The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “Mr. Gray, this is Franny. Franny, tell Mr. Gray how old you are.”

  “Five,” whispered Franny.

  “No,” said Mrs. White. “You’re six. You just had a birthday, didn’t you?”

  “Can I go to my room?” whispered Franny.

  “And this is Charles Junior. He’s nine. Junior, say hello to Mr. Gray.”

  Unlike that of his catatonic sister, the boy’s brain was functional. He was orange-haired like his mother, though his mop was largely hidden beneath a coonskin cap that, from its crunchy condition, looked to be the unwashed mainstay of his getup. Like a raccoon, his eyes were small, bright, and nocturnal.

  “Gee whiz, Mr. Gray, you don’t look so good.”

  Mrs. White touched her pearls. Junior perceived his gaucherie.

  “Oh, goobers. Sorry, Mother. Sorry, Mr. Gray. I didn’t mean anything, honest.”

  I lifted a papal hand. “I am, in fact, not entirely well. My particular affliction does not, for example, permit me to eat the same food as the rest of you.”

  Mrs. White, conservator of the consummate kitchen, frowned.

  “Then what do you eat?”

  Toast, I wished to reply. Piles and piles of poorly made toast.

  “I have my own stock of consumables. Vitamins, nutriments. It’s all very scientific.”

  “Well, I—I suppose you know best. All the same, I can’t have a lodger and not invite him to dinner. Even if you don’t eat. Why, it wouldn’t be Christian.”

  Her sculpted orange eyebrows rose in expectation of resistance. Damn it to hell. I could find no grounds. I nodded and hoped that my expression conveyed thankfulness rather than dread. Mrs. White shaped another joyless smile and then, without prelude, clasped her hands and bowed her head. Junior and Franny followed suit. My spirits plunged. A prayer to that welsher Gød? I’d debased myself a hundred ways in only a few hours, but there were depths to which I would not sink.

  “Thank you, Lord, for the blessing of this bountiful meal. Thank you for helping me find the courage to ask for a raise at the library, which I did not get, but it was a good learning experience anyway. Thank you, Lord, for watching over Junior and Franny at school. And thank you for protecting Mr. Gray in Korea. He will need help and guidance to get healthy and become a successful writer. In Jesus’s name we pray—”

  “Amen,” the troika of fools chorused.

  While the children sparred over serving spoons, Mrs. White took pointed note of my heathen hands, which still lay flat and naked.

  “What is your condition, Mr. Gray, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  The woman knew not the profundity of her query.

  Rapidly I cycled through my violent genesis with the Black Hand.

  “Black Hand,” blurted I. “Blackhand. Blackhand’s Disease.”

  “Oh, my,” gasped she. “That does sound bad.”

  Mrs. White returned her focus to the meal, which looked, in a word, revolting. She dubbed the entrée “the Twenty-Minute Roast,” though, in my opinion, if said roast is wedges of Spam spackled with orange marmalade, you ought to have spent more than twenty minutes contriving it. Side items confirmed the culinary vogue of accomplishing outré ingenuity at breakneck speeds. The “Red Crest Salad” was an ordeal of chopped tomatoes and sliced pickles suspended inside strawberry Jell-O, shirked by Junior and Franny in favor of meat pies slathered with a so-called Pink Meringue of ketchup and egg whites.

  If Korea hadn’t killed Mr. White, dinner might have.

  So began the tinkling of forks, the glugging of milk, the sniveling spates of diplomacy regarding plate cleanings. At first, the children were too shy to speak, but Mrs. White demanded inconsequential chitchat, and after some effort, she got it. Junior updated us on his progress as third-grade “ink monitor.” During Monday’s rounds of filling each student’s jar, he’d dumped ink on arch-rival Herbie Hinkle, resulting in a scrap, about which Mrs. White was still sermoning. Franny, meanwhile, recited a memorized list of birds throughout the meal: blackbird, bluebird, hummingbird, meadowlark, sparrow, woodpecker, wren. I looked out the picture window, hoping for evidence of aviary plague, anything to end the deadening roll-call.

  Around the time the children were making Jackson Pollocks of their plates, there came a clicking of claws upon the back door. Junior leapt from his seat and yanked open the door, and a barking dragon careened into the room at such velocity that her giant paws slipped on the linoleum and she went down with a meaty thwack, only to scrabble back up, jowls flouncing, and shark around the table while Franny and Junior chanted the butt-licker’s name as if she were some kind of national hero.

