“Cock.” Andy tossed the empty platter of oyster shells into the weeds. “It’s the cock of the conch.”
“So what?”
“So something you don’t know, if the conch gets his member nipped by a curious crab or a hungry eel the conch grows himself a new one.”
“Astounding.”
“Life in the Florida Keys, eel bites conch cock, end and beginning of story.”
Justo felt uneasy, he was being worked firmly into a corner with nowhere to go. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I’ve only got one cock, with or without polka dots. I’m not about to risk getting it shot off by talking to you about Karl Dean.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want you to tell me anything I didn’t already know.” Justo lied, not knowing what it was about Karl Dean he should be asking.
“Good, because you’re not going to get it. Why don’t you ask me something I don’t care about.”
“What about Karl Dean?”
“Karl Dean is dead.”
“So is James Dean. What’s the news flash?”
“Fast boats. Fast cars. Fast life. Vietnam. Florida. Latin America. Same shit.”
“Same song, different band?”
“Something like that.”
“Colombian band?”
“Said I’m not talking.”
“Bubba band?”
“Ditto.”
“Let’s talk about something you don’t mind talking about.”
“Let’s do that.”
Justo lowered his voice to indicate he thought someone might be crouching on the other side of the neighbor’s fence in the honeysuckle. “Dead goats.”
“Yah, so?”
“Bufo toads with their mouths nailed shut.”
“Huh?”
“Cemetery weirdness.”
“Know nothing about it.”
“Dead goats that write poetry?”
“Yah, like I said, so?”
“So what were you doing up on Sugarloaf Key at night?”
“Waiting for the bats to come home.”
“Did they?” Justo knew the answer to his own question. A large shrimp boatload of marijuana had been moved up the Keys that night. As a spit and slide man and small-time scammer, one of Andy’s brief jobs between women included little odds and ends as a spotter for smugglers, making certain the Coast Guard was not where it was supposed to be when something big and chancy was going down. Andy’s job on the Gulf side of Sugarloaf that night was simply to flash a light or give a radio code-call if things were not as they appeared. Andy was one of many small-time conspirators picking up small change from a major enterprise. In the vast ocean of illegal chance Andy was nothing more than a squid among sharks.
“I think your dog’s eating oyster shells.” Andy nodded toward Ocho nosing through one of the shell mounds, searching for something more edibly rewarding than pearls. “You get that dog out at the track? He one of those losers?”
“Did the bats come home?”
“They say bats have never been in that tower, that the crazy old coot who built it to rid his mangrove real estate of mosquitoes so he could sell it off to midwestern suckers went broke and crazy.” Andy’s smirk returned, he loved being pursued, kept him in shape for the women he fooled into chasing him.
“I hear dead goats write poetry.”
“Something strange. Can’t figure it. Maybe you can. You know a bunch about that Santería sort of thing.” Andy always thought Justo knew too much about that sort of thing. Andy nurtured a derisive contempt for Justo, felt his head was stuffed with so many dead Saints and poets it lent him an air of superiority beyond that normally assumed by people who worked behind a badge. Andy considered this unbecoming in a man of such obvious color. Justo spoke in riddles, blabbed words of poets hundred years gone, conversing sometimes in a language an honest workingman couldn’t understand. Andy didn’t trust himself with this stuff, it was over his head and he wanted rid of it.
“You remember any of the dead goat poetry?”
“Better.” Andy stood. “It was on a sheet of paper nailed to one of those big stilts. I saw it with my flashlight, because when I first come on that goat hanging there in the dark I thought maybe someone had gone and committed suicide out there, or at least someone had helped them with the job. So I shined the light on the paper to see if it was a suicide note. Maybe they was going to leave all their money to whoever found the body. But it wasn’t that. I tore the paper off because, who knows, might be the key to a lost treasure or something.”
“Still got it?”
“In the house. Be right back.”
Ocho wandered over to Justo while Andy was gone. The greyhound rested its head heavily on Justo’s knee, beseeching him with bewildered eyes, not realizing its source of canine discomfort emanated from a gut full of half-chewed oyster shells.
“Here it is.” Andy handed the paper to Justo. “Read up.” He sat down with a heaping platter of oysters, deftly splitting the coarse shells open with the thick blade of a rusty knife.
Justo smoothed the rumpled paper on the tabletop. The letters were writ large and purposefully clumsy, executed with various colored thick-tipped pens in the same style as the note left in the cemetery on Abuelo’s grave.
A GREEN SAILOR LOOKS NORTH
TO CUBAN MARTYRS
WHERE THE TREE OF LIFE
GROWS FROM THEIR HEADS.
THE ANGEL OF DEATH
SMILES UPON ALL.
