The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  “Get dressed,” said I.

  “Oh, I see. Fashionably late is what you are. Did Mother teach you that?”

  “Will you get dressed?”

  “My, my. This is going to be fun, isn’t it?”

  Nevertheless she followed orders, stamping into the bathroom to emerge fifteen minutes later transformed from limp-haired druid to gussied debutante, her Bridey-black hair pulled away from a strapless floor-length gown laced with a Mexican motif across skirt and bodice. For certain it was a gift from Mother, who, despite her faults, knew how to pair a dress to a body.

  Not that Margeaux was going to be mistaken for a Cinderella. Though thinner, she remained several sizes over fighting weight and her posture suggested a burden that had but grown heavier across the years. She fidgeted nonstop, running a finger beneath her three-strand pearl necklace and tugging at her silk gloves so that they covered every last scar.

  “Are you going to stare at me all night or what? It’s not like you look so great either. You look dead.”

  “I am here as a favor.”

  “When shall I present you with your award?”

  “Say what you wish. Let us embark.”

  “Fine, then. Great.”

  Neither of us budged.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “I confess I know nothing of our destination.”

  She covered her face with both hands.

  “Gød, you’re hopeless.”

  The night was windy. By the time we reached the parking lot, Margeaux had thrice failed to light a cigarette. With nothing to cork her mouth, she grouched the agenda. The last Saturday before semester’s end marked the traditional Winter Formal, a dance with no significance beyond that everyone in California was obsessed with being beautiful. In this aspect, Margeaux had not changed: the little girl who lambasted Hollywood fakers and fretted about Dust Bowl farmers had grown into a young woman of equivalent values.

  I, for one, was upbeat about our objective. What I knew about high school dances could fill a thimble, but I imagined that they were, first and foremost, dark. The idea that I could be an anonymous teenager for these few hours before my probable arrest had high appeal, and I was relieved that my jacket, untouched in the drug-den massacre, would suffice for such an event.

  My happy trance was cut short by a groan upon arrival at the red convertible.

  “This is the car you brought?” Margeaux whined.

  “Will the wind play havoc with your hair?”

  “Everyone will look at us,” hissed she.

  She curved her back, squooshing her corpulence against its delicate bindings, and glanced about. Skipping through the lot were half a dozen gowned and suited classmates rushing to overcome their own late starts, and not a one of them paid us any mind.

  “Isn’t that the point?” asked I. “To be seen? Why else the gown, the shoes, et cetera?”

  “The point is Mother. It’s always Mother. She wouldn’t let me graduate without attending a stupid dance. There’s a war going on, you know that? Millions of people are dying in Europe and this is what she decides to care about. She said if I don’t go, people will say nasty things.”

  “What kind of nasty things?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. That I don’t like boys?”

  “Interesting. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t like anyone. I don’t understand why that’s so difficult for people to understand.” She sighed. “Let’s just get into this capitalist U-boat and get this over with, okay?”

  She flopped herself into the Yankee Doodle and sank low into the seat. I was about to follow suit when I noticed a minor, but telling, detail. Each girl prattling past on heels wore a ribboned flower pinned above her breast. The boys piling into jalopies cradled similar miniature bouquets intended for their dates. It seemed an important, if subtle, social signifier, and it concerned me that, without it, Margeaux might encounter, as she put it, nasty things.

  “One moment,” said I, stepping away from the car.

  In truth it was a good two or three moments before I returned. I took my seat behind the wheel, tossed onto her lap a small arrangement of flowers, and revved the engine.

  “What’s this?” asked she.

  “It is called a corsage.” I swung the car around, honking at horseplayers.

  “I know what it’s called. Where did you get it?”

  “From some chap.”

  “And how did you get it, exactly?”

  “I socked him.”

  “You what?”

  “Only in the breadbasket. He will yet dance the night away, I promise you.”

