Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  "I'm missing something, Lala–"

  "You see, it should've been my choice, and that was stolen from me."

  "Listen, I don't think I–"

  "That's why...that's the reason, see? If it was her decision, that would be fine, but I don't think it was. And he kept her."

  "Who?"

  "The man in the Clinic. The doctor, or whoever. He took her and put her in a jar."

  "Oh fuck."

  "He never even asked me anything, to take a last look, he just carried her away." Lala trembled and turned an awful shade of green as her legs gave out. I held her while she vomited twice, and though I tried to get her to lay down she wouldn't give in. She was still spotting a little. "He had no right to do that, the rotten bastard! It's unfinished now. I have to go back."

  "I'll go with you."

  She lifted her chin. "You will?"

  "Sure,"I told her.

  But my smiled must've been something heinous to see. She drew away. So did Lester.

  Now I knew where to find Nicodemus and Jonah.

  14

  And I had been resurrected and lifted from my tomb.

  Megan healed me. She hauled me away from the geek life and gave me back my Talk. She took God out of my divine voice and discovered enough of the man left to put back into it. I learned to say what I'd always wanted to say. I no longer acted simply as a vessel for some louder, larger Word. She taught me to whisper in the cold night, and to whimper as well.

  She danced the cooch dances across stained motel carpets and asked for criticism that might inspire her to do better. It was actually an art form to her; that's what made it so exquisite and heartbreaking.

  But I could only stare and grin like an idiot, or sometimes fall apart in the twirling light of her passion. Her small hands rubbed the dead past out of my back. Her lips entranced me when she sang along to Top 40 hits that would've made even a geek gag. I followed her mouth the way the snakes had followed mine, tilting my head toward the jut of her tongue. She returned my chatter and how she loved to gossip. We never shut up for weeks on end.

  When we hooked up with McKenna's Carnival, I had the gift once more. I could size up a person's pain and haul them inside with a nod, a few carefully placed words or a glance into the madball.

  Megan looked so beautiful while pregnant that McKenna didn't want to take her out of the dance tent even after she started putting on weight. He still billed her as the star. Megan would smile at me from across the midway and my enigmatic act would be shot to hell. I'd be in the middle of a darkly cryptic reading, turning the tarot and gazing into the crystal ball, peering beyond the veil with the rubes on the edges of their seats, and suddenly the giddiness of our love would tickle me under the heart and I'd boil over with laughter. I'd lay on the bed holding her belly close and dream of children in the moonlight.

  It was a good life until Nicodemus found me and burned it all down.

  I had the sense that I was losing years and losing ground. "How old am I?" I whispered.

  "How should I know?" Lala said.

  "You're still a child," Jolly Nell told me. "The congregation loves you. There's still time to revel in your sanctity."

  "Yes."

  "You haven't even lifted a girl's skirt yet. You're thirteen...no, twelve...and you haven't found the bottle yet. They bring you their devotion. You soothe the soul with your shrieking fits. Your father is behind you, on the stage, proud and stately and satisfied."

  "That's right."

  "Are you doing okay?" Lala asked. "You look sort of out of it. You're scaring Lester."

  "Sorry."

  An August evening, cool with a storm on the horizon, the wind rising slightly and the crows pouring in. The cotton candy machines hummed without rest. I put in a few extra hours reading futures and gaping into the madball. Megan had finally started to show too much for the dance numbers and I didn't want her exerting herself anyway. She helped out under the food top and worked some of the concession stands when the crowds got thick.

  But that night she was in our trailer on the far side of the lot, thinking up names for the kid. I suppose all new parents fall into the pursuit of that, but with Megan it wasn't just a pastime. She took it extremely seriously, just like the dancing. She hadn't wanted to know the sex of our child but I did and she put up with the ultrasound for my benefit. We were going to have a boy.

  She had a lot of Irish in her and kept coming up with all this Celtic: Colin, Eoghain, Dylan, Cormac, O'Connell. She stayed away from biblical names, which was fine with me.

