Mile Zero (7 page)

“Can I help y’all?”

It was her. Can you save me is more like it, St. Cloud thought. She was here. The perfect line embodied in perfect form. “Yes … you … ah … can,” he lied. “I was looking for Evelyn.” How can anybody have a voice like hers, every syllable drawn out slowly, writ large with the point of a sharpened stick in her native red Georgian dust. St. Cloud followed her voice down a row of cages filled with the fowl life of preening peach-faced lovebirds and jabbering orange-chinned parakeets. He came face to face with her seated behind a secretary’s desk. She looked up at him from a newspaper folded to the want-ads section, a white blouse buttoned at her neck. How seriously she took her job, only a twenty-year-old can be that serious, never again. She shifted ever so slightly, an ill-at-ease, self-conscious breeze. She wasn’t used to being in such a position of authority, left on the business side of a desk to deal with the public, responsible. Even with the shield of his sunglasses St. Cloud still had to blink to bring her into focus. So much white. The starched ruffled blouse blurred the air around her, paled the pure green of her eyes.

“Evelyn stepped out but y’all welcome to wait.”

The word
y’all
brought her into focus. She sent the word flying, like a yacht in a squall. Probably the closest thing St. Cloud would hear to poetry that day, a sound of southern female antiquity. He was afraid to remove his sunglasses for fear she would see the far from clothed truth in his eyes and call the cops or pull out a gun and plug him dead. Her syllables reverberated in his brain. It wasn’t at all what she said, but the source from which she spoke. Syllables with the slow hiss of summer rain hitting red-clay earth on a deserted country road. Thank God Evelyn wasn’t here. St. Cloud didn’t trust Evelyn with this girl. Who would? He wouldn’t trust anyone around
such a cool cookie, such a sublime southern vamp. His desire for this young woman made him feel like a fool. It takes a fool to love like a fool.

She spoke again. Why did she persist addressing him in the plural,
you-all
? Did she divine the drunken pack of identities he traveled with? Truth was, she spared no one her grammatical miscalculations, in that she was a true southern populist: You’all for one and one for y’all. He stood with a dumb grin on his face listening to a hiss of summer rain. Her brief downpour of syllables was followed by a slow breeze pushing between leaves, or was it the air-conditioner flapping her newspaper, a breeze rustling verbs, gentle as wind chimes carrying away leisurely consonants to a whisper, ghost speech of invisible inflections. He wanted to put his lips to hers, capture the ancient ghost of invisible speech, but first he had to disarm this woman who measured the emotions of life with such a different scale. If he understood his southern women correctly he knew the unconscious provocative pout of the red lips before him could swiftly turn into the fatal snake kiss of a swamp cottonmouth.

“Are y’all alright? I said Evelyn’s not he’yah.”

“Yes … ah, I heard you. Just thinking … thinking I’ve been in here four or five times and you always look at me the same way.”

“How’s that?” Soft rain again, kicking up dust.

“Like you’ve never seen me before. Right now, you don’t seem to be so much looking at me as through me.”

“I’m sorry.” The green eyes seemed to take him in for the first time, but in an awkward way, the hands of a blind person reaching out to a voice in the darkness. “I really didn’t mean to be rude or asleep or anything.” Her lips relaxed into a queer smile. “Some people say I’m asleep all the time. But no …” The queer smile puckered with embarrassment. “That’s not it at all. I’m really right here all the time. Didn’t mean to be rude. Y’all are Evelyn’s husband, aren’t y’all?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean?” The queer smile returned.

“The divorce isn’t final yet.”

“Sorry.” The smile disappeared. She seemed on a sudden point of sadness. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way, that I’m sorry you aren’t divorced. I meant I’m sorry, you know, about the whole thing.”

No, St. Cloud didn’t know. He didn’t understand the whole thing well enough to be sorry about it. The fact that Evelyn and her girlfriend managed this bird store together, two sapphic birds in
paradise, was she sorry about that, or was she sorry about the fact he still had some unaccountable powerful attraction to his wife and prowled around after her in night gardens like a lurking romeo? Maybe she was sorry he was such a wreck, a nearly twice-her-age man diminished to not much more than a befuddled St. Bernard trying to keep his eyes off of a great feast. It could be she was just plain sorry he was an “older man” radiating a frightening intensity he himself didn’t even understand. Who’s sorry now?

