The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  V.

  SUBURBIA’S SAFENESS WAS FIGMENTAL. A bicycling paperboy launched a newsprint missile at me two doors down, and I might have challenged the shrimpy sniper to a duel had I not been forced to skitter from the path of a two-toned Ford backing from a driveway. It offered me a comical honk that belied its elephantine breadth. Inside the auto and others like it, I spied the wedding bands, filtered cigarettes, and flannel suits of exurbanite breadwinners, while waving good-bye from doorsteps were their doting housewives, torpedo-breasted from conical brassieres, and brandishing kitchen knives.

  Because I wished to casually catch Mrs. White’s eye upon her return (and because, frankly, the Kansan vastness of Heavenly Hills unnerved me), I cordoned myself to the immediate block, which Clown and I circled until I’d memorized every name upon every red-flagged mailbox: Falzone, Cunningham, Caruso, Schaefer, Mitchell, Romano, Dodd, Gurrieri, Brandt, Shoemaker, Schmitt, Marino, DeWitt.

  But this was no Times Square, where one could stroll Broadway eating a giraffe head and go unnoticed. Pink-skinned, starch-collared, and of forward-leaning middle-class comportment, the habitants perked up at aberration. Women pinning laundry to clotheslines peeked from behind snapping sheets; men parted kitchen curtains to peer over coffee cups; a white-gloved crossing guard lowered his sunglasses, and his smile, to level at me his dubiosity.

  Mrs. White’s estimation had been that half the people here are older than sin. Pretty close—every third person I saw was aged, men so frail they could but glower at their piles of thaw-sodden leaves, and women clinging to porch swings as if convinced their seats might rocket away, just like everything else that century. Both genders muttered at me in mother tongues. One sniff was all they needed, to know I was a herald of their encroaching deaths.

  Only the occasional Negro workman gave me a candid look as he pushed about his wheelbarrow of brick or evulsed three seasons of gunk from a rain gutter. These overalled chaps stared at me as if expecting a greeting. To borrow a phrase of Junior’s, they could go soak their heads! I followed the exemplum of my fellow Heavenly Hillers and pretended these laborers were invisible. Until, that is, the meat hook of a horrible hunch sunk into my spine.

  My darkened skin—why, the people of Heavenly Hills thought that I was a Negro! Failing that, a partial Negro; failing that, some other recipe that, whatever its ingredients, came at a lesser price than whole-grained whiteness. Freshly panicked, I beseeched the Negroes with an expression of despair, hoping they might publicly exculpate me of their brand. All they returned were frowns that seemed to ask, What the hell are you up to, strolling around a white neighborhood like this?

  The directives I whispered to Clown got her to growl, the Negroes shrunk back accordingly, and then, jostling the leash as if it were connected to a coach-and-four, I strode past the workers as if they’d never existed. Suburban America crystallized social classes, and I was confident about the category to which I belonged.

  Shortly after Clown issued the last of her three fecal deposits (there was no tabulating the gallons of urine discharged), our placid neighborhood, without so much as an alarm bell, was invaded. Giant yellow dirigibles howled down each street, hissed to abrupt stops, and launched millions of shrieking, grass-stained little Vikings, each of whom swung metal lunch boxes like medieval maces. Clown barked in delight, while I stood inert. Great Caesar’s ghost, the hordes! Were the suburbs laboratories of bourgeoisie baby-making and nothing else?

  Unlike their elders, the children were colorblind. They flowed past me like vomit, hot and sour and sticky. Clown, though, was a canine seer, and tented her ears at a specific call slicing through the commotion.

  “Mr. Gray! Mr. Gray!”

  I banked astern to catch the incursion of two miniature marauders. It was Junior and Franny, he in collared cotton and pleated shorts, she in a skirt-and-shirt combo printed with sailboat insignia—spiffy outfits that the school day had brutalized. The duo skidded to a halt, red-cheeked and gasping.

  “Jumping jeepers!” cried Junior. “You’re walking Clown!”

  “Clown! Clown! Clown!” chorused Franny.

  The siblings locked hands and skipped a circle around the dog and me, tickled to near-hysteria by this unforeseen development. While Clown responded with a four-footed fandango of her own, I mulled the curious turn. I’d hoped to impress Mrs. White, not her grubby-faced progeny, but might this tack work just as well?

