Mile Zero

by Sanchez, Thomas

  What Lila did not know Roger did. Roger hated the man at the bar more than the way his wife cheated on him with a ghost while she danced. The man at the bar was not special simply because he had been in Vietnam, every bubba-buck in the county between the ages of thirty-five and fifty had been in Nam. The man at the bar was special because he had no allegiances. Because the man had no trust, he had no fear. The man lived easily as a python with an undigested rat in his belly. He did not sweat and he never got drunk, worse, he did not live anywhere in the county, appearing time to time from nowhere, hiring men to work for him. Mostly the men he hired were out-of-work shrimpers who drifted far inland looking for flatland work, mostly they were black and desperate. The man figured sooner or later these men were going to sicken and tire of being forever dealt a hand of four jokers, and finally would go out and take what nobody let them earn legal, which would land them in the pen. This was their lives, what they could not pay for in money they would pay for in time behind bars, such was the only measure of commerce they could count on. The man offered these men what they had not counted on. He offered them fifty thousand dollars to run boatloads of cocaine up through the Yucatán Strait. A certain percentage of them would be caught, they would do time in Mexican jails, that time would be paid for by the man, up to ten thousand dollars a month, until such time the man bribed the Mexican officials to let his employees go. The black shrimpers looked at the job as an insurance policy, one way or another they were going to do hard time in this lifetime, why not get paid for it? If they made it through the Strait without getting busted there was a cash bonus. So when this man showed up in the backwater towns along the Gulf between Mobile and Tampa, he was greeted as a Santa Claus in jungle fatigues, a one-man social security agency. Everyone said with a wink the man’s occupation was selling maritime insurance. To some the man sold an alternate path through an unfair world, not to Roger. Roger had been in Nam and cut off a fair number of Gook ears himself, he recognized the man’s sour swagger, a swagger most left behind in Nam, as well as the crazy gleam in their eyes. This man paraded his swagger and flaunted his gleam. Roger knew the gleam was not that of a killer looking for prey, it was the prey looking for a bullet. The swagger was not in the walk, it was the manner in which the body swayed between the magnetic pull of two poles.

  Roger was a farmer and proud of it, a grower of good times and quality weed. Roger hated cocaine smugglers and figured sooner or later they were going to burn everybody’s life down, or drown the world in white powder cut from Indian veins. Roger resented it when the man came into the county and every deadbeat sucked up to him to make a fast haul on a slow boat out of Colombia. Roger hated the little gold monkey skull the man wore around his neck on a thick gold chain. He hated the little white business cards the man handed out which read INTERAMERICAS MARITIME INSURANCE ADJUSTERS LTD., PANAMA CITY, PANAMA.

  What attracted Lila was a silent scream rushing from the man she alone could hear. Lila knew indirectly only what she overheard about the man when Roger growled and blustered to his truckers that, mark his words, the cocaine sharpies were going to make the drug trade worse before it got better. Not that Roger did not want marijuana to stay illegal, he did. Roger wanted what he called “a fool’s measure of fair profit.” If corn was illegal Roger would grow it to get his fool’s measure, but he did not want outsiders coming into the county jacking around the labor market with big money made on foreign-grown goods. The cocaine sharpies were doling out so much money it was getting impossible to find a bubba-buck to truck a marijuana load up the Interstate anymore for less than twenty times union wages. Cocaine was ruining the trade. Roger swore more than once if the man so much as looked in his direction he would feed the guy’s balls to his bloodhounds. But until tonight the man never looked in Roger’s direction, he talked only to those he somehow knew wanted to talk to him. The man had no friends, no connections with people outside business at hand, always traveled alone. Sometimes Roger saw the man speeding by in a fancy rent-a-car on an isolated back road, off to lay a pile of cash on the old lady of one of his bubba-bucks salted away in a Mexican can. Roger took all this in, bided his time, he was after all a man of crops and weather reports.

  The boys in the band serenaded Roger, alone and befuddled in the middle of the dance floor, staggering beneath the spinning disco globe while his wife accepted the drink offered her by the man at the bar. It never entered Roger’s mind any woman of his would walk away from him in a public place, make a clown out of an honest farming man. It happened, now there was only one honorable way out. Roger would deal with the man later. In a second he covered the distance between himself and Lila at the bar, grabbed her by the shoulders, spun what was his around and dragged it onto the dance floor. The boys in the band whooped with rebel yells and broke into their best honky-tonk tale of sorrow sung on the back of loopin guitar wails. Roger began his frantic stomping, he shouted at a totally silent and still Lila. “What’s wrong with you, babe!”

