The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  Johnny’s lips quivered in a doughy frown. I braced for the worst. Instead, he dug from his pocket a final product that did not require swallowing: the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring.

  It was, indeed, a ring made from the cheapest tin, which one wore around one’s finger to lessen instances of stuttering. Useless though the trinket was, I found myself pushing it onto the ring finger of my right hand, where, I had to admit, it drew the eye away from Mr. Avery’s fishing-hook wound. I forced a wan smile and displayed the adornment for the boy’s approval. Pride fired up his rheumy eyes.

  Perhaps the ring contained some magic after all, for I realized that the pint-sized fool was correct. There was one thing that an unnatural beast like myself wanted quite badly. The clue had been in that single word Johnny had heard me mutter.

  I positioned the dead worms of my lips and gave speech a try.

  “Re.”

  How snorting and swinish was the grudging grunt!

  But how pleasurable was that second syllable, the buzz of a wrathful wasp.

  “Vvvvvvenge.”

  VI.

  WE WERE ON OUR WAY. Shortly after the noon hour the following day, Johnny ducked into my tent. He had to tell me of his discovery, “Something to make y’talking go faster.”

  I held up the finger sporting the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring, all the remedy I needed. He beamed at the gesture but asked if I’d ever seen Vera Diana stretch through her regimen of backstage gymnastics. Had I ever! Not even a dead man could resist gaping over a female form so erotically contorted. Well, said Johnny, he’d just overheard from a customer a ten-dollar word that would limber my vocal organs in the same way, so daring and multisyllabic was its composition.

  “Don’t know what it means,” confessed he, “but it’s got ’bout every sound y’need.”

  The word was “indefatigable.”

  It was, I had to admit, one hell of a word. Sized next to it, “revenge” was duck soup. For the rest of the day, I nestled the word to my breast as one might a shivering, wounded bird, for it was only at night that it might enjoy silence and space enough to fly. My initial attempts, though, were inhuman:

  Unnh-zhunn-shaaa-kuuhn-unnh-wuhh.

  A week more of practice and I had matriculated to another monstrosity:

  Ehh-dehh-hwa-hee-uhh-wul.

  Discouraging, yes, but what other path was there to pave? Over the subsequent month I spent uncountable hours picturing my teeth, lips, and tongue, going over in my mind how these organs had once upon a time moved in intricate concert, and when next I attempted my chorus there came from my mouth the frightful noises of animalia. Rat clicks, raccoon gurgles, the wheeze of a nightmaring dog:

  Inn-dehh-fweh-tee-ul-buh.

  Steady work continued by the rooster and by the locust. Never in my days as a tutored pupil, and certainly not as a Black Hand combatant, had I hammered so hard at an assignment. My reward was a semblance of sense:

  Inn-dee-fah-tee-guh-buh.

  In the lonely darkness of my rehearsal sessions, I began to weigh the wasted words of my life. Smug retorts to men whose bones I split with my blackjack, empty flatteries to whores who were but pale echoes of Wilma Sue, superficial solicitudes to the nameless bartenders who kept my steins wet. If I could have those words back, just a few, I would return the blood, the sweat, the beer, all of it with due interest:

  In-de-fa-ti-ga-ble.

  Indefatigable.

  INDEFATIGABLE.

  INDEFATIGABLE!!!

  The word became my battle cry. Dawn’s arrival no longer filled me with dread, for I was indefatigable. The coin-jangle of the poor giving their last pennies to hucksters no longer scoured me raw with guilt, for I was indefatigable. The Barker could plunge all the needles he wanted into my torpid flesh and it would not deter me from my goal—I was indefatigable! Speech came faster; short sentences were within my reach. I could hardly wait for nighttime so that I could chant into the dark like a zealot.

  It did not take a berobed scholar to valuate what these months meant to Johnny. He delighted in my developed whispers and clapped his palsied hands at each cunning new twist of my tongue. Every word I rediscovered was a scrap of hope thrown in his direction. Those scraps, I found, were large enough for me to nibble upon, too. Before long I believed that I had mastered enough speech to blurt a cold (if abbreviated) soliloquy to Luca Testa before murdering him.

