Mile Zero (3 page)

“There’s been a terrible accident! The lead boat piloted by hometowner Karl Dean has exploded! Reports from observing helicopters are Dean and his Throttleman were blasted from the cockpit in flames! Remember, boats hurtling at hundred-mile-an-hour speeds across changing waters can snag a bow in a wave and flip! Mother Nature don’t get you, then your own machine might! Miami Kid takes the lead, going for a world record, but what a catastrophe!”

C
AMINA POR LO CHAPEAO
. Walk on the smooth side. That is what Justo’s father always said, and his father lived long enough to die a happy man in his only wife’s arms. They stopped making love stories like that when Carole Lombard and Clark Gable died. It was a good Cuban saying, one Justo’s father learned from his father, who also died in his only wife’s arms. Now all four were out there in the middle of the cemetery, buried beneath a banyan tree, holding hands through eternity. It was Justo’s avowed purpose to join them one day with his only wife, Rosella.
Quien a su mujer no honra, asi mismo se deshonra
. He who does not honor his wife dishonors himself.

Justo was smooth as the gold-plated chicken wishbone hanging from a braided gold chain around his thick neck. The golden bone was rubbed so single-mindedly over the years it fit effortlessly into Justo’s palm like the slender hand of his oldest teenage daughter, Isabel. The bone was his good-luck charm, the very bone of faith he wished upon for survival, given him by his African great-aunt Oris fifteen years before when he upped for a second Marine hitch in Vietnam. Great-aunt Oris called on all the Santería saints and African gods to preserve her grand-nephew, and they did. When Justo was born, it was Oris who went out and immediately burned an offering of fifty candles in prayerful thanks to Santa Barbara for there being a pure black boy born into such a light-skinned Cuban family. At last a blessed African black bean amidst all the Spanish yellow rice. The stew of life would surely be spiced up. Oris measured the sum of the good life by its wildly different flavors.

Not only was Justo the only black bean in the stew, he was the last
on the island to carry on the Cuban family name from his father’s side, Tamarindo. A family named for a tree. The same type of tree under which the Cuban Patriots plotted in 1868 to overthrow their Spanish overlords. The patriots failed and invented the art of cunning exile, patiently waiting until
los Hermanos
of their homeland, the Brothers ninety miles across the Straits of Florida from Key West, were “ready to rise as one man.” A tree grows, a family nation takes root. A piece of the patriots’ legendary tree was kept in the cemetery where Justo was taken many times by his old grandfather, Abuelo. Young Justo would stand in wonder before a gnarled chunk of bark enshrined behind a scratched glass case set on a pedestal among concrete cracked graves containing the remains of the once far-dreaming Brothers who gave their lives. All the while Abuelo thundered and banged his cane on the cracked concrete, attempting to rouse the sleeping
Hermanos
to fulfill their destiny. If they had lived their plan was to make Key West part of Cuba. A tree would have grown bigger; Key West would still be an island of families, people talking on porch stoops, ice-cream vendors pushing their carts; opera would still be sung inside the ornate Instituto de San Carlos, arias echoing off glittering walls of majolica tiles. There was a reason Cubans once called Key West Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. There was a time when the island’s soul was Cuban, when it was prosperous and proud, with thousands of Strippers, Trimmers, Pickers and Packers rolling out one hundred million cigars a year by hand; a time of black beans and yellow rice, of grunts and grits, when a man took his daughter by the hand at age fifteen, led her before all the white picket fences of the cigar workers’ cottages barged over from the Bahamas, walking proudly to the San Carlos, where the town waited in all its sunday finery with a thumping band to trumpet the second most important day in a girl’s life,
Quince
, to dance her through a joyous celebration of her fifteenth birthday into womanhood, to toast and toast again with sweet
anejo, salud-salud
, toasts all around for the proud parents, salutations to the beaming father who gave rise to a fabulous female flower at the center of the Star of the Sea, center of the universe, and all for the glory of a free Cuba.

