Futile Efforts (42 page)

"You've got the serpent wrapped up tight," she said.

It might've been a vague reference to Satan, but that sort of crap didn't do much for me.
 
"Not exactly.
 
More like he's got me wrapped."

"He likes you."

"Most snakes do for some reason."

"What are you looking for here?"

"My kid."

She moved easily, even though her belly was already protruding quite far.
 
I had the urge to press my palm there, or my cheek, and rest for a while.
 
Despite those shrewd eyes there was a trace of naïveté to her.
 
Or perhaps that was only my penchant for seeing innocence where it didn't exist.

"You're here to find your own kid?"

"Yeah."

"That's a new one.
 
Usually they drive up outside and dump them off without hardly even slowing down."

There was also something about her that touched me in all the wrong places.
 
"Listen–"

"What?"

"No offense, really.
 
But leave me alone."

"Nobody wants to be alone."

"Terrific.
 
Then how about if you just get the hell out of my way."

She ignored that and glided beside me, the hem of her dress drifting against her knees as she unwound Lester from my leg and lifted him into her arms and held him like a baby.
 
I didn't think anything in the world could ever unsettle me anymore, but I was starting to get that feeling.

"You carry a lot of guilt," she said.

"Doesn't everybody?"

"No.
 
I don't."

"You sure of that?" I asked.

"Some of us set down our burdens."

"Some of us are assholes."

She let loose with a delicate giggle that floated around for a minute like cotton candy on the wind.
 
"Isn't everybody?"

"Just about."

She quit talking for a while but kept up with my quick pace.
 
I couldn't shake her.
 
I wanted to run and didn't know why.
 
Maybe it had something to do with her belly.
 
I kept flashing on Megan, pregnant and cheerful, scribbling names on a piece of paper and asking me which ones I liked.
 
One column for boys, the other for girls, and me pushing for the sonogram.

I wondered if Brando was still going through the motions, maybe trying a little of
On the Waterfront
or
The Wild One
by now.
 
Tennessee Williams must've been spitting up bottle caps in his grave.

"You're from down south," she said.
 
"Whereabouts?"

"All of it."

"Yeah, that makes sense.
 
You've hardly any accent.
 
And you've got a New Yorker attitude."

"Anybody who's dealt with a lot of people does."

"Maybe that's true."

"I think it is."

She kept on smiling and Lester glared in my direction, flicking his tongue at me.
 
That titter slipped out of her unconsciously, like a nervous tic.
 
It was getting under my skin for no reason at all.
 
She really did remind me too much of Megan when Megan carried Jonah, so lovely in the pale morning light.
 
They both had the same kind of childlike candor.

"I'm
Lala
," she said.

"Your parents named you
Lala
?"

"I named myself that."

"Oh."

"I should be in charge of my own identity, don't you think?"

"Sure."

"You can, you know," she told me.
 
"It'll be fine.
 
Go ahead."

"I can what?"

"Touch me."

It stopped me for a second.
 
It wasn't a sexual come-on, just a friendly gesture.
 
She'd sensed my urgency to hold that life close and she'd made the sympathetic offer.
 
I didn't realize my needs were so transparent.
 
My geek self was bleeding through, out of control and wailing in the dirty straw.

I gently laid the back of my hand against her belly and felt the pulsing of her warm womb.

My ancestry called to me in my veins.
 
It's happened before.
 
Nature expects value from us.
 
I closed my eyes and was fine for a moment, standing there smirking and floating away, and then it got to be too much.
 
A surge of memories brought up all my love and bile in one swift rush.
 
I yanked my hand away as if scalded, but it was already too late and always had been.
 
A moan began to rise in my chest and I choked it back down.
 
The girl wore Megan's smile.

I was nothing but memories now, stuffed with them, fueled by them.
 
Lala's
eyes flitted, that serene gaze wafting across me, here and there.
 
Her clothes smelled of hash and ten dollar cigars, but whether she'd been smoking or it was simply this place, I didn't know.
 
Lester looked a little high.

"You haven't come here to find out anything about life,"
Lala
said, "so it must be about death."

I let that one go by.
 
"Do you know where
Paynes
is?"

"
Paynes
?
 
Jesus, is that what you're here for?"
 
Again her grin angled up, the fanciful glint shining in her eyes.
 
"I should've guessed.
 
No wonder you carry a lot of guilt, if that's who you're after."

"Where is he?"

"Nobody knows that."

"I bet my father does," I said.
 
I hadn't meant to speak it aloud.
 
I was slipping more and more.

"Why?"

"I've got an instinct for these things.
 
Paynes
might have seen him."

"Your father?
 
You're after your father?
 
Why?"

