The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (25 page)

When Ted walks into Mick’s Bar & Grill for lunch, Earl Goforth, Burt Robbins, and Jim Elliott are at the back table, heehawing with the mayor and the fire chief, apparently at the expense of the scruffy character just making his exit, grinning but teeth clenched. Looks vaguely familiar. Might have been in the bank for a loan. Like everyone else. “That’s Georgie, our new fire inspector,” Maury Castle explains in his bellowing voice. “A coupla weeks ago, he took one of Lem’s old junkers out for a test drive and never brung it back, totaling it that night out on the whorehouse run. Lem keeps a loaded shotgun in his shop and he’s swore to kill Georgie if he ever shows his fucking face around there again. We just told Georgie his next fire inspection is Lem’s garage.” They all roar with laughter again, or at least the mayor roars; Robbins’ laugh is more like a mean snicker, Elliott’s a mulish snort, Mort Whimple’s a gasping wheeze, Mick’s a high-pitched hee-hee-hee, Earl’s a wet whistle out the hole in his war-scarred face.

Ted smiles faintly, orders up the usual, bowl of soup and a grilled ham and cheese, asking Mick not to burn the sandwich. About what’s edible in here, the soup not always. Where the elite meet to eat. “Why Lem’s?” he asks. “It’s not a public place.”

“Well, it is,” booms the mayor, still grinning. For Castle, the whole world is funny. Tragedy is funny. Death is funny. Power is. “We all take our cars there. There are oil spills everywhere, oily rags tossed about, welding torches going, sparks flying. And Lem’s a smoker. He can’t get insurance, or won’t. It’s almost sure to go up, sooner or later, and it’ll cost the city a ton to put the fucker out.”

“Lem’s struggling to make ends meet.”

“Ain’t we all?”

He knows there is something wrong about this, people have been complaining, but he cannot think about it just now. Other priorities pressing. The Chamber of Commerce problem, for example. Elliott stands, weaving unsteadily. “Gotta go practice my putts,” he says bleakly, swinging through on what looks more like an approach shot. “See you at three.” Useless.

“How’s Irene?” Robbins asks.

“The same.” But he’s not thinking about her. He’s thinking about the people he’s sharing a life with here. This is his town, he has devoted his life to it, and nothing’s perfect, but sometimes, like now, staring at their dumb grins, he has the urge just to pick up his ball and leave the field. When Justin Miller, who ran the newspaper here some years back, left town (good thing he’s not around now, hyping these nuts in his paper again; he sometimes misses the
Chronicle
, but closing it down and elbowing Miller out of here turns out to have been the smartest thing he could have done), one of the last things he said was, “Everything that happens, happens right here in West Condon. If it starts to look like nothing, then you’re beginning to get the picture.” Now Miller’s out chasing that nothing around the world for one of the television networks. Ted used to hate that kind of cynicism, but love, if it is love and not just some kind of late-middleaged confusion, is making him rethink everything. “What you see in a place like this,” Stacy has said in her soft plainspoken way, “is how sad everything is.” Which sums up his present feelings. Even the cheese tastes stale today, the soup lacks salt. Sad soup. But damn it—Castle, who’ll be running for reelection in a few months, is wheedling about the need for a new cop, especially with all this trailer trash rolling in—he’s still the captain. He got cast for the part and he can’t hand it off. And anyway, cheer up, it’s a Thursday. “Well, better start interviewing,” he says between bites. “And meanwhile let’s see if we can get some help from the towns around. I’ve asked Dee to send out an alert. At this point we’re expecting six or seven hundred cultists over the weekend. At least half that many are already here. Plus all the local sympathizers, at least another couple of hundred. Which means we could have a serious crowd control problem Sunday, especially if a lot of sightseers and hecklers turn up like last time.” He casts an accusing glance at Castle, who was one of the perpetrators of that infamous carnival. Grinning nastily around his cigar. “We’re getting zero help from the county, even though the hill is technically in their domain. We’d better be prepared to face this alone.”

“I hear tell Baxter’s coming back,” says Whimple, who as mayor had to deal with all that madness. It was all too much for Mort, especially when all the big-time news media hit town. Baxter in particular was a constant thorn in his side. Funny-faced Mort was a reliable ally at the Fort while he was there, but he hated the job, was glad to get back to the fire station.

“That’s the rumor. Baxter has been fulminating at every workplace accident in the country, and he may have gathered together his own little dissident army by now. The FBI tells me they’re still keeping a dossier on him, have done since his commie days, but they don’t have as free a hand with religionists, even dangerously kooky ones.”

“Are we going to get any state troopers?”

