The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (97 page)

“No, let’s do it and get it done. It’s what she wants, I know. Anyhow, the moon’s so bright tonight it’s almost like daytime. I’ve picked up some grass from that bad boy they call Moron. We can set on a tombstone and have us a party. C’mon, Duke. If you wanta have fun, come along with me…”

…

“It’s okay now, Duke. You’ve been a true pal. I’ll never forget it. Does your hand hurt?”

“Some. It’s swoll up a mite, but the weed’s helpin’. And this dead people party gits your mind off other things. Won’t throw another knuckleball for a while, though. Don’t know ifn I’ll be able to pluck a gittar right soon neither. Y’may hafta tape the pick to my finger splint.”

“I’ll do whatever you want me to, lover. I’m so grateful and proud. Nobody ever stood up for me like that before. You made me feel like a real person. And you did it with style. You really laid dumb Georgie out.”

“That pore mizzerbul joker was borned to be stood up’n knocked down. He ain’t even a number.”

“Those record company folks were helpful, too, shielding us and hustling us outa there when the place started popping. They were real nice.”

“Nice probly wasn’t on their minds. I think they was more like pertectin’ their proppity.”

“I guess that’s what we are now, all right. At least until they have a second listen and hear what noise I make and call singing. The Moon won’t likely want us back, though. They looked to be getting seriously trashed.”

“Sure, they’ll want us back. Trashin’ the Moon is like trashin’ trash: you probly cain’t tell the differnce. They ain’t never had such crowds, and ifn our songs take off, with that ‘Recorded Live at the Blue Moon Motel’ printed on all the labels, we’ll have put ’em on the map big time, and ole Will, too…hmm…damn if that don’t sound like a song title. ‘Trashin’ the Moon.’ Maybe I’ll git sumthin outa this crazy night after all.”

“I’m sorry I drug you into it, Duke. It
is
crazy. I know that.
I’m
crazy. But we made Marcella happy, so it was worth it.”

“Just on accounta you left a old plastic hair clasp over there on her grave?”

“No. That I honored her by completing the task she’d set me. It was like some of the stories we used to tell when looking into the barrette. You know, princess offered up as a bride, princes given weird tasks to win her hand and the kingdom, the need for a tittle of magic and a friendly helper to get the deed done—that sorta thing. We sometimes had cemeteries and unmarked graves in our stories, too. So I can see how she set all this up. It was her way of us playing together one last time…”

“Well, settin’ here in a paupers’ buryin’ ground under the hanged moon mongst the lonesome dead, jist the two of us, smokin’ reefers’n cuddlin’, is about as wild a party I been to since the wake fer Granpappy Rendine when his still blowed up, and I hate t’break it up, Patti Jo, but if the ole Blue Moon’s still standin’, we should oughta head back’n have us a beer outa the fridge’n move our cuddle twixt the sheets. I jist heerd a rooster soundin’ off over there.”

“Yeah, and we got a date in a few hours at a wedding, too. We’ll have to be up for that. I suppose all those rowdy boys’ll be there. One of them’s supposed to be the groom.”

“They’ll likely be too sick to stand, but ifn they start actin’ up, with my hand broke, you’ll hafta pertect me, lil darlin.”

“I will, lover. Anybody get close to you, they’ll find out what a angry Rendine gal can do to anyone messing with her favorite cousin. They just better hang on to their goolies.”

“Hmm. Must be even later’n I sposed. Lookie over there to the west. Looks like dawn a-breakin’.”

“I see it. The problem is the sun don’t come up in the west.”

“That’s right. If it’s doin’ that, them friends a ourn at the camp might be onta sumthin. Most probly it’s a fire. Big ’un, looks like.”

“We can drive past and see. Here. While you finish off the joint, I’ll just go say goodbye to Marcella…”

…

“Everthing cool?”

“Yup.”

“And now you’re free? She says you kin go?”

“I can go. But she’s not saying nothing. She’s the one who’s free. She’s gone.”

BOOK IV

And when he had opened the fourth seal
,

I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see
.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse:

and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth,

to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death,

and with the beasts of the earth
.

