Mile Zero (30 page)

Justo was becoming convinced the answer rested in the cemetery; more than curses had been planted in its crevices, restless unearthed promises resided there too. He could not stop his mind from wandering off on the scent of yet one more plausibility, falling headlong down another path which might link the cemetery to something living rather than dead. Other love stories were buried in the cemetery besides Justo’s parents and grandparents, one endured, its restless ending still haunted the town.

Justo grew up with the story of the Count and Acartonada, the female tubercular, a story rudely mythic, mocking any pretense the island city may have once had to a sane past. On the first friday of each month, while visiting the cemetery, Justo still felt he was treading
upon the bones of Acartonada, buried not once, but three times, the last in secret, beneath a blacktopped avenue crisscrossing the city of the dead at the island’s heart, condemned to restless peace in an unmarked grave. If love kills it can also give life. The frail Count was in his sixties when he arrived in Key West during the 1920s, his weakened European stiffness aided by a cane as he strolled city streets with the air of a displaced aristocrat, his bony feet sockless in battered tennis shoes, a monocle affixed to his left eye, worn as prominent badge proclaiming the fact he was Karl von Cosel, Dresden-born count, schooled not only in the infinities of astronomy, but also the finites of engineering and subtleties of metaphysics. A skinny man with goatish wisp of white beard and high bald forehead large enough to house two brains, the Count earned his way on the island operating the X-ray machine at the Marine Hospital. This arcane expertise brought the Count face to face with a fate he deemed worthy of immortality. Since the Count was master of the only ultraviolet X-ray machine between Havana and Miami he was called upon to examine a youthful Cuban, Acartonada. The crown of a carved tortoiseshell comb was set atop Acartonada’s hair, kept brushed in black cascading waves over white shoulders bent from coughing fits. Deep within a hospital room darkened to the outside world this woman in her early twenties slipped a blouse from trembling shoulders, over breasts glimpsed by a man only once, a husband who disappeared after their wedding years before. In a room impenetrable as the blackest forest in Germany, pale Acartonada sat without knowledge she was enthroned on a bizarre altar constructed in the Count’s brain, about to become a necrophiliac’s bride eternal. Quick as a kiss the first ultraviolet flash sealed her fate to this balding European, his monocled eye pierced through inflamed tissues and bending bones to the hollow breath of her disease. The Count saw not a spirit atrophied, a woman scorned, or the skeletal core of a gypsy curse, he discerned a magnificent bloom of female flesh destined to be preserved.
El deseo hace hermoso lo feo
. Desire makes the drab beautiful.

Disease was draining the vital essence from the Count’s Cuban flower, he plotted revenge on reality. What the Count conjured, as shades of ultraviolet light pierced his beauty’s flesh, was an illumination to sear the heavens in its simplicity. The Count plotted nothing less than a getaway plane ride into eternity. His desire was unbridled, the clock and his heart went ticking, two time bombs racing one another for the soul of Acartonada. The Count opened his purse and
purchased gifts for his newly beloved, he exposed the opposite of his Teutonic stiffness, solicitous charm. He called upon Acartonada at her parents’ home, going down on bended knee before this vision he had privately bombarded with iridescent X-rays, begging for marriage. This bride once scorned was flattered by such intense, yet socially stifled, attention focused upon her by a man, even one so odd and old. What Acartonada had innocently exposed to the Count in the dark hospital room was a desire for health; her kindness toward him was a transparently clothed plea for physical wholeness, not a scream of lust to break the eardrums of the angels. The Count would have it otherwise, his solicitations growing more insistent. Acartonada refused to see him, closed the door forever on his dark room and its eerie luminescent light which made her skin glow the color of an iced blue corpse. She thought she was safe, unaware the clock ticked, the Count’s heart plotted. When the hands of fate crossed the Count pounced.

It was Halloween, day of the dead, night of all saints, the end of another hurricane season marked by a festive parade down Duval Street. The parents of Acartonada, having helplessly watched her fade, covered her consumptive body in blankets, spiriting her to Duval Street in hopes the spectacle and fervor of this special night might raise her sunken spirits. It raised instead a hollow coughing from her narrow chest. In the universal panic common to distraught parents they cried out for help from any and all quarters. The Count appeared at their door with his ultraviolet X-ray machine. By the time the medical doctor arrived the daughter was dead. Acartonada was dead to all but the Count; for him the temporal engagement had ended, the spiritual wedding could now begin.

