Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  Jude's mouth wouldn't stop bleeding. She'd gone through three tissues already, balling the bloody ones at her feet. She sneered and the red ran over her chin. I had a first aid kit in the trunk that contained a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a septic pencil. I got it and kneeled in front of Jude, cleaned her wound and then used the pencil on her. It had been my father's. He'd never quite learned how to go from shaving with a straight razor to a safety razor and he used to tear his face up all the time.

  She seethed and spit. "God damn it, that thing hurts!"

  But it did the trick and stemmed the flow of blood. Two of Wes' teeth marks could be seen clearly, including the jagged edge of his broken left canine. With forensics they would've nailed him in five minutes.

  "Ah, shit, it still burns. When's it gonna stop?"

  "Just be glad he helped you," Betty told her.

  "I am, really."

  Yet she didn't say thank you. That was all right, I didn't mind. Betty had given me the nod and that's all that mattered, for the moment. We all had our stations. Jude was a chew toy.

  A coast guard cutter trailed by, and about ten minutes later another one. They each had their searchlights on, scanning the water.

  "Do you think something happened out there?" Dan asked.

  "Don't know," Wes said. "Maybe an accident?"

  "Out this far from the channels?"

  "A couple of stupidass kids probably stole their daddy's sailboat and got lost."

  "Dumbass pricks."

  I turned on the car radio and tuned in to a local news station. It was the major breaking story, although there wasn't much information yet. Betty moved in next to me, listening as she pressed against my body.

  "Holy Christ," she whispered, then stood and called into the wind. "They're saying a ferry sank off Echo Island. Forty people are missing."

  "More of those club scene mutts," Wes said. "Think of all the Jaguars and Mercedes that went down with them. The clammers are going to be picking hood ornaments out of their rakes for the next month."

  I turned off the radio and perused the waves, the night tide dragging up all kinds of detritus. The coast guard must've assumed the ferry had been far enough towards the island to base their rescue mission much further west. The couple of stray cutters we'd seen were just checking along the outer edge of their search grid.

  The girls collected some driftwood while Dan I gathered stones to form a pit. We started a small fire and sat around it with the blankets and beers. I'd stocked some sandwiches in the cooler and, except for Wes, we all ate, mostly in silence.

  This would be about the time that things would be at their roughest, as we watched one another and moped and considered ourselves in the eyes of each other. Our histories should not have been so entwined, but when I thought about it, I couldn't come up with any poignant or even especially distinct memories. It all just sort of blurred and fused together. There was just a dull wash of the blunted past putting pressure on the back of my head. They felt the same way. It's just as easy to become sick of your friends as it is to become sick of yourself.

  Wes had moved out along a butte and stared down at the rocks below, smiling.

  "The hell are you doing out there?" Dan called. "There's one roast beef hero left and I'm eating it if you don't move your ass."

  Taking off his jacket, Wes climbed a bit further down as the waves kicked up against his boots. The moon flashed off his teeth and he let out an odd yelp, and then did it again. I finally realized he was laughing.

  "You see something?" Jude asked.

  "Yeah," Wes said.

  She waited at least a ten count. "Well, what is it?"

  "Some drowned fucker caught in an eddy."

  They'd been together for so long that Dan and Betty both had the same sort of titter. They brushed Wes off and Dan tossed his can into the fire, where it hissed and snapped. He took another and cracked it as Jude looked over at me. She knew Wes wasn't kidding and so did I.

  There were plenty of stupid tricks to be played, but not about death and not by him. He sounded so much like my father that I could almost imagine the man out there instead of Wes, staring over the whitecaps and ready to hurl himself in.

  Jude tongued her torn lip and touched the holes he'd made in her flesh. She tensed so much that I heard her elbows pop.

  I got up and wandered over to the butte, walked out among the larger rocks and stood beside him. He said, "That's some unbelievable sight, huh?"

  It was.

