Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  "Me too," I told her, but I knew it wasn't bacon. So did she. I tried slipping by her but she grabbed my shoulder with one of her massive hands, held me up and carried me along. It had weight and solidity. Juba's shadow fell across my face and I was suddenly cool and in darkness. At times they appeared to interact with the world and be seen by others. People bounced off Jolly Nell or gazed upon the entirety of Juba, and women flirted with Hertzburg and all his hair.

  I said, "I can't remember if you're alive or dead."

  Hertzburg frowned and shrugged as we passed by a barbershop. "You've said that about yourself as well."

  "I know it."

  "Does it really matter to you that much?"

  "Sometimes."

  He smelled of burned–"Maybe you'll figure it out."

  "I get the feeling I won't."

  "Who gives a shit at this point? So long as you finish what's been started. Don't put such a high premium on the truth.”

  "Me?"

  A new warren of paths and alleys opened. Scattered in the corridors of the works people slept, sketched, sat reading Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, newspapers and menus. Playing the clarinet, dropping acid, and chalking pentagrams on the floor. They recited puerile passages from Crowley and LaVey. I used to do the same thing.

  I expected to see religious fanatics, a few Jesus freaks going off the deeper end, but there weren't any. That surprised me. The hordes of rats hung back in the converted meat lockers knocking off the weak, and the Goth-gurrls and leather-deathers wearing their scars and vampire paleness giggled like virgins and scampered around the show rooms painting themselves with latex.

  Juba said, "He won't come to you now, you know, in your vague and ugly dreams."

  "Oh yes he will."

  "No. Nicodemus could reach you across all your nightmares while you were on the outside–"

  "So?"

  "–but now even your vengeance belongs to the Works."

  I couldn't help it. I burst out laughing.

  Not that cool clear kind of chuckling but the real rot-gut that brings up acid from the back end of your life. It kept coming and coming while I gasped and wheezed, my heart starting to hurt and my muscles locked out of place. I glanced at the enormity surrounding me, understanding that it was nowhere near large enough to contain all my hate.

  Finally I settled back and wiped the tears off my chin.

  Fishboy Lenny said, "Mwoop fwsshh mwaop mwaop," and I totally agreed with him, whatever he meant.

  "Yeah, buddy."

  "Mwoop."

  I went to find a place to drop off, in order to hear the harsh and bitter words of my father.

  9

  Megan believed in redemption and revelation, down where it mattered. She blamed me for that. I had healed her once, she said, at twelve. Troubles in her stomach, brought on by a beating from her older brother after he'd kneed her out of the woodshed, prying her legs apart.

  She'd had ulcers throughout her childhood, with her grandfather offering rags dipped in sterno to kill the pain. Hemorrhaging for months and dealing with the bruises and cramps. The constant nausea of hopelessness and loss terrified her less than something unknown. She was changing.

  The discomfort and swelling in her belly grew worse each day until her parents finally dead-bolted her in her bedroom, away from the truancy officers and sheriff's deputies. Its sole window faced the woodshed, where her brother wept and howled and threw his shoulder against the chained door. He had changed too.

  Her grandfather, spitting blood, sneaked her out of the house, still gulping sterno and letting her suck a soaked shred of cloth. He carried her most of the six miles to the tent revival all-night sing, where I laid my hands upon her.

  The next morning she blessed my name because the pain was gone. God had become second string. A lifetime of prayers had been answered at last and heaven had nothing to do with it.

  She whispered my praises as her mama bundled up the bed sheets and set fire to them in the yard.

  Her brother had broken his neck hurling himself against the woodshed wall, sometime before sunrise. Her parents didn't cry. They didn't bother to bury him. They tossed his corpse onto the fire and then collected the bones and ashes and threw them into the scrub.

  Megan believed I had cleansed her, and now she returned the favor.

  I had taken the hideous baby out of her body, she thought, and she loved me for it.

