Naked Came the Florida Man

by Tim Dorsey

  One time that was different. A new mix of boys in the pickup truck. Before long she was facedown again between cane stalks, a large boy pinning her with knees in her back, twisting her right arm almost to the point of a radial fracture. Chris prayed for him to let go, but she never screamed.

  Then, suddenly, her arm was free. And the weight was off her back.

  “Dammit, Reggie! Why’d you punch me in the head?”

  “What’s wrong with you? She’s half your size.”

  “Fuck off!” The tormentor ran away.

  Chris rolled over in the dirt, and the boy named Reggie helped her up. “Maybe you shouldn’t come out here with these guys.”

  “I want to play football.”

  That was the last day Reggie was with her group, and then it was back to old routines again. At least she did catch the occasional rabbit, which meant a buck or two toward her football fund. Chris had bought a number of footballs in her short life. Sometimes she was able to play with one for two or three days before it was gone. A football was too precious for Chris to forget and leave somewhere. It was just snatched from her hands. One ball was even stolen as she stepped out of the store where she bought it. She stopped buying footballs and started sitting.

  Chris would sit on a milk crate on the balcony outside her grandmother’s apartment. Elbows on her knees, chin resting on her fists. She stared out into the empty street with eyes that were lasers of rage. She was one of the happiest kids you’d ever meet, which meant other kids had to make her sad. An hour could easily go by with Chris not moving, eyes locked in that fierce gaze. But it wasn’t a gaze of negativity that eats you alive from the inside. It was a look of ferocious, distilled determination. She began sitting out there so often and so long that many adults in the apartment building began subconsciously associating her with that milk crate.

  She usually sat on the crate after being run off from whatever the neighborhood boys were having fun doing. The few girls who were around were much older, with their own social castes and more subtle ways of hurting. Chris just kept sitting and glaring with such intensity you’d think she was going to hemorrhage. What was she thinking about all that time?

  When Chris wasn’t sitting on that crate or getting run off, she spent time in her room, tending curiosity. That meant books from the school library. She loved the science ones. Volcanoes, the planets, how clouds form, photosynthesis. But her all-time favorite was a book about sea creatures. The only thing she knew from Pahokee was Lake Okeechobee and all the bass fishermen, because it was fresh water. But this book brimmed with gripping pictures that filled her imagination with the faraway world of the ocean. Urchins and rays and giant squid. She was particularly fascinated by every detail in the life cycle of the hermit crab. Then there was another book she had purchased, one with holes in it. A collector’s book. She would press pennies into the holes according to year, and read voraciously about the mints in Denver and San Francisco, and the wartime pennies made of zinc because artillery shells needed the copper.

  But a child like Chris was meant to be outdoors, which meant she was relentless at trying to join in and being run off and sitting on a crate. Here’s what she was thinking on that crate: I’ll show them. Someday they’ll want to be my friend. They all will . . . Of course she was just a little kid and only had so much life experience to work with, so she thought: Yes, something urgent will come up with the boys. Suddenly they’ll all need really important information about hermit crabs or Lincoln pennies, and then where will they have to come? That’s right, me . . . She maintained her severe glare of tunnel vision, fantasizing about all the kids in the neighborhood coming up the street in a V formation, led by the biggest and most popular. They’d climb up to her apartment balcony and beg forgiveness, and she’d tell them about crustaceans or loose change or both.

  Adults weren’t the only ones who observed Chris’s devotion to that milk crate. Some of the boys also began to notice. They pointed up at the balcony and laughed. Then it became a running joke. Whenever she tried to hang out and participate in whatever they were doing: “Why don’t you go home to your milk crate?”

  It began following her around, even when she wasn’t trying to join in. She’d be walking down the sidewalk and then shouts from across the street, in a shitty, singsong taunting chant: “Milk crate . . . Milk crate . . .”

  Then they took it further, and it became her nickname. “Where are you going, Milk Crate?”

