The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  Our bad luck was that the crater had been assigned National Landmark status three years prior. The closest property we could purchase was a two-hour hike due west, though thanks to the planate topography, the crater’s rim remained visible. Isolation slowed the builders’ pace—first, they had to build roads—and during downtimes, I costumed myself in long sleeves, the cowboy hat I’d bartered from Eduardo, and my NASA aviators and sidled next to the men. Even laborers this gruff were tickled by the project’s novelty and fed me, in dribs and drabs, the strange history of the Barringer Crater.

  Daniel Moreau Barringer had been an explorer as rotund as he’d been brash, scouring the West in the 1800s for exploitable mineral deposits. Around the time that I was fixing to duel the Barker, Barringer’s inventory of what was soon to be called Arizona climaxed with a visit to the crater. Ruthie Ness would have admired Barringer’s nose for profit; he tested for nickel, found it, linked it with findings in known meteorites, and determined to extract ore that, by his ginger estimation, would fetch one hundred million bucks.

  That had been the tugging I’d felt while approaching the crater: meteorite particles still magnetized fifty thousand years after impact. They’d also pulled at Barringer, whose obsession turned him into an object of ridicule. In 1908 alone, he dug twenty-eight holes, all of them damned. Industrial drills became stuck or simply broke. Shafts flooded with groundwater. Experts, beginning to pity poor Barringer, theorized that the meteorite had vaporized on impact, not unlike the hundreds of thousands of dollars Barringer had invested. By 1929, it was accepted that the value of the ore could not possibly equal the price of acquiring it—and yet Barringer, like Dr. Leather, slogged after his impossible goal, until he died, twenty-six years after he’d begun, and no closer to victory.

  What convinced me that I had found my destiny was how the crater, like my own body, was a shrine to human folly, beginning with Barringer’s failure but continuing with the 1950s fire that had burned the rimside structure where specimens had been studied; the airplane that had crashed into its western wall in 1964, its wrecked fuselage too unwieldy to bother removing; the crater’s use in the late 1960s as a lunarscape for Apollo astronauts, including the doomed; and now me, the biggest catastrophe of all.

  I felt at home before the home was finished. We went over budget by half, but I’d become incapable of doubt. Ruthie dizzied and tizzied, but no matter how often she gazed longingly at the road leading toward civilization, she never took it, and for this I began to feel ever more kindly toward her. She and I were in this together, for better or worse. (Take a wild guess which, Reader.)

  The completed structure was of Spanish Territorial style, a one-story, eight-room, clay-roofed, whitewashed adobe casa del poblador built in a U-shape around a small patio featuring a burbling fountain, alongside which I planned to spend months deliberating In Our Image. So convinced was I by the mysticism that had brought me to Canyon Diablo that I believed I was incapable of bad ideas. Did Bridey’s story have to be a film, wondered I? Could her message be delivered through a play? How about a record album packaged with a storytelling gatefold?

  Upon a patio shelf, I gave A Ghost Rolls Over a place of honor. No sooner had I placed it than a burst of desert wind tossed the rain-warped pages from poem to poem, rasping like Church’s stroke-damaged voice.

  Private Finch, it whispered. Keep going.

  The first of them arrived while Ruthie and I selected doors from a catalogue. As she vetoed my exorbitant favorites, I noticed the oddest thing: an overheated Mustang convertible on our property, against which leaned a quartet of twentysomethings. While Ruthie haggled with the architect, I watched the newcomers; seeing me watch, they stood straighter. Though they’d parked at a distance, they looked to be ex-Woodstockers, hair still long but no longer woven with daisies; clothes still colorful but not so harlequin; and postures more stooped, for vagabondage had been traded years ago for shit jobs and car payments, and such obligations broke backs.

  Being eyeballed perturbed me, but it was October, and desert nights could sink to the twenties. In a canvas-topped convertible, they’d freeze. Yet when Ruthie and I hunkered down in our new, if doorless, quarters, the foursome did not leave. They huddled beneath blankets in their Mustang, watching our house like a drive-in movie before shivering themselves to sleep.

