The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

“Bunny?” sputtered I.

  The chant grew in ferocity until Bunny and I, frozen in a shared stare of disbelief, began to be knocked about by the chanters. She snatched me by the wrist and led me through the hot press of bodies; I could but stumble behind and follow the bounce of her two-foot-wide Afro. Better that than meet the looks coming at us like wasps: she black, I white; she beautiful, I ugly. Alongside a broken chain-link fence, she dropped my wrist, took a step back, and indulged in a good, long, comprehensive gander, while I did the same.

  Bunny Tucker had been an artless fourteen when I’d met her. Now she was my age, a foot taller, and settled into one hell of a figure, even while her face had preserved its puckish pudge. What best bolstered her grown-up semblance was that she was dressed, as her fellow Panthers might say, like a bad-ass motherfucker: knee-high boots, short black dress, and long leather coat. She adjusted the huge round sunglasses speared into her hair, bringing me to recall how, the last time I’d seen her, the hair had been in pigtails, and I’d pulled them. It embarrassed me; I spoke to alleviate myself.

  “You . . . have changed a great deal.”

  She shook her head in wonderment. “You sure haven’t.”

  “Looks,” said I, “can deceive.”

  To my surprise, she smirked. “Zebulon X, huh?”

  My chagrin, soaring already, doubled. She laughed.

  “That’s all right. I’ve got a new name too.”

  She extended a slender brown arm.

  “Jolami Tiombe, pleased to meet you.”

  I glanced at the Black Panther sentries and swore that their statue faces had angled our way. Bunny, though, courageous as ever, deserved a corresponding response. While her palm heated my icicle fingers, I pictured Abigail Finch zeroing in on our black-and-white handshake through Satan’s periscope and promptly rolling over in her grave.

  “At least my name,” said I, “is simple to say.”

  “Don’t worry. Old friends are allowed to call me Bunny.”

  Despite the angry chants cracking between city surfaces, Bunny beamed. It was both perplexing and wonderful, and I felt bereft when she covered her face with the clipboard.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s just—you’re a strange memory. It’s hard to believe you’re real. Even though I’ve been reading about you in newsletters.”

  “You wrote a song about me. That alone makes me real.”

  “You don’t hate me for it?”

  “To the contrary, I consider it the music industry’s finest hour!”

  The clipboard dropped to reveal eyes glossed by held tears.

  “When you did what you did, when I was little.” She grasped for words. “It . . . was the only magical thing that ever happened to me.”

  One might watch one million feet of Black Panther film footage and never suspect that in any of the militants existed such vulnerabilities. My dead flesh felt stabbed; it hurt more than any martyrdom, and I blustered it aside.

  “Preposterous! What of the Beau-Ts? Your tour bus must be a magic carpet!”

  She smiled sadly. “Do I look like I’m still in the group?”

  Just as Bunny was no Mississippi ragamuffin, neither was she the gowned and bouffanted Beau-T last seen in the pages of Ebony. Her defection should have been obvious, and I gestured an apology for my brain, imprudent as ever.

  “It’s all right. It was fun at first, it really was. I had my best girlfriends, Linda and Debbie, and we spent all our time sewing matching outfits and rehearsing songs by Petula Clark and the Shangri-Las. Daddy—you remember Reverend Tucker—well, he hated it, called it the devil’s music. Then I wrote that song, you know? Just that one song. And there was a talent contest in New Orleans, and there was this Motown scout there, and they put out the single and then, yeah, like you said, the three of us were on the road, getting tutored on the bus all day and doing shows all night, opening up for the Temptations and the Marvelettes. I’m not going to lie. It was a dream come true. Before the Panthers, how else were three little black girls going to make good?”

  “I confess that I did wonder why there was no second song.”

  “Oh, there was a second song. And a third, and a fourth. See, ‘Old Mr. Finch’ only got to Number eleven. Between Number eleven and Number ten, there’s a Grand Canyon your whole career can get lost inside. Motown tried to rearrange our whole action. They wanted Debbie to sing lead. She was prettier, I guess, light-skinned. What was I going to do, argue? They wouldn’t let me write anything, and all they gave us were boo-hooers. ‘My boyfriend done left me, what am I going to do,’ all that foolishness.”

