The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  For this one night, when the blade of a fearful future had been pressed to our collective jugular, I would be Mr. White so that Mrs. White could say good-bye.

  I considered it my great honor.

  Oh, Charles, moaned she, my Charles.

  After she’d made peace with my corpse—Charles’s corpse—she positioned me in the precise posture she recalled from her fondest nights. She balanced me upon my right side and snuggled her spine into the curve of my body. Next she picked up my left wrist and wrapped my arm around her bosom. Finally, she hiked my left leg so that it draped atop her thighs. A tuck here, a wiggle there, and then it was perfect. She sighed, happy beneath my heaviness.

  Almost four years had passed since Charles’s death, and in the hours before she slept, Mrs. White, in a murmur too soft for me to follow, recounted to her husband everything he’d missed. Surely she spoke of the children, how they’d grown. Possibly she even spoke of me, how I’d helped. There was crying—shuddering jags that rattled my skeleton and dampened our sheets. But there was also laughter—bashful giggles to loud brays, the sheer variety of which attested to the nuance of their relationship. There was anger as well—frustrated huffs damning him, no doubt, for getting himself killed. And there was, in the dead of night, a sexual event—I felt her snug a fist between her thighs before her back began to hitch with what could have been ecstasy or grief, or most likely both. If I could have cried, I would have, so moved was I to feel, flesh to flesh, every tick and tremble of human emotion. It was mutual one last time, the both of us annihilated piece by piece, and then, through her sequence of safe, soft snores, rebuilt.

  XIV.

  I, ABIDING INSOMNIAC, WAS WAKEFUL to the knocking.

  In the years after Little Johnny Grandpa’s demise, I would have belted you had you prophesied I would befriend another child. Yet Junior had grown dear, and I distressed at what he might think upon seeing me entwined with his mother. I unsnarled my limbs, threw on shirt and jacket, and did what buttoning I could while stumbling across the dark room.

  But the face I spied through the cracked door was not Junior’s perceptive hatchet but rather Franny’s plaintive moon. She was so heavy-lidded that my anachronistic presence caused her but one hypnagogic twitch before she yawned and rubbed her eyes.

  “There’s noises,” mushmouthed she. “By the garage.”

  My sigh carried no aggravation, only paternal indulgence. Sputnik had stirred stress in the nine-year-old; it was to be expected that she sought the protective wing of a father, and the garage was the location most associated with Mr. White. I resolved to clean it on the morrow: wash the windows, scrub the floors, sell off the junk, and broom it free of ghosts.

  For now, though, I had a man’s duty, and having helped Mrs. White achieve slumber, why not be as useful to her daughter? I shut the bedroom door behind me, kneeled down, and placed a hand upon Franny’s shoulder.

  “As long as I am here,” whispered I, “I shall protect you from bumps in the night. Come, now. It is sleepytime for little girls.”

  I steered Franny to her room, a powder-blue world of dolls, horses, and a four-poster bed. Franny, in her drowsy dopiness, put up no fight, snuggling her downy head into a conspiracy of stuffed bears. How tiny the lass looked upon that great big bed. I found the edge of the sheet, snugged it to her chin, and sat upon the mattress edge. Her eyelids were fluttering.

  “Is the space rocket going to get us?” asked she.

  Had only I’d known Merle at this age—sweet, inquisitive, darling.

  “Did you know,” posed I, “that Earth itself is a spaceship?”

  “It is?”

  “Unequivocally. You and I are rocketeers aboard the greatest spaceship that ever was, hurtling at unimaginable speed through the solar system. And Earth is a lot bigger than any little Sputnik, isn’t it?”

  I made sure to pronounce it Spoot-nik. Franny’s giggle turned into a yawn.

  “Are you the new daddy?” sighed she from the brink.

  Perhaps the suburbs were Picture Craft paint-by-number kits, their inhabitants Silly Putty, their smiles Slinkys. I rebuked myself for ever having felt superior. The people here dreamed and sorrowed as much as anyone else, and if the final purpose of my fantastic existence was to becalm three of these humble souls, well, ’twas an honorable purpose, an honorable death, and I was a damned lucky bastard to have it.

