Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“There’s a famous painting of her in a church in Florida, lying in the ditch, pointing to Heaven like that.”

“With a blue arm?”

“No, she’s very—”

“What’s it based on? The painter’s fancy, I suppose, like all the hokum Jesus paintings. I bet no one even took a photograph while she was in the ditch.”

“Well, no…not in the ditch exactly…” Perhaps the whole conversation this afternoon has been aimed at this moment. There is something more he has wanted to share with Sally and he hasn’t known how to bring it up, and now here it is. It’s as if she knew just the question to ask. He reaches into his book bag and brings out the photos. He’s brought two of them — before and after shots, so to speak. “These were taken just before she died. In the first one there, you can see her hand is pointing up just like—”

“Hey! Look at the gorgeous ass on that stud!” She runs her finger over it, grinning broadly. This might not have been the best idea. People’s heads are turning. “Who is that? Oh right! I know! The newspaper guy. Miller. I heard my dad talking about these photos back at the time. And that’s her, hunh? The voice in the ditch. Poor thing. She’s cute. Except in this other one she looks absolutely terrified. She’s clutching that choker around her neck like the guy’s about to strangle her. Or maybe he’s going to beat her with that newspaper. Do you suppose these photos have anything to do with her being out there on the mine road that night?” She thinks about that for a moment. “Sure they do.”

“That might be a kind of simple way of looking at it,” he says softly, recalling Darren’s words. “God is not a ladies’ romance novelist.”

“No, you’re right there. He works more in the horror genre. Do you love God, Billy Don?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

“If I thought he was really there, I’d hate him.”

“Wow. Just like Darren says. You really are evil.”

Sally grins and winks at him, stubbing out her cigarette, and he doesn’t know if it’s the wink of the devil or just a mischievous girl trying to be funny. “I wonder who took these photos. Do you suppose the jerk set up a camera at his back and took them himself?”

“Maybe. But we think it could be some sort of mysterious…you know…”

“God as a pornographer? Funny. I wouldn’t be surprised. But tell me, Billy Don,” she says, leaning across the table again in her bright orange T-shirt with the soft things floating in it and lowering her voice at last, “do these photos turn you on?”

“Well, sure. A little.” He knows he’s red to the roots (what a question!), but the conversation has come around to where in his fanta sies he’s always imagined it would, and he can tell she’s pretty excited herself. He’d like to ask her how she feels about them, but he doesn’t know how. He can only grin stupidly and read her shirt again.

“What does your friend think of them?”

“Darren? He says he feels as if he is staring upon the face of evil.”

The expression on Sally’s face is hard to read at first. It’s like amazement, disbelief, expectation — but then she bursts into a whooping peal of laughter, nearly falls off her chair. Everybody in the drugstore is staring at them now and he knows he should hide the photos, but he can’t move. “The face of evil!” she cries. “That’s beautiful!”

“I think he meant, you know, the cruelty and—”

“He’s not talking about the girl, I assume,” she gasps, in and around her laughter.

“No—”

“What other face is there, Billy Don?”

When he stares blankly at her, she points to it. Oh. That’s really embarrassing. It is funny, though, and he finds himself giggling in a hiccuppy sort of way. The guy behind the soda fountain is craning his neck to try to see the photos. Hastily, he slips them back into his book bag.

“Listen, Billy D,” Sally says. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Hey, listen to this one!” the Elliott girl calls out from behind an overgrown chokeberry thicket, putting Darren’s teeth on edge, her very presence a desecration here. “‘Buck Noone: Coalminer. Gone Below to Work One Last Shift.’”

“That’s great,” says Billy Don, grinning his clownish mustachioed grin. “But come here. Something really weird.” The girl has twisted wildflowers into her snarly hair and is wearing an orange T-shirt with what looks like the Star of Bethlehem on it (black on orange, the devil’s colors) and a two-edged slogan that could mean the birth of Christ connects you to God, but probably means that Christianity is lethal. “This headstone broke in half. See what it says.”

“‘A Broken Heart Lies Here.’ Wow! That one wins the black ribbon! Except…” She kicks at a whiskey bottle and a couple of crushed beercans in the weeds nearby. “Probably not God’s joke, but some drunk’s. Party place.”

The two of them are so engaged in their ghoulish amusements that they have forgotten the reason they are here. No matter. They will not find what they are looking for. Even did it exist, it would not appear before their blinded eyes. For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed.

Darren does not feel he has come here of his own accord. He has been brought here, whether by some demonic force or by the will of God, he cannot be sure, but mindful of the messages he has been discovering of late, he too, though uninterested in the pointless search of his two companions, has looked and listened carefully, read the stony messages, watched for suggestive patterns in the arrangement of the tombs, especially here in this old municipal cemetery from early in the century, when the town was young. It was not far from the center when first laid out, but the town, instead of embracing it, grew the other way, almost as if in fear or revulsion, and over time other cemeteries of a more contemporary and sterile sort (they have visited them) were created while this one sank into its woodsy surroundings and was largely forgotten, its graves untended. “You Will Be In Our Hearts Forever,” says a particularly melancholy gravestone lying in cracked ruin on its back, buried in weeds and dark green with moss, the deceased’s name obliterated by the weather or else broken away. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the Preacher. Who did not know Jesus.

When Darren discovered both the photos and the car gone, he was seized by a convulsive rage, which may have been a holy rage, though it didn’t feel like it. He felt personally betrayed and his eyes filled with tears. If Billy Don has shown that evil girl those photos, what else has he shown and told her? He had been working on his investigations into what he was calling “paranormal manifestations at the site of the first martyrdom” and additional esoteric implications in the patterns of text and number in other recordings and documents, such as “The Revelation to Reverend Ely Collins,” and in his careful cut-and-splice isolation of the fragments from the ditch he had struck on something new and startling: the word “two” before “week” (so perhaps it was “weeks”). Did that mean the voice was suggesting that the critical date might not be June the seventh, but July the twenty-sixth? He had dashed out in search of Billy Don to get his opinion and out in the main square had run into Mrs. Blaurock, who told him she’d just spoken with Billy Don on his way over to the parking lot. She’d grabbed his arm in her big meaty fist and said, “There’s a lotta people here think you boys’re on to something. God bless you, son. You keep doing your good work.” Their car was gone. He’d feared the worst. The missing photos had confirmed it.