The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  It was a massacre.

  What luck I had blundered right into it.

  Machine-gun fire poured from the enemy trench like jets of water. Go ahead, Fritz! Shoot me, I dare you! I leapt to my feet and legged southward toward downed doughboys while opening fire with my inhumanly steady hands; helmeted Krauts ducked one after another like tots at a nursery game. Ten feet I ran, ever closer to the fallen. Finally, a German with a spine took aim and a bullet struck me in the right side. I staggered. But did I fall?

  Hell, no, sir, I did not fall!

  A flamethrower’s inferno mushroomed into my path, a second too early to envelop me. When I dove through its shimmering vapor, I felt the edges of my hair frizzle and the skin of my left shoulder shrivel. In a living man, the burns would be unbearable. But did I falter?

  Hell, no, sir, I did not falter!

  Here, at last, was a GI squatting in the mud, barely older than I, the red blotches of his infected skin beginning to suppurate into yellow blisters. I dropped into the crater and crawled on my belly while Kraut fire tore the trees limbs above, pelting us with daggers of wood. The GI fumbled at his mask with his teeth and feet, a ridiculous stunt.

  My judgment, I admit, was rushed. His attempts were valiant, actually, seeing how his hands had been reduced to fingerless nubs. I grabbed his mask, tightened the straps, but before pushing it onto his face noticed the green condensation streaking down the glass. Mustard gas—I hurled the mask toward the German line, a tiny poison bomb, and a machine gun shot it to pieces midair. Oh, to hell with it! I whipped off my own mask and tightened it around the GI’s face. Life was so much improved without that Isolator wheeze!

  “Can you walk?” shouted I.

  He shook his head. A yellow blister on his nose burst.

  I slung my rifle over my back, looped one arm beneath the boy’s shoulders, and with the other lifted his knees. In the same motion I snatched up my .45. I mounted the hill in full view of the Germans and let loose with a war scream, burial dirt tumbling from my mouth and firing the .45 with an accuracy Pullman Larry would have coveted. Huns dove for cover.

  A full round is what it took for me to achieve total astonishment. I was carrying the soldier with no more difficulty than Church had once carried me. Somewhere beneath the dirt—or when choosing to rise from it—I’d rediscovered the strength that had deserted me after death. Could it be because the task in which I was involved was, for once, a virtuous one?

  It was a moment ill-suited for reflection. Still roaring, I crashed through the woods until I spied a group of masked Marines holding a position behind a bastion of sandbags. I heard one of them shout, “Covering fire!,” followed by the chunky rattle of just that. Beneath their bullets I slid around the bags and let them catch the injured boy. The soldiers stared at me in disbelief; even the medic paused in shock before taking a look at the GI.

  I holstered my .45, brought down my Chauchat, reloaded, and began to scale the sandbags. A hand gripped me. It belonged to an incredulous private. His voice was muted behind his respirator.

  “You can’t go back out there!”

  “Let go of me,” said I.

  “You need a mask! It’ll burn you alive!”

  I grinned; I could not help it. This was why I had been brought to this ruined hunting preserve in northern France. Thank you, Death, for burying me deep enough so that I might remember.

  “Then burn I shall,” said I.

  Jerry won my respect. He shot right at me, unlike the coward who’d assassinated me in 1896. But no combination of Central Powers could match me that day. Bring on the Germans, the Austrians, the Bulgarians, the Turks! I’d take on all of them with this single French lead-hucker despised for its lousy calibration. With it I ripped rifles from the hands of snipers, shot grenades while they still hung the air. My first trip back across the field of fire cost me some machine-gunning of my left calf, but I brought to the medic an officer with a bayonet blade in his neck. My next trip involved taking a slug to my left hip and wading through a thick new stew of gas, but I came back with a legless private tucked beneath an arm.

  On and on it went. Impervious to bullets, able to play dead to perfection and then dart forward like a rabbit, unaffected by the sounds or tremors that had normal soldiers pissing their pants, I saved those men with the riskiest jobs of all: the chaplains, the stretcher-bearers, the runners. Had I a free hand, I’d collect firearms along the way. Yes, yes, bits of flesh were blown from my body, but hell, Reader, I’d suffered worse.

