Mile Zero (24 page)

“Don’t have the hot sailor. Got the cool breeze.” Bonefish squeezed onto the stool next to Marilyn. He was in a big hurry, hurricane was comin, but now there was some important business to unfold, new things to be learned and passed. Hurricane could wait a few minutes.

“Here’s couple a beers for you two.” Diver Dave popped the tops of two cans and banged them on the counter, their contents rushing with a foaming spurt at the fresh openings. Diver Dave popped a can for himself, worked his big lips over the entire top and sucked the can empty easily as a thimble full of tea. He tipped back on his heels to announce his pleasure with a loud barrel-burst burp of approval.

“Asshole!” the Amazon parrot perched on Dave’s right shoulder scolded.

“Up yours, Amigo!” Dave shouted back.

“Up yours,” echoed the parrot.

Dave loved his parrot. Some people said Amigo was never off Dave’s shoulder, day or night, certainly the powdery dry white river of parrot poop permanently trailing off the sleeve of Dave’s beer-stained T-shirt made that idea one of fact more than rumor. Some
people even claimed Amigo was on Dave’s shoulder whenever Dave had the pleasure of female company in his bed. Certainly Amigo’s cocky attitude on Dave’s shoulder, his cavalier eye and unerring raucous two-toned whistle aimed at all good-looking women, made this seem more believable than not. Amigo never whistled at Marilyn, although she was not without her own peculiar attractiveness. A sturdily constructed woman in her late fifties, Marilyn kept her hair dyed a girlish light brown, styled in a dated but carefree hint of a bob. She was a woman who loved the sort of outdoor activities mostly reserved for men. Marilyn had spent a large part of her youth toiling in a Key West pineapple cannery. She worked not as a canner, but as a dockhand, unloading ripe tonnage of spiny-hulled fruit barged over from Cuba. Marilyn worked through the middle section of her life on shrimp boats, normally the exclusive domain of men. She did not spend that time slaving over kerosene stoves in hot galleys, or frolicking beneath sheets of narrow berths, while far below pink crustaceans had their migratory underwater path from the Dry Tortugas intercepted by miles of dragging nets. She toiled topside in the dreck and dross of slippery decks alongside the men as a net hauler. Marilyn displayed the fleshy tanned muscles of a healthy laborer, attractive in a handsome sort of way for her time, handsome still. Except Amigo didn’t think so, never whistled at her. Sometimes, when Marilyn thought she looked particularly attractive, and even wore a pair of new jeans, she would wait for Amigo’s whistle of approval. Marilyn never got it. She never hesitated to let Amigo know what she thought about his insulting lack of taste. “Fuck you,” Marilyn would shout her disapproval at the parrot. “Fuck you,” Amigo would mock, then roll his green head and whistle mightily, as if Marilyn had a ravishing sister in the back room of the diner no one else could conjure except him with his jungle-piercing eyes.

“Now don’t go and start a fight with Marilyn, Amigo,” Dave cooed to the ever-vigilant bird as he popped another can of beer open. Amigo ignored the advice, craning his neck and screwing up one beady eye as he surveyed Marilyn, a fowl judge at a beauty pageant whose studied opinion was not to be summarily dismissed.

“That bird don’t deserve no attention. He ain’t no movie star.” Marilyn sullenly slurped her soup while keeping a defiant gaze fixed on the parrot. She knew exactly how to get at the short hairs of Dave. Her slurping grew more pronounced as her defiant gaze melted into a smug grin of triumph.

Bonefish could see what was coming and tried to turn the tide of conversation, banging his empty beer can down as if it was the metal period at the close of a chapter, and he was turning the page. “Okay, Marilyn, you get the condishner. Got to help me get it out the window though. Too heavy for me alone.”

“Is it same size as the one you gave me last year?”

“No. This one’s top of the line. Could freeze carrots in front of it.”

“Bullshit!” The word bellowed out of Dave’s barrel belly, his big body puffing up red. “Bullshit Amigo ain’t no movie star!”

“Ain’t,” Marilyn slurped.

“Then what in hell you think those are? Polaroids of Lassie?” Dave jabbed his finger at a gallery of faded black and white photo glossies tacked to the side wall beneath the phony fiberglass glory of a mounted leaping blue marlin Dave caught off the coast of Cuba the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Dave had nearly been bombed out of the water by his own countrymen that day, scariest day of his life. “Just you look at those photos, why don’t you? Amigo’s a fame-ass world-renowned bird!”

