The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

  The Kid walks over to the blowup of the Man hung up near the fireplace—an awesome sucker in truth, looking wild-eyed and dangerous, wielding a mine pick like some kind of Iron Age killer—and he goes down on one knee in front of it in a kind of stiff deliberate way, like he’s trying to signify something. A kneeling knight, maybe. Chepe and Teresita do the same, adding in some genuflections, though the Kid doesn’t seem to be looking for imitators. He’s just into it. After he has done that and mumbled a few things about retribution and the end of things, talking maybe to the Man, he takes the picture down, smashes the frame it was in, and folds it up to take along. Then he says that Deacon’s notion of delivering the nitro from the back of the hill via one of the caravans has given him an idea: They’ll strip out three or four of the campers and trailers, stow their bikes inside, and drive them out of here, dump them later. Move slow, like old people, take different routes to throw off the guys in the sky and anyone else who might get curious. This seems pretty cool, though Houndawg, too wrecked to drive a cage with all its floor pedals, has to team up with somebody. He tells the Kid he’ll ride shotgun for him with his rifle; still enough bullets to bring down a chopper or two, if they get chased. They choose their vehicles and throw out the shit inside them, setting aside what’s edible or eating it, pocketing what’s valuable. Not much. These are poor folk.

  But then Deacon steps out of a house trailer, clutching by the scruff a bedraggled woman looking too tired and beat up to complain. “Look what I found,” he shouts, grinning in his beard, and he lifts her off the ground like shot game. “We ain’t got time for that,” Brainerd says, and Deac says: “No, not now. I was thinking hostage.” The others nod at that, but Houndawg figures she’d be more trouble than she’s worth. Most women are. Better to tie her to a tree before setting the place alight. He’s about to say so when a powerful big-bellied man with a gray burr around his puffy ears stumbles out of the trailer, still pulling his pants up. Must have been in the can. Deacon drops the woman and pulls a knife, as the fat man, faster than he looks, leaps forward and throws his arms around the Deac in a bear hug. Not easy to do. Deacon’s a big man, too. They all unsheathe their blades and advance on the two of them, but the Kid holds his hands up to stop them, a dry hard grimace on his face. He seems fascinated by the sight of the two huge men locked in their fierce embrace, Deacon’s knife deep in the other man’s meaty back but, arms pinned, unable to pull it out and strike again. Like hulking giants in a death dance. Something the Kid may have seen in one of his superhero comics, acted out now before his eyes. Though in the strip the pants of one of them probably wasn’t around his ankles, his hairy butt framed by unbuttoned trapdoor longjohns. There is a long quiet moment broken only by soft wheezing grunts as Deacon slowly presses back against the man’s grip, the Brunist tattoo on Deac’s shoulder with its skull and lightning bolt seeming to bulge and tremble as if about to pop. It’s like time itself is slowing down and so motionless are they, eyes squeezed shut, they seem almost to have fallen asleep in each other’s arms. Houndawg, leaning against a tree not to fall over, is taut, almost breathless, stuttering a bit in the brainpan himself. Deacon, feet spread and pushing against the earth as if to stop its turning slowly leans forward, trying to tumble his opponent to the ground, but then blood begins to leak from Deacon’s mouth, nose, eyes, and there is a crackling sound. The Kid lurches forward, they all do, except for Houndawg, driving their knives into the longjohnned fat man over and over, turning white to crimson, Brainerd finally yanking the man’s head back from behind and slicing his thick white throat. Too late for Deacon, whose bleeding eyes spring open at the end as though to witness their avenging. Teresita turns on the sadsack woman and is about to plunge her blade in her when Brainerd grabs her arm. “Leave her be, girl,” he says, taking the woman by the hair and hauling her to her feet. “I kin use her.”

  “Blessed are the fantasists for they shall not be dismayed by oblivion!” the man who calls himself Jesus is declaring.

  “Yea, Lord, save us from oblivion!”

  “But damned are they who project their mad fantasies upon others!”

