The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  High tide was expected at five. The protestors held an anticipatory beach bash fit for Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, complete with bonfires, local quartets doing their best Beatles and Stones, and kids doing the Watusi around my head, which sat upon the sand like a child’s pail. Mirthmaking halted whenever it was time for another impugning of LBJ’s honor, and during one such address, an emotional waif placed upon my head an Indian headdress decked out with flower-power buttons.

  I hollered for the getup to be removed at once, but it was four o’clock and the tide was advancing, dampening make-out blankets and endangering baggies of primo grass. The microphones shorted, and that was it. Fairweather frolickers relocated to the bordering park, from which they could cheer my drowning in comfort.

  Only a single fibril of Atlantic ocean had tickled my chin when my peripheral vision was occluded by a visitor, a plain-looking woman barely over five feet tall. The first thing noticeable was her cultural polarity. Her double-breasted wool coat and tapered trousers so personified the Man that I presumed her to be one of the Merry Pranksters, madcap liberals who dressed like stiffs in order to bombard some fussbudget or another with soot or glitter.

  But when she squatted before me, I could find no trace of the Pranksters’ ingrained grime. She was mid-twenties, thickly spectacled, hair pulled into a businesslike bun. She held a notebook, which she parted, and a pen, which she drew.

  “Is this an interview? I’m a mite busy just now.”

  “It’s been a challenge to get you alone.”

  Barely detectable was the New England flatness of her vowels, like President Kennedy’s but of dirtier birth. Years of practice had hidden it well.

  “Too bad you did not do your homework,” said I. “Zebulon X does not make statements.”

  “This isn’t an interview. This is a proposition.”

  “I suppose I can hardly walk away from it, can I?”

  “My name is Ruthie Ness,” continued she, “and I’d like to represent you.”

  A rivulet of salt water shot between my interlocutor’s sensible shoes and frothed my lip. She set aside her notebook and with some distaste fashioned with her clean hands a ditch and rampart to stave the tide a few minutes longer.

  “An agent, eh? If you represent Brigitte Bardot, we have a deal.”

  “I don’t represent anyone else. I’d like to work with you exclusively.”

  “Give me time to feel flattered. It might take until I am underwater.”

  “I have all the pertinent degrees. Law, accounting, business.”

  “And yet still in the bloom of womanhood.”

  My implication was that she was too young to have accomplished much beyond the skyward flinging of her college mortarboard. Ruthie Ness caught the drift but stared through sunset spectacles, careful not to react. High tide waited not for prideful stalemates; I did not have time to pull details like teeth.

  “Martyrs typically follow their own fancies,” said I.

  “But you’re hardly typical, are you?”

  The sand over my shoulders bulged from my underground shrug.

  “What service could you possibly provide me?”

  “For one, you wouldn’t be buried on a beach to be drowned in ice-cold water without any kind of compensation.”

  “Touché. But wealth interests neither me nor the crowds within which I circulate.”

  “That’s a shortsighted view. Agronomist trends never last. Have you seen the Dow Jones average lately? You need to look at a bigger historical picture.”

  “I know my history,” snapped I.

  She managed a dry smile. Her version of an apology, I gathered.

  “Mr. Finch, you have talent. But if you continue along this path, you’ll do damage to yourself that renders your talent null.”

  “I have so far resisted the coup de grâce,” admitted I, “the burning at the stake for which everyone waits. It is a pigeonhearted evasion.”

  “Not at all. It’s smart. Let me be smart for you. I only want to safeguard your sustainability.”

  “And for this favor you expect to receive—”

  Surf sizzled, and I saw the gray plash of water one second before it slapped me in the eyes. I blew my face free of foam and found my visitor refortifying her wall of sand. But it was one woman versus gravitational forces. It was time to drown, and we both knew it. She stood and brushed sand from her notebook, hands, and slacks.

  “There’s an all-night restaurant called Bucket Mouth Seafood at the north end of the boardwalk. The tide should recede by eight. You’ll need time to tidy. Reservations at ten?”

  “I’ll be seafood by then. Reserve what you wish; I promise nothing.”

