The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (33 page)

“Beautiful,” said I.

His lips twitched toward a shy smile.

“Really? You think so?”

I nodded. “And so upbeat. Just what we need right now.”

He laughed, eyelids pearled with tears, and gripped my shoulder. A revived round of shelling rocked the forest floor about us. Lend an ear, Jason Stavros—is not imitation the truest shape of flattery? Recitations of bullets fell in meters and Maxims in complete stanzas, each brought to the exclamation-point finish of sniper fire or the full-stop period of a mortar blast. I half shut my eyes and settled into the
abstract poetry. There existed entire catalogs of annihilations worse than this, so quieted was I by the lyrical iambics and the steady hand of a brother.

My thirst for a dazzling destruction was quenched to such degree that I failed to notice, dragging himself toward us on bloodied elbows, the mangled remains of Church.

XVI.

N
OTHING BUT HONED INTUITION COULD
have brought him back. His face was blown open, the right cheek excavated to reveal a neat row of molars still snug in their gums. The boys moaned. They wept. They reached for their fallen hero but I ripped their hands from his clothes. The arms of the living were blunderous, wobbling things and I would not trust them to honor the delicate injuries of the greatest friend I'd ever had. I dragged Church into my lap and stared helplessly into the brown stew of mud, weeds, and gristle, within which two frantic blue eyes goggled.

I raced through the standard pat-down for mortal wounds but all that I could see in the dark was the pale spotting of melted lemon drops against black blood. From his throat came a thick death-gurgle, so I flopped him on his side and jammed my dirty fingers down his clotted throat. What I would have given to hear, bubbling up from the blood, that asinine “Merry Christmas!”

Hands pulled me away so that a soldier more experienced in resuscitation could take over. I kicked in protest, good sense be damned, driving my boots into the mud until I'd motored myself to the far point of our hollow, the same beachhead from which Church had set sail. His brave belly marks still scored the forest floor.

I did not have to think about it for long.

Running was my job, too.

I planted my heels and launched, only to be dropped by a pair of hands around my good thigh.

Piano had lunged for me at the last instant.

“Ye can't go, boy-o!”

“Dolt! Unhand me!”

I kicked at his hands but the cuckoo kept contriving new grips. He offered me an obsequious grin and pulled from his pocket the wad of paper over which he'd been slaving.

“It's for you, Prefer-Not-To. Take it and travel well.”

“Give me your gun instead so that I may shoot you!”

“Ye won't make it no farther than Church without an O'Hannigan map. They're the best. Always have been.”

How I would have liked to give the Irishman a brisk strangling! But time was paramount. I swiped the farcical drawing, stuffed it into my uniform, and then gave the dunce a good kick in the stomach. From his shoulders I propelled myself with the opposite of Church's inchworm discretion, racing in four-legged style through moist clay dredged up by a hundred shells. I felt the pause of German surprise, then felt a hot gust of Maxim fire coming up from behind. Unburdened by the weight of a rifle I made it to an oak and fixed my spine against it. Presently the tree was torn to pieces as if by the tiny hands of a hundred feral children.

From there I writhed through underbrush, lost but for the knowledge that downhill equalled riverward. Soon I was out of rifle range, probably sniper range, too, though shells, of course, continued to drop. I was not a good soldier but none in any nation's history moved with my sort of stealth, and when I spied my first German crouching in the weeds, he did not, in turn, spy me. I lay there for
a time, without weapon, without breath, without pulse, perfectly undetectable and just as perfectly harmless.

Despair can direct one to do the oddest things.

I dug out Piano's map and peered at it in the moonlight.

The schizophrenic universe he'd invented was pink and populated with both gray and gold saucer-shaped objects, each sprouting red limbs crosshatched with blue. Though the night's abortive charge had speckled the map with mud, I could see that painstaking attention had been paid; eraser burns marked where blue hatches had been removed from one side of a red line and added to the other, along with a particular sort of serif.

A bomb exploded one hundred feet to the west and its flames brought sudden illumination. The German squatting before me was reconciled with a gray icon upon the map, itself rather squat.

These were not geographical features that Piano had been notating. These were bodies, live and dead, American and German both. And those hatchmarks upon each one? Those were weapons, estimated quantities of ammunition. Which meant that I could, if I wished, crawl twenty feet south where laid, according to Piano's bookkeeping, a dead American, and take up what Piano indicated was a bayonet, and, if I wished, use that bayonet upon this unsuspecting Hun to effect a soft death that would go unnoticed in a thicket of such unnatural commotion.

