The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  She toed the curb, whining for permission to approach.

  “No,” croaked I.

  She tilted her heavy, exhausted, but still hopeful head.

  Of all the words I’d taught her—“Steal,” “Blitz,” “Slay,” “Hunt,” “Tackle,” “Claw”—I’d never bothered with the most important word of all, the one that I myself had labored in vain to master over both a lifetime and deathtime: “Stay.”

  Her front paws edged into the street.

  “Don’t,” said I.

  She limped onto Cedar Lane, her good eye shining through the night. I wanted to hold out a hand to halt her, but I had only one hand left and it was busy with my parcel of lopped flesh. Clown, ducking her head bashfully, crept another few feet. I warbled in frustration, for I did want her to approach, to nuzzle my legs as she’d done so often before. The Triangulinos had taken parts of me, but The Toe had survived intact and I would willingly offer it to Clown until her dying days. She reached my curb, sat down, tail wagging despite her injuries, and gazed up at me, certain in the way that only dogs can be that I would keep her with me forever.

  Because I was a spineless son-of-a-bitch, I let the fancy play out. I’d kneel, bury my face in her fur, and let her swamp breath fill my neck-chasm. But such physical contact to a dog would be as cruel as rousing Mrs. White from the most peaceful sleep she’d had in years just to show her my arm stump and proclaim my departure. Clown needed a veterinarian for her eye and who knew what assortment of internal injuries. Were she to follow me, she might die. And so it was for love, Reader, that I did the worst thing I could imagine.

  “Go away!” shouted I. “Bad dog! Bad dog! Bad dog!”

  Clown cowered and her forehead crinkled, and yet she did not flee. I knew what I had to do and cried out in heartbreak, execrating the Gød who’d put me up to this, the pushing away of not only this loyal animal but the entire family, who would, I was certain, otherwise follow my scent and bring me back, foolishly believing that it was for their benefit.

  I kicked Clown in the ribs. She whimpered and scuttled. I kicked her harder. She groaned and showed me her pink belly. I will not say how many kicks it took to persuade the beautiful animal to leave. By then, birds had begun to tweet and lawn sprinklers had begun to creak. But slink away Clown did at last, stomach to the pavement, streaking blood as if her heart leaked it, throwing back puzzled looks of apology, certain that she somehow deserved my anger.

  Von Lüth had set the best example. My phantom arm twitched for a brick with which to bash in my face. Instead I hoisted the sack of my disconnected parts. I ordered my legs to move. The legs, by some stroke of luck still attached, did as requested, and athwart the lawns of Heavenly Hills I zigzagged into the fiery dawn of an unwanted future, swearing to Gød, louder and louder, that I would have my revenge on Him as surely as the Triangulinos had had theirs on me. Just you fucking wait.

  PART NINE

  1957–1962

  Relating Your Hero’s Involvement In A Little Tin Can And A Long Twilight Struggle, Heretofore Terrestrial, Hereinafter Cosmogonic.

  I.

  A CORPSE FINDS NO RESPITE. SQUAT in urban alleyways, and moviegoers are sure to shortcut through while sermonizing on 12 Angry Men. Find a sun-scorched vacant lot in which to nest, and children will converge to abuse Barbie dolls and Wham-O Frisbees. Repair to town, adopt the seesaw lurch of the ghetto, and here come bleeding-heart Samaritans proselytizing a new thing called food stamps, blinking condoling eyelashes at your rotten face. Decamp, find an auto junkyard, burrow inside a Beetle, and then, come the weekend, teenagers amass to swill booze, unhook brassieres, and trade verses of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a purported obscenity that, when voiced by drunken idealists, made me push a fist—the last one I owned—between my teeth to choke down howls of my own, for Ginsberg wrote about me, Zebulon Finch. I was one of his “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

  My Dearest Reader is forgiven for imagining romantic scenarios of yours truly rolling across the snuggeries of homophile San Francisco or kicking through the amphetaminic detritus of Hell’s Kitchen. I kept, in fact, to wearisome old Kansas, trekking first to Lawrence, second to Topeka, and then onward to a string of pygmoid burgs like Salina, Hays, and Scott City. The single parcel I carried was the desire to return to the Marlboro Man’s Montana. While my missing arm did not impede me as it would have others (I had no outfits to change, no fork to grip, no waste to wipe), my amputation had been grisly enough to make hitchhiking a useless endeavor.

