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  THOMAS SANCHEZ’S

  MILE ZERO

  “A great novel of America … unforgettable.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Lush, tropical, feverish … Cultures explode in Mile Zero.… Sanchez’s fictional Key West acts as a narcotic propelling the characters into a bizarre American dreamland, turning them into human firecrackers.”

  —Newsday

  “An epic of Americana for the 60s generation come of age, grand and encompassing … The scope is tremendous … the language, nothing short of stunning … This is great stuff.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “A fully realized portrait of America on the other side of Vietnam … Mile Zero is a brave, smart novel with huge swatches of color and ironic vision that belong to Thomas Sanchez alone.”

  —Boston Globe

  “A personal vision of the great American novel … a rare and exhilarating experience, a brilliant wide-angled metaphorical treatise on modern American life.”

  —Playboy

  “Hypnotic … world-class literature, bends the mind as only great literature can … a brilliant, brooding lyric epic.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Packed with stories, crowded with characters, lush with language—a Gothic mystery gone contemporary and cosmic … rich and overwhelming in its abundance.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Mile Zero reads as if it were written in the author’s own blood, carved on his soul, plucked from a mind on the brink…. It is what the Great American Novel was supposed to be about: the great American experience.”

  —Toronto Star

  “With all of its cranks, madmen and saints … Mile Zero becomes, in its mythical accounts of tenderness and brutality, a great American novel.”

  —Milwaukee Journal

  “Part thriller, part romance, part phantasmagoria … a dense, tropical nightmare of bright sunshine and dark images that stay with you long after its strange finale.”

  —Charlotte Observer

  “A psychic travelogue, a brilliant, breathless ride into the dark heart of a perfect metaphor.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “A major literary event from a writer of enormous gifts … Mile Zero is a novel of exquisite sorrow … and terrible beauty.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The only safe thing to say about Mile Zero is that it is unique. Its tornado-like blend of history, myth, and fable are sure to draw comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez…. Sanchez is a linguistic juggler.”

  —St. Louis Times-Dispatch

  “Sanchez is interested in nothing less than encapsulating the entire 60s and all the passionate turmoil that era symbolizes.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Exciting … a whale of a story … vivid and exotic.”

  —USA Today

  ALSO BY THOMAS SANCHEZ

  Rabbit Boss (1973)

  Zoot-Suit Murders (1978)

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION,

  OCTOBER 1990

  Copyright © 1989 by Thomas Sanchez

  Map copyright © 1989 by Claudia Carlson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1989.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sanchez, Thomas.

  Mile zero / Thomas Sanchez.—1st Vintage

  contemporaries ed.

  p. cm. —(Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76608-3

  I. Title.

  PS3569.A469M55 1990

  813’.54—dc20 90-50248

  v3.1

  SIEMPRE

  Stephanie Dante, who

  rocked it on

  water

  Jon Lovelace, who

  pulled it from

  fire.

  MEMORIES

  Robert Kirsch • Dorothea Oppenheimer • Henry Robbins

  THANKS TO

  The National Endowment for the Arts

  The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  The Yaddo Corporation

  VOUDOUN PRAYER

  Mèt Agoué, kòté ou yé

  Ou pa oué mwê nâ résif

  Agoué, kòté ou yé

  Ou pa oué mwé sou lâ mè

  M’gê zavirô nâ mê mwê

  M’pa sa toune déyè

  M’douvâ déja

  Master Agwé, where are you?

  Can’t you see I’m on the reef?

  Agwé, where are you?

  Can’t you see I’m on the sea?

