The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (77 page)

He’s not sure what she means (that voice in the ditch?), but as he finds himself staring at her
FAITH
is
BELIEVING WHAT
you
KNOW AIN’T
so T-shirt, he says: “In lines like that, you mean?” She stretches the shirt out away from her tits as if reading it for the first time. No bra under there. The shirt collapses back over her nipples, which are the sexiest thing about her. If Angela were wearing it, to read it you’d have to walk those hills a letter at a time. Though she never would. Not much wit in that girl. “Where do you find those funky tees, Sal? Different one every time I see you.”

“I make them. But they don’t hold up well in the wash.”

“You made that up, too?” he asks, pointing.

“No, that’s Mark Twain. Or at least he got credit for it. Goes back to the Greeks, I imagine, or more likely the Babylonians. Or the guys before them who didn’t have anybody writing down what they said.”

“Great. Mark Twain. You’ve finally named someone I’ve read.”

“
Huckleberry Finn?
”

“No, I couldn’t get through that one.
Tom Sawyer
.”

“A kind of role model, I suppose.”

“I did think of him as pretty cool. And we had the same name. I especially liked the snuggle with what’s-her-name in the cave. Lights out, pissing herself with terror, ready for anything. When you’re ten years old, that’s pretty hot stuff.”

“You must have still been in your
Tom Sawyer
phase when you tried to scare the pants off me with that end-of-the-world line back in high school.”

“Did I? Hah. Did it work?”

“Yes, it got me to praying. I was still in my Aunt Polly phase.”

“You know, they always said that though Tom seemed like a rascal, really he was innocent. But that’s not true. Really he wasn’t.”

“No, neither was Becky. They were both just dumb.”

Ted pulls a chair up at the mayor’s table in Mick’s Bar & Grill and orders up the usual. Mumbled greetings around. His fellow civic leaders. They’re a sorry lot, for the most part, but they’re what he has to work with, and he somehow has to mold them into a team. Several of them are on the NOWC steering committee and he lets them know, over his bowl of thin flavorless soup and a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, about the meeting on Wednesday to work up new plans for the Fourth. “It’s not a sure thing, but Governor Kirkpatrick is out on the hustings that day and said he’d try to fit us in.” What the governor actually said was, “It’s an election year, Ted. You’ve got problems down there. I don’t want them to rub off on me.” But he also needs Ted’s annual contribution to his campaign fund, so he didn’t say no. Mort Whimple, the fire chief, wants to know what the hell hustings are, and Elliott from his perch at the bar says muddily that it’s where you graze sheep. “You know,” he sings, raising his highball glass of iced gin, “‘Home, home on the hustings…!’” Maury tells him Jim’s workweek is now down to an hour a day, and that one not worth much. “The governor offered up some ways the state might help us out and he would use the occasion to announce them.” What Kirk suggested was that they were looking for a location for a maximum security prison. It would take some selling. Doesn’t exactly enhance the neighborhood, but it adds jobs. Ted replied that this was a good place for it. There was an available work force and they could also help fill it.

When he mentions inviting the new prospective owners of the old West Condon Hotel to the celebrations on the Fourth, Mayor Maury Castle mashes out his cigar and growls in his P.A. system voice: “The Roma Historical Society. Who are those guys? I got a feeling it was the Roma Historical Society just got us our new cop.”

Whom Ted has seen this morning over at the police station. Vince Bonali’s loutish son Charlie. Billed hat down over his nose like a Marine sergeant’s, snapping his jaws and fingers, seemingly impatient with the slow pace of justice. Might be useful. Chief Romano is a weak man and things could get rough. Romano’s number two, Monk Wallace, has been on the force forever and is reliable enough, but a slow-moving sort who likes to just sit and chew and watch the world go by. The other two officers are ex-miners, post-disaster charity hires—Louie Testatonda, a soft beanbag of a fellow, and the night duty cop, Bo Bosticker, a drowsy dimwit. They might need a guy like Charlie. By the time Ted arrived this morning, all those arrested Saturday night had already been released by order of deputy sheriff Calvin Smith, pending further investigations by the district attorney. All but Abner Baxter. Romano is holding him on old charges from five years ago, including jumping bail on murder charges and the destructive assault on St. Stephen’s. Dee is still upset about that. Baxter could be heard railing at them from his cell, promising terrible retribution, if not in this world, then the next. When Ted asked what was going on out at the camp, the chief said that Baxter had been evicted a month or so ago over something involving his motorcycle son and his pals. That gang was gone, but the old man remained in the area and was still unloading his usual Bible-slapping crappola in the fields around. What happened Saturday night was apparently part of some kind of feud going on, and it has gotten to the point where they’ve started shooting at each other. One of the Coates boys ended up with buckshot in his backside and according to the sheriff a lot of shots were fired in both directions. Cause enough to close the camp down. If Puller won’t do it, maybe the state will. Ted promised Dee a prosecutorial brief from the city to give him adequate cause to hold Baxter. He’d like to keep the preacher penned up and is disappointed the others have been let out. He wonders if there’s some sort of discord in the sheriff’s office and if there’s some way to use it if there is.

