The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (78 page)

Alone on a saddle stool at the steak house bar on a quiet Wednesday evening, communing with a double shot of Tennessee sour mash on the rocks. Waiting for Tommy, who is late. Coming from his lifeguard job at the pool. And probably from one pair of thighs or another. That unquiet time of life. Ted remembers it, not all that fondly. But at least he always knew who he was, where he was going, what he’d be doing. Tommy has a new plan for the rest of his life every week. Ted is concerned, sometimes irritated, tries to show neither, knowing how little it takes to set Tommy off. He needs him now. Close by. Needs him, loves him. Loves the others, too, misses them, but he feels there’s a special bond between him and Tommy, something that’s been there since the boy was born. If only he’d take life more seriously. Tommy loves his privileges but not their responsibility. Ted hates those who don’t give a damn and worries his son is drifting down that alley. Probably just a phase. Still a kid. One day, he’s certain, he’ll be handing the First National Bank over to him and be proud to do so. No doubt his own father had the same worries.

Fatherhood was not something Ted thought about. It just happened. He has been grateful ever since. Three kids, all doing well. He doesn’t pray much, but he thanks God for that. He has tried to talk about it with Tommy, what fatherhood means to him, but it only embarrasses the boy. He prefers to talk baseball instead. Cars. Travel fantasies. Tommy jokes about the life here. Calls the people out at the club a bunch of illiterate yoyos. Well, they are, but he hasn’t earned the right to say so. He’s even made some smartass remarks lately about banks and religion, calling both of them social parasites and partners in the power game. What college can do to a kid’s core values. There’s a sociology prof up there Ted would like to throttle. Tommy hasn’t gone to church since he came home after graduation, either. Out most nights. Drinks a lot. Often testy, restless. Good with his mother, though. Patient in a way Ted finds difficult. Tommy is upset about what’s happening to her, of course. It’s a tough thing to deal with, part of what’s making him edgy. Making them both edgy. Though with Ted there’s anger, too. Instead of loving farewells at the end, there’s this betrayal, bitterness, the religious madness, the shattering of their early dreams. If he were the first to go, it wouldn’t be like this. His heart would be full of gratitude. Now Irene is tearing up her photo albums, their long life together apparently without value. The wedding album has disappeared altogether, the photos of him in his officer’s uniform. Stripping it all away before the Last Judgment. At which, she assures him, he won’t do well. Her end of the world is everybody else’s end of the world. People, when they know they’re going to die, can get like that. Then along comes a scheming woman like Bernice Filbert. Who’s hanging out now at Pat Suggs’ bedside. Someone else to get her hooks into.

Though he and Tommy are both on their own the rest of the week, usually eating at different times even when Concetta cooks up a pot of spaghetti and meatballs for them, they have set Wednesdays aside for supper together here, away from the golfing crowd, in West Condon’s only claim to royalty. Sir Loin. Not that the food’s much better here than it is at the Hole. The grilled steaks are usually edible after you cut away the fat, but that’s about it. They come with iceberg lettuce blobbed with French dressing out of a bottle and potatoes that taste pre-baked a week before and reheated, all on the same oval platter. The dollop of sour cream and chives on the potatoes is probably the tastiest thing on offer. He always asks for extra. Well-stocked bar, though. Even a short wine list with the familiar classics. Beaujolais. Valpolicella. Liebfraumilch. Chianti in a basket. California Chablis. Mountain Red. And a pretty assortment of sweetly smiling waitresses in short skirts. Loins on view. The owner is a Rotarian, on the school board, a Methodist, has a sizable mortgage. He begged off from today’s meeting of the NOWC steering committee but promised to help foot the bill for the fireworks on the Fourth. Ted feels like he’s helping keep him afloat by eating here from time to time, as he and Irene used to do every other week or so. It’s not far from the charred shell of the old Dance Barn just down the road. Seeing Maudie a couple of days ago reminded him of it. The big bands that came through. It was different here then.

