The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “C’mon, Mother-Father, gimme a break and talk to me.”

  I hid myself behind the fountain.

  “Relax,” said she. “You don’t look much worse than the junkies I’ve had in the studio.”

  “What is it you wish to know, Miss Winkler?”

  “Like, for starters, what the fuck are you doing out here?”

  “I haven’t hurt a soul.”

  “This is the seventies. You know what happens when all you keep around are sycophants, right?”

  “If Miss Ness finds you on our fence, you’re done for.”

  “That little tart doesn’t scare me.”

  “When cornered, she sprays quite a stink.”

  “Your ladies tell me you have an aura. I don’t see it.”

  “They’re not my ladies.”

  “Maybe they mean a smell? I can smell you from here.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  “Look, man—or woman, or neither, or whatever. You either tell me what you’re up to out here or I’m gonna make something up.”

  I’d met other journalists in my day, notably Kip McKenzie of New York Herald Tribune and Ed Mann of Hearst Metrotone. Both had been willing to falsify, to doll up, to blackmail to get the “news” they wanted. I glared at Winkler.

  “You really want to know?”

  “I’m in the desert dangling from your fence, aren’t I?”

  Carefully I advanced until the head of the mike was inches away from my face. Winkler managed to get her headphones on without falling from her perch. Some of my most effective applications of la silenziosità (General Hazard, Merle) had been done with a verbal assist, and I leaned in, touching my dry lips to the foam windscreen. The miracle of modern amplifiers, thought I, would turn my soft words into crashing waves.

  “You’ve fought hard to get where you are,” whispered I. “Men have fought you at every turn. It has hurt. Over and over it has hurt. You’ve taken this pain inside you. Grown it from embryo to fetus to child, and yet it goes unborn, draining from you the life that should be yours. You acknowledge this to yourself when your show is over, when you walk from a dark studio across a dark parking lot to a dark car to a dark home. It does not have to be this way, Miss Winkler. All of the Savages are capable midwives; we can caesarean the pain. The leather you wear, those headphones, that motorcycle helmet, all of it is armor you won’t need anymore, not out here.”

  Prim footfalls told me that Ruthie had burst into the patio, but I held up my hand to keep her from interrupting. Winkler’s microphone had dropped, and her jaw had done likewise. She slumped off the fence, disappearing from view, and I heard the plastic crack of broken equipment. I looked at Ruthie, anticipating congratulation. She only frowned, pissed I’d let off the outlander with nothing worse than some busted gear.

  But Wailin’ Wendy Winkler spent the rest of the weekend at Savage Ranch, and when she peeled away Monday morning, her naked flesh was white fire shooting across a copper canyon.

  That night’s Future Shock, the final episode, was a three-hour soliloquy on the enlightenment she’d found among the Savages. She signed off using a name with which her listeners were unfamiliar—Wailin’ Wendy Savage—and left the final hour of her show to the playing of Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets LP in its entirety, during which, or so went radioland lore, she strode out of the KLXB studio as naked as she’d arrived, mounted her Harley, and sped east toward the desert, never to return again.

  Wailin’ Wendy’s most ardent fans were girls and women, a not insignificant fraction of whom followed their idol into Canyon Diablo, swelling our population to seventy-four by summer—and, yes, I was proud that, at the end of their respective ropes, they’d chosen me to seek out. That number didn’t take into account our two known deaths and three disappearances, plenty enough to bring the Man (to use a Scheinbergism) to our door. But the patrolmen found no evidence that anyone was trespassing, was being treated improperly, or had been coerced into anything. Hell, even some of the fuzz were hip enough to know Wailin’ Wendy.

  That doesn’t mean they joined us for tea and cakes. Several patrolmen broke rank to accuse me of operating a leper colony and to promise they wouldn’t rest until they got my chop-shop shut down. Ruthie’s impassive mask only incensed them; it was Wailin’ Wendy’s cool heckling, honed during interviews with rock-and-roll royalty, that chased them away. Wendy’s considerable celebrity among the Savages waxed, as did Ruthie’s loathing of her new rival.

