The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (88 page)

“Like those ladies’ romances you read, you mean,” Sally says with a grin, picking at her teeth with a fingernail. “The conventional way of telling stories is itself a kind of religion, you know, a dogmatic belief in a certain type of human perception as the only valid one. Like religious people, conventional writers follow hand-me-down catechisms and look upon the human story through a particular narrow lens, not crafted by them and belonging to generations of writers long dead. So conventional writers are no more realists than these fundamentalist Rapture nuts are. The true realists are the lens-breakers, always have been. The readers, like your average Sunday morning churchgoers, can’t keep up with all this, so the innovators who are cutting the real mainstream often go unnoticed in their own time. It’s the price they pay. They don’t make as much money, but they have more fun.” Sally brushes some crumbs off her chested slogan, causing
GOD
to wobble as though calling for attention. Or nodding his agreement. “Tight-assed little paragraphs laid out in order like snapshots in a photo album are not for me. I don’t want a life like that either.” Sally has been fumbling edgily with her pack of cigarettes. She needs to get out into the open air. Stacy asks for the bill. “Recently I went to visit Tommy’s mother who’s dying of cancer and is pretty much bedridden, the poor woman. We spent a lot of time looking at her photo albums. You know, the usual parade of bygone days lying like corpses against those funereal black pages: childhood, college, family, kids, travels, and so on. I’m in some of them, playing with little Tommy in the park, making him cry, that sort of thing. What’s odd, though, is that she’s mutilating them. Ripping people out of photos, trashbagging whole albums. As far as I could tell, it’s mostly images of Tommy’s dad that are getting edited out. Who knows why. Maybe she feels he isn’t paying her enough attention, or she thinks he’s playing around, or she’s just mad that she’s dying and he isn’t. But, whatever, the more damage she does to them, the more interesting they get. They’re an ugly mess, but there’s passion now. Art.” Sally is smiling. Stacy isn’t, though she’s trying. “I asked her if she had three wishes, what would she wish for? I expected her to say something like not to have cancer or maybe the end of all cancer in the world or else something vengeful to go along with what she is doing to the photo albums. But instead, she said she wished we were all better prepared for the disappointment that life is.”

“Oh…! That’s so sad…”

On West Condon’s Main Street, the lunchtime klatch has reconvened at Mick’s Bar & Grill. Georgie, tagging along with the fire chief, needs a drink badly after what he’s just seen, but so far, no one has offered him one. Whatever made Dave off himself like that? Georgie can conceive of doing things that might leave him with limited chances of survival—he’s seen all the old war movies and has imagined his own ill-fated heroics (after a consolatory fuck or two with the village darlings)—but jumping forever into the night like that for no better reason than love or money makes no sense to him. Old man Beeker of the hardware store, munching away, says if things don’t get better on Main Street, he’ll be the next to tear up his ticket, and others echo him, though Burt Robbins says the problem was that Osborne was just another blue-collar meathead who couldn’t make the class jump. His snarling remarks always piss Georgie off, the more so when aimed at a solid guy like Dave, his body not even cold yet, but he keeps his peace and probably, because he can never turn it off, even has a stupid grin on his face. Is it bad luck to see a guy swing like that? Probably, but so is everything else.

The mayor, who dumped the shoe store on Dave in the first place, comes in and lights a cigar and orders up a soup and a club sandwich, looking both solemn and pleased with himself. They ask him what he was talking about with Cavanaugh, and Castle says in his booming, cheek-blowing way that the banker has been pressuring him to lock up Charlie Bonali for busting his kid’s nose in a squabble over a girl, and he suggested to the banker if he wants to have a wop war he should get Puller and Smith to be his hired guns, knowing what they think of dagos. People laugh sourly at this. Just what is being laughed at is unclear, though Georgie has the idea it might be his own kind, so he orders up a plate of bacon, cinnamon toast, and three easy overs, and figures it’s the mayor’s treat. Stevie has told him that since old man Suggs’ brain burned out on him, his manager has taken over and might be hiring again, and he might not share Suggs’ grudge against the Roman church. McDaniel is an outsider, hopefully ignorant of Georgie’s history, so maybe he’ll go check it out, though it does sound too much like work.

