The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (18 page)

“Goddamn it, Ruby,” Georgie asks, “what’s all this for? If life is such shit, why do we go on living it?” He answers himself: Because you’re scared not to, asshole. And because there’s always hope for one more piece of tail. He pats the dashboard (he’s glad he didn’t turn her in, he’d be all alone without her), his nose at the windshield, trying to see through it, thinking about dying. Or rather, trying not to, but unable to keep it out. Where was Marcella Bruno killed? On this road? No, out by the mine. “What’s it like, Ruby? What happens when you die?” The Waterton road is empty, almost spookily so. Nobody else fool enough to be out. No risk of hitting anybody, but it is easy to lose the road altogether. Can’t see through the window but when he sticks his head out he gets snow in his face. Maybe he should never let Ruby go, he’s thinking. Just drive through Waterton and keep on rolling. Go somewhere warm, make some money, fix her up. Whitewall tires. Radio. Leopard-skin seat covers, soft to stroke. Then he sees it, a small dark thing scurrying across the snowy road out in front of him with glowing ruby dots where its eyes are. It startles him with its sudden challenging presence. Raccoon maybe. Cat. Squirrel. Whatever. It’s dead meat. Georgie floors the accelerator. No pickup at all. If anything the old girl slows down. He knows if he can hit this thing, everything will be all right. “Come on, sweetheart, throw your hips into it! You can do it!” His fingers are snapping at the wheel as if working pinball flippers, his whole body twisting and pushing. The animal has frozen. He’s got it! And then, just as he’s about to score, Ruby starts to fishtail, he whips the wheel back and forth trying to straighten her out, everything is suddenly spinning around him, trees that weren’t there wheeling about in front of his face, and he braces for the impact.

The whumping crumple of metal is not as loud as he’d expected, though in the silence that follows it echoes loudly in his mind. He has been thrown around, whacked his head on the window, but he’s okay. He switches off the motor, leaves the lights on, crawls out. He has wrapped Ruby around a light pole on the passenger side, the old girl nearly cloven in half at the waist, her rear end at an angle to the rest of her. “Oh, baby. I’m sorry.” He is. It is the saddest thing that has happened in a long sad day. He’s even crying a little. For her. For himself. He walks around her in the falling snow, whispering his apologies. His farewells. He crawls back in on the driver’s side to rescue the centerfold, looking a bit the worse for wear. He kisses the steering wheel, getting out. He has a long walk back to face. But first he clambers up on Ruby’s hood and, kneeling there in pious homage, lowers his pants, and using the centerfold’s taunting raised ass to arouse himself, jerks off on Ruby’s cracked windshield, fantasizing a loving blowjob (“Marcella! I love you!” he whispers as he comes). His final blessing. He wipes himself with the centerfold, no doubt inking his dick colorfully, and, a mile or so down the snowy road toward town, tosses it in the ditch.

I.5

Wednesday 1 April – Friday 3 April

Her true love is wedged deep inside her as if trying to take root there. Oh, would that he might! She squeezes as hard as she can, gripping his muscular bottom tightly, her ankles locked around his thighs, wishing this moment could last forever. She feels like she is in Heaven, floating on silvery clouds (she will say so later in her diary), waves of ecstasy throbbing through her like a sweet angelic storm. Five years of a terrible emptiness, this is what he is filling. Her dark ages. Oh, oh! Her whole being is flooded with rapturous delight. Soft white snow is falling all about them like the feathers of a dove, curtaining them where they lie on her bed of dreams in the back of Tommy’s mother’s station wagon. “Oh, I love you, Tommy!” she whispers. “With all my heart! I do!” Tommy moves slowly in her as though he too wishes to prolong this awesome moment for as long as possible, and as he does so she can feel her whole body begin to vibrate with liquid desire. He raises himself up to gaze adoringly down upon her and she knows herself to be a glowing image of fire, passion, and love.

The day opened up warm and sweet, heralding a new awakening. Angela arose feeling blissfully happy, fully alive. No heroine she has ever read about ever felt more so. On her way to the bank, she saw a white dove perched on a telephone wire like a kind of miracle, and she crossed herself and prayed to it, and now what she prayed for has come true. Oh, thank you, God! Thank you, Santa Maria, madre di Dio, piena di grazie! “White Dove” is their song, a strange song for lovers, yet prophetic too, for their love is tinged with the sorrow of dead and dying mothers. It was playing on the car radio that night, when, as the only gift she had to give, she gave him her virginity out here at the ice plant. Where she insisted on coming tonight. A sacred place (now doubly so), a sacred day. His white dove, Tommy called her that night so long ago, kissing her breasts worshipfully. They were much smaller then, she was still just a child, immature in body and mind. She dried his beautiful organ with her own panties (there was precious blood), her head leaning against his chest, listening to his pounding heart. And this day (she is an April fool for love!) is now another for her secret calendar.