The Count prevailed upon the family to allow him the honor of erecting a baroque vault for their daughter which would be the envy of the saints. After the funeral the Count began a two-year vigil at the vault, until finally it was thought he had laid the memory of Acartonada to rest. A half decade slipped away before a teen-aged confidant of Acartonada’s discovered the body had long since been freed from the wormy interior of its formidable sanctuary. Peering through the dusty back window of an abandoned slaughterhouse, whose every battered board and termite-riddled beam now formed the Count’s shabby castle, the confidant spied the amber glass eyes of Acartonada staring from an ornate bed. The high, carved bedposts were draped by trailing webs of cheesecloth, forming a canopy over
a half-sitting body clothed in formal bridal gown, the glint of a gold wedding band on one of the fingers. Expensive necklaces and bracelets adorned the neck and wrists of the person reconstructed of wire and wax, alone in the room with a pipe organ, an operating table and the dusty X-ray machine. Nailed above the door a sign declared
LABORATORY
.

At the Count’s trial it became clear that years previous he had built the vault in order to enter it one day and lead his decomposing bride home. In the slaughterhouse bridal suite the Count played the pipe organ positioned next to the honeymoon bed so his beloved could hear perfectly. Each evening his fingers skipped across the keys, entertaining his sleeping bride with clouds of celestial notes from
Parsifal’s
“Good Friday Spell.” How close that Good Friday of true resurrection was only the Count knew. Before Acartonada’s confidant brought down the curtain on the Count’s domestic tranquillity he had been feverishly reconstructing the wood and tin carcass of an old World War I airplane. Soon the Count and his bride were to fly across the Atlantic to the fatherland, perhaps to winter in a Swiss sanitarium where Acartonada could heal her lungs. The trial judge concluded the eccentric foreigner, who had a way with mortuary wax and cosmetic applications, was simply mad. The Count was tarred and feathered with nothing more than the assignation of grave robber. Justo remembered as a boy joining the line of over three thousand people trudging past Acartonada’s open casket in Lopez’s Funeral Home. The Count’s fragile, risen-from-the-dead bride was fully displayed to the town’s curious. Abuelo had stood for the longest time peering into the casket, mumbling to Justo that there was, in the mad foreigner’s devotion, something which touched all men who ever dreamed of enshrining their life’s love in a shining, eternal moment. Maybe the Count’s losing his mind over the girl allowed him to cheat reality. Perhaps madness alone could deliver man his eternal bride. Justo could still hear clearly the conversation after the funeral parlor parade of sightseers was over, in the back room of
la grocería
. Abuelo and the men talking of how soft and round Acartonada’s breasts were, how her long black hair was still fixed proudly as a Spanish queen. “I would have been on her all the time too,” one of the men laughed. All laughed. “That’s the perfect kind of wife, one who never grows old, never asks you to buy her anything, and never talks back.” What Justo did not know then as a young boy he knew now as a man. The Count’s flights of fancy were not restricted only to freedom’s
joyride across the Atlantic. Discovered fitted between the fragile thighs of Acartonada’s waxed and wired corpse was a smooth rubber tube, stuffed cottonballs at its bottom saturated with the spent frustration of the Count’s mundane lust, the seed of desire at last taking root in the fertile hollow of memory.

