The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (36 page)

VII.

Y
OU ARE WISE TO WONDER
how long an unwatched car full of liquor can last in a given megalopolis. Call it luck, if you wish, for an otherwise unlucky chump, that week after week after week, no one came across my dear Lizzie.

That does not mean the delectable Dog Bowl Debbie found its way to the intended buyer. John Quincy had provided no instructions beyond showing up at a certain warehouse across the East River. That distance became the difference: Church and I continued to sell the bottles piecemeal to pay for food, heat, and rent. These were the barest of necessities, I knew that, and yet I couldn't look for long at any coin earmarked for the Quincys. I tried to convince myself that my duty toward them was finite, that Zebulon Finch was unbeholden to any man.

Except, perhaps, Church. Month after month the city beyond our ramshackle walls crackled with gunfire, much of it coached by a brash impresario named Lucky Luciano. Crime, ever profitable, boomed to historic proportions. The stock market, too, rose, and rose, and rose, making everyone, or so it seemed, rich. I could not go a day without reading breathless advice from columnists (“Put Your Small Capital Into Niles-Bement-Pond if You Wish to Live Like Rockefeller”) or fielding tips from shoeshine boys (“Psst, buddy! Invest in Allied Chemical and Dye!”).

Church and I had no bank account with which to gamble—nor shoes worthy of a shine, come to think of it. In 1926 the Dog Bowl Debbie ran out, and until 1929 we held the most menial of jobs: packing newspapers, freighting auto parts, selling Juicy Fruit gum on the street. Where Church's disfigurement did not make him unhireable, his mood swings earned him the boot, and I, in solidarity, followed him toward the exit.

He was everything I had in the world, even though our life together felt inconsequential compared to the spectacular feats we'd brought off in the Great War. Such battlefield glory haunted both of us, but especially Church. It did not take an Einstein (or a Frood) to see that war had rattled something loose inside him the same as it had Piano, and that this dislodgment, not his cheek, was his most dominant wound.

The Dream of the Cotton Club remained just that, for Church dared not darken its hallowed doorway until he'd made something of himself. My primary purpose was to buoy my friend's sinking spirits, so I encouraged our continued attendance at more plebeian dives. To maintain my own disposition, I saved cash enough to purchase a terrific ten-dollar Knapp-Felt fedora—second only to the Excelsior in my history of favorite accoutrements.

From beneath its ivory petersham band and laughably long brim, I screened flotillas of flappers for a girl kindhearted enough to look past Church's face. Sensing that I was not on the make, females gravitated into my jurisdiction. As much as it anguished me to be a nonsexual object, I discovered, to my surprise, a great deal of pleasure in chatting up these browbeaten but brazen babes who worked in steno pools, department stores, libraries, and schools in jobs far more interesting than any Church or I had ever held. Who knew that women had so much to say?

So fond of them did I become that I could not blame them for spurning Church. The odds stacked against these young women were enough without him lopsiding the equation.

This phase of our life came to an end in May 1927. The fad
du
jour
was dance marathons, endurance contests in which the last couple standing won a cash award. These “bunion derbies” held every hallmark of an event ideal for Church: he needed money, longed for situations in which a girl could not flee before getting to know him, loved to dance, and had a minotaur's endurance. So when he shook an advertisement in my face and said he couldn't lose, what could I feel but gladness at the return of his swaggering gasconade?

It went, of course, poorly, as did everything he attempted that decade. The tin-roofed Coney Island amphitheater was sardined with hundreds of numbered contestants, and I watched from the bleachers as Church and the gal with whom he'd been paired—Couple #281—spun within a sea of individual whirlpools. The first day and night cut the frenzy down to thirty couples, but these were the desperate diehards. A full week later, most of them fought on, their snappy tangos abased into the slouches of half-snipped marionettes.

Some men dragged semi-conscious girls; some girls passed smelling salts before the faces of their drowsing men. Shoes had long since been kicked off to make room for blisters, and the hardwood was smeared with blood. Given that the swelling of his problematic right knee was evident from one hundred feet away, Church's violent crash on Day Fourteen was almost a relief.

From the filthed floor, his glasses and copper cheek askew, he sobbed.

“I won the
war
. I won the
war
. And I can't even win
this
?”