  A dozen rescues later, the soldiers of the sandbag citadel fell upon me and swore that they’d recommended me for the Croix de Guerre and Silver Star, even a Medal of Honor, provided I halt my demented redemption. The rest of my long existence would have been different had I listened. But the deafening peals of back-and-forth bombardments were pierced by a cry of pain close to the German line, a voice that each of us recognized, though never had we imagined it could sound anything less than unshakable and unafraid.

  Church.

  XI.

  WHAT A SOUND. IT BLED resolve from every American who heard it. Reader, I petition your patience. I bolted from the arms of my friendly detainers, vaulted o’er the sandbags, and charged one last time into the crossfire. I veered rightward of a spattering patch of bulleted clay and lunged against a berm of earth tilled by gunfire, behind which I might deduce Church’s position.

  I was not the only soldier to claim the spot. A GI was crouched there, running a thumb over the pin of his grenade. It made me a tad nervous, so I crawled ten feet northward until the diminishing hill forced me to my stomach. There I stopped and listened. Nothing. Nothing, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing—wait, yes, there! You couldn’t call it a sob, not from Burt Churchwell you couldn’t, but the hiccup of pain was unmistakable. He was alive, and close, but in a direction that was, shall we say, inconvenient.

  I took my helmet in my hand and nudged it above the hill.

  Sniper fire—zing! ’Twas shot right out of my hand.

  I contemplated this event for a moment, then looked to the man fondling the grenade.

  “You! Private!”

  Languidly he turned his head.

  “Sergeant,” clarified he.

  I gestured my apology to his chevrons.

  “I wonder, Sergeant, sir, would you mind terribly throwing that egg?”

  He regarded it, stroked it.

  “It’s the only one I got,” mused he.

  “Oh, they’re bringing more, sir, wagons of them,” lied I. “Throw it due west, twenty yards, at my say-so. Go left of that and you’ll blow up a corporal. Go short and you’ll blow up me. Got it? Sir, I mean?”

  He pondered the request long enough for Church to hiccup again.

  At last the sergeant sighed.

  “No one here lets you keep anything. Fine, I’ll throw it.”

  I drew myself into a squat and pressed my Chauchat to my chest. Why wait?

  “Now, Sergeant! Throw it now!”

  His arm reared back in a perfect arc and I bounced to my feet, filling the forest with bullets. The grenade whizzed past me as I ran, and behind bee-swarms of enemy fire I saw it drop. A sergeant indeed!—’twas a bull’s-eye right at the edge of the German trench. I veered, emptying my clip, until I saw a man in U.S. fatigues hunkered behind a boulder. The surroundings were littered with unidentifiable body parts, random cuts of meat in beige casings.

  I collapsed myself alongside the one living body.

  A bayonet blade came jabbing at my face. I batted it away with my own.

  “It’s me! American! Marine!”

  Church moaned through a gas mask caked with dirt.

  “Private Prefer-Not-To? You?”

  Bullets cracked off the edge of the boulder. I pressed a finger to his lips. He was whole as far as I could tell. Then his leg spasmed with pain and I saw a f
oot-long strip of fatty skin lying in the dirt like a dead snake. It had been carved from the back of his right calf by a piece of shell shrapnel that lay black and smoking in the weeds. The exposed muscle, as if in shock, barely bled. A mortal wound it was not, yet walking out of here in full view of the Germans might be impossible.

  I unlatched my full canteen, pulled the mask from his face, and poured the water at his mouth. He gulped, coughed, and spewed before replacing his mask. I looked for somewhere to set the canteen and, finding no better option, hung it by its strap on a severed arm wedged into the boulder. Yes, I know—not my finest moment.

  “Dirty Squareheads tricked me,” rasped Church. “Guy was yelling ‘medic’ in perfect English. Bunch of us gyrenes came in for evac and boom.” He punched the ground with a fist. “One dang Squarehead. With one dang submachine gun. Then they started shelling.”

  “Submachiner? Where?”

