Mile Zero (21 page)

“Sure, everyone wonders that. So?”

“So I know where they go.”

“Y’all been drinking too much.” Lila’s fingers detached completely from St. Cloud’s knee, releasing whatever intimacy the gesture held. Both hands firmly on the steering wheel again. “Y’all are making no sense.”

Her words came not as a condemnation, but coolly as a weather report about oncoming hot weather, for she was far too Southern a female to get between a man and his liquor. She would no more think of asking a man to give up boozing than ask someone from China to stop using chopsticks. Lila was born on the losing side of the American tracks, expected her men to behave badly and boorishly. When they hid beneath the sea depths of alcohol she wasn’t about to go looking for them, or throw them a life-saving line. Lila was secure with the knowledge she knew right where her men could be found. All she had to do was whistle and they would come swimming up from their ocean of self-imposed exile and flop over into the safety of her boat with a congratulatory grin of well-earned self-pity. Southern men played a predictable game with their women. Lila grew up with the game, accepted it. She recognized it in men who were not even true
Southerners, like the one squirming in her net now, carrying around more guilt than Lee’s Army slinking off from Appomattox, for what reason she did not know. Sometimes, when this one got on his rum and pushed himself over the hill of his charming self, out spilled this stuff about Vietnam, how it destroyed a generation. He had not fought in Vietnam, she couldn’t figure what his problem was, what chip of heavy loss he thought he had earned the right to carry around on his shoulder. Being from the deep South she had cousins and uncles who had died in Vietnam, but none of the family went around talking about it. For the life of her, Lila did not see what the personal failure of this Northern man next to her was, other than his being one of those people too clever for the everyday world, but not clever enough for the real world. He did have a strangeness which she was a sucker for. He had the wounded eyes of an underdog in a devil-be-damned world. She was a simple Southern woman attracted to contrary Northern lights. The fact this Northerner was older meant only that they were on more equal footing, gave him more chance of running an even race with her. Only one other man had given her an even race, he too was twice her age, but that man had foxed her out of her hole. She still awaited a sign from him. She found waiting had its sideshow attractions. This Northern man next to her was a brief amusement for a young woman who had a mind only for herself, one blessed with gumption of inexperience, possessed of the power to pluck common sense from all men, married or otherwise. At this point in Lila’s life she did not care so much where the stars went, as where they came from. She played her emotions squarely, unaware there would be no second act to her youthful actions, when emotions once felt so strongly would be inevitably squandered, played broadly to an empty house.

“Y’all know what?” Lila’s languid drawl drifted around the bend of some lazy Southern river. “Y’all really are strange. Y’all know that?”

St. Cloud did not know what he knew, except that Lila had better keep her eyes on the road. “This is your right turn, after the canal bridge, then up the gravel road.”

“Did the man you talked to say whether the last puppy was male or female?”

“Did he say whether the last puppy was a doctor or a lawyer?”

“Yes!” Lila laughed, swerving the convertible right onto a gravel road so suddenly St. Cloud was slammed against the door. She was willing to play with him now. The dog was close. The closer she got
to the dog, the closer she seemed to get to St. Cloud, was willing to venture off on his little excursions of merriment, join him in toppling over the expected and sane. “Doctors and lawyers? Why not!” She liked the way he batted words around as if he owned their true meanings, that was one thing different about him, one of his distracting amusements. She had never been with a man who cared for words, had never really given it any thought. Words to her were so many eggs in a carton, only took them out when needed, and she was a good cook, a great cook really, one who never wasted an egg. With this man words flew as if different colored doves from a magician’s hat, to land who knows where.

“What would you say?” St. Cloud pushed himself away from the door handle jammed uncomfortably into his back, his lips thickening into a drunken pout as he fumbled for the rest of his thought before finding it. “If I told you some of those famous disappeared stars were right here in my pocket, what would you say to that?”

“I’d still say y’all are strange.” Lila smiled as her hand went back to his knee with a playful squeeze. “Very strange.”

