The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (92 page)

“The police have been at the studio!” she cries. “They came to arrest poor Wesley!
Hurry! You must save him!”
The children gather behind her, pointing and giggling. One of the little boys sails a paper plane in that direction, but it veers away shyly. It immediately becomes a game like pin the tail on the donkey and they are all trying to hit the target with their paper planes. She turns to them. “The police are trying to put Jesus in prison! We have to stop them! Tell them he took a bus out of town! Tell them he ascended into Heaven! Anything!
But don’t let them find him!”

After they have all scattered, Connie, somewhat shaken (he was not made for life’s rough and tumble), wanders his backyard collecting books and pages. He has decided to postpone his truth-in-fiction sermon. He is too disconcerted to carry on, and summer is anyway too frivolous a time for it. Besides, let’s be frank: those in his pastorate prefer a simple—and brief—communion service with a few Christian homilies tossed in, caring nothing for these bookish disputes, which just put them to sleep. He is, as Wesley himself has reminded him, only talking to himself.

The drive back from the lakes is a disaster. Debra makes the mistake of trying one last time to talk Colin into leaving the camp with her, taking a sudden turn onto the highway as she’s crossing it, and Colin in panic tries to leap out of the moving car; she has to hit the brakes and grab him. She tries to pacify him in the old way, but he slaps furiously at her hand, shrieking wildly. “Don’t touch me! They won’t let me into Heaven!” She promises him, crossing her heart, that they’ll go straight back to the camp, just please don’t try to jump out of the car again. She drives very slowly, her heart pounding, tears in her eyes, one foot on the brake, Colin glaring at her in terror and gripping the door handle all the way back. As soon as they reach the camp gates, he does jump out of the car, tumbling onto the road, then leaping up and running toward all the people rushing their way, gripping his crotch, screaming hysterically that she’s been doing terrible wicked things.
“To this!”
My God, has he opened up his pants? She sinks into the car seat, leans her head against the wheel. She only wants to die. “It’s the police!” people are shouting outside her window. “They came to arrest you! Darren kept them out, but they’ll be back! You can’t let them see you!” She doesn’t move. She doesn’t care.

“The Virgin Mary told her that the cancer was eating her mind. If she could kill the cancer in her mind before it was too late, the cancer in her body would just melt away.” Concetta Moroni is in Gabriela Fer-rero’s kitchen with her friends, Bianca and Gina and Francesca. The kitchen smells like a chicken coop with a kind of perfume on top, but they are all used to it by now. The five of them have gathered, as they often do in one kitchen or another, for a late afternoon coffee, drawn together today by the shoe store man who hung himself in his shop window, which Concetta witnessed (she gasps and crosses herself each time that terrifying scene pops back to mind) and Gabriela, picking up her prescription, saw just afterwards, when they were cutting the poor man down, and then Francesca saw the body when they brought it to the hospital. They all agree that it was the bank’s fault, and Concetta expresses her pity for poor Mrs. Cavanaugh, having to live with that cold heartless man who only knows about money and is holding the whole town to ransom. “Mrs. Cavanaugh said the Virgin Mary telling her that was like a dream even though she was wide awake, and I said, no, it was a miracle, a visitation.” Her friends all nod at that, though Gabriela says maybe it’s all that morfiend she’s taking. Gina, who is the mayor’s secretary, wants to know how you cure mind cancer. “Like you cure all cancer, Gina,” Concetta says. “Prayer. The only thing that works. If God wants you to die, there’s nothing you can do, but you can always ask. Mrs. Cavanaugh and I may go to Lourdes to ask up close.” She opens a little silk pouch and shows them the woman’s rings, including her wedding ring, which Concetta is supposed to sell to raise the money for their trip to Lourdes because Mr. Cavanaugh refuses to give her any. Bianca tells about a friend who went to Lourdes and got her hearing back, and Francesca says if the Virgin is visiting Mrs. Cavanaugh here in West Condon, maybe they don’t have to go to Lourdes. Francesca works as a receptionist at the hospital and is therefore their expert on medical knowledge, and she says that the best thing for mind cancer is hot compresses.

“Look at all those wires and panels and dials those sound guys have set up. Looks like an execution chamber in here.”

“Yeah, not that I ever seen one. Nor won’t never, I hope, knock on wood. Ifn they was any wood around to knock on…”

“You can use my head, Duke. Nothing up there right now but wet sawdust. The way they’ve set us out on the floor like this is scary. I’m so nervous I have to pee every five minutes. I just only hope I can remember the words tonight.”

