The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (29 page)

Nat is sitting beside Midnight in the dark, under the mine tipple, watching the thickening crowds on the hill through stolen binoculars, most of them in those white gowns like old women at a dance. They’re all making tent meeting noises now, mixed in with some twangy guitars and the tiny pops of flashbulbs going off. Usually, even at this distance, he could hear his father’s voice above the racket, but not tonight. The old man has turned beggar. Not so many gawkers now as before; the sheriff’s car has been parked more or less permanently down there, so people don’t tend to hang around unless they want to go on up and be part of it. Anyway, it’s boring. The sheriff himself is not there, but his number two is. Smith. Nat knows him from churchgoing days when his old man was the preacher. Smith marched out here that day with everyone else, but as soon as it was over he dropped out, just when his old man most needed him. Maybe he was a double agent, working for the other side. Another target. Pop. Midnight’s chrome picks up flickering lights from the bonfires over there, making her seem alive and restless, burning from within. Like Nat is. He rests his hand on her frame, as though to calm her. He feels another headache coming on and needs to get himself in motion. The other Apostles have been making a swoop of the roads around, plotting out escape routes, casing supply joints, siphoning off fuel from parked cars, visiting roadhouses. Like Houndawg, Nat doesn’t drink, but the others do. Houndawg calls it laying down roadslick. Juice says it keeps the machinery oiled. Midnight was green when Nat appropriated her, but Houndawg has helped him chop her down and rebuild her, bobbing the fender, wrenching in some scraps from the junkyard, reshaping the pipes, filing away all the ID numbers, and adding new engine guards, then repainting her body bits shiny black. Littleface calls her Nat’s Batmobile. She’s faster now and no way anybody could identify her. Houndawg himself rides a souped-up flathead with stretched downtubes and buckhorn handlebars, what he calls his old war horse. “Butt ugly, but fast and smooth.” He’s back, having a smoke in the darkness, Juice and Cubano are just rolling in, and Nat can hear the rumble of Littleface’s shotgun pipes out on the access road. Have to do something about eating. There’s food over there in the big tent and on a table set by one of the bonfires, he can smell it from here, but he doubts his pals would be allowed, and the Warrior Apostles travel together. Besides, the deputy sheriff is over there somewhere. “C’mon,” he says as Littleface pulls in, “I’m hungry. Let’s go.” He stows the binoculars in his saddlebag, mounts Midnight and kicks her into life. Paulie hears the motors turn over and aches to be with them. Franny has tried to force some chicken and beans on him, but he’s not hungry. He never is. There’s some green Jell-O with marshmallows in it, and the twitchy little half-pint eats some of that. Franny thinks all the beatings may have stunted him, but he’s only thirteen, he may not have started to grow yet. His not eating always makes their father mad, and Franny started getting fat eating up Paulie’s leftovers so he wouldn’t get another whipping. Now, eating is the only thing she feels like doing. Her kid sister, who is two years older than Paulie, is stunted in another way. She’s got okay looks, a good figure, but she’s got the brains of a seven-year-old. Amanda has taken her share of their father’s beatings just like the rest of them, and still gets hauled in from time to time, but on her they seemed to have had a different effect. Maybe they weren’t so hard. While the rest shy away from their father, Amanda clings to him. Thankfully, all that holy smiting of sinners’ backsides seems to be passing away. In the early years of the Persecution, their father was more severe than ever, the laying on of the razor strop a regular family worship ritual, forcibly witnessed by all, but he has mellowed over time or else he is just giving up on them and has his mind on other things. The razor strop itself got thrown away or else Nat stole it. It was probably Nat who broke him. Nat was threatened with a thrashing when he stole the motorcycle, but Nat’s near as big as her father and when Nat stood him down, her father just got older overnight. Franny often, out of pity, took beatings for the younger ones, but they didn’t seem to appreciate it. Even, oddly, resented it. Well, the problem with big dumb Franny is, she just doesn’t get it. She thinks her father’s whippings were tough, wait till she gets to hell. Amanda knows. It’s about the saving of souls, and Franny’s will not be saved. Amanda can feel her own soul inside her, anxious for its fate, and she knows the body must be punished for it to be redeemed. She is, she knows, a sinful girl, and when she heard her father shout from the pulpit, “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut if off, and cast it from thee,” and that if you didn’t, your whole body would get thrown in hell, it frightened her so she could sleep only fitfully for weeks after, afraid the hand would do in her sleep what she refused to let it do awake, and sometimes it did. Not even to her father can she talk about this, she can only beg him to punish her for her redemption’s sake. Her father, she knows, is going to Heaven, and the worst thing Amanda can imagine about hell is not the eternal torment but being all alone there. Junior, too, understands the relationship between the punishment of the body and the redemption of the soul, though he has a more generalized notion of sin—we are all born into sin—and consequently has a more traditional and communal notion of the need to punish the flesh to be free of the flesh. Mortification: this is a word Junior has taught Elaine. Whom he has been keeping an eye on, just as she has been furtively watching him. He has approached her, but under the watchful eye of her mother she has been very jumpy and unfriendly. But he knows. He has been in her underwear drawer. The belt he found there is buckled tightly around the tops of his thighs, under his tunic. He feels the tug of sin each step he takes. Like Paulie, Junior has also heard the motorbikes leave, and has heard Ben tell Elaine’s mother that he’s worried those boys are headed to the camp again and that he should get over there to check on things. So he’s gone (Nat’s an idiot, but a useful one) and Elaine’s mother is dragged away to preach to everyone about the new tabernacle. Junior looks at Elaine and she looks at him.

