The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  We shook, and Reader, it felt fine.

  “Gød, Private, I’m sorry, I’m so danged sorry. I got the operation, just like you said, and it helped some, it did—and my rent, it went up and up, and the money helped with that, too—but I couldn’t—I just wasn’t sure you wanted me to—”

  I sealed our continued clutch with my opposite hand so that he did not feel it necessary to complete his statement. It was difficult to believe that I was the son of the unfeeling Bartholomew Finch, so badly did I wish to embrace this long-lost comrade.

  “I saw the magazine pictures,” said he, “but couldn’t ever believe it. How in heck did you end up here?”

  I dared grip his shoulder. Far beneath the atrophy lurked a quarterback’s girth.

  “There is much to say.” I indicated two chairs. “Let us say it all.”

  Hollywood was a fever and Church was the tub of ice that lifted me from it. For hours we exchanged not gossip and aspersions but rather stories of simple struggles: the darn good buck-twenty-five an hour he’d made as a welder before the smoke had aggravated his bad lung; the highway robbery of dental fees that obliged him to home-yank three teeth via pliers; the work he’d recently found helping move an entire graveyard across town—lots of smelly coffins, but golly, he sure enjoyed being in the outdoors.

  Church had found peace in hardship, and in his itemized banalities I found something as well: the pain and striving that was life, that was meaning, as opposed to the mesmeric embalmment of Hollywood. Of course I was lost out here in this fancy crypt—I was Death walking among the dead! Where I belonged was back in the trenches with my dearest friend.

  So captivated was I by our future together that Bridey’s nighttime return home caught me unawares. She clacked into the drawing room on impossible heels, legs glossy beneath a country-club daysuit, her gloved arms arranged fetchingly as she worked to unpin a hat from her waves of black hair. Even then, hours before the real disaster, I detected my blunder.

  We should have already left.

  “If you must use this dreadful room,” said she, “then I insist that you get off your ass and—”

  The heels quit their clack. Bridey flapped surprised lashes at the giant man taking up her satinwood settee. Church, a gent through and through, pushed upon his cane and rocketed upward. Beholden by social convention, I did the same, but found it difficult to meet Bridey’s eyes. Never before had I entertained a personal guest; it did not take a person of her intuition to sense that a plot was afoot.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” said she.

  Church stumbled forward, his leg fighting his cane, burying an inopportune cough in his shoulder while reaching out a quaking hand.

  “Miss—I am—it’s my—I am very, very pleased—”

  I spoke through teeth.

  “Allow me to introduce Burt Churchwell. He is a friend from the war. He is from Iowa.”

  The last bit I added for sympathy’s sake. Bridey peaked her eyebrows at the exoticism and extended a hand to see what the backcountry brute might do with it. Church stalked it as one would a greased pig, coming at it with two hands in case it darted. Once he’d captured it, he cradled it in disbelief, sliding his thumbs across the pearly silk.

  “Are all Iowans aficionados of gloves?” asked Bridey.

  Church dropped the hand as if caught licking it.

  “Oh, no, ma’am. Not that yours aren’t—I just haven’t ever met—I’ve seen so—well, I can’t even count—so many of your pictures and—”

  “Then it is I who must thank you,” said Bridey. “Tickets are no longer cheap, are they? I fear one day they’ll cost a whole dollar.”

  Church’s flabbergast blinded him to Bridey’s unsparing enumerating of his threadbare blazer, unscrubbable shirt stains, and undernail grease. The plunging basin of his right cheek interested her the most.

  “Of course you will dine with us,” said she.

  “No, ma’am,” sputtered Church. “I couldn’t!”

  “That’s right,” interjected I. “He is on a New York clock and weary from travel.”

  “Good, I prefer my men weary, they are so much easier to influence. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Churchwell?”

  “Church. Everyone calls me Church.”

  “Then I shall call you ‘C.’ Now, let me rouse the chef. Odds are she’s tipsy on cooking sherry at this hour, though inebriation does tend to bring out her genius. Shall we say ninety minutes? I would like to freshen up. Perhaps I’ll don a new pair of gloves to feed your fetish.”

