The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2 by Daniel Kraus

Author:Daniel Kraus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

PART TEN

1962–1969

The Times They A-Change, But Your Hero Can’t Get No Satisfaction; Or, How We Had To Destroy Amerika In Order To Save It.

I.

WE SHALL OVERCOME,” THEY SANG. Intrepid attitude, but they looked unequal to the task, this ragtag corps of fifteen to twenty Sunday-best Negroes who swayed with linked arms outside a Greyhound station in Biloxi, Mississippi, where jittery young men shaven to shiny cheeks and afloat in army garb amassed to board the bus that would take them from the Southeast United States and start them toward Southeast Asia.

The Negroes belted not to hurrah Biloxi’s bravest but to inveigh against the military draft that had enlisted them. The protestors paraded handcrafted placards reading STOP THE WAR and REFUSE TO FIGHT. My Dearest Reader knows that to tabulate the overseas conflicts I’d seen come and go would take all day, yet only in the past eleven months had I seen a U.S. citizen publicly decry a war involving our boys. Given my history with John Quincy’s tribe, further admixture with Negros worried me, but alas, I was a beggar, not a chooser. Having hatcheted headway with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and the integration of the Little Rock Nine in 1957, Negroes had become the nation’s preeminent fuss-makers. Thus, they would have to do.

The bus station hinted at the jungle to which the new GIs were headed: rainforest-green kudzu, tiger-orange rust, and panther-black oil brightened only by the mighty magnolia tree that lorded over all of it, ornamented with spring’s pink buds. I put my palm to its trunk as a doctor places a stethoscope. The branches offered a plentitude of footholds for the gumptious cragsman. I slung my rucksack across my back, lodged my shoe into the foundational fork, and started up.

One-armed climbing is a gradual business, and by the time I’d attained the highest possible weight-bearing branch, all draftees had arrived. None had noticed my ascent; mothers were occupied with parting embraces, fathers with shaking the hell out of their sons’ hands, Negro protesters with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” I straddled my branch, shimmied out as far as I dared, and opened my rucksack. There I paused, caught by a voice in the choir. It was that of a young girl and was possessed of a clarity and resonance so beyond her years that the other singers sounded like Midtown traffic.

Enough of that—back to work. I hadn’t known to what height I’d climbed, and the manila rope I’d brought was too long. I lowered it to the ground like a fishing lure, marked the proper length, and reached into my jacket pocket, past the Excelsior and inside the sheath of Piano’s map, where I kept Gordo’s knife. It sliced through the rope’s braid, and the extra length thumped to the grass. One end of the remaining rope I tied around the branch with a double overhand knot. The other end I gathered into my lap; I’d been practicing for this moment for days. Form a loop.

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