  Lila turned her back on him and walked out the swinging doors, across the gravel parking lot to the phone booth beneath the flashing neon arrow. Her fingers trembled but her mind was made up. She dialed the number, when she heard the familiar voice she pleaded, “Mama, I’m down at the Ace. Can y’all pick me up?” Lila heard only the first part of Margaret-Lynn’s voice coming back through the line static; “What’s wrong, hon? Has Rog—”

  Roger’s hand wedged the booth door open and tore the phone from Lila with such force its steel connector cable ripped from the wall. “Haul your ass into the pick-up!”

  “I’m not going to!”

  Roger pulled Lila from the booth as easily as he tossed heavy bales of marijuana up onto his trucks. “Goddamn bitches are all the same!” He snarled his revelation into the night. Lila stumbled beneath his grasp, small stones pricking her knees, trickles of blood tracing her legs.

  “Roger, listen to me. I’ve decided—”

  “What’d you say?” Roger stopped.

  “Decided I want to live a—”

  “Shut up! Not talking to you! Want to know what he said?”

  From her crouched position Lila lifted her head. Across the gravel lot glowing red from the overhead sign was the man from the bar, framed in the doorway of the Ace.

  The question from the man across the gravel came again, a flat midwestern voice. “Thought your wife might appreciate one more dance before you take her home.”

  “Sheeee-yit!” Roger’s fingers opened in a quick muscular spasm and Lila was loose. “Just what I fuckin figured I heard!” Roger’s words were not directed toward the man, nor toward Lila, his words roared in disbelief up to the flashing arrow. He calculated most men he met in his lifetime were born dumb, standing before him now was the dumbest of all come to collect his prize, and he was going to give it to him. Without another word Roger marched across crunching gravel to the pick-up, yanked the door open, reached up behind the backseat and unhooked the rifle from its window rack. Son of a bitch if some men don’t have balls for brains, Roger hissed under his breath, for the life of him he couldn’t figure such stupidity. He threw the safety off above the rifle’s trigger and wheeled around, bringing the man up in the cross-hair sight. This was one dumb bunny Roger was going to gut-blast off the playing field.

  The scream Lila thought she alone could hear from the man at the bar earlier she now heard from herself. The man’s hand flashed, too late did she realize he had a gun. The crack of a bullet tore through Lila’s scream into Roger’s chest, wobbling his knees as he stumbled forward, the rifle still raised. Roger’s eyes rolled upward toward the red arrow, something badly broken within him, something which would never be fixed.

  Lila was afraid to move. Maybe the man with the flat voice was going to shoot her next. Nobody was coming out of the bar to help her. She knew they wouldn’t. This was the way things were settled in the county. No one was going to get between anyone else’s trouble. Everybody had to make a living one way or another. Lila’s instinc
t was to run to her dying husband. It was not much of an instinct. Roger’s attempt to stamp something down in her had the effect of bringing something new up. Her voice was shaky but she spoke her mind. “Do y’all like French cookin?”

  MK smiled, his foreign midwestern voice oddly soothing to Lila’s Southern ears. “Long time ago in Saigon, had a Catholic girlfriend, all she ever cooked was French. Can you do Coquilles Saint-Jacques?”

  18

  REALITY’S submerged shadow took shape slowly for St. Cloud. Survival forced him to seek a new pollen to open the petals of Lila’s true purpose. He turned his passion into the deeper intention of trust, trust became the pollen. St. Cloud crawled, self-effaced himself, committed acts of ruthless shame, all to gain Lila’s trust. He had gone so far as to help her buy the pug puppy. During moments of confessional trust, as Lila’s lips pressed against his ear in fearful whispers and conjured her intimate past, St. Cloud knew his callow plotting had succeeded. He did everything to gain Lila’s person, swim with her soul, marry her flesh, sought against all odds the feverish flowering of her lithe body as it loosened to spin around his until he felt cocooned in a glistening moment, pooled in silk, then the silken pool would mirror, shatter, allowing disjointed shards from Lila’s past to cut into her immediate desire. There was a fusion of ferocious intentions as their naked bodies pursued an inner distance across the expanse of white sheet beneath the dusty window above his bed. Ultimately Lila prevailed, coming through St. Cloud with the force of desperation, trying to satisfy hidden need, satiate enormous longing. It was then St. Cloud realized his competition for Lila’s soul was more than a ghost.

