The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  The door cymbaled against the siding.

  “Oh, Papa,” sighed Merle. “You’re so fucking late.”

  Was it the plasma pull of a shared ancestry that allowed instant recognition? This wasn’t the fifteen-year-old guttersnipe who Leather had called a shit-throwing gibbon. This wasn’t the forty-six-year-old morphine addict the drug dealer Sandy had called a skinny little bitch with the clap. Dearest Reader, if your tender heart can weather the tempest of truth, the worst thing possible had happened to my fearless, indomitable daughter: she’d become eighty-eight years old.

  Merle’s moth-eaten housecoat hiked up to thick-ankled, purple- veined calves as she adjusted her smudged bifocals.

  “You look like shit, too. One arm, Papa?”

  I pictured how she used to tap her teeth with a fingernail while devising her next acid criticism. Those teeth were gone now, leaving her with a lisp. I stood speechless as she smacked her lax lips and fretted her hand along the doorway in the manner of the elderly, reassuring herself of the permanence of objects.

  “You’re . . .” Such was my fluster that I could barely finish. “ . . . R?”

  “Merle Ruby Watson. Never did like ‘Merle.’ Sounds like a man’s name.”

  From my pocket I pulled the passel of letters, brown and melted from the aquarium bath, and held them out as if they were a search order.

  “But these letters . . .”

  Merle scowled, her toothless jaw jutting, the greasy tails of her hair flopping.

  “Would you have come if I’d said it was me?”

  Merle had begun sending letters to Savage Ranch five years after Ruthie and I had broken ground on the property, after the First and Second Addresses, after Wailin’ Wendy’s farewell broadcast had enlisted droves, after I’d discovered Night of the Living Dead and its all-important anthropophagous agenda. The envelopes felt brittle and unsubstantial. I let them fall from my hand. They looked at home alongside the crushed beverage cup.

  “And the things you wrote? The things you knew?”

  “You told me everything, Papa. You insisted on telling me everything.”

  How was it her aged brain’s recall was better than my youthful one? In 1910, inside Leather’s domed veranda, I’d lavished upon my daughter extensive details of my deathly existence in the daft hope she might return the balance of trust. What I hadn’t described to her in words, she’d discovered firsthand living with me for a year in Salem, where she’d learned my sounds, smells, and textures, right down to my innards while stitching shut my abdomen from Leather’s dinner-table carving.

  Merle’s glower liquefied under its weight of wattled skin.

  “Why’d you wait so long, Papa?”

  Together, separated by fifteen feet of clear, midday mountain sun, we trembled.

  “I’m sorry,” said I.

  “I got this place for you. For both of us. Back when I could still get around all right. I got it way out here where I couldn’t get into any more trouble. Because that’s what you wanted. You remember, don’t you? You wanted us to be together forever. That’s what you said. But look at me now. What’s forever worth now?”

  Whispering was all I had left.

  “I don’t know.”

  Her arthritis seized. She grimaced. “There’s no more time to waste. Come on.”

  She let go of the door, which struck her on her hunched back as she hobbled into the black interior. Alone, I released the shudder I’d been containing. It shook through every accursed part of my body, for nature itself rebels when a parent sees a daughter seventy-one years his senior. The quarrels I had with Gød were myriad, but here was a plea none other would ever surpass.

  Give me my life back, mourned I, so that I might die before hearing another word.

  The inside of the trailer was more forested than the outside, a morass of food-trash underbrush, magazine promontories, dirty-clothing vines, and asbestos stalactites, all of it shaded a brown from the cardboarded windows. Three mice raced along a countertop behind a metropolis of beer cans coated with cigarette butts. Even their puny brains sensed the horrible thing about to happen.

  Past a cramped, odoriferous kitchen and doorless toilet, I found Merle sitting upon a couch that vomited yellow stuffing. She was lit by the home’s chief light source, an eight-inch Magnavox television antlered with wire hangers and aluminum foil. The signal was paper-thin and blizzarded by blue static, yet I could make out aerial footage of a remote building surrounded by a couple hundred white dashes, which were, I came to realize, covered bodies. How ineffectual Savage Ranch looked from above, how crude and ugly.

