The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (91 page)

Though Ely’s spirit seems to have withdrawn from his wife and daughter of late, Ben has felt him close by all day, and he is reassured by that. Ely seems to be saying, just by being there, that there is man’s work to be done and Ben must do it, though he promises him no peace from the sin of it, nor does Ben expect such a promise. Contrarily, Ben has not felt Jesus close by, not for some time. Moses, more like. As he said to Clara at the hospital this morning, “I’m feeling more Old Testament than New.” “I know,” she said. “But we’re New Testament people, Ben. We have to bear up.” But she was crying and did not stop crying.

When Ben unearthed the first batch of dummies down where the attack on Elaine took place, he supposed he had found it all. Only when he chanced on the second smaller lot in Rocky’s violated grave did he realize the bikers must have buried their haul in separate parcels. More than anything else it’s that careful planning that convinces Ben they’ll return. How much is there? Sheriff Puller told them what the old inventory showed, but it was assumed to be out of date, and at the time no one took it seriously. But maybe they should have. The two parcels Ben has found would be only about a fifth of that inventory amount, meaning, if the number’s right, there may be five or six other locations—or even more, depending on how they split it up. After finding the heap in his dog’s grave, he paid a visit to his old abandoned farm shack where the biker boys holed up while they were here, figuring it was a likely out-of-the-way place for them to stow such things. He rooted about and took up floorboards and followed all their tracks, but he turned up nothing. Now, though, under the sharp cold spray, it comes to him like a revelation: that pile of small unburnt logs in the old wood cookstove. Everything else a shambles and those clean logs stacked as neatly as a kid’s building blocks. He’ll stop by there on his way back from the hospital.

He’s just drying off, thinking about this, when Wayne Shawcross comes running in. “Ben! It’s the police! She ain’t here, but they’ve come to arrest Sister Debra!”

“They put a full-court press on Fleet, Dad. Fleet said Charlie picked up a pear and ate it with his mouth open while leaning on him. He was pretty sure Moron and Grunge and the others were pocketing other stuff from the store, but Charlie was wearing his brass knuckles and had all his attention. When he told Charlie the pear cost a quarter, Charlie tossed the core at him and told him to keep the change and try to keep his arms from getting broken.” They’re on the fifth green, Ted putting for a par. Tommy is understandably struggling with his swing today, trying to see with blackened eyes past his smashed and bandaged nose. They’re not keeping score. They’re having the conversation they missed at the Loin on Wednesday, when Tommy ended up in hospital. Tommy has been telling him now about a phone call he got from young Piccolotti after Charlie Bonali and his gang, including Concetta Moroni’s badboy son, visited his Italian grocery this afternoon, threatening him with dire consequences to body and business if he didn’t join his Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force and contribute to arming it. “They also call themselves the Dagotown Devil Dogs, Fleet said.”

“Devil dogs. Old wartime nickname for Marines. Probably reliving his days in the military.”

“Well, that’s another thing, Dad. Charlie was only in the Marines a few weeks before he went AWOL. Something Angela once told me. He ended up doing brig time and getting busted out with a dishonorable discharge.” Nick only said Charlie had military experience. But he must have known. When he gets back to the clubhouse, he’ll call Nick and Dee and demand Charlie’s immediate arrest. Now. You’ve got sixty minutes. Ted sinks his putt in spite of hitting it too hard, but after two tries and another long lie, Tommy gives up and picks his ball up.

