Futile Efforts Read Online Free PDF Page A

as though he might actually respond and grow hard.   Her tongue darted to his balls, swabbing them lovingly.   It didn't affect me the way I thought it might.   It didn't fill me with heat, I didn't want her, and even the familiar sadness and desire was gone.
    Jude let out with a caterwaul laugh and went to get another stick she could use to prop up his dick.   She struggled off into the night still pouring blood.
    I wandered down the shore in the opposite direction. I couldn't figure out why the coast guard had given up searching the area, except that maybe the ferry had been close enough to Echo Island for most of the bodies to wash up there.   The currents were odd in the channel.   Bodies that were only a foot away in the water might have wound up drifting miles apart from each other.
    Sea spray blew into my face.   Timbers of the lighthouse groaned and gasped in judgment.   History and change streamed on the wind, no different than ever before.   The downed ferry probably still hadn't completely settled into the silt at the bottom of the channel.   I'd only by chance become a part of some much larger force.   A process, an alchemy designed to take what was common and turn it into the extraordinary.
    The night wasn't done with me yet.
    I found the girl.
    She floated in the weeds like drowned Ophelia, buffeted by the softest edges of   the dying, ebbing waves.   She lay out before me like every heartache I'd ever suffered, each unfulfilled goal that had turned into hell.   I swayed.   She held a purity that I'd never seen in anybody before, a simplicity and naked depth that weakened my knees but drew me forward.
    I didn't want to touch her and ruin this grand image.   Gradually, the waves brought her up to shore and released her into the sand at my feet.
    In life she'd had golden hair but now it was thick with seaweed and glowed a bitter bone white in the moonlight.   Drops of water rolled off the muscles of her neck, shoulders, and thighs, leaving the lightest of salt trails behind.   She wore a light cotton summer dress and the slap of the breakers had actually folded her hands across her belly.   She looked healthy and melancholy.
    One freckle-spotted breast had worked free—the nipple small and pink, not entirely hard but just enough to give it a point.   I moved to clench her and stopped, then gently placed her breast back inside her dress.
    Over my shoulder, Wes chuckled and hissed his hatred.
    "Watch this," he said.   "I'm gonna fuck this dead bitch.   Right here, in front of that other cunt."
    He still thought there was something left to be jealous about.   He'd hold onto his wrath even when there was nobody left to be furious with.   He found no solace and saw no beauty in this alchemist's dream occurring around us.
    "Leave her alone," I said, but he didn't hear me.   We both planted our torches.
    "You're gonna see something now, man.   Jude is gonna learn two can play at a game as sick as this."
    "Wes—"
    "What, she thinks cutting up her pussy on a dead kid is going to make me feel sorry for her?   Gonna make me love her more?   Fuck no!   I'm looking forward to this."
    I walked back over to where Freddy's pants lay and worked the belt loose.   Betty and Jude were still busy with fixing up Sol's dick with a stick.   I scanned the area for Dan and found him staggering out along the butte.   I couldn't have rushed out there in time to save him from throwing himself down against the rocks, and I didn't want to.   I watched him drop from sight.
    I raced back to Ophelia.   Wes had gotten her dress off.   Her arms lay over her head and she appeared to be scowling, the terror of rape written in the lines and shadows of her features.   He'd forced her eyes open.
    "This frigid bitch is mine."
    "Leave her," I said again, even more softly, but this time he heard me.
    "What?"
    "Go away and let her alone."
    "So," he said, letting loose that crazed laugh.   "You've got some rage of your