Origin of the Brunists

1

Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee seven and seven, the male and his female …

West Condon, as though unable to gaze any longer upon the deep black reach of night, rolls over on its back to receive the Monday sun, now rising, as men say, in the eastern sky: the eye of God, the golden chariot, the communal hearthfire and source of life, the solar center that, for all its berserk fury, still works its daily anodyne magic on man’s ultimately incurable disease of dread and despair. Its first rays glance off the top of the West Condon Hotel, the high school flagpole, roof and treetops, the Deepwater No. 9 tipple and watertower, and, close by, the small irregular rise, now internationally known as the Mount of Redemption, where this morning occasional white chicken feathers lie like a fall of manna, their barbs gummed into clumps by the dew. Although no one is out at the mine, on the flagpole, or in the treetops, and thus cannot see the sun until at least another hour’s roll has lapsed, and though, as a matter of further fact, almost none will bother to look at it when it can be seen, its radiations are nevertheless early perceived: they shred dreams, calm the sleepless, turn West Condon on: clocks sound, radios crow, throats hack, razors buzz, frypans heat, toilets flush, children scuffle, doors bang, church and school bells ring, forks clink, toasters pop, motors turn over, sweepers roar, it is Monday morning.

Justin Miller, editor and publisher of the West Condon Chronicle, rouses himself from the jobroom sofa, where he has spent the night, camera at his side, in a vain attempt to catch further demonstrators or looters in the act. He feels, in a word, rotten. Dirty, unshaved, tired, disgusted. When there is enough light, he steps outside in the street to take photos of the broken windows, the cross on the door, then develops and prints them immediately for quick sale to the wireservices and photo magazines. He decides to leave the damages unrepaired as one further curiosity for the newshounds who will descend on the town, noses at the ready, this weekend — indeed, the back lot of the hotel is already filling up with cars — and now simply boards up the windows from the inside with cardboard ripped from packing boxes. He is still at the task when his office and advertising people begin to arrive, and, given his bearish temper this morning, he is hardly delighted to learn that his indispensable office girl, bookkeeper, librarian, classified ads chief, and social columnist Annie Pompa will not show up … for “religious” reasons, one of the other girls explains, then tenders her own resignation. “Ah shit!” the editor is heard to lament.

The morning does not go well. The ad force returns glumly from futile rounds, reporting they weren’t even allowed in the door most places. Miller encourages them not to worry about it, he anticipated as much, didn’t he? A little patience and things will return to normal. The girls up front, those who remain, receive angry phonecalls canceling subscriptions, but he tells them to accept them gracefully and to arrange for larger bundles to be left at newsstands. No one, he knows, will want to be without the paper, and after it’s all over they will all renew. Without Jones, however, the pressures of the day mount. Miller attempts to gather most of the routine material by phone, but gets almost no response from anyone. Even Dee Romano at the police station hangs up on him.

Just before heading to Fisher’s coffeeshop for breakfast, he hears from Barney Davis: the mine is closed. He banners that instead of the Brunists, but ties it to the Brunist story. At the coffeeshop, he finds Robbins, Elliott, and Cavanaugh already discussing the closing, the word having flown ahead of him. Cavanaugh turns his back as Miller enters. Amuses him. Cavanaugh could be like a little kid playing cops and robbers, getting mad and going home when the others wouldn’t fall dead when shot.

“Highest paid industrial worker in the U.S.,” Robbins is snarling. “If he had any brains, he’d take a cut in pay to keep his goddamn mines open.” Cavanaugh settles into his traditional role of defending the moderate labor movement, Elliott agreeing with everybody. Merest rituals.

“Pecan waffles, Doris,” he says. They turn on him, then turn away.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Robbins is arguing. “I’m not saying the miners don’t deserve good pay and good working conditions. I’m only saying—”

“They don’t deserve good pay and good working conditions,” says Cavanaugh.

“In a lot of ways now, you have to admit, Burt’s right,” Elliott offers by way of mediation. Right is right: he’s a goddamn fascist. And so on. Over and over. “Coalmining is a marginal business these days, and the union has pretty much brought on itself the closing down of so many.”

Traditionally now, it is his, the expert’s line: “That and dieselization of the railroads and strip-mining and the profit motive and the rising cost of machinery and underground gasification and rulings on—”

“Hark ye,” interrupts Robbins, “to the white turd!” Not even much laughter. It is, from their end of the counter, all too true. Well, anyway, they’re reading his newspaper. And, in spite of their anger, in spite of his battered plant and decimated force, even in spite of his breakup with Marcella, Miller feels oddly pleased with himself. He has not, by God, been assimilated.

There is an awkward silence then, and something seems to be missing. Puzzles Miller for a moment. Then he realizes it is Jones’ absence. At just such moments, Jones would always grunt, cueing the others to amused attention. Time for a story. Most likely horrible, for Jones was horrible, horrible but decorated with a deathly humor, for Jones was also funny. The Father. A reservoir of gaudy misery, he collected horror like others collect stamps. And he never failed to get them. They always attended when Papa Jones cast his bloody pearls. Now, without him, they stand, exit as a group.

“Where’s Wally this morning?” Miller asks Doris, who has just cleaned the crud off the grill with a dishcloth which she is now using to dry a few coffee cups.

“Who, the boss?” She arches one penciled brow, loose-wristedly flaps a palm at him. “Spent the night on the Legion floor. Can’t walk, can’t turn his neck, can’t talk, he’s in a hell of a mess! When I seen him coming down the street like that, I thought, oh-oh! Doris, old girl, you better take the day off! But you know what?”

“What?”

“He come in giggling like a idiot!” Doris whirs one index finger around her ear. “Now he’s upstairs sleeping it off.”

A couple East Condoners enter the coffeeshop, take stools at the other end of the counter from him. Look at first like newsmen, but they turn out to be salesmen passing through. Newspapers — including his Saturday night edition — rattle, eggs sizzle and pop on the grill, coffee cups clank. The salesmen kid with Doris and the one reading the Chronicle asks if she’s ready to meet her Maker.

“Which maker?” she retorts flatly, hand on grease-stained hip. “I been made by so many, I wouldn’t know one from the other.”

The salesmen whoop at that. Even Doris grins as she flops the eggs to platters, glances over at Miller and winks. And now, treated to this classic, they will travel and the word will be carried. Miller grins at that, as Doris turns, flips up the top of the waffle iron. Sloppy as she is, she never misses the moment: they’re always golden brown.

Miller receives them. “A blessing, Doris!” he praises, pouring syrup. “You’re a goddamn saint!”

The Brunist Mrs. Betty Wilson is waiting for him on his return to the office, posted plumply and skittishly in the chair by his desk, and her news depresses him deeply: Giovanni Bruno seems much stronger now, it’s almost like he’s suddenly come alive, but his sister, she says, hasn’t eaten a bite or said a word for nigh on a week now, and she seems, well, a bit strange. “Sometimes she don’t even, even take care of herself, Mr. Miller. But nobody blames you, Mr. Miller. Leastways, not me or Clara or Wanda or Mary. We know they’s more to it than meets the eye.” What met the eye was Marcella arriving hysterical and more or less stripped.

“Thanks, Mrs. Wilson. You’re quite right.”

“Clara is jist tearin’ up the countryside, Mr. Miller, and now Ben Wosznik he’s helpin’ her, you remember Ben. Oh, the most terrible thing! Last Friday, the very day they crucified Christ Jesus, why, a whole buncha men come and beat up poor Ben, yes, that there Mr. Cavanaugh and Mr. Bonali and a whole buncha them fellas. And they drug poor Mary Harlowe right outa her own house and like to kidnap her little children, it was jist awful! They come to the Halls’ place, too, I seen them, but Mabel she didn’t let them in, and that’s jist a good thing she didn’t! And now Ben and Clara, why, they’re lookin’ for more folks to come next weekend and Clara she’s very optimistic. Of course, you know how she is, Mr. Miller. And that Palmers boy, he’s got seven or eight new members somewheres, though of course them young ones hardly ever stays on.”

All good stuff. Miller gets more details on the Common Sense visits, then he tips her, and the woman leaves. Irresistibly, he opens his desk drawer, takes out Jones’ photos. There you are, he says: the Tiger. Look at her face. Jones caught it all. Well, she’s mad, he tells himself, and it was she, staking too much on a thin fantasy, who broke herself; he was little more than the accidental instrument … his audience, however, remains unconvinced. Conscience, he knows, is merely instinct socialized into guilt— Can one, knowing this, still fall prey to it? Yes, concludes this man much given to this sort of theorizing, another flaw in the evolution of mind. He dumps the photos back in the drawer, realizing the whole thing is starting to make him sick.

Then, like an act of grace, there appears in his morning mail, a black-bordered envelope.

One day during the Last Judgment proceedings, there appeared before the Judge a prophet and his beautiful sister. Aha! said the Judge to the prophet: I believe I know you! Yes, smiled the prophet with modest pride: I foretold your coming. How could you have done such a thing, asked the Judge: when I didn’t even know myself? Perhaps there is another, replied the prophet with a sly inscrutable wink over the Judge’s shoulder: yet greater than either of us. Hmmm, said the Judge, considering that: yet it seems improbable. What is probability in a universe such as ours? asked the prophet. I don’t know, I guess I was just a born skeptic, said the Judge with a wry knowing smile: But now what am I to do with you? I suppose you want to go to Heaven. Well, uh, no, Your Honor, replied the prophet: if you don’t mind, I’d rather like — hee hee — to be put in charge of Hell. Hah! good boy! said the Judge: It’s done! When, however, the Supreme Judge asked the prophet’s sister, whose beauty might have weakened any lesser Judge, she opted for Heaven.

— And why do you wish to be admitted to Heaven, my dear?

— Because I am afraid to be where you are not.

— But you can never be where I am.

— Because … because I believe in you.

— And if I do not believe in myself?

— Because you are perfect.

— What is your imperfection?

— Because you are beautiful.

— You, too, are beautiful. Where is the reason?

— Because, then, because I need you.

— Your need is a burden, inappropriate in Heaven.

— Because I find fullness only with you.

— What do you lack?

— Because … because I love you.

— In Heaven, there are no transitive verbs.

— Then because I shall cry if you do not admit me!

— Your tears, my sweet, shall water Hell.

The next supplicant, a virgin who shall here be otherwise nameless, was brought before the Judge. Her virginity, of course, was not a possession (the Judgment itself made property an absurd contradiction), but rather of the essence, a thing happily forever renewable, if in fact with use it ever aged.

— And why do you wish to be admitted to Heaven?

— What is Heaven?

— Why, Heaven is where I am.

— And where are you?

— I have said.

— And so have I.

The Judge smiled and because, to tell the truth, there had never been a Heaven before, the Judge and the virgin forthwith created one and had a Hell of a good time doing it….

But when he calls her, he finds her cold and indifferent, as though she might be resenting having sent him what she did, and it takes him awhile, but after all, in the end, they both have a fear of Hell, and she says finally, “Okay, Tiger. You’re the Judge.” And, somehow, they’re both able to laugh.

Midmorning finds Eleanor Norton stopped dead in her tracks downtown at the corner of Third and Main. She has been wandering absently through the bright town, shocked that others use light without perceiving what they use, and has arrived now at this corner where suddenly everything seems incredibly strange. People pass and their stares prove her corporeal existence, and yet it is as though …

Don’t you see, dear Elan? You have passed through!

Ah! But, but who are you?

You know me and yet you do not know me.

Domiron!

I have come briefly to bring you hope and renewed assurance. Do not forsake your vision, Elan! do not forsake me!

How could I! But where am I? I seem to be here and yet not here. Am I at the seventh aspect?

No, we have met, let us say, halfway.

Are you — I’ve always wanted to ask — are you the only God?

Perhaps not, Elan, but such is our relationship at this level that that can be thought of as the case.

“Wait!”

Yes?

“I … I love you!”

Your love is known and dear to me. You would never have found me without it, for existence at the seventh aspect is pure love itself, without form, without object, without act.

“How strange! I seem to have known that all along!”

Is that strange?

“And am I worthy?”

Look about you at these staring faces. Do they perceive the light?

“No.”

Do they hear my voice?

“No.”

Do they even wish to? Do they try? Could they even dream of it?

“No.”

Then you have given response to yourself, have witnessed the gulf between you and men. Yet, remember, Elan: every created thing is divine, even these stupid foolish men!

“Yes, yes! God is all that is!”

Therefore, hark ye, Elan! I say to you that a time has been ordained and a time is to come. Time is not, yet a time must end: Stand on high without remorse and look about thee eastward with love!

“I shall!”

You have.

“Never leave me!”

As you love me, Elan, so I love you. Lo! I am with you always!

She returns. The objects solidify, the street hardens. She occurs before their eyes, creates ears for their laughter. She pities them. The dense ones, the lost ones. “I love you all,” she says, then steps forward. Their circle rends to let her pass.

Ugly Palmers stands in the noisy melancholic corridors of old WCHS, leaning against Elaine’s locker, at noon. He sees it all as if for the first time, hears only now the music in the excited voices and banging lockers, smells as though they had never before existed the dense sweaty odors of the generations which have passed through here. Nostalgically, he munches an apple, runs his fingers over the cool surface of Elaine’s locker. An end to this! Sometimes it seems almost unbelievable. Already, though he still has a whole week to enjoy it here, he is feeling the pain of irrevocable loss. And yet: he is happy.

Elaine, however, arrives crying, her little face streaked with tears, blowing her nose in one of her Pa’s big handkerchiefs. There’s something so lovable about her blowing her nose in one of those great big handkerchiefs, something so terrible about her tears. “What’s the matter, Elaine?”

She snuffles, more tears come, she opens her locker, shoves her books in, but she doesn’t answer.

“What is it, Elaine? Why’re you crying?”

“I cain’t tell you,” she whispers. She pulls out a brown paper bag, containing her lunch, from the locker, then closes it again.

“Why not?”

“It’s too bad.”

“Bad?” Carl Dean bristles. “You can tell me, Elaine. You still love me, don’t you?”

She nods, looks up at him with reddened eyes. Her look always gets him. “It was something Junior Baxter said. In front of everybody.”

Carl Dean feels his muscles tense, his back straighten, his fists ball shut. But he feels very cool now. This is something he can handle. “What was it?” he asks.

“He called me … he called me …”

“Look, why don’t you write it?” he suggests. He gives her a pencil stub and she uses the paper lunchbag. Her face reddens and her eyes water up again as she writes. She turns away and he reads: HORE. He sets his teeth. Looks around. Never find him now. But Junior’s first class after lunch is history. They eat their lunch in dark silence, holding hands.

He walks Elaine to her class, then goes down the hall to look for Junior. Class has already begun and Junior Baxter is on the far side of the room, next to the windows, between Joey Altoviti and Angie Bonali. Boy, what a bunch of enemies! He has no choice. He strides into the room, trying to act official about it. “Excuse me,” he says, “but I have to talk with Junior Baxter a minute.” Junior shrinks into his seat, toward the aisle, but Carl Dean drags him out. Books spill and girls cry out. Junior grabs onto his desk, starts whining like a baby, kicks out, but he is weaker than a girl. Carl Dean hauls him out the door, paying no mind to the teacher’s protest, and in the corridor gives Junior a thrashing. Junior puts up no defense to speak of, so Carl Dean alternates his blows by whim between the boy’s beanbag belly and his fat white face. When blood is running out his mouth and nose and Junior starts to vomit, Carl Dean lets up. “Now you just watch how you talk to girls from now on,” he says.

He realizes then he has a considerable audience. One of them is the principal, Mr. Bradley. “Come with me, young man!” Mr. Bradley says. In the office, Carl Dean starts to explain, but Mr. Bradley cuts him off. “I know who you are,” he says. “Now, you go down and clean out your locker, turn in everything you might have checked out, bring the locker key back to me … and get out of here!”

“Get out—?”

“You are expelled!”

So, he does what Mr. Bradley has told him to do, but in a kind of daze, wondering how it could ever have happened, how his life could have turned out this way, and altogether it takes him about forty-five minutes, so he is able to catch Elaine in the corridor between fifth and sixth hour classes. He tells her all that happened and he doesn’t know exactly what he wants her to do about it, but she does it anyway. She takes ahold of his hand like she doesn’t mean ever to let go and says if he has to go, then she’s going too, and that’s how it is that they walk out of there together, laughingly in love, and the day, crazy as it is, is beautiful.

Elaine’s Ma is that moment over in Randolph Junction with another Brunist, Ben Wosznik, concluding the most successful day so far. The newspaper stories have carried their fame far and wide, and the way, she discovers, has been prepared. Naturally, there are those who scoff, there always are, but there are many who do not. Above all, she does not encounter out here that kind of implacable hostility she has run up against in West Condon. And, of course, the people with whom she speaks have, almost all of them, known and respected her and Ely for years and years, such that even the scoffers scoff gently.

The Cleggs, Hiram and Emma, to whom she and Ben now bid farewell, are two of at least fifteen people who have said they would try to come next weekend, and, what is more, they believe they can bring another half dozen or so with them. Both Hiram and Emma are important leaders of the Randolph Junction Church of the Nazarene. Clara tells them how the Spirit has truly taken on flesh, that a new day is come, brought by the White Bird, which would last to the end of the world.

“Amazing! To be sure, there is something great here!” Hiram says, nodding gravely, and Emma listens wide-eyed.

Clara recounts the prophecies and the signs, tells of Ely’s premonitions and his disaster message, explains how so many folks arrived at the same truth by different paths, and mentions the secret aspects of it which of course cannot be let out until they actually join. She’s noticed the effect this usually has.

“And a prophetic cross, you say?”

“You mean like to tell the future?” Emma asks. “Oh, Hiram! we must go see!”

“Yes, dear, I quite agree.”

Clara also is careful to mention how the Mother Mary has played a part, because she has discovered this idea has a tremendous appeal wherever she goes. Ben tells them again how he himself was attracted to the group and why he has stayed on. It’s just plain common sense to come and have a look for yourself, he says.

“True! That’s true!” says Hiram.

Ben’s frank and earthy manner impresses people.

Driving back toward West Condon together, Clara tells Ben how big a help he has been to her. He tells her then how much he admires her, and adds surprisingly that if she ever thought of remarrying, he would like to be considered. She says she hasn’t been thinking about any such thing. He tells her that he understands perfectly well and certainly he could never hope to hold a candle to so great a man as Ely Collins, but he only wanted her to know how he felt. Just like Ben, she thinks, to put it so plain like that. Anyways, he adds, there’s no point even concerning themselves about it until after next Sunday, if there is an afterwards, but he does go on to mention anyway the Bible story about the woman who was widowed seven times. Of course, that story has already occurred to her. And then something Elaine reminded her of yesterday morning, something she had almost forgot, something Ely used to say in almost every preaching, comes back to her now and it has all the ring of a prophecy to it: “Grace is not something you die to get, it is something you get to live!”

One moment, Colin Meredith is assured of the end and ecstatic with its glorious promise, the next, plunged into deepest despair in seeing it can never be, then relieved and even made joyful by the certainty of continuance, the certainty of more life, next terrorized by a sudden paralyzing vision of the final horror now upon them. For one sublime and exquisite moment, he embraces and is embraced by all, the boy of the Brunists, the loved one, he upon whom all depend, the all without whom he is forever lost; and then, suddenly, he is utterly alone, ignored, forgotten, unwanted — Eleanor is self-absorbed and impatient, Carl Dean deserts him for a girl, Giovanni does not even see him, a woman laughs cruelly in his face. Though he has willed an end to all his vices, they return to overwhelm him. Chaste in principle, he seeks lecherous solace in the act of love. Spent, he sinks miserably into self-disgust, returns repentant to his vows and to his friends, only to meet rebuff and anguish and to fall again in sin. She is beautiful, but her beauty is ultimately a terror to him; she is enormous, but her enormity protects him. She is brilliant with Mr. Himebaugh’s cold true brilliance, and her passion is as spontaneous and furious as Carl Dean’s temper. Her eyes are gray and wise, and her mouth is young and full and eager. Her breasts, sweet to his hungry mouth, are greater even than Mrs. Wilson’s, her hips, which quiver in his grip, mightier even than Mrs. Hall’s. Her arms grip with the strength of Mr. Wosznik, her hands, like Mrs. Cravens’, tear at his flesh, her massive thighs squeeze and kick like a mare’s, and her hair, wild as the prophet’s, whirls and snarls and clings to his body. Her womb, fertile as Mrs. Harlowe’s, grabs him like a fist and wrings the seed from his body and angels sing and sweat beads his forehead—“Mother!” he cries out, and sucks, bites, chews the hard nipple of his pillow. “Son!” she says, and sinks away from him into the dark and hollow earth.

We all were so happy there together

In our peaceful little mountain home,

But the Savior needed angels up in heaven:

Now they’re singin’ round that great white throne!

Tommy (the Kitten) Cavanaugh has, at long last, climbed that famous furry mountain and passed into manhood. Spent, yet firm and ready as ever — a tiger, man! — he cuddles naked with her in a corner of the Lincoln’s rangy back seat, staring out on the old ice plant, only witness to the miracle of his accomplishment. He rolls down the window, and, turning his back to her — which she kisses and softly scratches — he slips the fragile skin off: like a young snake enjoying his first molt. Taking care to hold it cuplike so as not to make an even worse mess in his Dad’s car, he flips it out, regretting that it could not be kept somehow as a souvenir. He’s still wet where the skin was and his hands are sticky, so he looks in the clothes on the floor for a handkerchief or something, comes across her panties. “May I?” he asks devilishly, yet at the same time with an intimacy, a camaraderie, he has never known before. She nods, takes them from him, dries him tenderly, looking down at it, her cheeks against his chest. There are dark stains, too, which cause profound pangs of compassion and gratitude to course through him.

