The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  IX.

  THE CROWBAR FOUND ITS PURPOSE. I wiggled the tip into the seam between door and jamb, and because I felt no pain, hammered my palm at the tool’s other end until I’d forced a breach. From there it was a matter of physics. I applied my weight to the better side of the fulcrum until smooth, dispassionate wood broke into a cuckoo grin of splinters. That left only two locks to be defeated. One hour of vigorous swinging later, the door, what was left of it, yawned open.

  The Dead Letter Office was no larger than expected, the size of a one-car garage, yet filled with none of Mr. White’s cobwebbed do-it-yourself tools, backyard grills, or winter sleds. Ominously unadorned chests, boxes, bins, and bags were stacked about, often at chest level, suggesting a volume of collected material it’d take weeks to sift through instead of the mere hours I had before Ruthie presumably returned. Regardless, I barged down the cleared path. Herein were secrets; I’d been hearing their whispers for years.

  Atop a table to the left was a wooden box showing indications of regular use, so I started there, attacking it with the crowbar until the lock cracked. The contents surprised me with their bright colors. Collected here were the confiscated identification items of Savages past and present. Most featured photos of happy faces, for each signified a subject who’d just been permitted to drive a car, start college, or begin a new job. None of the shining, flash-bulb eyes could foresee of a future of gobbling gore from the desert floor.

  I threw shut the lid and plied the crowbar to a massive adjacent trunk. Inside I discovered fantastic depths of mail, a full decade of it, each envelope complete with a Savage Ranch return address and a stamp unblemished by postmark. Nothing extraordinary there; I knew Ruthie only pretended to truck mail to Flagstaff. What was extraordinary was my desire to read the letters. Gabe’s death had defeated my deafness, banished my blindness, and I wanted to hear and see everything.

  I plucked a letter from halfway down the paper soup. It was from a woman called Chelsea Savage. I remembered her, a diminutive gentlewoman in her fifties bashful about nudity and too timid to say much during meetings, and yet a fleet adopter of anthropophagy, ever giving of her breast and thigh meat and famously fond of fingers, which she’d gnaw on like jerky. She’d expired of blood loss in 1980, but in this letter was vividly alive. Addressed to Chelsea’s daughter, it marked an attempt to explain her decision to move to the desert.

  In that she failed; the cockamamie choice could never sound rational. In reminding me of life’s intricate, barbed, and contradictory thrills, however, she succeeded. Her five-page letter swerved from jolly recollections of a swimsuit faux pas and anecdotes about a farting cat to stark confessions regarding the husband whose death had set off Chelsea’s crisis. Even the grapey shade of ink was poignant, as was the curlicue handwriting, the wide-ruled paper, and the four or five odd folds required to fit the letter inside an envelope.

  Hundreds if not thousands of such letters existed. One after another I tore them open until the fallen paper resembled the shag-carpet fad that had passed us by. The whole day slipped away, not that I cared, so bracing was the cold, blue sanity pouring through my body like antifreeze. At length I forced myself to stop. I gazed into the trunk, scheming about how I might take it with me. My dead extremities tingled. Yes—I was leaving, I’d decided just like that, and right away, for once I was gone, my followers would begin to leave, too, and the Savages could cut their losses, if you are in the mood to excuse the grisly pun.

  I shoveled mail back into the trunk. I was shutting it—fate, a game of millimeters!—when I noticed that the inner lid had a cubbyhole. I operated the sliding-door, and a bound parcel of letters dropped into the padding of correspondence below. Ruthie had kept these letters together with twine, though this was not the most notable detail. The envelopes’ ragged edges showed that these letters, unlike the others, had been opened and read. It was a mystery best solved later, but I’d observed fish long enough to know how hard it was to resist biting tantalizing lures.

  My teeth and fingers had the twine snapped before I could think better. These were not outgoing letters from Savages. They were incoming mail, addressed not to Excelsior, Inc., Ruthie Ness, or even Mother-Father Savage, but to Zebulon Finch, a name I hadn’t seen or heard since Hershel Harel had pulled Bridey’s will from his valise. Each envelope, and there were thirty-six, was addressed in the same crude squiggle. The epistolarian’s name was absent, but the return address was Tranquility, Washington. From the oldest postmarked envelope I yanked the entrails.

