The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

  “Hah,” said Tommy, turning toward her. “So you figure the guy was in a hurry and just cut the boots off with the feet still in them.”

  “Something like that. But the body without the feet was identified and that wasn’t Carl Dean either. We know now how the boots might have got from the dead guy at the camp to the one on the roof. The question is: how did the first guy get them?”

  Tommy stares at her a moment over his beer. “Ah, I get it. You think maybe the guy dumped down the mine was…?”

  “He still had his feet on, but nothing on them except the tatters of rotting socks.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked. Forget the socks. I made that up. But they said, yes, he was essentially barefoot. So, all right: the day of the rape. You were waiting for Carl Dean at Lem’s garage, but he didn’t show up. His truck was packed and parked in front of the camp lodge. He was on his way out of there, but something interrupted him. Unfortunately, the cultists set the van alight; they thought it was the devil’s van or some such lunacy. The people I talked to last summer told me that both Aunt Debra and the Collins girl said Carl Dean was there at the rape, but they were confused about what part he played. They were both traumatized, especially the girl, so it was probably all just a blur. But Carl Dean was evidently in love with that girl and had come all the way back here to see her. And she was in trouble. What I’m trying to say is that it looks like your friend, whom everyone has vilified, was really a hero.”

  “Brilliant, Holmes. Good for old Ugly. But a dead hero.”

  “Longevity’s not a goal for most heroes. They’re going for something else. It’s why we remember them and not much of anyone else.”

  “Mm. Poor old Pete over there’s another. I’ve been by the store a few times to see him. He says he knows they’re making a big deal out of what he did and everyone’s talking about how he sacrificed himself out of love for Monica and her kid, but actually that wasn’t on his mind at all. The ball was in the air, he said, and as soon as his feet left the floor, he was back on the court. Went up for the interception and follow-through jump shot and knew he had to sink it before the buzzer.”

  “Wow! I know that feeling. When the thing itself takes over and you’re just its tool. Okay, here’s another, not so scary. You know that Olive Oyl wallflower who used to pull sodas in Doc Foley’s drugstore?”

  “Beanpole Becky? Sure.”

  “Well, she turned up on TV the other day to describe the killing of Doc Foley and her own near-death experience. She said in that flat deadpan voice of hers that the whole thing has affected her orgasms, making the interviewer’s eyes pop. He asked if she meant that it was, you know, interfering with…? ‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean they’re better.’”

  Tommy thought that was hilarious, and the rest of the night, like Becky’s orgasms, went better. Trading hero tales was a good idea. Tommy turned his back on Angela’s party and over the next couple of rounds, in and around the over-amplified music, they talked about his mother’s wacky trip to Lourdes with Concetta Moroni, paid for by an old boyfriend; the Bali postcard the ex-mayor sent the city council; and Christmas week’s big news that Priscilla Tindle, who was back with her husband, had given birth to a daughter whom she was reportedly naming Mary after the child’s grandmother, though maybe that was just one of her dad’s jokes. Sally’s mother had visited the preacher in the mental hospital and found him neatly shaved and barbered, smoking his pipe again, and completely sane, so far as she could tell. It was like the Jesus in him had sort of boiled off, or dropped away like the husk of a seedpod. His wife—Sally’s “Aunt Debra”—was, and perhaps still is, in a women’s prison, where she was apparently becoming something of a spiritual leader, talking with the birds and creating her own pollyanna branch of Brunism, and her adopted orphan had had, in her mother’s words, “a very successful surgical intervention. Really, they’ve done a great job with the poor boy. He’s very relaxed and pleasant now and he doesn’t remember a thing about his mixed-up past. Of course, he doesn’t recognize anybody either.” Sally, her own brain wobbling a bit in her skull at the thought of this “intervention,” took a mental note at the time about magic spells: You only hear about those who break their spells. Most don’t.

