Mile Zero (8 page)

“Why … my dog, of course.” The surface of her green eyes rippled with ridicule at his awkward approach. “I’m saving up forty dollars a week to buy him.”

“Maybe your dog will be the adventurous type and want to take a walk on the wild side of Catholic Lane?”

Her eyes went cold. He had gone too far. The green water froze, isolating him in a moment of dead silence, the silence preceding the power of a solid ice surface cracking with a roar of swollen tension. “I’m very pleased with my life … my … independence. When your divorce is final I’ll see y’all.”

“It’s not that simple. Nothing is final or forever. Not divorce decrees, not eternal love.”

“It is simple for me, and that’s final.”

A sudden electrical surge flickered the fluorescent tubes overhead, pouring cool blue light down upon her. The pools of her eyes widened, the blue light exposing at the depths of each a translucent pearl, mirrored souls of ancient oysters. Madonna on the reef.

St. Cloud tried his last and most obvious trick. “At least you can tell me your name?”

“Lila.”

Not easy for a bull to swim beneath the sea.

N
O TE ME TANGUES
, St. Cloud. Don’t let me down.” Justo nervously rubbed the gold wishbone hung from the thick chain around his neck. He peered expectantly down the long dimly lit corridor at the double-glass doors of the courthouse entrance closed against the brilliant afternoon sunlight outside. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Where is Voltaire?” Justo turned back to St. Cloud. “Look, I can’t get the kid to say much, what he does say I can barely make out its meaning. You’ve got to break through to him. Voltaire’s scared, doesn’t trust any of us. Take him into a side room here and win him over, understand? Then we go in to see the judge. At least we get the kid to answer rudimentary questions. Voltaire doesn’t answer any questions the judge can fill in all the blanks. The judge fills in the blanks and Voltaire gets a free ride up to the Everglades detention camp, then is deported straight back to Haiti.
Como te cae eso?
How do you like that?”

“Don’t like it. Voltaire’s too scared to talk. You can’t make a three-legged dog walk straight by cutting off its tail.”

“That’s exactly right.” Justo slapped St. Cloud grandly on the back. “I want you to unscare him. Grow him another leg so he can run away from this whole mess.”

“Maybe? Might not be possible. You found out yet what part of Haiti he’s from?”

“All he does is point on a map, puts a finger on the lower of those two peninsulas that stick out westerly like crab pinchers from the main body of the island.”

“Cibao Mountains?”

“That’s it.”

“Haiti means high land in Indian. Voltaire’s from the highest part of the poorest country in the Hemisphere. Gets to be over six thousand feet up there in those mountains, jungles been burned off, land overplanted a century ago, hardscrabble now.
Paysans
up there have really been isolated, more African than Haitian.”

“
Grande
voodoo.” Justo whistled softly beneath his breath, rubbing his gold bone.

“Mucho mucho grande
. Very superstitious people. God only knows what goes on up in those remote mountains, and he’s not telling.” At this moment St. Cloud wished he had a lucky bone to believe in, anything to believe in.

“They’re here!”

The double-glass doors of the entrance flew open, an armed deputy stepping in from harsh sunlight, behind him in handcuffs the slight black shadow of Voltaire, behind the shadow another armed deputy, all three eclipsing the sunlight as they moved down the dimly lit corridor.

St. Cloud wondered how much time he had to work this miracle Justo expected of him. He congratulated himself on having the foresight to bring along a pint of rum, maybe that would stop his body from shaking and shoot him full of confidence. His fingers clutched the neck of the bottle wrapped tightly in a paper bag. He wobbled with the fidgety fervor of an anarchist about to hurl a Molotov cocktail into the jaws of indecency. As Voltaire’s thin shadow came into stark relief St. Cloud’s fervor was replaced with contempt, contempt for his own meaningless life. Everybody betrays everybody sometime, but St. Cloud knew he had betrayed himself. He was the indecent one, and the handcuffed man-child standing before him, with scabbing wounds healing on a face scourged by starvation and sun, was too pure in his simple act of surviving to contend with.

Justo’s voice brought St. Cloud back from the brink of self-loathing. “This is the prisoner. You’ve got one hour before a Public Defender’s attorney gets here to take the prisoner to be arraigned.”

“Can you remove his handcuffs?”

“The prisoner is charged with murder on the high seas. He’s a very dangerous criminal.”

“Maybe he’ll be more willing to talk if he doesn’t feel like a trapped animal. Besides, where’s he going to go?”

“I’m glad you asked me that.” Justo grinned. He nodded to one of
the unsmiling deputies. “Release the prisoner and stand guard outside the door to this room behind us while the translator and prisoner have their conference. St. Cloud, you know what you have to do?”

“Yes. We’ve done it before, but it doesn’t always work.”

“It’ll work.” Justo rubbed his bone and opened the door behind him into a bare room with a table and two chairs. A boldface black-and-white clock on the wall with a long sweeping second hand served as the only decorative reminder of what the true issue of criminal court is about.
“No te me tangues.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t.” Justo slapped St. Cloud on the back with the bravado of a high-school football coach sending in his last bench warmer to save the big game. “By the way, at the end of the hour give the prisoner this.” Justo handed St. Cloud an egg carton tightly bound with thick twine. “He’ll need it.”