  The corpse rolled over in the water, twisting around and around in his little foaming whirlpool before we could get him up onto land. He was dressed well—in a black silk shirt and dark chinos. A life-preserver was improperly tied around his neck and it appeared that he'd strangled as much as drowned.

  Dan had taken the last roast beef sandwich and spit out a mouthful. "Holy shit!"

  Betty and Jude stood just out of reach. They weren't frightened. None of us were. It broke up the monotony.

  I expected the guy's face to have been torn up by the shoal ridge but when his chin angled towards me I could see that he was handsome and freshly shaved. He still had enough mousse in his hair to make it stand up a bit, a couple of carefully crafted curls in front waving.

  I tried to imagine his fear on the ferry as it went down—all that screaming in the dark, people pummeling against you, wondering whether you should leave your clothes on, your shoes and socks on, or strip to your skivvies with the ladies yelling around you. His clothes were new and had cost him too much. I could understand why he didn't want to lose them. His shoes were still tied.

  Who could you help, and who would help you? Then into the freezing water, as the ferry went further over on its side, with everybody flopping over each other, and continued to go down. The drag of the great beast holding you under even while the life preserver tried to draw you up. The shrieking need for oxygen.

  He couldn't have been dead for very long. There was no bloating at all, no discoloration. He literally looked as if he'd just fallen into the water five minutes ago. Now he wanted to towel off, go out and party, get laid. He'd have to get his clothes dry cleaned, no big deal.

  We stood in a ring around him and stared.

  Jude said, "He's cute."

  "Jesus Christ, is that any way to talk about him now?" Dan said.

  "But he is."

  "Oh stop it."

  "But he is!"

  Dan drained the rest of his beer in one gulp. A shiver worked through him and his shoulders tilted. "Guy can't be over nineteen, he must have fake I.D." He glared at Jude as if she'd kicked his puppy to death in front of him.

  "What? I'm just saying…and it's true. I mean…right, Betts?"

  Betty said nothing, but I knew she liked the look of the drowned guy too. Even his dead lips had a boyish charm about them.

  We were getting into something here. Sometimes you have just enough presence of mind to know when you've finally turned a corner and the world will never be the same again. The breeze stiffened and I sniffed to see if the smell of rot was coming off him yet. Instead I picked up on the scent of after-shave that still clung to him.

  Dan's hands trembled badly and he began to lose it. His mouth moved but he said nothing. This was an ugly enough matter made worse by the fact that he'd found his younger brother dead a few years back. The kid and his girlfriend had left a long and loving missive behind as part of their suicide pact, locked in with the family mini-van running. They'd worked on the letter together even as the garage filled with carbon dioxide. They'd written poems to one another on a yellow pad, and Dan's brother died in mid-sentence.

  The girl had lived. Now she was married to a young exec and they had a baby. She still sent Christmas cards to Dan and his family, and every Christmas he threatened to hunt her down and murder her in her sleep.

  "Check his wallet," he said. "See who the fuck he is. Come on, we need to go call the cops."

  We all had cell phones but they wouldn't work this far out.
>
  Jude snaked her hand into the dead guy's pocket, feeling around. I could see the bulge of his wallet but she slipped by it and continued on towards his crotch. Wes let out another quiet yelp of laughter and she responded by sighing deeply. Her fingers patted the drowned guy's package. She opened her lip again and a dollop of drying blood worked into the corner of her mouth.

  "No no," Dan said, "hey, no."

  "So, you like him, Jude?" Wes asked.

  His scarred hands were on the kid, tugging the body forward through broken shells and dried seaweed and tossing it down at Jude's feet. Wes still had muscle, and lifting the dead weight on his own barely made him huff. He untied the knotted life preserver and hurled it back across the rocks, grinning ferociously. Veins in his neck and arms stuck out as thick as grubs.

  "Take him then. Go on."

  The jaws of her muscles tightened and she gave a rictus grin. "Sure, Wesley, if you want me to."

  "And what if I didn't want you to?"

  "But you do, don't you?" That sigh again, coming from so deep down inside of her that it sounded like a breeze sifting through a cavern.