  “Until ten.” She began to leave.

  “Do me one favor!” cried I.

  She narrowed distrustful eyes. “I don’t do favors.”

  “Call it a show of good faith, then, and remove this obnoxious headdress.”

  From my Lake Michigan submersion, to Margeaux’s Yankee Doodle nosedive, to the zeppelin plunge into Berlin’s Schwielowsee, I’d logged enough underwater hours to know that places of pensivity existed therein. I relaxed into the sand, which heavied to cement, and when the water was high enough to stop drubbing me like driftwood, I peered through the soup of seaweed, silt, and hot dog wrappers and pondered the proposal.

  If Ruthie Ness had on her wall every diploma she’d listed, there were far simpler means to a fortune. Why choose a product so prickly as I? The likeliest explanation was some moral crusade, and yet she evinced no particular philosophy, and in the late sixties, that was the most outrageous put-on of all. I shook my head and watched the flotsam caper. I had no reason to accept her invitation, except that, since Bunny’s repudiation, I was lost, wandering, and desperate for someone to direct me back to a righteous road. Only one thing troubled me.

  How had she known my real name was Finch?

  Bucket Mouth Seafood was a wood-paneled, slime-floored establishment balanced upon stilts and connected to an unsound pier. Waitresses, all of them crusty old ladies with cigarettes betwixt salt-scoured lips, delivered dead fish on wooden trenchers and dumped steamed crab, shrimp, mussels, and clams straight onto paper-covered tabletops for barbarian-style feeding. I arrived at eleven, a full hour late to test Ruthie Ness’s resolve, but for my efforts received not even a tetchy look. She sat at a table in the middle of the restaurant, toe tapping metronomically, as if she could wait all week.

  She enacted her version of a smile and set down her glass of wine, the only item she’d ordered. I sat, scared away the serving wench, and gave my host an expectant look.

  “‘Ruthie,’” said I, “is too girlish to suit you. Why not ‘Ruth’?”

  “I’ve found that the little ‘ie’ helps sugar the medicine.”

  “Well, Ruthie, what is your prescription?”

  “Miss Ness.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I prefer that you call me Miss Ness. It’s more professional.”

  It was a bit early in our working relationship to make demands. I gave the pint-sized lawbringer my most intimidating look and resolved to keep calling her Ruthie privately. As if to barricade against the place’s rowdy ambiance, Ruthie had changed into the shapeless livery of a woman thrice her age—a long-sleeved step-in dress with a matronly collar and a color too dull to register in the low light. Given my hand-me-down Renaissance blouse, rhinestone-appliquéd blue jeans, and motorcycle boots, we made quite the pair.

  “Professional,” repeated I. “Is that what you call this look?”

  “I’m not in the business of being looked at.”

  I felt the sting of reproach—a rare thing.

  “I am saying only that you look quite unlike your contemporaries. For that matter, you don’t speak like them either.”

  “Nor do you.”

  “A second touché.”

  Ruthie lifted a briefcase to her lap, aligned combination numbers, cracked it open, and sorted through the accordio
n folder.

  “My contemporaries, as you call them, can walk around barefoot and do drugs and get pregnant, and at the end of the day go back to parents who’ll take care of them. To be frank, I was born poor. My parents are dead. I’m not pretty enough to count on hooking some careerist. I worked three jobs to get through law school. To do all that requires a plan. A vision.”

  She withdrew a paperclipped bundle that, from the unconscionable paragraphing and minuscule typeface, I recognized as a contract. She offered it, but I waved it away.

  “Your plan, or vision, has failed to take into consideration how little stock I hold in signatures and dotted lines. I own no identification papers. I exist outside of government registers. Also, as it happens, I loathe reading. If you wish to tender a proposal, then speak, woman, and be convincing.”

  Ruthie took a sip of merlot and refreshed her tightrope smiling act. “How is business, if may I ask?”

  “My father was a dynamitier,” replied I.

  “Is that so?”

  “ ‘Business,’ he’d always say, ‘is booming.’ ”

  “He was right about that. Destruction never goes out of demand. Hence your modest success. People see something of theirs destroyed, and they can’t help but want their turn at destroying.”

