by Daniel Kraus
Merle’s declining health allowed me to be the father I’d never had the chance or inclination to be before. Though Merle’s mind remained sharp for an octogenarian, her body backslid toward infancy. She spat food and phlegm; I was there with towel. She soiled herself; I was there with washrags and fresh laundry. She whimpered from pains she couldn’t express; I stroked her baby-thin hair and assured her that I was by her side and there I would remain.
By the fall of 1984, one of her maladies—the boys of Savage Ranch might have called it a Fever of Unknown Origin—peaked. We both knew the end was nigh. Day and night I kept to the bedside, monitoring her temperature and stepping away only to fix tea and tapioca she couldn’t keep down. The two or three hours a day during which she was lucid, I tried to engage her in dialogue to ensure that no unturned stones remained between us. In each of these sessions I pressed the same question: Is there anything you wish to tell me?
One day—the last day, as it turned out—there was.
“You remember,” asked she, “our room in Salinas?”
“Salem. And yes, every inch of it.”
“You remember . . . oh, I was so angry with you.”
“In that, you were remarkably consistent.”
“All I wanted was to buy pretty dresses, and dance, and kiss boys.”
“Not a bad way to live a life, all considered.”
“And you . . . you were so angry with me, too.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You took me by the wrists. Back then you had two hands.”
“I remember.”
“And you said, ‘Daughter, look into my eyes.’ And I saw . . . the most horrid thing.”
Her parting words of 1914 were branded onto my heart:
My horrible, worthless, lonely death? Have you known it all along? What kind of father are you to show it to me?
“I have regretted it ever since,” said I.
“What I saw was . . . this.”
“What do you mean?”
“This bed. The trash on the floor. The cold and the dark. The TV. TVs weren’t invented yet, but I saw it, a bright little box.”
Never had my hypotheses about la silenziosità been so specifically confirmed. How the opaque images of her deathbed had haunted Merle over the decades, I couldn’t bear to know. I took her limp hand. Her eyes rolled sidewise until they found mine.
“Except you,” said she. “I didn’t see you.”
For a minute I could not move. Then I kissed her old hand and placed it against my cold forehead, which I bowed to hide my face, for I knew she’d never understand why my whole body had begun to shake, not with grief but with the laughter of indescribable relief and untellable awe, the laughter of finishing a marathon which has torn one’s feet to ribbons. For if Merle had foreseen her deathbed in exquisite detail but I hadn’t been there, that meant the visions of la silenziosità weren’t fixed fates.
Do you understand, Reader, what this means?
Fates can change if people change.
Free will matters.
Acts of kindness matter.
Love matters.
“I’m here now,” whispered I. “Baby, I’m here now.”
“I know, Daddy,” said she. “Daddy, I know.”
Merle Ruby Watson took her last breath at dawn on September 30, 1984. She died in Tranquility, Washington, at age eighty-nine. She attained no high school or college degree. She performed no military service. She had no profession, only the oddest of jobs. She was beloved by few, though she lived more than most. She was preceded in death by mother Wilma Sue Watson and was survived, in some respects, by father Zebulon Finch. Those who wish to send flowers can cram them up their asses, for no funeral services will be held—not those, at least, that you’d want to attend.
That is the truth. Even my Reader may wish to turn from the funeration I performed, even though you will, I suspect, sympathize with why I did it. One minute after Merle’s passing, I had the most nauseating thought I’d ever had, which is saying something indeed. Merle was my daughter; we shared the same blood. If I’d resurrected seventeen minutes after Wilma Sue had killed me, wasn’t there a chance that Merle’s letters to Savage Ranch might come true and she might suffer her father’s fate?
No. Gød, no.
Seventeen minutes is not much time to destroy, beyond all irrational doubt, the body of one’s only child. The mobile home, that electric monstrosity, harbored no kerosene, so I flung myself about, grabbing knives, tenderizers, hammers, loose brick, anything that might saw muscle or slice tendon or crush bone, for the Excelsior ticked at a speed unfair to a young man whose own clock moved so slowly, and I wrapped Merle, my beautiful little girl, inside her winding sheets and dragged her down the cinder-block steps and onto the dirt patch in front of the trailer, and beneath a mountain that stared down like a bloodthirsty Aztec god, I took a cleaver and lifted it and
[PAGE RIPPED OUT]
PART TWELVE
1985–1994
At Last It Befalls That Your Hero Is Proclaimed A Madman, Given Befitting Lodgment, And Has His Head Examined.