  I'd just turned over the Ten of Swords and the Hanging Man when the agony speared me through the kidneys. I grunted and chewed my tongue. The mark was an elderly lady around seventy years old and when my face blanched she figured I saw her death in the deck.

  "Oh lordy, lordy!" she shouted. "It's my colon, ain't it? I knew that damn doctor done give me somethin' awful bad with his probin' black fingers! I got cancer of the colon!"

  "Lady–help, go get somebody–"

  "We needs help for my colon!" she squawked, running in circles in front of the ten. "The magic man says so!"

  I smelled bacon.

  No one knew where the fire had started, but the center sideshow tens went up immediately, followed by the bally platforms and canvas partitions of the milk bottle and ball game and squirt gun concessions. The roustabouts labored in a frenzy to save what they could.

  I worked the hose and bucket lines, but it was already way too late. Most of the freaks were dead from the flames or smoke inhalation. The pickled punks had boiled in their jars.

  The arsonist had spread gallons of gasoline and alcohol around, possibly for hours, and no one had noticed a thing. Herzburg had tried to save two women from his audience, but by the time he made it out of the inferno and onto the midway he was a blazing pyre holding two molten corpses. He lived for almost six hours, longer than any man should have been able to. He'd been using vegetable oil in his hair to give it a shine, and when he went up he ignited as if he'd been dipped in phosphorus.

  Finally he gave up the fight. Perhaps the ghosts of Juba and Nell had talked him into slipping free from his immolated shell. Even then, it would've taken some convincing.

  When I got back to our trailer I found Megan on our bed.

  She had a couple of Irish legend high fantasy novels out, as well as the Big Book of Baby names. They'd been tossed onto the floor and stepped on.

  Nicodemus hadn't used a skillet. Instead, he took his time with a busted whiskey bottle. I'd kicked it aside as I entered.

  A Bible had been left open on her dead breast.

  With her blood he'd circled the name Jonah, and the child was gone.

  15

  The flood was upon us, and I wanted to go with it. I followed Lala to the Clinic where the walls and the floors and the ceilings demanded offerings. Stone and dust also needed life and lineage. We went deeper and deeper into the entrails of the Works, passing others who swept by like wraiths.

  Beads draped in doorways fluttered in the heated draft. Poetry drifted around our feet, pages turning, unmerciful stanzas beckoning. A furnace roared nearby. I knew the sound of fire. Newly made pottery sat out in the halls, glazed and smoking, sacred vessels used to hold cannabis or recently removed organs. Freshly finished paintings remained tacky to the touch.

  A geek could go places where almost no other man could. The serpent inside his stomach, his head inside the serpent. I was off on a tangent and yet this was somehow also coming full circle. The two ends of my life were meeting in the middle. It wouldn't take long now. The currents swirled to take on new shapes. Hollow-eyed women walked past, speckling the floor with trails of red.

  Others stepped by all the more stronger for it, shaking their heads, annoyed perhaps, or strident. They'd done what needed to be done and there were other things to do now. We stood in the atmosphere of the pulpit, where the belief and lunacy meshed with mash liquor and fable. It was necessity. Lala led me on. Wooden stat
ues of Irish folk heroes appeared from out of mounds of sawdust. Faces formed of terra cotta and porcelain stared at us as we walked past. My father had found a home here–where religion and injury and flesh fused into something both living and dead.

  Juba said, "Stop. Don't go any farther."

  "Why?"

  He didn't answer. His eyes were full of worry as he wet his lips. Juba hesitated in the air, and I could see each beat of his heart through that nutmeg skin. He grew upset, his blood coursing and his heart pounding heavily in his tissue-thin chest. His oblong head tipped one way and then the other.

  I grinned at him. "Because you can't go beyond this point?"

  "There are limits."

  "Sure. Don't worry. I'll get it done without you."

  "I know that. I've always known that."

  Lala watched without knowing what she was witnessing. She said, "There are shadows. There are bones in the walls."