“I can hear your heart,” she whispers.

Which is cause for him to listen to hers, and he does so, staring ahead at that stupendous pink bud at the tip of his nose. The two feelings he has not anticipated are the inexpressible after-sense of well-being that now magnifies everything into such tremendous — almost unbearable — beauty, and the terrible nostalgia that goes, he supposes, with any perfect love. For love it is, no doubt about it, the greatest he has ever known and the greatest, he’s sure, he’ll ever know. The unexpected beauty, the excruciating sadness, the intensity of his love, all seem oddly summed up in the silly country music swimming over them from the car radio. He knows now that, though neither of them like hillbilly stuff, it will be, in an inescapable way, their song, and that no matter where they are or who they’re married to, the song will recall for them this moment….

White dove will mourn in sorrow,

And the willows bow down their heads,

I live my life in sorrow,

Since Mother and Daddy are dea-ea-ead!

Sooner or later, in a sad, a terrible, yet also beautiful moment, they will have to talk about religion, that impossible thing, bigger than both of them, cruel to their love, her Catholicism and his Protestantism, and, after that, sooner or later, they will have to tear themselves apart. Forever. Tears spring to the edges of his eyes. There are tears in her eyes, too, and he wonders if her thoughts are the same as his. “I love you,” he says. He kisses her long and tenderly, tragically, and though her whole body is available to him, his embrace is chaste and gentle, a promise of his eternal care for her. So beautiful is she, so virginal, so his … his white dove …

As the years roll by I often wonder,

Will we all be together some day?

And each night as I wander through the graveyard,

Darkness hides me where I kneel to pray!

White dove will mourn in sorrow…

Sainthood, ultimately, is a rising above — not only God — but the Destroyer as well. Saint Rahim, rigid, hungry, but supremely at one with the All, stares meditatively in front of him at springs and the red and blue stripes of a cotton mattress. Illusion at moments of remarkable distance. A great calm. Through discipline to pattern. Distantly, a toilet lid clunks carelessly against the enameled tank. Like a bell in the mind. Shattering of peace, but still the perception of pattern. Again — as always — his childhood washes over and through him here, like an infusion of raw guilt, imprecise as ever in the imagery it calls up, yet piercing in the accuracy of emotions aroused. Panic! This dust—! He twists, squirms, chokes. Then it passes. He sighs. In truth, he feels better just now than he has felt all day, his second to go without food. Just six more days, and they say it gets easier after the third day. He believes he can make it. Abstractly, he worries about his cats. They have also been subjected to a fast, but he is not certain they will survive the week. Except for Nyx. Nyx will survive. He smiles.

Water running. Door hinges revolving. He turns his head, watches her bare feet pad wearily across the wooden floor. Poor dear child! She is very weak. He would give up speech, too, but cannot afford it, not even for her sake. He needs every word at his command to keep the others from faltering. God! he cannot stand alone! She arrives at the bed, pauses. She has forgotten to turn out the light. An urge to kiss her small toes — just a foot from his face — leaps to his lips, but he overmasters it. Discipline is his greatest virtue. She curls a toe. Oh God! He starts to cry, clamps his hand between his teeth, bites down with all his strength. She turns toward the door, hesitating, as though measuring the distance. Then, mechanically, her small feet, under the hem of her tunic, pad back to the door. The light goes off. She no longer troubles to put the hook.

Almost before he realizes it, her feet are near his face again. God! catches his breath, holds himself rigid. At last, she enters the bed. The mattress hardly sinks below her weight now, so thin is she. He reaches up, strokes the gentle depression. Calm returns. He waits for her to sleep. The perfect man is the motionless cause.

2

The news of the mine closing broke on Monday and Sal Ferrero came by Tuesday morning, the fourteenth. Vince was up on the ladder. He had stirred up the old paint, was just putting a new coat over the patch he’d started on the south side nearly a month before. He knew what Sal wanted to talk about, so he hooked the bucket on the top of the ladder, crawled down. They had known it was coming, everybody had known it for weeks, but still it had hit them hard. “It’s awful,” he said. He pulled out his handkerchief, wiped the paint off his hands.

“It’s a real blow, Vince.”

“I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do.” He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket, shaking his head thoughtfully. “Care for a beer, Sal?”

Sal looked at his watch. Poor guy seemed lost. “Pretty early,” he said. “But, hell, okay.” They walked up on the porch, Vince’s four-fingered hand clapped on Sal’s narrow shoulders.

“How about a couple beers, chicken?” Vince called in through the screen door. They eased themselves into chairs like tired old beat-up men. Vince fumbled in his pocket, found a half-smoked cigar butt, stuck it in his cheeks. “Well, goddamn it, I knew they’d do it, Sal.”

“I know.” He sighed, pulling one big ear absently. Looking at his old friend closely, Vince saw for the first time that Sal was getting to be an old man.

Etta came out with the beers, but today there wasn’t any of the usual kidding around. Sal and Etta looked at each other, shook their heads in troubled silence, and she went back in. Last night, she cried for over an hour; in fact, she’d hardly stopped crying since Charlie pulled out without a word Sunday afternoon. She was some better today, but still pretty glum.

“Well,” said Sal, sipping at the beer, “I suppose they did what they had to do.”

“I tell you what they had to do, Sal. They had to think about us, the people of this community, that’s what they by God had to do! Instead of fretting how much they were gonna suck outa here — no, Sal, they ain’t no excuse! It’s high time we started fighting back!”

Sal nodded. Poor guy was really down in the dumps. Vince felt bad, but somehow not as bad as he probably ought to.

“Sure leaves us high and dry, Vince.”

“You said it — and now with all this Brunist shit — Jesus!”

“Sure is getting wild, all right.”

“Wild ain’t the word. Did you see that story Tiger published last night about them people who got together naked and whipped themselves all bloody, and how they got ahold of some little virgin girl and made a big mess outa her?”

“No, I musta missed that. I hardly noticed anything except about the mine closing.”

“Well, there was a white bird in this story, too, or maybe they called themselves a ‘White Dove Gang’ or something, but the awful thing was how they take this girl and tell her she is the Mother of God, see, and they strip her naked and spread her on the altar.” All the while Vince read it, he kept seeing his daughter Angie there, and it made him so mad he wanted to cry. “Then they have a big ceremony and everybody whips her and screws her, just a little virgin, see, who doesn’t know what’s happening.”

“That’s pretty awful, Vince.”

“Wait! You ain’t heard the worst! If she gets knocked up, they strip her again and stick her in a barrel of water. Then they chop off the little kid’s left tit and close up the bloody goddamn hole with a hot iron!”

“Jesus Christ! You mean this was in the newspaper?”

“I’m telling you, Sal! But the point is, they chop this tit up and eat it, see, just like it was the Host—”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Wait! That’s not all! If she has a boy, why, they say that this is the Savior, and they take this little newborn baby and they stab it and drink its blood. Then they dry up the body and beat it to powder, and, Sal, they make bread outa that powder and they eat that, too!”

“Have you still got that paper?”

“Sure, I saved it.”

“But you mean these Brunist people are doing things like that? Why, that’s horrible, Vince! I didn’t realize—”

“Well, this wasn’t the Brunists, this was some people in Russia a hundred years or so ago, but the point is, like Miller is virtually saying, Sal, in the end, they’re all the same.”

“It kinda shakes you up, doesn’t it?”

“And Jesus, right there in the goddamn newspaper, Sal! I didn’t see it at first, it was Angie who found it, and she got all hysterical, why, it was just awful.”

“It is awful. Jesus, I don’t think they should print stuff like that, Vince. Not where young kids can see it and get ideas.”

“I’m not kidding, Sal, sometimes I feel like going down there myself and breaking that sonuvabitch Miller’s neck.”

“It sure seems funny how all of this is fitting together, all this horrible stuff and the mine closing down and the bad times, all that Black Hand trouble we was having, and now, Jesus, all these goddamn newspeople pouring in here, why, the streets are full of them, and they’re just here to make us out a bunch of fools!”

“Don’t I know it?” Vince pulled the unlit butt out of his mouth, stared at it a moment in disgust, pitched it out toward the street.

“I suppose more guys than ever will be moving on now,” Sal said. “Looks like old West Condon is all washed up.”

Vince slammed the rocker arm with his palm so hard it surprised even him and made Sal nearly spill his beer. “We can’t let it die, Sal, we just can’t, goddamn it!” He’d show them the way, by God, he’d find it and show them all. “It’s our town, Sal, and if it dies, we die with it!” Sal shrugged. “Hey! you ain’t figuring on bugging out on me, too, are you?”

Sal grinned, pulled his ear. “No, I suppose not. I’m too goddamn tired to go anywhere.” He sighed. “Sure is funny how a dump like this can grow on you.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” Vince agreed.

“Here we are, Vince, a couple old displaced dagos who’ve got nothing but trouble and the runaround in this damn town, and still, when the chips are down, we can’t seem to let go of it.”

“I been thinking about that lately, Sal. I been thinking a man ain’t born with an attachment to the soil, like they say, or even to a piece of it, he just sort of picks it up as he goes along.”

“You been making too many goddamn speeches,” Sal said.

Vince laughed, downed the rest of his beer. “I tell you the truth, Sal. I been enjoying this work with the Committee.”

“So we’ve noticed.”

“Go ahead, wise off, you bastard, but it’s been a good thing for me. Somehow — I don’t know — but somehow, growing up in an immigrant home and all, I just always had a kind of oddball idea about this place, like I was being kept here against my will and the town was a bunch of goddamn foreigners I didn’t understand and never could.” He paused, leaned back in the rocker, wiped the beer foam from his lip. “But I’ve got so I can see things better, Sal. I’ve caught on to what makes this town tick. Sometimes, goddamn it, I feel like I been fighting the wrong damn fights all this time.”

“Well, you got the right kind of friends, Vince.”

“Yeah, maybe … but, hell,” grinned Vince, “you’re one of them, ain’t you?”

Three of his new friends came by that afternoon, Ted Cavanaugh, Burt Robbins, and Reverend Wesley Edwards of the First Presbyterian. Just in case Ted might drop over, Vince had quit the painting project and cleaned up, now felt smug about his foresight. “We don’t think it will do much good frankly,” Ted said, “but we thought it was at least worth a try to call on Ralph Himebaugh, Dr. Norton, and the Meredith boy. Want to come along?”

“Sure. I’ll go tell Etta.”

In the car, on their way downtown, Vince in the back with the minister, Robbins brown-nosing Cavanaugh up front, Ted told them about some of the latest incidents: Mrs. Norton talking to herself on the street, the Palmers boy getting thrown out of school on bad conduct yesterday, and the Easter Sunday burning of one of Widow Harlowe’s cats, which looked like a revival of the Black Hand activities, maybe even an inside revenge for her having weakened last Friday.

“Oh, Jesus!” Vince said with a shudder, and his missing finger tingled. Catching himself, he started to apologize to the minister, but the guy smiled and shook his head. Likable man, small fellow with a deep hairline, piercing gaze, nervous mouth, very bright.

“We want to be reasonable,” Ted was saying, “but we want them to know what the limits of our tolerance are. If they want to persist in their destructive ways, well, they’re free to do so, but we’d rather they didn’t do it here. We can’t afford it.”

That sounded more like it. Vince was in the mood to kick somebody’s ass out of town. The minister had a pipe stoked up; Ted and Burt had cigarettes going. Vince regretted having forgot his cigars in the anxiety not to hold anybody up. Maybe Ted guessed it: he handed a cigar back over his shoulder. Great guy. “Thanks, Ted.” The minister lit it for him.

“Why don’t we just ask the Nortons to get out?” Robbins suggested. “They’re outsiders anyhow.”

“Well,” the minister said, “I think we want to give them every chance to mitigate their views and become absorbed once more in the community life. Our task is not so much to chastise or threaten, as to define for them what it means to be a West Condoner.”

“Exactly!” said Ted. “Whatever we do, we’ve got to take it easy. We don’t want them to be able to use anything against us. Oh, incidentally, you fellows might like to read this,” he added, passing a letter back.

It was addressed to the mayor, came from a man named Wild in a town over in the next state. The guy was bitching about his son’s getting spooky letters from Mrs. Norton, trying to get the boy to leave home, come to West Condon before the 19th. He told how they’d had to boot her out of Carlyle about a year or so ago, and warned the mayor that she was a complete nut and had a perverted interest in young boys. “Whew! Pretty hot stuff!” Vince commented, handing the letter to the minister.

Ted parked in front of Savings and Loan, and they walked up to the second floor where Himebaugh had his law office. “He was here about an hour ago,” Ted whispered on the stairs. “If he’s gone, we’ll try his house.”

But he was there, cleaning papers out of file cabinets and desk drawers, dumping them indiscriminately into a large trash basket. He looked up at them, smiled oddly. “Good afternoon, gentlemen! How have you been?”

“Good to see you again, Ralph!” Ted beamed. “Ralph, you know Burt, Wes. This is Vince Bonali—”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Himebaugh.”

“My pleasure, I assure you.”

What odd words these were! Things you said every day, but now they had such a weird ring, ghostly. “What are you throwing away there?” Vince asked, to get the ball rolling.

“Oh, damage suits, Mr. Bonali. Wills. Liquor licenses.” Vince had heard the guy was shy, but if so, he hardly showed it now. Bright humorous gleam in his eyes, bold gestures, firm handshake. Kind of tremble there, though. “Did you gentlemen ever stop to consider how inutterably absurd our legal institutions are?”

“Sure, lots of times!” laughed Ted easily. “I don’t know who’s more absurd, though, the institutions or the damned attorneys who invent them!”

The lawyer smiled faintly, but something seemed to give way. He sat down, motioned them to chairs. They remained standing.

“Of course, there’s an element of the absurd in every institution, isn’t there, Ralph?” Reverend Edwards asked. “Any society is a kind of jerryrig at best, and it’s hard to think of one without the compromises that make it seem absurd.”

“Yes,” Himebaugh agreed. His fingers were pressed together prayerlike in front of him and they trembled. “That’s how it usually seems to turn out, all right.” A kind of smile jumped to his face, jumped away. “But no more.”

“But that’s pretty much what it means to be a man, isn’t it, Ralph?” Ted asked. “Holding on to one’s beliefs on the one hand, one’s ideals, and on the other, accommodating oneself to the institution, making changes in it where it seems—”

“No, not at all!” snapped the lawyer. He leaned forward on one unsteady elbow, and his lips seemed to flush pink. Kind of flutter in the thick brows as he looked up at them. The guy looked in pretty bad shape, now that Vince observed more closely. Awful thin. “To be a whole man is to be at one with the—”

“Aw, come on, Ralph,” Robbins cut in. “Let’s talk plain. All Ted’s trying to say is a guy can believe what he wants to believe, and still get along with—”

“You can’t know one thing and act otherwise,” the lawyer said. Precise enunciation, tremulous undercurrent. The total insane calm of the man and his weird shifty eyes were beginning to get to all four of them. “You can’t know that fire burns and put your hand into it.”

“No? Well, goddamn it, Ralph,” Cavanaugh said gruffly, “that seems to me just what the hell you’re doing!”

The lawyer smiled, lips quivering. “Maybe I’ve gone the next step. Maybe I’ve found out that fire doesn’t burn, after all.”

“Oh, hell, Himebaugh!” Robbins said. “Don’t you see, we’re here to help you get out of this thing.”

“I don’t want help. I don’t need help.” No smiles now. Very white. Very goddamn sick.

“Well, man, it’s now or never. Don’t expect us to come around Monday to give you a hand when you’ve got this whole town ready to ride you out on a rail—”

“There won’t be a Monday, you fools!” Himebaugh cried. He leaped up, grabbed a pile of papers, heaved them at them. A folder struck Vince right on the bridge of his nose, made his eyes smart. He moved in, fists doubled, but Ted held him back. “Get out! Get out!” the lawyer screamed. Threw more heaps of paper. Jesus, he was really cracking up! Paper flying everywhere like a goddamn flock of mad birds let loose. “Get out, I say! Get out, you fools, or I’ll kill you!” Banging of cabinet doors. His screams echoed. Waste-basket rattled off a wall. “I’ll kill you!” They heard him screaming like that all the way out to the street.

On the way to the Nortons, they talked about it. Even Ted was shocked, and they all noticed how his health had deteriorated. Vince, embarrassed by the tears, repeated several times how the folder had caught him square on the nose. “I felt like laying into that guy right then and there!” he boomed. “Good thing you held me back, Ted!”

It was already dusk when they stepped heavy-footed onto the Nortons’ front porch, knocked. Dr. Norton came to the door. Looked like they might have waked him up. “Hello, fellows, come on in.” Soft gentle voice. You could hardly hear him. Vince started forward, but Ted, holding his ground, blocked him.

“I don’t think it will take us long to say what we’ve come to say, Dr. Norton,” Ted said.

Norton’s wife, the schoolteacher Vince had driven in from the coalmine one day a couple months or so ago, stepped up behind the veterinarian. “What is it, Wylie?”

“These men …”

“We just came to say it might be better for you and for everybody,” Robbins said, “if you just sort of moved on.”

“Now, wait a moment, Mr. Robbins,” the minister interrupted. “I think we want to give Dr. and Mrs. Norton every opportunity to reconsider the whole thing. You see, Dr. Norton, we — that is, all of us here in West Condon — have become concerned about certain activities which, we feel, are not in the best interests of—”

“Why, gentlemen!” laughed Mrs. Norton. “All this has happened before!”

“How’s that?” asked Reverend Edwards, biting down on his lower lip.

“Look, Wylie! the dark one!” Vince broke into a strange sweat under her excited gaze. She smiled at him. “We are not going to leave.”

“Well,” said Reverend Edwards, “that’s what I’m trying—”

“We have been expecting you. We have been pursued by you all our lives, and we knew that you would find us here. But we have been brought here to consummate our life’s work, and we are never going to run again. We are not afraid.”

Robbins’ neck was blushing red, a sure sign. “Maybe you better think again—”

“We are going to the Mount of Redemption on Sunday to await the Coming of the Light. I hope you gentlemen will find it in your hearts to join us there. Now, go away and bother us no more. Wash the earth from your hands and feet and cast your eyes to the limitless stars!”

“That’s nutty!” said Robbins. “Show ’em the letter.”

“Forget it,” said Cavanaugh. He showed by his look, his back turned coldly on the Nortons, that he considered it a lost cause.

They made one final call. And this one worked. At the orphanage, Reverend Edwards and Ted Cavanaugh pinned the Meredith kid in one lamplit corner. The old hotbox technique. Vince himself had used it in the union organizing days. Meredith was a pansy and it didn’t take much to break him. Suddenly, in a flood of tears, he said he was sorry, it was all wrong, embraced Cavanaugh like a father, disclaimed the Brunists, said they’d been persecuting him from the start, hinted they might have been whipping him, and, in fear of them, he asked to be hidden away. Reverend Edwards, deeply moved, offered his home for the rest of the week. The boy wept gratefully, then cheered up, became even joyful on the ride to the Presbyterian manse, and it made them all feel good. Won one!

Or so they thought. That night, Tuesday, not only the goddamn local paper and the city papers were headlining the Brunist story, but it was even featured on the six o’clock televised newscast. Helicopter movies of West Condon and the coalmine, blown-up stills of some of Tiger Miller’s photos, and the announcer saying: “In this placid little American community of West Condon, a small band of devout believers, calling themselves followers of the coalminer-prophet Giovanni Bruno, believe that on Sunday evening, the nineteenth of April, the world will end. In expectation of their own salvation, they will gather on this little knoll here, near the Deepwater Number Nine coalmine, where only three months ago an explosion and fire killed ninety-seven men. From that catastrophe, on Sunday, January eleventh, one man was rescued, this man—”

“Daddy!” Angie called out from her bedroom and he nearly went a foot up off his chair. “Listen to this!”

She threw open her door, the radio turned up fullblast. Cheap country-style music, badly sung. “What’s that?” he asked. She’d taken lately to listening to a lot of that crap, especially the morbid ones about dead people, not excluding dead daddies.

“The Brunists!” she cried. “They’re singing!”

Do not think that God’s Chosen are the mighty!

Do not think that God’s Elect are the high!

Just remember the stories in your Bible:

’Tis the humble whom God doth glorify!

Think of Moses, discovered in a river!

Think of Jesus, a carpenter’s son!

Think of Bruno, a humble coalminer!

’Tis the poor by whom God’s battles are won!

So, hark ye to the White Bird of Glory!

Yes, hark ye to the White Bird of Grace!

We shall gather at the Mount of Redemption

To meet our dear Lord there face to face…

“I’ll be goddamned!” Vince said, and hurried away midchorus to the phone. “Hello, Ted? Vince here. Hey, turn on your radio! The Brunists are singing! They’re on TV, too!”

“Jesus Christ, what next! Vince, I’ve got some bad news.”

“Yeah?” Felt the hair on his neck stand up.

“The Meredith boy. Wes Edwards just phoned in a panic to tell me the kid has slashed his wrists with a razor. He’s in the hospital.”

“Jeee-zuss God All-mighty!” Took the wind right out of him. “Is it bad?”

