The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  He was paralyzed by my Death-look.

  What he saw inside of it, or so I came to believe, was Death in its wholeness, its hugeness, its inescapability, and the torment Death would deliver unto him should he not alter his behaviors. The Barker could not see such a thing and not be frightened. Nor could he fail to hate me for it afterward.

  The Dearest Reader might presume I loved every second. To the contrary! ’Twas horrid—horrid. As candied had been my curtailed vision into the void, the bitter aftertaste of its absence was a thousand times worse. The Barker’s eyes, you see, reflected back every atom of my own hideousness. So too, probably, had the eyes of the hundreds I’d pulped at the behest of Testa, but only now could I see with clarity how evil I’d been then and how very alone I was now.

  La silenziosità slipped away. The Barker staggered in place, blinking and harrumphing, too shaken to reassemble his former authority. He reached to straighten a lapel that was not there. He tried on different expressions but discarded each as if it were an embarrassing bit of costume.

  “You . . . Mr. Finch.” He shook his head. “Stick. Mr. Stick.”

  Even the beaten child sensed something unprecedented had occurred. Johnny peeked from his fetal coil as the Barker remembered his shotgun, snatched it with both hands, tried to use its weight to reestablish reality.

  “We are not finished. You . . . you monster. You and I are not yet through.”

  The Barker wanted out of there. He hurried to the tent flap and lifted it. The light was far whiter than when he had entered. He squinted, looked to the dirt, and then whirled around to face us once more, fully awakened to a humiliation he did not even understand. Nothing was being forgotten, not my insubordination nor the immobilizing experience of seeing his own black future in my dead eyes. With a hand still clutching our doomed, undelivered letter to Luca Testa, the Barker gestured to Johnny.

  “Come now. We will get Professor Bach to patch you up. After all, you took a nasty fall. You ought to take more care.”

  VIII.

  ONE WEEK LATER IT WAS Halloween. As a lifelong entertainer, the Barker could not be ignorant of the holiday’s roots in dies parentales, the Roman festival of the dead, in particular the midnight rites of Feralia in which the malevolent deceased were exorcized.

  The date was ideal for exorcising me as well.

  So lightless was the October sky that it slid into night without notice. The moment I was assisted through the back door of the Gallery of Suffering, the Barker locked eyes with me and I knew. This was to be the final performance of the troublesome, underhanded, secretive, and astonishing—though not quite astonishing enough—Mr. Stick.

  It surprised me that my first regret was that I would not be able to say farewell and good luck to Johnny. As was the Barker’s decree, the two of us had been kept apart since the morning our plot was uncovered, but from afar I had spied the bandages that sheathed his ribs as well as the sling that cradled his wrist. The Barker’s fabricated explanations began the night after the injuries and I heard them repeatedly as I queued up abaft the stage.

  “This cherished child hurt a rib whilst chasing his beloved red ball over a hill, running slower than the next child by a power of ten. This same sprightly cub sprained his wrist shooting marbles with his chums—but how he wanted that golden aggie! Ladies and gentleman, I see your faces and we can, if you’d like, lament this child’s fractures and bruises. But I choose instead to celebrate them! Youth will not be repressed, no matter how unfortunate and twisted its form, and for this I give all thanks to Gød.”

  The idiots clucked in appreciation.

  “Oh, Little Johnny Grandpa? Look what Dr. Whistler has for you. I purchased it from a lad whose pockets were overstuffed with marbles. That’s right—it is the selfsame golden aggie! No, no, child, do not waste words thanking me. You glow with happiness and that is thanks enough.”

  At least, thought I, as I was shoved on stage that Halloween night of 1899, I would not have to endure such lies much longer.

  Ohioans proved themselves indulgent of the macabre holiday by amassing in unusual numbers. At least twenty-five pairs of eyes reflected our fiery stage lamps. This pleased the Barker. Their word-of-mouth would lend credence to the eulogy for Mr. Stick he would no doubt repeat as frequently as he bestowed the same golden aggie upon Little Johnny Grandpa night after night.

