Origin of the Brunists (69 page)

Born to be caught and killed. Frail cages. Containing what? Staring at X rays of his fractured clavicle, right thumb and left humerus, which Happy held out for him to see one morning while one of her buddies gave him an enema, both of them joking about his torn ear, rooted-out hair, broken nose, blackened eyes, and chipped and loosened teeth, he suddenly felt himself out there on the hill again, being danced on, bedded with corpses, splayed for a good Christian gelding, saw again the massed-up nameless bodies, the mad frenzy for life, the loins giving birth, and deep despair sprayed up his ass and inundated his body. “Why did you bother, Happy?” he asked.

He expected her to make some crack, but instead she only smiled and said, “I don't know. I guess because I like the way you laugh.”

Yes, there was that. Not the void within and ahead, but the immediate living space between two. The plug was pulled and the sheet lifted, and the despair, a lot of it anyway, flooded out of him with a soft gurgle. “My message to the world,” he said, and if he hadn't been afraid of swallowing half his teeth in the process, he might have laughed along with them.

Survival of the fittest. Or was it the youngest? Or rather the one with the right connections? Jesus yelling from his cross: “Maggie! where the hell is Maggie?” Miller mused, uprighted, staring out on a balmy April afternoon. What next? He didn't know. A lot of feelers from radio and television, but all they offered him was a job and he didn't want a job. Dear Mr. Christ: In view of your experience in personnel management … No, it was somehow like Ox Clemens going down in the mines: a broken bird. Once Ox had scandalized a whole stadium of fans and players, those that saw and heard, when, coming into a time-out huddle just after making a brilliant drive-in shot in a whale of a game up in the state championships, face dripping sweat and eyes closed, hand on a hard-on that not even a jockstrap could hold back, he gasped,
“Oh Jesus! I jist wanna jack off!”
In the walled-in years of datelines that had followed, whenever for a moment he'd broken out of the pattern, Miller had remembered Ox's mystical moment, and he was thinking about it now.

On a table nearby sat, or stood, his old speedgraphic. Somebody had gathered up the pieces, Jones maybe, and sent them to him. Jones' own photos, he'd learned, were being made into a book called
On the Mount of Redemption
. Happy had reassembled the whole apparatus into a kind of squatting figure with the lens for a navel, looking, not back into a dark inscrutable box, but out on West Condon, and her parabolic intent was not lost on him: shrunk and its perspective distorted, West Condon was upside down. Happy, he knew, wanted to leave West Condon. He couldn't blame her. So did he, yet at the same time he knew better than to expect too much of East Condon. A little more elbow room, of course, a little more privacy in which to nurture their nascent sect. Here, he no longer hated really, he was only tired, the spirit was gone out of him and he just felt plain cramped … or maybe that was only a product of his present plight. Crucifixion was a proper end for insurgents: it dehumanized them. Man only felt like man when he could bring his hands together.

A lot of people had come to see him. Some of the klatch from Mick's had brought him a fifth of Canadian and some cheap bourbon, most of which they'd managed to drink up themselves at his bedside, either forgetting he had no arms to help himself with, or feeling too embarrassed about it to hold the glass for him. No one had said anything directly, but the way they'd talked, Miller had got the idea they supposed he'd be moving on when he was able. Guys on his ball team had stopped up to shoot the shit. He'd urged them to get a team up, but they seemed to have no heart for it. Most of his people from the plant had dropped by, too, sooner or later. Naturally, they'd wanted to know what was going to happen: was the
Chronicle
going to publish again? He didn't know. But he'd told them he thought it would open and he paid them their regular salaries. Sometimes, he had to admit it, the idea of working up a good layout or chasing a story appealed to him, and he longed to hear old Hilda hump again. Just the taste of a Coke stirred up the old excitement. But then somebody like Robbins or Elliott would drop in and make him want to run again. Reverend Wesley Edwards had winked at him and tossed a wave from the doorway most mornings, but he had never come in. Was he gloating? Probably.

Jesus, dying, disconnected, was shocked to find Judas at his feet. “Which … one of us,” Jesus gasped, “is really He: I or … or thou?” Judas offered up a hallowing omniscient smile, shrugged, and went his way, never to be seen in these parts again. Probably best, all right.

His own connection came by then to lower him, turning a noisy crank at his feet: mechanized Descent. Later, she would prepare spices and ointments. For now, she only wrapped his body in the sterile linens, stuck a thermometer in his mouth, turned her back to pluck idly at the wandering legband. Five picas, given all stresses. And that was what he needed to know: what were the stresses? Even the thermometer was a lesson, he knew. Was he going to go on forever plucking at legbands and submitting to having his temperature pointlessly taken? Oh Christ! How he wanted to move his arms again! How he wanted to
feel!
He spat out the thermometer, careful not to dislodge any teeth, and said, “Happy, come here!” She had to stand on a phonebook because of his arm's elevation, and he could only use one hand, but she could use two. He closed his eyes and received a world of messages, and while they were plugged in like that, he worrying about whether or not his whole life until now hadn't been just one fractured waste of time, she phoned him in yet another
Judgment…
.

