Mile Zero (49 page)

I
T’S NOT
that when you’re younger you have a bigger sexual appetite, it’s when you’re older you’ve just suffered through too many mediocre meals. So many little men with big ideas about women, even I know when to throw in my hat.”

“You’ve got all the time in the world, honey. Don’t you worry.” Angelica shifted her weight from one foot to the other, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye as she laughed. “You’ve got me, model, muse and nurse. Who could ask for anything more? You’re just being selfish and cranky.”

“I am selfish. The selfishness of growing old is to do all the listening while others do all the talking. My problem is I just didn’t listen enough when I had the chance.”

“Because you’re a painter. Painters listen with their eyes. You saw plenty.”

“I’ve made a mess of it. Like all artists, I was lonely and absurd, then I got the poison,
praise
. I had too much attention. Success is the end of everything, the beginning of nothing. You know, one rat can birth a hundred other rats in a year, but can’t create a dove or a lion, just more rats. I know many painters like that. I kept trying to give birth to a new me with each painting. What people don’t know is the works of mine hanging in the world’s museums are more of the same, dead rats in gilded frames, dead rats with million-dollar price tags.”

“Don’t do this to yourself,” Angelica could not stop her tears. She stood at the foot of the big brass bed, fully clothed in a light summer dress; she even wore shoes. “Don’t quit.”

“Didn’t say I quit. I’m sketching you in my mind right now, even
though you’re not nude. Flesh is only so much clay, it’s whose hands it’s in that counts.”

Angelica gave a brave laugh. “Keep feeling me in your mind, I’m much safer there.”

“That’s not all I’m doing in my mind.”

“Good. Keep it up!” Angelica forced an air of teasing merriment into her voice. “How do you know I’m not nude? You can’t see further than the nightstand next to your bed.”

“An … An … Angelica, what do you take me for, an old man who goes out to the dog track once a month to bet his Social Security check?” A renewed sense of challenge gleamed in Isaac’s eyes. “I could paint you as a briefcase full of dirty socks and Vienna sausages and it would still walk off the canvas as a voluptuous nude. Painters and prizefighters have to get up off the canvas before the final count.”

“Good, then no more talk about rats.”

“Rats have legs too, a job to do.”

“They might have legs, but they don’t have my ass.”

“Noooo.” Isaac laughed painfully, a hollow wheeze pushing from his bony chest. He sucked in his breath to form new words. “They don’t have your light either, that light is the one corner left in heaven I haven’t been able to paint my way out of. I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone. I didn’t have sex with my models before painting them. But look at me now.” The breath of his words seemed to be dying away, fading back to a whisper. “I’m like distracted old Walt Whitman, who lived right up to the end for the act of creation, lice prowling through his thinned white hair, searching his scalp for a noonday suck, while beneath his thick skull were dreams of birchwood horizons and hard New England Back Bay boys. I think the poets get up off the canvas best, better than heavyweight fighters even. You know, Justo came by here last week, told me a story about that poet he loves so much, that Gargonzola guy. Well, it seems old Gurglezona got dotty as Whitman at the end, kept asking everybody what time it was, then would go to the window and complain he couldn’t see any landscape, just a giant blue spot. That’s where I’m headed now, beyond the landscape of flesh, beyond the wild blue yonder. I want to get the color right for once, got to be the right light. Do you know how many blues there are?”

Angelica sat quietly at the foot of Isaac’s bed, staring at the floor as her body shuddered.

“The length of forever, in human terms, is the shadow of a lifetime.
All life creates light, all light creates shadows. Must define shadows if you are to get it right. I couldn’t get the shadows right, now it’s too late. Ah, but then, even failure isn’t forever. Isn’t that right, St. Cloud?”

“I’ve been working on it.” St. Cloud squeezed Isaac’s frail hand grasping his. Seated in a chair next to the bed, St. Cloud gazed through the windows, across a darkening sea to a thin blue line on the horizon. The longer he stared at the wavering line the more it seemed to contract into a simple blue spot.