  By the time the doors were installed, there was a total of two cars and six people. By the time water flowed from our single pump—it made the developer nervous, but Ruthie was a tightwad—the vehicles had copulated and birthed twice as many passengers. The construction crew packed up, and Ruthie and I were left with this convergence of ex-hippies. It could have been a siege; we should have been frightened. But I detected no menace, and neither did Ruthie, who scoped them with her X-ray glasses to screen for signs of money.

  I resolved to grant the oglers not a second more of my valuable time. I retired to the patio, where I’d assembled a desk-and-chair facsimile of Mrs. White’s basement berth, and removed with relish the first of a bulk order of composition books. Thirty years had elapsed since I’d read Bridey’s script, but I was certain I remembered enough. Atop the first page, I wrote with a curlicued flourish:

  IN OUR IMAGE: IDEAS!

  But the yawning page possessed none of the gabby magic of the biographical notebooks you now hold. For two weeks I added nothing besides further festooning of the title. At every rise of wind, I looked to A Ghost Rolls Over, hoping Church’s voice might return with further advice. Finally I broke, blaming my authorial impotence on the incessant chatter from the front yard. I threw down my pencil, stalked along the arcade, and found Ruthie in the frontmost salon watching them through a window. She heard my arrival and spoke without turning.

  “They’ve set up tents and teepees. They’re sharing pots of food.”

  “They’re lost. Their whole damn generation is lost.”

  “They don’t look lost to me. They look happy. They look like they’re waiting.”

  “I told you. No more martyrdoms.”

  “I know.”

  “If they want to stand around and stare, it’s a free desert.”

  “It is.” Ruthie’s tone made it clear what she thought of the word “free.”

  “On second thought,” said I, “they’re squatting upon the private property of Excelsior, Inc. Possibly they require a scaring off.”

  “Go ahead. I bet they’d be glad to see you.”

  “You do it, then. You’re far scarier than I.”

  “How long has it been since you saw them?”

  She tugged me closer by the sleeve. Circumstantial contact, Reader, yet it brought a bloom of unexpected warmth to cold, grateful bones, and I obediently shambled forward. Because I had to duck beneath a glare, the reveal was not gradual but abrupt. Twenty-five people had set up camp in a semicircle fifty yards from the house. My days with NSTF had habituated me to organic farms and co-ops, but there were no chickens to feed here, no gardens to tend, no produce to swap. Canyon Diablo was a wasteland, and they ate from dusty supermarket cans before walking behind a patch of cacti where a crude latrine had been established. All the while, their faces behaved like sunflowers, following the sun, which was, I realized, me.

  “It’s a bloody cult,” said I.

  How did Manson’s dune-buggy ruts keep trapping me?

  “Such an uncharitable word,” tsked Ruthie. “Look closer. Who do you see?”

  “To the left, dimwits. To the right, dunderheads.”

  “No judgments. Who do you see?”

  Seek-and-find games were for children. I looked from grubby face to peeling shoulders to underfed ribs. I was about to double down on my reply when I was struck by a shared trait so obvious as to be invisible.

  “They’re women,” said I.

  “Nine out of ten of them. Why do you think that is?”

  “You’re a woman, or so I understand. You tell me.”

  “Have you heard of the feminine mystique?”

  “The p
hrase is ‘sex appeal,’ Miss Ness. Naturally you are unfamiliar.”

  On the heels of her friendly tug, my snap was unbecoming. If she minded, though, she had the maturity not to show it.

  “The Feminine Mystique. It’s a book. It’s about women’s dissatisfaction with their limited roles in society. Their frustration with a destiny that begins and ends with their anatomy.”

  “I see you’ve slogged through this polemic.”

  She shrugged. “It was popular in law school.”

  “So our trespassers are women’s-libbers? Perplexing.”

  “Is it? I want you to think about that. About the women you knew in the fifties, the women you knew in the sixties. What they wanted versus what they got.”

  I pondered Mrs. White, housetrained by the Mrs. Shoemakers of the world until her only extant dream was winning the Pillsbury Bake-off. I thought of Janice the flower child and Bunny the militant, both pursuing a fulfillment that, at last check, was far from filled. My tie-dyed memories were, in fact, filled with young women protesters treated like children by condescending college profs and supposed male allies, both of whom encouraged bra burning for no reasons beyond the salacious.

