Mile Zero (11 page)

“I already talked to my people about it and this is outside my people. I thought your people might know. Might be your people’s kind of thing, which is different.”

“It be different.”

“How different? Suppose you tell me, or do you want me to run a check on this gun of yours to see what kind of exciting life it’s had?”

“There be things not to talk about. Don’t be a shitkicker. A shitkicker, he sees a big ol pile of shit on the far side of the street, he run over and kick it. Best you pass it on by. The maggots and the flies of this bad world will take care of the shit piles. Ask me bout somethin else. Hey, I got an idea for you. You want a dog?”

“I’m crossing the street to kick the shit.”

“This here be a nice dog for you. Don’t make a mistake and pass him up.” Handsomemost winced from the pain in his groin as he knelt next to the leashed greyhound. He ran a hand along the animal’s arched back, down over the thrust of its boned ribcage, underneath to the soft belly, his diamond-ringed fingers stroking the short hairs in time to the rapid thump of a racing heart. “This here dog be a good pal. Keep you out of harm’s way because he don’t know shit from apple butter. That’s why his racin days be over. This fella, he turned into a biter instead of chasin the little metal bunny. Be your pal for life. He don’t bite people, just other dogs when he be runnin with em. This biter cost me over eight thousand in handlin and trainin fees. He be yours for the takin.”

“Untie him.”

“Ah-hah!” Handsomemost chuckled deep in his throat as he pulled at the end of the leash knotted to the mangrove stump. “Knew you be an animal lover.”

“I want you to untie him because I don’t want him in the way when I blow the apple butter out your ears.” Justo aimed the gun at Handsomemost’s head.
“Dos aves de rapiña no mantienen compañía.”

“Don’t be givin me none of that Cuban mumbo-jumbo. Just what you be talkin, bubba?”

“Two birds of prey do not hunt together.”

“No more triflin with me. You be triflin too much. I don’t be no triflin man.” He jerked the knot of the greyhound’s leash free.

Justo kept the gun on Handsomemost as he released the dog. Maybe he wasn’t going to get this cagey bird to talk. Maybe Handsomemost didn’t know anything about the weirdness and was just playing it up as something he could trade. Justo looked over to the end of the runway where a plane nosed into air, its silver belly passing overhead, the whiny propellers echoing across the mangrove swamp. It seemed to Justo a perfect opportunity to put one more hot dog out of business.

“Don’t be a shitkicker!” Handsomemost sensed what Justo was about to do, stumbling backwards into a tangle of mangrove roots with his hands held high. “Remember the chickens and goats! Don’t mess with the Saints!”

Justo lowered the gun. “Put the greyhound in the back of my car and beat it before I outthink myself.”

“Free doggy bones for everyone.” Handsomemost chuckled, stooping to grab the greyhound’s leash. “I owe you one.”

“Two.”

“One. The Saints have to be fed.”

T
HE SAINTS
have to be fed. Recently it had become more famine than feast. Justo fumbled open the bag of greasy conch fritters on the car seat next to him as he turned off Duval Street, headed toward the cemetery. He ground the chewy conch meat between his teeth and swallowed it in a lump destined to give him a pain before another
mal día
was over. Maybe he should have taken Handsomemost out for the count. Perfect opportunity, armed and dangerous. But then Handsomemost occupied a sort of demilitarized zone of amorality, tap-dancing in alligator loafers between old gods and new devils, owing allegiance to both, offering loyalty to none, enchanted fool.
Aunque la mona se vista de seda, mona se queda
. The monkey in silk is still a monkey.

The greyhound in the backseat tipped its long snoot over Justo’s shoulder, sniffing the spicy odor of conch meat, yawning its mouth open and licking Justo’s cheek in a nonchalant gesture of familiarity. Ocho, Number Eight, is what I’ll call you, Justo decided, fingering another fritter from the greasy bag for the dog. Number Eight because I sense you’ve spent your entire short life behind the eight ball about to be snookered. Here you go, Ocho, Justo pushed a fritter into the dog’s obliging mouth, just don’t tell anybody where you got it. Ocho fixed Justo with the caring gaze of a confidant and licked his lips shut. Ocho had the contented look of a dog a man could tell his troubles to.
Mal día
, Ocho, Justo sighed, another bad day begun, how I wish I could have stayed in bed this morning with Rosella. Sometimes I think a man gets up and goes to work just to deny himself the pleasure of his wife. A man walks around all day with that denial
trailing him like a tail he doesn’t know what to do with, a tail growing right out the back of his pants and dragging behind in the dust. True lust can be a curse. You have to keep turning it down if you want to heat it up. Finally the tail dragging in the dust grows so obvious it trips a man up. That is something you and I understand, Ocho. We are the last of true family men holding the great institution of marriage together while all the other dogs out there are chasing their tails around in circles without understanding why they have tails to begin with. We are the end of the line. After us, nothing. No romance, no self-denial, no one-woman love, just men with tails growing out the seat of their pants and barking dogs. The louder the bark the more frightened the dog. You can understand that, my friend. Justo patted Ocho’s head. You know what I’m talking about? Ocho yawned with a pleasant gurgle, tipping his open mouth up in anticipation of an entire bag of conch fritters about to come flying miraculously through the air. A man and a dog do what they have to do. Justo nudged another fritter into Ocho’s eager mouth while pondering this latest illumination. A woman does what she doesn’t have to do.

