Futile Efforts (8 page)

Had they lured her back here somehow or had she finally run away from her parents as she'd promised? It was a two-hour drive at least. Was the boyfriend who liked horror movies creeping along Potters Avenue now, a grease monkey who'd nabbed her off the Hudson and made a break for it? Were the roaming bands of Satanists marching through the neighborhood?

Now, voices from the bushes, as if they were crouching there together. "The girl's dead. Don't."

"
Shh
…he'll hear you."

Jenks wheeled and parted the branches, hoping to grab hold of someone, anyone, perhaps a piece of his own past, but there was nothing. They could reach out but could not be touched. The wind rose again, wailing, and tugged at his hair the way Debra used to do when they were fighting.

"Deb? Did you do this?"

Footsteps behind him, somebody hesitant as if trying to be sneaky, then dashing forward like it was all just a game. Light and quick, several of them rushing him at once as the rustling leaves whirled and spiraled over his head. Maybe all of the women together. He began his turn knowing he would never make it, that he wouldn't be allowed to see what was coming up behind him, ever, as his sister's voice, forever petulant and crazed, cried out, "That's my brother! I need him." Jenks still didn't know who the other dead women were, but now he finally understood why they had joined and what they were all doing together. Plotting. It wouldn't do any good to beg.

As the willows wept with the heaving breeze, giggles breaking to his left and right, her voice grew closer and clearer with such a genuine hatred for everything alive, shrieking in her dead madness, "
Get him
!"

By Jack Ketchum

I
think Dark Fiction has come to mean pretty much nothing. A publishing catch-phrase. Maybe it never did mean much. But if it did, at best, it seemed to me to refer to the dark night of the soul, the times and places in which we get lost, irretrievably sometimes. When it seems no good deed goes unpunished, when nothing we do can ever work out right. "We all need a private mission to perform, a reason to take the next step," Tom writes here. But the world often conspires to make those missions quixotic to say the least and utterly disastrous at worst. If there's redemption to be found in these doomed quests it can come at a terrible cost — and there may be none to be found at all. This is the territory AN AVERAGE INSANITY, A COMMON AGONY essays. Here, in this story much bigger than its few pages, we are lonely and isolated by definition, unable to quite connect. All unions so tenuous as to be almost illusory — but necessary as breath. I would like to refer to the final union here, in the very last paragraph — fragile, painful, possibly doomed, but unbroken — yet I'd spoil it for you if I did. Suffice to say that for me it was heartbreaking, while at the same time I could feel the spirit soar. Tough-minded, tender-hearted — the dark night of the soul still leaning toward the light.

–Jack Ketchum author of
RED
and
SHE WAKES

T
hey thought it was just the funniest thing ever, bringing the old guy
and
his dog into the place.
 
Three college jocks drunker than hell but with a real edge about them, carrying a harsh atmosphere inside with them from the street.
 
Vin tightened in his chair as a flush of heat went through his belly.
 
It only took a glance to know everything about them: a trio of starting line seniors but the pros hadn't come knocking like they were supposed to.
 
Now at twenty-two these kids were already witnessing the fall of their dreams, the slow flat resentment angling up through their lives.

It's why they were so loud.
 
Laughing wildly, easing loose with a little madness, pushing the blind man on, they grabbed him roughly and hugging him to their barrel chests as if he was their greatest love.
 
His cane tapped mercilessly, slapping at puddles of spilled beer.
 
Even the guide dog walked warily beside its master, watchful, sensing a vague evil.

Vin felt it too.
 
His scalp prickled and the sweat began to writhe at his temples.

The waitress came over and asked, "Another scotch?"
 
She had her body angled at him but she too continued glancing over at the scene.

A new song kicked on with a dully throbbing beat and she unconsciously swayed to it.
 
He liked the way she held herself.
 
Solid, with a real personality, an honest grin.
 
She had a deeper strata to her disposition.
 
Usually waitresses in the strip joints felt a competition with the dancers, and tried to really throw it out there under the customers' noses.
 
Blathering and flirting, putting a hand on your arm, giving the plastic smile.
 
Everybody going for the same lousy buck.

The need to sigh rose in his chest but he crushed it back down.
 
She had a strong chin, a delicate cheek, and short brown hair that framed her heart-shaped face.
 
A sudden jab of melancholy got him low, the way it always did when he realized he couldn't think sweet thoughts about girls like this anymore.
 
They just made him into a dirty old man now, and he didn't know how it had happened.

"No, just a beer this time," he said.

"Charlie's on break," she told him, with a worried tone.
 
It perked him up in his seat.
 
She frowned in a little girl, brooding manner, and he thought anybody who made her pout like that should be buried under the cesspools of hell.

"Who's Charlie?"

"The bouncer.
 
It looked like a calm night so he took off with his girlfriend for a little while."
 
She caught her bottom lip between two teeth and worked it for a second.
 
"They're making fun of him, aren't they?
 
And he doesn't know it."

"He knows it," Vin told her.
 
