Read Mile Zero for Free Online

important.” Justo looked along the dock, reporters were waving at him, television crews jostling each other for camera positions. He wished he could go off to the bar with St. Cloud and drink his way out of such
a mal día
. A cool breeze flapped the loose ends of his
guayabera
shirt. He turned from the hectic scene on the dock, his eyes going to the words scrawled in blood along the gunwale. “I agree with you. Columbus and the
paysans
on this boat were after the same thing. Both knew they had to keep the Saints fed to get where they were going. Problem is nobody knows these days what the Saints are eating.”

3
     
    USA 41 – HAITI 1 . The hand-scrawled message on the chalkboard placed among the bank of colored liquor bottles behind the bar shimmered through misting cigarette smoke. Whirring fan blades overhead tore at the boisterous conversations in the crowded Wreck Room bar, whipping sentences and paragraphs in random patterns, flinging fumbling articulations and drunken declarations onto lips moving with pantomime thickness. It was difficult to tell who at the bar said what and how many drinks back they said it. It no longer mattered. Who cared? Almost no one was watching the television screen aimed at the long bar from a far corner, beaming yesterday’s news in the early morning hours, illuminating over and over the image of the hundred-ton Space Shuttle lifting from primordial ooze of swampy Everglades atop six million pounds of orange flaming rocket thrust, performing a quick disappearing act into heaven’s blue yawn in less time than the blink of an alligator’s eye, leaving behind a five-hour traffic snarl on asphalt arteries spiraling away from the Space Center launch pad, honking cars filled with people headed back to a mundane world, stifling their desire to be orbiting above it all faster than seventeen thousand miles an hour. Such was the news from the television, a comet man-made, followed by the filmed image of a black policeman in a loose
guayabera
shirt standing before a Haitian refugee boat as bloated bodies skinned white by the sun were hefted onto a dock of pressing spectators.
“No,”
the recorded voice from Justo’s filmed image made its way from the television up above the roar of the bar into the swirling fan blades.
“There’s no proof of cannibalism on this boat. I don’t know where that rumor got started
.
These people died of exposure, starvation and drinking seawater. There will be an investigation. Yes, one survivor. No, I already told you, no signs of cannibalism have been exhibited on any bodies.”
    “Whose treasure is it anyway? I’d like to know! I mean, the Indians found it and made other Indians dig for it. Then the Spaniards took it from the Indians. Same thing is going on now four hundred years later in space. I don’t see what the difference is if those Space Shuttle guys zipped over to the moon and found themselves some great cache from a crashed Martian flying saucer, a million tons of gleaming platinum scattered around in moon craters. You think those guys are going to let that stuff just lie there for another zillion years? Hell no! They would do just what the Spanish Conquistadores did, load it up and wing it on home. That’s what we’re doing up there in space. Isn’t one bit different from what Ponce de León was up to when he was running around Florida here in the sixteenth century, and it’s no different from me diving these Spanish wrecks off the Keys. Finders keepers, losers bleeders. Know what I mean, St. Cloud?”
    St. Cloud heard Brogan’s words, but he couldn’t concentrate on them. Something wasn’t right up there on the television screen. St. Cloud had watched the news come around four times so far that night. Something was off. After Justo’s image on the television disappeared the screen flickered with the exploding wreckage of Karl Dean’s powerboat filmed from a helicopter, shards of brightly colored fiberglass scattered like jewels