  “It is true,” bugled I. “I have led your animal on an impressive trail of elimination.”

  “Elim-in-ation?” asked Franny.

  “He means ‘poop’!” Junior nearly fainted from mirth.

  Franny changed her chant.

  “Poop! Poop! Poop!”

  With monkey hands they pulled me by sleeve and trouser toward the pink house, desperate to show me off as a cat does its slain mouse. As it happened, Mrs. White had just arrived, arms full of groceries and using her hip to shut the door of her olive-green Buick Roadmaster. She knew the rhythm of her children’s feet and extended her neck to see past the bags. She was a woman easily embarrassed when caught unawares—her cat’s-eye sunglasses were as aslant as her velvet pillbox—but Junior and Franny permitted her no time. They seizured about the lawn in their haste to recount how they’d gotten off the bus, and had then seen Clown, and had then seen Mr. Gray, and then had run up to us, and then, and then, and then, and—

  “Mr. Gray,” interrupted Mrs. White. “Does Blackhand’s Disease allow you to be in the sun?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I only assumed, because I’ve never seen you go outside . . .”

  “Oh, right. No, I’ve only been busy. With . . .”

  “Writing,” she offered helpfully.

  I twirled a finger at my noggin. “So many ideas needing expression.”

  Grocery weight forced her inside, but not before she nodded slowly enough to suggest that, first, she was unconvinced by my lie, and second, despite my promises of incommunicability, the daylight contrast of my brownish hue with the blush color of her offspring upset her. Even if our mingling carried no health risks, just as deadly were the risks of the neighborhood grapevine and its chief vigneron, Mrs. Shoemaker. From what I’d gathered, the tyrannical queen of Mulberry Terrace plied telephone lines like garrotes.

  When it came to Junior and Franny, however, the ice had been irreparably broken. They used that night’s dinner as an opportunity to pelt me with the sort of blunt-object questions only ever asked by children.

  “Where’d ya come from?” asked Junior.

  “Where did you come from,” corrected Mrs. White.

  “Chicago.” Unless, of course, von Lüth had been correct and I’d always existed in Judas’s Gethsemane, Caligula’s Rome, Vlad the Impaler’s Romania, John Wesley Hardin’s Old West.

  “Whatcha like doing?” asked Franny.

  “What do you like to do,” corrected Mrs. White.

  “Nothing much.” Were that only the historical fact! What I’d liked to do was destroy the lives of my fellow man. Wasn’t that the leading theory of why I’d been sentenced to stick around?

  “You gone anywhere neat?” asked Junior.

  “Have you been anywhere neat,” corrected Mrs. White.

  “Not really.” But that was the problem, wasn’t it? I’d been everywhere, but nowhere had I found a home, certainly not one more fitting than a six-foot hole in the dirt.

  “Don’t you know no tricks?” asked Franny.

  “Heavens,” sighed Mrs. White. “Children, your grammar.”

  “None, I’m afraid.” The biggest trick I’d ever pulled was convincing myself that I had a purpose here on Mulberry Terrace, that the Marlboro Man had sent me here for a reason.

  Mrs. White insisted upon tableside decorum and got it, instructing the children to eat their Cherry Pineapple Bologna (instant mashed potatoes stirred with bologna, glazed with maraschino cherry and crushed pineapple, and then drowned in red food coloring) and initiate school-day reportage. They sighed
and complied; only I noticed their mother’s preoccupation. Mrs. White knew as well as I that this was the first time in a year—since, perhaps, the death of their father?—that Junior and Franny had made it through dinner without squabble or sob.

  This one fact, or so I suspect, kept Mrs. White from dictating that I leave her children alone. Thus did the routine solidify: mornings spent enjoying Clown’s tussling with The Toe; afternoon dog walks timed to coincide with the arrival of the school bus; and a retreat to the basement save a final cameo at dinner, where my stinginess with personal data only further incensed the siblings’ competition for my attention.

  Junior, a critical three years older, held the edge. He took to bringing to the table his most favored toys and presenting them for approval. They were asinine gewgaws. A plastic Davy Crockett rifle, which swept back memories of the gun-shaped stick my mother had robbed from me at age eight. A Slinky, a colossal spring with no apparent purpose beyond becoming entangled in his sister’s hair. Silly Putty, a glob of goo good for nothing except reminding me of the human melt I’d seen at Hiroshima. I was roundly appalled. Never in history had so much money been frittered on objects of such triviality.

