Mile Zero (31 page)

“La cabeza blanca en canas, y los sesos por venir!”
Justo slammed his fist onto the steering wheel. Gray-headed and still no brains! Damned druggie, probably powered by his own astral wind, spaced out and knocked up by punk mushrooms or bathtub designer drugs guiding him with bright lights from flying saucers only he could see. Justo started the car’s engine and drove on. He could not suppress his rage and resentment at another of life’s walking wounded begging to be run over by throwing himself in the path of the real world. Justo remembered when Space Cadet first appeared, toward the end of the Vietnam war, descending with other longhairs down the island chain like a plague of grasshoppers clinging to the last blades of wheat, hatched out of psychedelic-painted vans and converted school buses, bumping to a stop at the end of Highway U.S. 1. More than a few of the sporting local Conchs and sailors loved trying to knock sense enough into the bean-sprout-breath interlopers so they would turn tail and head out of paradise. Still they came, growing so numerous the local sports complained there were not enough beer bottles in town to bash brains back into these longhairs. Then a funny thing happened. Some of the Conchs went over to the longhairs because of their bare-breasted women in skimpy granny dresses with unshaven hair under their arms ripe as a damp scent of molasses. The local sports discovered the marijuana the longhairs had was a cheaper high than a case of beer, and it blew in on a never-ending Belize breeze and Jamaican wind. The strangest thing was the longhairs were not jealous of their bare-breasted women, encouraged them to be passed
around with the granola cookies, pot and Bob Dylan records. This was enough to make even the Nam-bound sailors take notice, many of them started going over the hill to nosh at the groovy trough of natural foods and unnatural acts. Acid, Speed, growling guitars and sugary sitars—seemed like the whole world was turning Hip, and the hot little island at the edge of the Gulf was winking a modern cool eye. A long time back that was, before Rosella was pregnant with Isabel. Now there were only the odd few longhairs left in town, like Space Cadet, wandering in a cultural combat zone, staggering slowly out of step, missing life’s every other beat, the world long since passed by, most all the others having cut their hair down to a social regimental length a full decade past. Space Cadet was bent forever, like the wheel of his battered bike, sliding around town wearing his tight
THE NEXT GENERATION
T-shirt, convinced the planets were going to line up and bump each other out of the universe, as if God was a pool player about to sink the earth out of sight in the lefthand-side Black Hole pocket. If the Space Cadets of this world have their way, Justo banged the steering wheel again, there won’t be a next generation.

The white glare of morning struck steep metal rooftops, behind shuttered windows sleepers stirred uneasily to clock radios heralding news of another day swelling with heat. Justo prayed the Saints were not asleep, but riding shotgun on his conscience. Coming from the far distance ahead at the end of the street was a creature scurrying quick as a messenger from hell. Was it the Saints answering his prayers with a sign of warning? The squat shiny form rolled closer, exposing its prosaic reality, nothing more than a flat-nosed truck with a bulbous metal tank attached to its back from which stubby nozzles extruded, fouling the air with a curtain of mosquito-killing insecticide. Justo pulled his car out of the way, cranked the windows up to block the spewing stench from the spray truck prowling for winged blood suckers embarked on sticking it to a rising population. Most people would rather live with an itch on their conscience than a bite on their ass. At this moment Justo felt he was no different. He waited until the raspy whine of the sprayer was far behind before pulling back into the street. Ocho was awake in the backseat, nuzzling his snout against Justo’s shoulder, sniffing about for an errant conch fritter only a dog’s luck might bring his way. Justo petted the searching snout.
Manea la cola el can, no por ti, sino por el pan
. The dog wags his tail, not for you, but for your bread. Man’s life was not so different, Justo thought, a wag of the tail to the right person, or a check in the mail,
a kind bark at night, or a warm body pulling into bed beside you, amounted to the same, so blessedly simple. Man is nothing but
el mismo perro con differente collar
. Same dog with a different collar. Makes no difference if the collar is carved of gold or woven with straw, man is a dog prancing on both hind twos, dragging his tail of telltale lust in the dust behind.

Something else ahead. More street action. What now? Justo took a deep breath, instinctively rubbed the gold wishbone chained around his neck. Could be the Saints were protecting him by throwing one obstacle after another in his path, preventing his cuckolding himself before the cock crowed an end to this early dawn. Renoir in his white suit stood in the middle of the street flailing his arms to the heavens, forcing Justo to stop. Renoir’s fists banged so loudly on the car roof over Justo’s head it was difficult to understand what he was screaming.

“Angelica’s inside, said you’d be coming, got to help us!”

Justo’s hand went to unhook the speakerphone of the police radio bolted beneath the car dashboard. “Somebody hurt?”

“Yes!” Renoir yanked the car door open. “Come with me, no ambulance. Angelica said you’d help, you’d understand.” Renoir tried to grab Justo’s shoulder and pull him from the car.

Justo pushed the grasping hands away and climbed out. “Where’s Angelica?”

“Let’s go!” Renoir spun quickly on his heels, running off on the sidewalk following a high wall painted the blushed color of a baby’s bottom.