“I ast about the setup and ole Elmer lifted up his Stetson to reset his hairpiece’n declared it was time fer us to step out inta the crowd’n
be
somebody.”

“Elmer?”

“Elmer Jankowski. Happens that’s Will Henry’s real monicker, wudja believe? One a them recordin’ fellers let the cat out. Always figgered Hank Williams backwards couldn’t be his genuine tag.”

“Oh. I see. Funny. Well, I’m changing my name, too, Duke. We gotta fix the sign out front and be sure it gets spelt right on the record label. I’m changing it to Rendine.”

“That’s my name.”

“I know. I don’t mean it like a married name. It’s just who I am now. Who you made me. It’s like that song of yours, the only good thing that’s happened. I wanta mark it somehow. Patti Jo Rendine. It’s the only name I want now for the rest of my life. And nobody knows it’s your real name, not even those record company guys. Just only you and me and your mama. You can think of me like a kinda cousin. A kissin’ cousin.”

“Well, purty lady, gimme a smack to show me whom you am. Yep. I reckanize you now, Patti Jo Rendine. Gimme me another, dear cuz, jist fer ole times’ sake.”

“Mmm. That feels almost too good to feel good, Duke. I always thought I knew too much about love and the disappointments of love, but I’ve never known anything like this. And thanks, I do appreciate your not being mad about the name.”

“Mad? Patti Jo, you’re the best doggone thing happened to the fambly since great granpappy Rendine figgered out howta make likker outa swamp moss. But, y’know, them record fellers said ifn one of our songs take off, they wanta git us round to other radio stations’n agent us inta gigs in bigger places. We may hafta load up the ole Packard’n hit the road. You gonna be ready fer that?”

“Well…sure…”

“What does Marcella say about it?”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be okay. She’ll let me know when it’s time to go.”

“Hey, that’s a nice line for a song.”

“What is?”

“She’ll let me know when it’s time to go. Like, they’s this feller shacked up with a beautiful gal who’s the restless sort, y’know, always havin’ to try on a new man from time to time. She’s beautiful’n he’s gonna enjoy her while he can, even knowin’…she’ll let me know when it’s time to go.”

“I can almost hear it now. But that’s not me, you know.”

“No, sweet angel. It ain’t me neither.”

It has been a long day for Police Chief Dee Romano, and it’s getting longer. That mess over at the shoe store filling the streets with restless gawkers. Vandalism at the bank. He jailed that wiseass Johnson, put up with his shit for a while and let him go. Cavanaugh and Minicozzi on his back all day. He has been ordered to lock up Charlie Bonali before sundown or heads will roll. Charlie himself turned up at the station, still partly uniformed, snapping his fingers and ignoring Dee’s orders to turn in his arms and equipment. When he told him that when the city attorney sends the charges over he’ll have to arrest him, he only laughed. Bunch of younger pezzi di merda hanging on his elbow, chewing thick wads of gum and grinning malevolently, most of them wagging beer bottles and calling themselves the Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force. Charlie’s private army. Demands came in to arrest the Presbyterian minister and his wife, but when they took the phony warrant out to the church camp to pick up the wife, they got turned away by a blond kid needing a haircut; got a better one now. Monk and Louie, meanwhile, haven’t been able to find the preacher, even though that loony has been staggering around in plain sight all day making mischief, his girlfriend chasing him with her tail on view. They’re still out there, somewhere. The city attorney calls again to tell him Bonali is at Hog’s Tavern and ready to turn himself in, letting him know that he has spoken with Judge Altoviti and bail will be granted, the money for it already in hand.

Louie and Monk return, finally, and he asks them where the hell they’ve been.

“Lookin’ for that preacher. A little kid come in and says he seen Jesus over to the bus station and begged us not to let him go away so we run over there. Turns out they ain’t been a bus through in more’n two hours and none due soon, but they was another kid there playing the pinball machine, and when we asked, he said he thought Jesus had gone to get a pizza while he was waiting for a bus.”

“Whaddaya mean, playing the pinball machine? That thing’s been tilted for years now.”

