Mile Zero

  “I’m going to call an ambulance.” Justo tried to reassure Renoir. “Floyd should be X-rayed, his spine might have been injured.”

  “No!” Renoir turned painful eyes up to Justo. “No hospitals. I can take care of him.”

  “That’s not the point, he’s—”

  “Stay out of it!” The pain in Renoir’s eyes turned coldly defiant.

  “Look, it’s the law. I wouldn’t be doing my job if—”

  “Your job’s got nothing to do with it!” Renoir’s voice exploded in a screaming ache. “What do you know about it? Nothing! I can take care of him! Don’t think I can’t!”

  Justo reached a hand down to help Angelica up. “Guess we better leave.” He felt a tightness in his chest. The emotion pouring from Renoir embarrassed him, it was as if he were witnessing an excruciating confession of love and cry for forgiveness. What was to forgive was not for Justo to know. What Justo did know was these two men should be left alone in this private moment of recaptured life. Justo slipped his arm around Angelica’s waist as she stood. He did not care if anyone saw this gesture of affection in the full glare of a new morning. He walked slowly with Angelica around the crescent of beach. “Where’d you learn to pump heart like that? Had no idea you knew CPR.”

  “You work in a bar, you have to know it. Never can tell when some drunk is going to choke on his martini olive.” Angelica leaned her body close to Justo; an intimacy had been shared between them this morning, far different from the one either originally had in mind. They were now bound together in a way stolen moments beneath sheets could never achieve. “Do you want to come home with me?”

  Justo laughed nervously. “Somehow I don’t feel very romantic.” He rubbed his lips with the back of his hand.

  “I didn’t mean for what we had in mind before.” Angelica looked at Justo with surprise. “I meant only for a cup of coffee or something. Feels weird. Just don’t want to be alone, that’s all.”

  Justo did not like himself for what he was about to do. He knew all through the early morning he was headed for a wetting, now it had taken place, he was not going to go home with Angelica. He tried to change the subject. “Feels weird to me too. How did you end up with those guys out there?”

  “I was driving slow to see if you were still following, thought maybe you had tricked me and weren’t coming. When I was passing the compound, there Renoir was, waving.”

  “Wonder why he didn’t wake someone up in the guesthouse, or use their phone?”

  “Panicked, I guess. Sometimes people do the opposite of what makes sense when they get in a tight situation.” Angelica stopped and slipped from the protective grasp of Justo’s arm around her waist. “Just like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you coming home with me or not?”

  Justo was caught in his own trap. Angelica was right, he was going to choose the coward’s exit. “Another time.” He leaned and kissed her.

  “Okay.” Angelica laughed, reaching up to smooth his cheek with knowing fingers. “Another time.”

  Justo walked with her in silence along the beach, the sexual connection between them broken, replaced by something more substantial. In front of the high wall of the compound he watched Angelica drive away into the dying sunrise. His thoughts went across the island to Rosella rising from another night alone. He was indeed a very hungry man. He thought of his daughters shaking off troubled teenage dreams. He was a husband and father. He walked to the phone booth on the street corner and dialed the chalked number he memorized hours before in the Wreck Room. Justo had not wanted to do it this way, did not want Zobop to know he was on his trail of dead goats and cemetery poetry. The phone rang twelve times. Justo was about to hang up when he heard the click of reception followed by long silence. Suddenly Justo recognized the number he dialed. The rum-soaked syllables coursing through telephone wires were hesitant but unmistakable. Justo hung up. A Green Sailor looks north? The last voice on the island Justo expected to be on the other end of the line was that of St. Cloud.

  16

  SOMEWHERE along the way I lost the way and Lila became very fleshy, attractive to the bone, a seductive spice flowing in my veins.” As his words slipped into late afternoon humidity St. Cloud kept an eye on the scorpion slithering down the yellow pine of the bedroom wall, its anchor-shaped tail poking nervously at the air. “She’s more than a spice. I’m a hopeless junkie.”

