The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  Principally it peeved me because it was a lie. The Astros were clearly not A-OK. When at last exposed to dummy models of the developing vessel, they saw proof of what the naysayers had naysaid. The capsule did look like a can of spam; seats were being prepared for chimp as well as human passengers; the thing would splash down in the ocean like a turd rather than be permitted the regal landing ace pilots like them could deliver.

  Death didn’t worry the Mercury Seven. What worried them was looking like fools.

  It was amid this overstrung atmosphere that each Astro was assigned a specialized area of development: Carpenter on communications, Schirra on life-support systems, et cetera. Except me, of course, who by omission was officially stamped as incompetent. Freed to roam, tinker, and opine, the Seven also freed themselves to taunt me, usually with implications that I was “wife” to the doting Rig, who swung by every afternoon to check on me—or, in the Astros’ eyes, pinch my hip and ask what was for dinner. Engineers forever prattled about the “principle of redundancy,” the doctrine of fail-safes built into the capsule’s nervous system, and being a Fail-safe myself, I was awarded the nickname Major Redundant, my least favorite since Horstmeier had styled me Private Prefer-Not-To.

  One Astro who disregarded the epithet was the only one I half-liked, Gordo. At thirty-two, he was the youngest of the Seven, and brash to a degree that transcended ego; he believed in his abilities like he believed there was air to breathe, and as a result he was impossible to rile, rib, or even reliably read. He was an island, and was unbothered who docked at his port, even if it were Major Redundant.

  “Good morrow, Captain Cooper,” I might say. “Is there a way today I might be of assistance?”

  “It’s Gordo.” His Okie drawl was so banjoed, you might have thought him witless if Brigadier General Flickinger hadn’t insisted to the media that all Astros had IQs over 130. I had my doubts about that, but appreciated the compassion in Gordo’s sigh. “You gotta change how you talk, Slick.”

  Slick—now there was a name I could live with! One of Gordo’s assignments was to prepare a survival kit suitable for a capsule landing in water, jungle, badlands, or forest, a task he undertook with a yokel’s stubborn absorption. He became obsessed with designing the perfect survival knife, going so far as to draft a knife-fighting wacko in Florida and traveling back and forth to meet with him until he’d delivered hand-forged, hand-tempered utility knives of the highest-grade Swedish steel—knives capable of cutting through anything in the world, crowed Gordo. Ever since my 1873 Colt Peacemaker, I’d been a sucker for a good weapon, but ’twas not to be. They produced only seven.

  The other Astro to leave me unhassled was, naturally, John Glenn. Even when this grievance or that rocked his colleagues off their nuts, the pious Presbyterian preserved polite patience, hoping, I am sure, that his Gød would take notice and one day promote him to first-chair ass-kisser.

  Glenn’s diamondiferous record was regurgitated by so many so often that anyone with ears got to memorize it. After leaving college post–Pearl Harbor to do what I could not—fly fifty-nine combat missions in the Pacific—the former high school letterman and marrier of his childhood sweetheart attended training at the Amphibious Warfare School at Quantico before requesting two tours of duty over Korea, where he flew ninety more missions, shrugged off hundreds of landed bullets, and famously downed three Communist MiG-15s in the final nine days of battle. Despite a uniform cumbered by Distinguished Flying Crosses and an eighteen-cluster Air Medal, he managed to test aircraft with the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, grabbing headlines in 1957 after setting a coast-to-coast, 726-miles-per-hour supersonic speed record. The celebrity earned him the most American of rewards: guest spots on two TV game shows, I’ve Got a Secret and Name That Tune, where he laughed, plumped his freckly cheeks, and reiterated his faith that each of us had a place in Gød’s plan.

  He was, to put a finger on it, a Charles White who’d not only survived but thrived. It pissed me off. I was the one who was supposed to be Charles’s surrogate! I wanted Glenn out of my damned sight, but “Gød’s plan” had a reverse agenda. Every night the Astros went home to their new quarters in Langley’s housing developments, where their wives had been installed to do what they’d always done—keep house in shabby shacks where the dishes rattled with every takeoff, herd their offspring, and go slowly insane. Except, that is, for Glenn.