  “In military circles they call that a scorched earth doctrine.”

  “Oh, I like that. Let’s borrow it for our arrangement—the Scorched Earth Doctrine.”

  “Fine, you have your title. Now work backward.”

  Ruthie put her elbows on the table and leaned into lamplight.

  “Destruction is exactly what I want to talk about. This past year alone, just think of it.”

  Gloomier suggestions were hard to imagine. Barely had I traipsed from Ritchie Tucker’s hospital than had John Coltrane, soundtracker of Ritchie’s murder, died from cancer deranged by heroin. It was a portentous death that jostled for press coverage alongside the Newark race riots of July, which left twenty-three dead; the Detroit race riots two weeks later, during which one hundred blocks of the Motor City screamed with more rebel gunfire than any Southeast Asian DMZ; and the arrest of Black Panther founder Huey Newton, who was shot in the gut by a pig and handcuffed to a gurney just like Ritchie. I felt gut-shot too; I could feel Johnny’s marble roll toward the puncture.

  Ruthie swished her merlot.

  “This level of destruction breeds a need for a whole lot of revenge. Your stock could keep rising.”

  “You seem to understand what my eager young rebels do not, that my act is no mere sleight of hand. And yet, Miss Ness, you have no questions about my bodily architecture?”

  She fluttered a hand as if at a gnat.

  “Not interested.”

  “But surely, as a business matter, you require assurance—”

  She set down her glass heavily enough to send a slosh of wine over the rim. Her accent, too, surfaced, redolent of briny harbors, sea-crusted fishermen, foul-tongued women.

  “We aren’t going to talk about it.”

  Ahnt gonna tack. She heard her indigenous inflection and caged her jaw.

  It will seem morbid to the Dearest Reader, but I often visualized the process of becoming acquainted as a progression of inflicted wounds. Mrs. Leather had accepted a series of small cuts through which I could see her goodness; Church had cracked himself open all at once, laying everything bare; Bridey had fought back, creating a bloodbath; and Mrs. White had eviscerated herself slowly, inch by inch, until I’d seen everything. But Ruthie Ness offered nothing; I had to stab, stab, stab, and so far, my blade had hit only bone.

  “The point is,” said she, “none of this is slowing down anytime soon. If these marches and sit-ins had a leader, that would be one thing. You could prevail on him to take some role in your protection. But the whole purpose of the youth campaign, as I see it, is to create a leaderless society. You say you know your history? Well, then you know that’s not utopia at all. That’s chaos.”

  “It is true,” admitted I, “that they talk much of pacifism—”

  “Yes, refusing to be accessories to murder overseas—”

  “—all the while arming themselves to the teeth.”

  Tasting triumph, her cultivated erudition lapsed and she licked wine from the rim of her glass. Concurring with her had been as bad as dropping a poker hand face-up, but I could not drudge up anger over the flub. I was too tired, too alone. My head, literally buried in the sand, had been but a pagan maypole around which so-called radicals could gambol. Ruthie was right, wasn’t she? Demonstrations were sock hops for the draft-dodgers wearing buttons that shouted NEVER GROW UP! Didn’t they realize that was a curse? Wasn’t the entire point of a movement to move?

  When I checked back, Ruthie’s lips were merlot red.

  “Without me,” said she, “you’ll be in pieces by ’69.”

  Deep down, Reader, I knew this; of course I knew it. The martyrdoms I’d pulled off for Scheinberg’s brand of do-gooders had become as rote and pointless as the performances at the Barker’s Gallery of Suffering. At least turn-of-the-millennium audiences had had the ability to be shocked. Today’s crusaders were desensitized to any horror I could invent, and it shouldn’t have taken Bunny’s loud forswearing of me to accept it.

  “I’ve worked with profiteers before,” said I. “They always want blood money.”

  “A percentage of the profits. And, yes, there must be profits. That’s how we sort out the legitimate requests. I’m not going to let someone tear your legs off to save the Black-Footed Ferret. You don’t exist as far as Social Security is concerned, so the venture is going to require a little creativity. But that’s what I’ve studied for. I’ll create legal entities through which we can filter funds. You won’t have to worry about the IRS, the FBI, nobody.”