  When midday heat was at its fiercest, packs of females would help themselves to the house’s shade for what they called “rap sessions.” Like the creep I was, I took to slinking to the nearest window to eavesdrop. Tale by tale, trauma by trauma, I began to solve Ruthie’s riddle. Some of the women were divorcées who’d fled wife-swapping key parties and were now scared stupid by the lack of survival skills acquired during wedded subservience. Others were young women traumatized by the “liberation” that had dragged them through addiction, poverty, prostitution, rape, or abortion.

  “Question Authority” had been the hippie slogan they’d once promulgated, but now they longed for Authority’s return, and I did sympathize. In the absence of Abigail and Bartholomew Finch, hadn’t I attached myself to ninety-two years of authority figures? Still, though, regardless of what these crackpots saw in me, it was necessary that they quit my land. So it happened in the infant days of 1972, inflamed by my lack of progress with In Our Image, that I chose to show them how they’d hitched their pioneer wagons to a bucking bronco. From what I knew of cultists, they’d be difficult to dispel, but I was in a mood bad enough to try.

  Ruthie spread the word in what, for her, passed as chipper spirits. For months she’d endured desert purgatory with a distracted artiste, without contriving a single way to bleed our odd idolators of money. Her body drummed with a physical need to take what was left of Bridey’s bounty, relocate us to civilization, and get to resuscitating Excelsior, Inc.

  Minutes before dusk on February 7, I adorned myself in Eduardo’s cowboy hat and NASA aviators and opened the front door to find the whole dusk-lit rag-tag bunch, which had grown by then to thirty, silent in rapt readiness. The Reader might expect that my long-awaited emergence would provoke applause, but it generated only gasps, a sensible reaction, seeing how, aside from the aforesaid hat and shades, I was naked.

  Even now I consider the stratagem shrewd, if requiring great feasts of swallowed pride. I needed not utter a word for them to extrapolate from my debilitated build how unsuited I was for idolization. Their bulging eyes flew first to the most garish of wounds: the gnarled arm nub; the dry hanks of flesh marking the former domains of my pecker and bollocks; the oft-stitched stomach flap. I forced myself not to cover my body as they explored my quirkiest wounds, from the thigh gash where a shattered klieg light had impaled me during my newsreel shoot, to Clown’s lovingly mauled plaything.

  I awaited the curled lips of disgust, the fumbling from purses of car keys, the moaning realizations of having steered down another of life’s dead ends. What happened instead: a young woman dropped to her knees on the hard desert floor and stared in apparent disbelief at her own unclean but intact limbs. Clean tears carved lines through her dirty cheeks. She looked, Reader, if I dare say it, grateful.

  Exaltation spread like a puddle. Some lay flat on their faces as if unworthy. Others raised arms over their heads in surrender as if hoping those who’d ruined my body would do the same to theirs. It was forty degrees at sundown; they were cold. The group had drawn tighter; they were huddled. My sweltered brain fused the qualities: these were America’s cold, huddled masses, their legend carved into the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, and like travelers passing through Ellis Island, they’d taken painful journeys to get here and wanted only that a tall, noble figure might lift a torch so that they might follow it. And they’d chosen me. No, let me restate that.

  Of course they’d chosen me.

  Enlightenment draped over me like a coronated king’s Pallium Regale. Church had lost part of his face and become a better person, then had lost mastery of voice and leg to become a near-perfect one. Why should it surprise me that while becoming less, I, too, had been becoming more? Even that I lacked genitalia felt inevitable. I was not Man, who had harried these admirers, nor Woman, who had competed with them at every turn. I was beyond gender, a newborn of sorts, a starchild conceived in the solar-storm womb of Harpocrates 7 and birthed by thousands of wet nurses at Woodstock.

  The sun was low behind me, painting vermillion the faces of the ardent. I’d anticipated this, hence the cowboy hat and aviators. What I hadn’t anticipated was the beauty with which the sun imbued them, how each smudge of dirt became the perfect application of natural cosmetics. Forget the Fifty-One, thought I. This group was smaller but growing by the day, not only ready to be saved by me but also ready—why not?—to thank me for it.