  He was in rare voice, a baritone burr I’d not heard since my first months. I let it lull me. He spun his anecdotes with so much relish that he smacked his lips. He brandished the first of the needles as if it were a rabbit pulled from a magician’s hat while the Kitten Chorus hit every cue. He orchestrated like a conductor with the most resourceful of batons, alternating moods of scherzo and fugue; inserting commentary in both passionate glissandos and whispering nocturnes; sustaining impossible fermatas until the cliff-drop of his refrain of needles. The audience was his faithful, gasping chorale.

  The music made me as delirious as any paying customer. We broke the one-hour mark, a staggering feat, and began eating into the time reserved for Pullman Larry’s sharpshooting show. In shadow against the side of the tent, I could make out the line of impatient ticket holders. They would have to wait. The final lance was slipped from the velvet casing. He held it up to the light. It was nigh time for the Barker to do what he had set forth that night to do.

  The needle approached my eye. I felt it tickle my eyelashes. Then it became a dark wedge scribbling across the surface of my eyeball as it searched for a different entry point than usual, for this time the Barker meant to run my brain straight through, and afterward—who knew? Cremation? Burial? One way or the other I was finished.

  The great, and possibly disappointing, surprise of that instant was how dearly I wished to live! Perhaps it was my desire for revenge upon the Barker, upon Luca Testa, upon Gød Himself, I do not know; or perhaps it was something Mr. Charles Darwin would have endorsed, a primordial slithering toward life, always life. Woe—I do not know! But in that climactic moment, the walls of fear (and dignity?) that I’d built about me collapsed and my mouth dropped open.

  “Euri. Pides,” said I.

  The Barker pulled back an inch. His expression was something new.

  “Euripides.” This time I got the fifth-century tragedian’s name out in a single breath. My voice was raw and multi-octave, not unlike the groaning of five rows of wooden benches when each person upon them leans forward in unison—which is precisely what happened.

  For a moment I was as fearful as a child who has lost his mother. The Barker offered no solace. His face was a soup, churning and changing. The Kitten Chorus grew fidgety at the change in program and hissed to be set free. With trepidation I scanned the crowd of Ohioans. Moths danced near open flames like lingering particles of my spoken words.

  There was nothing to do but complete what I had begun. Johnny, my patient English teacher, was owed that much.

  “‘No. One. Can con. Fidently say. That. He will. Still. Be living. Tomorrow.’”

  With a snap, a moth perished in fire. A pair of tickets were dropped; you could hear the thin paper rustle past the lace hem of a dress. Not a single man or woman or child in Ohio, it seemed, had expected the final quote of the evening to come from the Subject.

  Their stares drove me to panic. What was I doing in front of all of these good people? Yes, of course, finish the scene! I rose to wobbly knees and lifted a trembling hand in salute. It was the usual end to the usual act and it was to be met with the usual scattering of hand-claps.

  Instead, this humble gesture was the coup de grâce of a performance of legend. Dozens of breaths expelled at once and the pandemonium began. Men of poise shouted “Bravo!” Women abandoned decorum by squealing. Applause lit somewhere stage right and in seconds consumed the entire tent. They were on their feet. They were stomping on the pews. Those in line outside began lifting the edge of the tent to see what was behi
nd the bedlam. Children’s faces appeared first; being monkeys, they smiled and clapped in imitation and crawled inside, and then their parents, those non-paying trespassers, streamed after in chase, clueless as to what had occurred but nonetheless bewitched, tipping their hats to the Barker, and to me as well.

  I backpedaled from it and stumbled; a hand shot out to steady me. I followed the wrist, elbow, and shoulder to find that my rescuer was none other than my enemy. His mouth made a horizontal line that his forehead mimicked. I do not know if he’d guessed that I’d suspected my intended fate that night, but he could not get rid of me now, not after I’d generated this reaction.

  The Barker and his fellows scooted me offstage with their hands at my back, as if congratulating me on a job well done. Once behind the curtain, they drew away as if I were boiling with contagion. Pullman Larry stood close tapping his spurred boot, gazing pointedly at a pocket watch that told of the late hour. Mr. Hobby was there, too, chewing at his mustache, his forehead slick with perspiration, a pencil behind each ear. The Barker held out my elbow to his most trusted associate.

