Futile Efforts (43 page)

With his left arm broken and pinned beneath the wreckage he reached over with his free hand and caught me as I slithered from her womb, already falling.

He managed to undo her bloody blouse and pressed me to my mother's dying breast, where I fed until long after her milk turned cold.
 
I'd been nursed by a corpse.

It was the truth, but the story had plenty of tragedy, tear-jerking melodrama, miracle and morbidity to it, which worked wonders on the stage.

How they came in droves to see the child preacher who'd been born in the midst of lightning, with a torrent of rain washing across his dead mother, while his father slowly began to drown and held the babe up above the raging waters of the black ditch.
 
And everybody especially liked the gleaming wings of angels bit.

It was my father's first gesture toward becoming myth, and that was all he really needed.
 
By the times a passing trucker hauling cabbage stopped to help, and the rescue crews arrived, Nicodemus was back on the trail to God and so hopped up on Jesus that his broken arm didn't even bother him.

Neither did the death of my mother.

He had a son.

8

I
walked around the Works for a day and a half.
 
I sat in on a few classes.
 
One instructed you on how to prepare cheese blintzes in blackberry sauce.
 
Always put the "seam-side" of the crepes down on the wax paper, cooking the blackberries in a sauce pan over low heat until bubbling, then pulping them with a potato masher.
 
Jolly Nell couldn't sit beside me because there was only one free seat, so she found a place in the back where she could take up three chairs.

She made such sounds of delight at each step of the preparation that the chef eventually focused all his attention on her, whether he saw her or not, and held up the plates to show off the ingredients before and after adding them together.
 
Depending on the blackberries and your preferences, you might want to strain out the seeds using a sieve.
 
Add sugar, mix water and cornstarch in a small cup and pour into the sauce.
 
Serve on the side or put a dollop on each blintz.

Another lecture was for a martial arts street fighting class that taught forty ways to kill a man with your bare hands.
 
I walked in during the middle of it and watched two guys hold back their fervor while speaking clearly and with authority, dropping one another to a cement floor without any mats.
 
I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the guy next to me and jotted a few helpful notes.

Striking the
nasion
, which is the summit of the nose, with sufficient force may result in death.
 
Attacking the
philtrum
, the area between the upper lip and the bottom of the nose, may also cause mortal damage.
 
I liked that term "mortal damage" and underlined it several times.
 
I resisted the urge to add an exclamation point.
 
A sharp blow to the Adam's apple can cause a man to asphyxiate.
 
A blow to the base of the cerebellum, at the nape of the neck, can bring about death.

Catch someone in a full nelson and bend his neck forward until it breaks or the supply of spinal fluid is cut off to the brain.
 
The Russian Omelet had you cross an enemy's legs and fold him by pinning his shoulders to the ground, upside down, and sitting on his legs until the base of his spine cracked.
 
The Brain Buster placed a man in a headlock as you quickly grabbed his belt and yanked him into the air until he was vertical and upside down.
 
Then you dropped him on his head, which absorbed your combined weight.
 
Most effective on concrete or gravel.

I really wanted a crepe now, but by the time I got back to the first room the class had become a performance art piece.
 
I might've been seeing things but it appeared that the walls had been let out a few extra feet.
 
I couldn't figure out how it was done.
 
Six ballerinas carried television sets with live video feed and mimed making love to the various faces that sprang across the screens.
 
I kind of enjoyed watching the show, but I was still hungry for a blintz.

The size of the spaces in the Works was deceiving, the way they could run into one another, alternating, traveling, transforming.
 
Construction went on overhead, workers doing some brick work.
 
Bulky guys in hard hats moved machinery and scaffolding.
 
Murals and posters were being put up and taken down with great frequency.
 
Event advertisements, local sales.
 
Who the hell cared about discounts to Six Flags Great Adventure?
 
Who could ever get out of here and play on the rides?

Like graffiti, the process was ongoing and profitless.
 
If one leg on the vast amount of scaffolding buckled the whole setup would drop and take out two hundred people.
 
Kids composed haiku and smoked grass under it, elderly couples strolling along with their canes and kerchiefs.

Nell said, "I smell bacon."

My stomach trembled.

"Me too," I told her, but I knew it wasn't bacon.
 
So did she.
 
I tried slipping by her but she grabbed my shoulder with one of her massive hands, held me up and carried me along.
 
It had weight and solidity.
 
Juba's shadow fell across my face and I was suddenly cool and in darkness.
 
At times they appeared to interact with the world and be seen by others.
 
People bounced off Jolly Nell or gazed upon the entirety of Juba, and women flirted with
Hertzburg
and all his hair.

I said, "I can't remember if you're alive or dead."

