Mile Zero (5 page)

“You’re an accessory to murder after the fact.”

“The hell I am.” St. Cloud tried to pull away from Justo’s hand digging into his shoulder. “What’s going on?”

“I want you to play ball with me, to be a team player. Could change your life. Look down there.” Justo released his grip and pointed to the splintered planking of the boat’s gunwale. Crude letters faded brown by the sun were painted the length of the boat’s upper edge.

St. Cloud squinted at the scrawl, trying to decipher its meaning, reading the words out loud.
“Re … zis … to. Li … berté … ou … lan … mo
. Liberation or death.”

“It’s written in blood.” Justo fingered his wishbone, his eyes going back and forth over the faded letters, “I know the look of dried blood.”

While Justo rubbed his gold bone, St. Cloud congratulated himself for having started off such a strange day by drinking the sun up with a bottle of Haiti’s finest. “Thing is,” St. Cloud mumbled, speaking more to himself than Justo, who turned to hear the slurred words running together in rum-slickened syllables, “while ago, standing up there behind the rope watching what was going on, couldn’t help think about something which occurred to me early this morning. These
paysans
were at sea, probably had no compass, overhead a Space Shuttle was heaven bound. Can’t shake the feeling we’re living in a modern Christopher Columbus age, at the beginning of one world, end of another.”

“That’s why this Haitian kid is so important.” Justo looked along the dock, reporters were waving at him, television crews jostling each other for camera positions. He wished he could go off to the bar with St. Cloud and drink his way out of such
a mal día
. A cool breeze flapped the loose ends of his
guayabera
shirt. He turned from the hectic scene on the dock, his eyes going to the words scrawled in blood along the gunwale. “I agree with you. Columbus and the
paysans
on this boat were after the same thing. Both knew they had to keep the Saints fed to get where they were going. Problem is nobody knows these days what the Saints are eating.”

USA
41 – HAITI 1
. The hand-scrawled message on the chalkboard placed among the bank of colored liquor bottles behind the bar shimmered through misting cigarette smoke. Whirring fan blades overhead tore at the boisterous conversations in the crowded Wreck Room bar, whipping sentences and paragraphs in random patterns, flinging fumbling articulations and drunken declarations onto lips moving with pantomime thickness. It was difficult to tell who at the bar said what and how many drinks back they said it. It no longer mattered. Who cared? Almost no one was watching the television screen aimed at the long bar from a far corner, beaming yesterday’s news in the early morning hours, illuminating over and over the image of the hundred-ton Space Shuttle lifting from primordial ooze of swampy Everglades atop six million pounds of orange flaming rocket thrust, performing a quick disappearing act into heaven’s blue yawn in less time than the blink of an alligator’s eye, leaving behind a five-hour traffic snarl on asphalt arteries spiraling away from the Space Center launch pad, honking cars filled with people headed back to a mundane world, stifling their desire to be orbiting above it all faster than seventeen thousand miles an hour. Such was the news from the television, a comet man-made, followed by the filmed image of a black policeman in a loose
guayabera
shirt standing before a Haitian refugee boat as bloated bodies skinned white by the sun were hefted onto a dock of pressing spectators.
“No,”
the recorded voice from Justo’s filmed image made its way from the television up above the roar of the bar into the swirling fan blades.
“There’s no proof of cannibalism on this boat. I don’t know where that rumor got started
.
These people died of exposure, starvation and drinking seawater. There will be an investigation. Yes, one survivor. No, I already told you, no signs of cannibalism have been exhibited on any bodies.”

“Whose treasure is it anyway? I’d like to know! I mean, the Indians found it and made other Indians dig for it. Then the Spaniards took it from the Indians. Same thing is going on now four hundred years later in space. I don’t see what the difference is if those Space Shuttle guys zipped over to the moon and found themselves some great cache from a crashed Martian flying saucer, a million tons of gleaming platinum scattered around in moon craters. You think those guys are going to let that stuff just lie there for another zillion years? Hell no! They would do just what the Spanish Conquistadores did, load it up and wing it on home. That’s what we’re doing up there in space. Isn’t one bit different from what Ponce de León was up to when he was running around Florida here in the sixteenth century, and it’s no different from me diving these Spanish wrecks off the Keys. Finders keepers, losers bleeders. Know what I mean, St. Cloud?”