  10

  Circling, I hunted for a way to get to the regions inside the Works that I hadn't been to yet. I seemed to be traveling in a well-defined rut, unable to slip out of the channel, going around and around. Construction continued in the buildings, hammering taking the top of my skull off and electric drills whining constantly. Maybe if I planted myself in this spot the rest of the Works would eventually come to me.

  Brando was hitting his post-Superman stride, all the downhill stuff. A Dry White Season, Don Juan DeMarco, and oh my Christ The Island of Dr. Moreau. It almost hypnotized me, the way he brought it all into Streetcar. He still wore the dirty T-shirt and he looked even more constipated.

  "Where's Lala?" I asked.

  "Who?"

  "That girl who was coaching you a couple of days ago."

  "Oh her. I never seen her before or since. Stupid chick didn't have any idea what it means to be an actor. Kept telling me to play it real. If I wanted to be real, then what the shit would I be an actor for?"

  "Good point."

  "Worse," he said. "I think she stole my snake."

  "Too bad, man."

  "Yeah."

  Brando went back to doing his thing, now up to the Blanche Dubois rape scene. I watched for another minute or two and then backed away to the cardboard playhouse. I climbed inside and yanked the string and closed the paper window. It was dark but comfortable.

  Outside, Juba leaned down to the window and hissed against it. "If you go to sleep you may never awaken again. We didn't."

  "Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances," I said.

  "You've just crawled into your own grave."

  I was getting a little tired of his constant nettling. I might've felt guilty, but not enough for me to keep putting up with it. "Have you found Jonah yet?"

  "No."

  "Then stop pestering me and go look."

  I heard the cartilage in his knees, elbows and spine crackling as he stood and kept standing up to his full height before finally moving off.

  Nell talked through the ceiling and said, "Pleasant dreams."

  I could still smell bacon frying and the stink of my father's breath.

  I slept.

  11

  Come find me, Nicodemus said, and there was a hint of fear in his voice. God's got us all out on the rock, he does. It started with me but I guess it's gotta end with you, that's the way of things. Sometimes our sacrifices are spurned. By God or by our kin. Just go on and ask Cain hisself. He was damned, but he was the chosen one. Just like you.

  My father liked to play to my vanity even though I wasn't vain. It was part of his myth in the making. Jonah hasn't got any more need of you now, and for that alone you ought to get on your knee and be thankful. A child can be a disagreeable thing. It grows heavy. There's a need to drop our sacks by the roadside. As if I could do that, as if I would ever do that.

  He must've had the bottle again, something to give him a backbone. When he said my son's name it clutched in his throat and came out like a jagged piece of terror. You're flesh of my flesh. What's yours is mine. We're still family, despite everything. The blood in your veins runs only because I willed it to be done. But the suffering, that there is your debt to be paid, and so's mine. You owe that much. Talk about a Christ complex, give it a rest.

  Funny how he never mentioned murder. His lips pulled off his dry teeth and settled into a grim smile. I knew I was going to kill him and wondered if Jonah would eventually feel the need to do the same to me. That would be all right. We've laid out on the rock
. It's where we all wind up 'neath the eye 'a God. I took it as metaphor. Maybe it was true.

  Sometimes the old man was inside my head, and sometimes it was just the hurricane.

  12

  After I'd quit my ministry at fourteen, I watched my father losing his messiah inch by inch and day by day, just as I was. We drank together and got into bar brawls three or four nights a week, and as the money ran out we formed a sort of peace with our ruin. Or so I thought until the day he tried to murder me.

  Nicodemus had never been any good with the cash when it was rolling in. Even when he was loaded he played the horses and gave most of it away in bizarre fits of charity. He did some hard-line preaching of his own for a while as I sat in the back pew watching, pondering what the true intent was behind his words. He chose obscure passages from the Bible and made haphazard leaps in logic trying to understand the ways of God. It got them tittering in their seats now and then. He carried his conflicts right into the pulpit, the same way I'd done.