“No, Doc Lewis told Wes it looked very much like the boy’s done it before. Apparently he doesn’t do it to kill himself. But we can’t let go of him now. If he got back to the Brunists, he’d probably try to make murderers of us, or worse, the state of mind he’s in. We’re sending him up to a state hospital tonight. But, listen, Vince, not a word! Miller will probably find out, but if he or anybody asks, you know nothing, okay?”

“Sure, Ted. But Jesus, what a bad break!”

“Nobody’s fault. We might even have saved the boy’s life. No telling what he might have done after Sunday night. But we don’t want Wes Edwards to get mixed up in this if we can help it, and so it’s just as well the Brunists don’t know how he ended up over there. Anyway, he’ll be up there a good while, so there’s no worry about him Sunday night. Just let’s hope Miller doesn’t get wind of it.”

Fat chance. Headlines Wednesday night: BRUNIST KIDNAPPED! COLIN MEREDITH DISAPPEARS FROM WEST CONDON! TREATED AT HOSPITAL FOR INJURIES OR POSSIBLE SUICIDE! LAST SEEN AT HOME OF REV. WESLEY EDWARDS! And so on, big scare stuff. Phone rang. Thinking it was Ted, he answered it. “Mr. Bonali, this is CBS calling. We understand you were with the missing Meredith boy yesterday afternoon, just before his disappearance. Can you tell us—?” In a panic he hung up. Jesus! Kidnapping — that’s FBI stuff, isn’t it? He told Etta to answer the phone, ask who was calling, and if it wasn’t Ted, to say he wasn’t home.

He switched on the TV and — wham! — there was Mrs. Norton’s funny little face. Every now and then, as she turned her head different angles, the floods beamed off her glasses and caused a kind of leap of light around her head. “We do not know what has happened to him. Our … sources, our sources at the higher aspects have informed us that he has fallen into the hands of the powers of darkness. We are … deeply hurt and concerned, but we are not surprised. We have all suffered threats upon our lives and upon our health. We are praying for his deliverance.”

Announcer: “Mrs. Norton, do you have any idea who these powers, uh, these powers of darkness might be?”

Mrs. Norton: “Yes!” She paused, fingering a little medallion on her breast that flicked light back at the lens like a secret code. Vince started right up in his chair, felt a cold sweat in the small of his back. She was looking right at him. “All of you!” she said.

Feeling shaky, he called Ted, and Ted told him to relax, the entire story was being released, that he himself was taking all the responsibility, and that he would be by to see him the next morning. Final meeting of the Common Sense Committee tomorrow night. That calmed Vince down — Jesus! Ted was a great guy! — but he was still pretty restless. He paced the room, trapped by the Brunists: newspaper headlines black as death, their goddamn faces on television, and — blam! — Angie threw open her door again, and there they were:

Come all ye who seek your salvation!

Come all who would stand upon God’s Land!

Come and march to the Mount of Redemption,

For the end of all things is at hand!

So, hark ye to the White Bird of Glory …!

Ted’s message the next day, the sixteenth, was to cool it. But Vince was feeling so goddamn high, he knew it wouldn’t be easy. He had splurged on a bottle of whiskey, good stuff, in anticipation of Ted’s visit, but Ted had turned it down. Too early in the day, he said. Vince, who had already poured his own to make the offering of it more natural, felt a little awkward himself with a glass of whiskey in his hand at ten in the goddamn morning, but he lied that he usually took a bracer in the mornings. He hoped he hadn’t made some kind of mistake. Jesus! the thing hit him like seven hundred blazing bicarbonates!

Ted showed him their release on the Meredith boy. The boy had come to them, it claimed, in fear of reprisals from members of the Brunist group, whose fanaticism he had come to abhor, and had asked for protection. He had wept gratefully when Reverend Edwards, approached on the matter, had generously welcomed the boy to his own home. But, evidently distraught by the experiences of the preceding weeks and fearing that attempts might be made against his life, he had cut his wrists with a razor, although not seriously. He was now being cared for in a hospital distant from West Condon, the name of which was not being divulged for the present for the boy’s own protection. Hah! “That should keep them quiet!” Vince said.

“Well,” said Ted, “it’s mainly the truth, after all.”

“Yeah,” Vince said, remembering the hotbox. Swallowed down the whiskey belches. Wondered whether to suffer the stuff gradually, or just throw it down. “And so tonight at the meeting, you want me to ask everybody to stay at home.”

“Right. Not much hope they will, but we can try.” Ted paused, grinned. “I don’t want to give you stagefright or anything, Rockduster, but I should warn you that the meeting is being covered by radio, news chains, and television across the country.”

That put Vince at the verge of a bowel movement, but outwardly he remained calm. He even shrugged. And he was pleased that Ted still remembered his first CSC speech.

“You know, Vince, I’d like to make the meeting so goddamned straightforward, so goddamned plain and sensible, that it will bore those cheap corrupt headline-hunters to death, and they’ll pack up and get out of here.”

Vince laughed, toned it: little too harsh maybe. Didn’t know why he felt so goddamn nervous today, sensation that something was — he looked out at the big red Lincoln: it was the connection. Today they broke the connection. “I wish we could’ve stopped it, Ted.”

“So do I, Vince. But I don’t see what more we could have done. We’ve at least contained it, and even cut them down one. I frankly doubt that that little handful of people can do us much harm, no matter how hard Tiger Miller strains. Now, our main worry is just to keep everybody calmed down, away from that hill, minimize the effect Sunday, and then try to get over it. Of course, things could get worse. If they do, I’ll give you a call.”

“I’ll stay by the phone, Ted. Isn’t there anything else we can do meanwhile?”

“I don’t know what. I tried to cajole Whimple into arresting Bruno on grounds of suspected insanity, but he didn’t have the nerve.”

Vince glanced up, found Ted’s cool eyes fixed on him. He lowered his gaze, took a slow drink of whiskey. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “He should’ve done it.” Then he added: “I sure as hell would’ve.”

“Speaking of Whimple, Vince,” Ted continued, “I wonder if you’d do us the favor of asking for a vote of thanks for him tonight at the meeting, for him and Father Baglione and Reverend Edwards.”

“Sure.” Fixed his jaw in a kind of mockery.

“Oh hell, I know, Vince, they’re not the ones who have put out on this job, but that’s the game we play.” There was a pause. It was now or never. Vince gazed thoughtfully into his whiskey glass. “You might be interested in knowing, though, that they’re setting up a Mayor’s Special Commission on Industrial Planning. I’ve nominated you for a spot on it.”

Vince nodded, stroked his chin, looked up at Ted. “Thanks,” he said. “I’d like that.”

Ted shrugged. “Nothing to thank me for, Vince. You’re the right man for the job, that’s all. Probably be about eight of us. Not too much in the way of rewards, twenty or so a month probably, but it might lead to some good things.” Ted stood.

“Well,” said Vince standing, extending his hand, “see you tonight at the adjournment.”

“Let’s call it a recess,” Ted said with a smile.

“It was really great, Vince, you were really great!” Etta kept repeating it, over and over, all the way home from the meeting, from all those cameras, all that noise, all those assurances, all the way home and into their bedroom, where now she stood at the mirror in her slip, putting clips and curlers in her hair. Large satisfied smile on her face. “Everybody couldn’t stop complimenting me afterwards.”

Vince tossed his pants over a chair, sat on the edge of the bed in his shorts. “Well, chicken, you ain’t got the best yet, I been saving it.”

“Really? You mean there’s something more?” She looked inquisitively at him through the mirror as she reached under her slip, pulled down her huge balloonlike drawers. She carried them over to the closet where her nightshirt hung on a clothes hook.

“It is my pleasure to announce that they have just set up this here mayor’s special group for planning industry, and just by chance it turns out, ahem, that the old man’s gonna be on it.”

“What!” She wheeled around, face alive with a big plump happiness. “Oh, Vince, that’s swell!” First real burst of enthusiasm he’d seen her register since he could remember.

Vince felt great, heroic in fact, but he nodded with an affected disinterest, inspected his toes. “Even gonna bring in a few coins each month. Ted’ll be coming by next week, after this Bruno sideshow is closed down, to talk about it.” While he was talking, she turned her broad back to him, started to hoist the slip up over her big pink body. Vince tiptoed over behind her, reached suddenly around and hugged onto both breasts.

“Vince! Help! I can’t see! Vince!”

“Sshh! You’ll have Angie thinking I’m committing murder instead of just friendly rape!” She giggled girlishly, twisted her three hundred pounds around, tried to work her arms free of the entangling slip, but it was wrapped around her head, caught in the curlers. There was always something wonderfully oily about her body. Vince clutched onto the far breast with one hand, slid the still-whole one down over the mountainous range of her smooth bulbous abdomen, felt the groin flesh start and tremble. A man really had to stretch. “And, baby,” he whispered, releasing her breast to shove his shorts down, “we’re just seven short months away from city elections….”

Vince was up on the ladder again Friday morning, feeling like a kind of king up there, when Burt Robbins and the shoeman Maury Castle came by. “Hey, Vince, got a minute?” Something phony in their smiles.

“Hell,” Vince laughed carelessly, “this is the fifth goddamn time I’ve painted this same patch!” But he crawled down.

“Vince, goddamn! Good to see you!” Castle grabbed his hand and nearly tore it off. “Listen, buddy, we got a great great project!”

“Yeah?” Kept grinning, but he didn’t like the looks of it.

“If you’re game,” Robbins added. The needle.

“Listen, Vince,” said Castle, leaning forward like he was about to let go a secret, but his voice was just as loud as ever. “We got a hilarious idea — we thought we might bring the end of the world tonight. A little early.”

“How’s that?”

“A few of us is planning to pay a call tonight on old Ralphie—”

“You mean—?”

“Himebaugh,” said Robbins. “The guy who tried to bloody your nose with a filing cabinet.”

Vince grinned. “So?” He felt himself getting sucked deeper and deeper.

“So we thought we’d visit Ralphie tonight — in-cog-nito, as they say,” explained Castle, “and inform him we’re the Second Coming. You get the picture?”

“Yeah, I think so—”

“Well, how’s it grab you?”

Vince rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, reached in his shirt pocket for a cigar. Didn’t grab him at all, not at all, but he supposed he’d have to go along. “But he’ll probably be over at Bruno’s house—”

“We checked that out,” Robbins said. “They’ve got a long weekend coming up and apparently decided to spend this night at home, getting a good rest and winding up their private affairs.”

Vince tried to look amused. “I dunno, Ted said—”

“Whatsamatter?” Castle asked. “You Ted’s baby?”

Vince smarted. “No, shit, but—”

“Anyway, keep it quiet,” said Robbins, “but Ted’s in on this. You know how he feels about Himebaugh.” Robbins’ eyes were nothing but slits. Vince thought about the mayor and how he hadn’t had the nerve.

“Well, come on, Vince!” Castle shouted. When that man opened his mouth it really whammed out of there. “You game, goddamn it, or ain’t you?”

“Hell, I’m always game. Who else—?”

“Bring anybody you want. We already talked to Cheese Johnson and Georgie Lucci, and they’re coming. Anybody else you like.”

Cheese. Known the bastard for years and never knew anybody called him Cheese. Maybe one of these guys thought it up. “Okay. Where do we go?”

“Over to my place first,” said Castle. “We’ll oil up the machinery before. I’m at 701 Elm, first white house on the corner of Elm and Seventh. Seven sharp.”

“Okay,” said Vince, working up a grin around the cigar. Get a free drink or two out of it anyhow.

“Oh, and Vince, bring an old sheet.”

“Jesus loves me, this I know,

Cause ole Bruno tol’ me so!

Little ones to him belong,

His is short, but mine is long!”

sang old Cheese Johnson at the top of his goddamn funny nasal voice.

“Yes, Jesus loves me!

Yes, Jesus loves me …!”

bellowed old Vince and old Sal Ferrero and good old Georgie Lucci.

“Hey, you guys, can it! You’ll have us all in the clink!” hissed old Burt, but he was laughing, old Maury was laughing, everybody was laughing to beat hell.

“Ifn Jesus loved you, you wouldn’ talk thetaway!” slurred old Cheese. Vince giggled.

They stopped and staggered out of the car.

“This the place?” hollered Georgie. “Looks all dark.”

“Ssst!” That was old Burt the goddamn spoilsport. “Pipe down! We’re still a block away. We’ll walk the rest. Now look, you crazy bastards, calm down or you’ll spoil the gag!”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, boys!” moaned old Cheese, falling all over himself. “Don’t spoil the gag! Oh, Jesus!”

Arms over each other’s shoulders, they careened down the street. “Hey, wait!” That goddamn Robbins again.

“Maury, old buddy, call that fucking deacon off our ass, for God’s sake!”

Robbins laughed. “Shit, Vince, all I want is for you to get your goddamn sheets on. It’s no party without them.”

They paused for that business. Felt all stuffy inside. Vince thought he’d gag. Couldn’t find the damn eyeholes. Then two fingers nearly put his eyes out. “Got it now, Vince, old buddy?” That goddamn Castle had a voice carry to Singapore.

“Now, listen,” said Robbins. “Don’t forget the point is this: you guys are spirits from the other world, see, and—”

“Oh earthling Ralphus!” cried old Cheese Johnson, staggering around in hilarious circles. “We are spirits—”

“Hold it! hold it! You got it, but we’re not there yet. Now remember: you’ve come to pick Ralphie up and escort him to the spaceship.”

“Spayshit,” said Sal Ferrero solemnly. Castle guffawed. Sal got quieter and funnier the drunker he got.

“Tell him, above all, he’s not to wear any earth clothes, nothing, just a sheet, see, and then—”

“Sheetsie,” said Sal.

Robbins and Castle were laughing themselves sick. Old Burt could hardly talk. He was a lot nicer guy tonight. Maybe it just took awhile to get to know him. “And then you lead him right down to Main Street, and when you get him to city hall, you—”

“Shittyall,” said Sal.

“Jesus Christ!” howled the sheet that had old Georgie in it. “Sal, you’re a goddamn riot!”

“Riot!” affirmed Sal, and everybody broke up again.

Robbins hissed. “It’s right there, next house! Now remember: when you get him in front of city hall, you—”

“We pull off his sheet,” said Vince. Sure goddamn hard to breathe in this thing.

“You’ve got it!”

“Jesus, Vince!” cried the tall thin sheet with the silly-ass nasal voice. “You’ve got it!”

“But why ain’t you two guys wearing sheets?”

“Hell, he’d recognize our voices in a minute, Vince, spoil the gag. Look, see that hedge just over there? Me and Maury’ll wait behind that, watch how it goes. If you need us, we’ll be there. Now, go to it!”

The four sheets approached old Ralphie’s house.

“Damn, Sal, at least stand up right!”

“Riot!”

“Okay,” announced old Cheese, “watch this!” He picked up a handful of pebbles and flung them at a window. Himebaugh’s face appeared in it. “Light the torch!” Georgie struck a match to the torch, then lifted it flaming over his head. Old Ralphie’s eyes nearly shot right out of their sockets. Johnson lifted his elbows, shook the sheet. The others imitated him. Himebaugh opened the door a crack, poked out his terrified white face. “Oh earthling Ralphus! We are spirits from the upper worlds come to transport thee hither!” Except for the twang, it was a great fucking act. Himebaugh stepped gingerly out onto the porch, dressed in one of those funny Brunist nightshirts. “Our spaceship awaits thee!”

Vince’s line: “Come, friend! Makest thee haste!” Christ! stumbled all over the goddamn s-t's! “The Destroyer cometh!”

“B-but tonight?” whined the old guy. He was cracking all apart. Very different pose from what Vince had seen yesterday. “We thought — isn’t it—?”

“Well, our plans is got changed,” said old Cheese, ad-libbing it. “Now git your ass in gear, Ralphus!”

Himebaugh stiffened, eyebrows slid down off the top of his head. “I don’t know who you are,” he sighed, “but you’re wasting your time.”

“Tie ’em!” cried Sal. Georgie snickered. Vince had to piss.

“Listen, ifn you don’t git comin’,” hollered Johnson, sliding all the way back into his cruddy accent, “we’re gonna shag off without ye!”

Himebaugh shook his head wearily, went in, shut the door. Could hear the key working in the lock.

“Jeez, Cheese, it’s that goddamn hillbilly accent of yours,” Vince complained. “There ain’t no hillbillies in the other world, don’t you know that?”

“Whaddaya think we oughta do, bust in an’ git him?”

“Naw, what good would that do? Let’s go ask old Burt and old Maury.” Vince led the way to the hedge. Nobody there. “Why those goddamn sonsabitches!”

“Fairweather friends,” said Cheese.

“Left us in the fucking lurch,” said Georgie.

“But all is not lost!” announced old Sal, lifting off his sheet and producing a fifth of bourbon. “I borrowed this from good old faithful Maury’s liquor cabinet.”

“Hey! Good man, Salvo!” laughed Johnson, whipping off his sheet. “Uncork that mother!”

“Three cheers for old Sal Ferrero!” proposed Georgie, and they all hip-hip-hoorayed while pissing on a tree. Then the four of them sat down on their sheets behind the hedge and passed the bottle. “Well, what’ll we do next?” asked Georgie.

“Let’s go visit old Wosznik and spook his mutt,” suggested Johnson.

“We can burn down a couple houses,” Georgie offered. “Vince has got a hand we can use.” The bastard.

“Let’s go hang a buncha rubbers in the little tree on Cunt Hill,” Johnson said.

“Where’s that?” Vince asked.

“That rise out by old Number Nine—”

“Mount of Redemption,” said Sal.

“I never heard it called that,” Vince said. “When did it—?”

“Tiger Miller’s old buddy Lou Jones made it up.”

“What’s the point?”

“What’s the point of any cunt?” asked Georgie, and they all laughed idiotically at that.

Vince chugalugged on the fifth, got what he supposed was more or less his quarter, then handed it to Georgie. “Think I’ll bug out, fellow phantoms. Go get me some shuteye.” Thrust himself to his feet, staggered away. Fact was, he’d been thinking all night about poor Wanda Cravens. She never knew why he never came back. Poor kid. Shouldn’t have been that way. Man can cut out without being crude. Go tell her now. Wanda honey, I’m being a good boy now. Gonna be mayor, see, can’t fuck it up. You understand, hunh? Good girl. Lotta fun, but. Meant to tell you before, but I been busy — oh yes, very very busy. Too bad. Awful sorry. You know I am. Listen, though. You’re a cute kid. I’ll keep my eye out for you, know what I mean? Anything you ever need. Count on me.

Yeah, this was the place okay. Stumbled up on the porch, thumped the door, then staggered on in. Whoo-ee! shouldn’t have chugalugged. House dead still. All the junk gone. Jesus, maybe she’d moved. Light on in the bedroom. She was just grabbing up her ragtag robe when he reeled in. In her skivvies, snow-white, but her cute titties were flying free.

“Oh, Vince! Landsakes, you give me a fright! I was takin’ a bath. Didn’t know who it could be out there bumpin’ around.”

“Who else’d it be?”

“Well, I jist didn’t know, I thought maybe, you know, day after tomorra bein’ the end a the world and all, I jist thought—”

“Oh yeah. That.” Vince thought of old Ralphie and grinned. Lights all funny in the damn room somehow. He blew out his cheeks. “Hey, listen, Wanda, I didn’t mean to butt in or nothing, I just only came to tell you—”

“Vince, I never knowed you to drink so much.”

Must really be swaying. “Well, I ain’t accustomed to it.” Couldn’t quite see if she was all covered up with the robe or not.

“Vince, I’m sorry, but I have to ask ye to go. It’s all over now, what we was—”

“All over!”

“Yes, for some time now. I thought you knowed or guessed. I been comin’ to the light, Vince. And I gotta have my soul all clean for the end. I’ve sold all I had and give all the money away, and I ain’t gonna do nothin’ sinful. Leastways with the powers of—”

“Wanda! You ain’t saying you’re turning me out!”

“Vince, I gotta! It ain’t what I want or don’t want, things is different now. Jist one more day, Vince—”

“Wanda! How can you do it? I — you just—” He felt all knotted up. And she was so calm, so cold. Had she forgot how it was between them? “Please, I—”

“Vince, it was a mistake. I was lonely and you was nice to me, but we cain’t go makin’ that mistake all over agin.”

“Mistake!” Jesus, she was cutting him something awful!

“Now stop it, Vince! You’re drunk. Let’s be honest, I was a good thing for you, somethin’ for fun on the side, but—”

“Wanda!” He slumped to the bed by where she was standing, felt like bawling, took her hand. She didn’t understand, everything was wrong, he felt awful. “Wanda, Wanda, I love you! Couldn’t you tell that? You don’t know how you’re hurting me!”

“Oh, really, Vince! You’re gittin’ silly!”

He could smell the damp fragrance of her bathed crotch. My God, what was she doing to him? “Wanda, please! Try to understand! Listen, I’m gonna be mayor here! Don’t that mean nothing to you?” Maybe he should just tumble her to the sack and lay her. He worked her robe apart with his nose, pressed his face against her white-pantied groin, felt the nylon whistle along his beard.

“Vince, don’t—!”

He laughed the old laugh. “The mayor, baby!” Got a wrist before she could get away.

“The baby’s watchin’!”

“That never stopped us—”

“No!”

Shoved her hard to the bed. Springs twanged. Caught the wide-eyed drool of the baby, staring over the side of the crib. Heard Davey. She hit out, but no life in it. They all want it. “Please, Wanda!” he whispered hoarsely, as he wallowed down over her. “Once more, Wanda! for old times! for the old mayor!” She turned her head, wouldn’t let him kiss her. He unbuckled his pants, fingers thick and fumbling, whipped the fly open, reared his rump up and shoved his pants and shorts to his knees. Couldn’t bother getting the pants off her. Slide in past the legband. She squirmed—

“Please!”