“I’m sorry too.” St. Cloud sat on the edge of the desk, perched with the same unnaturalness as the red-breasted toucan clinging to an aluminum imitation tree trunk planted in the back corner of the store. The toucan fish-eyed him as it scissored sunflower seeds in an immense hooked beak. It takes a fool to love like a fool. If this was going to work, and he was going to defang this southern cottonmouth so she wouldn’t strike him, he had to try his entire bag of tricks. Otherwise he would appear to be the one thing that would spook her in the opposite direction, a threatening fool.

“Well …” She smiled the queer smile and pulled the folded newspaper close to her body, as if it was a lead apron to protect her from unwanted radiation. “I guess I can’t sell you a Moluccan cockatoo today?”

“How about showing me one anyway?” St. Cloud took trick number one from his bag. “I’m very interested in rare birds. You know I named this place ten years ago.”

She rose from behind the desk and let the newspaper fall away. There was something brazen about her body, which she held in a very chaste way. All white. She dressed all in white, even the skirt which went straight to her knees. She could be taken anywhere, from some southern cracker capital to a one-gas-station backwater bayou town. She would always be queen of peaches, heart of magnolia. Beyond the cloud of white she dressed in was the sameness of the skin, a flawless disconcerting color. She didn’t have a full-bodied tan like those sported so boldly by the island girls lying barebreasted on the beach, rather a hue glowed from within, as if her skin had been anointed with the essence of hickory oil, an amber gleam. She walked between the steel cages, the brown hair cut at her shoulders flew away from her face as she turned back to fix him with the queer smile. “You’re the one who gave this store its funny name? People always come in and ask me what it means, ‘Kiss My Linda.’ They ask me what kind of place this is.”

“I think ‘Kiss My Linda’ is kind of catchy, has a certain spin.”

“So?” She slid the door of a high conical cage open and offered the salmon-crested cockatoo inside her slender finger to hop onto from its perch. “What does it mean?”

“Kiss my pretty. But then it could mean kiss my pretty little whatever. That’s what it really means. Evelyn asked me once what the whatever was, I told her she had the prettiest little whatever I ever kissed. It’s a kind of private joke, because Evelyn never thought the store would make it. I told her if it didn’t, well, people could then just kiss her pretty little whatever, the prophecy of the sign would have the last laugh.”

The cockatoo swung onto her finger and she withdrew it from the cage. The bird hunched back its feathered shoulders and nibbled at her lips and ears. A low chatter of contentment ebbed from the fluffed creature’s arched throat, swelling to a sustained high-pitched twill, exciting the surrounding caged birds to a clattering jungle chorus. “That’s a cute story.” She spoke her words calmly into the raucous activity around her.

She was from the land of cute. Cute this, cute that, cute love, cute murder, it was all cute, and all so deceiving. St. Cloud wondered why he had such an unaccountable attraction to this woman who had entered his life so recently. She started turning up late at night drifting alone along Duval Street, protected by a serene beauty which scared off the usual needle-boy thugs and hot-rod Navy romeos cruising the bars for someone to write home about. She was after the music, floating from bar to bar where rock-and-roll bands and solo guitar pickers plied their trade to locals and tourists listening for a lyric to hang a bad love affair on. Seldom was she approached, although she was obviously the answer to most men’s desire, but packaged in such bright, fleshy reality she prevailed and intimidated. She dressed at night in a loose white cotton dress leaving everything to be desired open to the observing mind’s eye. When approached there were always a few words, a slight laugh and tilt of her head, sending the suitor off in an awkward dogtrot, humbled to be allowed the privilege of awaiting his turn at the back of some invisible line that wound out the door, along the neon-lit one-mile length of Duval Street stretching end to end from the Atlantic Ocean on one side to the Gulf of Mexico on the other. Sometimes she was ready to dance, so one of the brave few who approached her was allowed to escort her into the sweating crowd gyrating before the electrical blast of notes from refrigerator-size
loudspeakers. She never looked at her partner, the queer smile on her face fixed far away, as if dancing with someone thousands of miles distant. She stayed cool and irresistible, no matter how hot the crowded room or how robustly the randy sideshow suitors hooted their lust. St. Cloud had never seen anything like it, and he thought he had seen things never seen by man before, drunk or drugged. She was one cute player, and if he was going to win he had to play her cute game.