  Quite assuredly the vixen was up to something.

  A last supper, I told myself, and then I am gone.

  Bridey came to dinner late enough to make an entrance. Though how else does one enter when squeezed inside of a blood-red Vera West cut so low that one’s breasts receive only the tiniest handholds of crepe? This imposing chest was boosted by an engraved silver girdle, which matched both her sleek turban and the pearled band around her throat. From the staircase she descended like Poe’s Red Death into the masque.

  Church’s thighs thwacked the table when he stood, the first of countless faux pas committed at regular intervals throughout the meal. Bridey, at her most devious, had arranged a menu fit to flummox: peppercorn ox tongue, braised cock’s combs, and lemon-and-parsley offal with a side of creamed durian fruit. Church gaped at the spread as would any Heartlander, and with every improper approach, Bridey was there to tut-tut and refill his glass with wine.

  Does that sit queasily, Reader? It should. Church, the kid who’d survived a war without the abetment of a flask, the man who’d lived through Prohibition without so much as a curious sip, was so out of his depth that partaking in alcohol for the first time seemed like the simpler road, especially when being offered up by the star of his most outrageous fantasies.

  In a click, he was drunk. He sniggered when a sliver of tripe skittered from under his knife and Bridey giggled right along. He went mush-mouthed when saying “I don’t got a girl,” and the two hammed it up with “I gone dotted a knurl” and “I won’t gut an earl” before descending into besotted hilarity. A lesser expert on the Valentine oeuvre might have believed the performance, but not I. Pause the projector. See there, hidden amid the grain? She pretends to drink her wine, only pretends.

  Our tiffs had escalated to all-out warfare and the sea of battle was Church.

  Then bring the carronades broadside, thought I. She shall strike her colors before dawn.

  “Say, dear-heart,” posed I with acerbity, “why don’t I avail you with tales of Church’s wartime élan? He is a man twice decorated.” Pointedly I added, “The sort of man with whom one should not trifle.”

  “To the contrary, lover-boy.” Bridey matched acid with acid. “I’ve found that the strongest men are the ones most in need of trifling.”

  “Eating tongue is hard,” slurred Church. “So chewy.”

  “But lambkin,” seethed I, “surely a gentleman who has maintained his innocence despite such odds should be permitted to go about his way free of indoctrination into waywardism.” I brought out the Excelsior. “My, look at the time. Church, old friend, we ought to be tucking you into bed.”

  “I pee the bed.” Church coughed, shook his head. “No, no, I didn’t say that.”

  “Bed does sound like fun,” snapped Bridey. “But before dancing? Unheard of!”

  “Dancing?” I gnashed my jaws. “You cannot be serious, sugar-bun.”

  But serious my sugar-bun was. She lifted my punchy partner onto unsteady feet and led him from the room. I lingered to stew until I heard from the phonograph player the sliding trombone of Glenn Miller. I threw down my napkin, charged through the hallway of grandfather clocks, and entered the library, where Bridey’s seldom-used Philco unit was refulgent with electrical power. From the cabinet speakers resounded a juvenile ditty called “Chattanooga C
hoo Choo.”

  The music had a woozy swing, a perfect match for the loopy ellipses sketched across the carpet by Bridey as she, veteran of untold dance scenes, steered Church away from such tricky obstacles as the walls and floor. It brought to mind, and painfully, the time Church had taught me the Charleston in his kitchen. He’d been clumsy then; now he careened about like a dog on hind legs.

  Church had once mastered what he’d dubbed “the Game,” but Bridey’s game was scored by goals more far obscure. After abandoning fancy footwork in favor of check-to-cheek oscillations, she tickled her fingers along Church’s spine. His fists floated, afraid to touch her bare-skinned back. She pressed closer, crawling a hand up his arm, neck, and face, until her red nails tickled that most sacrosanct of private parts, the hole in his cheek.

  He gasped, frightened by the intimacy, and gripped Bridey’s body with childish desperation. His boozy, disoriented eyes sought mine and he mumbled for help.

  “Private . . . ? Is this . . . is it okay . . . ?”