  I have an oar in my hand,

  I cannot turn back,

  I am going forward.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  BOOK ONE

  REVELATION IN REPOSE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  BOOK TWO

  FALSE LIGHT Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  BOOK THREE

  MADONNA ON THE REEF Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  About the Author

  BOOK ONE

  REVELATION

  IN REPOSE

  1

  IT IS about water. It was about water in the beginning, it will be in the end. The ocean mothered us all. Water and darkness awaiting light. Night gives birth. An inkling of life over distant sea swells toward brilliance. Dawn emerges from Africa, strikes light between worlds, over misting mountains of Haiti, beyond the Great Bahama Bank, touching cane fields of Cuba, across the Tropic of Cancer to the sleeping island of Key West, farther to the Gold Coast of Florida, its great wall of condominiums demarcating mainland America.

  With coming light come seabirds skimming water, they fathom approaching weather without raising their heads, reading a surface of reflected cloud mountains imprinted over currents roaring through underwater canyons. Seabirds fly into new day, beneath them a watery world of mystery equal to the airy one above, where a man-made bird of steel streaks atop a pillar of flame. Only moments before the steel bird shook off an umbilical maze of flight feeders, its capsule head inhabited by six humans, their combined minds infinitely less than the bird’s programmed range of computerized functions. The steel bird pierced infinite space with calculated grace, sending supersonic shock waves earthward, scattering over ocean’s surface a new current, entrails of a departing dream hurtling heavenward. Seabirds read this curious current, only their feathered wings stir the air in silent aftermath.

  The seabirds do not look up to the man-made future, nor do they stop and circle a boat adrift, its tattered sail limp against a broken mast, the deck crowded with bodies. No sign of life signals the birds to swoop down. They glide on, leaving the boat to whatever current claims it. The seabirds have read the weather of coming day correctly. The solid-rocket blast of the spacecraft shuttling heavenward and the rudderless boat of Haitian refugees do not deter them. The coloration of the ocean portends the day’s approach
ing heat, sustenance must be taken quickly from sheltered mangrove shallows beyond the dark crescent of coral reef on the horizon. The birds do not alter their course. Ahead in the bright is Key West.

  “Rise and shine paradise! Radio W … K … E … Y broadcasting from your space-age island in the sun. Another boring day of subtropical splendor from Key Largo to Dry Tortugas. So take the handcuffs off your lover and let him or her enjoy temps of eighty-five and getting higher, humidity seventy-five percent and getting higher. In the Florida Straits swells two to six feet and getting, you guessed it, higher!”

  St. Cloud was at sea in a sea of sleep, a dream swimmer born half in air, half out of water, floating toward the same nightmare in Neptune’s murky cobalt closet, the submerged vision of a woman on the reef, wealth of seaweed wreathed in her hair, white body pierced by fish, turtles sucking at flowing fingers, her eyes translucent pearls, mirrored souls of ancient oysters. A powerful riptide separates her from St. Cloud, separates the muse from the music. Not easy for a bull to swim beneath the sea.

  The radio announcer’s voice out of static brought St. Cloud fully awake. He slipped from between Evelyn’s thighs where the dream of the night before shipwrecked him.

  “If you were knocked out of your bunk this morning by a sound loud as a cannonball, you were part of history. At six fifty-eight in the a.m. from Cape Kennedy, first ever made in the U.S.A. Space Shuttle was launched. Quarter million thrill seekers watched the big bird get it off. Got a couple thousand here waiting for our big launch, minutes away now from the final day of the International Powerboat Championships. Coast Guard’s patrolling the twenty-six-mile sea course. Key West harbor’s blocked off. If you’re not already out there in your own boat to witness the race start, forget it. Coasties say no more boats allowed to cross the race course. Two favorites might break a world record in today’s final race. Miami Kid, owned by a Central American consortium, finished yesterday’s qualifying heat at an awesome eighty-six mph on the rough-water storm course; the thirty-eight-foot Cougar catamaran, Murdoch’s Revenge, piloted by local Key Wester Karl Dean, was a hull length behind. Contending strong at only thirty-two points off the leaders are the French team from Calais and their boat Bullet Baguette, and the Italians in their Philippine-wood catamaran pushed by fourteen-hundred-horsepowered surface-piercing props. The competition’s fierce so stay tuned to your Pirate Island radio station in the wild blue yonder.”