  “Is it a parable, Lord?”

  “It’s a prophecy!”

  “That’s crazy! Don’t listen to him!” Angry shouts, heard now as then, so long ago, growing ever fiercer, commingled with the wails of woe and worship, a cacophony of dissent and fervent prayer and threat and lament, and also the rackety flapping of the helicopters overhead, with which Jesus did not have to contend in his own time.

  The rising anger might have turned to violence did not the man, swarmed about by small children as though costumed by them, look so uncannily like the image of Christ on their Sunday morning church programs, and had not Reverend Baxter—who at such a moment would ordinarily be railing at full throat against false prophets and other deceptive abominations of the sinful world—fallen, while gazing upon the intruder, into a dark contemplative silence, as if stilled by the ominous workings of the day; for, as he declared it would be, so it is, if what is seen can be believed. He does not believe it (who is this fool?), but he distrusts his disbelief. The announced hour of fulfillment—he has announced it!—is this it then? Is this He? He who will create a new Heaven and a new earth, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the one who always was, who is, and who is still to come? He can’t be! And yet, for such are the mysterious workings of the Lord, he—He?—can. There is also the alarming apocalyptic testimony of those who have fled West Condon. No one can doubt the muffled explosions, the smoke billowing over the town, the hovering helicopters (are they firing rockets?), the wild chorus of sirens over there getting louder. Some say they have seen bodies rising into the sky, though none can be seen from here. Should they flee while they still can? Or is the same thing happening all over the world? Many have been urging a return to the sanctuary of the camp. But is it sanctuary or entrapment? They ask this Jesus who has appeared before them. He only smiles with glittering eyes and says: “There is no sanctuary!” Which is exactly what Abner would have said himself.

  In the Meeting Hall below, when Abner called for this Holy March, he felt a surge of conviction more powerful than he’d ever felt before, and it’s almost as though that very certainty has provoked its contrary. Torn between yea, yea and nay, nay. Abner is most himself when most righteously enraged, and as they climbed up here, that rage, which served him well in the camp lodge, began to evaporate under the brightening sun, giving way to a kind of awed anticipation. Has God spoken through him, as he so often feels He has? If so, is he ready? Can he be, assailed by doubt? He felt the first presentiments of this strange bafflement of mood when they arrived down on the mine road at the place where he struck and killed the girl that terrible night. He seemed for a moment to see her there or to feel at least her presence, and the road seemed to blacken under his feet, and he knelt to pray. Her shattered face against the windshield scrimmed his mind, hanging like a transparent curtain against the thinning clouds when he looked up. He thought that climbing the hill away from the road would free him of her, but she has risen with him, haunts him still. Young Rector has taught him to trust these mysterious impressions as fleeting experiences of the real world beyond the corrupted one of our senses, and he has learned to trust the boy; he has been so right about so many things, and more loyal to Abner than his own family. He is less certain about the peculiar bug-eyed orphan at his side, even if he is one of the twelve First Followers; there is something not right about him. But young Rector has assured him that the boy is subject to a kind of divine madness, which makes him particularly receptive to holy visions. “Illuminations.” Glimpses beyond the veil. Where there is no dark and all is light.

  Light.

  And so Abner finds his voice. “Ye are the light of the world! You do not light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it gives light unto the world!” he declares, though without his usual vehemence, hearing himself somehow echoing himself, and the man who says he is Jesus repli
es: “Blessed are they who put their light under a bushel for they shall ignite a great conflagration!” Whereupon the very mention of fire sets everyone on the sacred Mount of Redemption off again.

