Mile Zero (47 page)

Lila didn’t know what accounted for St. Cloud’s sudden domestic turn and storm of delectable delights. He cooked all day in the kitchen of a tiny house which felt like the interior of an oversize cigar box, its century-old cypress wood walls veined with termite channels, reeking of damp earth and stewing vegetables. Something about St. Cloud’s newly acquired mantle of unabashed lunacy worked away on her. His antics seemed even more playful than those of her eager pug puppy, which chased its stubby tail round and round in St. Cloud’s kitchen as he tossed God knows what into steaming black kettles atop the stove. Lila asked why jasmine-scented candles burned in every corner of his hot humidor of a house? He laughed, saying it was because he put a love hex on her, if she didn’t watch out he would put one on her dog too. She inquired why he never removed the chicken wishbone necklace around his neck? The tips of the brittle bone were broken off, the charm resembled nothing more than a calcified stump, yet he even wore it in the shower. He answered deadpan, that if he took off the charm his fairy Godmother would fly away. She asked why he kept a split moonstone under his bed? He explained it was because a snake cannot be caught with perfume alone. Gradually Lila began to realize how far St. Cloud had traveled to take her away from herself. That was what intrigued her, his willingness to give himself over to something bigger than what he knew. Such was his strangeness. She asked him a question which never before occurred to her, a question she never put to any man. As soon as she asked, she didn’t know why she had.

Lila asked St. Cloud if he loved her. He was silent and turned to the kitchen screen door leading into his garden planted with Senegalese calabash, Mexican jicama, Bermuda onions, and Jamaican honeysuckle vines slithering up the trunk of a papaya tree. A chameleon clung to the outer surface of the door, claws anchored in the screen, tail swishing across wire mesh. A red bubble of flesh pulsed in the lizard’s throat as its green body bobbed to a slow heartbeat. “I’ll give you a piece of my heart,” Lila heard herself say to no one in particular in the steamy kitchen. “It’s not your heart I want, it’s your soul,” St. Cloud answered, stirring a bowl of cold strawberry soup with a wooden spoon. “I want all the way into you, to what
you’re hiding from yourself. I want to dive down and get it.” This was the strangeness Lila felt confused by, “Why me?” St. Cloud sipped a taste of cold strawberry from the wooden ladle, “Because I know what your soul is going to look like.” “What?” “The quiet surface of the mangrove flats on a bright afternoon. Through the quiet your soul will come bursting, the spinning arc of a silver tarpon flashing in pure oxygen, twisting free from the depths. I want that silver flash.” Lila moved toward the offered wooden spoon and sucked fruit soup, with strawberry seeds on her lips she challenged him, “All you want is to catch and devour me.” St. Cloud put his arms around her, pulling her body to him, a heavy breath of strawberries on both their lips. “No, I’m not after that tarpon to fry it and eat it. I want to stroke its silver body with my tongue, feel its wet purpose.” The chameleon released itself from wire mesh, leaping over backwards into the garden after a flitting bug. The pug puppy whined at Lila’s bare feet, it wanted whatever she was eating. St. Cloud held tight to Lila’s supple waist, if she was going to come crashing up through the bright surface he wanted to be with her. She moaned softly, not with desire nor frustration, “You’re so strange.” The puppy moaned with greedy hunger. A muffled thump of drums drifted into the kitchen on hot wind from the cemetery a block away, announcing the funeral procession of a prosperous black citizen from the far side of Duval Street. St. Cloud placed a hand beneath Lila’s chin, turning her face to his, “Come … up out … of yourself, to where I am. You won’t be sorry. Trust … me.” Lila’s eyes gleamed jade green, leopard eyes moving over melting iceflow, no footprints left behind on dazzling crystals, only animal magnetism pulling with irresistible force. “My my,” St. Cloud sighed. “Green light.” The strawberry blossoming of lips touched the tip of his heart. “Are you there? Come closer.” She undressed, giving full decoration to who she was, each garment discarded revealing a design of flesh made manifest, a silver shadow moving across a tight white sheet, a silken invention of such purity the velocity of its intention assumed uncontrollable force. His hands traveled her naked back, fingers spreading across a cool moon. Still, he did not have her. He had yet to make her trust, bring up an ice-breaking laugh from her depths, settle her at final ease. His lips went to her ear, whispering a Creole poem he hoped would turn passion’s tide, about a man grown fat from female worship, a man who couldn’t get enough, kept coming back for more:

