Mile Zero (17 page)

The more Brogan talked of MK in the Wreck Room last night, the more St. Cloud felt the busy teeth of a rat gnawing through his rum-soaked soul. The rat finally nested in the unresolved guilt of St. Cloud’s failed past. It had been many years since St. Cloud collapsed in pursuit of his youthful purpose, incapable of transcending the entrails of Vietnam, unable to use his knowledge and experience to make himself over into the shape of an anonymous man, like many of the pacifists did after the Second World War. St. Cloud felt the saddle of fear chafing on his shoulders. It was no longer enough to make a career of running from an old life, not enough to work the
high wire of self-pity without a net. Those who struggled to stop the war in Vietnam a generation ago knew they had been defeated. Vietnam was not a war that ended in peace, it was a peace made into a war, war with oneself. St. Cloud’s fascination with MK was a belief MK had tunneled his way to illuminating light by never accepting personal failure or national defeat. MK’s means of escape was to stay at war, keep moving, never come home, become ultimately what all civilized society is at war against. Brogan told St. Cloud MK made the same pact with himself as St. Cloud had, both understood that to come to peace with oneself is certain death.

St. Cloud had searched in his rummy haze for illumination, the bright hope of a burning hoop of completion. As Brogan talked St. Cloud saw the hoop coming toward him, a flaming circle of fire spreading in the green jungle from the dropped bomb of an overhead B-52. The only thing left for St. Cloud was to jump through the flaming hoop. He now understood. Vietnam had opened a world of pain and guilt for both himself and MK, was an aphrodisiac of moral mourning which had become a narcotic. At this point of damning light near dawn in the Wreck Room St. Cloud had another rum and lost control. He tumbled through space, a charred soul. He stumbled out the door of the Wreck Room, drifting like a dog with a cut tail, staggering into early morning. Everything seemed distant to him, far away as his lost youth, even Evelyn’s world behind shutters in the garden was a forbidden planet, at best an unreachable moon. There was greater safety behind closed bedroom shutters, where fiery-tongued dragons ruled the lunar roost, than where St. Cloud was headed, up the last one-way alligator alley into the swamp of delusion. His blood hummed with blind idiot intention. He felt suddenly compelled to confess his passion for the barely legal-aged Dixie Peach who resided cool and unruffled amidst the squawks and screeches of Evelyn’s bird shop. Isaac would understand how such a southern drawling creature’s sensuality could perk up an aging man’s downed radar, explode what was left of his common sense. Though St. Cloud was still in love with his lost self in Evelyn, such was puppy love compared to the song of fools aching in his throat for Lila. He cocked his cap and set sail in a desperate stupor toward Isaac. Only Isaac could smooth St. Cloud’s ruffled soul, help him snatch sunken treasure from the unforgiving jaws of time. It was Isaac St. Cloud desperately needed now.

The uneven roll of the cracked sidewalk glimmered in morning
mist before St. Cloud, vivid as a silver flashing serpentine wave on a rough sea. The roots of towering Spanish laurel trees heaved the sidewalk up in ever-increasing treacherous waves. St. Cloud pushed on, a high-blown yachtsman in a storm-tossed moment. He was nearing the end of Whitehead Street. The pavement dead ahead stopped. The high Atlantic tide lapped against the SOUTHERNMOST POINT OF THE CONTINENTAL U.S.A., a landmark proclaimed in bright letters painted on a torpedo-shaped concrete monument, which informed as an afterthought in smaller letters around the torpedo’s nose:
90 MILES TO CUBA
. If Whitehead Street continued another ninety miles, instead of ending abruptly at the sharp edge of the Atlantic Ocean, St. Cloud could keep right on going until he walked down the palm-lined avenues of Havana and into the Floridita Bar, where he’d pull up a stool, wink at the white-gloved waiters balancing silver trays, order a round of drinks to toast tropical Marxism in the land of papaya girls with perfect ankles and pure smiles of mango persuasion. He resisted the temptation of walking on water and turned at the end of Whitehead up the next block, where the sidewalk had not only been cracked and lifted by another Spanish laurel, but shattered by a massive trunk pushing toward the sky in a mighty heave, throwing thick limbs out to block the sun. From towering overhead branches tendrils of airborne roots trailed fifty feet back to earth, forming a roped curtain, obliterating from view Isaac’s Bahamian mansion beyond.

