Mile Zero (33 page)

“Let me tell you about the strange music.”

“Goddamn it, man, you haven’t heard a word I said! I’m talking a painter’s light, not radio romance.”

“Music and light are connected.” St. Cloud took Isaac’s frail hand from the air and held it securely within his own, rubbing the blackened veins. “I appreciate what you’re trying to tell me, and you are right, except I’ve got this strange music playing in my ears, a high-pitched squeal.”

“Sounds like an island hawk.”

“Yes, and until now I only heard it at night outside my bedroom window while I was in bed with Lila. I’d go outside and look around,
but the bushes are too thick for me to make anything out. Hawks don’t hunt late at night. This is something else, sounds almost like a tin whistle.”

“Sounds more like you’ve got somebody lurking in the bushes who likes getting a look at your peach nectar as much as you do.”

“It’s been going on for some time. Sound is growing manic, unnatural.”

“Maybe your peeping Tom whistles through his teeth while he watches you worship your Aphrodite. I might whistle too. Reminds me, where’s Angelica? Where’s Renoir? Supposed to be here, it’s a Wednesday. Maybe Renoir finally got the right idea watching Angelica posing for me across a year of Wednesdays. Maybe they’ve run off together. I could die happy.”

St. Cloud watched the scorpion slither to the floor, hairy tail twitching for action, then heading for the brass bed. “I phoned Angelica this morning. No answer. Another thing. Someone called me at dawn, then hung up.”

“People get wrong numbers all the time, or maybe it was this Zobop guy. You told me you were going to have Angelica put your phone number on the Wreck Room chalkboard and sign Zobop’s name to it to see what you could snag.”

“Only action I’ve had on that one was two guys calling me for dates.”

“Getting any more poems nailed to your front door with a chicken claw?”

“That’s what I was going to tell you about earlier, it’s what I meant about the music getting stranger.” The scorpion slithered to the brass foot of the bed, bumped its head against the shiny metal three times before deciding to attempt the ascent. “This morning after the phone woke me up I heard the whistling outside again, very shrill. I stepped out to look around. Perched on the power pole above the cactus tree in my front yard was a hawk giving me a hard stare. It whistles and wheels off across the metal rooftops.”

“Told you it was an island hawk.”

“Thought for a minute it was a hawk all along, the two whistling sounds were so close. Turned to go back in and nearly tripped on a glass jar, the kind women used to can fruit in. The jar was on the top step where I couldn’t miss it, very old and scratchy, filled with stuff.”

“Filled with peach nectar.” Isaac winked. “Keep rubbing my hand like that, feels good.”

“Filled with rusty fishhooks, bent coins, twisted nails and another poem, its scribbling hard to make out, done with one of those felt-tip pens again.”

“What’s your friend Zobop got to say for himself now?”

“You remember what the poems nailed to my door said about a Green Sailor and the Cuban Martyrs?”

“Sure.”

“This is even stranger.
Eight palms point the way to two thousand souls entrapped by barbed wire
.”

“That’s it?”

“Signed,
Zobop
.”

Isaac turned his head on the pillow, the scorpion was eye level with him, wiggling its body on the ornate brass curve of the head stand. “You know,” Isaac rolled his head back toward St. Cloud, the wrinkles of his face cracking into a smile, “you might have something more real than cocaine paranoia or alcohol guilt after all. Something going on, but I don’t think it’s any more than the usual hanky-panky what takes place on this island. Could be nothing more than a jealous Cuban who wants Lila and he’s paid to have a Santería love hex put on you. I remember the old days here, I’m not talking of the Devil Dancers dressed in burlap with animal masks on who used to parade Duval Street. I mean the stuff going back beyond that, stuff that happened south of Duval, in what was called African Town. Your friend Justo knows, ought to ask him. There was a time when people in secret societies would kill anybody who revealed an evil truth. I’m not saying that’s bad. In our society someone reveals the awful secret of how to make an atomic bomb in his basement and becomes a national celebrity. Seems to me you ought to get Justo’s Aunt Oris to make up one of those lucky chicken wishbones like he wears. Never know, might work, saved Justo’s ass more than once. There’s a Conch woman lives across town by the old lighthouse, still throws a glass of water in the street every time a stranger strolls by her house, wants to wash away all those evil germs from nonbelievers, ward off bad spirits. There’s a lake in front of that woman’s rickety shack, even in middle of summer. People have a way of finding their own devils.”