  Not all hold the mine hill in such reverence, nor see the followers of the apostate Catholic Giovanni Bruno as anything but heretical, if not demonically possessed. Another of God’s armies, the Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force, who also call themselves, throwing insult back as pride, the Dagotown Devil Dogs, are even now gathering in the empty field near the hill, once meant as the site for an industrial park that was never built. They have been officially deputized by the city police chief and are turning to march upon the hill and arrest all those on it, with orders from their leader to shoot to kill, if necessary. Their church has been dynamited, friends and family killed or maimed, their priest hospitalized in critical condition. They are impatient to exact due justice; there will be no negotiations. In town, the police chief himself, as the reluctant de facto leader of all the volunteer police and rescue units from the region who have rolled in to help, has issued instructions to many of them to proceed toward the mine hill, and they are doing so. They too have suffered casualties and will brook no further resistance. More ambulances and medical teams arrive, and the chief sends them out there as well. The town banker, whose place of business, so central to the community, has been dynamited with a substantial loss of life and property, confers with the state governor before also heading to the mine. He demands that what remain of the troops called in by the governor be, for God’s sake, dispatched out there immediately to secure the hill and prevent the outbreak of anarchy and further bloodshed. The governor, who has just told a network interviewer that the problems here “have nothing to do with religion, these are just evil people assaulting a decent Christian community,” knows that no good will come of it. The young soldiers have been traumatized and are ill prepared for this sort of sectarian conflict, many of them being themselves believers of one or another of the contending persuasions, nor is it clear what exactly they will do when they get there. “Securing the hill” is probably an unexecutable command. But he also knows that he has no choice; he has made too many mistakes, the town is burning, and the banker has made it clear he will be held accountable. The swarming and increasingly hysterical news media, some of whose members have also been targeted, already hold him accountable. He has commandeered yellow school buses to replace the destroyed army vehicles and even now they are rumbling slowly out of town, bearing their whey-faced battalions.

  From her grandstand seat high up on the mine tipple steps, Sally Elliott can see the buses in the smoky distance, rocking in tandem on the approach road like liverish elephants, trunks to tails, and she takes a photo of them. They remind her of the last time this happened out here, when they used those buses for the mass arrests they made. She ran home that day before all the bad stuff began, but she remembers the buses, how surreal they seemed, and sinister, parked there side by side in the rain with their blunt impassive faces, waiting to open their maws and eat the people. She has been scribbling in her notebook, shut off from the world, totally absorbed, willfully ignoring the carryings-on of the Brunists on the hill and the more disconcerting sounds coming from the direction of the town. New principle: Writing first, everything else second. But there’s smoke on the horizon now, too. Helicopters wheeling about like chicken hawks. She worries about her mom and dad. Actually, she has been worried all along, but only now has she brought it forward into the thinking part of her head. Things may be turning out not so funny.

  She stands to stretch. Over on the hill, the Brunists seem to be having a row. The wacky Presbyterian minister has turned up there in his Jesus outfit and is apparently stirring them up, a chubby little fellow in a brown suit beside him like a company lawyer, or maybe his agent. His lady friend, the church organ lady, is bobbing indecisively up and down the back of the hill in her flesh-colored nightshirt, like a terrified puppet on elastic strings. She’s painted some of herself red. There’s a new crowd marching toward the hill from a distant field in a kind of loose military formation. Can’t see who they are, but the one out front in the blue police shirt might be Angie Bonali’s brother. Sirens are approaching from all directions. In a ditch at the edge of the old county road that runs past the church camp, a shiny pea-green bump catches her eye. Almost everything is green over there, but the bump is brighter than the rest, reflecting the sun. Metal. Like the top of a car.

  She has sat too long in the sun. She touches one finger to her chest, it leaves a white spot, then turns bright pink again. A helicopter buzzes her, the pilot grinning out the window, and she waves her shirt at him, grinning back. As she does so, she glimpses the weird golden-haired pal of Billy Don on the hill. Shielding his eyes. Staring over at her. That mental orphan at his side. He points. Uh oh. Time to go.