  Often when he raged about sin and trespasses he broke down into sobs or wracking laughter. If he could get away with it, he pretended to fall into a spell of tongues, but usually they caught him faking it and left him there. We shared a pint down at the river once, just before he was about to do a group baptism, and the sun and the lilacs helped us to get a good high going. He wound up holding some chunky teenager beneath the water too long and nearly drowned the kid in the muddy bottoms. Nicodemus left his congregation long before they left him.

  He had plenty of guns but chose to do me in with a frying pan.

  He stalked outside my bedroom one morning when I was hung-over and sleeping with Miss Chastity Flo, the only town whore who still had most of her teeth. She had a way about her that kept a wounded man oozing but alive. She'd bruised a couple of my vertebrae, broken the headboard, and swallowed my last half pint of whiskey. I was down to cooking sherry. It'd been a rough night.

  The agony had already started in my sleep and I awoke with my stomach twisted with the approach of evil. I fell out of bed and went to my knees, gasping and grinding my back teeth together. Miss Chastity Flo opened her eyes, yawned and started to laugh. She thought it was kind of funny and sexy, what I was doing down there, and she leaned back on the bed and spread her legs father apart.

  I was drunk and groggy and the swirling black energy of wrongness skewered through my chest. I twitched and gouged the dirty floor with my fingernails until they cracked.

  Nicodemus stepped in, wearing his frock coat and hat, ready to give his last sermon, holding his frying pan. When she spotted him she said, "Is he gonna cook us breakfast in bed?"

  "Get out, go on!" I yelled.

  "But I'm sort of hungry. I could use some scrambled eggs and sausage. You worked me up an appetite, son. Ain't ya at least gonna feed me after all I done for you last night?"

  "Go," I moaned. "The hammer's about to fall."

  "Are you two kiddin' me? You got any more scotch in the house. This sherry ain't worth shit."

  Nicodemus started his swing, but he couldn't raise the heavy iron skillet high enough with his bad arm to fully connect with the back of my head. He caught me with only a glancing blow and proceeded to hunt me around the house, shrieking verse from the Old Testament and generally getting his quotes wrong. Miss Chastity Flo thought it was all very mystical, mysterious and entertaining–me scrambling with my naked white ass hanging out, the old man screaming with his pan–until he stopped in his tracks, wheeled and went after her.

  I could barely see with the blood in my eyes. His first swing caught her in the mouth and there went her teeth. I was wrong, some of them were fake. I saw a partial bridge go flying. The searing in my guts grew much worse. Miss Chastity Flo tried to talk with her crushed lips, to beg or argue with Nicodemus about the evils of murder, but she didn't have much time as he brought the skillet down twice more on the sweet spot of her skull.

  The pan rang out with two nice notes, one low and one high, like a choir getting in tune. Miss Chastity Flo's ears spurted red and her eyes rolled up.

  Nicodemus, whom I'd seen in all in his many states of being, fooled me this time with his insanity. It was both familiar and yet altogether new. And like the skillet, he was now filled with a unique and absurd purpose. I leaned against the far wall and sat heavily as my father approached.

  His face glowed with unshakable resolution. I cocked my head at him and my blood sluiced across my brow. I think I was smiling. I'd been waiting for this for a long time, in one manner or another. I wanted to die, or so I'd thought. This was an opportunity not to be missed. I couldn't do it by myself, and I'd been waiting for the finality of his fist to strike. I wondered if he would tell me that God had set him upon this righteous path or if he'd bear up beneath his own feelings. He'd always hated me. Right from the first second when I'd lunged from my dying mother's womb and fallen into his mighty hand.

  On the stage, I'd offered possible redemption to those who asked and those who didn't. But as a drunkard and a failure, I mirrored only his own guilt and doom. I wore his face.

  As he came closer, his fury so evident and well lit, I did something I'd never done before.

  I preached at him. I hurled hellfire.

  He screamed as if I'd tossed embers into his eyes and he ran screeching out of the house and down the dirt road. I called the sheriff's office but was so sick on sherry that by the time they got there I wasn't making much sense. They soon grew disgusted and worked me over some. It was understandable. Half the folks in the county were related to Miss Chastity Flo by stock or marriage, and I was at least partly responsible for her death.