“Good idea to bring in some outside protection. I’ll talk to Justo about getting a lucky bone.” St. Cloud took Isaac’s other hand and began a gentle rubbing between bone-thin joints. “Maybe I’ll get Lila a lucky bone too.”

“Can’t hurt, might be somebody more lovesick over her than you,
someone else who loves women too much, finds the perfect one and loves her to distraction. Distraction is the envy of evil. You’re more distracted now than ever. Your hands are strong, I can feel, but they shake more than mine, not just from the booze either. I’m not saying you should give up drinking, nothing that severe, not worried about your swimming out of the hole of alcohol you’ve poured full in your life. What does worry me is you might not make it across the great forty-year-old divide with much of that fine mind left. I’m banking on you to make it. Don’t let me down like Renoir, be a man, be a man for all men, to all women. It’s important for men at my age to pick out a younger man and root for him, pass the torch. I don’t want to see you hoodwinked by a Dixie charmer desperate to hook a husband who will keep her in credit cards and babies. Remember, women you fuck are the sum total of every man they’ve ever slept with. You don’t have the slightest idea about where this one has been. As they say up where she’s from, beneath every soft southern belle’s nipple beats a heart of pure gristle. Be careful.” The eyes in Isaac’s shrunken face shone with the truth of worn chestnuts. “All of these moments we have here on earth are stolen, the trick is to never stop stealing, never stop with one woman, go on to the next. It’s all about women in the end, all of them pretenders. That is the journey, to find the greatest pretender. As time runs you down one truth wears you out, the women get younger, the days get shorter.”

The purple lids of Isaac’s eyes weighted to a close, his hand slackened within St. Cloud’s caressing grip. A fist of fear closed around St. Cloud’s heart, perhaps Isaac was slipping away to the land of feathers and trumpets. St. Cloud looked up, his gaze escaping from the bedroom of the Bahamian mansion through high French windows, across the Atlantic’s flat doldrums to the thin blue horizon which marked the last exit for everyone on the island. Maybe now Isaac was gliding out there, over clear water, through the illusive Green Flash, into false light, his body cut from space, pursuing the answer his lifelong chase of women across acres of stretched canvas thick with bright oil paints never yielded.

“Saw colors so beautiful, standing pricky as icing on a birthday cake. Maybe there is more than false light after all.” Isaac winked. “Goddamn man, what are you whimpering about? I’m not going anyplace. Told you long ago, I’m going to die in the saddle.” He smiled at the scorpion inches from his face, its slender stinger probing
the unknown. “My little friend, time to take a ride. St. Cloud, you can toss him out now.”

St. Cloud scooped the scorpion into his hand and hurled it through the open shutters. He turned back to Isaac. “Some day you’re going to be stung. That will be the end of you, not doctors.”

Isaac spluttered short yipping sounds which trailed away into a cackle. “I’ve lived with scorpions all my life. Nobody’s ever been stung by one in grandfather Isaac’s house, never will. Got to protect scorpions, don’t, rats will overrun the place. Not a rat in the house. Rats or scorpions, one or the other, must choose.”

“Think I’ve got both.”

“You’ve got trouble, one has to go.”

“Not up to me.”

“No.” Isaac turned his head toward a noise at the open doorway, glimpsing a shadow on the outer hallway wall. “It never is for people to decide. Rats and scorpions make their own decisions, don’t know which it will be until the very end.”

Renoir appeared in the doorway, thinner than the shadow he cast, paled to a ghostly silhouette in his white suit.

“What are you,” Isaac called to the shadow-thin presence. “Rat or scorpion?”

Renoir ignored the question, moving quickly to the bed and taking his father’s frail hand, feeling for the feeble pulse. “Have you taken your medicine?”

“Have I taken my medicine?” Isaac coughed himself almost breathless before answering. “God yes, but no thanks to you, you weren’t here to give it. Where were you? The medicine I need now is a dose of Angelica’s creamy thighs, have you ever noticed there are four distinctly different flesh tones between her knees and navel? She’s not a blond at all. Where is she, the little cheat?”

“Probably spending the afternoon with her daughter, since she works nights.”

“Tell me.” Isaac sucked what little breath he had in and held it before exhaling his question. “Do you think Angelica is a rat or scorpion?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Got to be one or the other.”

