Mile Zero

by Sanchez, Thomas

  Don’t worry chilrens, Mammy’s at the wheel of reason, Zobop’s at the wheel of the Ghost-Car. They say Zobop is a mob of sorcerers, magical gangsters who transform their victims into goats and toads before slaughtering them. They say Zobop has been given a burning charm from the Loas, for Zobop cleanses the earth of the foul and failed, leading them to the slaughterhouse to the march of a drumbeat. They say Zobop has intercourse with evil spirits, suckles from a fountain of fresh terrors. They say Zobop goes about the night in a Tiger-Car, an Auto-Zobop which careens through the heavens, along dark country roads, beaming blinding blue from bright headlights. They say Zobop feeds salt to zombies, which wakes and shakes them to acts of free will. They say Zobop kidnaps children. Lies! Zobop does not disturb the dead. Zobop inhabits the dead. Zobop kidnaps no one. Zobop did not kidnap you. Zobop just likes to take people for a little ride in his Ghost-Car, up the street of illusions, down the avenue of dreams, around the curve of illumination, over the cliff of doom.

  You-bop

  He-bop

  She-bop

  They-bop

  We-bop

  To-Zobop

  Bop till you drop. You think I’m kidding? Just wait. I drive by night. Do you see my clever soul? A newborn New World monkey at the wheel of misfortune. Here we go. Hang on!

  You don’t like it, do you? If I am everything you are not, then you are everything I am. You want to run, you want to close your ears, to close out treason of misfired reason, but you can’t. You are still with me because you are me. Look here, my darling suckling pig, my tireless turtle hatchling, the feast is in the wood. You don’t know what I’m talking about? For three hundred years you don’t know what I’ve been talking about. Three hundred years ago the great fleets of Castilian plunderers were cut to ribbons on coral off the Florida Straits, sunk to sea bottom, weighted by bullion and precious stones. For three hundred years this cargo attracted men like those who went down with the ships, men who didn’t make their own fortunes, spent lifetimes scratching the earth’s crevices in search of treasures bought by sweat of others. Men who mined the currency of cultural droppings which had fallen into cracks of history, or sunk to bottom of timeless ocean. Scattered around this island, in any direction you choose to sail, are treasures on the ocean floor still untouched. The wood of sunken galleons once transporting fabulous treasures now nurtures implacable shipworms. Shipworms feast upon a banquet of seasoned timber while surrounded by worthless dull gleam of gold and emeralds. Do you finally see the value of what I offer? Your treasure has no currency in the natural world. Heed my world if you do not want to end up a dead document. The feast is everywhere around and you turn a blind side to it, ignorant to turtle hatchlings moving toward false light of shopping centers, panthers coming up from the Everglades to cross deathtrap highways going nowhere. So I am forced to action. I start my engine. I roar to life after life. The Ghost-Car is on the prowl tonight. Zobop the Great Corrector is loose. He is not who you think him to be. He is a feast in the wood, a blue streak in the heavens, water on the brain.

  Water and wind, wind and water, they bore all plant life to this island in the beginning. Water and wind brought life, water and wind will take it away. I place my lips to the lambi, the sacred shell of the conch. My breath blows a message which opens the heavens, parts the pearly gates, calls upon the wind to sail ships across water to a magic spot, where those who survive dwell in perpetual mystery. I summon wind to raise the sea over this island, drown the disbelievers for one and all. I condemn tainted souls to a fate worse than life on this putrefied globe. Nothing shall be left except voices over still water, no more roaring cascade in my brain, calm prevails as waves smooth themselves overhead. The chattering screams of green monkeys heralding the deluge is finally silenced. In the east, sun rises in an Avenging Angel’s outstretched hand, graves yawn open around her as mounted Horsemen storm from beneath the sea, thunder ashore on raging tide of dead documents. I feed the sea, sow the waves, reap the tide, ride the current, time is on my side. I dance the time of my history while God is out to lunch and worms feast on wood. I right the way. I write the way. I write. I am witness. I am testimony. I am writing right, the right exit. Dead documents float ever swiftly to ocean surface. Furious weeds rise in a jar. The yellow circle closes. The steel cage clatters down around us all. Look at me, straight at me. Peer into my face. Escape awaits through my eyes. The only escape route is through the Eye of the Hurricane. I am the Hurricane. Get out while you can. Are you with me? Yes! Let’s go then! We are storm riders! We are in orbit! At last! Know my language! A-OK! A through ZZZZZZZ-Be-Bop Ah Lu-La! ZEROBOP!

