The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel
“Looks as how fatso has snookered us,” Roy Coates says with a sneer, and Tub stares back at him. If he were a man who ever smiled, he’d be smiling. But if Roy calls him fatso again, the fucker will end up in the bed next to the fire chief.
“My deputies are ready to fit you with some nice shiny bracelets and bus you to the county lock-up, if that’s your choice,” he says into the megaphone, “though the law don’t work so good around here and I don’t recommend it. Your other choice, which is a lot easier on everybody, is to permanently and for all time leave the area. If them’s your rathers, you got five minutes to pack up. Don’t try driving away on your own—you’re gonna be personally escorted outa here over into the next state. Anybody not got a vehicle and don’t wanta go to jail, we’ll be providing taxi service across the state line in them school buses over there. We’re all gonna proceed together in a nice neat line, just like a parade. Anybody peel off, they’ll get shot as fugitives from the law. You got little kids here. Let’s don’t let that happen. And if you try to come back in, you’ll just be giving my boys target practice. We’ll be patrolling all the highways and roads in the county, so don’t even think about it.”
“You cain’t take us in,” says Coates. “We live here.”
“Aiding and abetting,” he says.
“Bull.”
He lifts the megaphone. “All right, let’s get moving!” He’s waiting for Cal to cross him so he can break him, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, a snot-nosed brat dragging a dirty pink slipper on one foot comes over and pokes her finger in his belly. He swats at her but misses. “It’s real!” she shouts and other brats draw near with mischievous grins on their nasty little faces as if they all intend to have a poke.
“Luke, you come away from there and let the man be!” a woman calls out. “He’s just doing his job!” Big woman, near as big as he is, a squalling fat baby over her shoulder. She waddles out of the crowd toward him and gets a grip on the girl’s collar. “Sorry, Sheriff. We’re town folk. We just come out to bring some food and comfort to these poor people. I feel sorry for them and I think you should oughta too, but I suppose you got your orders. Us Christians is used to getting beat up by the law. We’ll be going now and leave you to it, but next time I see Jesus, I’m gonna tell him what you done.”
“Wait a minute—”
“I recognize them,” Smith says. “It’s okay. They’re living in the Chestnut Hills prefabs.”
“Squatters.”
“Maybe. But that’s Romano’s problem, not ours.”
It’s Suggs’ problem, too, he owning most of that property, but Tub knows this is not an argument that carries much weight with Smith. A lanky unkempt man with deep hollow eyes has come up beside the fat woman, toting a rifle and looking seriously deranged. Tub should probably tell him to hand over his weapon, but he has the notion it would not be a smart thing to do. The little girl in the pink slipper takes her thumb out of her mouth and asks: “Mom, can I have that silver star? Please, Mom!” and her mother tells her no, she can’t, it’s what makes the big man big, that without it he’d be a runt to a flea, and Coates’ sneer spreads through the crowd of faces like a kind of infection. Tub has somehow lost the thread of this game. “All you folks live in Chestnut Hills come with us now. This ain’t about us,” the woman says, and one or two follow her toward their cars, and then a few others, and then everyone. Now having Smith here is a bad thing. Tub might have shot a few of them, but with Smith as witness he has lost that option. All he can do is unholster his weapon and holler at them to stop in the name of the law and he does that. Some of his boys do fire warning shots over their heads, but the fat woman says: “Come along now! Don’t worry, they ain’t gonna shoot nobody. They ain’t very happy, but they ain’t crazy.”
“Doggone my soul, how I love them old songs! Put your hands t’gether there, folks, fer our sidekickin’ goddaddy, Will Henry! He has done so much fer us and he does pluck a mean box!” Tub Puller likes country music about as much as he likes any music (not much), so when he heard that tonight would be the last Duke L’Heureux and Patti Jo Rendine show at the Blue Moon, he decided it might be a smart idea to hang out for a couple of hours to prevent any repeat of the brawl and also to see what all the excitement is about, hoping only they weren’t singing songs like he’d heard them sing with the Brunists out on the mine hill, which he understood they were not. Needed a break from all that religious in-fighting. None of those nuts in here. He let Tess back at the station know he was going to be out of radio contact for an hour or two and if there was an emergency she should call him at the motel. He found the lot packed out, the stuttery “No Vacancy” neon sign lit, and the front door locked, and he had to bang loud with both fists to rouse anybody what with all the noise inside. When they finally showed up, they apologized, explaining they’d closed up because it was a complete sellout, no room for another body, though of course they’d let the sheriff in, which was, as he knew they were thinking, like letting in another half dozen. He asked them if there had been any trouble tonight and they said there had not and he moved on into the bar area. Not easy, even with the badge on his chest, to carve a grudging path. Never saw such a jam-up at the Moon, or anywhere else around here, for that matter. A lot of familiar faces but also a lot of strangers. The owner, watching things from the doorway, said they’d been rolling in all week for this show, every room booked double. But though he was glad to have seen this happen at the Moon, he said he was sad to see the act close down, and it was clear he’d had a few to console himself. Tub has sometimes stopped in here on dead midweek nights to have a whiskey or two on his own, so the bartender, when Tub finally got that far, simply greeted him with a nod and quietly poured him a glass of Coke spiked with a couple of shots of Kentucky bourbon, Tub hoping it might dull the pain in his tooth. After the holidays: the dentist, for sure.
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…
I was knockin’ about out on life’s highway,
All alone and livin’ in hell,
Feelin’ so bad I jist wanted to die,
Then I met my gal in the Blue Moon Motel!
And then the woman and Will Henry join in on the chorus…
It’s the oldest story I ever heerd tell
When boy meets gal at the Blue Moon Motel,
So listen up, darlin’, it ain’t never too soon
T’git your butt off to the ole Blue Moon…!
There’s a lot of hooting and hollering and lou
d 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…
We sang us some songs and crooned us some tunes
’Bout huggin’ and kissin’ and life was jist swell,
We was makin’ real gold outa all our blue moons
And we owed it all to the Blue Moon Motel…
This time the woman, Patti Jo, steps up to the mike to sing the chorus on her own…
It’s the oldest story I ever heerd tell
When gal meets boy at the Blue Moon Motel…
So listen up, cowboy, it ain’t never too soon
T’git your rocks off at the ole Blue Moon…!
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…
Well, we had a grand time and it hurts like hell
T’be singin’ farewell to the Blue Moon Motel…
But our hearts is still here and we’ll be back soon
Cuz we cain’t stay away from the ole Blue Moon!
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…
It’s the oldest story I ever heerd tell
When boy/gal meets gal/boy at the Blue Moon Motel…
So listen up, darlin’/cowboy, it ain’t never too soon
T’git your butt/rocks off to/at the ole Blue Moon…!
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.