Futile Efforts (41 page)

"What?" Brando asked.

"I asked if there was a church here."

His lip hunger lower.
 
"Did I hear that right?"

"I suspect you did.
 
Is there a spot to pray?
 
A chapel?"

"It's all holy ground, man."

This was the kind of dull answer I expected, but I really couldn't blame the guy.
 
"How about a bar?"

"Liquor is everywhere, just look.
 
Reach out.
 
Ask somebody.
 
They'll share with you."

"That wasn't what I asked."

"Well, shit."

Fishboy
Lenny smiled as much as he could without lips and scuttled forward on his belly, waving happily to the girl, who sat there nodding.

It would take me weeks to search every area and space inside the Works.
 
I wanted to sleep.
 
I wasn't tired after three days in the rain, but I needed to pick up Nicodemus's trail in the dream.

"Where's the
doniker
?" I asked.

"The what?"

"A restroom.
 
The toilet."

"What the fuck language are you speaking?"

He didn't have a clue.
 
He looked constipated and unaware of his condition.
 
One of these days his intestines would completely seize up and he'd keel over from a massive stroke.

Sacrifice was an inherent part of becoming something larger and he might just go the entire distance without ever taking a crap, I could feel the same kind of counterfeit energy in this place as in any bally.
 
The excitement was here but none of the gamble, none of the fun.
 
The tents would always be packed.
 
They wanted love and remembrance, shock, communion.
 
They asked me to glance into their palms in order to get God and their own nettling consciences off their backs.
 
I did what I could.
 
They wanted the freak show.

The pregnant girl, though, kept appraising.
 
I didn't like the way she stared at me.
 
There was no sharpness there, a bit of derision, I thought, though not quite enough to piss me off.
 
But for some reason it did.
 
She cocked her head and peered over my shoulder as if glimpsing the rest of my life layered up behind me.
 
It brought some color into her face and made her even prettier.

Brando reached into the cardboard playhouse and started tangling with something.
 
He drew out a snake.
 
"Meet Lester."

"Is it hot?" I asked.

"What?"

"Is it poisonous?"

"Damn, mister, you got a fucked up word for everything, I bet.
 
Nah, Lester isn't poisonous."

"Too bad."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I used to wrangle them.
 
There's more gamble to it if they're hot."

"Still hurts like a son of a bitch if he gets a piece of you."

I was suddenly very sick of the guy's voice and wanted her to talk instead, but she wouldn't.
 
I grabbed Lester and brought him up to my face.
 
I'd learned a lot about handling animals, especially reptiles, even before I started eating them.

Lester was easy.
 
After a few moments of zoning the snake, I could get him to copy my motions.
 
He'd tilt his chin when I did; flick his tongue out at mine.
 
Recoil and just forward following the actions of my head.
 
It was a trick, like everything else, but a fairly good one.

"That's wild," Brando said, defunct, almost dead.

"Yeah."

"He's even blinking when you do."

"That's part of the show."

"Can you teach me?"

"It would take too long."

That didn't flatten him.
 
Brando started blinking in time with the snake, in time with me.
 
"What else can you do with Lester?"

"Nothing you'd want to see."

"I want to see everything, man."

He was right, they always wanted to see it all.

I could've bitten Lester's head off and spit it into his lap.
 
I had been a geek for a few years when the whiskey had worn me into a madness much different from my father's.
 
I sweated mash liquor.
 
I smeared myself with my own shit and vomit and shoved empty beer cans up my ass.
 
I'd chewed the heads off chickens, mice and pit vipers and puked them into the crowd.

They loved it.

So did I.

And that's how Megan had found me
.

5

I'
d been dragged through the slough of cabbage palms and palmettos, where the gators clambered across the mangroves.
 
The carnival had set up outside the broad channels of swamp and I lived in a cage of gnarled roots sucking the spleens out of frogs.
 
They poled their skiffs for miles around to come watch.

Whatever hit the dirt became a part of me.
 
They thought I was too weak to wrestle the bull gators, but there were plenty of tricks.
 
They expected me to die a hundred times over and I wouldn't go.
 
The toads they tossed me were hot.
 
The mushrooms deadly.
 
The murderous stews should've put me down but didn't.
 
And they loved me and hated me for it.
 
The screams and cheers, the disgusted looks.
 
Cats' entrails and children's beaming smiles.
 
We learned a lot from one another, about how far we were all willing to go.

And in the middle of the madness, at its worst and at its best, somehow the madness ended.

Megan wiped the venom and feathers out of my mouth and held my shoulders down to the mattress while she slowly fed me soup and watered-down scotch.
 
