FUTILE EFFORTS
By Tom Piccirilli
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by Tom Piccirilli
Cover by Caniglia
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OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY TOM PICCIRILLI:
NOVELS:
Short Ride to Nowhere
Nightjack
The Dead Past – A Felicity Grove Mystery
NOVELLAS:
All You Despise
Fuckin' Lie Down Already
Loss
The Fever Kill
The Nobody
The Last Deep Breath
Frayed
You'd Better Watch Out
UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:
Nightjack – Narrated by Chet Williamson
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For Michelle
Acknowledgments
I'm indebted to more folks than I can ever thank, but let me give it a shot anyway. All my thanks and appreciation go out to: Jack O'Connell, TM Wright, Ed Gorman, Gerard Houarner, Linda Addison, Dallas, Lee, Matt Schwartz, Rich Chizmar, Brian Freeman, Caniglia, Chris Golden, Jim Moore, Brian Keene, Tom Monteleone, Tim Lebbon, Gary Braunbeck, Simon Clark, Mike Laimo, Ray Garton, Joe Nassise, Tamara Thorne, Patrick Swenson, Mike Arnzen, Thomas Tessier, Mick Garris, Dean Koontz, and Patrick Lussier.
–Table of Contents–
Alchemy - introduction by Gerard Houarner
Voice C - introduction by Edward Lee
An Average Insanity, A Common Agony - introduction by Jack Ketchum
Around it Still the Sumac Grows - introduction by Tom Monteleone
With Eyes Averted - introduction by TM Wright
Shadder - introduction by Tim Lebbon
Making Faces - introduction by Gary Braunbeck
Thief of Golgotha - introduction by Joseph Nassise
These Strange Lays - introduction by Ray Garton
Two in the Eyes - introduction by Brian Keene
Tortures of that Inward - introduction by Simon Clark
Traveling - introduction by Michael Laimo
Jesus Wrestles the Mob to Feed the Homeless - introduction by James Moore
Jonah Arose - introduction by Christopher Golden
45 poems - introduction by Mike Arnzen
From WAITING MY TURN TO GO UNDER THE KNIFE
A Long Island Tourist in New York
In Bed With It
Paradise
Sins of the Sons
On Learning More About the Sicilian
This Morning I was Mowed Down by a Runaway Train of Thought
Sycophancy (in my Pantsy)
Joe Friday, Myrtle, and the Diabolical Case of My Package
With the Sword of St. Michael Burning Over My Left Shoulder
Faces I Have Not Seen
My Grandfather's Fear Cut Loose Through the Decades to Perch at the Foot of My Disheveled Bed
On Reconciling Your Love, Faith, and Marriage with the Missing
Tips of Two of Your Fingers
Me and Somebody Just Like Me
Big G & Little J
My Friend Ernie, Trying to Light a Match
From THIS CAPE IS RED BECAUSE I'VE BEEN BLEEDING
Jones Beach, Thirty Years After the Last Sand Castle
My Sister
Adjusting the Atonement
The Toll of Your Personal Evil Troll
This Cape is Red Because I've Been Bleeding
Nunzio, Sixty Years Dead, Lying at My Side, Staring
A Symbolic Interpretation of the Worst Day of My Life
Concern.
Choke and Throttle
How to Make It Through a Friday Night Without Biting Your Tongue in Two
My First Groupie and How Much I Love Her Despite the Failed Assassination Attempt
Why I Can't Stand Behind Some People, and Why You Ought to Be Scared About It
One For the Worm
It Knows So Much More Than Me
When You Look Down to Find Yourself Going but Not Yet Gone
From A STUDENT OF HELL
Poised On The Division Bridge
Sunday, While The Sauce Simmers
Divinity As Witness To The Depth Of Our Darkening Love
A Countenance More In Anger Than In Sorrow
Soft And Sweet Cool Whisper Of Revenge
Sponging My Syrup Up Off The Formica
When The Delicate Fragrance Grows Too Great
A Dull Blade Slicing Off A Portion Of Prayer
Taking The Bull's Ear Between My Teeth
In An Effort To Remove The Seventh Sin From My Fifth Rib
Jealousy
My Dead Dad Can Beat Up Your Dead Dad
Driving Through the Heart of Kansas, Kansas Driven Through My Heart
Upon Releasing What Needs To Stay Caged
Mist Settling On The Faces Of My Family
Introduction for "Alchemy"
By Gerard Houarner
Long Island is a thin sliver of land stretching out into the Atlantic, home to the fabulous and privileged, the ordinary and the broken. Nestled between New York City's hyper-hub of civilization and the sea's raw wilderness, Long Island is like any other human-settled place. There are strip malls and huge shopping centers, stunning mansions and small, decrepit hovels, busy industrial parks and quiet, lonely bits of wasteland. Highways pulse with the flow of man and machine, while some sidewalks never seem to harbor any sign of life. Big deal.
