Mile Zero (44 page)

Hectore was stunned at the blast of language from St. Cloud. Of all the flashing fish churning the addled water of Hectore’s cocaine-dazed brain, the most improbable had jumped tonight. The last thing he expected to hear uttered in a Key West bar was the monumental refrains of Pablo Neruda, whose poetry in Latin America was committed to heart, along with such dates as when Simón Bolívar freed Colombia from the Spaniards, by schoolboys, right-wing judges and Communist priests. “A miracle,” Hectore proclaimed, jamming a Cuban cigar between St. Cloud’s lips and lighting it. He stared into the dilated eyes of this stoned Norteamericano, who didn’t look Spanish but roared epic poetry in a pure Castilian tongue, a miracle improbable as a dog singing an opera in the sweetest Italian voice heard since Michelangelo was paid for his St. Peter’s paint job. Hectore was in a swoon, this poetic Caruso next to him was stoned out of his mind into the mind of another. He ordered Alonzo to chop new snow-white lines on the bar top to celebrate the miracle. Angelica dispensed more cigars and popped a bottle of cognac. She didn’t understand a word of the Spanish that rolled from St. Cloud’s lips, but knew something sensational was happening. Hectore declared the Caruso next to him was nothing short of a saint, only a saint could make such heavenly sounds. The newly sainted St. Cloud told Hectore that he already was a saint, his name was St. Cloud. The saint told Hectore he was making a horrible mistake, that the big man lying on the floor quiet as a billiard ball was really named Bubba-Bob. Everyone in Key West was called bubba, Hectore had the wrong bubba, his bubba lived out by the dog track. If that weren’t true, Hectore was welcome to cut off the eggs between the new saint’s legs, all dozen of them. Hectore was confused, the more cognac he drank the dizzier
he became. He believed he had witnessed a miracle, but he was running out of ideas faster than he was running out of cocaine. When light of a new day appeared through cracks in the Wreck Room shutters, Hectore confided that he loved St. Cloud. He whispered that he wanted to believe what the saint said about Bubba-Bob, for he did not want to teach a lesson to the wrong man, but how could he believe what the saint told him was true, not some trick fish chumming up the swirling waters of both their stoned brains? Hectore demanded from the saint only the truth, then the real miracle happened. St. Cloud looked up to the wall clock behind the bar. It was five minutes to five. He declared that Hectore would hear the real voice of Neruda before the cocks crowed. “Impossible,” Hectore shouted. The whole world knew Neruda died a broken man after Chile’s last freely elected president was shot to death in his palace while still in pajamas. St. Cloud coolly inquired, if Hectore heard Neruda’s voice, would he free Bubba-Bob, would he have faith? Hectore knew this was nothing more than the blessed madness of a crazy saint, but what did he have to lose? If the saint was right, a miracle, if not, chopped eggs all around. St. Cloud instructed Angelica to set the dial of the bar radio to a specific station. Nothing came from the channel except raspy static, piercing the dense smoke of the room. Alonzo pressed his hands to his ears, screaming Hectore was a fool playing a madman’s game. Hectore’s confusion turned to agitation, he raised his knife, the blade facing St. Cloud, “No fucking tricks!” The hands of the wall clock pointed exactly to five o’clock, through radio static a blast of martial music charged into the room. A fervent roll of drums preceded the husky surge of an army chorus, voices rising in rhythmic unison, praising in song the virtues of glorious revolution. Hectore’s back stiffened. The army chorus gave way to a children’s choir, the Cuban national anthem winging into the bar on the airwaves of Cuba’s most powerful radio station. Ninety miles away the anthem roused farmers to work, rallied bureaucrats, motivated lovers and liars, awakened babies, welcomed home cheating husbands and lost fishermen. As the lilting lyrics faded the sonorous intonations of Pablo Neruda’s voice boomed across the Florida Straits, his breath birthing a poetic Southern Hemisphere of clouded volcanic peaks, raging rivers, deserts of copper and jungles of gold. Hectore dropped his knife, his face glowed from alcohol and drug abuse, his eyes brimmed with tears. He had witnessed a true miracle, was in the presence of a verified saint. Outside in emerging dawn the cocks of
Key West crowed. A bet was a bet. Hectore wept, throwing his arms around St. Cloud. Lives were saved.

