Mile Zero (28 page)

“Maybe MK went to Bangkok that first time to reproduce himself.” Brogan seemed to be finding answers to his own questions. “Maybe MK sought to regenerate his spirit, he was still young then, but growing ancient by the hour. He had been in the jungle only nine months before he emerged into a delirium of opium and flesh along the back canals of Bangkok. MK desired to penetrate the distant part of himself he held back from death, if he could reach this essence there still might be hope to escape the jungle. MK was taken by cab across many canals floating with flowers and garbage to a special house where women were not for sale by the hour or day, but their very lives were for sale, they were surplus daughters and sisters, sold off in an ancient tradition, justifiable only to seller and buyer. MK had heard rumors of such a house while in the jungle. He saved his money to search it out on his first R and R. If he survived the jungle he was going to find the perfect girl and buy her, the two of them would disappear from all the tears and trials of this earth.” Brogan stopped, momentarily losing his way on such a meandering trail. His eyes focused through the smoky window behind the bar, where a nearly naked woman in wavering heat put the tip of her cigarette to a flaming match offered by a young man astride a motorcycle. Brogan seemed reminded of something, a hidden sign. “When MK bribed his way into the special house he saw thirty, fifty girls. The old man running the place stroked his whiskers between nicotine-stained fingers before unveiling a young girl, spinning her out from silken bondage, revealing an object of perfection, a melding of grace and desire to bend the beholder’s eye with covetous shame. MK did not avert his gaze.
Hello I love you won’t you tell me your name?
This vision could be his salvation. MK tenderly wound the long swaths of silk about the girl’s exposed body, preventing other eyes from feasting upon flesh so pure. He ordered a great banquet, and in this country, where women squatted outside the door as man the master ate in privacy and solace, MK fed the girl from his fingertips. In a room alone, with servants forbidden, small plates of delicacies surrounded the two of them as the girl sucked from MK’s fingers and lips tiny sweet fish from rivers, dark succulents from the sea, raisined meats
and coconut milk. Stretching her full across cushions aglow in candlelight MK oiled and kneaded the length of her supple body. Before dawn he was going to free her forever, from whatever rough hands would defile and demean her. MK had come to save himself and her, a final escape, exit from the jungle. Now that they had each other he slipped the white phosphorus grenade from its hiding place in his knapsack, balancing the familiar weight in his palm. The perfect girl eyed the rough metal egg with curiosity, she was a poor country girl who had never seen deathly weapons. Her fingers reached to the egg, fondling its harshness, tracing the tip of the pin. Before dawn broke MK was going to leave the jungle forever with the girl he could never have in the far flat fields of Minnesota.
Hello I love you won’t you tell me your name
. MK was going to blow the house of slavery holding his perfect girl captive to kingdom come. Nothing would be left except a bright flash of orange flame, then a towering funnel of white clouds bearing him and the object of his perfection straight to the mother’s milk of stars stretched across the heavens above.”

“This is bullshit!” Bubba-Bob roared into Brogan’s face. “MK never blew his fucking self up!”

“When dawn came”—Brogan didn’t miss a beat—“MK awoke. The perfect girl was gone, but the grenade was still in his hand, she had left that, not knowing what it was, not understanding its explosive value. His wallet was gone, his knapsack was gone. MK thought of popping the pin, bomb Hanoi, bomb Saigon, bomb Bangkok, bomb America, bomb yourself. But he didn’t. MK laughed, the first time he laughed in nine months. MK laughed alone in the alone room. MK never laughed again, until years later, watching the fall of Saigon on television in a bar in Belize. MK laughed, he knew he was better off to take his chances in the jungle.”

“Too bad the bitch didn’t have the sense to pull the pin on the bastard.” Bubba-Bob gave Angelica his rascal wink. “Would have saved guys in twelve countries from trying to do it since.” Bubba-Bob was in the mood for rock hard fun or a rock hard fight, not parables.

“MK says after his failed encounter with perfection he only sought imperfect girls, very imperfect.”

