Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  Jenks stood, put his shoes on, stepped to the window and stared at the leaves gushing by like the surf rolling in. He spun to the doorway and walked into his sister's bedroom, where the blood trail had started. "Debra, who did this to you? Was it Meeker?"

  His phone rang once more.

  It was Voice A saying, "Who is that?"

  "Are you asking about Meeker? I think he's the man who killed my sister."

  "Who is that?"

  "Debra is another voice you jabber with."

  "The kid's over there."

  "Tell her to give me a call."

  "The girl's…"

  He hung up again.

  In the dimness of 1529 Baldwin Boulevard, he carefully walked the pattern of his sister's killing. Cops said it had started in her bedroom, beside the nightstand, and then she was dragged struggling into the kitchen. Drawers were open but no knives were taken or used. Then out the back door into the yard, where she was left beneath the willows.

  At his chorus recital his class had sung "Riding in the Buggy," "Frere Jacques," "There's a Hole in the Bucket," and "Sweep, Sweep Away." His parents were there in the second row, Ma snapping pictures every three minutes. Always out of focus or cutting everyone's head off. Afterwards they'd stopped off for ice cream, not even eating in the parlor five minutes down the road. Bringing back sundaes, the mint chocolate chip for Deb. They'd only been out of the house about an hour and a half, but it was more than long enough.

  The voices again, loud but far away, sounding like they might be in the back yard. Jenks' swallowed a moan as he heard his sister shouting, "Give it back! It's mine! Give it to me!"

  And then A asking, "Who is that?"

  So here it was, finally, what he'd been waiting for most of his life. The chance to find out exactly what had happened while he'd been Frere Jacques-ing his little ass off.

  Jenks tore open the door and stumbled against the wrought-iron railing somebody had put in to replace his father's trellis. The moonlight lashed across his eyes like a whip. He flung an arm out and went down to one knee, barreling through the evergreen shrubs. Pain shot up his thigh but the icy breeze felt good against his throat.

  A spot of milky whiteness glowed near the base of the back fence. Jenks stepped over wondering, Is this it? Is this how she appears to me now?

  He didn't call Debra's name as he moved closer to the patch of ivory glimmer that burned in the dark. Jenks stooped and reached out.

  It was a pair of girl's panties.

  From the other side of the fence, Voice A whispered to him, "The kid's over there."

  Jenks spun and nearly flopped over Tracy's body, half-hidden in the leaves.

  She was laid out in the same position that his sister had been. Legs spread wide and left knee bent and propped, the shattered nose still leaking blood. Blouse open and her full breasts covered with scratches and bruises. Her forehead had split open and steaming fluids slithered along the furrows of her brow. She looked, perhaps, a tad less forlorn than she had earlier.

  Jenks brought the back of his hand up to cover his mouth and swallowed repeatedly while the moans crept in his chest. A surge of nausea swept through him and a small noise of defeat escaped him.

  He reached for his cell phone, but his pocket was empty. He must've lost it hitting that goddamn railing, floundering around in the blackness. He was still holding Tracy's panties in his other hand and tossed them away in disgust.

  Had they lured her back here somehow or had she finally run away from her parents as she'd promised? It was a two-hour drive at least. Was the boyfriend who liked horror movies creeping along Potters Avenue now, a grease monkey who'd nabbed her off the Hudson and made a break for it? Were the roaming bands of Satanists marching through the neighborhood?

  Now, voices from the bushes, as if they were crouching there together. "The girl's dead. Don't."

  "Shh…he'll hear you."

  Jenks wheeled and parted the branches, hoping to grab hold of someone, anyone, perhaps a piece of his own past, but there was nothing. They could reach out but could not be touched. The wind rose again, wailing, and tugged at his hair the way Debra used to do when they were fighting.

  "Deb? Did you do this?"

