Origin of the Brunists (57 page)

“We want to be reasonable,” Ted was saying, “but we want them to know what the limits of our tolerance are. If they want to persist in their destructive ways, well, they're free to do so, but we'd rather they didn't do it here. We can't afford it.”

That sounded more like it. Vince was in the mood to kick somebody's ass out of town. The minister had a pipe stoked up; Ted and Burt had cigarettes going. Vince regretted having forgot his cigars in the anxiety not to hold anybody up. Maybe Ted guessed it: he handed a cigar back over his shoulder. Great guy. “Thanks, Ted.” The minister lit it for him.

“Why don't we just ask the Nortons to get out?” Robbins suggested. “They're outsiders anyhow.”

“Well,” the minister said, “I think we want to give them every chance to mitigate their views and become absorbed once more in the community life. Our task is not so much to chastise or threaten, as to define for them what it means to be a West Condoner.”

“Exactly!” said Ted. “Whatever we do, we've got to take it easy. We don't want them to be able to use anything against us. Oh, incidentally, you fellows might like to read this,” he added, passing a letter back.

It was addressed to the mayor, came from a man named Wild in a town over in the next state. The guy was bitching about his son's getting spooky letters from Mrs. Norton, trying to get the boy to leave home, come to West Condon before the 19th. He told how they'd had to boot her out of Carlyle about a year or so ago, and warned the mayor that she was a complete nut and had a perverted interest in young boys. “Whew! Pretty hot stuff!” Vince commented, handing the letter to the minister.

Ted parked in front of Savings and Loan, and they walked up to the second floor where Himebaugh had his law office. “He was here about an hour ago,” Ted whispered on the stairs. “If he's gone, we'll try his house.”

But he was there, cleaning papers out of file cabinets and desk drawers, dumping them indiscriminately into a large trash basket. He looked up at them, smiled oddly. “Good afternoon, gentlemen! How have you been?”

“Good to see you again, Ralph!” Ted beamed. “Ralph, you know Burt, Wes. This is Vince Bonali—”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Himebaugh.”

“My pleasure, I assure you.”

What odd words these were! Things you said every day, but now they had such a weird ring, ghostly. “What are you throwing away there?” Vince asked, to get the ball rolling.

“Oh, damage suits, Mr. Bonali. Wills. Liquor licenses.” Vince had heard the guy was shy, but if so, he hardly showed it now. Bright humorous gleam in his eyes, bold gestures, firm handshake. Kind of tremble there, though. “Did you gentlemen ever stop to consider how inutterably absurd our legal institutions are?”

“Sure, lots of times!” laughed Ted easily. “I don't know who's more absurd, though, the institutions or the damned attorneys who invent them!”

The lawyer smiled faintly, but something seemed to give way. He sat down, motioned them to chairs. They remained standing.

“Of course, there's an element of the absurd in every institution, isn't there, Ralph?” Reverend Edwards asked. “Any society is a kind of jerryrig at best, and it's hard to think of one without the compromises that make it seem absurd.”

“Yes,” Himebaugh agreed. His fingers were pressed together prayerlike in front of him and they trembled. “That's how it usually seems to turn out, all right.” A kind of smile jumped to his face, jumped away. “But no more.”

“But that's pretty much what it means to be a man, isn't it, Ralph?” Ted asked. “Holding on to one's beliefs on the one hand, one's ideals, and on the other, accommodating oneself to the institution, making changes in it where it seems—”

“No, not at all!” snapped the lawyer. He leaned forward on one unsteady elbow, and his lips seemed to flush pink. Kind of flutter in the thick brows as he looked up at them. The guy looked in pretty bad shape, now that Vince observed more closely. Awful thin. “To be a whole man is to be at one with the—”

“Aw, come on, Ralph,” Robbins cut in. “Let's talk plain. All Ted's trying to say is a guy can believe what he wants to believe, and still get along with—”

“You can't know one thing and act otherwise,” the lawyer said. Precise enunciation, tremulous undercurrent. The total insane calm of the man and his weird shifty eyes were beginning to get to all four of them. “You can't know that fire burns and put your hand into it.”