St. Cloud watched Justo disappear down the long corridor and through the glare of glass doors at the courthouse entrance. He wanted to follow Justo into the sun, head for the closest bar to stop his body’s trembling from fear and alcoholic craving. He reluctantly motioned Voltaire into the empty room, seating him beneath the clock’s second hand as it swept past three o’clock. St. Cloud closed the door and punched in the button lock protruding from the knob. He sat quickly and peeled the bag from the neck of the rum bottle, swigging half a pint of amber liquid down in a swift gulp. He offered the bottle to Voltaire. Homesick syrup for the dispossessed. A dumb thing to do. St. Cloud knew the kid wouldn’t touch it, would rather bite off the head of a rabid bat and drink its blood than accept anything from this white devil, this corrupt symbol of authority, this pathetic messenger from the land of the free. St. Cloud knew that was not what the boy saw. Voltaire saw power, authority, someone not to be trusted, someone who threatened his security and kept him imprisoned, kept him an indispensable cog in a system he couldn’t comprehend. Then again, who could know what the kid really thought? St. Cloud knew he didn’t, he just had to trust his instincts, keep his own guilt in the saddle and ride for a touchdown of understanding. Fifteen thousand just like Voltaire had been busted along the shores of Florida in the past year, from seaside Palm Beach mansions to coral beaches of the Keys. Who knew how many got through? Who knew how many drowned or died of exposure on the
six-hundred-mile journey of open sea? St. Cloud took another drink. Who knew how those people on Voltaire’s boat died? Who had the nightmare script? Who knew what this kid lived through, what horrors he had seen, if he understood his chances of being shipped up to the Everglades detention camp were better than even unless Justo pulled off his miracle? All Voltaire had left was his life, and that was shaved down to pathetic irony, for life to a
paysan
meant land. Land was not only life, but the fountainspring of dignity giving man the strength to rise above being a common animal, walk on two legs with pride. When torrential tropical rains came in small Haitian villages, washing farmed soil loose, eroding it down to rivers and into the sea, the
paysans
would say, “There goes our life.” St. Cloud had heard their tales, had translated for hundreds of them. These were a people spun in a cocoon of misery. Like this boy before him, they still had an awesome sense of trust which allowed them to go forward. Courage in their language meant hard work. No matter how unspeakable the adversity, man-made or natural, no matter how inexorably the hardship river of tears washed the soil of life to the sea, as long as there was land there was hope. As long as there was hope there were families. This boy was guarded by all the saints and gods rubbing shoulders in the
hamforts
, the mystery houses, all summoned up to guard the
matelotes
, the shipmates on their final journey.

3:15. Time was running out. St. Cloud removed his sweat-soaked sailing cap and took another drink. He smiled and offered a hello to Voltaire. Nothing. He reached into the inside pocket of his one and only “court coat,” a sun-faded blue and white seersucker affair once worn by smart leading men in B-movies of the forties. He fumbled a worn paperback book out of a pocket and placed it on the table. Would it work? It had before. He began hesitantly, reading in Creole learned twenty years before at the university.
“Le Petit Prince. This is the story of the Little Prince.”
He didn’t have to go too far with this. If it was going to work it would work by the end of chapter six. If not, then never. It was a dumb trick, but there was some magic in it. Magic was what St. Cloud most needed now. He would rather be reading the fierce lyric and metaphoric dazzle of Lorca or Neruda. It was painful to read this naive story. He must make it believable, make the boy believe. Was Voltaire listening? No sign of life on an otherwise smooth face crisscrossed with visible scars of sorrow, stoic. No trust in this room. Let the story work. This was a tale of two lost souls, two
travelers in the void who could teach each other in their similar sense of loss and longing. This was a world where the distrust of the adult crossed the trusting path of childhood:

St. Cloud spoke the words of the book’s adult narrator, a crashed aviator stranded in a desert where his technology was rendered useless, suddenly meeting a princely boy from a planet called Imagination. Was Voltaire buying it? No sign.

St. Cloud kept reading and thinking. The flashy soldierly uniform of the small Prince was something Voltaire should be able to conjure, it was a mockery of the swashbuckling military image modern-day Haitian dictators so covetously preserved as they scattered clouds of dollar bills from open-topped limousines to starving true believers; it mocked as well those who put forth the saber-wielding philosophy of
boule kay, coupe tet, burn the houses, cut off the heads
, which prevailed for ten years of civil war before the 1804 independence of Haiti. Yes, this Prince was an image of anarchic childhood innocence dressed in the doom of his aspiration to be adult. Such a French story. How odd it should take place in the Sahara Desert, another French-colonized domain. And the story of Haiti, former slaves of the French, barely surviving the illusion of freedom, ruled for generations by masters of ceremony dressed in pomp of former French masters. No harsher master than a former slave. Every master needs a dog, every dog a bone.

St. Cloud swigged another mouthful of rum. The liquidity of his thoughts drifted randomly between the lines of Saint-Exupéry’s simple allegory as the sound of his voice floated around the room:

Of course the baobabs: devils, false messiahs, dictators, Hitlers and Huns, Presidents for Life, totalitarian intolerance and moral intemperance dozing in the
“heart of the earth’s darkness, until some one among them is seized with the desire to awaken.”
The baobab begins as
“a charming little sprig”
and grows to split a planet in pieces. Where the Little Prince came from,
“the soil of that planet was infested with them.”
Where Voltaire came from, the hardship river of tears flowed endlessly to the sea carrying the soil of life. Catastrophe of the baobabs.

3:30. Maybe it wasn’t going to work. This time the magic would fail. St. Cloud was running out of rum and running out of time. A red flush rose to his face. He felt raw and hot, a piece of meat flung onto a fire. He felt a fool for wasting his time with this stuff. He should have tried another tack. What happened on Voltaire’s boat? St. Cloud was too far into the story to stop and ask. He was drunk and his words slurred. What the hell was he doing here anyway? How did Justo get him into this? He could make all the money he wanted just interpreting for the legions of Latin American drug smugglers and TV-watching, lite beer-drinking wife beaters. He didn’t need this, but he had it. The one thing consoling him was the thought that whenever he was all the way up shit creek without a paddle he could always get out and walk to shore. He walked to shore.