  His puritanical decision was to keep his family stowed a hundred miles away to be visited only on weekends, during which he could dive-bomb dadhood, strafe the kids with kisses, and maybe missile his wife before barnstorming back to Langley BOQ—the same Spartan barracks where I was kept. Neither of us could travel six feet without blundering into the other, Glenn while jogging, studying, or reading his Bible, I while arranging dual Playboy centerfolds upon a table to contrast their assets.

  Most nights I cabbed to Rig’s hotel and paced through his caliginous smoke.

  “You’ve got to get me out of there!”

  “Your country needs you right where you are. You’ll prove your worth. I bet my job on it, didn’t I?”

  “You think too much of me. It is a bad bet.”

  “Surely you’ve known people worth protecting. Don’t lose sight of that.”

  “Believe me, it’s all that’s keeping me here, and only then, just barely. Have you seen the teeth on these Astros? Any day now they’ll start biting.”

  “You and I have been through this before. Slow and steady. Keep your eyes on the horizon. Don’t start jagging all over the road. Drive right down the center.”

  “Even those who calibrate with traffic lines can end up wrecked.”

  There was but one beat of silence, enough for the faux pas to whip through the hole in my heart. I’d just described the patch of ice that had stolen away his family. Too cowardly to apologize, I only cringed. Unlike me, however, Rig was a professional and persisted with his blandishments before bidding good-night like a proper human being.

  Moods should have brightened when NASA shifted operations from industrial-park Virginia to the sun-splashed Florida beachfront of our future launch site. But Cape Canaveral was a salt-rusted shithole of a surf town, and accordingly, relations further rusted. No sooner had we arrived than Hanger S was overhauled into a zoo for our chimponaut peers. Chimp do good, chimp get banana pellet. Chimp do bad, chimp get electric shock. The training’s conspicuous likeness to ours was too much for the Seven to tolerate. They revolted, moved themselves to the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach, and used their off-hours to gorge on the banana pellets of their preference—water skiing on the Banana River (I shit you not), peeling down roadways in gratis Chevy Corvettes and Shelby Cobras, and bedding young women who crossed off from homemade bingo cards which Astros they’d shagged.

  Except, once again, for Glenn. From a third straight BOQ he declined to stray. He and I were thereby handcuffed, light and dark, yin and yang, forced night after night to contemplate the disquieting mirror image the other offered. Glenn was who I’d once been—a fit, clear-eyed striver—and I was who Glenn would one day be—a decaying, gray-eyed corpse, and soon, if Mercury’s space-rafts sprung any leaks.

  That he found me too inconsequent to address, even derisively, fanned my flames. I cultivated taunts well beyond that of “Bobby Bowtie,” the most valid being that he simply did not belong in outer space, not if he didn’t have some earthly rage to burn off in the atmosphere. But any attack I initiated would make it evident that Glenn was my superior, bumping me to chimponaut status. Impotent to change the dynamic, I felt my dorm room constrict around me, until I recalled a coarseness of wood grain, glint of steel bars, and bouquet of straw bedding. It was the cage inside which the Barker had kept me for the first five years of my death, engraved with that unforgettable, unforgiveable legend: HIGHLY INTELLIGENT MONKEY.

  VI.

  THE PHYSICAL DRILLS OF THE Mercury Seven were considered by its participants an Olympic decathlon, with All-Americans John, Gordo, Scott, Gus, Wally, Al, and
Deke competing for the top pedestal of First Man in Space. But every Olympiad has a spoiler, some mud-hut nation no one can pronounce, and this was the role of the Mercury Eighth. Tests of endurance, after all, were my raison d’être. My body could be strapped into a whirligig the same as anyone’s—no, even better. I’d do it with style. I’d showboat down the whole damn river until the Astros swallowed their pride and acknowledged my existence.