I.
DEATH MAY BE CIVILIZATION’S GREAT equalizer, but not all deaths are equally great. Whereas the scene of Merle’s demise had been a leaky metal trailer boa-constricted by weeds, I located in Orlando, Florida, a facility called Edgerton Home for the Aging, a campus of flowerbedded footpaths and crepe-papered corridors through which nurses in casual dresses pushed wheelchaired tenants past walker-assisted chums on their way to the sunny atrium. Smells, sounds, and sights had an established routine here, and I counted upon the residents’ inferior eyesight, as well as my aviators and the black hooded sweatshirt I’d mined from Merle’s laundry mounds, to make me invisible. Despite all of this, he recognized me in seconds. Even more astonishing, he did not seem surprised to see me.
“Zebulon Finch,” said Allen Rigby. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
When had all those closest to me become enfeebled ancients? In many respects, Rigby had never changed: the wire-spectacled, tie-throttled government agent I’d met in a D.C. bunker in 1942 had been but a few crow’s-feet away from the NASA adviser I’d met at Big Jimmy Dutko’s Beaver Lounge in 1959. Add a quarter century more, and there was less hair and prescription glasses of a thicker gauge, but the man he’d been had yet to be fully digested. Indeed, he looked sharper than ever, which befuddled me until I realized why.
Rigby had quit smoking. The idea was too incredible; I searched for the telltale pocket bulge of a soft pack or close-at-hand ashtrays, but found them only at other tables. With the pervading gray pall lifted, Rigby was vivid and unburied—and that was just for starters. Instead of his ubiquitous white Oxford and black tie, he wore an open-throated Hawaiian shirt with a pocket filled not with leaking red pens but horse-racing score cards, insinuating actual leisure activities. Even the body beneath the clothes had become companionable, like an ex-footballer whose physique has finally relaxed from the rigors of weight training and high-protein diets.
Disconcerted by my changes, he gave me the look a father gives a long-absent son who’s gone pudgy and bald. He drummed fingernails, no longer nicotine yellow, upon the tabletop.
“You want to sit? Debrief?”
Eagle-eyed nurses had begun to notice the hooded, one-armed infiltrator.
“Do you have a private room?” asked I.
“This isn’t Sing Sing, Finch. Come on.”
Standing up wasn’t the most graceful thing he’d ever done, and he walked with all the pace of a tightrope walker, but the way he shooed nurses and saluted elderly comrades recalled how he’d once strode through Lovelace Clinic nodding casually at all the fighter jocks who knew his name.
His room was labeled 24E, a suitably anonymous epithet for a man who’d lived a life of top secrets. The abstemious quarters were barely bigger than the cell I’d been assigned at OSS (itself labeled the mysterious J-1121), but were painted a bright coral and decked with tchotchkes wit
h which no past Rigby would have trifled: sea shells, starfish, driftwood, and a cluster of seven framed photos over the bed. Once upon a time, I might have mocked such a mawkish display, but no young man exits a century the same as he entered into it.
I knew the subject of each photo, though we’d never met: cowlicked Roy, gap-toothed Sandra, Boy Scout Walter, puppy-squeezing Patty, cross-eyed Stanley, and crib-bound Florence, hexagoned around a Janet radiant in a gown as white as the snowy steps of the church inside which she’d just been wed. Having only months ago lost my own child, the abrupt sight of so many dead beloveds had me gripping the dresser.
“You gave them back to me,” said Rigby.
“I merit no plaudits,” growled I.
“Ten years, I couldn’t even say their names, or I’d be right back on that river bank. Now . . .” He shrugged. “Now they’re my stars in the sky.”
“Align yourself with a devil, Rigby, and you, too, might be damned.”