He picked her up at the bank, not in his father’s car but in the family station wagon, which was now his own car up at college, his mother being too ill to drive. Angela had hoped to see the big Lincoln come rolling up front to receive her as it had in times past (she had told her friend Stacy to watch), but now she is grateful for the extra room. It had been her suggestion that he come to the bank so they could go for a ride first, for she really didn’t want him to come to her house where her sour old grump of a father would be sitting in his front porch rocker in his dirty clothes like he always is, drinking beer and bellyaching, coming out with who knows what awful remarks. They drove out to the lakes and nearly got right to it—a breast was out and his hand was between her legs almost before she knew it, and she knew she was soaking wet down there and feared for a moment she had lost the power to resist—but she jumped out of the car, gasping for breath, and they went for a walk holding hands and other things (well, his hands were all over, he could not restrain himself), and even as she walked along, she was suffering little orgasms almost like hiccups.

It clouded over and a cold wind came up (her panties were off, she can’t even remember how that happened), so they went to the Blue Moon Motel for supper. She had a chicken salad sandwich, but she could only eat half of it, she was too excited, and she kept having to use the bathroom. It turned out there was a country singer in the lounge named Duke L’Heureux, so they went in, and since they were almost alone they danced for a while. Duke L’Heureux was pretty awful and they whispered jokes to each other about him (“What do you expect, with a name like that!”), but they asked him to sing “White Dove” for them and he did, several times, and Tommy bought him some drinks, so it was really a nice time, though Tommy’s hardness rubbing against her and his hands squeezing her breasts and pinching her nipples and stroking her bottom and crawling down between were driving her crazy. If he had asked her to take her clothes off and lie down on the dance floor, she would have done it. She wanted to get a room immediately in spite of all her romantic plans and she knew he was thinking the same thing, but then one of her father’s stupid friends turned up and started ogling her and she pulled Tommy out of there. It was beginning to snow when they returned to the car. It was very beautiful, and she reached into Tommy’s pants and took hold of him and kissed him hard on the mouth and asked him to drive to the ice plant, her head in his lap, kissing him all the way, and he had to stop for a moment to avoid having an accident.

Now he is sliding back and forth in her with measured strokes, still gazing down upon her with a look of intense fascination in his eyes, as though he cannot see enough. And then he kisses her, tenderly yet hungrily, his tongue licking her lips and exploring the recesses of her mouth, while his thrusts become more urgent and his fingers reach for her other opening down below, sending electric tremors of pleasure and mad desire racing through her, and she rises to meet him in a moment of uncontrolled passion, crying out in her delight. When she was a little girl she had once heard her parents say of a friend of theirs who was not married but was expecting a child that she had been touched by the finger of God, and though the grownups seemed to think that was funny, it made Angela recall that painting in St. Peter’s in Rome of God’s finger, the one touching Adam. There was something so mighty and awesome about that finger, frightening even, and she had never forgotten it. That’s what it feels like inside her now. The finger of God.

Snow is falling outside her window, recalling for her a long-ago walk through a snowy campus, a night of such exquisite purity, the flakes dropping past the lamps overhead like big soft petals. It was the first night he said he loved her, and during the long goodnight kisses outside her sorority, she let his hands cup her breasts. Such strong masculine hands—as was he in all respects—and so handsome, so passionate, and yet so kind and gentle. So loving. In the spring, she accepted his fraternity pin (his brothers serenaded her, singing the song with her name in it) and, trusting him implicitly, she surrendered to him before they separated for the Easter holidays. Which were agonizing days for both of them. Mail was slow and phone calls difficult and expensive, so he drove all the way to her parents’ house to see her, and they walked hand in hand along the river, and he made love to her standing up against a secluded tree, and though it was all so new to her, she was able to laugh at the awkwardness of it, and then, still joined together, she cried. As she is crying now, and without him here to comfort her. Nor wanting him, for he is no comfort. She shudders and calls for the home care nurse Bernice, asks her to bring her one of her photo albums. The long white one.