A hollow coughing laughter spurted from Isaac’s lips. “There’s hope for you yet, St. Cloud. Just might succeed where I failed. I’ve been a fraud all my life. Don’t want to be a fraud in death too, like that midget buried in the island cemetery who insisted they box him up in a full-size casket. No dark child’s crib for him, he was going to be carried out on the shoulders of pallbearers like a regular man. Didn’t fool anyone but himself. Once they are in the ground everybody is the same size to the worms.”

Isaac seemed to be floating atop the white-sheeted mattress, suspended in undisturbed stillness. St. Cloud and Angelica had been by his side since early morning as he ebbed and flowed, coming back again and again from long hours of silence, jerking awake with startled wonder. The stacked bottles of pills on his bedside table were undisturbed. His desire was not to be drugged when he was dragged from this world, he wanted to see if death had a face, what color that face was. He did not want to be tricked at such a late date. He felt reassured with Angelica standing at the foot of his bed, an angel anchoring him to the heaven of lust he pursued on earth.

Sobbing filled the room from the foot of the brass bed where Angelica sat. Isaac’s purple eyelids slowly opened. He forced a wink in Angelica’s direction. “Darling angel, I’m not dead yet.”

“Dammit, Isaac.” Angelica pushed herself up and came to him, laying a hand on his forehead. “Don’t be such an old son-of-a-bitch and keep scaring me like that.”

“Me and Renoir,” another whisper escaped Isaac’s thin lips. “We grew up together.”

“He loves you.” Angelica traced her fingers lightly on Isaac’s perspiring forehead.

“You promised not to phone him.”

“I won’t. He’s always so thoughtful. I’ll bet he walks through that door any minute.”

“In many ways I don’t blame him, but in many ways I don’t feel guilty.”

“It’s not about guilt. You know what it’s about.”

Isaac said nothing, his eyelids beginning to sink again.

Angelica wanted to keep Isaac alert. “What about you, St. Cloud? Seen Renoir?”

“Not since before Fantasy Fest.”

“Fantasy Fest?” Isaac’s eyelids stopped their downward slide, his head turning toward St. Cloud. “Any news about Bubba-Bob?”

St. Cloud lost his focus on the thin blue horizon through the French windows, sky was closing over sea, salty breeze slipped into the bedroom, heavy with humidity. He felt pressure in his head, a storm in the making, a rain to dissolve dog days of summer which had lingered past their oppressive prime into fall. “Bubba-Bob’s going to be all right. Said to tell you he knows what a marlin feels like when it’s pole-gaffed.”

“He’s tough as a marlin.”

“Like you, too ornery to die.”

Isaac’s chest heaved with a choking cough, he cleared his throat to get his whisper of a voice back. “You still got that lucky bone Justo’s aunt gave you?”

“It’s around my neck.”

Isaac blinked his cataract-clouded eyes in St. Cloud’s direction. “There can never be too much magic on this island. Oris keeping you busy spooning love hex soup to the Dixie Peach?”

“Lila’s moved in with me. Guess she likes my pie crusts.”

A laugh squeezed from Isaac’s throat. “Now you’re in trouble. Once a woman moves in, no amount of voodoo can move her out. Even Oris can’t help you with that.”

“Lila’s different. Think I’ve got a chance at something, probably my last chance.”

“You don’t know it, but your last chance walked out the door with Evelyn. There was one worth fighting for.”

“I fought.”

“Yourself, still are.”

“Hey …” Angelica laughed. “What about me? Maybe I should fight over Evelyn too. You guys make it sound so good.”

“You’re not fighting for anyone, you’re mine.” Isaac’s fluttering eyelid stopped halfway in an attempted wink.

Angelica looked at St. Cloud, encouraging him to keep Isaac alert.
“Did Justo nail that skeleton yet?” She nodded vigorously for St. Cloud to speak up. “What’s
new
with the skeleton?”

Isaac’s faint breath echoed Angelica as he began to slip away. “What’s new with the skeleton?”

St. Cloud stroked the blackened veins on the back of Isaac’s hand. “Justo says with this voodoo and Santería stuff, you never know if one person is involved, or a mob. Justo plays his cards close.”

