Mile Zero (48 page)

“Whoooie! Hi-ya, honey!” Angelica called from her hairy aerie to Bubba-Bob. She snaked a bare leg from her dancing partner’s insistent arm, the red-painted nails of her foot pointing at Bubba-Bob. “C’mon and join me! Baby won’t bite!”

Bubba-Bob waved his cowboy hat. He turned to Lila with a mouth-splitting smile. “Ain’t she a homewrecker!” He grabbed the canteen from St. Cloud. “Let me wet the whistle, this night’s getting hot!” He belted a mouthful of rum and wrapped a brotherly arm around St. Cloud’s padded shoulders. “Ya know, I owe you. Get what I mean,
owe?
Just give Bubba-Bob the word if there’s anything or anyone hassling you, point their jelly ass in my direction. I’ll snip their balls and run em up the flagpole.” He took a philosophical swig of rum, then offered the canteen to St. Cloud by slamming it into his tuxedoed chest. “Tell ol Bubba here if you getting any shit. I’m serious as triple bypass surgery. They mess with St. Cloud, then they messing with the big Bubba.” He pulled his cheek out with a thick thumb and let it whack back against his teeth with a loud slap. “They might as well kiss the baby’s ass good-bye, cause that’s the last crack of light they’ll ever see.”

St. Cloud finished what little rum Bubba-Bob left at the canteen bottom. “There is someone whose balls you could prune. If I could only find him. Nobody can find him.”

“What’s that coming?” Bubba-Bob looked over St. Cloud’s shoulder. King Kong and his blonde had vanished up the street, replaced by the tenth high-school band of the night, costumed like a nightmare Mexican dinner and blowing a stormy version of “Seventy-six Trombones.” “Whose balls did you want pruned? Couldn’t hear you. Damn trombones! Hey, these high-school girls get cuter every year! Hot hot hot! Look at that enchilada over there. The one next to the red bikini dressed as a bottle of taco sauce. Light my
carne!”

St. Cloud’s eyes caught something strange moving through the crowd. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he could sense it. He saw it through the rows of bare-kneed marching schoolgirls, moving on the other side of the street, darting around a fat man costumed as Humpty-Dumpty who was vomiting in the gutter. Behind the fat man’s egg-shaped bulk St. Cloud thought he saw a white and black blur disappear into the crowd. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything at all. Maybe the rum and masked mayhem of the noisy night were wearing him raw. He slipped his arm around Lila’s waist. She laughed, fluttering her fan at his plastic movie-star face. Her hand came up beneath the tails of his tuxedo, rubbing the knotted muscles in the small of his back, kneading the tension from him, unraveling his paranoia. He closed his eyes, concentrating on the strength of her fingers. He thought about the recipe for rhubarb-chinaberry pie Aunt Oris gave him. He wanted to go home and bake a pie with the potency to draw a woman to a man. Aunt Oris promised her pie had more power to attract a woman than if St. Cloud were to wear a dead hummingbird around his neck. Dead hummingbirds did have their advantages, often they were the only magic capable of luring the black
bird of a woman’s heart into the cage of love. The big problem with a dead hummingbird came about if the suitor wore it on a day deemed incorrect by the calendar of Saints and Loas. If the suitor made such a mistake he stood a better chance of being struck by lightning than he did of striking his unsuspecting object of desire with cupid’s arrow. Aunt Oris warned St. Cloud about young men found along deserted pathways on Caribbean islands each spring, their bodies ripped open by lightning, dead hummingbirds tied about their necks. St. Cloud thought a rhubarb-chinaberry pie was a safer bet than a dead hummingbird. He did not want to walk around like a rum-soaked lightning rod defying Loas he had yet to identify, especially since he felt, for once in his life, he was on the right track with a woman. He wasn’t quite walking on the smooth side of the street, as Justo would say, but headed in that general direction. Above the calming sensation of Lila’s touch he felt a severe jab in his back, directly under his right shoulder. He thought Bubba-Bob was poking him again, then realized Bubba-Bob had moved to the other side of Lila, cheering on the hot enchiladas and sassy tacos. St. Cloud turned around and faced a skeleton trying to poke him again in the back; it was the white and black blur he thought he saw disappear across the street behind Humpty-Dumpty. The skeleton was a sinister apparition, covered by a black rubbery skin painted with realistic luminescent bones.

