The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “It’s not the fighting,” pressed I. “It’s the disobedience. It’s the poor grades.”

  “Golly, Mr. Gray. Didn’t you ever get lousy grades? Didn’t you ever get in fights? ”

  I ducked that line of questioning.

  “The point is the burden you place on your poor mother.”

  “Mom’s always blowing a gasket about this junk. Who cares? After the Commies bomb us, she’ll be glad I know how to fight!”

  “And if the Commies do not? I do not believe you possess the musculature to be the next Sugar Ray Robinson.”

  For a time he brooded, and I worried that I’d pushed the child, one of two living humans to hold me in favorable regard, to turn against me. Then Junior stopped short, quick-drew his rifle, and clacked out a dozen shots across Spruce Boulevard. The invisible rain of bullets was a violent expression of frustration with which I sympathized.

  “Why don’t you go back and tell Mom I ran away? I won’t blame you if I get caught, honest. And I won’t get caught. I’ll go right past the movie theater until I get to the road, and then I’ll hitchhike. I’ll hitchhike all the way to Disneyland. And I’ll get on the Mickey Mouse Club. And then when Mom turns the show on for Franny, she’ll see how much fun I’m having with the Mouseketeers, and then she’ll be sorry!”

  August was not cool enough for his cheeks to be that flushed, nor windy enough for his eyes to produce that weight of tears. As he stomped down the block, I followed at a distance, turning over my own history of hopeless fantasies: taking charge of Luca Testa’s blackmailing operation, joining Lucky Luciano in New York City’s underworld, parlaying newsreel celebrity into Hollywood fame. If only I’d had an older and wiser architect to indicate the shoddy draftsmanship of my blueprints.

  I caught up with Junior at the corner of Hemlock and Pine, plucked two bills from my pocket, and held them out.

  “Here is twenty dollars,” said I. “Good luck and happy trails.”

  He frowned at the cash, his smooth forehead knotting.

  “Gee, Mr. Gray.”

  “This won’t get you all of the way to Disneyland, but a week or two of fasting will not kill you. After all, you have all that Mickey Mouse money waiting for you.”

  Junior squinched his bruised eye.

  “You don’t care if I run away?”

  “It is your mother who cares. I find your plan rather compelling.”

  Junior considered this. “But what if I get hurt on the way?”

  “A wrassler like yourself? Inconceivable.”

  Junior bit his lower lip, perhaps to dam the saliva generated by the sight of such fantastic wealth. But then he did what I’d guessed he might. He gave the cash the cold shoulder and with a lope that was indubitably contrite, resumed our walk down Pine.

  I stuffed the bills back into my pocket, dizzy with triumph. Why, I’d done it! With neither fist nor fury, I’d nudged a youth down a truer path! My thoughts glided to Merle, the daughter I’d driven away with round after round of fatherly fumble. My body and brain remained stubbornly seventeen, but my parenting skills had, at long last, squirmed forward.

  When a theater called the Orpheum landed before us, a boxy building surely more impressive when wearing a tiara of nighttime neon, I was sorry to see it. Not only had I probed beyond the protective earthworks of Mulberry Terrace, I’d done so without raising collar or lowering hat against the thrown stones of censuring eyeballs. How exquisite it was to taste a daub of my jaunty old indestructible self!

  The Orpheum’s signboard related the weekend menu:

  DOUBLE FEATURE

  IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE

  CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

  IN EXCITING STEREOVISION 3-DIMENSION

  Movies and their bottomless bag of gimmicks always beguiled me. By George, thought I, maybe I’d accompany Junior into the theater itself, where I, not from outer space but indeed a creature of blackness, could perpetuate my alternate reality in a popcorn-funked dark.

  While I deliberated this bold move, my eyes, traitors to happiness, strayed to a bulletin board of advertisements for upcoming films. My mood, already high, soared higher at the sight of two features headlined by Bridey Valentine—only to precipitously fall. Neither one was In Our Image. One was titled Cult of the Tarantula, the other Granny Atom’s Terror Machine. Bridey, it seemed, had escaped Communist blacklisting (a feat, given her eccentric enthusiasms), but no number of cosmetic surgeries could prevent her from taking the inevitable tumble every aging actress took down Hollywood’s steps, which fed directly into a dungeon of reprobate cults and rogue atoms. She was, after all, by then (Gød, how could it be?) fifty-seven.