St. Cloud felt the stars slip from his pockets, fall with heart-beating thuds into his shoes. He had contact with her again. He marveled at how cavalierly she drew the short syllables out of the word strange, as if absentmindedly peeling an orange. In the radiant glow of the radio’s dial lit up along the dashboard Lila’s face seemed flushed a soft lavender. The ethereal color she was captured by reminded St. Cloud of a song he heard crooned many times from car radios when he was a teenager. The sensuous thread of the song’s central lyric leapt from his memory with alarming velocity, even though the lyric originally sung moved slow as molten lava:
Laaaaveeendeeer bluuuuue … dilly dilly
. Lavender blue, dilly dilly, what in hell was a
dilly dilly?
St. Cloud slipped the rum bottle from the paper bag, drained the remaining liquor with a deep sigh. So long ago those unanswered lyrics, filling the night music of his youth. He realized now, only too late in the game, he would never know the meaning of
dilly dilly
. “God pity the sailors on a night like this.” He heaved the empty bottle back over his shoulder to set it on a misguided journey as Lila hit the brakes, stopping the convertible before a house-trailer dwarfed by the towering concrete leg of a power pole supporting high lines of humming conduits. They stared at each other in the sudden humming electrical moment punctuated by the sound of the thrown bottle crashing against the rusting silver wall of the domed trailer. Lila’s
eyes brightened into a smile. St. Cloud had her where he wanted her. She was willing to see the humor in the ridiculous. Her lips parted to laugh as the fierce roar of an animal broke from inside the trailer. The roar turned to a vicious howling, rocking the trailer on axles sunk into sandy soil. A large beast was clawing from inside the trailer. The door sprang open. A black Doberman leapt out at the convertible before its head snapped back, a thick metal chain trailing from the dog’s collar pulling taut, holding the animal at bay with a strangling grunt.

“Thought you said you wasn’t Cuban!”

“I’m French and something else!” St. Cloud shouted in self-defense, stepping clumsily from the convertible, trying to adjust his eyes to the glare stabbing from a spotlight above the trailer door. “Third-generation French! Could be what he smells is my Latin blood.”

The man holding the dog said nothing. Maybe St. Cloud was pushing his bravado too far. Maybe the rum was pushing him into a well-lit corner with nowhere to run. What a stupid position he put himself in by unthinkingly swinging out of the car like Captain Blood-Shot Eyes. He pushed the bill of his faded sailor’s cap lower on his forehead to block the glare he faced, not taking his eyes off the Doberman, relieved when the man finally spoke.

“Alice don’t like Cubans, specially Cubans that come over on that boatlift while back.” The man controlling the straining dog seemed uncertain, tugged on the taut leash to keep the growling Doberman on its toes. “What you got in that bag? A gun?”

“Rum. Used to be rum. Got another bottle in the car. Want some?” St. Cloud held out the empty bag in a gesture of friendliness.

The Doberman lunged at the sudden movement, jerking the man two steps forward before he overpowered the animal’s pulling might. “That what you threw against my mobile home? Empty bottle of rum?”

“Sorry I threw the bottle, tossed it over my shoulder without looking, just careless.” St. Cloud attempted to squeeze the shaky mirth out of his voice. This guy had every right to be outraged. With a little probing in the wrong direction he would probably let Alice go to work. Wouldn’t be so bad St. Cloud figured, rather have the Doberman tear him apart than face Lila’s disappointment at not being allowed in the trailer to see the pug. “Really, it wasn’t intended, just that the car stopped so quickly it goofed my aim.”

“What about your wife? She Cuban?”

Lila walked around the convertible into bright light. She looked innocent as a schoolgirl off on a picnic, even in harsh light, her skin glowed. The Doberman’s growl slowed to a groan of discomfort. “I’m from Georgia, we don’t have Cubans in Georgia. Migh name is Ly’lah.” She raised her open hand to the man in an offer of greeting. The Doberman growled, opening its wide jaws, its bulging eyes taking in the skin of Lila’s legs inches from its exposed teeth.

“Behave, Alice!” The man jerked the chain leash, forcing the Doberman into a sitting position. He stroked the disgruntled animal’s bobbing head. “This little lady means no harm, Alice. Come to see the babies, that’s all. Hello, ma’am.” The man shook Lila’s offered hand. “Sorry about this kind of welcome, but like I told your husband on the phone, everything would be okay long as you weren’t Cuban types. We had lot of break-ins round here from boatlift people. Some even broke into our mobile home and took the TV, knocked Alice out with a ball bat, she’s been pretty jumpy ever since. Like ice tea or something? C’mon inside, got the babies inside. Actually my wife’s babies, she works night shift at the hospital so she ain’t here now, she would have loved to meet you. C’mon in.”