  My shoes crunched through what sounded like eggshells. I turned off the TV. The picture winked away, and in the curved glass waited Merle’s reflection. She’d seen the news, of that I was certain, and for the past week had been wondering if I might finally come. I preferred her blurry simulacrum to her distressing self; I did not turn around.

  “There’s a chair, Papa. Just brush off the junk.”

  The junk was a steeple of overdue bills, collection-agency threats, and hospital test results. Slowly I toppled it, watching each piece of bad news drop before I sat. It is difficult, Reader, to stare at your hands when you have but one, so I did what fate had brought me here to do. I looked at my daughter. Even darkness couldn’t conceal what, in cramped quarters, was close enough to touch.

  Time had always treated Merle poorly. She reeked like overripe fruit. Her arm skin, purpled by tattoos of jailhouse quality, pooled like dough around the needle pits of her morphine past and whatever had followed. Heroin? Crack? Crystal meth? Probably all of it. A puckered scar split her right cheek, and glossy pink triangles from broken glass covered half of her neck, residue of bad boyfriends or vindictive pimps or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which was a good way to describe Merle’s whole life. Disease was as palpable upon her as it had been on Gabe Mungo, portions attributable to old age but most of it compensation for a history of wayward choices, a quality she’d inherited from her father. Here was true suffering from a true savage, not the characters I’d directed to go along with a screenplay’s fiction.

  Her eyes, magnified by the bifocals, were large and liquid.

  “You smell like fire.”

  “I feel like fire,” said I.

  “Your face is still so young.”

  “I feel as old as sin.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Seven words that terrify anyone, dead or alive.

  “It could all be over tomorrow. My hypertension. My osteoporosis. The diabetes. The lung cancer. And I’m not at peace with it, I’m not. There’s things I have to make right. I could have told you, Papa. A thousand times I could’ve. But you know what? I didn’t think you deserved it. I don’t see so well these days, but I see this clear. You deserve to know it the same as I deserve to know it. Because we’re all bad. We’re all rotten. Every single one of us ever born.”

  With two words, I stretched my neck to the closest noose.

  “Tell me.”

  “I know who killed you, Papa.”

  I cocked my head. Surely I’d misheard. If there was one piece of information I’d have guaranteed I’d never acquire, much less inside this muggy metal tube, this was it. The desire to chase down my murderer had meant everything at the turn of the century. It had been the catalyst for Johnny’s awakening of my legs and tongue; it had brought me back to life, or as close as I could get. But after Luca Testa had exempted himself, I’d abandoned the hunt. I’d come to accept my death to be what deaths always were: meaningless.

  “Papa—”

  “Please, no.”

  “Papa, it was—”

  “Don’t tell me, Merle, don’t tell me.”

  “It was Mother. It was Wilma Sue.”

  Imagine that life is a battleship. Imagine that, in the high tides of a long war, it capsizes. Imagine that you make it onto a life raft alone, and into the choppy but infinite waters you float, lost a
t sea, yes, but carried by a gentle hand that keeps you safe from sharks, a hand that, after a while, you forget to feel, for its edges and creases have become the whole world on which you rely. Now imagine that a reef slices through the raft. Imagine that the raft shrivels and sinks.

  I cannot say what kind of bodily decay caused it, but a single bead of liquid bulbed at the corner of an eye that for eighty-seven years had been dry, and it slugged down my cheek, glistening a trail through dusty skin, past the broken vessels where Mrs. White had slapped me, near the eyetooth chipped while I’d crawled after Leather as he’d choked his wife, toward the rope burn of my Mississippi hanging, and into the chasm of the hook that had pulled me from lake water as a babe is fished from amniotic fluid. I placed my hand upon my wet cheek and let that hand slide to cover my eyes.

  “Oh, Merle,” said I. “Oh, Wilma Sue.”

  My daughter’s voice had changed: the lost teeth, the cancerous lungs, the vocal cord abasement of eighty-eight years of screaming and sobbing. Still it knew how to snook through my defenses. My hand adjusted to cover an ear against her explanation, but it helped little, for any gaps in her tale I filled in myself, so unoriginal was each plot point, so transparent the clues, so inevitable the motivations, so foreseeable the outcomes.