  Chicago was a vast distance to cover for two conspirators so lame of leg. My brainstorm was to bring the villain to me and force him to divulge all he knew of my murder, what black sorcery might have tainted it, perhaps even how to effect a cure. Then I’d repay him for his services by gunning him down with a sidearm Johnny would steal from one of our showmen. Firing a pistol would take a mastery of hand similar to my mastery of mouth, but there was time yet to achieve it. Finally, once the malefactor was dead, I would ride away in his transportation—and, yes, if possible, take this loyal little lad with me.

  The Black Hand had functioned quite well via the deployment of written letters, so I would follow the example. I bade Johnny to gather some materials for writing and three days later he smuggled to me a composition book, the same brand as I’d used as a student. A disfavorable coincidence, but nonetheless I set pen to paper. How the first squiggle of ink emboldened me! Poets, librettists, and sonneteers, thought I, would shrivel in comparison!

  That, it turned out, was overstating it. My hand was weak, my pencraft elementary. Johnny, though, was an absolute illiterate, so I had no choice but to proceed, albeit with brevity. Much humanity had I lost in death, but literary eloquence, ground to so sharp a point under Testa himself, lived on. To wit:

  To Our Lord & Master Mr. Testa—

  Dost thou remember May 7, 1896? On that day a fat tick dropped from your well-fed belly—a tick called Zebulon Finch. I hope you remember the name, for Mr. Finch now feeds from the blood of a traveling jubilee called Dr. Whistler’s Pageant of Health.

  Come see for yourself.

  Exhausted by the effort, I dropped the pen with the melodrama of a Victorian heroine. Would the archvillain take the bait? Of this I had no doubt. It was a direct taunt and Testa did not trifle with matters of pride. He would spare no expense in tracking down the Pageant and taking a second shot at my murder.

  On the opposite side I wrote Testa’s Chicago address and passed the letter through the iron bars. I fixed Johnny with the heartiest expression of confidence and encouragement I could muster. It would be up to him to hobble to town and post the letter. He had already done so much; I had no choice but to wager that this, too, was within range of his abilities. A bad bet, as it turned out, but can you blame me for placing it?

  VII.

  THE DEVIL IN THE SILK hat stormed the tent at daybreak. He was shoeless, sockless, and stripped to the waist, his neck spotted with shaving cream and florid from the application of boiling water. (Incongruously, he was top-hatted.) With one hand, he pushed ahead of him my diminutive accomplice. The man’s other hand, quite alarmingly, clutched a shotgun large enough to fell a rhinoceros.

  The Barker pressed the remonstrating lad into the bars of my cage. Yours truly flinched—so human a reaction for a monster! Johnny’s forehead took quite a knock and I believe he would have collapsed had not the Barker snared him by the neck and held him aloft.

  The scoundrel touched his hat brim in greeting.

  “Are you a sporting man, Mr. Stick?”

  For all my language lessons, I was struck dumb!

  “No, your present circumstances do not allow for it. Alas, nor do mine. In my younger years, however, I was a willing pupil, and my uncle taught me to track, to shoot, to dress my kill. I was not without some natural talent. The first thing you learn is that the hunt is best at dawn. What say we set this varmint loose, you and I, and see which of us can tag him first?”

 
Reader, do not fault me for thinking that the maniac meant each word. His very life was a twisted game; the Boardwalk of Chance might as well have been the setting for his every interaction.

  “Come now, Stick. Shall I send this boy up like skeet? Fly this boy who so wishes to fly away? No? Too bad; I feel the bloodlust churning. Maybe it is you, the bull in the cage, that ought to be set free for me to dodge and dispatch.”

  His grin, kept thus far at even keel, curled away as if eaten by fire.

  “Should either of you fine young gentlemen operate under the belief that I can be made a pigeon of, let me take this beautiful golden daybreak, delivered to us from a giving Lord, to relieve you of that presumption. Do you not see that this pageant is to me as a child is to his mother? When it wakes, I know its sounds, its odors, the ways in which it wiggles. Something is awry, I attend to it. I give it either my breast or the back of my hand.”