FOLLOWING
the white cowboy hat through the crowd of costumed people jamming Duval Street, Justo laughed about the life-saving favor Bubba-Bob owed St. Cloud. Most amusing was the fact such a salt of the sea, with a captain’s knowledge of tides and stars, who knew the trickiest currents along the reef and the deepest secrets of bottom fish, remained oblivious to other rules of nature, ignorant to energies abstract and unseeable, this learned wayfarer, who disdained all pursuits beyond those yielding a livelihood from brute will and strong hands, holding himself erect as the standard bearer in the brotherhood of hourly wage earners, had zero comprehension of men who made poetry, much less ever heard of the Chilean poet whose words St. Cloud conjured from static air that long-ago night when he found himself in the right bar at the wrong time. Not all considered St. Cloud a local hero, some said he just pulled a wild gamble with the
Marimberos
, which inadvertently saved Bubba-Bob’s life. Justo knew better, he knew St. Cloud stumbled home each night from the Wreck Room at early dawn, was the kind of man to listen in illumination of alcoholic stupor as Radio Havana signed on the air with rousing revolutionary fervor and recorded verse of South America’s twentieth century Shakespeare. If St. Cloud hadn’t been on top of his game Bubba-Bob would have ended as Hectore promised, with his asshole chained to a palm tree. When Hectore left the Wreck Room the fateful morning of Bubba-Bob’s first poetry lesson he threatened that if St. Cloud was playing false and Bubba Jonesby was not to be found at his trailer by the dog track, then not even Neruda, risen from the dead and walking across water ninety miles from Cuba to Key West, could prevent St. Cloud’s eggs from being smashed to powder as his body beat it to hell. Justo knew Hectore never came back, the
Marimberos
were not to be seen again, nor was Bubba Jonesby, for the following stone-crab season a crab trap was hoisted up while hungry sea gulls swirled overhead, within the dripping marine slime covering the wooden slats was the largest stone crab ever seen, its orange pincers slashing out a foot from its hubcap-sized body. Inside the slats with the feisty monster were mangled bones and the bare white orb of a human skull. The forensic experts in Miami could not match an identity to the strange bony crab bait, but the gut of the giant crustacean yielded a jewel of information, a high-school
graduation ring. The ring bore the insignia of Key West High, its gold sides stamped with the same graduation date as Justo’s. Raised initials carved in the center of the gnawed metal band were barely discernible:
BJ
.

“Hurricane be comin! This parade be wrong! Ol Mister Finito’s goin blow a hole through this island!”

Justo was startled by the words shouted at him from behind on the crowded street, a hand came down on his shoulder. He pulled away from an insistent grasp, turning quickly around into the toothless grin of Bonefish.

“Know how I be knowin Finito comin?” Bonefish ran a bony finger alongside his sun-scarred nose and tapped its bright red tip. “With this hooter is how I knows. Can smell Mister Finito before he gits out of Africa’s, when he’s nothin more than a baby squall. Can smells him comin cross warm waters. These peoples here paradin in streets don’t know Mister Finito like I knows him, don’t know he’s out there lurkin. Finito don’t take no holiday on Halloween, he be up to somethin. These paradin peoples be drunk and wrong, they be dead wrong. This tired old fish know what he know.”

Justo was losing sight of Bubba-Bob’s cowboy hat floating off in the crowd as Bonefish shouted his doomsday pitch above brassy blasts from a Bahamian band of black men strutting past in rows of snappy white uniforms.

“Hey, you need an aircondishner? I got two!”

Justo did not answer, leaving Bonefish behind as he pushed into the crowd.

“Know what else I gots sides the aircondishner?” Bonefish dug his hands into his bulging jacket pockets, “Got me some alligator pears!” He held aloft two gnarly green globes of fruit. “These avocados be savin you! After Mister Finito roars through gator pears be all they is. C’mon back, bubba. Finito be stormin tonight. You gonna die out there with no meat.”