  My best hope was to raid a car rental service with a stack of cash thick enough to distract from both my appearance and my lack of license. With the totality of my capital left to the Whites, I considered the source of that capital—the good old U.S. of A. Back pay for my two-front WWII service had appeased me in 1946, but now that I was flush with a more potent currency—time—I fixated upon what I saw as maltreatment. Grunt wages for infiltrating the top tiers of the Reich? For giving witness to the first A-bomb? Why, I deserved a captain’s compensation, enough to afford a Montana-bound stretch limousine chauffeured by a nude Anita Ekberg! (She could keep the cap.)

  But how was a down-and-out tatterdemalion expected to contact the big, bad military? They’d made a priority of keeping proper names out of earshot, meaning that I had but one usable contact. I would have to dig up Allen Rigby.

  With coins both begged and scrounged, I set up shop in area phone booths, pinching handsets between cheek and shoulder while using my surviving hand to harass unsuspecting operators. The last residence linked to Rigby was in D.C., but the operators insisted that the listing was obsolete. I sleuthed along a chain of defunct numbers, forwarding addresses, and testifying neighbors with such determination that I nearly forgot how my failed Operation Weeping Willow had cost Rigby his Washington job in the first place.

  Kansas snow, when it falls, does so as straight and hard as rocks, and I shut the phone booth against it one afternoon in February 1959. Right away came a bother of knocking—a grinning panhandler gesturing at his soiled bag of grubbed goodies. Local beggars believed that their frostbitten digits and overall filth made us natural consorts, and were ever eager to trade impedimenta, but I let the mendicant soak, dialing my umpteenth lead, an A. Rigby in, of all esoteric locales, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  The phone was picked up before the first ring had even finished.

  “Yeah?”

  It was all I needed to know that I’d found my man.

  My list of demands dribbled like melted snow down the tramp’s chin.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “J-1121.” Rigby’s larynx sounded as if clotted by bone. “Finch.”

  “The one,” rasped I, “and only.”

  His exhale was sandpaper crumpled in a fist. “I’ve been looking for you for months. You been using a fake name?”

  I, the former Joe Gray, gazed through phone-booth glass warped enough to change the world. What Rigby said made no sense. It was I who’d been chasing him.

  “Forget it,” said he. “Where the hell are you?”

  I paused; never before had I heard Rigby use a bad word.

  “Kansas,” said I.

  “Shit, that’s just across the panhandle. I’m sending a car.”

  Another bad word. My wariness grew.

  “Why would you send a car?”

  “I’ll give the driver my address, but write it down anyway.”

  The last words he’d shared aboard the C-53 Skytrooper remained as wet as a wound: wife Janet, children Roy, Sandra, Walter, Patty, Stanley, and Florence. These tender, susceptible souls could not be allowed to lay gentle eyes upon a ravaged incubus.

  “I will not come to your home.”

  “Fine. There’s a restaurant two blocks down the—”

  “I won’t enter a restaurant either.”

  “If you’d rather meet outdoors, there’s a park—”

  “You do not unde
rstand.” I recycled the language of morticians describing Charles’s body to Mrs. White. “I am in no state to be seen.”

  The old Rigby, one not so irascible, had been a master of trafficking silence, and yet this was his first of the conversation. I tried to picture him: the lamppost spine, the folded hands, the dispassionate mask. But when again he spoke, his voice snapped with uncharacteristic impatience.

  “There’s a car coming. Tomorrow, noon. At ten o’clock p.m. you’ll be delivered to a bar, a very, very dark bar. Don’t argue with me, we don’t have time. Now will you give me a goddamn address?”

  I might have stonewalled longer had not the bum reached into his bartering bag for what I was suddenly sure were my own left fingers, or left hand, or left arm, or left nut, wrapped in newspaper like fish, and swapped beggar to beggar until this one had found a young man in need of exactly the parts he had in stock. I bared my teeth; they clattered against AT&T plastic.