“I don’t know yet.” Actually, the governor has told him the request has to come from the sheriff’s office, but he doesn’t tell them that. Must be some way to get at Puller. Unless Suggs has bought him. Probably. So the question is, how much would it take to buy him back? “There’s bound to be some media coverage. I’d appreciate it if you’d drop by and have a strategic prep talk with Nick, Maury, make sure we hit ’em hard but don’t break any rules.” Castle laughs at this. “You might as well come along, Mort. You never know. They’ll probably want to rake over the past.”

“Maybe Lem loan me that fucking shotgun of his,” says Mort, rolling his off-center beebee eyes.

As Ted has explained to Stacy (she thinks golf is funny), he loves golf as he loves every competitive sport, including banking and life itself (“And love?” she asked, and though ordinarily he would have laughed and said, sure, that most of all, he found himself momentarily voiceless—this is not a game, he was thinking), but there is something different about golf. Though she said she used to be a Quaker like the rest of her family, Stacy is not a religious person, so he couldn’t explain it in those terms, and he had to fall back on the idea of beauty, with which he was anything but comfortable. Music, painting, books failed to move him. But a long completed pass or an explosive run through a swarm of tacklers, or watching his son sink a game-winner from the halfway line as the buzzer sounded, that was beautiful. And a golf course, when used as one, that is to say, purposefully, not merely as a park to walk in, is beautiful, can be. A revelation (he didn’t say this) of God’s bounty, His love of a moral order. Ted was not being frivolous when he proposed the rise at the sixth tee for this year’s Easter sunrise service. It was while standing there at the sixth tee one day, about this time of year but many years ago, not long after the war, that he first understood the nature of prayer. A prayer was not a recitation. It did not even have words. It was a silent whole-body communion with the divine. In the way that a good golf swing is. The mechanics of a church service never touch him that way. He always feels that he’s just going through the motions. Out here, it’s the real thing. He may be a secular churchgoer, but he is a Christian golfer. I may be a cynical old bastard, Teddy, his father once said, having just hit a beautiful drive down the middle of the eighteenth fairway, back when they had eighteen fairways (it
was
beautiful,
this
was beauty—he said this to Stacy), but one thing I believe is that being a good Christian (left this out), a good banker, good citizen, good lover, good anything, is like being a good golfer: it’s not something you do with just your head or your wrists, it takes your feet, your knees, your hips, your shoulders, your whole body and your whole concentration. Head down, stay focused, and swing easy. “Well,” she said, smiling up at him, her breath coming in short gasps, “it seems to work.”

Now, he’s standing in the middle of the fairway on the dogleg fourth with a clear view of the pin. Chance for a birdie. In the old days he would have reached the green from here with a three-iron or even a four; now he’ll probably use the three-wood again, the one he is using more and more as his driver, too. It gives him more loft and backspin, meaning it stays up in the air longer and so is still as long as it ever was, while his driver shots, though they still go further, have shortened—he feels younger than ever these days, but the length of his drives tells the true story—and are a little less reliable. The shorter shaft on the three-wood allows him to take a half step toward the ball, and that seems to help. Can take some of the wayward arc out of a slice, too, as he explained to young Nick Minicozzi, who has hit a couple already, because the backspin offsets the sidespin. Nick is over in the woods to the right now, debating between an easier shot back out onto the tee-side of the dogleg, or a tougher one through the trees and over the old cemetery toward the green. Nick, Ted knows, will settle for the sure thing; how they differ. Jim Elliott is on the other side of the fairway in the rough, looking for his ball. Which is about half his golf game. It wasn’t a hook, just clumsily mishit off the heel of the club. He’s got the swing of a heathen, as his father used to say. Elliott, after consulting his hip flask, will slash around a while, lie about his strokes, probably eventually send the ball—or
a
ball—straight across the fairway into the trees on the other side; he should have warned Nick to keep his head down. Connie Dreyer has just plunked his third shot into a water hazard and is now waiting for Ted to take his second before joining him for the walk to the green. The Reverend Konrad Dreyer is the very model of what he’s looking for as a replacement for Wes Edwards: a thoughtful softspoken intellectual utterly committed to his mission. The voice of Christian reason and moderation. Too bad he’s a Lutheran. Connie once told him he’d started out as a somewhat secular historian in search of what he called the “spirit of history” and with a fundamental belief in the creative force in the universe, that which orders and evolves and impels, what some people call “the ground of all being.” Impressed by the incredible tenacity and power of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as an evident emanation of that spirit, he’d moved on into church history in graduate school, preparing for a life as a professor of theology and church history. But then he woke up one Sunday morning to the realization that in acquiring the athletic skills of the academic he had lost the fear of God. Which is when he entered the Visible Church, taking on a pastorate. Ted’s shot hits the green, but too hard, and bounces off the other side. Should have used an iron after all.