Lila was completely silent. St. Cloud thought once again he had gone too far, around the curve of no return, broken the mood in a gamble for something grander. The strange music, like a high whistle from a wheeling hawk, which he often heard as he rolled across the white sheet with Lila, came through the dusty windowpane above his bed. He held his breath, the strange whistling stopped. From the distant cemetery a different music sounded, over the heads of cement cherubs and marble-winged angels an uplifting blast of trumpets encouraged the mournful drums beating a man’s last time. Lila turned, her breasts brushing St. Cloud’s chest, words from her lips coming full in his mouth. “You are … so … strange.” Her words whirled away in a closed space of tongues striking fire. St. Cloud knew then he had her soul. It was too late to celebrate, Lila had stolen his entire sense of self. At dawn he wandered into the little backyard garden, sat among rowed cabbages, beneath the papaya tree with the honeysuckle vining up its trunk. He removed his torn T-shirt, exposing neck, chest and arms covered with round bluing bruises from the night before, when Lila’s softest kisses left the imprint of bullet holes on his skin. As morning sun sailed overhead, climbing to ever more brilliant heights, St. Cloud made a discovery. He was a marked victim of wounds visible only to himself. He pushed from the cabbages,
unsteady on quaking legs, cocked a hand over his eyes to shield himself from the burning orb in the heavens, which only now revealed its true shape, a ship with sheeted sails fullblown in a clouded wind. The victim of invisible wounds saluted the Queen passing overhead. Sail on sailor in sea of Erzulie.

S
T. CLOUD
had alligator pears in his pockets. He had the stump of Aunt Oris’ wishbone securely anchored on the string around his neck. He had the beautiful Southern belle of the devil’s bewitching ball standing at his out-of-date tuxedoed side. He had everything, ready to take on whatever might come at him from the crushing crowd of Duval Street. He was better prepared than a Boy Scout dropped into a foreign forest. He had avocado meat to eat if Bonefish’s Mister Finito slipped into town on a tailspinning wind. Although the air remained still, empty of turtle rot, was perfumed with breath of night-blooming jasmine, he stood guard, his canteen filled with
clarin
. If a hex came wanging down Duval with his name written on it, he was ready. Rum and Aunt Oris’ wishbone charm fortified his more than normal queasy nature; if forced to choose quickly between the two, he wouldn’t hesitate first to drain the canteen of its secretive syrupy power. Not that he was a disbeliever in Aunt Oris’ signposts pointing to salvation in this world, and everlasting grace in the next, the problem was many of the revelations which came from her that night of their first encounter could have originated from an idle town gossip, as well as from an active spiritualist. Aunt Oris was blind and couldn’t read, but someone may have informed her about the local newspaper article reporting the discovery of a mutilated goat in the Sugarloaf bat tower. Few people knew of the yellow X painted on Renoir’s door, but many saw the X on the jailhouse wall after Voltaire was whisked north to the Everglades camp. Someone may have informed Aunt Oris about such mysterious events. It also wasn’t certain her knowledge of Zobop was prescient. St. Cloud himself had
caused Zobop’s name to be chalked on the Wreck Room message board, hoping to expose the cryptic scribbler’s identity. Aunt Oris’ awareness of Zobop’s cemetery poem about Filor’s sly old mouse may have come from Justo. Since Aunt Oris was destined to be buried in the family plot, Justo may have felt compelled to call in some white magic to defend the sacred ground against otherworldly desecraters. St. Cloud was not a total disbeliever in Aunt Oris’ mystical powers because she was right about the most important thing. What she told him about the pain in his heart was true, and he had followed her cure of an aphrodisiacal menu to the hilt, wangling his way to happiness through prescribed potions and edible concoctions. If he had not gone to Aunt Oris there would be no way in tricky Erzulie’s great watery universe that Rhett Butler would be standing with his arm around Scarlett O’Hara on this Halloween night, marveling at masked men dressed in black tights and top hats, marching behind a truckload of Carmen Mirandas cavorting to rhumba music. Piercing the Latin beat blasting from the truck was a singular sound, like the squeal of a high-wheeling hawk. St. Cloud knew the sound well, it was the sound he had been hearing through his bedroom window whenever he was with Lila. The sound came from the marching men in jaunty black top hats, all were blowing tin whistles clenched in their teeth, creating an earsplitting chorus which scraped at the night sky. The whistle blowers passed, leaving one behind, who swung a white cane aloft, pointing to words painted on a cardboard sign he held:
VOODOO SPACE INVADERS FROM FORT LAUDERDALE
. The man’s head jerked rapidly from side to side, his face powdered pasty white; through eyeholes cut into his mask bloodshot eyes glared. St. Cloud felt a sharp stab in his back.