Enos Beeker, the hardware store owner, asks him now if he’d heard about Pat Suggs’ brain attack, and he tells them he’s just come from the hospital. “He’s out of intensive care and into a private room, but he has taken a crippling hit.” When Doc Lewis emerged from Suggs’ private room, Ted caught a glimpse of his former home care nurse, Bernice Filbert, dressed something like a World War I battlefield nurse, at Suggs’ bedside. Bernice started when she saw him and hurried to close the door again. He glared at her, smiling coldly, as though to suggest she’s in for it. And she is. Without Suggs’ help, she’s headed to prison for embezzlement and grand larceny. Burly plaid-shirted man with a thick black beard in there, too. Maudie, a nurse he knew from his own high school days, passed by and told him that was Mr. Suggs’ strip mine boss, Ross McDaniel. “Hardshell libertarian,” she said, inventing another sect. A cute freckle-faced kid back in school with a nice body who put out generously, something of a legend at the Baptist summer church camps out at No-Name, now as wide as she is tall, her dry hair thinning out, her freckles spreading. Still cheerful, though, as she always was, with a flair for the soap-operatic. Learned from her about the Collins girl. “When they brought her in, she looked like a skeleton with tissue-paper skin stretched over, and she’s still bad off. She’s trying to die. Has to be force fed.”

He passes on some of this to the klatch in Mick’s. Not all of it. Shaping the news to his purposes. Including in, including out. The way newspapers and news magazines work, inventing history. Something Miller said, some years ago. Probably in here, over a charred hamburger. He sure did that, damn him. His invented history is still being spun out. Miller did what he could to ruin this town and should have been tarred and feathered on his way out. Ted sometimes misses him, though.

Doc Lewis told him that Suggs had emerged temporarily from his coma, but the stroke was very severe. He asked if Ted knew of any surviving heirs. He didn’t. A complete loner, far as he knew. Pat is mostly paralyzed, he learned, though he can twitch his left hand. He can open and close his eyes, but his face is frozen and he has trouble swallowing. No speech, but all the involuntary behaviors are apparently functioning, and though it’s hard to be certain, deep down inside his insensible shell he still seems more or less alert. So far. As with earthquakes, there’s always the fear of aftershocks. Was he a heavy drinker? “He used to be pretty wild, but he got religion. Now I hear he’s a teetotaler.” Lewis nodded at that. “We’re starting rehab immediately, but the prognosis for recovery is not good.”

Rehab is what Main Street needs, too, but same prognosis. It’s a depressing sight out there. “We’ll have to get rid of those boarded-up shops for the visitors on the Fourth, Maury.” The mayor says sourly that it sounds like a job for the city manager. Ted expects that and ignores it. “Open them up free for craft and art shows, antique sales, club displays, get the shops that remain to put welcoming signs up for the holidays.”

“Dave Osborne’s already got started,” says Gus Baird, the travel agent and Rotary president. “I dropped in Saturday and found him braiding all the shoestrings in the store into a single long strand. Very colorful. Says he has a birthday coming up and he’s making decorations for the party. The strings are gone from all the shoes in the shop, including the ones in the window. Open boxes everywhere. Even the strings from the shoes he was wearing were gone.”

The klatch finds that pretty funny. Ted has known for some time that Osborne is in trouble. At the hospital this morning, he was thinking that if Suggs died he might try to acquire the strip mine operations and move Dave out there to manage them, mining being more in his line of work. But he’s evidently too late. He makes a mental note to drop by. He asks Mick for lemon meringue pie, hoping it’s less than a week old, and that causes another explosion of hee-hawing laughter. He asks what’s the joke and is told the story of Robbins getting slapped in the face with a slice of that pie by Prissy Tindle. Elliott clambers down off his stool to do a rubber-kneed hip- and head-wagging imitation of her performance, one hand on the bar to keep his balance. When he lets go to swing his hand through, he loses it. Hits his head on the way down, but doesn’t seem to feel it. “Hoo hah!” he says from beneath the stools. “Crazy stupid cunt,” Burt grumbles amid all the laughter. He still doesn’t see what was funny about it, but everyone else does, including Elliott, still braying down on the floor. Beeker says he saw Prissy driving through town with a long-haired beardy guy who must have been Wes Edwards, but you’d never have recognized him. “Dancing with the dork,” croons Gus Baird, rolling his eyes. Ted says his probable replacement, bright young fellow named Jenkins, would be here right after the Fourth. “We can put him up in the manse, Gus, get him used to his new home. His first pastorate. May take him a while to adjust.” Elliott meanwhile has been hauling himself laboriously to his feet, grunting and farting, and he gets a round of applause when he succeeds, which he acknowledges by raising his arms and falling to his ass again and having to begin all over.

