Mile Zero (26 page)

“Astounding.”

“Life in the Florida Keys, eel bites conch cock, end and beginning of story.”

Justo felt uneasy, he was being worked firmly into a corner with nowhere to go. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I’ve only got one cock, with or without polka dots. I’m not about to risk getting it shot off by talking to you about Karl Dean.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want you to tell me anything I didn’t already know.” Justo lied, not knowing what it was about Karl Dean he should be asking.

“Good, because you’re not going to get it. Why don’t you ask me something I don’t care about.”

“What about Karl Dean?”

“Karl Dean is dead.”

“So is James Dean. What’s the news flash?”

“Fast boats. Fast cars. Fast life. Vietnam. Florida. Latin America. Same shit.”

“Same song, different band?”

“Something like that.”

“Colombian band?”

“Said I’m not talking.”

“Bubba band?”

“Ditto.”

“Let’s talk about something you don’t mind talking about.”

“Let’s do that.”

Justo lowered his voice to indicate he thought someone might be crouching on the other side of the neighbor’s fence in the honeysuckle. “Dead goats.”

“Yah, so?”

“Bufo toads with their mouths nailed shut.”

“Huh?”

“Cemetery weirdness.”

“Know nothing about it.”

“Dead goats that write poetry?”

“Yah, like I said, so?”

“So what were you doing up on Sugarloaf Key at night?”

“Waiting for the bats to come home.”

“Did they?” Justo knew the answer to his own question. A large shrimp boatload of marijuana had been moved up the Keys that night. As a spit and slide man and small-time scammer, one of Andy’s brief jobs between women included little odds and ends as a spotter for smugglers, making certain the Coast Guard was not where it was supposed to be when something big and chancy was going down. Andy’s job on the Gulf side of Sugarloaf that night was simply to flash a light or give a radio code-call if things were not as they appeared. Andy was one of many small-time conspirators picking up small change from a major enterprise. In the vast ocean of illegal chance Andy was nothing more than a squid among sharks.

“I think your dog’s eating oyster shells.” Andy nodded toward Ocho nosing through one of the shell mounds, searching for something more edibly rewarding than pearls. “You get that dog out at the track? He one of those losers?”

“Did the bats come home?”

“They say bats have never been in that tower, that the crazy old
coot who built it to rid his mangrove real estate of mosquitoes so he could sell it off to midwestern suckers went broke and crazy.” Andy’s smirk returned, he loved being pursued, kept him in shape for the women he fooled into chasing him.

“I hear dead goats write poetry.”

“Something strange. Can’t figure it. Maybe you can. You know a bunch about that Santería sort of thing.” Andy always thought Justo knew too much about that sort of thing. Andy nurtured a derisive contempt for Justo, felt his head was stuffed with so many dead Saints and poets it lent him an air of superiority beyond that normally assumed by people who worked behind a badge. Andy considered this unbecoming in a man of such obvious color. Justo spoke in riddles, blabbed words of poets hundred years gone, conversing sometimes in a language an honest workingman couldn’t understand. Andy didn’t trust himself with this stuff, it was over his head and he wanted rid of it.

“You remember any of the dead goat poetry?”

“Better.” Andy stood. “It was on a sheet of paper nailed to one of those big stilts. I saw it with my flashlight, because when I first come on that goat hanging there in the dark I thought maybe someone had gone and committed suicide out there, or at least someone had helped them with the job. So I shined the light on the paper to see if it was a suicide note. Maybe they was going to leave all their money to whoever found the body. But it wasn’t that. I tore the paper off because, who knows, might be the key to a lost treasure or something.”

“Still got it?”

“In the house. Be right back.”

Ocho wandered over to Justo while Andy was gone. The greyhound rested its head heavily on Justo’s knee, beseeching him with bewildered eyes, not realizing its source of canine discomfort emanated from a gut full of half-chewed oyster shells.

“Here it is.” Andy handed the paper to Justo. “Read up.” He sat down with a heaping platter of oysters, deftly splitting the coarse shells open with the thick blade of a rusty knife.

Justo smoothed the rumpled paper on the tabletop. The letters were writ large and purposefully clumsy, executed with various colored thick-tipped pens in the same style as the note left in the cemetery on Abuelo’s grave.

A Green Sailor looks north? Justo had no idea what that meant, what martyrs and angels, goats and toads meant. The shadow was rapidly filling with fear. Maybe Andy was an unwitting player in Zobop’s scheme. “You get any of this?”