  Tommy said he was glad she was working for the West Condon NOW consortium and told her more about his dad’s battles with the governor, the city manager, and Charlie Bonali, who had formed a kind of unholy alliance, the police chief part of it, his dad the common enemy. With the mayor absconded, there was a vacuum in town and Minicozzi and Bonali, both seen as heroes of a sort, were filling it. The governor was dumping money into the town, but it was all going through Minicozzi, and there were probably kickbacks. Bonali’s building company got the big city hall restoration job without any competitive bids, Minicozzi claiming some kind of emergency powers. Already there were serious cost overruns, yet nothing seemed actually to have been done beyond fencing it off. The bank was robbed that day of the dynamite and the bikers were blamed, but his dad was pretty sure it was the bank lawyer. “Dad’s determined to bring the governor down. He’s putting his money in the next elections on the hotshot D.A. who nailed the Brunists.” Tommy said he had no problem with that guy pushing for all those executions in order to make his name. “Look at how many people got killed because of those rabid freaks.” Sally said that if they were freaks, then most of the rest of the country was, too, because a recent poll suggested over eighty percent of all Americans believe pretty much the same apocalyptic fantasies, it’s only that not many have put a particular date on them. As for the absentee biker gang being the ones who terrorized the town, not those who had been arrested and charged, Tommy shrugged and said they were all part of the same family and the same fanatical cult. “They all wore Brunist shit on their leathers. Their tattoos. Their minds were fucked by their religious leaders, who have to be held responsible.” The media often spoke now of the Baxter clan, referencing famous criminal families of the past. Old black-and-white photos of group hangings of captured bandit gangs were shown on television. Paul Baxter was on the original list of indictments until his head was found in the state park, whereupon he was replaced by Nathan, known now to be the masked gan-gleader advertising himself as “Kid Rivers.” There were countrywide “Dead or Alive” posters up for him and he was number one on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, the mug shots showing a mean-looking kid about fourteen years old.

  A honey blonde in a red shirt and skirt with white fringes coordinating with Will Henry’s red-fringed white suit had joined him to reprise the early L’Heureux-Rendine hits, “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” “A Toybox of Tears,” “She’ll Let Me Know When It’s Time to Go,” and “I Thought I Knew Too Much about Love,” and then, by popular demand, for at least the fourth time that night, “The Blue Moon Motel,” with its rowdy appeal to get it on. “So listen up, cowboy, it ain’t never too soon,” they sang, “to pop your cork at the ole Blue Moon!” Tommy cleared his throat and said he was really sorry about his stupid badass behavior at the highway motel that night, he was out of control, a total jerk, and he hoped she could understand what he was going through and forgive him for it. She smiled and said sure (everybody in the joint was singing along now, bellowing out the lines, it was like church at its best), but when he told her he’d booked a room here as a kind of peace gesture—“It wasn’t easy, there were no vacancies,” he shouted over the raucous crowd, “but there was a last-minute cancellation!”—she smiled again and said no thanks. “Still holding a grudge?” “No, never did. But you’re not as cute without your funny nose guard.” He grinned and took her hand and said, “C’mon,” but she shook her head. She realized she felt nothing at all for this young man, which surprised her. She placed her other hand over his. “I’ve moved on, Tommy. Don’t take offense. But what can I say? You don’t really interest me any longer.” He seemed hurt by that and pulled his hand back, looking like he might revert to his badass jerk mode. Men are such sen
timentalists.

  And then, that winter, Sally’s life took a surprise turn. Her workshop story, “Jan,” was accepted by a prestigious national magazine. She hadn’t even sent it to them; her old workshop teacher had. To show he was open-minded, he had also submitted one of her “Against the Cretins” fragments to an eccentric avant-garde literary magazine, whose only literary criterion, he told her when she called, was dirty language, and that one, too, was taken. It seemed forever before “Jan” appeared, but within days of its publication (her prof had made a few cuts and moved a couple of paragraphs about, so she was torn between gratitude and fury, elation and frustration, though never mind, it was only a workshop exercise anyway), she was getting calls from agents and publishers, asking to see more. She was sure she could bowl them over with her more imaginative writing, so she rushed some of it off special delivery, though with each submission, just in case, she also mentioned what she might do with “Jan” if she ever developed it further. One of these letters got her both a literary agent and then a book offer from a big New York publisher. The publishers were not interested in the experimental work. They wanted a further expansion of the published story along the more conventional reportage lines she had suggested in her letter with the events clearly linked to the Brunist cult and the Mine Hill Massacre, which, with all the scheduled executions, were still in the national headlines, and they wanted it more or less immediately so that the book could appear while the subject was still topical.

