The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “What have you done?”

  “Only what you authorized me to do.”

  “Authorized?”

  “You did sign the contract.”

  I nearly asked her to speak sense, until I remembered it: December 1967, Bucket Mouth Seafood, Asbury Park, New Jersey, eleven at night, Ruthie Ness drinking merlot and pushing across the tacky table a paper and pen, and Zebulon X, dried off from a buried-in-the-sand drowning, signing it without reading, for what did a dead man care of fine print?

  “How much have you taken?”

  “Everything.”

  “Bridey’s money?”

  “Everything.”

  I pushed from the nearest trunk and rushed Ruthie. She took a step back, then another, openly afraid, and I was glad.

  “There’s petty cash,” blurted she. “I might be able to get you—”

  My stump whacked against Ruthie hard enough to spin her around. A flash of malicious satisfaction engulfed me, but my first steps into the front salon were off-kilter, giving me no chance against the underfoot slickness. My right leg, weaker since a German shell had hollowed it in 1918, buckled and I landed on my ass. Closer to the floor, the sharp scent of the liquid hit me.

  The light from this angle was better. I could see Ruthie clearly as she smoothed the wrinkles of her pantsuit and regripped the metal canister.

  “Miss Ness.” I despised how fearful I sounded. “What else have you done?”

  Ruthie valuated the trimmings she’d overseen, from the herringbone brick and Gallic casements to the wrought-iron fleur-de-lis hinges on every door. Her spectacles came to rest upon the newest furnishment: a cluster of gasoline casks, each bearing fresh sales stamps from Flagstaff and each pinged inward by the emptying of its contents. The liquid soaking into my trousers was gas, and I scrambled to my feet even as I traced multiple trails of it, one headed east toward the front loggia, another south toward the bedrooms and offices, and yet another west toward the courtyard, where I pictured Gabe’s soaked body alongside a reflecting pool, an imminent Viking funeral.

  “Don’t think I’m not sad,” said Ruthie. “I have to hand it to you. This became a home, it really did. It’s the only real home I ever had.”

  Her body jerked forward, the most abrupt motion I’d ever seen her make. She shook the contents of her can all over the Dead Letter Office. With each splash, I winced. She sighed, set the canister on the floor, and removed a handkerchief from her pocket to dry her hands.

  “Maybe that’s what I have to learn about homes. They’re not easy to leave, but there comes a time when there is simply no better option. My mother taught me that. ‘We used to live in a great big castle,’ she used to tell me. I guess this was our castle, Mr. Finch, but Excelsior, Inc., as of tonight, is dissolved. Don’t feel bad about it. It happens to the best of businesses.”

  Never was Ruthie’s sad smile of affection any stronger.

  “If I have a regret, it’s that I never got to see inside you, to see what was so important to Great-grandad Cornelius, to see if it was worth all this.” She shrugged. “But what do I know about biology? I’m more of a numbers gal.”

  She tucked away the handkerchief and produced a cigarette lighter.

  The stairway to the second floor was ten feet away, my best chance. My feet cracked through gasoline puddles as I heard the tink of the lighter striking clay tile, the whoom of fire blooming, and the clack-clack-clack of Ruthie backpedaling from the hot gust. Before I hit the first step, I could hear one, then two, then three breathy roars as the fire ran the trails Ruthie had mapped. The stairs beneath my feet were gold with gasoline, and flames gave chase.

  The second floor had been doused as well, but I did not hesitate to cross it, for I knew the Savages were watching their oasis catch fire, and it was quite possible they’d stand in place and burn, too, unless their leader—a grandiose word for the drifting admiral I’d been!—ordered them to retreat.

  Fire erupted from the stairwell, and the ignitable lake upon which I stood shone a blinding orange. I charged beneath the fish tank, collided with the balcony doors, and for the first time passed through them, then slammed them shut against the lunging flames. The door rattled as if a bear wanted through it, and snakes of smoke slithered between slats.

  I whirled and grabbed the railing.

  Every eyeball, excepting those extracted and eaten, goggled up at me, reflecting the fire that already licked through windows below me and to my right and left; even the palm trees at either side of the building were begetting fruits of flame. The Savages clutched one another with whatever limbs they had left. A few carried buckets of drinking water, ready to fight the fire should I require it, not that it would be enough. Ruthie’s restriction of water to a single pump would have its consequences.