“And that thing they have about the Corpse, it’s like they’re queer for each other, just like fucking priests and the corpse of Christ.” The ex–U.S. Marine recruit Charlie Bonali is treating members of his newly-formed Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force to afternoon beers in Hog’s Tavern, a dark little bar in the Italian neighborhood once popular with coalminers but now a little-used relic of times past. Hog Galasso has been dead for over a decade, but subsequent owners have seen no need to change the name, nor for that matter to clean it up or improve its reputation. The Hog is what it is, a local legend and landmark, scarred and rank and joyless. Charlie picks up his bottle and sucks long from it, looking like he might bite the top off and eat it, then signals for another. “They’re like a mob of sick monks who whip themselves all the time just to show how holy they are.” At the request of his enrapt younger comrades, Charlie, popping his knuckles for punctuation, is recounting his brief unhappy life in what he calls the “Marine Corpse” with its “little tin soldiers in toy uniforms.” “They’re always horsing around, grabbing each other, and the ones who don’t touch, they’re often the weirdest of them all, vicious little jerkoffs who get their kicks out of seeing other guys get their balls twisted. Killing for them is a kind of faggoty flirting with the Corpse. Trying to make out.” Charlie belches fulsomely, examines his fingernails, polishes them on his unbuttoned blue police shirt. He is being arrested today but only laughs about it. “For me, killing people is just a job. It’s no different from stepping on ants. And I like having a piece in my hands. Makes me feel like I am who I am. I’ve erased a few suckers, had to. That’s why I’m back here for a while. There was a hood on the south side of the city working for the Old Man who decided to set up for himself. He said he didn’t see any need to continue the partnership any longer, they could just be friends. So the Old Man sent me and some other guys in to waste him, make him a lesson for others. Now I got nothing against this motherfucker, it’s just a matter of politics and territory, like in the last war the old farts are always bragging about. The dude had trouble with piles, and he went to a private clinic every so often to get his asshole doctored. We ambushed him there, only it turned out he’d been expecting us and had brought a lot of artillery with him and we were the ones who got ambushed. The shit was really flying. Talk about getting your ass reamed! But one thing I’d learned from the Corpse was to stay cool and keep a steady finger. Soon as I saw the receptionist was not at her desk, I just ducked out of sight, snapped my Sten onto automatic, and then at the first lull, stepped back in and blew them all away. They were shooting back, but they missed. They were trying too hard, like the sarge used to say. Six of us went in there, but only three of us got out, and one of them was badly shot up. I carried him out on my shoulder and later him and the other guy told the Old Man all that had happened. I was a hero. I mean a real hero. Those candyasses back in the Corpse would have shit green to watch me. So I got a rep now, I got respect. The Old Man smiles when he sees me. The other big guys aren’t so sure. They think I might try to take their place someday.” Charlie smiles a crooked smile at the rigid glassy-eyed faces smiling back. “And, hell, they’re probably right.”

Reverend Konrad Dreyer of Trinity Lutheran, home from his pole-fishing excursion to the lakes with his two small sons (they have caught three little sunfish the boys will share at supper), is seated in a lawn chair in his sunny backyard, which is also the church’s backyard, a stack of books, his briar pipe, and a pitcher of fresh lemonade on the table beside him. The boys are off to the city swimming pool with his wife; he has this delicious late afternoon to himself. All around him: the green lawn he has nurtured, the flowers and fruit trees he has planted. Butterflies. Songbirds. The midsummer sun is still high in the sky and warm—warm enough for T-shirt and shorts, but not yet smotheringly hot as it soon will be in the weeks ahead. On his return from the lakes, his wife told him about the suicide of the shoe store man and said that Police Chief Romano called and wanted him to please call back, and he did so. Officer Romano said the deceased listed his religious preference as Lutheran and he wondered if the Reverend knew him or his family, as they were looking for possible surviving relations. Connie said, sorry, the man was not a member of his congregation and he did not know him. That’s not surprising, he was not known as a religious man, the police officer said, but he had received a request from the secretary of the United Mine Workers local asking if Trinity Lutheran could host a memorial service for the man as they regarded him highly and wished to honor his passing, and Connie said that they could and that they should call him personally to schedule it. During summer vacation time, activities at the church dwindle, it should not be a problem.

