The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (98 page)

Before the ceremonies, standing around outside having a smoke, Davis had to take some flak from miners, led by that gasbag Bonali, complaining about the sale of the mine to the holyrollers instead of reopening it and putting men to work again. The Barn reminded them, pushing his rimless specs up his thin beak, that he is no longer associated with that company, but it was his understanding the sale still had not gone through and so far it didn’t include mineral rights. That’s what he’d heard. Tub didn’t know that and he wondered if Suggs does. Tub can appreciate Davis’ situation now that he has been sheriff a while: the endless contrary demands, the petty criticisms, everybody trying to get your ear and bend it. He can imagine being sheriff for life—for one thing, it gets him free tailored shirts and pants—but he wouldn’t want anything up the ladder from that. As for Osborne, the truth is he was easy to get on with—no ambition, so stepped on nobody’s toes, good at what he did—but Tub knows he also let things happen down there in his good-guy way. The man knew about the shoddy inspections, the covering up of reports of faulty wiring, the lack of regular rockdusting and excessive coaldust on the haulage ways, the failure to seal off leaking marsh gas, and he grumbled about all these things like everyone else did, but he didn’t pipe up like he should have. Osborne was at his best telling jokes. Sure came up with a zinger at the end.

Most of the Christian Patriots are here. They each nodded silently at Tub when they arrived. A passel of disaster widows, some still wearing black, looking gloomy. Maybe they’re feeling guilty for not buying shoes from Osborne. The majority crammed into the pews, though, are miners who used to work with Tub down in Deepwater. Those with gumption have mostly moved on; these bums in here are the losers. Like Bert Martini, the one-armed grouser talking now. Martini was one of the guys carried out by Osborne and his rescue team, his arm sheared off when a shuttle buggy, knocked off the rails by the blast, rolled over it. He’s up front, praising Osborne and waving his stub around and sounding off about the criminal irresponsibility of the mine owners. “Took their money and shut down our workplace and left us to rot and die! It’s what’s killed Dave Osborne! There oughta be some justice!”
“Amen, brother!”
Buff Cooley, another rescued miner, shouts out and others agree more secularly. Reminds Tub of union meetings past. Why he avoided them when he could.
“Go to now, ye rich men, weep’n howl for the miseries what’ll come upon ye! James 5:1!”
That’s cowardly Bible spouter Willie Hall, one of the Brunists from the church camp. Let him get started and this thing will never end. The little chickenshit’s alive because, as he often did, he ducked the shift that night. Abner Baxter, Tub’s old faceboss, is here too, flanked by some of his oldtime rough boys, like Coates and Cox, and still looking beat up from the last time Chief Romano got his hands on him. There’s a five-year-old warrant out for that old gobpile orator’s arrest if he turns up inside city limits, which is what Romano held him on for his midnight thrashing, but no chance he’ll grab him again here in the church. Too bad. Tub would like to see the sonuvabitch get hammered and he doesn’t care who does it. Baxter has been a pain in the butt since he came back and it would be better if he got the idea it might be healthier to move on.

Tub’s deputy and old mine buddy Cal Smith is speaking now, telling everyone what a loyal and dependable guy Osborne was. “A man you had to respect.” Cal Smith’s own loyalty is coming up short. He and Cal worked together down in Deepwater for years—Tub the shot firer, Cal his driller and cutter, two of the dirtiest and most hazardous jobs in the mines. Tub took it on because it paid extra, and Smith probably did too. In the old days, when they first broke in, they had to use dynamite. Fused foot-long sticks poked into boreholes on the coalface. When they went off, they brought down a mass of wall for the loaders. A lot could go wrong, but he and Smith knew their job, and nothing ever did. Later, they started using compressed air. It was still dangerous, especially the flyrock, but not near so bad as the dynamite, and the pay stayed the same. Cal was as careful as Tub was; Tub always appreciated that. So when he got elected sheriff, also a dangerous job, he wanted Cal there beside him doing the drilling and cutting. Now, he knows, Cal has been going behind his back, protecting Baxter against orders, playing by his own set of rules. The morning after Tub arrested all those assholes who attacked the Brunist camp, the sonuvabitch went down to the jail and set them free. Tub’s going to have to find somebody else and has been looking over the audience for a possible replacement. The widows remind him that most of the good guys are dead, but maybe that’s also just misplaced sentiment. Buff Cooley’s up there now, into one of his union rants. A Patriot, comes to all the drills, tough as nails, but probably too inflammable. And he so hates the establishment, if he were a deputy sheriff, Buff would have to rail at himself. Even though Travers Dunlevy at the Brunist camp is not from around here, Tub had thought of recruiting him for the job—an active Patriot with an edge about him and a good eye with a weapon—but the chump apparently knocked off his wife and her lover out at the camp Saturday night, then skipped town. Dumbest reason in the world for getting yourself in trouble. Tub is getting a bit fed up with those clowns out there, truth to tell, but the money is still rolling into his account from Suggs’ mine, where he is listed as a technical consultant, so he does what he has to do. When he got dragged out to the camp the first time that night, to keep the heat off, he called what he’d found a probable lovers’ suicide, but it’s not likely he’ll get away with that. Already that sleazebag shyster Minicozzi down at city hall, throwing his puny weight around, has demanded from the city a public inquest and a second coroner’s report. Meanwhile Tub has put out an all-points alert for Dunlevy but doesn’t expect to find him and doesn’t particularly want to.

