other. It was that part of the country. He was about to turn it off when he heard a congregation singing Ben Wosznik’s old tune, “The White Bird of Glory,” the one that starts with the mine disaster. It was a live broadcast coming from a Brunist church in Lynchburg, and when the song was over, the preacher sent around the collection plate, asking for contributions to what he called the new Brunist Wilderness Camp and Headquarters. He gave their local church address for mailed-in contributions. “We shall gather at the Mount of Redemption to meet our dear Lord there face to face!” he declared, quoting the lines of the song, and apparently that was exactly what they meant to do. On the nineteenth of April. Buses were being chartered. Pach’ took off his apron and quit his job on the spot, thoroughly pissing off his employers, who were gearing up for their annual Easter buffet brunch. He headed to Lynchburg, intent on getting there before the service was over so he could talk to the preacher, that radio station tuned in the whole way. He made it in time to see a handful of fresh converts in Brunist tunics getting baptized by light and was able to corner the preacher after, but it wasn’t easy to get anything out of him. He was one of those smug greasy fucks with peroxide blond hair and a smarmy style, and Pach’ couldn’t hide his loathing of him. His own beardy unkempt appearance also put the preacher off; he could tell by the way his eyes narrowed when he took him in. Probably didn’t even smell all that good. It might have speeded things up to let it out that he was one of those twelve First Followers the preacher had blathered about in his sermon, but it would have taken too long to explain and he didn’t want to risk having Elaine alerted. Luckily, he had a few bucks in his pocket, so he took them out and said he’d heard what the preacher had said about the Brunist camp and he wanted to contribute to it, and that softened Blondie up enough to get what he wanted out of him. He’d have made it here sooner, but he had to earn gas money along the way and he had a lot of breakdowns. And, well, maybe, also, sure, the usual cold feet.