Origin of the Brunists (40 page)

He shouldn't go out there, just fog up the vision, but he'd promised yesterday. He'd better go. He would. Picked up the phone, dialed the hospital. Though it was what he lived by, he regretted the one-track specificity of all action, of all choice, what time made you do when you came to a fork in the path … or two forks at once. Eleanor Norton's seven aspects were the thing, by God! While he waited, he hummed “Just As I Am,” an old revival tune, and doodled on his desk blotter. He noticed that all the doodles lately looked alike: M's. Since his own name had never fascinated him that much, they could only stand for one thing. Some were peaked and shaded heavily, gone over and over until they looked like a flock of shaggy black birds in flight in a green sky. Others were rounded like two hillocks, or like one hill cleft, insignia of all three feminine distinctions at once. As if something were lacking still, some of the M's had even been enclosed in a circle. “And that Thou bidd'st me come to Thee,” he sang into the phone, “O Lamb of God, I come! I come!”

Marcella, digging in the dewed earth by the old apple tree, sings revival songs of her own make. She punches open the gaily colored seed packages. Thirty days! The sun is gloriously hot on her spring-frocked back. He comes!

After loading up the hooks with wirecopy, Miller took the panel out to the hospital. Stalled at every stopsign, clanked even on new asphalt. Old rusty-smelling wreck. One year old. Stopped for gas at the station where Lem Filbert worked, asked him if he was keeping in shape. Filbert played a creaky shortstop on their semipro team. The guy grinned broadly, then sighed, spat. “Ahh, shit, I'm gittin' too fuckin' old, Tiger.”

“Yeah, we all are. Where's all the young talent?”

Filbert's grin faded. “They're smart. They're all gittin' outa this deathtrap before it's too fuckin' late.”

“Is that Mello in there working on that Ford?”

“Yep, he's one a the fuckin' lucky ones. Come on a coupla weeks ago. Been at least fifty fuckin' guys by here lookin' for a job.” The valve on the gas hose burped shut. Filbert squirted enough more in to round the charge off, hung up the hose, capped the gastank, spat again. “Gonna be a lotta fuckin' holes in the lineup this year,” he said flatly, and stared off.

“I know.” There was nothing else either of them could say, so Miller paid and left. Lem's brother, Tuck, killed in the mine disaster—about all they were able to bring out were his head and feet—had played a great center field with them for six or seven years. There were others, too, too painful to think about. Lorenzini and Calcaterra. Their pitcher Bill Lawson, whose widow had been in and out of the cult. Mario Juliano. And Bert Martini with one arm gone now. Martini caught and Miller had known one-arm catchers before, and he hoped to rehabilitate the old guy. But it was going to be a pretty glum season. Man. Down with spring.

Inside the hospital, the white was perhaps a little whiter, but past that there was nothing to let you know spring had got turned on outside. Miller picked up the traffic list. Seven admitted, five released: even the batting average was bad. He went back, took the elevator up to second. As he stepped out, the first thing he saw was Happy Bottom's happy bottom. Her back was to him, her head down studying the diet and medications lists, and she was absently pinching through her skirt to tug down the legband that forever gaped upward. A useless effort, he had told her, being able to prove that the band's natural position, given all stresses, was exactly five picas above her thigh's best wrinkle. So what? she would say, and, turning from him, tug it again. “Now, how did you know I was coming?” he asked.

Her hand twitched away in reflex as her head came up, then stroked back toward its tugging cranny, again pincered the white skirt. Her arm relaxed, the hand sagging, pulling the taut skirt yet tauter. She turned then to look at him. “Oh,” she pouted, “I thought it was one of the doctors.”

A bell rang and a light came on down the corridor. “Say, I can't stay,” Miller said. “I just dropped up a second to—”

“Post office is in room 24-A,” she said with a challenging smile, and left him to go answer the patient's signal, switching her hips not too subtly at all. He could almost hear the old barrel organ root-toot-tootling away.

Of course, he should just wait here since he wasn't going to stay, but he didn't, wandered instead down to 24-A, empty as he had supposed it would be. He leaned back against the bed, waited, a few fantasies flowering from the root below.

Happy entered, glanced back behind her, eased the door shut. All those M's, my God! M for mountains. She met his smile with one of her own, approached, everything moving at once. M for everything moving at once. “At last!” she growled. A wisp of sandy hair poked out under her nurse's cap. “You are in my clutches! The Black Hand strokes again!”

Miller grinned. “Mother,” he complained, “you forget the gravity of the situation. Men are dying!”

She smiled up at him. Her breasts had that rare muscular thrust that made them look, from above, like a pedestal for the head. Or a platter. “Dying indeed. You've been around those awful morbid people too much, Tiger.”

“They're not morbid, they're ecstatic.”

“Listen, I saw that poor boy Bruno. He had so many scars on and around his unfortunate joint, it looked like he'd been rebuilt there by a quack plastic surgeon.”

“Who, Giovanni? You mean he had some accident—?”

“You bet, accident. Whoever flayed him, flayed by patterns. Or maybe he used a knife. He was a real curiosity out here. All the nurses took turns with his baths to get a look. Of course, as soon as he was strong enough, we couldn't get near him.”

“Really?” Miller laughed. He'd guessed as much, but now he had information he hadn't known otherwise how to get. “Who bathed him then?”

“His sister.” If she caught his inward jolt, she gave no sign of it. “And as for dying, well, nobody tries any of that funny business up here unless I let them. Of course, on off days, why, I don't really care. I just forget and they drop off like flies.” The platter punched his chest as if to roll his own head upon it, and, below, her hipbone curled in to knock once. Enough. “Tiger, there's thirty-six people up here whose lives depend on you!”

