The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (9 page)

VIII.

O
NE WEEK LATER IT WAS
Halloween. As a lifelong entertainer, the Barker could not be ignorant of the holiday's roots in
dies parentales
, the Roman festival of the dead, in particular the midnight rites of Feralia in which the malevolent deceased were exorcized.

The date was ideal for exorcising me as well.

So lightless was the October sky that it slid into night without notice. The moment I was assisted through the back door of the Gallery of Suffering, the Barker locked eyes with me and I knew. This was to be the final performance of the troublesome, underhanded, secretive, and astonishing—though not quite astonishing enough—Mr. Stick.

It surprised me that my first regret was that I would not be able to say farewell and good luck to Johnny. As was the Barker's decree, the two of us had been kept apart since the morning our plot was uncovered, but from afar I had spied the bandages that sheathed his ribs as well as the sling that cradled his wrist. The Barker's fabricated explanations began the night after the injuries and I heard them repeatedly as I queued up abaft the stage.

“This cherished child hurt a rib whilst chasing his beloved red ball over a hill, running slower than the next child by a power of ten. This same sprightly cub sprained his wrist shooting marbles with his
chums—but how he wanted that golden aggie! Ladies and gentleman, I see your faces and we can, if you'd like, lament this child's fractures and bruises. But I choose instead to celebrate them! Youth will not be repressed, no matter how unfortunate and twisted its form, and for this I give all thanks to Gød.”

The idiots clucked in appreciation.

“Oh, Little Johnny Grandpa? Look what Dr. Whistler has for you. I purchased it from a lad whose pockets were overstuffed with marbles. That's right—it is the selfsame golden aggie! No, no, child, do not waste words thanking me. You glow with happiness and that is thanks enough.”

At least, thought I, as I was shoved on stage that Halloween night of 1899, I would not have to endure such lies much longer.

Ohioans proved themselves indulgent of the macabre holiday by amassing in unusual numbers. At least twenty-five pairs of eyes reflected our fiery stage lamps. This pleased the Barker. Their word-of-mouth would lend credence to the eulogy for Mr. Stick he would no doubt repeat as frequently as he bestowed the same golden aggie upon Little Johnny Grandpa night after night.

He was in rare voice, a baritone burr I'd not heard since my first months. I let it lull me. He spun his anecdotes with so much relish that he smacked his lips. He brandished the first of the needles as if it were a rabbit pulled from a magician's hat while the Kitten Chorus hit every cue. He orchestrated like a conductor with the most resourceful of batons, alternating moods of scherzo and fugue; inserting commentary in both passionate glissandos and whispering nocturnes; sustaining impossible fermatas until the cliff-drop of his refrain of needles. The audience was his faithful, gasping chorale.

The music made me as delirious as any paying customer. We
broke the one-hour mark, a staggering feat, and began eating into the time reserved for Pullman Larry's sharpshooting show. In shadow against the side of the tent, I could make out the line of impatient ticket holders. They would have to wait. The final lance was slipped from the velvet casing. He held it up to the light. It was nigh time for the Barker to do what he had set forth that night to do.

The needle approached my eye. I felt it tickle my eyelashes. Then it became a dark wedge scribbling across the surface of my eyeball as it searched for a different entry point than usual, for this time the Barker meant to run my brain straight through, and afterward—who knew? Cremation? Burial? One way or the other I was finished.

The great, and possibly disappointing, surprise of that instant was how dearly I wished to live! Perhaps it was my desire for revenge upon the Barker, upon Luca Testa, upon Gød Himself, I do not know; or perhaps it was something Mr. Charles Darwin would have endorsed, a primordial slithering toward life, always life. Woe—I do not know! But in that climactic moment, the walls of fear (and dignity?) that I'd built about me collapsed and my mouth dropped open.

“Euri. Pides,” said I.

The Barker pulled back an inch. His expression was something new.

“Euripides.” This time I got the fifth-century tragedian's name out in a single breath. My voice was raw and multi-octave, not unlike the groaning of five rows of wooden benches when each person upon them leans forward in unison—which is precisely what happened.

For a moment I was as fearful as a child who has lost his mother. The Barker offered no solace. His face was a soup, churning and changing. The Kitten Chorus grew fidgety at the change in program
and hissed to be set free. With trepidation I scanned the crowd of Ohioans. Moths danced near open flames like lingering particles of my spoken words.

There was nothing to do but complete what I had begun. Johnny, my patient English teacher, was owed that much.

“‘No. One. Can con. Fidently say. That. He will. Still. Be living. Tomorrow.'”

With a snap, a moth perished in fire. A pair of tickets were dropped; you could hear the thin paper rustle past the lace hem of a dress. Not a single man or woman or child in Ohio, it seemed, had expected the final quote of the evening to come from the Subject.

