Brogan was Lila’s connection to MK, brother to brother. MK was not the only high roller in Key West, there were many others, high up and low down, on both sides of the law, who wanted MK put out of business, or the business put to MK. That was the reason Lila never went to Brogan’s house. How innocent for Lila to be seen dancing one dance with Brogan, never more, then sending him packing like any other struggling suitor. If the wrong person knew Lila’s connection to MK she could be used against him, her life bartered for vengeance in a sinister game not of her making. St. Cloud understood the ghost he was dueling was MK, but someone else may have made the connection too, Zobop. The high whistle St. Cloud heard outside his bedroom window could be a death tune, the scribbles of poetry nailed to his door could be a beast toying with its prey. Bubba-Bob’s warning could be ringing true, to get involved with MK meant mayhem, if so St. Cloud could count his remaining days on one hand. Perhaps Bubba-Bob blundered onto the connection that Lila was MK’s young peach, kept precious and hidden away in the backwater confines of Key West. Bubba-Bob was too clever a fisherman to declare publicly he had made such a discovery, he did not want to end up on the wrong end of the food chain, but he would tip off a friend he owed a favor about troubled waters ahead.
St. Cloud ceased being a bull rocking in a woman’s sea, seeking the gyroscope’s center of gravity to right the way; the grand confusion clawing into his normal emptiness left his less-than-steady hands shaking with anticipated dread. I myself am not myself, as the man said. A sideways slither is often the quickest way home. There was another bull now, standing between himself and MK, a bull of contention that existed long before Lila came between them. Justo was the one to define the bull for St. Cloud, often repeating his Abuelo’s tale of al alimón, the blood dare, a duet of death fought by two matadors in distant Spanish times. Few witnessed al alimón, but it was sworn to have happened, the gypsy poets still sang its sad glory, to fight al alimón was less than bravery and more of blood belief, for the bull was fought by two matadors at once, armed with one sword and no cape, no lance-bearing horsemen to prick and harass the adversary. The matadors took turns meeting each charge of the bull by using the other man’s body as a distracting swirl of cape; the alternating unarmed man was at great peril, using his body as a feigned thrust or protective shield. The man with the sword played his risk to the finest; if he did not judge correctly where he himself would have placed the human cape, he would drive the sword through flesh of the other man. No words passed between the two matadors, a false move by either meant death, their blood instinct facing the attacker must flow in unison, harmonious purpose preceded all thought. These two were beyond brothers, dueling in hopes of achieving blind faith; to escape being trampled their faith became at the moment of truth pure revelation. The enemy was not the bull, it was whatever might stand between these two, preventing them from becoming one mind, heart and hand with common purpose. If something stood between them their defeated blood would commingle in the dry sand of the arena.
Things were no longer so confused for St. Cloud, the burning hoop of completion smoldered before him, he understood the nature of the bull. The full-blown mystery opera of MK was revealed and St. Cloud was part of it, the odd circle after a generation passed had closed. The bull between St. Cloud and MK was Vietnam, the war of their youth bonded them to a brotherhood of outsiders, unless they could fight the bull al alimón they were condemned to die in the arms of each other’s memories, their defeated blood commingling in the dry sand of a distant past, forgotten by a world long since moved on to fresh pain.
St. Cloud felt the rope of self-betrayal binding him to MK tighten with painful urgency; because of Lila he had to devise a way to cut through knots hardened by a generation of hopelessness. Lila could be the way out, St. Cloud had no misgivings about the origination of his fanatical desire for her. If he could convince Lila his offering of trust was the beginning of love, then he had started undoing the ties that bind. If MK was keeping Lila in Key West for the same reason, holding out a last hope, planning to return, then he would kill anyone who attempted escape on his magic carpet.