  We see Eye through I now. You knew you were me all along, didn’t you?

  BOOK THREE

  MADONNA

  ON THE

  REEF

  20

  CAYO HUESO ES EL PAIS DE SIGUARAYA. Key West is the land where anything goes. On this evening of All Saints’ Justo didn’t know if things were going to the Gods or to the Devils. One thing certain things were already going their usual loco. Justo touched the gold bone at his neck as he made his way toward music blaring from crowded Duval Street ahead. All Saints’ Eve always spooked him, spooked him as a kid, spooked him more now. Made no difference if All Saints’ Eve was also called Halloween. On this island Halloween wasn’t a night which brought out gay children costumed for treats. Instead it released the child within adults. It was an excuse for masked nocturnal antics, dancing in the streets, ceaseless prowling through raucous bars and discos in search of illicit treats. A night spent hidden behind the costume of an ape, a Bozo clown or an impeached president, one could don the ego of another, the droll become garish. Accountants miraculously transformed into barstool Romeos, bank clerks slinky as short-skirted Lolitas, randy divorcees slippery as oil-slick Valentinos, and nervous Navy housewives purring hot as fresh whiskered cats in black leotards. La vida es un tango. Life is a ball.

  The ghosts of All Saints’ Eve, and the goblins of Halloween, had lately given way to an official Mardi Gras-style frolic, a high time of civic-minded madness, renamed by the city, Fantasy Fest. Beneath the costumed sheets of Fantasy Fest’s ribald revelry was a not-so-disguised plan designed to lure ever more northern tourists into the jaws of the island’s insatiable hunger for fast bucks and quick turnover. The warily wise native Conchs slammed their shutters, waiting for the brassy overflow of masked tricksters to blow away in a whirlwind of hangovers, empty wallets and guilty consciences. Fantasy Fest obliterated a once serious date on the calendar, the end of hurricane threat, another furious season survived, not that there still weren’t tropical storms off the coast of Africa capable of cooking up a two-hundred-mile-an-hour surprise. The Conchs knew the main danger was past, even though the official hurricane season didn’t end for another month. Conchs understood the nature of their weather, with each sweltering dog day, from beginning of August right through end of sweaty October, gathering storms grew more frequent and belligerent. A beefy squall could turn overnight into a swirl of devastating windy skirts, sweeping the island’s inhabitants into the sea beneath a twenty-foot wall of water. Justo could live without Fantasy Fest, it had become less of one thing, a corruption of many. No longer a simple kids’ holiday or a religious celebration for the devoutly superstitious, not even the official end of hurricane season. Because it was not what it pretended to be many people mightily aspired to make it into a real excuse for riotous behavior. Cada uno tiene su modo de matar pulgas. Everyone has his own way of killing fleas.

  Fantasy Fest was not a cop’s favorite holiday. Justo was normally at home that night, surrounded by close compadres drinking compuesto and playing dominoes in his living room as tangled scents of squid, chicken and shrimp drifted from the kitchen, where gossipy chatter of Rosella and the women added spice to a boiling stewpot of Paella Valenciana. While masked revelers danced to a worrisome beat in distant streets Justo smugly thought, as he watched an opponent’s bridge of dominoes about to fall, puerco con frio, y hombres
con vino, hacen gran ruido. Cold pigs and drunken men make a lot of noise. But this Halloween Justo was not spending a tranquil night at home. He was in the midst of drunken men, drunken pigs, drunken lions, Little Bo-Peeps, Attila the Huns and Andrew Jacksons, a howling mob of counterfeit inebriates. He was in a sofo con, an embarrassing fix, hoofing it without the authority of a perseguidora, a police car. Why? Because, eres como Canuto, mientras mas viejo mas bruto. The older you get the dumber you are. His elaborate scheme to keep control of Voltaire’s destiny had collapsed. Not only had the Coast Guard sent in a squad of lawyers to argue the city of Key West had no jurisdiction over what transpired on Voltaire’s boat while on the high seas, the grand jury refused to hear the case on a battery of technical points, not the least of which was a lack of evidence to find Voltaire accountable for anything other than nearly starving to death, much less manslaughter. To make matters worse, while Justo investigated the drug murder of a Massachusetts felon on the lam, cut off in his prime by a blast from a sawed-off shotgun behind the All-You-Can-Eat fried chicken diner out on the boulevard, two Federal Marshals from Miami showed at the jail in an unmarked van with blacked-out windows to haul Voltaire to the Everglades detention camp. Mal día. On top of this a Southerner recently recruited by the police department, a six-foot-five genius who thought Don Cervantes Saavedra was the name of any Cuban refugee running for mayor or caught doping greyhounds before a big Quinella, had complained up the chain of command that Justo kept a dog in his car while on duty. The blister-faced recruit maintained Justo’s behavior violated regulations, a threat to dignity the force worked hard to maintain in face of a sullen and apathetic public. Justo knew, from reliable information of scammers working the seamier side streets off Duval, the Southerner was a heavy-handed skimmer of narcotics seized in daily busts. This white man in blue did not like Justo’s skin hue, distrusted the way Justo chose to turn a blind eye to smaller infractions in order to bag bigger game. Complaints about Ocho, coupled with the honor Justo brought the department in the case of Voltaire, compelled his superiors to make him a small present. Despite seniority he was busted back to a street beat during the baddest week of the year, the week of Fantasy Fest. Justo was allowed no comfortable loose guayabera shirt to walk the streets in, instead he had to stuff himself into an iron-creased suit of regulation rayon blues he hadn’t worn in years. A too small visored police cap perched atop his head; revolver, riot stick and handcuffs swung at his hips as he patrolled his beat with a static squeal coming from the two-way radio crammed in his back pocket. Mal día, what a bad day. What a bad situation. Quien al cielo escupe, en la cara le cae. He who spits toward heaven has the spittle fall back in his face.

