The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “It’s foah my family,” blurted Ruthie.

  As a boy without one, the f-word always startled me. Even jackals, supposed I, had jackal parents.

  “Your story, if I recall, was that your parents are dead.”

  Ruthie nodded. Her bun further unspooled.

  “They ahh. That wasn’t a lie. And I sworah to myself that I wahd do everything they cahdn’t. I wahd make something of myself. And not by fetching coffee foah the boss or typing his memos. By creating something of my own and sticking with it until there was no mistaking I’d succeeded.”

  “That you chose me as an industry is absurd. Why?”

  “Does it mattah? The point is, I did. And if I fail, that’s my fault, and I’ll have to live with it. But yoah cahn’t fahce me to fail. You just cahn’t.”

  My role as a Better God was over, and yet I had been made better, hadn’t I? Right at the end, courtesy of guardian angels Burt Churchwell and Bunny Tucker? Their flapping wings urged compassion, or at least patience. Ruthie Ness, after all, was a safe I’d failed so long to crack. Perhaps, somewhere deep inside her, were pearls of purity and gems of goodness. Where else but the path out of Woodstock would I be so charitably inclined?

  “From here onward,” warned I, “I make the calls. I choose what’s right, what’s wrong.”

  Hope glowed through the splints of her mucked lashes. For several unnerving seconds, her muscular rigidity gave way to a Merle-like jerking and sniffling, before the rope of control reknotted itself and began to crank tight the slack. Ruthie’s voice, sandbagging against hurricanes of emotion, hiccuped, then reclaimed its careful mid-Atlantic accent.

  “I’ll find a way to make it work, Mr. Finch, to make everything work. Leave it to me. Leave absolutely everything to me.”

  II.

  CRYING HAD HUMILIATED RUTHIE NESS, and to cover she rammed ahead like never before. By nightfall, we’d hiked against a renewed tide of concertgoers, found paved land, hitchhiked to Poughkeepsie, and taken adjacent rooms in a roadside inn. After she shut her door, I heard the click and hum of her television warming up—a signal, thought I, that she was trusting me not to flee. Nothing made more sense than absconding, yet I found my ankles invisibly manacled. A new page, albeit in a strange language, had turned. What if the first person I could help in my post-Zebulon X guise was Ruthie Ness? Warily, but hopefully, I kept by her side.

  The Poughkeepsie Truce, an addendum to our Scorched Earth Doctrine, remained in effect a week later. When our savings, or so reported Ruthie, had dwindled to nearly nothing, an age-mottled, furry-eared fellow became the third person to track me down via Woodstock’s ubiquitous radio spots. Ruthie’s sonar was in full effect; I never would’ve known of the old fart’s arrival if Ruthie hadn’t deemed him useful. She knocked, then opened my door wide enough for the geriatric to shuffle inside without aid of cane or walker. I was seated in the room’s only chair, so he was forced to struggle with the bed, while Ruthie, apex predator, preferred the high ground of standing.

  “This is Hershel Harel. He is a lawyer. He has something to say.”

  Harel—why was the name familiar? By the way the old-timer scoured my face instead of arm nub, I judged that he too had a familiarity. Finally he chuffed as if underwhelmed. Muttering, he unbuckled a valise and removed a folder of legal papers. Ruthie’s stock in trade; her eyes lamped.

  “I think this whole thing is garbage,” grouched he. “How many years did I try to talk sense into her? She didn’t have any family left, but who cares? There are charities, I said, foundations, I said. Your name isn’t mud. Maybe we can get a theater named after you. But you think a shikse like that even listened to a shlemiel like me? She did her own lawyering, you know. I only gave advice, which she never took.”

  Without realizing it, I’d moved to the edge of my chair.

  “Who?” asked I.

  Harel snorted. “Bridey Valentine. Maybe you’ve heard of her?”

  The memory of Harel’s name rushed back. Bridey used to phone him when she couldn’t untangle a gnarl of warranties, indemnifications, or arbitrations. Rich detail from Bridey’s Colonial Queen Anne mansion, a galaxy away from this dank and mildewy hovel, came along with Harel’s name, how the coldness of the marble floors made muggy clouds alongside the roaring fireplaces, the clucking and sighs of the hall of grandfather clocks, the floral perfumes that eddied in the wake of Bridey’s saunter. Horrible things had happened in that place near the end, but those were seeds I could spit. The overall flavor was delicious: her lips, which tasted of lipstick and bruising; her skin, which tasted of strawberry; her sweat, that bottomless salt lick—and all of it dished freely to a cold corpse, without equivocation.