But through a certain kind of eye, filtered by a soul tuned to the frequencies of anguish and sensitized to every twitch of pain, the Island's shadows deepen. Words exchanged carelessly between acquaintances suddenly lope to the wild cadences of subterranean need. Details lost, half-buried, in the roots and foundations of larger things suddenly quake and tremble. Cracks widen and swallow the unwary. Secrets escape. The fine dust of despair whirls in dust devils at the feet of the desperate.
Long Island in Tom Piccirilli's voice becomes something much greater than its ordinary reality. The rolling landscape of middle class dream and ambition becomes a haunted crossroads between the rational world of the everyday and the torturous realm of the unconscious. The hungers and agonies of youth burn with supernatural intensity, fueled by life-long descents into personal hells as much as by beer and hormone-saturated bodies. There are moments of dislocation in which we are startled by the recognition that expectations of a setting and its inhabitants are not going to be met, that something else is going to happen and it's going to hurt more than we can imagine. A disturbing sense of wrongness creeps like salt-tang fog over sand, through wind-warped trees, and odd things are cast off, or cast ashore.
Then things get really tough.
Anyone who's read any Pic at all knows how large the Island looms in his imagination. What follows is an extreme example of that passion. Desire, love and self-destruction seep from wounds his characters pick at every day of their lives. Then the ocean makes an offering which cuts deep, and the wounds open wider. Appetites roar as they're released from their cages. Blood and rage flow,
inevitable but still surprising. We go past the warped and broken hearts, the poisoned connective tissue that has held lives together, and sink down to the bone, to the structure of the pain Pic's vision has exposed. Reality suffers a violent transfiguration.
Tom has come home, and he's showing the rest of us what the place might look like under the right –– or wrong –– light. We may feel like we've fallen off the earth, but where we've landed is as true as it is dark. It is just another place in which humans have settled and made their own.
Welcome to the Long Island of the damned.
–Gerard Houarner, author of THE BEAST THAT WAS MAX and ROAD TO HELL
Alchemy
For Dallas & Lee, my big brothers in blood
I'm another of those quiet ones that nobody ever notices. For some that means nothing but fear and harassment, being bullied and ostracized through school and beyond. They go to the grave gratefully, hollowed out and less than a shadow.
But for others it's a gift that allows them to glide into the right place at the perfect time, to surround themselves with protection and slip away, when necessary, without notice.
I was a little of both, and it worked against my nerves on certain nights, driving the others around. Dan and Betty were squeezed into the front seat of my '62 Chevy and Jude and Wes were laid out and lying easy in the back. The stink of their cigarettes would never get out of my cushions. They were all drinking from beer cans in foam holders, splashing my seat covers. Nobody had offered me one because they knew I didn't drink, but it would've been nice if somebody had been thoughtful enough to pick up a six-pack of ginger ale and toss it into the cooler too.
I didn't mind much. I didn't mind anything much, really. I'd made an ally out of indifference and it came in handy.
We were heading out on Ocean Parkway past the public beaches and the nightclubs on the water. Every now and again we'd hit a pocket of heavy traffic made up of BMWs, Caddies, and Ferraris, the beautiful people all congregating at some action hot spot where they'd wait on line hoping to be recognized by one another.
Finally the cars and lights faded until we were the only thing moving out towards the point. Betty sat in the middle, between me and Dan, and occasionally her fingernails would rest against my leg. They were painted blue with little gold designs of them, just pointed enough to cause my nerves to tingle through my jeans whenever we hit a bump in the road.
Dan's window was open a crack and the wind blew her blonde hair up against my neck. She was ultra-cute in that non-intimidating way, and when she angled her chin towards me and I saw the side of her face, my chest would hitch to the left. Then my pulse would settle again and we were back where we belonged.
As always, Wes had already drank too much and it was hitting him pretty hard. He was mean to begin with and got even uglier with every can he consumed. He'd flunked out of his junior year in college and his parents wouldn't let him back in the house. He'd been a low-level star on our high school football team, and he'd had just enough of a chance to make it if he'd applied himself. He didn't. He was cut from the college team early on and had never fully recovered from it.
I'd had to help him find an apartment and a fair paying job, hunt up a decent car for him and lend him enough money for a down payment and his first month's rent. It was one of the few times he'd looked at me with real respect. I'd been on my own since I was seventeen.
For all my efforts, Wes was still coming apart. He couldn't handle the loss of his moderate dream, even though he'd done nothing to maintain it. I could see the fibers of his being snapping one after the other, and sometimes I wondered how many he had left before he completely unraveled.
Wes let out a belch that made all of us gag. "Do you ever get so fed up that you've just got to stab some son of a bitch four or five times in the chest just so you can eat your breakfast in peace?"
Dan gave a bark of laughter because it sounded funny, actually, to hear that sort of shit while cruising down the route with the sawgrass tilting towards the fender. Dan had stabbed a kid in the leg with a protractor once, back in the tenth grade, and he'd been forced into therapy for a couple of years. It was either that or juvie time. It hadn't helped.
I looked up into the rear view and tried to lock eyes with Wes, but Jude was on top of him, snuggling or sleeping, with all her reams of red hair splayed out across his body. She was frightened of him but she loved to be kept on the edge, terrified and bruised, so it worked out just fine.