The imbecilic spugna on the floor has been blabbering something about Jesus Christ being nothing but a deadbeat freeloader, so finally Mort Whimple asks Mick what the hell Elliott is talking about, and Mick confirms that the crazy preacher who thinks he’s Jesus had been in earlier and polished off a sandwich and a few glasses of gin on Jim’s tab. Earl Goforth says he saw Prissy Tindle out in front of the shoe store, running around frantically in the street looking for the preacher in nothing but a raggedy nightshirt and showing her ass out a rip at the back, and there are further remarks from other witnesses, not all complimentary, on this remarkable sight. Georgie, tucking into his eggs, wonders how he missed that. “In case she comes in here looking, Mick,” Robbins says, “lemme have a slice of that lemon pie.”

Who does come in is Elliott’s wife. Nice-looking lady in a crisp lemony frock who knows everybody and gets friendly greetings. “Come on, Jim,” she says, trying to haul her husband to his feet. So much dead weight. “Give me a hand, Maury,” she grunts. “Whuzz happenin’?” Elliott asks. “Whereza party?” “It’s naptime, Jim. The party’s tonight. You have to sober up so you can start over again.” Georgie pops the last bite into his mouth and helps the lady get the dipso off the floor and out to the street and into her car—a lot of people still wandering around out there in front of the shoe store—then just drifts off, figuring on a little sonnellino of his own somewhere in preparation for tonight’s big stag party for Stevie. Maybe his old lady would trade him an hour on the sofa for the story of Osborne’s suicide.

“I don’t think you go anywhere,” Luke says. “I think they just stick you in the ground like they did Gramma and you stay there forever. I think it’s a big mistake to die. I don’t ever want to do it.”

“That’s stupid, Lukie,” says her big brother around his jawbreaker. “What about the Rapture? Mom’s gonna get really mad if I tell her what you said.”

“Go ahead. I’ll tell her you thought Jesus is just some man in a fake beard.”

“Like Santa Claus, you mean?” one of the other kids asks.

“Yeah,” says Mattie. “But meaner.”

“Well, Santa Claus can be pretty mean, too,” Luke says, and some of the other kids agree with that.

“He gave Ma a black eye last year,” one of them says.

Markie starts to cry and his jawbreaker pops out and lands in the gutter. Mattie wipes it on his cutoffs and gives it back to his brother to stop his crying. The three young Blaurocks are sitting on a curb in Chestnut Hills under the midday sun with all these other kids, peeling the rubber off their sneaker soles and sucking on the all-day jawbreakers given to them by the shoe store man who has just gone off to the other world—even if that world, as Luke would have it, is only a hole in the ground. Meanwhile, their mom is traipsing from door to door in Chestnut Hills with little Johnny in her arms, telling everyone about Jesus and the hanged man. Mattie is skeptical about these Jesus sightings, but Luke says their mom is seeing him because she wants to, and because of who she is, that makes it so. “If Mom wants something to happen, it happens.” No one argues with that, not even Mattie. There are always people in and out of their house now. It’s almost a kind of church, whichever house they’re in, changing houses being about the most fun thing they do now. Most of the kids know that Luke is completely mistaken about what happens after you die. When some glad morning the roll is called up yonder, they’re all going to fly away, fly away, to join the angel chorus and rest at Jesus’ feet (won’t it be so sweet), joyfully carried on the wings of that great speckled bird to gather at the river in that fair land where the soul never dies, at a better home awaiting over on God’s celestial shore up in the sky, Lord, in the sky, where the silver fountains play upon the mountain high and the milk and honey and healing waters flow cleft for me. They know that. They have sung all the songs and heard all the stories and they know the truth. And Lukie does, too, she’s just being contrary, as usual.

The fragrant Chester K. Johnson, chronically unemployed ex-coalminer, odd-jobber, smalltime thief, cardsharp when sober (not often), and unregenerate wiseass, contrarian by nature, rises, bearing the scars of many battles, from the stinking beat-up sofa in the American Legion Hall above the Main Street dime store where he has spent the morning after an all-nighter so heavy it has obliterated all memory of the day that preceded it. Perhaps there was a poker game up here at dawn; he doesn’t recall. His empty pockets provide no clue, whereas a coin would be something like positive proof and also token for a coffee somewhere. The place is filthy but not so filthy as his own wretched waterless and powerless dirt-floor hutch at West Condon’s hardscrabble edge, wherethrough have drifted, along with the multitudinous vermin, some three generations of Johnsons, if his restless fucked-up clan can be measured by generations, he the last of known whereabouts, known to him anyway, default inheritor of the family estate.

