Cold Florida

by Phillip DePoy

  ‘You don’t look so bad, considering,’ she said. ‘That’s a nice suit, it’s just a little beat up. Yudda didn’t mention that we also heard you saved some baby from a fate worse than death; Lou Yahola’s cooking.’

  ‘Well,’ I explained to them both, ‘as it happens, I did save a baby – and nobody’s dead. Although, I have been pronounced dead before, only not here in Florida. This was back home in Brooklyn. This is why I find it a little amusing that you should bring up the subject.’

  ‘I assume that a story goes with that,’ Myrna said.

  Myrna was wise to me. I often came into Yudda’s Crab Palace offering up the jive. Sometimes it was good for a drink. Every once in a while, I got a free meal out of it. I did it because it made me colorful, and I enjoyed being the interesting outsider from Brooklyn. It was really my only shot at participating in the community at all. I was a Yankee Jew Criminal, the only one of that kind in Fry’s Bay. So, my only shot at being accepted by the locals was to take what made me different and turn that into what made me fascinating. This kind of understanding or insight into my own behavior was something I got from several years of Freudian analysis. I originally undertook such an endeavor to discover why I liked to steal cars, which I never figured out, but the entire enterprise did have some advantages.

  ‘Now, where to begin?’ I asked.

  I stalled Yudda and Myrna in the telling of my story in order that they would be tantalized, which was something that often made a story better. Also I figured I might get my luncheon comped if I drew things out. It was always worth a shot.

  Unfortunately, Yudda was way ahead of me.

  ‘You’re going to have the grilled shark steak with spicy steamed rice and purple slaw,’ he said. ‘It’s the best we got today. Nothing’s too good for a guy who saved a baby and came back from the dead.’

  ‘So that’s settled,’ I said, sitting back in the booth.

  Yudda took a seat at the bar facing me, and Myrna leaned on her elbows. Yudda set down his cup of stew, but took a healthy slug from the thermos of martini.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’re ready.’

  ‘All right,’ I told him, ‘and stop me if I’ve told you part of this before, because it’s a very long story and I wouldn’t want to repeat anything.’

  ‘Or tell us the whole thing in one sitting,’ Yudda intoned, heavy-lidded. ‘God forbid you should run out of material.’

  ‘Do you want to hear how I got dead or not?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell,’ Myrna said impatiently.

  ‘Well,’ I muttered, slumping down somewhat. ‘I believe that I told you I was busted twice for car theft. Which, incidentally, was a very good percentage, considering how many fine automobiles I boosted in my youth. The first time—’

  ‘Was a very nice rabbi who dropped the charges if you said some kind of prayer,’ Myrna interrupted. ‘Skip on down to the second time.’

  ‘Second time,’ I picked up immediately, ‘was the kicker. I would rather not say what happened to get me nabbed, but nabbed I was. I was riding in the backseat of a cop car doing about seventy because the circumstances were dicey, and it was a very crummy night, with thunder and lightning and a blinding amount of rain. It was maybe three in the morning, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, wham! A Buick the size of a bulldozer knocked the cop car into a roll. I mean, we rolled over maybe five, six times – I couldn’t say exactly, because I passed out after the first few. Now, I have no idea what happened immediately after that, or what was up with the cops or the Buick, but here is what I can tell you: I was pronounced dead at the scene.’

  ‘And you know this how?’ Yudda asked me.

  I leaned forward, my eyes drilling into his. ‘Because I woke up in the morgue.’

  Yudda’s eyes widened. ‘The morgue?’

  ‘With my shoes off and a tag on my toe!’

  ‘Holy crap,’ Myrna whispered.

  ‘In a normal world, when a man like Foggy Moscowitz gets killed, he stays dead. But apparently, I had other options.’

  ‘You woke up in the morgue?’ Myrna had to repeat.

  ‘Covered in blood.’ I nodded. ‘My leg was killing me. My vision was blurred, like I was under water. My hair was a mess. My recently laundered white shirt was torn. My nice blue silk tie was bloodstained. My new gabardine suit was a wreck. But I was alive.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’ Yudda shook his head. ‘Only you.’

