The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (115 page)

By the time Gabriela Ferrero and her sister-in-law, Concetta Moroni, reach the hospital, senior staff have arrived and put some order to the chaos. The destroyed ambulance is still smoldering, there have been casualties, and the front lobby has been heavily damaged, but they have restored emergency power by way of the standby hospital generator and have cordoned off the building. Gabriela and Concetta have been told to go home or wait indefinitely in the parking lot or the basement canteen. The staff has secured two floors for receiving casualties, dispensed calmatives to the traumatized nurses, set up volunteer guards at the entrances, and they have moved quickly through the hospital to reassure patients in their darkened rooms, many of whom are terrified by everything they’ve heard, while others only complain about the television being off and ask them to please fix it or else give them a reduction in their bill.

The fire department, with its crew of four, stopped by the hospital on the way back from the power station (they brought in two bodies and three injured workers), but after a quick dousing of the blazing ambulance, they have gone on to the high school to deal with the fires and carnage at the basketball gym, serving now as both fire engine and ambulance. They used this gym after the mine disaster as a temporary morgue. It’s one again. Governor Nolan Kirkpatrick, visiting what’s left of the decimated National Guard unit, confers with school officials, looking like a man who has just learned he is suffering from a fatal illness. He has had the young officer in charge call up reinforcements and more state police on his orders and send an official plea for help to the federal government, which he always denigrates in his election campaigns. Now he commandeers some yellow school buses parked for the summer over near the football field, ordering the remaining troops out to the mine hill in some of them and sending the others to the county airport to meet the new Guardsmen being flown in. Fire Chief Mort Whimple picks up three more firefighters from among the troops, but he is beginning to feel the hopelessness of his task. The high school fire is not yet under control, he can see smoke rising from other locations in the town—can smell it in the air—and the water pressure is rapidly dwindling. On his way here, he saw flooding in the streets. Thought it was just from the rain until he saw all the open hydrants.

Much as Baptiste loathes the Catholic Church and disbelieves all its teachings, he still could not stop himself from genuflecting as he entered (Deacon laughed at him), laden with his grave tidings. He has paused in the narthex to peer in on what awaits him while Deacon and Spider clamber silently up into the choir loft to cover him, Thaxton standing guard out front on his motorcycle. The Kid’s carefully mapped plans are ticking along like clockwork. It’ll all be over before anyone knows what’s happening. The nave looks empty, though there is a disturbing fragrance of incense, a banging of bells. Baptiste is not unfamiliar with the Kid’s vision of a Holy War. He was raised Catholic in an illiterate dirt-poor Acadiana family, and he was first taught about the violent way the world would end by a mad French priest who wore a haircloth and shaved his head and went barefoot in all weather. When Baptiste was nine years old, the priest, after first scaring the pants off him with his fiery description of the Last Judgment—
Dies Irae!
—then fucked him, telling him it was the sacred route to eternal life and salvation from the horrors of hell, praying feverishly all the time he humped away, and making Baptiste pray, too, adding that his tears were holy and he should not be ashamed of them. This path to salvation was not a short one. It lasted almost four years before Baptiste, consumed by hatred of the stinking priest and inspired by a folktale his grand-père had told him, reached between his legs with a knife and did a little mid-fuck creative gelding. He told the priest his screams were holy and he should not be ashamed of them. Last time he was in a church, until now. His grand-père, Pépé Jules, was an old-time Bayou fiddler who spoke no English and taught him all the best Cajun swearwords, most of them as used against priests and nuns. Pépé Jules also fucked him. Called it making family music. Baptiste never liked it, but he never hated him for it, because there was no praying, just singing and laughing. Pépé bought him his first whore and his first motorcycle, on which Baptiste ran errands for him, learning the neige trade. When Pépé Jules died one night in a tavern knife fight, Baptiste hit the road and hasn’t looked back since. Mostly lonely years, but he is finding a home now with the Wrath, who treat him with a respect he has not known before. He glances at his stopwatch and then, crossing himself again, pushes on into the aromatic church, moving quickly, intending to place the strapped packets of dynamite under the covered altar, but an ugly baggy-eyed priest rises up from behind it with a rifle, and before he can draw a gun or light the fuse, brings Baptiste to his knees with a shot in the gut. More shots ring out from the loft above him and the priest crumples. Without warning (where the hell is Thaxton?), the church is suddenly swarming with locals. Baptiste lurches to his feet, but meaty types barking in some kind of wop wrestle him to the floor and pound his head against it as if trying to crack it open. Can’t reach the batons. Just inches away. Baptiste needs help. He’s not going to get it.

