Futile Efforts (37 page)

Fishboy
Lenny was having a hell of a time in the roiling gutter, bobbing and swimming in torrents of rainwater.
 
Corpses of bloated rats rolled by, sweeping down toward the docks.
 
Addicts and the homeless shivered themselves to pieces, begging pocket change from stonewall citizens and wet, heartless hookers. The downpour didn't stop the whores.
 
If anything, it drove them out into the saturated night.
 
They paraded through the subways and pushed across the avenue, all tits and rabbit fur and shining red umbrellas.
 
They slogged up to taxis at traffic lights, crawled into the backs of vans, and hung at the entrance of the Works hoping to entice the curious passer-by.

Starving dogs tore each other apart in the alleys, just another fragment of the drenched tableau.
 
Blood ran but washed away immediately, leaving no impression of life or death behind.
 
It was nothing new.
 
Jolly Nell couldn't take the street noise and started singing the poisoned violets scene
Poveri
Fiori
from Act IV of
Adriana
Lecouvreur
. I'd never realized before that she could really belt out the high notes when she put everything into it.

Male prostitutes in baseball caps or cowboy hats leaned back against the bricks, posing beneath lamp lights, thumbs hooked in their jeans as the slow-moving traffic eased by like oil Christ, they'd all watched too many movies but none of the right ones.
 
Frizzy heads bobbed in the laps of anemic businessmen, and the world kept kicking.

I could feel the energy gathering around us, swirling, black and degenerate.
 
The stink of displacement, of aberration, became stronger as I kept watch.
 
I knew it was going to be bad.
 
Any sharp noise drew my attention in the constant patter, gurgle and spray of rain.

Juba unfolded himself from where he knelt, unwinding those unholy limbs further and further until they looked as if they would never stop.
 
Even on his knees he's taller than most men, and when he stands he towers above all normality.
 
Anybody looking out a second-story window would be almost eye-level with him.
 
He wavered in the air, each elongated bone and tendon showing through the thin tissue of his nutmeg flesh.
 
His oblong head appeared poorly crafted, lopsided to the left where his shoulder was hunched.
 
He was a tad over eight feet tall, but Nell could easily pick him up and carry him across the midway, even tossing him in the air and juggling him a bit.
 
It had once been part of the act and drew delighted yowls from the children.

He was also an anatomical wonder.
 
When Juba sucked in his stomach you could see his backbone thrusting through.
 
For a quarter you could touch it.
 
Ladies would squeal and make disgusted faces, and dream about what this freak would be like in bed, with everything so long.

His heart was perfectly defined, and you could watch the muscle beating.
 
I'd witnessed the pounding of his anger, remorse and desire.
 
He remained a soft-spoken godly man, but I still didn't know which god.

"Is something going to happen?" Juba asked.
 
Even his voice was thin, a sparse whisper.

"Yes," I said.
 
"You feel it too?"

"I can tell by your face."

"Oh."

"And I know you're never mistaken about things like this."

"We all have our talents."

Jolly Nell, forever the enthusiastic optimist, said, "Perhaps nothing bad will come, this one time."

How I loved her for that.
 
For her willingness to offer me a chance to be wrong about the arrival of misery.

But I wasn't, and Nell understood that.
 
She'd always been the caregiver, the brace over which the rest of us could sag or slump.
 
Her mother had sold her to McKenna's Carnival when she was seven years old and already topping one-sixty.
 
Falling into her arms was like being embraced by all your loves and fears at once, the power in them something natural, intense and dominant.
 
She snapped two of my ribs in a rough clench a while back, but I needed that hug worse than anything else at the time, even while the shards of bone ground together in my lungs.
 
I spit blood for days.

Now, at five-one, she broke seven hundred pounds easy, but never seemed to have trouble with her ankles or shins or lower back the way some of the other Jollies had.
 
Nell moved with the consistency and gravity of the setting moon.
 
She affected us like a tidal force.

My fingers began to tremble and the burning in my guts grew worse.
 
It happened like this, from time to time, when the hammer was about to drop.
 
My breath came in bites and my eyes flitted wildly, scanning the cars racing by in the seeping darkness, headlights smeared upon the slick blackness.

Nell hugged me, but my ribs hadn't completely healed yet and I grunted in pain, quivering at her touch.
 
She said, "None of this is your fault.
 
It's all right.
 
It's going to be fine."

Hertzburg
let out a belly full of ferocious laughter.
 
It went on longer than it should have, there in the storm.
 
Thunder snarled above.
 
Finally he noted Nell's expression and stopped.
 
"I'm sorry, but your idealism during our current circumstances astounds me at this point."

"It shouldn't," she told him.

"No, I suppose not.
 
Some of us can clear away death as easily as finishing off a roasted pig."

"Oh, well, isn't that cute?"

"For others it gets tangled in our curls."

Jolly Nell planted herself, fists on her colossal hips.
 
"Face up to it, you're enjoying yourself.
 
You're having a terrific time."

"Do we have any choice?"

"That's enough," I said.

"Of course it is.
 
Let's hold our vigil and observe further."