  The plastic prattle of the Davy Crockett rifle woke me from my stupor. Junior, his movie ticket bit between his teeth like a buckaroo’s cigarette, was peppering me with friendly fire before entering the Orpheum.

  “See you later, alligator!” cried he.

  My mind was aggrieved and slow.

  “What? I do not understand.”

  Junior drowned in exasperation. “You’re supposed to say, ‘In a while, crocodile!’ ”

  I nodded, feeling quite old. Junior waved—I would not be joining him after all—and vamoosed into a lobby crammed with children stumbling about in red-and-blue 3-D glasses and giggling in anticipation of cinematic fright. I turned away from the box office and attuned myself to the pink house’s basement beacon. My preferred role in this science-fiction/fantasy/horror hybrid was that of a harmless lodger in the quiet Wichita outskirts, but Bridey Valentine’s slow spoil was a reminder that I was, in truth, just as Junior had suggested, an alligator: scaly, cold-blooded, low-lying, ageless, and in the habit of snapping in half anyone who came too close.

  VII.

  NO, I HADN’T FIXED THE confounded toaster or spent an iota of effort on that hole in the wall, but my safe squiring of Junior to his double-feature impressed my value upon Mrs. White as inexorably as my brutal beating of Giuseppe Fratelli had upon Luca Testa. The children, little radar dishes, picked up on the tweaked signal and began encircling me after dinner to delay my decampment. Trapped upstairs, I learned more about Heavenly Hills in a week than in the totality of the preceding year. Ever was Mrs. White rushing home from the Lane Ladies or canasta to propagate hearsay with fellow housewives, twirling her finger in the telephone cord like a teenager.

  Consider the melodrama of Mr. Mitchell, who washed his steel-blue Chevrolet Nomad every Sunday morning, right across the street from us, the sudsy runoff pooling in the gutter like beer I’d seen axed from barrels by Prohibition police. The problem was that Mr. Mitchell’s routine showcased that he didn’t attend Sunday services—a cardinal offense, especially to Mrs. Shoemaker. Stubborn secularist though he might have been, Mr. Mitchell hadn’t the heretic grit to withstand his wife’s begging, and thus the ceremonial soaping of the Chevy switched to perfectly decent Saturdays.

  Far more tragicomic was the story of the Cunninghams. In September their septic tank backed up, and their lawn, so attentively sodded back in spring, ballooned with a goiter of sewage. Mr. Cunningham, proprietor of a shoe-shine parlor, was caught during a lean season, and it was two weeks before he could get the blister lanced and drained. Clown adored the stench and beelined there during our walks, and for a fortnight I watched the Cunningham clan fade to ghosts—the neighbors, led by Mrs. Shoemaker, looked right through them.

  You cannot blame me for worrying that my involvement with the Whites might lead to similar blackballing. Junior worried me the most. He would sit beside me every chance he got, plant his pudgy cheeks into his palms, and with disconcerting intensity search my eyes. If the boy looked hard enough, might he strike a wellspring of la silenziosità? He was too young to glimpse his own demise; I looked away. Yet he was like Clown when given the order to Slay. Once he’d jawed into something pungent, he wouldn’t let go. One Sunday while Mrs. White paid homage to a coven called the Parent-Teacher Association, Junior cornered me after one of my fake bathroom trips, hi
s plastic rifle at ease upon a shoulder.

  “Is it a superpower?” whispered he. “I won’t tell no one, honest.”

  I tried to angle past the runt, but he backpedaled.

  “Is Mr. Gray your human name? Is it cuz you’re a superhero?”

  A far-flung arrow from Little Johnny Grandpa hit home.

  Beg y’pardon, Mr. Stick, but I have me a question. Are y’really dead like some of them say? Are ya? And if y’are, does that mean you’re an angel?

  “A superhero. You know, like Superman?” Junior gasped. “You don’t know Superman?!”

  The name triggered a recollection of a program I’d often glimpsed while passing the family television, one which began with a broadcaster boasting how Superman was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I’d assumed the hero in question to be an exhibitionist pervert—he cavorted about, after all, in underwear—but then I recalled the next line from the opening spiel: “Yes, it’s Superman! Strange visitor from another planet who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men!”

