The weight of Brogan’s body shifted on the barstool, knocking against St. Cloud. Brogan’s heavy insistence was not that of a drunken challenger or an overzealous friend, more like an anxious load seeking universal balance. “Have I ever told you about my brother?” Brogan raised an emptied cocktail glass close to his lips, his words echoing up with urgency. “My brother’s a sort of adventurer down in Central America. Yeah, that’s what he is, a sort of adventurer.”
St. Cloud knew enough to write a book about Brogan’s brother and always wanted to hear more, but sliding his attention over to Brogan on the stool next to him was going to be a tricky maneuver. The blood of St. Cloud’s veins hummed with the sugar slush of rum; any coherent thought trying to swim upstream to his brain was almost certain to drown. First things first. St. Cloud struggled to focus his eyes from the television set, down the mirrored wall into the narrow runway behind the bar, where Angelica reigned supreme. He tried to steady the blond vision of Angelica, tears streaming down her cheeks as she poured a Niagara Falls of alcohol into drained glasses held out to her along the bar. Angelica’s white shorts were of such insignificant material they could be stuffed into a whiskey shot glass with room left over for two olives. Each time Angelica spun around in a provocative pirouette, bending over to expose fleshy charms as she snagged yet another bottle of West Indies rum, enough silent prayers went up from the men along the bar to have turned the tide of the Crusades. Angelica presented a fast-moving target for St. Cloud, he struggled to keep the target steady as she poured rum to the top of Brogan’s empty glass without his asking for it. She wiped tears from her eyes, holding the bottle of rum up expectantly before St. Cloud, her smoky voice delivering the slow curve of a daring confrontation. “Why don’t you just take me away from all of this and fuck me?”
Brogan sucked the rum out of his glass in one gulp. “My brother says Central America is where the buck bucks. He says what’s going on down there is like a poker game with your mother. You can only play that game one way. To the end. You lose, you are not born. You win and you can’t live with your conscience, because you have fucked your mother over. What was that you just said, Angelica?”
“I asked St. Cloud why he just didn’t take me away from all of this.”
Brogan raised his empty glass to Angelica in an unsteady salute. “I was talking about motherfuckers. I was talking about politics. I was talking about my brother.”
“He was my brother and now he’s dead.” Angelica brushed a new set of tears from her eyes.
“What are you talking about?” Brogan stammered, lowering his glass in disbelief. “MK is not your brother. MK is my brother. Did I ever tell you how MK got his name?”
“Karl Dean is what I’m talking about, you jerk. Karl Dean was my brother and now he’s dead.”
“He wasn’t your brother.” Brogan shoved his empty glass across the bar. “He was your lover.”
“You’re all my brothers.” Angelica poured Brogan another drink, her tears splashing on the mahogany gloss of the bar top.
Among Angelica’s many charms, which St. Cloud found too numerous at this moment to count, she had one seductive quality that went unrivaled. This quality, which attracted St. Cloud most to Angelica, was that she was wicked and there, immediately available in a way which intended no harm to others. Angelica wasn’t a beat me, whip me, bite me, make me write bad checks girl. Angelica was a woman clearly without her own mind and never in need of it; she functioned on a level of selfless emotions. At the point in her life when most other women begin to wear jewelry to enhance their fading youth, Angelica wore less makeup and fewer clothes. Instead of dressing in a manner designed as sensible, Angelica was in headlong pursuit of the irresponsible. She had a reputation, among the town’s self-appointed male judges of female virtues, as having at any one given moment the hardest nipples and the softest heart. Angelica was a northern woman who had drifted on a bet and a dare along the high-rise, time-sharing Gulf of Mexico coast, and ended up in the southernmost Redneck Riviera. But Angelica was not a Saturday night tickle to be found seven nights a week in the Wreck Room. She was no hillbilly harlot or card-carrying member of the drug-a-day club, rather, she was the marrying kind who spent her whole life trying to prove she wasn’t the marrying kind. Even Angelica’s five-year-old daughter knew that. Angelica was the kind of woman who aimed to please, and aimed straight. Right now St. Cloud knew her aim was targeted at him. That didn’t stop Brogan from rattling on anyway.