  Nell spread her arms and I dropped inside them, holding on tight enough to break any other woman's back. But she only squeezed harder, engulfing me in the warm welcome of her soft flesh. I fell and kept falling into that feathery bed of her body, until the tears came and I could almost believe she was my mother hugging me with all the lost love I'd never known.

  "Take care of yourself," she said.

  "I will."

  Herzburg shook my hand and I could feel the naked power within him, the wildness, wherever he was. "You shouldn't have to be alone. I'll make the effort if you want me to."

  "No need for that. You've got other things to do now. Go on."

  "You're certain?" he asked.

  "It'll be all right. Trust me."

  He nodded and stroked his great beard, inspecting me, unable to decide whether I was strong enough or not. "Do what has to be done."

  "Sure."

  Lester flicked his tongue into my ear and Lala leaned against me for support. Her discomfort had grown more intense, but she didn't want to stop. She stared at the passing women with their flattened bellies and said, "All of them wanted out before their right time. A few weeks, a few months."

  "Maybe it's not as bad as that."

  ”Is he keeping every one of them?"

  "Let's go find out."

  We were almost there. I caught a whiff of the old man now, his fear and pride and arrogance. The raw religion that never did enough to salve his ego. He wanted an angelic tongue but couldn't afford the price. We took another corner and walked down a poorly lit hallway.

  The women congregated around us, waiting to enter, heading out. Some seemed relieved, others had a desperate savagery about them. Hands plucked at my sleeves, fingernails tearing against my neck. Hard-lined jaws went by, soft chins, frightened eyes, courage in motion. They wanted something, we all wanted something. I muttered every verse about vengeance that I knew, and though they sounded hollow and hypocritical they still got my wheels turning.

  I entered the Clinic and there he was.

  Nicodemus.

  My father.

  The preacher, the drunk, the killer of my lady.

  The man who had incinerated the carny and almost everybody in it, who had murdered my love Megan and stolen my son because he hated the abnormal and the blessed, especially me, and who was now forming his own little freak show.

  Even here, with his hands up inside a woman's womb, he wore his frock coat and hat. As he moved I heard two or three flasks knocking together in his pocket, and I didn't smell any whiskey.

  Nicodemus had been extremely busy. He'd picked up a few new skills since I'd seen him last.

  I watched him take the fetus, doing the bidding of the Works.

  The kid wanted out, I could see that. Nine months was too long a stretch in a woman's body, inside this place. The children were more now, different, changed–the umbilical reached into the void and fed them sustenance from the other side of Pandemonium.

  I knew more about abortionists than I really wanted to. Pregnant freaks were always having miscarriages, premature births and terminations because of what they called a "catastrophic fetal anomaly." Genetic disorders abounded. I wasn't only a Talker, but a listener as well. Maybe I'd sat in on a class somewhere between the blintzes and the how-to-kill-with-your-bare-hands lecture.

  First he injected medication directly into the fetus to stop the fetal heart instantly. He'd already placed the first laminaria in, probably the day before. It was a seaweed about the size of a match stick that absorbs moisture from the body and slowly becomes larger. It helps to prevent infection. After it's been placed in, the laminaria expands overnight and dilates the cervix in a manner that reduces pain and the risk of perforation. He'd probably already changed them twice. Then the amniotic membrane was ruptured and drained. Contraction of the uterus reduced blood loss. Release of the fluid enhanced movement of the fetus and placenta into the cervix. Nicodemus performed a modified D&C using forceps to remove the fetus intact.

  Then he took down a jar filled with yellow fluid and pickled the punk.

  I understood why he was doing it. He too was assaulted by memories, full to bursting with them, buoyed and invigorated by them. He relived the day of my birth in that deadly storm, when my dying mother's legs hung wide open toward his face and he caught me with one hand. As I slithered into the world, already falling faster than the devil plunging into the pit.