  “How is she?” stammered I. “Is she here?”

  “You schmuck. Bridey Valentine is dead.”

  Tales from the obituarist, Dearest Reader, never fail to stun. The Excelsior against my breast must have needed winding, for the next click of the second hand took ten years to pass. Afraid that I would begin blubbering in front of Ruthie—penance for having watched her do the same—I fished out the pocket watch and busied myself turning its dial while my mind likewise cranked. It did no good. I could feel Bridey’s lotioned thighs gliding over my celibate torso, her every flex and throb seducing me from Wilma Sue, even one night suggesting, as you might recall, that we film our unnatural deeds toward a promise that had at last been revealed as a lie:

  Pictures never die, silly. That’s why I, too, am going to live forever.

  Bridey had meant for Zebulon Finch to be part of her permanent collection, but it was Bridey who’d been boxed and stowed by a disinterested graveyard collector. My motel room, itself a cheap casket, collapsed around me, and though I no longer breathed, I struggled for breath.

  “This is . . . difficult . . . to understand—”

  “Why’s that? She was seventy-eight and lived hard. It’s bullshit you don’t already know she’s gone. So many charities and foundations I showed her, oy vey. Because I was her friend, you understand? And who are you? She wouldn’t tell me a thing.”

  I needn’t have worried about Ruthie relishing my discomfort. Her eyes were locked on Harel’s folder.

  “Tell Mr. Finch what you’ve brought.”

  Harel pointed a crooked finger at me. “If Mr. Finch meant anything to Miss Valentine, he’d already know!”

  “You promised your client.” Ruthie was done with pussyfoot. “Do your job, Mr. Harel.”

  He muttered profanities and removed a stapled packet.

  “The last will and testament,” boomed he, “of Bridey Valentine.”

  Congratulations, Margeaux had cracked as we’d motored toward her 1941 Winter Formal. Mother put you in her will. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten; it was that I’d assumed my role in the death of her daughter had been enough to prompt a revision. Perhaps Bridey had been so grief-stricken that she’d forgotten? No, for Harel had said he’d tried to talk her out of it. What, then, was behind this? Was is possible that Bridey had understood me more than I’d ever dared believe, had known the crash had been Margeaux’s wish, and had augured that, decades later, I’d still be drifting the earth, more alone and designless than ever?

  “Tell him the figure,” ordered Ruthie.

  “Just under a million,” said Harel.

  Dollars? I stared at Ruthie, whose blouse looked to be soaked in drool.

  “And it would’ve been a hell of a lot more,” roared Harel, “if she’d done what I told her: quit acting and start saving. You know what was not fun? Watching it all fall apart. The cars, the home, everything. I watched that. Hershel Harel watched that. Where were you?”

  You may find it difficult to lament the fates of the famous and rich, but for me it was reflex. The butler, gone. The cook, gone. The lady’s maid, Japanese gardener, chauffeur, hairdresser, vocal coach, all gone, each loss feeling to Bridey as the Triangulinos’ piece-by-piece amputations had felt to me.

  “But a shikse like that! She kept doing pictu
res, hoping one of them would break big. But how could they? Dirty little nickel- and-dimers. Punk kids with cameras debasing a Hollywood legend. If you’re lucky, you’ve never seen them.”

  Fifteen years ago, I’d walked Junior to the Orpheum and seen Bridey’s fifty-seven-year-old face grimacing on ads for fare like Cult of the Tarantula. Those had been hard enough to swallow, but the productions Harel began listing wouldn’t even play in Wichita; they’d be relegated to sleazy urban grindhouses. I recall these titles only in prurient pieces: the words “Gutter” and “Bloodbath,” “Naughty” and “Centerfold,” “Depraved” and “Swingers,” “Virgin” and “Violated”—and “Teenage,” always “Teenage.” Bridey, of course, had been too old for the jailbait roles but still famous enough to ensure that the fresh packages of teen meat would sell worldwide.

  “If she hadn’t made those pictures, I wouldn’t need to tell you she was dead. Her obituary would’ve been on the front pages, where it belonged.”

  Ruthie came at us with a dagger. No, a pen.

  “Sign on the lines, Mr. Finch,” said she.

