Mile Zero (36 page)

Dancing stirred in Lila an intense feeling of escape, to her couples existed to split and spin from one another, into a place of uninhibited movement. Lila was as unaware of Roger’s hatred of how she danced as she was of how she ignored him after they began dancing, for then he simply ceased to be, and she soared. But on this night of the quivering aspic Roger was holding her down. In the swirl of the crowd, and the ratty race of bad guitar licks screeching from the boys in the band, Lila felt her arms bruised from Roger’s rough pawing. She struggled to find a familiar escape hatch of rhythm to sail off through. Roger’s clumsy feet stomping on hers kept her earthbound. Each time she tried to escape his overreaching grasp he came bumping crudely into her, trying to nail the cast of her gaze with a mean glare. Lila was not soaring, she was for the first time in her life pinned to the moment on the dance floor.

It was never Lila’s way to encourage the urgings of men toward her, a calculated shyness was her shield to fend off life’s mounting tide of admiring males. What Lila never did was make loose eye contact with a man, but on this night, as aspic slid down an aluminum wall in a marijuana field filled with howling bloodhounds, her eyes swept the length of the bar, tangled with the only pair of male eyes not seeking her above smirking lips. Like everyone else at the bar, the man sat with his stool turned to face the dance floor, watching the spectacle of a husband trying publicly to stomp his wife, except this man was not leaning forward with leering anticipation, his back was pressed straight against the long counter. Lila felt his intentions coming at her heart like a knife, a pain uncoiled from him across the dance floor and coupled with her new sense of reckless being.

“I’m sick of it, Roger!” Lila shouted into the music, surprised at
her own words, surprised they stopped Roger cold. She stood at the center of the dance floor, out of breath and alone. Something had finally gone right within her, an awakening which brought her up short. Without hesitating she walked over to the man whose pain was calling her. For the first time in her life Lila thought she could help someone, she never felt that strong before.

The man accepted Lila as if he had been patiently awaiting her all his life, he simply swirled around on his stool and ordered her what she always drank. Lila pressed in next to him and raised the glass he offered to her lips. Her body was hot and flushed, the man was strangely cool, yet she sensed her power over him. She did not need a key to unlock the steel door he kept forcibly closed between him and the outside world. What made him unapproachable to others made him vulnerable to her. Lila brought no history with her, having left her old life on the dance floor, that is why he had no lock to keep her out. Lila existed as an immortal moment, her awareness did not transcend the immediacy of her being, nor trouble itself with distinctions of distant times. As a Southerner her consciousness was flattened between the Civil War and Vietnam, those two conflicts crossed over in her mind and fused into a single notion of vague valor, for this reason she could not possibly understand who this man was, where he had been, and so approached him without fear. She could and did feel the pain rise from him, whether the pain’s source originated in the fields of Gettysburg or the jungles of Vietnam meant less than nothing to Lila, and everything to the man she found herself next to.

