by Tom Cooper
A hot swell of nausea rose in Crowe’s guts. He leaned over the gunwale and retched up a spate of Hamm’s beer. He cupped a handful of water, splashed it over his mouth and face. He spat, but his mouth was dry.
He forced himself still. He stared into the dark and waited. When his eyes adjusted, he spotted them floating in the water. Five or six bale-sized packages, wrapped tight in plastic and burlap and twine.
Crowe took the oars and he shoved them closer. He grabbed one of the floating parcels and heaved it onto the boat. Maybe sixty-five pounds, maybe seventy, whatever it was.
Crowe had a good idea.
He was almost sure. The smell, pungent and sticky.
But he dug his keys out of his jeans pocket anyway. Tore into the package with a key and reached into the hole. Even before he pulled out the leaves the stink was unmistakable.
A bale of marijuana, dank Colombian.
What locals called a square grouper.
“Goddamn,” Reed Crowe said. “Oh shit.”
Heidi knew damn well what the smell was. She smelled it often enough on Crowe. Now she was telling him again that if he didn’t take her home now, she was never talking to him again.
Crowe was all but deaf, he was so rattled and chock full of adrenaline.
A fresh shock went through him when he thought he saw one of the burned men watching him. The man closest, who lay burning in the cattails. A pain-crazed eye fixed on him and stayed riveted. His skin smoked and bubbled. The tatters of his clothes smoldered on his scorched body.
Reed Crowe stopped and waited. He stared into the dark. He called out.
“Hello?” Crowe said with his hands cupped around his mouth. “Mister, hey?”
“Who’re you talkin’ to?”
“Don’t look.”
She told Reed he was being an asshole. That he was being dangerous, like his father.
Crowe only said, “Keep your eyes closed.”
“God. Damn. It.”
Crowe called out again into the dark and waited. He could hear the blood whomping in his head.
The insects, hushed by the crash, were slowly resuming their chorus.
Then the man’s eye went dead, a lifeless matte.
An optical illusion, Crowe convinced himself.
Nerves.
Still he waited a moment until he was convinced he’d seen a mirage, that his mind was playing tricks.
It was another half hour before they reached the harbor. By then Heidi was so scared and angry she was no longer speaking to Reed Crowe. She stayed pilled into herself like a kid in a middle-school tornado drill.
The harbor lot was empty save for Crowe’s brand-new orange hatchback. Before he got a chance to rope the skiff into its berth, Heidi was already out of the boat stalking down the length of the pier. She went straight to the hatchback and slammed herself inside and stayed there.
Crowe off-loaded the bale. He was running on adrenaline alone. He was sore-boned and his legs felt like gelatin. He wondered what his next move would be.
He knew he would call the police about the crash at a gas station pay phone. He would disguise his voice to sound older than he was and he would try to keep the fear and guilt and uncertainty out of it.
And the excitement.
He would mention nothing about the weed. He would hang up before they had a chance to ask about anything.
Paranoid they were already on his trail, Crowe glanced over his shoulder as he shoved the bale into the trunk, but the road abutting the harbor was empty still of morning traffic, such traffic as there was in this outpost.
Morning was beginning its first blush over the tops of the trees. A baleful wind moved through the pines. Crowe could not shake the feeling the trees were watchful. Reproachful.
When Crowe got behind the wheel he reached for Heidi. At first he thought she was crying but she slanted away and said, “Take me home. Now.”
Her voice was choked with anger.
Crowe knew her well enough to know any words he said now would be wasted.
But while trying to banish from his mind those burning bodies, those ravaged faces, the angry dead eye watching him in the dark, Reed Crowe said to Heidi Karavas, “This is going to change our life.”
And he thought it was so, knew it was so, a certainty he felt in blood and bone as still sopping, reeking of the sulfur swamp, he drove them home.
THE SINKHOLE
IT WAS A THREE-ASPIRIN MORNING, THE day after the anniversary of Reed Crowe’s daughter’s death, the eve of his ex-wife Heidi Karavas’s return to the island after one of her long trips abroad, and something was amiss. So amiss that Crowe stopped stirring the sugar in his Café Bustelo and set down his spoon on the kitchen island and pondered what it was.