  Footsteps behind him, somebody hesitant as if trying to be sneaky, then dashing forward like it was all just a game. Light and quick, several of them rushing him at once as the rustling leaves whirled and spiraled over his head. Maybe all of the women together. He began his turn knowing he would never make it, that he wouldn't be allowed to see what was coming up behind him, ever, as his sister's voice, forever petulant and crazed, cried out, "That's my brother! I need him." Jenks still didn't know who the other dead women were, but now he finally understood why they had joined and what they were all doing together. Plotting. It wouldn't do any good to beg.

  As the willows wept with the heaving breeze, giggles breaking to his left and right, her voice grew closer and clearer with such a genuine hatred for everything alive, shrieking in her dead madness, "Get him!"

  Introduction to "An Average Insanity, A Common Agony"

  By Jack Ketchum

  I think Dark Fiction has come to mean pretty much nothing. A publishing catch-phrase. Maybe it never did mean much. But if it did, at best, it seemed to me to refer to the dark night of the soul, the times and places in which we get lost, irretrievably sometimes. When it seems no good deed goes unpunished, when nothing we do can ever work out right. "We all need a private mission to perform, a reason to take the next step," Tom writes here. But the world often conspires to make those missions quixotic to say the least and utterly disastrous at worst. If there's redemption to be found in these doomed quests it can come at a terrible cost — and there may be none to be found at all. This is the territory AN AVERAGE INSANITY, A COMMON AGONY essays. Here, in this story much bigger than its few pages, we are lonely and isolated by definition, unable to quite connect. All unions so tenuous as to be almost illusory — but necessary as breath. I would like to refer to the final union here, in the very last paragraph — fragile, painful, possibly doomed, but unbroken — yet I'd spoil it for you if I did. Suffice to say that for me it was heartbreaking, while at the same time I could feel the spirit soar. Tough-minded, tender-hearted — the dark night of the soul still leaning toward the light.

  –Jack Ketchum author of RED and SHE WAKES

  An Average Insanity, A Common Agony

  They thought it was just the funniest thing ever, bringing the old guy and his dog into the place. Three college jocks drunker than hell but with a real edge about them, carrying a harsh atmosphere inside with them from the street. Vin tightened in his chair as a flush of heat went through his belly. It only took a glance to know everything about them: a trio of starting line seniors but the pros hadn't come knocking like they were supposed to. Now at twenty-two these kids were already witnessing the fall of their dreams, the slow flat resentment angling up through their lives.

  It's why they were so loud. Laughing wildly, easing loose with a little madness, pushing the blind man on, they grabbed him roughly and hugging him to their barrel chests as if he was their greatest love. His cane tapped mercilessly, slapping at puddles of spilled beer. Even the guide dog walked warily beside its master, watchful, sensing a vague evil.

  Vin felt it too. His scalp prickled and the sweat began to writhe at his temples.

  The waitress came over and asked, "Another scotch?" She had her body angled at him but she too continued glancing over at the scene.

  A new song kicked on with a dully throbbing beat and she unconsciously swayed to it. He liked the way she held herself. Solid, with a real personality, an honest grin. She had a deeper strata to her disposition. Usually waitresses in the strip joints felt a competition with the dancers, and tried to really throw it out there under the customers' noses. Blathering and flirting, putting a hand on your arm, giving the plastic smile. Everybody going for the same lousy buck.

  The need to sigh rose in his chest but he cru
shed it back down. She had a strong chin, a delicate cheek, and short brown hair that framed her heart-shaped face. A sudden jab of melancholy got him low, the way it always did when he realized he couldn't think sweet thoughts about girls like this anymore. They just made him into a dirty old man now, and he didn't know how it had happened.

  "No, just a beer this time," he said.

  "Charlie's on break," she told him, with a worried tone. It perked him up in his seat. She frowned in a little girl, brooding manner, and he thought anybody who made her pout like that should be buried under the cesspools of hell.

  "Who's Charlie?"