What Lila did not know Roger did. Roger hated the man at the bar more than the way his wife cheated on him with a ghost while she danced. The man at the bar was not special simply because he had been in Vietnam, every bubba-buck in the county between the ages of thirty-five and fifty had been in Nam. The man at the bar was special because he had no allegiances. Because the man had no trust, he had no fear. The man lived easily as a python with an undigested rat in his belly. He did not sweat and he never got drunk, worse, he did not live anywhere in the county, appearing time to time from nowhere, hiring men to work for him. Mostly the men he hired were out-of-work shrimpers who drifted far inland looking for flatland work, mostly they were black and desperate. The man figured sooner or later these men were going to sicken and tire of being forever dealt a hand of four jokers, and finally would go out and take what nobody let them earn legal, which would land them in the pen. This
was their lives, what they could not pay for in money they would pay for in time behind bars, such was the only measure of commerce they could count on. The man offered these men what they had not counted on. He offered them fifty thousand dollars to run boatloads of cocaine up through the Yucatán Strait. A certain percentage of them would be caught, they would do time in Mexican jails, that time would be paid for by the man, up to ten thousand dollars a month, until such time the man bribed the Mexican officials to let his employees go. The black shrimpers looked at the job as an insurance policy, one way or another they were going to do hard time in this lifetime, why not get paid for it? If they made it through the Strait without getting busted there was a cash bonus. So when this man showed up in the backwater towns along the Gulf between Mobile and Tampa, he was greeted as a Santa Claus in jungle fatigues, a one-man social security agency. Everyone said with a wink the man’s occupation was selling maritime insurance. To some the man sold an alternate path through an unfair world, not to Roger. Roger had been in Nam and cut off a fair number of Gook ears himself, he recognized the man’s sour swagger, a swagger most left behind in Nam, as well as the crazy gleam in their eyes. This man paraded his swagger and flaunted his gleam. Roger knew the gleam was not that of a killer looking for prey, it was the prey looking for a bullet. The swagger was not in the walk, it was the manner in which the body swayed between the magnetic pull of two poles.

Roger was a farmer and proud of it, a grower of good times and quality weed. Roger hated cocaine smugglers and figured sooner or later they were going to burn everybody’s life down, or drown the world in white powder cut from Indian veins. Roger resented it when the man came into the county and every deadbeat sucked up to him to make a fast haul on a slow boat out of Colombia. Roger hated the little gold monkey skull the man wore around his neck on a thick gold chain. He hated the little white business cards the man handed out which read
INTERAMERICAS MARITIME INSURANCE ADJUSTERS LTD., PANAMA CITY, PANAMA
.

What attracted Lila was a silent scream rushing from the man she alone could hear. Lila knew indirectly only what she overheard about the man when Roger growled and blustered to his truckers that, mark his words, the cocaine sharpies were going to make the drug trade worse before it got better. Not that Roger did not want marijuana to stay illegal, he did. Roger wanted what he called “a fool’s measure of
fair profit.” If corn was illegal Roger would grow it to get his fool’s measure, but he did not want outsiders coming into the county jacking around the labor market with big money made on foreign-grown goods. The cocaine sharpies were doling out so much money it was getting impossible to find a bubba-buck to truck a marijuana load up the Interstate anymore for less than twenty times union wages. Cocaine was ruining the trade. Roger swore more than once if the man so much as looked in his direction he would feed the guy’s balls to his bloodhounds. But until tonight the man never looked in Roger’s direction, he talked only to those he somehow knew wanted to talk to him. The man had no friends, no connections with people outside business at hand, always traveled alone. Sometimes Roger saw the man speeding by in a fancy rent-a-car on an isolated back road, off to lay a pile of cash on the old lady of one of his bubba-bucks salted away in a Mexican can. Roger took all this in, bided his time, he was after all a man of crops and weather reports.

The boys in the band serenaded Roger, alone and befuddled in the middle of the dance floor, staggering beneath the spinning disco globe while his wife accepted the drink offered her by the man at the bar. It never entered Roger’s mind any woman of his would walk away from him in a public place, make a clown out of an honest farming man. It happened, now there was only one honorable way out. Roger would deal with the man later. In a second he covered the distance between himself and Lila at the bar, grabbed her by the shoulders, spun what was his around and dragged it onto the dance floor. The boys in the band whooped with rebel yells and broke into their best honky-tonk tale of sorrow sung on the back of loopin guitar wails. Roger began his frantic stomping, he shouted at a totally silent and still Lila. “What’s wrong with
you
, babe!”

Lila turned her back on him and walked out the swinging doors, across the gravel parking lot to the phone booth beneath the flashing neon arrow. Her fingers trembled but her mind was made up. She dialed the number, when she heard the familiar voice she pleaded, “Mama, I’m down at the Ace. Can y’all pick me up?” Lila heard only the first part of Margaret-Lynn’s voice coming back through the line static; “What’s wrong, hon? Has Rog—”

Roger’s hand wedged the booth door open and tore the phone from Lila with such force its steel connector cable ripped from the wall. “Haul your ass into the pick-up!”