“I say bees balls, bubba! Bees balls to your brother and his turd world exploits!” Bubba-Bob had had enough. He considered himself a patient man, a fishing man, a man who waited for others to run out of luck. Bubba-Bob didn’t consider himself a typical Charter Boat captain, because too many guys nowadays had backed into the business
sniffing the ass-end of a freshwater salmon, considered themselves sportsmen who gamed for fish, rather than fishermen who fished for meat. Bubba-Bob considered himself a saltwater professional, it made him sick to set tarpon free after they had put up a good fight. Such was the world Bubba-Bob now had to put up with, letting tarpon free and asking coke whores how long it took them to come. It had become a guppy-eat-guppy world, and it stuck a jewfish bone in the throat of a shark-killing saltwater professional just to think about it. “MK’s just another Vet who got lucky, was in the right place at the right time and made himself a killing. None of that impresses me. Sure as hell doesn’t stand the hair up at the bottom of my dick. I’ll tell you what I really think of MK.” Bubba-Bob swigged another glass of rum, which Angelica had quickly poured, thinking it might fire him off in a direction of less lethal consequence. “The bottom line is not the dollar, but our Government. We’ve got a free country that makes room for us to smuggle and deal, legitimizes our petty ripoffs by making them illegal, which makes them profitable. MK’s screwing all that up. MK hasn’t sold out down there in Latin America just for a buck, but for the sake of selling out to find out what’s on the other side of that. MK deals in guns, drugs, high-tech stuff, sells to any side. It’d be one thing if MK was even a Commie, but MK doesn’t even have that excuse, he’s not even a fucking liberal. MK’s sold out his country and he knows it. So I say bees balls, bubba, bees balls to your brother. He ain’t no fishin man, that’s for sure. MK’s going to get unlucky, very unlucky, and when he does he’s going to find himself at the wrong end of the food chain.”

Bubba-Bob’s words hissed in Brogan’s face, they were a clear sign for Angelica to beat an acceptable retreat. It was too late to put Bubba-Bob back in his cage, even if five lion tamers were standing by to do the job. Angelica filled glasses and rang the cash register, keeping her eyes on Brogan and Bubba-Bob at the far end of the bar where a silence had descended, dividing the two like an invisible blade. Maybe Bubba-Bob was getting ready to break every bone in Brogan’s body, maybe he felt he already had. Maybe Brogan was too drunkenly self-absorbed to have heard a word Bubba-Bob uttered. Whatever it was, it was too good a show for Angelica to pass on, so she slid back down to the deathly quiet end of the bar with a perky smile pressed on her lips, arriving in time to hear Brogan’s words, groggy but deliberate, brushing aside the silence.

“MK started tying up his imperfect girls, he became a tie-up guy.
He tied imperfect girls up for more than one reason, but the real reason he found by accident after Bangkok. He had this girlfriend in Saigon, Joy-Joy, a Vietnamese Catholic, not a hooker, but not a saint either. Joy-Joy had parents to feed, couple of younger brothers, she was a great cook and younger than MK. MK set Joy-Joy up in a little apartment, when he came out of the jungle he wanted her there. At first MK tied Joy-Joy up just to look at her, tied her to the bed. Later, he tied her to the doorknob of the only door in the one-room apartment. He tied her carefully, with soft but secure rope. Sometimes Joy-Joy wore nothing, just a gold chain with a crucifix hanging from her neck. Sometimes what Joy-Joy did wear MK took off so he could watch the changes of color on her flesh as hot light streamed through the dusty window. MK just sat there, watching her, listening to all the sounds coming up from the street, hissing motorbikes, shouting foreign voices, he smelled the stink of fish oil from foods frying in other apartments. One day, about a month after Tet, MK had come back from up around Hue, he knelt Joy-Joy down with her bare knees scraping the floor, tied her hands to the doorknob, bound her feet. He took off his pants and came at her from behind. Joy-Joy did not move, not a muscle flinched. MK felt the skin of her buttocks cold as slick steel pressed against his upper thighs. He moved inside her, but nothing happened for him. All MK heard was his own hard breathing. It was as if Joy-Joy wasn’t there. An hour, maybe two, he was caught to her like that, nothing coming from him but an aching hardness refusing to go away. Then Joy-Joy slowly arched her back, a great cat preening with determination, her head turned back toward him. MK reached to kiss her lips, aching in the very center of his being. His face came close to Joy-Joy’s and she spat. A white projectile of spit exploded in MK’s face, he shuddered, falling away from her, his ache gone.”

Angelica prided herself in slipping with equanimity between the steamy sheets of perverse moments, but in this instance she glimpsed a shadow far darker than that on the dark side of the moon and wanted to travel back to earth quickly as possible. She offered Brogan another drink. There was no expression on his face, only the curious red in his eyes. She tried to get through to him again, she was beginning to think he might not come back this time, just orbit out there in darkness with his thoughts of MK. “Why don’t you and Bubba-Bob come over to my house after I close for a little blowfish?” She watched Brogan’s expression to determine if she registered on
his Richter scale of existence. She didn’t. Brogan’s slurred words continued.

“After that MK couldn’t come unless a woman spat in his face. There’s only one woman he doesn’t need to do that with anymore.”

