The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  “Begin!” shouted Hobby. The word lost volume as he scrambled for the perimeter.

  Pullman Larry pulled away and I realized I must do the same. I lifted a knee and my foot came down and rumbled the Earth—no, it was thunder, crashing about the black jar that contained us like bugs. My second step was just as shattering, a series of explosions as finely sequenced as if set and triggered by Bartholomew Finch himself.

  I lost count. Five steps, six? Lightning flared, revealing chthonian dimension to the mountain ranges of the clouds, and then came down at us like bolts from Zeus, drawing patterns clean as chalk across a blackboard. I found myself absorbing the energy and the anger of these dark heavens. Much had I done to earn this long-awaited final meeting with Death and I’d entered into it readily. That was before the Barker had exited the drama with unfathomable cowardice. Dying like this was no different from being shot in the back on the shores of Lake Michigan and I could not allow that, not again.

  Ten, eleven, twelve steps? The rain became the manifestation of the cold hate exuding from my extremities; the mud sucking at my soles became the self-disgust of my betrayal of Johnny. As I reached my fifteenth step—the correct count came to me through the firework blasting of thunder—I turned and laughed at the abrupt understanding that crashed over me in a tsunamic tide.

  It was not anger that was required to summon la silenziosità; not just anger, I should say. It was the repellent melange of fury and regret and, most important of all, fear, an ingredient that, though foreign to me while working for the Black Hand, I had discovered anew when defending Johnny against the Barker’s assault and while liberating the General of his wartime guilt.

  They had been right, both Testa and the Barker.

  You gotta have fear in your heart.

  Pullman Larry was impossibly distant, his features smudged through the downpour. Yet his bright eyes dulled as he recognized in la silenziosità the Death that must come for us all. His practiced squint widened with childlike dread. His laconic smirk loosened into a gawp. When Mr. Hobby shouted “Fire!” there was but a startled jerk from Pullman’s shoulders before he halfheartedly raised his gun through some scrap of ingrained instinct.

  The sight of his revolver made visceral the abstract truth: I wanted to survive, at least past this deceitful joust. Of course I could never hit anything from this distance and under such foul conditions. But—what was this now?—I was moving.

  Thunder burst and spectators wailed. I was hurtling across the field. The gun, the full thousand pounds of it, was rising up with my arm and the speck of my being not lost in the weightless spiral of la silenziosità experienced great satisfaction from the wielding. I felt rainwater spilling out of my mouth and realized that I was grinning.

  At twenty paces I fired a shot; the bullet lost itself in the curtains of rain. I kept careening forth and now that I could see the whites of Pullman’s mesmerized eyes and the quivering of his bottom lip, I fired again. Horrible—a lightning bolt lashed out like a lizard’s tongue and ate it.

  The shot was close enough to have an effect upon Pullman’s stupor. His face crinkled into the blubbering mug of a terrorized toddler and his arm lashed out and the revolver discharged, but there was no aiming involved and it went directly into the seething crowd to his right, and now there was real screaming, male and female alike, as hundreds of people tore themselves away from their stations and began scrambling into the maelstrom of stroboscopic light and the ocean of falling water, diving into the woods or burrowing into the mud or stupidly dashing right into the line of fire, elbows locked around their heads.

  Still I advanced. A man bounced off my elbow and in retaliation I fired a third shot. Not only did I miss but the sound further oriented Pullman. His gun swung across the field—more screaming—and fixed upon me. The dentist was sobbing and dancing in place, but his arm was a trained animal, steady enough on its own when the trigger was squeezed.

  The bullet lodged in my left abdomen. I was spun around and the world became a tornado seen from inside the funnel. But at circle’s end I found myself facing the correct direction and kept moving. Pullman fired two more times and both bullets passed through my body, one through my right shoulder and one through my right thigh. Not the head shots he’d promised the Barker, but not bad under the circumstances.

  For a moment or two I teetered sideways, then backward, then dug my heels into mud and sprung forward with a rush of euphoria, for here at last I was taking full advantage of my corpselike state. The new holes in my body lightened me and allowed me to move with real purpose. I was running.