But he was shuffling past me toward an easy chair, into which he lowered himself with a grunt. He massaged knurled fingers that, without a cigarette, looked like unloaded guns, and gazed past the window’s silvered curtain of Spanish moss. Suddenly I could picture all six children clambering out of their photo frames to climb all over the grandfatherly figure. I believe it was a vision in which Rigby also indulged.
“Just because I’m retired doesn’t mean I don’t keep government contacts. ‘Zebulon X’? ‘Mother-Father Savage’? Christ alive. You’ve lived one hell of a life.”
“Death.”
“Either way, one hell of one. Take it from a fogey who’s seen a thing or two himself.” He pointed at the room’s second chair. “You didn’t come for Backgammon Thursday. Tell me what you want. If it’s in the power of an eighty-year-old retiree with a bad back, I’ll do it. The Feds are after you, you know, and they’ve gotten better at their job since my day.”
Notable exceptions notwithstanding, I had a history of following the man’s orders. I positioned myself opposite and caulked twenty-three years’ worth of gaps in his knowledge, which were shockingly few; the intel provided by his “government contacts” had been superb. Ergo I sped through the icky particulars of martyrdoms and meteorite madness to focus on my death’s penultimate chapter: my last days with Merle.
I did feel some satisfaction that my torpid carcass retained the capacity to startle. Zebulon Finch, the immature immortal, had a child? I told the sad story, sadder this go-round for my Chicago assassin having been outed. It was Allen Rigby alone I told what I’d done to Merle’s body, for if he’d pardoned me for the climactics at Savage Ranch, thought I, he might pardon me for anything. Forgive me, Dearest Reader, for tearing out the pages on which I wrote these same details, but it was unsightly work, my pencil snagging in imagined gore, the paper glopping with imagined blood. I scrunched and swallowed the pages. If my body has since turned to dust, those pages might be lying intact alongside these notebooks. In that case, they are yours to read, provided you are strong of stomach.
What I will tell you is that I distributed Merle’s ashes deep inside the glens, dells, and combes of the hills she’d chosen as home. I could but hope that the purity of untouched environs would annul the blood disease of being a Finch. Before leaving Country Home, I turned the trailer inside out, and found in a tucked-away envelope a single item of interest—the WANTED poster of Zebulon Finch she’d inherited from Wilma Sue, the same one with which Merle had accosted me at our first meeting. Though it had gone transparent with age, I marveled at how the handsome, cocksure hooligan of 1895 had become the ugly, lachrymose specter I saw in Merle’s bathroom mirror.
Rigby handled the poster as if it were a Sumerian cuneiform instead of the dross of a callow blackmailer, while I recounted my final jaunt across the continent. Modern telephone operators had access to incredible wellsprings of information, and pinpointing Rigby’s location had taken but a few hours. The trek itself was miserable—the Ford Fairlane, mourning its master, died before getting out of Washington, and America’s nostalgic indulgence of hobos had ended—but the most dangerous part had been the walk through Orlando, a city so splashed in sun that there were no shadows through which to skulk. Five blocks from the Edgerton Home for the Aging, I’d been confronted by two young men, the first in a jean jacket pinned with superfluous chains, the second toting a suitcase-sized portable music player blasting out the herky-jerky refrain of “Beat It” by some girlish vocalist. The pair, I believe, had been intent upon roughing me up before the jean-jacketed one had said, “Yo, don’t touch this dude. He’s got the AIDS.”
I’d invoked what I could of Gabe Mungo’s élan and kept walking.
Three different attendants knocked to remind Rigby that tonight’s dinnertime featured a choral group from a local high school singing jukebox favorites from the 1950s. Rigby shouted for each of these intruders to vamoose, then leaned in as much as his back would allow.
“So,” surmised he, “it’s not just the Feds who are after you.”
Rigby’s judgment was finely honed. Who could say Ruthie didn’t have siblings sworn to a kindred pledge? How could one know if the offspring of the Triangulinos even now sharpened their sticks? Did it not stand to reason that among the families of 236 dead Savages there existed some dedicated revengers? Like Dr. Leather playing Gesualdo’s Moro, losso, al mio duolo on his Victrola, the atonalities might repeat, repeat, repeat.