Can’t recover those old times, but things can be better. Will be. With Pat Suggs out of the way, Ted is feeling on top of the game once more. In control of the clock. Not that he wishes the man ill—tough thing, a stroke, he hopes he doesn’t have to go through it himself—but before Suggs can get on his feet again, if ever, the cult will be out of here, some people will be locked away, the camp will be back in Presbyterian hands, the mine hill scramble will be ancient history, the town under Nick’s sure hand back on a stable footing and free of corruption. He’ll get something out of Kirkpatrick, a prison, National Guard shooting range, whatever, maybe state backing for a coal gasification project. There’ll be more jobs, and more jobs make for more small businesses. Main Street will look like Main Street again. When Irene goes, he can set up Concetta with an Italian place on Main Street. She’s a great cook, could feature fresh homemade pasta, give Mick some competition. One good restaurant breeds another. The street could get famous in this part of the state. Then, when the old hotel is back in operation, they could move her into it. She has kids; it could be a real old-fashioned family restaurant.

Tommy has ideas, too. Until the city consortium got interested in the old hotel, Tommy thought they should make a mining museum out of it, try to draw tourists. Ted regrets his response. What’ll we have? he remembers snapping. Nothing but busloads of school children. The only new business we can hope for is a candy shop with postcards. And who gives a damn about mining history anyway except ex-miners, and they’re jobless and pissed off and would just smear the place with graffiti. That was harsh. Tommy was probably hurt, though he only shrugged and walked away. Well, Ted was depressed at the time, and he apologized, told Tommy what some of the problems were. Later, they got to talking about the idea again in a new setting: How about the old mine? A tour of the horrific disaster with rides for the kids. Upgrade the hoists for a safe but scary drop into the darkness. Get the skips and shuttle cars rolling again down there and fancied up a bit like carnival rides. Everybody wearing mining helmets. Which can be purchased in the gift shop. Wax museum dioramas of the horrors of the disaster itself that light up as you pass. Empty miners’ shoes and ownerless dinner buckets scattered about. Broken spectacles. False teeth. Sound effects: the explosion, the screams, the shouts. It could get famous enough to attract the whole nation. Tommy even suggested re-enacting the Brunist end-of-the-world scene on top of the hill, but Ted nixed that. Who knows what lunatics might turn up, thinking it was the real thing? Enough of that shit.

He chuckles, feeling loose and mellow, talking like a college kid. He orders up another double. Shouldn’t, third already (where’s the boy?), but he’ll limit himself to a beer at supper. Also feeling, somewhat sweetly, melancholic. Maybe it’s the tinny music on the cheap restaurant speakers. All the old songs. Nameless studio bands, but the tunes are enough.
Getting sentimental over you
… Yes, he is. Silently, he hums along. Stacy is alone tonight at Mrs. Battles’ rooming house. He thinks about her there. All alone and feeling blue. She has admitted that she sometimes masturbates, longing for him when he isn’t there. He imagines her doing that and it excites him—
things you say and do just thrill me through and through
—and he has to straighten up for a moment and adjust things, pretending to be reaching for his bill clip, which he sets on the bar. He has often thought to visit her there, but that would be too daring. And Mrs. B is a notorious gossip. They’ll be together again tomorrow night. Soon enough. Keep it cool. What we do on Thursdays. Something Stacy says. Probably a line from some old movie. He hasn’t gone to one for years, though they sometimes watch them now on the motel TV. Stacy seems to have seen them all, even the old ones. Knows the plots, likes to imagine alternative ones. That’s what the movies are, she likes to say. Alternative plots. Not like life. Life has only one. That’s sad. But true. Like all these songs.
All of you
… Never paid much attention to them before. Now he can name them, sing along on some of the lines.
I’d love to gain complete control of you, handle even the heart and soul of you
… Getting educated. Never too late.

Through the plate glass window with the restaurant name painted in reverse, he sees Tommy’s red convertible pull into the parking lot and swing up near the window, where he can leave the top down and watch it from the restaurant. Tommy waves at him as he climbs out. A handsome boy—tall, lean, with the grace of a good athlete and a big infectious smile. Ted’s chest fills with pride, love, a tinge of grief: all this will pass. He wants to hug him when he enters, and he stands, arms akimbo, meaning to do so, but instead finds himself shaking his son’s hand and asking him why he’s late and why he couldn’t at least have changed out of his T-shirt and shorts for dinner. “Sorry, Dad. Stopped by to see Mom first and she wanted to chat. Why is she so mad at you?”

