Mile Zero (20 page)

Renoir turned from his maritime interests on the horizon. “Why don’t you give yourself a rest, Dad, at least on your sickbed? Cut the locker-room catechism of heterosexuality and let Angelica go home to her little girl. St. Cloud is going to go out and make a fool of himself, always does.” Renoir arched a bemused eyebrow. “He’s obviously never met a cock more interesting than a cunt.”

“Funny, I’ve never met a cock more interesting than a cunt.” Angelica shifted her body weight forward, anticipating a strong reaction to challenge such obvious profundity. “And let me tell you, I’ve met some dillies.”

“St. Cloud, come, get in bed with me. Bring Angelica.” Isaac patted the fluffy mattress next to him with a flutter of his frail hand. “Enough talking.” His words sank to a whisper. “Bring the true Christian into bed, the two of you, lie with me.”

“Going to cost you extra, Isaac.” Angelica bent a foot back and reached around to undo the thin strap of a high-heeled shoe. “Then again,” she dropped the shoe to the floor and raised the other foot, “might not cost you a thing.”

Renoir slumped into the wicker chair. “You two are going to kill him. Don’t you know when to stop feeding his illusions?”

“Don’t worry about me.” Isaac raised a frail hand. “Always wanted to die in the saddle.”

“The saddle?” Renoir shook his head in disbelief. “You can’t even get the horse out of the barn.”

“Did I ever tell you?” Isaac touched the soft skin of Angelica’s shoulder as she slipped in next to him, his voice dropping to the barest whisper. “Why I started to paint, before the women? It was
the clouds. Those ever-changing colors and shapes. So obvious. Always preening to natural advantage of the golden heavens. Hiding from false light. Same way the human form does. Space and calculus on the run from reality. Shape and color haven’t a thing to do with landscape. Beauty is a bluff, it’s false light. You must cut the bodies off from space, eliminate the fraud behind the gimmick so only spinning mass is left. Energy is all. Indelible impression of the vital. Sunrise moment between worlds. Between monsters and humans, netherworlds and upperworlds, darkness and light. Like the green flash out on that big ocean so few people ever see after a lifetime of looking. It’s that separating color one struggles to capture. Birthing color turning to no color in false light between cobalt sea and sky blue sky. All my life I tried to get that false light into my art.” Isaac’s whisper halted, his frail hand slipped from Angelica’s shoulder, eyes widening with anticipation. “There haven’t been clouds over the ocean for two months. Flat, dead doldrums. Maybe I’ll have to leave you all soon. So soon?”

B
EAUTY
is a bluff. Love is a blind man’s game. St. Cloud sensed he had a one-way ticket up a self-made Alligator Alley into the jaws of fate. How could a man come so far and not outgrow his stupidity? St. Cloud could no longer outdistance his common sense by flooding a sea of booze over every mindful prick of reality. If beauty is a bluff then Isaac was right about Lila, that after a man reaches a certain age it is difficult to distinguish whether he has fallen in love with a young woman of true beauty, or she appears beautiful simply because she is young. St. Cloud did not know if his heart was being tricked by the fatal attraction of false romantic lights, leading him in desperate pursuit of his own lost youth. Maybe the only thing left he was capable of outrunning at his age was reason. Not much of a victory there, no triumph over the lies he led. St. Cloud was definitely headed up a personal Alligator Alley. There was a fickle feel to it all, a slippery sense he had lost his way. He sensed he had to hang onto his life for dear life. Fate was setting him up, kicking the options out beneath him. He felt the noose of inevitable circumstance as tightly as had an illegal Cuban refugee he had interpreted for several years back. The Cuban was in and out of jail in Miami, then like a piece of steel feeling the inevitable pull of the magnet, was drawn south toward Cuba, finally wandering into a liquor store on Sombrero Key where he found some quick trouble, then was popped in the can for it. The Judge at the Cuban’s trial was a good old boy who stood on the solid pork barrel of redneck justice, fed up with seeing riffraff refugees ripping off America’s abundance, delighted to have an opportunity to get his hands on one of the foreigners before the Feds could whisk
the deadbeat away north to one of the country club prisons, which were nothing more than summer camps for perverts and freeloaders. “Why did you go into that liquor store and shoot the owner?” the Judge demanded in a voice which rattled the skeletal bones of the invisible gallery of ghostly Confederate peers he appeared to be addressing, instead of five people in an otherwise barren room. The Cuban shrugged incomprehensibly; he had the gangly body of a man brought up sucking the meat out of chicken necks and eating hard times for dessert. The Cuban asked St. Cloud to have the Judge repeat the question, then grinned with frankness, the answer so simple. “Because el proprietor had
dinero
in the drawers of the cash register.” “Did you know you were going to rob the store when you went in,” the Judge thundered. “No!” “Then why were you carrying the gun?” This was it, the Cuban had to have St. Cloud reinterpret the question three times, for he couldn’t believe this formidable man in a black robe could ask such a stupid question. The Cuban’s grin opened to a full smile. “Why? Because I never go anyplace without my gun.” So it was that a dog never left home without his fleas, that the only thing history books get right are the numbers of pages they contain, that a man who falls in love with a younger woman is only trying to bluff the inevitable.

