Mile Zero (34 page)

“Don’t want it.”

“I do.” Renoir grabbed the gun from St. Cloud’s hand, slipping it beneath his white suitcoat and behind a thin alligator belt.

Isaac turned to Renoir. “The hell you say. You don’t know how to use it, never wanted to handle one before. What do you think you’re going to do with it?”

Renoir rose, an enigmatic smile creased his lips, expressing a cross between contempt and concern. “Homosexual heroics, Dad. You and St. Cloud go back to discussing locker-room politics.” His shadow disappeared through the doorway.

“Son of a bitch.” Isaac’s brown eyes shone once more bright as worn chestnuts. “We must stay alive for this, St. Cloud. My son’s got some of the old man’s wood in his pecker after all.”

S
T. CLOUD
was a rat. Until now he thought himself a scorpion. Lila was the scorpion, the choice had been made. Rats had gnawed through the core of his rum-soaked soul and nested. He was a less than cunning rodent who could not control his desire for the inevitable numbing scorpion sting. A grand confusion clawed into his normal emptiness, what he had lost with Evelyn he felt he could renew with Lila. He had baited a trap with the meat of nostalgia for the man he no longer was, the trap was about to slam shut. The nausea that shook him awake each morning after a late night of drinking launched him into another day of feigning that he was a human being. Physical wretchedness had become a welcome tonic, spiritual debauchery was the dulled diversion he craved, plucked the wings from his wobbly flight, settled him down to grounded reality. Someone meant him great harm. Zobop was the least of his problems now. Someone meant to harm him wholly. He suspected that someone might be himself.

I myself am not myself
was a consoling sentiment St. Cloud had stolen years before from a dead poet. He believed this sentiment demarcated a jumping-off point to the infinities of his own existence. The poet who penned the thought walked away from his life one day into California’s high mountains never to return, an early soldier of faith missing in action. St. Cloud only now realized the poet walked into his life, not away from it. Perhaps his own flight from California to Florida, from youthful ideals to a fountain of hopes, was his way in, not out. St. Cloud composed himself with the fidgety anticipation of a man standing at the gates of his own disappearance. Beckoning beyond the gates was the disturbed vision of Lila, indistinguishable
between love and desire. Lila was an ache of confusion, a bruise on his soul, spreading inevitably as a warm wind steals south each winter to escape trees hung with frozen oranges. Heat from Lila’s lips burned through St. Cloud’s skin, melting the rational ice of his mind. As his passion deepened, the petals of Lila’s true purpose yielded final discovery, she was more than he imagined. Lila brought St. Cloud to the awareness he was far less the man than he took himself to be. There was serious damage in his eyes when he faced himself in the mirror, it could no longer be hidden. Worse, Lila’s clear eyes gazing up into his reflected perfectly his inescapable predicament. Even when Lila’s body moved beneath him, then was pinned by the muscled scissors of his bare legs, they both stopped, stilled in the moment, aware his damaged image played off the sea-green surface of her eyes, aware that beneath the bright marine surface Lila was drifting swiftly elsewhere, into a murky universe where St. Cloud followed awkwardly, a lost fool shadowing a foreign spirit, riding the tide of surprise to its final beach. Alcohol had pickled St. Cloud’s bruised Piscean soul, his bones were fluid, fish scales covered his flesh, what he needed most was resilience. When he bubbled with a gasp back to the surface of the present after a breath-held diving pursuit of Lila’s fleeing spirit, certain knowledge awaited him. Lila loved someone else. The deep off-stage shadow in the play was emerging.

Strange music pierced the windowpane above St. Cloud’s bed, beaded sweat skimmed the edge of his body, falling like rain onto Lila beneath him. He was maddened with heat, Lila was improbably cool, her body dry, except for a slick of dampness holding him effortlessly between her legs. The strange music broke through the humming blood in St. Cloud’s eardrums. He could not bear to face the marine clarity of Lila’s eyes reflecting his image as she lay beneath him so cool. He would rather face the music than face that image; he turned to the strange music. Lila’s fingers rose along both sides of his neck to intertwine, fingers guiding a tightening fleshy net. She pulled him down again, scent of magnolia flowing into his mouth. St. Cloud melted, sure as a cube of sugar in a hot glass of water. Strange music chimed in his ears, he was compelled to take up pursuit of Lila, only in such a moment did she leave a murky passage for him to steal through, penetrate her innermost thoughts, break into her submerged past. She allowed herself to cry and confide, until she came back to her beginning, and took him there too.