  Nevertheless their mouths hung wide for the Third Address.

  I had to bay to be heard.

  “THIS IS THE END!”

  They moaned and swayed.

  “I DID IT ALL WRONG! I DID EVERYTHING WRONG!”

  I thought of what Church, the real one, had said to me at Woodstock.

  “YOU NEED TO KEEP GOING! YOU NEED TO FINISH—”

  —your lives was what I said, but the southern roof collapsed, the parapet exploding in brick, molding, and glass. The Savages reeled back, shielding their faces from a photosphere of sparks. They had gone frantic, babbling in tongues, clawing at their skin, skittering like insects. The noise of fear and destruction was thunderous. I ratcheted to a scream.

  “YOU NEED TO CONTINUE—”

  —living was what I said, but the northern downspout ripped from the outer wall and took with it a wagonload of brick that came right at me, bashing through the ten-foot planter box affixed to the balcony. It detonated in plaster and ceramic. The downspout took a perpendicular turn and dropped like a flaming broadsword into the crowd, splitting them into two halves. I only glimpsed them beginning to scatter, for half the balcony’s floor crumbled and I fell. My left leg dangled in air before I heaved myself to the surviving half. I was on my knees, face pressed to the balustrade, watching how the downspout acted as Satan’s spinal cord, shooting ribs of fire across the dry desert grass, which Ruthie had irrigated with gasoline.

  My followers wailed but were disciplined beyond any Gallery of Pain huckster, Marine Corps unit, Astro trainee, or NSTF protestor. Caught inside polygonic cages of fire under the hellish red of the sweltering night, the Savages turned to one another, hearts pounding with frenzied joy. Mother-Father Savage had just said that this was the end, and to bring it about they had only to follow my final order, which they’d heard in incomplete pieces:

  You need to finish—

  You need to continue—

  And so they did, eager to do my bidding as Chuck Manson’s family had been to do his, stripping off what capes of civilized conduct they still wore and falling upon one another with finger and tooth. Alisha Savage sank her jaws into the jugular of Kimberly Savage, while Phoebe Savage took hold of Alisha Savage’s bottom lip and ripped it off like fat from a steak. Regina Savage buried her face in Tracy Savage’s clawed-open stomach while Tracy Savage munched Cassandra Savage’s nose. Fernanda Savage, meanwhile, made good use of Lana Savage’s leg stump, digging her fingers into the fissure and levering with such force that Lana’s entire groin cracked open, her pelvis becoming a serving bowl of pubic muscle and gluteal nerves, intestine and colon, bladder and uterus.

  If the Savages were a religion, here was their rapture. The overheated desert dirt poured forth its tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and Gila monsters, which seethed about the women as they tore and gnashed and chewed, and quickly, before the fire robbed the Savages of their final feast. I shrieked that they’d misunderstood, but really they hadn’t; just because scales had fallen from my eyes did not mean I could wrest from them the principles they revered. I covered my face with my hand. I’d forsaken the Fifty-One for the Savages, believing I’d traded up, when all I’d done was build my own desert M
authausen.

  With a crunch, the balcony dropped six inches, yet clung to the building by adobe ligament. Yes, I could fall into the Savage fray just as I’d fallen from the Fliegende Hitler, but what would it bring me beyond more martyrdom I didn’t deserve? Delirious, I struggled to my feet and, once balanced upon the seesaw surface, took hold of a doorknob and was glad to see smoke rise from my palm. I hadn’t burned at Woodstock, but perhaps I should have.

  I opened the door. Fire mushroomed at my head, and I instinctively ducked. The room had become an oven and the heat cindered the ends of my hair. I toed the gasoline border and lifted my chin against the wall of flame; it tickled my throat, tightened the flesh.

  There was a soft bubbling. My head already tilted, I needed but roll my eyes to see the fish tank directly above and how the water was beginning to roil. Poor fish, cooked alive. An idea flopped into my mind with all the vim of a dead body. While flames lashed out with stingers, setting fire to my jacket hem and both legs of my pants, I reached into my jacket pocket, past R’s letters, past the Excelsior, past every ingredient of that centennial stew, until I found Gordo’s knife.