  The characterization touched a nerve of mine that was not altogether dead. I, too, belonged to this world only by degrees; I, too, had physical capacities that, were you feeling altruistic, you might describe as “powers” or “abilities.” So lonely was my rare condition that these barely shared traits were enough to pique a begrudging interest.

  “I capitulate,” said I. “Tell me about your Superman.”

  The pink house had a secret space, a gabled, unfinished attic redolent of mothballs and unlit but for two fly-corpsed bulbs. While I consulted my Excelsior—the PTA black mass would not last all night—Junior knelt before four cardboard boxes and, in an orange plashet of light, made introductions.

  Superman, learned I, had traveled to Earth as an infant escapee of the exploded planet of Krypton. This story was certified not by gold-edged vellum-bound tomes but from stacks of comic books Junior had inherited from his father. The bulk of this ripped, wrinkled, and stained archive had been published during World War II, when Charles Senior had been a teenager. Turning each delicate page, I felt a jab of sadness with regard to this man I’d never meet. How viciously quick it was that boys became men and men became dust.

  As best I could tell, Supe, as Junior called him, spent his days bashing through brick walls, tossing around trucks, and striking macho poses against a staff of incompetent baddies. According to the yellowest issues, his Krypton craft had grounded in a small, possibly Kansan town, where he was found by the benevolent Kents and brought to an orphanage. Straightaway, I felt the sting of kinship. My second youth had withstood the shocks of many a foster family. In Superman’s case, the Kents returned to adopt him, name him Clark, and teach him that he must use his powers for good.

  This gave me pause while Junior blabbered.

  “Look, here’s where Supe saves Lois from the Archer’s arrow!”

  Church’s Theory of 17, though disproved, had given rise to the Fifty-One’s badgering nags. The idea planted by Superman’s creators, a pair of Jewish geniuses called Siegel and Shuster, was even simpler and more profound. Moments before we’d plunged into the ocean, Margeaux had begged to know what I wanted from life, and I’d said, I want to fix things. To make things right. Tossing commuter buses at arch-villains was beyond my ability, but I could start smaller, right there in that cramped attic, and do what I could to fix this one broken family. Might my failure with the Watsons—Wilma Sue and Merle—be absolved by success with the Whites?

  “Look, Mr. Gray,” begged Junior. “Here’s where Supe busts Funnyface’s shrinking ray.”

  I couldn’t commit to the Man of Steel’s generosity of spirit before contending with his name. Superman was, of course, muscle-bound. But should you, in your ultramodern space-age, have access to the original issues, select a random panel and examine it. Closer now. Closer still. See how the four-color printing process unfastens Supe’s chiseled pink face into blue, red, yellow, and black dots? This I submit as a metaphor for having one’s atoms scattered across time, the agony of permanent impermanence. Superman was no free, flying thing. He was a man shackled by destiny, bled dot by dot onto pulpy paper not of his choosing. Normal life was right there in front of him—substitute alliteration, and Mary Magdalene becomes Lois Lane—but Superman could have none of it.

  Reader, I do hope this sounds familiar.

  Thenceforth I resolved to think of Superman by his Krypton name, Kal-El, the survivor of a lost world. If I could convince myself that I was at least of Kal-El’s breed, just some run-of-the-mill Kryptonian, I might become the white light that could burn away, at least for a time, the black tendrils of the Millennialist that had clenched Mulberry Terrace’s pinkest house.

  I allowed Junior to lead me by the hand toward the home’s heart, the lemon-peel-yellow living room through which I’d never more than hurried. I catalogued the hooded fireplace, womanish Murano lamps, and svelte rotary phone. The shapes and colors might have bewildered the old Zebulon, but not the new one. I used Kal-El’s microscopic vision (Action Comics #24) to see past the zippy paint jobs and stylish showpieces to the humble brick and aluminum beneath.

