The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  I looped Clown’s leash around a light pole. She drooled happily as I jammed the crowbar behind WHITE and with a yank tore it free of the brick. After I did the same with COLORED, I slipped both placards into my back pocket, took the leash, tipped my hat at the two dozen who’d stopped to stare, and paused long enough for Clown to piss on the library lawn. I cannot say if Mrs. White was watching. I can say, however, that she broke protocol that night by slipping the Saint Bernard a large strip of prime rib.

  The next time I encountered the troop of Negro laborers, this time clipping the ends of the Dodds’ trees, I removed both placards from my pockets and flung them across the lawn. The foreman squinted at me curiously, removed his work gloves, and picked up the bent rectangles of metal. I waited, a smile at my lips, for a round of applause. Instead, the foreman sent both placards flying back at me with such accuracy that I had to duck and cover like Junior and Franny during bomb drills.

  “Real fine, Mr. Gray,” said the foreman. “But we got our own crowbars.”

  I was affronted, then hours later ashamed, but both were only emotions. What followed were actions as real as any barricade, beating, or bombing. Mr. Dodd had seen the foreman hurl the pieces of metal, and the entire crew was sacked, never again to be seen in Heavenly Hills. Unbeknownst to me, phone cables everywhere began to droop with the weight of electricity as the news of my part in the scandal began to circulate up and down Mulberry Terrace.

  Mrs. White’s belated arrival home the next night was not by itself alarming; Monday was bowling league, and no doubt the game had gone an extra frame or two. But clinks from the liquor cabinet were rare, so I crept upstairs and into the unlit kitchen, where Mrs. White sat at the nook, the illumination points of moon and cigarette casting silky swirls across the toaster’s chrome.

  Mrs. White pointed her cig at the opposite chair. I sat, but that we hadn’t shared this table since my interview made me measure my words more than usual.

  “I sense,” said I, “that this drink is not your first.”

  Her tapped ashes glowed red.

  “I got fired.”

  My reaction was as physical as an upchucking.

  “I acted alone. I’ll tell them you had nothing to do with it. Should I call now? No, best to wait until morning. They will take you back, I am sure of it.”

  Mrs. White shrugged.

  “Lots of colored people use the library. That already makes it a target. Having me around just made it worse. Ever since the cookout they’ve gotten complaints about me. I believe there’s even a petition. All you did is give them the excuse. That’s not why I’m upset.”

  I pictured Junior and Franny holding out hats like urchin beggars. My own money was dwindling fast.

  “Then why?” cried I. “What could be worse?”

  She threw down half the glass in one swallow.

  “I thought bowling would take my mind off it. It was the normalest thing I could think of. But it was a trap. By the time I noticed my team was the only Lane Ladies there, I already had my shoes laced. You know, I thought I was safe with my girls, but they had a whole speech rehearsed. About me, you, our relationship, how difficult it’s making things for them. For them! They think something indecent is going on, and I’ll tell you what, I didn’t correct them. I just picked up a bowling ball, a big heavy man’s ball, and held it up like I was going to squash them, and told them they could turn blue for all I cared, and I just hucked that ball right down the center of the lane, not even aiming, and got a seven-ten split. Then bam, I walked right out.”

  I could not help but smile. When she, in a most unladylike fashion, lifted her right leg and plunked it atop the table, my smile broadened. No high-heels tonight; here was a scuffed, beige leather bowling shoe with rawhide laces—a stolen one. She noticed my grin, chuckled, and hiccupped.

  “Who needs ’em?” challenged she.

  She dragged until her Chesterfield died. Left to the moonlight, she became as ghostly as I. She toyed with the toaster, brave with darkness and drink.

  “I feel as if . . .” She sighed. “It’s a very strange feeling.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s as if I don’t care that I was fired. Who wants to stand behind the same counter her whole life? I feel like there’s something . . . I don’t know. Something I don’t have but perhaps wish I had . . . ?”

  “ ‘Want’ is the word,” said I. “You want something.”

  The Eska Protein Wave shimmied in an excited nod, as if want were a concept she’d only previously considered in relation to packaged goods.