St. Cloud was determined not to let Lila down as he had Evelyn. He had started so young with Evelyn, but a man cannot marry his conscience. There was a purity of purpose in Evelyn from those early college days of protest which she still carried forward. Evelyn was ever graceful, slipping from beneath the weight of youthful illusions as easily as a snake sheds the skins of its seasons. He remembered when they met in 1966 during an antiwar march, pushing through the college town streets crowded with sign carriers, “HELL NO WE WON’T GO” screamers, and sound trucks blasting political accusations. St. Cloud sensed a sensuous purpose about Evelyn being jostled in the crowd, the crush of strident protesters accentuated her girlish body. He felt she was out of step with the indignant rhythm propelling marchers around them; his own outrage at bombs raining from B-52s on remote villages eight thousand miles distant was surmounted by an embarrassing desire for this thin girl at his side. He thought she could see his naked intent, that he was exposed for what he was; he tried to disguise his lust, wrapping an arm around her shoulders as if to protect her from the shoving crowd. What he sought was the sexual source of her commitment. He held her like a cripple clinging to a crutch. Slung around his neck was a pair of binoculars which gave him an idea. He suggested they get away from the crowd’s determined militant air, things were getting messy, bottles were flying, glass was breaking, there was trouble ahead, a sure trap, he had been down these streets before, he knew. He also knew a way to the rooftop of the college bookstore, where they could survey the sweep of the entire protest with the binoculars, and his yearning for Evelyn could be spent, far above the heady atmosphere of idealistic histrionics. They drifted to the back of the chanting crowd, along streets left deserted in the wake of the passing protest, then cut across alleys, ascending a rickety fire-escape ladder up a three-story brick wall and onto the bookstore rooftop. The scene below was not what St. Cloud expected. The familiar grid of city streets was laid out beneath them, the usual police barricades placed at busy intersections to force the march along an orderly course, but beyond the front line of the march, in the only direction the crowd could move between barricaded side streets, were helmeted police waiting with riot clubs. Through his binoculars St. Cloud focused on rooftops above the street where the march was about to come to a surprising end; the rooftops were lined with sandbags, manned by young uniformed National Guardsmen with mounted machine guns aimed down at the street. “Rats in a maze!” St. Cloud shouted into the din of loudspeakers and sirens swelling up from below. He turned away in disgust, a disgust aimed at himself. What a stupid way to try to end a war. Where the crowd was he did not want to be. He was going to stay one step ahead of the game, keep one foot out of the maze, ready to run from what he saw as an exercise in mass impotence. His flight from the madness of war would be his life, he would kill his life off in silent protest, turn his back on his future potential. As he peered through the binoculars on that long-ago day of his first date with Evelyn he could still hear her saying, “You’re wrong. They aren’t rats, you are the rat for running from it. You’ll see, this will end it, but not for you.” Evelyn’s words still rang in his memory, with them he recalled the sound of the helicopters clattering above them on the bookstore rooftop, clouds of tear gas from the choppers’ steel bellies floating into streets below, and he could no longer see, gravel pricking into his knees as he fell, his eyes throbbing as if pierced by a rain of cactus needles, a fire raging in his chest, a fire the eruption of vomit spewing from his mouth could never put out.
The differences were there from the beginning. Evelyn carried her ideals with her, St. Cloud was on the run from his. A man can’t marry his conscience, but St. Cloud had been fool enough to try. He wasn’t certain if he married Evelyn because he loved her, or because the shared idealism of their youth proved a stronger passion than the urgent sexual desire that originally brought them together.
What Evelyn said about him from the first was true, the root of his restlessness could not be torn from him. He was part of the generation conceived under the cloud of Hiroshima and came of age during the time of Vietnam, one of Uncle Sammy’s marked babies. A strange stain of guilt covered him, an implacable atomic dust gnawed at his essence. Evelyn refused to allow the shadow of the cloud to keep her shivering in the dark crevice of despair, she understood no one could outrun the cloud, it is in the heart, forever. But the heart harbors other things, the balances and weights of truth and survival, the knowingness of when to shed the afterbirth of former selves. Evelyn’s sense of survival was stronger than St. Cloud’s, she knew her strength pulled him head over heels for her, but nothing remains the same, nothing is forever, she taught him that. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe St. Cloud would never learn, continue to fall in love with abstractions to avoid the true lessons of the heart. Evelyn was lost to him as they journeyed from those early college days of commitment, lost because he could not find himself.