“Not a thing.” Andy popped an oyster shell open and slurped its contents. “Beats shit out of me total.”

“Mind if I keep it? Want to compare it with some other writings.”

“Be my guest.” Andy tossed an empty oyster shell over his shoulder into the weeds. “All mumbo jumbo anyway, your people’s kinda stuff. But if there’s treasure to be found, we’re partners, right?”

“Got my word on it.” Justo stood and joined Ocho waiting anxiously before a high wooden gate, the greyhound’s narrow face twisted in pain from a shell-stuffed belly.

“Hey, Tamarindo!” Andy called, raising high the rusty shucking knife in his hand before bringing the blade down with a deep stab into the scarred tabletop.

“Yeah. I forgot.” Justo stopped at the gate. “Thanks for the oysters.”

“Naw, that’s not it. You can keep your word about the treasure thing, I don’t want it. Cop’s word can cause me to lose my conch cock, and I don’t have a spare.” Andy forced the rusty knife blade free from the tabletop and wiped the wood splinters off on his pants. The smirk was back on his face.

Justo opened the gate, letting Ocho wobble out before turning back. “Don’t worry, my friend, you have nothing to fear when it comes to your verge.”

“Why?”

“Because,
el rabo del puerco nunca estara como una fleca
.”

“Speak American.”

“A pig’s tail will never make a good arrow.”

Andy’s smirk faded in the sun setting over the top of the honeysuckle of his neighbor’s backyard fence.

I
’D TAKE
my last dollar and spend it to stay warm.”

“Well, you in the right place, bubba. So hot out there on Duval Street tonight it’s a hundred-ten under the neon. Too hot to wear your own sweat.”

“Can’t be too hot for me.” Brogan rubbed the slick edge of a beer can to his forehead, waiting for the can’s welcome cold prick to numb the skin between his eyes. “Did I ever tell you how my brother used to stay cool in Nam on those leech-sucking nights before the monsoon broke the heat belt?”

“Don’t give a shit about MK. Good time to go fishing for sharks now, solid amberjacks out around the bridges, eighty, hundred pounders, sharks chasing after them, gobbling them up like candy. Good time to kill sharks. Want to go out tomorrow? I don’t have any charters, so hot no tourists going out, slow time on the flat blue. Best way to kill time is to kill sharks.”

“Most boring thing I ever heard.” Brogan set his beer down and turned his eyes on Bubba-Bob. “Killing sharks interests me about as much as shooting sea gulls or fucking coke whores.” Brogan’s eyes set into a hard stare, the hard stare of a man who deals in precious metals, other people’s precious metals. Brogan was pissed tonight in more ways than one. For one thing he didn’t think he was getting any closer to the treasure he had been hunting for seven years. Lately he was going out further and further and deeper and deeper, toward the Tortugas, to where it was too deep to make any sense. Any galleon that cut on a reef would not have sunk that low, all the big-time treasure hunters with their high-tech gear and bottom-sucking rigs
had long since packed their scientific underwater sniffing act to a different part of the ocean. Brogan was looking where common sense indicated a galleon would have been blown right off the map. He prided himself on playing hunches, not common sense. Common sense was for sunday preachers and monday sinners. On this hot night Brogan was exhausted from being out on the water for five weeks, coming up from the deep again and again, empty. When a man is that deep and something goes wrong and he loses oxygen, it is only four to six minutes before he’s wearing diapers for the rest of his life, if he’s lucky enough to be hauled up in time. Brogan’s eyes burned from staring through the scratchy glass plate of a face mask for gold coins and cannons encrusted into improbable shapes, searching for aged phantoms of wealth on the sandy floor of an ever-changing sea. Brogan’s eyes burned ruby red. When Brogan’s eyes burned red enough his thoughts swung away from immediate problems to the brilliant and bad gentleman of trouble’s bottom line who was his brother. When Brogan got into this mood his thoughts swung right past the common sense he so despised, he even risked raising the anger of Bubba-Bob, a man famous, at this tip-top hour of the morning after a long night in the Wreck Room, for taking offense at the slightest slight. It required five men to stop Bubba-Bob when he started swinging his shark-killing fists. Brogan had more than once personally been one of the five, having to knock Bubba-Bob over the head with a chair. But nothing worked, no matter how much violence was tap-danced on Bubba-Bob’s head he came back for more, delighting in the rhythm of destruction. The type of man who killed sharks for relaxation would tear another man’s eyes out for sport.