  Yet I did not fracture the rifle over a knee, hammer flat the Slinky, or feed the Silly Putty to the nearest Saint Bernard. Mrs. White toiled thanklessly for her children, but without a Mr. White to serve as traffic cop, the two ran amok, breaking things left and right that Mrs. White (delusional woman) kept adding to my repair list. Buying toys was her attempt to satiate the mania of youth.

  It was the era of fatuous fads, and the White pups had to have every one—Franny’s hula hoop, killer of a half-dozen vases; Junior’s yo-yo, breaker of windows fore and aft; Franny’s pet rock, plonked inside the Roadmaster’s gas tank; Junior’s famous run of Stuntarang-brand boomerangs, all five nabbed by the cottonwoods lining Mulberry. Much safer were the Picture Craft paint-by-number sets that Mrs. White shuffled to her children like poker hands. By pairing numbered landscapes with dozens of capsules of correspondingly numbered paints, these products strangled all creativity from the oldest art and guaranteed that any slob with a couple bucks could be a Monet. Well, except for Junior, who could not resist using up all the #47 Burnt Sienna on impromptu dinosaurs, which, of course, he unveiled at the dinner table for my critique.

  “Not bad,” said I. “That farmhouse deserved a trampling.”

  Mrs. White gave me a dirty look and tsked the anachronistic prehistorics.

  “Charles White Junior, this is the exact problem with your schoolwork. If you are to get anywhere in life, you must learn to follow the rules.”

  My instinct was to huzzah the lad’s insubordination, but I was kept mum by Mrs. White’s look of pride as she snapped on her dishwashing gloves and gazed over her number-coloring, hula-hooping, yo-yo-ing tribe. Each night I’d dawdle before heading down the basement stairs, weighing the Whites’ general well-being against my own family tragedy: Abigail and Bartholomew, the contemptible parents; Church, the betrayed brother; Wilma Sue, the could-have-been wife; Merle, the alienated daughter.

  If Slinkys and Silly Putty were the keys to contentment, who was I to scoff?

  VI.

  MRS. WHITE CAME A TAPPING, gently rapping at my chamber door on the last Saturday of August, the climax of a clangorous summer vacation season, while I keyed away at my Royal Quiet de Luxe. My lucky piece of paper having long disintegrated, I’d taken to typing Testa’s sentiment about fear and hearts onto a sweat sock. I rushed to the door and warily allowed the smallest opening.

  Mrs. White waited in the cellar dark, hands fidgeting before her apron. Her smile was labored enough that it did not qualify as such. I squinted, hunted about for other ambushers, and opened the door another inch.

  “May I have a word, Mr. Gray?”

  I cursed myself and my futile ploy. My displays with Clown had failed and my room was to become a bomb shelter. I needed time to prepare a convincing rejoinder.

  “Very sorry, Mrs. White. But you catch me grappling with a pivotal scene.”

  “Oh?”

  She lifted to her toes to catch a glimpse of my masterpiece. Since said opus was, in fact, an inky sock, I shifted to block her view. Were she to see it, no doubt she would ring the Wichita author’s guild to have me stripped of my writer’s license before sundown. She lowered herself to her high heels. I smiled, cleared my throat, and began to withdraw.

  Mrs. White wrung her apron and words ran like dirty dishwater.

  “Mr. Gray, it’s like this. You know it’s Junior’s first week of fifth grade, and I promised him last night that if he finished his schoolwork, he could go to the movies today, and he did, he did finish, and even though it wasn’t perfect, it’s so difficult to get him to apply himself to schoolwork at all. I feel like I must make good—Charles always said it’s important, as a parent, to be consistent. But I’m at sixes and sevens. I have to bake three cakes for Franny’s bake sale tomorrow. And I have twenty pages of recipes to hand-copy for our Women’s Bible Study recipe book—Mrs. Eldridge won’t type from anything but neat handwriting, although it’s not my fault half the ladies waited until yesterday to hand theirs in. That’s what I get for being secretary, I suppose. If the car was working, I’d drive Junior myself, I’d make time, but it’s in the shop again. Did I tell you it’s in the shop again? It’s doing that thumping thing. Oh, I wish you knew about cars. Mechanics cheat me all the time, I know they do, because I don’t have a husband, so how would I know any better? Well, I guess that’s my predicament.”