The unshakable guilt of Vietnam became St. Cloud’s mistress, swelling to disproportionate balance between himself and Evelyn. Even in long moments of passion, Evelyn knew she shared St. Cloud with something else, that he owed his allegiance to his assumed collapse of bravado. She sensed he harbored his sexual energy, as if it were a sin to spend his essence on anything more intimate than his desperate sense of loss. What had been good between them in the beginning went quickly bad. Evelyn could trace it to that first day on the bookstore roof as the rain of tear gas clouded overhead; it was their collective beginning and St. Cloud’s personal end, for he was powerless to shift the predictable course of the antiwar march below in the streets, let alone derail the roaring train of history called the Vietnam war, destined to derail in a crash of disorienting despair. It was on the bookstore roof where St. Cloud surrendered his youthful ideals. Watching the diminutive protestors in the maze of streets below marching toward inevitable failure, he saw clearly that his way was to become a warrior of the shadows, to trade his life for all-out war on war, declare war against his own country, become a human bomb, an incendiary physical device, an instrument of destructive force equal to the destructive force operative in the steaming jungles eight thousand miles away. To stop the war St. Cloud would have to sacrifice himself, no quarter could be given, no reserve sought, by necessity he must become the ultimate weapon, destroy the infrastructure of his own society. Whenever bombs rained from bays of B-52S eight thousand miles away he would provide equal explosions in his homeland. Power lines, bridges, dams, roads, all would be blown. The country would tremble beneath a violent finger of disaster pointed by one of its own. The bones of those who spoke broken promises would be broken, no prisoners would be taken. Release was to become a terrorist, a fierce wind of retribution culminating in one’s own fiery reprisal. Release was the extinction of madness by madness.
Evelyn alone understood St. Cloud’s innermost failure; he was incapable of crossing the line, could not pass the point of no return, could not justify what it would take to win. Even if St. Cloud could stomach it, even if to splatter the blood and bone of his own countrymen across a map of justified reprisal was imaginable, it remained in the end beyond his doing. It was not that he was a coward, it was simply he was not a killer. That is why he was against the war from its origination. He could not become a killer, even for a cause he deemed far greater than the mediocrity of his own existence. Evelyn understood the suffering of St. Cloud’s soul. To what reality he finally emerged was not important; what was important was that he escape the Black Cloud, understand at last he was capable of change, accountable only to himself. Evelyn had discovered this truth within herself before she discovered St. Cloud, for it was not St. Cloud who discovered her in the mayhem of that long-ago antiwar march, it was she who was seeking him in her dusty sandals and thin dress, stalking the male wounded, sniffing for the scent of fear she knew so well. Though she was only twenty at the time she had traced in a few short years a lifetime of despair and guilt over the war eight thousand miles away, which was driving an endless stake through the heart of her generation. As she watched the stake being driven ever deeper it became horrifying to her that so many were unaware of its lethal presence, as if the stake had driven out the capacity for remorse, leaving a large part of the generation face down in a brain-dead field of apathy. This fact above all others drove Evelyn to desperate extremes, left her with the unmistaken calling that she alone must assume the agonizing guilt denied others. Antiwar marches and public screams of protestation were no longer enough for Evelyn. She felt compelled to pursue fateful acts. In the eternity of the few years before she met St. Cloud in the crowded streets of a college town, she had danced naked on a bar top in a roadside strip joint near the sprawl of a California airbase constructed in the midst of onion fields unfolding to the horizon. Evelyn’s teen-aged body gyrated nightly to the thunderous roar of Vietnam-bound transport planes overhead, which dwarfed the metallic incantations of guitars from loudspeakers surrounding her. Smoky air swirled about her sweat-slickened turns on the bar as eighteen-year-old boys followed her every move. The hair of the eighteen-year-olds was cut recruit bristle short, their creased battle fatigues creaking with untried embarrassment as their upturned faces sought a reflection of redemption in the shine of Evelyn’s stiletto-heeled shoes stamping out the wailing guitar beat on the bar top. The muscles of Evelyn’s calves tightened within nylon stockings gartered by a lace noose cinched about her waist. Her fingers traveled an outline of breasts, up to shoulders thrust back as she arched, arms outstretched behind, a curved bridge beneath the overhead spin of a mirrored globe flinging