  I tickled Franny’s nose with a finger.

  “Sleep well,” said I, “little space-girl.”

  The house had never been so still. I wandered it, projecting onto its moon-paled surfaces, as I’d once projected Rigby’s 16mm films, visions of the Whites’ future. The Zenith brought to mind the movies. The four of us would attend drive-in double bills, laugh at Abbott and Costello, laugh even harder at the rubberized creatures of Junior’s shockers. The phonograph player brought to mind what the kids called “sock hops.” Soon Franny would be begging to partake in such wiggling—and why not Mrs. White as well? And the pink refrigerator brought to mind the backyard barbecues we’d hold, where no one but us would be invited.

  I inflated my dead lungs with air.

  Sixty-one years after my death, I would start to live.

  Four in the morning was too early for garage cleaning, but I was overeager and told myself that I would be quiet. The house’s back door yowled when I opened it. I winced, and then, to avoid interrupting the family’s hard-fought sleep, I left the door ajar as I plodded across the backyard. My thoughts were taken with sweeping, hosing, and mopping when I opened the door to the garage, not with Franny’s insistence that she’d heard noises coming from inside it.

  I stepped in, shut the door, found the light string, and yanked it.

  Eight naked people stood in a semicircle.

  The swinging bulb gouged ghoulish black shapes into their sockets, scapulas, ribs, and pelvises. They were old, their spines curled, cheeks cloven, the men’s scalps mottled and chapped, their peckers withered and brown, the women’s breasts puckered and pendent, their pubic hair matted and gray. But more than their bodies, it was the folded stacks of their clothing that horrified me. To disrobe in the dark would have taken these ancients an hour, meaning this was no random cabal, no private perversity. They’d gathered here for a purpose.

  The octet turned toward me in a synchronized pivot of weak knees, bad hips, and chronic corns. Harsh yellow light shone upon skin bleached bone-white from decades without direct sun, save for an elaborate black symbol tattooed upon every left bicep.

  A triangle made of triangles.

  Let me spin you, Reader, a yarn of karma, how each knife slash and bullet shot is a seed planted that one day must be harvested. Those names on neighborhood mailboxes? Those fogeys frowning through their cookout cake? Caruso, Falzone, Marino, Gurrieri, Romano—Italian names, Sicilian names. Here, naked before me, were the surviving members of the so-called Triangulino clan I’d tormented during my final weeks with the Black Hand. Once strikingly handsome and nubile, they were now over eighty and through some heinous joke relocated from Chicago’s mean streets to the “easy living” of the suburbs, where they’d recognized me. How could they ever forget my cruel, jeering face?

  That I’d come to identify with Kal-El had been an extraordinary show of arrogance, for even that most super of heroes had his Achilles’ heel: Kryptonite, a radioactive rock from his home planet. So it was that a fragment of my old world had tumbled home to destroy me. How many times had I typed myself a warning with my Royal Quiet de Luxe, and yet every time chosen to ignore it?

  You gotta have fear in your heart.

  I hadn’t, and here was Hell, determined to be paid.

  Their frail bones were marrowed with six decades of escalating wrath. They came for me like Mauthausen inmates for the potato cart, their fish bellies spotted with malignant moles like witch’s teats, their genitals, lips, and jowls a-sway with every shamble. It was with a surfeit of nausea that I understood the rationale behind their nudity: to keep their clo
thes clean of the gore about to be splattered.

  The eight had almost encircled me before I saw the tools swinging from their gnarled paws. Hacksaw. Claw hammer. Garden shovel. Hedge shears. Monkey wrench. Hand drill. Tire iron. Garden hoe. Each item chosen from Charles’s do-it-yourself gallimaufry, as if the dead soldier hadn’t been pleased that I’d lain with his wife and so had donated his extensive know-how to dicing up the dead adulterer.

  The Triangulinos fell upon me, literally so, stumbling and gripping my clothes, each one lighter than Junior but en masse heavy enough to bring me to my knees. I reached for the doorknob; if I could grip it, I might drag myself from this gray-haired riptide. But my outstretched hand was driven down by a whack of the wrench, and without equilibrium I fell to cement. I blinked at the blank bulb above me; seconds later, it was blotted out by shriveled faces that began to grin in childlike wonder at the varmint they’d trapped.

