The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (48 page)

XIV.

B
RIDEY WAS FACING THE PHONOGRAPH
player when I returned. Her biceps glowed bluish where it had struck the shelf. I heard the moist
whump
of a needle drop, followed by the opening drawl of Artie Shaw's “Stardust.” Her naked back rolled with the wistful strain, spine and scapula pressing against her skin like dragon wings wanting to be freed. Her hips swung this way, slow, and that way, slower, so that her blood-colored gown was a dripping wound cut through the air.

Her languid turnabout was protracted agony. Throbbing pale neck, smothered cinder eyes, slippery crimson lips. She sucked on a long cigarette.

“My dance partner. He's run off. I need another.”

I became a bull. Lower the head, square the shoulders, and snort.

Bridey Valentine always got what she wanted, is that right?

Fine, then, fine. After all, she'd earned it.

Our love story, if that's what you'd like to call it, was never going to end any direction other than horizontal. I took her by the waist and lugged her toward the hearth. A Persian rug fattened before her dragged feet and her hip collided with the end of the loveseat; it splintered and she grunted in pain. But it was she who pushed me over the back so that I landed upon the cushion. Around it she paced a coyote circle, gauging which part of me to eat first.

She ankled off her shoes, worked her hands under the hem of her dress, removed her knickers, and threw them into the fire. She was then upon me with claws and teeth, ripping at jacket and shirt, unmindful of the signatures her nails might forever write across my flesh. She was sloppy and impatient; she left my upper body half-dressed and went for the trousers, beneath which she felt the hardness she'd so long hunted.

Just as rigor mortis had stiffened individual muscles of my body, so had it stiffened the softer tissue of my genitals. I had over the past year grown rigid enough to do a man's work, even though I was not a man, not even a boy, just a corpse who turned this consensual fornication—“carnal knowledge” as Bridey would say—into a rape of all things natural. She snarled and grabbed it, her selfish motivation, after all this time, still intact: to screw the Wilma Sue, and everything else left of my old life, right out of me. She positioned my pecker at the bow of her sex.

I was colder than cold. She was hotter than hot.

White steam crept from under the red skirt.

Bridey bucked her hips and we were locked. She pointed her face at the coffered ceiling and shivered at the deep chill. Then she swore gruffly, directly cursing her icicle invader, and began to jolt back and forth. Faintly I felt a single bead of mercury heat. I dug my fingers through the dress and into her thighs so as to hang on for dear death.

We were foes caught in a playground fight of slapping limbs when things inverted. We fell from the loveseat, rolled, and sprang back in the same position, she on top and crashing her hard pelvis into my fragile own. A general softness cushioned the assault and I turned my head to find beneath me a bedding of black fur. The bear rug, that mocking bane, had me in its clawed clutches!
See?
laughed the bear.
Even dead things have their uses.

Bridey dragged her bosom along my chest so that the friction peeled away the bodice. She pushed the dress down to her waist and slid her hands up her naked torso. What looked like sensual self-fondling was anything but; it was a mirror of the tour of my wounds I'd given her our first night together, her own Revelation Almanac—a meticulous account of the damages accrued when playing tug-of-war with Death.

The scars glowed in the orange light. Here, a breast-lift. There, a tummy-tuck. Evidence of Dr. Biff's meddling was curlicued into her navel and tucked into the crevices of her armpits. Bridey lifted her hair from her shoulders and angled her body so that I might appreciate the disfigurements for the war injuries that they were. Church had removed his facial prosthesis to disclose his damage; Bridey removed her gown to reveal hers.

“Stardust” finished. Needle nudged label and made a cyclical thump. Bridey adopted the rhythm, squeezing her lathered legs around my white slabs of cold thigh. Forget the Greek death mask, the Egyptian mummification kit; forget every spookish icon with which she'd styled herself a patroness of the dark. Copulating with the Devil himself, now that was the outermost thrill.

Within this meat-etiquette melding I began to experience uncoiling spires of pleasure. These went far beyond the cheap pumps of blood I'd felt as a youth; this was a lessening of deadness for having been plugged into a furnace of life. I, the gigolo Zebulon Finch, was once again a fumbling virgin. Bridey, voracious vamp, was restored her maidenhood.

