The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “Revolution,” murmured he.

  The maniac kicked open his door, got out, and headed down the road at the pigs.

  Bunny ejected a raging river of obscenities and clambered off in chase. She slid over the hood of the Electra, snagged Ritchie by the sleeve, and spoke rapidly into his ear, presumably pleas for him to put away the shotgun. The braggadocio I’d brayed didn’t permit me to be wired to my seat; I climbed from the car and tumbled toward the deadest end I’d ever seen.

  The Famous Flames’ funk had been replaced by a disorienting musical cacophony pouring from the open window of the hippest cat in Bed-Stuy. The sixties had mutated even jazz, and my beloved Harlem swing of Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton had become the acid peals of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, the latter of whom was responsible for the anarchic epic squawking over our scene. The album, called Ascension, had been recorded in a dungeon studio on skeleton-key piano, hell-fire saxophones, and head-hunter drums, and unlike Gesualdo’s icy obscurity, Coltrane’s atonality blistered like disease—we’d all be screaming along before the end.

  The pig restraining the suspect spotted us. From his belt he whipped a flashlight and flared it. Ritchie and Bunny had to avert their eyes, but my dead irises slurped the light straight into my void. I’d caught up to the wranglesome siblings when the officer shouted.

  “Halt! Police matter!” To his partner, “Brownlow, get up!”

  Brownlow, plainclothed but packing, crawled from the Corvair. He dropped the trash he’d been sifting, in favor of his automatic. He pointed the gun at the road several paces ahead of us.

  “Detective Brownlow and Officer Keller, Brooklyn PD, asking you to return to your vehicle.”

  Coltrane, Tyner, Garrison, Jones, Hubbard, Johnson, Brown, Tchicai, Sanders, Shepp, and Davis wailed inharmonic warnings, but Ritchie paid no heed. Instead of concealing his shotgun, he held it up like a badge.

  “Black Panther Party of Self-Defense! Name, Richard Tucker! Authorized by Defense Minister Huey P. Newton and Chairman Bobby Seale to protect and assist my Afro-American brother! I will speak to the brother first, and then allow you to proceed with any lawful arrest! Please step aside!”

  The Afro-American brother in question did not look relieved. Though half of his face was flattened against the car, it was clear he was terrified of being caught helpless if bullets began to fly. He started torquing, begging to be freed, forcing Keller to use his full body weight to constrain him.

  “Call for backup,” said Brownlow.

  “I can’t!”

  Brownlow cursed. The barrel of his gun rose with each step Ritchie took. “Get your hands up!”

  Ritchie replied by pumping a round into the shotgun.

  “Ritchie!” Bunny had her brother by the jacket but pulled with too little strength to impede the lowering of the sawed-off. Brownlow dropped into a firer’s crouch and aimed his pistol with both hands. We were ten feet apart and closing.

  “Drop the weapon or I fire!”

  “I’ll blow your pig head right off your pig neck! Step aside!”

  Every one of these inflamers was going to be dead in seconds! With but one arm, I could not tackle both Tuckers, so I tricked to the right and tossed myself into their path in hopes of tripping them. But my leap itself was startling, and before I hit cement, I saw, in the beams of the Electra’s headlights, Brownlow react by pulling his hammer. I wrapped my arm around a pair of legs and yanked, hoping to drag someone beneath the coming fire.

  It was the suspect who thwarted the inevitable. He jammed an elbow into Keller’s eye and wrenched free. Still handcuffed, however, he stumbled against Brownlow. The detective pulled back from the escapee while Ritchie, whose legs I hadn’t snagged, hurdled my body and slammed the stock of his shotgun into Brownlow’s face. His nose exploded and his skull struck pavement. But he hadn’t dropped his pistol. There it was, still cocked, angling upward, and his finger squeezed—

  CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  A man cried out. The suspect, that unluckiest of ducks, had been hit. Ritchie dove headfirst into the Corvair’s open back door. I took Bunny about the waist and propelled both of us behind the trunk. Inside the Corvair, Ritchie popped up and discharged his shotgun from the backseat. The driver’s-side window exploded, showering Brownlow with glass. He covered his face and rolled to a spot beyond the car’s hood.