  Walking away from Woodstock had been a walk away from money. What good could it do me? But sign I did, page after page, four copies of each, though I could not feel the implement inside my palm. Harel was old, and he’d tired himself out; he scrawled where he needed to scrawl, and then Ruthie got in on the fun, signing as carefully as if she were composing a sonnet. When all was complete, Harel wiped his hands as if brushing off what he might call shmutz, stowed his copy of the forms, unhappily provided his business card, and hobbled toward the door, where he paused to give me a stare that damned me more than a thousand Yiddish slurs.

  “All she wanted to do was make this one special picture. She threw millions at producers in France, Italy, India, not a one of whom did anything but cut and run. Who can blame them? She never let them read the script! But Zebulon Finch, she said—Zebulon Finch would understand. What does that mean? Feh. It’s my concern no more. Now it’s yours. So don’t be another punk kid, you hear me? Do what the rest of the world didn’t do and make Bridey Valentine proud.”

  To her dying day, she’d tried to get In Our Image, her magnum opus, produced. And I, it seemed, had been the only person ever to read it, save those last few pages.

  Here, already, was my answer to why the inheritance mattered. Harel’s exhortation, conflated with my directionless melancholy, resulted in the swift certainty that I, Bridey’s lover and confidant, was responsible for realizing her stymied vision. I stood, surprising Harel and alarming Ruthie, and began to nod, for my dry cavities had been quickened with purpose. Bridey’s last wish was a compass with which I might navigate. True, I was an amateur, but I had at my disposal three important things. One: money, barrels of it. Two: Ruthie Ness, a woman with a producer’s ability to alchemize my fantasies into reality. And three, that rarest of commodities: all the time in the world.

  Sufferers of my biography’s every convolution won’t raise an eyebrow that, by summer, Ruthie and I were on horseback in the Arizona desert. Our Mexican guide, a vaquero named Eduardo, was not much of a tour guide, though on occasion he did flap his ten-gallon hat at shadscale shrubs that resembled boobs and at rock tors that resembled penises. I rather appreciated the man’s wordless humor, while Ruthie, still subject to a living being’s sore legs and aching ass, filled his back with imaginary bullets.

  Eduardo wasn’t being paid for commentary. After a long wait for Bridey’s cash to fatten the Excelsior, Inc., coffers, I’d demanded that Ruthie purchase a car, which she did with characteristic practicality—not the brand-new onyx-black Mercury Marauder I requested but a used Ford Fairlane station wagon the color of feces. The smell inside it, though, I could only blame on myself; for the remainder of my tale, Dearest Reader, there will be no more hiding my deterioration. With sunlight magnified through dashboard glass, my flesh heated and my seat filled with a beige crumble of skin. I thought of Mauthausen’s chimney stacks, their spouting embers, and the Millennialist, who was bound to catch us if we stopped.

  Across America I drove our odoriferous auto on a haphazard hunt for a place from which I could conceptualize In Our Image without interruption. Outside of Flagstaff, our shit-wagon broke down with all the spectacle of the Fourth of July, spewing black smoke and shooting fire. One-armed men cannot applaud, but I snapped appreciation like a beatnik while Ruthie scrambled with her lockbox from the blast zone.

  Eduardo was laboring at a ranch thereabouts. We found him courtesy of the smoking bonfire he’d made of invasive brush. Though his English was meager, he nodded confidently when I told him I was looking for a special place unlike any other in the world. He whistled while trailing a finger from the clouds to the ground. I had no idea what that meant.

  “Sí, señor. I know where. Muy especial. ”

  Eduardo shrugged at his bonfire, making it clear that he would never dream of abandoning such a fulfilling job. I showed him what two hundred dollars looked like, and he summoned three caballos out of thin air, saddled them with vittles and pup-tents and the golden lockbox, and after a too-short lesson on equine etiquette, led us into the horizon on clopping hooves. Ruthie was aghast, but her post-cry quality of determination persevered.

  Her concern, to be fair, had merit. The Great Basin is the largest desert habitat in America, a two-hundred-thousand-square-mile death trap triggered between the Sierra Nevada and Wasatch Range, and if we got lost, Ruthie might well be forced to eat our horses, then Eduardo, then me. My trust in our guide, however, grew by the mile. This was where I was supposed to be, I could feel it. The Marlboro Man’s Montana had been magnificent, but the cold northern atmosphere had preserved my corpse too well. The desert’s opposite climate would be more conducive to my overdue business of disintegration, thereby pushing me to work like Bridey: hard, fast, day, night.