  I held it like a candle and thrust it upward. A single blow, and thick white cracks spread like spiderweb across the glass. Two seconds passed, during which flames spiraled up my legs, and then the tank exploded from the bottom up. From the room’s upper half, a Niagara Falls of water crashed down with ice floes of broken glass. I was hurled to the floor, flattened by an ocean, and felt the snap of one, two, three ribs.

  The weight of fish pattering against my back was, in comparison, as soft as eyelashes, but it was that gentleness that roused me enough to take a knee beneath the downpour and see a room sloshing with four feet of water gone black with muddied ember. The fire in the room had been quenched, and tank water was cutting a path down the stairs. It wouldn’t last long; the whole building rattled with brimstone. I waded through the bilge in my steaming clothing, brushing back wooly brown smoke and kneeing aside the bobbing bodies of my fish friends.

  The stairwell was a rapids I navigated on three limbs. The salon below remained an inferno, but the tsunami had snuffed enough of it for me to scramble across smolder, crawl through a northern window, and battle through burning shrubbery. Outside, it was seventy degrees cooler, but still hot as hell, and I yawed across the dirt, gaping at the cannibal apocalypse to my right: Ruthie’s Scorched Earth Doctrine had become literal. A whole kingdom of smoke hung over the compound, and I wondered, were I to stand in place, if I might be noticed by the Savages, who’d belly up to me on limb stumps and gurgle past extracted tongues, craving the holiest flesh of all.

  But only one figure watched me. Can’t you see him?

  That charred marionette jester frolicking from one fire to the next?

  I stumbled away and came upon a fracas of feasting closer than the rest. Three women squatted like hyenas over a fourth, chewing and choking and snuffling, while the Ford Fairlane sat a few feet away, the driver’s door open, keys in the ignition, and radio playing upbeat rock that lampooned the carnage. On instinct I approached. The pitapat of water dribbling from my clothing went unheeded behind the night’s cries and rhapsodies; even when I came within six feet, the eaters were fixated on their eating.

  Ruthie hadn’t made it to her car. Both of her legs and her left arm had been pulled off and lay in the laps of women who noshed them like chicken drumsticks. Her hair had kept its obdurate bun, despite the fact that it, along with the underlying scalp, had been peeled clean off. None other than Ruthie’s bête noire, Wailin’ Wendy Savage, had pried open the lid of her skull so as to pick at her tasty brain. Next to her, the fanatic Sharon Savage, still alive after all these years and happily limbless, rocked on her spine like an infant, licking her lips and waiting to be fed.

  The con job Ruthie had perpetrated had been unforgivable. That didn’t mean I was glad to see she was still alive. Her head lolled in my direction, even though her eyes had been stabbed by the lens shards of her glasses. Every time Wailin’ Wendy dug into her frontal lobe, Ruthie grinned in the sloppy manner of the mentally handicapped. A nervous-system reflex, that’s all it was, but it stabbed me like an icicle nonetheless.

  The last known Leather was gone, and did it bring me satisfaction? Here were the opposites of my martyrdoms: people killing themselves for me. I used the car door to keep myself upright while the Great Basin Desert played like a pipe organ of screams and the fire reached heights enough to mirror the falling meteor of Barringer’s crater. There would be no hiding this night of violence, for those who survived would be too few to enact our rites of cremation. What I’d done there was evil, and everyone would see it. Still I insist to you that being evil is so much easier when you have as much time as I to arrive at it.

  There was one who might understand this awful truth, and finding her was the sole reason I didn’t take this latest opportunity to burn. The letters from R were waterlogged but still there, molded to my chest. If luck would hold, she might still be in Tranquility, Washington, her body, like mine, a wrinkled, faded, and torn roadmap of misdirection. Together we might sit in sedate commiseration, the crushing weight of being the world’s onliest demon halved at last into manageable burdens. We couldn’t offer each other forgiveness, but understanding? Was that too much for which a monster could hope?