  St. Cloud’s gaze followed the heave of Evelyn’s breathing. The green and red bloom of a tattooed rose blossomed at the top of her breast in dawn light stabbing through the salt-streaked glass porthole above the narrow berth. The tide sloshed against the hull, lulling the boat in a sighing rhythm. Bull rocking in a woman’s sea. St. Cloud held his breath as Evelyn turned in her sleep. He was where he wanted to be, for the moment. If fate pulled the plug on him he was content to be so close to rock bottom. How much lower can a man sink? Somehow it was making sense to make no sense of it. Evelyn’s tanned back was presented to him flawless as an empty movie screen, except for a fading scar beneath a winged shoulderblade, etched into her skin ten years before when they first drifted down to the Keys. America was still at war in Vietnam, and St. Cloud and Evelyn took the core of their love for granted, looking for nothing, running from everything. The first time they swam in vivid waters along the reef they dove again and again into a world pure with color, touched only by their eyes, the splendor robbed their breath, they could not get enough of it, feasted on the sight of brilliant fish scattering along the purple-hued shelf of coral stepping beyond sight into a cobalt deep. Swimming back to the surface their lungs burst with excitement, here was something beyond predictability. St. Cloud noticed blood running from a jagged puncture beneath Evelyn’s shoulder. As she dove again a trail of blood lingered, an almost imperceptible ribbon running from her body back up to the bubbling surface. Through clear water St. Cloud could see Evelyn swimming in a new world, oblivious to the wound from a sharp snag on the reef. St. Cloud understood in that moment their lives were going to be transformed, but the very nature of the change was beyond fathoming. The trail of blood going inky and disappearing into the surrounding blue was like an unraveling of their life together, back to the time before they met, when both were separate. Like the jagged scar on Evelyn’s back separating her new world from his, the bloom of the tattooed rose foretold a radical blossoming of another change. Before the rose made its indelible impression on Evelyn’s flesh, St. Cloud resided deep within the smugness of idealism, accepted the predictability of his wayward youth. St. Cloud not only thought he understood Evelyn, he thought he knew what they both stood for, what America stood for, and how they didn’t fit. That was long ago, before their chance landing on Key West, an island made quirky by a dangerous slant of light angling from the tropics. Every time St. Cloud tasted the sweet salt of the rose bloom on Evelyn’s skin he awakened to the humor of the situation. More roses were tattooed on breasts of women in Key West than there were real roses in all the fancy Miami flower shops. Whenever St. Cloud removed a woman’s brassiere, or she opened her blouse to him, he expected a rose to blossom, or occasionally an octopus to be exposed, its inky-blue tentacles gripping a breast, fixing him with a one-eyed nipple stare. The rose tattoos thrived in a hothouse hum of tropical treachery, a consuming disorientation of desire fertilized by disintegrating ideals, an inescapable rust of the soul. Nothing lasts in the tropics, lovers come and go, ideals bloat and burst, implacable impermanence. Nothing lasts forever, not even eternal love.

  St. Cloud had not so much lost Evelyn to the bloom of other roses as he had lost her to himself, betrayed former commitment by allowing cynical corruption to enter his blood. Commitment’s distant memory had washed beneath the bridge of time in a torrent of rum. By the time Evelyn’s rose was being touched and tried by other roses, St. Cloud was swirling helplessly in a sea of self-pity. He knew Evelyn’s passions had long since melded into dark crevices of female flowered gardens, where he committed the crime of bearing witness to the dragon of his jealousy. In the beginning he greeted this inevitability by turning his eyes elsewhere, stared without blinking into endless nights of infidelity. Even though he remained legally married to Evelyn, the divorce not yet finalized, the loss was final, except at times like this, when St. Cloud cajoled Evelyn into deferring to his emptiness, appealed to his own wife for a slick remedy of ecstasy, a mercy bullet to blast him beyond misery. He had lured Evelyn onto her own boat the night before, baited his trap for one last fling with the meat of nostalgia, snaring Evelyn’s instinct for female pardon. This was not an exercise in masculine conniving, for the problem was not that women were now the main contenders for his wife’s emotions. The reality was St. Cloud no longer contended, could not even contend with himself, except when he attempted to penetrate to the origin of his loss.