A wedge of human-size dancing pumpkins blocked Justo’s path. He was afraid he was going to lose complete sight of Bubba-Bob’s bobbing cowboy hat. He knocked down two dancing pumpkins refusing to move aside, making only ten yards before being stopped again. A middle-aged woman in a Wonder Woman costume stood before him, waving a foot-long stick with a jagged tin star nailed to its tip.

“You a real cop or what,” the masked Wonder Woman demanded, pointing the sharp star into Justo’s face.

“Real,” Justo grabbed the star stick. “Out of my way.”

“Sure you’re not one of those butch bimbos? Town’s full of disco drag queens and butch bimbos. Impossible to tell who’s cruising who. Told my husband not to bring me here. This place is a drag compared to New Orleans Mardi Gras, a fat dud.”

“Go back to New Orleans then, and move aside.”

Wonder Woman stepped defiantly forward, spreading a bed-sheet cape from outstretched arms, exposing a shapely body encased in skintight red, white and blue star-spangled outfit. “My husband’s President Lincoln, see him over there talking to a palm tree? He’s the one with the phony gray beard and black top hat? He might be six foot three, but he doesn’t have Abe’s foot-long magic twanger between his legs. I mean he’s got nothing. Just like this town, a real fat dud. Understand?”

“No, and I don’t care.” If this middle-aged cutie did not have sense to back off he was afraid of what he might do. Over the top of her spread cape he saw Bubba-Bob’s white cowboy hat cross Duval Street in front of nine marching men dressed as saw blades, waving a banner:
MIAMI CHAINSAW BAND
.

“If you’re a real cop, do me a big favor.” Wonder Woman’s lips formed a wry smile beneath her masked eyes. “Call me a cab. Flew in here two days ago and I can fly out the same way.” She turned her wry smile toward Abraham Lincoln and a youthful man, naked except for a brief Tarzan thong slung around his waist, a spiked crown of palm fronds wreathed around his head. “Abe can stay here and marry that date palm he’s been chatting up for the last hour. If Abe thinks I’m going to put up with that anymore, he’s crazy. This is one Wonder Woman who won’t sit around waiting for an emancipation proclamation of the sexes, not when there are jet planes she won’t. Hey, what’s that? You really
are
a cop!” Wonder Woman’s words were interrupted by static squeal of the two-way radio hooked to Justo’s belt, a dispatcher’s voice announcing a breaking and entering five blocks south, an officer on the scene requesting immediate back-up.

Justo knew it was nearly impossible to move a patrol car through the costumed crowd of revelers, which meant he was the closest cop to give assistance. He also knew who the officer calling for backup five blocks away was. He took off running.

Wonder Woman whooped with excitement, waving the star stick over her head, as if she had been transformed into the Good Witch of the West, bestowing her blessing on a confused Dorothy racing toward Oz.

Justo headed away from the crowd, sprinting down a back alley, emerging onto Whitehead Street. In the distance rose the silhouette of the lighthouse built after the 1840 hurricane, its brick bulk towering above cigarmakers’ shacks. The brilliant lantern eye of the lighthouse had been dark for a generation, no longer guiding ships. The lighthouse guided Justo, he turned the corner before it, stopping at the sound of a burglar alarm ringing from within a wooden shack weathered silver by a hundred summers. Faintly discernible letters on a battered tin sign above the shack’s front entrance had not changed since Justo was a boy:
A. GARCIA & SONS * BUCHES * BOLLOS * CUBAN SANDWICHES
. It was still Justo’s favorite
buche
shop. Pacing beneath the sign was one of Key West’s finest, the redneck rookie whose complaints had led to Justo’s walking a beat this Halloween night. One of the rookie’s hands fidgeted nervously on the handle of a holstered .38, the other hand grasping a flashlight, its sweeping beam landing with a blinding flash in Justo’s face.

“What took you so goddamn long?” the rookie drawled in a guttural growl. “I put the call in twenty minutes ago.”

“Kill the light!”

The beam flicked off.

Justo stepped forward. “What’s the deal?”

“Break-in,” Rod hissed. “No sign of forced entry here, must have broke a back window. Still inside because there’s a wall of cactus behind the store, a monkey couldn’t get over it. Have to come out this way.” He yanked his gun from its holster. “I’ll slip around, cut the electricity to the alarm, then flush em out.”