It was our first time. It was our last time.

Shakespeare had it right about a post-poisoned Juliet:

She was a flower, but death deflowered her.

“Yes,” cried she.

Yes—devastation.

“Yes!” cried she.

Yes—immolation!

“
Yes
!” cried she.

Yes—
erasure, destruction, oblivion, take me!

Her starved muscles, biting; our quick cadence, disrupted; her flammable sweat upon both of us, sparked and rushing in blue flame. With one brute thrust of her hips, she harvested my root. There was a dull snap. No orgasm on Earth could lighten so heavy a weight, no ejaculation could offer such overdue release. Bridey slid away with my pecker still inside of her and I was glad. She could not keep the whole of me forever, but this single piece, for which I had no further use, belonged to her—it had for a while—and would make, thought I, a nice addition to her museum, a final endowment from me to my cut-up and sewed-back-together patchwork queen.

XV.

R
UMORS IN THE DROWSY DARK:

Z will take you.

Not since my death had I been this close to actual sleep, and yet I could not help but rouse myself with speculation. “Take”: was the word used in the mortal sense? For though I could not sleep, breathe, or eat, I had proven myself adept at taking. Look to my hands for proof. Sixty-two years since a cursed birth and those merlot spots came not from age but from spilled blood.

He'll go with you, I promise.

Surely the destination of debate was Hades? Though I knew not the exact route, I'd seen multitudes of signposts and might yet be convinced to pathfind.

I'll ask him when he's up.

Up? I'd never be up again! I chuckled the vulgar joke into the bear rug.

He'll meet you at your place at seven. Baby, I have to run, I'll ring you later.

Good! Begone with you! Your nattering distracts from my misery.

Ta-ta, little Gopher.

Gopher?

The voice, then, was not that of a Delphic deity tossing lightning-bolt riddles at my skull. It was Bridey, the human female with whom I'd lain to crippling effect. Bridey's tone that morn ought to have been one of howling horror. She ought to have lurched into the room, pouring blood from her groin, still clenching the knives with which she'd cut out the parts I'd diseased.

Instead, she'd telephoned her daughter. Such calls were usually held out of earshot, so certain were they to degenerate into bickering and wheedling. Today, though, Bridey had exuded maternal control, given sound advice, and, as a bonus, lent her daughter the services of her live-in eunuch as blithely as she might loan out a pair of heels. I glimpsed her for one second, ravishing in a pearl-white negligee, the chiffon frolicking along the versicolored Turkish runner.

Then she was upstairs, ringing the bell for her hairdresser. I drew myself to a seated position upon the bear rug, nauseated by the lack of—well, how else to say it?—
flopping
from my nether regions. From what grade of steel was this Valentine woman forged? Off to the studio she was gallivanting, whistling birdsong, as if it were every day she extracted from her cervix a hunk of hardened corpse.

The telephone began to ring.

How could I mourn my mangling if Margeaux kept bringing her mother back to the phone? To hell with it, I'd set the girl straight myself. The idea of me making a social call was laughable. Truly, I might never leave the house again! I began to stand but hesitated upon hearing an object hit the floor. There, tented upon the bear's head, was a stack of paper bound by three brass fasteners, having been left upon my lap as if in amends for my literal emasculation. I picked up the two hundred pages and flipped them over.

“In Our Image”

Screen Play by Bridey Valentine

Final Draft / 12-6-41

Property of Bridey Valentine Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif.

WARNING: ORIGINAL CREATIVE PROPERTY PROTECTED BY LAW.

For as long as I might decay, I shan't forget that cover page, not the pyramid of text, not the Underwood font, not the capitalized paranoia of the concluding threat. The date printed on it belonged to that very morning, which meant Bridey had woken early to run a copy—over a decade's worth of work, given to me to read at last.

The foregone farce of the story was beside the point. Instead of a morning-after ejection from the palace, I was being offered a permanent place, a producer's role in the next stage of Bridey's career as she freed herself from studio strangulation, rejected the Hays Code, and roadshowed her opus across the globe. After last night, the two of us shared an unspeakable secret, and was that not indistinguishable from absolute trust?

