The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  There was nothing erotic about my followers’ nakedness. Bare bodies simply made it easier to chart one’s progress down the anti-beautification scale. Certainly it brought our enclave notoriety. Voyeurs drove all the way to Canyon Diablo to see if the rumors were true. A small percentage of the voyeurs stayed with us, while the rest went home to spread word of the desert’s strangest mirage.

  Ruthie knew branding. Our group needed a name. So I supplied one that bridged the In Our Image storyline with the Montana ideal—the Savages. Ruthie believed repetition to be a winner, and thus our home became Savage Ranch, I became Mother-Father Savage, and each Savage was asked to hand over her IDs and replace her surname. When a visitor approached the cult, it was common to overhear a screwy round of greetings. “Welcome. I’m Maggie Savage, and this is Francine Savage, Malaika Savage, and Simran Savage.” (We were multiculturally ahead of our time—white, black, Latino, Indian, or Asian, our pot melted all of them down.)

  I believe that Ruthie’s obfuscation of the Savages’ identities was meant to complicate potential lawsuits. She needn’t have worried. The Savages protected me more ferociously than the Hell’s Angels had the Rolling Stones. When the rare father did arrive to reclaim his daughter and demand to have words, the Savages surrounded the house with a human fence and, if they were pushed first, pushed back. It confused and terrified even the most pigheaded man to be beset by naked breasts and exposed pubic hair and have none of it, for once, be a Triple-X film produced for his pleasure.

  All this the women did despite that I hadn’t appeared since the First Address. When Ruthie began needling me to meet one-on-one with each Savage, it wasn’t because she believed in my ambition of a purer society. What she wanted was to keep our school of fish from wiggling free of our net while she worked to monetize their loyalty. She had shown patience with me and deserved reciprocation. I agreed to hold private ten-minute meetings at the fatiguing rate of one per week.

  Ruthie held a lottery, and a girl my age (seventeen, that is) was the first to win the pleasure of my company. Ruthie was, as ever, fully clothed in a polyester pantsuit when she escorted the naked, wide-eyed, and trembling Tammy Savage to the back patio. I was reclined on my wicker lounger in loose trousers and halfway buttoned shirt, as well as my trademark aviators and cowboy hat, holding court much like, I suppose, a Texan Luca Testa. I indicated the opposite chair, but Tammy was overwhelmed by the fountain in a landscape so scant of water. Ruthie took Tammy’s shoulders, sat her upon the chair, and moved across the patio to monitor us from a shaded bench.

  Truth be told, I was nervous as well. Though I spied my nude followers daily from ranch apertures, never had I been so close. Tammy’s skin was mahogany from aggregations of sunburn. Her breasts looked large atop a torso withered from malnourishment. Her stomach and thighs were so coated in dirt that she looked to be wearing pantaloons.

  “So,” said I. “You . . . ah . . .”

  She took a fistful of her hair and thrust it toward me.

  “I haven’t washed it in months. And it’s softer, Mother-Father Savage, I swear it.”

  Softer, perhaps, but also a rat’s nest of grimed knots and tumbleweed-thistled mats. A gorge of revulsion rose, but I fought it back by recalling the whorled pelts of mighty buffalo and majestic pronghorn I’d stroked under the Marlboro Man’s guidance. Ruthie had been right. Tammy Savage looked happy. No, that word was lacking. The girl was conflagrant with joy.

  And I was responsible! I’d done this!

  “Beautiful,” said I. “Your fingernails as well.”

  Tammy Savage dropped her hair-knot and stared at her nails so intently that her eyes crossed. The nails’ edges were brown and ragged, the plates calved, the cuticles shredded.

  “I used to paint them,” mused she.

  I recalled when the scandalous style had come into vogue, pointed out to me by an exuberant Church in a Manhattan gin joint. I nodded for her to continue.

  “I had favorite brands and everything. Cutex, Clairol, Revlon. Favorite colors, too. Red Berry, Coral Sand—oh, Bright Cocoa was my favorite of all. But it’s meaningless, isn’t it? The whole circle? Looking like they say you should so you can be pretty, so you can get a job, so you can make money, so you can buy more things to look even more like they say you should? It’s just like you told us. The entire order breaks down if you just let go of looks and let yourself become . . .”