  Lately heaven seemed to be raining displeasure on Justo. He blamed himself for Voltaire’s fate. True, no good deed goes unpunished. He knew he shouldn’t have tried such a crazy stunt to keep Voltaire bottled up in the judicial system so he wouldn’t be grabbed by the Feds and sent back into the jaws of the shark. But anything was worth a try, and with St. Cloud working in the same direction he thought, well, now it saddened him what he thought that long-ago day when the Coasties towed the refugee boat into Mallory Dock. He had thought wrong. Se la dejaron en la mano. He was left holding the bag. Still, he had one card to play before the game was over. He was determined to take the last gamble to get Voltaire back. To make the gamble work he needed St. Cloud again. Somewhere in the gang of celebrants crowding the streets on this Halloween night of fantasy festivities he was bound to run across St. Cloud. St. Cloud was not one to miss a party, especially where the promise of free rum was loose in the air.

  WHAT’S 1 MILE LONG?

  FLOATS AND GLOWS?

  MAKES MUSIC?

  IS TOTALLY CRAZED?

  The question chalked on the blackboard behind the Wreck Room bar counter did not pose much of a challenge to the customers shouting for another drink. The answer was the Grand Costume Parade, making its noisy way down the one-mile length of Duval Street past the Wreck Room windows. Justo attempted to catch Angelica’s eye as she pacified fruit-hatted Carmen Mirandas, hoop-skirted Dolly Madisons, and intergalactic travelers sporting tinfoil antennae. Even the boisterous Bubba-Bob had exchanged his captain’s cap for a broad-brimmed cowboy hat. Things were definitely not as they should be. In the slot behind the bar where Angelica normally worked alone, five bartenders scurried with trays of foaming drinks. Justo couldn’t shout his question to Angelica, if she had seen St. Cloud. The noise inside the room was louder than the loudspeakers booming Japanese rock and roll from a truck rolling by outside. A thirty-foot glitter-scaled Godzilla reared from the truck’s flatbed, a vomit of foil-wrapped chocolate kisses erupting from the beast’s mouth onto grateful revelers lining the street.

  “You want to go to Hollywood?”

  Justo turned to find the voice directed at him in the crowded room.

  It was a raspy voice. Its owner wore red tights and purple high-heeled shoes, a pink rabbit stole was slung over skinny cocoa-colored shoulders, a blond wig with a dazzling rhinestone tiara topped the whole affair. Green lipstick around the voice’s mouth puckered in a large, “O, oh, ohh! You come with me, honey, and you come to Hollywood.”

  Justo stared into the voice’s smooth face, its eyes covered by a black Lone Ranger mask. He didn’t know if he was being hustled by man or woman, though he had a strong suspicion. The creature raised a bony hand, its painted fingernails digging into Justo’s elbow.

  “C’mon sugar, let’s fly to where I can make you a star.” The voice darted from a tongue close to Justo’s ear.

  Justo was in the trap a good cop should never be in, caught off guard. A queer embarrassment flushed his face ruddy purple. He couldn’t decide whether to book the creature pawing him, or laugh off the proposition.