  It only made Chris stomp her feet harder on the way home. Ironically, her main source of solace and strength became sitting on that crate. So sit she did. One day! . . . One day! . . .

  Then one day Chris came home from school and found that someone had stolen her milk crate.

  “Chris? Chris?” said Coach Calhoun. “Did you hear me? Have you ever been bullied?”

  “Huh, what?” She raised her chin from her fists. “I’m sorry. I drifted there for a second.”

  “I was asking about bullies.”

  “Oh no. Not really.”

  “I’ve never seen a look like that in your eyes before,” said Calhoun. “You almost scared me.”

  “Just tired.”

  “I heard they call you Milk Crate, not out of affection. And they stole yours.”

  “No big deal. I got another.”

  “Okay, if you say so . . . We need to start getting ready for the game.”

  “You got it, Coach.” Chris went to a storage locker for the paper cups.

  The game went pretty much as expected, a rout by Pahokee. Reggie was awarded the game ball.

  An hour later, the last of the team dribbled out of the locker room in street clothes, laughing and recounting key plays that now loomed larger in their imaginations. Coach Calhoun emerged and headed for his car.

  He stopped. The field and stands were empty now, just a single small person at the far end repeatedly trying to kick a football through the uprights.

  One of the field maintenance people walked past the coach, opened the main power box and threw a large circuit breaker, turning off the stadium lights. Chris just teed up again and kicked one in the dark.

  “Excuse me,” Calhoun said to the maintenance guy. “Could you turn the lights back on?”

  Chapter 18

  The Atlantic Coast

  Florida has a lot of cities and towns with fort in the name. Given everything else, why not?

  Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Fort Meade, Fort Lonesome, Fort White, Fort Walton Beach. Tampa used to be Fort Brooke, and Ocala was Fort King. And there are more than a hundred other well-known actual forts, many still in existence, for which communities are not named. As late as the early twentieth century, the Sunshine State was still frontier country. While people in Manhattan attended operas and Yankee games, many Floridians were, well, Seminoles, the unconquered people, living down in the Glades.

  A gold Plymouth Satellite revved south down coastal Highway A1A, through one of the last long, relatively empty and non-berserk stretches of Florida seaside where you can hear yourself think, and that voice is whispering not to take it for granted. Driving by Patrick Air Force Base, through Indialantic, Melbourne Beach, Sebastian Inlet, Wabasso Beach, past the Navy SEAL Museum before turning inland at the jetties.

  Into Fort Pierce.

  The city is located on the east coast of Florida about sixty miles north of West Palm Beach, named after the army fort built during the Second Seminole War in 1938, which in turn was named for Colonel Benjamin Pierce, brother of the fourteenth president of the United States, for what that’s worth. Fort Pierce is the home of the A. E. Backus Gallery, in honor of the famous natural-landscape artist, and birthplace of the Florida Highwaymen painters movement. But in more recent years, as more and more people discover the past, it’s developed a growing reputation for something else.

  Zora Neale Hurston was a black woman traveling Florida in the 1930s. Not the best time for that combination in the Jim Crow South. Yet she carried it off with such class and dignity th
at you can only genuflect. She was a novelist, historian, anthropologist and a standout in the Harlem Renaissance scene. Or that’s how one avid Floridian put it.

  “Stetson Kennedy was often at the wheel of the car,” said Serge, at the wheel of the gold Plymouth heading west on Avenue D. “The state’s connective tissue I spoke of earlier. Rawlings to Stetson to Zora. She roamed the back roads with him, preserving local history and chronicling her times, kind of like us.”

  The Plymouth turned north as Serge chugged a travel mug of coffee. “Zora is often associated with Eatonville, one of the first self-governing African American communities, which used to be north of Orlando, and is now engulfed by it. They have a festival for her each year.” The car continued a short distance until easing to a stop at 1734 Avenue I. “But Hurston spent her last years here.” An arm pointed.

  Coleman looked oddly out the window. “That tiny-ass house?”