What is the speed limit on Alligator Alley before the obvious crash? Maybe Isaac and Angelica were right, what St. Cloud suffered from was nothing more than a lurid fixation with transitory beauty. If so, he was on the verge of discovering less about himself and more about Lila, time was running out on his bluff. He had long ago reduced his once lofty beliefs into a simplistic profundity, that there are only two types of people in the world, those who want to fuck you, and those who want to fuck you over. He knew Lila was one of those types as he lay listening to her soft breathing next to him in bed. He would not know until he reached the end of Alligator Alley if she was also the other type. A pug puppy, curled against Lila’s back, whined and kicked its small legs, drifting along in its dream, pushing closer to Lila’s moist skin as it grunted its animal pleasure. Staggered lines of moonlight fell through shutters from the far side of the bedroom, tracing the length of Lila’s body, flickering across her skin, creating the illusion she was a shapely heroine in a black-and-white movie. The silhouette of her body fulfilled an unnerving classic vision, appearing to be from another age, possessed of flow and form glimpsed only on certain Greek statues, a timeless suppleness balanced
with female fullness, promising perfection beyond the touchable, beyond reach of a mere mortal male attempting to grasp its inner essence. Something glowed from within Lila, surrounded her with a disconcerting aura of antiquity, made more startling because of her youth. St. Cloud wanted to touch her again, simply place his hands on the aura which seemed so palpable and powerful. But he did not wish to awaken her. Did not wish to dispel a moment charged with such vision. Instead he gently moved his fingertips to the exposed pink underbelly of the pug. The dog grunted its pleasure, diminutive feet pawing air in a somnolent attempt of trying to snuggle closer to a dream tit. Such an odd little creature with its shoved-in face flattened to a fleshy pancake, its fat stub of a body ending at a tail cropped unnaturally short. Whatever attracted Lila to this breed was beyond St. Cloud. Perhaps it was the animal’s absurd physiology, the fact that it was so much the opposite of Lila’s own perfection. The queer little package had definitely been delivered at the furthest end of beauty’s eternal measuring stick. Whatever compelled Lila to seek out this breed was now complicated by the fact that the dog had come to play the role of an improbable Cupid. St. Cloud visualized the silly creature flying through clouds, clutching a bow of love with the sharp arrow of romance strung back, set to release quick as a heat-seeking missile searching hapless target. He had offered to accompany Lila on the day she finally saved enough money to buy the puppy, until then the newspaper want ads were growing ever more hysterical:
PUGS! THREE BUNDLES OF JOY LEFT!
Then,
TWO ONLY PURE-BRED PUGS!
Finally,
LAST CHANCE FOR LAST PUG!
After the last ad Lila insisted on making her move. They drove up the Keys in her convertible, top down, wind curling the dress above her knees, hair flying as she roared across bridges from one swampy mangrove mass to the next, the sea going off in inky distance on both sides of the highway as the sun slipped toward the horizon. Afterglow of departing day illuminated an urgency in her face. She possessed a passion which could turn away fatal intentions, or invite fleshy blows, her body orchestrated by an arcane dance, which at this moment had nothing to do with her foot pressed flat on the convertible’s gas pedal. Chopped notes of rock and roll flew from the radio as she sped ahead, ever closer to
LAST CHANCE FOR LAST PUG!