His head, like a Magic 8 Ball these days. The pot, the wine. YES. NO. MAYBE. TRY AGAIN LATER.
Mostly the latter.
Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t losing his mind, like his mother, living almost five years now in a Fort Lauderdale nursing home. Early onset dementia.
Now Crowe looked through the Gulf-facing windows of his beach house, scratching his beach bum beard, blinking groggy blinks behind his green-tinted aviators.
Yes, something was off. Something was peculiar. Crowe couldn’t place what.
A nervous tinselly light dappled the ceiling and glittered on the terrazzo floor. Brighter than usual, the sun. Sharper.
He sipped from the blue enamel FLORIDA MAN MYSTERY HOUSE mug, the coffee still so hot it scorched his lips. He cursed, set the mug down.
Then he noticed the blank wall next to the television. Where a framed watercolor by Lily, his deceased daughter, usually hung, there was now a bare nail.
Crowe got up from the kitchen island stool and went to where the painting lay facedown on the floor. He picked it up. The glass and frame were unbroken. A watercolor of Crowe, fishing, on a little dinghy in the sea. Below the boat Lily had drawn a coral reef with anemones and parti-colored polyps. A school of bright tropical fish swam toward Crowe’s line and hook. The fish had exaggerated smiles, human teeth.
Crowe put the painting back up, straightened it. “Otter,” he said. The girl’s nickname.
He was not usually a superstitious man.
But even with the painting back on the wall, Crowe sensed something off. He scratched the scruff of his beach bum beard, contemplated what it was.
He put on his rubber flip-flops and scuffed outside in his boxers and bathrobe.
A brilliant cloudless morning, mid-April, the south Florida sun in his hair and on his scalp. Almost tourist season. Almost spring break.
Almost fucked, between the Emerald Island Inn and the Florida Man Mystery House, his businesses, if you could even call them that, falling to ratshit. All of his debts piling on.
But a beautiful day yet. The mellow spring breeze riffling the sea oats on the sand dunes.
Crowe was halfway across his small garden, its menagerie of cacti and succulents in terra-cotta pots, when he halted.
The lime tree with the red hummingbird feeder, vanished.
For a wild second he thought the tree stolen. He wondered what kind of reprobate would go to such lengths.
Before long he realized this an addle-brained notion.
It was a sinkhole.
A sinkhole. In his fucking yard.
The state was riddled with them.
Honeycombed.
And now here was one just like they showed on the news, on his property.
FLORIDA MAN WAKES UP TO HOLE HALFWAY TO CHINA IN HIS BACKYARD
Crowe toed up in his zories for a closer gander. Where it once stood there was now an unimpeded view of Florida beachfront. He could see the plank board path wending among the hundred-year-old dunes. And beyond the dunes the expanse of sugar-white beach, the b
ottle-green Gulf rolling soft and tranquil like it always did before spring heated up and summer storms made the water moody.
Crowe stepped to the edge of the chasm and peered down. He couldn’t see bottom. Couldn’t see the hummingbird tree.
Just an ink black crack, a zigzag seam of darkness.
“Holy motherfucking blue shit,” Reed Crowe said.
Arms akimbo, face vexed, Crowe glanced around. He went to the patio table and fetched the conch shell ashtray full of joint ends and chucked it into the hole. Down it clattered and clacked, maybe twenty-five feet, maybe thirty, before hitting bottom.
He wanted to chuck other things down the hole, and he could have easily pissed away the whole morning in this fashion, but there was no time.
It was ten A.M. and he was due at the Florida Man Mystery House.
THE FLORIDA MAN MYSTERY HOUSE
THE FLORIDA MAN MYSTERY HOUSE, ONE of those dubious roadside attractions in this part of the state, a remnant from the era of tin can tourism, before HoJo and Holiday Inn and oh-Jesus-Christ-Mary-Mother-of-God Disney World. Now the highway billboards for the Mystery House were so faded, the paint so thin, the paper so flayed and shredded, the palimpsest of old ads showed underneath.