  “Realtors prefer to call it cozy.” Serge got out of the car with his mug. “While Zora was well known and respected in literary circles, her body of work never really gained traction with the general public until well after her death in 1960. In fact, Zora lived out her last decade in destitute obscurity. She taught briefly at a local school, wrote a few articles for the local paper, even worked as a motel maid. But her undaunted pride and individual spirit never waned. Near the end she wrote: ‘I have made phenomenal growth as a creative artist . . . If I die without money, somebody will bury me.’”

  They walked across a tidy lawn toward a modest light blue stucco house with a flat roof. Couldn’t be more than five hundred square feet.

  “This was her last home.” Serge stopped to absorb invisible rays coming off it. “Sometimes history puts the right person at the right place at the right time. Just after Hurston died, a sheriff’s deputy named Pat Duval happened to be driving by here when he noticed someone burning trash in a big oil drum. He stopped to inquire, and the man said he was disposing of stuff from the house. Now, the deputy happened to be one of the few people at the time who had read Hurston and knew her worth. He quickly put out the fire, saving invaluable manuscripts and personal papers. Doesn’t that spin your derby?”

  Coleman was paying attention to something else. “What’s with that big sign?”

  “Official marker for the house, stop number three of eight on the Hurston Dust Tracks Heritage Trail,” said Serge. “The city of Fort Pierce rightfully stepped up to honor Hurston and educate the masses, which I’m totally down with.”

  “Then why that look on your face?”

  Serge finished his coffee in a long swig. “I like to dig up these off-the-path places on my own, and the sign makes it look like I cheated. But I knew about this place before the sign, I swear!” He grabbed Coleman by the front of his shirt. “After I’m gone, you’re the only one who can set the record straight!”

  “Sure thing,” said Coleman. “My shirt . . .”

  “Sorry.” Serge released him. “Do you think I’m over-reacting?”

  “Who am I to judge?”

  “I’ve been thinking of getting a service animal,” said Serge. “Or switching to decaf.”

  “Service animal?” said Coleman. “You’re not disabled.”

  “Oh, how wrong you are,” said Serge. “I’m crazy, whack job, nut-bar, basketcase, Looney Tunes, Froot Loops, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, screws loose, not playing with a full deck, batshit, bats in the belfry, off my rocker, off the deep end, out where the buses don’t run. Stop me when I’ve made my point.”

  “No, I get it. I already knew but didn’t want to say anything.” Coleman whistled. “Wow, you’re really admitting that to yourself?”

  “Of course. What’s the big deal?” Serge got out his camera. “Everyone’s a little bit crazy, but my case is state-of-the-art. Usually it’s a blessing, endowing me with supernatural powers of free-range thinking: Pavlov’s dog, pinecones, softer bath tissue, covalent molecules, Pyrrhic victories, Lou Gehrig, nuance, the induction cooktop, the Yalta Conference, rationalization, pasteurization, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Lemon Pledge, the number fifty-six, ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ opening products to void warranty, Hot Pockets, rainfall at the airport, Aztec beating hearts, osmosis, buy-one-get-one, frequent having to go, Netflix original series . . .”

  Coleman crushed another beer can. “What about the rest of the time?”

  “. . . Hydraulic fluid, Portnoy’s Complaint, the camel’s nose under the tent, vote motherfucker! . . . What?”

  “The rest of the time?” said Coleman. “When it’s not a blessing?”

  “Then there’s screaming and pointing, and we have to run away again.”

  “I don’t see how a service animal can fix that.”

  “When you say service animal, most people think of a guide dog leading the blind or performing other essential tasks for the handicapped.” Serge handed his camera to Coleman. “But there’s a whole other sub-category called ‘emotional support animals,’ who take the edge off mental conditions. Except that when you’re dealing with crazy, you get the kind of animal selections you’d expect. And you wouldn’t believe the growing list that is now confounding the transportation industry: from tiny pigs and iguanas to parrots and even boa constrictors, who are said to be able to detect certain seizures in advance and give a little warning squeeze. Other times the squeeze is a different warning—‘Get this fucking snake off me!’—so there’s an obvious downside. Even some animals have support animals. Thoroughbred horse breeders often place a donkey in a stall if one of their studs has a history of spazzing out.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “I’m thinking of getting a meerkat.”