  Again I nodded her on.

  “A Savage,” said she.

  Tears sprung to her eyes, though, with no mascara, nothing was in danger of running. Tammy Savage took a deep breath, her bare chest rising, her heart beating visibly beneath underfed flesh, her nostrils flaring hungrily when a breeze brought her my odor.

  “We’ll be animals,” promised she, “all of us, just the way you want us.”

  In subsequent weeks I met Anita Savage, a mid-fifties woman who itemized for me every dirt-filled wrinkle she no longer treated with creams or hid behind foundation. Beverly Savage was twenty-five and struck silent with awe, though that didn’t stop her from touring me through her body hair, thick enough now that it harbored burrs and small twigs. Rhonda Savage was in her late thirties and had what I took to be a speech impediment, until she peeled back her lips to show me the teeth she’d stopped brushing, several of them orange with plaque and suppurating from purple gums.

  What my ego took from such blind allegiance is obvious. But what did Ruthie get? Plenty, Dearest Reader—Excelsior, Inc. was back in the black. Our small but steady influx of devotees were willing to sacrifice everything to Mother-Father Savage, and Ruthie took full advantage, explaining to them how the renunciation of societal norms included the relinquishment of worldly goods. This was no Woodstock; admittance was not free. The price of entry to Savage Ranch was the turning over of jewelry, heirlooms, wallets, checkbooks, Social Security payouts, and deeds to home and property. Ruthie promised to “get rid of” these tainted effects. She did, in a manner of speaking, absorbing the assets into the business account she’d set up in Flagstaff.

  Only Ruthie’s selling off their vehicles troubled me, for without them the Savages had no means of leaving, and I didn’t like to think of myself as a warden. Ruthie kept the ranch’s only car, our Ford Fairlane (the cheapskate had had it repaired), and before she took her weekly supply trips to town, she’d gather everyone’s mail—missives reassuring loved ones, I was sure, that they were fine, their leader was righteous, and that there was no cause for concern.

  Ruthie, though, saw no upside to these letters. They would only rile family and friends. Safer that the Savages drop from the face of the Earth, so she furtively filed the mail inside a spare room I came to call the Dead Letter Office. Bridey had maintained a similar space inside which she’d kept the materials for In Our Image. What was with women and their secret chambers? Some nights I’d prowl the house and long to read gushing laudation about myself, but the Dead Letter Office was always locked and Ruthie wasn’t sharing the key. I’d need an ax to get in, which didn’t seem worth the effort.

  On New Year’s Day 1973, the Savages began to develop. My meeting that evening was with Sharon Savage, who’d drawn poorly in Ruthie’s lottery and was the last of our inaugural round of meetings. Sharon, however, looked serene enough when she arrived at the patio, situating her naked, formerly corn-fed but now gangling forty-year-old body on the chair and giving me a sly grin as if we were in longstanding cahoots. By then I was old hat at one-on-ones and knew the bits by which mares could be led.

  “I am eager to hear all about you,” cued I.

  There was an established playbook. Sharon would begin with how she’d been brought up in Indiana or Idaho on the right side of Gød. Her parents hadn’t been perfect, but they’d been good enough. But all the death in Vietnam, the injustices suffered by minorities, the Watergate stories suggesting President Nixon was a criminal—well, it’d become too much. Sharon would tell me how she’d felt her rope unravel from America’s dock. Until, that is, she’d hear
d how that martyr fellow who’d disappeared in ’69 had set up camp in the desert and scrubbed the complications of society down to bestial basics. That was when she had begun to feel the return of hope.

  Except Sharon Savage ignored the script. She perched her butt on the edge of the chair and preened like a woman trying to catch the eye of a fellow across the bar, fluffing her mangy hair, arching her filth-striped back, and splaying her right hand across her stretchmarked stomach. She craved compliments, and I saw no reason to withhold them.

  “Look at you. So animalistic, you’ll soon walk on all fours.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea, Mother-Father Savage.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are filled with so much insight for someone so young.”

  “Again, I thank you.”