“Well, he was pretending then. The crazy preacher wasn’t at Rico’s pizza joint neither, but they was a little girl playing jacks in the street who said she seen him and heard him talk about going to preach out in Chestnut Hills. She said some funny lady with a bare bottom was driving him and she pointed in the direction they went. We grabbed the cruiser and rolled out there, but Chestnut Hills is mostly a slum for the homeless nowadays and we couldn’t find nobody who seen him—until we come on a coupla kids sitting on a curb, and they said they seen him at the big stone church in town where they was flying paper airplanes. That sounded pretty nutty and we was about to give up, figuring we was getting the runaround, but we supposed they musta been talking about the Lutheran place, so we stopped by there anyhow, and sure enough, the preacher there said the Jesus guy had been there, and the kids, too, making paper airplanes, and even the lady with the nekkid patoot. He didn’t know where they’d gone.”

“What are you sucking on, Monk?”

“Jawbreaker. One of them little kids gimme it.”

Romano is beat and ready to call it a day, hand the station over to Bo, but before he heads home, he and his two lieutenants have one final run to make to complete the list of his day’s failures.

It’s that time of day: When shadows fall and trees whisper day is ending… An old song, as the country singer Duke L’Heureux would say, but a new virgin of it. The people of West Condon have been through this longest day countless times, and at the same time it has never happened before; they have often reached this tender time of evening, but not the tender time of
this
evening now softly upon them. The midsummer sun is still posted as high in the sky as it ever gets in midwinter, but it has begun to lodge in trees and duck behind buildings, offering a gentler, kinder light. Work for most, if they have work, is over, and they are, often with a drink in hand, considering the possibilities of the long twilight ahead. There are gatherings on front porches, at backyard grills, in the town’s bars and eateries, over picnics at the parks and lakes, on baseball diamonds, cinder basketball courts, the golf course, on street corners. Dave Osborne’s shop-window suicide has thrown a weird cast upon the day and much of the talk is about it. Those who have seen the rogue Jesus, believed by many to be an escapee from that crazy church camp sect, parading drunkenly about with his rascally troop of kiddies and that frantic lady in the ripped nightshirt have these tales to tell as well, and as with the day itself, everyone has heard such stories before, and yet they are all completely new. Those gathered on Vince Bonali’s front porch have the additional treat of son Charlie’s comical account of his arrest by the clowns who pass for town cops and his subsequent release on bail. Charlie’s stories go down well, supplemented as they are by a case of cold bottled beer provided by him, and even his father knows better than to butt in. Their church organist running around in the streets with her behind on view was also witnessed by Emily Wetherwax, out shopping for hamburger and hotdog buns for tonight’s picnic out at the lakes, and she describes the sight on the phone to Susanna Elliott. She and Susanna have agreed they’ll take the Wetherwax car out to the lakes and both are excited by the old-fashioned wienie-roast fun ahead. “I even picked up some marshmallows,” Emily says. Emily has been asked to help out down at the bank as they have lost one of their tellers and are shorthanded. Her husband Archie is somewhere up a telephone pole just now, Susanna’s Jim is snoring on the couch, sleeping off one hangover to get ready for another. “Remember, Em, how on hot nights,” Susanna says as her daughter Sally comes through the door, “when they wouldn’t let us into the Dance Barn because we were too young, we used to dance in the parking lot, listening to the music coming through the open windows?” The banker, in from the links, hears from his bank lawyer and city attorney the story of Charlie Bonali’s arrest and his release on bail, as granted by Judge Altoviti, and asks, “Did we contest it?” “We queried it,” he is told. This is not the answer the banker wanted to hear, but he is into his second sour mash whiskey and is already thinking ahead to his upcoming night at the highway motel (the light outside the Nineteenth Hole windows, which face onto the putting green, is just right) and he lets it go. The nearness of you… The woman he’ll be seeing has just dropped the Elliott girl off at home and is on her way out to the motel. She has not heard the stories of the man dressed like Jesus or even that of the suicide, but she has heard the story of the torn scrapbook photos and she remains gloomily haunted by it. Perhaps she will have to cancel tonight’s supper date. The various stories, though not that one, are going around the pool hall, too, where the organizer of tonight’s big stag party for Stevie Lawson is doing his best to scratch up some coin for the festivities by challenging the hangabouts in there to games, and Georgie has held his own, two bits at a time, but the truth is that he can’t shoot for shit since Lem Filbert laid into him with that crowbar and crooked up his arm. Georgie damns the hothead many times a day, and he damns him now. Lem is still at work, one day like another, pissed off that his bonehead mechanic has knocked off early. He’s having second thoughts about the big new loan he has just signed on for at the bank; he’ll have to work twice as hard just to meet the payments and he doesn’t know how he can do that.