Mile Zero

by Sanchez, Thomas

  “You haven’t answered Angelica’s question, St. Cloud.” Renoir stretched his legs before him in the wicker chair, folded his hands across his stomach, a pencil-thin Buddha contemplating the ironic answer to all life. “Is she your kind of girl?”

  St. Cloud never noticed Angelica had a small blue squid tattooed on the inside of her left ankle, or maybe he had forgotten, it all seemed so long ago, urgent voices across tranquil sea of alcohol. He spoke softly so as not to sink in the tranquil sea. “Angelica’s not the kind of girl you can take home to your wife.”

  “You did!” Angelica’s words rode in on sudden uncontrollable laughter. “Sometimes I took you home to your wife.”

  “That was the beginning of the end.” St. Cloud felt himself starting to sink.

  Angelica stopped laughing. “For her the end of the beginning.”

  St. Cloud was definitely submerged, he heard his words glub to the surface, weak with exasperation, a plea for a secure handhold to save him from this mess. “Nothing’s forever, not even eternal love.”

  A defiant grin crossed Angelica’s face. “Listen, after you’ve had an orgasm it’s time to get off the stage. Every ham knows that.”

  “He isn’t afraid of these things.” Isaac wheezed. “St. Cloud knows how to make a sandwich with what God gave him. The issue here is that some men mate in captivity, some don’t. In a moment of weakness I mated in captivity once. Look at the result.” Isaac rolled his watery eyes toward Renoir, then thought better of it. “You can only hit a donkey between the eyes with a board so many times before it stops seeing stars in its eyes. Wake up, St. Cloud. I’ve tried to tell you so many times. Fall in love with a town, not a woman. When you get tired of a town you can always leave it. A town doesn’t expect you to call and ask when you are coming back, it doesn’t expect flowers, and it doesn’t shed a tear for your self-pity.”

  “Check the bulge in his pants.” Renoir folded one long leg casually over the other. “St. Cloud is capable of falling in love with Main Street, he’s lucky he can walk down any street without tripping over his third leg. If you put a skirt on every telephone pole in town he would have them pregnant by sundown. Fall in love with a town? What kind of advice is that?”

  “Advice you wouldn’t understand.” Isaac tried to push his shrunken body higher on the throne of oversized pillows. “St. Cloud thinks with his pecker, he’s always corkscrewing his life around in a cockeyed direction, that’s why he’s never out of trouble. By the time he knows where he is his pecker has come and gone two days before. St. Cloud is more of an endangered species than the precious Florida panther.”

  “Pity the poor panther.” Renoir winked at Angelica.

  “I think I’m in love.” The words squeezed out of St. Cloud’s alcoholic swamp. He could not believe he was making a public confession of passion. “Really in love. Only way out is a bullet or a fast train.”

  “No trains through here since the hurricane of ’thirty-five blew out Flagler’s Overseas Railroad. The bullet is your only choice, at least it will save the panthers.” Renoir leaned back in the wicker chair and fixed St. Cloud with a salacious wink. “Who’s the lucky boy you’re in love with?”

  “What was that?” Isaac pushed higher on the pillows. “My hearing is going faster than my eyesight. What did St. Cloud say?”

  “He said,” Renoir shoved out of the wicker chair, “he thinks he’s in love. He’s excited from watching Angelica’s modeling act.”

  “Honey …” Angelica shifted her weight from one high heel to another. “You’re just jealous. Remember, getting the candy out of the wrapper doesn’t always mean you can eat it.”

  “It’s not Angelica.” St. Cloud wanted to set the record straight, though there was no denying Angelica was gorgeous, in or out of the right light. She would be gorgeous in a black room with all the exits sealed. “It’s not you, Angelica. It’s the girl who works in Evelyn’s bird shop.”

  “Oh brother!” Renoir collapsed back into the wicker chair. “It isn’t bad enough you’re raping the environment. Now it’s hey little high-school girl where you goin’.”

  “She’s twenty years old.”

  “Some difference.” Renoir uncrossed his legs. “So it’s Heartbreak Hotel time.”

  “Cut it out, Renoir.” Angelica tapped the toe of her right high heel impatiently, a naked schoolmarm about to lecture. “This could be serious. This could be a major league mistake. We’ve got to make sure he makes it. He’s obviously in pain and wants to share. He’s very generous. He’s fuck struck. Tell us about it, honey.”