Littleface and his fellow outlaws are throwing together a supper out of things found in the Brunist camp kitchen fridge and cupboards. Some cold fried chicken, milk, apples, cookies and crackers—a feast. Nat has told them to help themselves to the food, but to leave everything else alone. “If we wanta camp out here a while, we gotta stay cool.” That makes sense like everything Nat says. He’s just a kid but smart as hell. Even skinny old Houndawg looks up to him. Littleface loves him, has his name tattooed in tiny Gothic over his left nipple near his Warrior Apostles tattoo, though Nat doesn’t know that. Religion is not a big deal for Littleface, but if Nat wants this scene, he wants it. He’s mad at something, so Littleface is mad, too. Nat’s old man is a preacher and Nat is a kind of preacher, too, but he doesn’t preach
to
anybody. No stupid church services—that’s for sissies, Nat says—no talk about sin, no praying. Nat just yells at who he calls the Big One from time to time, telling him what he thinks and what he’s going to do, and the rest of them tune in and sometimes shout at the Big One, too. Face’s pal Juice from Crusadeer days really gets into it, stomping around like he’s marching and hooting and hollering along with Nat. Nat showed Face his
Classic Comics
version of the Book of Revelation to give him some idea of what’s ahead. God and Jesus so damned mad they’re going to destroy fucking everything, and the Apostles, Nat says, are going to be God’s hit men. So all right, why not, let’s at it. Littleface’s old lady was an evangelical type, probably still is if she’s alive, so he’s heard the stories, but he never realized Jesus was such an awesome dude. He raises just one finger and the earth splits and swallows up all the howling and screeching sinners and then snaps shut on them again.
Ker-splat!
He speaks and the bodies of the enemies are ripped open and it’s hard not to get hit by the flying flesh and blood. It’s amazing! There’s guys on horses and, even as they go galloping along, their flesh dissolves and their eyes and tongues melt away, the horses, too, and they end up just hideous skeletons, falling apart. Stories his old lady never told him. His old man got shot up and is no more and is not missed. Littleface does miss his brother whom he used to ride with, but who’s in the federal lockup doing hard time and may never come out. Just as well. Lot of guys on the outside trying to kill him. His brother was a first-class gearhead and Littleface often argues with him when working on his bike. “Who ya talking to, Face,” Cubano asked him, “to your asshole?” “No, to yours, Spic. Unless that ugly thing is your face.” Nat is pressing his fingers to his temples: one of his headaches coming on. They usually hit him in the predawn hours, set him to howling like a wild animal. Can last for hours, days even. Why he says he doesn’t drink. Whiskey, anyway. One day, when Nat was twisted up with headache pain, they came on a goat tied to a tree. Nat walked up to it, slit its throat, and put his mouth to the spurting blood. Did he want them to drink it, too? Nat didn’t say, but Littleface and Juice took it as a dare and did. Houndawg chopped the head off and threw the body over his buckhorns and they left the area, and that night, after Houndawg and Cubano had skinned and cleaned the animal, they grilled it over an open fire. What was amazing was that Nat’s headache had gone away, and that set off a pattern of his killing animals and drinking their blood, and it seems to work. Littleface has a bottle of bourbon he lifted from a shopping center liquor store out on the highway, in spite of all the eyes on him (he bought a pack of cigs and a beer to cover his exit), and he shares it now with Juice and Cubano. Beats blood any day. Juice rides what Houndawg calls a garbage wagon, a bike pieced together from boneyard scraps and very heavily loaded with saddlebags, chrome, accessories, and as covered with pins, stickers, flags, and Jesus paintings as his body is with tattoos. His Juicebox. He can do anything with it, spin it on a dime, walk it on its back wheel, leap cars with it. One of the stickers on its back fender says: “Watch your ass! Jesus is coming and He is as mad as hell!” He likes to say that he wants to get raptured doing a ton down an endless highway. Juice was very impressed when Nat showed them the big photo of Bruno by the fireplace. They all were, even Houndawg. “Look at that fucking mine pick,” Juice said. “Cool, man! I want one a them.” And he swung his arms like scything a wheat field. “You knew that dude, Nat?” Nat nodded, studying the picture. “The Man,” he said. It was near lifesize and in the dim light it seemed to Littleface almost like the Man was alive and staring straight at them. Like something out of a horror movie. Go get them motherfuckers, he seemed to say. Like Jesus. Raise a finger and—
zap!
“Maybe they got some picks like that over at the mine,” Littleface says now, gnawing a chicken leg, and Juice lights up and says, “Hey!” Cubano, sitting on an upturned crate, is showing them a trick he can do of throwing an apple into the air and slicing it in two with his switchblade as it falls, when old lady Collins’ husband walks into the kitchen with his German shepherd. “What’re you boys doing here? They’s food over on the Mount.” “We don’t feel exactly welcome there,” Nat says. Nat, Littleface knows, has taken a natural unliking to this beardy hayseed, though he looks like one of the good guys in that Revelations comicbook. Of course, in Nat’s interpretation of that story, maybe the good guys are the bad guys. “We thought you wouldn’t give a care if we ate up some old leftovers.” “Well, I think it’s better if you stay with the rest of us.” He’s seen the bottle of whiskey and he doesn’t seem happy about it. Houndawg has called the dog over to him and is stroking him gently. “I do love dawgs,” he says with his usual easy drawl, taking a grip on the dog’s snout and peeling his lip back, “even old toothless ones. How d’ye call him?” “C’mere, Rocky,” Ben says. But Houndawg has a grip on Rocky’s collar in one hand, his open blade in the other. “Now just set still, Rocky. We’ll find ye sumthin soft t’gum.” Littleface realizes the man and his dog are all alone. Five to one, not much they couldn’t do. He can see that Nat, gripping his forehead, is thinking the same thing. “C’mon,” Nat says finally, rising with a fuck-you shrug. “Somebody here don’t smell so good, and it ain’t the dog. Let’s cut out.”

