Mile Zero (39 page)

He sought no wider war, but soon enough little gold clouds began to pursue him, surrounding his earthbound body in damp dawn revelations. The little gold clouds came at first sporadically, so no one noticed. Then the clouds appeared more frequently, then predictably, until every morning he was awash in little clouds becoming a big cloud spreading on the bedsheet. No longer a daring flyboy, he had become a sailor adrift. He awoke to the acrid smell beneath him, and realized the barracks of snoring flyboys in bunks lined on either side of his had lost confidence in him. He was given an honorable discharge for a less than honorable situation. Uncle Sam cannot have his steel-nerved pilots running around in the jungle wrapped in diapers. He questioned himself into three parts. Was he pissing from fear of combat? Fear of death? Fear of retribution from his father? Three parts with one possible answer rising above all others. Was he a coward? He had gone from a boy to a killer to a full-grown baby wetting the bed. The army psychiatrists assured him of his bravery. Perfectly normal what had happened, happened all the time to the toughest in such stressful situations, when he returned stateside the
problem would dry up in two or three weeks, he’d see. He didn’t see, he panicked. A year went by and always the gold cloud was there in the morning. Nothing could stop it, not blocking out what he had done in the hog eight thousand miles away, not going on a week-long water fast. Even when he stopped eating it made no difference, he continued to piss the essence of his life away, piss himself down the drain. This played havoc with his mind, but it was secondary to a new problem, which was immediate and devastating. The problem never occurred in the jungle, but it did stateside in the city. He began to frequent bars in search of women, and because he loved alcohol, the numbing effect it had on his fingers, until all feeling fled and he had to work his brain hard to conjure what sensation of feeling in his extremities was once like. He kept up this alcoholic intake until the numbness took over his brain, and he forgot whatever he was thinking about, dead to the conscious world, exit of the benumbed. Around this time he became quite charming to women at the bar. He had no idea what he was actually saying, but whatever it was women were amused by it, by his reckless emptiness. The women took him home, but since he was without feeling in his extremities they had to support him, wedge their bodies under his limp arm, forming a female crutch, which would eventually give way, spilling him across a strange bed. After a while he would feel something, not actually feel something, but think something, then whatever it was disappeared and dawn broke with a great gush of a golden cloud, and he awoke to a woman screaming beneath him, struggling to free herself from more than just the excess of the previous night’s antics.

The golden cloud stalked him everywhere. He would be standing on a street corner waiting for a bus when unexpectedly the cloud would break with a rush, an embarrassing rampant run descending the length of his leg, he would feel his pants, pat them down, but always they were dry. He would be waiting at a market checkout counter, struggling to hold the cloud back, but could sense its slow seeping, an implacable revealing leak, when he hefted his heavy bag of groceries he would steal a glance at his zippered crotch, all dry. The golden cloud was driving him to manic distraction, pursued him right into his dreams. All night long he swam in a yellow sea with no shore in sight. After awakening from near drowning, the bed sheet was always dry. Only at dawn, when he fell into deep sleep, exhausted from outsmarting the cloud, would a soggy reality finally overtake him. In despair he gave up women. He took to doing drugs, deducing
their psychedelic and hallucinatory capabilities would dry out his impure thoughts, fry his brain, rendering him light as the magic feather which allowed Dumbo the elephant transcendent flight, high over rice paddies and circus tents, above bamboo hootches and steel skyscrapers, above all clouds. He grew his hair long and hid behind a beard. His once fierce eyes took on a distant watery look, two bottomless wells. This damp despair attracted like a dowser a pregnant woman he found himself stroking one night after he poured on the charms in a local bar. The woman was possessed with an invisible magnetism, a water witch of the soul plumbing his depths. He loved the round hill of her belly. When he burrowed his head between her spread legs he remembered anew what it was like to be with a woman. He lay an ear to her swelled stomach and listened to the far-off water sounds of another swimming being, floating in dark and foreign fluid, waiting like him to be born on a wave. The woman seemed to know everything about him he himself was afraid to tell. When she awoke with him that first morning, adrift inside an acrid golden cloud, she reached out and stroked his head like a newborn.
You shouldn’t have gone
, she purred.
I’ll stay until you stop this
. She never told him what he had done eight thousand miles away was wrong, she never spoke of the jungle. Finally the golden cloud passed from his life, into its empty space flooded unspeakable dread, an all-engulfing fear of retribution. What his father thought of his cowardly exit from the field of valor was the least of his problems now. He took to pumping needles into his veins, filled with any new and fiery narcotic hitting the streets, trying to mainline his unutterable sense of guilt, anesthetize his soul.
Poor baby
, Evelyn purred, and hers was born dead. Evelyn took the needles from the veins of a hog driver flying high on a magic feather, then plunged them into her own flesh. How much can one give to stop a war, knowing there will be others?