If I wished.

For doing so would mean splitting from the covenant, Church's beguiling Theory of 17, to which for months I'd been true. What needed answering, and right now before Church bled out, was a question viscid enough to have mired every race of people since the
dawn of consciousness: whether defending the life of a loved one was worth the destruction of others.

Since Church's befriending, I'd packed away my fear, fool that I was, and now it leapt back to my heart where it belonged, more painful then ever, for this fear was not for myself but for another.
This
, I declare to you, is the fear above all others, the field on which the least forgiving of combats are waged.

I took up my task with an Aztec's ardor. I found the bayonet where Piano's map placed it, made my silent advance, and drove it through a ribcage hard enough to affix the torso to a tree, and while the Kraut quivered and drooled I consulted the map for my next prey.

Reader, oh, Reader, I was
born
for butchery. How was it I'd believed anything else? So gratifying, the release of life from one of these fragile humans; so invigorating, the gush of warmth over my cold hand. I killed and killed, and when I reached what remained of the bridge, I consulted the map, my murderer's handbook, and located the resting place of two Americans. I took up their rifles, nice ones too—one of the coveted Brownings as well as a swell bolt-action Springfield—and loaded them. Stealth would not be required for this final spree.

The last bastions of German hope had pillared themselves atop a riverside knoll, a smart enough position were they not besieged by so proficient an assassin. I scaled the least expected face and caught one sleepy-eyed Jerry picking his nose. Give him credit; one handed, he managed to bayonet me as I returned the same favor through his right eye. The soldier's aim had been canny; from my stomach popped Johnny's golden marble.
Let it go,
thought I, but I, if you have not noticed, was unstoppable, and I fired the Browning to jar it free from the soldier's skull while using the recoil to power my pivot. As
I sailed into view of the dozen or more dumbfounded Germans, I juggled the rifles, snatched the aggie from the air, tossed it back into my mouth, and opened fire with both guns into every last Heinie on that hill.

I left no survivors. Not even myself.

Reinforcements escorted the GIs and gyrenes of that harrowing hollow back to HQ around eleven o'clock that morning, the same time Armistice took effect. Even men missing limbs or blinded behind bandages lifted victorious fists into the air or cried through masks of mud, while the healthy gave a cheer that I figure still echoes through the valleys of the Meuse and circles the summits of the Argonne. At 1101, the woods came alive with happy Huns, their arms raised the same as ours except to signal surrender.

Church was rushed from the forest on a stretcher and lifted into an ambulance. I reached to take his hand, but it was bloody and, to my horror, slipped through mine. I shouted his name. Four medics, three more than allotted for the average man, thumped me aside as they tried to stabilize him. For the moment, Church was alive; his stripped-naked chest pounded in uneven jags. What was unknown was what, exactly, remained of his big, handsome face, for his head had been swaddled in thick cloths that already were soaking with gore.

Someone had scrounged his deflated football and tucked it under his arm. The Game might be over, but a long solo contest was about to begin.

The ambulance left. My shoulders became gallows and from them I hanged. Some time later, I cannot be more exact, an elbow nudged at my ribs. It was Jason Stavros, helmet vanquished, hair swooped into a coiffure of hardening mud. His precious volume of
Percy Shelley was lodged in his armpit, riddled with bullets. Poetry, it turned out, had saved him.

He handed me a lit cigar while, from behind one of his own, he sang along to some patriotic drivel. I hated to puncture his pleasure but a question of consequence needed asking.

“Did Piano make it?”

“Piano?” He frowned as if he did not believe in so preposterous a name. But artifice would never work for Jason Stavros. He looked through his cigar smoke to the broken earth beneath his boots. “Nah. Didn't work out for Piano.”

I bit down upon my cigar and searched the horizon. It would always be the horizon for me, wouldn't it?—never a proper end in sight. I straightened my back until I felt the comforting crinkle of Piano's map alongside my heart. On that sheet of paper had been transposed each of the Gød-loving Catholic's many scars, the same as my body bore each of mine. Yes, you might call it crazy. Or you might call it a conscientious document of survival, not unlike the manuscript you now hold.