  The best the pigs could do was haul out a musty old obscenity ordinance. So Ruthie bought white bedsheets and handed them out, and thereafter the Savages wore makeshift togas that turned us into an outpost of ghosts, or supposedly went the rumors among children of the bordering Navajo Nation, who believed us to be yee naaldlooshii, or skin-walkers, humans able to transform into animals. We were, after all, trying.

  In June I took what began as a typical one-on-one with Jasmine Savage, known at the ranch for drilling holes into her body in emulation of my bullet wounds. For this meeting, however, Jasmine had tucked into her toga a pinched-faced infant recently born on the premises and christened (if you insist on using that word) Demetrius Savage. I did not cotton to nurslings, but as Ruthie began prodding Jasmine to leave, she whipped around and made a bold, if mad, request.

  “Would you bite my baby?”

  Only Ruthie’s astonished pause told me that I’d heard right. That and the muffled sound of a pile of boxes collapsing in the storage room—ghosts rolling over, no doubt, as Stavros’s book toppled to the floor, spine cracked and pages spread.

  Merry Christmas, Private!

  “You’ve had a very special meeting,” said Ruthie. “It’s time to—”

  “Because he’s sick.” Suddenly Jasmine was shaking so much, I believed she might drop the child, compounding his woe. “I know we don’t believe in doctors. They steal away the pain that belongs to us; I understand that. But Demetrius has a bad fever, real bad; his whole body is burning up.”

  “You understand,” said Ruthie, “that you’re not confined here?”

  Though she was, really. One didn’t just stroll out of a desert.

  “I don’t want to leave, Mother-Father. My home is here with you. If you bit my baby, though, I think it might help, or even if it doesn’t, even if he dies—which I know is all right, we all have to die and it’s a wonderful thing that we have the opportunity, you’ve taught us that—but even if he dies, maybe he’ll die like you did and become something even better.”

  You used to be a good runner, Private. Now run!

  I’d learned about book burning from the Nazis; Stavros’s book was next.

  “Tell me, Jasmine,” said I, “where you got this notion.”

  Only then did she become embarrassed, staring at her dirty feet and shrugging, though a direct question from Mother-Father could hardly be ignored. Her response was highly unexpected. Not a month before joining Savage Ranch, she and her friends had visited a Laguna Beach drive-in. The title of the film they’d seen she could not recall, but she swore it had portrayed people like me, dead yet alive, who, through bites, had turned others into their kind. Upon my pressing, she mumbled the main thing she remembered, a box-office gimmick offering a fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy in case viewers suffered heart attacks from fright.

  It was good information; in exchange, I gave her child a harder look. He had a gray tint. I suspected he would not last the week. Batty though Jasmine seemed, I didn’t know if I could take the night-after-night sobbing of a bereaved mother, and besides, I was here to help these women, wasn’t I? With significant emotional disaccord I beckoned her closer. Ruthie glared her disapproval while Jasmine unwrapped her child from the toga.

  Demetrius was a bobble-headed thing with far too little baby fat. Eventually I settled upon his foot and, with great care, put my teeth to a thin band of skin across the outer arch. Into what unpredictable situations were leaders thrust! I bit down.

  The drawn blood wa
s nominal, but spotted effectively upon Jasmine’s sheet as she was escorted away, blubbering gratitude. The blood tasted diluted, nothing like the strong, sharp tang of the split lips of my youth. As Mother-Father Savage disliked negative thoughts, I chose the distraction of destroying, once and for all, A Ghost Rolls Over. Strangely, I couldn’t find it. The storage room had been rearranged, and rather than believe the book had waddled away like a crab, I presumed Ruthie had pitched the rain-puffed piece of poetic prattle into the trash. I allowed my shoulders to relax, then my mind. No book, no Church, no one left to try to tell me what a leader shouldn’t do.

  I told Ruthie to begin bringing home copies of Flagstaff newspapers. I did not tell her why. This film of which Jasmine had spoken, I wished to see it, and nowhere were drive-in circuits better advertised than the local classifieds. Luck, for once, deigned to smile. The picture in question turned out to be a midnight-movie mainstay, and only six weeks passed before I spotted a two-inch advertisement for the Hi-Way Drive-In promoting a gimmick of their own: “Important! Death Certificate Must Be Signed before Being Admitted!” The movie was part of a double bill and was called Night of the Living Dead.