When the union bosses running the show discover that the old bearded guy at the back of the church is the famous country singer Ben Wosznik and ask him, overcoming the general town-wide bias against the Brunists, to come up and sing Woody Guthrie’s “The Dying Miner,” Tub figures he can only bear so much of this teary-eyed horseshit. He’ll let Smith watch over the campers; it’s time to cut out.

Sheriff Puller has played enough double-deck pinochle to know how to finesse a trick. In fact he is beginning to think of pinochle as a patriotic American game, and a Christian one, and that maybe they ought to use pinochle as part of their militia training program. Tub has led low, telling his deputy Smith that Suggs has asked him to negotiate a conclusion to the problems at the new campgrounds he’s been building out beyond the church camp so he can get on with its construction, and since Cal knows those people better than he does, he wants him to organize a meeting at the site for the two of them with all their leaders and see if they can’t resolve the issues. Forcing a crawl, as one might say at table, and here they are. He is disappointed that Abner Baxter does not appear, but most of the others do, including Red’s puffball son Young Abner, as well as Roy Coates and his boys and Jewell Cox and others from town. Most of the rest hang back, but as the talks proceed they come out of their tents and trucks and edge forward. Then he plays trumps. All his newly deputized officers from the Christian Patriots come roaring up in their cars, spitting gravel as they hit the brakes; they spring from their cars and surround the campsite, weapons in hand. Tub has been careful to deputize only those he could count on not to spill the beans to Smith or the Baxterites, and he can see by the flicker of surprise on Smith’s otherwise stony face that he has been successful. A couple of big yellow school buses roll in behind the deputies’ cars. Tub tells Smith not to worry, they’ve all been properly deputized on orders from the state governor. Then he puts a megaphone to his mouth and says: “I know you think of yourselves as religious people, but the truth is, you’re all criminals. You are breaking the law, and you do not stop breaking the law even when you are told that is what you are doing, so I have no choice but to put you all under arrest.” One of the men at the back makes a break for it, but two of the deputies fire shots over his head and he pulls up short. They lower their weapons and point them at his chest. He steps back with the others.

“Looks as how fatso has snookered us,” Roy Coates says with a sneer, and Tub stares back at him. If he were a man who ever smiled, he’d be smiling. But if Roy calls him fatso again, the fucker will end up in the bed next to the fire chief.

“My deputies are ready to fit you with some nice shiny bracelets and bus you to the county lock-up, if that’s your choice,” he says into the megaphone, “though the law don’t work so good around here and I don’t recommend it. Your other choice, which is a lot easier on everybody, is to permanently and for all time leave the area. If them’s your rathers, you got five minutes to pack up. Don’t try driving away on your own—you’re gonna be personally escorted outa here over into the next state. Anybody not got a vehicle and don’t wanta go to jail, we’ll be providing taxi service across the state line in them school buses over there. We’re all gonna proceed together in a nice neat line, just like a parade. Anybody peel off, they’ll get shot as fugitives from the law. You got little kids here. Let’s don’t let that happen. And if you try to come back in, you’ll just be giving my boys target practice. We’ll be patrolling all the highways and roads in the county, so don’t even think about it.”

