Origin of the Brunists

  “Hey, you seen Kit’s girl? She’s a real dog!”

  “Whaddaya mean, man?”

  “Haven’t you seen how she drops her pants whenever she sees his bone?”

  “Ow!”

  Another thing his Dad had told him was that the girls would only come to him as clean as he went to them, and he had found out that this wasn’t exactly true either. That little Elliott girl, for example, as far as she knew from the way everybody joked around about him, he was over in Waterton or had somebody in his back seat every night and had syphilis and everything else from so much sex, and yet there she was, letting him drive her right out to the ice plant last night, popping into the back seat with him, and, my gosh, not knowing anything about anything, just letting him do what he wanted to do, a complete dumb cherry, though really kind of nice, and only if he had known what to do, known for sure, why, he could have made her right then and there. Even as it was, they had had a pretty hot time, but finally he got a little scared. He was afraid of making a mess of things. One trouble was, he never felt like going out with a girl unless he could like her well enough to marry her, and if he liked her then he didn’t want to hurt her any way. Of course, Sally Elliott came from a good family, her Dad being the Chamber of Commerce secretary and all, so even if something did happen it couldn’t be too horrible. Yes, he was a darned kitten, all right, and the more he thought about it, the more it made him mad. Boy, Tiger Miller wouldn’t wait around—you gotta grow up, man!

  “Hey, Kit! What’s worse than your old man with a jag on?”

  Tommy thought. “I don’t know. Your girl with a rag on?”

  “Naw!” the guy howled through the laughter. “Your old lady with a jig on!”

  Tommy laughed with the others, but he didn’t like the joke. He was sensitive about “old lady” jokes ever since his Mom had got humiliated last year in the newspaper. It had really made his Dad sore, because he thought at first Tiger Miller had done it on purpose, and here he had been the one who had brought him back to West Condon in the first place and then to pull a rotten trick like that. Tommy had been badly upset by the event, since three of the people he loved the most were involved, but finally it turned out that Tiger probably wasn’t at fault.

  Actually, though none of his buddies knew it now, Tommy had received his nickname upon Tiger Miller’s return to the town. He was about eleven or so when Tiger came home, and everybody said then that Tommy was going to be just like him, and they started calling him Tiger’s Kitten. Now it was plain Kit, and when anyone asked, he would say it was the girls who had started calling him Kit Carson, the Irrepressible Explorer. After graduation, he looked forward to playing on Tiger’s baseball team in the area semipro league. Even though Tiger was a pretty old guy now, he was still the best first baseman in the league and a regular .400 hitter. Tommy was glad he had learned to play shortstop, because they would have a chance to play together.

  Tommy noticed Sally Elliott over by the vacated Sunday school building, staring over his way. “Excuse me, men,” he said, catching the wadded program and flipping it back into the guy’s crotch, “but my services are in demand.”

  “Hey, Kit,” one guy whispered, “you getting some of that?”

  “Well, uh, let’s say I’m looking into it.” He strolled out of their laughter and over toward the girl. Wow, just seeing her standing there so awkward heated him up—he hoped it wasn’t going to show. Man, it had to happen soon! And she was so nice, there was something really soft and great about her. If only she had known the score, and he—well, he knew what it was that held him back. Sometimes he envied those poor bastards with their nobody fathers. Man, they could do it in full public and it wouldn’t matter.

  Charlie Bonali, making laborious toilet, listened to his old man in the living room bitching and moaning about his bad luck. Well, he was a goddamn failure and he wouldn’t admit it. Just about everybody Charlie knew was a failure and that was the goddamn truth, a bunch of saps. Everywhere he looked, nothing but saps. And his old lady was even worse, trying to drag him off to Mass and yap-yapping about the horrors of hell. Charlie had skipped Mass this morning and had had to take a lot of guff off her and he was still sore about it. Man! he’d sure got dropped by a pair of squares! Showered and shampooed, Charlie stood naked in the bathroom, rolling on deodorant and applying cologne. He cocked his dark brow and curled his thick lip down. “You handsome fucker!” he said and flashed a white toothy smile. Held it. Looked closer. Yeah, they needed brushing again.