"I think I know what you mean," Dan told him. "Yeah. You're just trying to get to work and you've got five minutes to spare and there's this hole in your stomach. No way to make it to lunch without sucking down some of that cheap quick crap they got in those Styrofoam trays, with the little plastic forks always breaking so you. Not enough syrup in those little packs they give you. Some old blue-haired biddies squawking about senior discounts, and a couple of punks talking tough shit in the corner. You're sitting there trying to eat a Mega-egga-bun and hash browns, and then that, you know, that feeling—"
"It's a swirl of blackness," Wes said, "that sort of starts spinning at the back of your brain. The pain begins but it doesn't mean anything at first, it's just the same sort of twinge you've had to deal with for years."
"It is?" Betty asked, smiling. "Maybe it's time for that orthoscopic surgery, let them look around in there, check the cartilage out." She thought he was talking about his knee again. He blamed his failed football career on a knee injury that didn't exist and she liked prodding him for it. Wes didn't take offense, but he crawled deeper inside his own anger. It made him warmer in there, closer to his fires, and he began to sweat.
This was still only a joke to them, just the alcohol talking, but I knew that thrum in his voice. I'd heard it many times before in my father.
Jude licked the threads of sweat off Wes' neck. His molars clicked together. "Sometimes you wonder what the hell you would do if—"
"Yeah yeaah," Dan urged, with a sort of praise the lord rhythm going now. "Uh huh."
"—if your head ever cleared and all the noise receded enough—"
"Yeah, uh huh …"
"—for the world to show up in colors—"
"Uh huh, yeahh…" Dan was chuckling, pissed off about goddamn plastic forks.
"—instead of—of—"
Sure, I thought. Wes let the sentence die off and nobody picked it up. I knew the next words should've been something like…instead of through the bloody tint of rage.
Ineffectual drama. The banal and commonplace ache of ordinary decay.
It had been my father's pain as well. He'd begun several business ventures with the glitter of gold in his eyes, and as each one tumbled down around him he took further solace in the bottle. It had been his own father's story as well, and for all I knew the narrative went back fifty generations of quiet men. He walked through the house with whiskey on his breath, staring into reflective surfaces but hardly ever the mirror. It wasn't his defeats and bankruptcy that killed him at fifty, but the knowledge that despite his best efforts he'd sat back in his lounge chair to become nothing more than a cliché.
Jude muttered to Wes and he mumbled back, and soon they drew the blanket over themselves and began to play around clumsily. She squealed and squeaked, and his teeth kept grinding. Dan lit a cigarette and rolled his window down further, shaking his head and lost in the strained mood that now filled the car.
I snapped on the radio and let the soft melody of Sam Cooke's start to raise my hackles and take me out of myself. Betty snapped it off and said, "Christ, no more oldies, all right? There's nothing but oldies stations out this far. Toss a tape in."
I didn't bother because all my cassettes were oldies too. She took a hit off the cigarette and let the smoke roll out slowly between her lips, blowing it down across my lap. The three of us stared ahead through the windshield as though fate would lunge up ahead and show us something besides sand and rock and saltwater weeds.
More or less, this had developed into a we
ekend ritual, and I didn't see it coming to an end any time soon. Wes would murmur his failures and frustrations in the back of my car. Jude remained defined by his disappointments, without an identity of her own. She was only an extension of him and that black swirl he'd mentioned. It didn't bother her much either. She hardly ever spoke or voiced an opinion. Certainly not one that went counter to Wes.
Betty and Dan were different. You could see it in everything they did, even now. He deferred to her in all instances, and it bothered the hell out of her that he was so soft, but not enough to end their relationship. She wanted a sap but was revolted by his sappiness. She occasionally looked at the side of my face.
Temptation is nothing more than ability to fantasize. Betty had an imagination. I'd been biding my time, in a way, since the seventh grade, hoping she'd eventually become aware of me. Perhaps it would happen.
I pulled up to the point and everyone poured out of the Chevy. Jude unfurled from beneath the blanket and I saw that her lip was bleeding badly. It made sense. Wes didn't need soft words and tenderness, he wanted something to kill.
Dan and I carried the cooler down to the rocky beach beneath the abandoned lighthouse. No one used the old shipping lanes anymore and the shore had eroded so severely that a commission on safety finally closed the lighthouse. Another twenty feet of land despoliation and the whole thing would slide into the sea.
The night had a chill to it but not the kind that slices you to the bone. Moonlight crashed down on us, illuminating the point until it was nearly as bright as morning.
Betty kept closer to me than usual and Dan noticed. I wondered if he'd release some of his hurt and hate on me, come launch himself in my direction with those ham hock fists clutching at my throat. He used to carry a knife, just like Wes, but I wasn't sure if he did anymore. Maybe he wanted to stab somebody in the heart five times too. Maybe he thought I'd bothered him too much while he tried swallowing down his Mega-egga-bun. The little insanities eventually added up.
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