  “Yes. That’s it. And—oh, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. But it makes me wonder. Is this all there is? Is this everything? I took homemaking classes. I got married, I had children. I had the kitchen cabinets rebuilt so I wouldn’t have to stoop or stretch. I mean, I did what everyone told me to. Doesn’t there have to be more? That’s what everyone said during the war—hang on, better things are coming. But where is it? What is it?”

  Mrs. White had muddled toward the biggest question of all.

  “The funny thing is,” said she, “I don’t think if Charles were here that I’d be allowed to feel this way. But it’s like there’s a gap where he used to be, and as his widow I can see through it, and you know what’s behind it? Nothing at all. It’s like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain. He couldn’t offer Dorothy anything because it was all a lie. Everything we’ve ever been promised, Mr. Gray, is just a big fat lie.”

  “You’ve had an excess of alcohol. You should lie down.”

  I did not believe that she had.

  “You’re right,” said she.

  She did not believe it either.

  Once she’d shuffled off to bed, the bowling shoes soft compared to her usual heels, I was left with the residue of her words churning like smoke in moonlight. I flicked on the overhead lamp, closed the door so as not to wake Clown’s stomach, and regarded my sworn nemesis—the Western Brass toaster. I snagged the power cord, reeled it in, and stared into the dual slots, one that arbitrarily burned bread in hellfire, the other that let bread live untouched. Gød’s toaster, you might say, and that is why I decided to defeat it. After all, with our breadwinner jobless, broken items around the house would need to be fixed, Mrs. White and myself included.

  XIII.

  THE CALENDAR ADVERTISED TWO YEARS of the decade still to go, but I assure you, Dearest Reader, that the 1950s expired one humdrum evening in October 1957, and in its death throes dragged me down with it. That night we watched the premiere of a contemporary opera buffa titled Leave It to Beaver. Passable fare, judged I, though I could not comfortably watch a family called the Cleavers, recalling as I did the Barker’s soothsaying over a half-century ago:

  You are a cleaver. That is what you do. You shall cut the world in half, Mr. Finch.

  We slept as Americans sleep—righteous and bored—as our greatest foe infiltrated our empire, not across shores as we’d done at Normandy, Peleliu, and Tarawa, but from the sky. The news broke on the morning of October 5, but it was a Saturday and the family was scattered, Mrs. White comparison shopping for cheaper groceries, Junior playing pickup stickball, Franny at the dance studio, and Mr. Gray staring down Clown in the backyard with brush and hose.

  Mrs. White had pulled into the driveway a thousand times, but never like this. The Roadmaster squealed at the turn and yelped at the sudden braking. I heard the car door open, but not close, and Mrs. White’s heels reached the front door in remarkably few steps. Inside, the radio turned on, then the television. I dropped the grooming implements and snapped for Clown to follow me indoors.

  On the TV before which Mrs. White perched, newsmen adjusted their glasses, consulted reports handed from faceless assistants, and meted out kibbles of information about “outer space” and “solar radio interference” and “interplanetary travel” that sounded ripped from the lousy scripts of one of Junior’s flying-saucer films.

  “What is this rubbish?” asked I.

&nb
sp; “The Russians launched it. It’s called Sputnik.”

  “Spoot-nik? What is a Spoot-nik?”

  “I don’t know. A satellite?”

  “What does this satellite do?”

  “I don’t know. No one does. But it’s up there. It’s right on top of us.”

  “Hogwash,” said I. “Pure fiddle-faddle!”

  The anchor sighed, as if wearied by my disbelief, squared his script, and told us, in a hide-your-children tone, that the sounds about to be broadcast were being transmitted live from the first manmade object ever sent into orbit. He cleared his throat, perhaps to choke down shrieks of existential fear, and the audio track switched over to a frothy, seaside frequency that, almost instantly, became diced by a high-pitched pattern:

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  I blurted in terror, the back of my knees struck the sofa, and down I crashed. Leather and his Isolator were my nightmares, mine alone, and yet the surgeon somehow had scooped his own brains from the Cotton Club floor and alchemized them into stars, so that his poison wheeze could be injected into millions through television tubes.

  Only minutes later did I register the noise as quicker and squeakier, like the cheep of a rat stomped to pulp but still alive: hwee-hwee, fwee-fwee. The anchor was unable to stomach it and cut the audio, though for every listener that day, it kept coming, and coming, just like that slow sower of death himself, the Millennialist.