Marilyn refused to turn to peruse the wall covered with photos, she had seen it all before. In the 1950s a Hollywood film crew came to Key West to shoot a movie about the fierce battle during the 1920s between the local Conchs and Greek immigrants, bloodying one another over who had proprietary rights to the sponge beds of the Florida Keys. The Conchs won out, forcing the Greeks three hundred miles north, above Tampa Bay to Tarpon Springs. Key West was an island the Conchs were not about to be pushed from, having been over the generations pushed from almost every other island, but in the end Mother Nature’s irony prevailed. The mysterious blight of ’34 killed off the sponge beds in the Lower Keys.

Diver Dave was a dashing man in the 1950s, with oil black hair slicked back from his sun-darkened face. The Hollywood types thought Dave looked Greek, so they put him in their movie. Dave’s job was to wear tight blue jeans, a striped blue-and-white Greek fisherman’s sweater, and shout the line: “S
tart your boat-engines boys, the Conchs are comin back!”
It took three days of shooting for the Hollywood types to get that scene right. All during the camera takes of Dave rising from his swinging hammock, looking to the sea and shouting his line, Amigo was perched overhead on the arc of a palm frond, playing the part of a pet parrot kept by the Greek Spongers. Amigo’s only line in the movie was to discharge a licentious whistle
whenever he spied the blond starlet of the film in her pretty ruffled blouse dipped daringly low off one shoulder. During those long hours of shooting Dave’s big scene Amigo excreted his powdery white pearls of wisdom onto Dave in the hammock below. Dave couldn’t change his position from one take to the next. After a while he learned to judge just how long it would be between the time Amigo snapped a sunflower seed in his beak and an inevitable plop of parrot poop would descend like featherweight hail to rest upon his cheek. The photos on the diner wall showed Amigo with the cast and crew of the film, everybody smiling and waving. There were many photos of the blond starlet laughing hysterically as Amigo buried his green head into the fleshy valley of exposed cleavage between her breasts. Dave got very close to that bird during the shooting, bought him and brought him back to the diner. The two were inseparable ever since. Dave loved that bird with all his might.

“This bird’s a phony!” Marilyn jabbed her soup spoon at Amigo. “He’s not the same as the bird in those photos. He’s a pet-store fake, a scrawny chicken dyed pukey green!”

Dave’s big hands clenched into fists, he placed them both on the counter in front of Marilyn’s bowl of chowder and leaned over on stiffened arms. “Up yours,” Dave hissed. “Up yours,” the parrot squawked.

“The conch in this chowder is past its prime.” Marilyn batted her short gray lashes at the beefy man bearing down on her. “I think you’re using three-day-old amberjack in it again.”

Everybody knew Marilyn loved Dave, always had. Marilyn figured the only thing that kept her unhappy all these years, after her fourth husband died working on the new Seven Mile Bridge, was the parrot never gave Dave the whistle of approval to go to bed with her. Dave never went to bed with a woman Amigo didn’t call out his craving for. The only thing different about this particular afternoon was Marilyn normally didn’t insult Dave’s lack of culinary expertise, and his best friend, until after she finished her second piece of Key lime pie. Something was nagging at her.

Bonefish figured whatever nagged Marilyn, at her age it couldn’t be her female time of month. No, Bonefish deduced the prompter of the problem was El Finito headed this way, made people jumpy. “Got to go. Can’t wait.” Bonefish spun on his stool. He saw the eye of El Finito wink offshore, a monster of destruction pushing a fifty-foot-high storm surge before it.

Marilyn knew how to get Bonefish to stay. She tossed him some bait. “I heard some stuff about that goat found hanging upside down in the bat tower.”

Bonefish let the stool’s swivel seat carry him completely around and stop before Marilyn’s grinning face. “What you hear I don’t hear?” Bonefish couldn’t believe his ears, he was the one who always had the first and last word on any subject, he was the bee of gossip, no pollen was spread Bonefish didn’t spread himself. Marilyn was poaching on his territory. Maybe the hurricane comin had distracted him. Sometimes a man gets distracted by other work.

“Santería is what I heard. And I’ll have a piece of Key lime pie, if you please,” Marilyn smiled coquettishly at Dave.

“Bullshit.” Dave turned to get the pie. “That goat’s got nothing to do with Santería. Just some weirdo, or frisky kids fooling as usual.”