  “Hold on.” Isaac sputtered and coughed. “St. Cloud, hand me my breatholator. Steady it for me.” Isaac clutched St. Cloud’s guiding hand, placed trembling lips to the plastic mouthpiece. He inhaled with a fervent rasping as his dim eyes roved over the shape of Angelica standing at the foot of the bed. He slipped wet lips from the breatholator, revitalized. “Look at this girl!” Isaac rubbed the thick black veins of his frail hands in glee, smiling with uninhibited pleasure. “St. Cloud, this is the girl for you! The softer they are the harder they come. She’s the truest Christian on this godforsaken rock, all she has to do is walk down the street to have every man in her wake bumping into the wall as he follows along like a starved hound in search of a butcher shop. Even now she can make me rise. Not really, since they took those big arteries out of my legs, which I made Renoir promise not to let them do before I went in for the operation. I said I’d rather be dead than no longer be able to rise to the occasion. Since the operation I really can’t get it to move let alone rise. But I’m at my best with it every morning, because my brain remembers the blood swelling to attention between my legs for seventy-two years. My brain wakes up with a hard-on. The mornings I have Angelica here I’m like a man with an amputated leg who can feel his toes twitch. I’m telling you, Angelica is solid gold right down to her soul. You’ve been mooning over this girl in the bird shop for two months now. That’s going to end badly. No matter how pretty they are, the boredom of a young woman finally catches up with you. You have to train them. Then what do you do with them? It’s like training a seal. Endearing at first, but who wants to walk around with a pocketful of sardines for the rest of his life? Forget the Georgia peach. You’re better off with Angelica. She’s the kind of woman who won’t take yes for an answer. Angelica is truth in packaging. Christ, what a package. Look at it! A whore in tart’s clothing. You can pay her or marry her. What difference does it make? If all it cost you is money you are coming out ahead of the game. Angelica is like a once-in-a-lifetime bright diamond thrown into a ring of ignorant thieves. Pick it up, boy! Pick it up! Don’t disappoint an old man.” Isaac’s liquid gaze drifted from St. Cloud to Angelica, then poked around at shadows in the room, finally lighting on Renoir, who was turned to the window feigning interest in a large freighter rounding toward the Gulf on the thin blue horizon. “I keep hoping, you know, even at this late date, maybe watching Angelica, Renoir will feel what I can’t. I named him Renoir after the monumental painter of female flesh of all time until I came along. The real Renoir was an appreciator, a man with an eye for the knowing. I name my kid after him and what do I get? Look at him, would you? Dressed in that crisp white tropical suit you’d think he was going to run downstairs and set the table for Easter dinner. He looks like a maître d’ at the Last Supper.”

  Renoir turned from his maritime interests on the horizon. “Why don’t you give yourself a rest, Dad, at least on your sickbed? Cut the locker-room catechism of heterosexuality and let Angelica go home to her little girl. St. Cloud is going to go out and make a fool of himself, always does.” Renoir arched a bemused eyebrow. “He’s obviously never met a cock more interesting than a cunt.”

  “Funny, I’ve never met a cock more interesting than a cunt.” Angelica shifted her body weight forward, anticipating a strong reaction to challenge such obvious profundity. “And let me tell you, I’ve met some dillies.”

  “St. Cloud, come, get in bed with me. Br
ing Angelica.” Isaac patted the fluffy mattress next to him with a flutter of his frail hand. “Enough talking.” His words sank to a whisper. “Bring the true Christian into bed, the two of you, lie with me.”

  “Going to cost you extra, Isaac.” Angelica bent a foot back and reached around to undo the thin strap of a high-heeled shoe. “Then again,” she dropped the shoe to the floor and raised the other foot, “might not cost you a thing.”

  Renoir slumped into the wicker chair. “You two are going to kill him. Don’t you know when to stop feeding his illusions?”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Isaac raised a frail hand. “Always wanted to die in the saddle.”

  “The saddle?” Renoir shook his head in disbelief. “You can’t even get the horse out of the barn.”

  “Did I ever tell you?” Isaac touched the soft skin of Angelica’s shoulder as she slipped in next to him, his voice dropping to the barest whisper. “Why I started to paint, before the women? It was the clouds. Those ever-changing colors and shapes. So obvious. Always preening to natural advantage of the golden heavens. Hiding from false light. Same way the human form does. Space and calculus on the run from reality. Shape and color haven’t a thing to do with landscape. Beauty is a bluff, it’s false light. You must cut the bodies off from space, eliminate the fraud behind the gimmick so only spinning mass is left. Energy is all. Indelible impression of the vital. Sunrise moment between worlds. Between monsters and humans, netherworlds and upperworlds, darkness and light. Like the green flash out on that big ocean so few people ever see after a lifetime of looking. It’s that separating color one struggles to capture. Birthing color turning to no color in false light between cobalt sea and sky blue sky. All my life I tried to get that false light into my art.” Isaac’s whisper halted, his frail hand slipped from Angelica’s shoulder, eyes widening with anticipation. “There haven’t been clouds over the ocean for two months. Flat, dead doldrums. Maybe I’ll have to leave you all soon. So soon?”