“Oh Wanda, you don’t know how you’re hurting me!”

“I love you!”

“One more for the old mayor!”

“The mayor, baby!”

Vince lurched up off the bed, tripped over his own pants, whammed to the floor on his hands and knees. Johnson, Ferrero, and Lucci stood in the doorway splitting their goddamn drunken guts with laughter. “You goddamn sonuvabitching cocksuckers!” screamed Vince. Pants all tangled up somehow. Baby howling like a maniac. Davey padding in. Wanted to take a swing, hit anybody. But Jesus, he realized he had nothing left in him and he was going blind to boot.

“Well, so this is how we talk to the spirits!” grinned Johnson. “Well, boys, I for one am goin’ to join this here religion!”

“I believe!” cried Georgie. Jesus, they could hardly stand.

“Now you two fellers take a restrainin’ grip on old Dad there, so’s he don’t break the spell,” Johnson said, then hiccupped, “and let’s see ifn I cain’t git a message through to the holy kingdom.”

Sal and Georgie rubberlegged over. Grabbed Vince unconvincingly just as he’d got his pants up. Georgie shoved his pants down to his ankles again. “Don’t want you running out on us again,” he said. Vince struggled, but just didn’t have any goddamn strength.

Johnson unzipped his fly and reeled forward. Wanda cowered pale against the head of the bed, clutching the robe tight around her neck, but showing a bright white glimpse of snatch. Wasn’t her fault, she was too scared to realize, but still it made Vince mad, showing what she had like that. Lights were still screwed up. And he couldn’t sort the noises. Like a fucking circus or something. Watched the scene, but had to think about it to be sure he was seeing it. Was Johnson into her? No, he was still standing there, showing off his instrument, pulling out his shirt, and hiccupping. “Le’s git the Comin’ on the road!” he was saying to Wanda.

“Please!” she whispered. “Go away!” She was scared. Vince couldn’t see her good, but he knew, could tell. The poor kid. “Davey! don’t look! Go to your room!”

“You let go, Sal, old buddy,” Vince whispered between his teeth, “or I’ll rebust that arm of yours so they’ll never get it fixed again!” Sal relaxed his grip. Vince stepped out of one pant leg, spun, tempted to bust Georgie’s nuts, but, pitying him standing there so blearily innocent, he only threw a right to the gut. Georgie whined and doubled, and Vince popped him hard as he could on the back of the neck, sent him — grateful maybe — to the floor. Johnson faced around just as Vince reached him, one leg dragging his pants on the floor, but the dumb bastard made the mistake of trying to close his fly first and caught Vince’s full-bodied right square in his silly mouth. His head shot back like it was snapped and he crashed against the wall, brought down the endtable and bedlamp. Lights and shadows flew every which way, like suddenly there was a hundred people in there running around. Tried to think how to follow up. Reached for his own pants. Wanda was gone, that quick. Heard her grab up the phone in the hall. Johnson pushed confusedly up off the floor, wheeled forward, pitched himself on Vince more like a lover than a foe, and they tumbled like potato bags to the floor. Johnson kneed him in the stomach. Vince struggled. If only he could get room to swing. For a minute he thought, Aw, to hell with it. Bad dream. Wake up. Johnson was pummeling him with short weak blows to the midriff, but they felt a great distance off. They rolled and pitched drearily on the floor. Nobody seemed to get ahead.

“Vince baby,” Johnson gasped, “you’ll git slivers in your ass!” That lamebrain was grinning even with blood smeared all over his knobby mug — must have really opened something up with that right.

Bonali raised his hips up fast and sudden, hardly thinking about it, surprising even himself, drove Johnson off-balance headfirst into the wall, slid out fast from under the bastard and slugged him with all his might behind the ear, in the face, wherever he could make it land. He stood up, gasping for breath. Room still whipping around there, wilder than ever. “Johnson!” Coughing, could hardly breathe. Johnson out dead. “You always talk too much for your own fucking good!” Reached down, pulled up his shorts. His balls hurt him and he tried to see if they’d got busted or something.

“Police are on the way,” Wanda said, watching him coldly from the doorway, dressed now in slacks and sweater, baby in her arms, holding Davey’s hand.

Georgie was still groveling on the floor, holding his belly, whimpering, “Muh-donna!”

Sal was standing like a specter against the wall. Going green. “Sal, you better bug out, buddy,” Vince gasped. “I’ll be right behind.” Sal was gone like a shot. Vince untwisted his pants, they were a goddamn mess, hauled them up, felt the pockets: billfold gone! Jesus, they could pin him with that! “Wanda, listen, if the cops get here before I get away, you tell them these two bastards came first, and I followed them and tried to protect you, you hear?” But he saw no response there. Searched for the billfold. Sense of not moving fast enough, limbs heavy, head — found it under the goddamn bed. Crawled under, bed above him winding like a fucking carousel, he was sweating to beat hell, and the dust under here was sticking to him. He spat, reached for the billfold — move, Dad! — had his ass out when Dee Romano and old Willie walked in, pistols cocked.

“Landsakes!” exclaimed Willie through his whistling false teeth. “Looks like they’s been some party!”

Wanda stood wan and martyred with her kids. Vince tried to get her eye. Georgie squinted blearily up at Dee and Willie from the floor, as though trying to figure out who the hell they could be.

“What happened, Mrs. Cravens?” Romano asked. Kept his great big gun out, very edgy, finger on the goddamn trigger.

“Well, these guys—” Vince began, getting to his feet, but Romano waved his pistol at him menacingly.

“These here men come in drunk, just bustin’ in, got in a awful fight,” said Wanda dully. “They was another one, but he run off.”

“Musta been that body we passed,” Willie remarked.

“Yeah,” said Dee.

“What’d they come for?” drawled Willie.

Romano grinned sarcastically and pointed with his gun down at Johnson, just beginning to stir: Johnson’s prick was lolling limp outside his fly.

Wanda began to cry. “I don’t know even who they are!” She wept. Davey started in, too. So he had a voice okay. “Maybe they come in here by mistake. I don’t know why they picked on me!”

“Hey, wait—!” protested Vince, then thought better of it, cut himself off.

“Do you wanna file any charges?” asked Romano.

“No,” she said, sniffling pathetically. “Please, officer, jist git ’em out!”

Johnson came around just then, sat up painfully, stared head-on into Romano’s pistol barrel. “Man alive!” he exclaimed. “I’d say that one takes the prize!” Vince couldn’t help grinning. Johnson got to his feet, noticed he was still open, turned his back to Wanda to zip up. “Now, how many times I told ye, Wanda, when I’m takin’ a nap, not to—” He caught his bloody reflection in the mirror, stepped closer in alarm. “Jesus, men! It ain’t me!” he cried.

“Come on, quit the clowning!” said Romano officiously. “We’re all going down to the station. You can clean up there.” He paused for effect. “Over the next six months or so.”

“Dee baby, you been watchin’ too much TV,” said Johnson. The five of them filed out of the room, old Willie leading, Romano lingering fifth. “Come on, Romano,” complained Johnson in a nasal nag, “ifn we cain’t have none, you cain’t neither.”

“You bastard!” hissed Romano, and kicked Johnson hard in the butt. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cravens. We’ll take care of these guys. For good.”

They washed up at the station. It all began to register there what had happened, what the consequences were. Several people had seen him as they drove to the station — right down the middle of Main Street, for Christ sake — though they might not have been able to recognize him. Had his eyes ducked coming in, didn’t know if he was being watched out front or not. Goddamn Romano pushing them in ahead with his pistol out for the whole fucking world to see. But, hell, what did all that matter? Six months! And Jesus, what could he even say! Caught, man. In the act. Pants down. It would be in the newspapers. And mixed up with the Brunist mess besides. Oh God! And Ted and his family, Etta, Angie! How the hell had he ever—? Had to get out, had to, even if he had to screw Johnson and Lucci to do it. He was nearly crying.

Johnson nudged him, washing up. “Got fifteen bucks or so?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Reached for his billfold to look.

“No, don’t grab for it now,” cautioned Johnson. “Jist have it ready, and play along with ol’ Chester.” The guy’s face was a mess and a tooth was broken, but he could still grin.

They went out front again to get booked. Luckily, nobody was lounging around in the station like they usually were. “Say, Willie, ol’ man, while we’re signin’ ourselves into this fine hotel here, would ye be so kind as to run out and git ol’ Chester a pack a smokes?” He handed Willie five bucks. “Gonna be a long night. And buy some for yourself.” Willie looked questioningly at Romano, and Romano nodded him out. “Well, now, where do we sign this here petition?” asked Johnson, examining the book. “Well, I’ll be damned! Here’s all my old very best friends. Hell, I’d be downright honored to join this fine company.”

“Stop wising off and get it over with!” snapped Romano.

“Listen, you know, Dee baby, they ain’t nothin’ really that cunt kin pin us on. Ever sonuvabitch in this town has been humpin’ her since ol’ Lee got hisself killt. Ain’t that the truth, boys?”

“Jesus, yes!” affirmed Georgie. “She asked us all over. Last big bang before the end of the world, she thinks.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Vince. “She’s one of those Brunist nuts, Dee, one of those folks who’s been causing this town, our community here, so much trouble.” Perspiring, felt rotten about screwing her like that, but she’d screwed him first, hadn’t she?

“Well, now, that’s all very interesting,” said Romano. “Now, sign your names here, and I’ll get your new home away from home all ready for you.”

“Hey, ya know, boys,” said Johnson, picking up the pen and licking the point, “old Dee here’s got his eye on a very fine huntin’ dog. Ain’t that so, Dee?” Romano grumbled again, squinted his eye warily toward Johnson. “Very purty spaniel type, useter be ol’ Eddie Wilson’s mutt, poor ol’ Eddie, ya know.”

“Oh yeah!” said Vince, getting the picture now. “Very fine dog. I’d like to have it, but I cain’t afford it.” Christ, he even found himself imitating Johnson’s cornball cadences. Still felt pretty funny, though he thought his head was clearing some.

“How much does old Widow Wilson want for it?” asked Lucci, joining in.

“Forty,” mumbled Romano, his eye on the door.

“Ya know,” said Johnson, “all of us guys is so fond of our ol’ buddy here, our good ol’ swell ol’ asshole buddy Dee, whaddaya say we all make him a little present a that there dog, whaddaya say?”

“Well, I been wanting to make a present to good old Dee for a long time now,” said Vince. “This sure does look like a fine opportunity.”

“Don’t it though!” said Johnson. The three of them turned on Romano.

He hesitated, glanced at the door. “Well, I guess she is one a them troublemakers,” he muttered and took the book back. They dropped the bills in front of him and walked out, hands in pockets.

Outside, the light blinded them. Heart jumped, because his first thought was the mine blowing up. Then he saw all the cameras, guys rushing up. Questions. Pops of light. He brushed by them, but came up against Tiger Miller. “What’s up, Bonali?” he asked.

Vince could tell the sonuvabitch already knew plenty. “Nothing,” he said and set his jaw, ready to lay into the bastard if he had to. Felt Johnson and Lucci backing him up. “Just having a little talk with the boys here about the Brunists.” Some of the cameras, he saw, were movie jobs. He wondered what brought them.

“What kind of talk?” Miller stood his ground. “Listen, Vince, you’d better cool it. You’ve got big ambitions here, but don’t forget you can screw yourself by going too far, getting into some legal trouble, and if I ever hear about—”

“Oh yeah Jesus!” cried Johnson, his cackling laugh cutting Miller off. “Don’t do nothin’ as might git ye in trouble, Vince!”

Lucci joined the bastard in the yak-yakking. “One more time for the ol’ mayor!” he cried.

“Don’t sweat it, Miller!” growled Vince, and shoved by him. Shit. Felt like the number-one all-star ass of all time. And it was bound to get worse. All those cameras. And he knew better than to think Johnson could keep his fat mouth shut.

Four A.M. Staggered from the bed. Reached the bathroom door and up it came. Tracked through it in bare feet to the stool and got rid of the rest. Down to the bile. Sat on the side of the tub, head in hands. Sick. Not just in the gut. Sick in the heart, too. Fucked it up. End of the world. It was all over.

3

Miller listened to Hilda roar and groan, smelled her dark reek, watched his Saturday night edition, that of the eighteenth of April, flap-flap-flap out of her. The back shop force, faces streaked with oily black ink, looked beat, but pleased with themselves. They’d made it through the week, shy two men who had quit under Cavanaugh’s pressure, stayed right on schedule, got $50 bonuses for it. Twice already tonight — God’s vindictive ways — the old press had broken down, but it looked now like she’d make it through the rest of the run.

Miller tucked his hand into the parade of copies slapping out, pulled out a damp one. WE SHALL GATHER AT THE MOUNT OF REDEMPTION! Two-line banner, bigger than anything since the war. Official portrait of the whole group, now minus Colin Meredith, spanned the middle columns under the banner. Not his photo, of course. In an odd reversal of roles, he had come more and more this week to depend on the East Condon newsmen, having been cut off on all sides by his own people. The photo showed fifteen tunicked grownups, eight infants similarly dressed. He’d thought the group would have grown by now, but the Common Sensers had apparently locked them out. Widow Wilson had spoken of converts, but they hadn’t shown their faces.

But they might. Certainly he’d got a lot of letters from all over the country expressing interest in and sympathy with the Brunist movement. Tonight’s paper was full of these letters. A minister in Mississippi who said he’d chartered a bus for the West Condon pilgrimage. A movie actress who wrote from California that Bruno had appeared to her in her dreams, promising her salvation. A blind man in an old folks’ home in New Hampshire who claimed that, hearing about Bruno on television, he had suddenly had a glimpse of light and seemed headed for a cure. That wasn’t the only miracle. An invalid in Arizona had risen from his bed and begun to walk, and, if his letter could be believed, was presently hitchhiking his way across the country to West Condon. A woman in Chicago, committing suicide, had left a note behind, confirming, through her own sources, Bruno’s prophecy, and explaining that she couldn’t bear to face the horror that would be her sinner’s lot.

The inside pages — there were now virtually no ads — were filled with a picture story of the Brunists. He was in a couple of the pictures himself. Nothing so fancy as some of the big spreads he’d helped work up for a couple of the national picture magazines, but pretty good at that. He’d filled in with a rerun of the texts of Ben Wosznik’s songs, the essentials of Eleanor Norton’s system, Bruno’s prophecies, or “words.” These latter, now six in number, had been codified as: Hark ye to the White Bird; I am the One to Come; Coming of Light, Sunday Week; The tomb is its message; A circle of evenings; and Gather on the Mount of Redemption. He had letters he had beguiled out of several eminent churchmen, an article on the lusty response of the mass media to the event, and blunt verbatim reports of conversations he’d overheard in Mick’s, the coffeeshop, in barbershops and on the street. Miller had also taken a last-minute interest in that vast segment of the holy milieu who were simply not involved, had interviewed the high school track coach, a drummer in a nearby roadhouse, a bartender in Waterton, his own mentally subnormal janitor Jerry. An old woman in her nineties told him she used to expect the end of the world all the time, but it was like all of a sudden it had slipped up on her. She’d always been a decent Godfearing woman, to be sure, but now did all this mean she had to go out on that hill and sing songs and all? How big a hill was it? Could they get all the people they were going to save up on that one hill? Would there be room for her even if she went out there? And what if it wasn’t the end of the world at all, why, she’d probably catch her death! And surely there would be photographers and, yes, television, because she’d noticed that all her favorites this week from Captain Kangaroo to What’s My Line? had got bumped by this thing. So what should she wear? She had nothing new. No, no, it was better to stay home and watch it on television, that was almost like being there, wasn’t it? Or maybe if she broke her leg and couldn’t get there, what if she did that? It’d be all the same, didn’t he think so? Yes, that was a splendid idea! Watch it on television, get a slip from the doctor explaining it would be unwise for her to spend the night out in the air, call a taxi to be at her house about twenty minutes before, you see, and if things seemed to be going on, why then, trot on out….

As for the Brunists, they now gave interviews freely to anyone but him, held open house daily, posed for photos, appeared gladly on radio and television. Last night, Ben Wosznik had given a touching account of his conversion, had sung a few songs he had composed, had spoken simply but convincingly of each of his fellow Brunists, and had even managed to turn so grotesque an object as that scabby black hand — still one of their altar relics and getting them a lot of mileage in the East Condon newspapers — into a moving symbol of the persecution that besets the holy. As for Marcella, Miller, staring again at his front-page group photo, hardly recognized her. Ralph Himebaugh and Eleanor Norton were holding her up, and her head lolled foolishly on Himebaugh’s shoulder. Her hair hung down haglike past her ears, past her face, now a dull matte white. Those eyes that had so captivated him now stared vapidly out past the camera, too large for this face, all their bright glitter gone. The others in the photo were pale and solemn, posed stiffly as in old daguerrotypes, heads high, hands folded, chins up … “such a one caught up, even to the third heaven …”

He realized that his own mind had also been, subtly, geared for an end tomorrow: Monday had been and still was an unreality. Projects always did that. They set up something that looked hard and real, something to aim at, but they always concealed then the thick tangle of endless ambiguities that were the one true thing of this world. For Miller, there was nothing worse than the end of a project: cold sweats, nausea, couldn’t eat — like shaking a habit. Even knowing that though, he could never resist launching new ones. The reason was: it was that or nothing, and nothing was not good at all. There was, of course, the alternative of the lifetime project instead of all these short ones, but he feared a greater despair, the midproject collapse. He could only make himself believe in a game a short time, and he preferred to take a lot of short hard falls than one long sickening and endless drop. Did Happy Bottom guess this? Did she see that Monday must come? It didn’t matter; forget it. He tossed the paper in a trash barrel and went home, there to crawl in a white hole with a great white mole, split white thighs and sleep a white sleep.

Marcella wakes from a distant place. An inexplicable chill. She supposes that, kissed by Death, she is dead. Her body is still bare as He left it, the tunic rolled up to her throat. The house is filled with noise. Her wake? Yet, when she rolls her ear into the pillow, she hears the beating of a heart. Can it be hers? Has she returned?

Freshly showered, richly fed, mildly drunk, the phone unplugged, the doors locked, and the blinds pulled, Happy Bottom and the West Condon Tiger lay face to fork, listening to the merry secular twang of Yogi Bear on the bedroom television, each contemplating in his/her own way that peculiar piece of anatomy toward which he/she was so relentlessly drawn, tasting it, toying with it, slowly drifting out of this time and this place, out of particularity toward union with the One. Classical copulation, belly to belly, was of course the true magical experience: the illusion of having solved the Great Mystery, simply because the parts seemed to fit. Antipodally, on the other hand, the parts no longer fit, and analogues had to be improvised. But, thus stripped of magic, it was closer to a pure mystical experience, for contemplation of the mystery was direct, enhanced by the strange fact that one could not imagine the thoughts of one’s partner, since one could not, without repugnance, imagine the partner’s perspective, being able only to feel — literally — the other’s hunger and excitement, the other’s joy. Though each knew, better even than any part of himself/herself, that concavity/convexity that he/she kissed, it nevertheless remained utterly unimaginable to him/her, impossible, always incredibly new. A tasty cornflakes commercial was the ding-dong epithalamium that accompanied their gradual ascent into blessedness. Happy’s thighs twitched, kicked, cuffed his ears, her bottom leapt, her fingers scurried, burrowed, clawed, kneaded, her mouth raged—

“This man, Giovanni Bruno, was born thirty-four years ago next November, the fourth child of five of Antonio Bruno, an immigrant Italian coalminer, and his wife Emilia. Three months ago — or to be precise, fourteen Sundays ago tomorrow — he was rescued from a mine disaster that killed ninety-seven men. Tomorrow, he and a band of devout followers anticipate the end of the world. The astonishing story of the Brunists of West Condon, after this message …”

Miller recognized it. He had written it. He’d forgot it was to be televised tonight. If Happy noticed his sudden distraction, she gave no sign of it. Unless an increased fervency was in fact a sign—

“… Little is known of Giovanni Bruno’s boyhood, but that is not to say that it was uneventful. It was a time of physical and psychological insecurity, a time of anti-union violence and inter-union wars, a time of Ku-Klux Klan persecutions of immigrant Catholics, and particularly of Italians, of whom, by 1920, there were more than twice as many working the American coal beds as any other nationality. It was a time when coalmines were closing and jobs were few. Then came the crash of 1929, and by 1933, West Condon’s largest industry was relief. West Condon then was a town of intense poverty, of hatred and suspicion, of prohibition gangsterism, of corruption and lawlessness. The mines still operating paid fifty cents an hour at the coalface, and life at that face was miserable and precarious. Death came quickly and brutally, and families such as the Brunos lived in its shadow. It came by fire, by falling rock and coal, by powder and methane explosions, by the crushing impact of mine cars and locomotives, by falls down shafts. Knees swelled, spines were broken, arms were crushed, lungs were scarred, eyes lost their vision. Both of Giovanni Bruno’s brothers were killed in the mines, and his father was made a virtual invalid the last ten years of his life …”

Losing it, the ascendant thrust, the flight from the immediate, Miller wondered if he should risk breaking their convulsive circle to go turn the goddamn set off. But, as he pulled his head back, Happy flashed out with her top thigh, rolled him to his back, pinning him, and down fell the mighty hero of the sun, undone by the dragon Ouroboros, primordial and true….