—The Book of Revelation 6.7-8

IV.1

Wednesday 24 June – Friday 3July

J. P. Suggs looks like a dead man, the reddish gray frizz on his bony skull like some kind of sickly mold. Only his eyes and a finger on one hand work. No expression, just those eyes staring out from some awful depth. Gives Tub the creeps. Is he angry? Can’t tell. He can blink and wag the one finger. Ask him a question, he blinks once to say yes, stares back icily for no. Sometimes he wags his finger to say no, and then it seems like he might be angry that he’s having to work too hard, but mostly he either blinks once or stares back. Tub on occasion has remarked that he and Suggs see eye to eye, and that remark has now taken on a spookier meaning. But give Suggs credit, he’s a tough old bird. Has been in and out of coma, reduced to a stalk of celery with eyeballs, but he refuses to give up. Tub admires that. Bernice, old Tuck Filbert’s quirky widow, is here in the room, working as a private nurse for the old man. It’s not charity and she’s not doing it just for the money. Without Suggs, she’s in deep shit. Like her patient, she mostly lives in her own head; if Suggs’ head is a stone, though, hers is a swamp. She and Suggs have contrived this code of eye blinks and finger twitches, and she has been helping to move the conversation along. “I suppose I could deputize the Patriots.” The man blinks. Suggs wants all the Baxter followers camped on his property arrested for trespassing and either jailed or chased out of the county once and for all. “Baxter has already had the stuffing knocked out of him by that gangster cop, but it has only made him meaner.” The sheriff is talking more than is his habit, filling up the silence, doing Suggs’ talking for him, as it were. Though Tub has used the Christian Patriots against the illegal Baxterite encampments before, he has not sent them in as official sheriff’s deputies. Doing that will pit him against his own sidekick. “I’m having some trouble with Cal Smith.” Suggs blinks once, which Tub takes to mean “I told you so.” “I’m looking around for a new deputy. One of the Patriots probably. Though not many of them are near smart enough.” Suggs’ lids droop slightly as though to say “So what?” Or maybe he’s passing out again. Tub can see all the forces lining up. His own volunteer unit and Patriots militia with the Brunist campers and Suggs’ money. Next, Smith and the Baxterites, lawless drifters for the most part, many of whom are armed—and a lot more of them around than there used to be. Then the town establishment: Romano and his city cops, the mayor, the city manager, all under the banker’s thumb. And now Vince Bonali’s tough-ass kid and his Knights of Columbus Defense Dogs, or whatever they’re called, together with all the rest of the Romanists. Mostly pissed-off, unemployed ex-miners who are apt to shoot at just about anybody as a remedy for unhappiness. And what next? State troopers, maybe National Guard, though so far Tub has fended off the governor. He has also heard rumors of the FBI getting involved, which means federal troops. Hot summer ahead.

Down the hall from Suggs’ room, Lem Filbert is bellowing out his curses. They’re aimed mainly at the West Condon fire chief, who is in a bed at the other end of the hall. Lem says he aims to fucking kill the fucker as soon as he’s able to fucking stagger down there, and because he probably means it, Romano has his fat Italian officer posted outside his room. What’s Lem going to do, strangle him with his IV tube? He says the fucking mayor is also in for it and everybody else at fucking city hall. He intends to fucking kill the whole crooked fucking lot. Tub does not hear himself mentioned but doubts he’d be excepted. When Whimple turned up at the fire station late last Sunday morning after being up all night hopelessly battling the oily blaze at Lem’s garage, Lem was waiting for him with a crowbar. Bernice said the first thing she did when she saw the fire, even before calling the fire department, was hide her brother-in-law’s guns, which was a good thing because the place burned to the ground and everything on his car lot caught fire as well, the biggest fire in these parts since the old Dance Barn went up, and Lem snapped. Apparently he’d gone storming down to the fire station looking for Georgie Lucci, who has been sacking out on a mattress there and against whom Lem has had a longtime grudge, but Georgie wasn’t in. Lying low. Or maybe passed out in a ditch somewhere on the other side of town, as he later claimed. So it was Whimple who ended up in the hospital. Romano and his boys ran over to try to calm Filbert down, but when Bosticker got within a yard of him, Lem laid into him with a crippling crowbar blow to his knees. When he fell, Lem took his gun off him, at which point Romano decided it was time to stop fooling around and he shot him. Aimed at his gun hand, hit his bony wrist, shattering it, the bullet ricocheting off into his gut, and then, when Lem grabbed the gun up from the street with his good hand and kept coming, Romano shot him again, this time in the arm, and then again in the leg, finally bringing him down. Still, Lem fought them all the way out here to the hospital, and he has never stopped yelling even though they’ve kept him heavily doped. At first the mayor tried to blame the fire on Lem’s own carelessness and his flaunting of fire regulations, but when they found the empty shells of Roman candles, he decided some drunken kids must have driven by and set it alight. His cops more or less confirmed that. An anonymous caller even phoned in to say he’d seen kids running away from there when it started to go up, but he couldn’t see who they were.

Tub has his own notions. It had been a particularly bad Saturday night in the county. Mischievous kids on the loose, the usual drunken wife-bashing, the arrest of the Edwards woman (she’s also here in the hospital somewhere; Suggs told him to forget about her, a lost cause), the weekly Patriots training session interrupted by the camp murders, a string of burglaries over in Randolph Junction, the trashing of the Blue Moon Motel, and before the night was over, he’d got called out to the camp a second time after some drunks intruded and set off some fireworks down near where the murders had happened earlier. They had caught one of them—that stupid jackass, Johnson—when he plowed into the beehives in the dark. Tub, his mood worsened by the onset of a toothache, kicked him around for a time, asking him questions, trying to find out who had been with him and thinking he might even try to pin the double murders on him, but the jerk was so badly bee-stung—must have been hundreds swarmed onto him—Tub didn’t have the heart to work him over as he might have done. His arm looked like it might be broken, so Tub shipped him off to the emergency room instead. Anyway, he knew who the others were, and if there were any sleepers, they’d be easy to spot by the bee stings. As for the fire, he figured Lem wasn’t that far off when he first went looking for someone to batter to death. Those fuckups had been causing trouble all night, setting off a wild brawl at the Blue Moon before their assault on the Brunist camp; after collecting the fireworks debris at the camp, Tub wasn’t surprised when more of it turned up later in the ruins of Lem’s garage. Given everything else that had happened, he’d decided against filing any report about the camp break-in by those drunks, not to draw more unwanted attention to that place. He certainly doesn’t want any state or federal forces moving in, taking over his job. But if Lem gets his sanity back, they’ll have a talk.