  “Don’t be shy, honey. I’ll be gentle as Lassie. Maybe you don’t trust me to make you a star? Maybe you don’t trust women? Let me tell you something about women.”

  The green lips were heating to their subject. Justo felt the hot air from them on his cheek as he turned to catch Angelica’s attention again. Maybe if he ignored the clutching creature it would slither back under its barstool. No such luck.

  The green lips loosened with philosophical fervor. “Women know nothing of truth. Lies lies lies. Quack quack quack. Say whatever they want to suit themselves. Know what people say? A lie is a man’s last resort and a woman’s first aid. Have you ever noticed how a bad woman always gets a good man? Which are you, honey, a bad woman or a good man?”

  “A bad cop.”

  “I knew you weren’t a cop right off. Watched you come in. Stiff and stuffy in your butch blue suit, trying not to be noticed. Says to myself, this black boy is so uncomfortable. He should be masquerading as the Tin Man, or maybe delicious Dorothy herself.”

  It was worse than Justo first imagined. Green lips figured him for an impostor, a shoe clerk or a lawyer decked out as one of Key West’s finest. That was the trouble with Fantasy Fest, nobody was who they were supposed to be. Green lips had a point. Justo probably could command more respect dressed as the Tin Man on a night like this. “Look,” he growled even more menacingly. “I am a real cop. Don’t push it.”

  “No such thing as a real cop,” green lips snickered. “Only traffic cops and crooked cops.”

  “Listen—!” Justo grabbed the rabbit stole draped around skinny shoulders and twisted it into a knot beneath green lips’ chin. At times like this his Cuban Spanish came instinctively faster than his English. “Agila! Vete a la puneta!”

  “Does that mean we are engaged?”

  “Beat it! Go to the devil!”

  “Don’t want to go to the devil.” The pucker of green lips dissolved into a pout, painted fingernails digging deeper into Justo’s elbow. “Just want to go to Hollywood with you. Want to make you a matinee idol.”

  Justo didn’t have time for this. From the corner of his eye he saw the white cowboy hat of Bubba-Bob bobbing above crowded heads, moving toward the doo
r. He stiffened an index finger and brought it up in a swift poke into the hollow beneath green lips’ Adam’s apple. A surprised gasp whooshed from green lips, the skinny body teetering backwards on spiked heels.