At last Justo had somebody he could talk to. Whenever he talked to his Rosella about this, she slammed the door and he felt his tail grow another two feet. The ones he could definitely not talk to about it were his daughters, the oldest, Isabel, almost fifteen and turning every male head at mass each sunday morning. He could feel his power with Isabel ebbing away day by day. With a crumbling sense of the truly helpless he watched her preordained passage, like the tarpon coming up from the deep Cuban waters of spring to sport and spawn in the shallow channels and coral flats along the Keys. What angler would hook Isabel’s treasure as she leapt from the dusk of her pubescence into the nocturnal passion of womanhood? Justo wondered. He knew they were out there waiting. Young men. Anglers playing the angles. It troubled him in a way he had never been troubled before. The trouble started in the past year when Isabel would walk into a dimly lit room, approaching him from behind. Justo would think it was Rosella, his mind leaping back twenty years. It was Rosella, the girl he married, appearing in an oblique reverse rush through time. Then the rude realization it was his daughter, Isabel. Certain embarrassment then overtook him, a painful hook of barbed remorse that Rosella had truly not reappeared in a moment of youthful reincarnation. A sense of guilt flowed from the undeniable illumination he couldn’t accept this present-day beauty before him as
an independent being to be cherished for her own self. Isabel was a ghost stirring distant realities from his attic of memory. Men should not have daughters. A cruel fate for both.

Whenever one of these ghostly encounters would occur Isabel would sit on the edge of Justo’s chair and ask what was wrong, and he would ask her about her schoolwork. A jealousy filled his veins. He didn’t want to give this girl up. It was like losing his wife’s youth twice. Anger overtook his jealousy. Not the anger associated with the knowledge some angling angler would have Isabel for the first time. Anger that he would never have that experience with Rosella again. Why should some faceless boy have it who would not understand its power? Justo was becoming a sorrowful old man before his time. That is what having daughters will do to a man. A cruel fate. Maybe that was why
Quince
was so important to his wife, Rosella. All that fuss and bother about the fifteenth birthday celebration which would surely leave him broke. Two hundred fifty guests, every relative from Key West to Tampa eating roast pig, fried plantain bananas and
yuca
, enough food to fuel a presidential inaugural, plus two bands, six priests, and a chorus of pretty white-gloved waiters to attend the entire circus in the Casa Marina Hotel’s high-arched grand salon overlooking the Atlantic. What a feast, fifty pigs giving their lives for his daughter’s fifteenth birthday. What a bill. A bill he was willing to pay, a matter of honor and duty, the star of Cuba burns bright with pride. Only now was Justo beginning to understand
Quince’s
greater significance, something deeper was going on. In the end
Quince
was not so much a daughter’s passing to womanhood, but a wife’s having her husband’s dreams returned.

Justo traveled the narrowing streets popping conch fritters and ruminating on the mysterious ways of women which eluded all masculine equations. Resting next to him on the front seat of the car was a bouquet of lilies. A prickly sweet aroma exuded from the flared petals, filling the car with the scent of first communions and death. It was the first friday of the month. The first friday of the month Justo always had his lilies and headed for the cemetery to honor the past in order to make sense of the ever-increasing fractured present. This first friday he had been sidetracked by Handsomemost. Justo got the call as he was headed to the cemetery. Shots being fired out by the airport. Probably just the gang of boys who mucked around in the mangroves there playing Yankees and Gooks, replaying a war they were sorry to have missed, and mourned with the misguided
fervor only adolescent males seem capable of. The boys built forts in the salt swamps, divided into teams of jungle fatigue-clad Marines and black pajama-cloaked Viet Cong, replaying a video war which had been conjured through twenty-inch holes of television screens a decade before. The boys’ play was more real than the distant ghosts of the television war. On especially sporting occasions the boys would load real bullets into their .22 rifles and fire off a round at an outgoing airplane for the glory of the race and erupting hormones. A shot heard round the mangrove swamps, reverberating with the thrilling reality that the thin line between brotherhood and enmity is crossed in a man’s own mind long before it is crossed in the politics of killing. But it wasn’t the frisky weekday warriors who were getting it off in the mangroves at the end of the airport runway this particular morning. It was Handsomemost blowing away his dreaded canine losers.

