Mile Zero (9 page)

St. Cloud continued the story. Their story. The history of the world in a simple children’s book. As he read he sensed he was growing dumber by the moment. His clumsy syllables tumbled over each other into the room:

With belabored breath fueled by fumes of rum St. Cloud staggered on into chapter six. It was now or never. Just a half page to go. If the magic didn’t work it was a trip up the Everglades, where the alligators would be the least of Voltaire’s problems:

There it was, a gasp. St. Cloud looked up from the battered book into Voltaire’s brown eyes filled with longing and pain, quick breaths
heaving his thin shoulders back. Yes, my friend, St. Cloud wanted to say, you may feel for our little Prince here in the book, for he is you, and you are him. So far from home, so far from sunsets, always thinking the nightmare will end and you will awake at home. But your home
is
the nightmare, a planet split by baobab Presidents for Life, or worse:

Tears flowed in a silent stream from Voltaire. His lips, scabbed from his ordeal on the boat, quivered. He blinked, trying to dam the tears. He looked at St. Cloud for the answer to stop his quiet sobbing. St, Cloud continued reading, rum ringing in his head, forcing croaking words through a knot in his throat:

It is all magic in the jungle. St. Cloud pulled a kerchief from his seersucker coat and passed it across to Voltaire.

“Merci.”
The boy wiped roughly at his face, irritating the crisscross of sun-blistered scabs.
“Merci beaucoup.”

St. Cloud wanted to trade places with Voltaire. He clenched his teeth to suppress the emotion welling up through the rum-slowed throbbing in his veins. How much he desired to get this boy off the shark hook. He pushed the egg carton across the table and smiled, continuing to use his college-learned Creole. “Open it.”

Voltaire fingered the carton with trembling hands. He pulled at the twine and stopped, looking to St. Cloud for encouragement. St. Cloud smiled. “Go on, don’t fear.” Voltaire broke the twine bindings, slowly raised the carton lid, tilting his head cautiously to one side to
gain an advance glance at unknown contents, which could spring out with the force of a lion onto a lamb’s back. He bent the lid all the way over. Eleven of the twelve hollowed indentations intended for eggs were empty. Nestled in one hollow was a small pigskin bag bound by overlays of braided goat hair and knotted to an oil-stained leather necklace. An
ouanga
bag. The same bag St. Cloud noticed Justo pick up when it dropped from Voltaire’s fist while he was being lifted onto the paramedics’ stretcher at Mallory Dock. Had anyone else seen Justo take the bag? St. Cloud never mentioned that he had seen it. Justo had his way of operating. There were things on the island Justo knew that should never be explained, should always remain hidden, that’s why they were hidden. People know better than to disturb an accommodation that has taken generations to establish. Such is the foundation of civilization, an accommodation between opposing forces, good and evil, fear and power. Don’t rock the boat. Go your own way. Don’t look back, you won’t like what you see. This was Justo’s philosophy as St. Cloud understood it, so he never mentioned the bag.

Voltaire carefully lifted the
ouanga
bag from the carton, unraveled its leather necklace, looping it over his head so the knotted bag came to rest against bare skin exposed in the V at the top of his unbuttoned shirt. For the first time he smiled. A sense of calm came into him. What was in the bag? St. Cloud wondered. Dove hearts? Bat teeth? Lizard jaws? Crow feathers? Cat’s eye? Lucky stones? Snake bones? Anything for some fast luck in the jungle. St. Cloud would probably never know the contents. All he knew was he had to take what he could get. And what he could get from Voltaire was flying fish.

In Voltaire’s village people were starving, throughout the mountains people were starving, yet the Tonton Macoutes still came at night searching for the
comoquin
, those suspected of belonging to the club of traitors speaking badly of the government, the spies and cowards who plotted escape to America. The Tontons came with trucks grinding through the night, smashing doors and leading men away in ropes. One night they took Voltaire’s father, one night they took Voltaire himself. His hands tied, he stood with head bowed among many men in a truck bumping for miles along a darkened road until stopping, each man pulled out at gunpoint and placed in one of four lines before the stone wall of a prison, waiting to be escorted in and interviewed by the chief Tonton. A few men came back out of the
prison and were herded into the truck, most did not return. Before dawn those still left in line began to wail with fear. When Voltaire was taken before the chief he could not stop wailing. “What’s wrong with you,” the chief demanded. “You have no right to scream like this! I want you to go home and shut your mouth! I never want to hear from you again!” When the truck was ready to go only eight men were in it. The truck swung around behind the prison, rumbled down a cobblestone road, past the stench of the prison dump, scattering surprised dogs that tore at a fresh pile of beaten men with hands bound by ropes. Many on the truck recognized brothers, fathers, uncles, friends. No one made a sound.