Restless curses and plaintive promises were planted everywhere in the crevices of the cemetery. Driving through damp heat ascending into a brightening morning, Justo could not stop his thoughts from crossing at the cemetery, trying to connect with a love beyond the grave. A power unstoppable and sexual was implicit in the recent mutilations of the goat and toad. It was beyond Santería. In Santería there is no warning if one is the target of secret ritual, one just suddenly drops with a gall-bladder attack or an irrevocable pain through the heart. Maybe this was a voodoo deal after all. Justo would have to ask St. Cloud about Zobop. St. Cloud might know who or what Zobop was, if St. Cloud was sober enough to rub two syllables together.
Los niños y los locos dicen las verdades
. Children and drunks tell the truth. Lately it was hard to tell what the truth of St. Cloud was, bad enough when he was snooping around in the night after his estranged wife, now St. Cloud insisted someone wanted to harm him. No one was harming St. Cloud more than himself, struck dumb over a young girl. If St. Cloud did not watch out he would end his days like the Count, a
viejo verde
, an old man chasing young skirts. Something similar in St. Cloud’s singular desire for Lila reminded Justo of the Count’s fixation. The Count never did overcome Acartonada. After Acartonada’s second burial the Count attempted to blow open the welded steel doors of the baroque vault. To keep the pitiful remains of Acartonada beyond the Count’s earthly reach rumor was the family secretly reburied her a third time, in a metal casket deep beneath one of the cemetery’s thick asphalt avenues. Nothing seemed to deter the Count, determined chaser of ghostly skirts; at his death another waxed likeness of his eternal bride was discovered in his shabby room. Some said the Count had the real Acartonada all the time, that what the family secretly buried was a fake, planted by the Count in the blown-open baroque vault. Justo believed no speculation, no matter how bizarre, could be discounted when it came to what a man will do to get a woman. St. Cloud was one to keep both eyes on, a grand loser, loses money, loses erections, loses wives. Justo did not think St. Cloud was in danger of losing his life, too much one of life’s enchanted fools for that. Loser that he was, St. Cloud was
central to helping Justo keep the Haitian kid from being snatched by Immigration and whisked to the Everglades detention camp in an abandoned missile base. Time was running out for Voltaire, Immigration had issued another detainer, trying to get their hands on him. Justo did not think he could convince the State Attorney’s Office to cover him until he got a grand jury trial. At a grand jury trial Justo was convinced Voltaire would spring on involuntary manslaughter; for this he counted on St. Cloud’s interpretive courtroom poetics. St. Cloud would have the grand jury mopping their eyes when they heard Voltaire’s tale of terror. Time is what Justo needed, and in that time he needed to keep his eyes on St. Cloud, to save his pinch hitter for that fateful moment when he would step to center stage and knock the ball out of the grand jury hearing room. If it was too late for grand loser St. Cloud to save himself, at least he could resurrect the value of his existence by saving someone else.

Justo’s job was to suspect everyone on the island of some sort of guilt or other. He did not figure St. Cloud to be a Green Sailor, Zobop, or Angel of Death, but one thing certain, St. Cloud was crazy as the Baron. For five years the Baron fed his bridal effigy of paraffin wax and piano wire a special diet of chemical solutions, praying for cellular rebirth of his sleeping beauty. For the ten years Justo knew St. Cloud the man always claimed he did not want any part of gaining forgiveness through forgetting. St. Cloud desired to keep the flicker of his failed history alive, a burning remembrance of mistakes past, conscience was his mother’s milk. St. Cloud believed there was no rhyme without reason, no crime without passion. Justo knew St. Cloud was capable of killing for love, maybe already had, by killing his common sense in pursuit of Lila. Justo had watched St. Cloud become a
turrudo
, a cuckold, and one of his own making. But deep down what man wasn’t a self-made
turrudo
, what man wasn’t the fool of his own invention? No one knows what happens between another man and woman, no one can judge. To judge a fellow cuckold is to attempt to cuckold mother justice herself, and that, for Justo, was the final invitation to folly. Justo was on his way to join the fellowship of the cuckolds; he could not stop from judging himself.

Justo had instructed Angelica to go directly home from the Wreck Room and he would follow in his car so no one would observe them headed to her house. He knew he was in for a wetting. He pleaded with the Saints, and with the saintly image of sweet Rosella, to forgive him for what he was about to do. Justo was so overcome with his
burden of assumed mortal sin before even arriving at Angelica’s doorstep that he nearly missed the fast-moving apparition in the road ahead, its dark silhouette weaving sideways, erratic as a spooked manta ray. Justo backed his foot quickly off the gas pedal to slow the car as he jerked the steering wheel to one side, swerving from the man on a bicycle aimed straight for him. The man on the bicycle made no attempt to avoid Justo, the jagged tip of one handlebar scraping alongside the car as the bicycle rushed past. Justo caught a glimpse of Space Cadet’s face above him, bland as a bleached pumpkin in the morning mist. Space Cadet’s thick blade of braided gray hair trailed in a self-generated wind as he sped away in the high squeal of a bent bicycle wheel. Justo’s sudden swerve to avoid a collision stalled the car’s engine and threw Ocho off the backseat with a startled whimper; he turned to shout his displeasure out the open car window. Space Cadet had already disappeared into the blanket of rising heat.