“Hand,” he grinned, “you're even blacker than I thought.” And, as if in thanks for that, as her mouth dampened his grin, her hand trickled in a liquid gambol down his spine to midthigh, then back up the front where a wild demand had stirred. “But there's no lock on that door,” he whispered, her lips biting his words.

“I've got the key to the upstairs X-ray room, and it just happens to be time for my break. Won't be anybody up there all morning.” There was spring light in her smile and a glitter in her eyes' mischief that chased all phantoms, even the most recent, while from his fingertips, pressed urgently into the soft swells that had won her her name, there radiated a message of scorn for the highflown moralizing of his morning walk and a sense of cosmic pandemonium that made him laugh. “We shall take inside pictures and sell them secretly to zee leetle boys,” she murmured. “We shall make a
meellion!”
He didn't know if she meant dollars or pictures, but knew better than to ask.

Marcella sits on a stool under the scrawny apple tree in the grassless backyard, her hands full of damp dirt, the sun on her bright yellow back. Before her: a plot of troubled earth, about four feet square, marked off from the world's vague extension by four corner stakes and a piece of wrapping string. Four or five sticks poke up in the plot like its first people, broad-shouldered, wearing empty seed packages, but headless. The gaiety of their uniforms delights her, but what will express the joy they
think?
She spies a clump of new dandelions in Rosalia's yard next door. She picks a few, punches little holes in the tops of the seed envelopes—really the bottoms, for they are upsidedown, of course—and inserts the dandelion heads. She laughs. The fact is, Marcella doesn't exactly believe in the cataclysm. At first, she had some doubts about her brother even, for she had never confused love with worship. But she has grown greatly in these few weeks, has discovered the true solidity of truths she previously only suspected, or thought might just be creatures of her own inturned foolishness. For example: that Jesus is not salvation, but only a single path among many to a higher condition that ultimately must even exclude him. Or: that true knowledge is the discerning of pattern, and wisdom is its right interpretation. She has been greatly helped by them all. By Eleanor and by Mr. Himebaugh, even by Clara. And most of all by Justin. Though silent, apart, calm, singular, he is yet at the heart of the Plan, moving with hidden fingers, fulfilling with unspoken words, gentle, responsive, aloof from the human frailties of the group. Justin is—in a sense—their priest. She feels it. Perhaps they all feel it. She thinks of his silence as like the ardent silence of the sun, his apartness as like the enfolding apartness of the stars, his calm like the contained explosions in her chest. But the cataclysm: well, it's a matter of definition. God is terrible, but as beauty is terrible, not horror. So, if she prepares the earth for Him, even four little square feet of it, it is not to deny His coming, but to affirm the love that motivates Him
.

Impulsively, his Saturday edition thrown shoddily to bed, Miller decided to go see Marcella. Go see her now, while his seed machine, old despot, was utterly drained of need, and make up his mind about that thing once and for all. Without the Chevy and the panel out, he had no choice, walked over. Didn't mind. Loosened him up and gave him time to think. It was a little brazen, this midday visit, but there were few ignorant now of his involvement with the cult and, therefore, with any or all women in it. That was the trouble with this goddamn village, there was just no way to let an affair ripen on its own, it inevitably got put on a stage to be applauded, hooted, laughed at, or second-guessed. Even the high school kids suffered this kind of daily intrusion—how long had he known, for instance, that Ted Cavanaugh's boy Tommy had been taking little Sally Elliott, Jim's daughter, out to the ice plant several times a week? Only guy in town who refused to listen to that rumor was Coach George Bayles, who was afraid if he acknowledged it, he'd have to bench Tommy for breaking training and lose every game left on the schedule. Miller had in recent years resigned himself to pickups in roadhouses and distant dance halls—had the advantage they were usually young—but he was growing away from secretaries and phone operators, had trouble setting up anything worth more than a second listless event.

He passed the Lincoln School yard where a gang of youngsters were playing basketball. Lot of pushing, elbowing, fumbling, shouting. Found himself unconsciously trying to pick out the ones that might have promise. The ball escaped them, trickled out of bounds. A fat boy chased it, and the others let him. “Hey! Hi, Tiger!” shouted one of them, one of his carriers down at the plant. “That's Tiger Miller, the baseball player!” the kid shouted at the others.

“We know it,” said the fat boy irritably, then turned his hungry smile on Miller. “Take a shot, Tiger!” he called, and heaved the ball. Three bounces. Miller reached down for it. Felt good in his hands.

“From way out here?” Miller asked, grinning. “I don't think I can make it.”

“Aww,” said the fat boy, and the others joined in. “C'mon, Tiger!”

Miller sucked the ball with both hands to his forehead, his old shot: believed in thinking the ball into the basket. Hell of a long distance at that, though. He relaxed, brought the ball down hard against the pavement, half step forward, ball eased up against the palm of his right, the impact that converted mere force into a subtle control system, and as the ball's momentum pushed his hand up, his left glided up, struggling against the bind of his trenchcoat, to guide—thrust off the asphalt with the calf muscles, felt old muscles snap awake, at jump's peak, ball at the brain, shoved himself back to earth again. The ball arched away—
fffft!
—didn't even touch the fucking rim going through. Hah! Only the stiff clock of his leather soles batting thinly on the asphalt whipped him back out of the stadium to this present scene, where small boys cheered the old baseball player who ran the town newspaper.

“Shoot another one, Tiger!” they cried.

Miller laughed, but knew when to quit. Still felt the knot in his legs from that short tight jump. “Let's see you guys try it,” he said, and he left them excitedly imitating him.

As luck would have it, it was Eleanor Norton, not Marcella, who met him at the door of the Bruno house. Unprepared for her and with no excuse for being there, he said lamely, “Looks like good weather for tonight's trip to the hill, doesn't it?”