You had to wonder if the place was still open.
It was. Barely.
But in its heyday the Florida Man Mystery House boasted about a dozen big billboards all along the Florida highways.
I-75, I-95, I-4.
Two on Alligator Alley.
Even a few on the newfangled turnpike.
Now, these days, the Florida Man Mystery House was more of a place you happened upon by accident. A place you stopped to stretch your legs. A place where you stopped to take a piss, a dump. A place where you got out of your pea-green station wagon with the wooden siding because you couldn’t stand another moment in the sweltering car with your batshit family.
A picayune operation, the Florida Man Mystery House. A skeleton crew. Just Reed Crowe, Wayne Wade, and Eddie Maldonado, aka the Coca-Cola Kid, a Mexican teenager from outside Emerald City.
Beginning of April, Eddie showed up asking if he could sell refreshments off Crowe’s boat. The kid offered to pay for part of the gas, plus half the soda earnings, cash. Crowe saw no harm. Told the kid just the gas money was fine. If times weren’t so lean, he might not have asked for that much.
And now, this morning, in his orange hatchback en route to the Florida Man Mystery House, Crowe passed one of the billboards. He gave the shabby-looking advertisement a look of rue.
The old-time tiki font faded and birdshit-spackled, the attractions almost illegible.
GO SPELUNKING IN THE DEEPEST [BIRD SHIT] OF [BIRD SHIT]. OUTER SPACE [BIRD SHIT]. AMAZING ODD [BIRD SHIT].
COCA-COLA. TAB. ICE-COLD [BIRD SHIT].
Riding shotgun was a head of lettuce, for Bogey the tortoise. “See that, man?” Crowe asked the lettuce. “Ice-cold bird shit. Now I’m jonesin’ for ice-cold bird shit. How ’bout you?”
BATHROOMS CLEAN!
LONG DRIVE BEFORE ANOTHER [BIRD SHIT] ONE!
SEE BOGEY THE 200-YEAR-OLD TORTOISE!
“Fuckin’ Wayne,” Crowe muttered.
A refrain of late: fuckin’ Wayne.
Wayne Wade, Crowe’s childhood friend and factotum of Crowe’s moribund enterprises.
Wayne Wade with three DUIs.
Wayne Wade, always in arrears with a bookie or a weed dealer. Wayne Wade, fired from every pool hall and sports bar and wing hut in the county. And eighty-sixed from over half of those. Places where even the pill heads and cokeheads kept their jobs.
Lately Reed Crowe thought he needed a big long break from Wayne Wade. Several months at least. He hated feeling this way about his lifelong friend, but there you had it. Everywhere he turned, Jesus Christ: Wayne. Wayne at the pool hall. Wayne at the Sea Cave Arcade. Wayne at the Rum Jungle. Mostly it was at the Rum Jungle these days, because Wayne was eighty-sixed for life from Chill Norton’s Pervy Mermaid on the other side of the bridge.
There was also Reed Crowe’s other business. The Emerald Island Inn. Two stories, a salt-crusted old Florida motel if there ever was one, stucco of turquoise and cream and pink, narrow cement balconies connecting the rooms. Towels and beach shorts and bikini bottoms hanging on the railing, Florida Gator and Florida Seminole kids crowding the public beach with their coolers full of beer and their cheap tourist shop beach chairs that broke four days after you bought them.
More than half a century ago when they built the causeway from the mainland to Emerald Island, the inn was erected near the public beach, between the water tower and the lighthouse. There was the Rum Jungle tiki bar, the Blue Parrot diner, the bait shop, the mini-mart. These were the few concessions to tourism on the island. The rest of Emerald Island was divvied up into big multi-acre lots belonging to the locals. And beyond these big chunks of land, on the southern half of the island, was primordial wilderness, the nature preserve. One of the last bastions of undeveloped beachfront this part of Florida.