Over the bacchanalia of exulting Americans and capitulating Germans I lifted my gaze. At last I settled upon a sight I shan't forget no matter the decades I spend spoiling down here in my tomb. Unattended Maxim guns on tripods sat high along an empty ridge, black scarecrows against a tangerine sky, dormant but deadly, just like me.

PART FIVE

1919–1931

Herein The Twenties Cavort And Crash, And Your Hero, Of All People, Is Called Upon To Catch A Killer.

I.

W
E CROSSED THE ATLANTIC
in
a repurposed German battleship and in May moored at the city of Newport News, Virginia. Other termini were more common (New York City, Philadelphia, Charleston, and—forgive my shudder—Boston), but this was the straw we drew, and when we stepped upon the dock we girded ourselves for the homecoming that had become part of the military narrative: limp girls ready to be dipped into deep kisses; confetti cast from above; high school bands muddling through nationalistic atonalities; and a slow ride down Main Street in a roofless auto.

But the nation, poor thing, was tuckered out from parades. The only welcoming parties were those gathered to reclaim the lost luggage of their households' males. I knocked through the theatrics and joined across the street those of the Seventh Marine Regiment not yet met by family. We numbered seven, including Jason Stavros, who had wired his Utah kin that he was taking the long train home so that he might prepare his diary.

Their presence placated me. Long past Armistice, these men had made good on Church's promise to protect me, enacting subterfuge after subterfuge so that I might sidestep dicey administrative hurdles, from physical evaluations to discharge paperwork. Our silences were common and comfortable. Here, though, on American
soil, they felt gawky, and we fussed with our packs until a scab-faced grenadier grunted, “Beer?” and we all nodded, grateful that one of us remembered what men did when not busy killing.

We found a brass rail and put our feet up on it. The saloon was a muddy-floored sewer populated by dockyard slobs, and they bought us round after round while we mishandled basic public behaviors. We spoke too loudly as if over mortar fire; we whispered too softly as if crawling beneath enemy wire; we reacted stoically when what was called for was easy laughter. The mirror behind the bar reflected our panic.

Thanks go to that scabby grenadier, who again saved the day by mooning at his glass of ale and saying, “Enjoy it, mates, it might be your last.”

I, of course, could not drink, but felt party to their pain. While our boys had been bayonetting Huns and burying the corpses of their friends, what thank-you gift had America wrapped? Why, they'd bowed a ribbon of legislation called the Eighteenth Amendment, which would soon illegalize intoxicating spirits, and, as long as they were having fun, passed a postscript called the Volstead Act, which would extend the ban to the most harmless of lagers.

What rabid curs had orchestrated these waylays upon our full-flavored foams? Priggish prudes acting under such disquieting titles as the Anti-Saloon League (horrors!) and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (I think I shall be sick!). These “Drys” blamed we “Wets” for every social ill under the sun, but let us not be coy. The brewing industry was run by lions of legend named Budweiser and Busch and Schlitz, all of them German—Kaiserites!—and that was reason enough to shut them down. Our nation never asked we who fought the Germans if we also wished to drink their beer.
Ja,
Reader,
ja
!

In the wee hours, we Marines stumbled from the bar as if gutshot. Ever sober, I guided us to a hotel destitute enough to contain such destitute hearts. Ribaldry ran out as we unrolled sweaty rolls of cash, paid for berths, and then loitered in an ill-lit lobby, embarrassed at night's end the same as we'd been at the beginning. It was gentle Jason Stavros who dared ask the unasked.

“Anyone heard from Church?”

I shuddered at the name. I'd lost him, and it was less painful to let him stay lost.

The grenadier scratched loose a few scabs.

“Few of us went to the hospital in Paris,” said he, “but he made us scat.”

“How was he?” asked a private.

“Bad.” The grenadier tried to think of a better word but could not.

“I heard they shipped him back in January,” said Jason Stavros.

“Here?” asked the private. “Shipped back here?”

We exchanged looks of terror. What if Burt Churchwell was right here in Newport News? We'd be honor-bound to track him down and lay our frightened eyes upon what was left. My own slow corrosion I could stomach, but strong, proud Church's abrupt one? I did not believe I could withstand it.

“Nah,” said Jason Stavros. “New York. He's back in Iowa by now, for sure.”