  "The bouncer. It looked like a calm night so he took off with his girlfriend for a little while." She caught her bottom lip between two teeth and worked it for a second. "They're making fun of him, aren't they? And he doesn't know it."

  "He knows it," Vin told her. "Even his dog knows it."

  "He sells magazines on the corner with another old guy."

  "I know, I see him all the time."

  "I hope there's no trouble."

  She'd been handing Vin his drinks for two hours, but the sudden shift in mood somehow brought them together now, alerted them to one another's presence. She gave him a hard look, the kind that took in details besides your face.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "This is a dive," she said. "Mostly for drunks and bachelor parties and dumb kids who don't have the money to go see real erotic dancers."

  "You don't show much loyalty to your boss."

  "This is a stop-gap. I just got out of school. Fashion design. Visual merchandising. The real job in the city with Truex & Balenciaga doesn't start until the end of the month."

  "Seventh Avenue," Vin said. "Quite a step up from this neighborhood." He shrugged and, almost with an air of surrender, nodded. "My father used to drink here with his buddies, back in the day. We lived around the corner. I still do, five houses down from where I grew up. This wasn't a strip joint back then, just a local pub. Not choice by any stretch, but some class, at least for the locals. A couple of the Brooklyn golden gloves champs, Johnny Tormino and Jojo Lebowski, used to hang around here."

  "I don't know who they are."

  "No reason why you should. Just a couple of guys who had some great stories."

  "Are you a boxer?" she asked. "You look in shape, like you could do some damage if you wanted to."

  "For my age?"

  "You're not that old."

  It was true, but it almost never felt that way. He'd turned some kind of corner not long ago and hadn't been the same since. He was thirty-nine and hadn't gone too far to fat yet, and he could still quote Browning and Keats when the mood called for it, but that didn't happen anymore. Perhaps it never really had.

  Another eruption of scarcely-contained malicious laughter, the kind of giggles the psychopaths on the ten o'clock news gave all the time. The blind man spoke quietly and they were still touching him, thumping his shoulder. Vin wanted to smash a bottle over somebody's face, but there still wasn't any visible reason for all the tension going through his guts. He wondered if he was starting to lose the nature of his character, the way his father had at about this age. Getting a little stupid, always sitting in the chair, silent and staring off. With almost no real identity at all at the end.

  The jocks called her over and she went to take their orders. Vin locked up again. One kid put his hand on her hip, another pressed himself in close, showing off his teeth.

  It always came down to this, the anger stirring inside him, the jealousy about any woman he even looked at. He brought the glass up to his mouth but it was empty.

  One of the flat-chested dancers walked across the stage and tried to make eyes. She swung around the pole and jiggled what little meat she had. You could count every rib if you wanted, and her nostrils were pink with flaring busted capillaries. Bony but with stretch marks around her nipples. Another coke head with a couple of kids being taken care of by her parents. She used pancake to cover over the bruises on her legs, but left the rug burns on her knees for everyone to see. Maybe it was supposed to be a turn on. Vin was usually confused about shit like that.

  The waitress moved by him on the run and said, "I'll get your beer in a sec."

  "Okay."

  The stripper didn't appreciate his lack of interest and really started doing her best slap and grind. It was so pathetic that he nearly laughed, until he realized what he must look like from the other side of the stage.

  A graying middle-aged guy with his own scars and pock-marks, stubbled and squinting, the wrinkled around his eyes deep enough that they needed to be dusted. In a dive like this on a Friday night, with an overflowing ashtray and a couple of empty shot glasses in front of him, sitting around and waiting for money or happiness or fate to fall through the ceiling and into his fucking arms.

  He handed her a five dollar bill and she gave him the imitation smile and wandered off down the stage.

  She did the same shimmy in front of the jocks and the boys roared. There had been three just like them in college with Vin, twenty years ago. Del, Philly, and Bent. He was the bookworm anchor to their boisterous clique, and for a long while he'd admired them with a strange joy, sick with envy. Until one by one they'd all fallen away to pregnant girlfriends, factory jobs, and jail time.

