Mile Zero Read Online Free PDF Page A

Strewn about the deck of the wreck were men, women and children, arms and legs stiffened into grotesquecontortions of death, sun-rotted flesh peeling from bones, eyes bubbled white with decay. The boat was less than thirty-five feet long, a glorified raft, its mast a hacked limb from a tree, the sails patched together bed sheets. Justo wouldn’t have trusted the boat’s splintered hulk to make it across one of the ritzy hotel pools in Miami, let alone six hundred miles of open water, up from the Caribbean Sea through the slice of the Windward Passage, past Cuba into the forceful flow of the Gulf Stream swinging east, then pulled north by the Straits of Florida’s fast-running current. Someone had kept the fire going in the
richaud
until the very end. What for? A sign to an African god? Voodoo? Justo fingered the wishbone at his neck and mumbled three Hail Mary’s. He would have said more but another roar went up from the judges’ grandstand as a voice boomed over loudspeakers announcing prize money to be awarded the race winners. The cheering crowd brought Justo back from his prayerful respite; he tried to focus on the nightmare scene in the boat, hoping his prayers would have made it all a mere passing apparition. The sun had turned the black bodies of the
paysans
blacker. Justo had seen it all before in Vietnam. The team of uniformed Coast Guardsmen in the boat awkwardly loaded the dead into rubber body bags. Memories, uniforms. A buried past rising. Justo thanked the Saints for his belief in Catholicism. He knew what an act of true confession was for, to absolve the living from their guilt of having survived life’s hell, to release a man from eternal anguish, to make a man forget. Vietnam was finished for Justo. Over. But this was different, a new devil. How can a man ask forgiveness from a tide of dead refugees? Different bodies, but the same old smell of death swelling a man’s nostrils. Justo held his breath, not wanting to inhale the finality of it all. A scream of ambulance sirens snaked in the distance across the island, through palm trees and narrow streets. There had been no ambulances in Vietnam’s jungles, only the howl of a jackal in a man’s blood, fear bursting in eardrums as medevac choppers roared in overhead. Another roar erupted from the judges’ grandstand. Bodies bagged in rubber shrouds were passed up from the refugee boat, along a chain gang of uniformed men up to the dock next to Justo. Half of the unbagged bodies left on the boat were children, black bodies turned blacker, finally gone powdery white in death. Must have been drinking seawater, Justo thought, their bellies bloated, skin parched, an agonizing death for children of dirt farmers adrift in a sea of uncertainty. Justo knew it could be one of his own daughters down there, if he had been born on the wrongisland in time. Could be his African grandparents, slumped in each other’s arms, only the sea between them and freedom. Three generations after his grandparents came from Africa the tide still brought in the same devil’s bounty of misery. Ambulance doors swung open behind Justo, then slammed shut, the vehicles wailing away to the morgue. What was that down in the boat? Something? The last body which had been buried beneath the others. Maybe? Yes. Life had trained Justo for this sort of thing. Four years in an Asian jungle refined his seventh sense, honed his second nature. A boy buried moves. Praise the Saints, the kid was moving.
    “He’s alive! That boy’s alive!”
    “Yes sir!” A Guardsman tugging the boy by a bony ankle into a body bag released his grip, as if suddenly aware he had a rabid animal by the tail.
    The sound of sirens grew louder in Justo’s ears. Behind him the growing crowd pushed with the belligerent force of the savagely curious against the rope barricade. His own men in uniform had arrived, pushing people back. Justo knew that most often people are only curious about other people after they are dead.