  When Mrs. White returned, surly with bad blood from Junior’s educators, she might have lashed out at the sight of me, the weird boarder, snugged on the sofa betwixt Junior and Franny, but I used Kal-El’s face-changing ability (Superman #5) to shine upon her a saintly smile. When she, discombobulated, wobbled toward the kitchen to set down the school reports, I used Kal-El’s super-speed (Action Comics #1) to dash past her and make room by pushing aside burial mounds of deficient toast. And when she started back toward the living room, confused, I bade her to relax beside her children, and I credit Kal-El’s X-ray vision (Action Comics #11) for thawing her chilliness enough that she did just that.

  Mrs. White looked at Junior, the target of her intended scolding, but his convulsive glee at the group gathering melted her heart. She did not appear to know what to say. She crossed her ankles. She tidied her lipstick with a pinkie. She forced a smile at the wall.

  “Well, here we all are,” said she. “I suppose we should watch a program?”

  Junior shot from his cushion, snatched the cart upon which rested the Zenith TV—a wooden cube embedded with a glass screen no larger than a textbook—and dragged it close, the rubber wheels gnashing through carpet. He turned on the set with a loud click and plunked back down, and the four of us waited while the unit warmed up and a wan image began to surface like a corpse rising through murky waters.

  Bridey Valentine had owned the first TV set I’d seen, but it had been a glorified picture frame. The Zenith contained a whole universe, lasered from Gød knew where to our rabbit-ear antenna. I do not recall which program we watched that evening, so occupied was I with monitoring Mrs. White’s mood. I am willing to bet that she, too, was aware of little beyond my presence. While Junior cackled, Franny sniggered, and Clown yawned, Mrs. White and I contemplated four or five flickering worlds, hoping a clue might emerge as to how we might navigate our own.

  Just as Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons gathered in radial formations before mystical fires, we four began to gather each night before our electric deity. The programming itself was nonsensical. You might not have pegged Junior as a connoisseur of experimental art, but how else to explain his engrossment in the irrational flapdoodle of The Howdy Doody Show, a show set in “Doodyville” and starring a deranged puppet, menacing jester, and ringmaster who forced a riser full of captured children to sing on demand. Franny, meanwhile, had an unaccountable affection for Lawrence Welk, a mumbling German who welcomed onto his stage a perplexing roster of classical, crooner, and vaudeville acts, all behind a hallucinogenic screen of bubbles. My own favorite was The $64,000 Question, a press-your-luck quiz show in which contestants were crammed into an “isolation booth.”

  “Isolation booth” was exactly how I’d begun thinking of my basement bert
h. I felt better upstairs, snuggled in warm blankets of static and, I admit, between warm bodies. It was significant that Father Knows Best was the one program in which Mrs. White, too, lost herself; the Whites, of course, longed for a father/husband of their own. This alleged comedy chronicled a quintet of simps known as the Andersons, and was set in an exact mirror of Heavenly Hills. My reaction was different from Mrs. White’s. I wished to strangle each and every Anderson, except perhaps Mrs. Anderson, who reacted to her husband’s every gaffe with the same morphinic smile. In my imagination I produced a midnight program centering upon Mrs. Anderson’s private hours, during which she released stress by dismembering cats and self-flogging her sweaty, naked back.

  It was the curious pre-recorded laughter of Father Knows Best that most affected my days and nights. The America into which the Marlboro Man had strong-armed me was a paradox. To be an individualist (to wash your Chevy Nomad on Sunday, let’s say) was to be presumed unwholesome, if not an outright Red. Instead each person strived to be a carbon copy of her or his neighbor—and what was more Communist than that? The Andersons’ laugh track mocked the trap in which families like the Whites had caught themselves. Wa-ha-ha-ha! It affected pity for their winless predicament. Awwwww! It chuckled in superiority as they strained at the leashes they held in their very own fists. Hur-hur-hur-hur!

  It did not escape my notice that Mrs. White took child-raising prompts directly from Mrs. Anderson, including “family outings” to local pools, county parks, and Wichita-area children’s theater. Mrs. White showed no relish in leading these excursions, and Junior and Franny no joy in being railroaded. Of course I was never invited—Kal-El could touch normal life, but never grasp it—and when I did optimistically edge close to their party, she’d fend me off with a seven-word $64,000 question so that I’d retreat to my isolation booth, where, like Clark Kent, I could impersonate a writer.

  “The hole in the wall? The toaster?”