“Kids and weirdos wouldn’t go to such trouble to kill a goat.” Marilyn’s words followed Dave as he turned to get the pie. “That tower’s higher than a windmill, who’s going to scramble way up thirty feet inside it, tie a goat’s hind legs, slit its throat and hang it by a rope? Tell me, huh, what kind of weirdo would do that?”

“Any weirdo.” Dave clanked the plate of yellow-green pie belligerently on the counter before Marilyn and snarled, “That’s why they’re weird.”

Bonefish hated to ask the question he was about to ask Marilyn, he liked information to flow to him because of his inevitable attraction, easy as nails to a magnet. “How do you know somebody didn’t kill the goat first, slit its throat on the ground, then take it up to the top of the tower?”

“Why should I tell you?” Marilyn cut a dainty piece of pie for herself. “You’ll just blab it to everybody.”

“Because I’m supposed to know! That’s why!” Bonefish’s face lost its thin shape and sagged with sadness. He couldn’t believe Marilyn’s slight. To think he was going to give this woman his new air-condishner. How many condishners can a woman use in a small trailer anyway? Bonefish had been giving Marilyn condishners for the past twenty years. He decided he wasn’t going to give Marilyn his TV set either. He decided it was over for Marilyn, she deserved whatever El Finito had up his windy sleeve for her.

“How
do
you know the goat wasn’t killed on the ground, Marilyn?” Justo interrupted with Bonefish’s original question, leaning forward on his stool at the opposite end of the crowded counter, peering down
the long row of Dave’s satisfied customers munching on tough shark sandwiches and overcooked squid rings.

“Well …” Marilyn straightened, assuming a formal pose, this was official business now that Justo cut in, police business, no longer idle chitchat batted between friends. This could add up to something reported in the local newspaper, a photograph to go with it maybe, maybe on the sportfishing page where the biggest catch of the day was always shown; there Marilyn would be, grinning away right next to the four-hundred-pound blue marlin or the two-hundred-fifty-pound sailfish. “My third husband told me. Andy saw it last night, long before that school-bus load of third graders were taken out to the tower for a picnic and got the scare of their little lives. You know,” Marilyn suspended the thought, her face aglow, the attention of the entire diner fixed on her every word. She finally had the audience she had waited some time for. Marilyn wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to chum the waters of chance. Maybe her photo would make front page. “I don’t know what Andy is going to do for a living. He was thirty-nine when I divorced him ten years ago. Andy couldn’t figure out what to do then, he still can’t tie his own shoes without help.” Marilyn scanned her captive audience for the answer to her question she knew would not be forthcoming, and she knew why. Marilyn considered herself a hardworking woman, she didn’t take easy shortcuts like Andy, but this was a town chock full of shortcut men who still seemed to take longer to get someplace than anyone else, not like the rum-running boys she grew up with, those Pelicans had a work ethic, or so it seemed.

“What was Andy doing out at the tower last night?” Justo’s question traveled the length of the counter with such inquisitive forcefulness the satisfied customers stopped their chewing and slurping.

“What is Andy usually doing anywhere?” Marilyn shrugged and tossed her bobbed hair.

“I didn’t say anywhere. I said
there
.” Justo’s inquisitive tone changed to impatience.

“Really don’t know and really don’t care.” Marilyn’s fingers ran into her short hair and fluffed it. She wasn’t going to be intimidated by any man, especially one she wasn’t married to, didn’t have to put up with that, but she liked Justo, he wasn’t a shortcut man, better yet, he had risen to take her bait. Marilyn inadvertently tossed Justo what he didn’t realize he was looking for. “All I know is Andy found some writings out there.”

Justo swerved off his stool and walked straight to Marilyn. “Now tell me, what kind of writings did Andy find?”

Justo’s voice always had a deep roughness, but his eyes had a sensitive brown gloss Marilyn found disturbingly attractive. She had had more than one dream about this dark man with the powerful chest. Back in the days before her second husband there were so few people on the island, sooner or later, everybody dreamed about everybody else, one way or the other. Marilyn definitely dreamed about Justo the other way. She wondered, with Justo standing so close she felt the heat of his body, if he remembered the wild times they had in her dreams, those swollen moments of slick escape. Marilyn was fairly certain Justo did remember, and decided to offer him another little reward since he was popping for all her bait. It didn’t seem she could go wrong this afternoon. “Mumbo jumbo stuff. Poetry stuff. That’s all I know.”