ZOBOP
A Green Sailor looks north? Justo had no idea what that meant, what martyrs and angels, goats and toads meant. The shadow was rapidly filling with fear. Maybe Andy was an unwitting player in Zobop’s scheme. “You get any of this?”
“Not a thing.” Andy popped an oyster shell open and slurped its contents. “Beats shit out of me total.”
“Mind if I keep it? Want to compare it with some other writings.”
“Be my guest.” Andy tossed an empty oyster shell over his shoulder into the weeds. “All mumbo jumbo anyway, your people’s kinda stuff. But if there’s treasure to be found, we’re partners, right?”
“Got my word on it.” Justo stood and joined Ocho waiting anxiously before a high wooden gate, the greyhound’s narrow face twisted in pain from a shell-stuffed belly.
“Hey, Tamarindo!” Andy called, raising high the rusty shucking knife in his hand before bringing the blade down with a deep stab into the scarred tabletop.
“Yeah. I forgot.” Justo stopped at the gate. “Thanks for the oysters.”
“Naw, that’s not it. You can keep your word about the treasure thing, I don’t want it. Cop’s word can cause me to lose my conch cock, and I don’t have a spare.” Andy forced the rusty knife blade free from the tabletop and wiped the wood splinters off on his pants. The smirk was back on his face.
Justo opened the gate, letting Ocho wobble out before turning back. “Don’t worry, my friend, you have nothing to fear when it comes to your verge.”
“Why?”
“Because, el rabo del puerco nunca estara como una fleca.”
“Speak American.”
“A pig’s tail will never make a good arrow.”
Andy’s smirk faded in the sun setting over the top of the honeysuckle of his neighbor’s backyard fence.
14
I’D TAKE my last dollar and spend it to stay warm.”
“Well, you in the right place, bubba. So hot out there on Duval Street tonight it’s a hundred-ten under the neon. Too hot to wear your own sweat.”
“Can’t be too hot for me.” Brogan rubbed the slick edge of a beer can to his forehead, waiting for the can’s welcome cold prick to numb the skin between his eyes. “Did I ever tell you how my brother used to stay cool in Nam on those leech-sucking nights before the monsoon broke the heat belt?”
“Don’t give a shit about MK. Good time to go fishing for sharks now, solid amberjacks out around the bridges, eighty, hundred pounders, sharks chasing after them, gobblin
g them up like candy. Good time to kill sharks. Want to go out tomorrow? I don’t have any charters, so hot no tourists going out, slow time on the flat blue. Best way to kill time is to kill sharks.”
“Most boring thing I ever heard.” Brogan set his beer down and turned his eyes on Bubba-Bob. “Killing sharks interests me about as much as shooting sea gulls or fucking coke whores.” Brogan’s eyes set into a hard stare, the hard stare of a man who deals in precious metals, other people’s precious metals. Brogan was pissed tonight in more ways than one. For one thing he didn’t think he was getting any closer to the treasure he had been hunting for seven years. Lately he was going out further and further and deeper and deeper, toward the Tortugas, to where it was too deep to make any sense. Any galleon that cut on a reef would not have sunk that low, all the big-time treasure hunters with their high-tech gear and bottom-sucking rigs had long since packed their scientific underwater sniffing act to a different part of the ocean. Brogan was looking where common sense indicated a galleon would have been blown right off the map. He prided himself on playing hunches, not common sense. Common sense was for sunday preachers and monday sinners. On this hot night Brogan was exhausted from being out on the water for five weeks, coming up from the deep again and again, empty. When a man is that deep and something goes wrong and he loses oxygen, it is only four to six minutes before he’s wearing diapers for the rest of his life, if he’s lucky enough to be hauled up in time. Brogan’s eyes burned from staring through the scratchy glass plate of a face mask for gold coins and cannons encrusted into improbable shapes, searching for aged phantoms of wealth on the sandy floor of an ever-changing sea. Brogan’s eyes burned ruby red. When Brogan’s eyes burned red enough his thoughts swung away from immediate problems to the brilliant and bad gentleman of trouble’s bottom line who was his brother. When Brogan got into this mood his thoughts swung right past the common sense he so despised, he even risked raising the anger of Bubba-Bob, a man famous, at this tip-top hour of the morning after a long night in the Wreck Room, for taking offense at the slightest slight. It required five men to stop Bubba-Bob when he started swinging his shark-killing fists. Brogan had more than once personally been one of the five, having to knock Bubba-Bob over the head with a chair. But nothing worked, no matter how much violence was tap-danced on Bubba-Bob’s head he came back for more, delighting in the rhythm of destruction. The type of man who killed sharks for relaxation would tear another man’s eyes out for sport.
