Free Mile Zero by Thomas Sanchez Page A

coat,” a sun-faded blue and white seersucker affair once worn by smart leading men in B-movies of the forties. He fumbled a worn paperback book out of a pocket and placed it on the table. Would it work? It had before. He began hesitantly, reading in Creole learned twenty years before at the university.
“Le Petit Prince. This is the story of the Little Prince.”
He didn’t have to go too far with this. If it was going to work it would work by the end of chapter six. If not, then never. It was a dumb trick, but there was some magic in it. Magic was what St. Cloud most needed now. He would rather be reading the fierce lyric and metaphoric dazzle of Lorca or Neruda. It was painful to read this naive story. He must make it believable, make the boy believe. Was Voltaire listening? No sign of life on an otherwise smooth face crisscrossed with visible scars of sorrow, stoic. No trust in this room. Let the story work. This was a tale of two lost souls, twotravelers in the void who could teach each other in their similar sense of loss and longing. This was a world where the distrust of the adult crossed the trusting path of childhood:
    I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus can you imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice. It said, “If you please—draw me a sheep!”
     
    St. Cloud spoke the words of the book’s adult narrator, a crashed aviator stranded in a desert where his technology was rendered useless, suddenly meeting a princely boy from a planet called Imagination. Was Voltaire buying it? No sign.
    St. Cloud kept reading and thinking. The flashy soldierly uniform of the small Prince was something Voltaire should be able to conjure, it was a mockery of the swashbuckling military image modern-day Haitian dictators so covetously preserved as they scattered clouds of dollar bills from open-topped limousines to starving true believers; it mocked as well those who put forth the saber-wielding philosophy of
boule kay, coupe tet, burn the houses, cut off the heads
, which prevailed for ten years of civil war before the 1804 independence of Haiti. Yes, this Prince was an image of anarchic childhood innocence dressed in the doom of his aspiration to be adult. Such a French story. How odd it should take place in the Sahara Desert, another French-colonized domain. And the story of Haiti, former slaves of the French, barely surviving the illusion of freedom, ruled for generations by masters of ceremony dressed in pomp of former French masters. No harsher master than a former slave. Every master needs a dog, every dog a bone.
    St. Cloud swigged another mouthful of rum. The liquidity of his thoughts drifted randomly between the lines of Saint-Exupéry’s simple allegory as the sound of his voice floated around the room:
    As each day passed I would learn, in our talk, something about the little prince’s planet, his departure from it, his journey. The information would come very slowly, as it might chance to fall from his thoughts. It was in this way that I heard, on the third day, about the catastrophe of the baobabs
.
     
    Of course the baobabs: devils, false messiahs, dictators, Hitlers and Huns, Presidents for Life, totalitarian intolerance and moral intemperance dozing in the
“heart of the earth’s darkness, until some one among them is seized with the desire to awaken.”
The baobab begins as
“a charming little sprig”
and grows to split a planet in pieces. Where the Little Prince came from,
“the soil of that planet was infested with them.”
Where Voltaire came from, the hardship river of tears flowed endlessly to the sea carrying the soil of life. Catastrophe of the baobabs.
    3:30. Maybe it wasn’t going to work. This time the magic would fail. St. Cloud was running out of rum and running out of time. A red flush rose to his face. He felt raw and hot, a piece of meat flung onto a fire. He felt a fool for wasting his time with this