It was a mistake to come back here. Angela’s idea. Another romantic Saturday night at the Blue Moon Motel with that happy couple, Monica and Pete Piccolotti, meant to stir the dying embers. More like pitching cold water on them. Fleet and Monica have been at each other since they arrived. The hayseed duo, who have gone over the top tonight with gross off-color songs about incest and bus-fucks and trailer park whores (who writes this back-alley crap? and why are all these jerks in here, including the hick in the cowboy hat who runs the local radio station, whooping it up and asking for more?), are now trying to make amends with “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” or maybe Angela requested it. Probably. “He’s cute,” Monica says, nodding toward the beanpole singer. “He looks sort of like Jimmy Stewart after he’s had the stomach flu for six weeks.” Which is meant to be funny, but Pete, downing his beer, snaps back, “Have I told you lately that I’d like to stuff that goddamn guitar up that swamp rat’s ass?” He belches loud enough for everyone in the Moon to hear and gets up to go to the bar for another round. Monica says, “That’s enough, Pete,” and he says, “Well, no, sweet mama, it is not.”

Tommy rises to go with him, leaving the girls to talk about what sour ungrateful assholes they’re both stuck with and why isn’t there a nice place to go in West Condon where people dress up a little. Tommy is in a foul mood and Angela has picked up on it and has become snappish herself. And at the same time cloyingly affectionate. Trying to hang on. He fumbled the big midweek bye-bye and now here he is with it all still to do. He used their religious differences, why it was best to accept the inevitable, sad as it was, they belonged to two different worlds, they should call it off now before they got too deep and it became too painful; but, trying to keep the back door open in case he got desperate before this long summer is over, he softened it with too many I love yous, and Angela was convinced they could work it out. In fact, she took it as a kind of provisional marriage proposal and said they should go talk to the priest about it and he was too drained (what a night!) to argue. In fact, while he was brooding over what he might say next (tell her he had become an atheist and his kids would have to be raised atheist? no, a mistake to mention kids at all), he dropped off and didn’t come to until after Angela had already left for the bank the next morning. She left a tissue with her lipstick-imprinted kiss on her pillow beside him. He blew his nose in it. His dad had more business meetings to attend out of town, something about seeing state officials in hopes of landing something big for the town before the Fourth, so after the pool job he had to stay home with his mother the next couple of nights, settle into summertime reruns. Which was a relief, in a way. It gave him time to think, and Angela could sense that and said on the phone he was just using his mother as an excuse not to see her, and like a fool he kept insisting otherwise and making his mother’s condition out to be worse than it was.

But tonight’s the night. Has to be. A clean break. He’d imagined tender farewells, lingering kisses; it’s not going to be that way. He may not even get laid.
Tant pis
, as they say in Paris, which is where he should be tonight. Where it’s a whole lot easier than this. The only other French he knows is how to ask a girl to lie down with him, and that’s all you need. He had to coax Concetta into staying and to pay her overtime to get the night free, but she and her widow friends seem glad enough to get the work and the money his dad’s been giving him as compensation for missing out on Europe more than covers the cost. Only it’s a waste for a night like this. Except for Fleet, he hates everyone here. What is he doing in this stupid backwater? Naz Moroni was in here earlier with his demented Dagotown pals and there might have been trouble, but they had some women with them—breasty, big-nosed girls Tommy recognized from the pool—and they only made threatening and obscene gestures, which Angie insisted they ignore. If you want to take them on, Fleet said, let me know. Joey Castiglione was with them, or maybe he came on his own. Joey has the hots for Angela and Tommy wished he’d just grab Angie up and steal her away—it would have solved all his problems—but when Joey saw them there, he turned around and walked out again. Tommy thinks back on the college bars, the girls he knew up there, the class they had, and knows he doesn’t belong here. He has to figure a way out. Now.

“You’re trying to break it off with Angie. It won’t be easy, Kit. You’re her fucking be-all and end-all. You’ll have a wildcat on your hands.” The drinks have been made and paid for, but neither of them is in a hurry to return to the table. They drink them there at the bar and order up others. Fleet will be joining them on the golf course tomorrow afternoon, though he says he hasn’t played since high school, can’t afford the club membership or green fees. Tommy wants his dad to arrange some help for Fleet and the store, at least get him a complimentary trial membership at the club for the rest of the summer. “I suppose having babies is the sore point. The Catholic thing…?”