  Mr Zebulon Finch I am like you I am Dead but alive also please come see me I live in Tranquility it is in Washington also I live in a Country Home and there is Room for you here also

  R

  A barely literate run-on sentence, poxy of penmanship and sorely in want of punctuation—but what a message! I braced myself as the Dead Letter Office turned upside-down. Could it be that my century-long presumption that I walked the earth alone was incorrect? Could there be another out there as damned as I? R was obviously female; untrained though she was as a writer, her alphabet carried the balletic shapes rare to men’s cumbersome paws. Imagine it: a woman counterpart, waiting for me at a home deep enough into the country that two creatures like us could exist away from the living with whom, it had become clear, we ought not to have dealings.

  The Excelsior ticked so hard that it fibrillated my clay heart. I gasped, and just that quickly came to a purer understanding of why Mary Shelley’s monster had forced Victor Frankenstein to create a mate upon his laboratory slab. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, quoth the monster, and will be content with the same fare.

  The existence of another like myself so surpassed anything for which I’d ever hoped that, for a time, I could but hang on while the Dead Letter Office continued to roll. But spring to action I did, for the letter had been sent in 1975, a bewildering eight years prior. I raced through the others, hoping that R hadn’t lost faith. She hadn’t; the letters had continued to come, once every three or four months, always with the same return address. Twinges of impatience were perceptible in the writing, but never anger. Instead, R had tried to prove her bona fides by describing what dead innards felt like or the smell of slowly spoiling flesh, all of it poorly written, but all of it true down to the finest detail.

  Her tone wavered only in the final letter, postmarked one whole year ago. R’s authorial voice was so terminologically understated that the sole sentence screamed.

  There is no more Time you must visit Now I cant keep Country Home clean

  R

  My bleat banged about the small room. What if my counterpart, the only one tightfisted Gød had ever allowed me, had been forced from her country home? Again I thought of Victor Frankenstein, who, disgusted by his female creation, ripped the creature to shreds, a brutality at which the monster reacted “with a howl of devilish despair.” I gathered R’s letters, lashed them back together, and turned toward the door.

  And then I swiveled back. Just as my eye had caught the trunk’s lid compartment, it caught something else in Ruthie’s House of Horrors. Sitting central upon the back shelf was the golden lockbox she’d acquired at the height of martyrdom profits and had toted about like a baby until the spoils of Savage Ranch had rendered the small container inadequate. How tightly she’d clutched the box to her bosom. How she’d caressed it half-asleep on buses or trains.

  To pay for my sins, I took the box and crowbarred it.

  Cash had long since been moved to a Flagstaff bank. The box, though, wasn’t empty. Inside was a scattering of old documents. There were several birth certificates ranging in antiquity from white to yellow to gray. Another was degree credentials from Harvard College, or so I believed, for I did not dare fully unfold it, so brittle had the paper become. Most jarring, there was a black-and-white photograph of an unsmiling Ruthie at roughly age ten, holding hands with a dour woman I didn’t recognize and yet, somehow, did.

  When I replaced the photograph, I heard a c
link. I dug my fingertips past the documents and felt a cold piece of metal. I extracted it and held it before my eyes. It was a ring. Common sense suggested an heirloom, but it was constructed of the shoddiest tin, was without gem, and was rusted from decades of poor storage. Yet it was slippery in my palm as if creeping toward my right ring finger, which made sense, seeing as how that’s where it had lived for fifteen years.

  It was the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring.

  The horror upon seeing it emerge from Ruthie’s lockbox after seventy years was absolute. Little Johnny Grandpa had given the Pageant of Health trinket to me in 1898 in the hopes that it might help me recover my speech, and though it hadn’t, it had done something far greater, serving as receipt that even I, runaway, criminal, murderer, beer-guzzler, serial abandoner, could make a friend who believed there to be good inside him. The last time I’d seen it had been the night of the Cockshuts’ dinner with Dr. Leather, when I’d left it on my nightstand to satisfy the doctor’s dress code. Upon fleeing that night, I couldn’t risk climbing three stories to retrieve it.

