The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  I stared at Church in disbelief. He laughed and spoke a short, silly word.

  “Jazz.”

  Had mischief-making of this magnificent measure been going on while I’d puttered along Georgia’s dusty, boring byways? I looked to the floor to clear my head and saw near my feet a splendid brass spittoon—a spittoon, I say! More than anything else, this engilded saliva repository drove home the scope of our country’s post-war prosperity. It was as if the millions of recently dead had to be exorcized if normal life were to be resumed, and here in this room were enacted the forbidden rites.

  Church had ordered drinks at some point. A fizzy soda for the constant abstainer and for me, of course, a seltzer I would not touch—both of us wastes of space in this bedlamite market of freely flowing firewater. He snatched his cup and waited until I lifted mine. Together we clinked our glasses and he, after drinking, chuckled.

  “Stop mooning at the gosh-danged band! The dancing girls are right there!”

  Imagine it, Dearest Reader, if you do not mind an aphrodisiacal blush. These prancing pretties followed every physical urge no matter how licentious the thresh, their shingled bobs frolicking about their jawlines with the same shimmy as their sequined dresses, smoking all the while from long, slender cigarette holders. They were skinny and flat and plated by waistless dresses a-swing with pearls.

  Church shouted over the din.

  “They call themselves ‘flappers.’ That the ‘garçon look.’ It’s French. Not bad, eh?”

  “They look quite unlike the mademoiselles I remember.”

  He slapped my back.

  “You got that right, buddy. Take it from me, these girls are a whole new breed. They stay out all night and dance till daybreak. See their fingernails? That’s polish—they polish their fingernails! And, boy, are they ever crazy for gin! Some of them carry flasks in their dang garter belts. It’s a good way to meet them—just ask for a gulp. You can spit it out on the sly. They’d go wild for that Dog Bowl stuff we sold today. Anything to get blotto.”

  “Blotto?”

  “Drunk! Tipsy! I tell you, this town’s a bachelor’s paradise! I’ll teach you everything.” He stopped, his face falling. “You can still like girls, can’t you?”

  It depended, of course, on how liberal one was with the word like, but this was neither the time nor place to get didactic about the function, or lack thereof, of my nether regions. I nodded.

  “Great. All right, see that Jane there, just coming in? See how she’s got mirrors sewn into her dress? That’s a custom job, and you know what that tells me? Nouveau riche, loud and clear.”

  “Nouveau . . . ?”

  “New money. They dance faster and kiss longer. They’re not hung up by all those old-time traditions.”

  “Their standards are lower, you mean.”

  “Well, that’s a lousy way to look at it. They’re more fun is all. They want to pet. It’s Prohibition, I’m telling you. A girl’s gotta be a little bit bad to go to a gin joint, and once she gets a taste—bam! She can’t get enough. It’s like Frood says, girls are animals the same as us men.”

  “Frood.”

  “What, you haven’t heard of Frood?”

  “A famous caveman, perhaps?”

  “He’s a head doctor. These girls are over the moon about Frood.”

  Ah—Sigmund Freud. I’d read about that oversexed quack. I smiled and nodded. No reason to fuss about proper phonetics.

  “I knew you’d pick up fast. You’re an odd duck, Finch, but sharp as they come.” He finished off his soda as though it were a bracing pull of whiskey. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

  He clapped his hands, blew out a breath, hopped off his stool, and hobbled his way to the dance floor. I watched with great curiosity as he integrated his bulky shape into the knit of lithe, slinging bodies. His gait, so sure upon fields of fire and football, was as oafish here as it had been in his kitchen, but he commenced with the same nerve, heaving his shoes hither, tossing his arms yon, and soon enough his conquered oval of floor space intersected with that of some gamboling gals. In the heat of the brawl, in the delirium of jazz, one partner was as good as another, and I observed with admiration and envy as his paws pressed upon slender hips and twirled them away only to reel them back via lanky, bejangled arms.