On the walk to the green, he thanks the Lutheran minister again for all he’s doing to help the Presbyterians in their crisis, and they talk about Wes Edwards. Wes often joined them out here on weekday and Saturday afternoons. Would that be good therapy for him? No. Lost cause. Though Dreyer is more hopeful. “Wesley has been a faithful servant of God. God will not abandon him.” “Far as I can tell,” Ted says, “that’s just the problem—He’s got inside him and Wes can’t get Him out!” Connie smiles compassionately at that and goes on to explain the sources of some of Wesley’s outbursts, including what seemed to be an Easter morning threat to destroy the church. “Mark 13.2,” says Connie. “Don’t worry. People with Christ parapathies often use that verse to assert themselves without even considering what it might mean.” Ted tells Connie about Debra emptying out all their bank accounts to finance the Brunists. “Jim’s wife Susanna says Debra told her she’d decided to lay down all she has and follow Christ. Only she laid down everything Wes has, too.”

While Connie sorts out his problems at the water hazard, Ted studies his lie. Not too bad. He’s played it before. About twenty yards beyond the pin in a clump of unmowed grass. It is technically fairway, so, with an unskilled parttime groundskeeper, it is within the club rules to clear the grass and debris around the ball, and he does so, then joins Connie on the bench beside the ball washer for a smoke while waiting for the others. He can still par the hole and plans to. Dreyer tips back his straw skimmer, strikes a match over his briar pipebowl, and asks about Irene. “A little better right now. Some kind of remission, I think.” When he called home from the bank to check in with the home care nurse, Bernice said, “Well, she keeps trying to get up and walk around, Mr. Cavanaugh. I think she wants to up and fly like Elijah.” “It has been hard, Connie.” “I know. The children?” “They were all back at Christmas and we’ve stayed in touch. It would help if they could get back more often, but my oldest is in the State Department and posted to the Far East, where they really have their hands full, my daughter out on the coast has a legal practice and small children, and Tommy’s finishing university, so I’m pretty much on my own. Tommy at least will be back for the summer.” He needs Tommy, needs his help, his attention. Tommy’s a bit lost right now, is even talking about going on to grad school, studying some subject other than business. Pointless. His grades are mediocre, way below his abilities. He got dropped from the basketball team, in spite of Ted’s influence up there, apparently for flaunting training regulations. He seems all too loose and easy, as if life were just a passing joke—it’s
not
a joke, damn it. Ted has only a B.A., all he has needed, and has always thought of business school as an excuse to keep fucking off, avoiding the hard decisions. But at least it might keep a kid like Tommy on track until he can grow up, so he’ll push the idea. Tommy had wanted to work in the bank this summer, but Ted couldn’t risk it—the boy has made a play for just about everyone in there, including Stacy—so he has managed to get him on the city payroll instead. They’ll talk all this out when he’s home for the weekend.

Nick Minicozzi’s shot lands conveniently at the lip of the green. Must be at least his fourth. A tough couple of holes but he has a natural swing and, though not daring, is a stubborn competitor. When Nick sent the official foreclosure documents down this afternoon, Stacy brought them in and stood by his desk for a moment while he leafed through them. She seemed decidedly unhappy. Probably she had talked with most of these people at her desk. In the stack, along with the unpaid house mortgages and failed small businesses: Maury Castle’s old shoe store. As the Deepwater night manager, Dave Osborne was something of a hero on the night of the disaster, so, with the mine closed, Ted helped him buy the store when Castle was elected mayor. He should have known better. Even Castle was losing money and he knew something about salesmanship. For a while, Osborne joined the others for lunch at Mick’s, trying to fit in, but he has not been in for some time now. Except for small loans Ted granted him, he has had no money to buy in fresh stock, so most of the shoes for sale are the same ones as four or five years ago. Osborne is now deep in debt with no obvious way out; the bank has played along too long, the shop has to be closed and put on the block like so many others on Main. But Stacy was still standing there—“Look,” she said, pointing: “New shoes!”—and he realized how much, just now, he needed her. He could not bear her censure. He set the documents aside. “These can wait,” he said (was he growling? he was growling). “If the bank owns all the property in town, what the hell’s it going to do with it?” “You’re beautiful,” she whispered as she left. Elliott’s ball lands short of the green. He may have just picked it up finally and thrown it. If he announces it was his third shot, he’ll fire him on the spot. When Nick arrives, cursing his slices, Ted says, “Your hips are moving forward before your hands are, Nick. At the driving range, try hitting a bucket of balls with your feet together. If your hips move first, you’ll lose your balance.”