  ‘I squeezed my eyes shut, see, thinking maybe I was dreaming. I was hoping the place would somehow turn into my room at the Magellan Inn. When that didn’t happen, I sat up to take my first real look around the joint. It was dark and cold.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Yudda said.

  ‘There wasn’t much to the room,’ I went on. ‘Three tables side-by-side. I was on the middle one. The walls were painted some sort of industrial green, the kind of color that was supposed to be soothing and cheerful but only ended up being depressing.’

  ‘Most of the customers there in the morgue,’ Yudda said to me, ‘what do they care about the color of the walls?’

  ‘I agree,’ I said.

  ‘So come on, what happened next?’ Myrna’s voice was impatient.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked. ‘I hobbled my ass over to the double doors, leaned hard, popped the dead bolt, and stumbled into the night.’

  ‘And Foggy Moscowitz,’ Myrna said, clasping her hands aside her face, ‘was born again.’

  ‘In the non-Christian sense,’ I assured her.

  ‘But here you are,’ she said.

  Yudda took another swig from his thermos. ‘You got a line of crap that could reach all the way to Europe, you know that? That what brought you to Florida?’

  ‘Well, a couple of other things happened after that,’ I declared, ‘but that was the beginning of the story, yes. Swear to God.’

  ‘OK,’ he told me, hefting himself off the barstool, ‘but you’ll pardon me if I don’t stand anywhere near you in a thunderstorm.’

  Myrna brought my luncheon and silence prevailed in Yudda’s Crab Palace for the ensuing twenty minutes.

  TEN

  When my meal settled, and a good meal it was, I decided that it might be best to retrace my steps from the previous night, which I hated doing. I liked to move forward. I had always found that, when you moved back, you were liable to bump into something you’d rather forget about. But there didn’t seem to be much else to do.

  So I offered to pay Yudda, just for show. He made the mildest of protestations. I quickly acquiesced, before he could change his mind, and I was out the door with my wallet safely in my pocket.

  Despite my better judgment, I headed toward the apartment of Jody the pusher.

  It was a sunny day, and the gloom of the previous night seemed to be lifting. It was even warming up. Somewhere in the air there was a hint of spring, which came early in Florida, I learned. In the part of Brooklyn where I was from, you could wait until June for a warm day. Maybe it was that way all over Brooklyn, I wouldn’t know. I stuck pretty close to the neighborhood whenever I was there. But in Fry’s Bay, it might be nice by the end of February. This was a reason that a great many people from Brooklyn wanted to come to Florida, though it was not my primary motivation.

  At any rate, I ended up at Jody’s door. I checked my watch and discovered that it was after one o’clock in the afternoon. I thought she might be up. I knocked on the door, and heard cursing and stumbling from inside the apartment. Then I heard what sounded very much like the click of a handgun. I felt in my pocket, like a reflex, only to discover that the pistol I’d pulled off the kid in Pete’s was no longer with me. I decided that I would worry about that later. At that moment, I only stepped away from the door, a little to the side. I thought I would not present a perfect target should anything happen to go off.

  ‘Jody?’ I sang out, nice as you please. ‘It’s Foggy. From last night. Remember?’

  ‘Who?’ she mumbled.

  ‘You know,’ I reminded her, ‘
I brought you donuts? And then you tried to have me beat up over at Pete’s?’

  Jody did not make a sound.

  ‘Jody, believe me,’ I told her, ‘I never carry a grudge. So you can put away the gun that I heard and we can just talk. Leave the door closed if you want to. Closed and locked. I only want to ask you a couple of questions.’

  ‘Why would I want to talk to you?’ I could hear that she was irate, although I couldn’t figure why.

  ‘Because I’m trying to help Lynette,’ I said, ‘same as you.’

  ‘Help Lynette,’ she repeats. ‘That’s a laugh. Since when did my people ever get any good out of the kind of help you people talk about?’

  ‘You people?’ I asked, incredulously. ‘Just who do you think I am?’