  Saps. God, the place was rotten to the core! Pray, pay, and get blown to hell. Jesus, when would they ever learn? Take the disaster. Okay, so his old man got out, but what the hell was he doing down there in the first place? And old Ange. There was a smart one. Thousand laughs, punch in the ribs, knew all the answers. Now he rots, burned black to the bone. Smart, very smart. And now what was Charlie’s old lady saying? That Uncle Ange was lucky: he’d been to confession the Sunday before. Charlie nearly laughed out loud. He could hear old Ange himself say it, it was Ange’s favorite line: “Lucky, my lily-white ass!” It was hard to figure. A dumb guy gets nailed up on a goddamn cross, and they all think that’s so great, they want to get up there and hang with him. What a bunch of misery-loving nuts! Man, that was one line Charlie Bonali was not going to stand in! He didn’t even know if he could stomach another Easter season around this dump. He had cleaned his fingernails and toenails with a brush in the bath, and now trimmed them with a clipper. He had one foot up on the stool, his bare ass to the door, when his kid sister Angie knocked.

  “Aren’t you out of there yet?” she demanded. “You’re worse than a girl!”

  “Come on ahead, if you’re in such a hurry,” he shouted back. He hoped to hell she would, she’d shut up then, and he stood a little straighter just in case she did.

  “Not with you in there!” she huffed and went away.

  He sighed, put his foot down, filed his fingernails. The old man was howling about all his hard work in the mines having brought him to nothing but a big fat dead end, a favorite crybaby routine of his these days, and how there was no justice in it. The old man was very hot on justice and injustice, and thought a man should get what he worked for. Jesus God, he was dumb.

  Charlie fingered tonic into his wavy black hair, devoted ten careful minutes to a strand-by-strand arrangement of it. Damn hairline was edging back, he was sure of it. Work, my Jesus. Well, Charlie could tell the old man things. If a punk weighed in at a hundred pounds, could he play tackle on a varsity team? Hell, no! And take it from a big man. Some guys had it, some didn’t. So much for justice, old man. Now, the guys that had it, the smart guys, how did they get it? By being tough. None of your bellyaching about justice, man. If the other guy was born dumb or weak or sick or poor or old or unlucky, well, fuck him. Make him work for you, make him kiss your ass, that was the message from the cross. Charlie flexed his meaty shoulders, smashed his fist into his palm. Yeah, man. Snapped his fingers, the old sign for action.

  He brushed his teeth, leaning up against the lavatory. The sleek pressure of the cold enamel delighted his rod and groin. As he looked down to spit, though, he saw that his belly ballooned out over the lip of the sink. Goddamn beergut, he was going to pot. He stared glumly at that pale bag, shaggily coated with curly black hair. Another sign of the bad times. All he did now was drink beer and sometimes pick up some middle-age stuff in one of the joints. They had to know a lot of tricks or he couldn’t even pop off, he was so depressed. He had to get out of here. Nearly all his buddies who graduated with him last year were gone now, and the ones who’d stayed were in worse shape than he was. The new high school kids looked like little babies, like that bitchy little runt of a sister of his, and the upper-class girls acted scared of him. Jesus, he was looking like an old man, that’s what. He sucked in his gut and whacked it hard with the butt of his hand. Have to toughen up, goddamn it! He whacked it a couple more times, then looked away irritably as it sagged again.

  He
pulled on his clean T-shirt and repeated the ritual of the comb. Couple of his buddies had joined the Marines. Shit, that sounded pretty stupid, but maybe he ought to, too. Something to tide him over until he found his way to the top. If he hung around here any longer he was going to go off his nut. By God, why not? He’d do it, he’d join the goddamn Marines and get away from his old man and his old lady, away from the bitching and nagging and away from the mines and West Condon and God and all his fucking paraphernalia. He flashed the smile. Yeah, man. Then, reluctantly, he pulled on his shorts.