“Great getup!” Bubba-Bob swung around and complimented the skeleton. “Shit bubba, I’d like to use your rubber-covered ass as bait-lure for marlin. Bet if I trolled with you I’d hook up in no time a world-class fish.”

The skeleton raised a silver knife.

“That sucker looks real.” Bubba-Bob reached up to touch the gleaming blade.

The skeleton jerked the blade back, raising it high in the air, beyond Bubba-Bob’s long reach.

“Hey! Who are you?” Bubba-Bob stepped toward the skeleton. “Brogan? Is that you dressed in this weird shit? That’s something you would do!”

The knife slashed down, aimed at St. Cloud.

Bubba-Bob grabbed the bony wrist wielding the blade, trying to break its momentum. The skeleton’s wrist slipped from his grasp, the knife continuing its downward thrust, barely missing its intended target, slicing along the side of St. Cloud’s tuxedo, stabbing the bulge of avocados in his coat pocket. Bubba-Bob banged his hulk into St.
Cloud, slamming him to the ground before the sharp blade had time to rise and strike again. The costumed crowd shoved and screamed. Bubba-Bob’s fist swung up, his broad knuckles aimed at the skeleton’s skull face. The silver blade flashed, cutting the air out of Bubba-Bob’s body as it plunged deep into his chest.

From his position behind a hysterical hoop-skirted Little Bo-Peep, Justo saw Bubba-Bob go down. The skeleton’s knife flashed again. Justo pulled his gun and fired in the air. The crowd dropped to the ground, leaving the skeleton standing alone, its knife poised above St. Cloud. The skull face snapped around, searching for the gunshot source. Justo aimed his revolver; it was a dangerous shot, if he missed the skeleton he might hit St. Cloud. In the second it took to decide to pull the trigger the skeleton leapt over St. Cloud, disappearing behind flower-encrusted wings of a Space-Shuttle float.

Justo pushed screamers aside, bulling past the spacecraft. He saw a white and black blur cut across the intersection, headed in the direction of Whitehead Street and the old lighthouse. He played a hunch. If the skeleton thought he would radio ahead to have the lighthouse end of Whitehead blocked, then the skeleton would turn in the opposite direction, toward the abandoned Naval Base, where it could lose itself among deserted buildings sprawled between the brightly lit activity of downtown and the Atlantic Ocean’s vast darkness. Justo did not radio ahead. If his hunch was right, there wasn’t time. He turned into a narrow lane which crossed over to Whitehead. If he was fast enough he could cut the skeleton off as it doubled back, headed for safety of the Naval Base. When he huffed his way onto Whitehead Street he saw his hunch was right. The skeleton was racing along the sidewalk, straight for him. Justo dropped into a firing position, his gun aimed at the rush of luminescent bones. If he could take the creature without killing it, he would. If it didn’t stop, he was going to blast it. He had no idea what was inside the black rubber suit, maybe bullets couldn’t stop it. His finger went to the trigger. The skeleton seemed to read his mind. It spun and sprinted across the street, hit with a smashing clang massive locked gates leading into the Naval Base. Before Justo could get off a shot the skeleton leapt onto the gate’s iron grates, pulled itself hand over hand to the top and dropped to the other side on all fours. It darted away down a deserted avenue cast in deep darkness beneath the overhead spread of giant banyan trees.

Justo ran to the gates. He was getting too old and slow for this.
Maybe this night was meant to teach him his time of trying to keep peace in the jungle of the streets, with or without a patrol car, was over. He felt like a creaky gorilla, grunting and groaning his way up the iron grates, kneecaps banging painfully, the skin of his chin scraping. The arrow-tipped spikes at the gate top tore through his uniform, he hung in precarious balance fourteen feet above the street. With a supreme effort he hefted his weight over the spikes and dropped to the other side, landing with a force that knocked the wind from him. He lay sprawled on the ground, his holstered gun jammed sharply under his hipbone. He forced himself to a wobbling stance, his uniform ripped and bloodied. Every part of him hurt, but every part seemed to work. He had successfully scaled the locked Presidential Gates leading to Harry Truman’s Little White House.