Old Wally Fisher came by when he got out of jail. Because of the bingo tent scandal and his general poor attitude, he'd been jugged that night with all the Brunists. When they'd spied him in their midst, still in streetclothes, they'd taken him for an envoy from the dark powers, and he would have gone the way of all poor flesh, meaning Miller, had not Dee Romano propitiously and for five bucks intervened. Fisher's account of that night's whole wild scene was hilarious, obscene but hilarious, from the no doubt apocryphal tale of the state centurion caught mixing it up in the women's cell to the description of the comedy outside, seen through the cell windows, where a wobbly-kneed scar-faced Mort Whimple and a ring of unnerved troopers had stood, weapons at the ready, to keep at bay a rollicking mob of news and cameramen, East and West Condoners, visiondrunk one and all—and Miller, hearing it, felt better than he'd felt in weeks. They had jailed the poor guy, hadn't set him free until he had agreed to turn over the entire proceeds of his First Annual Spring Carnival to the West Condon Chamber of Commerce for its industrial brochure, had brought a series of damage suits against him, and had started boycotting his coffeeshop, but the old bastard could still laugh about it, and Miller laughed with him. “Oh Jesus, Tiger, we gotta do something like that again soon!” he wheezed, dewlaps awag, old man's lowslung paunch quaking. (Jesus, crucified, had a sudden glimpse of all his end would lead to, and he began to giggle. A Roman soldier, indignant at the blasphemy, thrust his spear into Jesus' quaking side. Real blood came out, and the soldier paled. But Jesus went right on giggling: once you know you're going to die, what, really, can they do to you?)

“Well, we could run Doris for mayor,” Miller suggested. The old man had a fit about that, but Miller, laughing, had a funny thought: what about running Abner Baxter?

By the time Ted Cavanaugh came to see Miller, the idea had got a pretty firm hold on him. A number of things had happened in the meantime. The article he'd set out to do on the Brunists in the first place, his study of small-group rebound in the face of public embarrassment and a description of the roots of religious motivation and commitment, his public excuse for involvement and his private antidote against the guilt he felt for the pain he'd caused, got rejected again, discouraging him from any more games-playing in that direction. On the other hand, he had received—and accepted—an offer to do a series of TV commentaries on the Brunists which, he saw, might give him a wimble into the whole world's cranny. Moreover, he could move his arms again, plug in razors, use the telephone, pinch bottoms, and piss alone: in short, felt a man again.

Abner, he knew, was still in town, only Brunist leader not to run, and Miller learned he was holding clandestine Brunist meetings with a format all his own. His church had been wrecked, his home broken into and looted, black crosses swatched on his door, his kids beaten up, all credit canceled, and he'd got a lot of anonymous phonecalls and letters telling him he'd better move on or else. But he'd stayed. And, from what Miller could pick up, he also seemed to be at odds with the rest of the Brunists by now, or at least with Clara's people, and partly, it seemed, because he still insisted louder than anybody that Bruno was a prophet and the Coming was at hand. A democratic mayoral election with the Millennium as an issue: it had a certain promise, and he could plot the documentary out from the beginning, wouldn't have to move in after it was all over.

Wes Edwards came in with Cavanaugh, crinkled up his pastoral face, and asked, “Feeling better?” and that just about decided it for Miller.

The chat with Cavanaugh went poorly from the start. Ted was talking about West Condon's troubles and “the best thing for all of us,” Miller was talking about Peter who, hearing the cock crow thrice, got to like the music of it, and Edwards was speaking nervously about friends he had up in the city who might find something for Justin more suitable for his talents. “Where things are livelier,” the preacher was saying, and Ted's words were “shoulder to the wheel” and “a tough ball game,” while Miller, speaking of money changers and pigeon-sellers and getting nowhere, finally interrupted and said, “I'm not going.”

Cavanaugh stood. “Why not?”

Miller sighed. “Necessity is laid upon me,” he said.

“I've got a buyer for you,” Cavanaugh said, not getting it. He explained the details: amounted to enough to clear debts and buy gas to get out of town.

Miller listened. If he had any horse sense, he'd take it, but the recent deprivation of his senses had deprived him of that one as well. He knew, of course, that the plant was in bad shape, had been looted during his hospitalization, knew, too, that he was sick to death of deadlines and club meetings, knew that Happy wanted to get out of here and rightside-up again, but still he couldn't stop himself. “Go to hell,” he said. He heard Happy outside his door, so he added as a sort of dedication: “Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

She came in after they'd gone and he explained it to her. “Just until November,” he said. He had a lot of money just now from all those articles and the TV assignments to get the plant in shape, and for the present a weekly would do as well as a daily. Maybe he could even get ahold of the radio station somehow. He began to make plans.

Happy sighed. “Okay, but if we stay that long, we might as well stay on through January.”

“Why? You mean the Brunist—?”

“I'm talking about
tigers
, man,” she said, and patted her belly.

“Hey! You mean it? But when—?”

She shrugged, grinned. “Sons of Noah …”

“Aha! sign of the covenant!”

So they quickly signed a pact, exchanged gifts, broke a chamberpot, bought Ascension Day airline tickets for the Caribbean, and, nailed to the old tree of life and knowledge that night, she murmured in his ear one last
Last Judgment…