  After years of slipshod promises about good vibrations and California dreamin’, the pledges of the Scorched Earth Doctrine felt like solid rock. How tempting for Zebulon X, the silent one, to have someone to do all the talking.

  I stuck my hand out to get the covenant done with.

  Her thick lenses magnified her stony stare.

  “No handshake. We are not friends.”

  It was peculiar how the reprimand rather hurt; her skeleton had rejoined the knife-stab of familiarity once again. Ruthie slid the contract across the table along with a pen. Legally my scrawl meant nothing, but if she wanted the gesture, so be it. I read only a line or two before giving up, zeroing in on the blank spaces, and signing my name, page after page, how I’d once typed You gotta have fear in your heart on my Royal Quiet de Luxe typewriter until the blank page had become nothing but ink.

  X.

  NONE OF THIS IS SLOWING down anytime soon, Ruthie Ness had said, and it took but one month to confirm her insight. On the last day of January 1968, Communist forces coordinated an assault on over one hundred South Vietnam cities, a pyrotechnic display of base-camp bombardments, highway bombings, embassy invasions, palace seizings, and urban incursions that left nine thousand dead. The carnage squeezed into American TV boxes like meat squeezed into a sausage stuffer, creating a buffet of spicy dishes: Midwestern boys dying on film as if cued by Maximilian Chernoff; rescue choppers landing in fields of tall grass that rippled like green pools of bile; and Vietnamese panicking in ways that felt pornographic, often naked, screaming at chicken pitches, and gaping into camera lenses with the uncomprehending eyes of infants.

  A U.S. Officer in the Mekong Delta, after overseeing a slaughter of civilians at Bên Tre City, was quoted as saying, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it,” and indeed this had been the mindset of America’s older generations. But after this so-called Tet Offensive, even adults lost faith. Finally they poked their groundhog faces from their prefab burrows, showed up to the office without ties if they showed up at all, and joined their children on the streets in numb objection to what felt like a personal betrayal.

  In short, Tet had laid a gold-bricked road for any industr
ious martyr-for-hire. But Ruthie Ness’s short stature came with the sine qua non of Napoléon issues, and she made it known that the days of procuring Zebulon X for your cause in exchange for mellow chicks and out-of-this-world tunes were over. Now there was a corporation called Excelsior, Inc. (she’d capitulated to my demands that I get to name it), and all negotiations had to pass through the company’s orneriest employee.

  Rare were the Harvey Scheinbergs intellectually acute enough to dig Excelsior, Inc.’s legalese. One confused hippie after another gave up, and it bothered me, but Ruthie kept her grip on the reins. It was not a bad thing, insisted she, that my frequency of martyrdom slow down, and besides, it was the fault of these unscrubbed youngsters that they hadn’t the wherewithal to stage the sort of events Zebulon X warranted.

  If 1967 had been the Summer of Love, then its lovemaking, poisoned by the mother’s ingested LSD and the father’s ingested Agent Orange, had conceived a clawed, yowling, mutant child called 1968. To the delight of protestors, LBJ declared that he wouldn’t run for a second presidential term, which hung the future of the Vietnam War on the November election. On the left queued peacenik pet Eugene McCarthy and leftist Robert Kennedy, hoping to pick up his slain brother’s mantle; on the right stood jowly scowler Richard Nixon and professional bigot George Wallace, best known for his catchy chant, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Somewhere, thought I, Bunny Tucker was lifting a fist higher than ever.

  The astronomic stakes of the election drove demonstrators quite mad by spring. Speed freaks in Day-Glo clothing organized sack races down major freeways, set off firecrackers inside capital buildings, and handed out acid-laced Kool-Aid to passersby. It was a jamboree that stunk of reefer and sweat and semen. Who had time anymore to notice the martyr fellow cutting off his nipples before lying upon a bed of broken glass in simulation of the tortures of Agatha of Sicily? Agatha of where, man?