  Which meant someone had found it. And saved it. And kept it like a vow.

  Jason Stavros’s A Ghost Rolls Over hadn’t been destroyed after all. The book was right here, somewhere inside the Dead Letter Office, of course it was, for Ruthie Ness, it had become apparent, threw nothing away, not ever, and was not just some random entrepreneur but someone who knew far more about me than she’d revealed, and it did not behoove me to linger about to learn more. Church’s ghost leapt from its poetry casket, whisper-shouting as one does when delivering orders close to the German line.

  You gotta move, Private! On the double!

  I slid the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring onto my finger, tough to do with one arm, but oh, it fit nicely, so nicely; it was as if I myself had fit back into the world.

  Merry Christmas! Enough with dang jewelry, Private!

  I looked around for Stavros’s book, but Church was nuts, shouting for me to get my butt in gear, and this time it wasn’t only him, it was the whole Third Battalion, not just the codgers who’d been alive to sign the book but also those who’d died in the field: Mouse Bartosiewicz, Peanut Capella, Professor Ehrenström, Piano O’Hannigan, rising from their graves to save my thankless corpse one more time.

  You’ll never make corporal, acting like this!

  You want to be ripped to smithereens like the rest of us, soldier?

  Private Finch, you lazy lollygagger, you gotta do what the Skipper says and move out!

  Each voice was but a shard of my own sanity—Reader, I know that!—but I clenched my fist, felt the old invigorating bite of the ring, and decided that the fallen would be honored. I’d leave the ghost-book behind and save the Savages who hadn’t yet died from their allegiance, thereby saving myself, and only then would I seek out the mysterious R. Having won, the voices quieted. Only then, in the hush, did I hear music and make a queasy realization. Savage Ranch had run out of radios long ago, except the one in the Ford Fairlane.

  The clarity of sound indicated that the music flowed from the car’s open window. How long had it been playing? I peered from within the Dead Letter Office and could not see a single splash of sun in the compound. Night had fallen, making Ruthie’s shape in the doorway even smaller than usual, this time a smallness not of supercilious cat but of patient wolf.

  X.

  NO OTHER WOMAN I’D EVER met stood like Ruthie Ness. There was no bent knee, slung hip, inturned toe, clasped hands, or angled chin. She stood as hung from a meathook: feet forward, legs straight, shoulders slumped, arms dangling. Proof of life was evident only in how her left hand gripped a large dark object concealed in shadow, just like her face, which oscillated right and left until she’d taken slow, careful tally of the rifled mail trunk, the popped lockbox, R’s letters beneath my arm, and the tin ring on my finger.

  “You feel volatile,” said she. “But I urge you to be calm about this.”

  Never in all my bloviating about how we Savages improved upon Jesus Christ’s Last Supper had I wondered who might emerge as my Judas.

  “Gladys Leather?” guessed I.

  I could make out a pinched smile.

  “Believe me, Mr. Finch, when I say I never wanted to be impressed by you. But I have been. Your knowledge of the humanities, history, so many eclectic subjects. The way you turned an incoherent, frankly irresponsible idea of this place in the desert into a real moneymaker—I don’t know that I’ve ever been so impressed. Our relationship has genuinely affected me, and isn’t that worth something? Math, though, has never been your strong suit. When was Gladys Leather born?”

  “I . . . I don’t . . . 1905?”

  “So how old would Gladys be today? If she were alive, which she isn’t.”

  I pictured Mary Leather’s pride and joy, that mugging munchkin who’d dragged her expensive dollies by the hair up and down the family manor’s first and second floors, but never the third, of course, from whence one could smell meat etiquette as it roasted its demons.

  “Seventy-eight?”

  “Now, what if Gladys survived life on the street after you left the Leathers broke, and then had her own daughter when she was twenty?”