Their stares drove me to panic. What was I doing in front of all of these good people? Yes, of course, finish the scene! I rose to wobbly knees and lifted a trembling hand in salute. It was the usual end to the usual act and it was to be met with the usual scattering of hand-claps.

Instead, this humble gesture was the coup de grâce of a performance of legend. Dozens of breaths expelled at once and the pandemonium began. Men of poise shouted “Bravo!” Women abandoned decorum by squealing. Applause lit somewhere stage right and in seconds consumed the entire tent. They were on their feet. They were stomping on the pews. Those in line outside began lifting the edge of the tent to see what was behind the bedlam. Children's faces appeared first; being monkeys, they smiled and clapped in imitation and crawled inside, and then their parents, those non-paying trespassers, streamed after in chase, clueless as to what had occurred but nonetheless bewitched, tipping their hats to the Barker, and to me as well.

I backpedaled from it and stumbled; a hand shot out to steady
me. I followed the wrist, elbow, and shoulder to find that my rescuer was none other than my enemy. His mouth made a horizontal line that his forehead mimicked. I do not know if he'd guessed that I'd suspected my intended fate that night, but he could not get rid of me now, not after I'd generated this reaction.

The Barker and his fellows scooted me offstage with their hands at my back, as if congratulating me on a job well done. Once behind the curtain, they drew away as if I were boiling with contagion. Pullman Larry stood close tapping his spurred boot, gazing pointedly at a pocket watch that told of the late hour. Mr. Hobby was there, too, chewing at his mustache, his forehead slick with perspiration, a pencil behind each ear. The Barker held out my elbow to his most trusted associate.

“Remove the needles and take him to his cage. Make haste; our dentist is truant.”

Hobby winced apologetically. “They demand another show.”

The Barker blinked. “They—they what?”

Hobby winced again.

“The folks in line. They wish for Mr. Stick to give a command performance.”

Pullman Larry crossed his arms. “This is cow shit.”

“Our first audience,” continued Hobby, “has cycled around to see him again.”

“To see that comatose feller?” sputtered Pullman. “Y'all are pullin' my leg.”

The Barker glared at me. This was my fault. I had put him in this position of having to choose between loathing and money. Really, it was no choice at all.

“Fine. We shall perform again. Send out word.”

Pullman's hands gripped the handles of his twin pistols.

“This is a danged outrage!”

“You'll be paid per usual,” snarled the Barker.

“I been playin' the final spot here for a coon's age and I ain't about to watch no dang voodoo doll take my place!”

“I make the decisions here,” said the Barker. “You'll do well to remember that.”

Pullman cocked and uncocked his triggers.

“You pack too many folks in there and whatever the secret is to his little trick? Mark my words, it won't last. Then you'll come crawling back to me and we'll see what percentage I accept then, won't we?” He planted his cowboy hat. “Make more coin selling my Gød of Pain anyhow. More than you'll ever see!”

With a flail of pink fringe he turned on his three-inch heels and was gone. In the resultant flap of tarp, I caught a glimpse of Johnny outside, his face slack with either shock or pride. When the flap closed, there was something about it, even then, that felt final.

The Barker massaged his closed eyes for a moment.

“See to it there is no chaos in our queue, Mr. Hobby. You there, boy. Come here. Remove these needles into this box.” He sighed and gave me the flat look of an infantryman ordered to fight alongside a despised rival. “Yet another stupendous show is upon us.”

IX.

H
OW DO I BEGIN TO
describe the months following my speaking debut? One night after that auspicious improvisation, the Barker delivered to me a terse directive. Our stock climax of a needle into the eye would heretofore be replaced with a short testimonial from Mr. Stick about how the product of the night (whatever it might be) had provided me with my enviable abilities. Sensing a subtle shift in power, I agreed and when the moment came I summoned verbiage memorized from one of the Barker's many pitches. The audience approved and out came the wallets.

Attendance surged. Pullman Larry's sharpshooting show did indeed find itself swapping with mine, and the dentist made no secret about his disgust at serving as my opening act. Even unhappier was the Barker. After years of dwindling income, his profits were on the rise, and yet he behaved as if each coin he counted was stippled with invisible barbs. Oh, how he hated me.

Mr. Hobby presented me with a suit so new it bore the indents of the manufacturer's rack. I was grateful to peel off the old one. The humans who lined up an hour in advance were not there to see my snappy suit; I knew that. They wanted to see me take punishment. But their interest in my verbal contributions was real, too, and by and by I found myself incorporating more speech into the routine, punctuating the Barker's anthology of over-trod
citations with vapid interjections: “Hear, hear!” “Wise words, those!”

