The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (99 page)

A guitar is still slung around Duke’s stringy neck, but two of the fingers on his strumming hand are taped to a splint, so most of the guitar playing is being provided by his slack-britches partner and the local radio station announcer, Will Henry, playing backup on the night and adding his whine to the others. The woman doesn’t sing all that well but she’s got an earnestness about her that somehow makes her sound better than she is. So far it has mostly been twangy old standards like “I’m Movin’ On” and “Night Train to Memphis,” where they’re apparently headed tomorrow for a big Fourth of July stage show and a string of downriver venues after that, but he’s heard talk of some off-color songs and he hopes his uniform and the fact he knows them from the church camp isn’t putting them off. He’s had some rough weeks with more to come on this long beer-picnic weekend, and he doesn’t mean to make a fuss about song lyrics; he’s only in need of an easeful few minutes before the next call comes in. Of course they may not even have seen him, but that’s unlikely as his size always gets noticed, people turning to stare wherever he goes, and even now a lot of them are watching him, sitting there at the bar on a stool that feels more like the top end of a fire hydrant, drinking off his Coke and bourbon and accepting another.

Now, after a medley of moon songs—“Tennessee Moon,” “Blue Moon,” “Howlin’ at the Moon”—Duke announces that to mark the occasion tonight he has written a new number, “The Blue Moon Motel,” and that gets a wild cheer and some applause and foot-stomping. Will Henry does some preliminary strumming and Duke leans into the mike…

And then the woman and Will Henry join in on the chorus…

There’s a lot of hooting and hollering and loud whistling at that and then Duke calls the owner of the motel to come forward and he does, somewhat sheepishly and unsteadily, glass in hand, and he is cheered like you might cheer a ballplayer, and Duke puts his arm around him…

This time the woman, Patti Jo, steps up to the mike to sing the chorus on her own…

There’s a lot of loud whoopeeing and clapping and heehawing laughter, and though this is an uncommon scene for Tub Puller, he is beginning to melt somewhat into it and feel less uncomfortable on his bar stool, and he may even be grinning, though perhaps that’s not obvious to others. But then the woman from the motel front desk presses through the crowd to shout in his ear that he has a phone call from his office. He says to tell the woman he’ll call back on the car radio, it’s too noisy in here, and he slowly downs his drink, lingering for one more verse…

The stringbean cowboy-hatted singer shouts out through the uproar for everybody to join in on the chorus, and they do, each singing their own preferred versions, and if Tub were the sort of person to do that he’d surely do the same, but instead he swivels heavily about and puts foot to floor and shoulders his way out. Back to the face…

When Tub Puller took over the rundown sheriff’s office from Dee Romano’s do-nothing cousin who treated the job as a family perk, he completely revitalized it. He repainted the office itself, hung blinds and detailed maps of the county, put down new linoleum, brought in furniture sturdy enough to take his bulk. His predecessor hardly ever ventured out of West Condon, not many people even knew he was there, but Tub has expanded his territory to include the entire county and has been developing a volunteer force prepared to respond to any emergency. He also added a new two-way car-radio system. It meant hiring operators on a tight budget, but there were any number of unemployed miners’ widows looking for a little extra grocery money and willing to put in long hours of light work for not much pay. He could not afford twenty-four hour coverage, so he set up two nine-hour shifts, keeping someone there from seven in the morning to an hour after midnight. After that, emergency calls are switched to his home phone. A lot more work, but sheriffing is about all he does or wants to do, and it beats coalmining.

Now it’s an accident on the back road to Tucker City. He’s not happy about having to leave the Moon, and his tooth still hurts, but routine is routine and he sticks by it as what he knows best. Tess said in her radio call that she had deflected a few nuisance calls, but this one seemed pretty bad and he should probably check it out. He asked her who called it in and she said it was Royboy Coates. She said his mother had called earlier to say he hadn’t come home for supper and she was worried about him, but she reminded Thelma that Royboy has had a way of getting in trouble of late and has been seen at all hours in unsavory places with unsavory people and that she and Roy should have a serious talk with him, and Thelma said no matter how many beatings Royboy takes from his father, it doesn’t seem to make a tittle of difference. Tess said Royboy told her on the phone that it was some young kid on a motor bike, a car or truck must have hit him, he wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead, but he’d wait there until the sheriff showed up, though he was scared so please come right away. He asked Tess if she knew where Cal Smith was and she didn’t. He asked her to try to reach him by phone and also one or two of the new deputies and to send them out there to join him in case he needs help. He’ll also need an ambulance if it’s as bad as Royboy says, so she should stay there until he calls back, but she reminded him tomorrow was a holiday and she was supposed to knock off early, so he told her to order the ambulance up now. She also reminded him about the Fourth of July parade tomorrow, which he’ll have to ride in, suggesting he might want to take the newlyweds along in the back seat, now that he’s hiring Franny in the office, and he reminded her he’s supposed to ride a goddamned horse and then he got on the road. He considered driving past the Brunist camp and picking up Hunk or Wayne, but it’s out of the way and they’re probably already in bed.