When Tommy arrives home after work on Wednesday, feeling down, the old priest is just leaving. His mom’s latest holiness whim. Concetta and Rosalia are there, looking smug. He’s just had trouble at the pool with Concetta’s kid and his dickhead cronies. The town’s bummed-out failures. There used to be mines to send them into. Now the only occupation left is street bully. The girls like to pretend to be drowning so Tommy will come out and rescue them, hug them to safety with his arm around their bosoms. He has sometimes played along, good practice, until some of the guys started imitating them, falling into the pool and floundering about comically, crying out “Help! Help! Tommy!” in falsetto voices. He tells them he’s like God, it’s up to him who lives or dies, and they’re definitely not worth saving. Today, though, Moroni’s evil buddy, Grunge Grabowski, doing the falsetto routine, threw little Buddy Wetherwax into the deep end—and Buddy can’t swim. He dove in and dragged Buddy—snorting and choking and beating on him blindly with his little fists, protesting all the way that he didn’t need to be saved—over to the edge of the pool, where Babs, his big sister, squatted, waiting for him, her legs spread suggestively, a few curly auburn hairs peeking out at the swimsuit leg seams. So Tommy had to throw Moroni and his pals out. “Yeah? Let’s see you try, scumbag,” Moron snarled, cocking his fists, his buddies hovering close by. “Nah,” Tommy said. “Not my job. I’ll let the police do it. That’s what they’re paid for.” And he went over to the emergency phone on the pole next to the lifeguard chair. With that, Moroni and his gang left, but not before Moron threatened to be waiting for him when he left the pool. He could handle Moroni, but probably not all of them, so he went ahead and called Chief Romano to tell him there might be trouble, it would be good to have someone just hanging around at closing time, and old Monk Wallace turned up and slouched at the fence, eyeing the girls and spitting into a tobacco tin.

“What’s up with the priest, Mom?” He and his father both like Concetta’s cooking and neither really care what religion his mother adopts next. There’s no more money to squander, she can fly off to Heaven by any route she chooses. Tolerant flexibility is one of the advantages of being a Presbyterian. The priest has left behind a faint musty old man smell. “Been showing him your photo albums?”

“I was taking confession, Tommy, and having my catechism lesson. And, yes, I was showing him these pictures of my aunt’s family on my mother’s side who are Catholics by marriage. He looks grumpy but he’s really quite nice. They call him Father Bags. Isn’t that amusing?”

Those old albums have come to mean a lot to his mother in her illness, though she has also been doing a lot of damage to them, tearing up photos, sometimes whole pages. As best he can tell it’s mostly his father who’s getting ripped out of her story. Tommy has never paid any attention to these albums, but Sally Elliott has recently been given a tour and claims to have seen one of him at about age five with his pants down in the park having a wee wee; she was probably lying, but if it’s there, he might figure out how to have some fun with it.

Fun is mostly what he’s not having. Which is why he’s feeling low. Not how he imagined his glorious summer after graduation. Except for the sporty new wheels with nowhere to go, sex with Angela is about it, and that’s going stale. How do married people do it? Angela sets the agenda now and she doesn’t give him a lot of elbow room. Babs Weth-erwax lingered for a while after the pool closed this afternoon, having sent her little brother on ahead with a friend, and though it was a bit like robbing the cradle, he was tempted to invite her into the changing rooms, but Ramona Testatonda, Angela’s fat spy, was also lingering, watching everything, and he wasn’t yet ready to make the break. Not like that anyway. Not for a juvenile. But maybe it’s about time to close down shop. He’ll miss Angie’s great body and all the things she does with it, but the world is full of great bodies. Bodies are the main thing it produces, and even the ones that are not great can be good for a romp, and what they don’t know, they can be taught. Just thinking this way cheers him up. He’ll spring it on her tonight. After the sex, of course. Thinking it might be the last time will give it a certain urgency. Might be the best night so far. Around the world in eighty ways. He’s already hard thinking about it. First, though, he’s overdue at Her Loins for his weekly supper with Dad. He has been skipping church. Probably in for a lecture.