“Thanks for your earlier offer of selling me a bird, but I don’t need one.” St. Cloud summoned up what he thought was his most beguiling smile. “Maybe I can buy this fellow for you.” He pointed at the cockatoo balanced on her finger. “You seem to create quite an effect on him. Seems a pity to keep the two of you separated.”

The cockatoo craned its neck, its salmon-crested head feathers stiffening into a brilliant crown. She stroked the cockatoo’s outstretched neck. “I’m not so special. This little guy is just a born lover. He’s been handled by Evelyn ever since he got out of the egg. Besides, I’m really a dog person. I’m saving up to buy a dog.”

St. Cloud pulled another trick from his bag. “That’s what you were looking for in the want ads when I came in?”

“How did y’all know that? I found one just today up past Little Torch Key. Someone has a litter and I called and said I’d put down a twenty-five-dollar deposit. They only have one left and want four hundred dollars for him. I don’t know if they’ll hold him until I can get all the money.”

“Evelyn’s very good about those things, why don’t you ask her to give you an advance?”

“No.” She stopped stroking the cockatoo and quickly placed it back in its cage, sliding the door closed with a loud clack. “I’ll earn my own money.” The queer little smile left her lips. She turned and walked back toward the desk.

St. Cloud now knew what it felt like to be dismissed by her like one of the boys at the bar waiting for a dance, sent to the back of the line. He needed to get another trick out of his bag. She was moving away from him, down the row of cages. Then he understood. The fluid way she moved, as if gravity was an irritant which had to be pushed aside, the sway of hips, the slant of rounded calves, the forward tilt of her shoulders, all of it combined did not add up to the somnolent step of a sleepwalker, but of someone walking underwater. He finally understood what the inexplicable attraction was, why he had to talk
to her instead of just tracking her in his nocturnal wanderings. She sat at the desk and looked back at him, the blur of her eyes sea green. Now he knew. She was the woman on the underwater reef in his recurring dream, submerged in Neptune’s murky cobalt closet, a wealth of seaweed wreathed in her hair, white body pierced by fish slipping through thighs. He moved toward her between the cages with a newly acquired heaviness in his legs. Not easy for a bull to swim beneath the sea.

St. Cloud made his way to the desk, clung to its edge like it was the side of a life raft. He struggled to get one more trick out of his bag before he drowned. “Can I see you? I must see you. I must talk to you.”

“Y’all are seeing me.” She straightened in her chair, pushing away from the desperate pleading in his voice.

“I don’t mean here. I mean after you get off. I mean tonight. Where do you live?”

“I live on a lane called love.” She observed him warily, the fluorescent tubes above cast a cool light over her aloofness. “Do y’all know Love Lane?” She threw the question out unexpectedly, as if sensing the drowning man before her would go under without something to buoy him up. “It does sound corny, but it’s true. Love Lane’s behind the library. Key West is filled with funny little lanes with cute names.”

St. Cloud leaned toward her from the edge of the desk, then pulled back, afraid of getting in over his head. The breeze of the air-conditioner touched up the fall of her brown hair, exposing the sides of her face, slender bones pressed an indentation like inverted quarters of the moon at the top of each cheek. “I live on Catholic Lane.” He spoke the words slowly, struggling to put more distance between himself and the green drowning pools. “If we can only get the two lanes end to end we could make one long street of Christian Love.”

She wasn’t buying his clumsy trickery. “When does a lane become a street? I moved down here from Georgia, up there we have Main Streets and Second Avenues. No matter how small the town, or little the streets get, they never become lanes.”

“A lane becomes a street when a pier becomes a bridge.”

“What do y’all mean by that?”

“James Joyce, a writer, said a pier is a disappointed bridge.”

“I’m not disappointed with my little lane. I’m very happy there. A place of my own where I come and go as I please. I hope my little
lane never becomes a street, that would be too busy and complicated. I don’t want complications on my lane.”

“Even if it becomes a street of brotherly love and kisses?”

“I’ve got all the love and kisses I need.”

“Who are you saving them for?”