  Prissy Tindle has carefully choreographed her “Save the Fathers Arabesque,” a routine meant to whisk Jesus and his inner Wesley away from the danger they are in with a simple fluid and irresistible movement while paralyzing all those confused people with surprise and wonder. It would be better if she could pop suddenly from behind one of those big earth-moving things, but they’re too far away to reach unseen. There’s only one way and not much time. When they first parked down here behind the hill, there were a couple of muddy old junkers resting by the ditch with no one in them, but more people have been arriving by that road, several of them dressed in those white bedsheet things, almost all of them carrying guns and looking insanely dangerous. Jesus doesn’t understand the trouble he is in, or else he’s just trying to get killed. Which some say was Jesus’ problem in the first place, back when he first made himself famous. She finds herself calling him Jesus all the time now, for it’s the only name he answers to, and anyway it’s like poor dear Wesley has sunk away somewhere beyond her reach. She felt more comfortable with Wesley on top, so to speak, for she still had some sway, but she has to admit that Jesus is sexier—so forthright and self-assured and virile. Thrilling, really. It’s like Wesley has been saved after all. And for all their bold new style, they still need her—maybe more than ever. She brushes their hair, keeps their beard trimmed, creates and cares for their wardrobe, feeds them, and, when she can, shields them from trouble. If only they would stop arguing with each other! Down at the far end of the road, men are forming up and beginning to march this way. She does not know who they are, but she does not think they will be friendly. And those shrieking sirens! Like burning cats! She has to get him away from here! If only Jesus will cooperate! How can he not, seeing the danger she will be in? She wants only to be away from here, but old trouper that she is, she takes one determined but terrified step after another and arrives at the top and there they are again, spread out below her, all those wild mad people! They are shouting at Jesus and at each other—anything could happen! Be brave, her inner voice shouts. She has used up all her lipstick on herself, hoping she has created the right effect. She flings off her gown and opens her mouth to do her naked Whore of Babylon shriek. But nothing comes out. She’s too scared. She’s a dancer, not a singer. That panicky little preacher at Jesus’ side with his hair standing on end and shirt tails out stares at her in abject horror, and his eyes roll back and he keels right over. “It’s the Antichrist!” she hears someone scream. Hysterically, over and over. That orphan boy who so hates Wesley. Oh no! They all start shouting. “Don’t let her get away!” “She killed an old lady!” What? There is a terrifying rattle of gunfire. But well in the background, for—that does it!—Prissy Tindle is already performing her “Leaping Gazelle Adieu” through a crowd of advancing armed men (there is rude laughter, a passing slap on her bare fanny) on her way back down to the car. Jesus is in great jeopardy, and she fears for him and she loves him, but he’ll just have to miracle himself out of it somehow. She’s retiring to the wings. Bring down the curtain and kill the lights. This show is closing.

  Hovis, holding up what looked like a raggedy tarpau
lin thick with mud, had just been showing Uriah the missing slicker he’d found—“It looks different,” Uriah said, and Hovis said, “Gotta be it, Uriah. Ain’t nobody else but you’d wear nuthin this old and ugly!”—when Sister Debra’s strange boy interrupted Jesus’ recitation of his newfangled beatitudes and started screaming about the Antichrist, and everybody commenced shooting at the old mine tipple like it was some kind of giant coming after them. Neither Hovis nor Uriah could see exactly what they were shooting at, but they fired off a few rounds because it seemed like the way this day was panning out. A day which—both have thought but not at the same time—may be the last of its kind. Even before Jesus turned up with his sweaty little pal in the suit, Uriah could feel it in his bones, like the onset of a thunderstorm, though the skies are clear. The end of things. Uriah had said as much to the scruffy fellow in the Brunist tunic from back home, pointing out that the very sun seemed stalled up there, right smack on top of the Mount, and the fellow, a friendly and poetical sort, had said, “Yep, know what you’re sayin’, brother. Like it’s been a sweet ride, but bad curves a-comin’.” Sister Wanda had come to the hill with him, and when people asked after the big fellow she stared at them like she was only half there and said he was feeling poorly, and people said they were sorry to hear that but they were glad that he had let her be up here with the Elect now that things were really starting to happen. Poor worn-out thing, her belly hanging low on her scrawny frame; Uriah hopes she’ll be blessed with more smarts and gumption in the next world.