I.9

Sunday 19 April

Two children enter the garden. God’s children. They have not chosen each other. God has chosen them, as He did the first stunned parents—whose initials they share, though they are not thinking about this. Nor are they thinking about parenting. It would make no sense. They are thinking about, not first things, but last things. Clad like forest ghosts, they step into the garden in the predawn dark, oblivious to its mysterious beauty, to say goodbye to this doomed human world, and to seek God’s grace in His eternal one to follow. She does not like this world and will be happy to see it go away. She wants it to end so that she might be with her father and brother again and be freed forever from timidity and bad teeth. She wants it to end right
now
, and she believes that this day that’s dawning might be when it happens. And if not, then very soon. Her father said so. Who is, as always, nearby. When she says the words, “Our Father which art in Heaven,” it is her father she sees up there. No beard. Tall and wise and smiling down at her with love in his heart. She talks to him every day, and she promises him she is coming as soon as she can. An eternity without him is the most terrible thing she can imagine. And a life without him is nearly as bad. She
will
be redeemed and will do all in her power to be sure of it. That is why she is here. Her mother does not understand, but her father will. The Bible has taught her the relation of pain and suffering to salvation, and in a moment of inspiration—long ago, when they were both still very young—he with whom she walks has shown her the path. It was all quite new and baffling, but his letters (he’s very smart) have explained things better.