We sighed in relief. Iowa was farther away than Europe, Japan, and the North Pole combined. Backslaps were manufactured, goodnight adieus delivered, and promises made to breakfast together and exchange addresses in the morning. I nodded agreement, and they, my steadfast chums, were good enough to play along; surely they'd noticed that I hadn't paid for a room. These fine men had more than
fulfilled their duty in regard to Private Zebulon Finch.

At ease, boys,
thought I.

Dawn found me on a southbound train. Marine garb does wonders for a traveler and I was given every deference. Two days later I was back in Xenion, Georgia, the only real home I'd ever known. The lane to Sweetgum brought me solace. There was the ivy-strangled pergola, the Roman columns, the four-paneled front door. Best of all were the plentiful patches of white cotton scattered across the field. At last, Sweetgum was returning to life.

I proceeded no farther than the front gate. Those patches of white were not cotton—not even close. They were paper surgical masks, the kind worn by every American back home suffering through the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919, which, before it had dried up, had killed more Yanks than the Germans and with no more fanfare than a quick bedtime smothering. Why so many of these masks here at Sweetgum? No sooner had I posed to myself the question than I surmised the dreadful answer.

I slunk back into town, found a neglected tavern, and gestured for a drink; I required a glass to grip if I were to make it through the next few minutes. The bartender curled his lip and offered me a milk. A milk! I presumed he believed me underage before I noticed there was not a barrel of beer nor bottle of spirits on the premises. The South was overstocked with Christian zealots—just ask ol' Mr. Stick—and it looked as though all worthwhile beverages had been hauled off to the stockroom of that lucky son-of-a-bitch Saint Peter.

The man planted before me the glass of milk. He looked as disgusted as I, so I capitalized upon our shared dysphoria.

“What happened out at Sweetgum?”

The bartender smirked at my aristocratic accent.

“Who's asking? You even know what clan live thereabouts?”

“Lucy, Nelly, Patsy, Peggy, Polly, Susannah, and the honorable Mrs. Joseph Thomas Hazard.”

It was a convincing enough reply. The bartender swiped up his towel and searched for something to wipe clean, but again, there were no barrels, no bottles, nothing upon which dust might settle.

“Tell you what. Them ladies are saints. The flu hit, there wudn't room in no hospital for miles, and them ladies opened their home to folk who wudn't kith or kin. Took care of my Adelaide, too, and brung her through the worst of it. She got a cough now here to stay and she can't see right no more, but she's alive, ain't she? Them Hazard ladies did that.”

“Did they . . . ?”

“Die? Four of them did. It's a awful thing. But how many like my Adelaide lived because of them? A hundred? That's a debt no one round here can pay.”

Four of the seven gone. Which four? No, I could not bear to know! I pushed aside my milk, slapped some money to the counter, and stood.

“Look here, son,” said the bartender. “I got me some gin 'neath the floor. Sit down, I'll pour you one on the house.”

I waved him off, exited, and blundered around the back. Trash bins blocked my way; I kicked them over and out spilled more whiteness—masks or milk, both were ill omens. Farther back was an outmoded privy that still stank from regular use. I sat in the scrub-grass with my back to the whorled wood, as much in sorrow for the good sisters of Sweetgum as for myself, alone again, evermore.

Hours passed before I heard the voices. They rose from behind the rusted hulk of a junked automobile fifty feet up the hill. Unwilling to
field human contact, I crouched behind a bank of tall weeds and watched two Negroes, biceps bulging beneath large crates, head toward the tavern. The first was old and bearded and the second no older than thirteen. They entered the tavern through a back door and minutes later emerged with empty arms but thick pockets.

“Ain't our fault some a' them bottles gone missing,” grumbled the kid.

“Boss Man gonna have our necks when he hear—”

“Well, what do he expect? You give a man a car full a' shine, he gonna drink some, ain't he? It just be human nature.”

“You know I don't drink a damn drop. Boss Man count every bottle.”

“Me neither, Paw-Paw.” The kid grinned. “Not while we working anyways.”

Moonshiners! They ran thick as ticks in agrarian Georgia, or so I'd heard; even the Hazard sisters had indulged in fiery backwoods bootleg on occasion. With Prohibition about to squeeze the last drops from a long-liquored nation, an empyrean age had arrived for these black marketeers. Their cauldrons would bubble at accelerated rates and their desperado dealings could become legend, if they employed the right kind of scofflaw with the right kind of disregard for personal safety. Now, let's see—did I know anyone who fit that description?