The trailer interior was done up in imitation suburban, the cluttered contents arranged to emulate a solid midwestern tract house which had been swirled around in a massive duster and banged down intact on the less than certain foundation of the Florida Keys. Garish orange Naugahyde recliner chairs offered the only wild moment of colorful tropical abandon, all else seemed dipped in sepia and grays, muted the most synthetic of hues. Ed was very proud of his mobile castle perched precariously at the edge of the Gulf Stream. He said his name was Ed, and he was going to make everybody ice tea whether they wanted it or not, because he knew what a long drive it was out from Key West just to see the babies. Ed appreciated that, appreciated that very much, because his wife took the babies seriously. Ed took his wife seriously. They both took their boys very seriously. Those were photographs of the boys over on top of the organ, grinning away at invisible flashing bulbs in their best public performances to date. The boys were displayed as fussy-haired toddlers, gap-toothed first graders, and now somewhat older, gangly, distracted, a hint of desperation creeping into frozen Schoolbook smiles. The boys’ faces sprawled over the entire organ top, a forest of photographic memories which would be crowded even if allowed to prowl the grand space of a piano top rather than a tiny lay-away-plan organ wedged into a
corner, surrounded by many of the necessities appropriate to suburban living, including a large new television set, tuned to a giveaway game show with the sound turned low, and stacks of well-thumbed television guides. Hung dangerously low from the ceiling by plastic rope were plant holders outfitted with stiff arrangements of artificial foliage defying any identifiable natural origin. Squandering all available space against the back wall was a dirt-colored sofa encased in clear plastic to protect it from the brutalizing bouncing boys might inflict upon it. Alice sat alert before one corner of the sofa, her hulk jammed uneasily against a tall glass case filled with ceramic knickknacks of disparate shapes and sizes, each depicting the likeness of a pug, some sporting painted fur, others short, gauzy fuzz, colored everything from grasshopper green to spray-painted pink, a few fawned with glassy marble eyes at an unseen master, or were inflicted with opaque saucer-size red eyes glued on flat faces with black button noses; all appeared to be prosaic prizes dished up at county fairs for lucky winners at two-bit games of chance. Laced among this stiff menagerie were fancy red, blue, yellow and green ribbons emblazoned with
BEST OF SHOW, RUNNER-UP, THIRD PLACE
, and various other declarations of merit garnered at dog shows in towns with names St. Cloud never heard of.

Alice eyed St. Cloud with fierce intensity as he studied the strange case. She too looked unreal in this setting, her bulged eyes a little too glassy, the undersized ax-shaped head bobbing maniacally, threatening to fly off the black-muscled body and do unspeakable damage to humans. St. Cloud noticed there was also something off about Ed. As he scanned the walls, laden with plaques and mounted certificates attesting to
PEE-WEE LEAGUE FATHER OF THE YEAR, TO THE BEST CUB SCOUT MASTER EVER, MISTER POPULAR FROM HIS FANS, DAD OF THE YEAR
, St. Cloud sensed a serious off-centeredness about Ed’s entire family enterprise. He tried to suppress a feeling that great evil was lurking in this cloistered trailer tricked out with all the comforts of a suburban home. Ed’s wife probably was not working at the hospital, but had escaped long ago, fled with the boys, leaving only photographic memories on the organ. Ed seemed the kind of monster who beat and bullied his family; thank God they had long since caught the midnight special on a one-way freedom ticket. Where was the pug? St. Cloud simply wanted to get the puppy and get out of this midget suburban nightmare guarded by a slobbering Doberman whose brain had been loosened by a burglar breaking a ball bat over its thick skull. St. Cloud felt cramped and trapped, he desired at minimum an escape
to the convertible for another nip of Haiti’s finest. “If you don’t mind I’ll just slip out and wait in the car.”

Lila turned from the glass case, where she was bent studying the bizarre menagerie, the green of her eyes dazzling in the subdued tones of the room, they held one unmistakable message:
Don’t you dare go anywhere
. Before she had a chance to voice her displeasure Ed appeared with three ice-clanking glasses of tea.