Mile Zero (4 page)

Mal día
, Justo whispered beneath his breath, it was Space Cadet, what was he up to? So many of Space Cadet’s brain cells had been burned out on mushrooms, pot and acid that Justo figured just going to the corner store for him must be like trying to cross a continent crisscrossed with raging rivers while all the bridges have been blown.

“I said back off from the rope!” The Guardsman aimed his revolver at the words stitched across Space Cadet’s faded baseball cap proclaiming THE NEXT GENERATION.

Justo grabbed the loosely braided swag of gray hair dangling like the rope to a bell from beneath the back of Space Cadet’s cap.
“Dios da sombrero a quien no tiene cabeza,”
he mumbled as the muscles in his arm tightened and he yanked the braid. God gives hats to some who have no head.

Space Cadet turned slowly, a queer grin spread over a forty-year-old face remarkable for its unlined quality; the bulging eyes seemed to spin in opposite orbits, washed of all color, too weird to betray weariness. If those eyes ever stopped spinning, Justo often thought, watch out. But the eyes were spinning, taking no notice of Justo. The wail of the electric guitars Space Cadet marched to blared from the depths of a generation long since passed, the psychedelic imprint of those heady, hippie times, now only a blur. Space Cadet himself was one of the last remnants from those times, like the tie-dyed whirl of color T-shirt he wore with its ever shrinking grip on his bony chest.

No hope here. Justo sighed and released his grip from Space Cadet’s braid. Let the Guardsman blow this portent of the next generation to kingdom come. If this is the next generation, it’s come and gone. What had come was the Haitian boat. Saving Space Cadet’s
skinny ass from the itchy trigger finger of an overzealous Guardsman was the least of all problems this bad day brought.

Justo looked down into the boat. The horror was worse than he could have imagined, no wonder the young Guardsman was so nervous. Justo stepped over the rope and into the barrel tip of the Guardsman’s revolver.

The Guardsman backed off, but he did not lower the gun. “Sir! You’ll have to stay on the other side, orders of the Captain!”

“This is city property you Coasties have docked at.” Justo flipped his wallet open, flashing the hard metal of his detective’s badge. “I’m the Captain here.”

The young Guardsman eyed the badge, holstered his revolver and saluted, relieved to surrender authority in an ugly matter he would rather have no part of. “Yes sir! Captain sir! Gangway down there!” The Guardsman shouted over his shoulder, “Captain coming aboard!”

Justo walked to the edge of the concrete bulwark and peered down into the listing craft. Close up, the sight made him sick in his gut, shooting an acid arrow deep into his being, deeper than a thousand cups of
buche
could ever burn their way into. Justo shook his head slowly, rubbing the gold wishbone at his neck, nothing could be done now.
El qué no entra a nadar, no se ahoga en el mar
. He who doesn’t enter the sea will never be drowned by the sea.