"Even his dog knows it."

"He sells magazines on the corner with another old guy."

"I know, I see him all the time."

"I hope there's no trouble."

She'd been handing Vin his drinks for two hours, but the sudden shift in mood somehow brought them together now, alerted them to one another's presence.
 
She gave him a hard look, the kind that took in details besides your face.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"This is a dive," she said.
 
"Mostly for drunks and bachelor parties and dumb kids who don't have the money to go see real erotic dancers."

"You don't show much loyalty to your boss."

"This is a stop-gap. I just got out of school.
 
Fashion design.
 
Visual merchandising.
 
The real job in the city with
Truex
& Balenciaga
doesn't start until the end of the month."

"Seventh Avenue," Vin said.
 
"Quite a step up from this neighborhood."
 
He shrugged and, almost with an air of surrender, nodded.
 
"My father used to drink here with his buddies, back in the day.
 
We lived around the corner.
 
I still do, five houses down from where I grew up.
 
This wasn't a strip joint back then, just a local pub.
 
Not choice by any stretch, but some class, at least for the locals.
 
A couple of the Brooklyn golden gloves champs, Johnny
Tormino
and
Jojo
Lebowski
, used to hang around here."

"I don't know who they are."

"No reason why you should.
 
Just a couple of guys who had some great stories."

"Are you a boxer?" she asked.
 
"You look in shape, like you could do some damage if you wanted to."

"For my age?"

"You're not that old."

It was true, but it almost never felt that way.
 
He'd turned some kind of corner not long ago and hadn't been the same since.
 
He was thirty-nine and hadn't gone too far to fat yet, and he could still quote Browning and Keats when the mood called for it, but that didn't happen anymore.
 
Perhaps it never really had.

Another eruption of scarcely-contained malicious laughter, the kind of giggles the psychopaths on the ten o'clock news gave all the time.
 
The blind man spoke quietly and they were still touching him, thumping his shoulder.
 
Vin wanted to smash a bottle over somebody's face, but there still wasn't any visible reason for all the tension going through his guts.
 
He wondered if he was starting to lose the nature of his character, the way his father had at about this age.
 
Getting a little stupid, always sitting in the chair, silent and staring off.
 
With almost no real identity at all at the end.

The jocks called her over and she went to take their orders.
 
Vin locked up again.
 
One kid put his hand on her hip, another pressed himself in close, showing off his teeth.

 
It always came down to this, the anger stirring inside him, the jealousy about any woman he even looked at.
 
He brought the glass up to his mouth but it was empty.

One of the flat-
chested
dancers walked across the stage and tried to make eyes.
 
She swung around the pole and jiggled what little meat she had.
 
You could count every rib if you wanted, and her nostrils were pink with flaring busted capillaries.
 
Bony but with stretch marks around her nipples.
 
Another coke head with a couple of kids being taken care of by her parents.
 
She used pancake to cover over the bruises on her legs, but left the rug burns on her knees for everyone to see.
 
Maybe it was supposed to be a turn on.
 
Vin was usually confused about shit like that.

The waitress moved by him on the run and said, "I'll get your beer in a sec."

"Okay."

The stripper didn't appreciate his lack of interest and really started doing her best slap and grind.
 
It was so pathetic that he nearly laughed, until he realized what he must look like from the other side of the stage.

A graying middle-aged guy with his own scars and pock-marks,
stubbled
and squinting, the wrinkled around his eyes deep enough that they needed to be dusted.
 
In a dive like this on a Friday night, with an overflowing ashtray and a couple of empty shot glasses in front of him, sitting around and waiting for money or happiness or fate to fall through the ceiling and into his fucking arms.

He handed her a five dollar bill and she gave him the imitation smile and wandered off down the stage.

She did the same shimmy in front of the jocks and the boys roared.
 
There had been three just like them in college with Vin, twenty years ago.
 
Del, Philly, and Bent. He was the bookworm anchor to their boisterous clique, and for a long while he'd admired them with a strange joy, sick with envy.
 
Until one by one they'd all fallen away to pregnant girlfriends, factory jobs, and jail time.

Now here they were again, alternate versions of Del, Philly, and Bent, but so much like them in subtle mannerisms, down to their sharp movements and the near-hysteria in their laughter.

The German Shepherd swung its snout towards Vin and gazed at him with sorrowful eyes.

Still waiting for his beer, he looked down and saw that not only had the waitress already brought it to him, but he'd finished more than half the bottle.

Christ, just like Dad.

He took out a ten and left it for her, spun from his seat and moved towards the door.
 
A growing anxiety kicked him along.
 
As he passed the German Shepherd, he held his hand out and the dog licked his wrist, folding its ears back and cringing as the noise surged again.

The blind man was no longer smiling.
 
He said a few quiet words Vin couldn't pick up, and then his lips appeared to weld together forming a bloodless line.
 
His chest heaved as his breathing became rapid.
 
The waitress came by with more drinks and the boys sucked them down, and another burned out dancer commenced to stick it in front of them.