The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (120 page)

A young white-robed fellow with long golden curls like someone out of a storybook steps forward and says: “I’m sorry, but that is not what Jesus said.” A hush falls. The boy seems to have everyone’s respect. Perhaps there is hope. There is another creature pasted to him like a pop-eyed Siamese twin, or else Joshua is seeing double. He may be. His eyes are misted over with tears and sweat. It is stiflingly hot. It’s as if the torrid Bible lands have been transported here, or they there. His chest hurts. His feet hurt. He has a stitch in his side. His corduroy suit suffocates him. He envies that other boy perched over across the way on that strange rickety structure (a carnival ride?) with his shirt off. Probably a boy. “He said: Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

“I know, young man. I already said that. A long time ago. I am saying something else now. The old has passed away, as I have also said. The new has come.”

“But if you are who you say you are—”

“I say nothing. The words are yours.”

Houndawg is also hurting. He can hardly walk, but he can still ride, his bike a kind of wheelchair operated mostly by hand. He once traveled with a pegless guy, a paraplegic shot up in the war. The guy taught him a few tricks that are useful now. None for stopping the pain, though. Hacker promised him meds from the hospital and drugstore raids, but he hasn’t shown up out here at the Brunist camp. Teresita said she heard a lot of gunfire on the way out of town and she doesn’t think the poor dude made it. There was a supercharged moment back there when Houndawg felt about as alive as he’s ever felt, but it has sputtered out with the pain. Not running on all barrels either. A kind of fading in and out, like a loss of compression. Fever probably. His leg has a wrecked, ugly look and he leaves it mostly hidden away in his pantleg, not to be sickened by the sight and smell of it. And now Kid Rivers is talking about a head-on assault on the hill. Wherever the Kid goes, Houndawg will follow, the Kid being pretty much what’s left of his fucked-up life, but he hopes he doesn’t do that. Catch them by surprise, he says. Roar at them from all sides at once. The Big One’s with us, he says. The Kid believes that. Even if “us” is only these six, all that remain of the Wrath of God. And anyway, you never die. The comicbooks tell him so. Cubano and Littleface and Spider and all the rest aren’t really dead. “They’ll be back, man.” Houndawg doesn’t think so. Another notion from the Kid’s strips: the Legions of the Holy Dead joining the living in the final battle against the Forces of Evil. Houndawg heard him talking to himself one night and asked him who he was talking to. “Face. He’s there, man. He’s still there.”

Who is the Big One? In the Kid’s scheme of things, best Houndawg can tell, it’s the Devil. The one who lost the first War of the Gods and now wants his own back. Which makes them all players on a bigger stage than the one Houndawg was cast for. In reality, the Gods’ battleground looks a lot like Nat Baxter’s hometown, the combatants his family and friends, imagined enemies. And who he wants now, of course, is his old man. His ass still smarts from all the whalings he took as a kid, and he wants his own turn. But the others have been up on that stony rise above the camp with their binocs and have seen everyone over there on the mine hill armed to the molars. They’d be so many birds at a turkey shoot, as Brainerd says. Unless they could get in behind the mine buildings unseen and hit them suddenly from the blind side. That’s Chepe’s idea. But how would they do that? It’s all so naked over there. Unseen is a fantasy. Chepe himself looks like a fantasy today, dressed in bright colors as if for a party. Tight shiny pants and one of those lacy faggot shirts from south of the border the color of hot piss. He’s been brilliant, though. Fearless. The Kid reminds them that he still has the two Brunist tunics saved from the day they buried the nitro here at the camp a couple of months ago, and there are a few sticks left. Someone could strap them around his body, he says, wear the tunic over the top, walk into their midst over there as a fellow believer and give them all a grand send-off into the Promised Land. The others glance Houndawg’s way. He’s half-dead anyway, they’re thinking, so why not? Because he’s no Juice or Sick or Rupe; he wouldn’t be as old as he is if he were. And he doesn’t buy the immortality wheeze. He leans on his good leg and waits them out. Then Deacon comes up with an idea that might work. Steal one of the campers left behind here and take the nitro in canvas bags around to the back side, climb the hill in the tunics and mingle with the believers, leave the shit with long fuses lit and drift back to the wheels again. “Have to be somebody they don’t know,” Brainerd says. Which excludes Houndawg and the Kid. So Houndawg nods and says he likes the idea. Chepe and Teresita don’t fit in with the white trash over there and Deac is not of a size to pass unnoticed. Brainerd has just volunteered himself.