  “Private Finch,” shushed Bridey, “can’t help you now.”

  “Private Prefer-Not-To,” blubbered Church. “That’s what we use to call him.”

  Their slow waltz circled round and Bridey’s carnivore eyes caught mine.

  “Why, that’s a very apt name. There are, in fact, a few things he prefers not to do.”

  She slid her hands down Church’s sides and onto his thighs.

  Even invertebrate cuckolds had their limits! I sprang forth, snared Bridey’s wrist in one hand and Church’s in the other, and disentangled them as would a boxing ref. Bridey was hurled into a bookcase; she cried out. Church capsized over the arm of a sofa. She I left to her smarting but he I hauled to his feet. His skin was teal and his cheeks swollen as if with vomit. I tugged him from the library and hollered to the rafters for help.

  The butler met us in the hall. While the grandfather clocks tsked our boorish behavior, I enjoined the servant to call a cab, insert Mr. Churchwell inside of it, and supply the driver money enough for a hotel room in which my friend could repair. The butler was guiding Church’s arms through his coat sleeves when Church began to register the new drama in which he’d been cast.

  “Hang on. Wait. Private, I wanna stay.”

  “Listen to me as well as you are able. You are being taken to a hotel. Sleep off the drink. Tomorrow I will gather you, I promise. But tonight there is business I must conclude.”

  “Well, that’s some way to treat an old friend. Merry Christmas!”

  What I most wished to do was punch his lights out, stuff him into a trunk, and mail him parcel post back to Iowa where he belonged. A hotel was at least a quarantine; every second he spent in Hollywood, I now realized, came at the risk of contaminating the open wounds of his lungs or, more to the point, his heart. This town excelled at finding those whose damaged parts would make the tastiest sausage, provided an unsatisfied customer like myself did not move quick and steal them from the butcher block.

  XIV.

  BRIDEY WAS FACING THE PHONOGRAPH player when I returned. Her biceps glowed bluish where it had struck the shelf. I heard the moist whump of a needle drop, followed by the opening drawl of Artie Shaw’s “Stardust.” Her naked back rolled with the wistful strain, spine and scapula pressing against her skin like dragon wings wanting to be freed. Her hips swung this way, slow, and that way, slower, so that her blood-colored gown was a dripping wound cut through the air.

  Her languid turnabout was protracted agony. Throbbing pale neck, smothered cinder eyes, slippery crimson lips. She sucked on a long cigarette.

  “My dance partner. He’s run off. I need another.”

  I became a bull. Lower the head, square the shoulders, and snort.

  Bridey Valentine always got what she wanted, is that right?

  Fine, then, fine. After all, she’d earned it.

  Our love story, if that’s what you’d like to call it, was never going to end any direction other than horizontal. I took her by the waist and lugged her toward the hearth. A Persian rug fattened before her dragged feet and her hip collided with the end of the loveseat; it splintered and she grunted in pain. But it was she who pushed me over the back so that I landed upon the cushion. Around it she paced a coyote circle, gauging which part of me to eat first.

  She ankled off her shoes, worked her hands under the hem of her dress, removed her knickers, and threw them into the fire. She was then upon me with claws and teeth, ripping at jacket and shirt, unmindful of the signatures her nails might forever write across my flesh. She was sloppy and impatient; she left my upper body half-dressed and went for the trousers, beneath which she felt the hardness she’d so long hunted.

  Just as rigor mortis had stiffened individual muscles of my body, so had it stiffened the softer tissue of my genitals. I had over the past year grown rigid enough to do a man’s work, even though I was not a man, not even a boy, just a corpse who turned this consensual fornication—“carnal knowledge” as Bridey would say—into a rape of all things natural. She snarled and grabbed it, her selfish motivation, after all this time, still intact: to screw the Wilma Sue, and everything else left of my old life, right out of me. She positioned my pecker at the bow of her sex.

  I was colder than cold. She was hotter than hot.

  White steam crept from under the red skirt.