  Behind them spread the crater’s rim like mighty pterodactyl wings. Was it the meteorite’s magnetism that began pulling words from my gut? What I said during that sunset would become known as the First Address, loosely paraphrased years later in competing memoirs from two survivors. Before the calamitous climax, Dearest Reader, you will recoil at the Second Address and exclaim in horror at the Third Address. If it helps you make it through, consider it a game: count down the three addresses as you might the dropping of the atomic bomb.

  “You have suffered at the hands of men,” said I.

  My voiced cracked. Think of Church, I told myself, forcing words through his stroke-strangled throat, of Bunny, leaning bravely into the stage microphone.

  “You have suffered at the hands of women, too,” continued I. “But I want you to know something: that suffering is over. Many years ago a doctor named Cornelius Leather introduced to me the concept of a People Garden, a place where warm bodies could cool, and age, and fall apart in peaceful fellowship. I found it repulsive at the time, but I was foolish. Only right now do I see that. You and I, all of us, are part of the same garden. Dear Gød, does any of this make sense?”

  The question was for myself, but the women, as well as the few men, nodded with enthusiasm, and I continued, taking up a gospel cadence I must have learned from Reverend Tucker.

  “You have traveled far into the desert because you hunger for a garden’s sustenance. I did the same thing twenty-five years ago with a fellow called the Marlboro Man, and I found that garden once more on a city roof of a man named von Lüth. Look around you! Out here there is nothing but nature. Out here we can live as we were born to live: as animals harmonized with our earth, casting away the dogmas of decorum and physical appearance that have always enslaved us.”

  From where did this rhetoric derive? The answer thrilled me. In Our Image. From her first facelift to every subsequent nipple nip and tummy tuck, Bridey had been forced into the iron maiden of Hollywood expectations, until she was physically and emotionally minced. The script’s final scene, as described by Bridey, was an indictment of the standards that were killing her, with her female protagonist being dissected, chopped up, and sold as parcels of meat.

  Bridey had been confident that In Our Image would improve women’s lives, and her script, realized I, needn’t be a film I funded or a play I produced. It could be real life, my house and acreage the set, t
he cultists the actors. My desire to do some good on this rotten planet might at last succeed without mediators—no MGM Studios, no NASA brass, no NSTF bullhorners. Just these women in want of a purpose, and me, genderless doyen, who had a purpose to give them.

  I glanced back at the house. Miss Ness was right where I needed her to be, watching from the window, her fingers starting to twitch for their calculator. I hesitated, just for a second, before the sandstorm whisper of my followers—“Yes, that’s right, tell it”—hissed across the desert, hurrying me toward the finish before I could heed a second hiss coming from a rain-suppled book: No, Private, you got it all mixed up in your dang head.

  “Look at yourselves. The state of your clothes, your skin. You’re already beginning to let it fall away. That is why we, the Great Unwashed, gather not in some umbral underground but in Earth’s brightest spot, so that we might finally see. Let us devolve so that we might evolve. Let us be beasts together. Throw away your combs, throw away your sponges, throw away your compacts of powders and puffs. Once all of us become what the city people call ‘hideous,’ what will be left for us to do but care for our fellow hideous? That is called love. And we shall know it. For maybe the first time in our woebegone lives, we shall know it.”

  IV.

  BLAME IT ON THE DISORIENTING sunshine, as did one memoirist. Blame it on starvation, as did the other. Over the following months our twenty-seven women and three men (Ruthie had begun recording information on each) took my edict of anti-beauty to heart. Women quit wearing makeup. Everyone quit shaving. Bathing was abandoned—it was tough to do in the desert anyhow. In no time at all, the clothes, shredded and foul, came off. That’s right, Reader, in emulation of their leader, my people became nudists. Thigh-length velvet shirts, midriff-baring two-piecers, embroidered pantsuits, thick platform shoes, and huge-collared mint-green leisure suits all got tossed into a pile and burned to a black polyester glob.