  Only when the band collapsed and took five did Church wipe his face with his sleeve, take his current partner by the elbow, and pull her in the direction of my table. I sat straighter. By then the flapper had gotten a good look at Church’s face and had put on the brakes. She pointed over her shoulder at friends, probably imaginary. Church hooked a thumb my way and tugged her closer. She laughed to be friendly but her eyes flashed with alarm. Church’s next advance brought her within ten feet of the table but by then she was wiggling off the hook, no longer smiling, and as she hurried away I heard his last plea:

  “But don’t you want to talk about Frood?”

  I cursed myself out loud for not having corrected his earlier pronunciation. The girl brayed; I winced; Church’s shoulders fell and he limped his way to our table a good six inches shorter. He hit the stool hard; his empty soda glass skittered into my full glass of water.

  “This ain’t the same country we left. I suppose it’s better. It must be. I mean, look how happy everyone is.”

  It was true that you could not number every instance of revelry, of decadence, of flaunted illegality. Surely this was behavior befitting a nation at the edge of empire.

  “Guess I gotta learn to present myself better. Both of us do. We gotta learn to sell our good sides.”

  I recalled the club’s password, spoken by Church with such pride.

  “Salesmanship,” said I.

  Church cracked a grin. The band kicked back into gear with a syncopated shriek and that grin truncated into a wistful twist of lip, while his eyes drifted after the smoke churned up by romping bodies.

  “The Cotton Club.”

  His whispered words were a magic spell.

  “That’s where we’ll go, little buddy. It’s up on Lenox—the finest place around. Got the finest girls, too, none of the gold diggers you get at holes like this. At the Cotton Club it’s first-class all the way. Chorus girls, more than you could pet if you had all week—even the hat-check girls are tony. And the bands? They make this one sound like a bunch of geese. You ever heard of Duke Ellington? Louis Armstrong? Well, you will. We’ll hear them play, you and me, watch how the crime guys give them thousand-buck tips just to play a tune.”

  This was more than a dream; it was, for Church, the Dream, and for a time I too dreamt of mingling among perfumed heiresses, listening to the melodious repartees of personalities of radio and screen, and seeing sawbucks fly from the wallets of captains of industry. I thirsted for specifics.

  “You have been there, then?”

  “Well, no. Not yet. But, heck, you don’t need to go no further than the line out front to know it’s pure swank. There ain’t any Plymouths parked outside, you catch my drift? Only Stutzes, Dusenbergs, all the best. You can’t walk into a joint like the Cotton Club in duds like these. No, we gotta make some dough first, we gotta look sharp. A few months, if things go good? Wait and see. We’ll dance the night away.”

  VII.

  YOU ARE WISE TO WONDER how long an unwatched car full of liquor can last in a given megalopolis. Call it luck, if you wish, for an otherwise unlucky chump, that week after week after week, no one came across my dear Lizzie.

  That does not mean the delectable Dog Bowl Debbie found its way to the intended buyer. John Quincy had provided no instructions beyond showing up at a certain warehouse across the East River. That distance became the difference: Church and I continued to sell the bottles piecemeal to pay for food, heat, and rent. These were the barest of necessities, I knew that, and yet I couldn’t look for long at any coin earmarked for the Quincys. I tried t
o convince myself that my duty toward them was finite, that Zebulon Finch was unbeholden to any man.

  Except, perhaps, Church. Month after month the city beyond our ramshackle walls crackled with gunfire, much of it coached by a brash impresario named Lucky Luciano. Crime, ever profitable, boomed to historic proportions. The stock market, too, rose, and rose, and rose, making everyone, or so it seemed, rich. I could not go a day without reading breathless advice from columnists (“Put Your Small Capital Into Niles-Bement-Pond if You Wish to Live Like Rockefeller”) or fielding tips from shoeshine boys (“Psst, buddy! Invest in Allied Chemical and Dye!”).

  Church and I had no bank account with which to gamble—nor shoes worthy of a shine, come to think of it. In 1926 the Dog Bowl Debbie ran out, and until 1929 we held the most menial of jobs: packing newspapers, freighting auto parts, selling Juicy Fruit gum on the street. Where Church’s disfigurement did not make him unhireable, his mood swings earned him the boot, and I, in solidarity, followed him toward the exit.