  “Remove the needles and take him to his cage. Make haste; our dentist is truant.”

  Hobby winced apologetically. “They demand another show.”

  The Barker blinked. “They—they what?”

  Hobby winced again.

  “The folks in line. They wish for Mr. Stick to give a command performance.”

  Pullman Larry crossed his arms. “This is cow shit.”

  “Our first audience,” continued Hobby, “has cycled around to see him again.”

  “To see that comatose feller?” sputtered Pullman. “Y’all are pullin’ my leg.”

  The Barker glared at me. This was my fault. I had put him in this position of having to choose between loathing and money. Really, it was no choice at all.

  “Fine. We shall perform again. Send out word.”

  Pullman’s hands gripped the handles of his twin pistols.

  “This is a danged outrage!”

  “You’ll be paid per usual,” snarled the Barker.

  “I been playin’ the final spot here for a coon’s age and I ain’t about to watch no dang voodoo doll take my place!”

  “I make the decisions here,” said the Barker. “You’ll do well to remember that.”

  Pullman cocked and uncocked his triggers.

  “You pack too many folks in there and whatever the secret is to his little trick? Mark my words, it won’t last. Then you’ll come crawling back to me and we’ll see what percentage I accept then, won’t we?” He planted his cowboy hat. “Make more coin selling my Gød of Pain anyhow. More than you’ll ever see!”

  With a flail of pink fringe he turned on his three-inch heels and was gone. In the resultant flap of tarp, I caught a glimpse of Johnny outside, his face slack with either shock or pride. When the flap closed, there was something about it, even then, that felt final.

  The Barker massaged his closed eyes for a moment.

  “See to it there is no chaos in our queue, Mr. Hobby. You there, boy. Come here. Remove these needles into this box.” He sighed and gave me the flat look of an infantryman ordered to fight alongside a despised rival. “Yet another stupendous show is upon us.”

  IX.

  HOW DO I BEGIN TO describe the months following my speaking debut? One night after that auspicious improvisation, the Barker delivered to me a terse directive. Our stock climax of a needle into the eye would heretofore be replaced with a short testimonial from Mr. Stick about how the product of the night (whatever it might be) had provided me with my enviable abilities. Sensing a subtle shift in power, I agreed and when the moment came I summoned verbiage memorized from one of the Barker’s many pitches. The audience approved and out came the wallets.

  Attendance surged. Pullman Larry’s sharpshooting show did indeed find itself swapping with mine, and the dentist made no secret about his disgust at serving as my opening act. Even unhappier was the Barker. After years of dwindling income, his profits were on the rise, and yet he behaved as if each coin he counted was stippled with invisible barbs. Oh, how he hated me.

  Mr. Hobby presented me with a suit so new it bore the indents of the manufacturer’s rack. I was grateful to peel off the old one. The humans who lined up an hour in advance were not there to see my snappy suit; I knew that. They wanted to see me take punishment. But their interest in my verbal contributions was real, too, and by and by I found myself incorporating more speech into the routine, punctuating the Barker’s anthology of over-trod citations with vapid interjections: “Hear, hear!” “Wise words, those!”

  I was not above humor, either: “Golly, but that scratches an itch,” I’d say when he drove a pin through my heart. One night I told an entire joke. After the Barker inserted a particularly long needle, I said, in the deadpan which was becoming my trademark, “I cannot think of what I would do without you. But it is worth a try.” The laughter: uproarious! The Barker’s blush: priceless!

  You may wonder how I massed so many words in sequence. Every inch of progress I owed to Johnny, for he’d sparked what had become a regenerating need to speak. Still the Barker’s decree held and the boy and I were kept distant. Worse, the lad had taken to drink; not before or since have I seen anyone take to it more quickly. His nose swelled, patches of strawberry veins invaded his cheeks, and he became shackled to the kind of headaches even a grown man struggles to bear.