  “CLOWN! CLOWN! CLOWN! CLOWN!”

  Mrs. White rubbed her temples until the jubilee petered out. Once the dog stopped circling the table, she revealed herself to be a three-foot, two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard of brindled brown-and-black fur. Clown, as she was called, shoved her deadly muzzle into the crotches of both children, trailing ropes of slobber. At last my presence penetrated her dullard skull and she cocked her head, bloodshot eyes struggling to see past her avalanche of forehead flab.

  The bitch did not growl in aggression, nor did she pant with happiness. Instead, an irresolute whine emitted from somewhere beneath the saliva-hardened neck scruff. Suffice it to say I did not rise from my seat until after the children had finished scraping their rubbish into the gobbling gullet of the garbage disposal and Junior had hauled off Clown for private wrestling. I sighed, almost nostalgic for the intellectual trials of Udo von Lüth’s Germany. I’d survived my first suburban dinner, but the little pink house on Mulberry Terrace seemed to become more hazardous by the hour.

  IV.

  MY JOLTING FIRST DAY WITH the Whites molded the template for the following eight months of Heavenly Hills living, every twenty-four-hour period composed of twenty-three underground (even during promised babysitting episodes) and one above. Highlights included stilted exchanges with Mrs. White, who reminded Mr. Gray about the broken toaster and that hole in the wall, while Mr. Gray thrust out his only defense, early rent; Mr. Gray typing gibberish upon his single page of paper, day and night, until it grew gummy with ink; and dinners at which Mr. Gray shielded himself from the children’s inspection and Clown’s lunatic romping by blinding himself in the gleam of his shining, empty plate.

  The basement had no lavatory, so twice a day, just to avoid suspicion, I forced myself upstairs, where I entered the bathroom, locked the door, and flushed the toilet. During these turns of pretense I collected dozens of glimpses of Mrs. White lost in reverie gazing at a picture. Her melted posture of longing made it evident that it was a photo of Mr. White, probably in square-shouldered Army dress. The pink house offered no other evidence of this husband so recently deceased, no slippers waiting for feet, no cold pipe waiting to be puffed, just this single photo that Mrs. White kept to herself, her own private ritual of pain.

  Now and then she caught me spying.

  “Are you here to fix the toaster?” she’d threaten.

  Mrs. White knew how to send me high-tailing! Avoiding her became trickier in early 1955, when she began making regular trips to the basement. Upon hearing her heels click down the stairs, I’d crack my door and peek, keeping one hand on the Royal Quiet de Luxe to propagate authorly artifice. What I’d find was Mrs. White in casual ensembles—say, a belted denim jumper behind the ubiquitous pocketed apron—from which she would remove not ladle nor whisk nor lemon zester, but rather a retractable steel tape measure.

  She’d run the tape across horizontal stretches of unfinished wall and then, balanced upon a chair, across the vertical axis. She’d gnaw her nails in consternation and take notes on a slip of paper, then compare these notes to a rubber-banded pack of pamphlets also kept in the apron pocket. The kitchen forever needed attention, though, and as was inevitable, one day Mrs. White left those pamphlets behind. Feeling like the mischievous Junior, I stole across the basement. In muted daylight I read, and was, to be sure, startled by the content
.

  “This Is Civil Defense” was the name of the first booklet. It was a manual reimagining the suburbs not as refuge against the metropolitan grind but rather against the bugbear of Soviet attack. If the bombs from enemy planes ever fell on your city, read this whimsical primer, they would not fall on a plant, or an organization, or a system of government. They would fall on you and your family and friends. The next publication, “Home Protection Exercises,” was every ounce as jolly, with illustrations of “atomic dust” preceding a list of chores for each family member after Armageddon had come calling like the Avon Lady. “What You Should Know About Radioactive Fallout” supplied fun survival tips (vacuum up nuclear dust with your handy new Hoover!), while “The Family Fallout Shelter” made the purpose of Mrs. White’s measuring tape crystal clear.

  Reader, it perturbed me. The petrifying hours spent cowering with Frau Meixelsperger in a tin box had convinced me I’d rather take a direct hit from an H-bomb than try that again. And one needed only to have seen the aftereffects of Hiroshima to know how preposterously inadequate do-it-yourself hints would be in the face of U.S.-USSR counterblows, which those in the pamphlet biz called “mutual annihilation.”