  “Gladys’s daughter? Is that who you are?”

  “Your math, Mr. Finch. How old would that child be now?

  “I can’t . . . fifty-eight? I don’t understand . . .”

  “Nonsense. You’re doing wonderfully. Let’s say that Gladys’s daughter also had a daughter when she was barely birthing age. An unfortunate situation, but homeless women don’t have much protection against rape.”

  “Enough,” begged I. “You’re Dr. Leather’s great-granddaughter?” I laughed, a short, mad howl. “No, that’s—that’s inconceivable. That’s impossible.”

  The baritone throb of air purifiers and the tenor lamentations of circulating fans had become the compound’s perpetual Gregorian chant, but at that moment, as if corrupted by one of NASA’s glitches, the closest one puttered toward death, emitting a creaking wheeze that, had my ears not been clogged so long by the blandishments of believers, I might have noticed years before.

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  “Inconceivable, yes.” Ruthie shrugged. “But nothing’s impossible.”

  People brought to death’s precipice only to be yanked back insist that the total spans of their lives whirl past, a phenomenon of which I’d been robbed. But cornered inside the Dead Letter Office, my mind flushed clean as if by one of Mrs. White’s new-and-improved kitchen solvents, I cycled through every clue that had been waggled in front of my witless face for years.

  That accent Ruthie tried so hard to bury? Good Gød, I’d lived in Boston for eight torturous years! The Leathers had spoken like the upper crust to which they’d belonged, but their fall would have dumped later generations into a pool of coarser intonations. Ruthie’s attestation that her family was dead was true—I myself had been spattered by Dr. Leather’s brilliant brains—as was her post-Woodstock crying-jag declaration (brava, Miss Ness, brava!) that she’d committed herself to me to rectify family failings. Ruthie, in other words, had sought me out to mine me monetarily as her great-grandfather had mined me bodily, and with the same single-minded commitment. Hence the three jobs during law school, the avid exploitation of legal loopholes, her inhuman work ethic.

  Even I, the painless, was pained by the evidence. How she’d lured me into partnership by dangling the nation’s revenge-lust, when all along it had been her own: People see something of theirs destroyed and they can’t help it—they want their turn at destroying. How disinterested she’d been in the minutiae of my existence, and why? Because she’d heard about it ever since childhood. Even her drabness of dress and thickness of glasses had inhibited me from matching her cheekbones and eyes to those of Mary Leather. Most flagrant of all had been Ruthie’s response to Harvey Scheinberg’s asking why she accepted blood money from warmongers: B
ecause the stupid deserve to follow the bold.

  Dr. Cornelius Leather, Ruthie Ness, née Leather, and any other Leather who’d bloodhounded me across a twentieth-century minefield were therefore exposed as the bold. I, then, definitely now, was the stupid, having believed that viruses like HIV were the only blood maladies transferable from parent to child.

  “I heard so many stories about you,” said Ruthie, “and you’re just like they said. Filled with potential but helpless to do anything with it without assistance. It’s presumptuous of me, I know. Great-granddad Cornelius, he was the genius of the family, and if he couldn’t get anything out of you, how could I? But you grow up brushing maggots off your trash-can dinners, it takes a toll. By the time I was a teenager, I knew what I had to do.”

  “Ruthie . . .”

  “Miss Ness, please. It’ll make this easier.”

  “I thought you and I were . . . perhaps not friends, but . . .”

  “We’ve had some nice moments. Nicer than I ever would have expected. But when you hit me . . . Well, it was probably good that you did. I’d lost my way. I’d forgotten my obligations.”

  “You honestly think Dr. Leather’s studies could have changed the world?”

  Ruthie shot air through her nose, her version of a laugh.

  “My concerns were more practical than that. Had you kept your word and stayed with the doctor until he was finished, he would have made money. Lots of money. Millions of dollars. Me, my mother, my grandmother—I can’t even imagine how much better their lives would have been or how much longer they’d have lived. You’ve got no right to be angry. In fact, you ought to forgive me for what I’ve done.”