Mile Zero (16 page)

N
OTHING
is forever, not even eternal love. If the rats don’t get you the scorpions will. Still, St. Cloud hoped. Lost in his own shadow he trailed the moist impressions of barefoot prints left by Evelyn and her companion along the heat-cracked sidewalk. The full moon hung at the street’s deserted end, its orange lantern eye an unblinking target for the barbed lunacy of cats in shadows confessing consummate pain of vented lust. Behind the moon lightning stabbed a distant sky, a tumble of stars fell south across the Tropic of Cancer toward Cuba, thunder boomed beyond the Great Bahama Bank. The streets St. Cloud walked all became dead-end alligator alleys on a coral-capped island shaped by shipwrecked dreams and hurricane reality. An anxious atmosphere presided over the island suspended within the confluence of the moody Gulf of Mexico and the torrent of the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Here luck is determined by the roll of the waves. No matter how complex or simple one’s life is rigged all bait becomes equal beneath such vast ocean bodies obeying solar gravitational spin and lunar countercurrent force. Through the centuries this reality exacted from all a fearful belief in the great currents of chance. The island’s mansions and shacks of Bahamian freemen, Cuban cigarmakers, renegade sea captains, turtle hunters, shrimpers, sponge gatherers and rumrunners were built with backs to the sea, the direction from which hurricanes and pirates roared ashore. Tide turning winds of unpredictability created an inward architecture. Houses were constructed cheek by jowl, close enough to block boisterous weather and allow the call of alarm to pass from one high-perched porch to another. The island city reeked with an
implacable sense of impermanence, was made incestuous by communal fear of the world beyond its protective reef.

Skeletal house shadows stole across deserted streets in moonlight, their fragile outlines leapt over St. Cloud onto opposite rooftops, darkening windows and doors. Dreams of fear and lust clawed through rooftops and beneath subconscious sheets. Intimate shapes slipped into obscure crevices, coupling sleepers, producing progeny of an unspoken conspiracy. The sanest sleepers succumbed to this incestuous scheme. Upon awakening all could abandon responsibility for personal actions, assume a collective cloak of dementia imposed the night before by the genuinely mad, for there were only two types of people on the island, scorpions and rats. That is what many islanders believed. St. Cloud believed it too, and he was not descended from runaway British slaves or clipper-ship wreckers. If rats scurried on the gingerbread spindles of a white veranda, then scorpions were not to be found sunning themselves on the high widow’s walk. If scorpions slithered down yellow-pine bedroom walls, no rats were gnawing in the attic. Houses are inhabited by scorpions or rats. That is what the old Conchs say. If the two dwell together there will be the devil who dwells beneath the rock of the island to pay. Certain as calm weather will one day become a howling squall and boisterous weather become hurricane El Finito, rats and scorpions are destined to intertwine in the island’s nocturnal wanderings, the sleepers awaken to a reality not yet dreamed.

Nothing is forever, not even eternal love. Still, St. Cloud followed Evelyn beneath brightening streetlights haloed by sultry salt air flowing fresh from the Florida Bay. How does a man track a woman? There seemed only bare skin between Evelyn and the world. St. Cloud used her familiar scent as guide. Her body glowed with cool sweat, thin red material was banded over breasts and clasped in the juncture of a taut back, whiteness of abbreviated shorts flashed at the top of tanned legs. She wore less of something and more of nothing. St. Cloud felt the urging toward her he was never able to control, which over years Evelyn had been able to manipulate, operate the passion of her purpose just beyond his reach. Still he reached, even when he knew Evelyn was beyond touching, was with someone else, as she was now. St. Cloud followed and lurked, no better than the phantom cats screeching in the backyard of the island’s imagination. What difference did it make if he and Evelyn were getting a divorce? They were still
married, and the town’s screeching cats still had to screw standing up because the streets were so narrow, while dogs stood on their heads just to wag their tails. Phantom rapist, why couldn’t he let Evelyn go? This is an island, no matter how far you go you always have to turn around and come back. What goes around comes around. Maybe that was it. Evelyn was his history, represented his memories. Without Evelyn his youth disappeared, his essence evaporated. Maybe he was simply skulking around his past, a vicarious seducer of distant memories, raping his own dreams. Could he let her go?

St. Cloud had become a man of limited means and narrow streets, a lurking back-alley lizard, a three-minute love affair in a two-minute town. What was the poetic line of that other drunken poetic scammer he was fond of? That other ranting romantic of song searching for the muse in the hollow worm at the bottom of every mescal bottle, the worm which crawls through wood-heart soul of every man destined to die a boy. St. Cloud had to stop drinking. He was losing it. Come back, little memory. Now it was coming closer, on its knees, a worm of an idea crawling. It was about the eye. Yes.
The eye is jealous
. It was coming back. That’s it. Jealousy.
The eye is jealous of whatever moves and the heart
—always the heart—
is too far buried in the sand to tell
.

