Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Well, we don’t think it was just luck.”

“Oh right. God’s secret designs. Kill a kid to kickstart a new religion. And so now you guys are trying to crack God’s code. Don’t you ever wonder, Billy Don, why any god, if there were one, would want to play such silly games with people? If he wanted something, why wouldn’t he just come out with it?”

“He did that. It’s called the Bible. It’s up to us to read it and understand it and live by it.”

“Yeah, I’ve read the thing. Most of it. Skipped some of the dumber parts. If God wrote it, he’s a crummy writer. He didn’t, of course. A bunch of beardy guys with tight assholes did.”

He knows he’s gone red again. She’s trying to provoke him and he should probably get up and leave, but the sundae is like the most delicious thing he’s ever eaten and he can’t help but linger over it. The sort of thing he has had to do without while traveling unpaid with the Brunists. If he or Darren need money for anything — new jeans or a pair of shoes — they have to ask Clara for it; no way they could ever ask for ice cream money, though Sister Ludie Belle sometimes buys tubs of commercial ice cream for the Sunday camp meals. Sally, watching him, says, “Hey, Billy Don. Would you like another?” He stares down into his empty bowl. He wants to say no thank you, but Satan (maybe she really is the devil incarnate like Darren says) has him by the whats-its and he can’t.

And it’s not just the sundae. Sally mostly makes fun of him, he knows that, but he likes to be around her and he finds himself confessing things to her he’d never tell anyone else. All his doubts, for example. How he still prays every day but feels more and more like he’s just talking to himself, as if his involvement with the Brunists has cut him off from God and Jesus (“Well, there’s something to be said for them, then,” Sally said). How he wanted to get on that bus with the kids from Florida — they were a lot more fun than the crowd at the camp, and just as Christian — but how hard it would be to let down Darren and Sister Clara and Brother Ben. About how he woke up one night and Darren was touching him and how it scared him but he let it happen. In fact, maybe that was the scariest part. He didn’t know what else to do until it occurred to him he could just roll over. The next day Darren told him about a dream he’d had about a beautiful woman who turned into Mabel Hall when he touched her and he wondered if it was some kind of omen. Billy Don believed him and didn’t believe him at the same time. Mostly he didn’t believe him, and it made him wonder about the wet dreams he’d had recently, though he didn’t tell Sally that part.

And now these obsessions with words and numbers. When he told Sally about Darren’s code charts and “sacred calendars” at their first meeting here last week, Sally said, “Numbers always have these weird magical properties — but it depends on where you start counting from, right? To add a millennium, you first have to locate zero and one.” “I think we have worked all that out,” he said with a smile, and she smiled right back at him and said, “I think we have not,” and she told him about all the different calendars through history and how there have been thousands of prophets of apocalypse and all of them obviously wrong, the first being Jesus himself. “Well, Jesus was a special case,” he said, “because Jesus didn’t die. As for all the others, we can learn from them, and where they failed we can get it right.” But a seed of doubt had been planted and he knew she could hear it in his voice. When she shook her head sadly and said, “Oh, Billy Don,” he felt like he wanted to hug her and be hugged by her, and he worried then that he was succumbing to evil, and he wondered if he should just stand up and walk away as fast as he could.

It has been especially hard for him not to stand up for Darren. Becoming his friend was a turning point in Billy Don’s life. He was morally adrift until then, confused, more interested in baseball than religion and in the opposite sex more than either. He ended up in Bible college because it was cheap and said to be easy and full of friendly girls. And because he needed to get on the wagon and stay there. He and Darren met in a New Testament seminar taught by an old fellow with soft dewlaps and a soft brain who dug at his scalp while lecturing as if trying to dip his fingers in it, and they started meeting outside of class for coffee or lemonade and boiled peanuts. Darren introduced him to the scarier side of religion — what it was all about, really — and opened his eyes to the underlying patterns of things, which are not really hidden so much as just not visible on the surface. Billy Don was always good at puzzles — Darren said it was a gift from God and at the heart of his calling (he’d not even thought about having a calling) — and Darren proposed some new ones of a seriousness beyond anything he had imagined before. Darren was the smartest and most intense person he had ever met, and when Billy Don was around him, he felt connected to the world — not just the world, the universe —in a way he had never known. But now, well, he’s not so sure.

Today, when he brought up the Sibylline Oracles and how they prophesied the birth of Jesus, thinking to impress her, she only looked pained and told him they were a well-known sixth century fraud. Could this be true? “Such a desperate human thing,” she said, “to look for mysteries where there are none.” She often says things like that and it both thrills him and dismays him. That she treats him so seriously; that she mocks him so. But he likes to hear her laugh, so bold and free. He’s never heard a girl laugh quite like that, and he sometimes plays the fool for the simple reward of it. Now he has been telling her more of the Marcella legends, about the heart-shaped bloodstain on her tunic, about how when she died she pointed to Heaven and kept that pose all the next day (the belief of many being that she was raptured straight to Heaven), about the white bird that flew overhead and some said right out of her mouth, and the crosses of blood that appeared on people’s foreheads after. “Raptured? But there was a body. What happened to it?”

“No one knows.”

“Well, it all sounds like a lotta phony baloney to me,” she says, shaking her head and lighting up again.

“Yeah, that’s sorta what Pach’ said, too.”

“Patch?”

“Carl Dean Palmers. He’s one of the original twelve First Followers. He just turned up over the weekend. Drove in in an old beat-up van.”

“Oh, right. Ugly Palmers. What we called him in high school. Poor boy, he was. A knobby-headed toad with acne all the way to his knees and a raging temper. How does he look now?”

“Okay. He’s got a beard. Seems cool.”

“I thought he ended up in the penitentiary.”

“He did. He’s out now He picked up his new name in prison. When we filled him in about Marcella, he said he was there that night, and all that was, well, he used a bad word, but, like you said, baloney.”

Sally leans across the table and whispers conspiratorially, “What was the bad word, Billy D?” There’s an embarrassed pause and he knows he has an idiotic grin on his face. “Bullshit…?” He nods. “So,” she exclaims, leaning back, “Ugly Palmers said it was all bullshit. Good for him!” She raises her empty sundae bowl as if in a toast. “Bullshit!”

“Well, maybe,” he says, trying not to look at the guy behind the soda fountain, “except for the part about her pointing to Heaven. You can see that even in the news photos.”

“Hmm. You’re right. I do remember something like that. Her arm sticking up like a petrified blue twig. I was so grossed out I could hardly register the details. At the time, I figured it must have been some kind of trick, but, really, I didn’t want to look. I was pretty squeamish back then.”