  “Dead.” He jerked his chin at a half-empty bag of grenades. “I been tossing these every couple minutes. Won’t last, and I’m throwing blind. Out of ammo, too. Got this bayonet, though, so I might take one or two with me.” He grabbed my collar. “Hey, Prefer-Not-To. Do something right for a change. Tell Lilly Eve Johnson from Dubuque, Iowa, I loved her to pieces. Right up till the end I loved her. Will you do that for me?”

  “I most certainly will not. We’re going to get you—”

  “Then go on, crawl your yellow belly out of here! I gotta be ready when they come.”

  He angled his bayonet against the boulder, the perfect position should a German face pop over the crest. With his free hand he reached into his pouch, extracted a lemon drop, lifted aside his mask, and placed the candy into his mouth.

  No soldier, alive or dead, knew the significance of this action better than I. I hurled myself on top of him and pinned down his arms with my rifle. He made fists and tried to raise them but I had the advantage of not just surprise but my returned strength. I pushed aside his mask, dug my fingers into his cheek, forced open his lower jaw, reached inside his mouth, and Reader, call me crazy if you wish, but I dug that yellow son of a bitch out of there and tossed it into the grass.

  “You are not going to die, Corporal. You are going to listen to what I say and—”

  “Get off me, you coward—”

  “You say you love your Marines? If you lie here and die, it is going to kill them. The Third Battalion will fall. The whole Seventh might not hold. So I must insist that you try. Not for me, for I give far less than one damn, but for them, the leathernecks. Your boys.”

  Church’s bloody teeth ground and his big left arm, seaworthy as ever, slipped out from under my rifle and took my neck so hard that two of his fingers sunk into my grappling-hook wound. He pulled until my forehead knocked against his own.

  “Call the play, then, Prefer-Not-To. Let’s finish out the Game.”

  He secured his mask and then, ever so gingerly, we arranged our bodies into low squats. A hundred rubies of blood gathered on Church’s exposed leg muscle, each one matched by a pearl of sweat upon his face. I reloaded and wrapped an arm around his back, the same way he’d supported me on our first march. I nodded at the grenadier bag.

  “I need you to throw a couple of those and then we’ll—”

  “I’m not some tenderfoot, Private. I know the routine.”

  He tossed aside his useless rifle and took up the bag. Four grenades remained.

  Four measly grenades, one piece-of-shit French rifle, and two hobbling Marines against a full trench of furious Huns. Then, just to top it off, mad orders from a crazed commander:

  (((Run away on tricycle or battleship, but dissection awaits you everywhere.)))

  (((Here, let me open you with knife, so much more exacting than bullet.)))

  (((And look! Your invitation to the People Garden, it has at last arrived!)))

  Of course this malevolent mentor impugned me; upon his laugh-rollicked tray he arranged not his favorite kit of scalpels and sutures but rather syringes of toxic doubt, bonesaws of intimidation, chisels of misgivings. I was but a boy playing at being a man. Success of any kind was beyond my reach.

  “Counting backward!” shouted Church. “Three—two—one!”

  He pulled the pin of a grenade, whether or not I was ready, and hurled the pineapple with the speed and accuracy of a bow-shot arrow. Before it buried itself into German mud, he’d pulled the pin on the next, changed his target, and thrown another blistering fastball.

  Mud and men exploded from the trench; Dr. Leather and his paraphernalia of paralysis were simultaneously blown away. I moved, dragging Church’s weight behind our cover of black smoke and into the trample of wheat. An outcrop of stone rose fifty feet away, though it might have well been a mile. From the edge of my vision I saw the redirecting muzzles of Jerry’s guns, yet rather than falter I thought again of the Hazard sisters. Perhaps one day they’d replay this battle, hatch a better plan, map for me a superior path. In the meantime? This was the way Zebulon Finch wanted to go out.

  I opened fire with my Chauchat, but with only one arm to steady the gun the shots did little more than distract. Church, however, planted his injured leg, cried out in pain, and hurled a perfect spiral into the face of a machine-gunner. Then he was pushing off again and so was I, loping along in artless concert as bullets carved visible paths through the tall grass. Our grenade exploded and German helmets, some with heads strapped in, rocketed from the trench. Church’s bellow was automatic.