St. Cloud heard Brogan’s words, but he couldn’t concentrate on them. Something wasn’t right up there on the television screen. St. Cloud had watched the news come around four times so far that night. Something was off. After Justo’s image on the television disappeared the screen flickered with the exploding wreckage of Karl Dean’s powerboat filmed from a helicopter, shards of brightly colored fiberglass scattered like jewels around the face-down deadweight of Dean’s body bobbing in water. The thin line between winning a race and burial at sea had been crossed. But something more had been crossed. Burial at sea for a speeding thrill seeker was one thing, forty-one dead Haitians was another. One man’s bait is another man’s meal. Everyone races to the same fate, but there was more. St. Cloud felt it wasn’t all so simple.

The weight of Brogan’s body shifted on the barstool, knocking against St. Cloud. Brogan’s heavy insistence was not that of a drunken challenger or an overzealous friend, more like an anxious load seeking universal balance. “Have I ever told you about my brother?” Brogan raised an emptied cocktail glass close to his lips, his words echoing up with urgency. “My brother’s a sort of adventurer down in Central America. Yeah, that’s what he is, a sort of adventurer.”

St. Cloud knew enough to write a book about Brogan’s brother and always wanted to hear more, but sliding his attention over to Brogan on the stool next to him was going to be a tricky maneuver.
The blood of St. Cloud’s veins hummed with the sugar slush of rum; any coherent thought trying to swim upstream to his brain was almost certain to drown. First things first. St. Cloud struggled to focus his eyes from the television set, down the mirrored wall into the narrow runway behind the bar, where Angelica reigned supreme. He tried to steady the blond vision of Angelica, tears streaming down her cheeks as she poured a Niagara Falls of alcohol into drained glasses held out to her along the bar. Angelica’s white shorts were of such insignificant material they could be stuffed into a whiskey shot glass with room left over for two olives. Each time Angelica spun around in a provocative pirouette, bending over to expose fleshy charms as she snagged yet another bottle of West Indies rum, enough silent prayers went up from the men along the bar to have turned the tide of the Crusades. Angelica presented a fast-moving target for St. Cloud, he struggled to keep the target steady as she poured rum to the top of Brogan’s empty glass without his asking for it. She wiped tears from her eyes, holding the bottle of rum up expectantly before St. Cloud, her smoky voice delivering the slow curve of a daring confrontation. “Why don’t you just take me away from all of this and fuck me?”

Brogan sucked the rum out of his glass in one gulp. “My brother says Central America is where the buck bucks. He says what’s going on down there is like a poker game with your mother. You can only play that game one way. To the end. You lose, you are not born. You win and you can’t live with your conscience, because you have fucked your mother over. What was that you just said, Angelica?”

“I asked St. Cloud why he just didn’t take me away from all of this.”

Brogan raised his empty glass to Angelica in an unsteady salute. “I was talking about motherfuckers. I was talking about politics. I was talking about my brother.”

“He was my brother and now he’s dead.” Angelica brushed a new set of tears from her eyes.

“What are you talking about?” Brogan stammered, lowering his glass in disbelief. “MK is not your brother. MK is my brother. Did I ever tell you how MK got his name?”

“Karl Dean is what I’m talking about, you jerk. Karl Dean was my brother and now he’s dead.”

“He wasn’t your brother.” Brogan shoved his empty glass across the bar. “He was your lover.”

“You’re all my brothers.” Angelica poured Brogan another drink, her tears splashing on the mahogany gloss of the bar top.

Among Angelica’s many charms, which St. Cloud found too numerous at this moment to count, she had one seductive quality that went unrivaled. This quality, which attracted St. Cloud most to Angelica, was that she was wicked and there, immediately available in a way which intended no harm to others. Angelica wasn’t a beat me, whip me, bite me, make me write bad checks girl. Angelica was a woman clearly without her own mind and never in need of it; she functioned on a level of selfless emotions. At the point in her life when most other women begin to wear jewelry to enhance their fading youth, Angelica wore less makeup and fewer clothes. Instead of dressing in a manner designed as sensible, Angelica was in headlong pursuit of the irresponsible. She had a reputation, among the town’s self-appointed male judges of female virtues, as having at any one given moment the hardest nipples and the softest heart. Angelica was a northern woman who had drifted on a bet and a dare along the high-rise, time-sharing Gulf of Mexico coast, and ended up in the southernmost Redneck Riviera. But Angelica was not a Saturday night tickle to be found seven nights a week in the Wreck Room. She was no hillbilly harlot or card-carrying member of the drug-a-day club, rather, she was the marrying kind who spent her whole life trying to prove she wasn’t the marrying kind. Even Angelica’s five-year-old daughter knew that. Angelica was the kind of woman who aimed to please, and aimed straight. Right now St. Cloud knew her aim was targeted at him. That didn’t stop Brogan from rattling on anyway.