  The cowboy hat of Bubba-Bob disappeared out the door. Justo bulled after it through the menagerie of bizarre beasts and femmes fatales of both sexes, pushing his way into the even greater crush of Duval Street. He had a hunch by following Bubba-Bob he might find St. Cloud. There were few men not island-born Bubba-Bob deemed worthy of sharing drink with. St. Cloud was definitely at the top of that list. Bubba-Bob owed St. Cloud a large and life-saving favor. It was St. Cloud’s glib tongue that saved Bubba-Bob from a cruel end worse than Karl Dean’s. Even though St. Cloud’s saving of Bubba-Bob’s skin happened several years back, it was still talked about from bar to bar as if it happened yesterday, making St. Cloud a local hero in some quarters. Justo knew the truth of the matter. St. Cloud had walked into the wrong bar at the right time. It was more than St. Cloud’s rum-loosened tongue that rescued Bubba-Bob from what was menacingly aimed at him. What was aimed at him were three Marimberos fresh from Bogotá. These weren’t just any three Colombian cocaine cowboys, they were on the trickle-down payroll of MK. They had been with MK since the early days of flying small planeloads of marijuana, up to the present time of running cargo ships of cocaine into Florida more frequently than ferries across the English Channel. Over the years the Marimberos enforced MK’s standard rule of trade: delivery plus two weeks to pay for the shipment. It was delivery plus two which brought the Marimberos to Key West in a rented Cadillac with blacked-out windows. They came to teach a lesson to a commercial lobster boat captain who had the bad manners not to pay for his load of cocaine passed from an MK mother ship. The Captain swore the Coast Guard busted his boat twenty miles out from Cuba, but the uniformed men who made the bust were put-up guys hired by the Captain, it was a straight rip-off. MK knew things were loosening around the edges, screws had to be tightened. He was forced to run a school of show and tell, his Marimberos constantly called upon to hold classes. Last Christmas they had been in Tampa, delivering a textbook lesson on the ABC’s of inter-American commercial ethics to a drug lawyer working both sides of the line. The lawyer’s name was Woof-Woof, a handle applied because he could woof down a half kilo of coke faster than an anteater hoses up a jar of honey, and because his bayside estate was guarded by two vicious pit bullterriers. Woof-Woof entertained guests by commanding the pit bulls to attack the smooth trunk of a royal palm soaring from the divingboard end of his swimming pool. Released from chained leashes, the ax-shaped heads of the pit bulls would strike the trunk with razor teeth, their bodies rising higher with each ferocious bite, like mutant monkeys from hell ascending Eden’s last tree. The bowwows were no problem for the Marimberos when they arrived at the locked gates of Woof-Woof’s estate Christmas Eve, because MK knew everything about Woof-Woof. Woof-Woof was not unlike many lawyers MK put through law school with money laundered cleaner than a convent girl’s underwear. When the Marimberos tied Woof-Woof up in his living room they told him he had been naughty, but they were going to feed him well. They sat him on the shiny red tricycle he planned to give his nephew for Christmas, from there he could watch as they unwrapped his presents beneath the decorated pine tree. They chained the carnivorous canines to the chrome metal legs of a suede sofa, and helped themselves to Woof-Woof’s buckets of champagne, cocaine and Quaaludes. So many presents to open, so little time until the hour of the virgin birth. The presents did not bring out the Christmas spirit in the Marimberos. They fought over a diamond pinky ring, silk neckties which could be worn to a marriage or a funeral, and a gold bracelet engraved with WOOFIE MY SAVIOR, LOVE KIT KAT. The boxes of Swiss chocolates and Florida fruitcakes the Marimberos’ shared with their bound host, shoveling bonbons and glazed figs into his mouth until his cheeks bulged and saliva dripped from his lips onto a fattened belly. The famished pit bulls snarled, but received not so much as a sugared plum. What revived the Marimberos festive spirit was playing back recorded messages on Woof-Woof’s telephone answering machine. Aside from business and family ring-ups many young women were attempting to solicit the favor of a return call. One solicitor purred in a velvet voice which drove the Marimberos to manic distraction as they dipped their beaks into finger-thick lines of cocaine. “Woofie honey, you there? This is Meow-Meow. Five in the morning and just got in from Coconut Grove. Famished for your you know what. My tongue is furry and white. Meow-me-yow. Where is Woofie when Kit Kat needs her special thing?” The Marimberos howled, the starving pit bulls growled. Everyone knew where Kit Kat’s special thing was, stuffed full of Christmas goodies and bound naked to a kid’s bike. The Marimberos were rocking with the yuletide spirit, they gobbled handfuls of Quaaludes and set about decorating Woof-Woof. They wound electrical tape around his head and over his mouth, then draped the attached links of kosher hot dogs over his shoulders and across his fattened belly. The two drooling brutes chained to the sofa eyed the fleshy decoration just beyond their straining reach with proprietary interest. Woof-Woof had yet to say a word, assuming the Marimberos were sent simply to scare him, but with ten pounds of hot dogs clothing him he decided it was time to cut a deal, he knew where all the bodies were buried, he was indispensable to MK. He tried to shout his terms. The sounds coming from his taped mouth were like hollow gasps from a rabbit clubbed back of its head. At sunup the phone started ringing again. The Marimberos played back the voice of a small boy wanting to know if Santa was bringing him a red bike, another voice whispered in a whiskey-throated purr that it was fresh from the shower and desperate for Woofie’s special thing. The Marimberos shouted at Woof-Woof. They were confused. They couldn’t comprehend why a man with a license to steal, a prosperous American drug attorney, would chisel a lousy hundred grand by skimming money he was supposed to move through safe banks in Mexico so MK’s imprisoned black shrimpers could return to business. Why would such an educated man with a mansion on Tampa Bay, a yacht tied out front and Kitty Kat girlfriends, go up against the accommodation? Was it true the Feds were about to nail him with twenty-two conspiracy counts and he had already flipped to them? The Marimberos were full of questions as they continued to deck Woof-Woof out like a butcher’s Christmas tree. They demanded answers, but all they got were muffled blubs from Woof-Woof’s taped mouth and ever more urgent calls from meowing Kit Kat. The pit bulls were lunging at the scent of a meal in the air. Did Woof-Woof know pit bulls ate all of their prey after they killed it, bones and all? “I want my special thing,” Kit Kat pleaded. “God bless ye merry gentlemen,” the Marimberos toasted each other with champagne and released the voracious animals. As the pit bulls tore into the flesh of their overdue present the Marimberos slipped off to the airport, were back in Bogotá by late Christmas day. Not unlike the Three Kings of the Orient nearly two thousand years earlier, theirs was simply to bear witness to a fait accompli. It was for others to puzzle the truth of mysteries, divine or mundane.