  To the dismay of her new agent who had negotiated the contract, she turned it down. She regretted her cowardly cover letter. She wasn’t a journalist. Breaking conventions is what she did. The agent said she was passing up an opportunity to launch her writing career, if the book was successful she could write how and what she wished thereafter, but Sally said that any book she wrote that she didn’t want to write was unlikely to be successful. Her agent was not very enthusiastic about the more imaginative work either, so she sent her stories around on her own, having been bitten somewhat by the publishing bug. After some time, the little vanguard magazine appeared with her “Cretins” story and they took a second, a “Big Mary” fragment, but the others all came back, and the “Big Mary” piece never got published because the magazine folded. With a little inside push from her agent and her former workshop teacher, however, her two published stories and the book interest did win her a fellowship that fall at a writers’ colony located in a mountain retreat far from West Condon, so she was able to give up her job with the construction firm. The architect friend of Tommy’s dad, also using that unsettling word “career,” offered her a full-time position at much higher wages either in West Condon or in the city if she wanted it, saying they were just about to break into big money, and she was tempted, but took a rain check, which she knew, unless devoid of writing ideas and utterly desperate, she’d never call in. He was a good-looking guy and, if he had come on to her, she probably, feeling lonely, would have accepted the offer and lived a completely different life, but he treated her more as one of the boys.

  All of this had little impact back home. No one in West Condon was much interested writers who weren’t on television or in the news-paper—which was rare, since the town didn’t have a news station or paper of its own. Her only brush with fame was during the midsummer first-anniversary tourist surge when she spied a torn oil-stained copy of the magazine with her story in it on the floor of Rico’s Pizza Palace, probably dropped by a disappointed visitor—the editors had referenced the Brunist cult in their authors’ notes. She rescued it, has it still. The “big money” the architect spoke of was in anticipation of the imminent collapse of their local competitors. The year-long city hall ripoff erupted eventually into a full-blown scandal, due mostly to the relentless perseverance of Tommy’s dad. Minicozzi was indicted, his mob connections exposed (the governor did not escape the implications), and the president of Bonali Family Builders—who was not Charlie Bonali, but his dad—was sent to prison. Charlie disappeared into the city, along with Moron Moroni and some of the other so-called Dagotown Devil Dogs. His sister lost her job at city hall and got married. The police chief was demoted and a new chief was hired in from upstate. The town had neither mayor nor city manager for a while and was run largely by the city council. The town had not had much luck with mayors and there was little appetite to elect a new one, nor did anyone seem interested in the job. Most of that happened after Sally had left town, but her mom kept her informed.

  Before leaving West Condon for the writers colony at the end of August (forever, she felt), Sally paid a final visit to the Brunist file drawer in the Chronicle job room. Somebody, she discovered, had been poking around in the files since she was last there. The drawer was open and the “Abner Baxter Family” and “Millennial Cults” folders were out on top of the cabinet. She asked and the little mustachioed print shop owner said the only other visitor had been the mayor, who was in just before he disappeared, buying up a stack of the final edition of the paper at a nickel each “for the city archives,” but he himself was in there with the fellow the whole time and he had no interest in the files. Does anyone else have a key? He didn’t know. He’d never changed the locks, and the previous newspaper people might still have theirs. “No need for locks, really,” he said with a cheerful, pink-cheeked smile. “This is a safe town where you can trust your neighbors.”