light across faces excited by a stripped-down oiled body begging to be held as affectionately and with such wanton consequence as a recruit fondles his first rifle. After each of Evelyn’s nightly go-go performances she would lead a recruit into the cubicle recess of a motel room next to the strip joint, take a bland sweating face between her two cool hands and gaze into eyes with hope carved from them with her sure purpose, like a fortune-teller melting the marrow of a new believer’s bones. All the while the roar of transport planes shook the already trembling motel bed. Planes landed and departed on runways reaching to the horizon of open California farmland. White flowering fields of onions surrounded the activity of men on the runways, whose machines had no relation to the tilling of the earth. Beyond the runways, past the camouflaged hulks of barracks and galvanized metal warehouses of munitions waiting to be loaded, were grand piles of harvested onions, mountains of vegetables exuding a pungent odor of earth salt to sail the wind, powerful enough to bring tears to men’s eyes as jet engines rent the air, as steel bellies of planes yawned open to offer bodies in green rubber bags inside stacks of shiny aluminum caskets, as long lines of recruits in green uniforms stood ready to march into the yawning bellies. The eye-tearing salt scent of onions traveled for miles, down the highway, past crowded go-go bars and topless-bottomless strip joints, through the whine of the sucking motel air-conditioner into Evelyn’s flared nostrils as her mouth moved on a sweat bland face, her hips rising from the shaking bed to meet the thrusting weight of a shuddering body, at that moment her lips flowered with their true purpose, her heated words released into an unsuspecting ear: “Don’t go. Just turn your back on it and walk away. Hell no, don’t go.”
Evelyn could not stop a war, but she could start a man’s conscience. Some of the bland-faced recruits walked away from her bed, away from the airfield, drifted down the highway, distancing themselves from a killer identity before it was too late, abandoning their own names and families, slipping into neutral countries, or disappearing into the cracks of a burgeoning underground. Some marched to a new drummer of inspirational purpose, others were forever condemned to uncertainty, letting their hair grow long and their memories short, starting new lives, forgetting old hurts. In one way or another, those who walked away from Evelyn’s bed with conspiratorial words ringing in their ears severed forever the tenuous thread that
connected them to the mighty notion at play on the glistening tarmacs of the airfield of men leaving a country at peace to make war in another country. This severing happened not in a flash of illuminating cowardice or elevated consciousness, but in an unpredictable moment when a young girl surrounded by the air-conditioned wind of sweet onions whispered, Don’t go. Some didn’t. Evelyn never knew, Evelyn never counted.
Evelyn carried her message from the onion fields into the big cities with college campuses not yet awakened to the consequences of a stake being driven through the heart of the least suspecting. She looked the predictable type on a college campus. She looked neither for nor against anything, espoused no political cant and outwardly breached no social contract expected of someone her age. She quietly worked the fields of academe. At night, in her bed, her success was her swift surprise, her whispered avowed purpose. Naked college boys were into her before gauging the true depth of her intention. The boys rose speechless from rumpled sheets, tried to pay her or kiss her, but knew from the expression in her eyes there was only one earthly payment expected of them. Evelyn was there for them, presenting in passion’s irrational moment the only rational way to pay the bill. She never knew if they did, never knew which way they drifted when the draft notice came in the mail. She didn’t have the heart to look back, there were more colleges, all across the country, she didn’t have much time, and when she felt she was losing the battle, she headed back to the airbase in the onion fields, to the bar top surrounded now by even more bland faces, not hundreds, but thousands: black, brown, white, red. It was in her heart her job to strip bare and mount the bar top, on the off chance a bland face would see reflected his road to redemption in the shine of her stiletto shoes. Long after the music stopped none of the bland faces, not those choosing to travel the thread from a country at peace to a country at war, nor those who drifted away to an inevitable uneasy peace with themselves, knew what happened to the all-American-looking girl who danced naked on a bar top in a neon-lit strip joint at the edge of onion fields. She became to them as much a dream as their own youth had become. They could not know she grew an independent life in her from those endless sweaty nights. Although the growth deviated from her avowed purpose, Evelyn let the forming human buried deep in her belly be.
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