Evelyn and the slender woman who held her hand turned the corner at the end of the street.
Whatever moves
. The heart moves in sand despite its blind eye. Did St. Cloud want to smash Evelyn’s present reality to keep forever her muse trapped in the perfect bottle of their shared past? Stars in his eyes, brains in his shoes, another whiskey waltz. He was not thinking straight. Worms don’t move straight in mud, a sideways slither is often the quickest route home. St. Cloud was walking underwater again, pushing toward the jeweled surface. So much history between the two of them. All that water under the bridge, over his head. He passed beneath the outstretched arms of a night-blooming cactus tree, its star-shaped flowers winking back at a starry sky. Stars in his eyes, brains in his shoes, another whiskey waltz. Evelyn was halfway up the next block, a smooth flash of flesh. Frogs clamored, restless bull-throated insect suckers baying at a foreign moon. They could smell rain coming.

Lightning flared closer in the south, storm off the coast of Cuba. It was late. Radio Havana was finally off the air. Into its static void rushed powerful stations from Miami, invading the airwaves of the tropical workers’ paradise with promise of faster cars, clearer skin
and prune-slick regularity. American Rock and Roll was coming on strong. Little Richard sí! Marx no, viva Elvis! Rock and Roll the Revolutionary soul. While out beyond the Dry Tortugas Hurricane El Finito lurked, big boisterous blow biding his time before roaring through waning dog days to fix problems for rockers and despots. St. Cloud understood it was all about water, to go out on it, to be part of it, surrounded. The island was an elaborate dock of dreams lost in its own sea of time, kept afloat by the lust and lure of the ultimate siren song.

A motorcycle pierced through dreams, screamed down a steamy side street far across the island, reverberating between houses, entangling in St. Cloud’s mind. It was the identical whine of a marijuana-loaded cigarette boat running three skips and a heartbeat ahead of a Coast Guard cutter, losing itself in a mangrove maze of shallow water back country, zeroing in on the promise of a million-dollar profit or a cute seven-year stretch in an upstate panhandle prison. Dreams and schemes tangled as St. Cloud stumbled around to the back of Evelyn’s house. He leaned against the smoothed trunk of a banyan, deep in shadow. Through the open shutters of Evelyn’s bedroom a ladder of light was cast into the garden, its last bright step falling at St. Cloud’s feet. Slouched beneath the banyan he had a cockeyed perspective into the bedroom. Images of two women inside flickered insistent as a silent movie through slatted shutters, movements broken into isolated moments, the full motive of female gestures incomplete. Oriental robes loosened on bodies, silk flash. St. Cloud moaned. This had to stop. The only thing worse than drunken deception is illuminating self-pity. Thank God for the crutch of a banyan tree with its roots anchored in ancient coral rock to hold a man up, to steady the aim of his desire, support his sideways progress.

The Conchs say the devil is under the rock of the island. St. Cloud tried to get a hold of himself. The devil was in him. That’s why he was here, on the outside looking in the window of the present, rubbing his loss against the smoky glass of memory. He still couldn’t get in. There was no clear glass here, only cocked shutters sheltering silken moments, robes slipping from shoulders, flare of match, damp scent of marijuana floating from within, blending with airborne secretion of jasmine. This garden was sucking St. Cloud into its green hole. Used to be his garden, his bedroom, his wife with a fallen silk robe gathered around ankles, his muse, his Madonna. Why do this, why
persist? What snake did he expect to find in this Eden? What music slipping the strange skin of its song did he expect to hear?

Lightning illuminated the garden, exposing at St. Cloud’s feet a swirl of ants disassembling an upturned Cuban Death’s Head palmetto bug, its many legs already devoured. Thunder bellowed closer. The rain from New Spain was almost here. Not much time. The ants chewed hurriedly, a circular, purposive flurry, spiriting away neat carcass hunks into a secret recess to make an honest feast in a disquieting world. The garden fell back into its dark moments. Warm rain from New Spain arrived, spattering broad leaves. Lizards leapt in the grass, frogs crooned. What was embroidered on those silk robes sliding off bodies? Dragons, fiery tongues entwined? The shutters flew open in the rainy breeze, scorpions slithered up bedroom walls. Evelyn rose from the swell of a female sea. Intruding rain mixed with the sweat of exposed skin. She leaned forward to claim the banging shutters, arms outstretched from the swing of her breasts. She paused. Her words cast into rain hissing across the garden before the shutters enclosed her. “Good night, St. Cloud.”