  The suspect pressed his spine against the bumper alongside Bunny and me. The brake light behind his head shone with such red intensity that the jets of blood springing from his mutilated elbow might as well have been clear water. Bunny fought from my clutches, took the man by the armpits, and, while he screeched in agony, pulled him toward the gutter. Officer Keller scurried around the rear of the car on all fours like a kid playing hide-and-seek. The eye that wasn’t swollen shut opened wider at seeing us, and he let his torso fall to the pavement so that he could withdraw his pistol. Bunny, trapped behind the suspect, tried to push away, but was too slow. The gun was out and pointed at us, a surefire hit.

  It was Keller’s fault, I suppose, that his earlier pat-down hadn’t uncovered the four-inch Walther tucked at the small of the suspect’s back. In a striking feat of flexibility, the fellow drew the mini-gun with his cuffed hands and fired. A bud of pink flesh blossomed from Keller’s thigh. He yowled, dropped his weapon, and pressed at the wound. Coltrane’s band screamed in excitement—one second, two seconds—and then thick black blood pumped through the officer’s fingers. Bunny froze, but I dragged her until we were on the sidewalk side of the Corvair. Gunfire between Brownlow and Ritchie now shook the street, the Corvair having become a tiny Alamo.

  Bunny and I huddled against the back right tire. The two casualties cried for help. Shots from Brownlow sent automotive gore zinging down our backs: arm-rest skin, turn-signal bone, seat-cushion fat. Ritchie responded with double shotgun fire, the first of which exploded into the car’s engine, the second of which tore the center from a NO PARKING sign. The door beside our faces flew open, dangling like a half-severed limb, and Ritchie somersaulted to the gutter. He saw us, shouted “Run, motherfuckers!” and sprinted for the Electra. Bunny scrambled after, but the Marine in me knew it was bad practice. Their backs were exposed.

  I checked and saw Brownlow rise from beyond the smoking hood, scoop blood from his eyes, and take good, slow aim at the Tuckers. I shouted, recognized the noise as ineffectual, and charged after them in hopes that my body might be a magnet for lead. The Excelsior elongated the seconds so that I could recognize time’s remorseless rush. One second you’re a pigtailed girl singing praise to fairy Jesus, the next you’re the target of the same bullet that’s been fired for centuries.

  Only one of the Tuckers was savable. I leapt at Bunny.

  I felt the shot before I heard it, discovered myself tangled with Bunny before I recalled falling, perceived the blood in my palm before I felt the sticky wetness. I noted the bullet embedded into one of my vertebrae, easily concealable with my jacket—but who was bleeding? I disengaged Bunny’s limbs from her brother’s while Brownlow bore down, bellowing at us to stick ’em up. The hysterical blares of cop cruisers and ambulances drowned him out while the shirtless brown ghosts of Bed-Stuy resurfaced, close enough to give the detective trouble.

  I slapped Bunny’s face. Her eyes blinked.

  “I’m okay?” burbled she. “I’m okay?”

  I pawed her body all over, opprobrious interracial contact in any other context, until both of us were assured that she’d suffered no injury. Together we looked at Ritchie. He was facedown, beret smashed under his nose. Balletic wisps of smoke rose from two jagged chasms of jacket leather. Coltrane’s band was still chortling like madmen; it was a long song and they had an infinity to play it. Look at the blood moseying along the slanted street, their instruments seemed to gabble, but in which direction, can you tell? Up or down? Ascension or the opposite?

  VIII.

  BLACK PANTHER PATROLLING PROCEDURE included trailing an arrested brother to jail and baili
ng him out, after which, more often than not, said brother would, in his own self-interest, become a Panther, too. But this was a hospital, an institution from which one dared not expedite exit, and inside it the revolutionaries lost their lockstep and paced the east half of the waiting room, adjusting weapon holsters and cussing like mad and making everyone else wish they’d chosen a different night to get that cough checked out.

  Word had traveled fast about Ritchie Tucker being shot in the back by pigs, and by midnight fifty Panthers had gathered, each of whom embraced Bunny before firing the Black Power fist at the police force, which had amassed in the west half of the room to prevent an uprising. The pigs, though, frothed more than the Panthers, with individual hotheads barking racial epithets across the aisle. One of their own had been shot, too, though Officer Keller (perhaps giddy from blood loss?) had unexpectedly credited Bunny and me for trying to stop Ritchie—a nice gesture—right before Keller had passed out.