  “Should your plan be to vituperate me vis-à-vis Weeping Willow, save the breath. I have telephoned you not out of magnanimity but for the abject purpose of cash; to me, you are a conduit to dollar bills, nothing more. Is this quite understood?”

  Beneath the tap-tap mocking upon phone-booth glass (my severed fingers, thought I, cajoling me—Zebulon, old friend, let us in), I detected Rigby’s low laugh.

  “Shit, J-1121, if what I’m planning works out, money won’t be a problem.”

  II.

  THE BAR WAS CALLED BIG Jimmy Dutko’s Beaver Lounge, and despite the painted-over window touting such amenities as BEER • WINE • COCKTAILS • FOOD • AIR CONDITIONING, they had none of the above, only watery brown fluid in dirty glasses. The joint was shadowy, though, just as Rigby had promised, forcing me to land by the runway lights of wet bottles, puddled tabletops, and sotted eyes.

  Nevertheless I could tell that Rigby hadn’t changed much in sixteen years. His balding hair was still balding rather than vamoosed altogether; his spectacles were the exact same wire frames; and his standard white shirt, reliably bloomed at the breast pocket with red ink, remained cinched by a black tie. It was how he wore everything that struck me. His wispy hair had a hog’s bristle, his glasses a defiant skewness, his clothes a wrinkled neglect.

  I would have believed it impossible, but his pace of smoking had doubled. As I took the booth seat across from him, I counted two ashtrays lost beneath dunes of volcanic ash and three fresh packs at the ready. His coffee intake, too, had achieved egregious peaks: two pots, empty but still radiating heat, sat waiting to be refilled, while he cracked his knuckles. He examined me for one minute before speaking. His teeth were blond with nicotine, his breath barbed with caffeine.

  “You carry yourself like you’re ashamed. We’ve had three wars in four decades; lost limbs are a fact of life. Learn to carry yourself better, and you’ll look heroic. Might start to feel that way, too.”

  The tension of chest I’d accrued during a nine-hour ride in a Chrysler Imperial began to disperse into what extremities I had left. It is likely, Reader, that you have no sense of what it means to lose five percent of your body in a single go. You mourn it as you do a loved one—let us say, for example, Wilma Sue—so intrinsic a part of you for so long that the loss can only be grasped at in places darker even than Big Jimmy Dutko’s Beaver Lounge.

  Rigby was owed indignation on the subject of J-1121, and that he chose instead to speak supportive words warmed me more than the Southwestern clime. Indeed, hadn’t the two of us shared extraordinary experiences about which we might jocularly reminisce? I hadn’t smiled since my final tucking-in of Franny, and it felt so pleasant that I tumbled into it, like a child down a hill unmindful of coming briar.

  “What gives, old bloke?” jested I. “A meeting at which you don’t foist upon me a single unreadable report?”

  His lip jerked, more caffeine tic than smile.

  “Surely you brought our Nazi Flash Cards!” continued I. “I was thinking you and I might propose the idea to Parker Brothers. What better way to capitalize on their Monopoly success than a game plastered with the faces of iniquitous villains? Unless, that is, your children have played our prototype to death. How is your ponderous brood? Has Janet popped out additional pups, or have you resigned yourself to the paltry baker’s dozen already sired?”

  How frolicsome I felt! Gift of gab restored, phantom limb forgotten, piquant wit firing like Maxims! Rigby lifted his cup, knew by its weight that it was empty, stamped out a cig, and lit another without altering his vacuous expression.

  “They’re dead.”

  A concrete mix of shock mortared me to the booth as Rigby laid out in simple sentences, as he’d clearly done many times before, the outlandishly horrific parameters of the incident. Four years before, Rigby, driving his wife and six kids back from a sledding excursion in western Massachusetts, had failed to heed signage reminding motorists of the icing propensity of bridges, and their family wagon had skidded, bashed through the fence, and punched upside-down through river ice ninety feet below. The car had sunk and flooded with water, but beyond noting that his wife and an unspecified number of children had been killed on impact, he left the fight for survival to my imagination. He swam to the surface to get air for a rescue dive, but it was too late, and what he did instead, over the half hour it took for rescue vehicles to arrive, was extract the frozen blue corpses of his family and stack them, one by one, like cordwood on a snowy bank.