  I was resolute in blaming Pullman Larry. With each state boundary we crossed, the dastardly dentist would buy up local moonshines and amuse himself by giving them to Johnny to choke down. Pullman would clap the boy on the humped back and encourage bigger mouthfuls as remedy for his sundry ailments. Whenever Johnny fell on his face while crossing the yard, I needed only turn my head to find Pullman Larry bent over with the force of his guffaws.

  It is helpful to remember that Little Johnny Grandpa had been a fixture in the Gallery of Suffering for most of his life. Doing his show stinking drunk did not present much of a challenge, not at first. Audiences were happy to chalk up his slurring to his medical condition. Scuttlebutt, however, had it that his show was swerving into unsafe territory. He moved about the Gallery with the stagger of a lush, not of an old man, and customers knew the difference. When he collapsed into the laps of women, no more did they twitter at his folly; rather, they recoiled from his breath.

  But who had time to think about Johnny and our shared oaths of revenge when fame was within arm’s reach? A riotous new millennium had broken open and I planned to be a prominent rioter, a mite paler and cooler of temperature, perhaps, though looking no older than I’d been at my death. The America I observed, meanwhile, aged by the minute. The stink of burnt oil and the pneumonic cough of petrol machinery heralded the approach of automobiles along the same paths down which our carriages lumbered. Telephone cables joined us, too, strung along the road like laundry lines. News of our arrival in each town traveled faster. So did the customers.

  Mr. Stick’s audience became dedicated in a way unfamiliar to Dr. Whistler’s. Those forlorn buyers of our religious trinkets began instead migrating to my performances. A single show was often all it took to hook them, and the following night the same sad sacks would gather outside the Gallery with hymnals spread in an attempt to whip the assembled into a Sunday state. Once inside the tent, these fanatics would testify at irregular intervals, throwing the Barker off his script. One night in Kentucky a woman bolted upright and began gibbering in a nonsense tongue until she had to be removed.

  Soon after rose a countermovement peopled by grave Evangelicals just as preoccupied with yours truly, though instead of singing they held aloft handmade signs lettered in severe black paint. Oh, but the messages were jolly!

  THERE BE ONLY HELL THAT AWAITS

  AND YE GUIDE IS MISTER STICK, LUCIFER’S HELPER!

  WE ARE JOINING GENERAL STICK’S BEETLE ARMY,
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br />   HARD-SHELLED FOR REVELATIONS!

  These brimstoners did not cotton to their saved counterparts, and now and again the war of psalms escalated into physical melees. Remaining in any one town for too long became a risk; the Barker did not like to attract the attention of lawmen. The result was that we spent half of our days in transit, a disagreeable percentage if your name was Mr. Hobby.

  It began to feel as if we were on the lam. The Barker woke each day with his ear to the ground and I oft heard him speak to Hobby of a growing animosity in Washington regarding the unchecked contents and unbridled claims of patent medicines. Rumors swirled about a trafficking law that would hog-tie interstate transport of food, liquor, and, more to the point, drugs. Even worse, there was serious talk of requiring drug producers to be accurate in their labeling of product.

  Hobby stood alongside me backstage one night, raking a hand through his shedding hair while reading from what all indications was a most bothersome manuscript. By the by he put it aside and I struggled over to have myself a look-see. The book, published by some medical association or another, was over five hundred pages and focused upon the topic of “quackery.” On one page I found a checklist of “notable humbuggers”; missing from this manifest was the Barker and I wondered if the slight would relieve or ruffle him.

  In the winter of 1900, the highest compliment was paid me: three products emblazoned with the likeness of none other than your sheepish narrator. I shall let the labels of the first two speak for themselves: Mr. Stick’s Suffradine, The Carbonated Cream For Numbing Those Scalds, Relieving That Stranguary & Bolstering All Muscle Gimps; and Mr. Stick’s Ambrosial Aegis Vegetable Compound (A Delicious Drink) For The Sweet Slaying Of Nervous Stomach & Neuralgia. These were harmless agents meant to distract the user while the body made its own repairs. Both had been offered at the Pageant for years, though not behind such handsome packaging.