Over the years a wandering path had been hacked through the dense jungle beneath the tree, leading to the twenty broad stairs rising steeply to the wraparound porch. It seemed the tree was the house, of primary permanence, all else was simple landscape, feckless man-made ornament. Only beneath a tree of majesty could Isaac’s mansion appear dwarfed. The structure was honored as one of the town’s grandest and eccentric; most of all, like the island Conch people themselves, it was hailed as a survivor. The house originally stood on a distant Bahamian island, where a hurricane had swept through with such fury it tossed houses, people and trees into the ocean, right down to the last coconut, everything except the multistoried Victorian gingerbread-style mansion of the island’s plantation overlord, a deserted monument left in the calm. The painstakingly built society which gave rise to such grandeur was gone, demolished in the quick breath of a greater master’s plan. The mansion’s owner was evicted on a howling night, tossed out with his slaves into the common grave
of the sea. The elaborate structure lingered in forlorn splendor on an island passed by for a generation by those blessed with memory of how swiftly the well-laid plans of man could be swept aside. The mansion was battered by new storms. Its mahogany shutters slammed and cracked in high winds. The elaborately carved spindles of the balustrade circling the second-story exterior balcony shrunk in the sun and snapped, imprinting an impression of a wide toothsome smile with the teeth missing. The tin-stamped roofs of the cupolas rising above the second story on all four corners, which once stood proudly as castle turrets on guard against the impervious tide of time, had surrendered. The cupolas buckled and collapsed, one after the other, each with a deeper sigh of disrepair as it caved into the silence of neglect. It took a man who thought big to salvage the gingerbread shambles. Even in an age when men thought nothing of floating houses from island to island, moving them lock, stock and dormers, mansards and gables across the seas, it required a grand schemer to restore glory to the mansion. James Fredrick Isaac was such a man. A Wrecker by trade, a gambler by nature, and a humble servant of God who roared brimstone and fire on the sabbath, James Fredrick, some said, understood the truth of false lights, made his fortune betting on the truth of that illusion. There were many men like James Fredrick who arrived in Key West penniless as the eighteenth century came into the nineteenth, loaded with opportunity for fortune. The gilded fate of many was mere miles away, off the westward hook of Key West where magnificent merchant Clipper ships of the day rode high down the Florida Straits, hugged the narrow channel along the reef’s jagged wall, into deep safety of the Gulf of Mexico. Not all vessels sailed into safe harbor. When weather turned squally even the most astute shipmaster was hard put to keep his vessel off the miles of shoals waiting on one side of Key West, and the reef on the other. Along the entire length of the Bahama Channel and the Florida Straits only a few weak lights glimmered to warn wary sailors off razor rocks capable of undoing the stoutest hull. So many ships sunk with silk and gold, lace and pewter, and all the bounty of the Seven Seas in between, that by 1850 Key West became the wealthiest town in America. The men who made that wealth were the Wreckers and the speculators who backed them. These men bid their time against inevitable inclement weather and human folly. The Wrecker put his ship and life on the line. The speculator bet his cash to back the Wrecker. It seemed the shipborne riches of the world, no matter what
their original destination, were preordained to end up in the mammoth salvage warehouses of Key West. When a ship was torn open on the reef a cry of
WRRREEEEEECK AHHHH-SHHHHORE
went up through the town. Church bells rang from steeples and men came running to crew fast boats to the wreck. The first to arrive at the disaster became the Wreck Master, who laid claim by law to the salvage. But the race to the wreck was normally in savage weather, or on moonless nights across a course laid with craggy underwater traps. Many Wreckers lost their lives on the rocks in their rush to riches. Others died trying to right ships listing on the reef, or raising those sunk to the bottom. Even more were crushed beneath tonnage of a shifting sea and flood tides as they worked to empty a submerged cargo hold. Such was how James Fredrick lost the lower half of his left leg. In James Fredrick’s early days, before he captained his own boat, he crewed on a Wrecking Ship with a reputation of sending its divers over the rail before the foundered position of the wrecked vessel alongside had steadied. One blustery night James Fredrick was the first over the rail, leaping across a storming sea with a securing rope. He landed safely on the listing ship as a dark wave swept over its bow with a roar which tore the rope through James Fredrick’s hands, slammed him across the breadth of the splintering main deck in a choke of salt water, leaving him buried beneath the crushing fall of barrels filled with Spanish olives.