  My concerns were more pressing and practical. Should our nervous widow prevail in converting her cellar into a shelter, my corpse would be dropkicked back to the curb. If I wished to preserve my place on Mulberry Terrace, I’d need to make myself useful, and be quick about it.

  “Useful”—my least favorite word!

  Dinnertimes made it plain that the White children, too, had contracted atomic mania from teachers. When menaced by an especially foul dish (Fonduloha, a hollowed-out pineapple stuffed with turkey, peanuts, mayonnaise, curry, coconut, canned mandarins, and the defamed pineapple itself), Junior’s tactic was to screech like a bomb siren, at which point he and Franny would dive beneath their chairs to show off their duck-and-cover technique. From my basement windows I’d even observed the brats teaching this routine to Clown. At the word “duck,” the slabbery mammoth would lie flat, her barrel body planted in the snow. At the word “cover,” she’d shield her snout with both front paws.

  An amusing display, perhaps, were the dog in question less fearsome. Nevertheless I grew jealous of the frolicking Whites, who took for granted that their mastiff wouldn’t rip their smiling faces off. I’d experienced no such fidelity since abandoning Church in Manhattan’s Chinatown twenty-three years earlier, and this forlorn fact contributed to my plan. Humans had proven jeopardous to befriend—you need look no further back than von Lüth—but perhaps I could ingratiate myself to the Whites via their non-human affiliate.

  In defiance of the hygienic habits of suburban living, the dog lived indoors. For hours each weekday, Mrs. White was at the library and the children at school, meaning that all I had to do was go upstairs, rouse the beast, and make my petition. Easy to say, but you try it! Listen to the switchblade clicks of the creature’s pacing claws, her shell-blast sneezes, the squeal of floorboards beneath her extraordinary weight. It took me a week (or two, or three; let us not get bogged down in the extent of my cowardice) to select from a cellar lumber pile a defensive two-by-four and tiptoe upstairs on a quiet February morning.

  I found Clown snailed at the foot of Junior’s bed. She brought herself to four legs, dropped herself to the floor, and stared, a white stalactite of drool elongating from a jowl. A Saint Bernard’s eyes are monklike, teardropped by hoods of skin, and yet I could tell by the flattening of her broad neck that she was not overjoyed to see me.

  “Easy, there, dog,” warned I.

  The velour drapery of her lips rose to reveal jagged canines.

  Oh, hell. I hoisted the two-by-four.

  The drool thickened but did not snap.

  I smiled placatingly and edged closer. The dog side-eyed me like my wartime nemesis Piano O’Hannigan, and from deep inside her throat began a growl. On instinct I shook the two-by-four, and the dog’s lips made room for bonus teeth—incisors now, premolars. Her claws began to knead the carpet. Disaster, Zebulon, disaster! I choked up on my weapon and cursed the whole boneheaded affair. Should the Whites return home to find their precious pet clubbed to death, they would not exactly hold a parade in my honor.

  “Listen here, dog. You are guardian of this home. I do not wish to replace you. I wish only to reach a jointly beneficial accord so that your tallest human doesn’t turn my room into a damn bunker. Here is my proposal. I shall pat you upon your head, or scratch your withers or loin, and deliver to you meaty morsels, as many as I can smuggle. In turn, you shall wag your tail upon my approach for all to see. Is this agreeable?”

  Jaws jolted forward with a splattering bark. I stumbled over a misplaced plaything and slammed back against the wall. Model war planes spun from the ceiling, and rifle-firing cowboys charged from patterned wallpaper. I cleared my vision, and there was Clown, heaving and baying, large sectors of hide seizing with an undergrid of muscle, her muzzle aimed at my crotch, my trousers already spattered with suds.

  The aggression rocketed me out of Heavenly Hills, out of Wichita, out of Kansas, all the way back to the Rocky Mountains. What the Marlboro Man had taught me poured back like blood into pinched flesh. Wild though this animal was, I’d faced wilder and had avoided all stompings, gorings, and gnashings, not because I’d dominated them but because I was them, existing outside of the violent, noisy, plane-flying, rifle-toting human plane.

  Gently I placed the two-by-four upon the floor, kneeled, and unspooled the transcendental yarn of la silenziosità.