  We shall spend some time in this desert, Dearest Reader; let me situate you. Imagine eternal runways of olive gravel and pale yellow grass leading toward bulging bluffs twice as distant as they appear. Picture boulders tossed impossibly across sand. Visualize tall, lonely cacti trolling through stiff snags of brush like lost monsters. Smell the hot sandstone, the fleeting wafts of carrion spoil. Feel the heat as flat as a griddle against your every exposed inch. See the sky, blue glass or black oil, or if a storm is coming, gray goiters bulging with magma red. The desert is Earth’s la silenziosità: stillness so infinite, you cannot see the mountain mandible that, millennia by millennia, closes around you.

  After a night spent tented between shrieking coyotes, we loped across Canyon Diablo—the Devil’s Canyon, a parched patch of Navajo land defined by a winding arroyo—until Eduardo pointed at what looked like a long butte. “Muy especial,” he repeated. It was only after heading up the butte’s lip hours later that I began to feel a prickling in my guts so faint, I doubted that my breathing companions would notice it. A force was pulling me at the molecular level. I goosed my horse, and it galloped to the top of the rise, where the view spread out before me as if spilled by a clumsy child. This was no butte.

  It was a hole scooped from the earth by a hand of unrealizable size, a crater over a mile in diameter, with striated slopes diving five hundred feet to a tawny base upon which one could arrange twenty football fields. It was a sea without water, a coliseum for giants. Eduardo’s horse joined mine.

  “Especial,” said I. “Very especial.”

  Eduardo repeated the gesture he’d made before we’d set out, tracing a finger from clouds to crater.

  “A meteor,” guessed I.

  “Sí, señor. Muy, muy grande.”

  Ruthie, the lousiest rider of our trio, arrived and alighted from her animal, and with sore buttocks clenching beneath unsuitable dress slacks, walked to the crater’s edge. Even she, self-taught to have diatribes prepared on profit margins and tax incentives, was speechless.

  “Here,” said I. “It must be here.”

  “What?” asked Ruthie.

  “Home.”
<
br />   The word was simple and gorgeous. Had I ever called someplace home and truly felt it? It was past time. I was seventeen, old enough for a place of my own.

  Ruthie pulled herself from the crater’s psychological stranglehold and turned. Small glasslike rocks crackled like wine-bottle glass beneath her city shoes. She shaded her eyes with saddle-reddened palms.

  “You want to live here.”

  I nodded. And smiled. I did.

  “That,” said she, “is ridiculous.”

  Before such rocky majesty, Ruthie Ness was a pebble.

  “No one is forcing you to stay,” said I. “Your steed awaits.”

  “Mr. Finch, please, I’m trying to work with you. I’ve come this far, haven’t I? You have to work with me, just a little. There’s no one around for miles. You’re as good as dead out here.”

  Right away she flinched at the comment. My smile stretched across the leathered skin of my face. As good as dead? Why, that sounded perfect. Ruthie, emptied of persuasions, wiped at the sweat from her hairline and panted in the sun. It was just the moment of doubt I’d been watching for since her breakdown in the rain. I held my animal steady as Ruthie cycled through mistrustful squints, judgmental nose-wrinkles, and indignant lip lickings. I rooted for her, Reader; I did. I couldn’t hope to execute grand plans without her as agent, and I prayed she’d take my boldly dangled bait.

  She considered the infinite baked acres beyond the crater. I followed suit. How had this happened? Me, establishing a desert refuge, just like Chuck Manson?

  Ruthie did not disappoint. She broke the spell by hurling sunlight at me off her glasses.

  “You’re intent on challenging me,” said she. “Fine. Watch me rise to it.”

  III.

  CONSTRUCTION BEGAN ON JULY 1, 1971. The temperature was 106 degrees, but the Flagstaff crew’s sweet-potato tans were impervious as they pushed dirty fingertips across blueprints and jostled throttles on their dumpers, loaders, backhoes, dozers, graders, mixers, pavers, and forklifts. Ruthie believed my obsession with In Our Image a result of sunstroke, but it wasn’t in her character to back down until I saw the extent of my mistake, at which point she believed she could get us back to the business of making money. Indeed, we might need it. A third of Bridey’s million was going to the home, and it sickened Ruthie. I saw her slink away twice to vomit, though it could have been the heat.