Bubba-Bob acted like he hadn’t heard Brogan’s rash declaration of not wanting to slash shark throats from gill to gill. Maybe Bubba-Bob had not heard it, or thought he heard something different in the Wreck Room filled with the whir of overhead fans and conversations shouted in a storm of drunken syllables. Bubba-Bob was more concerned with sharks and women, especially Angelica behind the bar in the shot-glass short shorts. “One time Angelica and me got it on.” Bubba-Bob laid a heavy hand on Brogan’s shoulder, trying to keep his unsteady gaze pinned to the center of Angelica’s thin halter top. “I get Angelica home, chop some lines of toot, woof up and say, Baby, I’m a great lover but I want it to be good for you, fishermen are patient, tell me the truth, what is the best amount of time for you to have an orgasm? Angelica answers, one tape side. I says I don’t get it. Angelica says one tape side of music, she likes to put on a music tape and come before it reaches the end of the first side, says if she doesn’t come by then it isn’t worth it. So I slip on a tape, stuff from the sixties, the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire,’ you know, Light my fire light my fire light my fire, romantic, and we strike up the band, but halfway into the tape my cock’s going coke-soft on me, squirrelly as an eel on a hook, and I’m thinking we’re counting down to a music orgasm and I’m not going to make it and I didn’t. The tape ended. I says to Angelica, Now what? Angelica doesn’t miss a beat, says there’s one whole side left on the tape, so why don’t I get down on all fours and lick her.” Bubba-Bob raised his glass of rum quizzically to pursed lips. “What does she think I am, a fucking St. Bernard?”
“No, a blowfish.”
“A blowfish!” Bubba-Bob tightened his grip on Brogan’s shoulder, his powerful fingers digging in with the determination of a first mate hefting a four-hundred-pound marlin aboard boat barehanded, or at least preparing to heft Brogan off his stool and throw him through the smoky plate-glass window behind the bar into the fierce heat of neon lit Duval Street. Bubba-Bob pushed his face close to Brogan’s, his thick lips darkened and split by the sun, the big teeth white and sharp, his breath sputtering in a hot blast. “Fa … fa … fa … fucking ba … ba … blowfish! That’s great!” Bubba-Bob slammed the empty rum glass on the counter and howled. “Angelica! Bring your favorite blowfish another round.”
“Let’s have a little less quiet down here.” Angelica laughed, pouring Bubba-Bob another rum. “What’s Brogan baiting you with anyway?”
“A blowfish! A goddamn blowfish!” Bubba-Bob couldn’t put a cap on his mirth, sputtering a spit of delight. “That’s a story I’ve got to tell next time I get a charter of Texans.”
Brogan didn’t think what he said was funny. Brogan was still pissed in more ways than one and nodded at Angelica for another drink. Angelica was one of his favorite women, not like St. Cloud’s wife Evelyn, whom he considered a witch with balls. Brogan tried to remember if he was sleeping with Angelica during the time he was sleeping with Evelyn. That was a strange time, right before Evelyn stopped sleeping with men, he thought he had something to do with that. Something Evelyn said to him then seemed odd. She said she didn’t want to hear about MK and his exploits in Nam, was fed up with Nam, fed up with war, fed up with all the assholes who weren’t fed up. Angelica was never fed up, nor for that matter ever filled up, she was a drinking man’s bartender. Brogan was like most serious drinkers on the island, his allegiance was to bartenders, not bars. If he didn’t like one of the bartenders in a bar he boycotted the whole business. What he especially did not like were aging college-boy types who had half of a degree in something and took to bartending as a way to support the antics of their college dormitory-inspired drug and alcohol habits. These were the boys who ruin a good drink with the attitude they could be doing something better than serving it. These boys preyed on the professional hard luck dropouts, parading puffy airs from their cloistered days in the idea supermarkets of higher education. The hard lucks mistakenly thought the aging college boys were doubly courageous in their choice of a mildly corrupt existence, since the college boys could obviously be elsewhere. Reality was they could not, the college boys were simply fast fool artists masquerading as bonafide deadbeats. Such notions jumped in Brogan’s brain, until he found his train of thought again, hopped aboard before the train pulled out of the station without him. “Yes, I guess you could call my brother a sort of adventurer. My brother is doing spooky things down in Latin America, spookier things than he did in Nam.”
“What’s up with you, bubba?” Bubba-Bob quickly released his grip on Brogan’s shoulder. “Who in hell is spookin what?”
“MK.” Angelica whispered the initials as if expecting to be arrested for simply uttering them. “Brogan’s in one of those MK moods again, off about his brother.”