  My fourth shot missed from a distance of five feet. Pullman let loose with a high-pitched shriek and fired, hitting me again in the right shoulder, but by then I was crashing into him and he went down into a puddle with all four limbs wiggling so that he resembled an overturned beetle. His gun was lost in the storm and I advanced until I straddled his waist. His cowboy hat lost, Pullman Larry blinked into the rain that pounded his face. His eyes were clear and so, I discovered, were mine; la silenziosità had slipped away and I was back in this real world, wet and gored and exhausted and emptied of fear.

  I leaned over, supported myself with hands on knees, and took a closer look at the dentist. He was no longer crying or crapping himself and instead sneered, having never lost a contest before in his life. I wondered if in some squirmy part of his brain he appreciated the unforeseen turn of events, how the Highly Intelligent Monkey, the Nothing in Particular, had gunned down the only man who could never be outgunned.

  I fit the muzzle of my revolver against those handsome white teeth.

  Where was his Gød of Pain now?

  His death sounded like more mud splashing about. Felt like mud, too, when it hit me. No matter—I wiped it away along with the rain and wheeled about to absorb the scene. It was as if a military campaign had been conducted while my back was turned. The mud was scored in countless furrows. Thousands of footprints evidenced the frenzy. Dozens of people still flopped about in the mud, injured or immobilized or unable to tear themselves from the disaster of historic proportions.

  One felled body loomed larger than the rest, even though it was, truth be told, a very small body indeed. Twenty feet behind me lay Little Johnny Grandpa on his back, his blue overalls and white arm sling blackened with mud and his face taking the hard rain without cover.

  A feeling of great unease lowered upon me as I shoved the revolver into my trouser pocket and started toward him on legs far less steady than those under the influence of la silenziosità. My feet slithered away and I found myself on all fours, my hands disappearing into the mire. I crawled the last few feet until I could collapse at the lad’s side. So hunched, I could feel the rain weep through my body’s newest holes.

  Johnny had been shot twice in the chest. The shudder that gripped me nearly tore my limbs asunder. Reader, do you not see? These were the very two bullets that had passed through my dead flesh before being stopped by the smaller target of his body. That meant that this boy had been directly behind me as I charged Pullman Larry. Unbidden the vision came to me: Johnny hobbling across the sloppy field in his three-point foot-cane shamble, crying my name against the storm because he was certain of my doom and had to try to stop it—and why? Because the drunken, jealous, protective, lonely, gracious, foolish little boy had loved me.

  Rain cascaded down my cheeks like the tears my eyes were incapable of producing. I pressed my palms against the lad’s punctured torso in the stupid hope of damming the bubbling blood and felt beneath my fingers the brittle tremor of a breath. This lad had given me my words back, so I placed my mouth at his ear and gave back all that I had left: lies.

  For a few magnificent seconds, I believed them.

  “We did it,” said I. “We got our revenge.”

  Johnny’s cataracts swam with rain.

  “We can leave now,” said I. “Find a place to live, you and
me, where no one will bother us.”

  His mouth opened, filled with water.

  His arms stirred and I shook my head to tell him that he was under no circumstances to move, that I was strong enough for the both of us. I cradled his mud-spattered cheek in a cold hand, and even drowning in rain his eyes gleamed at this tender touch. His old, coarse lips inched upward into a smile and a thin glaze of blood cascaded down his neck, and then, so sudden for a boy who had lived so long, he died.

  I rested my head against his chest. It was reasonable, thought I, that I might remain in that pose forever. But before long a hard nodule began bothering my chin. I figured it to be a bullet, snagged against one of the boy’s shattered ribs. But when I investigated the pocket of his overalls, I discovered the golden aggie used each night in his Gallery performance.

  Oh, Gød! This boy! His spirit had not been nearly as broken as I had thought! Not only had he contacted Luca Testa as per my instruction but he had stolen this most insidious of props from the Barker and kept it on his person as a sacred talisman. I held the marble to the rain and gave it a jeweler’s inspection. It was my duty to keep it safe. No matter how long my death dragged on, this lad’s troth and valor could not be forgotten.