  St. Cloud had reeled a treasure up from Lila’s submerged past, but the full weight of the bounty’s apparent truth was slow in coming. Callow cajoler riding the tide of surprise to its final beach, his cunning had to be forever on the move, winning Lila over patiently one moment to the next. Lila had begun for him as untried female perfection, an exquisite statue he was intimidated by for fear its integrity would disintegrate if he tried to break down its parts. As the cracks in the statue revealed themselves, opened to expose veins of complication, the thunder of his ignorance deafened him. How wrong he had been from the outset, his crooked crawl of drunken pursuit of Lila, and the net of idealism he cast over her, paled against the brutal truth of her young life. Everyone warned him, even Evelyn, who tolerated his masquerades of romantic pain as she would a brother’s, rather than a former husband’s. Evelyn warned he was infatuated with an idea of his own poetic conjuring, had dealt into a rigged game where the joker was the dealer. Lila was far from the cool unruffled surface St. Cloud first imagined. He was no more than a worm floating at the bottom of a female sea, a blinded male whose pursuit of female perfection was driven by fleshy greed and unwieldy desire to bottle outright the sex of youth.

  There were places Lila led St. Cloud he was not prepared to go. Months before, when she drifted alone during late nights from bar to bar along Duval Street, he was willing to accept whatever destination caught her fancy. Watching one night from a hidden vantage point in the jostling bar crowd, as she danced her way through a long line of suitors with the queer smile on her face fixed far away as if keeping step with an invisible partner, he made the discovery there was one constant to her desire to dance beyond the periphery of emotional attachment. The constant was Brogan. The mescal worm could have been messing with St. Cloud’s brain, or rum was floating away what was left of his common sense, but it took him some time to figure Brogan’s being in one or another of the dance hall bars Lila passed through was beyond coincidence. Lila was meeting Brogan clandestinely in the most public of places, a unique coupling of purposes. But what was the purpose of each? Brogan was not without his own style of attraction, despite his jaded past the desperate twinkle of a treasure searcher sparkled in his eye. St. Cloud figured Brogan too old for Lila; though Brogan was his own age, St. Cloud deduced he was the younger of the two, for he had killed off any hope of catching up to his youthful ideals, his abandonment of conscience entitled him to suck from a personally styled fountain of youth.

  No tricks were required for Lila to meet Brogan in any number of back-door situations far from the prying eyes of a bar crowd. Lila could easily have gone to Brogan’s house. What eased its way into the swamp of St. Cloud’s inebriation was a notion simple in the extreme. Lila did not want to be seen going to Brogan’s house. She never once brought his name up, never greeted him on the street. Lila spoke with Brogan only when she danced with him. Brogan was the only one she spoke with while dancing, that was the oddity. St. Cloud noticed, for he alone was trailing Lila on her late night sojourns, watching randy sideshow suitors hoot their lust, grovel for her attention, then run for another shot of bottled courage. What rose clearly from this confusion was Lila did not want to be associated with Brogan in any way other than what appeared socially casual. The reason for this was for St. Cloud to fathom.

  The confessional bits and pieces of Lila’s childhood and marriage to Roger came together and ended in the parking lot of the Ace in the Hole, where her new life began, and what brought her to Key West started. She never mentioned where she had gone with MK, for how long. Her history with MK eluded St. Cloud, until he made the connection with Brogan. St. Cloud had walked the wobbly plank of trust to get this far with Lila; he knew if he asked her a question, any question, about her past, the trust would be broken. She had to come to him on her own, her telling emerged from a new need. He had asked Evelyn what she knew of Lila, she knew less than he did. He admired Evelyn’s targeting of people, in their early college days together at Berkeley she could, after five minutes in a room full of antiwar organizers, pick from the intent, moppy-haired radicals the five most likely to be FBI plants. Evelyn told him Lila’s gorgeous flesh masked a hand grenade ready to explode. Perhaps the explosion had already begun with his infatuation, had destroyed his sense of reason. With reason or not, St. Cloud believed the duel for Lila was between himself and MK.