  “Junkies are made, not born,” Isaac wheezed. “Junkies mother their own monkeys and pack them around on their backs for the world’s applause at self-destruction. You’re no self-made junkie, you’re a born fool, big difference.” Isaac rolled his head on the pillow and joined St. Cloud’s tracking of the scorpion’s progress. “Anyway, the whole world loves a lover, and you’re the second biggest fool for love alive after me. Don’t understand your problem, other than it’s been man’s problem with woman since Eve sucked the worm out of the apple before offering it to Adam. No man has ever been handed more than an apple riddled with empty worm holes. You won’t be the last to find out an apple a day won’t keep the devil away. Peach nectar is not a bad tit to suck.” A tiny gurgle riding a laugh came from Isaac’s throat. “I’ll be fucking angels soon.” Isaac turned from the scorpion and winked. “What do you think of that? Feathered strumpets and golden trumpets for eternity, what a way to be dead.”

  “Think I’ve gone around the bend.” St. Cloud spoke instinctively, without taking Isaac’s offered exit of humor. St. Cloud was not going to quit at what he had come to say, at what he was trying to get at. He felt like a man trying to commit suicide, calling a friend in a fit of crying drunkenness, pleading to talk, to be walked in friendship back to reality.

  “Just what are you trying to say?”

  “Think somebody’s trying to kill me.”

  “Haaahrumph!” Isaac snorted and turned back to the scorpion’s descent. “You deserve to be shot, damn fool, nothing but a pitiful love bandit. None of us deserve to live, so what? You going to smash this scorpion or let him bite us on the ass?”

  “Let him bite us, we both don’t have long to live anyway. I’m telling you, Isaac, I might be killed. Just want you to know why, that’s all. Not that it’s any big deal, just wanted you to know because I thought you’d appreciate the reason. I’m sure it’s got to do with my loving Lila. Some kind of crazy Romeo and Juliet thing and I’m playing both parts, but she’s the deep off-stage shadow in the play. Something hidden within Lila I can’t get to, a danger there which doesn’t want to be unearthed. I’d kill for Lila. Justo says I already have, myself, because I’m losing my mind like this, killing off my common sense. Still got sense enough to know someone’s out to off me. I’m not talking the usual cocaine paranoia down here. I’m talking someone desperate to get me.”

  “Tropical witchery is more like it, son. This girl’s sucked the sense out of your head and left you with balls for brains. Why in hell would anyone want to kill you? Don’t watch yourself the girl’s going to do the obvious, like they all do sooner or later, leave. Then you’ll end up pathetic as batty old Count Cosel, jerking off every night into a pile of cottonballs. Young women in the tropics come and go, you know that. They come and they go, but they don’t grow. They just go. Get ready for it. That’s the real death you’ve got to face, the exit of your Southern muse.”

  “Did I tell you earlier, I keep hearing strange music?”

  “Hahrumph!” Isaac’s bony chest heaved in a gasp of disparaging air. “None of us deserve to live. Wonder we don’t melt in our baths as Picasso once said. Let me tell you about one of the dumb things I did when I crossed the great forty-year-old divide. Took my easel out of the studio, away from all the models, up to the mountains, got myself prepared in the darkness, peered from behind the easel out at the edge of the world, eager as a boy awaiting his first erection. Was going to paint that sunrise quick as a snapshot, eternal as mc–squared equals the banging dawn of creation, make a painting in the new world between instin
ct and intellect, dismantle all color theories, prove rainbows were only God pissing on earth. Was going to get that rainbow in a bottle, freeze it in time, pin it like a butterfly to the wall. Thought I could do that. Thought I’d learned enough at my advanced age to un-teach myself. There I was, poised on the moment. The canvas before me, brush in hand, wet palette of oils at my side. First light leaked from the heavens, birds broke song, sky cluttered a thousand colors in my eye. Awed and amazed I turned to stone. Broad daylight crawled over me, intense glare after color, empty canvas staring back at me.” Isaac’s words stopped, his bony chest swelling with another exasperating heave.

  The scorpion was almost to the baseboard of the bedroom wall. “You didn’t get it?”