How young Lila was then, Miss Lila Sue-Lynn Defore, not much
different from most other Southern girls next door, except a certain sullen beauty unmistakable from the start, which had males from nine to ninety crowding around, thick as moths swarming about a drive-in movie screen on a muggy June night. It was not that Lila was not smart, she just never had a chance. Like many of her sisters of that time, her cultural endeavors extended not much further than a twist of the radio knob to tune in citified country crooners from Atlanta slogging through their predictable lyrics with the professional plunk of house painters rolling on interior latex. Lila’s beauty exacted a certain toll on the world, brought everything around up short, in her presence the usual dwindled to the inconsequential. The antiquity of Lila’s beauty emerged not from hot Georgia clay, but from a time before men and women existed, a glimmer in a distant universal sky of what perfection could be if molded of flesh and blood. All of this existed beyond Lila’s awareness, to herself she was simply the expected naked body reflected in the mirror. Lila took no more note of her image than a dog casually catching its reflection in a rain puddle. The manner in which men treated Lila she assumed was how they treated every other female, with jealousy and persistence, their crude insistence foreshadowing future guilt. Lila had brothers, she had sisters, they treated her as nothing more uncommon than a house sparrow, having seen her form and flower. Men came to the house for all the sisters from early on, such was not unusual, but something did occur which was. When Lila reached eighteen men stopped coming around, even the boys she knew from high school no longer fumbled on the phone for dates. Lila had become intimidating. A grace gathered round her beauty, forging a magnetic field of protection which put off the young and unwise. After a time this magnetic field inverted its own law of protection, coming to attract first the soundly stupid, then the profoundly dangerous.

Roger “At the Ready” Johnson was soundly stupid. The stupidest thing Roger ever did was marry Lila. Roger liked to brag before he was killed that he was the cleverest boy in the marijuana patch. Hadn’t he snared himself the catch of the county? And all Roger had to do to win this trophy was accept an invitation to dinner. Roger had not been invited to Lila’s family home by Lila, but by Lila’s mother, Margaret-Lynn. At forty-eight, with a trick or three up her sleeveless dresses, which showed off a shape to keep up with the fast curves of her best-looking daughters, Margaret-Lynn was not so much concerned her last unmarried daughter would sit home alone another
friday night, as she was frantic her third husband, the one she married when Lila was a little girl, was after their last big fight not going to come back to her, ever. Margaret-Lynn thought Roger might appreciate one of Lila’s special kind of home-cooked meals, then maybe a glass of California wine, then maybe a few of Roger’s special marijuana smokes, for Roger was always at the ready, biggest marijuana grower in the county, thirty-four years old with a mean laugh, twelve muddied four-wheel-drive vehicles, no bank account, and enough cash to buy himself a small country, which was not about to happen since Roger never journeyed beyond the large but isolated county he was born in, except to go to war. One thing sure, Roger knew the county’s every back road and person, lawful or not. Roger was available and farm-face attractive, most of all he was wealthy in the ways of those locals who knew how to bid up the high side of a crop easily grown and in rising demand. Roger was also always ready to knock his women around, or walk up to a man and bite his ear off if he suspected he’d been soured on a deal. Roger had an eye for women well mapped out by other men, and a large belly for home-cooked meals, a man of simple tastes with a demanding appetite.