  I swerved from the lot and floored it, hurling Margeaux against her seat, though that did not prevent her observing me with renewed interest. The possibility occurred to me that no boy had ever before done her a kindness; the thought brought me much discomfort. There was a refreshing clarity to Margeaux’s absolute disapproval of the world, and I wished not to corrupt it.

  She murmured directions. I watched for police lights. She was ruminative. I wondered what in the goddamned hell I was doing. Presently she spoke.

  “Congratulations, by the way.”

  “Be less obscure.”

  “Mother told me this morning. Look, I don’t care. I’m happy for you. It’s true, I never thought of you as a plutocrat, but what do I care? People change.”

  “What are you going on about?”

  “The will.” She frowned. “Was it supposed to be a surprise? Mother put you in her will.”

  Let this line upon the page be the proxy for my stupefaction.

  “Are you all right?” asked she. “I don’t want you to crash this monstrosity.”

  “Money,” stammered I. “I have no right to it.”

  “Look, don’t worry about me, she has plenty for her whole pathetic excuse for a family.”

  Family: does it not strike you as a pregnant word?

  If the script had been a proposal without a ring, the will was marriage without a certificate.

  We arrived at the local Elks Lodge, site of the Winter Formal, long before I could begin to process the flustering news. The clamor from inside confirmed that we were indeed late, and yet we sat for a time in the parked car listening to the squawk of muffled jazz and the moan of a building wind, while a single glum balloon knocked its head against a lobby window.

  I got out of the car, made my way around it, opened her door, and extended my elbow.

  She blinked up at me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t you think we should go inside?”

  “What? You can’t come in with me.”

  Few things are as disheartening as letting a proffered arm fall.

  “No, it’s not like that,” said she. “It’s just—it’s the school. They have a million rules. You have to register guests and I didn’t know that—I mean, Mother didn’t—it would create a big fuss. We’d have to find the principal and get his permission, and then—”

  That I’d imagined the evening unfolding otherwise was embarrassing. I held up a hand to quiet her.

  “Everyone will look. Say no more.”

  My smile might have even looked real.

  I stepped back to allow her to hoist herself from the car. She faced the Elks Lodge as if it were the gallows. I watched from my demoted position as chauffeur as she did a dozen feminine things at which, on any other night, she might have scoffed, rising upon toes to create a straighter back, twisting a bracelet to some better advantage, touching her hair so gently as not to be touching it at all.

  Her sigh was loud and defeated; I found myself aching at the heartbreak of the hopeful little handbag positioned as shield over her tender stomach. She gave me a skittish glance.

  “Beautiful,” blurted I.

  “Z,” said she. “Lyin
g does not suit you.”

  But she flushed, and the best way to hide it was to break away across the lot. I followed her progress, from the uncertain stoop of her shoulders as she leaned into the wind to the nervous fists formed inside her silken gloves. Everyone else in sight was coupled, but when a Negro fellow held the door open for Margeaux alone, she nodded with a poise that would have made her mother proud.

  I reclaimed the driver’s seat. It would take a cop of Roseborough’s tenacity to track me to an Elk’s Club in Santa Barbara; thus, I had hours to kill. I placed upon my lap the last diversion I had in the world: the bedraggled, battle-pocked copy of In Our Image. I smoothed it out the best I could and opened the first page. It stuck to the verso via a daub of dried blood.

  By the low illumination of parking lot lamps, I read. And read more. And—by jove—read even more than that. It was as if I were back in that well-booked guest room at Sweetgum, riveted by the expeditionary antics of H. Rider Haggard and the visionary leaps of H. G. Wells. Even if the script were unproduceable (it was), even if the struggle to make it would bring Bridey nothing but professional ruin (it would), the half-baked fairy-tale amalgam of wolves and women that she’d described to me was nothing less than hypnotic when put to page.