“No? Well, goddamn it, Ralph,” Cavanaugh said gruffly, “that seems to me just what the hell you're doing!”

The lawyer smiled, lips quivering. “Maybe I've gone the next step. Maybe I've found out that fire doesn't burn, after all.”

“Oh, hell, Himebaugh!” Robbins said. “Don't you see, we're here to help you get out of this thing.”

“I don't want help. I don't need help.” No smiles now. Very white. Very goddamn sick.

“Well, man, it's now or never. Don't expect us to come around Monday to give you a hand when you've got this whole town ready to ride you out on a rail—”

“There won't
be
a Monday, you
fools!”
Himebaugh cried. He leaped up, grabbed a pile of papers, heaved them at them. A folder struck Vince right on the bridge of his nose, made his eyes smart. He moved in, fists doubled, but Ted held him back.
“Get out! Get out!”
the lawyer screamed. Threw more heaps of paper. Jesus, he was really cracking up! Paper flying everywhere like a goddamn flock of mad birds let loose. “Get out, I say!
Get out, you fools, or I'll kill you!”
Banging of cabinet doors. His screams echoed. Waste-basket rattled off a wall.
“I'll kill you!”
They heard him screaming like that all the way out to the street.

On the way to the Nortons, they talked about it. Even Ted was shocked, and they all noticed how his health had deteriorated. Vince, embarrassed by the tears, repeated several times how the folder had caught him square on the nose. “I felt like laying into that guy right then and there!” he boomed. “Good thing you held me back, Ted!”

It was already dusk when they stepped heavy-footed onto the Nortons' front porch, knocked. Dr. Norton came to the door. Looked like they might have waked him up. “Hello, fellows, come on in.” Soft gentle voice. You could hardly hear him. Vince started forward, but Ted, holding his ground, blocked him.

“I don't think it will take us long to say what we've come to say, Dr. Norton,” Ted said.

Norton's wife, the schoolteacher Vince had driven in from the coalmine one day a couple months or so ago, stepped up behind the veterinarian. “What is it, Wylie?”

“These men …”

“We just came to say it might be better for you and for everybody,” Robbins said, “if you just sort of moved on.”

“Now, wait a moment, Mr. Robbins,” the minister interrupted. “I think we want to give Dr. and Mrs. Norton every opportunity to reconsider the whole thing. You see, Dr. Norton, we—that is, all of us here in West Condon—have become concerned about certain activities which, we feel, are not in the best interests of—”

“Why, gentlemen!” laughed Mrs. Norton. “All this has happened before!”

“How's that?” asked Reverend Edwards, biting down on his lower lip.

“Look, Wylie! the dark one!” Vince broke into a strange sweat under her excited gaze. She smiled at him. “We are not going to leave.”

“Well,” said Reverend Edwards, “that's what I'm trying—”

“We have been expecting you. We have been pursued by you all our lives, and we knew that you would find us here. But we have been brought here to consummate our life's work, and we are never going to run again. We are not afraid.”

Robbins' neck was blushing red, a sure sign. “Maybe you better think again—”

“We are going to the Mount of Redemption on Sunday to await the Coming of the Light. I hope you gentlemen will find it in your hearts to join us there. Now, go away and bother us no more. Wash the earth from your hands and feet and cast your eyes to the limitless stars!”

“That's nutty!” said Robbins. “Show 'em the letter.”

“Forget it,” said Cavanaugh. He showed by his look, his back turned coldly on the Nortons, that he considered it a lost cause.

They made one final call. And this one worked. At the orphanage, Reverend Edwards and Ted Cavanaugh pinned the Meredith kid in one lamplit corner. The old hotbox technique. Vince himself had used it in the union organizing days. Meredith was a pansy and it didn't take much to break him. Suddenly, in a flood of tears, he said he was sorry, it was all wrong, embraced Cavanaugh like a father, disclaimed the Brunists, said they'd been persecuting him from the start, hinted they might have been whipping him, and, in fear of them, he asked to be hidden away. Reverend Edwards, deeply moved, offered his home for the rest of the week. The boy wept gratefully, then cheered up, became even joyful on the ride to the Presbyterian manse, and it made them all feel good. Won one!

