Origin of the Brunists (4 page)

“From out of thy immortal womb
—
”

There is a roar of hooting and laughter, and all the men crowd around to see and hear. Bruno, encircled, is crying. Johnson pumps his fist in front of Bruno as though masturbating him. Clemens gives no least damn about Bruno, but he can appreciate his position. He lights a small firecracker and tucks it into Bonali's hip pocket, exits for the lamphouse, tag in hand.

The tag is brass. Stamped on its face is a small
9
, a much larger
1213
, and at the bottom the letters
G.D.C.Co
. All the tags have the
9
and the letters, but only Oxford Clemens' bears
1213
. Like the numbers on basketball jerseys, it tells you who the players are. At 6:03, he hands it over to old Pop Hendricks and receives in exchange his lamp and battery, similarly numbered. Pop hooks the brass tag on a large board which schematically describes the mine workings.

As Clemens is fitting the lamp into the groove in his helmet his faceboss, Angelo Moroni, stomps into the lamphouse, steel-toed boots sounding off the dry wooden floor. Moroni is laughing still about Bruno's poem, but when he sees Clemens, he wipes away the laugh with a bunched flicker of his thick grimy fist, growls something about the cracker. “I oughta take away your fucking butts, Clemens,” he says, but low, not loud enough for Pop to hear. Moroni and Bonali are old wop buddies.

Oxford grins, exhibiting a missing eyetooth, changes the subject. “Ain't seen Willie Hall?” Hall is Clemens' assigned buddy in the mine.

“No. Whatsa matter? Ain't he here?”

“Ain't seen him.”

“Trouble is, he can't stand working with you, Ferd.”

Clemens shrugs, grins again. Moroni hands his tag to Pop Hendricks. “Want me to wait for him, or—?''

“No, wait a minute,” says Moroni. “There's a new kid here tonight.” He takes his lamp and battery, clumps with them to the door of the lamphouse, cranes his head out. “Hey, Rosselli! C'mere!”

Unwanted dead or alive, that's how it always was with Oxford Clemens. They called him Ferd, Ferd the Turd, and either let him alone or let him have it. He didn't know his old man and his old lady wanted him croaked, wanted his Aunt Marge to kill him soon as he came out, but Aunt Marge never killed anything, not even cockroaches or chickens, for she believed in the peace everlasting and God's infinite mercy and eating the bread. And the teachers cracked his head with rulers and the kids at school, all younger than he, called him Bully and Ferd and Hayseed and threw rocks at him, ganged up on him. Only way they'd ever beat him. And they threw iceballs at him and tore up his books and threw spitballs at him and busted his tooth once with a bottle. That's how it was. He learned to take it easy and keep his eyes open. He stole himself a good gun, did a lot of hunting, caught squirrels on the run, then stomped their heads to stop them flopping around in the brush, but left them lie: people don't eat squirrels anymore. And he stole him some good line and a couple hooks, used grasshoppers, worms, plain old houseflies, and pulled bluegills out of the fat muddy streams on humid afternoons, setting world records till his arms got tired, and he strung them up on a piece of wire hanger, stuck them back in the water to stop them flopping around in the weeds, and left them there: nobody likes to clean bluegills. And he stole him a basketball from the high school one night after a ball game and, being tall and rough, he could bully the young boys at Lincoln School of an evening. He got fancy with his hands and hooked them in from thirty feet, but nobody would stick around long with Ferd Clemens hogging the game, so he'd say to hell with them and go on popping long ones by himself, setting world records until the sun was long since gone, and then he'd have him a smoke and drop by the poolhall, shoot him some snooker, an ace from the age of eleven, and cuss like crazy, making those old guys split their sides.

Tony Rosselli introduces himself, and Oxford grunts in reply. They board the cage together, take hold of the rings. Clemens now wears gloves, but Rosselli, without, flinches, not having realized the rings would be cold. Joe Castiglione, Mike Strelchuk, and a couple greasers named Cooley and Wosznik get on with them. They switch their lamps on and Castiglione trains his on Rosselli's new blue denims. “Hey, boys, who's the dude?” he shouts, and the others put their lamps on him too as the cage hurtles through blackness some five or six hundred feet to the bottom.

