Mile Zero (2 page)

The seabirds do not look up to the man-made future, nor do they stop and circle a boat adrift, its tattered sail limp against a broken mast, the deck crowded with bodies. No sign of life signals the birds to swoop down. They glide on, leaving the boat to whatever current
claims it. The seabirds have read the weather of coming day correctly. The solid-rocket blast of the spacecraft shuttling heavenward and the rudderless boat of Haitian refugees do not deter them. The coloration of the ocean portends the day’s approaching heat, sustenance must be taken quickly from sheltered mangrove shallows beyond the dark crescent of coral reef on the horizon. The birds do not alter their course. Ahead in the bright is Key West.

“Rise and shine paradise! Radio W … K … E … Y broadcasting from your space-age island in the sun. Another boring day of subtropical splendor from Key Largo to Dry Tortugas. So take the handcuffs off your lover and let him or her enjoy temps of eighty-five and getting higher, humidity seventy-five percent and getting higher. In the Florida Straits swells two to six feet and getting, you guessed it, higher!”

St. Cloud was at sea in a sea of sleep, a dream swimmer born half in air, half out of water, floating toward the same nightmare in Neptune’s murky cobalt closet, the submerged vision of a woman on the reef, wealth of seaweed wreathed in her hair, white body pierced by fish, turtles sucking at flowing fingers, her eyes translucent pearls, mirrored souls of ancient oysters. A powerful riptide separates her from St. Cloud, separates the muse from the music. Not easy for a bull to swim beneath the sea.

The radio announcer’s voice out of static brought St. Cloud fully awake. He slipped from between Evelyn’s thighs where the dream of the night before shipwrecked him.

“If you were knocked out of your bunk this morning by a sound loud as a cannonball, you were part of history. At six fifty-eight in the a.m. from Cape Kennedy, first ever made in the U.S.A. Space Shuttle was launched. Quarter million thrill seekers watched the big bird get it off. Got a couple thousand here waiting for our big launch, minutes away now from the final day of the International Powerboat Championships. Coast Guard’s patrolling the twenty-six-mile sea course. Key West harbor’s blocked off. If you’re not already out there in your own boat to witness the race start, forget it. Coasties say no more boats allowed to cross the race course. Two favorites might break a world record in today’s final race. Miami Kid, owned by a Central American consortium, finished yesterday’s qualifying heat at an awesome eighty-six mph on the rough-water storm course; the thirty-eight-foot Cougar catamaran, Murdoch’s Revenge, piloted
by local Key Wester Karl Dean, was a hull length behind. Contending strong at only thirty-two points off the leaders are the French team from Calais and their boat Bullet Baguette, and the Italians in their Philippine-wood catamaran pushed by fourteen-hundred-horsepowered surface-piercing props. The competition’s fierce so stay tuned to your Pirate Island radio station in the wild blue yonder.”

St. Cloud’s gaze followed the heave of Evelyn’s breathing. The green and red bloom of a tattooed rose blossomed at the top of her breast in dawn light stabbing through the salt-streaked glass porthole above the narrow berth. The tide sloshed against the hull, lulling the boat in a sighing rhythm. Bull rocking in a woman’s sea. St. Cloud held his breath as Evelyn turned in her sleep. He was where he wanted to be, for the moment. If fate pulled the plug on him he was content to be so close to rock bottom. How much lower can a man sink? Somehow it was making sense to make no sense of it. Evelyn’s tanned back was presented to him flawless as an empty movie screen, except for a fading scar beneath a winged shoulderblade, etched into her skin ten years before when they first drifted down to the Keys. America was still at war in Vietnam, and St. Cloud and Evelyn took the core of their love for granted, looking for nothing, running from everything. The first time they swam in vivid waters along the reef they dove again and again into a world pure with color, touched only by their eyes, the splendor robbed their breath, they could not get enough of it, feasted on the sight of brilliant fish scattering along the purple-hued shelf of coral stepping beyond sight into a cobalt deep. Swimming back to the surface their lungs burst with excitement, here was something beyond predictability. St. Cloud noticed blood running from a jagged puncture beneath Evelyn’s shoulder. As she dove again a trail of blood lingered, an almost imperceptible ribbon running from her body back up to the bubbling surface. Through clear water St. Cloud could see Evelyn swimming in a new world, oblivious to the wound from a sharp snag on the reef. St. Cloud understood in that moment their lives were going to be transformed, but the very nature of the change was beyond fathoming. The trail of blood going inky and disappearing into the surrounding blue was like an unraveling of their life together, back to the time before they met, when both were separate. Like the jagged scar on Evelyn’s back separating her new world from his, the bloom of the tattooed rose foretold a radical blossoming of another change. Before the rose made its indelible
impression on Evelyn’s flesh, St. Cloud resided deep within the smugness of idealism, accepted the predictability of his wayward youth. St. Cloud not only thought he understood Evelyn, he thought he knew what they both stood for, what America stood for, and how they didn’t fit. That was long ago, before their chance landing on Key West, an island made quirky by a dangerous slant of light angling from the tropics. Every time St. Cloud tasted the sweet salt of the rose bloom on Evelyn’s skin he awakened to the humor of the situation. More roses were tattooed on breasts of women in Key West than there were real roses in all the fancy Miami flower shops. Whenever St. Cloud removed a woman’s brassiere, or she opened her blouse to him, he expected a rose to blossom, or occasionally an octopus to be exposed, its inky-blue tentacles gripping a breast, fixing him with a one-eyed nipple stare. The rose tattoos thrived in a hothouse hum of tropical treachery, a consuming disorientation of desire fertilized by disintegrating ideals, an inescapable rust of the soul. Nothing lasts in the tropics, lovers come and go, ideals bloat and burst, implacable impermanence. Nothing lasts forever, not even eternal love.