  The flaccid folds of their grins soured as my eternal youth further deranged them. They needed to inflict upon me the old age I was owed; I needed to be hobbled, whittled, and twisted. Even that they’d chosen that particular night made sense, for Sputnik signaled the start of a fearless spacefaring age that would have no use for the infirm. The time had come to wrap up old business.

  I fought. Oh, Reader, how I fought. Wasn’t I the young buck who’d borne soldiers from the Belleau Wood battlefield and helped Church heft crates of Dog Bowl Debbie across Manhattan? It took me one random fist to send an old person reeling with broken jaw or dislocated shoulder. But it was like battling a horde of rats; one face fell away, only for another to replace it, giggling and slobbering.

  Jagged yellow fingernails ripped at my clothes. My jacket was peeled off like a layer of skin. My shirt buttons popped, as did those of my trousers, and any fabric that resisted was sliced to ribbons and ripped away. The Triangulinos hooted like simians at the surprise sight of a dilapidated body closer to their own than they’d suspected. They wormed their hairy, lukewarm torsos atop mine for leverage; together we formed a quivering mound of weeviled flesh boned only by cold blades, sharp drills, heavy hammers.

  I opened my mouth but could not allow myself to scream, for the garage windows were open and I’d left the back door of the house wide as well, and curious Franny would not yet be deep asleep. She’d be the first to hear my cry, the first to wander into the garage, the first to lay eyes upon the depraved display. What the Triangulinos might do to her I dared not consider. I clamped my teeth and between them offered my assailants a piteous whine.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  The avengers, like so many from history, went straight for castration. They clucked in consternation upon finding my pecker already harvested, but my scrotum remained, and one of the ladies—Mrs. Romano, I believe—gathered it in an arthritic palm and pulled it taut so that the gentleman next to her—Mr. Falzone, I believe—could lean in with the shears, snug the scrotum into the fork of the blades, and snip. My balls dropped from my body bloodlessly, as when Mrs. White trimmed pale dough from her pie crust.

  The anguish was so overpowering, I barely noticed when they passed around my testicular pouch and pushed their sniffing noses against it like canines into carrion. I writhed, hoping to take advantage of their diversion, but they snapped to attention with such speed that tendons popped and bones clacked.

  The shovel handle pinned me across the throat. My left arm was pulled perpendicular and pressed to the floor. I turned my cheek against the cold concrete and watched the hacksaw settle upon the base of my fingers. I almost laughed; it was beyond belief that I would lose so much flesh after lasting so long. But the steel teeth bit down, juddered against bone, and sawed, as simple as that. Gray flecks of knuckle danced into the air; I gaped in awe at the pygmy fireworks. The sawing lasted until the teeth scritched against cement, and when the saw pulled away, all four of my fingers tumbled after it.

  What noises the ghouls made as they traded my digits like playing cards! I’d once broken down their kinfolk bone by bone; repaying the crime made them giddy. The hacksaw jumped to my wrist, where it began to cut with improved form—my disembowler was getting the hang of it. When the hand had been removed, I saw not a cross-section of severed carpal bones but rather my severed dreams. No longer could I use that hand to ruffle Junior’s hair after he accepted his high-school degree, college degree, law degree, professional honors. Without that hand to guide him, his grades would slip until he joined the greasers on their hot-rodding road to nowhere.

  My forearm was the next to go, and with it the fantasy of embracing Franny on her wedding day or accepting when she handed over her first baby for me to hold. The hacksaw was insatiable; next it removed everything below my left shoulder, robbing me of the chance to use that biceps to assist Mrs. White, elderly herself one day, around our pink home long after the children had grown. It was gone, all of it gone, all profits of humanity, paid toward a receipt of pain swollen red with interest.

  Blackhand’s Disease was not only real; it was incurable.