  “Course not, no fool can, or maybe only a fool can and I’m a failed fool. We know it’s all abstraction, apparition. When you see a sunrise painting you are witnessing the pitiful subjectivity of the lousy artist fool enough to try and paint it. It’s all illusory illumination, pure falsehood of light. The light’s not important, it’s the darkness preceding it, defines it, that place before there is life. That place defines this place.” The scorpion touched the floor. “Do you get it, son?”

  “Yeah. Now I know why you only paint women.”

  “No!” Isaac pushed his thin body higher on the stack of pillows. “That’s not the point. The point is to try and paint your way out of the dark cave before creation, to constantly reinvent yourself. The point is, St. Cloud, if you want to go back to darkness I’m not going to try and stop you. Not going to hand out an intellectual argument as to why you shouldn’t. Go ahead and travel back to darkness, smug as a wrong-way fetus, but don’t moon around about getting killed over some Southern yam pie. You’re too smart for self-pity and I’m too old for bullshit.”

  “Let me tell you about the strange music.”

  “Goddamn it, man, you haven’t heard a word I said! I’m talking a painter’s light, not radio romance.”

  “Music and light are connected.” St. Cloud took Isaac’s frail hand from the air and held it securely within his own, rubbing the blackened veins. “I appreciate what you’re trying to tell me, and you are right, except I’ve got this strange music playing in my ears, a high-pitched squeal.”

  “Sounds like an island hawk.”

  “Yes, and until now I only heard it at night outside my bedroom window while I was in bed with Lila. I’d go outside and look around, but the bushes are too thick for me to make anything out. Hawks don’t hunt late at night. This is something else, sounds almost like a tin whistle.”

  “Sounds more like you’ve got somebody lurking in the bushes who likes getting a look at your peach nectar as much as you do.”

  “It’s been going on for some time. Sound is growing manic, unnatural.”

  “Maybe your peeping Tom whistles through his teeth while he watches you worship your Aphrodite. I might whistle too. Reminds me, where’s Angelica? Where’s Renoir? Supposed to be here, it’s a Wednesday. Maybe Renoir finally got the right idea watching Angelica posing for me across a year of Wednesdays. Maybe they’ve run off together. I could die happy.”

  St. Cloud watched the scorpion slither to the floor, hairy tail twitching for action, then heading for the brass bed. “I phoned Angelica this morning. No answer. Another thing. Someone called me at dawn, then hung up.”

  “People get wrong numbers all the time, or maybe it was this Zobop guy. You told me you were going to have Angelica put your phone number on the Wreck Room chalkboard and sign Zobop’s name to it to see what you could snag.”

  “Only action I’ve had on that one was two guys calling me for dates.”

  “Getting any more poems nailed to your front door with a chicken claw?”

  “That’s what I was going to tell you about earlier, it’s what I meant about the music getting stranger.” The scorpion slithered to the brass foot of the bed, bumped its head against the shiny metal three times before deciding to attempt the ascent. “This morning after the phone woke me up I heard the whistling outside again, very shrill. I stepped out to look around. Perched on the power pole above the cactus tree in my front yard was a hawk giving me a hard stare. It whistles and wheels off across the metal rooftops.”

  “Told you it was an island hawk.”

  “Thought for a minute it was a hawk all along, the two whistling sounds were so close. Turned to go back in and nearly tripped on a glass jar, the kind women used to can fruit in. The jar was on the top step where I couldn’t miss it, very old and scratchy, filled with stuff.”

  “Filled with peach nectar.” Isaac winked. “Keep rubbing my hand like that, feels good.”

  “Filled with rusty fishhooks, bent coins, twisted nails and another poem, its scribbling hard to make out, done with one of those felt-tip pens again.”

  “What’s your friend Zobop got to say for himself now?”

  “You remember what the poems nailed to my door said about a Green Sailor and the Cuban Martyrs?”

  “Sure.”

  “This is even stranger. Eight palms point the way to two thousand souls entrapped by barbed wire.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Signed, Zobop.”