It was a slow advance past the noisy good times of the beaches
and amusement parks, with me bearing half of Church's substantial weight as he had borne mine during the march to Belleau Wood. Coney Island was stocked with every pleasure a person could want, from sailboats to cotton candy to, shall we say, more adult diversions, and Church broke from my grip to keel toward one such house of whoredom. I grimaced but had no choice but to draggle after. Such establishments had once brought me considerable joy, but ever since Wilma Sue, the sight of one disheartened me.

Two women led us down a dingy hallway and into a grubby bedroom, where they took from Church two dollars and began to peel off their clothes. It had been thirty years since I'd been privy to such an unveiling, and there were myriad details to note regarding contemporary undergarments, the most jarring of which was the tubular elastic used to flatten the breasts. (Yes, Reader, I know—a criminal intent!) These girls had precious little meat on their bones; the point of the style, I think, was to make ladies look forever young. As someone with just such an affliction, I ached after the kind of soft, luscious flesh of which you could take hold. Oh, Wilma Sue, how I missed her, and in so many ways!

Church's hooker went by Nan, mine Dot. Both affected flapper flash, though a slapdash variety. Instead of the cunning bobs labored over by “beauticians” (a new and hopeful-sounding profession), these girls' hair looked self-lopped; instead of dangling strings of pearls they sported glass beads; and the lockets around their necks contained not swatches of perfumed cotton but cocaine, which both girls snorted from their fingernails, giggling.

Church initiated sexual congress. His bad knee shook, his feet bled into the carpet, and the number pinned to the back of his shirt made his effort feel like another contest. Dot lounged happily upon
my unresponsive lap, re-doing her makeup in a compact mirror. On went the rose rouge, the pale powder, the red Cupid's bow lips, the thick black kohl around the eyes. I was too close to appreciate the effort. Her face looked to me like a loosely fitting mask.

While Church went about his business, the girls bantered.

Dot: “Nan, you got a cig?”

Nan: “You've been on a real toot with those. Don'tcha know gaspers will do ya in?”

Dot: “That's a wad of chewing gum. Ain't you read the magazines? It's how all the stars keep their figures.”

Nan: “You're all wet. Exercising's what does it.”

Dot: “Hah! With all our lays we both oughta be beanpoles. Look, my girl Mabel knows her onions, and she don't eat nothing but spinach and juice—and you'd be happy to have her hip bones.”

Nan: “I'd be happy to have her
bubs
. Mine are too big.”

Dot: “Well, just keep strapping 'em in, maybe they'll shrink.”

Better to sit there, impotent and uninteresting, than undergo the strange suffering of Church. Sweat poured from his crimson face until his glasses began to slide down his nose, dragging with them his copper cheek. This threw off his focus; his thrusts staggered and his grunts stuttered; and then, quite evidently, he began to fail at his task. He tried to nudge his cheek back up with his shoulder and in the doing so stumbled backward.

Nan noticed.

“Aw, what happened, Burke baby?”

Church pushed away from her thighs and retreated to the corner to pull up his pants.

“It's Burt.”

“That's what I said—Burke. Come back, we'll try again.”

“
Burt.
And that over there is Zebulon Finch. Got it?”

“He your kid brother? He's cute. Dot will give him a round, won't you, Dottie? And you and me can start over.”

Church's hands came away from his belt in fists.

“That right there is no kid. That's Private Zebulon Finch of the Seventh Marine Regiment. You got any idea of what this guy did for me? For his brothers? If he doesn't want to be touched, you don't touch him, you got that? You don't
deserve
to touch him, you diseased witch.”

Nan's spirits dropped like a nightgown. She raised herself to sitting position.

“You better take a shower, mister. You're getting a little hot under the collar.”

“I'm just asking for some respect is all.”

“Well, this ain't how you get it. Dot, get your clothes.”

“What?” demanded Church. “We're done, just like that?”

“Sorry, bank's closed—
Burke
.”

This kindled within me an angry flame, though whether directed at the raccoon-faced courtesan or the whole sorry situation I cannot say. I stood, bouncing Dot to her feet, and lurched across the room with arms raised, as if scaring away a sidewalk of pigeons. No, Reader, I am not proud of it, but I had Church's shaking fists to consider.

“Get out of here!” shouted I.

Nan got off the bed, swiped up her clothes, and pressed them to her body.

