The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (61 page)

His own underwear is freshly laundered, thanks to Ludie Belle—she might have guessed he’d be heading off soon, she does always seem to know what’s happening next—and he’s wearing one of Wayne’s warm hand-me-down flannel shirts with reinforced elbow patches. New patches on the knees of his jeans, too. When he took them off for Ludie Belle to mend, she remarked quite plainly on the size of his cock, which she called his Old Adam, saying she supposed it gave him bragging rights in the shower room, but probably it could sometimes be a nuisance, too, and he said that it was. Such conversations were never easy for him, but with Ludie Belle they seemed almost natural, and they didn’t even cause his acne to flare up. She could talk about such things and about the love of Jesus all in the same breath, which she sometimes did at prayer meetings when things got dull. It was Ludie Belle who brought up Elaine without his even mentioning her name (this did cause his face to heat up), telling him he should not expect too much. “The child is greatly confused.” She did not imply he should give up and leave, but she did not imply he should stay either.

He turns over the panel truck engine, giving it a bit of throttle, and while letting it warm up, scrapes the dead bugs off the windshield and hangs the toe-touching naked lady over the rearview mirror again. The old van has had some hard miles, but it’s ticking along well enough, ticking being the right word for the sound the tappets are making. He’ll drop by Lem’s for a final tune-up and a cup of coffee before he hits the road. Lem has been letting him earn beer money this week at the garage whenever he’s been able to break away from the camp, but there’s not enough business there for a full-time job, as Lem never fails to lament, and anyway Pach’ does not want to waste any more time around here; this story has ended. Some in the camp have probably wondered what he was up to, rolling out from time to time in this old newspaper rural delivery van they still associate with the cult’s Judas (that evil rag is dead and they’re not, as they like to point out), but the black grease on his hands and clothes told them clearly enough where he’d been, and he was able to bring back some gum and candy for the kids, a little act in part to impress Elaine, though it flew right past her. Pach’ is a hard worker, always has been. Even in prison he worked hard. Lem appreciates that, as do Ben and Wayne out here at the camp. Main difference is that Lem’s garage is a crossroads to everywhere—anybody might stop by, even people off the highway—while out here it’s almost like crawling inside your own body, and it makes him realize how unnatural this past week has been for him. Being cooped up all those years has made him the sort of ramblin’ man Duke and his woman were singing about last night at the motel, and of all his skills, moving on is what he does best. He came back here chasing a fantasy—a fantasy just as stupid as religion is. He got rid of that one, now he’s done with this one as well. No more pipe dreams of any kind; he’s a free man, freer than he’s ever been. Or so (the light is on in the Collins trailer and he wonders if she’s wondering where he’s going) he keeps reminding himself.

Among Lem’s customers yesterday was Moneybags’ old man, in to pick up his Continental after its final paint job, Lem having told Pach’ about the beating it took one night from the biker gang, pointing out where all the dents and dings had been. Couldn’t see a single one. Lem’s good. Not that he makes anything at it. He’s keeping everyone’s car on the road but barely ekes out a living, surviving mostly on bank loans. From the pit where he was lubing an aging Olds, Pach’ watched the banker. Looked like a guy who never sweated. The sort who did all his work with a nod or two and people jumped. Strong hands, big shoulders, slumping a bit, thick neck and wrists, a guy comfortable with his weight. His brat’s a wimp by comparison. Pach’ ran into Moneybags himself at the Moon last night. The sonuvabitch called him Ugly as if they were still back in high school. Probably thought he was being friendly. Pach’ wanted to paste him one, but the dumb fuck was not worth the trouble. Moneybags was there with his old high school piece and a couple of other wops. They made a date to meet at Lem’s this morning, so if the jerk shows up maybe he’ll get another chance to offer him a knuckle sandwich. For old times’ sake. Certainly he has a few things to tell the smug bastard. Wake him up to the real world.