  I fell into the car and started it. Fifteen years old, that auto, but Ruthie had made mechanics rich by keeping it in fine fettle. The tank, prepped for getaway, was full. I had a bit of cash on me; it wouldn’t get me to Washington, but it’d get me out of Arizona. I shut the door and rolled up the windows, the Babel of Armageddon abating to a muted beat. I swung the car around. The radio, still playing, segued into a cut from a new LP by a guy named Bruce hailing from the same New Jersey boardwalks where I’d first met Ruthie. Everything dies, baby, cautioned he, and maybe everything that dies, one day comes back.

  XI.

  NEWS OF THIS NATURE CAN’T be outrun. Reports of a situation at Savage Ranch, the home base of a cloistered Arizona cult, began issuing from the car radio fifteen hours into my journey. By the end of my second day of driving in a vehicle that stank of wet soot, the “situation” had become a “tragedy” worse than Jonestown in its caliber of atrocity. I broke off the radio knob, and, just for good measure, pulled onto the highway shoulder and snapped off the car’s antenna.

  Past the North Rim of the Grand Canyon I drove, through the cupped hands of Salt Lake City’s Rockies, across the iron bridges of Twin Falls, through the rainbowed hills of Boise, and into Gifford Pinchot National Forest in the Cascade Range, an arcadia of velour greens and alabaster peaks. None of it helped; my skin crawled with guilt and shame, and all that kept me from steering the car into a chasm in the style of Margeaux was the lifeline represented by R, which I used to pull myself forward, hand over hand over hand.

  Ruthie had stocked the Ford with getaway provisions, including her prized bank books, though stopping in Flagstaff to dicker with bankers would have only gotten me detained. Thankfully, the glove compartment contained five thousand dollars in cash. Fuel, therefore, was not an issue, and the last gas station at which I stopped—full-service, thank Gød, for whenever I exited the Fairlane, my flaking, desert-dried flesh drew stares—was located along the Swift Reservoir seventy miles northeast of Portland, Oregon.

  It was the last place my road atlas did any good. Hiding behind a popped collar and NASA aviators, the portrait of the preying pervert, I beckoned a gullible-looking kid to the car window and slid him forty dollars to buy every local road and trail map in the station, keep the change. It did the trick. Tranquility, Washington, looked to be one of those townships I’d visited over and again throughout my death, a flyspot that might be flicked from the map with a finger.

  After hours of wrong ways down blind mountain byways, I spotted “Tranquility” hand-painted onto a post stabbed into a brackish ditch. Ten minutes later, I’d found R’s so-called Country Home. It was not the corniced cottag
e, complete with grazing sheep, that I’d drawn in my mind. It was, rather, a thirty-foot mobile home held together by rusty aluminum siding, its every broken window sealed up with cardboard. It rested upon a lopsided layer of crumbling cinder block, its old tires scattered about, each hosting a sui generis biome of orange hawkweed, yellow toadflax, and assorted weeds.

  I killed the ignition and stood beside the car, the engine ticking in time with the Excelsior. I looked northward, where, above a peplum of clouds, Mount Saint Helens stood far more bravely than I. Three years prior, the volcano had erupted, shearing off its northern face, shooting magma, filling Spirit Lake with debris, mudsliding for fifty miles, and killing fifty-seven people—child’s play compared to the body count of a single Mother-Father Savage. Though Mount Saint Helens looked peaceful, its presence underlined both the magnitude and the unpredictability of the moment: a meeting unlike any the world had ever seen.

  Leaves rattled, birds whooped, insects trilled. Compared to the noiseless desert, the whole natural world wanted me to ascend the cinder-block steps and knock upon the askew door, from which poked a plastic fork in lieu of a handle. I filled my leathered lungs with air I did not need, and with small steps but great circumspection traversed the bramble that served as front lawn. Had Mount Saint Helens reactivated? Every part of me was shaking.

  My foot came down upon an object that popped loudly enough to betray its synthetic origin—a fast-food beverage cup. From inside the mobile home came a humanoid warble and a blast of television noise. The trailer rocked, shedding scurfs of rust, and a corner of cardboard was pulled back from a window. Tin cans, from the sound of it, were kicked aside, and before the trailer door opened with a feline yowl, I was bushwhacked by a fact that hurt very much indeed.

  Dead things like me didn’t eat from tin cans or drink from fast-food cups.