  For emphasis he gave Johnny a shake and one of the boy’s few remaining teeth rang off an iron bar. Johnny did not recoil, but for the second time I did. The letter had been my idea; this beating belonged to me.

  “Stopping this child at full bore was no more difficult than stopping a mouse by stepping on its tail. They squeak the same, too. Crinkling ’twixt the lad’s hand and cane was a missive bound for the local postman. He claimed the words were his invention. I had myself a chuckle at that. If there is one thing I am sure of regarding this particular entertainer, it is that he goes about life quite unhindered by intellect. But you? I had you pegged as daft. And now this exhibit of authorship! Jolly good show.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Stick, sir,” slurred Johnny. “Sorry, sir, I’m sorry.”

  The Barker smiled.

  “‘Mr. Stick.’ That is the name on the posters and fliers for which I have paid so handsomely. Strange that it is not the name referenced in this note.”

  He set his shotgun against a tower of boxed tonic—within my grasp, had I the strength!—and pulled from his trousers familiar stationery. It proved too delicate to unfold with one hand and so he heaved Johnny to the dirt. The boy attempted to mitigate the impact, but his brittle bones offered no more protection than a handful of twigs. His elbows went akimbo and his sternum landed with a crack. For the third time in short sequence I cringed.

  The Barker cleared his throat, smoothed out the paper, and squinted through an imaginary monocle.

  “Zeb—” He stretched out his lower lip, pretending to be stymied by the most exotic of spellings. “Zeb-yew-lon Finch.” He straightened his spine as if becoming conscious of a dignitary standing before him. “So melodious a moniker for a man who wallows in straw, who stinks of the animal that occupied his cage before him. Is the name genuine? Or a nom de guerre? I wonder. So much I wonder about, frankly, after having read this letter.”

  Johnny moaned from his crumpled station in the dirt.

  “Y’don’t talk that way to Mr. Stick. Hack. No one does. Hack. Hack.”

  “Mice are quiet,” the Barker reminded.

  “Hack! Snooooooort! Spit!”

  The sounds crackled with urgency. I glanced and saw red ropes of saliva stretch from the boy’s whiskered lips. He was cradling his ribcage with an arm that ended in a dangling, injured wrist. I appealed to the Barker, but the rage baking from his bare chest was enough to compete with the uncharacteristic fall heat. The man’s temperature had, in fact, been building steadily over the past year—the truth, Dearest Reader, is that Zeb-yew-lon Finch had chosen to ignore it.

  The Barker leaned a naked shoulder against the cage, affecting nonchalance.

  “Zebulon Finch, this letter boasts, is still alive. I suppose that’s mostly true. It goes on to state that the aforementioned Mr. Finch is retained by Dr. Whistler’s Pageant of Health. Another truth. You acquit yourself well, Mr. Stick. Aside from belabored metaphor, little else is communicated. I find that curious. This is but a simple declaration of existence. Who, I wonder, would care to know the true identity of Mr. Stick?”

  “He’s twice the man of you!” cried Johnny. “Thief! Sodomite!”

  “Charming child,” said the Barker. “Lucky for me, this memorandum is addressed.” He gave the paper a dramaturgic perusal. “Marked to the attention of one Mr. Luca Testa of Chicago. Now, I am trying to recall. Do I know a Mr. Testa? Hmm. No. No, I think not, and I know every medicine show operator from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Yet there is but one reason you would send such an epistle. Mr. Testa”—his utterance dripped with disgust; at least we agreed upon that—“is the owner of a fledgling fair and both of you are planning to jump ship.”

  Here he’d made a pompous gaffe! The self-absorbed jester could not fathom a world existing beyond his profession. He beamed at the two of us as if we were darling children.

  “When I think how the two of you must have huddled together, drawing these big plans in excited whispers, the poignancy is almost too much to bear.”

  “Up your ass,” said Johnny. “Cough. Cough. Cough.”

  “I cannot imagine why this Mr. Testa would want to sew such troublesome warts onto his own flesh. The point is, Mr. Stick, you belong to me, and no one else shall have you.”

  “I don’t want to belong to you!” said Johnny. “I’d rather die!”