The telephone was still ringing.

I rolled the script into nightstick shape, wrapped the bear rug around my body to cover my shame, and hobbled into the hall where resided the telephone chair. The phone was baby blue and of hourglass contour, and it convulsed with every cry. I snatched it up and spoke so as to have both first and last words.

“Zebulon speaking. I'm afraid your mother spoke out of turn. I am engaged tonight and every night henceforth. I wish you moderately well. Good day.”

Alas, had only I hung up as swiftly as I'd answered.

“Papa?”

The voice was broken glass shaved across concrete.

But I knew that glass; I knew that concrete.

“Merle?” whispered I. “Merle, is that you?”

“Oh, Papa. Papa, help. They say they're going to kill me.”

Some shocks the old knees could not take. I collapsed into the telephone chair. Last I'd seen Merle Ruby Watson was a quarter century ago as she'd backpedaled from a crummy Massachusetts hovel with her mother's Colt Lightning revolver pointed, my booby prize for having used
la silenziosità
to give her a glimpse of her fate
.
Her final shout had been an oath to conquer the world, though it sounded as if she'd gotten it backward.

Her ability to track me down, at least, had not waned.

“Merle. Where . . . ?”

“I'm here, Los Angeles. I'm with—they don't want me to say.”

“These people are with you now?”

“They're right here. Please don't be cross with me. I didn't want to bother you but they made me! They made me tell them who you are because they say I owe them money, and I don't have even close to what they're—”

“Do you? Owe these people money?”

“Well, yes, I suppose I do, but—”

“How much?”

“Oh, Papa, I didn't want it to be this way!”

“Merle. How much?”

“They say two thousand, though I don't see how that's—”

“Two?
Thousand
? In what bramble have you become ensnarled?”

“What matters is I don't have it. These people are serious, Papa. They know you have the money and they want it.”

“What makes you believe I have two thousand dollars?”

“Papa! Everyone knows who you live with.”

“Miss Valentine's money is entirely inaccessible to me.”

“Please!” Her rawness thickened with sobs.
“They are going to kill me.”

Had she called twelve hours earlier, I would have yanked the phone cable from the wall. But the situation, to say the least, had changed. Beneath the bear rug I was neutered, a tangible reminder that I would never again sire a child. Bartholomew Finch was likely dead; my foster-father, Dr. Leather, was the same; Church, my sole brother, was at best sleeping off a hangover at a hotel, at worst prone in a ditch, the hayseed victim of a scheming city.

That left Merle. Bloodsucker yes, banshee for sure, but she was nevertheless the last link I had with life and I could not abandon her as I'd abandoned all others.

“The address,” said I. “Give it.”

There was a lengthy interim during which I gathered my clothes from the library floor, dressed myself, rolled the screenplay and placed it into my inside jacket pocket, and crouched in the cellar while Bridey called for me, searched about, and finally departed. Afterward I scaled the stairs, entered her dressing room, breached the shoe closet, and found, right where snooping young Margeaux had years ago said they would be, rolls of cash, quite a few of them, waiting inside the second-to-the-last hatbox on the left.

XVI.

T
HE NEIGHBORHOOD TO WHICH I'D
been bidden was a snarl of railroad tracks called Watts. I had taken the first car in the garage, Bridey's brand-new Coachcraft Roadster (known as the “Yankee Doodle”), a snug, roofless two-seater as bright red as her beloved Lincoln LeBaron. It proved to be a remarkably poor choice; its futuristic design caught the attention of dozens of directionless jaywalkers as well as one street preacher clutching a shepherd's staff, who chased me down the block as if warning me to turn away.

It was an overcast fifty degrees, polar by L.A. standards, when I parked the Yankee Doodle outside a line of darkened doorways, the saddest of which was not the smoke-scarred typewriter repair shop or the glass-shattered liquor store but rather a bombed-out hollow identified as “Dog & Cat Hospital.” This was the landmark Merle had referenced. Around the corner, clinging by rust to the brickwork, was a metal stairway leading to the second-story flat. I patted the two thousand dollars in my breast pocket and made the climb.