  Zebulon X, not quite Pig but certainly not Black Panther, nervously kept his seat next to Bunny. When the rabble-rouser who’d delivered the afternoon speech arrived, he paid respects to Bunny and asked for her version of events. I’d heard her tell the story ten times by then; her lashes had thickened into tearful spikes. The speaker offered his handkerchief, and Bunny wiped her face. It came away brown with Ritchie’s blood. She considered the smudge for a moment, and then, in a raw voice, told the story once more.

  “The fucking fuzz handcuffed him to the gurney,” she finished.

  “Ritchie’s a burro,” soothed the speaker. “He’ll make it.”

  “I hope he doesn’t. I hope he’s already dead.”

  “Sister Jolami.”

  “The pigs’ll lock him up for good. That’s no life.”

  “I’m going to talk to the doctors. See what’s what. You sit tight.”

  He hugged her and strode past the heckling cops as if they were whining puppies. There, I had to admit, walked a man; in his wake, I felt like an incompetent child. I glanced at Bunny. She seemed afloat in the smog of clinical disinfection. Buzzing speakers called for “Dr. Buckner, Dr. Buckner.” The pale green light above us flickered. The floor stank like stomach acid and bleach. “Dr. Buckner, Dr. Buckner.” Even I, deathless one, felt upon my corpse the cephalopod suckers of Death.

  Bunny collapsed into her plastic chair, and her sunglasses, cracked in half during the shoot-out, at last fell from her Afro into her lap. She fondled the cheap plastic, then stroked the dress beneath. The color was black enough to conceal Ritchie’s blood, though I doubted any regimen of laundry would ever remove the stiff, sanguine snarl.

  For the first time in hours, she looked at me.

  “Why me?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “On the street. You could’ve saved either of us. You chose me.”

  “I . . . because . . .”

  Because I liked her and disliked Ritchie. What good would it do to say it?

  “Ritchie had problems. He had hard times. He wasn’t nice. But this isn’t the time for nice. This is the time for courage, and Ritchie had lots of it. He could’ve moved the Panthers forward. He could’ve moved the whole country.”

  “So might you,” suggested I.

  Her face tightened.

  “With what? My pancakes?” She shook her head. “Nuh-uh. You fucked up tonight. You should’ve saved Ritchie. The whole reason he was on that street was because of you.”

  I favored neither her subject matter nor building volume.

  “You are upset. Of that I have nothing but sympathy. I hesitate to point out that I didn’t advocate your brother advancing upon policemen with a chambered shotgun.”

  “At the rally, when he got in your face, you got right back in his. You didn’t have to do that. I told you not to. You didn’t have to push him into proving what kind of man he was.”

  “I should have taken his abuse, is that it?”

  “Yes! What’s so wrong with that? Gød forbid a black man ever gets the last word. Gød forbid a white man has to feel bad about himself for two or three minutes of U.S. history. You can martyr yourself all day long, but it’s Ritchie Tucker who suffered, who knew what suffering was. You could have just let him be.”

  I scanned the room to confirm that Bunny’s diatribe was catching the attention of wrathy blacks. Reader, I was agog. Why, I’d protested alongside these Afro-Americans! Only hours ago, I’d fulfilled my obligation and killed myself while Ritchie had stood nearby heckling me, and though technically I’d done it for Students for a Democratic Society, it had been in public partnership with the Panthers. When would my displays of tolerance be deemed sufficient?

  “Your brother wished to help the man being handcuffed, but what did he accomplish besides getting the man shot? Indeed I tried to protect your brother from his own destructive impulses!”

  Bunny’s upper lip curled in a way that frightened me.

  “You’ll never get it, will you?”

  “Get what? I’m here, aren’t I? In this ghastly room at the witching hour?”

  “This isn’t about you protecting Ritchie. You even understand that word? Protecting is what you do with property. What I needed you to do, what all of us need all white people to do, is help us or get the fuck out of the way. Helping us means being ready to die for the cause—and Ritchie was ready. But if you’re Zebulon X and you can’t die in the first place? Shit. Then I don’t think you can really believe in anything.”

  I do not think I knew how much I adored her before she hurt me so deeply.

  “If you’re really a miracle man,” continued she, “then save him.”