  “MERRY CHRISTMAS! MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

  We had halved the distance to the outcropping when we heard the whizz that preceded the explosion of a whizz-bang. On instinct we threw ourselves to the dirt. When the bang came it scooped a gorge in the field, the charred ground belching a truckload of virgin dirt that then fell heavy as cadavers. My Chauchat was torn from my hands and I revoked every bad word I’d said about that Frog hunk of junk—I wanted it back!

  I whipped out my .45 and began popping off rounds, a waste of ammo, though the dirt cloud hid us long enough for me to drag Church back to his feet. We stumbled through the freshly carved ravine and up over the side, then dashed for the outcropping while four or five Huns rushed along their trench to match us step for step.

  Church threw the last grenade sidearm, a movement of inexpressible grace, and it cut across the wheat with just enough backspin to make it over the lip of the trench and into the laps of our pursuers. Instead of shots fired there was a German babble of panic, followed by detonation and screams—and then our outcropping was right there! A steep bank of stone promised to slow us, so I took Church in a bear hug and with all of my might flung him to safety. He landed on his back, screaming through his gas mask, clutching his raw, open calf.

  He made quite a bit of noise. So much so that I did not hear the whizz. Church did.

  “Down, Private, down!”

  In many respects I was fortunate. The shell was not a direct hit. The field behind me surged upward as if it were an ocean wave. Moist clay bestrewed Church’s appalled face before I felt a mallet blow to my right leg. I teetered, then looked down to see a snarled wad of shrapnel stabbed into the dirt, pinning beneath it a hunk of bloodless gray meat. Feeling only a dull disturbance, I decided to take a closer look at my legs.

  My left leg was fine, but a hole the size of a baseball had been punched through my right thigh; I could see through it to the scorched grass beneath. With no muscle to support it, the flesh walls began to crumple. I pitched forward, right into Church’s arms. He wrapped me tight and yanked me behind the rock, shouting self-evident silliness.

  “You’re hit! Aw, Private, you’re hit bad!”

  I propped myself against the rock. It was a fine enough spot to sit until they approximated our new location and launched another mortar.

  “Stop moving, Private! Medic! Medic!”

  One could excuse his agitation. Mine was, without
doubt, a killing blow. Major arteries had been more than severed; they’d been blown out entirely. Even were there a doctor close by armed with tourniquet, he would not bother, for there was not a man alive who would not bleed out in thirty seconds. Church knew this and yet, despite his pain, despite the knock-knock of Death upon his own chamber door, he dug out a lemon drop and offered it as distraction from what he believed must be unimaginable agony.

  “Save it,” said I.

  The forest floor was blanketed with dry wheat and sloppy mud. I gathered both by the handful and began to stuff them into my thigh cavity. Behind the window of his gas mask, Church’s eyes widened. Once the thigh was full enough to support weight, I gave Church a polite nod.

  “Your belt, please?”

  He asked no questions. In seconds he had it unbuckled, wrapped twice around my thigh, pulled tight, and knotted. While I tested my reconstructed leg against an embedded rock, Church fought against twenty-two years of rational convictions, even, perhaps, against the abrupt and irrecoverable loss of Gød. I did not have the time required to feel bad about any of it. For now, we had to move, and fast, before the Huns, those angry wasps, sunk their stingers.

  “Grab onto me,” said I. “I shall do the crawling.”

  He pointed at my face in expanding wonder.

  “You’re not even wearing a mask. How . . . ?”

  I held out my .45.

  “Can you shoot? I need you to do so, Corporal, and with precision.”

  Though the mask hid much of his face, I could see enough to follow the cycle of his abhorrence, repudiation, and denial. But was this not war? Did not each new day shine its torch upon some rare abomination? Resolution diamoned Church’s eyes and then his body. He snatched the .45 from me, popped the rod, thumbed the cylinder, and counted the remaining bullets. With practiced flash, he whipped shut the mechanism and yanked the hammer.