St. Cloud had not so much lost Evelyn to the bloom of other roses as he had lost her to himself, betrayed former commitment by allowing cynical corruption to enter his blood. Commitment’s distant memory had washed beneath the bridge of time in a torrent of rum. By the time Evelyn’s rose was being touched and tried by other roses, St. Cloud was swirling helplessly in a sea of self-pity. He knew Evelyn’s passions had long since melded into dark crevices of female flowered gardens, where he committed the crime of bearing witness to the dragon of his jealousy. In the beginning he greeted this inevitability by turning his eyes elsewhere, stared without blinking into endless nights of infidelity. Even though he remained legally married to Evelyn, the divorce not yet finalized, the loss was final, except at times like this, when St. Cloud cajoled Evelyn into deferring to his emptiness, appealed to his own wife for a slick remedy of ecstasy, a mercy bullet to blast him beyond misery. He had lured Evelyn onto her own boat the night before, baited his trap for one last fling with the meat of nostalgia, snaring Evelyn’s instinct for female pardon. This was not an exercise in masculine conniving, for the problem was not that women were now the main contenders for his wife’s emotions. The reality was St. Cloud no longer contended, could not even contend with himself, except when he attempted to penetrate to the origin of his loss.

The hardening rise of St. Cloud’s flesh moved deep into the damp between Evelyn’s legs as his lips traveled along the fading scar beneath her shoulderblade. Evelyn turned against the fleshy slide of his body, murmured into the slurring sound of slapping tide, cutting St. Cloud loose, an abandoned bull adrift on a lost ship.

From above the helicopters came. The race was on. St. Cloud reluctantly withdrew from Evelyn, pulled his pants up to his waist over a stubborn stiffness no longer of consequence, and went topside where he was greeted by cheers rising from an anchored flotilla of paint-blistered skiffs, sleek ketches and listing lobster boats crowded with beer-drinking spectators applauding a roaring line of forty-foot-long powerboats led overhead by a flock of helicopters. The spectacle of speed burst from around the far side of the island, an invading force of machinery and technology fueled by glory and risk in a mad pursuit to break former feats of record. In the deafening roar the flotilla seemed under attack, caught in a sudden atmosphere of warlike activity. The waterborne herd thundered by at full throttle into a one-hundred-and-sixty-mile run over a glass-hard surface made dangerous by slippery speed and tentative friction. Boldly painted boat hulls nosed high, sharp bows tilting six feet into the air. Rayed bolts of sunlight reflected off the drivers’ and throttlemen’s crash helmets deep within cocooned cockpits nearly obscured by white-hot jet exhausts plowing a showering spray to a distant horizon and over its edge.