"Because the old man stole my son from me and I want him back."

"Why?"

"You're a pretty annoying
cooch
," I told her.

"Whatever that means.
 
I like the sound of your voice.
 
There's power there.
 
You take charge."

"It's a gift."

"Is it?"

I thought about that.
 
We could go around in circles for days.
 
No wonder I didn't like her much.
 
"Probably not."

Lester seemed to have a lot on his mind.
 
He wavered as he slid into
Lala's
arms, rising and flowing, quietly hissing.
 
Perhaps he'd heard about me gnawing off the heads of his cousins for a pint of gin.
 
A thing like that got around.
 
Lala
kissed him between the eyes, nodded at me as if she'd be back shortly, and turned away.
 
I blinked and she was gone.

Fishboy
Lenny waved a flipper after her.
 
Or maybe he just wanted to say good-bye to Lester.

Jolly Nell said, "A sweet girl.
 
Don't get this one killed."

I wandered on
.

7

N
icodemus stood tall.
 
Barely topping 5'9” in his boots, he still carried with him an imposing will.
 
Raw-boned and wiry with especially large hands hanging off his thin wrists.
 
One arm was always slightly akimbo, as if he were about to elbow somebody in the ribs.
 
He spoke hard words, inflexible and severe, yet his voice was always calm, almost mild, even when damning some poor bastard on the spot.

He took to the bottle early and only gave it up whenever he found Jesus.
 
When he lost Jesus he'd find the bottle again, and that's the way it went on for most of his life.
 
He knew himself but never truly understood what he wanted, and his expectations were convoluted at best.

He'd drifted across Oklahoma and Texas working on oil well crews and laying pipe for the drilling rigs, preaching to the other vagrants and runaway kids that rambled into camp.
 
He used a trenching shovel to hurl a Rotary-rig operator off a derrick during a drunken brawl and just kept on kicking it down to Mexico until he faded into the jungles.
 
He hooked up with a missionary in South America for a time and took a couple of poisoned blow darts in the back.
 
Two small but thickly puckered scars rose from just over his kidneys, close enough together to have been serpent fangs.
 
Sometimes the symbol matters a lot more than the message.

He never said how he and my mother had met.
 
For a while I assumed she was a river-bottom whore who'd begun to tire of the business.
 
It was common in those parts.
 
But eventually I found a few black-and-white photos he'd cached away.
 
There were looping ballpoint scribbles on the back, and though I tried for years to decipher the words, I never did.

The photographs showed a young woman with a heart-shaped face framed by a toss of brown curls.
 
She wore a somewhat sad smile and in every picture she was looking down or away.
 
Fingers splayed as if warding off the camera.
 
She had petite porcelain white hands.

I took her, whoever she was, to be my mother.
 
I needed her that much, and I thought those hands would have appealed to Nicodemus enough for him to marry her.

My mother died giving birth to me, in the center of the storm, at the bottom of a drainage ditch.
 
Nicodemus had quit on Jesus by then, come back to the States, and started working as a fry cook at a truck stop where the lot lizard whores took home at least half his pay.
 
He got along well with the truckers.
 
They engaged each other in their tales of adventure and hardship, traveling across the country, the women they laid, the jails they'd done time in.
 
For the most part I could picture him as an agreeable and jocular man, though by the time I could talk he was neither.

Oddly enough, for someone who spent eighteen hours a day out of the house, he was home for her when she went into labor.
 
My mother already had a small valise packed.
 
She'd fed the cats and used a neighbor's phone to call ahead to the hospital.
 
She'd blown out the candles and sat waiting on the couch while he buckled his pants on.
 
Nicodemus had been ignoring the bills over the last few months and yet she'd never argued with him over any of it.
 
Had she lacked the nerve?
 
Had he beaten her into meek compliance?
 
I didn't believe so.
 
I'd thought about it for a long time.
 
She must've known that the only way to handle my father was to leave him be–whether he was boozing or on the ground bleeding.

He'd been drunk for three days and driving her to the hospital in his pickup truck when they hit a muddy curve too fast, flipped on Highway 17 and went over a twenty-five-foot embankment.
 
My father passed in and out of consciousness for the next several hours, driven by her screams, he said, while angels called to him and the tips of their gleaming strange wings brushed against his lips.

He said.

Nicodemus had been spattered and blinded by motor oil, transmission fluid and streaming water.
 
The rain poured in through the smashed windshield and put out the flames creeping near the ruptured gas tank.
 
When he came to again he realized they were upside down, my mother trapped in her seat belt, her twisted legs hanging wide open toward his face.
 
I was already squirming from her shattered pelvis as her heart continued to feed the muscles that shoved me forward into the world.