He stumbles off to take a leak and to check in the cracked mirror the hair on his face, which he scrapes off about once a week to stop the itching, the nearest thing he has to a calendar, the days otherwise passing without remark. He decides it can wait another day or two. When did something of sustenance last pass between his broken teeth? Nothing chewable comes to mind, his daily nutrition mostly provided these days by the froth of fermented grains, and that rarely of his own purchase. In short, he is hungry or probably hungry. Maybe he’ll hitch a ride to Waterton. There are a couple of doddering whores over there, including the sister of one of his old mine buddies killed out at Deepwater, who have taken him on as a sort of charity case, and who may be willing to stir up a pot of beans and rice for him when they see his sad condition. Also, he can get his monthly bath and still be back in time for Georgie Lucci’s stag party tonight for Stevie Lawson. Tomorrow, Stevie is marrying one of the Baxter girls, the fat ugly one, though the poor dingdong, who has the brains of a turnip, doesn’t seem to know how it’s happened. The thought of married life makes Cheese queasy, though he’d happily marry anybody’s mother if she’d cook for him and wash and mend his clothes and give him a bit of money for booze and women.

Down on the painfully bright street he finds a lot of people milling about—too many, the town cops among them (what the fuck is going on?)—so he ducks down an alleyway, figuring he might as well check out the trash cans behind the Pizza Palace for a scrap of breakfast, and there encounters a bearded midday drunk in fruity gold slippers, a blue bathrobe, and a hiked red nightshirt pissing against a wall. He’s so crocked he thinks he’s Jesus Christ. “Behold, our belly’s like wine which hash no vent and’s ready t’burst iz wineskin!” he declares, letting fly. Chester Johnson knows this legendary personage primarily by way of his own fulsome and frequent curses, pronounced through his missing teeth as Cheese-us Christ, whence his nickname, his customary unwashed state also playing its part. “Where am I?” the drunk asks confusedly. “’Iz brick wall looks f’miliar.” He leans forward, knocking his forehead against it, leans back. “Hah! Must be wunna the fourteen shtations. Back onna glory trail…!” What is he talking about? No idea. He looks like he might have escaped from that religious zoo out at the church camp near Deepwater. Which means he’s open game. “It hash been said the ’vents of my life reveal the mind of God,” he goes on, talking too loud as drunks do and sweeping his free hand through the stagnant alley air with its heaped-up rubbish and overloaded trashcans. “Look about’n wonder!” As he splashes against the wall, Cheese considers rolling him, but he sees the sucker has no pockets in that smocky thing and his legs under it are bare; might be a lark and a way to get the day started, but there would be no profit in it. It’s like the loony is reading his mind, though, because the next thing he says in his thick-tongued slur is: “So, whish are you, my friend? Good thief’r bad?”

“Huh, gotta be the bad one,” Cheese replies with his usual loose grin, feeling vaguely threatened by something beyond his ken but wondering at the same time if there might be some fun to be had in this, a story to carry with him to Waterton as entertainment for the girls. As an old carny barker uncle who took up preaching as a hustle once told him: Jesus Christ, buster, is the hottest fucking freakshow on the midway. Always envied that uncle; his women, his money. “Ain’t never been a good nuthin nor never aimed t’be.”

“A wise choice,” this alley Jesus says, dropping his skirt and wheeling blearily around to look him over. How did he get so tanked without pockets? He must have a tab somewhere or else he has generous friends. Maybe he could tap into that. “The good thief got locked up for eternity inna Holy Kingdom, a bitter fate. You don’ want that.”

“Hellfire, no,” he agrees, and spits through the gap in his teeth. His preacher uncle laid the whole Jesus story on him, at least the hairier bits, though Cheese remembers only the parts about the flood and the animals, the lady who got screwed by a bird, and then the weird zombie act at the end, which his uncle said was the real zinger and key to his good fortune. People are scared to die, he said, and they’ll cough up anything if they think they can get out of it. He recalls nothing about thieves, but the Jesus character did gather a gang around him, and who knows what they got up to?

Chester is about to suggest, somewhat in jest, that, if Christa-mighty has no objection to a little healthy thieving, they ought to pal up, when the guy, with a wicked grin, says much the same thing (Cheese feels like the fly is open on his brain), declaring they could be “laborers together for God” against “iz ’bominable pit of c’ruption inna pois’nous grip of the moneylenders.” Cheese can go along with that to the extent he understands it, but, holy shit, what the guy wants to rob is the bank. “Come along now! Returning to the people whuzz rightly theirs is not theft! Follow me!”