  Frustrated, I think, by my lack of expression, the Barker turned on the crumpled lad with sudden ferocity.

  “You think I shall lose one minute’s sleep over your fate, old man? Slobbering over my audiences nightly? Barely able to stand erect?”

  “I don’t care!”

  “You were worth nothing in your first four years, something marginal the next four, and now very little indeed in your twilight. You say you wish to die? Be my guest, though I implore you to schedule it during our six o’clock show. Your funeral, if well promoted, could be your highest grossing event.”

  “I’ll kill you,” wept Johnny. “Someday I’ll kill you.”

  “You’ll what me? Hard to hear due to the slobber, the missing teeth.”

  “Help! Someone! Anyone! Help!”

  The Barker looked surprised, as if he’d believed crying out for aid was a tactic below even this brat. Johnny was either too young, too old, or too afraid to hold to any such code. He ratcheted his blare and the Barker become aware of how the scene might look to someone answering the call: he half-dressed and armed, Johnny cowering, me looking on from my cage like the Marquis de Sade.

  The Barker drove his foot into the boy’s side.

  “Quiet,” said he.

  Johnny yelped.

  The Barker frowned and kicked again. It pained his naked foot and so when the boy next wailed he drove the butt of the shotgun into Johnny’s shoulder. Johnny’s response this time was more like a choke of surprise. I swear that the Barker giggled before he drove the gun again, using both hands to ensure that it popped against pelvis or knee or chest with just enough force to sting.

  “You are never to speak to him again,” said the Barker.

  “What?” shrieked Johnny. “Who?”

  “Far too loud.” The Barker cracked the stock against the boy’s shin.

  “Ow! Please! Stop!”

  On the chin this time—the bone did not break but must have come close.

  “Mr. Stick,” clarified the Barker. “You are longer to speak to Mr. Stick. Disobey and I will . . . well, I will come up with something. Tie you up in the woods by the feet, let the bears have at you. Are we understood?”

  “Yes!”

  This time the crotch. Johnny’s fists clutched his groin.

  “Quieter, mouse.”

  “Yes.”

  That should have ended it. But the Barker was giddy now and as a punctuation mark he brought the shotgun down a final time onto the boy’s ribs. The snap I heard was dry as timber collapsing in a campfire. Johnny gurgled. It sounded nothing like a man of seventy years or more. It was the sound of
a child under savage assault, pure and simple.

  What happened next is beyond my authorial acumen to describe. I had never harmed a child while working with the Black Hand, and yet had heard plenty of exclamations similar to those of Johnny. My mind raced to these aural memories and blindness overtook me, hot and silvery, like slipping into the mercury rivers of Hades. Was this Death, thought I, come once more to claim me? A hurtling backwards commenced: three years of performances, thousands of piercing needles; Mr. Hobby, the Soothing Foursome, the whole damned lot of rogues; Little Johnny Grandpa gifting me the kerchief to cover my grappling-hook wound; and then, as if it were in parallel time, brighter images of Abigail Finch and her nursemaids pressing stiff new shirts against my body; and then Wilma Sue, my Wilma Sue, tiptoeing across her room to watch a rainstorm rage outside Patterson’s window, the lamplight curving around her naked hip like my caressing hand. These things were life, and I could have no more of it, had fribbled it away when I’d possessed it, and sweeping me up now was the vortex of oblivion, experienced once before upon that Chicago beach, those seventeen minutes of perfect perpetual motion. This fresh taste of Death would not last, that I knew, and so I muttered profanities to Gød the deadbeat Father in the same breath that I told Him that I loved Him for allowing me a quick, sweet lick of this dimness, this stillness, this silence when I needed it most.

  La silenziosità—a phrase Giuseppe Fratelli had taught me.

  The Silentness.

  It was at that instant of la silenziosità that the Barker turned to me with a sunny grin.

  “So, Mr. Stick, what say you to this—”

  With every particle of psychic might I held to la silenziosità for four or five more seconds. It was long enough. The grin died on the Barker’s face. Color poured from his neck as if loosed from a beheading. There was a slackening of his every muscle down to the tiniest of forehead and eyelid.