Or so they thought. That night, Tuesday, not only the goddamn local paper and the city papers were headlining the Brunist story, but it was even featured on the six o'clock televised newscast. Helicopter movies of West Condon and the coalmine, blown-up stills of some of Tiger Miller's photos, and the announcer saying: “In this placid little American community of West Condon, a small band of devout believers, calling themselves followers of the coalminer-prophet Giovanni Bruno, believe that on Sunday evening, the nineteenth of April, the world will end. In expectation of their own salvation, they will gather on this little knoll here, near the Deepwater Number Nine coalmine, where only three months ago an explosion and fire killed ninety-seven men. From that catastrophe, on Sunday, January eleventh, one man was rescued, this man—”

“Daddy!” Angie called out from her bedroom and he nearly went a foot up off his chair. “Listen to
this!”

She threw open her door, the radio turned up fullblast. Cheap country-style music, badly sung. “What's that?” he asked. She'd taken lately to listening to a lot of that crap, especially the morbid ones about dead people, not excluding dead daddies.

“The Brunists!” she cried. “They're singing!”

“I'll be goddamned!” Vince said, and hurried away midchorus to the phone. “Hello, Ted? Vince here. Hey, turn on your radio! The Brunists are singing! They're on TV, too!”

“Jesus Christ, what next! Vince, I've got some bad news.”

“Yeah?” Felt the hair on his neck stand up.

“The Meredith boy. Wes Edwards just phoned in a panic to tell me the kid has slashed his wrists with a razor. He's in the hospital.”

“Jeee-zuss God All-
mighty!”
Took the wind right out of him. “Is it bad?”

“No, Doc Lewis told Wes it looked very much like the boy's done it before. Apparently he doesn't do it to kill himself. But we can't let go of him now. If he got back to the Brunists, he'd probably try to make murderers of us, or worse, the state of mind he's in. We're sending him up to a state hospital tonight. But, listen, Vince, not a word! Miller will probably find out, but if he or anybody asks, you know nothing, okay?”

“Sure, Ted. But Jesus, what a bad break!”

“Nobody's fault. We might even have saved the boy's life. No telling what he might have done after Sunday night. But we don't want Wes Edwards to get mixed up in this if we can help it, and so it's just as well the Brunists don't know how he ended up over there. Anyway, he'll be up there a good while, so there's no worry about him Sunday night. Just let's hope Miller doesn't get wind of it.”

Fat chance. Headlines Wednesday night: B
RUNIST
K
IDNAPPED!
C
OLIN
M
EREDITH
D
ISAPPEARS
FROM
W
EST
C
ONDON!
T
REATED
AT
H
OSPITAL
FOR
I
NJURIES
OR
P
OSSIBLE
S
UICIDE!
L
AST
S
EEN
AT
H
OME
OF
R
EV
. W
ESLEY
E
DWARDS!
And so on, big scare stuff. Phone rang. Thinking it was Ted, he answered it. “Mr. Bonali, this is CBS calling. We understand you were with the missing Meredith boy yesterday afternoon, just before his disappearance. Can you tell us—?” In a panic he hung up. Jesus! Kidnapping—that's FBI stuff, isn't it? He told Etta to answer the phone, ask who was calling, and if it wasn't Ted, to say he wasn't home.

He switched on the TV and—wham!—there was Mrs. Norton's funny little face. Every now and then, as she turned her head different angles, the floods beamed off her glasses and caused a kind of leap of light around her head. “We do not know what has happened to him. Our … sources, our sources at the higher aspects have informed us that he has fallen into the hands of the powers of darkness. We are … deeply hurt and concerned, but we are not surprised. We have all suffered threats upon our lives and upon our health. We are praying for his deliverance.”