  ‘Listen, dickweed,’ she growled. ‘My father was a soldier in the army, a deserter from Korea, locked up in the Columbus stockade. He escaped and got as far as our swamp. He almost died, see? But he was found by a Seminole woman, my mother, who took him in, nursed him back, saved his life. And what do you think was her reward? He knocked her up, slapped her around, and took off. I never saw his face. This, to me, is the perfect example of the relationship between your people and mine.’

  ‘Hang on, sister,’ I snapped back. ‘I don’t know who you think I am, but my people were slaves before your people even existed. You got a bad couple hundred years with the white man? Try five thousand! That’s what we got, first with the pharaohs, then the Cossacks, then the Nazis, and then somebody killed Lenny Bruce! We can’t even have Lenny Bruce!’

  ‘Who?’ She was nearly screaming.

  ‘Doesn’t matter!’ I matched her volume level. ‘The point is, I am not your people!’

  ‘Says you!’ And she fired her little pistol right through the door.

  If I had not been standing slightly to the side, the bullet would have gone right through me. As it was, the bullet kept on going until it got to the opposite wall in the hallway.

  I decided to keep still and see what she would do. I noticed that no one stirred from any other apartment; no one called out, no disturbance of any sort presented itself. As the seconds ticked by in silence, I came to the conclusion that a little gunfire in the middle of the day might not be such a rare occurrence in the place. I took a closer gander at the smeared, battered wall where Jody’s bullet had come to rest and, sure enough, there were maybe three other holes like the one she had just made.

  Then I heard strange noises in her apartment and realized that Jody was absconding via some rear egress. That kicked me into high gear. I raced down the hall, out the door, and around the back of the building, in under ten seconds. But it was not fast enough. I surmised that the open window I saw was the one in her apartment, and the still-trembling fire escape was the means by which she had achieved the roof. Not the alley where I was standing. In short, Jody was gone.

  I had a second or two in which to ponder this question: where was the gun that had been in my pocket – the one I had taken off the kid the previous evening at Pete’s? And that brought up several other questions. For example, if the cops showed up at the hospital the previous evening the way Maggie Redhawk said they did, why was I not at least questioned by them? First I stabbed a guy in the neck, and then I shot a guy in the knee. This, under most ordinary circumstances, would provoke at least a curious question or two from the local constabulary. So I was forced to wonder: what gives?

  ELEVEN

  Since I got no answers from Jody, I decided to continue my hapless re-creation of the previous night’s events by taking myself to Pete’s Billiard Emporium.

  In the light of the afternoon, it did not look so good. Some things – old buildings, semi-romantic landscapes, certain faces – are always best left to moonlight. The old joint looked very much like a tired hooker asleep on a park bench in the warm afternoon sun. I considered coming back when the sun went down, but I saw Fat through the window and I figured I might as well go in.

  The contrast between the light of day and the dark room was, for a second, blinding. I couldn’t see a thing, but I heard Fat say, ‘Foggy. Jesus. You had a night. Did you know some people are telling other people that you’re dead?’

  ‘So I heard,’ I told him. ‘How do you suppose such a rumor – so obviously untrue – gets started?’

  ‘Well, I can tell you,’ he said.

  His image was coming into view as my eyes adjusted to the dim light at the bar. He was smiling.

  I sat. ‘By all means, and maybe a nice cup of coffee?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said.

  He moved to the coffee machine, poured me a big white mug of mud, and zipped it across the bar to me like it was a beer. The cup turned – almost a pirouette – and the handle spun perfectly toward me so that I could pick it up and sip.

  ‘You know the hooligans who were in here last night?’ he asked me.

  ‘I do. I have some questions about them, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I have some answers,’ he said. ‘But first let me tell you that they have friends.’

  ‘Hard to believe.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Fat told me, ‘the friends got wind of their little party here – don’t ask me how – and, before you know it, some of these so-called friends were out and about, looking for you. Looking to even the score. And what do you think happened?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I admitted.