  Most of the exercises replicated the centrifugal and centripetal forces of zero-g in order to challenge Astro reflex acuity, and I held the advantage of having few senses left to dull. One by one, we were buckled inside a pod that zipped in circles until, at sixteen-g, mortal men lost consciousness. But look at Zebulon go! Seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-g and counting—and what’s this? He’s produced a comb from his pocket and is styling his hair? He’s A-OK, folks!

  Fine, let’s try the Air-Lubricated Free-Attitude Trainer, an elaborated Erector Set that spins 360 degrees so that Astros can wrestle pitch and yaw before commemorating the match with a nice, cleansing vomit. But look at Zebulon go! He’s rolling and toppling with the best of them—and what’s this? Is that Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” he’s crooning? Why, he’s more than A-OK!

  Well, the Multi-Axis Spin-Test Inertia Facility Trainer ought to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here, Astros are suspended in a midair gyroscope and subject to sixty revolutions per minute while taxed with centering a control stick. But look at Zebulon go! He’s cucumber-cool and though, it’s true, he’s not bothering with the stick, what’s this? He’s reading a book? Is that Tolstoy? Is that War and Peace? This kid is something else!

  No one saw it coming. With the decathlon half-run, I was the favorite for the gold; would-be silver medalist John Glenn was a long stride back. Glenn had control enough to ignore me; the tanned faces of the other six, however, pinked with indignity. I’d but stepped from the abhorred Slow Rotation Room at the end of another long day of vomity high-jinks no wobblier than when I’d entered, when Alan Shepard came forth and butted his chest into mine. That got me wobbling, all right, my missing arm its typical bane when it came to balance. I fell to a knee.

  “Someone write this down,” called Shepard. “Major Redundant finally took a spill.”

  He’d designed the moment with all the detail I used to give Black Hand ambushes. There were no intersecting halls down which passersby might pass by, no Suits dawdling to dispense demerits. Before I could mold an adequate glare, Wally Schirra appeared and offered his fallen comrade a hand. Perhaps not every Astro was a boor! I accepted the hand, only for him to sharply tug it. Without a fourth limb I pratfell onto my stomach.

  “You’re right,” agreed Schirra, “his EQ looks pretty shot.”

  I scrabbled to my knees, only to find myself encircled. Glenn and Gordo were AWOL, but five Astros were plenty enough to make the bullying feel more like the ring of Triangulinos inside Mr. White’s garage. My low crouch brought to mind the mountain lions I’d watched in Glacier National Park snowbanks. I adopted their fanged snarl and put up my dukes. (All right, Reader, duke; let’s not get lost in pedantry.)

  “You wish to exchange words? You calumniating, pusillanimous invertebrates? Oh, apologies! No doubt those adjectives befuddle you. Perhaps fists are what you’d rather exchange? Come, then, you gutless, yellow-bellied curs, let’s have it. Let us see if one of you can break a finger upon my hard-headed skull or poke an eye out on one of my pointy-pointy ribs. Oopsie-daisy, there goes your place in the flight order. Is it worth the candle, do you think, you pestiferous toads?”

  They were fighter jocks and favored hot impulse over cold reason; their bodies coiled, ready to engage in the sort of saloon brawl too long absent from their repertoires. Specific IQs aside, however, Astros were not, ultimately, stupid, and the event would have ended with a listless invective or two tossed over departing shoulders if another character hadn’t chosen the exact wrong moment to enter from the wing.

  With a bat-flap of fluttering footsteps, Rig was all over them, shoving Schirra aside with his right hand, Slayton with his left, and then using both to take Shepard by the shoulders and wheel him about. Rig wasn’t a large fellow—he was, if you recall, the average of the median of the mean—so it was with ease that Shepard, instincts sharpened to scimitars, foiled Rig’s grip with a simple twist.

  “Whoa, Nelly,” laughed Shepard. “Wally, fetch me some sugar cubes. This here horse is hungry.”

  “You think you’re so special?” cried Rig. “All of you?”

  Rig swiped with a fist, but Shepard parried it.

  “Well,” Grissom said, and shrugged, “they did only pick seven.”

