Mile Zero (6 page)

“I’m not going to give it up, St. Cloud.” Angelica backhanded new tears. “Why should I? You understand?”

“Why should you. Never. Thanks for the drinks. On the house?”

“The credo of the single woman is romance. I won’t give it up.”

“Never.”

“Why should I?”

“Shouldn’t.”

“Yes. It’s on the house, for you always.”

“Always.”

“Isn’t it just awful about those forty-one Haitians?”

“Always.”

The television flickered more ghostly images of the previous day’s tragedy. St. Cloud tried to fix his wavering triple vision on the ghosts. Nothing seemed steady. Something still wasn’t right up there on the screen where a medevac helicopter pilot was shouting at a television reporter above the roar of the crowd surrounding the race judges’ platform:
“Then the two lead boats drew hull to hull, had to swerve to miss the drifting Haitian boat! I don’t know how the Haitian boat got on the course so fast, must have been sucked in by a strong
current, appeared from nowhere, the pace boat didn’t even have time to run a red flag! Suddenly it looked like all three boats were going to eat it! When you’re blasting through heavy seas like that you run the risk of hooking the boat if you bank into a tight curve, catching a sponson hull in a wave and flipping! That happens there is a kill cord attached to the Driver which cuts the engine if he is thrown! Today there wasn’t time for that! Nobody stuffed under a wave, instead there was just a big explosion! We could actually see Karl Dean and his Throttleman blow right out of the water! Then Miami Kid pulled away, alone in the lead! Things were moving so fast the Haitian boat went drifting through falling debris from Karl’s destroyed boat! It was an inferno out there! Before I had a chance to jump from the chopper into the water it was too late. Bloody chaos!”

St. Cloud felt a stiffening in his neck, a numbing from a viselike grip which sent a persistent ache down his spinal cord. Something wasn’t right up there on the ghostly television. Who knows what the Saints are eating these days? Just what did Justo mean by that? Something not right up there but something not right down here. The hoarse laughter in St. Cloud’s ear focused him. He hunched his shoulders to shrug off the numbness in his neck. The laughter grew louder, it was not coming from the blurred crowd behind him, but was right in his ear. He tried to turn around but couldn’t. He felt his neck was stuck. He realized the numbness was not from the quarts of alcoholic novocaine he had poured into his body since the morning before, but from massive fingers clamping the back of his neck with the improbable iron tenacity of someone whose idea of a handshake was trying to squeeze toothpaste out of a shark. St. Cloud was held in the grip of a man who made his living on the ocean.

“I’m a fishin man! My father was a fishin man before me and his before him!” The words rushed into St. Cloud’s ear, the hand clamped on his neck in a shark-killing grip opened.

St. Cloud turned to a fierce red face burning with the fervent desire which can only be instilled in the true believers who imbibe a bottle of cognac before each and every dawn. St. Cloud was too deep in personal disintegration to hail this fellow sailor on a sea of booze. It was all he could manage to create a weak smile of greeting and let the Charter Boat captain belt out his standard line.

“This town is being ruint! Faggots and foreigners tryin to drive us Conchs into trailer camps!”

At last St. Cloud was inspired to summon insightful words to go
along with the idiotic drunken smile he felt frozen on his face. “Great to see you again, Bubba-Bob.”

“You can see the fruits and nuts skippin all around the island in loafers with no socks!” Bubba-Bob pushed himself back two steps from the bar, spread his feet out and stomped them solidly on the floor. “Lookit this!” Bubba-Bob jerked his fish-gut-stained khaki trousers high off his ankles. “White socks! Real men wear white socks!
Fishin
men wear white socks!”

“High fashion and social sobriety.” St. Cloud looked approvingly at the white socks. “That’s what you and I represent, sartorial splendor in the turtle grass. The last smart but fashionable holdouts.”

“Goddamn right!” Bubba-Bob dropped his trousers and cocked his head defiantly at the unseen sockless hordes about to crash the doors and invade this early morning moment when he was on the verge of hitting someone. “You want a drink?”