The man above him in the Presbyterian pulpit, who says he is Jesus and looks and talks like Jesus and for whom young Reverend Joshua J. Jenkins has no other name, is explaining that the end of the world is not an event but a kind of knowledge, and has therefore already happened, at least for those in the know; and those who are not in the know are living in sin, are they not, for ignorance is itself sinful. Whether he is addressing Joshua or the anxious woman in the silky peach-colored gown who has come tiptoeing in or someone else altogether is not clear. Earlier, when introducing himself, the man said he was often spoken of as the Incarnation of the Word, an expression that has fascinated and solaced Joshua in the sense of the Word being the design in the mind of the Architect of the Universe, that Word made flesh at one transcendental moment in history, a concept grandly profound and nobly expressed, but Jesus, this person calling himself that, a madman probably, said that it was, as they say in the fairytales,
just so
, and that that word he incarnated was Oblivion. “Or sometimes Desolation, the Abyss, Vanity—there are synonyms.” Said with the most unnerving of blissful smiles, marred only by the strange startled eyes, as if someone else were staring out through them.

This is not the interview experience Joshua had anticipated, that for which he has prepared by carefully reviewing church dogma and history, by assembling a vast array of Biblical and philosophical quotations as well as his own personal meditations, by outlining several possible inaugural sermons, and by attiring himself in this suffocating corduroy suit. Nor is he certain which mode of discourse he’s now in. It is like that of dreams, but it is not that of dreams—unless he is still on that bus, and he does not think he is. It feels like a mode more in tune with all those Sunday school songs that have been running through his head all morning. Now it is the man’s proposal that they all proceed out to some hill, one occupied—if the woman’s opinion, frantically stated, is correct—by dangerous crazy people. “We shall take Mr. Joshua J. Jenkins with us,” he says. “He is the grandson of a king. He will protect us. Come! Follow me!”

“But I can’t!” the lady says. Her sorrowful gaze reminds Joshua of portraits of the Virgin, cradling the head of her crucified Son. “My condition!” She tightens the gown over the little bulge in her midriff in demonstration that she is expecting. Young Reverend Jenkins is not accustomed to such intimacies; his gaze flies to the ceiling then drops to his new shoes. But is Jesus…? he is wondering with alarm. Has he…? Well, of course, he is
not
Jesus. Is he? “Please don’t go!” the lady pleads. “We could—we could go use the bath in the manse again?”

Whereupon Jesus pats her in a shockingly familiar way and says, “I have no choice, beautiful lady. I am who I am. Take courage! I will return again unto you, as is said. Come then, Mr. Jenkins,” he adds, stepping down from the podium and taking his arm. “Off we go! Just a closer walk with me!”

“I was just… I was just humming that!”

“Of course you were. Let us set forth now to sow our tidings, short of wholly glad though they be!”

At the car (church bells are ringing somewhere, like a movie soundtrack), Joshua’s companion pushes him in, slams the door, and hops into the driver’s seat. He pulls his gown up over his bony knees and reaches for the key miraculously waiting in the ignition. By now, Joshua has not the faintest idea who the man is or if he is just a man. He cannot really believe he is Jesus Christ—that’s absurd—but at the same time he finds it wondrous that a man of the first century knows how to drive this contemporary machine, a skill Joshua himself has not yet mastered. As though reading his thoughts, Jesus—or his impersonator—says: “If God had been the big deal they say He was, I could have ridden into Jerusalem in one of these instead of on a damned donkey! Right?”

They are about to pull out when four motorcyclists, three men and a woman, roar up in front of the church. Two of the men go running inside, then come running out again. As they watch in amazement, they are discovered.
“Down!”
Jesus commands and hauls him roughly below the dashboard. Bullets smash through the windshield. There is a loud crack like a thunderclap and fragments of glass strike the car, followed by louder thumps. “It is not Being that is ineffable,” Jesus remarks, uncorking a bottle he has conjured from under the driver’s seat and taking a long thirsty drink before offering it to Joshua, who can only shake his head helplessly, “but Becoming.”