“Yeah, you could call my brother an adventurer I guess. MK’s done all the usual stuff. You know, blowing up power stations of little Marijuana Republic islands so his men could load grass onto boats in the harbor and slip away under cover of darkness. MK’s been chased by Cuban gunboats in the Bimini Windward Passage. He even had a small nine-hundred-acre garden in Jamaica on the side of a mountain in Rasta Cockpit country. Thick jungle, had to truck the marijuana harvest out on donkeys, MK cut their vocal cords so nobody knew they were mule-training by. Those gentlemen donkeys had their ball bearings whacked off too, so they handled sweet as Bambi. Did I ever tell you how my brother got his name? MK was real decorated in the Nam war. I mean heavy decorated.”
St. Cloud wanted to hear the story again. The story always changed a little, but over the years he had heard Brogan talk of MK the central facts remained the same. MK was everything St. Cloud wasn’t. MK had been Special Forces in Vietnam during the 1960s when St. Cloud was marching against the war in San Francisco, having people spit on him and hiss Commie, that was the usual stuff back then. It seemed to St. Cloud now, after twenty years had passed, some curious circle was bringing him and MK together, fusing them in a bond of unfathomable brotherhood, inexorable and uncomfortable.
Angelica’s tears were melting the hardened sugar in St. Cloud’s veins. He cocked himself up on the barstool and leaned over the counter, wrapping his arms around Angelica so her face rested against his chest. Angelica’s sobbing shook the two of them until St. Cloud almost lost his balance and pitched over backward.
“Karl Dean was a great man!” Angelica sobbed against St. Cloud’s chest.
“Yes.” St. Cloud held onto Angelica for dear life. He knew if he let go he would take such a fall he would never get up. “Karl was a regular guy.” The sugar had not melted so much in St. Cloud’s veins that he didn’t know Karl Dean was one of the most disagreeable scammers in a town that prided itself in producing one hundred percent disagreeables. Karl was just another homegrown boy who figured out before he left high school that he could pump gas the rest of his life or run a few fast boats around in the dark across shallow water and get paid big money for the least amount of questions asked. Karl had a solid gold watch, but he could barely tell time or count to ten using the fingers of both hands. Karl always had one eye on the next girl in town to turn fifteen, the other eye on himself in the mirror resting on his knee as he snorted up his daily five G’s. A real regular guy around the island. Racing boats was not a sport to Karl, but a way of life, same as war games are not games to soldiers. On a small island full of hotshot boys in tight Hawaiian shirts and diamond earrings pierced in their ears, Karl was no different. He bragged about his educational shortcomings, flashed his hundred-dollar rolls of loot, and spent his early mornings in the din of the Wreck Room trying to find some lucky girl to get pretty with him on the mirror.
“Oh God, St. Cloud.” Angelica righted herself up and dabbed at her tears with a bar napkin. “I knew you had a good heart.”
St. Cloud took the bar napkin from Angelica and touched up the trickle of tears still running down her cheeks. “I don’t have such a good heart, it’s only that Karl was a regular guy. Me, I’m a man beyond belief.”
“Hey! What is this? I’m a professional.” Angelica snatched the tear-soaked napkin from St. Cloud and tossed it into the trashcan behind her. “Enough of the wake. Karl Dean was an asshole. Can I offer you boys a mescal nightcap?”
“Delighted.” Brogan accepted the offer for the two
of them.
St. Cloud knocked back four shots of Mexico’s meanest, Angelica’s face beaming before him, her cheeks high and dry now, her cheeks ringing red and gorgeous, contrasting against the skin of her slender neck, skin more blond than flesh-colored, almost the same blond as her cropped hair; she was St. Cloud’s arctic queen, radiant among the denizens of the tropics. He wondered how she did it. All night in bars, all day in bed. Angelica had the kind of high cheekbones that up north in New York were called money bones, the fashionable bones of a model. She could have made a fortune as a department store rag ramp-runner, instead she ran the gauntlet behind the Wreck Room bar, and gallantly sported St. Cloud to forehead-numbing mescal. He was awed and humbled. Once again he was falling in love with Angelica.
“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.”
4
IF 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.”<
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“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.”
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