  11

  BEAUTY is a bluff. Love is a blind man’s game. St. Cloud sensed he had a one-way ticket up a self-made Alligator Alley into the jaws of fate. How could a man come so far and not outgrow his stupidity? St. Cloud could no longer outdistance his common sense by flooding a sea of booze over every mindful prick of reality. If beauty is a bluff then Isaac was right about Lila, that after a man reaches a certain age it is difficult to distinguish whether he has fallen in love with a young woman of true beauty, or she appears beautiful simply because she is young. St. Cloud did not know if his heart was being tricked by the fatal attraction of false romantic lights, leading him in desperate pursuit of his own lost youth. Maybe the only thing left he was capable of outrunning at his age was reason. Not much of a victory there, no triumph over the lies he led. St. Cloud was definitely headed up a personal Alligator Alley. There was a fickle feel to it all, a slippery sense he had lost his way. He sensed he had to hang onto his life for dear life. Fate was setting him up, kicking the options out beneath him. He felt the noose of inevitable circumstance as tightly as had an illegal Cuban refugee he had interpreted for several years back. The Cuban was in and out of jail in Miami, then like a piece of steel feeling the inevitable pull of the magnet, was drawn south toward Cuba, finally wandering into a liquor store on Sombrero Key where he found some quick trouble, then was popped in the can for it. The Judge at the Cuban’s trial was a good old boy who stood on the solid pork barrel of redneck justice, fed up with seeing riffraff refugees ripping off America’s abundance, delighted to have an opportunity to get his hands on one of the foreigners before the Feds could whisk the deadbeat away north to one of the country club prisons, which were nothing more than summer camps for perverts and freeloaders. “Why did you go into that liquor store and shoot the owner?” the Judge demanded in a voice which rattled the skeletal bones of the invisible gallery of ghostly Confederate peers he appeared to be addressing, instead of five people in an otherwise barren room. The Cuban shrugged incomprehensibly; he had the gangly body of a man brought up sucking the meat out of chicken necks and eating hard times for dessert. The Cuban asked St. Cloud to have the Judge repeat the question, then grinned with frankness, the answer so simple. “Because el proprietor had dinero in the drawers of the cash register.” “Did you know you were going to rob the store when you went in,” the Judge thundered. “No!” “Then why were you carrying the gun?” This was it, the Cuban had to have St. Cloud reinterpret the question three times, for he couldn’t believe this formidable man in a black robe could ask such a stupid question. The Cuban’s grin opened to a full smile. “Why? Because I never go anyplace without my gun.” So it was that a dog never left home without his fleas, that the only thing history books get right are the numbers of pages they contain, that a man who falls in love with a younger woman is only trying to bluff the inevitable.

  What is the speed limit on Alligator Alley before the obvious crash? Maybe Isaac and Angelica were right, what St. Cloud suffered from was nothing more than a lurid fixation with transitory beauty. If so, he was on the verge of discovering less about himself and more about Lila, time was running out on his bluff. He had long ago reduced his once lofty beliefs into a simplistic profundity, that there are only two types of people in the world, those who want to fuck you, and those who want to fuck you over. He knew Lila was one of those types as he lay listening to her soft breathing next to him in bed. He would not know until he reached the end of Alligator Alley if she was also the other type. A pug puppy, curled against Lila’s back, whined and kicked its small legs, drifting along in its dream, pushing closer to Lila’s moist skin as it grunted its animal pleasure. Staggered lines of moonlight fell through shutters from the far side of the bedroom, tracing the length of Lila’s body, flickering across her skin, creating the illusion she was a shapely heroine in a black-and-white movie. The silhouette of her body fulfilled an unnerving classic vision, appearing to be from another age, possessed of flow and form glimpsed only on certain Greek statues, a timeless suppleness balanced with female fullness, promising perfection beyond the touchable, beyond reach of a mere mortal male attempting to grasp its inner essence. Something glowed from within Lila, surrounded her with a disconcerting aura of antiquity, made more startling because of her youth. St. Cloud wanted to touch her again, simply place his hands on the aura which seemed so palpable and powerful. But he did not wish to awaken her. Did not wish to dispel a moment charged with such vision. Instead he gently moved his fingertips to the exposed pink underbelly of the pug. The dog grunted its pleasure, diminutive feet pawing air in a somnolent attempt of trying to snuggle closer to a dream tit. Such an odd little creature with its shoved-in face flattened to a fleshy pancake, its fat stub of a body ending at a tail cropped unnaturally short. Whatever attracted Lila to this breed was beyond St. Cloud. Perhaps it was the animal’s absurd physiology, the fact that it was so much the opposite of Lila’s own perfection. The queer little package had definitely been delivered at the furthest end of beauty’s eternal measuring stick. Whatever compelled Lila to seek out this breed was now complicated by the fact that the dog had come to play the role of an improbable Cupid. St. Cloud visualized the silly creature flying through clouds, clutching a bow of love with the sharp arrow of romance strung back, set to release quick as a heat-seeking missile searching hapless target. He had offered to accompany Lila on the day she finally saved enough money to buy the puppy, until then the newspaper want ads were growing ever more hysterical: PUGS! THREE BUNDLES OF JOY LEFT! Then, TWO ONLY PURE-BRED PUGS! Finally, LAST CHANCE FOR LAST PUG! After the last ad Lila insisted on making her move. They drove up the Keys in her convertible, top down, wind curling the dress above her knees, hair flying as she roared across bridges from one swampy mangrove mass to the next, the sea going off in inky distance on both sides of the highway as the sun slipped toward the horizon. Afterglow of departing day illuminated an urgency in her face. She possessed a passion which could turn away fatal intentions, or invite fleshy blows, her body o
rchestrated by an arcane dance, which at this moment had nothing to do with her foot pressed flat on the convertible’s gas pedal. Chopped notes of rock and roll flew from the radio as she sped ahead, ever closer to LAST CHANCE FOR LAST PUG!