Hertzburg
didn't brush his soaked hair out of his eyes.
 
It hung dripping across his nose and cheeks, in the corners of his mouth, down those powerful arms and between his thick fingers.
 
Though billed as the Wild Man, he'd never been good at appearing feral.
 
He had too much pride for that.
 
McKenna used to go nuts when
Hertzburg
wore his reading glasses in the sideshow, playing chess against himself, discussing Nietzsche with the rubes, reciting Baudelaire and Goethe.
 
Anything to break character.
 
Even with his large muscles corded and covered in fuzz, wearing a Tarzan outfit with big leopard spots on it, he was the definition of poise.

Stoned teens in the audience would sometimes try to test him in an effort to impress their pimply girlfriends, swinging bicycle chains or tossing lit matchbooks.
 
Their ugly, harassing chortling would float through camp and the rest of us would know what was coming.
 
Hertzburg
never lost his composure.
 
Not when he'd grabbed the rube kids by their throats, not when they were trying to knife him, and not even while the cops shackled him and the parents shrieked.
 
He videotaped his performances so he could later prove he always acted in self-defense.

The street lights seemed to dim for an instant, showing the contours of shadows in the sheets of rain.
 
It appeared almost like fire falling upon us.
 
I doubled over and went to my knees.

Herzburg
said, "Guess this is it."

A Jeep Cherokee with bad brake lining tried to run the red, way too late.
 
The engine roared as the gears slipped.
 
Everybody on the street stopped what they were doing in order to watch.
 
A yellow cab pulled out and cut it off, sending the Jeep into a wicked skid, snaking and spinning now.
 
Nell covered her eyes but Juba leaned forward off the curb as if he might pluck out the driver with one hand.

Brake lights cast a sanguine hue against the rain.
 
The Jeep straightened an instant before it smashed into a teenage
crackhead
, tires screeching and sputtering in the puddles.
 
The girl had on a yellow slicker and it made her a good target.
 
She'd just taken down an entire bachelor party in the back of a limo and still had the loose cash in her hand.
 
The Jeep veered and swerved again as she rolled up the grille, bounced off the hood into the windshield, and flipped over the top.

Her arms went out wide as if trying to go with it and fly for a little while.
 
She appeared to have caught an updraft and the edges of her slicker flapped.
 
Her hair dipped and flung aloft.
 
The whole scene had a brutal sense of ballet to it.

Her body bowed hideously, staying up there for a time as if grooving to '70s tunes–"Dream Weaver," maybe "Thunder island" or "Crocodile Rock," and then she came crashing down on the curb.
 
Bills fluttered past, crisp twenties.
 
It looked like she'd made an even hundred for the whole party.
 
The back of her skull parted easily, flopping open on the cement.
 
Fishboy
Lenny swam up the gutter and peered closely at her, making his noises of distress and want.
 
"
Fweep
,
mweee
,
fwssshhh
."

Without so much as a crack in the windshield, the Jeep gunned it and kept going straight through the next intersection.
 
The three guys in the limo popped out of the moon roof and glanced down at the dead whore, grinning with slick teeth.
 
They'd put it to her, giving her a last lay to take to hell.
 
They should've just strangled her with their Italian ties.
 
Their high-pitched dingo laughter sounded deranged but genuine as they pulled away.
 
They were in a mood now and would probably smack around some deaf-mutes on the way home just to keep the high going.

Blurs of black motion began to swarm up and down the avenue.
 
The street folk were on the girl then, nabbing her shoes and money and vials of crack.
 
They danced after the cash, pirouetting in the wind, skipping past parked cars.
 
Nobody wanted the slicker but they hauled her corpse backward right out of her strained white thong.
 
Fishboy
Lenny watched it all with his usual wide-eyed innocence, twin nostril slashes on his nose less face quivering as he mewled.

Jolly Nell asked, "Shouldn't we help?"

Juba the living skeleton said, "We can do nothing, Nell, she's already dead.
 
Look–"

"They're taking her..."

"It's to be expected."

"My God, and her..."

"They live off carrion.
 
It's their way."

"Don't watch," I said from the shadows, watching.

Fishboy
Lenny swam from drainpipe to drainpipe as the sewers whirled and burped, his small flippers already spattered with red.
 
I'd worked alongside him for several years and still didn't know a thing about his past, or even if he had one.
 
He was found treading water in the tank of the high dive act one morning and immediately became part of McKenna's Carnival.

On occasion he would mimic words well enough to sound as if he was actually speaking, but they were only strung together, incoherent sentences.
 
It made you wonder what went on behind those wide eyes, and just what that mind might reveal.

The rumors about the Works had made it from New York down to the southern
carny
circuit. They were as different and preposterous as the gaffs and ballyhoo on any midway.

Like you used to have to screw on camera to get inside, or cut open your wrist and bleed in front of your children, or quote passages in Greek from the Book of Revelation.
 
It sounded stupid enough to be true and had all probably happened at one point or another.
 
There was an air of East Village artistry about it, a performance piece set in motion that hadn't let up with enough resistance to slow it down yet.
 
I wondered about that.