  The instant I thought of Hiroshima, Mrs. White did as well.

  We stared at each other.

  Could Sputnik be carrying an atomic bomb?

  The reporters were saying probably not—no, certainly not—for the orbiter had a twenty-two-inch diameter and weighed 184 pounds. But hold up, Mr. Newsman! Hadn’t we received those specifications from Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s own news agency? Didn’t it make sense for them to mislead us? I was likely the only American listening who felt a thrill. Not only was nuclear holocaust a fate our nation deserved, but it also carried the ancillary bonus of taking care of me, once and for all.

  Mrs. White, however, made a strangled sound.

  “Franny. Junior.”

  I felt a flash of shame before adopting her fright. The children, at least, deserved a shot at adulthood, didn’t they? Mrs. White soared from the sofa, out the front door, and into the open car. I followed in a daze, drifting into the Roadmaster’s exhaust and hearing, once the car had screeched away, a hwee-hwee, fwee-fwee emitting from every window on the block. I looked this way, then that, nauseated by the conviction that I would see a bullet-shaped helmet, two glass lenses, and an oxygen tube rise behind every single pane of glass, each Heavenly Hills household having ordered from the Sears catalogue a family pack of Isolators.

  I hurried inside.

  One hour later—an eternity in front of the doomsday Zenith—Mrs. White stormed the pink house with a child beneath each arm, Franny tutued and tearful, Junior dirt-dusted and fervent. Mrs. White held them by the wrists while considering the basement door. She’d been mocked for even considering the blueprints of “The Family Fallout Shelter.” Only now, at zero hour, had her paranoid visions been substantiated. She appealed to me, and I nodded. All right, let us gather in that space in which, until then, had been mine alone.

  My chamber, bare though it was, was cozy enough. Mrs. White roosted on my bed reading storybooks to Franny in a tremulous voice that only served to disturb her, while Junior and I, certified menfolk, squatted beside the radio we’d arranged at the other end of the room. Clown paced between female and male camps, her whine rather like Sputnik’s.

  Not even Junior’s Martian-invasion theory could distract me from the certitude that, in the span of two hours, Mrs. White had suffered a terrible setback. The past week had seen her at her strongest. The morning after being fired, she’d risen, red-eyed and hungover, to find me still in the nook, the toaster in a billion hopeless pieces, and instead of taking it as another sucker punch, she’d laughed—what a transformation of her careworn face!—dragged close the trash, and swept away all evidence of the infernal appliance.

  She’d thus far proven unemployable and had begun conjecturing aloud about getting some sort of degree, maybe learning to type, though both fields looked down upon overripe women of twenty-nine. Still she refused to despair. It was clear she’d made the decision not to yield to silent pressure to sell the pink house; the witches and warlocks of Heavenly Hills would take it over her dead body. The unpredictability of her future seemed to excite her, and that, in turn, excited me.

  Four days before Sputnik, a framed wedding portrait of Charles and Shirley appeared on the mantel among a congregation of other photographs. I watched Franny discover it, smile at it, and go on playing. I watched Junior discover it, touch his father’s face, and go on playing. When I was unobserved, I too addressed the photo. The newlyweds were achingly fresh-faced and undesigning; they looked like unformed tadpoles. Nevertheless I saluted the fallen soldier, for his return to Mulberry Terrace, not in a box this time, was a victory. We’d overcome the catastrophe of his death. We’d survived the intimidations of Mrs. Shoemaker. At last we could get on with our lives. Until Sputnik.

  Daylight dimmed through the cellar windows. Clown’s whine intensified; she needed to pee. So, too, did everyone else, and when Mrs. White asked me what I thought, I related how the radio had stressed that Americans were under no immediate danger. I put on my favorite jacket, hoping that the steady tick of the Excelsior would give me confidence, and chained by handholds—Mrs. White to Franny to Junior to me—we ascended the stairs, switched on lamps one by one, and found crouching in the darkness the same house we’d left behind.

  I opened the back door for Clown, who sprinted ten feet and whizzed hard enough to lift a dust cloud. Mrs. White and I surveyed the backyards and found them filled with families whose sobriety suggested that Sputnik was a technological Pearl Harbor, a space shot akin to those fabled first fires at Fort Sumter. Lucky observers had their kids’ telescopes, and the rest pointed at the Milky Way—not at us, for once—and whispered.