  Thou didst crush the head of the wicked,

  laying him bare from thigh to neck…

  One difference between Nathan Baxter and his father, now the Reverend Abner Baxter of the Church of the Nazarene, was that while his father believed in the eventual redistribution of all property equally to all people (or anyway all saints), no matter how it had to be accomplished, and as Jesus Christ, he preached, had intended, Nat Baxter recognized no property rights at all. “Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it.” At the high school gymnasium the Sunday of the mine disaster, Nat’s eye saw and coveted a beautifully gnarled black hand that lay, carbonized and unattached, among the bodies and other refuse, and, covertly, his hand grasped it, stuffed it in a paper sack.

  For a long time before, he and his little brother Paulie had played Batman and Robin, flying dangerously through the trees, destroying wild beasts, and doing God’s will amongst the ungodly. Bad guys were not always easy to come by, of course, and sometimes, to keep the game going, Robin himself had to display a streak of perversity, so he could be dealt with by the hard arm of the law, but there were usually some little kids in the neighborhood they could catch and tie up and bring to proper retribution. Or, if not, they could almost always talk their sister Amanda into it. She was ten and bigger than Paulie, but so weak that Paulie—Robin, that is—could usually catch her and pin her down by himself. The trouble was, she sometimes tattled, but that only added danger to their game, and whenever she did, she always knew she would get it double next time.

  Paulie had grown a little too smart, though, about playing Robin; he seemed to consider that it was even better than being Batman. So one day, as a lesson, Nat had shot a real robin with his beebee gun and had made Paulie watch it die. “Me, Batman,” he had said, standing over the bird. “You, Robin.” The bird was still blinking its heavy gray lids, but it had stopped trying to fly. As Paulie, scared, squatted down close to see where the bird had been hit, Nat had placed his foot on the bird’s head and slowly crunched its skull in. That had stopped Paulie being cocky about the part he played, but also it had almost stopped the game altogether. Paulie was too big a baby all the time.

  But finding the hand had solved all that. That Sunday, when he came home, he put on his sweatshirt, and pulling his left hand up into the sleeve, carefully fitted the left cuff around the wrist of the dead hand, holding it inside by the bone that stuck out. He left a note where Paulie would be sure to see it: Beware the Black Hand! and then waited until he had him alone in the bedroom to spring it on him. Paulie screamed and nearly fell into a frothing fit. Nat could hardly keep from giggling. Lowering his voice in imitation of their father’s, he warned Paulie to keep quiet about it; if he said anything to anybody, the Black Hand would get him. When, later that evening, Paulie got his peter whopped by their father’s razor strop, Nat told him it was God’s punishment because he had acted so scared he had almost given it all away. But, Nat said, he had proven himself, and now he could be the assistant to the Black Hand. What did he want to call himself? Paul suggested the Black Finger, but Nat rejected the idea: if they painted it black with ink, everybody would see it and ask about it. Paulie said, what about the Black Peter? That was where God had hit him, and you couldn’t see that. Nat agreed, provided Paulie would promise to be careful and wash it off every time before their mother gave them their baths.

  So, after that, the Black Hand and the Black Peter stalked the neighborhood. It was a million times better than being Batman and Robin, because now they were on the other side, and they could do whatever they wanted to. They stole and put poop on porches and tortured victims and broke bottles and burned birds they shot in gasoline and one night they strangled Widow Harlowe’s cat. With ink, Nat drew pictures of the black hand on little pieces of paper, which they left behind whenever they completed a really good job.

  They began making plans for initiating Amanda, but their father was home almost all the time now, what with the mine closed and the sermons he was always having to prepare, and they were afraid about her tattling. She was their father’s favorite, and he could get pretty rough if he thought she was being victimized. But then, one Sunday night early in February when he’d had the hand just about a month, both their parents had to attend some important church meeting called by Widow Collins in some man’s house, a wop man named Mr. Bruno, and they left Franny in charge. Nat now had the idea that his father did not like Widow Collins anymore, so he put her on the list for future visitations. Once their parents had left, their big brother Junior wandered off to town to play the pinball machines, and then one of Franny’s girlfriends came by and they went for a walk, so Paul and Nathan had Amanda to themselves. An opportunity like that could not be passed by. Pitilessly, the Black Hand and the Black Peter struck.