“Lucky girl,” Bubba-Bob blustered. “What’s MK do to her, stick a grenade up her ass?”

Angelica interceded, still hoping for a lighthearted conclusion. “Sometimes, you know, a girl can use a good tie-up job to get the juices flowing.”

Brogan didn’t take the bait, but Bubba-Bob did. “Yah! Once I tied up this old girlfriend of mine, she started screaming rape. How could I be raping her? That was the third goddamn time we were doing it that night.”

Angelica saw her chance to lead Bubba-Bob further away from a dangerous situation. “It all depends on who is the tie-er, and who’s the tie-ee. Maybe your girlfriend was just on the wrong end of the rope.”

“You like that stuff, don’t you?” Bubba-Bob asked the question as if he were about to stumble onto one of life’s elusive truths. A simple vision was visited in the part of Bubba-Bob’s brain linked directly to the numb region below his belt. In the wink of an eye Bubba-Bob glimpsed Angelica tied in a maze of knots, the tattooed squid surrounding the nipple of her left breast swelling to life, crawling off her body in quick escape. Bubba-Bob winked again to get the image back, but it had fled. Bubba-Bob considered himself lucky to have caught it the first time. A smug expression of sexual martyrdom spread from the corners of his thick lips and puffed his cheeks.

“Now here comes a man whose bed any woman would like to find herself handcuffed to.” Angelica nodded toward the door, then quickly turned to fish a special bottle of gold rum from the hundreds of choices rowed behind the bar. She poured a glass of the rum and offered it to Justo as he slid heavily onto a stool. She poured another glass for herself and held it up. “
Anejo
time.”

“Anejo
time.” Justo raised the glass to his lips and savored the sweet liquid, trying not to focus on the near nakedness revealed by Angelica’s behind-the-bar attire. Justo could arrest her for contributing to the delinquency of adults for wearing those shorts, or whatever that strip of cloth was called. If he wasn’t a married man he could … well, if he wasn’t a married man. “To
la cucaracha
.”

“
Salud
, to the roach.” Angelica rubbed her newly filled glass against
Justo’s, joining him in a pledge of allegiance to the Cuban Death’s Head bug, who will, local legend had it, spin on its hard-shelled body, then stop, its gnarly antennae pointing the direction from which El Finito will roar ashore. It was bad luck to crush these hurricane-predicting insects scurrying by the thousands across the island’s cracked sidewalks and shiny tiled kitchen floors. The myth the insect would one day stop dead in a furious spin, indicating the direction from which the end of the world would occur, could be taken seriously or not. Some thought it less of a myth and more of a joke played by local Cubans on the unsuspecting. Others believed the tale, that to squash a bulky Death’s Head bug invited one’s death by hurricane. Angelica never knew, when Justo offered his undying pledge of fellowship to the roach before downing a shot of
anejo
, if he was serious or not. She had the suspicion he was. After several shots of
anejo
Angelica became convinced he was.

“My brother,” Brogan emerged from the original starting point of the meandering trail he had been wandering for the past hour, “says the buck bucks in Central America.”

“The buck bucks for anyone who tries to ride it, bubba!” Bubba-Bob slammed his empty glass on the bar. “Nobody’s ever ridden that one to the grave.”

Angelica was thinking how slender her ankles looked with the straps of her high heels around them. She gazed into Justo’s brown eyes, thinking them dreamy and easy for a solid cop whose body bulged with such intentional strength. Her desire was to tie Justo’s thick leather belt close about her waist, cinch the cold holstered gun against her hips. “When are you going to carry me away from all this?” Angelica pushed the intention of her solicitation deep into Justo’s eyes.

“I’m a married man.”

“Honey …” Angelica poured them both very tall
anejos
. “Just because you’re on a diet doesn’t mean you can’t eat.”

A good thought. Justo chewed on it for all it was worth while eyeing the more delectable parts of Angelica’s fleshy exposure. There were times Justo ached to the marrow of his bones to be an unmarried man, matter of fact, twenty or thirty times a day; then, when day went into night and back into early day, like this one had, and he was worn to raw emotion, that was when he ached most, and the bed that contained his sleeping Rosella across the narrow streets of the town might as well be clear over to the Abacos for all the difference it might
make. Who knows? Only Justo and his conscience. Mister Conscience was a
formidal
opponent Justo preferred not to go up against, especially since he needed all the Saints’ help to rid the island of the evil he sensed swelling the heart valve of public decency. All through this night, and now into the early morning, Justo was a man on a mission; his persuasive call of ideals was more of a lure than Angelica. “Better not to stir the rice, although it sticks.”