  “They estimate,” said I to Mrs. White, “that it shall pass over us at eight.”

  And so it did, across a stretch of sky that, until that moment, had been our own. It was the tiniest twinkle, but still big enough to enfeeble a nation that hours before had believed Russians to be primitive clodhoppers. As the satellite sailed past, Mulberry Terrace cascaded with gasps—a series of soft pops—as if, on this anti-Independence Day, fireworks were being held not at the lake but beneath it. Everyone understood that the line being drawn across the sky was to separate old fears from new, and to combat that fear, each wife grabbed her husband, and each husband his wife, and held on for dear life.

  Mrs. White covered her face and ran inside.

  It took far longer than Sputnik’s passage for me to turn up the occupants of the pink house. Franny and Junior, I found in the latter’s room, sitting scared on the bed, their eyes the size reserved for when children hear a parent sobbing. My faculty as a caregiver had made strides, but this was beyond my ken. I asked Junior if he wanted to watch the Braves murder them Yankees; he shook his head. I asked Franny if she wanted to have a tea party—how many times had she pleaded for a dad-blasted tea party?—but she wouldn’t leave her brother’s side. Tonight, Mr. Gray was not comfort enough.

  With the children left to a fretful slumber, I paced like a Saint Bernard outside of Mrs. White’s bedroom, ears perked for the tumbler clink of bourbon through the tempest of tears. Being part of a family, I chastised myself, required offering ministrations of support. I remembered rescuing Merle from a lubricious lover outside our Salem apartment in 1913. And what had been my reward? The most transcendent minutes we’d ever shared, with my daughter furling her arms around me and keening, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

  I knuckled softly upon the door.

  “Mrs. White? May I be of assistance?”

  The sobbing caught, went silent.

  “M
rs. White? I think that I should come in.”

  Nothing.

  “Mrs. White, I am opening the door. Please take care that you are decent.”

  I played the memory of Wilma Sue pulling on a nightgown and lacing it—seventeen seconds—before pushing open the bedroom door. A prism of hallway light chipped from the darkness a yellow rectangle, within which I could see discarded slippers, drawn window shades, the bottom third of the bed, and the left shoulder of Mrs. White. My dead eyes took less time to adjust than living ones; in shadow, she sat upright upon her bed, not in a zippered chenille housecoat but a black taffeta slip. Her flounced hair and puffy eyes lent her a drowsy Marilyn Monroe look, and her arms were extended. To me, Dearest Reader, to me.

  “Shh,” said she. “Shh.”

  I closed the door behind me. The light cut out. The air felt like tar. Her hands, though, beckoned, and so I moved closer, pushing my legs through the tar, lest it harden. Her weightless hands settled like feathers upon my arms, and she looked up at me through moonlit tears.

  “I can’t do boy-girl,” whispered she. “I can’t.”

  “Nor can I.”

  She nodded, grateful. Both of her hands moved to my right cuff, where, despite the dark, she demonstrated a wifely skill with buttons. It was as if she couldn’t wait to unclothe me—she pushed back the sleeve, running her warm palm over the lizardy skin of Chernoff’s marred taxidermy, the cold pit of Mr. Avery’s fishing-hook wound, the hard nugget of Sandy’s embedded tooth. She undid the left cuff and caressed those wounds as well. Finally she drew back the entire shirt, leaving my torso bare. I shivered, not from temperature but the thrill of being seen, even if only by starlight.

  Mrs. White pulled me down to the bed, pressed me into a reclined position, and ran her hands over bullet holes, stomach stitching, bayonet wounds, the sawed-off rib. My instinct was to coil like a prodded caterpillar, for suburban life had taught me the holiness of hygiene, how Brillo Soap Pads, Soilax with Germisol, and Self-Polishing Simoniz were all that kept postwar democracies from festering into Red blights. I was nothing a good homemaker should touch, and yet, with the gentleness she would have shown her husband’s body had they opened the box, she pressed her soft cheek against my abraded chest, inhaled my spoiled funk, and at long last allowed herself to drown in the physical realities of death.