“Yeah, you could call my brother an adventurer I guess. MK’s done all the usual stuff. You know, blowing up power stations of little Marijuana Republic islands so his men could load grass onto boats in the harbor and slip away under cover of darkness. MK’s been chased by Cuban gunboats in the Bimini Windward Passage. He even had a small nine-hundred-acre garden in Jamaica on the side of a mountain in Rasta Cockpit country. Thick jungle, had to truck the marijuana harvest out on donkeys, MK cut their vocal cords so nobody knew they were mule-training by. Those gentlemen donkeys had their ball bearings whacked off too, so they handled sweet as Bambi. Did I ever tell you how my brother got his name? MK was real decorated in the Nam war. I mean heavy decorated.”

St. Cloud wanted to hear the story again. The story always changed
a little, but over the years he had heard Brogan talk of MK the central facts remained the same. MK was everything St. Cloud wasn’t. MK had been Special Forces in Vietnam during the 1960s when St. Cloud was marching against the war in San Francisco, having people spit on him and hiss
Commie
, that was the usual stuff back then. It seemed to St. Cloud now, after twenty years had passed, some curious circle was bringing him and MK together, fusing them in a bond of unfathomable brotherhood, inexorable and uncomfortable.

Angelica’s tears were melting the hardened sugar in St. Cloud’s veins. He cocked himself up on the barstool and leaned over the counter, wrapping his arms around Angelica so her face rested against his chest. Angelica’s sobbing shook the two of them until St. Cloud almost lost his balance and pitched over backward.

“Karl Dean was a great man!” Angelica sobbed against St. Cloud’s chest.

“Yes.” St. Cloud held onto Angelica for dear life. He knew if he let go he would take such a fall he would never get up. “Karl was a regular guy.” The sugar had not melted so much in St. Cloud’s veins that he didn’t know Karl Dean was one of the most disagreeable scammers in a town that prided itself in producing one hundred percent disagreeables. Karl was just another homegrown boy who figured out before he left high school that he could pump gas the rest of his life or run a few fast boats around in the dark across shallow water and get paid big money for the least amount of questions asked. Karl had a solid gold watch, but he could barely tell time or count to ten using the fingers of both hands. Karl always had one eye on the next girl in town to turn fifteen, the other eye on himself in the mirror resting on his knee as he snorted up his daily five G’s. A real regular guy around the island. Racing boats was not a sport to Karl, but a way of life, same as war games are not games to soldiers. On a small island full of hotshot boys in tight Hawaiian shirts and diamond earrings pierced in their ears, Karl was no different. He bragged about his educational shortcomings, flashed his hundred-dollar rolls of loot, and spent his early mornings in the din of the Wreck Room trying to find some lucky girl to get pretty with him on the mirror.

“Oh God, St. Cloud.” Angelica righted herself up and dabbed at her tears with a bar napkin. “I knew you had a good heart.”

St. Cloud took the bar napkin from Angelica and touched up the
trickle of tears still running down her cheeks. “I don’t have such a good heart, it’s only that Karl was a regular guy. Me, I’m a man beyond belief.”

“Hey! What is this? I’m a professional.” Angelica snatched the tear-soaked napkin from St. Cloud and tossed it into the trashcan behind her. “Enough of the wake. Karl Dean was an asshole. Can I offer you boys a mescal nightcap?”

“Delighted.” Brogan accepted the offer for the two of them.

St. Cloud knocked back four shots of Mexico’s meanest, Angelica’s face beaming before him, her cheeks high and dry now, her cheeks ringing red and gorgeous, contrasting against the skin of her slender neck, skin more blond than flesh-colored, almost the same blond as her cropped hair; she was St. Cloud’s arctic queen, radiant among the denizens of the tropics. He wondered how she did it. All night in bars, all day in bed. Angelica had the kind of high cheekbones that up north in New York were called money bones, the fashionable bones of a model. She could have made a fortune as a department store rag ramp-runner, instead she ran the gauntlet behind the Wreck Room bar, and gallantly sported St. Cloud to forehead-numbing mescal. He was awed and humbled. Once again he was falling in love with Angelica.