“… Like all his family before him, Giovanni Bruno, too, left school at an early age and entered the mines. Here you see him as he appeared in his high school class photo. He was considered, by the principal, John Bradley, a poor student, withdrawn and friendless.” [John Bradley: “Yes, I remember the boy well. He was never in any trouble, and he seemed intelligent enough, but he was poorly adjusted. When he left school at the legal age of sixteen, he still had not completed what we consider freshman or ninth grade work. He was — how shall I put it? — he was peculiar.”] “About that same time, Giovanni suffered what was apparently a sudden revolt from orthodox Roman Catholicism. Until then unusually devout, spending most of his free time in the Church, serving first as an altar boy, then as lay assistant to the right Reverend Battista Baglione here in West Condon, he suddenly separated himself from the Church and has not been known to have set foot inside it during these subsequent sixteen or seventeen years.” [Father Baglione: “Yes, I t’ink, uh, de ’eresy, yes, is cause, uh, by de, uh, de pride.”]

Those mountains, their valley twice pierced, now pitched, plunged, even as though angry, displaying against the gray-green wall beyond their vibrant silhouette of a rounded M, and in him a dark inscrutable river ran fast and deep …

“… If he entered the mines to seek companionship, however, he did not find it. Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine supervisor Barney Davis recalls that he was a listless worker, did not participate in union activities or attend meetings, was not well liked.” [Barney Davis: “He didn’t get along with anybody. Nobody wanted to work with him. Even his escape from disaster last January was a sign of this isolation. There were seven guys barricaded in that room. Six of them were together and they died. Bruno lay a ways off from them, and he lived. Maybe he had more oxygen, since he didn’t have to share it with anybody. The only guy in the mine who took pity on him was his working buddy Ely Collins. Reverend Collins.”] “Ely Collins, an evangelist preacher of the Church of the Nazarene, was one of those six men who died, trapped in that same space with Giovanni Bruno … but not before he had managed to write a brief note to his wife, Mrs. Clara Collins.” [Clara Collins: “‘I disobeyed and I know I must die. Listen always to the Holy Spirit in your Hearts. Abide in grace—’”]

And then the dams began to break, the mountains to crumble, the walls to fall, all the fountains of the great deep to burst forth, and the windows of heaven to open …

“… God in His mercy … a white bird … found him in a … Virgin Mary … message from the tomb … attractive softspoken girl born … unavailable for comment … able to pass on this good news to all the world …”

Has she slept again? Was she awake before? The chill is gone, the tunic lowered. The house is silent. Silent? Marcella rises.

Miller woke, still on his back. The room was dark, but for the image pitched by the television set, enough to enable him to make out the bluish billowing terrain of Happy’s bottom beside him. Something was missing. Announcer: “When it’s time to relax, time for a smoke, enjoy the real American flavor, the natural mildness, the kingsize satisfaction …” He, leaning out: “Aha.” She: “Don’t rock the boat.”

Marcella finds the house empty. Signs throughout of a sudden departure. Even her mother and brother are gone. Gone! A cry leaps to her throat. Can it be? It is coming! They forgot her! They have left her behind! She runs out the door. Gone! They have all gone! She is alone! Alone in the darkness! Wait! Wait!

The television off, bedlamp on, cold drink beside him, enjoying a smoke, belly down and Happy Bottom astride, giving him a really tremendous rubdown, he mused: “You know, the appeal of Noah is not the Ark or the rescue.”

“No?”

She was being sarcastic, but he went on. “They just added that stuff to make the story credible.”

“Aha.”

That was worse than sarcasm, that was outright mockery, but still he went on. “No, it’s the righteous destruction, that’s what it’s all about. We’re all Noahs.”

“Why”—as though astonished—“that’s true!”

And still he went on. “So, see, the excitement of the disaster is over unless new destruction is possible. If Noah has three sons, one and preferably two have to become corrupt, so that we can—”

Abruptly, she backed off and cracked his ass mightily, a kingsize belt that made him drop his smoke — grabbed it up, but not before he’d put a neat brown hole in the sheet. And then she cracked the other cheek and said, “And this is the sign of my covenant!” At which time, in view of the way things stood, he stubbed out the cigarette.

Running on the mine road, she can see their fire ahead. On the Mount. She hardly feels the ruts stabbing her bare feet, hardly notices the night’s damp chill, ignores the binding cramp in her chest, the lightness in her head. Will she be on time? Oh wait! And then she seems to see light, even to feel—yes! it is coming! Surging up behind. She races desperately against its advance. The light grows, gathers, enlarges. Ahead of her, always just ahead of her, spreading, filling the—the fire on the Mount is out! She cannot make it! Oh please! She sees her shadow as the light sweeps down on her from behind. She tries to enclose herself in its sweep. She spreads wide her arms to hold it back. Suddenly: lights spring up before her! out of nowhere! lights on all sides! flooding the world! she in its center! It comes! she cries. God is here! she laughs. And she spins whirls embraces light leaps heaving her bathing in light her washes and as she flows laughs His Presence light! stars burst sky burns with absolute laugh light! and

4

For I am the least of the apostles,

that am not meet to be called an apostle,

because I persecuted the Church of God.

But by the grace of God

I am what I am….

Abner Baxter stood brooding and crestfallen in the ditch over the battered body. Blood glistened yet in dark drools from mouth to ears, and the bright glitter had not yet departed from her open eyes. How many cars had struck her, he did not know, but he knew one that had. Lights sliced damply now through the night air and the country silence was laced with the shrieks and moans of men and women alike. A doctor pronounced her dead, and a great threnodial plaint went up. The prophet knelt to kiss her and rose with blood staining his lips, his face drawn with grief. A woman, the doctor’s wife, indeed the very woman who two months before had inveighed against him in the prophet’s house, now scourged him with lacerating cries of “murderer!” and “fiend!” and a hostile passion smoldered and grew in that great multitude. Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, Abner found that the will to resist had left him utterly. He had left his wife Sarah blubbering in the car, had marched boldly back down the mine road, past the shocked and stricken faces, in the ruthless beams of light, down the road to where he’d struck her, had seen her from the lip of the ditch lying at the bottom like a crumpled bird, lights from wrecked cars illuminating spectrally her small body, and with strength still, and with calm presence of mind, had strode down into this ditch, here to arrive standing still while others bent over her, here to see her twitch and die … and now it was done. Sister Clara Collins stood there, across the body from him, watching him. The doctor bent over the girl still, along with that Wosznik fellow and several others. Of his own people, Abner alone was there. Which was as it should be. The others wept. He would have too, perhaps, but something restrained him: a sense of propriety maybe, as though … as though he had no right. Those terrible texts which had been troubling him these past weeks, those passages which spoke of the rebellion which must precede Christ’s return, now sprang forth in his mind, augmenting his affliction. Apologies formed on his tongue, but he seemed incapable of speech. He stood by the dead child in the midst of that mantling hysteria and execration and waited — for what? Perhaps: to be slain. “Monster!” shrieked that maddened woman. “Butcher!”

“No, friends! We’re all murderers!” From a quarter least expected: it was Sister Clara Collins, ennobled, it would seem, by her own great griefs, and thus less undone by this present one, who now spoke forth boldly: “We all killed her with our hate and with our fear!” And he recognized the magnitude of it, the greatness of spirit, and he was stirred in the soul and much amazed. She stared then at his face, and Abner gave her much to read there, if she could but discern it. “Abner,” she said softly, softly though her voice carried far in the night air and stilled the lamentations, “this awful thing is a judgment on us — Please! Join hands with us now and pray!”

And he reached across and accepted Clara’s hand, and as he did so, a great warmth surged through him — for all things are cleansed with blood, he thought, and apart from shedding of blood there is no remission — and then, unleashed, the tears flowed.

“… And knowin’ that in the Last Days grievous times must come, help us to take heart, and, as Brother Abner hisself has taught us, Lord, to fergit the things which are behind, and stretchin’ forward to the things which are before, help us to press on….”

And with a great lightening of his heart, he perceived that, though a terrible thing was upon them and many would despair, he, Abner Baxter, would march in the vanguard and give them strength, and he foresaw the great and holy march upon the morrow, he like these, in a pure-white tunic, foresaw the massing on the Mount of the mighty army of the sons of light, foresaw the smiting of the wicked and the destruction of the temples, foresaw the glory….

Amens were shouted and songs were sung and people wept and embraced one another and his own tears, he saw, were dampening the shoulder of Sister Clara’s tunic, and for just that moment he felt a boy again and wished to fold himself forever in her embrace, but then it was Brother Ben Wosznik whose arm was around his shoulders and then a pale stout man named Brother Hiram and he saw his own wife Sarah come running down the ditch and into Clara’s arms—“Oh Sister Clara! God help us!”

“Children!” cried Sister Clara. “It is the last hour! God has called us to redemption! The battle lines is formed and the last struggle is commenced!”

“Destroyers are come upon all the bare heights in the wilderness!” Abner cried out then through his tears, finding voice. “For the sword of God devoureth from the one end of the land even unto the other end of the land! No flesh has got peace!”

“The darkness is passing! the hour is at hand! and the dead they shall hark to the White Bird of Grace and Glory and them that hear shall live!”

“Amen!”

“We shall live!”

And the stout man raised his hand and lifted his soft chin, tears streaming down his round cheeks, and Sister Clara cried, “Brother Hiram Clegg!”

“And henceforth,” he proclaimed, “them that have wives may be as though they had none, and them that weep as though they wept not, and them that rejoice as though they rejoiced not, and them that use the world as though they used it not, for the fashion of this world, it is passing away!”

And then up rose the woman who had so newly reviled him, and she cried out, “Go! says the prophet. Stand on high! Look thee toward the east! It comes!”

“Now!”

“Christ Jesus!”

“March!”

“Repent!”

“It is coming!”

“Save us!”

They lifted up the body.

O the powers of darkness tremble and with fear their hearts do fill,

As the sons of light go marching out to stand upon that Hill

Beneath the Cross and Circle to fulfill God’s blessed Will!

For the end of time has come!

So come and march with us to Glory!

Oh, come and march with us to Glory!

Yes, come and march with us to Glory!

For the end of time has come!

5

Mid-Sunday dreams. Not all peaceful. Races against old deadlines. Missing trains and planes. Bags, badly packed, falling open on busy platforms. All of them lucid, but disjointed. Trying to straighten them out, he woke. Then back down again. Sounds from the television, Happy’s adjacent body, daylight squeezing past the blinds, the twisted sheets, all these entered in, and though he was always conveniently far from this place and time, there was still a nagging need to be doing something he was neglecting, to get somewhere before it was too late, all of which, during semiconscious spells, he understood only too well. Once he was racing on a bicycle on an old dirt road. Then it was a car. Hairy turns, torn-up roads, horrible precipices, tremendous speed he couldn’t seem to control. As though in the sky above there were parenthetical comments being made by a television announcer, who called him “His Eminence Justin Miller” and once “His Promontory” just for laughs. The situation of this announcer was peculiar and he woke finally in the aura of that peculiarity: for the announcer, while ostensibly describing the race, if that’s what it was, neither explained accurately to the audience what “His Eminence” was doing, nor did he reveal to Miller the precise structure of the race, or how or why in fact he’d got into it. Perhaps it was night. Certainly, later, it was night. He was in a church-camp, having driven there perhaps, though this part was not distinct. Now he was at Inspiration Point with a blond-haired girl. Large full moon, which, however, was a bit unstable, occasionally startling him with its sudden oscillations. The girl was crying, yet they were both quite happy. They suddenly remembered the prayer meeting, raced, feeling guilty, through a dark forest, arrived late for it. Inside the church, there was crying and singing and impassioned preaching. The girl got drawn into it, soon was weeping emotionally with all the other boys and girls. He realized, within the dream, that all this had happened to him when he was in the seventh grade, and he had forgotten about this girl entirely. Her name, he recalled, was Mary. She was still the same, but he was now a grown man. The women who worked in the camp kitchen bawled and shrieked, their skirts always hiking up somehow over the roll of their stockings on their beefy thighs. He was dismayed that Mary, who had just wept for him (though exactly what he had done, he could not remember), now wept the same tears for Jesus. He turned to a companion, a large somber man whom he had brought here to show this sort of behavior, perhaps a father figure of sorts, and explained: “She has been seeking God, you see, but has never found him. I have been the victim of transcendence.”

He woke repeating this, correcting the last word to “transubstantiation,” and, opening his eyes, found himself vis-à-vis Happy’s magic Bottom, a scant six inches from his nose. She stood at the edge of the bed, his robe half on, lighting a cigarette. He leaned forward, nipped one cheek with his teeth.

She squeaked, dropping the smoke, then twitched like a mare flicking a fly. “I’ve been standing here for three hours waiting for you to do that,” she complained, covering it up now with the robe and stooping for the cigarette.

“The cross in the circle,” he mused, singsonging it to a tune that seemed to be running through his mind.

“How’s that?”

“The cross in the circle.” He turned her backside toward the full-length mirror on the back of the door, lifted the robe. “The circle,” he indicated, swooping his hand through an oval whose extremities were the small of her back and the back of her knees.

“That’s an egg,” she corrected.

“And the cross.” He started between the knees and plowed up through the vertical that would have ended at the sacroiliac, had she not got ticklish where the thigh-wrinkle crossbeam cut across it.

“That’s not a cross, either,” she said. “That’s a highway intersection.”

He laughed and pulled her toward him, but she resisted. She looked toward the television, and he guessed what was eating her. He fell back, pretending indifference. “What time is it?”

“About two,” she replied. “There they are again.” She turned up the volume and left without smiling. Phony fussing noises in the kitchen.

Miller sat up and pulled on his shorts, listening to the announcer recast once more the story of the goddamn Brunists and their march to the Mount of Redemption. In the background: the thumping strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which accounted for certain parts of dreams now coming to mind. He felt groggy from having slept too long and too hard, and he wondered what he and Happy could do this afternoon to get away from this thing altogether. Unlike the little old lady, he didn’t even want to watch it on television. Room seemed dark — must be cloudy out. He smiled, thinking of the night just past, and turned toward the set to watch the Brunists advancing toward him, tunics aflutter and banners high. Looked to be Locust, about the 1500 block. The street-level angle of the camera prevented him from seeing any but the front rank, but they seemed to have grown some. What woke him up was seeing Abner Baxter: there he was, he and Ben Wosznik flanking the lean prophet at the very front of the tramping column, both carrying banners. “Hey!” he said out loud, and then the next thing he saw was Marcella’s body on a kind of stretcher.

“… Of the prophet. We still have no definite explanation of her death. Members of the cult with whom we have spoken insist only that she met her death through an act of divine providence, but refuse to release further details.” Cut from Marcella to Ben Wosznik in a living room. Miller couldn’t believe it. His heart pounded. Ben said, “Well, now, I don’t think it’s proper for me to say. I will say that it seemed as though her tragic passing from this life, just so short a time before God’s Coming, before the Coming of Light, why, it did strike all of us like a message from above, not a punishment so much as an act of mercy, a kind of sacrifice, you might almost say, which brung to pass that a lot of good people who weren’t getting along suddenly found that their fights was foolish, and against the Will of God.” Miller crouched, in his shorts, gripping his T-shirt, before the set.

Announcer: “Excuse me, Mr. Wosznik, but do you mean to say that she met her death by some sort of sacrificial ritu—” Wosznik: “No, I don’t mean nothing like that! What kinda stories are you boys trying to scare up?” Announcer: “Why has no one been permitted to examine her?” But now it was Clara Collins who replied: “Well, we got a doctor with us. He done what he could, and now his word is good enough for us. We’re takin’ her with us to the Mount of Redemption so’s she can be received bodily unto the Lord, there to be raised from the dead. We ain’t takin’ no chances, deliverin’ her over to the powers of darkness.” Announcer: “Do you mean to say that you expect her to be brought back from the dead?” Clara: “Of course, I do. Don’t you believe in the resurrection of the dead?” Cut to procession. Tremendous crowd, all right. Far as you could see.

Not knowing when he’d begun, Miller now was nearly dressed, frantically buttoning his shirt, stuffing his feet into shoes.

Announcer: “Earlier today, Mr. Mortimer Whimple, mayor of the city of West Condon, issued a brief statement in which he deplored the Brunist aggression against several West Condon churches this morning and the consequent increase in violence and hysteria, but discounted a persistent rumor that the girl might have been ceremoniously sacrificed or might have offered herself up in self-immolation, observing …” Whimple: “We understand it was some kind of accident. Maybe a fall or something. I think it’s all too easy to jump to wild conclusions. You gotta remember that her health had got, ah, pretty precarious by going such a long time without eating, and, ah, there are none of the usual signs of violence like you might expect in a, a sacrifice, let me say.” He looked shrunken and persecuted. Announcer: “Mr. Mayor, has any official autopsy been conducted or ordered?” Whimple (hesitating): “Uh, no comment.” Another voice: “Mr. Mayor, are any arrests in connection with her death being contemplated?” Whimple: “Not now.” Announcer (while Whimple talked silently on the screen to reporters): “We learned about an hour ago through sources close to the mayor, however, that the governor is being kept in touch by telephone with the situation as it develops, and that elements of the state police force have been dispatched and are now on their way to West Condon.” View of the Brunists, sound of their marching hymn in the background. Nearing the edge of town. “We return you to the network program now in progress.”

Miller looked up from tying his shoes, saw Happy Bottom in the doorway. “Get your clothes on! Let’s get going!”

“I think I’ll take a shower,” she said. “I’ll come out later.”

“We just had three showers,” he argued, but he saw she was near to tears, or her equivalent of them which was a kind of bleak wintry absence of all anima.

Announcer’s voice broke through the network program again with a sudden bulletin, accompanied by a newsclip of the Brunists standing on a hill — already! — but this hill was rocky and unfamiliar. Didn’t recognize any of the cultists either. Good reason: they turned out to be a group in Beirut, where, the announcer explained, night had already fallen and the end of the world was expected momentarily. Quick bulletins then of similar groups gathering in Germany, in Great Britain, in Rhodesia, Greece, Australia, Peru, Canada, and all over the United States. In Guatemala, a popular astrologist who had rightly predicted the end of the last war and the deaths of three world leaders now claimed to have verified Bruno’s prediction of the Parousia, and was at this moment leading twenty-seven fat Catholic ladies, including the President’s sister — all shown from the elephantine rump in the newsclip — up the side of the volcano Acatenango. Cut to Eleanor Norton reading heaps upon heaps of telegrams in the Bruno living room from people who said they were either on the way to West Condon, or were organizing similar marches to hills or mountains in their vicinity. Interview with the Arizona invalid-hitchhiker, who had made it. Cut to a film of a small Cessna arriving at the county airport, its two occupants emerging dressed in Brunist tunics. Back to Eleanor and more telegrams, many of them requesting that she repeat all details over the television networks, which she willingly did. “We wish to emphasize that the exact … content of the Coming of Light is not known, what precisely it will be or how it will … take place. We do know that, whatever shape it takes, it will take place today, barring of course unforeseen obstacles caused by the powers of darkness. We are also reasonably convinced that it must take place here, in West Condon, on the Mount of Redemption, to where God, Domiron, all the higher forces of the universe, and our prophet Giovanni Bruno, the One to Come, have directed us to march. This does not … does not mean it will not occur simultaneously elsewhere, and we encourage all of you, elsewhere in the world, too distant to be able to reach us here … that all of you follow to the best of your abilities your own inspiration and sources. Those of you near enough to come, we urge you to do so, being unable to certify that this … this event will indeed occur in any other given place, but assured for those reasons I have so often repeated that it must surely occur at least at this Mount … this Mount over the Deepwater Coalmine.”

Clara Collins came on, a sudden dynamic contrast: “Yessir, we are very excited! This sudden response around the world to our message, or messages jist like ours, why, it certainly is another sign we’re on the right track. You cain’t say it’s jist coincidence. And you cain’t say we done any missionary work. It’s jist spontaneous-like, and I believe all this activity, all this here zeal for the Lord, well, it jist has got to mean something!”

Announcer: “When exactly, Mrs. Collins, do you anticipate the, eh, the end of the world?”

Clara: “Well, we don’t rightly know, but if you’re worryin’ about it like you better be, then I’d say to you you’d better come along with us right now, on account of it’s apt to happen jist any moment!” Back to the network.

He wasn’t able to catch them by car after all. Crowds blocked the way. People milled in every street. Mostly strangers. Lot of cars with out-of-state licenses. He parked as near to the back edge of town as he could, took up the speedgraphic, set out in a light jog. He decided to cut across the acreage that the city had just bought for purposes of luring industry. Hoped to cut the parade off. The lope over those untended fields was not easy: irregular, high with dried grass and shrubs that bit and clutched at his ankles, lot of junk to trip him up. He saw the crowds, though, just swelling out onto the mine road from the edge of town. Helicopter circling overhead, no doubt photographing his lone gallop crosscountry toward the Brunists: lost lamb returning to the fold, or messenger with the Word. Sky beyond the helicopter was gray with fat ripe clouds.

He angled more sharply so as to get ahead of the advancing masses. Out in front: several cars, many of them with tripods and other equipment strapped on top. Big TV outfit rolled along in front, followed by an enormous crowd that just didn’t seem to end. A kind of flood at that: the Brunists bubbling down the road like a spread of white foam, and at the edges, like dark scum, the welter of the curious, the doubters, the hecklers, the indignant. He aimed toward a grove of trees, saw that if his wind lasted he’d make it before the Brunists with a couple minutes to spare. The helicopter came roaring down over his head and onto the Brunists, there to hover like a great speckled insect.

