Robert Coover - Public Burning

“Yarf, Pat!” I’d pleaded, scratching my armpits, bounding up and down pathetically, then rolling around on the floor. If only she’d patted my head, scratched my ears, anything! My elbow had bumped Julie’s doll Tiny and it had fallen off a chair, banged its head on the floor, and let out a little crying noise. This had started Checkers barking at me, in turn waking up Julie. “Gruff! Yip!” I’d bellowed over her wailing. “Hrr-r-roiiwl-ll!”

“Now stop that, Dick!” Pat had scolded, her voice cold and angry. “You’re going to give them bad dreams!”

Grunting and huffing, I’d lurched for the doll and tipped over a table full of games and building blocks. I’d squatted amid the debris, clutching Tiny. Now everybody was screaming. Because of the doll. Somehow I’d managed to take Tiny’s head off. What was happening to me? I’d struggled for words, I’d wanted to tell Pat that she was the only one who could free me from this terrible enchantment, but all I could think of were arf and whine and snarl.

“Get out of here!” Pat had cried. “Right now! Or you’ll be sorry!”

I’d gone galumphing out into the hallway on all fours, feeling hunted, banging my shoulder — the sore one — on the doorjamb, skinning my face on the hallway carpet. That swarm of black thing was coming down on me again. I could feel it in Checkers’s fangs as he growled and nipped at my shins. I could smell it in my skunky armpits and foul breath. And I could see it coming out of Pat’s mouth as she passed me to go into our bedroom. What she’d said was: “Put Checkers in the basement, Dick, before you go to bed,” but what I’d seen coming out was: “You make me sick.” I’d reared up on my hind feet to follow after, but she’d slammed the door in my face. Oh, the bitch! I’d fallen back, howling and moaning like a wounded bear, then had gone lunging about, crashing into things, batting the walls, falling through doorways, ending up finally in a dark corner of the spare room, curled up, pawing my ears in misery, listening to Ethel Rosenberg’s aria drifting in through the window on the midsummer-night’s breeze, howling along pathetically and thinking: in the end, I’m not hard enough for politics, I don’t deserve to be President, I’m too good, the world’s not like that, my mother and my grandmother ruined me…

“Work and build, my sons, and build

a monument to love and joy,

to human worth, to faith we kept

for you, my sons, for you…”

Well, poor Ethel — let’s face it, she hadn’t had it easy either. I’d envied her her equanimity at the end: she’d died a death of almost unbearable beauty. In fact, it was unbearable — that was probably why we’d all fought our way up to the switch when the electrician bungled it. Ultimately anyway: I’d have to admit that wasn’t exactly what was on my mind at the time. I’d been thinking more about just getting the goddamn thing over with. I was hanging on then by the grace of one thought only: that the day had to end, it would all be got past. Had to. Time marches on. Shakespeare said that in some play, I believe. Some tomorrow would inevitably become today and we could start forgetting, that was the main thing. I’d never doubted this until that moment the doctors said she was still alive: then suddenly I’d felt like we were teetering on the brink of infinity. Scared the hell out of me. The rest was simple reflex.

Like the way I’d left the stage earlier on. When the lights went out, everybody had started screaming. It was terrible. Somebody was screaming wildly right where I was! It was me, I’d realized. Christ, I’d leapt completely outside myself! I’d pulled myself together as best I could, swallowed down my yelping panic, groped around in the dark for something to hang onto. What was awful was the terrible emptiness —it had felt like there was nothing holding anything together any more! I’d hit upon a chair and sat down in it. I’d felt safer. Thank God for gravity! I’d remembered my pants: I had to get them untangled before the lights came up again. I’d worked one shoe off. Then I’d felt the leather on my butt, the studs, and it had come to me suddenly where I was sitting. For one dreadful moment I’d felt locked to the chair, as though the leather of the seat and the skin of my ass had got interchanged somehow — then I’d ripped free at last, and the rest, as I say, was reflex. The momentum had carried me right off the edge of the stage and down with a bruising splat onto that sea of turbulent flesh below. Don’t know who I hit, but it had felt like Bess Truman. I’d pitched and rolled blindly through the turmoil, carried along by the tide. Everything was wet and slippery and violent, with high crests and deep troughs: like rape, I’d thought. I was afraid I was going to get seasick.

Then I’d opened my eyes and discovered I could see after all, even though everybody else in the Square had still seemed to be flopping about helplessly with glazed looks in their eyes, screaming about the darkness. I’d understood this. When I was very young, just a freshman in high school, my father took Harold and Don and me to Los Angeles to hear Dr. Paul Rader preach a revival sermon and give ourselves to Jesus. Mother did not go. I grasped, even then, that this was not her Jesus, not the Jesus I’d grown up with, the Jesus of little boys. This was a ferocious Jesus who lived in a wild place only grown-up men could go to. Or anyway this was the impression I got from my father, who seemed very serious, even frightened. My mother was sad to see us go and I felt sorry for her — it was like some kind of conspiracy against her. At the meeting, everyone became very emotional. My own father became very emotional, in a way I’d never seen before — he cried and seemed to lose control of himself, seemed to want to lose control of himself, as though the very firmness of his will — and he was always a very willful man — depended on this momentary release. Harold and Don cried, too. So did I, it seemed to be important to my father that I did so and I obeyed as I always obeyed. And like the rest of them, I walked down the aisle through that dark forest of wild emotions and pledged my life to that fierce Jesus. But all the time I felt as though I were walking in a dream, somebody else’s dream, not mine — I didn’t really quite believe in what I was doing. It was like being in a play and I could throw myself into the role with intensity and conviction, but inside I was holding something back. Even as I wept: later I was to recall this scene to help me to weep on cue in Bird-in-Hand , in the back seat of my Dad’s car with Ola, up at Wheeling — but that night I felt guilty about it. I worried that I had not been completely saved. Grace, I knew, was a matter of luck — after all, there were peoples all over the world who had missed out, who were still missing out, who’d never even heard of the name of Jesus, much less had a chance to be baptized, so grace wasn’t a blanket promise…and maybe I was not one of the chosen ones. I wept and knelt and prayed with the others, but I couldn’t really give myself to Jesus, not entirely, not the way the others did. Later, after I’d seen more of the world, I felt pleased with myself for not having given in. I was proud of my discipline — what my mother called Self-Regulation and Self-Restraint — and even though I envied my brothers’ ability to plunge uncritically out into Dad’s world, I nevertheless felt a notch above them. I felt singled out, touched by a special kind of grace, a unique destiny: I was God’s undercover agent in a secular world. For such a one, emotional release was a kind of debauchery. An impiety. My way was harder, but at least I could see where I was going.