Mile Zero (25 page)

“What kind of poetry stuff?”

“Andy thinks it’s Santería.”

The two Cubans beneath the big window stopped their game of dominoes, quickly scooping up the black and white playing pieces as if it were just announced a time-bomb had been placed in one of Diver Dave’s famous Key lime pies.

Dave was too astute a businessman to lose customers over any dead goat poems, which had nothing to do with his opening the diner bright and early every morning at six to fire up his steamer for the hundreds of cups of
buche
needed to launch the early morning fishermen and all night boozers. “Asshole.” Dave laughed. “Asshole,” Amigo echoed. “Shutup, Amigo, I’m talking. Andy’s an asshole. What does Andy know about Santería? Andy doesn’t know the difference between his thumb and a rectal thermometer.”

Marilyn didn’t like anyone talking about her husbands in a derogatory way, even if they were no longer her husbands, were nothing but worthless louts to be booted out of a straight woman’s bunk. “I suppose your educated asshole does know the difference between a thumb and a thermometer? Your educated asshole could tell the difference even if you were blindfolded, you’ve certainly sat on enough thumbs.” Marilyn tossed her sharp barb at Dave and it struck the target.

The satisfied customers grinned and started chewing and slurping again. The snickering Cubans spread dominoes across the table to take up where they had left off.
La mujer vieja
went
mano y mano
with
Dave and bested him at his own game. The Cubans always liked Marilyn better than Dave’s parrot. They didn’t believe Amigo was a Hollywood parrot. Big-time Hollywood parrots don’t end their days shitting on Diver Dave’s shoulder in a fishermen’s cafe across from the shrimp docks in Key West. The Cubans agreed to themselves with a chuckle, that pukey green bird was a foul-mouth impostor, probably a phony from Miami.

Bonefish jumped off his stool, he finally had what he wanted, pollen for the streets, a dead goat that writes poetry. No time to lose, Bonefish had to spread the word before the hurricane hit. Bonefish brushed past Justo in a hurry to get to the door. Bonefish respected Justo, an honest man in a world rigged for hurricanes. Bugs was Justo’s nickname as a kid. Bugs, because when Justo was a boy he could twist heads off netloads of shrimp faster than any man, twisted off so many millions of sea bugs’ heads he got their nickname of Bugs. Everybody had a nickname on the island. Hurricanes all had nicknames too. Bonefish didn’t know what the nickname of the big hurricane brewing out in the steamy ocean was. Bonefish knew it had a nickname and people would learn to respect it, he already did. Every year at the beginning of hurricane season he gave away all his earthly possessions, because in the end he was going to get them all back. Bonefish didn’t know why the Big Blow blew, he just knew it did.

T
HERE WERE
no bats in the bat tower on Sugarloaf Key. The tower stood more than a half century since its construction, forlorn and deserted, a south Florida folly rising above swampy patches of mangroves. The tower was stronger than the dream that spawned it, its superstructure of hard pine, its sides shingled with thick cuts of cedar, the thrust of its significant bulk perched on staunch twelve-foot-high stilts. The tower loomed large as an abandoned windmill stripped of its giant wind-turning paddles, but this was no construction of such obvious purpose. The tower had been erected to accept legions of bats winging in through its louvered openings. The blind winged creatures were to be passionately attracted to a secret stench of love bait within the tower’s bowels, there to mate and multiply, then swarm in screeching black clouds across the Keys, feasting upon the dread marsh mosquitoes, which forced even the fearless indoors during their bloodsucking season. No stairs led to the top of the tower; its long-since deceased builder did not want his precious pets distracted from their purpose of making his twenty-five-thousand-acre half-water, half-land investment safe from the bite of marsh mosquitoes, and ready for the sting of real estate commerce. The bats didn’t buy it. No bat ever took the aphrodisiac bait. The Keys were not yet to be delivered from the pesky bloodsucking scourge of antiquity; the second largest landowner of Florida was defeated by the lowly mosquito. Now, generations later, the tower was part of someone else’s vision, or nightmare; mosquitoes were the least of the problem.