  6

  A month of anguish and ordeal. A month of hope. Oh, the upward straining! Oh, the despair of nonfulfillment! Rarely had conviction so wholly failed her. Struck down, Clara Collins wept. Hardship afflicted though her life had been, always there had been something, or someone, to comfort her, to guard her from grief’s last defeat. Always in crisis—even at the worst a month ago when Ely got killed, and earlier when Harold died in the war—she had discovered, through her enduring faith in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, new inner rivers of resolve. But now, in this strange house, in inexplicable legion with these strange persons, at this strange and empty hour—emptier than she had ever conceived an hour could be—of midnight, the midnight that cleft the eighth of the month of February from the new ninth, as Abner Baxter hurled his implacable curses and all her friends walked out on her, Clara suffered a total collapse of strength. Everything just dropped out. Even faith failed her. She could not pray. It was as though they had walked out taking her very spirit with them, and now the hollow shell of her could but sit, utterly powerless and forsaken, in this bewilderingly darkened Italian living room lit only by its irreverent television—sit whimpering like a lost child.

  The hour had been striking still as she followed them out of Giovanni Bruno’s bedroom, through the dining room with its alien pungency, into the shrouded blink and rasp of the living room where the old father sat, foul-smelling and raking his throat, staring mindlessly at an old movie, followed them, held by a mere thread to the edge of the awful cliff, to the very door. Out they had marched, indignant, inflexible, even as though frightened, the Baxters and the Coates, all those people, the widows Lawson and Harlowe, the Willie Halls and Calvin Smiths, the Grays, Gideon Diggs, everybody, all the friends of the faith she had known and so devotedly served, even her truest friend Betty Wilson. Out! If only one could have—“Please!” she had whispered desperately to Betty, and Betty, crying shamelessly, had begged her forgiveness, then left with the others. The thread parted. She dropped, head spinning. Nearby: a sofa. It received her. There she wept.

  And the worst of it was: she no longer felt Ely’s presence. Throughout this month of terror and trial, he had stayed by her side, had seemed closer even than he had been while living, had guided her, inspirited her, given her strength and singleness of purpose … and now he was gone. Gone! Ely! How? How had it come to pass? “Puffed up with conceit!” Abner Baxter had cried, passing through the door. Oh no, dear God, it was not so!

  So utterly, so frankly and wholeheartedly, had she believed that the portentous thing was truly happening, that now it was as though it had happened and had left her behind, behind in the str
ange-scented emptiness with its blue flickering light and tinkling hollow voices. She had not doubted, no, indeed all her life had seemed to come to bear on this moment, all good Ely had taught her, and all the signs this month—especially his suffering—had insisted upon it. “For our light affliction, which is for the moment only, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory, because we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen!” So many indications of the Spirit at work! Ely’s message and the appearances to both him and his companion Giovanni Bruno of the mysterious white bird, then the startling coincidence of the story that appeared in the evening Chronicle—had not the whole world seen it?—about the shepherd boy who had been visited centuries ago by a white bird that had also changed into the Mother Mary, telling him then to lead a Holy Crusade. Even little Elaine’s innocent gift at Christmas of the small porcelain statue of Mary with the bleeding heart now seemed almost terrifying in its hidden portent. Then, too, there was poor Eddie Wilson with the broken back, suffering like Ely a saint’s end, dying in Sister Betty’s arms with Ely’s name on his lips and something like “God” before—and he had not even been near Ely in the mine! And what of the puzzling “black hand” slaying of Mary Harlowe’s cat? Was it not another sign? So clear! So foreboding! And how excited Willie and Mabel Hall had become when she showed them the note! Willie had turned pale as a ghost, told Clara he had stayed home from the mine that night just because it had been the eighth of the month. Oh, true! true!