Cayo Hueso
, Island of Bones, was the name the Spanish first gave the place, long before it had become a glittering star to the Cubans. Island of Bones, because the Spaniards found it littered with the bleached remains of the hounded, deserted and luckless. It wasn’t any star of the sea for the Spaniards, it was even less so in Justo’s
time. Sometimes, to Justo, the island steamed with the same scent of rancid inevitability as Saigon had in the final days before its fall. Justo carried with him a sense of doomed fate, especially now, as he shoved through the shouting and surging crowd along Mallory Dock. Some people on the dock recognized him, stepped respectfully out of his path, others moved grudgingly aside. A lifetime of sun had baked Justo’s Afro-Cuban skin to a polished mahogany, imbuing him with a sleek appearance and solid attitude, an attitude the Cubans called
formidal
. People didn’t step aside because of Justo’s broad chest, made more massive by being twenty pounds overweight, or because years of black belt karate training had articulated itself into a dangerous swagger of thick hips. People stepped aside because Justo was a bull of the streets, a tough cop who had worked his way up from the bottom to the lordly position of detective on a force that by tradition prided itself on being southern and white. Justo wore no badge. The loose blue
guayabera
shirt, always unbuttoned halfway down his chest, its shirt tails flapping at his hips in anticipation of a cool breeze, was his badge. Every day he munched his way through a bag of cold conch fritters, hoping the greasy deep-fried little balls of spicy conch meat would put out the fire of twelve daily
buche
espressos burning a hole big as a fist through his stomach, fixing on his face a sort of beatific grimace, much like the sardonic rapture captured on the faces of certain male saints painted on walls of churches in faraway countries without television.

Nothing escaped Justo’s brown eyes, not what happened before, not what happened since, such was his formidability. All gave Justo his due, even those among the crowd on Mallory Dock, some near hysteria, wailing because of the great calamity which had befallen one of the local boys in the race, others cheering the winning powerboat team being sprayed with champagne in front of television cameras surrounding the judges’ grandstand. Justo was that rare creature on the island, a man going someplace who knew where he was from. He was an old-fashioned family man, an island of integrity on an island of shifting morality. Long before the town tricked itself out for tourists and rolled over for frigid northerners, Justo had come to this dock for other celebrations. Once a year people crowded onto this cement bulwark at the abrupt Gulf of Mexico edge to cheer the passing parade of shrimp boats, their colorful nets winged out over water on forty-foot steel booms, jaunty as flying medieval pennants, a vast armada with appropriate names:
Black Madonna
,
Ramona’s Prayer
,
La
Libertad
—each boat passing the dock three times to hand-blown kisses, tossed flowers and the solemn words of the priest praying for “Full nets and a safe journey on future voyages.” The priest in his white linen vestments embroidered with a large red cross waved his hand in blessing, called on the miraculous Virgin Mother to fill the nets through all the backbreaking nights ahead with rich, squirming “pink gold” of the lowly but succulent cockroach of the sea, bountiful shrimp.

That was a long ago time when fishing was a poor man’s honest gamble in the big casino of the ocean. Every man’s net is equal under water. It remained so, but the value of the catch had changed. The shrimp fleet was still blessed, but it was more of a tourist attraction and less a spiritual send-off. The island itself had become a sideshow trick, the native Conchs, the working people, were the freaks. If there was any honesty the priest would bless all the boats used to run marijuana and cocaine. That was the economy people had better pray that the Virgin Mother hold up; without it, the unimaginative, the daring and the weak would all be equally broke. From where Justo stood the island was reduced to nothing more than a marijuana republic, a mere cocaine principality. A man could catch a million-dollar load of marijuana in an afternoon, or his nets yield no more than a ten-dollar bucket of shrimp for a month of nights’ work. What the sea gives up to the fisherman is all fair and equal catch, governed by no man-made decree or biblical mandate. Such was the law of the sea, and too, the unspoken law of the island.