  I felt weak, dug out my Excelsior, held it to my chest.

  What was I but the living dead?

  What was my sunlit world but unending night?

  It had to be providence, courtesy of some being more charitably inclined toward me than Gød. There was no telling how long the Hi-Way Drive-In would run the film; I ambushed Ruthie outside the Dead Letter Office. She gasped, plunging the key into a pantsuit pocket. Forget the key—I demanded access to the Ford Fairlane. She said no way. I declared that there was a picture show I must see. She smirked—a picture show?—and said I must be joking. The tennis continued until I skipped to the tiebreaker. Wailin’ Wendy Savage had kept her Harley, and if Mother-Father asked her for a ride to town, she’d say yes, wouldn’t she?

  Game, set, match.

  As Ruthie, plenty crabby about it, rolled the Fairlane down the sandy road (I hid in the backseat so as not to set off a panic at my departure), I fought to control a bubbling excitement, not only for the rare townward jaunt but for the film itself. Historically I’d favored lavish, expensive epics, and yet I was certain, before seeing one frame of film, that this bargain-budget quickie would be the most important motion picture I’d ever see. I take no pleasure, Dearest Reader, none whatsoever, in telling you that I was right.

  VI.

  THE HI-WAY DRIVE-IN RAN FILM at nightfall, with the clack of the projector serving as track-and-field starter pistol for the competitive groping in jalopies to every side. Ruthie ignored the steamy windows as she’d ignored the entirety of the 1960s. I’d insisted she buy a bin of popcorn, thinking it might foster the high times about which I’d once fantasized: Junior cheering big-screen heroes, Franny chanting for Jujubes, and Mrs. White indulging her brood. Ruthie, however, ingested popcorn kernels with all the relish of a conveyor belt. I sighed, reached across her to crank the speaker clipped to her window—she recoiled, back to avoiding my touch—and honed in on the screen’s concessions-stand conga line of frolicking frankfurters, skipping soda pops, and cavorting candies.

  The filmstrip jerked. A loud brass note rattled our speaker in time with the feature presentation’s opening shot: a black-and-white image of a country road along which moseyed a single automobile. Ninety minutes later, closing credits would insist that this countryside was near Pittsburgh, but I knew I’d seen it in dozens of places all over America, from Boston to Xenion to Wichita to Woodstock to Flagstaff, and I could have told you where the road led before the movie did: absolutely nowhere.

  The plot of Night of the Living Dead is uncomplicated. Seven strangers take refuge in a farmhouse against dead bodies that have returned to life to eat people; as Jasmine Savage had indicated, their bites turn the living into the living dead. The film devours clichés. Our heroine never rebounds from catatonia. Our hero is bloodthirstier than our villain. Our villain’s survival plan is the smartest one. Everyone dies. The whole film is an extension of that first shot, a road to nowhere, and the picture climaxes in an orgy of demolition, carnivorism, and fire, and even make-out kings and their fast queens came up for air to whimper.

  When credits reiterated the director’s name as George A. Romero, a mote of knowledge from my Little Italy days surfaced. “Romero” meant “one on a religious quest,” and my brain, obsessed now with destiny and fate, made a leap. Like von Lüth’s forerunner Madame Blavatsky and her coded accounts of the Stanzas of Dzyan, Mr. Romero had hidden messages inside his work, and I, like von Lüth’s Enigma engineers, need only unlock the code to understand.

  I demanded an encore two nights later, and again one night after that. When the film dropped from the Hi-Way marquee, I moped until it made midnight returns to the Starlite Auto, Moonlight Drive-Up, Big Twin Open Air, and Twilite All-Weather Come-and-Get-It. Unwilling to trust me not to abscond with our motor vehicle, Ruthie attended each show, muttering all the while how Wailin’ Wendy was no doubt using the time to usurp control. Ruthie distracted herself by taking over the Fairlane’s backseat, not for the carnal gymnastics for which it had been designed but to work dark arts upon her bank books.