As the roar of the motorcycles fades away, the lady in the flesh-colored smock comes staggering out of the back door of the church and throws herself into the back seat. “Oh my
God!”
she cries.

“Yes?”

“What’s
happening?”

Young Reverend Jenkins has difficulty finding his voice. When at last he is able, he wheezes: “Could you just drop me off at the bus station, please?”

Georgie’s mother slams the door in his face, but when she sees him waving the bills at her she opens it again. “Are you in trouble, Giorgio?” she asks, peering out at the mayor’s fancy black car.

“No, Mama, my ship’s come in, just like I told you. But I won’t be seeing you for a while.” She reaches one claw out for the money—“With interest,” he says—and he blows her a kiss through the tattered screen door—“Ciao, bella!”—and bounces down the steps back out to the limo. He has just popped in behind the wheel when a loud explosion rocks the neighborhood and the church bells stop ringing. “Hey! That mighta been our church!”

“
Their
church, Georgie. We don’t live here no more. Now let’s get the fuck outa here while we still can! We’ve wasted too much time already. And don’t go near the goddamned mine. Head over toward Wilmer on the Waterton road, pick up the highway at Daviston.”

The Waterton road, a route (alas, poor Ruby) Georgie knows all too well. But they’re already too late. Traffic approaches from both lanes, horns blaring, lights flashing, sirens wurping. Un ingorgo. They both swear simultaneously in their separate tongues. “Tieniti le palle!” Georgie shouts, and he throws on the brights and jams his foot down on the accelerator, heading straight at the oncoming traffic, dipping down at the last second into the muddy ditch, then racing along the edges of it, swooping from one side to another at top speed not to get stuck in the muck in the middle. Kicked-up mud, sticks and stones rattle on the underbody. Suddenly, just ahead: a culvert! Trees on the right, double lane of traffic up on the left! But they’ve reached the back end of the wrong-lane file, or almost. Georgie swings up onto the road at the last possible moment—“Eight ball into the top corner!” he cries—picking up a ding on the last car’s bumper and a scrape off the culvert (in his imagination, la bella Marcella is showing her ass or else it’s the Virgin Mary’s and he is worshipfully kissing it), and they’re on the way.

“Fucking Christ!” the mayor gasps, turned stone white. “Hope I packed some spare pants!”

The West Condon police chief, Dee Romano, trapped in the traffic heading into town on the Waterton road, has just witnessed the amazing maneuvers of the mayor’s limousine, the madly grinning Georgie Lucci at the wheel, the terrified mayor sitting rigidly beside him, gripping the dashboard with white knuckles, and he wonders if he has just seen Castle being kidnapped. Some shit Dee’s city cousins are up to? Dee, leaving the mine hill a few minutes too late to avoid the jam-up, has cut cross-country to a less-used road but found himself sucked up in a noisy congestion of police cars, ambulances, fire engines, and ordinary traffic—the latter headed in the contrary direction, the drivers utterly confused by the horns and bleating sirens. Except for a crossroad or two, there are no pullovers on this old road, just ditches to either side, so when cars stop in panic, everybody stops. His fault. He has called them all here. Only the state police motorcycles, weaving through the snarl, are getting through, and Dee flags one of them down, asks for a ride in, turning the squad car over to Louie Testatonda. “We’re going to the Catholic church,” he shouts in the state trooper’s ear. He has just been on the squawkie to Monk Wallace back at the station, learning that the bikers have not only blown up the power plant and phone exchange, but the rumor reaching him is that they’ve also attacked the radio station and the hospital, done some serious damage to the National Guard at their high school bivouac area, and now seem to be targeting the churches. “St. Stephen’s?” “Yup, purty sure,” Monk said. “Big noise summers over there.” Now Dee calls back to let Monk know he’s hitching a ride in with a state trooper and to ask him to send somebody over to ask his cousin Gina Juliano if she knows anything about the mayor. “Send who?” Voice thin. Can hardly hear him. “I’m all alone here.”