Justo decided not to radio for backup to hunt the skeleton through the military ghost town. To find this particular white and black needle in the haystack it would take one man, not fifty. The skeleton did not need to be pursued as much as it needed to be outsmarted. To attract an elusive needle a strong magnet was needed. Justo figured he was the magnet. He rubbed the gold wishbone at his neck, slipped the revolver from its holster and hobbled forward. Ahead in darkness he heard another sound, high-pitched, like a screeching hawk, but oddly melodious and humanly insistent, a strange sort of music he never heard before. He moved from the potholed center of the once grand avenue leading to the Little White House, hopped up onto the cracked sidewalk, following the row of overgrown banyans. He thought the music was coming from the gutted military post office in deep shadow across an expanse of parched lawn. He continued cautiously, from one banyan to the next. The music stopped. He leaned against the trunk of a banyan, holding his breath until the music started again. The music changed position, coming from farther up the avenue, where the monolithic Navy foundry loomed in moonlight. The music seemed to originate from inside the foundry’s steel doors, which stood open to a cavernous red-brick space. Justo crossed the avenue to the corner of the building, pressed his back against the wall as he edged toward the steel doors, when he reached them the strange music stopped. He didn’t hesitate, slipping quickly inside. He switched on his flashlight, offering himself as a target, his drawn revolver ready to fire upon the slightest movement. His eyes began to adjust to what seemed sheer blackness, slowly shapes emerged, becoming identifiable objects. A rustling of wings came from high above, joined by piercing
squeaks. Bats swirled in the peaked ceiling, soaring on rushes of hot air escaping through roof vents. Even in daylight it was difficult to take in the complexity of the cavernous foundry, its vaulted brick support pillars marching off at right angles to deserted offices, supply and boiler rooms, and beyond to the main gallery, where hammers and wrenches were once wielded by muscular men bending white-hot steel over brick-pit fires, creating shapes to replace mechanisms that powered dynamos of ships and submarines. Overhead, chain pulleys draped from timbered rafters, capable of swinging half-ton engines into the air with the ease of lifting a baby from its bath. Suspended from one of the chains was an anvil, its steel nose becoming visible as its mass swooped through air on groaning chain, smashing into the wall next to Justo’s head with an explosion of brick and mortar. Blinding mortar dust stung his eyes, he fell to his knees, trying to sense where the next attack would come from. The strange music started again, screeching like a tin whistle, coming from all corners of the foundry before moving outside, heading up the avenue toward the Little White House.

Justo felt his way in darkness from the foundry, stumbling up the avenue, stopping beneath towering date palms. He rubbed his stinging eyes. Before him the tin roof of the Little White House sloped sharply from two stories above, the front door was boarded over, a steel grate covering the window next to it pried off. Justo climbed through the opening, stepping into foul darkness. The house had been abandoned for years, but its dilapidated state and the glory of former residents attracted a stream of vagabonds and derelicts who managed to break in, regardless of patriotic efforts exerted by local civic-minded officials. Over the years hundreds had spent a day out of the rain, an afternoon out of hot sun, a night getting drunk, or a moment shooting up, in the gutted domain of a dead president’s vacation digs. The once pristine quarters were rife with shriveling turds, dried vomit and an overwhelming acrid scent of urine. Mildewed mattresses, beer cans and liquor bottles littered the termite-riddled floor of the living room, where sunburned reporters from around the world once crowded for press briefings beneath cooling blades of ceiling fans as secret service men went silently about their business. Justo accidently kicked one of the beer cans beneath his feet. The sound of strange music he was following stopped. He cautiously stepped forward, feeling an odd squish underfoot. The putrid stink of a rotting rat wafted into his nostrils. The strange music started again. It came from upstairs. He
followed the music up a steep staircase, the mahogany banister beneath his hand splintered and grimy. At the top of the landing the music became more insistent, emanating from a bedroom where President Truman once slept, haunted by dreams of rumbling battle and rumored peace. When Justo took a creaking step toward the closed bedroom door the music stopped, he pressed against the wall, counting ten before swinging around and kicking the door open. The room reeked of death, he suspected a trick. He swept the flashlight beam over an object hanging from blades of a ceiling fan. It was Marilyn’s Andy, the oyster-shucking scammer, naked and roped by the feet, ears slashed and throat slit. Across the wall behind was a giant yellow X, a note nailed to its center:

Justo heard the whistled pitch of strange music. He peered through broken windowpanes into night. A white and black blur flitted beneath palms, vanishing into the crevice of a shadow. He had not seen anyone run so fast since three months before, when Renoir led him on a breathless chase to the Atlantic’s shore.