Futile Efforts (18 page)

But Myrtle got migraines.

He struggled but his hands still hurt.
 
He ought to be able to break free of a knotted piece of twine but Baby Sis Claudine and Aunt
Tilly
were holding on too harshly.
 
They wouldn't let go.

The Brooms paraded before him, the same angelic face and the same primitive soul, until the shortest Broom pressed a cheek to his without a word. The children moved to him now with the tools and scissors and he remembered what the hideous voices used to say to him when he was a boy, how they'd command and beg and beguile, and as the
shadder
continued to thicken around him they came for his other eye, and he knew this was going to take a good long while.

by Gary
Braunbeck

I
n William Goldman's great suspense novel
Magic
, one of the characters--a professional magician--sums up his craft with a single, short, profound line: "Magic is misdirection."

You are about to be misdirected to startling effect, something at which Tom Piccirilli excels.
 
The misdirection I'm talking about isn't cheating (like Agatha Christie did with so many of her later mysteries, not providing the reader with important information in order to help them put the clues together), no; the misdirection to be found in "Making Faces" is the masterful sleight-of-hand that can only be done by an expert, someone who can make you watch his left hand when in truth it's the right to which you should be paying attention...but of course don't realize until it's too late.

It's no coincidence that Tom is also an accomplished and award-winning poet, because only one who understands the power of distilling language down to its barest, most vital essentials--the crystalline image, the precise metaphor, using only one word where others would employ ten--can master the kind of wondrous, chilling misdirection that makes a tale like "Making Faces" as powerful and haunting as it is. In the hands of a more impatient or careless writer, the subject matter of this story could have quickly reduced to the trivial; but in the hands of one who understands that magic is misdirection, it's a dazzler.

Just bear in mind--what you see happening and what you hear spoken does not necessarily have a damn thing to do with what's really going on. Watch yourselves.

–Gary
Braunbeck
, author of
IN SILENT GRAVES
and
GRAVEYARD PEOPLE

U
sually Lash wakes up thinking, This is it, you're finally dead.
 
It lets him start the day off with an overwhelming sense of relief.

The dog is chewing into his chest, about to crack through the breastbone and get to the thick meat of his heart inside.
 
Lash took the little bastard in because it was shivering under an abandoned Chevy with six saturate tickets beneath the busted wiper, rain sluicing off the hood and running high in the gutter.
 
Three distended bodies stacked face-down in the backseat.
 
The dog there with its tiny front paw held up–offering it out to Lash like, oh please take me home, look how cute I am, my name is
Iwuvyou
.
 
Lash has tried this with girls in bars and they just scowl at him, move a few stools down.

Talk about loyalty.
 
Now
Iwuvyou's
snout-deep in your torso, tail wagging like crazy,
wippity-wappity
.

But no, Lash realizes, You're still kicking, and the dog is only licking your chest hair, catching it in his teeth.
 
Because Lash has been sweating in the night and it's pooled there and dried in a salty line down to his belly button.

There's something that needs to be said this morning, that's clear, but he hasn't managed to grasp the essence of it yet.
 
He reaches up and puts his hand to his mouth, trying to see if there are any words there.
 
He tugs his lips apart, pinches his tongue.
 
He tastes charcoal on his fingertips.

What needed to be said has been drawn on the wall.

Today You Must Make a Change.

"Dammit," Lash says.
 
He already understands it's true, but he really hates to see it smeared all over the place like that.

The canvas stretched on the easel looks like a first-grader's been going at it with finger
paints
.
 
Once, he had promise.
 
His professors knew it, and so did his parents.
 
They encouraged, advised, and applauded until Lash couldn't take the ridiculous hope in their eyes anymore.
 
Mom looking at him so lovingly, with such misplaced pride, that he wanted to rip his own teeth out.
 
Jesus, you talk about pressure, the way they stared at you waiting for the genius to bleed out. The disappointment always close behind.
 
Come on, come on, we're waiting.

Since then he keeps up the pretense because life, somehow, means even less without it.
 
He calls himself an artist.
 
He used to say he was a painter but everybody kept wanting him to do their houses, their apartment ceilings.
 
Now he asks the chicks in the bar to sit for him, he'd love to do their portraits, and would they mind posing nude?
  
They gag on their banana daiquiris and move their seats.

What he is, is unemployed, paying his rent with some of the insurance money his mother left him.
 
He lives meager, which is a personality trait rather than a well-thought-out plan.
 
Every few days he throws some color at the easel and swirls the brush around, yearning for his subconscious to take over and carry the ball.
 
If he's feeling particularly passionate, he uses the charcoal.
 
That hasn't happened for a while.

There's a storm outside.

Wind drives the thrashing rain down upon the city and the madmen and murdered float and roll in the alleys.
 
Families crawl onto half-submerged buses as great surges and swells of water funnel over the dispossessed pedestrians.
 
Lash's mother would have called this the end of the world, and she would have said it happily.
 
He knows it's only another bad day.