  No mere pants pocket or vest pouch could protect so priceless an object. I slipped the aggie onto my tongue and swallowed. I had to massage my throat to force it all the way down, but when I could feel the marble lodged inside of my stomach I experienced a wash of warm feeling. It might have felt like one of the ill livers or coiled tapeworms that Dr. Whistler’s products claimed to cure, but it was just the opposite.

  I slid away from Johnny and took the revolver from my pocket.

  The Barker was right where I expected, not far from where he had limped from the field of honor with Professor Bach. The chemist, of course, had deserted him, as had everyone else. The bedraggled soul had not even Silly Sally Kitty Catty to stroke. He sat in the rain with his back propped against a tree and to me looked rather insane, aristocratically costumed but with an eye full of boggy sod and a waterfall crashing down from his top hat’s brim. The gauze packed around his injured foot was soaked purple and I wondered if it had been trampled in the commotion.

  Regardless, he was going nowhere. I stood at the feet of the defeated madman, the weight of the revolver and its single remaining bullet dragging down a right arm bothered, but no more than bothered, by two fresh bullet wounds.

  I raised the gun.

  The Barker grinned. Brown rain sluiced from his bloody teeth.

  “Congratulations, Finch.”

  Those two words contained far more than mere acknowledgment of an underdog victory. Dr. Whistler’s Pageant of Health was finished. An event of doubtful legality had resulted in injuries, deaths, shots fired into a civilian audience. The law would clamp down hard. Before the morning was through the rest of the company would have fled. Only the Barker would remain, crippled by his own hand. Not that he would have deserted. This was his shore-blown ship and he was the seasick captain.

  Testa had left me alive to suffer and so I chose to follow suit. There was nothing worse I could do than leave the Barker beneath this tree, bleeding and deranged and waiting for the police to end his storied career. Ah, the number of customers he’d rooked! The hundreds of bottles of sludge he’d moved! How he would miss them all when he was sealed off behind bars. I wondered if he might miss me, too, in somber moments of reflection, the way I took those needles like a champion, the fevered excitement I had raised among the reverent. Had it not been glorious?

  There was a forest just over the rise. I turned toward it. That was where I would disappear for now. I pocketed the revolver and took several steps in the direction of the tree line before the Barker again spoke.

  “Finch.”

  Through the gray mesh of rain he looked like a specter.

  “Remember when I called you a cleaver? When we first met? You remember that?”

  I did not respond.

  “I was right. You are a cleaver. That is what you do. You shall cut the world in half, Mr. Finch. Believers on one side, heretics on the other. So split, they shall fight, and the losses will be significant. I regret I may not be there to see it. Do you have any idea, good sir, the chaos you shall cause, the killings that will happen in your name?”

  The forest tugged at me but I gave this man a moment more.

  “There will be chaos and killing without my help,” said I.

  The Barker’s smile was wan.

  “Maybe so.”

  With that I left Dr. Whistler and his Pageant of Health and dove into a blackness of trees and thorned underbrush that within minutes made mockery of the pedigree of my imported suit. Once deep into the timber I buried the gun; I was safer without it. The tree cover meant less mud and I was able to move apace, and with every step I cycled through a fresh emotion: hate, hope, wrath, heartbreak, charity. But most of all there was fear. My fate might be the bright, cornpone one dreamed up by Johnny; it might be the apocalyptic one suggested by the Barker. I knew it could not be both. I resolved therefore to keep that fear in my heart and use it, forever and ever, amen.

  For now, I had a destination. It was not back to Chicago and Abigail Finch; I was too debauched to ever again defile that pristine mausoleum. I had a card in my pocket, you see, a gorgeous, sharp-cornered, ivory-and-gold rectangle, and on it was printed an address where lived a man who had sworn to take me in, who might, in fact, be qualified to answer the very question of my existence. Come see his People Garden, he’d said. I meant to do just that. One day soon, I was sure of it, I would stroll down Jefferson Street in Boston, lift a brass door knocker, and introduce myself to the butler: Sorry to bother, my good man, but the doctor has requested my presence. Dr. Cornelius Leather would then arrive, teacup in hand, confused because this filthy transient was in no way recognizable as a gentleman. So I would stand tall and speak in full voice, for I would not be ashamed of my true identity ever again:

  My name is Zebulon Finch.