  The ability had betrayed me aboard the Fliegende Hitler, but the dog slowed her growl to a putter and brought her muzzle within inches of my face. Blasts of hot, reeking breath made my cold skin clammy, but I could not turn away, for she was the realest thing I’d yet observed in this Formica fantasy.

  The dog was the first being since General Joseph Thomas Hazard in 1901 who did not fear the death she saw coming. And why? It is simple, Reader. As Animal, she was incapable of sin. She angled her head and blinked slowly at the boundless fields of grass waiting to be peed upon, the billions of bounding bunnies waiting to accept pursuit, and whatever else Gød had in store for dead dogs.

  “Hello, Clown,” whispered I. “My name is Zebulon Finch.”

  I bowed my head and allowed la silenziosità to slip away, and then waited to feel matching sets of fangs sink into my neck. Instead, a warm muzzle pressed against my crown. Clown sneezed moisture into my hair, sniffed my ears with gale-blast loudness, and nosed into the old gash in my neck, in each spot smelling whole histories unreachable to human noses. Only when she seemed finished did I meet her eyes.

  For one long second she was impassive and lethal.

  Then out plopped her tongue.

  My reaction was curious: I smiled. It manifested as abruptly as a burp. The dog reacted with a huge, rippling expression of such benevolence that it scorched my arctic flesh. I picked up the two-by-four and withdrew to the basement, confused by the onrush of good feeling. Dinner, of course, required reemergence, and when Clown did her post-poop victory laps around the table, she paused alongside my chair the same as she did Junior’s and Franny’s, head high as if eager to accept a pat. I dared not, not yet, but the Excelsior in my breast pocket ticked harder than it had in years.

  The care I felt for the dumb animal consumed me with harrowing speed. Every day I visited her upstairs, and every day—every single day without fail—she was overjoyed. She seemed to sense my physical fragility and did not leap, instead frolicking in a figure-eight pattern before sitting still for me to scratch her ears while her bushy tail whap-whap-whapped the floor. Wilma Sue, believed I, had once looked upon me with love, and Church’s brusque handshakes had once signaled devotion, but here was something different. This was adoration. Clown assumed that I was a good person—no, the best person—and because there was no telling her any different, I could but stroke her fur to calm the grateful trembling of my hands.

  Clown was keen to p
rove her loyalty. I said “duck” and she ducked. I said “cover” and she covered. I decided that this was fabulous and over the next months taught the animal a full program of tricks. In hindsight, I admit that they were consistent with my criminal proclivities. “Steal.” I pointed at an object, and she bolted to snatch it, and if I tried to yank it away, she was not allowed to relent. “Blitz.” No matter where I hid, she had to find me, even if it meant butting through presidios I’d built from chairs and sofa cushions. And, of course, “Slay”—the vicious throttling of an object, usually an egg carton or coffee can fetched from the trash. So gentle was Clown that it fascinated me to watch these emergences of natural force.

  When I wasn’t teaching her bad habits, we found satisfaction in simple proximity, me in an upholstered chair that still smelled of Charles White’s Burma-Shave, Clown sighing at my feet. One day I failed to don footwear or sock, and Clown showed shy interest in my bare feet, which, due to gravity, were dark purple from blood coagulate and therefore stank worse than the rest of me.

  Clown asked for so little that I made haste in asking her to partake in the littlest toe of my right foot. Her chin dropped miserably, positive that she was being tested for bad-dog behavior, and it took me an afternoon of encouragement before she gave in to her curiosity. She licked it, then chewed it, both with remarkable tenderness. The toe, a tuber of skin of trivial import, became “The Toe,” a symbol of amity shared between me and my furred friend. The crunch of her teeth against The Toe’s tiny bones, the squish of the masticated flesh, and the sight of its ever more mangled exterior filled me with happiness.

  I would have liked our tenderness to remain a private thing, but Mrs. White’s continued infatuation with civil defense impelled me to showcase the bond I’d nurtured. It was on a repulsively gorgeous day in May that I waited for Mrs. White to go shopping, got dressed in the better of my two outfits, tucked The Toe inside a shoe, and extracted from a mudroom drawer Clown’s leash. The dog went bonkers and began lobbing its two hundred pounds against the front door. Here it was, then: my true migration back to America. The question was whether I could resist my own urges to Steal, Blitz, and Slay.