The only sign of life on the boat was from a
richaud
, a thin wisp of smoke rising like a ghost from the blackened iron brazier. The
richaud
was placed in the middle of the deck, but it couldn’t have been used for cooking, for the naked, bone-thin people piled in the boat looked as if they hadn’t eaten for weeks. Maybe the
richaud
was being used by the last ones alive, signaling for help, delirious, hallucinating, no longer caring if they risked being taken back to Haiti, burning clothes in the
richaud
, flesh, bones, anything to send a smoke signal of distress from a rudderless leaking vessel. God knows what? No, that wasn’t it. Justo knew these people wouldn’t be taken back to Haiti alive. Better to swim with the sharks in the sea than be eaten by the dictator on land. Justo did not want to think of the nightmares these people had been exposed to, what final horror overtook them. They were
paysans
, hardscrabble peasants from Haiti’s interior, where half the children died by age five. Only the sea separated them from a new life. Better to swim with the sharks in the sea, even if one was a
paysan
and did not know how to swim. Strewn about the deck of the wreck were men, women and children, arms and legs stiffened into grotesque
contortions of death, sun-rotted flesh peeling from bones, eyes bubbled white with decay. The boat was less than thirty-five feet long, a glorified raft, its mast a hacked limb from a tree, the sails patched together bed sheets. Justo wouldn’t have trusted the boat’s splintered hulk to make it across one of the ritzy hotel pools in Miami, let alone six hundred miles of open water, up from the Caribbean Sea through the slice of the Windward Passage, past Cuba into the forceful flow of the Gulf Stream swinging east, then pulled north by the Straits of Florida’s fast-running current. Someone had kept the fire going in the
richaud
until the very end. What for? A sign to an African god? Voodoo? Justo fingered the wishbone at his neck and mumbled three Hail Mary’s. He would have said more but another roar went up from the judges’ grandstand as a voice boomed over loudspeakers announcing prize money to be awarded the race winners. The cheering crowd brought Justo back from his prayerful respite; he tried to focus on the nightmare scene in the boat, hoping his prayers would have made it all a mere passing apparition. The sun had turned the black bodies of the
paysans
blacker. Justo had seen it all before in Vietnam. The team of uniformed Coast Guardsmen in the boat awkwardly loaded the dead into rubber body bags. Memories, uniforms. A buried past rising. Justo thanked the Saints for his belief in Catholicism. He knew what an act of true confession was for, to absolve the living from their guilt of having survived life’s hell, to release a man from eternal anguish, to make a man forget. Vietnam was finished for Justo. Over. But this was different, a new devil. How can a man ask forgiveness from a tide of dead refugees? Different bodies, but the same old smell of death swelling a man’s nostrils. Justo held his breath, not wanting to inhale the finality of it all. A scream of ambulance sirens snaked in the distance across the island, through palm trees and narrow streets. There had been no ambulances in Vietnam’s jungles, only the howl of a jackal in a man’s blood, fear bursting in eardrums as medevac choppers roared in overhead. Another roar erupted from the judges’ grandstand. Bodies bagged in rubber shrouds were passed up from the refugee boat, along a chain gang of uniformed men up to the dock next to Justo. Half of the unbagged bodies left on the boat were children, black bodies turned blacker, finally gone powdery white in death. Must have been drinking seawater, Justo thought, their bellies bloated, skin parched, an agonizing death for children of dirt farmers adrift in a sea of uncertainty. Justo knew it could be one of his own daughters down there, if he had been born on the wrong
island in time. Could be his African grandparents, slumped in each other’s arms, only the sea between them and freedom. Three generations after his grandparents came from Africa the tide still brought in the same devil’s bounty of misery. Ambulance doors swung open behind Justo, then slammed shut, the vehicles wailing away to the morgue. What was that down in the boat? Something? The last body which had been buried beneath the others. Maybe? Yes. Life had trained Justo for this sort of thing. Four years in an Asian jungle refined his seventh sense, honed his second nature. A boy buried moves. Praise the Saints, the kid was moving.

“He’s alive! That boy’s alive!”

“Yes sir!” A Guardsman tugging the boy by a bony ankle into a body bag released his grip, as if suddenly aware he had a rabid animal by the tail.

The sound of sirens grew louder in Justo’s ears. Behind him the growing crowd pushed with the belligerent force of the savagely curious against the rope barricade. His own men in uniform had arrived, pushing people back. Justo knew that most often people are only curious about other people after they are dead. Another ambulance screeched to a slow roll, dispersing the crowd as it came to a stop before the rope, its blue rooflight whipping a brilliant blur in the sun, back doors flinging open, stretcher-bearers jumping to the ground.

“He’s alive!” Justo grabbed the closest ambulance attendant by the lapels of his white frock, shouting above the siren. “I want him! Take him directly to the city jail. Not to the hospital! He’s mine! Understand?”

The frightened attendant nodded and jumped down into the boat, helping the stretcher-bearers lift the limp body onto the stretcher.

“Tamarindo!” A tall Coast Guardsman, the metal insignia of a Captain’s badge pinned to the starched blue collar of his shirt, bellowed Justo’s surname as if it were a command for a dog to heel. “What do you think you’re up to? You’re not taking anyone, anywhere. This is a Coast Guard matter.” The Captain stepped over the rope, flanked by uniformed men with revolvers and handcuffs swaying from jutting hips. “You don’t have any authority here.”

Blood rushed to Justo’s face, bloating it disproportionately in the hot sun, he felt he looked as hideous as the
paysans
pulled from the boat. He turned on the Captain standing between his protectors. “I’ll tell you what’s going on.” Justo struggled to control his voice, slowed
it to a low growl. “You don’t get your ass off this dock I’m going to
bust you
. Immigration law states any alien seeking political asylum has the right to an attorney. You interdicted this boat in violation of international law. Just because you did it doesn’t make it legal. I’m taking the boy.”