  He was everything I had in the world, even though our life together felt inconsequential compared to the spectacular feats we’d brought off in the Great War. Such battlefield glory haunted both of us, but especially Church. It did not take an Einstein (or a Frood) to see that war had rattled something loose inside him the same as it had Piano, and that this dislodgment, not his cheek, was his most dominant wound.

  The Dream of the Cotton Club remained just that, for Church dared not darken its hallowed doorway until he’d made something of himself. My primary purpose was to buoy my friend’s sinking spirits, so I encouraged our continued attendance at more plebeian dives. To maintain my own disposition, I saved cash enough to purchase a terrific ten-dollar Knapp-Felt fedora—second only to the Excelsior in my history of favorite accoutrements.

  From beneath its ivory petersham band and laughably long brim, I screened flotillas of flappers for a girl kindhearted enough to look past Church’s face. Sensing that I was not on the make, females gravitated into my jurisdiction. As much as it anguished me to be a nonsexual object, I discovered, to my surprise, a great deal of pleasure in chatting up these browbeaten but brazen babes who worked in steno pools, department stores, libraries, and schools in jobs far more interesting than any Church or I had ever held. Who knew that women had so much to say?

  So fond of them did I become that I could not blame them for spurning Church. The odds stacked against these young women were enough without him lopsiding the equation.

  This phase of our life came to an end in May 1927. The fad du jour was dance marathons, endurance contests in which the last couple standing won a cash award. These “bunion derbies” held every hallmark of an event ideal for Church: he needed money, longed for situations in which a girl could not flee before getting to know him, loved to dance, and had a minotaur’s endurance. So when he shook an advertisement in my face and said he couldn’t lose, what could I feel but gladness at the return of his swaggering gasconade?

  It went, of course, poorly, as did everything he attempted that decade. The tin-roofed Coney Island amphitheater was sardined with hundreds of numbered contestants, and I watched from the bleachers as Church and the gal with whom he’d been paired—Couple #281—spun within a sea of individual whirlpools. The first day and night cut the frenzy down to thirty couples, but these were the desperate diehards. A full week later, most of them fought on, their snappy tangos abased into the slouches of half-snipped marionettes.

  Some men dragged semi-conscious girls; some girls passed smelling salts before the faces of their drowsing men. Shoes had long since been kicked off to make room for blisters, and the hardwood was smeared with blood. Given that the swelling of his problematic right knee was evident from one hundred feet away, Church’s violent crash on Day Fourteen was almost a relief.

  From the filthed floor, his glasses and copper cheek askew, he sobbed.

  “I won the war. I won the war. And I can’t even win this?”

  It was a slow advance past the noisy good times of the beaches and amusement parks, with me bearing half of Church’s substantial weight as he had borne mine during the march to Belleau Wood. Coney Island was stocked with every pleasure a person could want, from sailboats to cotton candy to, shall we say, more adult diversions, and Church broke from my grip to keel toward one such house of whoredom. I grimaced but had no choice but to draggle after. Such establishments had once brought me considerable joy, but ever since Wilma Sue, the sight of one disheartened me.

  Two women led us down a dingy hallway and into a grubby bedroom, where they took from Church two dollars and began to peel off their clothes. It had been thirty years since I’d been privy to such an unveiling, and there were myriad details to note regarding contemporary undergarments, the most jarring of which was the tubular elastic used to flatten the breasts. (Yes, Reader, I know—a criminal intent!) These girls had precious little meat on their bones; the point of the style, I think, was to make ladies look forever young. As someone with just such an affliction, I ached after the kind of soft, luscious flesh of which you could take hold. Oh, Wilma Sue, how I missed her, and in so many ways!