“This is
our
whoopee spot, kid. You can't give us the bum's rush!”

“Out, out, out, out, out!”

Dot, the meeker of the two, held the door open. Nan was furious
but I suspected this was not the first time a customer had forced a getaway. She shook a finger at us; her cheap strand of beads whirled about like Aboriginal boleadoras.

“You're real flat tires, the both of you!”

The door slammed and we listened to their naked footsteps patter down the hall and retreat inside another room. I leaned against the wall, brain boiling. Church took a seat upon the vacant bed. Tired old bedsprings moaned as he unclenched his hands and studied their scars: maps of Iowan farm land, demolished trenches, the back alleys of lower Manhattan.

“Ever wish you could go back to the war?” asked he. “Keep fighting it?”

I sighed.

“I admit,” said I, “there was a certain satisfaction in inching forward, ever forward.”

“There ain't no Skipper out here to tell you what direction to go.”

“I shall not abandon you. We will find the optimal path.”

“Easy for you to say. You got nothing but time. Me, I'm gonna be
thirty-two
in December. Life's just dropping away from me, Finch, I'm bleeding it out everywhere I go. I ain't had a job in I don't know how long. I ain't had a girl since Lilly, not one I didn't have to pay for. I used to be somebody but now I'm nobody. I'm nobody.”

He pulled off his glasses, the prosthetic along with it, and rubbed at his tears. The exposed pit of his cheek caught me unawares. The bone had been dug out as neatly as if by an ice-cream scoop, and the pink flesh inside had been layered by surgeons in the style of a croissant. The overall effect was that the right side of his face was being sucked into his skull.

I, too, was pulled by the vortex—I could stand to see my friend
like this no longer! I bucked from the bedroom wall and snatched the prosthetic from his hand. Church blinked at me with all the surprise of a child robbed of his birthday balloon. The apparatus was shockingly lightweight. How flimsy a thing to hold control over such a man.

I snapped the arms off the glasses. The rims split too and one of the lenses fell to the floor and broke into two clean halves. Church was aghast, confused, buffaloed.

“Stop? Finch? Stop?”

The prosthetic was of solid copper but, as Church had said, only one-thirty-second of an inch thick, disqualifying it for any Revelation Almanac we might encounter. I hurled it to the ground, spotted an umbrella left behind by a client of this substandard whorehouse, picked it up, and used the point to stab the lifeless copper until skin-colored paint chips began to scatter. It produced ten times the satisfaction of jabbing a bayonet into something living.

My next stab sent the cheek skittering across the floor.

It was halted by the dropped obstruction of a shoe.

Church stood there with a heaving chest and the cave of his cheek glistening. He lifted his shoe, evaluated the heel. Like him, it was old and beaten, but not without strength or sharpness. He looked, probably for the first time since 1918, like he knew what to do. He raised the heel and took aim, the same as he had against untold scores of armed Germans.

“I got you,” said he, “you little son of a gun.”

VIII.

S
O ATTUNED WERE OUR EARS
to the minimalist music of spare change dropped into our coffee-jar coffer that we barely noticed the murders at first. Daily news was, for the most part, inapplicable to our social station: stocks we could not buy, fashion we could not afford, events we could not attend. Freed of his false face, Church became a better man and found better work, and our rent, believe it or not, began to be paid on schedule. This left him little time for current events.

He'd instead narrowed his interest to celebrity gossip. Once a month he'd scrape together the change to buy
Photoplay
and read it front to back, responding to every article with adolescent credulity. “Wow!” he'd cry. “Mary Pickford really
is
just a regular girl at heart!” The glum irony was that we were smack in the middle of the age of the movie palace—lavish, air-conditioned, Egyptian-styled temples designed to give proper deference to the new wave of “talkies” starring the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Joan Crawford, Tom Mix, and Bridey Valentine—and we could ne'er afford two tickets!

For me, the dull diversion of fact-addled newspapers had been superseded by the squawking fluff coming from our secondhand Radiola. It mattered little if the program was morning calisthenics, sonorous scripture readings, malefic weather reports, musical showcases, children's prattle, or even Betty Crocker's Gold Medal Flour
Home Service. If it babbled, I was there to clap my hands in moppet delight.