  "And what if—"

  "Don't you, you goddamn pig son of a bitch?"

  Moonlight draped over the lighthouse and set the windows up top ablaze. They gleamed a vicious silver, staring down on us and holding court. The surf continued to roar and smash against the shore. We were as much a part of the world as the tide, and suddenly I wanted to feel the kid's frigid flesh too and ask him what the hell kind of trip he was on.

  "Yeah," Wes told her, "go on."

  "Go on and what?"

  "You know what," he said, and there was a hitch in his voice, a tiny tremor of fear or reluctance, or maybe it was just perversion.

  "Say it for me, Wesley, you bastard."

  But he couldn't, at least not all of it. "Let me watch you."

  The weight of night grew oppressive and battered the beach. I began to sag a little. Betty let out a groan way in the back of her throat that I found exceedingly erotic. Dan had the shakes and his teeth chattered together so badly that he could've bitten through bone.

  He whimpered, "Jesus, no, hey, this isn't funny anymore, look—"

  I could see it playing out one moment following the next, as inevitable as our lives leading us, step after step, to the point. I glanced into Betty's eyes and she crooked her head at me. We had maybe one moment left where we could snap free from what was happening, sneak off and get in the back seat of my car and peruse one another in the normal fashion. I would have what I'd always wanted, what I'd dreamed about for ten thousand nights. She could be mine and the ache inside would finally abate, at least a little, and we could share the convenience of a reasonable and routine life.

  Betty crooked her head the other way and looked back to the action.

  All right, so we were into it.

  With his fingers flashing, Wes got the corpse's pants down and Jude let loose with a manic giggle.

  "Get on, you cunt."

  She had some power to her and muscle of her own. She kept her hands on the drowned kid's shoulders, shoving and pinning him down as though he might actually try fighting back. Who knew, maybe he would. I knelt and nabbed the guy's pants, went through the pockets, and came up with his wallet. Frederick Wilson, nineteen years old. Two Gold Cards. No photos.

  So Jude was gonna fuck a dead guy. There it was. I could handle that. Dan looked ready to throw himself into the sea. He moaned softly and wrapped his arms around his chest as if to keep his heart trapped inside his rib cage. Betty's fingers clenched at her inner thigh, where she rubbed in a circular motion. I wondered if she might actually begin fondling herself in front of us, and if I could take it. There are people you lust for that you don't even really like, but that doesn't ease the savage and endless burning inside of you.

  Freddy wanted to fight but it was too late, his speedos were gone and Jude was already toying with his cock. Wes stared at her with a mixture of delight and disgust, the same way he probably glared into his mirror every morning. He wasn't defiling her as much as he was himself.

  Jude licked the length of Freddy's shaft and let it hook along her top teeth. I was sort of with him, getting into it, enjoying that pleasant feeling until she wrapped her hand around the corpse's cock and stroked way too hard. It would've hurt like a bastard if he'd been alive. She tugged and yanked and jerked until I wanted to scream for him. I clenched my jaws and groaned, and Jude slowed the pace, much more gentle. I almost said thank you.

  Dan vomited in the sand, straddled over the cooler. He didn't wipe his mouth as he nabbed another can of beer and sucked it down as fast as he could and then one more. He started to throw up again but held the liquor down, and the fog soon began to settle on his brain. He dropped heavily onto the beach and swooned, shaking his head and begging, "No no, come on now, guys, no…."

  Freddy probably felt the same way. Jude had his limp prick hauled up as far as it would go, staring thoughtfully at it. She inspected it closely, the head and underside, the size of his balls. She smiled up at Wes and he realized then that he never should've started the game. She was better at it and always would be, and now he was trapped with nowhere to crawl away to. He'd bitten through his own lip and a trace of blood threaded down his chin.

  "Fine, baby, fine," he assented as she hummed. "Let's get him hard for you."

  "Yes, Wesley, for me."

