Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

When she saw the police enter the First National Bank, she should never have fled. She could not have known that Wesley was in there; she was only frightened of the policemen, those ominous authority figures who have been turning up in her nightmares. But why are they in her dreams? Because of her fears for Wesley. And so, in a sense, she did know he was in there. It was her dream happening in real life. When she arrived after racing back from the empty studio, the women clerks were still in a tizzy about “the crazy man.” She didn’t need to ask any questions, she merely did her making-a-cash-withdrawal dance, one she has rehearsed all too often, and listened to their chatter and that of the other women who had entered. He was shouting lunatic things about love and Jesus and calling the bank president vile names, they said. He wanted to abduct Angela. The cute one, who acknowledges this with her hand on her breast. We’ll take her with us, he said. We? There were others? Probably outside in a getaway car. The women were waiting for him to draw a gun and try to rob the bank. There were no men in the bank now, so one of them admitted to having soiled her panties. Just a speck. It was so terrifying! But what happened to him? Angie’s brother came running over and arrested him. The crazy man called the officers agents of evil, or something like that. Charlie looks so handsome in his new police uniform.

So she came here to the police station, fearing the worst. She knew she might never see him again. She was close to tears. Could she somehow choreograph a jailbreak dance? But they have released him. He is not here. It’s a miracle. She feels a great wash of relief that makes her tremble, even though she is trying to appear calm and collected, like some sort of nurse or sister. She is surrounded by uniformed men who see her, she knows, as a ridiculous and wanton woman. In her worry and fear, she has been too transparent. But she can’t help it.

“Where did he go?” she asks at last, her voice cracking.

They don’t know. The burly one with the toothpick in his teeth has a vulgar little routine of his own, danced to the rhythm of his snapping fingers and popping knuckles with singular leering intent. He is standing between her and the door. She is already rehearsing in her mind her exit-stage-right dance. A casual farewell pirouette so she doesn’t get her backside pinched. The older one who is chewing tobacco spits into the corner and says, “Not much open on the street. You might try Mick’s. He was headed that general direction.”

On his way to his unannounced destination (though Jesus has divined it: This is crazy! They’ll be waiting for you!), Wesley has stopped to speak with his erstwhile friend and colleague, the Lutheran pastor Konrad Dreyer, whom he found tossing a ball around with his young boys in the churchyard during a sunny break in the weather. He wants Connie to call the Ministerial Association together to protest his unwarranted dismissal in the name of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and Connie has said he would do that, though it also has its hazards because of sectarian differences, especially since Wes is claiming some sort of direct mystical connection to the Redeemer.

“It is not mystical.”

He is in his old neighborhood, though he never thought of it as a neighborhood, more like some kind of accident that just happened, he but a passing witness. He had always known that his mission in life, as his mother had often reminded him, transcended neighborhoods, transcended towns, really, even nations, though sometimes it was hard to remember that during board wranglings or disorderly teenage Sunday School classes or rodent problems in the church basement. There are a lot of churches in this neighborhood, as there are in all others, here mostly made of stone or brick in accordance with the construction principles of the third little piggy. Trinity Lutheran is a limestone church with a heavy Teutonic entranceway, probably built about the same time as the lodge out at the church camp. Dark and damp inside, as he recalls, but pleasingly resonant for a preacher’s voice.

“Paul said, Christ lives in me. Does he live in you, Connie?”

Connie meditates on that. He lights up a pipe, so Wesley does likewise despite Jesus’ complaints that he is being asphyxiated. “Well, sure, Wes, in the sense that we all partake of the holy spirit. The ground of all being resonates through us all.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know, but I have to answer you in the way I best know how. I am less inclined to personalize the manifestations of the Absolute than are you. It is hard to speak of this, because as Dionysius the Areopagite has said: the finite cannot express encounters with the infinite. The created cannot do justice to the Creator. But I always feel that the spirit of God is within me, that God Himself is the ground of the soul and there is an inward way to Him. When I pray, I am not speaking to some outside other, but to the God within.”

“Yeah, well, does he ever talk back?”

“I believe my prayers are sometimes answered.”

“No, I mean, does he coach you in what to say and make you do things you weren’t planning to do and say things like ‘Where am I? Turn on the lights!’ or ‘Salute one another with a holy kiss,’ or ‘Hey, let me see your vengeance on them?’”

Connie chuckles around his pipestem. “What’s that from? Jeremiah? Lamentations?”

“His remarks are not always original, but given the context, it’s like I’m hearing them for the first time.” The more words, the more vanity, Jesus is saying now. He has been grumpy ever since they left the studio. Is there no end to windy words? “Right now he is saying, Is there no end to windy words?”

“Job, probably. No, that is not the sort of conversation, if it can be called that, that I have with the transcendent cause of all things. It is more like the immersion of my finite self within the infinite self that is God.”

“You know what? I think you’re just kidding yourself, Connie.”

Priscilla falters at the door of the Italian bar and grill. She can hear men hooting and barking with laughter inside and assumes they are laughing at poor Wesley. He is about all there is to laugh at in this town nowadays. She doesn’t want to do this, but she must. Only she can rescue him. Her dance will be one of great suffering, but the suffering should not show on her face, for it would only be cause for more cruel laughter. She steels herself (she has a little dance for this) and pushes on in, half blinded by fear and shame. The mayor is in there, the former mayor, and two of the church trustees who voted for Wesley’s incarceration, Burt Robbins and Jim Elliott, and they are looking at her with wild grins on their faces. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Wesley is not among them.

“Hey, Prissy!” Jim shouts as though from mountaintop to mountaintop, then heehaws like a donkey and falls off his barstool, bringing fresh whoops of laughter from the others. That her name alone evokes such merriment means they’ve been talking about her.

“If you’re looking for your loony loverboy,” Burt says, unable to speak without snarling through his beak, “he and whoever he was talking to just left.”

“Without paying,” the mayor adds in his booming voice, and the big flat-faced man behind the bar, a squeaky piccolo to the mayor’s bass, concurs.

“I’ll pay his bill,” she says, reaching into her purse, and they all think this is funny, too.

“So, how’s Ralph, Prissy?” Burt asks pointedly, and she decides to ignore that, preferring that they laugh at her silence rather than anything she might say. Jim is still on the floor but able still to emit donkey sounds. “You guys all dancing together now?”