Luca Testa would have had a good chuckle at this sorry stopgap of a syndicate. For starters, the door was unlocked—I walked right in. The blue smoke that swallowed me was thick, but still I could see that no sentinel guarded the door. Instead there were ratty sofas upon which slumped six or seven listless and underfed deadbeats,
some dozing in puddles of their own drool while others scratched at irritated skin. The place stank of tar and sugar. Somewhere, a radio droned on about Joe DiMaggio.

I crept through the living room, across the kitchen, and past three bedrooms, each of which had its windows draped in the faded Chinese textiles of a decrepit opium den. Women clad only in brassieres smoked wrinkled cigarettes that ashed upon their emaciated stomachs. Men with trembling fingers counted out lopsided pills. A boy my age sat in a corner, a soaked handkerchief pressed over his face, inhaling hallucinogenic fumes with religious fervor.

The air crackled with dissatisfied mutters.

At length I arrived at a narrow mud room pillared by ten fidgety men, each in the process of moving toward, or from, the amnesic states of the aforesaid sprawlers. It was not until I shouldered past a man with a black eye and a runny nose did I notice the female in their midst. She languished upon a metal folding chair, stringy brown hair dangling across two arms perforated with bruised needle holes.

I cleared my throat.

“Gentlemen. I am Zebulon Finch.”

The men chuckled at my diction and ignored me. The woman, though, raised her head.

Merle had come to me in Boston in a low state, rain-soaked and livid, qualities that had but sharpened the blades of her fifteen-year-old beauty. Even scrawny and sloshed in Salem, she'd smoldered with inextinguishable spirit. This woman, though, was older than Bridey and looked twice that. She'd become as skeletal as a dead tree, shedding desiccated bark and popping apart at the joints. Her hair was sparse; her skin was whey and splotched; furrows cut through her flesh as if tunneled by termites.

The Colt Lightning had long since been pawned away.

“It's Papa.” She grinned with yellow teeth. “Look, Sandy. Papa came.”

A freckled pig to her left broke off a dispute and turned to me with interest. His silver tie and fat lapels exhibited the catchpenny dazzle that years ago I would have sported myself, but looked passé next to my top-of-the-line tweed jacket, wool sweater, and patterned silk scarf. Sandy appreciated the ensemble before putting his hands to his hips.

“I'll be dipped in shit. It
is
you. I seen your mug in the papers. And here I thunk the skinny little bitch was having me on.”

My hands curled into hammers.

“The skinny little bitch happens to be my daughter.”

He slapped his thigh.

“That's what she said! You two are nuttier than junebugs in May. Guess you gotta be nutty when you're in pictures, eh? Say, lemme ask you, friend, cuz it's been occupying my mind. What size a' jugs do Bridey Valentine got? I figure they, you know, pad them up big for film, but I still stay she got real big ones. I'm a pretty good judge a' jugs.”

The lackeys laughed and smacked their hilarious hero on the back. Merle licked her scabbed lips, looking frail enough that a loud cough might seize her heart for good. What would Major Horstmeier have said? I ordered my fists to hold their fire.

“Her jugs, as you say, are of goodly proportion. Now that this knowledge has been shared, might we get down to it? I understand there is a ransom to be paid to remove Merle from this place.”

“Whoa, whoa, I ain't ever said
ransom
. Look, mister, I'm making jack shit off this deal. Two grand, that's just what the skinny little bitch owes me, I swear. The last thing I want is trouble, understand?”

Sandy parted his jacket to show the pistol tucked against his
porkbelly. I recognized the checkered grip of a .357 Magnum, too brilliant a revolver for such loathsome slime. The rabble showed no interest in the weapon, as they probably packed their own, but the bulging envelope I produced might as well have been the Hope Diamond. Some went revenant, others jabbered expletives, still another danced a jig. Sandy leered and extended a hoof.

I handed it over. Sandy ripped it open, peeked inside, and whooped. I turned away, gnashing air but wishing it was the man's flabby neck. Extortion was a favorite Black Hand tactic of mine and yet now I found myself appalled at the very notion of trading life, that most ephemeral of commodities, for a pile of paper printed with dollar signs.