“It’s not that simple, Father. There are other choices.”

“There are no choices. You either love women or you don’t.”

Renoir released his father’s hand. “Won’t you ever let up on the heterosexual heroics, even now?”

St. Cloud feared Renoir was losing his ability to hold back his true feelings. Through the years Renoir had not so much succumbed to, as suffered, his father’s constant emotional purges. There was an attitude about Renoir this afternoon of a man cornered, ready to strike back. Usually Renoir treated his father with a detached air of bemusement, observing the operatics from a safe distance of wit, often countering with his own brand of sexual bravado. St. Cloud was aware lately of a slow dissolve in Renoir’s demeanor, not just the man’s physical thinness going thinner, but a rope of some stark reality being pulled tight within, stretching to final breaking point.

“Guess I better be on my way,” St. Cloud stammered.

“Sit down,” Isaac patted the sheet beside him St. Cloud had just vacated.

St. Cloud sat awkwardly. He had always known Renoir was deeply hurt by his closeness to Isaac, the easy man-to-man rapport, the uncanny way in which both seemed to have the other’s thoughts. In the past Renoir turned that hurt to advantage, fashioned it together with his father’s mad musings into a personal definition of precisely what he himself did not want to be. In the dulled light Renoir’s right eyebrow arched, taut as a bowstring ready to release an arrow of truth. “Really …” St. Cloud started to rise from the bed again, feeling like a target for whatever arrow might fly. “Got to run.”

“Don’t go.” Isaac’s frail hand tugged on St. Cloud’s sleeve. “Have something I want to give you.” Isaac turned to Renoir. “You should know, St. Cloud is caught between obsession and distraction. He’s come to me because I’m a lifelong authority on matters arising from the pursuit of women. Someone’s put a love hex on St. Cloud and he can’t stay drunk enough to avoid it. What do you think of that?”

Renoir’s arched eyebrow went higher.

“What would you say if I told you someone was out to kill our St. Cloud?”

“I’d say,” Renoir eyed St. Cloud through his threatening arch, “that the women of this world would heave a collective sigh of relief.”

“Someone named Zobop wants to throw St. Cloud into a voodoo soup. How do you like that?”

Renoir’s arched eyebrow flattened, his pencil-thin mustache drew thinner across his lip. “What was it you just said?”

“1 said Zobop—”

“Somebody named Zobop spray-painted a yellow X across my door this morning. Sprayed it tall as a man.”

St. Cloud had the illumination he always feared, a familiar nightmare stepped from intoxicated dreams and beckoned. There really was a Zobop leaving his calling card all over town. “Was there … was there any poetry written? Small pieces of paper maybe, with writing?”

“No.”

Isaac pushed higher on his pillows. “Then how do you know Zobop slashed the X?”

“A signature was under the X.
Zobop.”

Isaac’s skinny chest expelled an exasperated gasp. “Just what we need in this town, a voodoo graffiti artist. One thing I can’t stand is bad public art. St. Cloud, open that drawer.” Isaac pointed a bony finger at the nightstand next to his bed, its top cluttered with bottles of medication.

St. Cloud cracked the drawer open, exposing more bottles, stacked twelve deep, elixirs to get a man up, down, sideways gone, or off the planet.

Isaac laughed. “Keep these pretty babies as my private stash, case some rascal doctor ever decides to cut me off. Pull the drawer all the way open.”

St. Cloud slid the drawer slowly; at the back was the blunt handle of a revolver.

Isaac wheezed. “Take it out.”

St. Cloud removed the revolver and slid the drawer closed.

“Been keeping that revolver for years. If a jealous husband ever showed up, I’d be ready. A sporting man can never be too careful, but it’s no use where I’m going.” Isaac raised his hand and clutched the front of St. Cloud’s sweat-stained shirt, pulling him closer. “Might need it where you’re headed.”

“No.” St. Cloud shook his head. “Made a pact with myself years ago while I was in the antiwar movement, no guns.”

“Just what do you think?” Isaac’s words were nearly breathless, rasping with urgency. “You think Zobop’s interested in some pacifist pact you made with your starry-eyed college-boy self? Take the weapon. When you get that lousy voodoo graffiti artist in your sights, tell yourself you are plugging him for me, if that will appease your lingering nonviolent conscience.”