Mile Zero by Thomas Sanchez Read Free Book Online Page A

Just what did Justo mean by that? Something not right up there but something not right down here. The hoarse laughter in St. Cloud’s ear focused him. He hunched his shoulders to shrug off the numbness in his neck. The laughter grew louder, it was not coming from the blurred crowd behind him, but was right in his ear. He tried to turn around but couldn’t. He felt his neck was stuck. He realized the numbness was not from the quarts of alcoholic novocaine he had poured into his body since the morning before, but from massive fingers clamping the back of his neck with the improbable iron tenacity of someone whose idea of a handshake was trying to squeeze toothpaste out of a shark. St. Cloud was held in the grip of a man who made his living on the ocean.
    “I’m a fishin man! My father was a fishin man before me and his before him!” The words rushed into St. Cloud’s ear, the hand clamped on his neck in a shark-killing grip opened.
    St. Cloud turned to a fierce red face burning with the fervent desire which can only be instilled in the true believers who imbibe a bottle of cognac before each and every dawn. St. Cloud was too deep in personal disintegration to hail this fellow sailor on a sea of booze. It was all he could manage to create a weak smile of greeting and let the Charter Boat captain belt out his standard line.
    “This town is being ruint! Faggots and foreigners tryin to drive us Conchs into trailer camps!”
    At last St. Cloud was inspired to summon insightful words to goalong with the idiotic drunken smile he felt frozen on his face. “Great to see you again, Bubba-Bob.”
    “You can see the fruits and nuts skippin all around the island in loafers with no socks!” Bubba-Bob pushed himself back two steps from the bar, spread his feet out and stomped them solidly on the floor. “Lookit this!” Bubba-Bob jerked his fish-gut-stained khaki trousers high off his ankles. “White socks! Real men wear white socks!
Fishin
men wear white socks!”
    “High fashion and social sobriety.” St. Cloud looked approvingly at the white socks. “That’s what you and I represent, sartorial splendor in the turtle grass. The last smart but fashionable holdouts.”
    “Goddamn right!” Bubba-Bob dropped his trousers and cocked his head defiantly at the unseen sockless hordes about to crash the doors and invade this early morning moment when he was on the verge of hitting someone. “You want a drink?”
    St. Cloud crossed his sockless feet beneath the lower rung of the barstool and hoped for the best. “Always a pleasure.”
    “Angelica! Again for my best bubba!” Bubba-Bob threw an arm around St. Cloud with the fervor of a lifeguard pulling a drowning man to shore.
“Salud!”
He slammed the glass Angelica refilled into St. Cloud’s full glass and drank with a hearty gurgle. “Yes sir, you are my bubba. You helped me out once, professor. A bubba never forgets.”
    “Never?” St. Cloud raised his glass in brief contemplation before emptying it.
    “But this town!” Bubba-Bob banged his empty glass down, no amount of alcohol could derail his one-track mind. “This town is finished. I remember this town when wood boats weren’t made of fiberglass and pussy was cunt.”
    “Great memories.”
    “Hey! You still sniffing around that little girl who works in your wife’s parrot store? You want to get women? I’ll tell you how to get women. Same way my daddy taught me how to get fish. A good fisherman is not lucky. A good fisherman finds the fish who are
unlucky
. What you’ve got to find is a woman unlucky enough to end up with an asshole like you.”
    St. Cloud weighed this logic carefully, smacked his lips in contemplation, then decided to go for it hook, line and sinker, but before he could Brogan leaned around in front of him, staring Bubba-Bob in the face.
    The thick gold earring pierced through Brogan’s right earlobe throbbed with the shadowed blade reflection from the twirling overhead fan. “My brother