Mile Zero (55 page)

The mechanic stopped his banging. He rubbed the hammer head against his oily cheek as he sauntered to the station wagon, looking down at St. Cloud suspiciously. “You her father or what?”

“Sure am.”

“She don’t look old enough to drive. Tell your little girl it’s ready. Gonna be ninety-five bucks. She got a credit card?”

“She’s good for it. Where is she?”

The mechanic pointed the hammer at a cinder-block building
squatting behind faded canvas awnings in a weedy lot. Neon letters blinked on the rooftop:
SAIL AWAY MOTEL
. “Over there, round back by the water.”

St. Cloud parked the station wagon and walked across the weedy lot with the pug tucked under his arm. A wood ramp led behind the motel, ending before an expanse of gravel staked with plastic flamingos. The pink flock leaned at dangerous angles on steel feet, painted eyes staring to ocean’s edge, where Lila watched laughing teenagers fishing from a pier, waves murmuring at her bare feet. St. Cloud feared going farther. Perhaps Lila was an illusion, like the Madonna on the reef, her siren’s calling song wooing sailors to sea bottom. A cold current of dread flowed through his heart. Lila’s body merged with water, cold current flowing around her submerged nakedness, bearing with it a surge of turtle hatchlings, beaked mouths clacking as they finned through her parted legs, brushing thighs, seeking breasts, nudging nipples, urging sustenance. Blue current bled milky white, the siren’s song wailing. Lila floated toward him, salty perfume on lips, slithery seaweed entangling his bull weight, plummeting him to Erzulie’s green depths.

“Y’all found me.” Lila’s voice surfaced on murmuring tide. “Knew y’all would come.” She reached out and stroked the head of the squirming puppy.

“I know all about MK.”

“It’s not MK.” Lila pulled him closer. “I left because of y’all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“MK sent me to Key West to wait, but he never came. Month after month I got postcards from different Latin American places, all said the same thing:
Not this trip
. My life became uncomplicated, no longer a husband, not even MK. He knew it was impossible to escape himself, so he let me go. Then y’all came along, insistent, like MK, same knots on the inside. Y’all were looking for commitment. If I stayed it would be walking away from myself.”

The intrigue St. Cloud constructed to win Lila collapsed. He had taken a calculated risk and lost. Against other men he could compete, he could not compete against willful spirit, youth will not accept proximity of vulnerability. He did not know if he trusted himself enough to set them both free. He had only one way to find out. He kissed her.

In the solar system of Lila’s experience St. Cloud was a foreign planet spinning to motives beyond comprehension. She was caught
in a polar slide toward an emotional opposite. When the male arc of his body rose, a coiled response unraveled from her, the probe of its progress tipped by her tongue, beyond passionate yielding to chance understanding. Lila broke free.

“I have to go.” She smoothed her skirt. “Started this morning and I’m only at mile marker fifty.”

St. Cloud held out the puppy. “Would you like him?”

“After what happened to the first one? Can’t have another.” She walked off across the expanse of gravel.

St. Cloud followed her to the mechanic’s garage, waiting as she backed the convertible out.

The mechanic swiped his sweaty forehead with an oily rag. “Some good-looking daughter you got. I were you, wouldn’t let her be driving with the top down. Lots of guys will be after her.”

The convertible stopped. “Wait a minute.” Lila climbed out, rushing to St. Cloud. “On second thought I’ll take him.” She snatched the wriggling puppy from his arms and ran back to the car, the dog licking her cheeks as she drove onto the busy highway. She looked back. “We’ll find each other again, promise!”

The mechanic slapped the rag against his palm. “Find each other again? Funny thing for a guy’s daughter to say.”

St. Cloud stood at the edge of the highway, watching the southern light of his life headed north. He decided not to set immediate course down the Keys to mile zero. He walked around behind Sail Away Motel, strolled through the leaning flock of flamingos to murmuring tideline. Music swelled from his ache, a zingy beat of papaya passion and mango persuasion, waterspouts danced across ocean’s horizon, beyond the last American wave, where storm warriors rode bareback on howling wind, where rain from New Spain spattered giants in forests and pygmies in cities, where Christopher Columbus hit his home run into the flat outfield of the Caribbean, where despots conspired to throw out the first hand grenade of the next warring season, where young men grew old waiting for the telephone to ring, where the last battle a man fights is with himself, where the beat of the Twentieth Century Cha-Cha has to be faced, yonder yonder yonder, where light on sea flashes blue, green, then surrenders her gift.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

The question did not come from the sea. It came from land.

“Answer me! Where do you think you’re headed? I followed you from the
Quince
. Knew there was something off, more than Lila. Told
you that
compuesto
would have you thinking you can walk on water.”

St. Cloud turned toward the black face on shore. “The New World.”

“Perfect! I heard on the squawker coming here, five refugees on a raft of truck tire inner tubes floated over. Don’t know how the sharks missed them. Coast Guard bringing them in. Going to need your forked tongue in court, always be a need for a translator in Babylon.”

Justo stretched his hand across water.

“Lila promised. She’s coming back.”

“Cristo volvera tambien.”
Justo pulled St. Cloud to firm ground.

Christ is coming back too
.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Sanchez spent his youth in northern California, where he began his first novel,
Rabbit Boss
, on a cattle ranch at the age of 21. One year later, he received a master’s degree from San Francisco State University.
Rabbit Boss
, a hundred-year saga of a California-Nevada Indian tribe, was completed when Sanchez was 27. After publishing a second novel,
Zoot-Suit Murders
, in the late 1970s, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his third novel, which became
Mile Zero
, written during the 1980s on the island of Key West. Sanchez divides his time between
California and Florida.