Whoever managed to get high inside the deserted bat tower and
hang the goat must have been part goat himself, for it was a slippery and risky undertaking to hazard at night—if it had been done at night; that was one of the things Justo still wasn’t certain of. Justo was certain the person had
uñas de gato
, claws of a cat. Something more goat and cat, and less than human, was leading Justo on, he felt it in his bones. The teacher of the elementary school children, who came upon the goat that morning, had the hapless apparition removed before Justo could get there, disposed of among the tonnage of debris at the city dump. The goat had definitely been alive when it was carried up to the top of the tower, the animal’s hind legs bound with rope, its body left hanging down the thirty-foot narrow drop of the interior shaft. Enough struggling life remained in the creature to spray the dark bat palace walls vibrant crimson from its slit throat. This wasn’t Santería. Justo knew Santería. Could be some score-settling cocaine Colombian cowboys from Miami, but if it was that kind of trouble Justo would have heard. The Saints talk, especially if they have Spanish accents. There were no secrets among them.

¿Quien le poner el escabel al gato?
Who shall hang the bell on the cat’s neck? He didn’t think it had anything to do with the children, children were brought on school outings to the tower all the time. There was an evil going around, Justo could smell it. Lately he started praying to Saint Jude, first thing in the morning, kneeling next to his bed as Rosella neared the end of her dreams. Justo envisioned how foolish he would look to the outside world, a big naked cop on his knees beseeching protection from the heavens before strapping on his ankle gun. The Saints were his guiding comfort. In the tropics people came and went, things quickly born went quickly dead, rot always filled the air, a fresh rot bearing ironic breath of a new beginning. Justo’s faith was constant, founded in Catholic and Santería Saints, taught to him as a boy by the Church and Aunt Oris. He fed those Saints who guarded him a diet of special prayers and sacred offerings, knew he could call upon them to bail him out of troubled waters. Except when it came to teenage daughters, the Saints didn’t know much about them; if they did they weren’t talking. The Church had an age-old theory about its young women, marry them off early for their own protection. Had he protected Rosella? Justo never thought of it that way. He didn’t think of himself as a protector, nor public guardian nor defender of the peace. Now there was something loose in the streets which didn’t fit the accommodation, it moved and surged like
fear filling a shadow, Justo could feel it in the bottom of his African soul to the center of his Catholic heart. There was one clear message coming from that tower on Sugarloaf Key, and it had nothing to do with
guayabitos en la azotea
, bats in the belfry.

What could Marilyn’s Andy know about
guayabitos
in the belfry? Maybe Andy had found the recipe for the secret love potion intended to draw bats to the tower. Justo’s Aunt Oris always insisted the elixir was nothing more than bat
guano
spiced with ground bat ovaries, and that’s why it never took. Oris said everybody knows you’ve got to throw in some owl liver and hawks’ claws to give any potion its inevitable kick, prayers to Santa Barbara wouldn’t hurt either. There were sixty-seven species of mosquitoes in Florida and no one had yet figured a way to eradicate just one of the species. You could spray pesticide on them but you couldn’t kill them off. Public authorities met the same defeat against mosquitoes as they did in their battle with drug smugglers. You could throw the book at smugglers, but you couldn’t put them out of business. That was something Justo thought he had a pretty good handle on, being as how he had an island boy’s philosophy and was also in a position of authority. It was all a natural law of commerce, as long as mosquitoes kept breeding in swamps and swimming pools, and the Government kept inventing what was legal and what was not, mosquito-sprayers and guys like Justo were going to be kept in business. Mosquitoes and smugglers were a fact of life, swat one and five more pop up. The only way to make smugglers obsolete was to legalize drugs. The Government perfected that line of thinking when it put the Bootleggers of the twenties out of business by legalizing alcohol. Mosquitoes are more tenacious than smugglers, they won’t disappear simply by legalizing their bites. Mosquitoes were in Florida to stay. Given their choice people would rather live with smugglers than mosquitoes. People will always choose to live with an itch on their conscience rather than a bite on their ass.