They probably shouldn’t have come back to the camp at all. Wasn’t in their original plan, which was to hit the town hard and fast, then scatter, gathering later at an abandoned Colorado ghost town Brainerd told them about. But then came the ambush on Sunday over in the woody patch the other side of the creek here. It was the same place they gangfucked that scrawny virgin, the killer blast a kind of awesome punctuation for it. Houndawg, crippled up by it and with little Paulie and his Apostle pals blown away, was feeling the rage and proposed they terrorize the camp and burn it down; the others bought into that, and during the rains they started collecting ten-gallon cans of gasoline and parking them in the woods off the old farm road at the far side of the camp. So it’s his fault they’re here. Though where else they could have gone except to hell is not clear. So maybe he did them all a favor.

As it turned out, the camp was empty, everyone having vacated the place to go sing Jesus songs on the mine hill. They could have strolled in, but that’s never the Kid’s way. If there’s no action, it’s not real. Doesn’t fill the frame. So after picking up the gas cans, they rolled in, blasting away, shooting the place up. That the camp was at their disposal, the Kid, with his cosmic view of things, took as another sign of otherworldly support for their mission, as he calls it, which is one of severe judgment and devastation. Desolation is the word on the Kid’s tongue these days. Utter desolation. That’s the state they left the town in and how they will leave the camp. Since he stopped being Nat Baxter, he has come to sound more like his old man every day, though it would rile him if anyone said so. Beginning to look like him, too. Putting on weight, neck and shoulders thickening. And he has suddenly grown older. Though some ways yet short of twenty, Nat has always said he felt like forty, and now, with Toad Rivers’ license in his pocket to confirm it, he is. Changing who he is has toughened him, smartened him. Young Nat Baxter might not have succeeded at this day’s operation. For Kid Rivers, it has been a walk.

After “capturing” the old lodge, as the Kid put it, they’d gathered in it to wait for the others, but nobody showed. Deacon said he thought he saw X and the girl peeling off right after they torched the liquor store, and Thaxton may have double-crossed them. “I caught him doing that R.C. abracadabra stuff with his fingers as we were running into the church and he had a stony look on his map like he’d just written us off,” he said. “And he wasn’t there when we came out. Thax wasn’t who he said he was.” “Warn’t even Thaxton t’begin with,” Brainerd said, scratching his head with his filthy finger splint and spitting chaw. “Tole me that was the name of a bud a his who got killt by a sideswiper, and he tuck it as his own cuz his name was on too many bounty lists.” They’re not sure what happened to Rupe, but he’s not back and has probably, as the Kid says, joined the Legions of the Holy Dead. Deacon told everyone how the Kid set off the dynamite Baptiste was carrying by shooting at it so that he and Spider could escape. “Didn’t do Baptiste much good, but he had a bunch of angry papists piled on him and was already done for. The Kid saved my ass, and Spider would’ve made it too, but he went back for his bike, and they were waiting for him. Not smart. But Spider had all his inks and designs in his saddlebags, couldn’t let ’em go. They were his life. A real artist, man. Right to the end.” Deacon is the Kid’s deputy, or maybe vice versa. They’re both driven by the need to destroy something, but for Deac it’s the system he hates and everything that holds it in place. The Kid knows the truth and is going to enact it; Deac knows the enemy and he’s going to bring them down. Deac’s enjoying himself in his dark grinning way; the Kid’s in a holy rage. As far as Houndawg can tell, Deacon doesn’t have a religious thought in his head. When he goes through the motions for the Kid’s sake, it’s like he’s playing out a private joke. Right now they suit each other, though he can see Deac splitting when they get out of here. If they ever do.

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.