Passover Lane and the cemetery were just ahead as Justo aimed his car down the skinny slot of Olivia Street, crowded on both sides with Cuban cigarmakers’ shotgun shacks. Most of the shacks had been sandblasted and repainted by northerners to a self-conscious pastel prettiness their original occupants would have been embarrassed by; some of the shacks still retained a stripped-by-the-sun steel gray anonymity. Very few of the quaint little houses sheltered true Conchs, Cubans and Bahamians, who could occasionally be glimpsed on front porches, gazing with a sublime prescient certainty indicating they had seen it all, knew how it was all to end, when Hurricane El Finito would purify the island of outsiders once again.

As Justo slowly made his way down narrow Olivia Street old times called to him from wood-covered porches so close to his car he could reach out and touch them. Justo could not help but recall the spicy scent of Cuban cooking that drifted from these humble houses when he was a boy. Olivia was the street he grew up on. Sizzling garlic and shrimp once permeated the air, drifting on a jasmine-scented breeze. Flaming red bougainvillea grew in haughty arches over kitchen doors then, brilliant yellow allamanda blossoms spilled along the sills of open bedroom windows. Olivia was a street crowded with small houses and big childhood memories. The now vanished Cuban
grocería
on the corner once sold
productos Latinos, buches
to blast your brain back to Guantanamo Bay and curvacious loaves of womanly thin Cuban bread.
Cervezas
kept the men animated in the store’s back room crowded with cider barrels, stacked blocks of jellied mango paste, and
sacks of black-eyed pea flour. The men argued endlessly about what caused the blight of ’39, when the sea went slack, spit up dead lobsters, sponges and conchs, then glittered bright and pristine, as if spread with a veneer of shark oil, the shallow bottom standing out in vibrant relief. Tall glasses of cool
vinos
kept the men betting on
boleta
or sweating through Wednesday afternoons around the radio, waiting for the high-pitched voice of an orphan boy in Havana to arrive with a static hum across ninety miles of ocean from Cuba, singsonging the winning numbers of the Lotería Nacional drawing. After the sweltering wait for the numbers a roar or a moan would go up from the men, depending on whether or not Lady Luck had also made the ninety-mile trip across the Florida Straits from Cuba that afternoon. Then the static hum of the radio stretched into a languid Latin rhythm, a distant faraway throb of rhumbas and saltwater breakers striking sandy shores. The music from Cuba filled the back room of the
grocería
with the swish of swaying palm trees.
Bang!
Justo’s grandfather’s cane would strike the pine-plank floor.
“Niño!”
Justo’s
abuelo
called to him.
“Mas marquitas y bollos!”
Off Justo went running with the single-minded intensity of a bird dog about to jump a covey of quail, returning to Abuelo and the men with bags of fried green plantain bananas and boxes of sweet
bollo
penny cakes. Abuelo then poured out shots of
compuesto
. The fiery sugarcane liquor fueled talk of cockfights and revolutions past and future. The urgency of passions stirred the hair on the back of young Justo’s neck with reckless excitement, as if the men in the back room were the center of a dangerous universe propelled by big ideals of political gambling. Justo felt he was perched at the edge of this universe, a boy among men, a mouse in a bull pen, unobserved, privileged to be present at the continual rebirth of cultural pride generated by wild talk and selective memories. Nailed high to the back room wall were two fading posters. One bore the fierce-eyed and mustached face of José Martí, the martyred George Washington of Cuba. The colorful poster opposite was the image of the Russian dancer Pavlova. Pavlova once catapulted across the stage of the formidable Instituto de San Carlos, which dominated Duval Street with its towering pillared arches and glittering Cuban tiles. Pavlova pirouetted on the very stage where Martí once preached eagerly to crowds about the seeds of rebellion growing in Cuba to a forest of
Los Pinos Nuevos
, the new pines of independence. Pavlova’s thighs swelled from the back room’s wall in white dancer’s tights hugging a forceful thrust of buttocks, where her daring blade
of black hair came to rest in a moment of tense repose. Pavlova threatened to explode from the poster in an energetic hurl through the colossal hoop of implacable male desire surrounding her in the room, to land squarely on the heart of the matter. Young Justo was lulled into a deep swim of desire over Pavlova, but so were all the men, none more than Abuelo. For Abuelo such was not adulterous desire pricked by lust. Abuelo had all the lust he could fathom in the cherry-dark crevices of his African bride of forty years. No, this was desire of another order. Desire for an object to end disorderly thoughts. Thoughts dwelling on the mystery of that alien race, woman. Pavlova in her dance of eternal delirium was a desired object to be understood by men primitive in their intentions and clumsy in their methods. All were such in the back room, except Abuelo. Abuelo was a man of
Letters
, looked up to with respect. Abuelo was a man gifted with the delicious wine of sweet-sounding metaphors and laced with knowledge spun from books. Abuelo in his youth had ascended to the altar of respect attained by only a chosen few. At the precocious age of nineteen Abuelo had become a Lector, a reader in the cigar factories that once hummed at the heart of the small island’s body of enormous productivity.