  I shall never know how she pulled it off. The man-wolf was no hirsute Lon Chaney Jr.-type gnawing the scenery, nor were the sex scenes comparable to the tawdry titillation you’d get from the Barker’s twenty-cent peep show. These elements were, rather, the crepuscular internal organs that, through pump and squish, powered the most beautiful of creatures—and was that not life itself? The dark inside that made us seek the light outside? The ineffable paradox of being?

  It was symbolic of my own prolonged death that I never got to read the death of Bridey’s protagonist. Mere pages before the screenplay revealed the meaning of life—by then, I expected nothing less—the driver’s door of the car flew open. I jerked in surprise, dropping the script. It was Margeaux; I hadn’t noticed her approach. But her pounding bosom left no doubt that it had been at a sprint. Her carefully woven hair had disentangled, hanging like entrails about her shoulders. Black daggers of melted mascara carved each cheek and her gloves had pooled to reveal past diagrams of pain.

  “Move over,” she sobbed.

  “Margeaux, what—”

  “Move!”

  XX.

  SHE DROVE FAST.

  “Faster,” she urged herself.

  The little engine screamed.

  “Faster.”

  They were the two syllables she’d stressed for an hour, a plea for time itself to accelerate until it drove a period into her long, tortured sentence. She did not divulge what had happened at the Winter Formal, but what matter did it make? Pain, her constant bedfellow, had grown sick of sharing a mattress and had decided to smother her with the pillow. Margeaux’s tears mixed with the salt of the Pacific Ocean. Big silver breakers shattered into the moonlit cliffs that propped up State Highway One.

  She’d chosen the coastline roadway for no reason that I could discern, but now that we were halfway to Los Angeles, I was determined to make her keep driving. Bridey and I were finished, but that did not mean I couldn’t, as my last act in Hollywood, force a mother-daughter reunion; Margeaux deserved better than a boarding school that brought her such misery. To hell with the gossip hounds who prowled Bridey’s gates, waiting for just such a scoop to make their careers: Bridey Valentine’s Illegitimate Love-Child Revealed!

  The Yankee Doodle was built for style, not control, and the ocean wind waggled the tail. Margeaux gasped and braced an arm against the dash, but after she straightened she barked baleful laughter into the night. She turned her painted face and shouted over the shrieking wind.

  “What is it you want? If not Mother’s money?”

  The gust from a northbound truck throttled our smaller vessel. The steering wheel juddered; she fought it. Meanwhile I fought her horrid question, but it kept after me with the artlessness of a junkyard dog. What, indeed, had I been doing for six decades? Were there ciphers to be read in my trail of wreckage?

  Ocean blasted cliff, artillery fire from Neptune. I ducked. The tide retracted its claws from the rock and sand with a hiss.

  “Tell me what you want!” begged she. “Something! Anything!”

  Was the center line of a highway meant to be straddled? It must be 1922, rural Georgia, where such lines did not yet exist and I drove a Model T called Tin Lizzie and could go wherever I wished, at whatever speed, with any cargo.

  A car horn blared. Margeaux swerved back to the brink. I spat the salt of years and found that I did, in fact, have an answer to her question.

  “I want to fix things,” said I. “To make things right.”

  “And what have you accomplished?”

  “Nothing.” The truth stung. “Nothing.”

  “Perfect! Then there’s no reason to be here. Is there?”

  The logic was indisputable. If Zebulon Finch, reset each day to age seventeen, could not scrape patient victory from this impatient world, then there was no victory to be scraped.

  “That cliff coming up,” mused she. “We could run right off it. All this wind? People would think it was an accident.”

  Margeaux’s hair had become mythological in the wind, grasping sea-serpent tentacles, writhing snake nest, black fire. Beneath, her face was silver and still. I became dazzled, then agonized, by the smooth vulnerability of youth, how little the flesh anticipates life’s coming ruin.

  “We could,” replied I.