  He found a piece of driftwood in the sawgrass, cracked off a five inch jagged section, and then stabbed it into the corpse's scrotum just beneath the testicles. Wes carefully maneuvered the stick up through Freddy's shaft until it stood on its own, the wood jutting free from that torn dead pecker. Something oozed but it wasn't blood.

  Collapsing in the sand, Dan curled up and hid his nuts. With a theatrical flourish, Jude took off her jeans and panties and tossed them onto the rocks. She lay across Freddy's icy chest and slithered her cunt over his leg. She moved wildly over him, fisting that mangled prick, writhing in a frenzy. She used her own juices to lubricate him. This was a mysterious and arcane theater, and I didn't want to think about what she might be acting out.

  Finally Jude mounted the drowned kid, easing her pussy lips open with one hand while guiding that mutilated cock in with the other.

  She kept their movements slow, rocking as she pushed down harder. She let out a grunt of pain but kept sinking further. A spurt of blood erupted black in the moonlight and she cried out but didn't stop. A disfiguring smile scarred her face. She gasped and squawked louder as she found the rhythm. Betty stepped closer and breathed against my neck. I didn't have an erection. This wasn't sex or even madness, it was simply the way things had to be.

  Soon Jude was quivering, keeping her eyes on Freddy's dead face as she moved above his body. The stick splintered and pierced her further so that squirts of blood gushed out every time she slammed her hips down to catch his cock again.

  Wes' eyes were as bright and blind as the unbroken panes of glass at the tower of the lighthouse. A part of him wanted to kill Jude and yet an even stronger part of himself just wanted to suffer. He'd been with her for five years and hadn't loved her for a minute, but at this instant she reached him in a way she'd never done before, and the sad bastard was actually grateful for it.

  Jude dropped, clung to Freddy and drew her nails across his chest over and over until thin lines as white as fish bellies opened in his flesh. So far they could still have an open casket for him, but his mother better not ask the mortician too many questions. Jude smoothed her fingertips over his face, brushing his forehead, running her hands through his hair, holding on while he punctured her further. She let out a harsh "Ngg," noise that actually made Betty suck air between her teeth.

  Jude climaxed, shuddering so hard that the stick snapped between her legs.

  There was no point in trying to figure any of it out.

  She'd been badly perforated, the blood swelling between her cunt lips and pouring out in a river filled with dark clots
and torn tissue. She didn't seem to mind. She slid back and dropped aside, where she coiled beside Freddy as if he were much more of a man than Wes had ever been. It drove Wes even further out of his skull. His brain was in flames and it made his eyes narrow until tears squirted out onto his cheeks. But he kept on smiling.

  The dead fish stench of the night tide wafted past. Freddy's after-shave mixed with it and came up with some new horribly foul odor. Dan had thrown up so much that he was wracked by the dry heaves, sobbing softly to himself beside the fire. Shadows danced across him as he spun and begged, "Please, we've got to get out of here. They'll be coming for us. The coast guard might be out there right now watching. This is murder."

  "He was already dead," Wes said.

  "We killed him."

  "We didn't kill the drowned pervert. He fell off a ferry and couldn't swim in his Gucci shoes."

  "What just happened," Dan said, "this…this…" The heaves interrupted him. He sputtered and coughed and his whole chest sounded parched and raw. He could barely catch his breath. He checked over his shoulder twice, as if his brother that committed suicide might be sneaking up on him. "What happened, that…that wasn't right."

  "He didn't complain."

  "But—but—she's bleeding all over the goddamn place, just look at her."

  "It's over, stop bawling. We're leaving."

  "Thank Christ!" Dan wailed, and he actually brought his hands together as if in prayer. "But what are we going to do with him?"

  "Bring the fucker with us. We'll toss his dead ass out in front of a hospital someplace."

  Dan nodded and reached down but couldn't bring himself to touch the corpse. That busted cock hung at a freakishly weird angle, the splintered wood jutting out from the scrotum and shaft in several places. Dan started to retch again and fell back into the sand. I had the feeling that he didn't give much of a shit about plastic forks anymore.