There, a half dozen miners are waiting for the mantrip, sitting idly on their buckets, and the arrival of the new man enlivens them. Foregoing their usual accounts of the arts of Ferd Clemens' sister, they turn instead on young Rosselli. Somebody suggests they maybe ought to initiate him. Rosselli grins awkwardly, full-faced brown-eyed boy of eighteen, maybe nineteen. Rare to see a young fellow like Rosselli starting in the mines these days: the assumption is that someone must have pulled strings to get him the job. Bill Lawson stares at the boy and stuffs a wad of tobacco in his cheeks. “Old Willie get fired, Ferd?” he asks, and spits through his teeth. Lawson pitches semipro ball in his off hours, and the tobacco is part of his style.

“Make room for the dude,” says Juliano.

Oxford Clemens sits on his bucket and gazes dully at a far wall, nibbling a matchstick.

“Hey, kid, whose ass did you suck?” asks Joe Castiglione, whose brother has been out of work almost two years. “Who'd your little buddy suck, Ferd?”

At the gym, they'll be coming through the doors, filling it up with noise and color, waving, shaking hands, shouting at each other. Boys in aprons will be selling Cokes, and the cheerleaders, orange WCs on their black sweaters, will be bouncing up and down and clapping their hands, no matter what. Oxford can hear the buzzer and it makes his hands sweat and tingle. In that gym, one day his sophomore year, he was fooling around with a basketball when the team came in to practice. He was feeling hot, so he said to hell with them and just kept on shooting. A tall rangy kid with dark brows jogged up and caught the ball under the basket and pitched it back out to him. He popped another and the tall kid grinned and flipped the ball out to him again. It reached him going like ninety—that guy could really let go that ball. Oxford aimed and popped another. The kid pulled it out of the nets and walked out and said his name was Justin Miller, and he said his name was Oxford Clemens. Then Justin—well, his real name was Tiger, of course—Tiger introduced Oxford to Coach Bayles and he worked out every night with them after that. Tiger showed him how to rebound and tip in and jump shoot and bounce pass and they gave him a suit, and one day Tiger said, “Come on, Ox baby, pop one!” And after that they all called him Ox, he was skinny as a rail, but they called him Ox,
Big Ox
, and all year long he and Tiger Miller threw basketballs at each other and into nets. There was one night against Tucker City when Big Ox laid in 34 points and tied what was then Tiger Miller's high school record. It was the last minutes of the game and he and Tiger broke away with the ball and ended up a mile in front of everybody under the basket all alone. Tiger passed the ball to shoot, but that meant the new all-time record, so Ox grinned and handed it back to Tiger, and Tiger grinned right back and said, “You tip, Ox!” and he laid it up on the rim and, everybody pounding down on them. Ox arched up like a tall bird and lifted the ball light as an egg into the hoop. And it was a new all-time record and they carried him around on their shoulders after and wrote him up in all the papers, and his sister Dinah, even though she couldn't come, she read all about it.

Oxford and the others gathered at the bottom board a mantrip at 6:33 and ride toward their working places in the maze of black-walled rooms off New Main South, ninth to sixteenth entries. The light from bare bulbs glistens off the rough cracks in the roof as the iron box rocks and sways, rattles and shrieks, making too much noise for talk. In its urgent rhythms, Oxford can almost hear his old Aunt Marge, who raised him and Dinah, letting go at the Church of the Nazarene:

When the mantrip stops at the ninth entry and there is a moment of silence, Tony Rosselli turns to Clemens and asks, “Say, wait, ain't you
Ox
Clemens? Didn't you play on the team that went to State?”