The male voice on the telephone that afternoon, when St. Cloud called the newspaper’s advertised number, mapped out its location in a loud voice: “After you pass Mile Marker Thirty headed up to Miami,
look for Tropical Mama’s Bar-B-Q-Pit, gonna be over to your left. Turn there, then go five blocks over two canals. Make quick right on the gravel road. Twelfth trailer on left under the concrete power pole with sea grape growing up its side is us. I’ll leave the light on case you can’t make it before sundown. Don’t worry about the Doberman pinscher, eats only bill collectors. Not Cuban, are you? Because Dobbie eats Cubans, even if they aren’t bill collectors.”

St. Cloud glimpsed in failing light the paint-peeling
TROPICAL MAMA’S
sign perched atop the tin roof of a ramshackle roadside diner. “You’ve just passed it,” he shouted into the radio’s blaring rock and roll.

Lila hit the brakes, skidding off the highway onto the gravel shoulder, hooking the convertible around in a steaming cloud of dust to face oncoming traffic. “Sorry.” She smiled into the wind. “Weren’t frightened, were y’all?”

“No, I was—”

St. Cloud’s words were cut off by the horn blast from a car that had been following closely behind them. A man, old enough to join the army but too young to buy an alcoholic drink legally, preened the upper half of his body out the passenger window as the car sped past, his right hand raised in a familiar salute with the middle finger extended as he screamed a passing verdict on Lila’s driving prowess. “Asssssssshooooooole!”

Lila paid no attention to the word curling off into wind-sucking whoosh of more cars speeding by. She shifted into jerky first, the back tires etching through forty feet of gravel before stopping again. Her lower lip trembled, she sensed the dog was close. “Tropical Mama’s is our turn, right?”

“Right.”

She cranked the steering wheel, plunged her foot on the accelerator, the convertible leapt across the highway through a momentary slot in the sixty-mile-an-hour rush of honking cars.

“Where’d you learn to drive like that?” St. Cloud tried to control the quiver of fear in his voice.

“Georgia.” Lila laughed, the convertible racing past Tropical Mama’s, the wind again scooping rock and roll from backseat speakers, scattering lyrics and guitar wails across blackened shapes of mangroves. “In the South we learn to drive before we learn to walk.” Lila’s right hand drifted from the steering wheel, touching St. Cloud’s knee. “Aren’t frightened, are y’all?”

This was the first time St. Cloud had felt any part of Lila’s body. If he didn’t answer, maybe she wouldn’t remove her hand. He had to stall. He pulled the rum bottle wrapped in a paper bag from between his legs, tilted his head back, sipping long and slow before mumbling into radio guitar wails. “Remember, go right after we cross the second canal bridge.”

“Y’all really afraid?” Lila’s fingers tightened on his knee.

St. Cloud felt she was connected to him, no matter how tentatively, flesh on flesh after so many long months of carefully holding his distance, couldn’t afford to lose her, had to stretch the connection, ride it like the Milky Way crashing overhead. “Remember when you were a kid?” He sucked another mouthful of rum, rolled it around his tongue, then swallowed with a laugh at the heavens, sidetracked by stars of Orion’s Belt, a glittery swirl wrapping around the waist of night. Next to him, without looking, he knew the wind flicked a cotton dress above the shapeliest knees south of the Mason-Dixon line.

“When I was a kid, what?” Lila’s fingers loosened on his knee. “Where y’all drifting off to? I asked if y’all are afraid.”

“Remember when you were a kid, you wondered where the stars went in the morning?”