  While those like Bridey moved through life as though their every gesture had consequence, those like her daughter were neglected, ignored, uninteresting, and therefore uninterested. Margeaux understood the feeling of importance no better than a scorned stepchild understood a birthday party when heard only through an attic floor. Of course she was apathetic about her mother’s will. Money meant nothing to her. What she was desperate for was purpose, but there was none to be found.

  I knew how she felt. I, too, could think of no good reason to carry on.

  Margeaux braked in the middle of the highway, and then reversed the car across the opposite lane and onto a trailhead leading into the Santa Monica Mountains. Tucked beneath a treed canopy, the Yankee Doodle idled, its headlights shooting across Highway One to incandesce the guardrail before dissipating into the ocean below. The crash and hiss, crash and hiss, crash and hiss of the tide terrified me, reminding me of something awful—but what? To drown it out, perhaps, Margeaux punched the engine, filling the forest around us with growling, encircling lions.

  Her eyes swam, her chest pounded.

  “Yes,” said she, and I heard an echo:

  Her mother, on the floor, crying Yes!, cheering a different sort of annihilation.

  I prepared to spew the buoying blather required to talk her down from this perilous perch. But the wind whistled encouragements from legions of the Hollywood dead, whose early exits from the stage of life had won rave reviews at so many a gossip-fueled cocktail party. This destructive tide—this crash and hiss—had Margeaux, too, in its grip. I found that I missed her extra pounds. I missed her skewed teeth. I missed her crooked glasses.

  “The rocks are craggy,” warned I. “They shan’t let you go.”

  Might not they take tenacious hold of me as well?

  Margeaux took my hand. Hers was hot, damp, and adamant, and told me that it was she who would not let me go. That this girl, realized I, was seventeen was not coincidence but a cosmic gift. Margeaux was offering the universe a chance to correct what it had flubbed in 1896. This time, there would be no rescue from the depths.

  “You’re so cold,” said she.

  I squeezed so that she might best feel infinity’s freeze.

  “Yes,” whispered I. “Coldness is all there is.”

  I put my icy lips to her heated fingers and with a kiss t
ransferred Bridey’s proposal to her daughter. Margeaux’s veil could be seaweed, her dress a bank of undersea sand, her bouquet a fistful of shells, and together we could bask in nuptials of lull and tranquility.

  It was then that I identified the sound of the tide.

  In it crashed: Hweeeeee . . .

  Out it hissed: Fweeeeee . . .

  These soft shushes were loud enough reminders of who I truly was. Deserter of Wilma Sue (hweeeeee), maimer of upright Triangulinos (fweeeeee), traitor of goodhearted Johnny (hweeeeee), bumbler of Leather’s revelations (fweeeeee), slaughterer of faceless Huns (hweeeeee), pied piper of murdered flappers (fweeeeee), misleader of faithful Church (hweeeeee), disappointer of a daughter (fweeeeee). These accusations were the tide, yes, but also the wind in the grass below, the rustle of the palm leaves above, the sigh of the girl alongside me, and the dead skin of my left hand sliding from the live skin of her right as she slotted the car into gear.

  Margeaux pounded the pedal. The tires squealed like hogs mid-butcher. For two seconds the car shook as if aboveground of my pop’s TNT, and then the tires snatched a wad of turf and slingshotted us forward. We came out crazy, snapping tree limbs and smashing a headlight before thudding down upon pavement. I tensed for north or south collision but the road was ours, and in the second before the grill snapped the guardrail, I took back Margeaux’s hand. In near-death she was perfect, invulnerable at last to time’s degeneration.

  I wonder if anyone saw the roadster fall into the ocean like a shiny red drop of blood.

  The crash was so loud it was silent. The impact hurled our hard skeletons against soft muscle. Images disassembled. Engine block driven through hood. Windshield glass sluicing laps with diamonds. A tire bobbing away into the black. A sudden pitch forward, sucked into a spumous hole. Tufts of torn seat leather rising with the water, to my chest, my neck, my chin, because we were sinking, and some things floated while others did not.