The superficial veil of sport had been pierced. In the calm left behind the passing disturbance furrowed wakes rose to rock the small flotilla. Evelyn emerged from below, touched St. Cloud’s shoulder. An embarrassed silence hung between them as their eardrums readjusted to calming water slap against the strain of the bobbing boat’s anchor. Seabirds heading in from open ocean cried out overhead. The sudden stillness of the moment was lengthened by the long pull of Haitian rum St. Cloud sucked from a snub-necked bottle. Far above the seabirds a vast cloud was unfolding a design as it sailed by. St. Cloud held the amber bottle up before his eyes, filtering harsh light in order to discern the cloud’s quickening shape. It looked like a lofty rose blooming white out of a sun-brilliant vase. Yes, St. Cloud was where he wanted to be. He reached up without looking and placed his hand over Evelyn’s on his shoulder. The seabirds darkened into flecks flying across the face of his rose in the sky, fleeting shadows on a soul, migrating in a migrating moment. Evelyn stretched on the
bow of the boat, spreading her body to the sun. The shadow from the cloud stole over her, obliterating the rose on her breast. St. Cloud pulled at the last of the rum, watching Evelyn’s rose return to prominence as cheers erupted from the surrounding boats, people anxious for the next round of the passing spectacle, bonded in their witness to the true danger of the sport unfolding. Evelyn lay on a beach towel, turning the curve of her back to St. Cloud, then rolling slowly over to face him. Her eyes searched his, not to find something within him, but to show him a way out. The taste of sweet rum was still on his tongue, the bitterness of self-recrimination rattled his thoughts. The spread of female flesh before him was all that was left to him, since his wife had long ago taken flight with the last of her pride and beginnings of her next life. St. Cloud sought refuge in his emptiness, Evelyn was showing him just how endless his emptiness was. He felt a hollow man filling with drunken falsity. The portable radio next to Evelyn’s head cast its excited electronic voice over water, releasing St. Cloud from the finality of Evelyn’s gaze. The urgent immediacy of the radio voice was undercut by anxious laughter and expectant shouting rising from the small flotilla of boats.

“Have
we got a race! Simi-smooth conditions beyond the reef. Hope we don’t have a disaster like last year, when defending leader Ron Stinson hulled the starboard sponson of his Cougar cat and catapulted into space with a busted back and both legs fractured. Hadn’t been for quick action of the Heli-Vac team Ron would have been so much shark food. It’s been confirmed the French boat Bullet Baguette is out with engine trouble. French team was saying at yesterday’s press conference their catamaran may be the fastest offshore boat in the world. Well the Frogs will never be able to prove it now, bye bye Baguette! Karl Dean still has a slight lead in Murdoch’s Revenge. Looking for a third straight win this season is Miami Kid, hot on Dean’s jet exhausts.”

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, boats gotta sink, St. Cloud thought, peering at Evelyn through the visual corruption of the empty rum bottle he held up before his face. Nothing is forever. St. Cloud corked the bottle and flung it overboard to begin its splashing journey. The message held in the bobbing amber glass was also in St. Cloud, equally invisible in the moment lengthening into midmorning. The roar of oncoming powerboats chummed the air with anticipation, churned the sea with sudden fury. To St. Cloud the boats’ miragelike passing of the small flotilla every twenty-two minutes was the only indication
a pursuit to break man-made records while flying over the back of an unyielding sea was indeed under way. For reasons having nothing to do with fame or fortune, St. Cloud began to pay attention.

“Official word on what was rumored earlier. Coast Guard reports a refugee boat has drifted into the race course off the southerly side of Rock Key, seven nautical miles out. What a welcome those folks are getting to the land of the free, twelve powerboats booming across water at them, fourteen choppers swirling overhead, they must think the whole U.S. Navy has pounced!”

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, starving Haitians gotta sail away from plantation island. St. Cloud figured in the grand scheme of things his having become the prince of cuckolded fools had as much to do with the refugee boat as it did with the Space Shuttle, which was nothing. He searched the sky for another cloud, another sign, another hook to hang a different thought on. The sky was empty, no scudding white roses big as battleships, no portentous signs of a hurricane’s oncoming boisterous weather for some to die in, some to become heroes in, the majority just to live through, survive without personal fanfare. No seabirds. Nothing. Nothing but blue sky bleeding into blue sea, and somewhere out there a boatload of Haitians. Tide comes in, tide goes out, what goes around comes about. The tide can bring in a boatload of desperate people, or a load of marijuana bales dumped from a cigarette boat the night before by smugglers outrunning a Coast Guard bust. The tide can bring in easy money or hard times. It was an odd time to live in, an odd place to be. St. Cloud had traveled across the first half of his life, and here he was, a self-made prince of cuckolds among desperate refugees and get-rich-quick drug smugglers. It was a world of plenty for the very few. How could some make so much so soon, while others starved so slowly? Everything would come around in the end, right itself right side up, St. Cloud believed that. Meanwhile, it all made him feel cheap and out of the action; it also made him feel like a bleeding liberal anachronism, the last dinosaur to be caught in an ice-age glacier with a mouthful of daisies. The empty bottle of rum bobbed on the current back to Haiti where it came from, its spirits released in a compromised world. St. Cloud felt the message from the bottle was in him. Maybe he had become the message. One thing he knew, he didn’t want to know the message’s full meaning. He had come too far and run too long to trick himself into believing he could change one damn thing in this world. On that subject St. Cloud was not about to be cheated.