His wind lasted, but barely. He staggered up against one of the trees, gasping, pulled out a smoke. His side ached, one ankle hurt. He tucked the camera between his knees, lit up, then sighted the camera on the road in front of him, just as a couple cars shot by.

“Real scene,” somebody said behind him.

Miller looked around, noticed for the first time that he shared the grove with three or four other cameramen. The guy who had addressed him had come up from behind, now stood looking over Miller’s shoulder. Young kid. Shaggy. Cocky.

“Did you catch the rumpus this morning at the R.C. place?”

“Guess I missed that,” Miller said, still panting.

“Apocalyptic,” the kid said. “Laid into altars with mining picks, swiped a lot of stuff.”

Miller could see the front ranks now: Giovanni Bruno, gaunt, lugging what did indeed look like a coal pick, head held high, hair flowing, legs kicking out vigorously against the restraint of the tunic, narrow bony feet, bare, beating down the hard ruts of the road; on either side of him, Abner Baxter and Ben Wosznik, singing lustily and bearing the two banners, a German police dog trotting at Wosznik’s heels.

The photographer unwrapped a red pack of gum, shoved about half of it in his mouth, offered Miller some. “No, thanks.” So, in went the rest.

Behind the three men walked the Nortons, side by side, faces collapsed in grief and maybe a kind of horror, but their step measured and determined. On either side, more or less in single file, marched the women of West Condon, led by Clara Collins and Sarah Baxter. Mixing in and trailing back down the road: scores of East Condoners, no, hundreds! Some wielded torches, some silver candlesticks, part of the morning’s loot, no doubt. And, in the middle, borne on—

“Now you won’t believe this,” the photographer said, working his jaws mightily around the gum, “but you see that little Seenyora Two Hung Lo? There in the middle with the little fat fella? Well, they both been to college.”

“Is that so?” Miller was getting his breath back. He dropped his butt to his feet, ground it out, pulled out another.

“Degrees and everything.” The kid lifted his camera, took a photo. Somehow, his doing that made the camera in Miller’s hand grow cold and heavy. The front ranks of the procession had pulled nearly abreast of them. “You wouldn’t think brainy types like that could get their asses in such a silly sling, now wouldja?”

“Hard to figure.”

“You said it, man.” The gum cracked and popped. Miller felt chills ripple through him, seeing the thing now clearly, jogging slightly, back and forth, back and forth, to the rhythm of their song. “Now that poor little piece of dead snatch they’re toting, that’s a different story.” On the shoulders of six men. Litter was what looked like a lawn chair, folded down flat. She was just no color at all. Something between the dull aluminum of the chair frame and the vapid gray of the darkening sky. Fresh white tunic, too big for her — a grotesquely ironic thought occurred to him, and, yes, it was probably true … they probably found that tunic in her closet, or a drawer, and thought … Her mouth gaped open, lips drawn dry; he licked his own self-consciously. One hand pointed rigidly heavenward, the other downward. Eyelids half-open over a filmy opaque surface. It was so unreal a thing, he could register no emotion except horror. Marcella! He shuddered, closed his eyes, opened them. “They say she died with her hand aimed up at the Old Man like that, and that was what made that redheaded bugger see the light.” Miller just couldn’t attach her to this brittle blue corpse that rocked on the road before him. The run here had weakened him, had made him sweat; now the sweat was cold as death on him and all his tendons were gone to rot. He leaned up against the tree to keep from buckling, flicked his cigarette into the ditch, lit a new one. Marcella. He saw her name on his desk blotter, heard her gay laughter, smelled her body on his, saw the intricate turn of a lightly tanned wrist, tasted the newness of her mouth. Marcella. Marcella Bruno. Was it something in her he had loved … or something in himself he had hated? He felt old. “Well, the word is she got banged by the guy who grinds out the local scandal sheet. He was a big cat in the club, but he cut out on them and got into her. She went off her nut and, so they say, finally knocked herself off. Now that’s pretty wild too, I admit, but that’s something I can understand.”

“Where’d you hear all that?”

“Oh, I dunno. You pick things up. You just drag in? There’s a couple lambent skin pix making the rounds at the flophouse that this wiseguy took of himself laying the meat to her. Big guy, about as tall as Papa Spook out there, but twice as wide.” The kid popped his gum, spat out the side of his mouth, photographed Marcella’s cadaver. “Gives you a weird feeling,” he said. “In one of the photos she’s just like that, one arm up, one down, looking scared. Like it was all planned.” Weird feeling.

Behind the body marched alternate pallbearers, large numbers of out-of-towners among them. Willie Hall and a heavyset man dragged along a little red wagon, in which, huddled miserably, sat Emilia Bruno, ancient, dark, withered, looking very ill indeed, yellowish eyes cast upward toward where her daughter rocked above her. Some of the men carried large wooden crosses at least four feet tall, roughly hewn from tree branches. Miller saw three or four of them. Then came the young, a disordered, emotional, wildly singing lot, dozens of them, all sizes. The four Baxter redheads stood out. Carl Dean Palmers hopped backwards in front of them, leading them in their singing:

“O the sons of light are marching since the coming of the dawn,

Led by Giovanni Bruno and the voice of Domiron!

We shall look upon God’s Glory after all the world is gone!

For the end of time has come!

So come and march with us to Glory!

Oh, come and march with us to Glory!

Yes, come and march with us to Glory!

For the end of time has come!”

The helicopter lowered, cameras whirred and shutters clicked on all sides, the crowds trotted by, filling the ditches. The guys here in the grove with him folded up their gear, hiked it to their shoulders and set off, keeping pace with the procession, the vanguard of which was now virtually out of sight. The kid started to trail the others, turned around. “Hey, you coming?” He cocked his head, spat. “Say, man, you feeling okay?” Miller nodded, leaned away from the tree. Nothing to do but go on, see it out, find out what he could. “Got a little too much last night, hunh?” The kid, thank God, didn’t wait for an answer.

There must have been at least three or four hundred tunicked followers in the procession, it was strung out for nearly a quarter of a mile. Others joined in, some wrapped in sheets, some merely in streetclothes, all barefoot. Behind the caravan were cars and trucks as far as the eye could see. A rumble in the sky. The singing broke off. Everyone looked up. A kind of moan or mumble rippled through the crowd, Brunists and spectators alike. Slowly, unevenly, the singing resumed:

“O the sons of light are marching to the Mount where it is said

We shall find our true Redemption from this world of woe and dread,

We shall see the cities crumble and the earth give up its dead,

For the end of time has come!

So come and march with us to Glory …!”

Miller trailed wearily along, the crowds ahead dissolving into a shifting white mass, bordered by browns and grays, Marcella’s body floating as though on a raft. Further rumbles overhead. Nervous jokes about that, strained laughter about his ears. He heard his name on occasion, nodded to people. What if, he wondered, what if he’d deflowered her first, talked after? He shuddered, as though with a chill. Ahead of him, the procession seemed to have stopped. People butted up against one another and began to murmur. He heard whisperings of “blockades” and “powers of darkness” and “police.” He edged up the slope of the ditch, made cautious inquiries of people in the rear ranks about Marcella, but they saw his camera and no one answered him. Back into the ditch then and toward the bottleneck, protected from Brunists who knew him by the thick hordes of massing spectators, staying as deep in the ditch as possible, passing under the body — he saw only the slight depression her cadaver made in the brightly striped canvas of the lawn chair — and the thick shapes of the tunicked women and the white banners, now becalmed.

At the head of it all he discovered a barricade and — goddamn! — a ticket booth! Manning it were Wally Fisher and Maury Castle and a couple guys Miller didn’t know. Miller had heard rumors all week that Fisher was up to no good, and Fisher himself, with a dry cackle, had spoken of his “brainstorm.” The cop Dee Romano was there, too, palm resting on his pistol butt. He was explaining that it was all legal, that Mr. Fisher had rented the premises for the day for the purposes of promoting a small carnival, and that the admission charge of one dollar was entirely legitimate — all of which meant that Romano was getting a cut of the gate.

There was a tremendous protest boiling up, and Dee couldn’t cover it. His right hand grew very fidgety. Maury Castle took over. “Now, folks, we realize that there is a conflict of interests here today,” he boomed out. “And we want to do everything possible to alleviate that conflict.” TV and movie cameras rolled, flashguns popped, the helicopter hovered. “We respect all religions and it was not Mr. Fisher’s intention to interfere with the activities of you people.” Only man in West Condon who could talk to a square mile of people without a P.A. system. “Therefore, we have not bothered in any way the hill where you folks are going, and we have not mounted any of our stands up there. Moreover, we understand—” There was a sudden loud clap of thunder. The helicopter lifted and soared away. Castle grinned up at the sky, then continued. “Because we understand that you folks are not really interested in our carnival, why, we thought the only courteous thing to do would be to let you pass by at no charge. But I want to ask you to please be orderly and I’m afraid we have to limit the free entrance only to those who have these here jumpers on, these — what do you call …” His voice had sunk to a consultational tone, still audible, as he leaned toward Wosznik. “Yes, these here tunics. So now, if you other folks will please step back just a minute and let these people pass through, it will make things a whole lot easier.”

There was a lot of discontent, but also a lot of laughter. Good old pioneer ingenuity. Clara Collins and Ben Wosznik stood by the gate, explaining to those at the tail end what had happened, seeking to protect their people, but in effect doing Castle’s work for him. They argued with Fisher and Castle about those members not in tunics, and bare feet became sufficient criteria, whereupon the Brunist fold was increased temporarily by about twenty-five young gate-crashers. Miller hung back until Clara and Wosznik had moved on. At the ticket booth, Fisher said, “One dollar, please.”

“Press,” said Miller sourly.

“No passes today,” the old bastard said with a broad grin. “This is, in fact, hee hee, a press carnival!” And then, his dewlaps flapping, he nearly gagged with laughter.

Rather than argue, Miller fished up a buck.

“Say, you’ll never guess who the hell is here today!” Fisher said.

“Jesus Christ.”

Again that deep delighted wheeze. “No! Father Jones! He got a job on one of the city papers and pulled this as his first goddamn assignment!” The old man really thought that was funny, wheezed and choked so hard that tears came to his eyes. “I was so happy to see him, I even let him in for nothing!” Then he leaned forward, his face up against the ticket window, looking for a moment like an old father confessor, and whispered, “Say, Miller, you got a pretty ass!” Then back he roared again, nearly falling off his stool. “Jesus! I’m having so much fun, I’ll never live out the day!”

Miller turned away from Fisher, only to confront Romano. “Take it easy today, Miller,” the cop said. “We don’t want no trouble.”

Miller brushed by, feeling not so very great. The carnival amounted to a handful of refreshment stands, a bingo game, and a numbers game, the latter already in operation and manned by Doris, the hotel coffeeshop waitress. She winked lewdly at him as he passed by. The Brunists had already arranged themselves on the hill, were busying themselves with their own circle, as though afraid to look down on the threat at the hill’s foot. He saw now what the wooden crosses were for. Ben Wosznik digging and directing, they planted the crosses on the east slope, mounted Marcella’s lawn-chair bier on them, each rounded aluminum corner resting on a rustic wooden crossbeam. A statue of the martyr Stephen — Miller recognized it as the patron of the Catholic Church here — seemed to appear from nowhere, dressed in a Brunist tunic. Sorrowful and empty-sleeved, it was placed beside Marcella on the south slope, this side of her, as though to guard her from the powers of darkness who milled about below, eating peanuts and cotton candy, drinking bottled pop. The silver candelabra were placed at her head and feet, but efforts to light them proved futile. The two banners were set in holes already dug for them and, between, an altar was put up with all its now-familiar Brunist relics.

It started then with a kind of moan, a wail, even while the crowds of spectators who had followed them out here filed still past the ticket booth, dropping their dollars. There was thunder. The wheel of the numbers game revolved with a purring flutter. Semicircling Marcella, but each with a view of the east, the Brunists knelt. The wail mounted. Popcorn flup-flup-flupped in the lit-up popping cage. A woman laughed. On the hill, a long dramatic prayer was commenced, led alternatively by Clara Collins and Abner Baxter and a plump man with a vibrant voice who Miller learned was a Mr. Hiram Clegg from some town nearby, the man he’d seen pulling Emilia’s wagon. Everyone joined in, echoing parts, chorusing familiar responses, all of it a kind of contest of Biblical knowledge and appropriate responsive ritual. Most of the new ones, apparently, were types like those of the local Church of the Nazarene; the Nortons seemed very isolated indeed. In fact, now that he thought of it, where was Himebaugh? Poor bastard didn’t have it, after all.

It was growing dark, more from the clouding over than from the approach of night, but Fisher had strung lights down along the row of booths, and now the cameramen were setting up their own lamps, electricity apparently provided by the mine. Miller wandered to the eastern edge of the carnival area, found Mickey DeMars there dispensing soft drinks.

“H’lo, Tiger!” Mick squeaked. “Say, you’re looking a little peaked. You been getting enough sleep?”

“What’ve you got back there, Mick?”

“Jim Beam or Canadian.”

“Either one.”

“Say, you seen Lou?”

“No.”

“Well, you never believe it, but the bastard’s out here!”

“I believe it, Mick.” He tossed the drink down, looked up at the soles of Marcella’s blue feet. Then, suddenly remembering, he reached in his trenchcoat pocket; his fingers closed around a small cotton sock. Beyond the Brunists, over the far edge of the hill, he could see the tops of trees, then the upper flight of the tipple and the watertower with its DEEPWATER banner, thrust fatly up like a carburetor advertisement. Beyond that, a motion in the skies of mixed grays, like a photograph taking shape: photograph of a young brown-eyed girl in a shawl, the shawl slipping to her shoulders … and he saw then that he was one with the Brunists: that he, too, had been brought full circle to stand upon this place….

We were gathered on the Mount of Redemption

On the night before the Coming of the Light,

Seeking peace and the path of Salvation,

But hate and fear made a horror of that night!

In faith, she came running out to save us;

In faith, she came out to end our strife;

And, with her hand pointing upward unto Heaven,

In faith, she laid down her precious life!

So, hark ye to the White Bird of Glory!

Yes, hark ye to the White Bird of Grace!

We have gathered at the Mount of Redemption

To meet our dear Lord here face to face!

He saw some of the clutch approaching, Cavanaugh, Whimple, Elliott and others, so he paid Mick and left. He had to pass by them, but they either missed him or intentionally ignored him. On the hill, the prayer meeting was getting louder, and Clara and Baxter were whipping the crowd up with challenges.

“Do you believe?”

“Yes! Oh Lord! Yes, we believe!”

“Does He come?”

“He comes! Yes! Now!”

“Are you ready?”

“Ready, Lord! Amen! God save us! Come!”

Severe rumbles in the sky now. Clara Collins gazed upward, lifted her fist and cried out, and they all mimed her. What power that woman had! Miller noticed she was wearing Ellie Norton’s gold medallion: a mysterious occult talisman on Eleanor, it became a flashing badge of hegemony on Clara. Could he go directly to her? Probably not. Not today. He looked for Betty Wilson, spied her on her knees between a woman even fatter than herself and the man named Clegg. Down here, the crowds were multiplying by the minute, now packed the tents and booths, and swarmed densely at the base of the hill. Though amused, often giggling pointlessly, chewing gum and popcorn with exaggerated jaw motions, getting into friendly scuffles, they nevertheless seemed disinclined to aim taunts directly at the Brunists. Maybe they were afraid to. There were close to four hundred excited people up on that hill. Or maybe it was just the way they’d been brought up. This was a religious service, after all, screwball or not, and what derision could one properly hurl at a man who prayed to the Christian God? They, too, had prayed, sung, confessed. Yet, they yearned to storm that hill, Miller could feel it, they ached to obliterate that white fungus, they were hate hungry and here was something to hit out at. They waited for: the outrage.

Miller slipped into the bingo tent, arranging himself with a view out at the hill. Crowds in front of him, but the hill rose above them. He looked for Jones. Preferred to settle that business first. People pushed into the tent in fear of rain, people pushed out to take another look, jostling him. Finally, he moved back into one empty corner, took a folding chair, and cut away a flap of canvas for a window. “Under the I: 28!” Up on the hill, Bruno paced silently among his followers, stopping once or twice to kiss the withered forehead of his old mother, she still heaped in a sickly little mound in the wagon. The man seemed suddenly this afternoon to have acquired tremendous energy, moved with assurance and even a kind of ferocity. “Under the O: 69!” Ripple of giggles. Outside, they were giggling at a couple who had stripped off their streetclothes to stand with the Brunists in their white underwear. And, just in front of him through the flap, he saw a fat lady giggle when someone handed her a bag of buttered popcorn. “Under the B: 9!” Bruno, he noticed, repeated a peculiar gesture several times: the raising of his hand in a kind of benediction and the placing of it on a person’s shoulder. At first, Miller supposed it was a way of giving encouragement, but then he observed that those least in need of it, received it: Eleanor, Baxter, Clara, Wosznik. “Under the B: 12!”

And then it began to rain. A cloudburst. The crowds shrieked, laughed like children at a party, pressed back against the small booths and tents, pushing for shelter. Up on the hill, the Brunists seemed to take cheer. They smiled down condescendingly upon the turmoil below them, then lifted their eyes and hands to the exploding heavens. The harder it rained, the more ecstatic they became, the more violent became the crowds at the base. Distantly, he heard the emcee calling out the bingo numbers, but could no longer distinguish them. Half-consciously he’d been waiting for 7 or 14, and knew now he’d never hear it. Behind the downpour, bullish thunder stampeded and trumpeted. Amateur photographers added their Brownies and Polaroids to the one-eyed host that encircled the worshipers, conspiring to nail them forever to this time and place, and Miller noticed that the one thing that drew the crowd’s attention from the hill were the instant copies of the Polaroid cameras, exciting them even more than watching the real thing.

The rain roared on the tent, thunder crashed, the crowds screamed and shouted, now laughing less. A fight broke out in front of him, a nose was bloodied, a face pushed in the mud. Up on the Mount, people leaped up in the air as though trying to fly, ran about, rolled in the mud. Streetclothes were shed and so, in some cases, was underwear. Some of the spectators caught out in the rain screamed at that, some laughed, some only shouted meaninglessly. People pushed up against the tent, buckling its sides inward and blocking Miller’s view, showing him nothing but dark wet bodies, hands feeling haunches, elbows swinging.

He stood on his chair, cut another hole higher up. The Brunists were in a frenzy. Their thin white tunics clung to their bodies, wimpling white, otherwise showing a pale flesh color, except where underclothing protected. Hair streamed over faces, hands reached upward as though clawing, naked bodies milled with tunicked ones. Lights went out, came on again, tremendous clap of thunder, everybody started, gasped en masse, cried out, laughed excitedly. Some cried. Rain blew in through his window, spraying his face. One hand gripped the speedgraphic, the other kneaded the sock in his pocket. The emcee no longer called out numbers, seemed to be pleading for calm. Some people on the outer, wettest, fringe, frightened by the storm and lashed by the frantic press of the mass, lost their heads and ran hysterically up the hill to join the Brunists. Near the entrance to the bingo tent a woman went down, a froth on her mouth, and others, losing balance, trampled and fell over her. Women prayed and shrieked, and there were cries, some mocking, some terrifyingly real, that the end was coming. Miller’s chair went out from under him, and he dropped leadenly on two men who, slugging at him, ended up at each other’s throats. At the corner on the side there seemed to be no body pressed, so he slashed a full-length slit and pushed out. As he pushed out, others pushed in, kicking, bucking. He saw new holes opening up. Couldn’t see the hill.

Miller bulled forward, not caring who or what he hit — what are social niceties in a stampede? Rain beat on his face and his feet slipped and skidded in the mud. People bitched. He got knocked up against the wall of a booth. But, more and more, the crowds were turning to face the Brunists. And it was a sight to see. Naked or near-naked, they leapt and groveled and embraced and rolled around in the mud. A large group danced wildly around Marcella, screaming at her, kissing her dead mouth, clearly expecting her to rise up off her litter. Women embraced the statue of Stephen and kissed its mouth. Men tore branches off the little tree until it was stripped nearly bare, and whipped themselves and each other. It was a scene to delight a Lou Jones and now Miller saw him, moving impassively up the hill, photographing them as he went, kneeling for angles, apparently steering a course toward the dead girl. Jones, in drooping fedora and glistening raincoat, shaped like a big dark bag, made an odd contrast to the frenetic worshipers who performed for his lens. There was something almost contemplative, devotional, almost statuesque about him as he crouched to peer into the instrument in his lap.

Miller, breaking free of the crowd at last, paused just a moment, long enough to spot the white helmets and black uniforms of the state troopers, just arrived and in an anxious huddle with Whimple, Cavanaugh, and Romano, then ran for the hill, ran for Jones. Other newsmen, following Jones’ lead, had ventured forward into that belt of space that had till now separated the redeemed from the dead. Miller slammed past them in his heavyfooted slog up the hill, anger mounting, but a peculiar joy, too: he was here! it was on! And an hysterical fat woman, her tunic up under her armpits, rolled under his feet, bowled him over, and he felt his face slap into the mud. Tried to stand, but found himself in a swirl of wet bodies. A man sat beating his own face with his fists, and a woman staggering backwards fell on him, their legs twining as they rolled. Miller couldn’t see Jones. Someone laid into him with a switch and he felt a tug at his clothes. He escaped, half running, half crawling, back downhill, then, seeing he was cut off from retreat by an advancing singing bloc of new and naked converts, swung around toward where Jones now knelt, his back to the eastern sky, focusing on the soles of Marcella’s feet, his sullen face veiled by the drip of rain off his hat-brim, plastic sack over his camera, soggy cigar in his mouth. Charging Jones, Miller caught a glimpse of Marcella’s cadaver, the tunic pasted down against her livid flesh, pools standing here and there, her mouth and eyes filling with water that the rain splashed in. Jones glanced up just as Miller leaped, a grin there, and he turned his shoulder— It was like hitting a goddam ox. It pitched him right on over and, in midair, he realized for the first time he was still carrying his own speedgraphic — Miller felt something go, a sharp hot pain in his left arm or shoulder, and he saw the camera just as his own ass came crashing down on it. Hurt, but angry, hating someone whether it was Jones or not, he stood to face the man, who now squatted, deadpan as always, cigar still in place, hat knocked a bit askew, gazing up at him.