Pach’ had been sitting there at the bar with three bikers, who were drawing a certain amount of attention. Warrior Apostles, as they called themselves on their studded black jackets. Decorated with dragons, swastikas, American flags, the face of Jesus. Wearing bandannas around their heads and ear studs. One of them had a patch on his jacket with what looked like Brunist symbols. Though the Baxter kid was not among them, he knew who they were, knew about all the trouble they’d caused, about their killing of Ben’s dog, their trashing of the camp, and so on, but he was drunk and past caring about all that shit and settled for a quiet bull session, fantasizing for a moment about another kind of life. If somebody had tried to throw them out, he would have taken their side as another outsider, and he rather hoped that might happen. Needed a good brawl to get his head straight again. Take on the fucking world. Didn’t care for the spic with the greasy duck’s ass hairdo, reminded him too much of the prison trusty who called him “Tonto” and tried to rape him, and the one who did all the talking was like a raw nerve with a loose mouth at the end and an unwashed mop of hair on top, a cranked-up badass who’d as soon knife you as say hello; but the hairy one with the midget face and no ears was half real and they got on all right. Talking with him, Pach’ could see that bikers had less lonely lives than he had, stuck as he was in his cage, as they called it. He asked them what they were doing hanging out in a shithole like this, and they said they were just passing through, be gone before sun-up. When the hairy one left, Pach’, dough running out and well plastered, left too. They exchanged grunts out in the parking lot and headed off in opposite directions, Pach’ passing a car that came barreling up the narrow road with its lights off. He flashed at it. Caught a glimpse of a fat guy hunkered over the wheel. Hard to tell. No lights on top but might have been heat.

The early morning light is leaking through the thick overcast sky. The camp will be stirring soon, but there’s still time to swing by the lodge on his way out to make himself a couple of sandwiches from the camp kitchen. His week’s wages, so to speak, well earned. When he turns off the motor and steps out of the van, he is struck by the moist dead quiet all around him, and it takes him back to Sunday mornings here at church camp all those years ago, when he’d rise before everyone else and walk into the more remote regions of the grounds to commune directly with God or nature or just with himself as he was then, green and hopeful. Suck up the morning dew. Jerk off. Deep into the summer, there’d be the sweet smell of vegetal decay, the ground hard underfoot, the promise of a hot sun; now it’s softer and denser than that, the greens brighter against the creosoted cedar cabins, even in the gray light—or because of it. There were no postlamps or phone lines then. Looks almost like a small mountain village now, nestled in the trees like something out of a storybook. The minister’s wife has planted a flower garden in front of the cabin next to the lodge that she and Colin are using and it’s in full flower, and there are other sprinkles of color in the high grass, mostly the yellows and whites and pale blues of flowering weeds, which he’s running through now, not knowing when he started, his heart pounding, a cry, a scream, shredding the silence, sounded like his name, his old one, the one she knows him by, racing past the cabins into the wet valley beyond, over tree roots and fallen branches, slashing through the shadowed ferns and sedges at the edge of the creek and splashing down into it in a single bound, stumbling on the stones there, turning his ankle, dropping to his knees in the water, everything slowing down, seeming to, his movements thickening as if in a dream, a terrified yowling, but pressing on, scrambling laboriously up the other side through the shrubs and brambles, losing his footing and sliding back down, clambering up on all fours, headed, he knows now, for that wild place where he used to spy on the minister’s wife, the patch of meadow in the woods, where he can hear voices, stifled laughter, tearing through the thorny forest undergrowth, crashing at last into the clearing, where he expects to find his old nem esis Junior Baxter, and does, but not as imagined, two guys in leather pinning him down on his back, that wild-eyed loudmouth biker and a fierce burrhead, orange fuzz on top, must be Junior’s kid brother, their knives out—are they killing him?—Junior gagged with the biker’s blue dew rag, naked but for what look like girls’ cotton panties stretched over his fat gut, his face bloody, mouth agape, maybe already dead, no sign of Elaine but a scatter of tunics that makes his heart sink, the biker and Junior’s brother rising to meet him, and then he hears her, or hears something, sees her, must be her, a pale naked thing back in the trees, two other guys rushing out from there, the spic and an older guy, blades flashing in their fists, it’s the fucker who set the fuzz on Face, cries the wild-eyed one crouched over Junior, and he knows that to get to Elaine he will have to go through them. His handgun’s back in the van. All he has are his fists. Nothing to do but meet what comes next…