“Well I’m not St. Cloud.” Bubba-Bob sucked sullenly at his rum, disturbed the current of conversation had moved off comic blowfish. “I don’t want to sit around till dawn like St. Cloud listening to this crap. I know MK. I’ve worked for MK. Half the guys in the Keys have worked for MK. What the hell is MK to me? Doesn’t scare me. I’m not Karl Dean.” Bubba-Bob finished off his rum and smacked his lips. “Blowfish. Now that’s funny.”
“How about one on the house?” Angelica had the rum flowing into Bubba-Bob’s glass before he could answer. She wanted to change the subject, the whole thing made her nervous, it wasn’t her business. She sympathized with the boys whose business it was, but she wanted no part of it. Karl Dean was dead and that was that. Hard to figure who was right and who was wrong in these matters, really made
no difference in the end. Something got done or it didn’t. Someone lived or died, seemed to make no difference since things continued on as before. Things unlearned were as good as untaught. “Why don’t you tell me what’s so funny about blowfish?” Angelica dabbed her bar rag at a trickle of rum left in the corner of Bubba-Bob’s mouth after he belted down her latest offering.
Brogan ignored Angelica’s attempt to spring him from his complex circles of thought. “MK says there are only two things in life you need to learn. First, how to get along with people. Second, how to get around them. Did I ever tell you how MK got his name?”
“Thousand fucking times you’ve told me!” Bubba-Bob shouted in Brogan’s face. “I hear it one more time I’m going to bash—”
“Good. I’ll tell you again.” Brogan assumed the air of a man pursuing a meandering trail with no guideposts to offer a way out. “In the jungle there are trails where the hunter has not been, traps are waiting to be sprung. No matter what politics a man carries in his heart, the reality of all revolutions advertises one true message: This bullet is for you. In the jungle of Vietnam MK forgot what he looked like, forgot where he came from, from a youth filled to the horizon with broad fields far as the eye could see, a straightforward youth, uncomplicated, unlike the jungle that transformed him, a jungle screaming green with intrigue of life’s highest inevitability, death. MK was balanced in the Vietnam jungle at first because he came from the flat, cold land of Minnesota. In the beginning he weighed events with the clear eye of an idealist. This blinded him to the jungle’s natural conspiracy, discarded him in the cleavage of evil and good as his comrades’ bodies were bagged in rubber sacks, sent away home to be counted, then covered up with dirt. MK waited in the green hell with the living. The living would say to each other every day: You gonna get outta this jungle, man, freedom bird’s a’comin, freedom bird’s gonna fly you way home. When the freedom bird came it most often was not a great bellied troop transport plane like MK was brought to the jungle in, but a commercial flight routed through Thailand or Singapore to pick up tourists and businessmen. MK was ordered to dress in his civvies for his freedom bird flight home through Singapore, he was not supposed to look like what he was. Even in civvies MK reeked of jungle rot, he could not scrub it from his skin. He would get up and scrub himself with soap every fifteen minutes on the plane. He knew he stank to the other passengers. When MK’s freedom bird left Vietnam the United States was a country still counting its daily toll from the jungle. When MK landed in Hawaii, they were still counting. When he landed in San Francisco, they were still counting. He kept heading east, through numbers adding up bodies, two hundred of them killed today, twenty of us, numb numbers adding up to spiritual novocaine. When he reached Minneapolis MK knew it was impossible to return to the beginning of the flat fields far as the eye could see. He no longer knew what the fields held, who might be waiting for him there, what traps. He knew only where the jungle was, it had become his true center. MK, the initials marked the end to his life. He flew across the United States to get as far from the flat fields as he could, but when he got off the plane they were still counting, and he was questioned immediately about the initials at the airport. The smell of the jungle was on him in the airport, he could not scrub it off, everyone knew, so he stood by himself, far from the plane’s passengers crowded around a spinning baggage carousel. Finally, the jostling was finished, the crowd gone, only his leather luggage was left on the stopped carousel, each of his bags identified with tags stamped MK. A woman approached. She was the age MK was then, twenty-two. MK was light-years from the woman, he was stuck between jungles, he was ancient and stank. She was encased in a crisp uniform, airport personnel, a smile of forgiving authority softened her lips. This was someone MK would have married had he stayed on after high school in the far flat land where roads and lives were straight as arrows. She would have been the wife who birthed twins if he had not gone to the jungle, her crisp body in his arms would have cried out with longing on her lips, unaware he had been nowhere and did not stink, whispering she could not live without him, their souls flying swift as arrows toward a ripe old age across the flat fields. ‘Sir, is that your luggage?’ The words of the woman in uniform interrupted MK’s thoughts of what might have been, her words filled the void where whisperings of eternal love might have been, had she greeted him as her long-lost hero husband who did not stink. ‘Yes,’ MK answered. ‘It’s mine.’ ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to claim it then.’ Her smile became more forgiving. MK moved toward the carousel to claim what was his. The leather luggage was still supple and new, still animal pungent. He had bought it on his way through Singapore, chose it specially, the harder you are, the softer your luggage. He pulled the bags carefully from the carousel and handed over his claim tickets. ‘I was in Vietnam.’ The words came from him of their own accord, flinging from the tip of his tongue in a bursting existence of their own, like clouds of smoke lifting from burning bodies he left behind in the jungle, bodies quickly dead from automatic rifle fire, strewn in mud between thatched huts, the acrid reek of an exploded phosphorus grenade he tossed on them stinging his nostrils, orange flames becoming white clouds, changing shapes until escaping into thin air, but not before imprinting an indelible mark on the earthbound. MK expected the woman to turn away from his stench. She gave him a brief smile, unaware his telling her he was in Vietnam was not a confession but a declaration, unaware she could have been the mother of his children, unaware there was something dangerous and unseen in him, unaware he was offering her his exploding heart on a platter. She raised her fingers absentmindedly to the DEBBIE stamped into an enameled nameplate pinned above her right breast. Her eyes went to the luggage, not in search of explanation, but friendly diversion. ‘That’s beautiful leather. What does the MK on the tags stand for?’ MK had wanted the initials to travel with him back from the jungle, marked on everything he owned, so those who paid to make him what he was by disowning his actions would see his brand everywhere, yet not know the assassin was among them. When he first came to the jungle from the flat land his body was so cool and collected his finger held remarkably true on a rifle trigger, so they put him across the border from where the war officially was, masked with a tar-black face and black canvas pajamas, dressed to kill smooth shaven-headed men in saffron-colored robes, and he did. He did not officially exist, there was to be no killing in the part of the jungle he preyed in, for no one there had declared war on him or his country. He was an invisible man regarded with fear and suspicion by regular soldiers who fought the irregular war, soldiers who knew not to ask him the number of enemy killed, for he employed his skills where there was no declared enemy. The regular soldiers noticed ribbons and medals of battle stretched across the chest of his uniform when he was on leave in Saigon, so inquired, ‘How many monkeys did you bag over there?’ His team of surreptitious travelers was known as Monkey Killers. The euphemism accumulated in time an eerie reality, the team thought of themselves as killers of animals, not village leaders and religious elders. Each man of the team sang a private song silently as his rifle stock butted into his shoulder, spraying a metallic clap of bullets to dance and riddle through saffron robes. MK could not get his song out of his mind, its chorus chanted over and over as he saw men fall before him: Hellooo I looove yooou, woon’t yooou tell me yooour name? Orange robes going red. MK did not know the past of the men he aimed true at, simply that their names were cleared from command above to be eradicated, names indicated on aerial topo maps as targets located in villages and towns. Fewer monkeys for the jungle to feed. A monkey doesn’t need a weapon to become a guerrilla, intentions precede weapons. A Monkey Killer forgets which side of the border he is on, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, makes no difference, no longer matters, the borders of countries, patriotism and demonism erased. The Monkey Killers were good soldiers, skilled hunters. A good soldier did not think beyond the thick leeches sucking at his neck, explosive trip wires at his booted feet, flash of sniper fire in the leaves. To the skill
ed hunter, the man marching directly before and after him marked his orbit, defined his final purpose. MK heard Debbie’s words coming through the tangled jungle of his mind: ‘You boys from Nam sure got a strange sense of humor.’ Debbie was standing before him with the smile of forgiveness on her lips, but MK was still in the steaming jungle, he didn’t understand, he looked for a way out, he asked her guidance. ‘What? What strange sense of humor?’ Debbie’s lips kept up their smile. ‘I asked what’s the MK stand for and you said Monkey Killer. You guys pick up strange nicknames over there.’ MK was no longer in the jungle, but he could not declare to those who made him the assassin what his purpose was as he moved among them. Intentions precede actions, invisibility needs no name, a simple initial is more than enough. At the far end of the airport’s subterranean carpeted tunnel a neon sign pointed the way: ALL TRANSPORTATION TO DOWNTOWN MIAMI. MK heard himself saying to Debbie, ‘No no, you misunderstood. I didn’t say Monkey Killer, I said Miami. Yes, the initials stand for Miami Kid.’ Debbie handed back the claim tickets to MK’s bags, her lips offering all the sympathy of a war widow. ‘Welcome home, Kid.’ ”
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