The crowd at Mallory Dock had come to celebrate, or grieve over, what the sea had rendered this day. No more than a handful remembered the time when the broad cement dock was a creaky run of bleached board pier studded with cavernous shrimp-packing houses where a boy could venture in a tattered T-shirt and shorts, while away his time talking to seagulls, until the steel boom-wings of shrimp boats approached from the thin blue horizon to spill from holds their briny nocturnal harvest; a boy could stand alongside the men then, a boy like Justo, with strong wrists and fast fingers, could pop off enough shrimp heads to fill a bucket with decapitated bodies of pink sea bugs every five minutes, fill a box every twenty minutes, could earn himself a buck, be his own man, buy his own
buche
and cigars, sit with the best of the town
hermanos
along Duval Street and watch the stream of
niñas bonitas
floating by in dresses bright and vivid as open-mouthed sea urchins sashaying in clear current of a coral tidal pool, but these
landbound skirted urchins on Duval Street desired to be fed with praise and promise, a boy had to wait, save his bug money, be industrious, join the Marines, then maybe one of these bright creatures with glistening braided hair coiled atop her head would take notice, turn inky eyes on him in sudden recognition, lower her rope of hair down to him from her lofty perch, then the boy would hear the bright creature’s name calling to him. Justo heard one name year after year blowing into him on fresh sea breezes coming ashore unexpectedly when spring winds shifted and swung around from the south, winds succinct with the clear sound of
Rosella
, a name he would one day join with his own to make a family, a name his youth was haunted by as he walked long ago through the packinghouses, the tide of discarded shrimp heads cracking and crunching beneath his white rubber boots, stony shrimp eyes connected to no body, gazing up at wooden ceiling fans whipping moisture from the air, each blade’s rotation scattering syllables of the name, flinging them like so many pure drops of sweat across the length of the packinghouse,
Rosella Rosella Rosella
. How could a man not marry a woman with a name like that? How could a man not take all the offered coiled rope in his hands and climb to the stars, roll with Rosella across white-sheeted nights until two beautiful daughters were born, looking just like Rosella and calling him Papa.
Quien se casa por amores, malos días y buenas noches
. He who marries for love will have bad days, but good nights.

Mal día
, what a bad day this was. Boat blowing up, refugee boat coming in. Next thing to happen would be for the Space Shuttle shot off this morning to fall out of the sky. Justo figured with his luck the shuttle would fall in the middle of Mallory Dock. He fingered the gold wishbone at his neck, popped another conch fritter and pushed deeper into the crowd, farther away from the judges’ grandstand where two new powerboat champions in sleek blue racing suits were being hoisted on shoulders above all. The champions were of no interest to Justo. It was the Coast Guard’s job to investigate the cause of the boat explosion. His job was in the opposite direction.

Down at the far end of the dock a rope barricade stretched to hold back the few onlookers trying for a closer look at the boat from Haiti being towed by a Coast Guard cutter. The battered wooden vessel bobbed behind the steel cutter throttling its massive engines to a muffled roar as it swung around to moor the rudderless craft behind it alongside the dock. From the boat’s broken mast flapped remnants of gray patched sails. A roar went up from the crowd behind Justo.
He turned to catch the glimpse of a beaming blonde in a brief bikini ascending the judges’ grandstand. Cameras clacked and popping bottle corks released a rain of champagne as the blonde triumphantly raised a silver trophy. The blonde wiggled in the champagne rain, exposing exaggerated contours of flesh beneath her soaked bikini before pirouetting on spike heels into the arms of champions eager to claim their silver trophy and the prize of puckered red lips.

“Get away from that rope!” A Coast Guardsman guarding the rope barricade barked his command, one hand snapping to the revolver holstered at his hip, threatening to draw on a long-haired man astride a battered bicycle. The man appeared oblivious to the warning, prodding the front wheel of the bicycle against the rope as if it were the string of a giant bow about to propel him into space.