I was not above humor, either: “Golly, but that scratches an itch,” I'd say when he drove a pin through my heart. One night I told an entire joke. After the Barker inserted a particularly long needle, I said, in the deadpan which was becoming my trademark, “I cannot think of what I would do without you. But it is worth a try.” The laughter: uproarious! The Barker's blush: priceless!

You may wonder how I massed so many words in sequence. Every inch of progress I owed to Johnny, for he'd sparked what had become a regenerating need to speak. Still the Barker's decree held and the boy and I were kept distant. Worse, the lad had taken to drink; not before or since have I seen anyone take to it more quickly. His nose swelled, patches of strawberry veins invaded his cheeks, and he became shackled to the kind of headaches even a grown man struggles to bear.

I was resolute in blaming Pullman Larry. With each state boundary we crossed, the dastardly dentist would buy up local moonshines and amuse himself by giving them to Johnny to choke down. Pullman would clap the boy on the humped back and encourage bigger mouthfuls as remedy for his sundry ailments. Whenever Johnny fell on his face while crossing the yard, I needed only turn my head to find Pullman Larry bent over with the force of his guffaws.

It is helpful to remember that Little Johnny Grandpa had been a fixture in the Gallery of Suffering for most of his life. Doing his show stinking drunk did not present much of a challenge, not at first. Audiences were happy to chalk up his slurring to his medical condition. Scuttlebutt, however, had it that his show was swerving into unsafe territory. He moved about the Gallery with the stagger of a lush, not of an old man, and customers knew the difference. When
he collapsed into the laps of women, no more did they twitter at his folly; rather, they recoiled from his breath.

But who had time to think about Johnny and our shared oaths of revenge when fame was within arm's reach? A riotous new millennium had broken open and I planned to be a prominent rioter, a mite paler and cooler of temperature, perhaps, though looking no older than I'd been at my death. The America I observed, meanwhile, aged by the minute. The stink of burnt oil and the pneumonic cough of petrol machinery heralded the approach of automobiles along the same paths down which our carriages lumbered. Telephone cables joined us, too, strung along the road like laundry lines. News of our arrival in each town traveled faster. So did the customers.

Mr. Stick's audience became dedicated in a way unfamiliar to Dr. Whistler's. Those forlorn buyers of our religious trinkets began instead migrating to my performances. A single show was often all it took to hook them, and the following night the same sad sacks would gather outside the Gallery with hymnals spread in an attempt to whip the assembled into a Sunday state. Once inside the tent, these fanatics would testify at irregular intervals, throwing the Barker off his script. One night in Kentucky a woman bolted upright and began gibbering in a nonsense tongue until she had to be removed.

Soon after rose a countermovement peopled by grave Evangelicals just as preoccupied with yours truly, though instead of singing they held aloft handmade signs lettered in severe black paint. Oh, but the messages were jolly!

THERE BE ONLY HELL THAT AWAITS

AND YE GUIDE IS MISTER STICK, LUCIFER'S HELPER!

WE ARE JOINING GENERAL STICK'S BEETLE ARMY,

HARD-SHELLED FOR REVELATIONS!

These brimstoners did not cotton to their saved counterparts, and now and again the war of psalms escalated into physical melees. Remaining in any one town for too long became a risk; the Barker did not like to attract the attention of lawmen. The result was that we spent half of our days in transit, a disagreeable percentage if your name was Mr. Hobby.

It began to feel as if we were on the lam. The Barker woke each day with his ear to the ground and I oft heard him speak to Hobby of a growing animosity in Washington regarding the unchecked contents and unbridled claims of patent medicines. Rumors swirled about a trafficking law that would hog-tie interstate transport of food, liquor, and, more to the point, drugs. Even worse, there was serious talk of requiring drug producers to be accurate in their labeling of product.

Hobby stood alongside me backstage one night, raking a hand through his shedding hair while reading from what all indications was a most bothersome manuscript. By the by he put it aside and I struggled over to have myself a look-see. The book, published by some medical association or another, was over five hundred pages and focused upon the topic of “quackery.” On one page I found a checklist of “notable humbuggers”; missing from this manifest was the Barker and I wondered if the slight would relieve or ruffle him.

In the winter of 1900, the highest compliment was paid me: three products emblazoned with the likeness of none other than your sheepish narrator. I shall let the labels of the first two speak for themselves: Mr. Stick's Suffradine, The Carbonated Cream For Numbing Those Scalds, Relieving That Stranguary & Bolstering All Muscle
Gimps; and Mr. Stick's Ambrosial Aegis Vegetable Compound (A Delicious Drink) For The Sweet Slaying Of Nervous Stomach & Neuralgia. These were harmless agents meant to distract the user while the body made its own repairs. Both had been offered at the Pageant for years, though not behind such handsome packaging.

