Mile Zero by Thomas Sanchez Page B

sport and spawn in the shallow channels and coral flats along the Keys. What angler would hook Isabel’s treasure as she leapt from the dusk of her pubescence into the nocturnal passion of womanhood? Justo wondered. He knew they were out there waiting. Young men. Anglers playing the angles. It troubled him in a way he had never been troubled before. The trouble started in the past year when Isabel would walk into a dimly lit room, approaching him from behind. Justo would think it was Rosella, his mind leaping back twenty years. It was Rosella, the girl he married, appearing in an oblique reverse rush through time. Then the rude realization it was his daughter, Isabel. Certain embarrassment then overtook him, a painful hook of barbed remorse that Rosella had truly not reappeared in a moment of youthful reincarnation. A sense of guilt flowed from the undeniable illumination he couldn’t accept this present-day beauty before him asan independent being to be cherished for her own self. Isabel was a ghost stirring distant realities from his attic of memory. Men should not have daughters. A cruel fate for both.
    Whenever one of these ghostly encounters would occur Isabel would sit on the edge of Justo’s chair and ask what was wrong, and he would ask her about her schoolwork. A jealousy filled his veins. He didn’t want to give this girl up. It was like losing his wife’s youth twice. Anger overtook his jealousy. Not the anger associated with the knowledge some angling angler would have Isabel for the first time. Anger that he would never have that experience with Rosella again. Why should some faceless boy have it who would not understand its power? Justo was becoming a sorrowful old man before his time. That is what having daughters will do to a man. A cruel fate. Maybe that was why
Quince
was so important to his wife, Rosella. All that fuss and bother about the fifteenth birthday celebration which would surely leave him broke. Two hundred fifty guests, every relative from Key West to Tampa eating roast pig, fried plantain bananas and
yuca
, enough food to fuel a presidential inaugural, plus two bands, six priests, and a chorus of pretty white-gloved waiters to attend the entire circus in the Casa Marina Hotel’s high-arched grand salon overlooking the Atlantic. What a feast, fifty pigs giving their lives for his daughter’s fifteenth birthday. What a bill. A bill he was willing to pay, a matter of honor and duty, the star of Cuba burns bright with pride. Only now was Justo beginning to understand
Quince’s
greater significance, something deeper was going on. In the end
Quince
was not so much a daughter’s passing to womanhood, but a wife’s having her husband’s dreams returned.
    Justo traveled the narrowing streets popping conch fritters and ruminating on the mysterious ways of women which eluded all masculine equations. Resting next to him on the front seat of the car was a bouquet of lilies. A prickly sweet aroma exuded from the flared petals, filling the car with the scent of first communions and death. It was the first friday of the month. The first friday of the month Justo always had his lilies and headed for the cemetery to honor the past in order to make sense of the ever-increasing fractured present. This first friday he had been sidetracked by Handsomemost. Justo got the call as he was headed to the cemetery. Shots being fired out by the airport. Probably just the gang of boys who mucked around in the mangroves there playing Yankees and Gooks, replaying a war they were sorry to have missed, and mourned with the misguidedfervor only adolescent males seem capable of. The boys built forts in the salt swamps, divided into teams of jungle fatigue-clad Marines and black pajama-cloaked Viet Cong, replaying a video war which had been conjured through twenty-inch holes of television screens a decade before. The boys’ play was more real than the distant ghosts of the television war. On especially sporting occasions