  It made perfect if demoralizing sense. If a powerful force like Bridey Valentine couldn’t escape being cast as “the Girl,” what hope had young Bunny Tucker?

  “Start over,” suggested I. “Surely you made piles of money.”

  “You’re old and wise about some stuff, Zebulon X, but other stuff, you’re younger than me. Hell no, I didn’t make no money. Daddy was right about that. We never had lawyers. We signed whatever they told us to sign. Poor Linda couldn’t even read. Before I left, this blind singer, real smart kid named Stevie Wonder, he broke it down for me. He told me I was making half a damn penny for every record we sold, minus taxes, minus packaging. Shit, the only real money we ever made was from session work, five bucks a day in a hot-as-hell studio while guitar players pinched our behinds.”

  Every crystal fantasy I’d fostered regarding Bunny’s life now grinded beneath my feet like shattered glass. If the last several years had taught me anything, it was that the only shortcuts America offered were just that, short-lived and cutting enough that you’d bleed all the way down the trail.

  “So you gave it up?”

  Bunny jammed her hands into her jacket pockets.

  “Yeah, well, there’s only so much disrespect a woman can take. When Dick Clark dumped us from the Caravan of Stars, I had to look in the mirror, you know? What was I doing wearing wigs and lashes, padding my bra with falsies? Why was I putting up with makeup ladies who didn’t know a thing about brown skin? Motown had us at charm school learning to talk white, eat white, act white. I tried to get Debbie and Linda to leave, too, but they were scared. We’d always been a group, right? They couldn’t see themselves as individual women anymore, and I’ll tell you what—that scared me more than anything.”

  “Nevertheless,” said I, “it is a leap from Motown to the Panthers.”

  Her dour lips curled to a grin.

  How was it possible, thought I, that Debbie was considered the pretty one?

  “You can blame my brother for that. You remember Ritchie?”

  “It is hard to forget such pure, concentrated loathing.”

  “Don’t take it personal. Ritchie hates everyone. The whole time I was off singing, he was in jail, and every time I phoned him, he was going off about this group or that, the Garveyites one week, the Urban League the next, but I never paid it any mind. I had songs about boyfriends to sing, right?”

  “Jail, eh? Do I want to know what he did?”

  “I guess you can ask him yourself. Here he comes.”

  I pirouetted in the direction of her gesture. Fifty feet away, plowing straight through an otherwise zigzagging crowd, was Ritchie Tucker. The preceding three years he wore far more heavily than his sister. Though but in his mid-twenties, he’d lost half his hair in strips so irregular, it looked as if it had been yanked with duct tape. His face, meanwhile, was pocked from either acne or disease, and his jaundiced eyes had only bulged further from their sockets. With black leather gloves he adjusted his beret—and his rifle—and kept barreling toward us.

  “He’s going to assault me, isn’t he?” asked I.

  “I hope not. Black man punching a white boy, that’s just what the pigs are waiting for.”

  I patted my pocket for Gordo’s knife.

  “Don’t go pulling your piece,” scolded Bunny. “Ritchie’s a little crazy, but I owe him everything. He turned me on to Sonia
Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, got me down with the Panthers. Turned my life around.” Nevertheless she held out a hand to slow her brother’s stride. “Ritchie. Easy, now. This is Zebulon X.”

  But Ritchie didn’t stop until his chest thumped against mine. I caught myself in time to watch him worm his tongue over his teeth as if hungry for blood. His eyes bugged so badly, I expected them to drop out and dangle upon stems, but what worried me most was the pink scar tissue at his left temple. It looked like an entry wound.

  “Zebulon X?” echoed he. “Woo-hoo-hoo!”

  I flinched at the unnaturally high pitch. Whatever had landed him in jail had included a gunshot to the head, I was certain of it, and the bullet had messed him up good.

  “Ritchie,” said Bunny. “Count to ten.”

  Ritchie did not feel like counting.

  “Putting X in your name, now that’s some offensive bullshit!”

  For Bunny’s sake, I put on a self-effacing smile and bowed amends.

  “Je m’excuse. My whole life, I’m afraid, is one of great offense.”

  He laughed, a gyrating, nervy jangle.

  “You’re fancy with the Frenchie talk, mon frère, but my little sis here, her mind has been expanded, exploded, and explicated. Racist faker-forger-fabricators need not apply, so why don’t you hop down the rabbit trail?”