“The hatred I’ve seeded across America,” said I, “blooms eternal.”
“I don’t hate you, Finch. Far from it.”
“I beg you to refrain from such irrelevances. The truth that matters is that you, if you’ll excuse the frankness, are not long for this Earth. After Merle, I cannot stand another passing, nor do I have the vigor to spend another forty years trying to develop a single relationship that borders upon the amicable. I must be filed away where no one shall find me. This is why I come to you.”
Rigby’s eyes narrowed, then strayed over my shoulder to consult his family. He expelled a dry laugh and pushed himself back into the chair.
“I’m the man who dropped you over Berlin.”
“Yes.”
“I’m the man who put you inside that space capsule.”
“Yes.”
He pounded the end table. A cup of water toppled and darkened the carpet.
“So why have me louse everything up again? I’m at peace with things now, and I tell you, it took me a long time to get there. Now you waltz in, ask me to do something I’m not prepared to do, never thinking of the effect it’ll have on me to know I’ve done you wrong yet again. You’re one self-absorbed bastard, Finch.”
“Except this time the placement comes at my request.”
“Why not go all the way, then? Set yourself on fire if you want out so bad. Why drag me into it?”
“Don’t think I haven’t given it consideration. Lately, though, my thoughts go to Merle, who lived with magnitudes of physical and emotional pain. She could have drawn shut the empty bag of her life at any time, and yet never took that simpler path. She chose to keep living, and that stubbornness, I would like to think, is a Finch family trait. In her honor, as well as the honor of those I’ve known who were never given the choice, I shall do the same. I shall persist. I shall persist and repent.”
Love matters, I added to myself, just so that I did not forget, and no longer would I traipse the planet impeding the person-to-person transmission of this most beautiful of diseases. I had caught it myself, a couple of times, and still felt the gorgeous wounds, still longed to shed tears at the exquisite scars.
Rigby muttered and snatched a bottle of pills from the table, though with the cup overturned, there was no way to take them. He gave the bottle a disgusted rattle and hurled it. We both watched it roll beneath the bed, out of reach of old men of pains and aches.
“I’m guessing you’re not talking about a prison.”
“Correct.”
“I’m guessing you’re thinking of a s
anatorium.”
“It would be for the best.”
“This isn’t the grand old days when a husband could check his wife into a nuthouse on his say-so. This is 1985. Everything’s on computers. You heard of IBM? Microsoft? They’ve got two Apple thingamabobs right here at Edgerton. I can’t leave the building without them typing me into what they call a floppy disk. A state psychiatric hospital would have ten times that level of security: identification papers, employment histories, medical records, some of it wired right through the telephone line. Don’t ask me how it works—all I know is you can’t exist off the grid anymore. We’re all connected now, and it’s only going to get worse.”
“This is why I’ve come to you.” I smiled. “Government contacts.”
Rigby ran a hand over his spotted scalp. “Give me the weekend to think this over, okay? You have somewhere to go?”
To go? Always. To stay? Aye, there was the rub.
“There’s always somewhere,” said I.
“All right. See you Monday.”
Whichever poker hand of afflictions age had dealt him—rosacea, hemorrhoids, glaucoma, perhaps some mortal ace of spades—not even played in sequence could they best Rigby when he was on his game. While his fellow long-tooths blotted bingo cards and whacked away with croquet mallets, he worked the horn. How long had it been since he’d had reason to cash in favors? On Monday, after I, in my druidic hood, stole through an atrium redolent of green beans and muskmelon, I found Rigby waiting in 24E with a manila folder as thick with paper as my old OSS dossier.
He looked over his glasses. I knew the expression from hundreds of basement briefings, and had I two arms and any spirit left whatsoever, I might have given the old boy a hug.
Rigby licked a finger and hustled through pages of departmental flowcharts, alphanumerical directories, and jotted questions, most of which had been struck through and annotated with answers. By quaint custom he’d blacked out classified information with a marker. For twenty minutes he explained what he felt a civilian could know about his investigations, before presenting his summary.