  The hardening rise of St. Cloud’s flesh moved deep into the damp between Evelyn’s legs as his lips traveled along the fading scar beneath her shoulderblade. Evelyn turned against the fleshy slide of his body, murmured into the slurring sound of slapping tide, cutting St. Cloud loose, an abandoned bull adrift on a lost ship.

  From above the helicopters came. The race was on. St. Cloud reluctantly withdrew from Evelyn, pulled his pants up to his waist over a stubborn stiffness no longer of consequence, and went topside where he was greeted by cheers rising from an anchored flotilla of paint-blistered skiffs, sleek ketches and listing lobster boats crowded with beer-drinking spectators applauding a roaring line of forty-foot-long powerboats led overhead by a flock of helicopters. The spectacle of speed burst from around the far side of the island, an invading force of machinery and technology fueled by glory and risk in a mad pursuit to break former feats of record. In the deafening roar the flotilla seemed under attack, caught in a sudden atmosphere of warlike activity. The waterborne herd thundered by at full throttle into a one-hundred-and-sixty-mile run over a glass-hard surface made dangerous by slippery speed and tentative friction. Boldly painted b
oat hulls nosed high, sharp bows tilting six feet into the air. Rayed bolts of sunlight reflected off the drivers’ and throttlemen’s crash helmets deep within cocooned cockpits nearly obscured by white-hot jet exhausts plowing a showering spray to a distant horizon and over its edge.

  The superficial veil of sport had been pierced. In the calm left behind the passing disturbance furrowed wakes rose to rock the small flotilla. Evelyn emerged from below, touched St. Cloud’s shoulder. An embarrassed silence hung between them as their eardrums readjusted to calming water slap against the strain of the bobbing boat’s anchor. Seabirds heading in from open ocean cried out overhead. The sudden stillness of the moment was lengthened by the long pull of Haitian rum St. Cloud sucked from a snub-necked bottle. Far above the seabirds a vast cloud was unfolding a design as it sailed by. St. Cloud held the amber bottle up before his eyes, filtering harsh light in order to discern the cloud’s quickening shape. It looked like a lofty rose blooming white out of a sun-brilliant vase. Yes, St. Cloud was where he wanted to be. He reached up without looking and placed his hand over Evelyn’s on his shoulder. The seabirds darkened into flecks flying across the face of his rose in the sky, fleeting shadows on a soul, migrating in a migrating moment. Evelyn stretched on the bow of the boat, spreading her body to the sun. The shadow from the cloud stole over her, obliterating the rose on her breast. St. Cloud pulled at the last of the rum, watching Evelyn’s rose return to prominence as cheers erupted from the surrounding boats, people anxious for the next round of the passing spectacle, bonded in their witness to the true danger of the sport unfolding. Evelyn lay on a beach towel, turning the curve of her back to St. Cloud, then rolling slowly over to face him. Her eyes searched his, not to find something within him, but to show him a way out. The taste of sweet rum was still on his tongue, the bitterness of self-recrimination rattled his thoughts. The spread of female flesh before him was all that was left to him, since his wife had long ago taken flight with the last of her pride and beginnings of her next life. St. Cloud sought refuge in his emptiness, Evelyn was showing him just how endless his emptiness was. He felt a hollow man filling with drunken falsity. The portable radio next to Evelyn’s head cast its excited electronic voice over water, releasing St. Cloud from the finality of Evelyn’s gaze. The urgent immediacy of the radio voice was undercut by anxious laughter and expectant shouting rising from the small flotilla of boats.