The Presbyterian manse lights are off and the curtains are open on this first night of April, and Prissy Tindle, who should perhaps at this moment be known by her stage name of Priscilla Parsons, is dancing the “Dance of the Annunciation” for Reverend Wesley Edwards by the pale glow of the unseasonable snow falling outside. She has been thinking about it and choreographing it in her mind all day, ever since she saw the shimmering white dove preening itself in much balmier weather outside her kitchen window this morning. Her horoscope encouraged artistic endeavor and suggested that she foster new relationships with imagination and transparency. Which she took to mean she should dance with her clothes off. Wesley’s record collection leaves much to be desired (it is probably his wife Debra’s, that silly woman, he seemed to know nothing about it), but at least she was able to find Debussy’s
Nocturnes
, the “Clouds” piece being both texturally and thematically appropriate for the angel Gabriel descending from Heaven while the dove of the Holy Spirit casts its fertilizing beam upon the magical scene. The mystery of mysteries. Forget your risen Christ, this is it.

Priscilla has chosen to interpret that mystery, not from the perspective of one of the three protagonists, but as an expression of the exchange occurring between them, including the respectful but lordly intrusion of the messenger, Mary’s bewilderment and disbelief, and the dove’s sweet feathery aggression, focusing, as the album cover notes say about the nocturne, on “an instant of pure beauty,” which is also of course an instant of pure terror. All of this is, simultaneously, in her dance. Further nuances of gesture have been suggested by other album notes regarding the melting of juxtaposed discords into impressions of lucent sonorities, the rich languorous tone of the English horn set against the undulating background of the other instruments (languorous undulation is one of her best moves), and Debussy’s own remark that the music he desired “must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams,” which describes perfectly her own lifelong aspirations as a dancer.

Suppleness perhaps comes less easily to her now, her body being less lithe than it once was, her feet no longer quite leaving the floor in her little springs, but time claims its little victories, what can you do. Not that she is any heavier, she has always been careful about that, dieting and exercising regularly, but her flesh has rearranged itself subtly, adding a touch of texture here and there, as she thinks of it, and in what she hopes is an opulent and intriguing way. And she can still touch the floor with her palms without bending her knees, a gesture that always gives Wesley particular delight (he has often kissed her then highest parts in respectful gratitude). Wesley, too, is naked, for she has explained to him that he will join her in her dance, or at least be part of it. And, semitumescent, he has been watching her and commenting on her performance and on her beauty with his indwelling Christ, who claims to feel quite abashed (Wesley’s translation) at this celebration of his conception. With his, or their, eyes upon her she feels flushed with anticipation. The room is sweetly perfumed as if with incense, adding to the sacred aura, for the three of them have been using Wesley’s briar pipe to smoke the marijuana she brought, the teeth marks on the stem giving her a sense of profound intimacy. Like sharing a toothbrush.

Priscilla can empathize with Wesley’s Christ within. She herself has always felt there to be another dancer inside her, trying to express herself—or itself—in a body that is, alas, never wholly responsive to its demands. In effect, this inner dancer represents the distance between the way she imagines herself dancing and the way it actually turns out. Although Prissy has held no two-sided conversations with this dancer within, she has sometimes spoken to her, or it, usually in exasperation or apology, much as one speaks to one’s conscience, and sometimes “listens” to it, too, if not literally or with much compliance. Her husband Ralph, with whom she danced in her early days, used to complain about her muttering while dancing, saying that it broke his concentration while communing with the music, which for him was a sacred connection, her muttering therefore a kind of sacrilege. All she could say to the pompous ass was he just didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t understand, which is the sort of philistine incomprehension poor dear Wesley is now enduring in this town. Reviled and ridiculed, abandoned, expelled from his pulpit and facing eviction from his home and, as she discovered today when trying to bank for him what’s probably his last paycheck (though she hasn’t told him, won’t, for fear of what he might do or ask her to do), pauperized by his traitorous wife, no doubt in collusion with his worst enemy, the bank owner. He has his rights, he cannot be evicted without due process, cannot be arrested for he has committed no crime, and he seems determined to stay put and fight his oppressors, but Prissy knows this is too dangerous. If the deacons can get him certified, as they intend, the men in little white suits will come to get him and he’ll be straitjacketed and locked away where she cannot help him.