  Now here they were again, alternate versions of Del, Philly, and Bent, but so much like them in subtle mannerisms, down to their sharp movements and the near-hysteria in their laughter.

  The German Shepherd swung its snout towards Vin and gazed at him with sorrowful eyes.

  Still waiting for his beer, he looked down and saw that not only had the waitress already brought it to him, but he'd finished more than half the bottle.

  Christ, just like Dad.

  He took out a ten and left it for her, spun from his seat and moved towards the door. A growing anxiety kicked him along. As he passed the German Shepherd, he held his hand out and the dog licked his wrist, folding its ears back and cringing as the noise surged again.

  The blind man was no longer smiling. He said a few quiet words Vin couldn't pick up, and then his lips appeared to weld together forming a bloodless line. His chest heaved as his breathing became rapid. The waitress came by with more drinks and the boys sucked them down, and another burned out dancer commenced to stick it in front of them.

  Vin got outside and the sudden cool air and silence was such a relief that he let out a gasp.

  He stepped onto the sidewalk and crossed the street, looking at the cramped houses that lined the area. Once he could've named everyone who lived in each of them: the Danetellos, the Martinis, the Ganuccis, and the Rorigans. He'd play stickball here with the rest of the kids, got into fights up the alley. The month he learned to drive he picked up his first lay, Jennie Bishop, right at the end of the road, and took her a mile down to the pier. It had been a reckless, mad night that ended with the challenge of manhood.

  Maybe it had proven to be too great an ordeal. Vin walked back to his place but didn't want to go in yet. There wasn't anything for him inside. Not even a goldfish. Nothing that needed his attention or affection. No work that had to be taken care of. No real hobbies to consume the hours. No family left. Most of his friends had moved out of state, looking for cheaper family housing down south or out west.

  The neighborhood had some kind of a pull on him tonight. You knew you were in trouble when you were this close to going through your high school yearbook and calling your old girlfriends. How sad was that.

  He walked down the block past the house where he grew up and stared at the bedroom window that used to be his. A soft breeze drifted against his throat and he realized with a strangely immense yet common dread that he was as cliché as every other man approaching middle age.

  It doesn't take much to crowd you out of your own house.

  When you were married it was the wife and her sister and mother and their busybody klatch. Later on it was
the letters and endless phone calls and visits from her lawyer. The front door rattling in its frame from the fists of collection agencies, the pricks serving summonses. Then the drinking buddies, the clinging one-night stands who didn't realize the night was over.

  He had all kinds of ghosts packed into his closets, and suddenly Vin backed up off the sidewalk, turned around, and had to fight to quell the desperate need to see that waitress again.

  It was utterly stupid. The old man folly that had gotten hold of his father at the end was already at work on him. He wandered aimlessly through the neighborhood for about an hour, trying to work off the anxiety.

  Instead, it had grown until he was on fire with it. His steps and body were driven forward. He moved in the direction of the titty bar wondering what new screw-up he was headed for this time.

  By now he was almost jogging, and he heard the murmurs of a mob before he saw them. Then the flashing lights lending a peculiar glow to the street, flaring up against the nearby houses where people leaned over their windowsills.

  Dozens had gathered in front of the bar. Two cruisers were parked head to head at the curb. They already had the crime scene tape strung around the door, the blue barricades blocking the sidewalk off.

  The waitress, four dancers with flimsy robes on, and a muscle-bound guy who must've been Charlie the bouncer were all congregated by the police cars. They each took a turn talking with the cops. Vin slid through the throng, which was already beginning to fracture as folks broke away into the darkness.

  Eventually he saw his chance and cut towards the waitress.

  She let out a small moan when he touched her on the shoulder, then took his hand when she saw it was him.

  "What happened?" he asked.

  "Jesus, you just missed it." Her voice was heavy with emotion, and he saw she'd been crying. "It started two minutes after you walked out."