  “You mean those cute little guys on nature shows who stand up to look for trouble?”

  Serge nodded. “A meerkat could level me out.” He walked to the front of the house and smiled. “Take my picture at Zora’s. Make sure not to get the sign . . .”

  Meanwhile . . .

  In a Cocoa Beach motel room: a ticking sound, then a loud snap.

  Malcolm frantically pulled his wrists free from the time lock. He felt the top of his head. “Ahhhhhhhhh!”

  He ran out of the motel room and into the office.

  The jaundiced manager jumped back from the counter. “Ahhhhhhh! What happened to your head? . . .”

  Ten minutes later, the motel parking lot swarmed with police vehicles. In the motel office, someone pulled a sheet over a body. The officer in charge looked up. “What the hell happened?”

  The motel manager shrugged. “He came in here demanding bacon and then collapsed.”

  An officer stuck his head in the door. “Lieutenant, I think there’s something you need to see.”

  They rushed up the walkway and entered room number 7. The officer nodded toward a wall.

  “Finger paintings?” said the lieutenant.

  “I recognize it,” said the officer. “The Everglades mural from the Clewiston Inn. The lounge is closed now, but they’re really nice about letting guests in. You should go.”

  The lieutenant glared. “I thought you had some key evidence.” He pointed in the general direction of the office. “What’s wrong with you? There’s a body getting cold back there.”

  The officer told the lieutenant to take a closer look at one of the paintings.

  He did.

  It was signed by the artist.

  Chapter 19

  Four Years Earlier

  A faithful stuffed wahoo with glazed eyes stared down from an office wall at a man cradling the receiver of a desk phone between his shoulder and neck. That left his hands free to take vigorous notes.

  “Thank you very much for your time.” He hung up.

  After that final international call to a Dominican Republic historical society, Captain Crack Nasty had everything he could possibly find on one Fulgencio Fakakta, right up until he fled the island in 1921. After that, the years in Florida were still a mystery that phone calls couldn’t solve. From here, it was in-person homework.


  Time for a road trip.

  Crack climbed into the cab of his Dodge Dakota pickup and headed west on Southern Boulevard. He left the outskirts of coastal development, passing the vintage Lion Country Safari roadside attraction, subconsciously thinking, How old are those animals? Then onward through Twentymile Bend, all the way out to where the first fumes of development picked up again as he neared the big lake. The road’s name changed to Hooker Highway. The schoolkids got a kick out of that.

  The captain started at the Pahokee and Belle Glade libraries, looking through special collections of old newspaper microfilms. He drove past the hurricane monument on the way over to the courthouses for records of faded deeds. He cruised the back roads around the addresses he had jotted down. Then he widened his circles of driving out into the nearest sugarcane fields. He picked up a tail. Not law enforcement, but local young men in their twenties. He thought: What has gone insane in this world when blacks are allowed to follow whites in the Deep South? Except his surveillance wasn’t threatening; it was concerned. The three youths were watching out for their neighbors because Crack’s movements around town came off like he was planning some kind of crime. Which was accurate.

  The salvager was more than relieved when he reached his next stop, the local police department. Crack asked to speak with their public-affairs spokesman, and was led into an office with a football in a display case on the desk. The captain said he was writing for one of those metal-detector hobby magazines, and he wanted to ask about some rumors he’d been hearing.

  “Oh, so that’s why you’ve been driving around here all suspicious like,” said the sergeant.

  “You know I’ve been driving around?” said Crack. “Then I need to tell you there were these dangerous characters following me.”

  “How do you think we found out you were driving around?” said the sergeant. “The guys following you called us on their cell phones. And they’re not dangerous; they used to play on the football team. They just thought you were up to something. Are you?”