As he rises over a little hump in the road, he sees Royboy there all right, just where he said he’d be—he waves frantically when he spots the sheriff’s car coming—and there’s the cyclist on the side of the road, his overturned motorbike another twenty yards further up where momentum must have taken it. Tub pulls his car over onto the shoulder and sits there for a moment, his lights on Royboy and the fallen biker, looking the scene over. There’s a motorcycle parked beside Royboy. His own most likely. Royboy looks terrified, but then he probably hasn’t seen many dead bodies, if it is dead. Tub is thinking about that biker gang with the death’s-head and Brunist tattoos and patches who were here a couple of months ago. There are a lot of motorcycles in the county, it’s a cheap way to get around, but you don’t often see them out on the back roads this late at night. He hasn’t dealt with a motorcycle accident since the night he created one down the road from the Blue Moon. He remembers the Cavanaugh station wagon rolling past that night, thinking at the time that it was the Cavanaugh brat and a girlfriend. They had more urgent things to do, he figured, so he finished what he was doing. But then he learned the next day the car had been stolen and trashed, probably by the bikers. If so, they’d seen him. They might have come after him right then, but they didn’t. He supposed that they would and prepared for it, but it didn’t happen, and instead they left the area. Ever since then they have been somewhat on his mind. There’s a thick stand of trees over to the left beyond the ditch. Could be hiding someone. He turns his spotlight on it, leaves it and his brights on and the motor running, unsnaps his rifle from the overhead carrier, checks the ammo in the two pistols on his hips, dons his helmet, crawls out of the car cautiously, and looks around. Everything dead quiet. All he hears is crickets and the soft rumble of his car motor. Those assholes make a lot of noise; he’s pretty sure he’d know if they’d come back. He’s not wearing his steel-toed miner’s boots tonight, but he doesn’t expect to need them. Keeping his eye on the woods and the road in both directions, he approaches Royboy and the body, which looks twisted and lifeless. Royboy is so scared his teeth are chattering. “Why aren’t you at home, Royboy?” he asks to break the silence, but Royboy only shakes his head and tries awkwardly to laugh. It’s more like a sick whine. Tub pokes his toe at the body, then squats, asking himself if he’s ever seen Royboy on a motorcycle and where is the phone he called from, to look more closely at it. Feels a chill. The greasy duck’s ass haircut tells him all he needs to know. It’s the darkie who rode with them, the one they called Cubano. The shit opens his eyes and winks at him. The sheriff is down there on one knee when they rise up out of the ditch and he more or less expects to die that way. The odd thought that comes to him is that now he won’t have to go to the dentist. They strip him of his weapons and march him back to his car, where he can hear Tess on the radio signing off, telling him the ambulance will be out there in about fifteen minutes but she hasn’t been able to reach Smith or any of the others, and reminding him again about the parade tomorrow.

IV.2

Saturday 4 July

Tommy Cavanaugh’s hastily assembled, ragtag West Condon Fourth of July parade turns the corner out of Third, nearly two hours late, and heads up Main Street in the glittering sunlight toward the patient citizenry. Not much to do in this town. This is something to do. They can wait for it. Sally steps out of her “Four Freedoms” tee shop to watch it go by and wave a manikin limb at Tommy. Leading it is the West Condon mayor, riding in the back seat of Tommy’s bright red convertible, the expression on his face that of a man listening to a dirty joke. He is accompanied by a supporting convoy of other area bigwigs and followed by a marching band of high school kids—long on drums, short on horns—tootling away at what is probably supposed to be “Stars and Stripes Forever,” or maybe it’s the high school marching song or even “White Christmas.” Next comes the heaving and yawing “New Opportunities for West Condon” float with young girls in swimsuits hanging on for dear life, and behind it whooping police cars, ambulances, and fire engines, and finally all the marching groups Tommy has lined up, some with their own drum corps, from churches, unions, civic and social clubs, businesses, scout troops and sewing circles, including an armed mob carrying a C
HRISTIAN
P
ATRIOTS
banner and some Italian neighborhood heavies led by Angie Bonali’s uniform-shirted brother Charlie, who busted Tommy’s nose and is supposed to be in jail but isn’t. They also have a banner: K
NIGHTS OF
C
OLUMBUS
V
OLUNTEER
D
EFENSE
F
ORCE,
it says. Also armed. People with childish ideas and grown-up weapons out to ruin the world. Tommy told her he had talked the sheriff into riding a white horse in the parade, but apparently he chickened out. Or maybe the horse did after seeing the sheriff. She once read in a pop psych book that parades were scarcely disguised representations of thrusting penises, drum majorettes at the tip wearing high plumed hats like French ticklers and twirling their batons in cocky foreplay, but on this dead street that would amount to a kind of necrophilia.

The corpse, however, is well-dressed for the occasion, with tricolor litter bins, ribbons on the lampposts, flags hanging from shop fronts, and a red-white-and-blue stripe down the middle of the street. Even the potholes have been filled in, if only with loose gravel. Sally has helped clean up and paint the empty Main Street stores for this weekend of rent-free entrepreneurialism, mostly taken up for rummage and bake sales, so-called arts and craft shows, charity drives, and town boosterism displays, and she has claimed this old once-bustling women’s clothing store for her own showroom, celebrating freedom from pulpit, flag, marketplace, and F
ROM THE
C
ULTURE OF
W
ILLFUL
I
GNORANCE
—which more or less includes everything else and is the theme of her current work-in-progress. This she has reshaped into “Living with the Cretins,” in which she describes the town and nation beyond as a vast terminally Christianized loony bin, entering it into the first annual West Condon Fourth of July essay contest. The only other entry, no doubt at Tommy’s urging, was by that dweeb Babs Wetherwax, “Why I Love My Country.” Ah yes, let me count the ways. Sally got second prize, which was more than she expected even with the limited submissions. Boobs will read her winning essay at the bank-sponsored Independence Day picnic this afternoon; Sally has not been invited to do so, but she may read her own anyway.