Mile Zero (51 page)

Baskets of heaped fruit beckoned, Voltaire rocked his head to music of invisible birds, his fingers gliding over golden oranges, ruby apples, emerald pears, perfection not seen in our insect-riddled land of shriveled trees, food fit for feast of Saints, he peeled plastic skin from a ruby apple, raising fruit to lips as angry words he could not understand screamed from a woman stalking toward him, he was like a sleepwalker shaken awake, he extended the apple to the woman, she stopped, as if the apple was a bomb capable of destroying glass palaces, behind us was shouting, I turned, a uniformed black police shoved through a crowd, Voltaire smiled and stumbled toward him, offering the basket of fruit, they were going to collide, I shouted for Voltaire to stop, he did not hear me in his dream, a gun flashed from black police, terror in Voltaire’s eyes, Tontons had found him, fruit jewels scattered as he ran across slippery mirage, black police went after him, I chased on blistered feet, Voltaire was quick as rabbit, he
ran out onto a busy highway, dodging speeding cars, horns honking, black police shouting, he streaked beneath an overhang of traffic lights, not seeing a truck hit him, hurling him onto hood of a car swerving in squeal of brakes, slamming him to pavement, across a yellow X large as a man, when I got to him blood rushed from his lips, I cradled him in my arms and prayed Saints wake us from good dream turned nightmare, white letters were beneath yellow X, I did not know their meaning, but memory has a picture:

Oh my sweet lamb.’ ”

I
THINK
he’s gone. Do you hear me?” St. Cloud tried to sort his thoughts, to push past the vision of Voltaire lying dead in front of a shopping mall at the edge of the Everglades, a place where the march of modernization overtook the millennial crawl of sea surrendering new land. The vision refused to recede, Voltaire on a yellow X, spinning counterclockwise, suspended between two worlds. Angelica appeared before him. It had stopped raining, dawn illuminated the thin blue horizon.

“You’ve been talking all night.” Angelica’s fingertips touched St. Cloud’s cheek. “Didn’t want to stop you, it’s what Isaac wanted.”

St. Cloud’s thoughts were muddled. The frail hand he held within his own was lifeless.

“Tried to call Renoir again, still no answer.”

“Answer?” St. Cloud looked up into Angelica’s face. No tears were in her eyes, just a clear gaze of blue. Maybe this was the last thing Isaac saw, stripped of all landscape, his giant blue spot, pursued to the end. St. Cloud did not want to let Isaac’s hand go, as long as he clung to it the connection between them remained. His mind drifted back to the story he had been telling, there was more to it, a strange ending. He recalled the silence after Hippolyte finished the breakout tale. As Hippolyte stared at the floor his own eyes went to the jungle painted across the back wall, the white panther peering back at him. Thunder rumbled across surrounding Everglades, slowly Hippolyte’s words made their way from scarred lips: “I used to be a strong man with security, a man who could cut cane twelve hours a day, sometimes
if a man loses the swing of his machete from tiredness as he slices cane, and the blade strikes him in the heat of the moment, his pumped-up blood will jump from the wound in minutes, he will die in the fields, I have cut myself twice, cuts deeper than a boar’s bite, then bound my cut from cloth of my torn pants, walked ten miles home over mountains and across streams, I was so strong, look at me now, wasting away because of no work in camp, without his security a man is nothing, his body quits if not used as loas deemed, I weigh no more than one of Voltaire’s flying fish.” Hippolyte’s words stopped, as if his breath was even too much of a burden to bear. St. Cloud bent before him again, reached into his pocket and withdrew the envelope containing twenty hundred-dollar bills. He pushed the envelope into Hippolyte’s gnarled hands, claiming it was a gift from Voltaire, who wrote St. Cloud he wanted his friend Hippolyte to have it. Hippolyte turned the sealed envelope in his hands, pondering its contents, he had not asked for gifts, furrows in his forehead deepened, maybe this was a trick, after all, St. Cloud only
said
he was Voltaire’s friend. There were many things in this new world Hippolyte did not know, mysteries beyond belief. One thing was not a mystery, he knew Voltaire was a
paysan
like him, unschooled. Voltaire could not write. “I did not come to Florida for sunshine,” Hippolyte whispered hoarsely. “Neither did I,” St. Cloud whispered back. Hippolyte rose from his cot, crouched before a footlocker and opened its metal door with a small key. He slid the envelope inside and gathered something swiftly from the back shelf into his fist. He sat on the cot holding his fist before St. Cloud’s face. “Voltaire died without security, not without spirit, I took this from around his neck as loas called him home, if you are his friend it should be with you.” Hippolyte’s fist opened to reveal the pigskin ball of a
ouanga
wound with goathair, bloodstained and mud-soiled. St. Cloud did not touch it, it was the only security Voltaire had in this world. “Take it,” Hippolyte urged. “Some things are meant to be, maybe you are not so white after all.”