  Bridey bucked her hips and we were locked. She pointed her face at the coffered ceiling and shivered at the deep chill. Then she swore gruffly, directly cursing her icicle invader, and began to jolt back and forth. Faintly I felt a single bead of mercury heat. I dug my fingers through the dress and into her thighs so as to hang on for dear death.

  We were foes caught in a playground fight of slapping limbs when things inverted. We fell from the loveseat, rolled, and sprang back in the same position, she on top and crashing her hard pelvis into my fragile own. A general softness cushioned the assault and I turned my head to find beneath me a bedding of black fur. The bear rug, that mocking bane, had me in its clawed clutches! See? laughed the bear. Even dead things have their uses.

  Bridey dragged her bosom along my chest so that the friction peeled away the bodice. She pushed the dress down to her waist and slid her hands up her naked torso. What looked like sensual self-fondling was anything but; it was a mirror of the tour of my wounds I’d given her our first night together, her own Revelation Almanac—a meticulous account of the damages accrued when playing tug-of-war with Death.

  The scars glowed in the orange light. Here, a breast-lift. There, a tummy-tuck. Evidence of Dr. Biff’s meddling was curlicued into her navel and tucked into the crevices of her armpits. Bridey lifted her hair from her shoulders and angled her body so that I might appreciate the disfigurements for the war injuries that they were. Church had removed his facial prosthesis to disclose his damage; Bridey removed her gown to reveal hers.

  “Stardust” finished. Needle nudged label and made a cyclical thump. Bridey adopted the rhythm, squeezing her lathered legs around my white slabs of cold thigh. Forget the Greek death mask, the Egyptian mummification kit; forget every spookish icon with which she’d styled herself a patroness of the dark. Copulating with the Devil himself, now that was the outermost thrill.

  Within this meat-etiquette melding I began to experience uncoiling spires of pleasure. These went far beyond the cheap pumps of blood I’d felt as a youth; this was a lessening of deadness for having been plugged into a furnace of life. I, the gigolo Zebulon Finch, was once again a fumbling virgin. Bridey, voracious vamp, was restored her maidenhood.

  It was our first time. It was our last time.

  Shakespeare had it right about a post-poisoned Juliet:

  She was a flower, but death deflowered her.

  “Yes,” cried she.

  Yes—devastation.

  “Yes!” cried she.

  Yes—immolation!

  “Yes!
” cried she.

  Yes—erasure, destruction, oblivion, take me!

  Her starved muscles, biting; our quick cadence, disrupted; her flammable sweat upon both of us, sparked and rushing in blue flame. With one brute thrust of her hips, she harvested my root. There was a dull snap. No orgasm on Earth could lighten so heavy a weight, no ejaculation could offer such overdue release. Bridey slid away with my pecker still inside of her and I was glad. She could not keep the whole of me forever, but this single piece, for which I had no further use, belonged to her—it had for a while—and would make, thought I, a nice addition to her museum, a final endowment from me to my cut-up and sewed-back-together patchwork queen.

  XV.

  RUMORS IN THE DROWSY DARK:

  Z will take you.

  Not since my death had I been this close to actual sleep, and yet I could not help but rouse myself with speculation. “Take”: was the word used in the mortal sense? For though I could not sleep, breathe, or eat, I had proven myself adept at taking. Look to my hands for proof. Sixty-two years since a cursed birth and those merlot spots came not from age but from spilled blood.

  He’ll go with you, I promise.

  Surely the destination of debate was Hades? Though I knew not the exact route, I’d seen multitudes of signposts and might yet be convinced to pathfind.

  I’ll ask him when he’s up.

  Up? I’d never be up again! I chuckled the vulgar joke into the bear rug.

  He’ll meet you at your place at seven. Baby, I have to run, I’ll ring you later.

  Good! Begone with you! Your nattering distracts from my misery.

  Ta-ta, little Gopher.

  Gopher?

  The voice, then, was not that of a Delphic deity tossing lightning-bolt riddles at my skull. It was Bridey, the human female with whom I’d lain to crippling effect. Bridey’s tone that morn ought to have been one of howling horror. She ought to have lurched into the room, pouring blood from her groin, still clenching the knives with which she’d cut out the parts I’d diseased.