  It was hot and stuffy in that windowless room. She put the hook on the job room door, took off her shirt, and started with the “Cults” file, which she wanted to explore as fodder for her Cretin Wizards, and in it she found the scrawled note: “The great majority of men do not think with abstract ideas, only with colorful images or with concrete facts. Abstract spiritual ideas and principles must be clothed in some vivid and compelling form, even if, like this note, borrowed from elsewhere. Thus, the heroic journey, the parables, the miracles, the Easter story, the cross.” Which she herself might have written, if not so succinctly. She copied the lines out in her notebook next to another thought she’d stolen from somewhere about imagination both illumining and darkening the mind, which she read as her kind of fiction versus the Christian sort, though she could see how it might work both ways. And then, without really registering the moves that got her there, she found herself stretched out on the leather couch again, smoking a joint and fantasizing about the new life that awaited her. It did not seem to include the cult or the town, not even as masked in the fairytale form of “Against the Cretins.” It was grander than that, more heroic, and at the same time more modest, at least in scale: Wit. Bright and quick and unforgettable. Ever since her night at the Moon with Tommy and their exchange of hero stories, she’d been playing with the hero idea. She had returned home that night and written: “She did not know if she was a real hero or a false hero, but she knew the first thing she had to do was leave home in order to proceed to what the Saturday morning cartoons called the ‘threshold of adventure.’” The new hero who emerged that night called himself or herself many names, but most recently Dawn, meaning lecherous, moist, wet, rutting; also graceful, but with the ancient sense of “one who has beautiful pudenda.” Perhaps, she was thinking as she lay there, Dawn’s first mind-opening adventure, sallying forth, radiant with purpose yet utterly in the dark, would be to awaken the Sleeping Prince in the Woods, that two-dick wonder (it was the circumcised one that mattered, though Dawn might not know that and have to try them both), then blithely send him on his way into the life of empty-headed princesses and ambitious chambermaids which were his destiny. Her hand by now was between her legs, hash in her lungs and behind her eyes. She was thinking about the Prince’s beautiful backside while he stood at the motel window, his sturdy prick glistening with the stains of a ruptured hymen, the bathing of it under the waterfall of the shower—feet, she knew then, just a euphemism in the Jesus stories. Her eye fell on the darkroom door with its glass panel, behind which the photographer had been hidden. She stood, took off the rest of her clothes, and lay down again, staring tau
ntingly at the secreted photographer and remembering Billy Don, the flushed expression on his face in the Tucker City drugstore when he showed her the pictures of this couch and the violated Bruno girl upon it, and she spread her legs and took her hand away and raised her inside arm against the back of the couch in imitation of one of those photos (the difference was the roach in her other hand), wondering if she had the imaginative power to make herself come without touching herself. While the invisible photographer watched, stunned by what he saw, but greedily snapping away. She was close to it.

  But her erotic imaginings were chilled by the lingering image of Billy Don, no longer that of him in the drugstore, but the final one: dead and bloodless in his wrecked car in the ditch at the edge of the camp, that hole in his forehead. She remembered suddenly that he was not wearing his dark glasses. This fact struck her at the time, it made him look so strange, he was never without them, even at night, but then she had forgotten it. Apparently Junior Baxter was wearing them when he was arrested, another strike against him. Junior had been found guilty of his murder and several other crimes on top, and had been sentenced to die in the electric chair. Arguing that charges of murder and conspiracy to murder seemed almost inadequate for the enormity of the crimes committed, the prosecutor secured death sentences for Junior’s father as well and for his surviving uncaptured brother, plus four so-called “Brunist Defenders,” two surviving Christian Patriots, and the entire membership of Nathan Baxter’s “Wrath of God” motorcycle gang, all sentenced in absentia, however many and whoever they were. Presumably this was good for a lot of votes. Abner Baxter’s closest lieutenant, Roy Coates, facing murder charges like the others, was given immunity for turning state’s witness, providing critical evidence against many of the “armed criminals” on the mine hill that day, including Baxter himself. This might have been the same reason Darren Rector only got a suspended three-year sentence; that and his pretty blond innocence. During the appeal process that followed, much of Coates’ testimony was found insubstantial and contradictory and was discounted, resulting in lesser punishments for two of those sentenced to death and the outright release of another, but all that was later on. Clara Collins-Wosznik and others named with her were charged with conspiracy to foment violence and civic disorder, but as they were no longer in the state and were not on the hill that day, the charges were eventually dropped. Not long after the sentencing, Nathan Baxter alias Tobias Rivers alias Kid Rivers was killed in southeast Texas in what looked like a gang execution, along with others assumed to be members of the Wrath of God gang, who had apparently renamed themselves the Crusadeers. Baxter had been hideously burnt and was all but unrecognizable, identifiable only by his Tobias Rivers driver’s license and wrecked motorcycle, making investigators cautious: Was this really Nat Baxter, or was he living on under yet another stolen identity?