“I’m not going to!”

Roger pulled Lila from the booth as easily as he tossed heavy bales of marijuana up onto his trucks. “Goddamn bitches are all the same!” He snarled his revelation into the night. Lila stumbled beneath his grasp, small stones pricking her knees, trickles of blood tracing her legs.

“Roger, listen to me. I’ve decided—”

“What’d you say?” Roger stopped.

“Decided I want to live a—”

“Shut up! Not talking to you! Want to know what
he
said?”

From her crouched position Lila lifted her head. Across the gravel lot glowing red from the overhead sign was the man from the bar, framed in the doorway of the Ace.

The question from the man across the gravel came again, a flat midwestern voice. “Thought your wife might appreciate one more dance before you take her home.”

“Sheeee-yit!” Roger’s fingers opened in a quick muscular spasm and Lila was loose. “Just what I fuckin figured I heard!” Roger’s words were not directed toward the man, nor toward Lila, his words roared in disbelief up to the flashing arrow. He calculated most men he met in his lifetime were born dumb, standing before him now was the dumbest of all come to collect his prize, and he was going to give it to him. Without another word Roger marched across crunching gravel to the pick-up, yanked the door open, reached up behind the backseat and unhooked the rifle from its window rack. Son of a bitch if some men don’t have balls for brains, Roger hissed under his breath, for the life of him he couldn’t figure such stupidity. He threw the safety off above the rifle’s trigger and wheeled around, bringing the man up in the cross-hair sight. This was one dumb bunny Roger was going to gut-blast off the playing field.

The scream Lila thought she alone could hear from the man at the bar earlier she now heard from herself. The man’s hand flashed, too late did she realize he had a gun. The crack of a bullet tore through Lila’s scream into Roger’s chest, wobbling his knees as he stumbled forward, the rifle still raised. Roger’s eyes rolled upward toward the red arrow, something badly broken within him, something which would never be fixed.

Lila was afraid to move. Maybe the man with the flat voice was going to shoot her next. Nobody was coming out of the bar to help her. She knew they wouldn’t. This was the way things were settled in the county. No one was going to get between anyone else’s trouble.
Everybody had to make a living one way or another. Lila’s instinct was to run to her dying husband. It was not much of an instinct. Roger’s attempt to stamp something down in her had the effect of bringing something new up. Her voice was shaky but she spoke her mind. “Do y’all like French cookin?”

MK smiled, his foreign midwestern voice oddly soothing to Lila’s Southern ears. “Long time ago in Saigon, had a Catholic girlfriend, all she ever cooked was French. Can you do
Coquilles Saint-Jacques
?”

R
EALITY’S
submerged shadow took shape slowly for St. Cloud. Survival forced him to seek a new pollen to open the petals of Lila’s true purpose. He turned his passion into the deeper intention of trust, trust became the pollen. St. Cloud crawled, self-effaced himself, committed acts of ruthless shame, all to gain Lila’s trust. He had gone so far as to help her buy the pug puppy. During moments of confessional trust, as Lila’s lips pressed against his ear in fearful whispers and conjured her intimate past, St. Cloud knew his callow plotting had succeeded. He did everything to gain Lila’s person, swim with her soul, marry her flesh, sought against all odds the feverish flowering of her lithe body as it loosened to spin around his until he felt cocooned in a glistening moment, pooled in silk, then the silken pool would mirror, shatter, allowing disjointed shards from Lila’s past to cut into her immediate desire. There was a fusion of ferocious intentions as their naked bodies pursued an inner distance across the expanse of white sheet beneath the dusty window above his bed. Ultimately Lila prevailed, coming through St. Cloud with the force of desperation, trying to satisfy hidden need, satiate enormous longing. It was then St. Cloud realized his competition for Lila’s soul was more than a ghost.