“Hey bubba! That your skinny ass inside that tuxedo? What you supposed to be, circus barker or Confederate pimp?”

St. Cloud turned, Bubba-Bob loomed over him, grinning beneath the cowboy hat. “Christ!” St. Cloud screamed above a spirited high-school band costumed as tail-swagging crocodiles hot on the heels of Voodoo Space Invaders. “You scared hell out of me, jabbing your finger in my back like that!”

“It’s Hell-O-Weanie bubba!” Bubba-Bob laughed, slapping St. Cloud on his padded tuxedo shoulder. “Treat or be tricked!”

“I’ll treat!” St. Cloud handed Bubba-Bob his canteen of rum. “It’s pure Haitian, knock your hat off.”

Bubba-Bob raised the canteen and sucked like a nursing calf, rum
running from both sides of his mouth. “Some treat,” he burped, backhanding his wet lips. “Why, Miss Scarlett!” He swept his cowboy hat off and bowed. “Ah am most sorry ah didn’t notice your lovely Southern self earlier.” He winked, “but I musta passed by yore cute lil ass thousand times fore figurin who all you and this Reb gigolo really was.”

Lila raised the secondhand fan she was carrying, fluttering it before her plastic Vivian Leigh face mask. Her voice slipped from behind the mask, muffled and mock Southern sweet. “Suh, a true gentleman nevah would admit to not recognizin the finest part of a Confederate daughtah’s anatomy, no mattah how many times he passed it by.”

St. Cloud took the canteen back, chuckling behind his plastic Clark Gable face. “You’re losing your feel, Bubba.”

“Losing my feel! If I so much as touched Lila’s little finger, you would blow me and my charter boat straight to hell with one of those firebombs you learned to make in college. You’d probably make sure I had a load of schoolteachers from Miami on board just for good measure.”

“True.” St. Cloud took a swift slug of rum. “But I’d let the schoolteachers off first.”

“Look at that!” Lila pointed to the most enormous float in the parade, being towed by a high-wheeled pickup and headed straight for them.

“Damn if it ain’t
King Kong
!” Bubba-Bob stepped into the street, as if he were going to challenge the thirty-five-foot-high gorilla dressed in a hula skirt of palm fronds and undulating mechanically to loud Hawaiian music. Cradled in the towering beast’s hairy arms was the nearly naked blond body of Angelica, squirming to tropical rhythm and screaming she was being kidnapped to the hooting crowd. A sign planted in thousands of flowers surrounding Kong’s giant bouncing feet advertised:
DRINK AT THE WRECK ROOM AND SINK FROM SIGHT!