Only the third product gave me pause, though I knew it should not concern me what the stupid of the world inflicted upon their stupider loved ones. It was a flat, thin box containing a slip of cheap purple velour and five needles neither as sharp nor as fine as the ones used in my act. They called this The Oriental Pin Therapy of the Astonishing Mr. Stick.

The simulacrum of my face on labels big and small magnified my import in the eyes of the audiences. Lines for my show stretched ever longer. I was delighted. By summer 1901 my program began to sell out on a regular basis. Mr. Hobby passed by my cage one morning discussing with a worker how to rejigger the pews so as to squeeze in more paying customers. I'd been ruminating on the same and called out to him. He stopped and I explained my idea for placing boards perpendicular to the pews so as to add up to twenty additional seats. Hobby nodded in the most peculiar way.

Only later did I realize that by offering a suggestion for improving the show, I no longer considered it a debasement. This, you will agree, was psychological headway. I dwelled on it overnight, wondering if my brain had begun to sour as had my flesh, yet began the following day with a sense of anticipation. Can you make sense of this, Reader? People were traveling from miles away, often on the backs of mules, with the express purpose of seeing me, and the drawings of me on our handbills were more flattering than any “Wanted” poster. That's it—I was
wanted.

A week later I was helped back to my tent by Mr. Hobby only to find that my cage had been pushed into a corner, where it loomed like a gargoyle. I gave Hobby a querulous look. He inhaled hard enough to flutter his mustache and gestured his forehead at the center of the room. There sat a derelict cot, as well as a narrow chest of drawers. I was speechless. I nodded my appreciation, forgetting that Pageant administrators were the ones who'd caged me in the first place.

That night I lay on the cot staring straight into the rippling darkness of the tent top. I heard enough pissing and smelled enough cigarettes to know that some marplot had been posted to ensure that I did not flee. It was wasted labor. Escape and revenge, the promises that had once kept my foul body kicking, no longer held appeal. Oh, 'twas a long night of pondering imponderables only to end up in the same spot: right there, where I was getting every damn thing I ever wanted.

Freedom from the cage provided excellent opportunity to work on physical rehabilitation. At night, while sentries kept watch, I took advantage of the tent, pacing up and down and lifting heavy objects (a foot stool, a box of tonic) as well as delicate ones (a teacup, a spoon). My progress was swift. Resurrecting muscles, I found, was akin to resurrecting speech. The ability swirled above my head like a firefly and I had only to learn how to reach out and snag it.

It was a beautiful autumn morning when I limped out to the road with my walking stick to watch the erection of a Pageant banner inscribed with the show's new full title: Dr. Whistler's Pageant of Health and Gallery of Suffering Featuring Defier of Death the Astonishing Mr. Stick. I hope you do not find it too unattractive that I took from the moment a good deal of pride. I breathed deep, a behavior I simulate though it serves no biologic purpose, and felt the
burrs and pollens of a new season adhering to the dry surfaces of my interior. I tapped the Little Miracle Electric Mexican Stuttering Ring against my stick and thought of Johnny for the first time in weeks.

I turned and there he was, squinting at the same banner from a distance. His eyes fell upon me, but when I gave him a friendly nod, his expression became one of anguish and betrayal. My good feeling sogged with shame. For a time I'd lent the lad's accursed life purpose. Now that I'd taken ownership of my role here, he had no hope. Some mornings I would spy him kicking around old bottles in a dispirited search for one more swallow. On scattered nights I would notice him slumped by the communal fire, drooling and crying. Our most promising intersection was the Gallery of Suffering, and one evening I did stumble across him. Sadly, it is a literal statement: the lad was passed out and face down in the grass where his disgusted handlers had left him.

It was October when our caravan paused outside of a small town that would loom large in the strange history of Zebulon Finch: Xenion, Georgia. We were met at its outskirts with the dismal sight of two men lynched among the Spanish moss of a single oak; the limb creaked at the weight. These men were white. No, not exactly white; they were plum from a week's rot. Pinned to each of their chests was a card sporting a one-word warning:

CHARLATAN

The Barker gave the order, reins were pulled, and the front horses began to circumnavigate. By then, I had graduated to sitting at the front of a wagon and I had my driver whip our animals so that we caught up with the Barker. I gave him a piece of my mind, which
he bore with his special brand of barely contained contempt. Shall we be intimidated by cheap scare tactics, asked I? Do not the good people of Xenion, Georgia, need their liniments and extracts and soaps and snuffs? What shall they do about their whooping cough and clubfeet and varicose veins and flatulency? Plus, what about my new forty-dollar velvet-and-corduroy suit and sixteen-dollar hat? For what had they been procured if not to show?

Truly, my boundless stupidity is something to behold.