  The angles and planes of his face had pretty much dropped in on themselves. I saw only weakness there in the vapid wrinkles and sagging skin. I'd thought I would kill my father the first minute I laid eyes on him, but I found myself suddenly wanting to talk. The woman who'd just had the abortion kept silent, glancing around, unsure of what had brought her here. Maybe she was in shock, or showing deference to the mammoth history around her. She began to mewl. She looked very much like the photos I'd seen of my mother.

  Symbols are all that count when you finally realize how little a mark you've made despite all your frantic thrashing. The wind blows it away. Perhaps Nicodemus had just been trying to kill me the entire time, in his mind and soul, and through the death of his son, the death of himself.

  He made no acknowledgment of me but held up the punk and said, "They can't do no sinnin' now." He stared at the little hands and tapped the glass until the fingers wobbled and waved to him.

  "But you can," I said. "Where's your skillet?"

  "Don't need it no more."

  "You might want to reconsider that."

  "Naw." He let out a wracked sigh, shrugging his shoulders and stretching. I could tell he'd been at it night and day since he arrived. "And we fight all the rest of our days lookin' for atonement."

  "You pathetic bastard."

  He pursed his lips, thinking about it some. "Yup."

  The myth that he had once become seemed ten thousand years already gone. He had shrunken and withered. He was nothing more than sand and cinder that kept creeping across the face of the earth.

  "None of this was necessary."

  "All of it was or it wouldn't have been done," he told me. "Ain't you learned that yet?"

  "You should've just let it go."

  He perked up and seemed genuinely curious at that. "Let go'a what? The money? The ministry? You talkin' about them trifles? None'a that was ever mine anyways. I never held any of it so how's I to let it go?"

  "Me then."

  "Oh, you. Well, yup. I shoulda done that, but a father makes sacrifices. The Almighty demands that of us, I already done told you. Ole Abraham laid his boy out on the rock. He did it for love, and I done the same. And I saved you from having to make that horrible act of burnt offerings and penance. I done it for love, and that there's the truth."

  "You might have yourself convinced of that but just look down. Your hands are covered in blood." And they were. I knew in my heart of hearts that he hadn't washed them since he'd butchered my lady.

  Nicodemus was trying to reach back out for his own legend, and the idea of dried blood flecking off his fingers would be one he couldn't defy. Juba's
death, and Nell's and Herzburg's also clung to him along with the scorched ghosts of dozens of others.

  He was the one who spoke like someone haunted, not me. "My hands, my soul, they been cleansed in blood. It's the road out of perdition. That's forever been the way of it, since the flood."

  Lala could barely bring herself to raise her voice above a whisper. "I don't care about any of that. I want to see her again, one last time. You had no right to do what you did."

  "Mebbe not," My father said, "but we all gotta do what's given us to do. That's the only duty we got."

  "Where's Jonah?" I asked.

  "Safe."

  "Terrific. Where?"

  "Never mind that. You can't have him. He don't want you no more. None'a them want any of youse no more."

  I looked Nicodemus over and wasn't sure what there was about him that I'd feared for so long. Or what it was that I had once loved in him so much. I thought about striking the nasion with enough force to cause death. I wanted to attack his philtrum and induce mortal damage or give a sharp enough blow to his Adam's apple to make him asphyxiate.

  I could imagine my father as a Russian Omelet, folded and pinned upside down while I sat on his legs until his spine broke. Forcing him into a Brain Buster might be a hell of a lot of fun, and I started to laugh just thinking about it. If I really wanted to torture him I could've given him some of that old-time brimstone preaching. I could still do it if I wanted.

  Lala stood nibbling her tongue, her fists right at her sides. The mewling woman held her arms out for the punk and Nicodemus just patted her leg and said, "There, sweet thing, there, it's all done now. You gonna go on your way without any such burden as this to hold you down to the rock." He kept drumming on her thigh, leaving crimson stripes against the pale flesh.

  I thought of how he had stared between my mother's broken legs on the night I was born, watching me leave paradise to enter this ugly world inch by inch, minute after minute while the rains pounded over his battered face and nearly sucked him under. How he must've chortled in that smashed truck, gathering his wrath to hurl back into the face of God.