Decades ago the island’s big coral reefs were a popular destination for snorkelers and scuba divers, but in the late sixties a freighter carrying insect repellent and rat poison demolished the reef. One of the major tourist attractions, gone. Now the coral was dead bone, the hydra-headed gorgonians bleached white.
Fewer and fewer came the snowbirds. The sportsmen and yachtsmen and anglers. The convalescents who sought the tropical climate, the sun and the salt air and the long walks on the beach, to restore their health.
To some of the more misanthropic natives, this was just as well.
With a passel of other itinerant part-time employees and a few part-time maids, Wayne Wade managed, if that was the word, the old Emerald Island Inn. A mistake ever to mix business and friendship.
A few times a week, part of his routine, Crowe drove to the motel and saw to business, made repairs.
King Canute fighting the tide.
The dog shit in the small playground with the merry-go-round and the slide. The ice machines on the three different floors always on the fritz. The dirty, salt-grimed windows. The garbage full of reeking rancid bait.
The rooms with the fraying rattan and wicker furniture. Toilets and sinks forever clogged. Tubs scum-ringed.
The community barbecue, infested with palmetto bugs. The ice machine, a fuck zone for rats. The vending machine, cobwebs inside, those chalky Necco wafers nobody liked, dubious-looking pickles swimming in cellophane packs full of chartreuse brine.
And so on.
Reed Crowe would ask, “Wayne, could you please get the burnt horseshoe crab out of the grill?”
“Why’d somebody put a horseshoe crab on the grill?” Wayne Wade would ask from under his oversized Miami Dolphins baseball cap, the rattail of his brown hair hanging through the hole in back.
“I’m on the case, Wayne. I’ve been canvassing a search. Knocking door to door.”
And now, for the rest of the drive, Crowe’s thoughts turned from Wayne and the Florida Man Mystery House and the Emerald Island Inn and remained on the sinkhole. He pictured the whole house swallowed.
“What about the house?” he asked the head of lettuce.
“The cats?”
He convinced himself they could surely sense something like that coming, the bubble of their internal level off plumb.
Just as Reed Crowe had felt that morning.
Just as Reed Crowe had felt lately.
It was going to be a bastard of a summer for sure.
* * *
—
In the parking lot were station wagons with New York and New Jersey plates. An orange VW with a Canadian tag.
A respectable showing, these days, for the Florida Man Mystery House. Maybe twelve, fifteen people on this outi
ng.
Crowe picked up the head of lettuce and got out of the car and went across the limestone and crushed shell lot lugging it under his arm like a Harlem Globetrotter with a basketball. Already sweltering. By the time he reached the gift shop, his forehead was sopping.
In the gift shop Wayne Wade stood behind the register. In plain view on the counter sat an open can of beer. His Walkman was clipped to the waistband of his jorts and the puffy orange headphones were clamped around his neck. Crowe could hear the tinny spillage of music.
Ramones. “Teenage Lobotomy.”
Pointing his chin at Crowe, Wayne Wade told one of the tourists, “That’s the guy you wanna talk to, mister. CEO of the operation.”
The man turned his beery bulldog face to Crowe.
“Howdy,” Crowe said. Thinking, Fuck me.
The man said, “You should get clearer signs. Wasted a lot of gas.”
Crowe apologized. Told the man he had a point.
“But don’t you got no dang number on the sign?”
Crowe kept the phone number off the billboards deliberately. Last thing he wanted, a bunch of assholes calling. And almost always the callers were assholes. Nutty assholes. Eighty-five percent of the time. Some half-drunk, half-crazed father from Peoria at wit’s end on a Florida vacation that was not going according to plan.
From some godforsaken pay phone near Alligator Alley they’d call Crowe for directions they couldn’t possibly follow. And Crowe wanted no part of them anyway, the hotheads near apoplexy, the station wagon dads with too many Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood movies in their heads.
Now Crowe said to the harried father, “You didn’t see the number?”
“I’m telling you, I got outta that car. I parked. Right, hon?”
Hon agreed.
And Crowe knew that the man had a point. Hell, he’d been riding Wayne Wade’s ass for how long about the signs? Goddamn years.