Hippolyte’s words echoed in St. Cloud’s mind as he clung to Isaac’s hand. Some things are meant to be simply because they exist, that does not make them easier to understand. He thought of what he learned after leaving Hippolyte, returning to Mrs. Mulrooney’s office with its air-conditioned breeze, while back in the vast room men on cots sweated out another day. He was sweating too, listening to Mrs. Mulrooney tell him Voltaire would have died even if he had not been
killed on the highway. She said Haitian activists caused such a stink about rumors of female hormones in detainees’ food that doctors made an examination. They found some men had yaws, a flesh-rotting disease the United Nations claims has been wiped out. They found something else, a lingering pneumonia which wastes a person away. The pneumonia is linked to a virus in Africa, started by green monkeys or something, nobody knows for certain, so new it doesn’t have a name. Immigrant Haitians have the highest chance of developing it, except for homosexuals. The doctors had no idea how many men in camp were homosexuals, they knew to a man how many were recent arrivals from Haiti. They asked permission to run tests on blood from Voltaire’s body. He had the green monkey virus, they figured Hippolyte had it too.

Angelica’s voice floated through to St. Cloud. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep, honey. You’ve been up all night.”

St. Cloud squeezed Isaac’s hand, he couldn’t bear to let go. Angelica seemed far away, dawn spreading purple behind her through the window. “You’ve been up all night too.”

“For me it’s easy, I’m a bartender. Isaac could trust me to stay awake for him. Let’s call his doctor and leave before the press gets here, Isaac would never want his friends to witness that.”

“Yes … you’re right. If we can’t get ahold of Renoir we’ll have to let the doctor know.”

“Go on. I’ll make the call.”

“Sure you don’t want me to stay while you do that?”

“Go.”

It was time. St. Cloud reached deep into his pants pocket and withdrew Voltaire’s
ouanga
, placed it within Isaac’s hand. He folded stiff fingers over the pigskin pouch, then laid the hand atop Isaac’s still heart. He did not need the
ouanga
, he had Aunt Oris’ lucky bone. Wherever he was headed he considered himself bulletproof. He pushed up from the chair.

The curtains framing Angelica at the window lifted in the wind, white rising wings at her shoulders, poised for flight.
Go
formed on her lips. Isaac was a luckier man than most.

St. Cloud descended into the cavernous foyer, feeling his way through sheet-shrouded furniture. He emerged onto the dilapidated veranda, pushed through the Spanish laurel’s curtain of hanging roots. Whitehead Street opened before him, its pavement stopping
where the cement finger of the southernmost point monument rose at the Atlantic’s edge. Stiff wind swung from south to northwest, sure sign the jaws of dog days were finally loosening their grip. The churning ocean was not its usual transparent blue, but opaque indigo. The storm that passed during night left isolated clouds on the horizon, beneath them spun spidery waterspouts, ghosts waltzing toward Cuba’s rattling sugarcane fields and papaya girls flirting with mango eyes. St. Cloud did not heed tropical temptations beyond waterspouts. He headed in the opposite direction, across island toward home, where Lila waited.

Narrow streets were filled with chorus of frogs croaking from damp gardens as evaporating rain steamed off tin roofs, lizards leapt from sidewalk cracks while rats rustled in palm fronds, on Catholic Lane Lila was sleeping. St. Cloud entered the house quietly, not wanting to awaken her. A note he tacked on the bedroom door was still there:
You are the corned beef in my heart’s customhouse, my hunger follows you, no wonder crude
. He smiled; beneath his note Lila had written:
Your beef is corny but your wonder is not crude!
He pushed the door open. Lila lay asleep, ceiling-fan blades stirring a breeze over her curved nakedness. What he needed to soothe his nerves was not a shot of alcohol, but to drink in the vision illuminated on the bed by dawn light. Strange music came quickly to mind. He thought he imagined it. Quickly as it came it went. Maybe what he heard was the fan’s electric thrum. He was afraid he might be dreaming, same way Voltaire thought he was dreaming the glass palace. He touched the lucky bone at his neck. A screeching sound jolted him, sounding like a hawk’s call or a blowing whistle. Lila opened her eyes, shadowy movement flitted across the window behind her. “Stay where you are,” St. Cloud whispered. He walked quickly through the house, stepping out the back door into the garden, pushing through banana leaves. The strange music stopped. Across rowed vegetables a papaya tree rose, halfway up its trunk was Lila’s pug, a spike driven through its skull, its throat slashed. He saw the naked shape of Lila through the bedroom window, one hand covering her mouth. Ajar glinted from blood-spattered cabbages beneath the papaya. He opened the jar and withdrew crumpled paper scrawled with purple ink:

St. Cloud let the bloody jar slip from his fingers and tossed the note into cabbages. What Justo said about everything leading to the cemetery was true. He started walking, crushing tomatoes and turnips beneath his feet. He heard Lila screaming for him not to go. He ran from the garden.

THE GATES
to the cemetery were open, someone had smashed the chained lock. St. Cloud hesitated, catching his breath, a line of eight palms guarded the entrance, their frond skirts rattling overhead. In the city of the dead the first thing to greet him was a sailor statue perched atop a granite pedestal amidst tombstones marking casualties of battleship
Maine
. The copper sailor had weathered a sea-green, as if an underwater vision dreamed above ground by those buried below, one hand held an oar, the other frozen in northward salute toward home. Someone had painted the sailor’s eyes yellow, blinding his vigil for ready rescue. St. Cloud looked in the direction the sailor could no longer see, across a skyline of tombstones and tin-roof mausoleums ensnared by overgrown vines. The metal clasp of a rope dangling from a flagpole clanged in the wind, tapping an inscrutable message. The wind also brought a hollow banging from the far side of a concrete hump housing generational graves. St. Cloud crept to the large tomb and pressed his back against its concrete wall, sliding to the corner, startling a greyhound with its snout caught in a vase of plastic flowers it was trying to drink from. The greyhound slammed the vase against the tomb, struggling to dislodge the improbable muzzle. The vase slipped free, scattering plastic flowers. “Ocho,” St. Cloud called after the disappearing dog. “Where’s Justo?” Only moaning wind came back in answer. If Ocho was around it meant Justo was close. There was no movement in the streets. St. Cloud headed in the direction of the sailor’s blinded gaze, toward the monument to Cuban Martyrs. Strange music began, its sharp sound leading to an obelisk fingering skyward above a forest of marble headstones. From the obelisk tip a hawk eyed St. Cloud as if he were a blundering mouse. The hawk’s beak opened, squealing pithy disdain as it took flight over stone angels weighted forever to earth. Strange music whistled through the air. Tombs and graves St. Cloud hurriedly passed were a blur, anyone could be hiding among the dead.
A LOS
MARTIRES DE CUBA
arched before him in metal letters, he edged past a granite pillar etched with dates of century-old Cuban battles. Where he thought the strange music came from, there was a glass case harboring a fleshlike root, a plaque announcing:
Tronco de Tamarindo bajo cuya sombra conspiraban, los patriotas Cubanos
. The root was from the tamarind tree beneath which the patriots plotted to liberate Cuba. From his vantage point among buried freedom fighters St. Cloud had an unobstructed view to the sailor staring with yellow eyes.
A Green Sailor looks to Cuban Martyrs, where the tree of life grows from their heads
. He spun around, back through the gateway to the martyrs was the spread of a breadfruit tree; its massive roots had toppled a line of gravestones like dominoes. Among fallen headstones were three freshly dug graves. St. Cloud peered into one of the deep holes, at bottom a bufo toad hopped in angry loops, attempting escape up slippery walls. “Justo,” St. Cloud whispered. Only Justo knew the meaning of the Zobop poem. He turned from the graves, searching for Justo, a sign of revelation.
The Angel of Death awaits, holds in her hand rising sun of your fate, don’t be late
. Don’t be late? Rising from the cemetery’s east, above Jews buried from sight behind a high fence scrolled with
B’NAI ZION
, was the sun. St. Cloud ran toward the ascending globe.
Don’t be late
. Ahead loomed an angel, feathered wings arched, cascade of hair falling across shoulders, an outstretched hand offering a bouquet of lilies to a grave lost from sight in weeds. Strange music floated along cemetery streets, converging on the angel bathed in blood-red light. Against the sky a woman’s-tongue tree rattled a racket of seedpods in the wind. From behind the tree a form astride a bicycle appeared, its black rubber skin painted with luminescent bones of a human skeleton, top hat clamped on its head, eyes blacked out by sunglasses, screeching whistle between teeth.