Yes, and he wore silk shirts and stopped screwing his sister's friends at Waterton, made out with all the fancypants high school girls instead. He'd still stop in for a round of snooker now and then, but just to let the old men clap him on the back and call him Big Ox. And he and Tiger took the team to State that year and only lost the final game, getting named, both of them, to the All-State All-Star team, and just sophomores. Only the next year it turned out Oxford was ineligible for being too old. He could hardly believe it, but when he found it was really true, he gave them all the royal digit and went down in the mines. Tiger had a new buddy he played ball with and Oxford almost never saw him, except when he went to see the games, had to put up instead with his bucktooth minebuddy Willie Hall, who went to church with his Aunt Marge and was too scared of the mines to work more than half the time. Oxford never got written up anymore and those fancypants girls hung up on him if he tried to call. His Aunt Marge went completely off her head and fell down in a froth in campmeeting one night and died of a stroke. He had the blues something rotten all the time. He went to Waterton every week, drank with Dinah till he was sick, and tumbled her girlfriends when they weren't busy.

Clemens and Rosselli leave the mantrip at the eleventh entry because Clemens wants to speak to somebody in that area, a buggy runner named Eddie Wilson. Bill Lawson and his buddy Mike Strelchuk follow them off. They wait for Oxford to turn down the entry, and then they sidle up next to Rosselli. Each takes an elbow. “C'mon, Tony,” says Strelchuk with a toothy big-jowled grin. “We'll walk you up toward the working area.”

A few feet away, Wilson is saying: “No, Ferd, goldarn it, I'm tellin' ye, I ain't lettin' ye have the barry of my dog, and that's it. I got me a hankerin' to maybe take the pup and go huntin' myself this weekend anyhow.” Clemens spits, gives it up.

Sitting there alone at a cracked creamy table one rainy week night, then, about midnight, and so desolate even Mrs. Dobie had waddled off to bed, the two of them sharing a sour beer, Oxford got to talking on about how he was feeling so very down, how his life was all used up, he might as well quit, and there weren't even any girls in the place tonight. Dinah showed deep age scars cutting through her forehead and under her eyes and around her mouth, and it made Oxford feel miserable and sick. He wished to hell he had some money to give her, send her off on a vacation somewhere, out West maybe, or buy her a new silk dress, spruce her up—Jesus! he was very sad. And while he was staring at his sister very sad she said, “C'mon, Oxford, you might as well stay here with me tonight.” Nobody was around to notice, so they went upstairs, joking and feeling a little like dumb kids. In bed, she played with him a little, but he couldn't get it up, it just wasn't any good, so they laughed and dropped off to sleep, and then they both woke up in the middle of the night, humping away to beat hell….

When Clemens arrives at the fourteenth, he discovers Rosselli down on his stomach, Strelchuk and Castiglione sitting on him, pinning his arms. The boy's face is smeared with blood and coal dust, and Strelchuk and Castiglione are rubbing coal dust into his new clothes. Jinx Pontormo kicks the stuff into his face. Tuck Filbert stands a few feet away with a big grin on his broad-jawed face. Strelchuck's buddy Bill Lawson comes up with a compressed-air hose. “Pull down his britches, boys, and we'll treat the baby dude to a little initiation goose!” he shouts, and lets fly a chaw of tobacco.

Ely Collins, the Nazarene preacher, emerges tall and gray from the entry, frowns, warns: “You boys oughtn't to clown around like that. It ain't right.”

Clemens essays a couple steps forward, but Filbert, Pontormo, and a couple other guys get in his way. Strelchuk and Castiglione try to roll Rosselli over, but in the effort lose their grip, and the boy breaks free of them. Lawson runs over to help, and Rosselli, lashing out wildly, catches him on the side of the head with his new steel-toed boot, sends the older miner sprawling. Strelchuk and Castiglione leap on Rosselli cursing, pin his arms and legs. On his back, the boy keeps twisting and jerking, but they have him good now.

“Okay, get his pants!” Strelchuk gasps.

“Little shit,” Lawson crabs, his hands trembling. He has a long bleeding gash on his face, and his false teeth are knocked awry. He and Pontormo unbuckle the kid's pants and rip them down off him.

The boy's struggling flesh, leaping like a chicken with its neck wrung, is a strange creamy white against the black earth. Strelchuk and Castiglione try to force the boy's legs back—Strelchuk clips him in the belly with the side of his hand, and the boy doubles up. They force his knees up against his chest, Rosselli still not giving up.