  While watching Brogan and Lila dancing St. Cloud recalled the forewarning thrown out by Bubba-Bob in a distant and all but otherwise forgotten drunken night at the Wreck Room. “Be careful with MK, or you’ll end up like Karl Dean at the bottom of the sea with sharks sucking your brains out.” St. Cloud did not understand Bubba’s meaning at the time. Bubba-Bob owed him a favor, maybe the warning was the favor. Karl Dean had been MK’s boy, one of the best cigarette-boat runners MK had, he could maneuver a load of marijuana at cut-throat speeds through moonless nights across backwater flats better than any boat jockey from Key Largo to Key West. MK started Karl off when he was sixteen. Karl had already dropped out of high school for fast money off-loading marijuana bales from shrimp boats when MK took notice and totaled up the future for him, which came out to a zero sum. As a local boy fond of shortcuts Karl had one of two choices, move up in the trade or pump gas for the rest of his life while waiting for his mama to die so he could sell her house to a rich northerner. Karl was impatient, he did not want to wait for his mama to die; besides, his mama had just remarried. Karl was a flashy kid who fought with the other off-loaders on the shrimp boats, that’s when MK noticed his quick hands. MK’s instincts told him Karl could run a boat into tight spots where a man with a brain wouldn’t. What appealed to MK was the fact Karl’s brain was far slower than his body’s reflexes; by the time Karl’s brain told him not to do something his body had already reacted, like racing a loaded cigarette boat across a low-tide cut of coral even a fast-moving tarpon on the run from a fishing boat would not risk cutting his belly on. Working for MK Karl made enough money to buy him and his mama big houses on Big Pine Key where a man had room to stretch his stuff along the zigzag of dynamited canals far from the back alleys and claustrophobic lanes of Key West. Karl was happy until cocaine replaced marijuana as the high profit item sealed in the thirty-foot hull of his cigarette boat on late night runs. Things were getting riskier and more profitable, not as they used to be in the laid-back days of marijuana; th
e boys on the off-loading mother ships were no longer good ol’ shrimpers, but fast Spanish-talking guys with excitable eyes and bulging guns tucked beneath their belts. Karl wanted his piece of the bigger pie. Since his brain was not smart enough to tell him to work for someone who would pay him more money, he started grumbling that MK let his people do with less than their just rewards. Karl’s talk got so bad people walked a wide path around him. People were not afraid of Karl, they were afraid of what MK was going to do to him, they did not want to be around when he did it. It got so that Karl, who was a top gun on the off-shore power boat race circuit, was having trouble finding sponsors to put him up for a race. Karl needed sponsors, he couldn’t sponsor himself. Where was he going to tell the IRS he got the money to race the whole season through in boats whose maintenance costs were more than the average man made in a year? He couldn’t say he got it from selling his mama’s house in Key West for a half million, he already did that to smoke-screen the houses he built on Big Pine Key. People knew Karl was in trouble when he couldn’t get a sponsor for the offshore championship in Key West last fall. When Karl did get a sponsor at the last moment people thought, well, maybe MK wasn’t so tough after all, maybe he had been gone from the island too long, running everything from Central America, maybe the Colombians with excitable eyes from Miami were moving on MK’s paradise franchise. In the past no one broke from MK. Karl Dean broke. Maybe MK wasn’t strong enough to teach Karl Dean a lesson. It had become a test. Karl Dean’s cocky ways, and the fact he got a sponsor to race in the championships at the last moment, might mean MK was no longer part of the local accommodation. These were thoughts people had when Karl Dean pulled ahead last fall in the championship race. These were thoughts people no longer had when they watched the reruns of Karl Dean and his boat exploding into a rain of fiberglass and flesh. Karl’s copilot, who ended up with him as shark bait, had a family in Sombrero Key, word was the family received international money orders from a Panama bank every month. MK took care of his own. People understood the lesson taught last fall. MK could make people grand with money, or quickly dead from revenge. When the Coast Guard inquired into the explosion of Karl Dean’s boat they concluded the force of the blast was far greater than any which could have been generated by fifty gallons of jet-fuel held in the three on-board tanks, a blast of such magnitude had to have come from another source. The Coast Guard never ruled out the probability of plastic explosives, but there was not enough debris left floating on the water to make a definitive conclusion. People who knew MK had already drawn a conclusion.