Suddenly he heard a shrill mad shriek that carried over all the roar up there: “That’s him! He murdered her!” It was Eleanor Norton, gray hair wild with the rain, tunic limp on her aging body, eyes fixed on him through wet lenses, arms outspread and fingers bent like claws—“Killer! Killer! Killer!”

It was a signal for them. All the aimless fury of the moment before suddenly discovered its object. He turned to run. They cut him off, swarmed down upon him. He dodged, spun, rolled, straight-armed, warded off blindly flung blows, but there were millions of them, and ducking one only put him in line for another. He watched feet trampling his camera as branches whaled his body, saw Jones, slyly amused, in modest retreat partway down the hill, photographing it all. He pushed downhill for Jones, but, letting down his guard, got a foot in his gut that doubled him over. He struggled to his feet, but they piled onto him. He swung at them, kicked, butted, but nothing slowed them. They covered him and their heaped flesh choked him. A fat man, that Clegg guy, an erection distorting the front of his wet tunic, leaped, came down like a mountain on Miller’s head. They fought for his trenchcoat and, releasing it, he somehow wriggled free. Wall of their bodies below him, so he switched strategy, bowled straight up the hill, seemed to have lost his shoes, but it helped him gain speed, dove headfirst into a cluster of bodies, felt something flatten his nose in, hit somebody hard as wood. Chorus of screams of horror — something cold struck his face — and as by the hundreds they jumped him, he saw what it was he had knocked over and he lost heart. They dragged him away from her, kicking and punching and whipping him with branches. Distantly, he felt their blows, felt them leap and dance on him, knew he was vomiting, knew he was bleeding, but as though someone were explaining this to him. They are killing you, he said, and though it caused wonderment in him, it could not lift an arm to stop them. He felt them shred the clothes off him, saw the ax, knew, though he couldn’t feel it, that his legs had been splayed and hands had been laid on him. Amazingly, just at that moment, he saw, or thought he saw, a woman giving birth: her enormous thighs were spread, drawn up in agony, and, staring up them, he saw blood burst out. “No!” he pleaded, but it sounded more like a gurgle. “Please!” and a whip lashed his mouth. Where the fuck were the troopers?

And it was done, the act was over. Through the web of pain, skies away, he recognized the tall broad-shouldered priestess with the gold medallion. She issued commands and he floated free. Rain washed over him. He seemed to be moving. The priestess was gone. And then there was a fall. Trees. Muddy cleft and a splash of water when he arrived. At which point, Tiger Miller departed from this world, passing on to his reward.

6

Vince Bonali and the only two buddies he had left in the world, old Cheese Johnson and old Georgie Lucci, sprawled, roaring drunk, upon the red wool expanse of vacant carpet in the lawyer’s house, as the West Condon cops, with Whimple and Cavanaugh and God knows who else, came in and arrested them there where they lay. This time there were no bird dogs to be bought, but, since the facilities were flooded with ecstatic raving Brunists, they let them go anyway. “Listen,” Vince told them. “Listen, I don’t give a shit what you do. Lock me up if you wanna. I don’t give a shit.” But they booted his ass out of there, and there was no place to go but home. Where things were not very good.

He staggered, feeling one with the scum of the earth, right down the rainsoaked middle of Main Street, telling anyone who cared to listen that he just didn’t give a shit, understand? then past St. Stephen’s where he had a kind of grievous heart attack that didn’t quite come off, past the homes of old buddies, Judases all, past the Bruno house, guarded now by burly troopers in white crash helmets, past his whole fucking life into total and eternal oblivion, reeling like an old blinded bull come mad to town.

There had been one moment today, there in the Church of the Nazarene, when, in spite of all his overcrowding misery, he’d been at peace with the world, a wild exhilarating bounce back from his notorious television appearance the night before — now, how had those TV bastards known they were going to go spooking Friday night? Robbins and Castle’d pay for that some day — the unspecified back scenes of which (were his pants zipped up? he’d been scared to look) had not escaped his wife and daughter.

It had started at Mass. His old archenemy Red Baxter, that sonuvabitch who’d once called Vince “a mealymouthed henchman for fascists,” had stormed into the Cathedral with all those raving Brunist crackpots, had laid into the altar and organ with a mining pick, had torn down paintings, and had even seemed set to slaughter the old priest. Vince had leaped up, followed by six or seven others, formed a human wall in front of Father Baglione, and held the Brunists to a stalemate. They had finally pulled out, but not before that goddamn Bruno had spit in the Father’s face. Baxter had railed at the congregated, calling the Church a whore: “I tell you, it has become a habitation of demons! and a haunt of every unclean spirit! and by the wine of her lust all the nations has fallen! and the kings of the earth has committed fornication with her, and the capitalists of the earth has waxed rich by the power of her wantonness! But listen here! I tell you, they shall weep and wail over her, when they look upon the smoke of her burning!” Burning! that was too much! Vince had plunged for the bastard, but guys had held him back. “There’s too many of them, Vince!” And Baxter, passing, had called him personally “a drunkard and a Jew and a fornicator, an intriguer dealing in the souls of men!” Vince then had seen what Bruno really was: he’d thought he was just a nut, but he was the very force of evil right in the flesh, the antichrist whose black spirit oozed out of him like an obscene vapor and penetrated all West Condon — could even penetrate the world! This was a battle of the spirit!

So, when it had broken up, they did what they had to do. Gathering up hatches and hammers, rifles, whatever they could find, they went, Vince leading them, to the Church of the Nazarene, about a dozen of them. It was a cheap squarish dump with false brick siding, a kind of one-room schoolhouse with a high loft and a damp crotchy odor. They bashed out all the windows, knocked out the lights, broke up the pews and folding chairs, tore out the wiring, smashed the pulpit and the old upright piano, ripped the songbooks. The thing that frustrated them was that no matter what they did to this dime-store junk, it didn’t compensate for the brutalizing of their Cathedral, but as they worked a kind of exhilaration did sweep over them. This was a holy thing, and they swung with the might of God empowering their bodies. Like a great horned beast in God’s service, they fell upon that place of sin and crushed it. They chopped the doors off the hinges, tore the toilet out of the floor, which caused the place to start flooding, broke into a small office. In there, they found a small desk, Baxter’s probably, almost nothing inside it: they chopped it up. They were sweating and they were feeling good. They dumped the books out of the shelves, heaved the shelves through the window, and tore up the books. Sal Ferrero said, “Hey, Vince! That’s a Bible you’re tearing up!” “But it ain’t a Catholic Bible, buddy!” They found two revolting paintings on the wall which they studied a moment before smashing. One was a grossly sensual male devil, bloated, cruel. The other was a hideous woman with snakes. “My God!” said Guido Mello. “What kind of place is this!” They left it nothing but rubble.

When it was done, they felt fine, they’d labored hard and had a good sweat up, they felt powerful and the axes and rifles swung firm in their hands, but they didn’t feel satisfied. “What next?” they wanted to know.

“Let’s go to the hill,” Bonali said.

Tremendous crowds jammed all the streets, they could hardly get through. Lay down on the horn and bulled ahead. Three carloads in tandem, ax handles and rifle barrels poking out the windows. Two or three guys, seeing them, piled in with them. Vince picked up Chester Johnson. “Hey, boys! didja see me on TV?” he preened, and Vince felt his neck flush. Rough laughter, deep in the throat, from the backseat.

The going was easier once they hit the mine road. Vince, leading, gunned it, had his old crate doing eighty before they reached the mine—“Well now, goddamn, I jist don’t think she’s gonna take off,” Johnson drawled — then saw ahead of him a barricade, slammed the brakes, skidded, nearly spun, pulled her out, shimmied to a halt, jumped out, found the cops and a bunch of shopowners off Main there.

“What the hell?” he asked, too loud, but he couldn’t help it. “You not gonna let them get to the hill?” He felt cheated somehow, but his heart was racing like a sonuvabitch, and his hands were sweating.

“Aw sure,” said Maury Castle, grinning at Vince — that goddamn fatface cocksucker! maybe this was the moment! “But, see, we just happened accidental-like to have scheduled our first annual spring carnival out here this weekend.”

Vince didn’t get it at all. “Whaddya mean, Castle?”

“Buck a head, Vince. Games and refreshments for everybody.”

Vince stared at Castle. “You guys always got it figured, don’t you?” Castle only shrugged, stared off. Vince went back to the boys, waiting for him there, half out of the cars. He realized then he was still swinging an ax. “Should we just bust on through?” They didn’t like the idea, seeing the cops there; he felt them shrink back from him. Just then, Vince spied Cavanaugh on the other side of the barricades. Something told him not to, but he hollered out: “Hey, Ted!” He grinned at the others. “Come on, you guys. Ted’ll let us in.”

They all climbed out, followed him up to the barricades. Ted came over, looking like a mortgage-holder, and said, “I thought I asked you to stay clear of here today, Bonali.”

Vince went cold all over. Didn’t hate, just felt emptied out, brought down. “I thought you might need me,” he said weakly. He felt his shame radiating behind him.

“Say, what the hell are you carrying there?”

“We just come from the—” But he decided not to mention it. Ted was a Protestant, too. He wouldn’t understand.

“Romano, I don’t want any goddamn weapons out here!”

Romano and Monk Wallace came out from behind the barricade, collected the rifles and axes. “Now, either pay your buck, boys, or beat it,” Romano said.

Bonali, crumbling into ruins, turned to go, but some of the other guys started forking up. “Hey! you gonna go along with that shit?” he hollered at them. It was a gray muggy day and his sweat was sticky on him. Something sick was lodged in his stomach.

“Take it easy, Vince,” said Mello. “This is gonna be pretty funny. I don’t want to miss it.”

As the other guys lined up like a bunch of fucking sheep, Mort Whimple came waddling up on the run. “I just got the word, Ted!” he gasped. “They’re about two blocks from Willow. They’ll hit the mine road in about ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

“Tell them to slow them down any way they can.” Cavanaugh looked irritably at his watch, then up at the sky. “Flat tire, anything.”

“They tell me Himebaugh’s still not with them,” the mayor said.

“Good,” was the first word of Ted’s reply, but Vince couldn’t hear the rest, because the mayor and Cavanaugh wandered off in a heads-down huddle. Something about the troopers coming by helicopter. Vince looked up. It was going to rain.

“Let’s go get Himebaugh,” Vince said to those who remained.

But the others split off from him. They didn’t make any excuses, they just edged away like he had some goddamn disease, strolled over to the ticketbooth and paid their dollars. “Come on, Vince,” said Sal Ferrero, smiling. Was he digging him? “Let’s watch this awhile, get something to drink, cool off.”

“You chickening out too, Sal?” Sal shrugged, looked embarrassed, wandered away. “Sal, goddamn you, man, I’m asking you for the last time! You coming, buddy, or ain’t you?”

“I’m not coming, Vince.”

“Well, fuck you then, you yellowbellied cocksucker!” Oh Jesus, it all boiled up in him, he was so mad he could have cried, and he could have killed Ferrero right there, could have thrown him to the dirt and battered his fucking brains out, and, trembling, he spun on Johnson and Lucci, the only two guys left — maybe they didn’t have a buck on them — and cried, “Let’s go, goddamn it!” And afraid they were going to bug out too, he added, “Himebaugh was a rich bastard. Maybe we’ll find something.” That kept them with him, okay, but he felt rotten about it. That sick thing was puffing up and filled his belly now.

They made it back to the edge of town just as the first carloads of newspaper and radio people were pulling out on the mine road. Everything was all mashed up. He blared and cursed and inched and bellowed, but finally ran into solid rivers of people who kicked his car and swore at him when he tried to move. They parked and walked, having a rough time of it against the tide, though Johnson and Lucci amused themselves feeling up every foreign female they squeezed by. It was getting dark and Vince thought he heard thunder.

At last they broke free of the mob, found their way back to Himebaugh’s place. Vince felt queasy, looked about nervously for cameras, but Johnson danced around waving at all the trees and shouting out his “earthling Ralphus” lines. Himebaugh’s front door was locked. Vince realized he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do if he found the man inside, but he put his shoulder to the door, and in three or four heaves it gave way. The moment it broke in, a big skinny black cat came streaking out, made Vince nearly jump out of his skin. “What the hell was that!”

“A little good luck,” said Lucci.

“That pussy looked like she might not a had no meat for awhile,” whined Johnson. Johnson wasn’t funny today. Just nasal and grating.

The house was nearly bare. Carpets still down, matted depressions where furniture had sat. A few heavy pieces remained. A couple paintings on the walls, books in the bookshelves. But everything showed signs of a quiet but permanent departure.

While Lucci and Johnson searched for loot, Bonali hunted Himebaugh. Didn’t want to find him, but he couldn’t quit the idea. Tried to remember the file busting him on the nose. The empty house was getting on his nerves. “Ho-lee shee-it!” cried Lucci just then, and Vince nearly squeaked out loud. “Hey, come here!”

Johnson and Bonali found him in the bathroom, staring into the tub. It was full of water. It was also full of dead cats. “I never knowed you could drown a cat without tyin’ a stone to him,” Johnson said.

“He must’ve held them under,” Vince reasoned. He tried to think of the antichrist, but it was getting all mixed up.

“Well,” cackled Johnson, “the cats are all yours, boys. I got mine.” He held up a bottle. Brandy.

“Jesus! Just what I need!” Vince said.

“Hunh-unh!” negated Johnson, tucking the bottle under his skinny arm and backing off.

“Unh-hunh!” argued Vince, and he and Lucci went for the flask.

“Okay, okay!” Johnson cried, going down hard. “Shit, boys, you’re swingin’ like you’re mad or somethin’!”

They split it, and when it was gone, they looked for more. Lucci found half a fifth near the tub, behind the stool, and Bonali discovered a whole one in the bookshelves. Outside, a storm had commenced to blow, and there wasn’t any point in going out there and getting wet, and that was how it was that the cops found them there in a state only bordering on consciousness.

There was nothing very wonderful about the days that followed either. Vince came down with the flu, which kept him in bed awhile, and Etta, in spite of everything, took care of him like always. When he could get up, he felt weak all the time, not up to anything more strenuous than sitting in his old rocker on the front porch. Ted Cavanaugh never came by about that special committee of course, though in his imaginings, Vince kept seeing that big red Lincoln pulling up at the curb. Out of boredom one morning, he did manage to drag himself back up the ladder and got the whole south side of the house painted. The paint was a little gommy. When he was through, he hardly realized he’d been painting, though he dreamt that night about falling off the ladder and woke up screaming for Angelo. Had no goddamn idea when he’d get to the other two sides.

Sal Ferrero came over while he still had the flu, and they apologized to each other. “I don’t know what happened to me that day, Sal.”

“I know, Vince. It was a crazy time. Anyhow, it’s over.”

It sure was. Sal dropped by about every second or third day after that. They bitched together about being out of work and no prospects, or talked over old times, and sometimes the Brunists came up, though they never felt exactly comfortable speaking about that. Sal filled Vince in on all that happened out there at the hill that day, about the rain and all those naked people, and how they got old Tiger Miller before the cops moved in, how in the big fight they overturned the TV dollies and busted the lamps, and how the bingo tent fell in, crushing a little child to death. “It’s awful, Sal.”

“Hard to realize it ever happened here.”

A lot of people got killed and hurt, and what did they do about it? Nothing. They put that old man Fisher in jail but let him right out again. Didn’t touch Castle. And all they did to Bruno was send him to the looneybin, put old Emilia in a rest home. Sent one kid up for nearly killing a couple cops. But that was all. The rest: scot-free. And now they were showing up on TV and whatnot all over the country. “It is hard to realize, Sal. I still can’t believe it.”

“They say Baxter’s even back in town again.”

“No kidding.” He wanted to explain to Sal about the emptiness, but somehow he didn’t have the words for it. Instead, Sal told him a story that was going around about how, when they still had all those wild wet Brunists packed into the jail here that night, a state trooper slipped into the women’s cell to play the stud bull and got pulled out an hour later half dead and raving mad.

Vince and Etta never went up to the Eagles anymore. He hated to see those faces up there, especially Johnson’s. They called him “The Mayor.” Vince spent the days rocking on the porch, the nights escaping west or into crime on the TV. He wished the daytime programs were better, so he didn’t ever have to do anything else. There was a strain between him and Etta most of the time, but watching TV, they were happy enough, and found themselves talking together about the programs.

They got a letter one day from the Marine Corps, inquiring into the whereabouts of their son Charles Josef, who, the letter said, had been AWOL since the seventh of April. Vince groaned and Etta bawled, but they’d both pretty much guessed as much. They wrote back that he had visited them on Easter weekend but that they had no idea where he had gone afterwards; then sent letters to the other kids in the family to let them know about it, in case he showed up with one of them. “Shit, I’m sorry,” Vince said that day, rocking all alone out on the front porch, and he cried awhile by himself.

It was all empty, the town was falling all apart, soon there wouldn’t be anybody left around but him. No mines, no paper, businesses closing. The clubs would go soon. He looked across the table and there was Ange Moroni, hat tipped down to his nose, grinning at his cards. Mike Strelchuk and Carlo Juliano playing with them. Why did he remember that? He didn’t know, but it was plain as day. There was a big crowd, loud music, and they were winning. Where did it go: that excitement?

One evening just as the ten-o’clock newscast was coming on, all they had to keep plugged into the world now that the Chronicle was closed, Vince stood to stretch, chanced to gaze out the window just in time to see Ted Cavanaugh’s red Lincoln swing up at the curb. He ran into the bedroom, woke Etta up. “Hey! Wake up! Ted’s coming! I just saw his car out front!” Looked frantically for a tie.

“Angie’s got a date with his boy,” Etta replied sleepily, and rolled over hugely.

Vince went back to the door, peeked out. It was true, nobody was getting out. He went in to watch the news and sports. Began to understand a few of the remarks Angie had been making of late, why she’d seemed almost to hate him. Hours passed. He watched the midnight movie, old swashbuckler, hardly followed it. Time it was over, having watched all those flashing swords, he was in a sweat, imagining just about every grotesque perversion conceivable. When she finally came in, he called to her. “I’m tired, Dad,” she snapped, sounding tough. Whorish. “Let’s have confessions tomorrow.”

The kid might not have laid her, but he’d sure mussed her up. “Who you been wrestling with?” he asked dully, then saw that her face was all streaked with tears.

“Oh, please!” she cried, and ran into her room. For a long time, he heard her sobbing in there. It naturally occurred to him what the matter was. He’d have Etta ask tomorrow. “Ted, old buddy, I hate to tell you, but you and me is about to become related, in a manner of speaking.” But shit, the bastard would find a way out of it, buy off the doctors or the judges or something. It’d be Vince who’d wind up in the jug afterwards, and little Angie to raise a bastard. Things were bad. In fact, they were so bad that when he found out the next day that this had not been the problem, that it was just a routine breakup, he almost found himself feeling let down.

That was the kind of mood he was in when Wally Brevnik and Georgie Lucci came by his house to say good-bye. They told him they were going up North together, get some kind of factory work. They’d both been in his gang at the mine, and they said they still thought he was the best goddamn faceboss that mine had ever had. They didn’t say anything about mayors, but told him they sure as hell hated to say good-bye.

Vince told them it hurt him to see them go, too. Seemed like just about everybody in town was bugging out on him. Again, he wanted to tell them about the big hole he was looking into, about how afraid he was.

Wally said that by God they’d write for him when they found something good, figured it would only take them a couple weeks. “Shit, a man of your ability and experience, Vince, you’ll have no trouble.”

Vince got a little excited about that, said for them not to forget now, hell, it’d be just like down in the mine, all of them working together, and they all laughed about that, and then they were gone. Last thing he heard, as he walked them out to their car and saw them off, was Ben Wosznik on the car radio singing that Brunist song that was such a big hit these days. They waved at each other until they turned a corner a couple blocks down. He turned around, that hillbilly melody still ringing in his head, and there was the old house. Angie’s bike up against the bright yellow porch. On the rocker: a new calico pillow that Etta had made for him. Stop kidding yourself, he said. You ain’t going nowhere.

Then one night, he went for a walk. He was trying to get a new outlook. He had made mistakes, but who in this town hadn’t? He walked under leafy trees, past flowering bushes and lawns with a new green nap, the air laden with vegetable renascence. This town wasn’t through yet, and neither was he. Why couldn’t he make a new start? The ballooning May moon smiled down on him as though to say: it goes on; only men quit.