  You must believe me, Reader, when I say that I wanted no conflict. Just the same, you know my record when it comes to turning the cheek to antagonizations, whether they be the early browbeatings of Church, the indictments of Detective Roseborough, or the bullying of the Mercury Seven. Though I replied through locked teeth, I tried to keep my voice even.

  “I have known Negroes before and lived in concord.”

  “Negroes? Now you’re traveling back in time! How about Afro-Americans? How about capital-B Blacks? Maybe you ought to time-trip further back, call us Blackamoors, see how that goes over in this crowd, Mr. X.”

  “Finch,” said Bunny. “That’s the name we knew as kids—Zebulon Finch. Ritchie, remember? You shot him down from the magnolia tree.”

  That a man could forget blasting a shotgun at a suicidal, putrescing, one-armed corpse could only be attributable to head trauma. Ritchie’s protuberant eyes conducted a slow investigation.

  “Hard to say. I’ve shot at so many whiteys, I lost count.”

  No longer could I bear it, not within earshot of Bunny, who, I confess, I felt a sudden need to impress. I lurched, reciprocating the chest-thump.

  “Now it makes sense,” taunted I, “for I recall from the magnolia tree your lousiness of aim. Here, I am closer. Care to try again?”

  Bunny ripped us apart.

  “Zebulon is on our side! He’s supporting us!”

  Ritchie raised his eyebrows, the left one into scar tissue, and dissolved into a snicker that speckled me with saliva.

  “Oh, yeah, now I got it figured! You’re one of them white folk who gives us moral support. Except guess what, whitey? Black Panthers don’t need your moral support. Black Panthers don’t need your feelings. What we need are liberators out working the street, protecting brothers from being brutalized, bashing the pigs that do the brutalizing. How does that sound, mon frère? You still feel like supporting us?”

  Bunny gave me an apologetic wince.

  “Rallies like this, his head gets all—”

  But the chants were too deafening and the sun too bright, and I was furious at the idea Ritchie had planted that even a Better God was false hope, a distraction next to good old-fashioned fists and guns. And so, Dearest Reader, being the choleric cad that I am, I cut off Bunny with a wave of my hand, thereby destroying, as you shall see, one more thing that might have lightened me with a feather of goodness.

  “Tonight, then, we go to the street,” challenged I. “Let us see who out-brutalizes who.”

  VII.

  RITCHIE’S LONG, BEERY BUICK ELECTRA slithered across the cracked concrete of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, into throbbing blobs of red stoplights, yellow streetlamps, and neon shop signs before dissolving into the silver blood of a gushing fire hydrant and then fading back into the dark. Brown-skinned children lined the streets like rust. They existed abruptly, an arm’s length from the car, and watched us pass with reflective, nocturnal eyes.

  James Brown and the Famous Flames razzed from the Electra’s radio. Ritchie snaked his head to the rhythm, made a watchful left turn, pulled on a joint, and offered it to Bunny in the passenger seat. She was silent and serious and gave me a damning glance: This was a very bad idea. Then, shaking her head, What the hell, she took a drag—she needed it.

  The mishmash of marijuana and nighttime cruising had settled a blanket atop Ritchie’s pointiest edges, but I could tell from Bunny’s monitoring that she did not expect it to last. What we were doing was “patrolling,” the practice detailed in the Black Panther speaker’s address. You found a pig accosting a Negro—“Afro-American” was not coming easily to me—and if things were crooked, you straightened them out and made that pig think twice about future misbehavior.

  “Dig our black children, no shirts in April, running round like mice.” Ritchie tsked and found my eyes in the rearview. “This here’s training grounds, preparing them for the day the pigs herd them into the pig pen, and I’m talking about the pen, the big one. ‘Get in the cold shower, little nigger. Rub this talc in your hair. We know all niggers got lice. Here’s some straw to sleep on. Here’s the trough for your slop.’ Whiteys love talk-talking about crime rates, but mark Ritchie Tucker’s words, mon frère, one day that crime rate will drop like a bomb, and the whiteys, they’ll be proud as hell. Then look at the jails and the prisons and tell Ritchie Tucker what you see. They’ll be packed like a hoghouse with brothers.”