II.7

Sunday 3 May

Debra has left her panties in the woods but there’s no going back to get them now. No going back there ever. It was her favorite place in the world, but she is afraid of it now. She sits in her nursing chair with the slashed velvet seat cuddling a distraught Colin, trying to stop her own crying because she knows it makes him cry, wishing she could seal up this cabin and never leave it. Debra has always been known for her cheerful optimism—Wesley himself used to say she came right out of a Hollywood movie—and even when times were difficult she could always see the positive side, but now she feels utterly destroyed, sunk in that slough of despond she once read about in a book in college and didn’t really understand. In fact, it was just a joke—Wesley’s joke, really. Let poor Christian Pilgrim into your slough of despond, he would whisper, back when he would still whisper such things and do such things, turning it into just a wet sticky place, not a dreadful condition of the soul. Such a place as cannot be mended, the book said: the joke after her hymen broke, thought funny then, terrifying now. An abyss has opened up and nothing is funny. Colin has stopped sobbing but is still trembling like a frightened rabbit, like the little bunny she once had as a child, the one her mother said died of too much loving, and she strokes his silky hair and presses his head against her bosom, which always calms him, trying, as her own tears flow, not to let her chest heave and set him off again.

The day had begun so peacefully, well before dawn. Her worries—about money (it is all gone), about the threat of having to leave their cabin, about Colin’s daily ups and downs and the personal conflicts in the camp which upset him so—had seemed to drop away and a great contentment stole over her, as often happens when she is close to nature, which for Debra is the same thing as being close to God. The sky was overcast. There was no moon and the streetlamps had been turned off at midnight. She felt invisible as she slipped past the cabins and down through Bluebell Valley accompanied only by birdsong, the ground soft underfoot from the recent rain and the padding of long grasses. Instead of crossing the creek by one of the wooden bridges, she decided to take off her sandals and wade over, her toes and the soles of her feet scouting the rocky bed before taking each step like little prowling animals nibbling at the unseen stones. It was deeper than usual and there was an arousing rush of current against her ankles. She paused in the middle, and gathering up her skirt, knelt to scoop up a palmful of water, sipping a drop or two, then washing her face with the dampness that remained, feeling like an ancient priestess performing her holy ablutions. She prayed simply that nothing ever change, her prayer directed to the tender night more than to any being, then stepped on across and slipped her sandals on again. There was a small incline on the other side, and though it was pitch black in there under the trees, she seemed to know exactly where to plant each foot, and she felt full of grace as she rose up it.

She avoided the clearing, partly because the two young people sometimes came there, or used to before that strange ugly man who so frightened Colin turned up, and though she disapproved of their behavior, she did not want to seem to interfere with it, circling around through the trees until she found a little patch of pine needles behind some bushes where she could squat for her morning pee. Which she has always thought of, when able to avoid the suffocating outhouse and steal over to her private garden among the waking birds, as one of the most sacred moments of her day. Not the most Presbyterian of sacraments, but she loves it all the more for that very reason. She has sometimes gone there just as dawn was breaking, the sun’s rays slanting gloriously through the thick trees then as though the divinity were joining her there in a kind of blessing. For fear of alarming the other campers, though she is not at all shy, she is forced to do this on the sly. But in the old days, between camping sessions, when the place was empty, depending on whether or not it was the mosquito season, she often wore no clothes at all around the camp, squatting whenever and wherever she felt like, bathing in the creek, sunning in the small meadow or even amid the bluebells and wildflowers next to the access road or right in front of the lodge on the patch of lawn there, putting her body in God’s hands. And sometimes she didn’t even care about the mosquitoes, accepting their stings like little love bites. The camp has never had a serious tick problem, though there is always a risk, adding an edge of danger to these excursions. People think that ticks drop from the trees, but actually they stay close to the ground and latch on from below. She did once get one and she had to bend over so Wesley could pull it out. He was so squeamish. Finally she had to bat his hand away and do it herself.