Justo ran after Renoir, through a wooden gate in the wall, along a gravel path beneath a choke of fat leaves sweeping down from trees crowded around shotgun cottages. Justo was being led into the hothouse atmosphere of one of the island’s many gay guesthouse compounds. He had entered so quickly he did not know which compound he was in, many seemed interchangeable: Jasmine Arms, Plantation Oasis, Polly Parrot Perch. Although some were nothing more than tarted-up rusted hulks of dilapidated trailers and termite-riddled shacks supported on foundations of crumbling limestone, others were shockingly elegant, tucked behind towering walls hiding jeweled settings of planted exotica. There were a number of compounds that offered a discriminating clientele discreet diversions or, for the stag-hearted and not so discriminating, chancy nocturnal meetings with haughty male youths wrapped in an Apollonesque glow. Justo grew up learning more slang words in Cuban for homosexual than for any
other possible predilection, physical action or emotional condition. This was an odd fact, one Justo often thought he should think about, but for some reason he rarely did, what one man did with another was of little interest to him. Justo remembered cousin Manuel, who had a furtive boyhood backyard bush affair with another boy. Manuel’s Catholic conscience was haunted by such homophobic extremity he banged out twelve kids twenty years later to prove he preferred women. Justo based his distinctions concerning people on a simplistic sense of good and bad; good and bad could be split like a stone, one was pure or one was evil. Who did the going into somebody, and who did the coming out, made no difference to Justo, for him right and wrong had nothing to do with sex. It was only when a person had two bad sides that they got in Justo’s way and would be knocked down never to rise again. In the early days, when Justo mixed more with the public and was less specialized, he did no more cop business in gay guesthouses than he did out in the motels lining the boulevard on the way into town. There had been one confusing moment for Justo in the early days, he was called by a panicked landlord to a shabby little house in a gay guesthouse compound, the doors nailed shut and the windows sealed with black tape. The tenants had not paid the rent for two months, the landlord was afraid to go in. Justo broke through the front door into the chill of air-conditioned darkness. He turned on the lights, exposing one large room sheeted in black plastic, a wide metal drain strategically set in the middle of the floor, a coiled garden hose in one corner. Justo never understood exactly what went on in the plastic room, whatever it was had nothing to do with two men loving each other, no more than incest has to do with fatherly love. Let the whole world bang hell out of each other was Justo’s philosophy, as long as they didn’t bang kids. Justo knew his ideas along these lines were primitive. He considered himself sophisticated in the way he charged life’s ever-changing windmills, but on this issue he remained a product of learned Christian behavior.

Chasing Renoir on the crunchy gravel Justo’s mind engaged in the strange clarity which accompanies the unexpected. He had noticed the trousers of Renoir’s normally crisp white suit were soaked through from the knees down, streaks of sand clung to the dampness around the knees. “Hey!” Justo shouted to Renoir sprinting so far ahead on the winding path he was almost out of sight. “Not so fast!” The words inspired Renoir to race even farther ahead. Justo still had great power in his leg and arm muscles, but the breath of life was definitely
growing shorter in his lungs. He was going gray and the gay rabbits were outrunning him, all he could hope for was enough oxygen in his brain to outsmart the rabbits. He lost sight of Renoir.

Justo’s labored panting grew louder in his ears, he stumbled to the end of the white path, beyond the last cottage. The Atlantic spread before him, its inky chop edging out on hardened sand left behind a low tide. The crescent-shaped length of beach fronting the compound was empty, at its far tip the dark pilings of a pier marched into low water. From the long shadow of a piling the white suit of Renoir stood out, hands waving. Justo took a deep breath and sprinted around the crescent, strong salty air reviving his tired lungs. Renoir was not beneath the pier when Justo reached it; beyond the pilings, on a tangled bed of rotting seaweed marooned by the receding tide was a beached naked body. Angelica was bent over the body with both her hands spread on its clammy skin above the heart, bearing down with quick rhythmic bursts to pressure a sign of life from unmoving lips.

Justo became aware of his own labored breath again as he watched Angelica attempting to pump life into the prone body. “What happened?”

“Floyd had … an …” Renoir dropped to his knees on the sand next to Angelica, as if kneeling in anguished prayer. “Had … an … accident.” Tears overwhelmed Renoir’s eyes as he gazed up at Justo. “Floyd went out to the end of the pier, still dark. He dove off, forgetting the low tide. I don’t know, maybe his neck is broken?”

“Keep pumping that heart,” Justo encouraged.

Angelica did not look up, bent to her task, the muscles of her exposed upper arms straining to bring pressure to bear on the unresponsive organ beneath her fingertips.

Renoir gently cradled Floyd’s head in his hands, brushing caked sand from the forehead, smoothing the damp hair. “Please don’t, please don’t,” Renoir cried to the face with closed eyes.

“I need to know how long Floyd’s been like this.” Justo knelt in the sand, placed his thumbs at the corners of the body’s eyes and pushed the stiff lids back, exposing two orbs of white, the irises rolled high, pointing to a brain which might be dead. “Keep pumping!” Justo shouted at Angelica. “Try it faster, thump-beat-beat-beat, faster, eighty beats a minute … that’s it.”