  I might have laughed at this information overkill hadn’t the sun nudged from cloud and illuminated trenchant detail. Her bright orange hair, typically plastered into helmet contour, was corkscrewed. Her purple dress was whited with spilled flour, her white apron purpled with spilled fruit. There were stains at her armpits—a woman’s shame—and even a full cosmetic mask couldn’t conceal the under-eye pouches.

  “I’ll walk him there,” said I.

  She placed a hand upon her pearls and exhaled.

  “Thank you, Mr. Gray. I’m so sorry for needing to ask. Your book—I know how important that scene must be—”

  “What time?”

  “Shall we say a half hour?”

  “Fine.”

  I began to close the door, but before I could, she bounced back to her toes.

  “Mr. Gray! One other thing.”

  “Yes, Mrs. White.”

  Again her poor apron was getting the business.

  “It’s only . . . well, do you think, when you are walking with Junior . . . It’s not a long walk by any means, but it’s long enough for two people to . . . well, do you think you might have a talk with him?”

  “A talk? I’m sure I don’t understand.”

  Her fingers, pale from pressure, made her gold wedding ring appear to glow.

  “Charles was brilliant at it. Talking to the children, I mean. That was more or less our arrangement. I’d manage the children day to day, but if there were problems, little rebellions, he stepped in. Junior’s at an age now where a woman doesn’t always know what to say. Last night he got into a little tiff. Just like boys do, nothing awful, but still, the other child’s mother was very cross, and I know how everyone watches me to see if I can handle my children.”

  I’d take the Oriental Pin Therapy of the Astonishing Mr. Stick over the awkward “talk” being foisted upon me! Raised without a pop, turned hoodlum as a result, and further disillusioned post-death by men inferior to the fatherly task, what broth could I pour down a lad’s throat that contained a soupçon of wisdom? A slammed door, that was what Mrs. White deserved, but I saw her lips purse toward another self-defensive speech.

  “Yes,” said I. “Fine. All right. A talk.”

  What an inhale! Mrs. White’s bosom achieved, for one second, Brideyian dimension. And what a sigh! Mrs. White’s visage achieved, for one second, Wilma Sue–like contentment. This stimulating double-vision of womanhood was shattered by the demonic
cry of the egg timer and the metallic crunch of another misfired piece of toast. Mrs. White cringed, nodded, and scooted.

  Thirty minutes later, I was outside in a jacket and hat suitable for a summer wilting toward fall. Mulberry Terrace was a foreboding orchestra of radio chanteuses, lawn mowers, water hoses, and shrieking youth, and I shivered, thinking of the unfamiliar blocks through which I was about to trespass. What would new suburbanites looking from new windows think about a dark-skinned fellow on a constitutional with a white child?

  My distress was preempted by the debut of our puny pugilist. Junior slouched outside, fists in pockets, plastic rifle wedged beneath elbow, and coonskin cap banked so I could not evaluate the damage until he was close. Mrs. White had underplayed the “little tiff.” The lad sported a jim-dandy of a black eye that, I knew from experience, would blossom into sensational colors. My first instinct was to acclaim the boy’s pugnacity. My second was to turn away in hot envy. I remembered Mrs. White and buried both.

  “Look what a mess you’ve made of your face,” said I.

  “It’s a beaut of a mouse,” blurted Junior. “And if that goon Herbie Hinkle talks garbage about Korea again, I’ll whip him a second time. I don’t care how many shiners I get!”

  His defiance so flustered me that I started off in the direction Mrs. White had explained. Junior followed, and for five uncomfortable minutes I deliberated over strategy. Perhaps I might spur myself toward sternness by imagining Junior as the Hitlerjugend imp with the dancing monkey. Both boys, after all, were chatty, intelligent, and rambunctious, different only due to a chance roll of the dice.

  “Look here, youngster. You have your mother in a state.”

  “Aw, bunk.” He kicked a pile of dead leaves. “Dad said wrasslin’ puts hair on your chest.”

  Hair on one’s chest was a fine thing, I had to admit.