Margaret-Lynn was uneasy about whether Lila’s cooking would altogether agree with Roger, for her youngest daughter’s cooking was, well, not usual, some even went so far as to call it odd. Margaret-Lynn plotted her evening with Roger carefully, it wasn’t her fault if her sweet youngest was eager to hide herself behind an apron in the kitchen. If Lila was bent on spending her days whipping up her odd fare, then it was the least a good mother could do to provide an appreciative male audience to woof it all down. Roger was good about it that first night he was invited over, though his goodness may have oozed from two joints he smoked in the cab of his high-wheeled pick-up speeding on his way to Margaret-Lynn’s house. That night Roger ate seven helpings of Grasshopper Mousse, country gentleman enough at the end to burp with appreciation and raise his glass of California wine in congratulations to the chef. Lila, not used to anyone saying anything about her cooking, since the whole family had grown accustomed to the unusual nightly fare, raised her own glass of wine and invited Roger, with all the genteel conviction of her Southern hospitality, “Y’all come back, heah?”

Late into the night after Lila’s first culinary triumph Roger whirled Margaret-Lynn around the crowded dance floor at the Ace in the Hole Bar and Lounge, then spun her along twisting roads in his pick-up
and came to a hard stop before his forty-foot luxury trailer in the woods. He hauled Margaret-Lynn down from the high-wheeled cab and carried her past his barking pack of bloodhounds right into the trailer’s bedroom. With no words Roger cranked up the blare of a country crooner on his expensive Japanese stereo, pulled Margaret-Lynn’s sleeveless dress off in one deft rip and caressed her, never less than roughly, in prelude to physically thrusting his thanks into her for earlier having allowed him to dine in the presence of such a miraculously beautiful chef. In the morning, in the trailer’s fancy kitchen aglitter with built-in appliances, Roger ever at the ready beat Margaret-Lynn to a black-and-blue pulp because she burned his scrambled eggs. “How could the mother of such a miraculously beautiful chef fuck up scrambled eggs,” Roger screamed at a cowering Margaret-Lynn on the kitchen floor. He tossed the rubbery mass of eggs to the snarling bloodhounds, pushed crying Margaret-Lynn into the high cab of the pick-up and took out across his fields of marijuana growing proud as Iowa corn beneath the shimmering protective green canopy of tall hardwood trees. When Roger shoved whimpering Margaret-Lynn from the pick-up in front of the little house she called home, Lila was not there, but Roger took up Lila’s invitation from the night before just the same. Driving away Roger shouted to Margaret-Lynn he’d be back the next friday for a home-cooked evening.

Lila never had a real Daddy. She had a Daddy, but to her he wasn’t real, since she never laid eyes on him after age five, by then there was a stepdaddy who called her darlin and patted her on the head for wearing such a prettyful dress. Maybe that is why Lila was attracted to all the wrong things in Roger. Some people said it was the reason she married him. When Roger came back for dinner the second friday he brought the California wine, ten bottles. Margaret-Lynn said nothing about anything, it was as if she had written a bad check and now the cops were at the door demanding payment. But it was not police at the door, it was Roger, talking loudly about his okra crop with repeated knowing winks, so everyone understood it was marijuana he was talking about, not okra. Roger crowed about how he had invested wise and could keep his bloodhounds in squirrel hearts and gator tails, and his own ass high and dry above the deep Georgia winter mud when he rode over to the Ace in the Hole in a four-wheel-drive machine. None of this mattered much to Lila, for as unimpressed as she was with her own beauty, she was even less
interested in things that could be bought and sold. Lila had her standards, her life was not cramped, no more than any female American teenager’s life is cramped who has television and the freedom of choice to turn its channels. One day, two years before Roger, when Lila was emotionally wrung out from all the country crooners crying on the radio, she had spun the afternoon TV dial in search of soap-operatic relief and come upon a new program direct from Atlanta, and she was hooked. Lila was fourteen then, when she walked in public she turned her shoulders in on herself to hide her full breasts. She always spoke softly, for no matter how inconsequential her conversations were, they broadcast quick as telegraphic messages to any male within a forty-mile radius. The day she found “Suzy’s Southern Style Cooking Show” on television was not any different from any other day in Lila’s life, yet it would in its way butter her future, slip her into a world she never suspected existed. She would spend the next two years of her life cooking just to realize how hungry she really was.