“Five, maybe ten minutes ago it happened.” Renoir brushed more sand from Floyd’s matted hair. “Pulled him from the water myself.
So early in the morning nobody was around, nobody but Space Cadet, who suddenly appeared on the pier. I told him to run over to Petronia Street and get Dr. Humphries, who knows Floyd. Humphries could get Floyd going again, but Space Cadet didn’t come back, doctor didn’t come. Floyd started coughing up water so I ran out to the street to use the pay phone when Angelica came by. Said she knew CPR and told me to wait for you, because you were right behind her.”

“Why didn’t you just call the emergency number?” Justo pushed the gray lips open, exposing a bloody tongue.

“We can take care of ourselves.” Renoir’s words were constrained, as if elucidating a difficult philosophy rather than issuing a simple statement. “We take care of each other.”

“From the looks of it you sure have been doing a great job,” Justo growled, leaning close to Floyd’s flaccid lips. He ran a finger into Floyd’s mouth, clearing a scum of sand, freeing the bloody tongue from a balled position at the entrance to the throat. Justo figured Floyd was gone, no breathing, no pulse, no vital signs at all. He had dealt with more than his share of stiffs who reached this stage, tried to pop life back into hundreds of dead drunks, drug O.D.’s, traffic fatalities, gasping heart attack victims and hopeless suicides. Not much to be done after a certain point. God alone knows that point, Justo told himself, placing his lips over the gray ones caked with sand and blood, pinching the cold nose off as he breathed four bursts of air into the cupped mouth filled with an odor of deep vomit, the odor that always reminded Justo of death’s final scent. Justo judged himself somewhat less of a man for not being able to perform this life-giving task without feeling queasy. No matter how many times he gave mouth-to-mouth a foul bile rose up in his stomach, a stupid reaction when the high stakes of life were at issue. It was one thing to try to kiss life back into a woman who’s been run down at a crosswalk, or a kid pulled from a backyard pool, another thing to be blowing into the lungs of a perfect stranger. Although Floyd was not a perfect stranger, more an imperfect acquaintance. Floyd was an over-the-hill muscles and mustache man, blew into Key West from the cold north many winters ago with a rich sugar daddy and a randy appetite which kept him prowling his youthful manhood away in the late-night gay discos. Floyd knew what certain northern men wanted when they slid south from their arctic confines. Though Floyd had long since gone bald he kept his muscles toned and pumped, his mustache and chest
hair trimmed and dyed. Every day, after a night of fast music and faster action, Floyd could be found on one of the more obscure beaches in a bathing suit summed up by two shreds of cloth, one twisted rakishly around the waist, the other cinched tight between firmed hills of bare buttocks baked by the sun. Floyd was tanned blacker than Justo’s African Aunt Oris was born, his skin gleamed with the artificiality of an enameled doll. Floyd’s fanatical predilection to roast his buns round the daytime clock accounted for the nickname which chased him into the island’s more catty crevices. A snicker and a wink were always passed along with the nickname, Fan-Tan. Fan-Tan, the most barbed of the feline tongues wagged, looked like an overexposed Oreo cookie, whatever in the world did Renoir see in that boy, honey? Don’t you know Renoir deserves better than to pour all his hard money down that manhole? Renoir could hustle himself plenty of crisp muscles and mustache if he wasn’t such a dear, so the cat tongues wagged. Fan-Tan was known as Floyd only to Renoir; no matter how the barbed tongues hissed, they could not pry Renoir’s affection from Fan-Tan. Renoir was one of the few on the island secure in his bones with who he was. If Justo were pushed to the wall, even he would count on Renoir, a trustworthy man straight in his beliefs. On the matter of Fan-Tan, Renoir listened not to any ill-winded gossip, even though he knew Fan-Tan still slipped away in late winter afternoons to the sandy stretch before the seaside wall of West Martello Tower. The red brick tower stood as decaying vestige of a Union fortress once housing Civil War soldiers and prisoners. Now the citadel was home to the Key West Garden Club, within its crumbling walls a choke of trees dripped webbed blossoms of rare airborne orchids, beneath cannon portholes in the rounded parapet facing the Atlantic Ocean solitary men sometimes perched, peering from behind the glare of sunglasses across the sandy beach toward the wooden finger of a low-lying pier. In the declining afternoon sun the pier was often crowded with young men in brief bathing suits, their thoughts never drifting toward the schools of errant snook that roiled the waters beneath their dangling naked feet. Among insiders the pier was known as Dick Dock, among less tolerant outsiders, as Queer Pier. The pier daily spawned a well-known mating scene. Over the years Justo had seldom been summoned there to investigate big trouble, except for an occasional zealous sport fresh off the Miami shuttle plane who decided he liked to mug other men after fishing from them encounters of lust or explosions of guilt. The turf around
the Civil War citadel was still a field of encounter for men from north and south, the threat of gunfire exchanged for the lark of spending anonymous sexual currency. Fan-Tan’s random wanderings between the brick-walled tower and the peacock display of boys in bikinis on the pier was considered ill conduct only because it carried with it the public flaunting of his cheating on Renoir.