The church directly across from his window is full of black motion, music, and activity.
 
In this part of the city, the buildings have gargoyles doing what they were made to do: their mouths are spigots designed to ease rain overflow.

Lash knows that the word gargoyle is actually a bastardization of "gurgling."
 
The stone beasts are named for the sounds they make.
 
He's full of useless information like that.
 
It's just more shit that doesn't make him money.

A child stands framed by stained glass and stares at Lash, with a strange intent, perhaps a great and worthwhile purpose.

Okay, so Lash tries not to let his urban paranoia carry him away, but you really gotta see this kid.
 
Tow-headed, huge brown eyes, acutely pale skin, and dressed well in black slacks and a white formal shirt buttoned all the way to the collar.
 
In the movies, creepy ten-year-olds are always ghosts come back to fuck up your week.

The kid sticks his tongue out.

You know what you have to do.
 
Lash remains an adult for about three seconds, and then the undying adolescent takes over, makes him growl at the boy.
 
They watch each other through throbbing sheets of water bursting and boiling on the windows.
 
The kid sticks his thumbs in his ears, wriggles his fingers, miming laughter.
 
Lash sticks his pinkies in his nostrils, yanks his nose wide, cocks his head.

These are all faces he's painted many times before, back when he tried to hone his small amount of talent.
 
Sketching
passers by
while seated in front of the museums and ritzy tourist traps.
 
Children used to get pissed at him for staring, they'd give him the finger, do guppy lips. Their parents would threaten him and pull out their cell phones, miming how they were calling the police. The Japanese would take a hundred photos of him, blinding him with the flashes until he packed up.
 
He figured the guys in front of the Louvre probably didn't have to suffer through this kind of crap, but who knew, maybe they did.

The kid points at Lash, then moves his hand slightly aside, indicating he should take a look.

Somebody's on the ledge.

Well now.

He thinks for a second that it might be himself.
 
You always had to be ready.
 
You could never be too sure.
 
He does that sometimes, sneaks up on himself.
 
You took what comforts you could afford.
 
It's kind of fun actually, watching himself jump.
 
Unless it's happening to him, with the bastard sort of prancing and laughing behind him.

Iwuvyou
begins yipping, tangling into circles, stopping to sniff at the floorboards, then recovering and leaping around the apartment.

It's the kid's mother.
 
Lash knows it as soon as he sees her.

You don't have a story unless you get mixed up in the middle of things.
 
Somehow, he's tripped over an energy curve, a quantum field, a cosmic force that connects the parent to the child.
 
She's running from gangsters, gonna pop in and plead for him to help save her son.
 
Offer herself to him as payment, but he's a hero here, gotta refuse.
 
For a bit.
 
Goes to scope the scene, outwits the mob–the amateur who's more pro than the professional
hitmen
themselves.
 
He comes back and the woman has double-crossed him, she spikes his drink.
 
But he's switched glasses.
 
She keels over, gagging, hands about her throat, the blood spiking from her ears.
 
He heads across to the church, discovers it's a money laundering biz, the kid is really a midget with a .45.
 
Lash busts him a good one in the chops, steals the briefcase lying at the pint-sized feet, it's full of cash.
 
But the bills are marked, it's all a waste, he returns to his apartment, opens a can of beef stew for
Iwuvyou
, thinks about tomorrow.

The lady out there on the ledge is shuddering so badly she might knock herself off.
 
Dressed in a black dinner dress, wearing pearls, she's about a dozen feet away, twenty-six floors up.
 
Her arms are stretched over her head and she's holding onto a gargoyle, gripping it around the throat like a careless weekend lover.
 
The beast is giving Lash that macho barroom grin, telling him,
Yo
buddy, fuck off, she's mine for the night.
 
Go find another lay.

Rainwater surges into her face and obscures her features.
 
The wet black hair drapes in savage coils and batters her shoulders.
 
Lash opens his window and the storm howls in answer, a thundering thrum roaring above him.
 
On occasion, you can almost believe in God.

"Hi," he calls to her.
 
"You wanna come in?"

She takes a hesitant step into mid-air, leaving her foot out over the precipice, as if considering what it might feel like not to have anything under you.
 
Lash has screwed around like that a little too, on really awful nights.
 
A bottle of tequila in one hand, a Bible in the other, some woman loud in his mind and the loneliness turning the back of his skull to steel.

The kid's mother wriggles her toes out there and kicks off her high-heeled shoe.
 
Looks Italian, the pair goes for at least a grand.
 
It fires down like a missile and clunks a street sign.
 
A shadow darts from behind a garbage can and scoops it up, vanishes again.

The sigh at the back of her throat is violent yet reassuring.
 
He knows what an overpowering sensation it can be, to have to force yourself to find reasons not to let go.

She puts her foot back on the ledge and does the same thing with the other one, taking the endless step, shirking out of her shoe.
 
Lash thinks, Okay, this here lady, she has a few issues to deal with.

Who're you to get in the way of that?
 
Nobody gets in the middle of yours.