St. Cloud had not surprisingly stumbled upon Evelyn in the antiwar crowd on that long-ago day of their first meeting. Evelyn discovered him. Staggering from the wreckage of a young life grown old, she was not the vulnerable creature he thought her to be. It was she who saw within him another saint to save. She turned a new corner, away from the psychedelic trip wires of drugs, which St. Cloud despised as self-serving distractions from the fight to stop the war. He became her fresh target. She decided the last to be saved were the antiwar soldiers, for one day they would be left with not only a lost war on their conscience, but a lost cause as well. A ferocity of separately held
beliefs fused St. Cloud and Evelyn together. They fell immediately into step. Before St. Cloud could turn back he was into Evelyn’s vocation. She strummed his strings, built his ego, pledged to stick by him through thin and thinner. With passing years she plumbed her hidden agenda. In moments of ecstasy she would bury her nose in the damp hair beneath his arm, her nostrils filling wide with naked scent, a consuming female at an inexhaustible salt lick of male vulnerability. Ultimately her female nurturing transcended his mundane politics. Rock-bottom reality could not be avoided. She herself was the salt of the earth. It was to women she finally turned when she turned from St. Cloud. She spun inward toward sensuality of friendship, slipping from burden of youthful illusions, gracefully as a snake sheds the season’s skins. While her purpose bloomed red as a rose in the hothouse of Key West, St. Cloud slid deeper into his slot of guilt. The more she stretched toward illuminating sunlight, the further into the shadows he dissolved, finally disappearing into a crack of acquiescence, no longer a player, reduced to a mere observer. It was not that Evelyn was attracted to her own kind in a sudden coup d’état of the heart. It was simply that on an eventual night a pair of hands held her exposed feet and stroked them as if they were the silkened dough of newly formed loaves of bread. The hands were female and grew warmer with sliding friction, raising from Evelyn a heat of expectation. Knowing thumbs and kneading fingers released from her fleshy soles an indescribable ache. It was not tenderness nor sisterly directness which turned Evelyn pliant. She yielded to tearful initiation of healing touch, a sincerity of common cause. For the first time she was detached from a past filled with despair, from a future urging destruction. She was jubilant. She felt as naked and fulfilled as Jesus on the cross.

Evelyn had at last made a pact of peace with herself, even though this led her away from St. Cloud. Every new life begins new problems. She still followed former sorrows and opened herself to St. Cloud when he came to her under cover of the Black Cloud’s shadow of guilt. But each time he came into her she was in reality sending him off. He was on his own now. The closer he came to personal destruction the closer he came to enlightenment. Evelyn kissed the thought of him good-bye. In her heart Evelyn bid St. Cloud farewell, and a fond farewell to all the Black Cloud boys. So long, happy trails, good luck. Godspeed.