I rose from the weeds, tipped my cap.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” said I. “My name is Zebulon Finch.”

The duo, believe it or not, was not overjoyed to meet me. Their first instinct was to run; their second instinct, upon seeing my
Marine emblem, was to fix in place in fear of being fired at; their third instinct, the prevailing one, was to draw into a crouch of defense or retreat, whatever my next action provoked. To put them at ease, I smiled, though I expect it was unconvincing. I could not pretend to be comfortable around their kind.

“Forgive the intrusion. But I overheard remarks regarding troubles in moving your moonshine.”

“Ain't no one said nothing about no shine, mister,” muttered the kid.

Paw-Paw snatched his grandson by the overalls. “We'll just be going about our way, sir.”

“Discussion of your work is verboten, I realize, but might we suspend the taboo here in private? I believe I am uniquely suited to your profession. Briefly, my qualifications: One, I have no affection for the Anti-Whiskey Bunch or the League of Upset Ladies or what-have-you. Two, I am discreet, as you can plainly see. Three, I am handy with a gun. Four, you need not fuss over bottle count for I do not drink.”

The kid possessed a twinkle of nerve I recognized from my own misbegotten youth.

“What do a man who don't drink care about selling drink?” asked he.

“It is a matter of philosophy, I suppose.”

“Harold,” warned the elder.

“Hold on, Paw-Paw.” Harold examined me. “You can drive a car?”

“Drive a car?” I had no idea how to drive a car. “Of course I can drive a car!”

Paw-Paw glared at Harold.

“You can't bring no white boy back to Boss Man!”

“Think what we could do if we had us a white boy in uniform. You just said we about to lose a runner.”

A
runner
?

My chest nearly burst with pride!

“Gentlemen,” spoke I, “do forgive the forthcoming boast. But when it comes to running few men upon this Earth are my equal.”

Five minutes of lavish hyperbole later, I found myself hunkered low in the backseat of a jalopy as it rollicked along bad roads to worse roads to no roads at all. Phone cables crisscrossing overhead gave way to woodland sunshade and the parting curtains of gangly kudzu. The car wheezed to a halt in a dark copse, from which we hiked a trail marked only by the sly placement of white stones at the bases of certain trees. Before I saw it, I smelled it: the bready aroma of rye, the sweet smoke of burnt sugar, the flat caramel of warm whiskey.

The distillery was an impressive wooden lean-to built against the incline of a hill. Steam mushroomed from steel vats and the ingredients of the trade were stacked high enough to act as walls: sacks of corn, potatoes, and yeast, and crates of corked jugs, pint and quart jars, empty wine bottles, and wide wooden barrels. At least twenty people, most of them women, stirred and tasted and bottled, while a few more sat on tree stumps and sang along to a man strumming a gap-toothed banjo. Every single one of them was colored. Foreboding, indeed, but what was even worse?

Each one toted a gun.

Weaponless and pale as I was, I began to postulate that I had made a critical blunder. Before I could escape, Harold, that purposeful whippersnapper, led me by the elbow through clouds of smoke and presented me before a figure who needed no introduction as Boss Man.

He was forty years of age, unremarkable of height and lean of build, and reclined upon a log bench with hands laced behind his head and shirt unbuttoned to the breeze. His oaken face was channeled by a life spent in the hard sun, but was, at this instant, placid as a sleeping newborn's. Hair, once dense and black, had grayed and withdrawn, allowing for an angelic golden gleam courtesy of the noonday sun. Nevertheless I recognized the crook at once and my stomach sank like a ship into the sea.

Boss Man was John Quincy, the corn thief, that secretive, insolent Negro with whom I'd shared a jail cell alongside General Hazard eighteen years before.

“You!” cried I.

John Quincy yawned.

“Boss Man,” said Harold, “this boy here say he want to run for us.”

I'd once belittled this man to cure my own battered ego. To appear before him as a subject made my cold skin crawl with shame. An obnoxious feeling; I shielded myself with indignation.

“I withdraw the offer!” declared I. “I would sooner work for the Kaiser!”

“He say he the best runner ever been,” continued Harold. “But I don't know. He look pretty regular to me.”