  By Halloween, when Night of the Living Dead never played at fewer than two houses at a time, I’d become the film’s foremost scholar, logging details I was certain that no one else—certainly not the randy youth who were the picture’s target demographic—had noticed. If Romero’s masterwork still exists in your time, Reader, pause here, load it into your hologram player or robotic eyeball, and cue it to eleven minutes and thirty-six seconds. All set? Now, there’s our heroine Barbra, stunned after the murder of her brother, edging into the farmhouse’s trophy room. The camera whip-pans to the right. Easy now! Advance the film slowly. Look there, in the first few frames of the shot of a taxidermied warthog head. Do you see it?

  I had to view it twenty times at regular speed before I was certain of what I saw. It is a hand—Mr. Romero’s, no doubt—pulling away from the camera lens. How could Romero, an artist of surgical exactitude, master of light and shadow, overlook this flub? I shall tell you; it is not a flub. It is a skeleton key offered to elite viewers. With this literal sleight of hand, Romero instructs us to look past the facade of movement, lighting, and soundtrack, all three elements of which, at that moment, are firing full-blast. The prop over which he chooses to slip us this key is also symbolic. A warthog head, followed by deer heads—beautiful animals, all of them slain, and all of them finding avengers in the living dead.

  What other doors does this key unlock? Minute 13:57: “[There will] probably be a lot more of them as soon as they find out about us,” remarks our male lead, predicting the Savages’ desperate flocking to Canyon Diablo. Minute 36:35: “Things that look like people but act like animals,” says a TV anchor, synopsizing what Savage Ranch had become. Minute 46:30: Crude makeup cannot hide that one of the living dead, preposterously, is played by one of the film’s lead actresses, emphasizing the blurred line between humans and animals that Savages straddled. What I came to believe, Reader, with my whole dead heart, was that Romero had made his film exclusively to transmit messages to me about the Savages. Night of the Living Dead wasn’t just Romero’s blessing for what I was doing.

  It was his instruction.

  The film’s fictional newsmen call the living dead “ghouls,” but this is a feint. Ghouls, as defined circa 1974, were lone madmen who dug up coffins to feed upon corpses. Romero’s living dead were, first of all, dead, and second of all, an entire single-minded movement. Explorations into other midnight movies (with bellyaching Ruthie in tow) confirmed that Night of the Living Dead had spearheaded its own subgenre, and its beleaguerers had claimed for themselves a sharper word: “zombies.”

  I knew the term only in relation to the Haitian voodoo sampled so disastrously in Dr. Leather’s lab. I harangued Ruthie until she retrieved library books on the subject, all of which fed me what I was alr
eady determined to swallow. It would prove most regrettable for me, and downright disastrous to my followers, that I learned that “zombie” derived from the African word “nzambi,” which means—hold on to your hat, Dearest Reader—“Gød.”

  Imagine how this fact wormed into my cerebellum! The zombie flicks I viewed were largely incompetent, but the canon’s fealty to Romero’s criterion spoke tomes about the strength of his tenets, the most central of which was cannibalism. Zombies ate people; those people became zombies; those zombies, too, ate people. Romero obviously (obviously!) was equating zombies’ devouring of family and friends with Christian Eucharist. What if, speculated I, history had sanitized its Sunday School stories? What if the disciples hadn’t eaten transubstantiated placeholders for Jesus’s body and blood but his actual body and blood? Didn’t it make more sense? Didn’t his disciples want Jesus inside of them?

  “My people,” greeted I.

  The Second Address occurred on November 9, 1974, three months from the day that Dick Nixon resigned and left Americans desperate for a leader, perhaps even a one-armed guru in a sweltering desert. From beneath my cowboy hat and behind my aviators I smiled at the happy followers that Ruthie—again looking to me with something close to admiration—had convened. Seeing that I was once again naked, they dropped their togas in solidarity, proudly revealing their topographies of scars. As during the First Address, I was moved by their beauty.

  “I know all of you so well,” said I. “Coretta Savage—you’re right in front, and, yes, I do think those cupped hands will help compensate for the removed ears. What did those ears ever hear anyway besides news of unremitting horror? Jeannie Savage—so nice to see you, your belly as spotted as that of a kitten, except your spots are excavations, aren’t they, deep as the mine shafts of Barringer’s crater? And, Sofia, I think your sisters will agree that, as lovely as was your bronze skin before, it is prettier a gristled pink. Was it a cheese grater you used? Most industrious, my dear.”