  A kid dashed past the car.

  “The road,” gasped Bunny. “Watch the road.”

  Ritchie did not seem to hear.

  “I bet mon frère’s one of them I-have-a-dream motherfuckers.”

  “You sound plain ignorant when you put down Dr. King,” said Bunny.

  “Brother Malcolm said King was nothing but an Uncle Tom who rolled belly-up for white folk.” Ritchie gestured with the joint. “How about you, mon frère? You ever been to Bed-Stuy before?”

  “You might be surprised,” said I, “where I’ve been and what—”

  “That’s all right,” he interrupted. “Ritchie is happy to be your tour guide. Just remember to tip, you know what I’m saying? Now, let’s see. Mon frère’s of the paler persuasion, so let me use words you might be able to dig. Hey, I bet you know about Vietnam, though, right? Haven’t ever heard of Bed-Stuy before, but you’re all educated up on rice paddies.”

  Bunny punched his shoulder.

  “You need to settle your ass down.”

  “Let’s be nonviolent about this, Sister Jolami! I’m just preparing what you call a metaphor. You heard of free-fire zones, mon frère? It’s one of them Army-Navy expressions. It means load ’em up, because hereabouts you’re authorized to shoot anything that moves. Here’s the funny thing, though. That’s the same exact situation we got going on in this colony we call Black Amerika. Something out here moves, BLAM!”

  I jumped in my seat. Ritchie cracked up, pounding the steering wheel.

  “Quit trying to scare him,” said Bunny, but when she faced the backseat, it was she who looked scared. An oncoming car set fire to her Afro as she managed a skittish smile. “Don’t listen to Ritchie. I wouldn’t have joined the Panthers if they didn’t do worlds of good. We set up health clinics, especially for addicts, and—”

  “Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide!” chortled Ritchie.

  “—we do free breakfasts for kids, which means I get up at four thirty every morning. That’s worse than being on tour, I’ll tell you what. I make the nastiest pancakes you’ve ever seen, but those hungry little bastards eat anything you put—”

  “Hang on, Sister Jolami,” said Ritchie. “What do you mean, quit trying to scare him? I didn’t t
hink a martyr was scared of anything.”

  “A statement of fact!” confirmed I. “While I have no doubt that your degenerate life has dragged you through foul waters, I guarantee that I have seen ten times worse. Your Afro-American riots, for instance! I’ve stood at their hubs and rated them but another day’s unremarkable work. Here, I have proof!”

  I began to nudge my sleeve upward to flaunt where the Nashville firehose had torn my elbow clean, but the Electra jagged as Ritchie pulled a quick right.

  “It’s only a riot if you’re a whitey. Otherwise it’s a revolution!” He scoffed. “At least mon frère quit calling us Negroes.”

  No warning—the brakes were stomped. My face smashed against the front seat, and Bunny hit the dashboard in a drum roll of arm bones. The car slung back and settled upon creaking shocks. I peeled my face from smoky leather and peered out the windshield.

  Half a block away was a stopped police car, its red strobe slowly revealing every wad of trash on the block. Both pigs were out of the cruiser, one fitting cuffs upon a black man pressed against a rattletrap Chevy Corvair, the other plundering the Corvair’s backseat for contraband. It was, in short, everything Ritchie had hoped to find.

  “Shit,” hissed Bunny. “Shit, shit.”

  Ritchie eased to the curb, muscled the gearshift to park, and killed the engine. The pigs had their hands full; we hadn’t been spotted. Ritchie leaned forward. The vitreous orbs of his eyes glowed pink with light, then gray, then pink, then gray. He was silent for what seemed like the first time in his life. Bunny put a hand to his arm.

  “We’re all alone out here. Let’s back off.”

  But friction with Zebulon X had reached a heat where nothing less than rash action would do. Ritchie reached into his jacket, undid snaps, and drew out a sawed-off shotgun.

  “Ballots or bullets. That’s what Brother Malcolm said.”

  I’d have bet my left foot (the one Clown hadn’t chewed on) that Ritchie Tucker had no interest in the slow stratagems of fund- raising, handbilling, and bussing. Bullets were fast, palpable deliverers of change, perfectly suited to those whose patience had been sheared by blows to the skull, jail time, and an infuriating Caucasian corpse.