Futile Efforts (3 page)

A coast guard cutter trailed by, and about ten minutes later another one.
 
They each had their searchlights on, scanning the water.

"Do you think something happened out there?" Dan asked.

"Don't know," Wes said. "Maybe an accident?"

"Out this far from the channels?"

"A couple of
stupidass
kids probably stole their daddy's sailboat and got lost."

"Dumbass pricks."

I turned on the car radio and tuned in to a local news station.
 
It was the major breaking story, although there wasn't much information yet.
 
Betty moved in next to me, listening as she pressed against my body.

"Holy Christ," she whispered, then stood and called into the wind.
 
"They're saying a ferry sank off Echo Island.
 
Forty people are missing."

"More of those club scene mutts," Wes said.
 
"Think of all the Jaguars and Mercedes that went down with them.
 
The
clammers
are going to be picking hood ornaments out of their rakes for the next month."

I turned off the radio and perused the waves, the night tide dragging up all kinds of detritus.
 
The coast guard must've assumed the ferry had been far enough towards the island to base their rescue mission much further west.
 
The couple of stray cutters we'd seen were just checking along the outer edge of their search grid.

The girls collected some driftwood while Dan I gathered stones to form a pit.
 
We started a small fire and sat around it with the blankets and beers.
 
I'd stocked some sandwiches in the cooler and, except for Wes, we all ate, mostly in silence.

This would be about the time that things would be at their roughest, as we watched one another and moped and considered ourselves in the eyes of each other. Our histories should not have been so entwined, but when I thought about it, I couldn't come up with any poignant or even especially distinct memories.
 
It all just sort of blurred and fused together.
 
There was just a dull wash of the blunted past putting pressure on the back of my head.
 
They felt the same way.
 
It's just as easy to become sick of your friends as it is to become sick of yourself.

Wes had moved out along a butte and stared down at the rocks below, smiling.

"The hell are you doing out there?" Dan called.
 
"There's one roast beef hero left and I'm eating it if you don't move your ass."

Taking off his jacket, Wes climbed a bit further down as the waves kicked up against his boots.
 
The moon flashed off his teeth and he let out an odd yelp, and then did it again.
 
I finally realized he was laughing.

"You see something?" Jude asked.

"Yeah," Wes said.

She waited at least a ten count.
 
"Well, what is it?"

"Some drowned fucker caught in an eddy."

They'd been together for so long that Dan and Betty both had the same sort of titter.
 
They brushed Wes off and Dan tossed his
can
into the fire, where it hissed and snapped.
 
He took another and cracked it as Jude looked over at me.
 
She knew Wes wasn't kidding and so did I.

There were plenty of stupid tricks to be played, but not about death and not by him.
 
He sounded so much like my father that I could almost imagine the man out there instead of Wes, staring over the whitecaps and ready to hurl himself in.

Jude tongued her torn lip and touched the holes he'd made in her flesh.
 
She tensed so much that I heard her elbows pop.

I got up and wandered over to the butte, walked out among the larger rocks and stood beside him.
 
He said, "That's some unbelievable sight, huh?"

It was.

The corpse rolled over in the water, twisting around and around in his little foaming whirlpool before we could get him up onto land.
 
He was dressed well—in a black silk shirt and dark chinos.
 
A life-preserver was improperly tied around his neck and it appeared that he'd strangled as much as drowned.

Dan had taken the last roast beef sandwich and spit out a mouthful.
 
"Holy shit!"

Betty and Jude stood just out of reach.
 
They weren't frightened.
 
None of us were.
 
It broke up the monotony.

I expected the guy's face to have been torn up by the shoal ridge but when his chin angled towards me I could see that he was handsome and freshly shaved.
 
He still had enough mousse in his hair to make it stand up a bit, a couple of carefully crafted curls in front waving.

I tried to imagine his fear on the ferry as it went down—all that screaming in the dark, people pummeling against you, wondering whether you should leave your clothes on, your shoes and socks on, or strip to your skivvies with the ladies yelling around you.
 
His clothes were new and had cost him too much.
 
I could understand why he didn't want to lose them.
 
His shoes were still tied.

Who could you help, and who would help you?
 
Then into the freezing water, as the ferry went further over on its side, with everybody flopping over each other, and continued to go down.
 
The drag of the great beast holding you under even while the life preserver tried to draw you up.
 
The shrieking need for oxygen.

He couldn't have been dead for very long.
 
There was no bloating at all, no discoloration.
 
He literally looked as if he'd just fallen into the water five minutes ago.
 
Now he wanted to towel off, go out and party, get laid.
 
He'd have to get his clothes dry cleaned, no big deal.

We stood in a ring around him and stared.

Jude said, "He's cute."

"Jesus Christ, is that any way to talk about him now?" Dan said.

"But he is."

"Oh stop it."

"But he is!"

Dan drained the rest of his beer in one gulp.
 
A shiver worked through him and his shoulders tilted.
 
"Guy can't be over nineteen, he must have fake I.D."
 