St. Cloud crossed his sockless feet beneath the lower rung of the barstool and hoped for the best. “Always a pleasure.”

“Angelica! Again for my best bubba!” Bubba-Bob threw an arm around St. Cloud with the fervor of a lifeguard pulling a drowning man to shore.
“Salud!”
He slammed the glass Angelica refilled into St. Cloud’s full glass and drank with a hearty gurgle. “Yes sir, you are my bubba. You helped me out once, professor. A bubba never forgets.”

“Never?” St. Cloud raised his glass in brief contemplation before emptying it.

“But this town!” Bubba-Bob banged his empty glass down, no amount of alcohol could derail his one-track mind. “This town is finished. I remember this town when wood boats weren’t made of fiberglass and pussy was cunt.”

“Great memories.”

“Hey! You still sniffing around that little girl who works in your wife’s parrot store? You want to get women? I’ll tell you how to get women. Same way my daddy taught me how to get fish. A good fisherman is not lucky. A good fisherman finds the fish who are
unlucky
. What you’ve got to find is a woman unlucky enough to end up with an asshole like you.”

St. Cloud weighed this logic carefully, smacked his lips in contemplation, then decided to go for it hook, line and sinker, but before he could Brogan leaned around in front of him, staring Bubba-Bob in the face.

The thick gold earring pierced through Brogan’s right earlobe throbbed with the shadowed blade reflection from the twirling overhead fan. “My brother says Central America is like a rat without a head.” Brogan’s words flew from his mouth into the whir of the fan blades. “My brother says everybody down there is running around like rats without heads.”

I
F A MAN
wants to get up in the morning he does not drink himself into oblivion the night before. Obviously St. Cloud had not wanted to get up. It was too early in the morning for him to be at the Star of Cuba laundromat, deep into a fifth cup of
buche
as he watched the clothes of strangers crash around behind portholes of scratched glass on dryer doors. At least something was on its way to being dried, if not purified. The machine heat from groaning washers and dryers made the humid day even more unbearable. Why was it the best
buche
shops in town seemed to be in abandoned gas stations turned into laundromats? To get to the source of
buche
in this laundromat St. Cloud had to walk the length of the moldy concrete building, past rows of machines, where a slot had been cut through the wall. A smiling Cuban woman on the other side of the slot cheerfully squeezed from steam-hissing steel nozzles a caffeine nectar to jangle the nerves and propel the timid. Hot liquid in a hot room in a hot town.

Justo nudged St. Cloud, puckered his lips and swigged his seventh
buche
of the morning. “One hour,
una hora
, I want you at the courthouse. The kid’s life could depend on it. You’re not there it’s your hung-over college-educated ass that will be on the line.”

“Okay, so I missed the arraignment earlier this morning. You going to have the judge empower you to jail the court-appointed interpreter for contempt?”

“Not a bad idea. You and Voltaire in the same cell. That way I’ve got the two of you together and I won’t have to go searching every bar in town to find you.”

“Voltaire’s the boy’s name?” St. Cloud squinted into heat ascending
thick as a tropical mist from clothes being folded at long tables by chattering Cuban housewives, none of the women over twenty-five, each dressed as if ready to run away to Miami, high heels and brightly painted fingernails, tight pants and careful white ankles, a roomful of passion thrilling to the
buches
they sipped to fuel their insouciant chatter. St. Cloud liked their style, among other things. These sultry beauties turned the drudgery of their daily lives into a full-dress operatic rehearsal of jealousy and hate, bartering back and forth a currency of ever changing value, gossip.

“That’s the kid’s name alright, Voltaire Tincourette. Speaks only that Haitian
paysan
dialect you heard on the boat.” Justo pursed his lips at another hot cup of
buche
, looking at St. Cloud across the cup’s rim. “Can’t understand a thing Voltaire says, except that he’s scared as hell.”

“Voltaire.” St. Cloud spoke the name as if it were a code that would release him from the reality of his own life, allow him to walk through the mist of the laundromat and invite all the lively Latin beauties up to the pink palaces of Miami. He wondered which one of their husbands would have a knife up his heart before he made it past the greyhound dog track at the edge of town. “Those French colonialists really had a sense of humor, naming their slaves after philosophers. Maybe that’s what they really thought the philosopher’s role was, verbal piecework for the intellectual glory of the race.”