“What kind of nonsense are you talking? You know our routine. We wanted to get this boat in to the closest shore point in order to save lives.”

“You made a mistake. Should have taken the boat around to the Coast Guard dock. I’ve got jurisdiction here and I’m busting the boy for involuntary manslaughter.”

“Tamarindo, you’re stepping into a government problem where you don’t belong.”

“A crime has been committed and the perpetrator is on city property. I think he killed everybody on this boat to survive.”

“That’s not the issue. You don’t know any more than we do about what happened at sea. There will be an inquiry into that. Look at the pathetic kid. He’s not even eighteen, so you don’t have the right to book him in your jail.”

“You got a birth certificate stating his age?”

“Listen, I don’t want to argue the point. It’s absurd for you to think—”

“Justo!” the ambulance attendant shouted from the boat. “The kid’s trying to say something.”

Justo jumped into the boat. What there was of the emaciated body was strapped to the stretcher, an IV needle stuck into the faint blue print of a vein in the crook of the boy’s arm. Justo knelt next to the stretcher, kneaded the boy’s bony hands clenched into feeble fists. The boy’s swollen lips cracked open, gasping for meaning.

The ambulance attendant looked questioningly at Justo. “What’s he saying?”

“Creole. He’s speaking Creole. Got to get somebody who understands it. Might be the last thing the boy ever says. Don’t move him.” Justo surveyed the crowd pushing against the rope barricade. Mother Mary, there must be someone. Yes, there was someone. An answer to Justo’s quick prayer. There he was, standing at the back of the crowd. The guy was a rummy and a bit of a weirdo, but he sometimes interpreted at court trials for Cuban and Haitian refugees. The drunker the guy was, the better interpreter he was, spoke in tongues,
leaning so close to the lips of the person he was interpreting for it reminded Justo of Judas about to kiss sweet Jesus.

“St. Cloud! Get down here!”

St. Cloud slipped under the rope barricade, hopped into the boat. He thought the boy was dead. The boy smelled dead.

“Don’t be squeamish!” Justo shouted above the wail of more sirens. “Put your ear to his lips so you can hear what he’s saying.”

St. Cloud fell to his knees, the rasp of the boy’s breath coming into his ear.

“What is it? What’s he saying?” Justo grabbed St. Cloud by the arm. “Come over here.” He pulled St. Cloud to the side of the boat. “I don’t want anybody else to hear. Now, what is it?”

“Hard to make out.” St. Cloud wiped his forehead, rum made him sweat, kept him cool in the subtropical swelter. “It’s some kind of Creole dialect, obscure. Something like,
Hail Papa Agwé who dwells in the sea, loa of ships. The Negro’s boat is in danger. Papa Agwé brings it to safety. Hail.”

“Christ. The poor bastard. There’s a lot of African stuff in Santería I learned from my Aunt Oris, but I don’t know who Papa Agwé is. Don’t recall Aunt Oris talking about Papa Agwé.”

“Voudoun, if I remember right. It’s been years since I studied it. I think Papa Agwé is a spirit, lord of the sea, symbolized by a boat and—”

“That’s enough. Come over here.” Justo tightened his grip on St. Cloud’s shoulder, pulling him back to the boy. “Okay, men.” Justo pointed at the ambulance attendants. “Pick up the stretcher and get this refugee out of here. You know where to take him.”

The attendants carefully lifted the stretcher. One of the boy’s clenched fists opened in a slight spasm, releasing a small pigskin bag secured with a knot of goat hair. Justo scooped the bag up, hiding it in his shirt pocket. He glanced at the dock to see if anyone noticed what he had done. The Captain was staring directly at him from beneath the stiff brim of his officer’s cap.

“Captain.” Justo stood up. “We’ve got to take this political refugee into custody. I’m appointing St. Cloud the refugee’s interpreter. He’s the only one who can understand him. St. Cloud could save his life.”

“This issue won’t be settled here, Tamarindo.” The Captain turned to go, his men stiffening to attention with hands raised in salute. “You’ll be hearing from the Department of Transportation and the
Immigration and Naturalization Service for obstruction of governmental policy. It’s your goose.” The Captain nodded to his armed escorts and they quickly opened an exit path for him through the pushing crowd.

Justo pulled St. Cloud close and whispered, “It’s your goose too.”

“What do you mean? I just got here, wondered what all the commotion was.”