Rain beat on the shuttered world of women. St. Cloud could see nothing within now. Evelyn’s words caught him off guard, froze him beneath the banyan in a tropical still life, a mute male statue steaming in the rain. The frogs hushed as beaked turtles went about their stealthy business in deep grass. The island opened to the fleeting rain from New Spain. Out across the Caribbean, over the edge of the world where Christopher Columbus hit his home run, the Madonna on the reef moaned her music underwater. St. Cloud was afraid to move, to lose the strange sound winging on a seaborne wind. The blurred image of Lila swam before him, calling the siren song of a muse emerging anew. If only there were words to capture her illusion. The Madonna on the reef was an illusion, like the Spanish galleons loaded with gold booty from the jungles and towering peaks of New Spain. All illusion. The gold in the ground had no more worth than chalk, until man invested value in it, was willing to die for it, commit a mother lode of sins on two continents for it. One of those ancient galleons had the Virgin Mary carved on its bow, halo of gold around her head, cutting through wind and waves, Mother Protector, Christian Conqueror, Saint of Saints, Virgin Conquistador. Out there on the sea the Virgin struck a reef, the galleon smashed to valueless timber, cut into a thousand pieces by the power of an impervious
tide. Sailor flesh becomes fish flesh. Conquistadores are conquered. Gold takes on the currency of sand, a glittering handful of legend. Still, there are those who follow that Madonna to the reef, go down with her, embrace the stormy illusion, all for the transitory chance to touch the glittering legend of their own lives.

R
UM RHUMBA
. St. Cloud felt he was right in step with the scorpions and rats. A tricky whiskey waltz to navigate the risk of cracked sidewalks and woeful fat-bodied Cuban Death’s Head bugs plodding to primordial beat, beating a path from his drunken path. He didn’t care to crush the creatures. St. Cloud thought them somehow charmed, if not sacred. Others saw them as overblown cockroaches on a filthy-bellied prowl to be stomped from existence. To step on one was to defy the gods, or worse. As Isaac said, it would be like pissing in the eye of the Sphinx. It was Isaac St. Cloud was after now. Only Isaac could put out the fire in his brain, flood his heart with some common sense after a night finally ending near dawn with Brogan in the Wreck Room and more MK talk. Brogan seemed to know so many intimate details about his brother’s life St. Cloud suspected Brogan didn’t have a brother. Maybe Brogan was talking about himself in a former life before drifting to Key West and dedicating himself to snatching sunken treasure from the jaws of time. Maybe Brogan was MK. St. Cloud didn’t know. Everyone this far south of the south seemed to have left behind a shadow life. Perhaps Brogan simply embellished the singular tune of his existence into the full-blown mystery opera of MK. Perhaps, but not probable. There was a strange kinship of spirit St. Cloud felt from what he’d heard about MK. He did not feel such kinship with Brogan. St. Cloud suspected the reality of MK did not originate in Brogan’s mind, but sprang from a deeper source. It all had to do with MK and St. Cloud being on opposite sides during the Vietnam war: one, the renegade protester; the other, a trained assassin. It had something to do with
that, an odd circle closing after a generation passed. The one who fought the war, the one who fought against it, ironically, the last two who cared. It had to do with that, but that was not everything. Everything was larger, confused and beyond reach. St. Cloud doubted Brogan’s drunken meanderings about MK would illuminate final truth. MK was a ghost in more ways than one. St. Cloud had never met the man. MK had come to the island and put his people into place years before St. Cloud and Evelyn arrived. MK was forever on the lips of many, a man seldom seen but whose presence was always felt. St. Cloud listened closely to Brogan’s rantings about his brother because it seemed Brogan was talking about what St. Cloud himself could easily have become. If fate had stopped the wheel of chance on an opposite number, St. Cloud would be MK; they were the reverse of one another, queerly nailed together on the cross of time. What St. Cloud had been trying all these years to wash away in a sea of alcohol was a war he couldn’t forget, a war nobody else remembered except those who fought in it or against it, the two now like reluctant partners from a bad marriage who, decades after the divorce, are doomed to remember their communal pain, condemned to relive moment to moment the crucial matter of the past, until the past becomes ever present. Enemies of the past now had become survivor warriors of the present. Such grand irony, the few left from the Vietnam generation whose consciences had been burned out were now fated to dance a duet of despair. Brash innocence had been slaughtered a generation before, the heroes of darkness were condemned to the light at the end of the tunnel. St. Cloud understood both he and MK were true POW’s of the skeletal memories of a nearly forgotten war, both left with leftover lives to flesh out. Conscience had not been taken prisoner, conscience had long since been lost to both.