He glared at Jude as if she'd kicked his puppy to death in front of him.

"What?
 
I'm just saying…and it's true.
 
I mean…right, Betts?"

Betty said nothing, but I knew she liked the look of the drowned guy too.
 
Even his dead lips had a boyish charm about them.

We were getting into something here. Sometimes you have just enough presence of mind to know when you've finally turned a corner and the world will never be the same again.
 
The breeze stiffened and I sniffed to see if the smell of rot was coming off him yet.
 
Instead I picked up on the scent of after-shave that still clung to him.

Dan's hands trembled badly and he
 
began to lose it.
 
His mouth moved but he said nothing.
 
This was an ugly enough matter made worse by the fact that he'd found his younger brother dead a few years back.
 
The kid and his girlfriend had left a long and loving missive behind as part of their suicide pact, locked in with the family mini-van running.
 
They'd worked on the letter together even as the garage filled with carbon dioxide.
 
They'd written poems to one another on a yellow pad, and Dan's brother died in mid-sentence.

The girl had lived.
 
Now she was married to a young exec and they had a baby.
 
She still sent Christmas cards to Dan and his family, and every Christmas he threatened to hunt her down and murder her in her sleep.

"Check his wallet," he said.
 
"See who the fuck he is.
 
Come on, we need to go call the cops."

We all had cell phones but they wouldn't work this far out.

Jude snaked her hand into the dead guy's pocket, feeling around. I could see the bulge of his wallet but she slipped by it and continued on towards his crotch.
 
Wes let out another quiet yelp of laughter and she responded by sighing deeply.
 
Her fingers patted the drowned guy's package.
 
She opened her lip again and a dollop of drying blood worked into the corner of her mouth.

"No no," Dan said, "hey, no."

"So, you like him, Jude?" Wes asked.

His scarred hands were on the kid, tugging the body forward through broken shells and dried seaweed and tossing it down at Jude's feet.
 
Wes still had muscle, and lifting the dead weight on his own barely made him huff.
 
He untied the knotted life preserver and hurled it back across the rocks, grinning ferociously.
 
Veins in his neck and arms stuck out as thick as grubs.

"Take him then.
 
Go on."

The jaws of her muscles tightened and she gave a rictus grin.
 
"Sure, Wesley, if you want me to."

"And what if I didn't want you to?"

"But you do, don't you?"
 
That sigh again, coming from so deep down inside of her that it sounded like a breeze sifting through a cavern.

"And what if—"

"Don't you, you goddamn pig son of a bitch?"

Moonlight draped over the lighthouse and set the windows up top ablaze.
 
They gleamed a vicious silver, staring down on us and holding court.
 
The surf continued to roar and smash against the shore.
 
We were as much a part of the world as the tide, and suddenly I wanted to feel the kid's frigid flesh too and ask him what the hell kind of trip he was on.

"Yeah," Wes told her, "go on."

"Go on and what?"

"You know what," he said, and there was a hitch in his voice, a tiny tremor of fear or reluctance, or maybe it was just perversion.

"Say it for me, Wesley, you bastard."

But he couldn't, at least not all of it.
 
"Let me watch you."

The weight of night grew oppressive and battered the beach.
 
I began to sag a little.
 
Betty let out a groan way in the back of her throat that I found exceedingly erotic.
 
Dan had the shakes and his teeth chattered together so badly that he could've bitten through bone.

He whimpered, "Jesus, no, hey, this isn't funny anymore, look—"

I could see it playing out one moment following the next, as inevitable as our lives leading us, step after step, to the point. I glanced into Betty's eyes and she crooked her head at me.
 
We had maybe one moment left where we could snap free from what was happening, sneak off and get in the back seat of my car and peruse one another in the normal fashion.
 
I would have what I'd always wanted, what I'd dreamed about for ten thousand nights.
 
She could be mine and the ache inside would finally abate, at least a little, and we could share the convenience of a reasonable and routine life.

Betty crooked her head the other way and looked back to the action.

All right, so we were into it.

With his fingers flashing, Wes got the corpse's pants down and Jude let loose with a manic giggle.

"Get on, you
cunt
."

She had some power to her and muscle of her own.
 
She kept her hands on the drowned kid's shoulders, shoving and pinning him down as though he might actually try fighting back.
 
Who knew, maybe he would.
 
I knelt and nabbed the guy's pants, went through the pockets, and came up with his wallet.
 
Frederick Wilson, nineteen years old.
 
Two Gold Cards.
 
No photos.

So Jude was gonna fuck a dead guy.
 
There it was.
 
I could handle that.
 
Dan looked ready to throw himself into the sea.
 
He moaned softly and wrapped his arms around his chest as if to keep his heart trapped inside his rib cage.
 
Betty's fingers clenched at her inner thigh, where she rubbed in a circular motion.
 
I wondered if she might actually begin fondling herself in front of us, and if I could take it.
 
There are people you lust for that you don't even really like, but that doesn't ease the savage and endless burning inside of you.