Only when coppers began raiding our scurvy saloons, not to arrest us for illicit imbibing but to pat us down for weapons, did we hear rumors about a killer. Forthwith I found a newspaper slicked with gin to a tabletop and flapped it about so that it might dry. On the walk home that night I read my first account of the Bird Hunter.

The
New York Herald Tribune
had an edge over the
Times
,
the
Sun
,
the
Evening World
,
the whole inky glut, for the
Herald Tribune
had on the case one Kip McKenzie, soon to be known as my favorite writer. It was McKenzie who'd nicknamed the killer. After the third murder, each of them young women returning home from speakeasies, he wrote, “If ‘flappers' are so named for chicks yet lacking the adult feathers to leave the nest, this executioner might well be called ‘the Bird Hunter,' so intent is he to clip those wings.”

Even when the killer went underground for months at a time, not one week passed without McKenzie boasting “exclusive scoops” from “top-secret sources” on one of these variants: a) The indomitable police had a suspect and were about to make the collar; b) There were additional unpublicized victims and the police were bungling boobs; or c) An eyewitness had surfaced to describe the killer as a very tall man, or a very short woman, or perhaps a circus-trained gorilla.

It was a lurid decade, you understand, and print outlets strove to outdo one another in both the size of their hollering headlines and the carnality of their content. We readers expected fresh, frequent, hot plates of sex and death, and shivered in delectation when McKenzie held back the goriest details to instead repeat his simple, teasing refrain:

“This girl, too, was gutted.”

The affair offended Church's Midwestern decency, and so, feeling like a Judas, I stole away so that I might enjoy exchanging wild hypotheses with strangers on the street. The Bird Hunter was a moralistic madman out to punish our reckless youth. No, he was a Dry delivering atonement to those who dared to draught the Devil's drink. Any madness was possible in the world of Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. Even yours truly, typically dazzled by wanton bloodshed, had disfavored February's execution-style St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago. Truly, could things get any worse?

Hah! Funny rhetorical, that.

Appreciate the caustic couplets of that drunk poet, Gød. On October 24, 1929, Kip McKenzie was back on the front page with the slaying of another young flapper. But his story had been booted below the fold to make way for the only thing worse than bloody murder—the bloodying of one's own pocketbook. The entire country was shaken on “Black Thursday,” a frightening enough label were it not for the Black Monday and Black Tuesday that quickly overshadowed it. No, it was not a spate of solar eclipses but the implosion of the anything-goes stock market. Boring stuff, yes, unless it was you who had your entire fortune dashed in a matter of hours.

The initial impact upon Church and me was minimal. The Dream of the Cotton Club remained just that; what little money we had fit into our wallets. But, oh, how the city moaned. We opened the windows to the mournful music while our Radiola supplied the numerical lyrics: American Telephone & Telegraph down 106 and 3/4 points, General Motors down 36 and 3/4 points, the whole market drained of billions of dollars, ninety percent of its total value. The imagery conjured was of tycoons in three-piece suits standing amid loops of ticker tape as tangled as battlefield entrails before
opening their fiftieth-floor office windows and taking the plunge.

“There won't be any jobs,” said Church. “Finch, what'll we do?”

I thought of the bottles of fallacious promises once sold by the Barker.

“This is what happens,” said I, “when one trusts in false prophets.”

The United States reeled as if socked by a Jack Dempsey roundhouse. New York City in particular hit the ropes, but at least we had a hero, the intrepid Kip McKenzie, and over the next two months he assaulted his clackety Underwood with the single-minded mission of elevating the moods of we millions of sad-sack suckers. Behold, his latest mobilization:

MARKET PLUNGE SQUELCHES SERIAL MURDERS

“Bird Hunter” Threat May Be Over, Says Our Reporter

Leading theories regarding the Bird Hunter had suggested that he was doling punishment for declining American ethics. The breaking waves of the crash, wrote McKenzie, had tossed the Roaring Twenties against the cliffs; give it a year, two at most, and necklines would rise and hemlines would fall and liquor would stop pouring in such volume. The Bird Hunter, in short, would have no more cause to kill. Wasn't it wonderful?

It was! It really was! I know that McKenzie's millions of readers took solace that, as bad as things were, there were worse things that had been sated. Too bad, then, that, beginning with the very first day of 1930, girls once again began to die, quite a lot of them.