By the time James Fredrick spied the deserted Bahamian mansion he was a graying man, his stoutness supported by one leg of muscular flesh, the other of solid gold. He clattered forth and fro on his gold peg leg across the deck of his own Baltimore Clipper. The Baltimore Clipper was not a true clipper, but a jaunty topsail schooner with a nine-foot draft needing only a handful of trustworthy men to crew. It could outsail the devil in a basket across the roughest seas. The Baltimore Clipper was the perfect wrecking vessel, except the hectic wrecking days of Key West were over. Two hundred miles of once night-dark waterway, which had given James Fredrick his fortune, were now aglow with lightships and lighthouses. Courts of law and underwriters had changed the rules of wrecking, implemented the gentleman’s notion of salvage. None of this bothered James Fredrick. He had made his fortune, surely as Commander Porter had years before run the pirates from these very same waters with his famous Mosquito Fleet, unwittingly making the Straits safe for Wreckers. Some said the only difference between a pirate and a Wrecker was a
legal piece of paper. James Fredrick didn’t say that, but he said something close to it. Every sabbath he let his congregation in for some front pew brow-beating. James Fredrick had become a reformed sinner. He was no longer the man who dispatched a hardy few in longboats, their smoking oil lanterns winking in darkness to beckon with false lights a confused shipmaster, luring with glaring lies the hold of another maritime treasure into the jaws of a shoal. James Fredrick had filled his purse from Wrecking and cleansed his conscience with Christianity. He became an ordained minister who stood each sabbath sturdy as a stork balanced on one leg, pounding the pulpit with his gold peg, speaking with personal conviction of St. Elmo’s fire and how the Lord saved him one stormy night from an avalanche of Spanish olive barrels.

James Fredrick never felt closer to God than when the plank decking of his jaunty schooner supported his peg leg on the high seas. Even though the Wrecking days had passed he still liked to troll for misadventure during the calm Christian working week. He sailed back and forth along the reef, on the off chance he might spy a ship that had its plug pulled on knife-sharp rock. To avoid the underwriters and their true bosses, the courts, James Fredrick sailed farther and farther from Key West, far away as the Bahamas and Abacos, in search of treasures from tragedy. On one of these journeys the old Wrecking Master, who even at sea dutifully wore the white Roman collar of a spiritual cleric, spied the gingerbread mansion. The mansion stood surrounded by eerie glare of salt ponds spotted across a desert of white sand. The fury of the long ago hurricane rendered the island inhospitable even to the tenacious mangrove. James Fredrick set his crew the task of dismantling the mansion and loading it aboard the ship. Sailing home the schooner passed during the night Alligator Reef, Fowey Rocks and Rebecca Shoal, strategically aglow with new lights warning of submerged hazards. The lights also signaled the end of the Wrecking days, but James Fredrick had rescued the greatest wreck of his career.

James Fredrick sited his Bahamian mansion at the southern edge of Key West facing the Atlantic Ocean, a defiant monument to natural disasters past and future, a tongue-in-cheek Christian testimonial to human folly, its intricate gingerbread structure painstakingly reassembled, clapboard by clapboard, wood-peg treenail by treenail. Climbing its broad front staircase St. Cloud was reminded of how over the years the mansion had escaped the fate of the island’s other grand
houses built by Wrecking tycoons, marine mercantile millionaires, and eccentric cigar factory moguls. The gingerbread mansion had not been chopped up room by room, floor by floor, into apartments and fashionable guesthouses, inhabited by those who did not know a chamfer from a dormer, a mansard from a dowel. The one thing the mansion had not escaped was the onrushing hurricane of time, falling once again into grave disorder and disrepair. It had become, in two generations since the death of James Fredrick Isaac, a dangerously leaning accumulation of exotically cut and fit timbers, threatening to tumble at the slightest human sigh, much less a full blown charge from El Finito bearing hard from Cuba.

The front door was ajar, as it always was. The stained-glass fanlight window above the door was spider-webbed with cracks, threatening to crash down from the creaking of St. Cloud’s footsteps. He entered the cavernous foyer, the musty space so grand that after the final cannons of the Civil War sounded it had been pressed into service as a ballroom to celebrate Key West’s military crowning as the fortified Gibraltar of America. The deep shadows of the foyer still offered ghostly promise of uniformed officers and hoop-gowned beauties to come spinning in a waltz trance through the forest of white paint-chipped Greek Revival columns. Overstuffed chairs and sofas were shrouded in white, their true shapes hidden beneath draped sheets. From the center of the foyer a circular flyaway staircase ascended, its once lustrous pecanwood steps buffed by time to a dusty dung color. Each step cracked loudly beneath St. Cloud’s weight, the sound reverberating into the darkening cavern of the foyer. At the top of the staircase landing the salty scent of the Atlantic fingered airily along a twenty-foot-high hallway. St. Cloud walked toward the end of the hallway where tall arched windows were thrown open to the sea. Bright light from blue water beyond bounced off the yellow-pine interior of hall walls. St. Cloud softened his step in expectation, nearing the door at the hall’s end leading into the master bedroom. The door was open. Holding his breath he leaned quietly against the doorjamb, waiting for his courage to rise. He peered in.