When Governor Kirkpatrick called him to say he was under a lot of pressure from people to send in the National Guard, Tub figured he was talking about the mayor and the town banker who had been badgering him too, and he told Kirkpatrick that Castle and Cavanaugh were alarmists, everything was under control, and if there should be any trouble, which he doesn’t expect, he could simply mobilize his volunteers, if the governor would authorize that, and the governor said that he would, that it seemed like the best solution. He’d even organize some sort of emergency budget for it if it turned out to be necessary, which is what Tub wanted to hear, saying that one thing he needed right now was more riot gear. The governor said he could do that. He was mainly concerned about some event the day after the Fourth, which Tub had heard about but without paying much attention. It seems the Brunists are organizing some sort of ceremony at the mine hill that day, Kirkpatrick said, and Cavanaugh is planning to spring a surprise on them that might backfire. The governor had stuck his neck out on this one and wanted to be sure the sheriff and his deputies would be out there that day, keeping an eye on things, and Tub said not to worry, they would be there. Tub has been explaining some of this to Suggs, choosing his words carefully, when he notices the old man is no longer focused on him, his eyes still open but without that fierce stare. Tuck’s widow, checking his pulse just to make sure, says Suggs often sleeps with his eyes open and that that’s what he’s doing now.

“Dave Osborne stayed on the phone until everyone he could reach below had been directed to safety, then joined the first rescue crew. We needed him down there. It was black as only you guys know it can be and thick with hot coaldust, and no one knew the Deepwater workings and could move through them blind like Dave Osborne.” It’s Barney Davis speaking, the Deepwater company supervisor at the time of the accident, now employed by the State Mining Board, having been shoehorned into the job by the company owners to protect their asses up in the capital. The Barn’s crew-cut hair is as white as it ever was, but he looks younger than he did five years ago; life in the capital suits him. Everybody else here in the church looks twenty years older, Tub included. He’s standing at the back, near the doors, rather hoping there might be an emergency call that will get him out of here. He is short on patience with this sort of memorializing sentimentality, and what little he has is being ground away by his nagging toothache. Should go to a dentist, keeps putting it off. He associates these places with the dead, funerals being the only times he turns up in them. Tub is not a churchgoer just like he’s not a flag waver. He is a patriot and a believer simply because this is the world he lives in and there is no reason not to be. He enforces the law around here, and it’s American law and Christian law, and if he started questioning too much how it got that way, he wouldn’t do a good job of it. He knows who he is, and that’s enough. The world will take care of itself and doesn’t need him for its ceremonies. But should he be wearing these guns on his hips in here? Probably not. Well, tough titty, as the saying goes in or out of a church. Without them he’d feel like he was not wearing pants. “We were anxious to find survivors and get them to the surface as quickly as we could, so we went below bareface with only wet rags against the dust and gases. What we found down there was a nightmare. Airlock doors blasted open, timbers the size of phone poles snapped like matchsticks, roofs down and piled on top of machinery and men, buggies crunched like sardine cans and blown up against the ribs, twisted rails looking like some kind of devil’s 3D handwriting. Dave Osborne guided us through all that with nothing but our cap lamps, aiming straight for the worst of it, sometimes on our hands and knees.” It was partly due to The Barn’s negligence that the mine blew up in the first place. Everybody knows that. In a just world the sonuvabitch would be doing time, but no one’s making a point of it. That’s not why the union invited him back. They know Davis is trying to get some mines reopened and they want him to keep doing that. Though the Osborne memorial service organized by the union is being hosted by the Lutherans, there are people here from most of the churches in town, including the RCs, all sitting together over at one side of the church like at the back of the bus, and even a few of those evangelicals from the church camp. There was a buzz when they showed up. Tub assured them he’d watch out for them, but they don’t really fit in here in this town anymore and they know it. They sit stiffly, looking like aliens wearing human masks, even more uncomfortable than the RCs. “Some of us started getting sick from the gas, so we turned back and brought up the first bodies we’d found. Dave didn’t want to quit and we had to drag him along with us back up to fresh air. He got himself fitted up with an oxygen tank and tools and went right back down on the next crew, working straight through until dawn. Dave Osborne was probably the first live person some of you out there saw that night. A hero. He was.”