  Church’s hooker went by Nan, mine Dot. Both affected flapper flash, though a slapdash variety. Instead of the cunning bobs labored over by “beauticians” (a new and hopeful-sounding profession), these girls’ hair looked self-lopped; instead of dangling strings of pearls they sported glass beads; and the lockets around their necks contained not swatches of perfumed cotton but cocaine, which both girls snorted from their fingernails, giggling.

  Church initiated sexual congress. His bad knee shook, his feet bled into the carpet, and the number pinned to the back of his shirt made his effort feel like another contest. Dot lounged happily upon my unresponsive lap, re-doing her makeup in a compact mirror. On went the rose rouge, the pale powder, the red Cupid’s bow lips, the thick black kohl around the eyes. I was too close to appreciate the effort. Her face looked to me like a loosely fitting mask.

  While Church went about his business, the girls bantered.

  Dot: “Nan, you got a cig?”

  Nan: “You’ve been on a real toot with those. Don’tcha know gaspers will do ya in?”

  Dot: “That’s a wad of chewing gum. Ain’t you read the magazines? It’s how all the stars keep their figures.”

  Nan: “You’re all wet. Exercising’s what does it.”

  Dot: “Hah! With all our lays we both oughta be beanpoles. Look, my girl Mabel knows her onions, and she don’t eat nothing but spinach and juice—and you’d be happy to have her hip bones.”

  Nan: “I’d be happy to have her bubs. Mine are too big.”

  Dot: “Well, just keep strapping ’em in, maybe they’ll shrink.”

  Better to sit there, impotent and uninteresting, than undergo the strange suffering of Church. Sweat poured from his crimson face until his glasses began to slide down his nose, dragging with them his copper cheek. This threw off his focus; his thrusts staggered and his grunts stuttered; and then, quite evidently, he began to fail at his task. He tried to nudge his cheek back up with his shoulder and in the doing so stumbled backward.

  Nan noticed.

  “Aw, what happened, Burke baby?”

  Church pushed away from her thighs and retreated to the corner to pull up his pants.

  “It’s Burt.”

  “That’s what I said—Burke. Come back, we’ll try again.”

  “Burt. And that over there is Zebulon Finch. Got it?”

  “He your kid brother? He’s cute. Dot will give him a round, won’t you, Dottie? And you and me can start over.”

  Church’s hands came away from his belt in fists.

  “That right there is no kid. That’s Private Zebulon Finch of the Seventh Marine Regiment. You got any idea of what this guy did for me? For his brothers? If he doesn’t want to be touched, you don’t touch him, you got that? You don’t deserve to
touch him, you diseased witch.”

  Nan’s spirits dropped like a nightgown. She raised herself to sitting position.

  “You better take a shower, mister. You’re getting a little hot under the collar.”

  “I’m just asking for some respect is all.”

  “Well, this ain’t how you get it. Dot, get your clothes.”

  “What?” demanded Church. “We’re done, just like that?”

  “Sorry, bank’s closed—Burke.”

  This kindled within me an angry flame, though whether directed at the raccoon-faced courtesan or the whole sorry situation I cannot say. I stood, bouncing Dot to her feet, and lurched across the room with arms raised, as if scaring away a sidewalk of pigeons. No, Reader, I am not proud of it, but I had Church’s shaking fists to consider.

  “Get out of here!” shouted I.

  Nan got off the bed, swiped up her clothes, and pressed them to her body.

  “This is our whoopee spot, kid. You can’t give us the bum’s rush!”

  “Out, out, out, out, out!”

  Dot, the meeker of the two, held the door open. Nan was furious but I suspected this was not the first time a customer had forced a getaway. She shook a finger at us; her cheap strand of beads whirled about like Aboriginal boleadoras.

  “You’re real flat tires, the both of you!”

  The door slammed and we listened to their naked footsteps patter down the hall and retreat inside another room. I leaned against the wall, brain boiling. Church took a seat upon the vacant bed. Tired old bedsprings moaned as he unclenched his hands and studied their scars: maps of Iowan farm land, demolished trenches, the back alleys of lower Manhattan.

  “Ever wish you could go back to the war?” asked he. “Keep fighting it?”