  Rigby curtly assigned himself all blame: “It was my fault.”

  “I . . . know not how to respond.”

  He eyed the two fresh pots of coffee being delivered as one might a bitter but needful medicine. While he poured and guzzled, I studied him until I saw how the old Allen Rigby had swollen with rancid innards of grief until he’d cracked open, spilling out a Rigby of similar work ethic but vastly different motivation.

  “It was good for my career,” said he.

  I recoiled. What a thing to say!

  “Sputnik happens, right? Suddenly our government feels like hiring, or even rehiring, the kind of man who doesn’t mind a little risk. Risk doesn’t mean shit to me, not anymore. By the time the Reds got Sputnik 2 and 3 in orbit, and everyone on our side was starting to brush up on their Russian, you know what I said? When they called me in, I said, ‘Fuck the Red bastards. Let’s gather our best men and beat their asses.’ Just like that, I’m on the payroll of a new division. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called NASA.”

  I shrugged cautiously. “My situation has distanced me from current affairs.”

  “National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I’m General Counsel. That means I do a bit of everything—development, operations, personnel, procurement, logistics, crew systems, mission analysis. Only four months old, and we’ve already got two dedicated flight centers and research centers in three different states. Better than that, we’ve got a mandate: get a man into orbit before the Reds. We’re not just talking about national security. We’re talking about national extinction. We’re talking about ICBMs.”

  “Sorry,” said I. “ABCD-whats?”

  “Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. We’ve got them. The Reds sure as hell have them; they’re playing chicken with the whole Eastern Bloc. Here, let me show you.”

  He pushed a wrinkled napkin to the center of our table, snatched the red pen from his stained pocket, and sketched a cylindrical object.

  “This is a Redstone missile. Eighty-three feet tall. Seventy-eight thousand pounds of thrust.”

  He circled the missile’s tapered tip.

  “This is where the nuclear warhead goes.”

  He drew a triangle at the base of that warhead.

  “We remove the bomb. Insert a one-man space capsule. That’s how we get our guy up there.”

  The ice-stubbled faces of Rigby’s dead family finally burnt away in the heat of this absurdity. Outer space? Was that really what we were talking about? Hours after Sputnik’s launch, Mrs. White had feared that space satellites might on
e day drop A-bombs like rocks off a bridge. But strapping a man to the business end of a missile was a higher level of farce.

  Rigby was steering his cutter straight through fifty-foot waves—“PSAC and MSEP are going to LFRC to prep OMS for EOR”—before I could raise my hand to shut him up. Having only one such appendage gave the gesture added weight.

  “Do not take this the wrong way, Rigby, for I know you have suffered great personal adversity. But you, sir, have gone bananas.”

  Rigby took a swig of joe so hot that steam vented from the slats of his teeth. His cup banged down on the napkin Redstone, bloodily smearing the ink.

  “You’ve seen a couple wars, Finch, but this one’s a lot colder and requires colder calculations. Think it through. We get astronauts up there, that proves we can get warheads up there. Stalemate’s the goal here. The Reds won’t dare strike us and we won’t dare strike the Reds. But if we fail? Shit, that’s the end. That’s it for America.”

  This dire diagnosis made gestures toward justifying my presence. Like a buzzard Tom Joad, anywhere America putresced, I’d be there to peck at the shreds.

  “I am hesitant to ask,” said I, “but what is an ‘astro-nut’?”

  Ash from Rigby’s cig fell into his coffee and he slurped it right up.

  “ ‘Naut,’ not ‘nut.’ Means ‘space voyager.’ NASA wants six. On the ground, they’ll help with capsule design, procedures, and equipment. In the air, general systems management, sequence monitoring, that sort of thing.”

  “Apologies,” said I, “for this saloon, as you promised, is low on light, and I therefore cannot gauge the consistency of your brain leakage. I pray that you are not suggesting, in some paroxysm of daftness, that I would qualify for such a job.”

  From the old cig he lit a new one.

  “There are a few prerequisites.”

  “Describe them,” cried I, “so we might conclude this comedy!”