  Isaac turned his head on the pillow, the scorpion was eye level with him, wiggling its body on the ornate brass curve of the head stand. “You know,” Isaac rolled his head back toward St. Cloud, the wrinkles of his face cracking into a smile, “you might have something more real than cocaine paranoia or alcohol guilt after all. Something going on, but I don’t think it’s any more than the usual hanky-panky what takes place on this island. Could be nothing more than a jealous Cuban who wants Lila and he’s paid to have a Santería love hex put on you. I remember the old days here, I’m not talking of the Devil Dancers dressed in burlap with animal masks on who used to parade Duval Street. I mean the stuff going back beyond that, stuff that happened south of Duval, in what was called African Town. Your friend Justo knows, ought to ask him. There was a time when people in secret societies would kill anybody who revealed an evil truth. I’m not saying that’s bad. In our society someone reveals the awful secret of how to make an atomic bomb in his basement and becomes a national celebrity. Seems to me you ought to get Justo’s Aunt Oris to make up one of those lucky chicken wishbones like he wears. Never know, might work, saved Justo’s ass more than once. There’s a Conch woman lives across town by the old lighthouse, still throws a glass of water in the street every time a stranger strolls by her house, wants to wash away all those evil germs from nonbelievers, ward off bad spirits. There’s a lake in front of that woman’s rickety shack, even in middle of summer. People have a way of finding their own devils.”

  “Good idea to bring in some outside protection. I’ll talk to Justo about getting a lucky bone.” St. Cloud took Isaac’s other hand and began a gentle rubbing between bone-thin joints. “Maybe I’ll get Lila a lucky bone too.”

  “Can’t hurt, might be somebody more lovesick over her than you, someone else who loves women too much, finds the perfect one and loves her to distraction. Distraction is the envy of evil. You’re more distracted now than ever. Your hands are strong, I can feel, but they shake more than mine, not just from the booze either. I’m not saying you should give up drinking, nothing that severe, not worried about your swimming out of the hole of alcohol you’ve poured full in your life. What does worry me is you might not make it across the great forty-year-old divide with much of that fine mind left. I’m banking on you to make it. Don’t let me down like Renoir, be a man, be a man for all men, to all women. It’s important for men at my age to pick out a younger man and root for him, pass the torch. I don’t want to see you hoodwinked by a Dixie charmer desperate to hook a husband who will keep her in credit cards and babies. Remember, women you fuck are the sum total of every man they’ve ever slept with. You don’t have the slightest idea about where this one has been. As they say up where she’s from, beneath every soft southern belle’s nipple beats a heart of pure gristle. Be car
eful.” The eyes in Isaac’s shrunken face shone with the truth of worn chestnuts. “All of these moments we have here on earth are stolen, the trick is to never stop stealing, never stop with one woman, go on to the next. It’s all about women in the end, all of them pretenders. That is the journey, to find the greatest pretender. As time runs you down one truth wears you out, the women get younger, the days get shorter.”

  The purple lids of Isaac’s eyes weighted to a close, his hand slackened within St. Cloud’s caressing grip. A fist of fear closed around St. Cloud’s heart, perhaps Isaac was slipping away to the land of feathers and trumpets. St. Cloud looked up, his gaze escaping from the bedroom of the Bahamian mansion through high French windows, across the Atlantic’s flat doldrums to the thin blue horizon which marked the last exit for everyone on the island. Maybe now Isaac was gliding out there, over clear water, through the illusive Green Flash, into false light, his body cut from space, pursuing the answer his lifelong chase of women across acres of stretched canvas thick with bright oil paints never yielded.

  “Saw colors so beautiful, standing pricky as icing on a birthday cake. Maybe there is more than false light after all.” Isaac winked. “Goddamn man, what are you whimpering about? I’m not going anyplace. Told you long ago, I’m going to die in the saddle.” He smiled at the scorpion inches from his face, its slender stinger probing the unknown. “My little friend, time to take a ride. St. Cloud, you can toss him out now.”

  St. Cloud scooped the scorpion into his hand and hurled it through the open shutters. He turned back to Isaac. “Some day you’re going to be stung. That will be the end of you, not doctors.”

  Isaac spluttered short yipping sounds which trailed away into a cackle. “I’ve lived with scorpions all my life. Nobody’s ever been stung by one in grandfather Isaac’s house, never will. Got to protect scorpions, don’t, rats will overrun the place. Not a rat in the house. Rats or scorpions, one or the other, must choose.”