  “I told you,” pleaded I. “I tried.”

  “Walk past those pigs, bust through that door, knock down any doctors who try and stop you, and put your miracle-man hands on my Ritchie and save him.”

  Even the weight of her scorn did not hide her desperation. The poor, poor girl; the only magic I had to offer was the spiritual shaming of la silenziosità, which would do a felon like Ritchie Tucker no good whatsoever.

  “Bunny,” sighed I. “That is not how it works.”

  With a fist, she brought the pieces of her sunglasses smashing down against the arm of her chair. Blood, her own this time, spurted from her pierced palm. Black Panthers lived atop hair triggers; they leapt to their boots, put leather-gloved hands to sidearms, and surrounded the woman who, that night, was their queen. Bunny, though, did not take her eyes off me. Her blood joined Ritchie’s on her dress.

  “Who am I to you, anyway? One day soon, I’ll be dead, too, and I won’t be shit on your shoes. You’ll just keep on with your journey or whatever you want to call it. I’m nothing but a footnote to your story. And of course it’s your story, isn’t it? Amerika’s story is always going to be yours. White. Male. Probably rich. You’re Rome and we all know what happened to Rome. Empire gets too big, empire falls.”

  I could hear the K in her Amerika. She hissed in disgust.

  “Get your ass out of here. And it’s not Bunny, motherfucker. It’s Jolami Tiombe.”

  It is likely that the search for Dr. Buckner dragged on, though the only sounds I could hear were the menacing squeak of two dozen leather jackets. I did not have to look directly to be blinded by the hospital light fulgurating from brass bandoliers and dark sunglasses. The night’s events had transformed each member of the troop into their namesake predator, the pack salivated for a kill, and here was a whitey, already wounded, who might go down easy.

  I stood, my shoulders thumping against concealed switchblades, pistol butts, and clenched fists. I angled my armless shoulder for access, and after they paused to make the point that they were in control, the leather curtain parted. I passed through a forest of scowls, only to stop briefly at the police line. My own kind, though they radiated just as much loathing. Where was the peace, love, and community that I, as a Better God, was supposed to be fostering among one and all?

  “Hey, whitey!”

  Warily I turned to find B
unny standing on her chair. She’d let her tears fall, and her cheeks shone like expensive polish.

  “You told me I was beautiful. The day we met. After Ritchie shot you down from that rope you wear. That’s how the Beau-Ts really got their name.”

  Even as I was flattered, eighty-eight years of sucker punches had taught me to expect a left hook. I recalled her misgivings over the Beaut-Ts’ breakup, how their conception of themselves as a trio had left them vulnerable when facing the world as individuals. No further worries on that front. Bunny had found a much larger group, over which she stood so tall that I swore I could hear her future speeches and see her image printed on future posters.

  “I’m sorry,” spat she, “I ever wrote that stupid song.”

  Nails driven through extremities, skin flayed by whips, Old Testament stonings, crushings beneath half-ton millstones—none of these martyrdoms inflicted the pain of these parting words. I slouched from the infirmary where Ritchie Tucker would be pronounced dead before sunrise, and into a chilly Brooklyn that, in its predawn vapors, looked off-color. What a human thing, thought I, it was to be wounded.

  So began what historians, those profane distortionists, would call the Summer of Love.

  IX.

  THE ANTIWAR CARAVAN, LOOKING MORE like a circus parade every day, rode into Asbury Park, New Jersey, in December 1967, and out of sheer habit I allowed myself to be pushed along with them, though Bunny’s renouncing of me had stamped out what little belief had remained that I was capable of anyone’s betterment.

  The organizers, inebriated on the superbly abhorrent news that troop levels in Nam had touched five hundred thousand, got stoned on the beach and within their ganja glee hatched a novel martyrdom. They’d bury me up to the neck in the sand at low tide alongside signage painted with a gauge tracking military levels in Vietnam—and then watch the symbolic tide roll over me. Despite hating being wet, I agreed to it, assuring them that it was well within my bag of tricks, and that, furthermore, it worked as a tribute to Presbyterian provocateur Margaret Wilson, who in 1685 was lashed to a palisade at the bottom of Scotland’s Solway Firth to drown with the tide’s return. The sole problem with the plan I kept to myself: I no longer cared.