  PART THREE

  1902–1913

  It Transpires That Your Hero Learns Strange Etiquette, Meets A Girl Of Significance, And Performs An Act Of Unforgivable Betrayal.

  I.

  FANTASIES.

  Indulge them at your peril.

  How long did it take me to reach the good doctor’s doorstep? Thirty-seven months. Call it impossible if you like. Was I not an impossible being? Yea, for three long years your hero wandered America’s eastmost column—good seats, it turned out, for watching the battered battalion of What Was lock bayonets with the spiffed army of What Was to Be.

  The field of combat? Why, it was the town in which you lived! The weapons? Cable cars and automobiles and improbable new flying machines. The ammunition? Riveted steel, scorched black oil. And the blood? The blood, no surprise, was blood, from men too slow to keep pace with these steaming, iron-toothed engines; from animals too dumb to evade sleek new methods of mass slaughter; from unremembered idiots caught flatfooted in the crosshairs of progress. Only from a distance could one appreciate the warfare for the clownish, bruising waltz that it was, and, indeed, it was at a distance I remained.

  My first weeks emancipated from the Pageant of Health were wasted hopping trains. Boston was my objective but the trains were snakes and slithered where they pleased. I hunkered near the open doors of storage cars, let the wind tussle the nongrowing hair of my head, and grinned as a vagabond should. America, this woozy smear of gray and brown and green, existed only for me to master!

  Instead my tale became a demon’s travelogue. Railyard men pointing flashlights made hobo travel perilous. No matter, thought I. A horse I would steal and into Boston I would ride like Paul Revere! But what did a city boy know of horses? Everywhere I spied riders my own age and yet could not bear to approach them. How carefree they were in their plots and pleasures! Their diverse, stimulating futures I
could visualize far more clearly than my own.

  Unable to stomach the galling unfairness of it all, I took to the byroads familiar to me from Pageant routes. But Mother Nature knew I was unnatural and she maligned me. In early summer 1902 my foot lodged between boulders in a creek and I stood in rising water for two days digging out the rocks with my fingers. That fall, torrential rains sank me so deep in mud that it was several days into the monsoon before I realized that I was screaming for it to stop, for everything to stop, either that or let the wet Earth swallow me whole. Wave after wave of such woes beset me as Gød did His holy best to remind me that I was not human but scavenger.

  Like a wild dog, I came to want nothing but to defend my solitude. I drifted with ill winds among the detritus of a changing nation, a rising trash heap of outdated material that included warped wood in favor of iron, then rusted iron in favor of steel. By and by, it included men, too; women and children, as well, each one a casualty of progress. I would come upon these forlorn convalescents squatting in spaces that should have been mine: slouching old barns, moss-coated caves, dewy timber.

  One cold day my legs refused to go farther. It happened at the edge of a Pennsylvania mining town. There I spent the last few months of 1904 standing in the trees behind a one-bedroom shack housing a stoic coal-heaver, his dejected wife, their deaf and dumb son, and between three and four diaper-loading gremlins. (I never got a reliable count.) Each night in the weeds, the wife wiped coal dust from her husband while he murmured about bosses fixing to poison him with firedamp gas; of that eight dollars a year they’d stupidly pledged to the Catholic Church; of coalworker strikes being plotted that never matured beyond blueprint.

  So absorbed were they in workaday indignities and a twelve-dollar rent that I went unnoticed for months. It was Christmas when I was discovered. The mute child ambled out back clutching Santa’s gift, a dime novel with a lurid science fiction title. As he thumbed through his book and wandered nearer, I reminded myself that I was a tree, outfitted in wet leaves, brown as bark, moss plugging each of my unhallowed holes.