  “It’s all any of us want, you know, to be like you in every way.”

  “In triplicate, my thanks.”

  Again, a smile just shy of flirtatious. When I failed to properly reciprocate, she pouted and angled her shoulder so I would notice that she hid something behind her back. I glanced at Ruthie, who was distracted counting down the minutes on her watch, and I decided I’d play along.

  “Pray tell, Sharon, what you have there.”

  She batted eyes bloodshot from swirling dust. “Do you really want to see? I think you’ll like it.”

  “Show me.” I was tiring of the game. “Mother-Father insists.”

  Being ordered was all she’d wanted. Her skin prickled into excited goose bumps before she stretched out her left hand for me to see, just as I’d once stretched my taxidermied paw to Bridey. The hand was good and dirty, like the Savages liked it, and in fine shape, save for the pinkie, which was a withered black reed. I ignored the woman’s rancid breath and leaned closer. It appeared as if the finger had been bashed between rocks, again and again, until it was a flattened tab of skin. From splits in the skin I could make out pulverized bone, whips of dead tendon, the stringy ulnar nerve, and a dry brown artery.

  “Just like you,” enthused Sharon.

  I discovered her staring at my hand, blighted, of course, due to everything from Mr. Avery’s fishing hook to the black singe of the Woodstock match.

  Sharon held up her hand. The pinkie, having no intact bone, wilted.

  “Watch,” purred she.

  With the dexterity of a farm wife who’d snapped a million green beans, she pinched the dead finger and tore it off. I gasped—a rare and holy sound, or so I gathered from Sharon’s obvious glee. Disjoined from hand, the finger was not recognizable as such; it looked like an earthworm after being baked by the sun. She dropped it at my feet.

  Ruthie knew how to interpret my sounds. She was at the chair in seconds, conducing Sharon Savage from the chair while reciting boilerplate about what a special meeting we’d had, and Happy New Year to you, Sharon—watch the step here as we exit. I was left alone with the helix of skin and that damn book of damn poetry, the pages of which shivered in an arid zephyr.

  It’s supposed to be your sacrifice, Private, not theirs.

  “Shut up,” hissed I. “I’m not a private anymore. You can’t—”

  Ruthie clopped in on business heels, clutching a dustpan. She kneeled, and with admirable poise, brushed the pinkie onto the plastic before standing straight.

  “That,” said she, “was something.”

  “You are a serial understater, Miss Ness.”

  “Their dedication is . . . it’s remarkable.”

  “It is rather difficult to talk to you with that . . . finger there.”

  “You see what they’re doing? They’re remaking themselves in your image.”

  These words, so near to the title of Bridey’s script, fastened to me like a cobra and pumped its venom into my veins. I rustled up the binoculars I’d had Ruthie buy in Flagstaff and, in a behavior unbecoming a sovereign, poked the lenses from under curtains to follow Sharon Savage as she, over ensuing days, showed off her homemade amputation. The face of each Savage cycled through the same reactions: shock, bewilderment, fascination, and admiration.

  Eventually batteries would run out and the Savages would be cut off from the world, but for now, a few radios remained and anyone listening could tell that the times were historic. The World Trade Center, beneath which I scribble away at these pages, was dedicated, and Nixon’s so-called Enemies List was published, including among its 823 entries an elusive radical called Zebulon X. But you wouldn’t know it from our second round of meetings, where the only topic was Sharon Savage, whom the Savages hailed as a colonist of conviction, while monitoring me for signs of disagreement.

  They’d find none. Sharon’s willful dismemberment, I’d decided, extended the anti-beauty concept rather nicely. My understanding of our cult’s divine text—In Our Image—was forever evolving, and I became convinced that ownership over one’s own pain was the noblest characteristic. To ensure my analysis wasn’t undermined by the resident naysayer, Burt Churchwell, I took A Ghost Rolls Over from its shelf, stuffed it into a box, and buried that box in a storage room.

  Hesitancy no longer diluted my orations. I believed what I said, every word. To Tammy Savage I explained: “This is the land of the free, they told us. That’s a laugh. I had to buy this property. I had to write checks to get the well dug. I had to fill out money orders for air conditioning. That’s land, water, and air—the fundamentals of life turned into gross commodities. But there is one element in this world for which they can never charge us. Pain—free and available by the bucketful.”