“You’ve got a verbal piece of work cut out for you this afternoon in the courtroom. Don’t make me come looking for you again or I’m going to let the husbands of these fine married ladies know what’s going on in that diseased mind of yours.” Justo laughed and slapped his broad chest, walking into the mist of steaming stacks of clothes. The young women stopped their chattering, glancing at him respectfully with an unconscious slight bow. Justo wagged a finger playfully at them before disappearing through the door.
“Di tu secreto a tu amiga y seras su cautivo.”
Tell your secrets to a friend and you will always be her prisoner.

St. Cloud still had some time before he had to present himself hung over and bleary-eyed at the courthouse. He winked at the chattering housewives. They had no reason to show him the respect they showed Justo, they acted as if he were nothing more than an unfolded stack of baby diapers. St. Cloud strolled down the aisle of groaning machines, leaving behind a bevy of slippery tongues and the smoking embarrassment of his shabby fantasy. He opened the
door of the laundromat onto the normal high-noon heat, which had blasted all but mad dogs and tourists off the streets. St. Cloud set off sailing down the sidewalk under full
buche
steam. Sweat beaded around the inside rim of his faded salt-stained sailing cap; from behind his black-as-sin sunglasses the world was looking pretty perky, everything clear as a ship’s bell. Maybe a line of remembered poetry would come today, had to stay alert in case it slanted at him from around the corner of a freshly lime-color painted Conch house, or came swinging down out of the sun, erupting quick as a Caribbean waterspout in the middle of the rutted street. Just couldn’t be too careful when a line of forgotten poetry was out there on the loose, somebody had to stay awake for it. St. Cloud appointed himself the sleeper with a watchful eye, but so many distractions, like a carload of young Cuban housewives, finally unshackled, freed from macho greed of overbearing husbands, a carload of uncorked female Latin sizzle zooming over the Seven Mile Bridge headed to high-rise palaces of pink Miami, brightly painted toenails tapping to a zingy tropical beat, sweat on gold crucifixes swinging between breasts. Why did young Cuban women have such careful white ankles? The cocked concrete finger of the Seven Mile Bridge was such a man-made marvel it could be seen by the Space Shuttle crew two hundred miles overhead, in earthly orbit as St. Cloud shuffled along the cracked sidewalk. All manner of things were balanced in the heavens. A perfect line of poetry could fall to earth like a burning comet or a scuttled Space Shuttle, a mundane-bound metaphoric spin in a topsy-turvy tailwind, ending in so much cosmic dust. St. Cloud had to stand guard for its coming. Why do Cuban women smell like burst pomegranates when they sweat, ruby dark fruit beyond perfume, a very good moment to inhale papaya passion and mango persuasion, take one last breath and die a little bit happy. Perfect ankles in an imperfect world. It could be worse.

ST. CLOUD
opened the front door of the bird shop, stepping into air-conditioned air beaten by colorful tropical wings accompanied by squawks and shrills announcing his male intrusion. He stood within a cave of steel cages, trying to adjust to a sudden thirty degree temperature drop and cool overhead fluorescent lights casting an iridescent glow over red-bellied macaws, plum-headed parakeets and suspicious Aztec conures. He wondered where
she
was amongst all
this exotic plumage. Got to be somewhere in this fine-feathered sideshow. Talk about a perfect line of poetry,
she
was a singing sonnet, a bluebell on a glacier mountainside, clearly a no-vacancy at the Heartbreak Hotel item, just one look and you could kiss yourself good-bye in the mirror.
She
was a one-way ticket to Lonely Street. Where was
she?
Always have to stand guard, somebody had to stay awake for it, don’t know when it’s going to show up, what form it will take, what one wouldn’t do for just one perfect line of the stuff, search out that fateful potential moment which can offer a lifetime of unrequited love, or a last train to oblivion. All aboard.