  But justice for whores is short in coming, and after a few days they let me go. I went home and looked at my father's footprints in the dust.

  Nicodemus hadn't returned to the shack and never would. I set it on fire and watched it blaze down to ashes while my guts crawled with a hint of depravity to come. The flames would follow.

  13

  When I stirred again I felt clear and capable. I'd broken onto a new track and could get someplace now. The playhouse was stale and rank with my own breath, and when I pulled the string to open the cardboard window it was like letting in a new morning.

  I climbed out and Fishboy Lenny happily waved to me and said, "Mwoop, ftssshawww."

  "Hey, buddy."

  "Mwaoop."

  I could feel the awful tension building inside me again, black and seeping, but I didn't resist, I tried to ride the crest. Engulfed from the inside out, I shuddered so violently I nearly bit through my tongue. The sweat did a slow skid down my neck. Whatever was about to hit this time would lead me to my vengeance or death or salvation. I didn't much care which it would be so long as it was soon.

  Lala spun past and she wasn't pregnant anymore.

  "Jesus holy Christ," I whispered.

  She saw me and kept walking, shambling in an odd fashion. She no longer moved quickly and easily through the obstacles of the Works. Obviously she was in some pain and a nasty hitch wrecked her careful stride.

  The hem of her dress was dappled with crimson and still wet and dripping. Lester slid around in her grasp and gazed backward over her shoulder, as if he had a score to settle with someone they'd just left behind.

  I got up close and Lala stopped, frowning. She didn't meet my eyes. Lester did, his head moving in a jerky way, back and forth. I realized he was imitating my own gestures, and that I was quivering badly.

  Her lips were white and going blue. A crease between her eyes had deepened to where it appeared as if she'd been slashed by a razor. I shouldn't have been so blatant about it, but I couldn't help myself. I stared and inspected her, thinking it was some kind of a trick yet unable to figure out how it was done. She'd been crying and salt streaks dusted her hair.

  I could see it happening–lying back in the stirrups, weeping quietly, the tears trailing through her curls toward her ears. Maybe it was for the best, but who the hell knew. Her eyes were pink and puffy and so
me of the naiveté had been kicked to death there. I still didn't complete believe it and pressed my palm to her trim belly. I wanted confirmation. We all did.

  "Don't touch me," she said.

  "What?"

  "I don't want you to touch me anymore. I know I said you could before but not now, all right?"

  "Okay."

  "Just keep your hands off me, got it?"

  "Sure."

  It wasn't a gaff. She'd had an abortion somewhere inside the Works. It had never shocked or surprised me before, but now it struck an aching chord because I was searching for my own son. She was just a kid locked inside a shadow existence of eclipse and ephemera.

  Symbols matter more than all your taxes. Signs and portents can carry you further than your sterno-gulping grandfather. I dropped my eyes and couldn't think of anything to say or do, so I turned aside.

  Lester made a pretty good leap for a snake of his size. He coiled and snapped up through the air. I caught him in one hand and let him swing around on my wrist. It was a sight that would've played out well in the carny. The audience would've given a nice round of applause even if I didn't bite its head off. I wasn't sure whether I should stop and hand him back to Lala or just keep going. I hesitated for an instant and then walked along.

  She followed me again, and when she began crying I held her while Lester twined around us both. Megan's presence became very strong, and I could feel her in my arms for an instant, her cooling touch easing my seething mind. Lala sagged a bit. The blood on her dress smeared against my knee. The pungent odor brought death back into my watering mouth.

  I used my thumbs to brush away her tears. Lala whispered something I didn't catch. "What's that?"

  "She wanted out."

  A freeze started low in my bowels and continued growing until I couldn't feel my fingertips anymore. We were out of the rut all right, and on our way. "What do you mean?"

  "The baby. I wanted to get rid of her, but I couldn't stop her either. I had to let her out."

  "You did?"

  "Yes. It's what I needed to do, but more than that. It's what this whole place here...everything, all of it around us, what it wanted her to do."