In tomorrow’s sermon, it is his intention to take on some of the more contentious issues being raised by faddish theologians: the death of God; the supposed fabrication of a Jesus who never was by way of ancient mystery cults and pagan spring deity myths; the invention of Christianity by Paul and the later gospel writers, none of whom knew Christ (if he existed); the contrary “truths” hidden in the Apocrypha, suppressed by the church fathers; Herod’s slaughter of the firstborn; the myth of John the Baptist; the “dubious” legends of the Virgin Mary, and so on. Thus his afternoon’s stacked reading. He will not argue separately against these naïve opinions but will rather contest the appropriateness of approaching the sacred by way of profane reasoning. In his early days at university as a philosophy major, before Augustine and Aquinas led him into theology and eventually the ministry, Connie, thinking he might have talent as a writer, took a memorable English course in which the professor convinced him that well-made fictions were true in ways that history and scientific formulae were not. Amusingly, the professor used the “Three Little Pigs” story as an example and actually made a kind of theology out of it. This concept of lies that were truer than truths corresponded nicely with his own belief in the “spirit” of history as opposed to history’s supposed facts and made him feel at one with what he was even then calling “the creative force of the universe.” It helped him to see that myths were not falsifications of history, but rather a special kind of language for grasping realities beyond time and space, realities of the eternal order, and to understand Christianity as the gradual shaping of a sustaining human vision, one impervious to the aberrations of history and the pretentious intrusions of misguided scholars. As such, it is true, even if it is not “true.”

He pauses, takes a note to that effect, then returns to the book in his hand, which examines the historical evidence behind the four Gospels, finding little, and none at all for the existence of any so-called Jesus of Nazareth. Whereupon, out of the blue and as if in manifest refutation, Jesus appears before him, dressed in a crimson tunic with a dark blue robe over his shoulders and accompanied by a flock of small children. It takes him more than a moment to recognize Wes Edwards. The transformation is quite remarkable. This is not the real Jesus, of course, but the one popularized by Western art: pale, straight-nosed and high-browed, with a well-trimmed beard and flowing auburn locks (has Priscilla been adding highlights?), and costumed straight out of the Renaissance masters and European cathedral windows. “Hello, Wes,” Connie says, standing and offering his hand. Which is not taken. “How good of you to drop by. I was just thinking about you.”

Wesley glances back over his shoulder, frowns. “I think it’s you he’s speaking to,” he says, peering down his nose. “Yes, yes, I know he’s a fool, and foolishness is a sin, but, as has been said, God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. He believes, as he says, in ‘learned ignorance,’ so let us help him along in his belief.” His focus lifts to rest on Connie. He smiles. His gaze is steely and unwavering, yet mischievous. He picks up the book Connie has been reading, thumbs through it thoughtfully. Much has changed in Wes’ demeanor. He has lost his old crinkly-smile, lip-nibbling manner, is more aggressive, self-assured. He almost
is
who he pretends to be. When Wes pauses at a page, Connie prepares for a discussion about Jesus’ own existence in history. Instead, Wes tears the page out, folds it into a paper airplane, and tosses it into the still air. It floats gracefully for a moment before dipping to earth, and Wes rips out another page.

“Hey, wait a minute—!”

The children clamber about, tugging on Wes’ robes, asking if they can make airplanes too, and he smiles and spreads his arms and says, “I place before you an open door.” Whereupon, before Connie can stop them, the children snatch up his books, spread out over the back yard, and commence to tear the pages out. Connie manages to grab hold of the last of the books, but the child screams so bloodcurdlingly he lets go of it again.

“Wes! Please! This is terrible! Make them give them back!”

“Wes, I’m afraid, is indisposed. And I am disinclined.”

“But how
can
you? This…this disrespect for…!”

“Nonsense. There is altogether too much mystification of the written word. Especially that insignificant branch of fantasy literature known as theology. It is right that, like fancy, these pages take flight. Think of them,” he adds, as a paper airplane floats past right in front of his nose—Connie ducks and bats at it as if at a pestering moth—“as angels bearing such pompous human folly on their wings as to fill thy mouth with laughing.”

The big children are showing the little ones how to fold the planes and set them dancing. Meanwhile, they help themselves to his lemonade, drinking straight from the pitcher. A little girl, her cheek bulging, offers him a sticky jawbreaker with her fingerprints on it from a filthy brown paper bag. He fears he might be ill. At which point Priscilla Tindle shows up in a breathless tizzy, wearing only a torn nightshirt. “Oh dear Jesus! Thank Heavens! I’ve been looking all over for you!” she gasps, tears in her eyes.
“Come! We have to go!”

“Woman, why weepest thou?” Wesley asks with a faint self-mocking smile, winking over her shoulder at Connie. Connie can see that her gown is ripped down the back and she is wearing nothing underneath it.