“Cards close,” Isaac exhaled.

“Justo does think he figured out the Zobop poem.”

“Zobop poem,” Isaac barely breathed.

“The
two thousand souls entrapped by barbed wire
, that’s the cemetery with its high fence.
Eight palms point the way
, those are the palms on Passover Lane flanking the cemetery entrance.
A Green Sailor looks north to Cuban Martyrs, where the tree of life grows from their heads
, refers to the sailor statue in the plot where battleship
Maine’s
crew is buried. The sailor’s right hand is cocked in salute northward, where José Martí’s liberators who died invading Cuba are entombed. Opposite the Cubans is an enormous breadfruit tree. Seems simple once you know, but who could have known? Justo says a toad helped him figure it out.”

“Toad figured it,” Isaac whispered.

“What Justo hasn’t puzzled is the
Angel of Death smiles upon all
. Hundreds of angel statues are scattered across the cemetery, small plastic ones, large marble ones. Everywhere you look angels are hovering over graves or looking over their wings in preparation for celestial takeoff. Which one is the Angel of Death? Aren’t they all?”

“Aren’t they all?”

“Somehow this Zobop has everything tied into the cemetery, even the yellow X. An X in the Little White House bedroom where Marilyn’s Andy was killed, one on the jail wall when Voltaire was released, another on Renoir’s front door. Then there’s the first X, the one Justo found on his grandfather’s grave. All roads seem to cross at the cemetery.”

“All roads crossed.”

“You once mentioned there were guys on this island in secret societies ready to kill anyone revealing an evil truth. Aunt Oris says you’re right. In some of those societies a new member had his chest shaved and marked with a yellow X, was forced to kneel within a circle of yellow chalked in dirt. He drank the blood of a goat whose throat had been slashed, while others called upon Nanga, Big Evil, to kill the initiate if he betrayed the brotherhood outside the circle.”

“Brotherhood?”

“That’s what Aunt Oris calls it. Last time they paraded around dressed as devils in top hats and tooting whistles was in the twenties. The ceremonial killings ended way before then. Sure, chickens and goats are still sacrificed, cats and dogs too, even dove hearts and shark eyes turn up at the feet of the Hurricane Virgin in the grotto of the Catholic church. Nearly any living thing you can think of has been strung up and wrung out to amend or avenge some purpose on this island over the years, to set things right, beat back evil, bring up the good. There are still
botànicas
in town hawking faceless cotton dolls, magic needles to stick them with, Evil Eye potion spray in a can to paint them with and bat blood mixed with Holy Water to anoint them with. Half the cocaine smugglers in town buy protection from a Santería godfather or godmother, wouldn’t dream of running a scam without feeding the Saints on prayers and thousand-dollar donations. People who buy into that can’t buy out. Some are more religious than the Pope, others are simply afraid, more spooked than a rat in a shithouse.”

“Spooked.”

“Everybody’s spooked one way or another and tries to do something about it, light a candle, have a shot of alcohol, say a prayer, smoke a joint, go on vacation, sacrifice a pet cat, turn on the television, any damn thing. Not sure what I’m talking about. Maybe this Zobop doesn’t make any sense. Maybe that’s the real thing, no sense to be made anymore.”

“Sense?” The breath of Isaac’s word barely made it beyond his trembling lips. “In my … day … people didn’t ask so many questions. In my day people didn’t need … so many answers. I need a blue spot.”

In the failing light of the bedroom the shriveled skin of Isaac’s bald head against the pillow made him appear like a freshly unwrapped Egyptian mummy, a weathered boy-king, gazing at a world filled with treasures no longer of value. The rasp of his breathing heaved his thin chest. Through French windows evening over water darkened to night, distant horizon exposed by lightning fingers pointing toward Cuba. Booming thunder marched in from the ocean, shaking Isaac’s Bahamian mansion to its coral-rock foundation.

Angelica stared at Isaac in flashing lightning, a half curve of smile on her lips, as if she knew all along the value of a muse was only justified if it led to enlightened finality.