“Real nice doing business with you, Mr. Finch,” said Sandy. “So I'm gonna give you some friendly advice. Old Merle here is what we call a ‘procurable woman.' She's probably got the clap, the syphilis, every VD there is. So you'll want to get yourself one of them prophylactics so you don't bring that junk home to Miss Valentine.”

Recall how I'd pounded Mr. Patterson, Wilma Sue's inkeep, into tenderized steak?

All fork-tongued slanderers of Watson girls beware:

There is a Finch bred for the sole purpose of pecking your eyes out.

Sandy's mouth detonated into blood and teeth. My fist ricocheted back, bones ringing, and I paused at the curious sight of one of his canines embedded between my knuckles. That woke up the narcotized ninnies. Hands ripped me away from Sandy, pinned back my arms, and socked me in the stomach. But these rhinos were juiced senseless, and with a few astute kicks I had pulled away and was lifting Merle by her twig shoulders.

“The money, Papa,” slurred she. “Get the money.”

Darling Merle! Her priorities were nothing if not reliable.

My left shoulder was wedged apart. It was Sandy, back on his feet, choking on pink froth, both fists clamped upon the hilt of his buried switchblade. His gurgle of rage turned quizzical when I evidenced no pain; instead, I twisted his arm round his back, the switchblade clacking against my clavicle. Sandy sobbed and kneeled. Both the envelope of cash and the .357 Magnum hit the floor.

Well, why not make my daughter happy?

The money I put in my pocket, the revolver I displayed to my audience.

“Shoot 'em, Papa,” croaked Merle. “Shoot 'em dead.”

Supporting my flyweight berserker by the shuddering shoulders, I pushed through the mud room and into the hallway, swinging the gun. Sandy's sycophantic sheep bleated and dove into darkened bedrooms. The only chatter was the radio, finished now with DiMaggio and babbling about the North African battlefront. The moment had the feel of victory until I caught the flashes of gun-metal, ten or twenty times over, drawn on either side of me.

One loathes to pocket a Magnum at such a moment, but I adjudged it prudent. I swept Merle into my arms, the same as I'd done a dozen injured soldiers on June 10, 1918, and sprinted, shouting for the bewildered junkies of the living room to make way. I shouldered body after body and the air became sleeted with pills, beclouded with cocaine, twinkled with pinwheeling hypodermics. I crashed through the storm door, hitting the rusted staircase with almost enough force to bring it down, and then hurtled down the steps, pitching with the topweight of my daughter.

That the Yankee Doodle was roofless saved precious seconds. I dropped Merle into the passenger seat and leapt behind the wheel.
The ignition was cranked and the engine was growling before I diagnosed something awry. How my jacket lay upon my chest was different than during the drive over. The object that I'd tucked into the inside pocket was gone.

Bridey's script had fallen out during the struggle.

That private work of twelve years, deserted among careless thieves.

I looked at Merle. Her sunken eyes were shut so hard her eyelids made butterfly quivers. The glove compartment buckle had scraped her wan cheek, but the wound was dry, as if she had no blood left to bleed. A feeble pair we would have made if not for the words whispering between her chalked lips:

“I love you, Daddy. I love you, Daddy.”

Everything else became trivial. It mattered not that I had no friends and no future, for in this woman's throat beat the pulse of Finch blood and that meant that I was not alone.

I placed a cold kiss upon her swampy temple.

She tightened into a ball like a poked caterpillar.

There was no fear, only gallantry. I uncorked the switchblade from my shoulder and pressed it into her fist. She snuffled like the child she'd never been, slight and vulnerable, fully dependent upon her father. I strode past the Dog & Cat Hospital, feeling rather canine myself, though, unlike Chernoff's Oksana, I'd risen from my long-held slumber. For the sake of Sandy and his abettors, I hoped the pet clinic still shelved tourniquets, styptic, other tools to staunch the blood of dumb animals. I also hoped that the Watts street preacher might roam our way, prepared to minister last rites to the immoral, desperate, and dead, or even to myself—all three in one neat package.