The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (131 page)

Sally didn’t like the story very much, her favorite bit being the Jesus paragraph (she got excited by her own sensuous description of Christ’s body and masturbated right along with Jan), but it was a big hit in the workshop. It was almost like being born again amidst well-meaning believers, and even the undercover Christians, with a few theological quibbles, praised it. Home at last! But then she followed it with a comicbook story about Sweet Jesus and his sidekick Dirty Pete, in which Sweet Jesus’ basic magical stunt is resurrection and the bad guys are all trying to learn his secret or expose him as a sham, and she got hammered again. The professor gave her some credit for light satire, but then effectively trashed it as a frivolous and arrogant provocation (which, admittedly, it was; she was tired of this clubby little gathering), and she left both workshop and college. Broke and jobless, she had no choice but to go home, weather her father’s drunken dopiness and her mother’s sad frustrations, and get the writing done.

That winter, West Condon was enjoying a rare if illusory moment of prosperity rising out of the summer’s horrors. Just about anyone who wanted a job had one, and a lot of out-of-towners were moving in to pick up the leavings. Her dad, unemployed and more or less unemployable, was an exception, though the new owners of Mick’s Bar & Grill gave him occasional free drinks and a sandwich to sit on a bar stool and regale the tourists with anecdotes from that memorable day, most of which he had to make up, having spent much of the time in a stupor on the floor. They’d hired Mick to do the cooking to keep it authentically inedible at twice the price and even put a wrecked helicopter, though not the same one, back on the roof again. Tourism had tailed off some since the end of summer, but the ongoing TV coverage of the conspiracy and murder trials still drew out-of-state cars and occasional busloads, so rooms were often at a premium. All the area motels were doing full capacity business, and townsfolk were offering rooms with breakfast in their homes to take in the overflow. Her mom had planned to do just that, hoping for construction company officials, before Sally came home and reclaimed her space. They were embarrassed when she offered to pay for her room, but in the end they accepted her help. The Roma Historical Society, once interested in the now decimated West Condon Hotel, acquired a cheap derelict motel near the Sir Loin steak house, an old one that still had individual cabins, offering their guests a bit of rustic tin-shower nostalgia, plus slot machines in the office lobby, conveniently situated a few yards beyond city limits, and a ten percent discount at the Sir Loin next door, which was doing good business like all the area eateries that remained, H
ELP
W
ANTED
signs in their windows for the first time she could remember. The gambling joints and whorehouses in and around Waterton were also prospering, it was said, thronged less with tourists than with locals, hard cash suddenly burning their pockets. Chestnut Hills had filled up again with squatters, hosting everything from poker games to prayer meetings, and roadside tents reappeared at the town’s edges. Old-timers said it reminded them of West Condon’s boom time in the first part of the century, when coal was king and laws were few, when the town was three or four times bigger than it is now and workers were living in railway freight cars fitted out with bunks and stoves—zulu cars, as they were called—and fighting was more common than fucking. Not exactly how it got said, but that’s how Sally wrote it in her notebook.

The big money was in construction, supported by state and federal disaster relief funds, and there were several companies in town vying for contracts, including two new home-based outfits, Bonali Family Builders and West Condon NOW, a consortium put together by the bank president and other local businessmen. The acting mayor/city manager favored the former, but the city council was still dominated by friends of Tommy’s dad, and moreover, he was able to pull in a sharp young architect from a big-city firm owned by a fraternity brother of his, making it difficult for Bonali Builders to compete except by way of intimidation and backroom influence. Charlie had appointed his dad president, his sister bookkeeper, and had hired his private army of Dagotown Devil Dogs as construction workers; it wasn’t clear where the start-up money was coming from. Angela was also the new secretary in the temporary mayoral office above the Knights of Columbus hall, occupied by the city manager. Sally, protecting her writing time, signed on three days a week with West Condon NOW to help write up proposals and pitch their designs, and was given a desk in the old Chamber of Commerce office where her dad once clowned about, bullet holes still in the Main Street windows, left there for the tourists to photograph.