Andy was one of the irregularly employed and frequently married men about town. Women were a job to him. Andy married women and sponged off their softness until they went hard and pried his leeching little-boy-lost act from their lives. Then Andy was off to the next woman, scamming his way on a magic carpet of endless endearments and pathetic platitudes through the door of another desperate heart. Andy was a middle-aged street boy always up for a drink and down in the gutter where the rat piss flowed. To Justo, Andy was
good as a blank check, a gentleman of the accommodation, a true
chivato
, an informer of the lowest rank with the highest yield of information. What could be trusted about Andy was his willingness to scratch his itchy conscience until it bled in order to avoid a bite on his precious ass.

“Tamarindo, you’ve got to do something about the fucking muggers. Town’s crawling with them. Not safe to walk the streets.” Andy speared another shifty glob of oyster flesh from its half shell and let it ride around in his mouth. “Mo fukin mucsters ruinin dis fukin I-land.” Andy sucked down the slippery creature his tongue was batting around, then ceremoniously backhanded a clear trickle of oyster juice from thick lips. “Why don’t you jump on your motorcycle, Tamarindo, ride out and bust chops on those bastards? They’re all from out of town anyway. Don’t contribute shit to the gross local economy.”

“Don’t have a motorcycle.”

“Ought to have us a raffle, get you one.”

“Good idea. We’ll have the raffle between your ex-wives.”

“You’re jealous.” Andy speared another oyster on the prong of his fork and winked at Justo. “You been married to the same woman so long your cock doesn’t know when it’s in or out of the honey.”

“Knows enough to know it’s not covered with little red polka dots.”

“They go away.”

“Only to come back again.”

“Figure the more women I’m with, more of the little red suckers I give away, sooner or later I won’t have any left, Andy’s law of averages.”

“Great law, if you’re Andy.”

“Polka dot proof.” Andy let his face relax into a smirk. “Want any more of this shit?” He shoved the platter of empty half shells away from him. “Got more inside I can shuck. Two dozen or so. No problem.”

“Think I lost my appetite.”

“Weak stomach from all those conch fritters you shovel down all day long. Little fuckers are going to be the death of you. Key West’s finest won’t die of a bullet hole shot through his heart, but a grease hole eaten clear through his gut. Those nasty little conchs are tough as sin, going to outlive us all. After the nuclear bomb conchs will still be coming up out of the ocean and crawling out of their shells. Want
to know something about conchs you’ve never known before?” Andy leaned close to Justo across the table, his breath perfumed with an oyster burp.

“You going to tell me why they’re called hurricane ham?”

“Hell no, every school kid knows that. Going to tell you something better. Know what a
verge
is?” Andy tipped back on his chair and let his gaze wander across the tabletop, through weeds and mounds of empty oyster shells decorating the small space between his tiny shotgun cottage and the honeysuckle climbing over his neighbor’s backyard fence. His watery blue eyes came back to Justo. “Give up? Don’t know what it is, do you?”

“I know what it is to be on the verge of something.” Justo didn’t like the corner Andy was trying to back him into. Justo knew he was the better word man of the two. Andy was a spit and slide man who memorized five or nine facts, then pulled them out like card tricks at a boring party. He wasn’t like those in town who were real word men, like St. Cloud, who had so many words up his sleeve he kept them mostly to himself. “Give up. What does verge mean?”

“Cock.” Andy tossed the empty platter of oyster shells into the weeds. “It’s the cock of the conch.”

“So what?”

“So something you don’t know, if the conch gets his member nipped by a curious crab or a hungry eel the conch grows himself a new one.”