  ‘One of these extracurricular cohorts saw you running like an idiot through the streets with a baby in your arms, and then this guy saw you tumble to the pavement, and he went back and told everyone that you dropped dead!’

  ‘I’ll be.’ I sipped my coffee, which tasted terrible. ‘But that’s the way these rumors get started.’

  ‘It is,’ he agreed.

  ‘About that,’ I said, squirming a bit on my stool. ‘Maggie Redhawk told me that you saved my bacon by telling the cops you were the one who stabbed the kid in the neck with a fork.’

  Fat nods. ‘You don’t need any legal trouble, Foggy,’ he said softly. ‘I know what you been through. Besides, the cop who investigated was that moron Rodney Weaver. I would mess with him just on general principles.’

  I sat there for a second trying to decide if I was grateful or suspicious, because I couldn’t ever remember anyone lying to the police on my behalf – although it was widely known that Rodney Weaver was, in fact, a moron. I didn’t have time to complete these thoughts because Fat started up again.

  ‘You know the drug dealer Jody Boyd?’

  ‘This is the first I heard her last name, but I do know her, only slightly.’

  ‘She’s the one who started the ruckus last night. She called those kids. They’re kind of her, what would you say? Local distributors, I guess is how you’d put it.’

  ‘They’re in business with her?’

  ‘A little. I think she gives them free dope in exchange for, like, a little legwork and some protection. They seem to like her.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, almost to myself. ‘Look, you wouldn’t know if those boys were Seminoles, would you?’

  He looked at me like I was nuts. ‘You didn’t know that? Christ. Half the people around here are full or part Seminole. And the rest of us are from out of town. I don’t think there’s but ten people in Fry’s Bay from the original white settlers.’

  ‘Huh.’ This seemed to me an appropriate response. ‘So then I guess I shouldn’t feel so much like an outsider.’

  ‘You?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. White people take you for a Seminole, the Seminoles take you for white. You’re a man without a country, brother.’

  ‘Oh. Well, there you go.’ I was only a little deflated. ‘But to return to the point, those kids last night, they’re Seminoles?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK, so let me ask you this: what do you know about the Seminole Tribal Council?’

  ‘You don’t want to mess with them, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘T
he Seminoles are the only tribe in America that never signed a peace treaty with the U.S. government. Technically they’re still at war.’

  ‘OK, but about the Council,’ I went on, because I was not at war with anybody that I knew of.

  ‘Some time in the 1950s, the Seminole tribes got together a Tribal Council and a Board of Directors. This was after they already filed a claim to get back their land. They’ve been waiting for that for a while.’

  ‘Get back their land?’ I ask. ‘How long have they been waiting?’

  ‘Since 1947. They lost it in, you know, the 1800s.’

  ‘Lost it to who?’ I wondered.

  ‘The government. The U.S. government.’

  ‘Wait.’ I tried to clear this up in my head. ‘The government took their land? No, that can’t be right.’

  ‘I understand that this is exactly how they feel about it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The Tribal Council,’ he said, ‘these men are tough as cuss; they got the patience of Job and the guts of a Kamikaze.’

  ‘Aside from the fact that you are mixing too many world cultures in one sentence, I get the picture.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he told me. ‘They live way back in the swamp. Don’t nobody know what they do back there. You hear all kinds of things. And if you go in yourself? You get all eat up by an alligator the size of a Cadillac. Seriously.’

  My eyes were completely adjusted to the light in the room by that point, and I could see that Fat had a worried look on his face.

  ‘You’re nervous about the fracas here last night,’ I surmised, ‘because you don’t want trouble with the Council.’

  ‘Bingo,’ he told me, tapping three times on the bar.

  ‘Well then I am doubly grateful to you,’ I said, ‘for taking the rap – for telling the policemen that you stabbed the kid.’

  He shrugged, but did not look me in the eye.

  And I was still suspicious because I thought that there was more to this than he was telling me. So I made a bold – or possibly foolish – play.

  ‘Can I see the phone for a second, Fat?’ I asked. ‘I have to call the boss.’