“You cain’t take us in,” says Coates. “We live here.”

“Aiding and abetting,” he says.

“Bull.”

He lifts the megaphone. “All right, let’s get moving!” He’s waiting for Cal to cross him so he can break him, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, a snot-nosed brat dragging a dirty pink slipper on one foot comes over and pokes her finger in his belly. He swats at her but misses. “It’s real!” she shouts and other brats draw near with mischievous grins on their nasty little faces as if they all intend to have a poke.

“Luke, you come away from there and let the man be!” a woman calls out. “He’s just doing his job!” Big woman, near as big as he is, a squalling fat baby over her shoulder. She waddles out of the crowd toward him and gets a grip on the girl’s collar. “Sorry, Sheriff. We’re town folk. We just come out to bring some food and comfort to these poor people. I feel sorry for them and I think you should oughta too, but I suppose you got your orders. Us Christians is used to getting beat up by the law. We’ll be going now and leave you to it, but next time I see Jesus, I’m gonna tell him what you done.”

“Wait a minute—”

“I recognize them,” Smith says. “It’s okay. They’re living in the Chestnut Hills prefabs.”

“Squatters.”

“Maybe. But that’s Romano’s problem, not ours.”

It’s Suggs’ problem, too, he owning most of that property, but Tub knows this is not an argument that carries much weight with Smith. A lanky unkempt man with deep hollow eyes has come up beside the fat woman, toting a rifle and looking seriously deranged. Tub should probably tell him to hand over his weapon, but he has the notion it would not be a smart thing to do. The little girl in the pink slipper takes her thumb out of her mouth and asks: “Mom, can I have that silver star?
Please
, Mom!” and her mother tells her no, she can’t, it’s what makes the big man big, that without it he’d be a runt to a flea, and Coates’ sneer spreads through the crowd of faces like a kind of infection. Tub has somehow lost the thread of this game. “All you folks live in Chestnut Hills come with us now. This ain’t about us,” the woman says, and one or two follow her toward their cars, and then a few others, and then everyone. Now having Smith here is a bad thing. Tub might have shot a few of them, but with Smith as witness he has lost that option. All he can do is unholster his weapon and holler at them to stop in the name of the law and he does that. Some of his boys do fire warning shots over their heads, but the fat woman says: “Come along now! Don’t worry, they ain’t gonna shoot nobody. They ain’t very happy, but they ain’t crazy.”

“Doggone my soul, how I love them old songs! Put your hands t’gether there, folks, fer our sidekickin’ goddaddy, Will Henry! He has done so much fer us and he does pluck a mean box!” Tub Puller likes country music about as much as he likes any music (not much), so when he heard that tonight would be the last Duke L’Heureux and Patti Jo Rendine show at the Blue Moon, he decided it might be a smart idea to hang out for a couple of hours to prevent any repeat of the brawl and also to see what all the excitement is about, hoping only they weren’t singing songs like he’d heard them sing with the Brunists out on the mine hill, which he understood they were not. Needed a break from all that religious in-fighting. None of those nuts in here. He let Tess back at the station know he was going to be out of radio contact for an hour or two and if there was an emergency she should call him at the motel. He found the lot packed out, the stuttery “No Vacancy” neon sign lit, and the front door locked, and he had to bang loud with both fists to rouse anybody what with all the noise inside. When they finally showed up, they apologized, explaining they’d closed up because it was a complete sellout, no room for another body, though of course they’d let the sheriff in, which was, as he knew they were thinking, like letting in another half dozen. He asked them if there had been any trouble tonight and they said there had not and he moved on into the bar area. Not easy, even with the badge on his chest, to carve a grudging path. Never saw such a jam-up at the Moon, or anywhere else around here, for that matter. A lot of familiar faces but also a lot of strangers. The owner, watching things from the doorway, said they’d been rolling in all week for this show, every room booked double. But though he was glad to have seen this happen at the Moon, he said he was sad to see the act close down, and it was clear he’d had a few to console himself. Tub has sometimes stopped in here on dead midweek nights to have a whiskey or two on his own, so the bartender, when Tub finally got that far, simply greeted him with a nod and quietly poured him a glass of Coke spiked with a couple of shots of Kentucky bourbon, Tub hoping it might dull the pain in his tooth. After the holidays: the dentist, for sure.