When Tommy came home from business school for the holidays that year, he called Sally and asked her to join him out at the Blue Moon Motel on the night of New Year’s Day to listen to their homegrown country star Will Henry celebrate the music of Duke L’Heureux and Patti Jo Rendine, who were that same night the feature attraction at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Their songs had hit the top of the charts several times over, and three of them were still in the top ten that yule-tide season, including their famous tribute to the Moon itself, making the motel the newest country music Mecca. “Old Will sings like he’s got a sax reed up his nose,” Tommy said, “but it should be worth a laugh.” The night was fully booked, but his dad knew the owner, they’d add a table. She said okay, why not? Just the right night for such a reunion: day after the night before. She wondered what they would find to talk about. And then, in that week between Christmas and New Year’s, she was gifted with grisly openers. A child had gone missing and his parents said he often played around the old abandoned Deepwater Number Nine mine, which was no longer being guarded—kids liked to light the gas leaking out of the mine through vents in the fields behind the slag heaps, more than one had got his fingers burnt and hair singed—and they were afraid he might have fallen down the closed shaft somehow. He hadn’t (he was finally found out at the lakes, curled up beside his bike, lost and hungry, in the bird sanctuary), but the decayed unidentified corpse of a white male in his twenties or thirties was discovered at the bottom. All they could say about it was that it looked like it had been badly chopped up and had been there for a while.

So Sally asked Tommy over their first beer who he thought that body was, and he said he had no idea. Everyone’s attention was on the murder trials just getting underway at the time, the networks replaying all the most violent footage from that catastrophic day, and Sally asked if Tommy had watched any of it. He had. Tommy had helped to identify the red boots left on the hotel roof when they blew away the biker who was wearing them as belonging to his former high school classmate Carl Dean Palmers. They had
APACHE
burned on the inside of them, which was Carl Dean’s new chosen name, and that went along with the feathers and the red Indian makeup. But now that he’d seen him in the replays, Tommy said when Sally asked, that guy dancing on the hotel roof was definitely not Carl Dean. “That dude could have played basketball, but not Ugly. He’s more the squat wrestler type. When he jumps, his feet probably never leave the ground.”

“But then how do you think his boots got up there?” Tommy didn’t know, didn’t really seem interested. He was scanning the SRO crowd. Angela Bonali was there in a side booth, looking about ten or fifteen pounds heavier than the last time Sally saw her, squeezed in with Joey Castiglione and Monica and blind Pete Piccolotti. It was some kind of celebration. Tommy feigned bored disinterest, Angela excessive affection for her new partner, a loud gaiety. Sally watched from the wings. Will Henry was singing about a ghost in a graveyard. “That wasn’t the first time that week a guy’s feet got separated from the rest of him,” Sally said to the back of Tommy’s head. “A few days before, there was that dynamite explosion at the church camp which killed a bunch of people. One of the bodies was found without a head, another without its feet, which were discovered later out at the state park where the bikers were holed up for a night or two afterwards.”

“Hah,” said Tommy, turning toward her. “So you figure the guy was in a hurry and just cut the boots off with the feet still in them.”

“Something like that. But the body without the feet was identified and that wasn’t Carl Dean either. We know now how the boots might have got from the dead guy at the camp to the one on the roof. The question is: how did the first guy get them?”

Tommy stares at her a moment over his beer. “Ah, I get it. You think maybe the guy dumped down the mine was…?”

“He still had his feet on, but nothing on them except the tatters of rotting socks.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked. Forget the socks. I made that up. But they said, yes, he was essentially barefoot. So, all right: the day of the rape. You were waiting for Carl Dean at Lem’s garage, but he didn’t show up. His truck was packed and parked in front of the camp lodge. He was on his way out of there, but something interrupted him. Unfortunately, the cultists set the van alight; they thought it was the devil’s van or some such lunacy. The people I talked to last summer told me that both Aunt Debra and the Collins girl said Carl Dean was there at the rape, but they were confused about what part he played. They were both traumatized, especially the girl, so it was probably all just a blur. But Carl Dean was evidently in love with that girl and had come all the way back here to see her. And she was in trouble. What I’m trying to say is that it looks like your friend, whom everyone has vilified, was really a hero.”

“Brilliant, Holmes. Good for old Ugly. But a dead hero.”

“Longevity’s not a goal for most heroes. They’re going for something else. It’s why we remember them and not much of anyone else.”