Hertzburg
frowned and shrugged as we passed by a barbershop.
 
"You've said that about yourself as well."

"I know it."

"Does it really matter to you that much?"

"Sometimes."

He smelled of burned
–"Maybe you'll figure it out."

"I get the feeling I won't."

"Who gives a
shit
at this point?
 
So long as you finish what's been started.
 
Don't put such a high premium on the truth.”

"Me?"

A new warren of paths and alleys opened.
 
Scattered in the corridors of the works people slept, sketched, sat reading Harlan Ellison's
Deathbird
Stories
, Jim Thompson's
The Killer Inside Me
, newspapers and menus.
 
Playing the clarinet, dropping acid, and chalking pentagrams on the floor.
 
They recited puerile passages from Crowley and
LaVey
.
 
I used to do the same thing.

I expected to see religious fanatics, a few Jesus freaks going off the deeper end, but there weren't any.
 
That surprised me.
 
The hordes of rats hung back in the converted meat lockers knocking off the weak, and the Goth-
gurrls
and leather-deathers wearing their scars and vampire paleness giggled like virgins and scampered around the show rooms painting themselves with latex.

Juba said, "He won't come to you now, you know, in your vague and ugly dreams."

"Oh yes he will."

"No. Nicodemus could reach you across all your nightmares while you were on the outside–"

"So?"

"–but now even your vengeance belongs to the Works."

I couldn't help it.
 
I burst out laughing.

Not that cool clear kind of chuckling but the real rot-gut that brings up acid from the back end of your life.
 
It kept coming and coming while I gasped and wheezed, my heart starting to hurt and my muscles locked out of place.
 
I glanced at the enormity surrounding me, understanding that it was nowhere near large enough to contain all my hate.

Finally I settled back and wiped the tears off my chin.

Fishboy
Lenny said, "
Mwoop
fwsshh
mwaop
mwaop
," and I totally agreed with him, whatever he meant.

"Yeah, buddy."

"
Mwoop
."

I went to find a place to drop off, in order to hear the harsh and bitter words of my father.

9

M
egan believed in redemption and revelation, down where it mattered.
 
She blamed me for that.
 
I had healed her once, she said, at twelve.
 
Troubles in her stomach, brought on by a beating from her older brother after he'd kneed her out of the woodshed, prying her legs apart.

She'd had ulcers throughout her childhood, with her grandfather offering rags dipped in
sterno
to kill the pain.
 
Hemorrhaging for months and dealing with the bruises and cramps.
 
The constant nausea of hopelessness and loss terrified her less than something unknown.
 
She was changing.

The discomfort and swelling in her belly grew worse each day until her parents finally dead-bolted her in her bedroom, away from the truancy officers and sheriff's deputies.
 
Its sole window faced the woodshed, where her brother wept and howled and threw his shoulder against the chained door.
 
He had changed too.

Her grandfather, spitting blood, sneaked her out of the house, still gulping
sterno
and letting her suck a soaked shred of cloth.
 
He carried her most of the six miles to the tent revival all-night sing, where I laid my hands upon her.

The next morning she blessed my name because the pain was gone.
 
God had become second string.
 
A lifetime of prayers had been answered at last and heaven had nothing to do with it.

She whispered my praises as her mama bundled up the bed sheets and set fire to them in the yard.

Her brother had broken his neck hurling himself against the woodshed wall, sometime before sunrise.
 
Her parents didn't cry.
 
They didn't bother to bury him.
 
They tossed his corpse onto the fire and then collected the bones and ashes and threw them into the scrub.

Megan believed I had cleansed her, and now she returned the favor.

I had taken the hideous baby out of her body, she thought, and she loved me for it
.

10

C
ircling, I hunted for a way to get to the regions inside the Works that I hadn't been to yet.
 
I seemed to be traveling in a well-defined rut, unable to slip out of the channel, going around and around.
 
Construction continued in the buildings, hammering taking the top of my skull off and electric drills whining constantly.
 
Maybe if I planted myself in this spot the rest of the Works would eventually come to me.

Brando was hitting his post-
Superman
stride, all the downhill stuff.
 
A Dry White Season, Don Juan
DeMarco
, and oh my Christ
The Island of Dr. Moreau
.
 
It almost hypnotized me, the way he brought it all into
Streetcar
.
 
He still wore the dirty T-shirt and he looked even more constipated.

"Where's
Lala
?" I asked.

"Who?"

"That girl who was coaching you a couple of days ago."

"Oh her.
 
I never seen her before or since.
 
Stupid chick didn't have any idea what it means to be an actor.
 
Kept telling me to play it real.
 
If I wanted to be real, then what the shit would I be an actor for?"

"Good point."

"Worse," he said.
 
"I think she stole my snake."