D
O YOU HEAR
my strange music? Now you know my secret. I cannot begin to tell you all the things I am. Do not rest easy, for I am not who you think me to be. Have you been holding my hand in yours? Do we see eye through eye? Can you hear with earless ears what you could not hear with ears? Do you trust me to right the way? Remember what that poacher in the Everglades said, the man with the anchor tattooed on his arm, the one who boasted he slaughtered ten thousand alligators in the mangrove swamps? You don’t remember, don’t know the history of your world, can’t recall what happens day to day in your own life. The tattooed poacher who killed ten thousand of an animal specie inhabiting earth before the joke of man was an embryonic pea brain stuffed in an ape’s skull, bragged, “If you don’t talk, you don’t get caught much.” I don’t talk at all. The purity of my actions speaks from memory, for I am the Great Corrector, and correct I will, my will be done with a vengeance. If someone steps beyond the circle there will be recrimination, the Dancing Devil to pay. My will will be done on earth as it is in hell, everything must flow back within the circle. What more can you expect from a world without hope, people too fooled by false gods to despair? You say people have a way of finding their own devils. I say, what is a devil but another false god? If you can be fooled into despair, then you can be tricked into redemption, for what is the chick, but the child of the egg? Look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t despair. You can’t. You would rather run over the last Florida panther in cars going nowhere, rather feast your fast-food palate on the last egret egg, anything but to look me in the eyes. Behold. I am the Green
Sailor. I am the Cuban Martyrs. I am the malaria-infected laborer of Flagler’s Overseas Railroad. I am all these things, dead and buried in the island cemetery with its eight tall palms pointing the way to its entrance gates. I am all mysteries waiting incarnation. I am your teacher.
Ya ye, moin nan sang he! Yah, yeh, I am in the blood, hey!
And I tell you a screaming deluge is coming out of Africa greater than any howling hurricane. Look in my eyes. Do you see the yellow circles? Do you see the bull falling with the knife blade in his neck? You better get down on your knees, pray you see the bull falling to his knees in the yellow center. A healthy man cannot make a sick man well, but a sick man can make a healthy man ill. I feel your hand trying to pull away. You don’t like what I bring you. You find distasteful how the teacher treats the sick pupil. Well you aren’t going anyplace, because there is no longer a place to go. You can flee the tiny circle of this island, but that will only lead to larger circles with more bulls falling to their knees. No, you aren’t going anyplace, because the final circle becomes the smallest, it is the circle within you, ignorance is the target of self-destruction. You carry the seeds of your demise within. All I have to do is wait and watch, then turn my back on your deafening cries as you plead for mercy, plead for a reborn body, for a fresh soul. You beg on bloodied knees for me to correct the uncorrectable, perform the miracle of all mysteries. Let me stick this piece of advice on your pleading tongue, prick up your ears before I take them to make another drum. If you are a good student who bodes ill, not a queasy, lockjawed follower of false singing prophets spilling their incessant swill on radio airwaves, then maybe I can be of assistance. If all the senses haven’t been squeezed from you by your idle talk, idle sex, tasteless food, families without fathers, fathers without mothers, mothers without children, children without a past, future without people, water without purity, unexploded bombs stuffed with the best offense is the best defense, stuffed with the fire of ultimate extinction, then maybe you have finally come to the right place. Ah, that is better, your hand relaxes in mine. Don’t cry, wipe that tear from your eye. You have no right to weep, tears are the milk of vanity. The last panther in the Florida Everglades does not cry. The last panther hunts to live.

Time was when people could be happy as pet pigs following a butcher with a stick or a house painter with a mustache. Time was when people would willingly trot after any Moses waving a sacred staff, eat bananas from the tree of life Adam planted in Eden, drink
paint thinner from a silver chalice, and feel content, stuffed, enlightened, most of all saved. Time was when an alligator tooth, three bat wings and a rat fur could buy protection against evil wind brewing. No
ouanga
is strong enough to stop what’s coming now. Time was when the Virgin of Miracles miraculously appeared atop a palm tree to heal the future and forgive the past. The Virgin has fled, swift as a white dove winging into setting sun. Listen to me if you want your babies born with less than two heads, your beans boiled, your cassavas cultivated, your coffee brewed, your dead to walk from their graves and the living to walk on water. Listen to me above the water’s roar, for I am not a beggar on horseback, a pious politician riding a goat, a prattling priest with a toad for a tongue. I am purity, a snake crawling, a hymn in the sky, a lullaby in the mouth of a babe, a blade falling across a bull’s neck. You can light candles for me along the riverbanks, but you will not see me. You can eat red meat, red mango root, red beans, drink red rum, red wine, red bull blood, but this will not feed me. Life does not sustain me, light does not illuminate me, fire does not burn me, time does not define me. I take your sweaty face between my hands, hands soft as newborn turtles, I hold your fate within silken fingers, I kiss your lying mouth, lick lizards from your lips, suck hummingbirds from your heart. Do not bite the tongue that feeds you. You are my pup, you are my pup. Your head upon my lap, your hand upon my private parts, I am your funny guillotine.