  They were stories Merle only heard when her mother was drunk. My Aaron—Wilma Sue’s final words to me before I left her in that bed above Patterson’s Inn—My stupid Aaron. She’d known she was pregnant, divulged Merle, and the invitation to duck beneath covers had been an invite to a family, which I’d spurned, only to spend each subsequent decade since trying to reinvent one. A woman with a child-puffed figure had no future at Patterson’s, so she’d left before she could be fired and found a bed just outside the city, believing her Aaron would find her, not knowing her Aaron’s world did not exist beyond Black Hand borderlands.

  Wherever Wilma Sue went, men smelled her former occupation and wanted her, pregnant or not, and for her defiance she was beaten so badly, she was certain, each time, that her baby was dead. Even as a fetus, though, Merle was pigheaded, and so Wilma Sue prostituted herself one last time in order to swipe the revolver of her dozing client, the same Colt Lightning she’d pass on to Merle, the same one Merle would point at me in Salem. Wilma Sue kept the gun close so that the next man who did anything to threaten her unborn child would end up dead.

  But it wasn’t that easy, was it? The knife blocks of men held vast varieties; they could cut you in all sorts of ways. No one would hire a pregnant woman whose eyes bled desperation. And who wanted anything to do with a derelict beggar and her sickly, coughing newborn? There was no food to be had. She produced no milk. No path presented itself but the criminal. She escaped down garbage-strewn alleys, hid in muddy graveyards, squatted in manure-filled barns to count her thieved coins. This was Wilma Sue Watson’s life. Was it any better than death?

  Left with no option, Wilma Sue traveled back to Chicago, a long journey filled with its own horrors, and on May 7, 1896, she prevailed upon a barkeep to hand me the infamous note compelling me to meet an unknown person to discuss an opportunity, which I’d read over pheasant, potatoes, and ale while she’d spied from across the street. She’d been right there, Reader, holding infant Merle to her bony ribs, watching me stuff my face and leer at the letter’s proposition, smugly certain that it would be one of big business.

  My overstarched collars, the Peacemaker I’d taken all morning to polish, the Excelsior I twirled upon its luminous chain—how intimidating, then humiliating, then enraging it would have looked to the wretched Wilma Sue. The baby she’d brought to show me could not possibly have the desired effect. She was a squalid beggar who had nothing, yet held me in her heart; I was an overindulged brat who had everything and, from all appearances, had forgotten she existed.

  Fourteen minutes clicked by between my on-time arrival and the 7:44 shot that killed me. I’d always pictured my murderer as hunkered in the weeds, murmuring maledictions over his firearm before storming the sand. Merle didn’t need to sketch the scene for me to visualize the reality. Wilma Sue had stood behind me in plain sight for all fourteen minutes, weighing upon the scales of her arms a baby and a gun, scales that were tipped by twelve months of constant degradation. When it came to her baby’s survival, Zebulon Aaron Finch, that pontifical, self-satisfied fop, his pockets full of ill-gotten cash, would be more helpful dead than alive.

  “She killed you for me,” said Merle.

  “As well she should have,” rasped I.

  “I was raised to hate you.”

  “As well you should, too.”

  “No, Papa. I can’t lie anymore. Maybe you helped turn Mother the way she was. But that doesn’t excuse her. She was a cruel woman.”

  “What?”

  “She drank. She beat me. She knocked me down in public.”

  “No, Merle—”

  “What do you expect? Her life was hard. I suppose she was loving sometimes, but she was hateful more often. It’s just like I said. We’re all the same. We’re all hateful.”

  Bridey Valentine, in a snit of sexual rage, had been right: You’ve built a pedestal to this girl like she’s the epitome of virtue, when she was every bit as faulted and as foul as me. It’s a child’s viewpoint, Z. You can be such a child. And like a child holds in his pocket a rabbit’s foot—or, come to think of it, a utility knife from a space capsule, or a hand-drawn map of the Meuse-Argonne, or a wrinkled photograph of his daughter, or an Atlanta Constitution advertisement, or a top-dollar pocket watch—I’d held tight to Wilma Sue, not because she was my immortal beloved but rather because she’d been what I needed to get by. If you have any doubt that seventeen is a child’s age, here, Reader, is your evidence.