Bubba-Bob acted like he hadn’t heard Brogan’s rash declaration of not wanting to slash shark throats from gill to gill. Maybe Bubba-Bob had not heard it, or thought he heard something different in the Wreck Room filled with the whir of overhead fans and conversations shouted in a storm of drunken syllables. Bubba-Bob was more concerned with sharks and women, especially Angelica behind the bar in the shot-glass short shorts. “One time Angelica and me got it on.” Bubba-Bob laid a heavy hand on Brogan’s shoulder, trying to keep his unsteady gaze pinned to the center of Angelica’s thin halter top. “I get Angelica home, chop some lines of toot, woof up and say, Baby, I’m a great lover but I want it to be good for you, fishermen are patient, tell me the truth, what is the best amount of time for you to have an orgasm? Angelica answers, one tape side. I says I don’t
get it. Angelica says one tape side of music, she likes to put on a music tape and come before it reaches the end of the first side, says if she doesn’t come by then it isn’t worth it. So I slip on a tape, stuff from the sixties, the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire,’ you know,
Light my fire light my fire light my fire
, romantic, and we strike up the band, but halfway into the tape my cock’s going coke-soft on me, squirrelly as an eel on a hook, and I’m thinking we’re counting down to a music orgasm and I’m not going to make it and I didn’t. The tape ended. I says to Angelica, Now what? Angelica doesn’t miss a beat, says there’s one whole side left on the tape, so why don’t I get down on all fours and lick her.” Bubba-Bob raised his glass of rum quizzically to pursed lips. “What does she think I am, a fucking St. Bernard?”

“No, a blowfish.”

“A blowfish!” Bubba-Bob tightened his grip on Brogan’s shoulder, his powerful fingers digging in with the determination of a first mate hefting a four-hundred-pound marlin aboard boat barehanded, or at least preparing to heft Brogan off his stool and throw him through the smoky plate-glass window behind the bar into the fierce heat of neon lit Duval Street. Bubba-Bob pushed his face close to Brogan’s, his thick lips darkened and split by the sun, the big teeth white and sharp, his breath sputtering in a hot blast. “Fa … fa … fa … fucking ba … ba … blowfish! That’s great!” Bubba-Bob slammed the empty rum glass on the counter and howled. “Angelica! Bring your favorite blowfish another round.”

“Let’s have a little less quiet down here.” Angelica laughed, pouring Bubba-Bob another rum. “What’s Brogan baiting you with anyway?”

“A blowfish! A goddamn blowfish!” Bubba-Bob couldn’t put a cap on his mirth, sputtering a spit of delight. “That’s a story I’ve got to tell next time I get a charter of Texans.”

Brogan didn’t think what he said was funny. Brogan was still pissed in more ways than one and nodded at Angelica for another drink. Angelica was one of his favorite women, not like St. Cloud’s wife Evelyn, whom he considered a witch with balls. Brogan tried to remember if he was sleeping with Angelica during the time he was sleeping with Evelyn. That was a strange time, right before Evelyn stopped sleeping with men, he thought he had something to do with that. Something Evelyn said to him then seemed odd. She said she didn’t want to hear about MK and his exploits in Nam, was fed up with Nam, fed up with war, fed up with all the assholes who weren’t fed up. Angelica was never fed up, nor for that matter ever filled up,
she was a drinking man’s bartender. Brogan was like most serious drinkers on the island, his allegiance was to bartenders, not bars. If he didn’t like one of the bartenders in a bar he boycotted the whole business. What he especially did not like were aging college-boy types who had half of a degree in something and took to bartending as a way to support the antics of their college dormitory-inspired drug and alcohol habits. These were the boys who ruin a good drink with the attitude they could be doing something better than serving it. These boys preyed on the professional hard luck dropouts, parading puffy airs from their cloistered days in the idea supermarkets of higher education. The hard lucks mistakenly thought the aging college boys were doubly courageous in their choice of a mildly corrupt existence, since the college boys could obviously be elsewhere. Reality was they could not, the college boys were simply fast fool artists masquerading as bonafide deadbeats. Such notions jumped in Brogan’s brain, until he found his train of thought again, hopped aboard before the train pulled out of the station without him. “Yes, I guess you could call my brother a sort of adventurer. My brother is doing spooky things down in Latin America, spookier things than he did in Nam.”