Voltaire’s mother once journeyed to the prison where her husband was kept, then she was followed by Tontons in a jeep for the five hours it took her to walk back to her village. The Tontons asked questions of her neighbors, people stopped talking to her. What the Tontons did not know was she had no heart to return to the prison, what she saw there was not the man she loved, but a tortured body covered with blood, the face beaten beyond a familiar bone, the mind wandering around with no one to control it, a stream of jibberish flowing from smashed lips. Voltaire’s mother later heard the man she loved died breathing blood into his brain. That is when her brother, Romulus, made his decision to escape by boat to America. Romulus did not have the two thousand dollars to pay the smugglers for the trip, but when he got to America the smugglers promised he could earn the money and send it back, he could earn the money to support his seven children too, and send it back. Romulus’ boat lost its way. The smugglers had promised there would be someone on board to navigate, but there were only simple
paysans
who understood how to plant by a full moon and harvest beneath a bright sun, they knew nothing of how nocturnal celestial lights could point a boat right. Romulus’ boat came into Miami Beach on a cloudless summer day, past speeding yachts and waving water-skiers. Gleaming glass buildings towered in a wall along the sand, cars roared along a palm-fringed boulevard, the loud beat of rhythmic radio music was in the air and a line of police vans was parked, waiting with uniformed policemen watching from behind sunglasses as the Haitian boat drifted aimlessly to shore. There was no turning back, nowhere to run, the policemen had rifles and dogs. The people of Romulus’ boat jumped overboard into warm surf, their few belongings bundled and balanced on their
heads as they walked among the greased sunbathers of the crowded beach and threw up their hands in surrender.

Romulus was taken to the detention center in the Everglades, held for two months, then deported back to Haiti. The Tontons put him in Fort Dimanche prison outside of Port-au-Prince. Most men do not leave Fort Dimanche; if they are not beaten to death they die of tuberculosis, dysentery, or having the blood sucked from them by scores of vermin. Romulus survived six months and made it back to his family in the village high in the Cibao Mountains, his disfigured body weighing less than eighty-five pounds. Romulus needed all the security he could get to protect him. Romulus needed
le bon Dieu
, Jesus Christ, he needed Maît’ Carrefour, the master who stands guard at earthly gates and keeps a protective eye on homes, roads and paths, he needed a thousand
ouangas
to preserve him from the smugglers, whom he still owed two thousand dollars. Because Romulus had taken the sea journey to America and was sent back without money he was made an example of by the smugglers, an example used often, an example no amount of security could protect a man from. Romulus was chopped like a pig, screaming in the night as the goats made milk, axes dismembering his body. You don’t pay the price, you pay with your life.

So it was now to Voltaire, the oldest, to support his mother, and his Uncle Romulus’ family of seven children. The only way to do this was to leave the village and journey to where the jobs were. Voltaire went to the smugglers and promised to pay for his passage once he got to America. Unlike Romulus’ boat, Voltaire’s sailed immediately into trouble, horrible trouble. Before Voltaire’s journey his mother took him to a mystery house at the crossroads for a
Wete Mo Na Dlo
, a ceremony of fishing a deceased one’s soul from the water. But no one Voltaire knew had died in water. He did not understand why his mother had taken him to the ceremony. On Voltaire’s first night out the boat caught the Caribbean current toward Cuba, a full moon silvered the sea and fish began to fly, everywhere sparkling wings over water. The people became very quiet and huddled low beneath the gunwale, for they knew that to be struck by a flying fish is to die. A flying fish is the arrow shot from the ghostly bow of a deceased one. The fish flew and flew. No one could hide. Ghost arrows never miss their intended mark.

4:00. Loud knocking at the door brought St. Cloud up from
Voltaire’s vision of flying fish. Voltaire stopped talking, looking at the door with apprehension. You don’t pay the price, you pay with your life. St. Cloud rose and stretched a trembling hand across the table, not so much to help Voltaire up, but to support him in his ordeal.

“Come, my philosopher friend. Judgment, not justice, awaits you.”

H
ANDSOMEMOST
Jimmy had one dead greyhound and was about to pop number two. He had to wait for another airplane to take off so nobody could hear his next gunshot. Handsomemost liked the thought that the people in the last airplane, lifting up and off at the end of the runway where the land gave itself back to swampy mangrove marsh, had no idea he was down below taking one more ugly dog out of the race. He could have taken the greyhounds to the city dump to pop them, but that would have meant a long drive with dogs drooling all over the upholstery of his expensive Japanese sports car. The other thing about the dump was the sea gulls, hordes of sea gulls swooping around in thermal gusts over the mountain of garbage that had grown to become the highest man-made point in the Florida Keys. Those sea gulls gave Handsomemost the jitters, ruined his sense of romance and style. Style was what Handsomemost Jimmy prided himself most in, besides, it stank out there at the dump. Handsomemost liked to think he had style in spades. He wasn’t just a scammer gambler from the dark side of town. He had worked his way up to a cultivated image. Handsomemost slithered around in tailored black slacks, and no matter what the weather, he made certain their crease never gave out. He sported black silk shirts, kept them open way down the front to display a necklace of two-fist-size doubloons fetched up from one of the Spanish wrecks off the reef. The doubloons were real, not the imitations sold around town to tourist coin collectors, but real gold that glittered like the gold of Handsomemost’s heavy bracelet watch. Handsomemost was not to be trifled with. He liked white powder and white women, bought and sold both, used and
abused both, it was a man’s right. Handsomemost bought and sold racehorses and racing dogs, airplanes and powerboats. He didn’t like to be trifled with. He was not one of the local white-boy scammers who figured if he wore a tight Hawaiian shirt, a gold earring, had a visible tattoo and brought a load of marijuana up from Belize, he was a pirate. What that kind of white boy was was just a little less dumb than the dumb narcs who couldn’t catch him. The worst thing about white scammers like that was they had bad taste in music, not even bad, terrible. Handsomemost liked to think he was black because he was smart, not the other way around. He liked to romance a dishonest wage from an honest night’s work. He prided himself that he was the type of scammer who would shoot a man for a dime and give him change.