  “You’ve always been kind to me,” said Merle. “So fucking kind, no matter the things I did. You gave me so many chances. I just needed to give you this chance back, all right? The chance to hate me, to hate Mother. You deserve it, Papa. You always have.”

  Though she spoke of hatred, her voice was free of it.

  My arm lifted from my lap. I watched it in a daze. I had to lean forward; that, too, I watched with curiosity, my feet resettling, my knees bending, my thighs contracting. The arm achieved its length, and I took Merle’s sclerotic hand from where it had clawed onto her robe. Her palm was papery, the knuckles swollen, faint of both pulse and heat. But when I squeezed the hand, the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring jawing into the gnarled fingers, her ligaments tightened and Merle squeezed back, as if she, too, had floated upon a life raft perforated with holes, dead in the water until, just now, I began pulling her onto mine.

  If we had to sink, by Gød, we’d do it together.

  XII.

  IN SALEM, MERLE AND I had spent one year together. In Tranquility, we spent one more. She told me, in the loose strings and tight knots of geriatric recall, what she’d been doing for forty years. She drilled rivets in a San Diego factory emptied of World War II draftees and saw a woman’s arm gobbled up by a grinder. In El Paso she sold buttons opposing racial integration. She took in street cats in Colorado Springs, up to twenty of them, and learned to pull kittens from wombs. She romanced an army captain in Shreveport until, without warning, he sat inside his closed garage and turned on his car. Outside Memphis she was bitten by a raccoon and nearly died of leptospirosis. She scotched a Cincinnati bank hold-up by stabbing the gunman with a pen. In Virginia Beach she became so interested in Mahatma Gandhi that she, dedicated illiterate, paid a paperboy to read her related news stories. One week after getting her driver’s license in Ann Arbor at age fifty, she mowed down a baby carriage and fainted, only to learn that it’d been full of groceries. She worked at a dress shop in Sioux Falls until she spat into the face of a customer who’d called Rosa Parks a nigger (her views on blacks had changed). In Provo she snatched money from an open register and matriculated to jail, wherefrom she rebelled, had sex with women, raised hell, and was graduated to prison. Her Lucille Ball impression made her f
ellow Las Vegas cocktail waitresses adore her. In Long Beach, she learned to swim. She placed second in the senior category of a dance contest in Fresno. In Eureka she voted for the first time: Richard Nixon in 1968 (but not in 1972). She acted as grandmother to a poor Japanese-American girl being raised by a single mother in Eugene, just like Wilma Sue had raised Merle, and it was the greatest honor of her life until that girl died of pneumonia.

  Infirm though she was, crumbling though I was, and ramshackle though our trailer became, our second cohabitation was worlds more wondrous than our first. Every detail with which she regaled me was another thread into another patch into another quilt that warmed away the shivers of having lived so long beside a woman who’d been plotting my downfall. In Tranquility, there was no deception, cunning, or guile, only sun, rain, sleet, and snow beating at our Country Home until the trailer mirrored our father-daughter bond: coated with mold, rife with leaks, infested with vermin, but, damn it all, still standing.

  Too sick to get up one snowbound day, she grilled me from sweaty sheets.

  “Tell me about you. I missed everything. I want to hear it.”

  “My journey has been one of triviality.”

  “Don’t goddamn lie.”

  I mulled for a minute. “I met Albert Einstein. Is that interesting?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I did, at a party in Hollywood.”

  “Whose party?”

  “Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.”

  Merle shook her head, then coughed, then laughed.

  “Oh, Papa. You don’t know the value of what you’ve got.”

  Thenceforth I tried cooling her fevers with the antidote of anecdote. As a turbulent teen, she’d despised my windy reports, but now the most picayune details sustained her: the slapstick, if lethal, foibles of those wonky Chauchat rifles; the sizable list of pet names I had for the Schutzstaffel thug Kuppisch; Junior’s diligent nutshelling of Kal-El’s deliverance from Krypton. What was wondrous was how less trivial my walking death felt when met by Merle’s interest. Perhaps mine had not been a wonderful existence, but it was, at least, one worth recounting—which I have done for you, Reader, in these pages you hold.