  To Anita Savage I explained: “Once upon a time, I was a man, and like all men, I let the world be my disciplinary master. The result was that physical pain is lost to me. But you, my friend, still have that gift, and it is too precious to squander. Don’t let pain come from sources that would barbarize your soul—senseless war, domestic abuse, and on, and on. To choose the source of your pain is the only true freedom you have.”

  To Beverly Savage, Rhonda Savage, and beyond I offered further reflections on the euphoria of suffering: all of our parts were infected by a disease called humanity, and thus it was our right, if not duty, to remove them. These lectures were carried back to the flock and repeated. Others began to wound themselves—a snip-snip here, a poke-poke there—after which Savages would gather to ooh the glorious running blood and ahh the sublime mauling of flesh. Often they’d be asked to prod the wound, and at the hiss of pain, oh, how they would cheer! The annalists who’d dub the seventies the “Me Decade” for its generation of self-obsessors should have seen my Savages. Their every infinitesimal injury was cataloged in diaries, wee little Revelation Almanacs, you might say, tracking meat etiquette’s final strain.

  Ruthie’s dispassionate daily briefings took on subtle notes of surprise, even respect; she’d never believed the listless Zebulon Finch could become so effective a leader. She buried these feelings of shy fondness as you might toxic trash, and got on with the briefings, which now included medical complications. A woman who’d cauterized her reproductive organs had gone feverish with infection and was last seen shambling off toward the mountains. One of the men had castrated himself in emulation, only to be discovered dead in his tent, as bloodless as if drained by a dingo. Sharon Savage’s entire left hand, for reasons obscure, had gone as dead as her former pinkie. I could take no firm grasp of any of it. Should I be troubled? Or should I be gratified, as Ruthie was, at the extent of the dedication?

  Blowing across my patio one day was a patch torn from someone’s bag or jacket. It was the logo of the Women’s Movement, a Venus symbol circumscribed around the same black fist used by the Black Hand, Black Panthers, and who knew what other losers of history. The patch was blotted brown, having been used to staunch bleeding. I fought back a queasy feeling and reminded myself that I was helping women help themselves, nothing more or less. I called out to Ruthie as she was preparing for her supply run and asked her to buy bulk containers of gauze and styptic. She sighed indulgently—I thought she might pat m
e upon the head—and said that she already had a closet full.

  V.

  WE BETTER THAN DOUBLED OUR numbers in five months, and credit went to a Los Angeles disc jockey known as Wailin’ Wendy Winkler, whose nightly rock-and-talk show, Future Shock from KLXB 93.3, was fixed on the dial of anyone whose tastes were refined beyond that of Barbra Streisand and Olivia Newton-John. Winkler was a leather-clad motorcycle mama given to serious reporting, and for weeks the Savages who gathered around the ranch’s last working radio buzzed about how Winkler had cut short an interview with John Cale—a “crashing bore,” she’d said—to rant on this cult in the Arizona desert where, rumor had it, chicks were cutting themselves to pieces.

  Callers wanted her to check it out, and so she did, raising pyres of dust as her lime-green Harley-Davidson roared down our road one Friday in March of 1974. Like most DJs, she didn’t look like she sounded (she was a burly forty-five, not a minxy twenty-six), but when she shouted for me past the Savages’ human shield, her voice was the same tar-and-gravel growl that kept listeners in thrall. Ruthie hated her on sight—she was alpha bitch at Savage Ranch!—and told Wailin’ Wendy Winkler that Mother-Father Savage didn’t talk to the press.

  Whistling affably, Winkler unpacked a banged-up tape recorder, handheld mike, and duct-taped headphones, and commenced interviewing Savages, whose wan cheeks found blood enough to blush. Ruthie, unwilling to summon police, gnashed her jaws while I snooped from windows, until, caught peeking by Winkler herself, I fled to the patio. Winkler circled to the back of the house and climbed the fence enough to poke her sunglassed, bandana-covered head over the top, along with the microphone.