  They squabbled in Italian about which part to ransack next, the same way I’d deliberated over portions of toaster. The hammer made a case for my right eyeball, the hand drill suggested my umbilicus, and the blade of the hoe proposed detaching my nose. My only defense was to disengage my mind, as I’d done decades ago as Dr. Whistler’s Subject, and drift beyond this torture box into wider spaces. It was out there that I heard what these deafened fiends could not.

  Sixteen claws clicking against sidewalk.

  Of course her superior ears had heard my sniveling. Of course she’d muzzled through the ajar back door. Of course she starved, as always, for executable commands. It might interest you, Dearest Reader, to know that Kal-El had a loyal dog of comparable talents: Krypto, aka “Superdog” (Adventure Comics #210). With my last vestige of super-breath (Action Comics #20), I wheezed a dire order from our private menu of tricks.

  “Blitz. Blitz. Blitz.”

  I could only imagine Clown’s sinewy squat and Sputnik-style launch into the screen window, which clattered to the garage floor before her muscular body thumped down on all fours. A deep growl gunned, and I felt upon my cool skin sizzling spatters of saliva. I looked up to find her lowering her thick head like a bull. She flared the red gems of her eyes at my old, naked, vulnerable destroyers.

  A young man could not ask for a more exquisite demon-dog.

  The Italian gabble died out. The hold on my body slackened.

  I uttered the last command I’d ever need give.

  “Slay.”

  Though Mr. Gray did not bleed, plenty of blood was shed that night. Clown was a cyclone of fur and fury, spit and savagery, charging fang-first into Mrs. Caruso and clamping down on her wrist. Both bitches’ haunches tensed as they dug in, but Clown outweighed the woman by double, and I heard bones snap. Clown did the canine death-shake, spat out the bleeding limb, and proceeded to Mr. Marino’s doddery leg, Mr. Gurrieri’s frangible elbow, Mrs. Falzone’s drooping turkey-neck. The onslaught was oddly silent. Clown did not bark, her victims did not scream. The garage filled with thuds of impact, hitches of breath, gasps of pain, chokes of blood. Everything smeared in motion; every white body was streaked with black blood; they clung to one another as if Death itself were swinging its scythe.

  I stood, somehow, but pitched rightward due to the missing weight of my left arm. My knees cracked down on the blood-smeared floor and I watched, booted about by the frantic feet of the Triangulinos, the listless lumps of my upper and lower arm, hand, fingers, and scrotum. I shielded my eyes from Clown’s onslaught, swiped my jacket and trousers, shrugged into them, and then used my shredded shirt as a shroud into which I raked the detached morsels of Zebulon Finch. I could not allow the Whites to make such a gruesome find.

  When I blundered outside into a violet predawn, I did so amid what, on any other night, would have been chalked up as a hallucination: bloody, naked elderly people limping away in all directions. Clow
n continued to spar with the unluckiest, but I pushed it from my mind. I’d taken innumerable walks around Heavenly Hills and knew an alley, a short seven blocks away, where I could distribute my severed parts among a line of garbage cans. Tomorrow, as fortune would have it, was Sunday, trash pickup day, the day when the aerodynamic, superhygenic, porcelain-enameled suburbs expunged their shameful refuse.

  I, too, had to be trashed. Were I to remain on Mulberry Terrace, the Triangulinos would regroup with scenarios even more insidious—burning down the pink house while the Whites slept, let’s say. I could not be responsible for that. I ordered myself to think of neither Junior nor Franny, for they’d grow up better without me. Nor should I think of Mrs. White curled up in bed happy at last, for our entangling there had been but an overdue farewell. Yes, for a flawless, fleeting instant, the family had felt like mine, but was anything truly yours that could so quickly be stolen away? What was left of my cash, at least, was still beneath the basement mattress for them to discover, and I was glad to have bequeathed this one thing of tangible worth.

  It was after crossing Cedar Lane that I heard a woeful squeak.

  I turned, misweighted and tottering, to find Clown waiting on the opposite curb, known to her as the limit to which she was allowed to walk unleashed. Patches of her fur were spiked with crusting blood. Her drool was pink, and two of her legs trembled in agony. Worst of all was her left eye—that small, bright, adoring marble—which, from some opportune blow, had been punched out of alignment. It pointed off in a pitiful, errant direction.