She knew better than to try to get me to go cold turkey.
 
I was so far into the bottle that my heart would've stopped without it.
 
Which might have been a good thing considering the situation.

The dreams had always been bad, but they grew worse while I dried out.
 
The D.T.'s didn't get me shrieking or tearing at my own eyes, though.
 
I'd eaten bugs and rats for years, what did I care if they crawled over me in my delusions?

Instead I was drawn into conversations with the prophets and lepers, kneeling at stone altars beneath a desert sun, carrying children sucking on honey-coated locusts.
 
I decapitated the priests of Baal, climbed mountains of fire.
 
Where was the New Testament?
 
Where had they hidden my forgiveness?
 
Archangel Michael aimed his fiery sword at my heart and plucked it out with one twitch of his wrist.

I was the seer, and I talked endlessly while Megan pressed icy towels to my forehead.

Two weeks passed before the hallucinations and delirium eased enough for me to realize I was no longer rolling in the mud and sawdust, covered in my own puke and blood, having pocket change heaved at me.
 
She'd either bought or stolen me from the
carny
, I never found out which.

I could only see in shadow at first as she leaned over my chest, a raven figure in an even darker world.

Her silhouette moved like fluid, back-lit by silver.
 
Occasionally I'd hear the rustle of cloth and chiming of metal.
 
A spoon would ease between my lips as shades and dimension slowly filled my mind again.

She had caramel-colored freckles spattered across her nose and cheeks, and a smile that put me at rest like nothing ever had before it.
 
I'd been burning my entire life–first with heavenly fire and then with lust, and finally with whiskey and poison.

But right then, in that first minute as I laid eyes on her, she cooled my thrashing spirit, and she did it without so much as a word.

She wore a silk kimono showing off every curve, and I saw the firm muscles of her arms and neck as she dipped the spoon again and again, feeding me.
 
I ate more slowly, watching the shape of her lips.
 
She was a beautiful stranger.

I scanned the room.
 
There was a black and white television with rabbit ears in the corner, some Mexican game show flashing silently screaming faces, no sound knob.
 
Dirty Venetian blinds were half drawn.
 
I saw a stream of dying orange light.
 
Her
cooch
costume was thrown over the back of a busted rattan chair, all sequins and
chainlets
and white plumes.
 
We were in a flea-trap motel and I had bed sores.

She noticed that my eyes had focused on her.
 
"You look awake.
 
Can you see straight yet?"

"Yes."
 
My vocal cords felt like they'd been scoured down to threads and knotted together.
 
I hadn't spoken a word in over a year, and my voice sounded so much like my father's that it made me look around for him.

"Good.
 
You're strong."

Nobody had ever said that to me before.
 
I didn't know how she could even think it, having cleaned the snake piss off my neck.
 
"No, I'm not."

"We'll see.
 
Now that you're over the worst of it you'll be on your feet again soon."

I thought I recognized her from the
cooch
dance, but I couldn't be sure of much anymore.
 
Had she been in the audience watching me geek all the animals?
 
Or had I snaked under the hoof tent and seen her and the other girls teasing the marks?
 
I hadn't had a lick of pride in years, but I suddenly felt a tinge of embarrassment.
 
It was an odd sensation.

"You're with the
carny
?" I asked.

"Not anymore," she said.
 
"Not that one.
 
They tore down and left town seven or eight days ago."

"I'm sorry," I told her, and I was.
 
"You must know the route.
 
You can still catch up."

"Hell no.
 
It was the worst one I'd ever worked.
 
I got hired outside of Edmond six weeks ago and hated every minute of it in that show.
 
Dyson ought to be arrested, the way he runs it."

"Dyson?"

"The owner."

He must've taken me on, but I couldn't remember.
 
Her accent had a nice flair.
 
It was Southern but without any drawl.
 
East Texas, I guessed, somewhere out in the flats and deep scrub.
 
I kept staring at her lips, and she didn't seem to mind.
 
"Why'd you help me?"

"You needed it."

"I'm nothing to you.
 
I'm–"

That smile again, comforting and cooling as she pressed a damp rag to my throat once more.
 
"I know who you are," she said.
 
"You healed me once."

6

I
felt something touch my ankle and thought it was
Fishboy
Lenny, but when I looked down I saw that Lester had followed after me and was now winding his way around my leg.

The girl walked alongside us.
 
She was smiling in a self-satisfied way, as if she'd just found a new partner she could help through a Tennessee Williams play.
 
I had caught her attention and felt uncomfortable with the fact.
 
Her pregnancy reminded me that I was really only here to get back Jonah.