He found he had wandered into the old housing development where Wanda lived. Quiet, empty, badly lit, yet bright in the moonlight. Decided to stop by, what the hell, make some sort of apology. She must be feeling about as cruddy as he was. It didn’t matter much anymore who saw him or what they thought. And he felt like a wrong had to be righted, no matter how it was misread afterwards. He even thought about going home to get Etta and bringing her with him, but it was a long walk. He located Wanda’s house, but it was dark. He didn’t see curtains up, remembered then that she had given everything away. Jesus, the poor kid, all she had was the bare walls! Then he saw the FOR RENT sign sticking up in the clay of the front yard. Gone. With the rest of them. Like Sal said, hard to believe it had really happened. He felt relieved, but vaguely disappointed at the same time. “Well, God bless her,” he said, not knowing quite what he meant by it.

Moseying back, he chanced to pass the old Bruno house. It sat like a spook there in a tunic of moonlight, no longer protected. They sure got Bruno and the old lady put away fast, had to give them credit for that much. Vince noticed that the windows and doors were broken. He wandered up … then once on the porch, on in. A pale ghostly light hung dustily throughout. Things looked pretty busted up. He stood in the front room and looked about him on the melancholy scene. Did they see it would come to this? In the dining room, a huge glass chandelier lay splattered all over the floor, so that it crunched wherever he walked. His eyes were adjusted to the dark now, and he saw that the drapes had been slashed, chairs broken up, upholstery ripped, and he remembered his own demolition of the Church of the Nazarene. “What do we do it for, God?” he asked aloud, and wouldn’t have been too surprised to get an answer. “Do You understand what makes it happen? Can You forgive it?”

He felt he needed something by which to remember his coming here, to remember the whole Brunist story, and, since it was the nearest at hand, he picked up a fragment of the broken chandelier. He held it up toward the moonlight and, miraculously, a rainbow danced and shimmered in it. He wandered through the other rooms, and throughout there was the sound of glass underfoot like slate in the mine, wallpaper stripped and hanging in spectral shreds, black distorted objects silhouetted against the pallid light. In the kitchen he found a staircase, mounted it. Things upstairs were no different. In the bathroom, even the fixtures had been torn out and robbed.

He heard sirens. He thought it might be another fire. The last one had brought him so much luck, he couldn’t resist chasing this one. And this time there’d be no screwing up. He started for the stairs, but realized the sirens were wailing up right out in front. No bells: must be an ambulance. Or the cops! Somebody had seen him come in! He looked frantically for a hidingplace, but the rooms were mostly barren. Heard them on the porch, heard the rattle of the door and the crunch of glass as they shoved on in. “This way!” That was Dee Romano! “The guy who called said we’d find him upstairs.” Vince’s heart raced, his mind seemed frozen. A back window. Might be a chance. Maybe a porch roof below. Heard them rumbling up the stairs. Window in the back bedroom, big one, but also a bed. He ducked under … and ducked right out again. Somebody already under there. Galloped on hands and knees to a closet, rolled inside. The light came on. Closet door was half open, but he couldn’t close it now. He huddled, shaking, in a corner. “I smell it,” said Romano. He could hear them bumping to their knees. “And here he is!” said Monk Wallace. “Jee-ee-zuss!” Old Willie scrambled out of there. “Boys, I’m retirin’!” he said. “What should we do?” asked Wallace. “Not our job,” said Romano. “We don’t have to pick it up.” They followed Willie out, leaving the light burning. Vince heard them talking down the stairs. More people down there. He supposed they’d keep coming all night. It’d be a long time before the place emptied out and he could leave. Meanwhile, he lay curled up there in a corner of the closet, bawling like a newborn baby. “Don’t leave me again!” he sobbed. “Without You, God, it’s horrible!” He had to still his sobs from time to time, because others, curious, came up to look, to shudder, to shrink away. “Boy, you never know, hunh?” “You said it, man!” “Like he just stretched out there and kicked off.” “Really weird.” “They all were.” Vince fingered the small piece of glass from the chandelier, pressed shut his eyes. Santa Maria, madre di Dio, pregate per noi peccatori, adesso e nell’ ora della nostra morte. Così sia.

When finally the tears had stopped, when he felt like all the horror had washed out of him and he could stand alone again, he stood and walked out, walked down. Somebody met him at the foot of the stairs. “Is it true, Vince?” Vince nodded, passed on. Glass crunched beneath his feet. He kept a tight grip on the piece in his pocket. “God, it’s awful, isn’t it, Vince?” somebody said. He shook his head in commiseration. “It couldn’t be worse,” he said. At the door, Dee Romano, looking washed out, nodded at him, and Vince nodded back. But it could be worse. And, walking out of the home of the prophet Giovanni Bruno on that lush night in May, Vince Bonali released at last the piece of glass (though he reached in his pocket every now and then to touch it again, make sure it was still there) and looked up at the magnitude and care of the universe and thanked God that, if no one else had, he at least had come at last to his Redemption.

7

In June, the Reformed Nazarene Followers of Giovanni Bruno all waited around the world for the Coming of Light again. It was on a Sunday, the seventh, seven Sundays after the nineteenth of April, but they waited until midnight because the next day was the eighth of the month, and Elaine’s Ma had not entirely put away that idea yet. It was an extraordinary — though, as it turned out, again somewhat symbolic — event, huge rallies everywhere, all of it covered simultaneously by world television, press, and radio: as though literally nothing else in the whole world was happening that night. In fact, it made Elaine feel funny the next day reading the newspapers and discovering that a lot of other things did happen. And another funny thing: as exciting as their own meeting was and as important as she was in it, she kept feeling all night like she’d rather go see it on television, as if that was where it was really happening.

Her Ma had changed a few things by the time of the June rallies — like wearing regular clothes under the tunics and staying in out of the weather — so things went a little more calmly most places. They read afterwards about some meetings where things got even worse than they had at the Mount of Redemption, but her Ma said those people were sensationalists and not real Christians. By letter and telephone and television appearances, her Ma and Ben organized these Bruno Follower rallies all over the world, convinced now that when it happened it would happen everywhere at once, though of course their own meeting in Randolph Junction was the most important and one of the biggest. Reverend Baxter wanted to hold it on the Mount of Redemption in West Condon, but Elaine’s Ma decided against it on account of the Persecution, organized it instead in Randolph Junction where the mayor was a friend of Brother Bishop Hiram Clegg and even became a True Follower. It was a very nice meeting, even though the newspeople were rather impolite some of the time and a few people from out of town got to acting up — in fact, though it was much bigger and there were a lot more lights, it was a great deal like the wonderful revivalist tentmeetings her Pa used to hold.

Elaine was thinking a lot about her Pa these days, not just because he had become a Saint and Martyr, or because she and her Ma sometimes talked to him, or because she might go to Heaven and see him soon, but because she had a new Pa now, Mr. Wosznik, and she couldn’t help comparing. She loved them both, but the truth was, if she could choose, she would stick with the old one. Ben was very kind, but her old Pa was even kinder. Her old Pa was smarter, too, she thought, and dressed better. Ben always smelled a little bit like a farm. Of course, one thing about Ben, he sure could sing. Their ballad with him singing it was number three on the Hillbilly Hit Parade, and they were making lots of money, which Ben was giving to the movement because they had a lot of expenses now. Just what they spent on postage was something hard to believe. Of course, as her Ma said, there wasn’t any need to choose: we were all God’s children and, in a way, were all married to each other. Ben sometimes made Elaine think of her brother Harold who was killed in the war, and who always used to play a banjo and sing religious songs to her when she was little, and she wondered if maybe her Ma wasn’t thinking of Harold when she married Ben. Her Ma kept her old name so people would always know who she was, calling herself Mrs. Clara Collins-Wosznik.

Elaine was a much bigger help to her Ma now than she used to be. Her Ma even remarked on it several times. She wasn’t afraid anymore and people looked up to her because she was one of the First Followers and might even be a Saint someday. She took up collections and typed envelopes and helped organize meetings and even gave instruction in the Creed sometimes to the younger people at Junior Evening Circle. Like everybody always agreed, the Creed was very beautiful; it was based on the Seven Words of Giovanni Bruno and Saint Paul and the Revelation to John, and contained wonderful new ideas about Mother Mary and Spiritual Communication and the God, not of Wrath or Love, but of Light. It changed from time to time because, as her Ma said, it was a living Creed: Domiron wasn’t mentioned in it anymore, for example, though he might come back, now that Mrs. Norton’s book, The Sayings of Domiron, was out. She and Dr. Norton had become the first Bishops of the whole state of California, and her Ma would always say how she admired that lady and still to this day wore the medallion, but as Bishops the Nortons were not very active. They seemed too inclined to go their own way and forget they were all children of the same God.

Some of the younger people Elaine instructed were boys and they paid her a lot of attention, but regardless of what her Ma said about all being married to each other, she never let things go too far. It wasn’t just because she had her mind on being a Saint, but because she was going steady in a religious kind of way: ever since Carl Dean had gone to jail for trying to kill all those policemen, she had been writing letters regularly with Junior Baxter. Junior had stayed in West Condon with his folks in spite of the terrible Persecution still going on there, and they were meeting secretly now — Junior wrote “underground” and Elaine actually thought they were meeting in the mines or something until her Ma explained. Her Ma didn’t seem too happy about her writing to Junior, but she didn’t say not to. Elaine didn’t show her Ma all the letters either, because sometimes she and Junior had to discuss pretty grown-up things, considering they both wanted to be Saints.

All day long that Sunday that they went to the Mount, the Day of Redemption, she and Junior had been staring at each other. Elaine didn’t know at the time if it was because they still hated each other or what, but she didn’t like it. Her tunic felt funny on her all day. She even thought of asking Carl Dean to make him stop, but she was afraid of causing trouble just when everybody was so excited about all the Baxter people joining them in the Spirit. And they were so tired. Elaine thought she’d drop, and it made her kind of dizzy all day — she kept getting the funny feeling she was floating in and out of all those other people. They had been up all night watching over poor Marcella whom she loved so — Elaine had cried and cried like a baby, and once had even kissed the cold mouth and nearly died doing it, it just didn’t seem possible. All the next day, she kept waiting for Marcella to rise up and take her hand and smile. And then all the baptisms there before they went out to march, just at dawn, because Giovanni Bruno, who was heartbroken, opened his mouth in that special way of his when he wanted to say something important and said: “Baptize … Light!” It was the last thing anybody ever remembered him saying before they took him away from the Mount. Her Ma and Reverend Baxter and Mrs. Norton all agreed right away: he meant they were supposed to have a new kind of baptism, a baptism with light, and so they gave him a flashlight to hold and everybody walked under it, sniffling and bawling to beat the band. Her Ma still baptized with light in the same way, she had a special lamp for it, but Junior said his Pa had changed it a little, using real fire, and they couldn’t wear anything on their shoulders. That made her Ma a little mad when she found out, just like she got upset at Mrs. Norton for saying out in California that “light” meant “television.” It seemed like her Ma was always caught in the middle between those two.

But Elaine’s commitment, the strangest and most important moment of her life, happened out there on the Mount of Redemption. Holding hands with Carl Dean, praying and singing and crying, Elaine had watched the lightning flash and the rain come down, had watched the terrible forces of evil gather like dirty clouds below them, had watched the worshiping multitudes rolling and dancing and beating each other, and she could tell that Carl Dean was pretty excited and not just about the End of the World. He kept looking around nervously and saying they might never see each other again after today and once he even asked her to go down in the trees with him so they could be alone a minute. But she was afraid and praying all the time, because she really believed, she really was sure it was going to happen and right then, and she kept looking for her Pa. She held on to Carl Dean’s hand because she was scared, but all the time she kept feeling miles away from him: suddenly the only thing that counted was that moment and Carl Dean couldn’t get his mind off what would happen next.

But then somebody came running up the Mount and he wasn’t in a tunic or taking off his dark garments of the earth and they saw it was Mr. Miller and Elaine felt a great terror because he seemed to be headed right for Marcella and everybody started screaming like crazy and Carl Dean ran away, left her all alone on the top of the Mount, ran to get Mr. Miller, and Elaine saw him hit him and everybody was hitting him and it was raining something awful and Marcella seemed to get right up and throw herself into the mud and Saint Stephen went tumbling down and Elaine was on her knees in the mud and bawling and calling for her Pa and terrified to be all alone and just then something hit her—whack! She spun, falling into the mud, scared to death, and she saw it was Junior Baxter. He was cold white in his tunic and his head seemed like on fire. He had a long greenish-white switch and he looked very serious. Nobody had ever switched her before, her Pa, her Ma, nobody. She looked around for her Ma, but everybody was over by Mr. Miller. “No!” she gasped.

But Junior didn’t hit her again. He looked around on the ground, found another switch somebody had dropped — the little tree there was nothing but a barbed pole now. He handed it to her. Her heart was pounding like mad, and she could hardly hold onto that greasy thing, could hardly see through the tears and rain, could hardly hear him in the rain’s roar when he said, “Hit me!” His voice was soft, almost like a girl’s. He turned his wet white back to her. She stood up, her knees shaky, but suddenly she wasn’t afraid anymore, the conflicts were gone, the strange sense of sin she felt for not being within was lifted, and at last the moment was whole. She swatted him lightly. She still didn’t know quite what she was doing and she was still bawling, but the sky seemed brighter even though it was still raining pitchforks and it seemed like they were suddenly all alone in the world and she thought: It’s coming! Now! And Junior’s switch whistled and bit into her side. She cried out, but the pain was a joy, strangely a joy, and the rain was right and the lightning and the frenzy, and everything was right now: she swung, hard—crack! Under his wet red hair, he smiled a little. She closed her eyes. His whip stung her legs. She lashed his legs. He whipped her tummy. She swung at his face. Faster and faster they slashed away and now the blows fell all over, on her face and chest, down her back, they didn’t take turns, just gave and took with all their hearts, and she couldn’t even see him, never knew when she hit him, just felt him out there, felt everything at once, and maybe she was singing, or maybe she was screaming, but it was coming, she grew a giant and lashed the world to her heart and her Pa was smiling down and the world was on her back, she stretched out her arms and dug her nails into its flesh and the rain was in her face and mud in her mouth, but she could still see Junior somehow, looking down with that serious face, the switch in his hand, and he had blood around his eye and trickling from his mouth, his hair red in the gray sky, and she stretched her limbs, north south east and west, stretched to embrace it all: NOW!

But when she looked again, Junior Baxter was on the ground and Carl Dean Palmers was on top of him, yelling that Junior’s Ma had just had a baby in front of everybody, though it turned out it really wasn’t a baby but a miscarriage, and he was hitting Junior with his fists, hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. And that was when it happened, when Elaine chose between love and sainthood: for one pitch-black moment she swooned away into the earth, to the very pit, then exploded up again into light, and the next thing she knew she was scratching and clawing Carl Dean, and screaming at him to stop, and when he did she fell down on top of Junior, all bloody and suffering, so Carl Dean couldn’t hit him again, and she screamed at Carl Dean to go away, go away! At first, she thought Carl Dean was going to cry, but then, instead, he sort of just went crazy. He called her what Junior had called her — he didn’t understand at all! — and right in front of her own Ma who had just come running up to say they had to get going because the Persecution was starting, and then, hollering like the Indians do in the movies, he went running right at all those policemen with their big white clubs. She never saw what happened because her Ma pulled her away, they had to run, they didn’t have time.

Later, she learned that Carl Dean had been sent up to detention for six months to a year for nearly killing three policemen. She thought that was awful, yet she sometimes wondered if he wasn’t the closest he ever got to real salvation right at that moment. He never wrote to her because of course he didn’t know where she was. That suited her okay. She never saw Junior Baxter again either, but they wrote letters. Sometimes they talked in the letters about what happened that afternoon on the Mount of Redemption. They both agreed they had “grown up” that day and had taken the whole world into their hearts. In the days that followed, things got broken up again, and they lost the complete feeling, but to help them remember, they agreed to touch each sore place every night when they said their prayers. The last mark to go away was one he had made across her heart. He said he believed that was very significant, for it meant that her heart was God’s, and she agreed. They both looked forward to the real and final Coming of the Light when they’d all be together in absolute union again.

Her Ma and his Pa also wrote letters, but not about the same things. Her Ma was worried, because Reverend Baxter kept insisting about having his own way on everything, and she thought maybe he tended to carry things too far sometimes. Like the baptism business, for instance, and some of the rules about the tunics. Her Ma liked to think of their Prophet as a great new spiritual force unleashed upon the world, a renovating force for all Christendom, she said, but it didn’t seem like Reverend Baxter even thought of himself as a Christian anymore, and he was more excited about the way the Prophet spit in the priest’s eye than in the way her Ma was helping the movement grow. Still, she went ahead and made him the Bishop of West Condon, mainly because nobody else was there anymore. Brother Willie Hall, who was supposed to be the Bishop, wasn’t able to stay on account of the Persecution, and so he and Sister Mabel became Traveling Missionaries for the movement. Elaine followed all this very closely, for she had a very strange feeling about something: she wondered if maybe she herself hadn’t come closer to Redemption that day on the Mount than her own Ma.

One very sad thing happened the Day of Redemption: Sister Emma Clegg died of a stroke. She was a very holy woman and some said afterward that God had taken her away as a Sign of his keeping his Word. Nevertheless, it was a terrible shock for Brother Hiram, who was such a nice man and loved his wife so. At first, he was put in jail with all the other menfolk, but they let him right out again to take care of burying his wife, and they never came back to get him again. For a long time, he was very depressed, and he didn’t want even to think about making a new life. But her Ma, who had suffered so herself, had restored his spirit and made him get active again in the movement. He became the Bishop of Randolph Junction and, on that Sunday morning of the seventh of June, the day of the possible Midnight Coming — though by then nearly everybody was expecting it on the eighth of January, possibly next year, but more likely either seven or fourteen years from now — had married the widow Sister Betty Wilson, her Ma and her new Pa Ben standing as witnesses. As her Ma said at the little party after, it was a very poetical arrangement. A lot of people were there from all over the world, and most of them cried to think about it.

They also found poor Mr. Himebaugh, who had disappeared the Night of the Sacrifice, starved to death. Her Ma didn’t find that at all poetical and, even though they made him a Martyr, she hardly ever talked about Mr. Himebaugh again. Colin Meredith wrote them from where they were keeping him that he was in continual communication with the spiritual world and would return to them one day with incredible revelations. Sister Mary Harlowe settled in Randolph Junction and kept coming to their meetings, because after all she was a First Follower and her husband was a Saint and Early Martyr, but it seemed like she was starting to get bitter and sometimes talked rudely to Elaine’s Ma. Sister Wanda Cravens never got bitter and she was always very active.

Their Prophet was excommunicated by the Romanists and put in chains, and his people prayed daily for his deliverance. Really, he and his Ma were put in institutions like poor Colin, but, as her own Ma said, it was the same thing, it was all a part of the Persecution, and, as everybody knew, the mental institutions were controlled by Jews and atheists and they tortured Christians. They prayed for him to return and lead them to Light and most people believed his appearance would coincide with the real and final Coming, which meant he probably wouldn’t turn up for another seven years anyway. They had to learn patience and readiness, her Ma always said. Her Ma, who had run into a lot of problems talking on the phone to people where the time and even the date were completely different, had even begun to wonder if her old Pa’s final message, now known as the Revelation to Saint Ely Collins, anyway that part regarding the “eighth of the month,” was not to be taken symbolically instead of literally. Elaine and Junior speculated about this in their letters and talked about what they would do that day that the Prophet appeared and they were all together again.

And then one day in the middle of June, about a week after they waited for the Midnight Coming, Brother Bishop Hiram Clegg called a special meeting of all the Bishops who could come, about thirty of them by then, and he didn’t tell her Ma about it. Her Ma got terribly upset when she found out, because it looked for all the world like Brother Hiram was taking things into his own hands — and after all she’d done for him! She prayed to God and got guidance from Pa, and then she took Elaine and they stormed right into the middle of that meeting. Her Ma strode right down the aisle and was just about to raise the roof, when they all stood up and clapped and clapped.

Bishop Clegg rapped a gavel and said: “Sister Clara, we have, ahem, convened here this here night to consider the future of this great movement, and we have determined that the world lies open before us and we have but begun. But to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead, we must put our house in working order. To this end, we have here gathered and here, by unanimous consent, resolved to name you, Sister Clara Collins-Wosznik, our Evangelical Leader and Organizer!” Her Ma was just stopped dead in her tracks and seemed to go white all over. “Our financial picture has, of course, ahem, not yet stabilized itself, for the core itself is smaller than the loose ends still to be tied up, so we must apologize for the modesty of our initial offer, but we do feel able at this time to, ah, to propose a commencing remuneration of seven thousand dollars a year and traveling expenses. If you could just see fit …” And poor Brother Hiram’s voice started to break because he saw how her Ma was taking it: her Ma just broke right down and cried, and Elaine cried, and then so did a lot of other folks.

Then her Ma wiped her face with one of her old Pa’s big handkerchiefs and stepped up to the front and gave the most exciting speech Elaine had ever heard. She talked of their sacred goals and the race they had to run and how God’s Kingdom was not a gift to the indolent but the justifiable wages for honest hard work. “A body visited by Grace must live by Grace!” she cried, and Elaine felt a shudder run through her, tingling the place over her heart, and she started thinking about the next letter she would write to Junior Baxter. Her Ma told of all the converts and read letters from distant places and then: “God willing,” she shouted out, “we will go out and win the souls of the whole wide world!”

Everybody stood up and clapped and cheered and cried and said she’d have to give that speech on television, surely no one could resist, and then Bishop Clegg led them all in fervent prayer. They had been calling themselves the Reformed Nazarene Followers of Giovanni Bruno, but that night they decided to go back to the name Mr. Miller had given them: the Brunists.