  Rig was possessed, his pores weeping caffeine, but as hard as he kept coming at Shepard with the awkward biffs of a desk worker, Shepard evaded with a matador’s lazy grace, stiff-arming the fifty-some-year-old man upon his gauzy-haired head and relishing the diversion. The other four stood sniggering into fists. The only clear sounds were Rig’s labored breathing and blundering feet, making a mockery of the fight I’d so much more efficiently, and for so much longer, been fighting.

  “Rig,” hissed I. “Stop.”

  “You think seven’s special?” raved Rig. “Seven isn’t shit. I’ll tell you about special! There’s only one person in the whole world like Zebulon Finch. One person!”

  Instead of enheartening me, the compliment nailed me to Rig, partner to his ineffectuality. The Astros weren’t interested regardless; the fight was finished. Rig, blasted off by pots of coffee but crash-landed by lungs of tar, wilted at the waist and drove both palms onto his knees. The Astros cocked their heads, unfamiliar with the phenomenon of unhealthful gasping, and then Shepard yawned, checked his wristwatch, and simply walked off as if the whole thing were forgotten. The others followed, resuming conversational tracks about car engines, steak seasonings, and fishing poles while my molten humiliation hardened to an igneous state.

  Rig panted, straightened, and put a woozy hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t you worry”—gasp, gasp—“about a thing while”—gasp, gasp—“your buddy Rig is around to—”

  I hadn’t Shepard’s dexterity but batted aside Rig’s hand all the same.

  “Must you demean me in front of men with whom I work?”

  Rig blinked, confused, still gulping for air.

  “Week after week I fight for respect,” raged I, “and you undermine all of it by rushing in to wipe my chin! I need to hold my own here. Can’t you understand that?”

  “You’re not like them. You don’t have to—”

  “And what if I want to be? What if I want to be like them? Or even better than them? Is that so impossible? I’m beating them, you know. Out here, on my own. Wasn’t that the whole point? Me, proving my worth? Proving the worth of both of us? Or am I just a way for you to score points in some future job assessment?”

  Rig mopped perspiration with a sleeve.

  “The only beating that matters is beating the Reds.”

  Too much dust was being raised by the NASA Olympics for me to see clearly to Russia. What I knew was that one did not find a foothold in manhood via a sponsor’s pampering. One earned it piecemeal with sweat and blood, provided those fluids were available.

  “Come on,” said Rig. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  “No.”

  “Until Gilruth gets these animals under control, I won’t have you staying on base. It’s obviously not safe. I’ve got room at the hotel. Come on.”

  “I will not.”

  Rig turned around, forehead pinched.

  “Why not? Isn’t getting out of here what you wanted?”

  I did have a misty memory of saying something of the sort. Well, who would hold that against me? I’d been brand new, intimidated by the Mercury program’s techno-industrial labyrinth, and in need of a docent. Since then I’d grown into my own, and this fist-chucking malcontent would topsyturn the whole enterprise if I let him, and thereby dawned my epiphany.


  The Cold War, you see, had hit its absurdist zenith in July, when Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had faced off in what the annals of history would call the “Kitchen Debate.” The setting was the American National Exhibition, a Tupperware Home Party writ large in which innovations of middle-class convenience had been showcased. The rub was that this fair had taken place in Moscow. Oven mitts had become boxing gloves that, instead of blood, had sprayed quotables that newsmen had breathlessly soaked up. One exchange I read I couldn’t dislodge from my skull.

  KHRUSHCHEV: Newly built Russian houses have all this equipment right now.

  NIXON: Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?. . .

  KHRUSHCHEV: Yes, that’s the kind of competition we want. But your generals say: let’s compete in rockets.

  You can appreciate, I think, how these reports gushed like gasoline into my tank. Here was the bridge between the suburban struggles I’d witnessed and the continent-spanning chess match that would decide the fate of the world. The government cared about conquest, glory, and bragging rights, not individual strugglers. It was Mrs. White, Junior, Franny, Clown, and others like them who needed a delegate inside the government, and in that mission I needed no further guidance. Dumping Rig, I told myself, was unlike dumping Johnny or betraying von Lüth. It had to be done for the greater good.