“Mm. Poor old Pete over there’s another. I’ve been by the store a few times to see him. He says he knows they’re making a big deal out of what he did and everyone’s talking about how he sacrificed himself out of love for Monica and her kid, but actually that wasn’t on his mind at all. The ball was in the air, he said, and as soon as his feet left the floor, he was back on the court. Went up for the interception and follow-through jump shot and knew he had to sink it before the buzzer.”

“Wow! I know that feeling. When the thing itself takes over and you’re just its tool. Okay, here’s another, not so scary. You know that Olive Oyl wallflower who used to pull sodas in Doc Foley’s drugstore?”

“Beanpole Becky? Sure.”

“Well, she turned up on TV the other day to describe the killing of Doc Foley and her own near-death experience. She said in that flat deadpan voice of hers that the whole thing has affected her orgasms, making the interviewer’s eyes pop. He asked if she meant that it was, you know, interfering with…? ‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean they’re better.’”

Tommy thought that was hilarious, and the rest of the night, like Becky’s orgasms, went better. Trading hero tales was a good idea. Tommy turned his back on Angela’s party and over the next couple of rounds, in and around the over-amplified music, they talked about his mother’s wacky trip to Lourdes with Concetta Moroni, paid for by an old boyfriend; the Bali postcard the ex-mayor sent the city council; and Christmas week’s big news that Priscilla Tindle, who was back with her husband, had given birth to a daughter whom she was reportedly naming Mary after the child’s grandmother, though maybe that was just one of her dad’s jokes. Sally’s mother had visited the preacher in the mental hospital and found him neatly shaved and barbered, smoking his pipe again, and completely sane, so far as she could tell. It was like the Jesus in him had sort of boiled off, or dropped away like the husk of a seedpod. His wife—Sally’s “Aunt Debra”—was, and perhaps still is, in a women’s prison, where she was apparently becoming something of a spiritual leader, talking with the birds and creating her own pollyanna branch of Brunism, and her adopted orphan had had, in her mother’s words, “a very successful surgical intervention. Really, they’ve done a great job with the poor boy. He’s very relaxed and pleasant now and he doesn’t remember a thing about his mixed-up past. Of course, he doesn’t recognize anybody either.” Sally, her own brain wobbling a bit in her skull at the thought of this “intervention,” took a mental note at the time about magic spells: You only hear about those who break their spells. Most don’t.

Tommy said he was glad she was working for the West Condon NOW consortium and told her more about his dad’s battles with the governor, the city manager, and Charlie Bonali, who had formed a kind of unholy alliance, the police chief part of it, his dad the common enemy. With the mayor absconded, there was a vacuum in town and Minicozzi and Bonali, both seen as heroes of a sort, were filling it. The governor was dumping money into the town, but it was all going through Minicozzi, and there were probably kickbacks. Bonali’s building company got the big city hall restoration job without any competitive bids, Minicozzi claiming some kind of emergency powers. Already there were serious cost overruns, yet nothing seemed actually to have been done beyond fencing it off. The bank was robbed that day of the dynamite and the bikers were blamed, but his dad was pretty sure it was the bank lawyer. “Dad’s determined to bring the governor down. He’s putting his money in the next elections on the hotshot D.A. who nailed the Brunists.” Tommy said he had no problem with that guy pushing for all those executions in order to make his name. “Look at how many people got killed because of those rabid freaks.” Sally said that if they were freaks, then most of the rest of the country was, too, because a recent poll suggested over eighty percent of all Americans believe pretty much the same apocalyptic fantasies, it’s only that not many have put a particular date on them. As for the absentee biker gang being the ones who terrorized the town, not those who had been arrested and charged, Tommy shrugged and said they were all part of the same family and the same fanatical cult. “They all wore Brunist shit on their leathers. Their tattoos. Their minds were fucked by their religious leaders, who have to be held responsible.” The media often spoke now of the Baxter clan, referencing famous criminal families of the past. Old black-and-white photos of group hangings of captured bandit gangs were shown on television. Paul Baxter was on the original list of indictments until his head was found in the state park, whereupon he was replaced by Nathan, known now to be the masked gan-gleader advertising himself as “Kid Rivers.” There were countrywide “Dead or Alive” posters up for him and he was number one on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, the mug shots showing a mean-looking kid about fourteen years old.