by Tom Cooper
“Get you a gift shop souvenir, mister? Get you a tchotchke? A gewgaw?”
“No need for gewgaws,” the man said.
“How about a beer?”
The man’s wife said to her husband, “It’s ten-thirty.”
“It’s a vacation,” said the man. He glanced quizzically at the head of lettuce cradled in Crowe’s arm. “A beer would be good.”
“My kind of man right there. Where you from?”
“Boise, Idaho.”
“Never heard of it,” joked Crowe, going to the cooler. “This your son?” He looked at the kid, a matryoshka version, one of those little Russian nesting dolls, smaller-sized, of his father. “Wanna beer, kid?”
“Hell, yeah,” said the kid.
“Billy,” the kid’s mother said. “You want red steak tonight? Behave.”
The family finally went and wandered amid the shabby bric-a-brac. The ball caps and the T-shirts and the mugs. The snow globes with the mermaid figures inside and with FLORIDA! written on the base. The backscratchers made of tiny alligator paws and the necklaces made of shark’s teeth.
The mothers and fathers and kids looked sunburned, sweaty, gypped.
Crowe would be the first to admit, a certain squalor had settled of late. Creaky weather-swollen planks, windows opaque with cobwebs and dust.
A swatch of flypaper, speckled with dead horseflies and mosquitoes, helixed above the door.
Once the tourists were out of earshot and wandering the Mystery House trail, its pell-mell shacks and shanties full of chintzy exhibits, Crowe fetched to the register. His thoughts had been on the sinkhole, and now there was this shit to deal with.
“Need you to fix that billboard,” Crowe told Wayne. “And those signs. People get turned around, off the highway.”
“Good morning,” said Wayne.
Crowe lowered his voice. “Don’t give me that shit.”
“Something about that Eddie I need to say,” Wayne told Crowe.
“Hear me? The signs, Wayne. Who gives a shit about Eddie?”
“Today? Ninety-four degrees.” He dug into his armpit with his thumb.
“Well, that’s why I’ve been telling you,” Crowe said. He lowered his voice. “And now here you go. Tomorrow it’ll be a hundred degrees. Or you’ll find some other excuse. Go paint it.”
“Now? I gotta get the costume on.”
“After the costume.”
“After the costume. I’ll have a stroke.”
Crowe noticed again the beer flagrantly out in the open. “Hey, how about the goddamn can?”
“Tsch.” Wayne set the can down on the floor. Then a look of petulant crafty triumph overtook his face, a notion having occurred to him. “It’ll take two seconds. I’ll blast the ever living fuck out of it with a fire hose.”
“Whatever. Sure.”
“Two seconds. I’ll take Gary Jupiter’s truck and you’ll see.”
“You’re gonna drive a fire truck. You’re gonna hot-wire a fire truck. Please. Do it. You’ll end up in prison for life. Please. I beg of you.”
“Some thing to say. I’ll get him a six-pack and he’ll drive it. Then I’ll blast the fuck outta that sign.”
Crowe told him he was doing no such thing.
“I wanna tell you about Eddie,” Wayne persisted.
“Goddamn it, there’s a sinkhole in my backyard.”
“What? Hell’s that gotta do with me?”
“Wayne.” Crowe pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Listen, he’s been stealing those Coca-Colas and Dr Peppers.” Then, seeing Crowe’s questioning face, Wayne said, “Yeah, they’re stolen. From Red, White and Blue Liquor.”
“Bullshit.”
Wayne made another face, a small satisfied simper rising on his lips. He raised his hands and showed his palms as if to absolve himself.
Before Wayne Wade could press further, a voice said, “I’ll do it, Mr. Crowe.” They looked. It was Eddie, standing beside the rack of rubber snakes and spiders next to the gift shop door.
Crowe told the kid, “It’s Reed, Eddie, please.”
“I’ll do it, Mr. Reed.”
“What, Eddie? Just Reed.”
“The signs,” said Eddie. “I’ll clean them.”
Wayne snatched up the swatter, swiped viciously at a horsefly. “Kiss ass,” he muttered.
“You’ll do it, Eddie?” Crowe asked the kid.
“Yes. Five dollars?”
Crowe looked at Wayne. “Five dollars? See this, Wayne. Initiative. Incentive. What’s the word?” Crowe snapped his fingers. Pointed at Wayne. “Gumption.”
Wayne Wade’s face was red. His goober teeth showed. “Oh, reverse psychology now,” Wayne said.
Crowe, still lugging the head of lettuce, went to the back of the shop and exited out into the oddity trail. “Five bucks,” Crowe said as if musing to himself, pitching his voice, “that’s a bargain.”
Crowe went down the footpath that drew a figure eight around the Mystery House attractions. In the middle of one of the loops was a concrete UFO, a Permastone igloo-shaped enclosure with hundreds of little portals made from the bottoms of green glass bottles. And in the middle of the other loop was the buried kiddy pool where Bogart, a humongous gopher turtle the size of a golf cart, made his nest several months out of the year.
The three or four other months, Crowe had no idea where Bogart went. A mystery.
Maybe he had some old lady turtle somewhere.
But going on fifteen years now, the stubborn old sonofabitch always came back, lumbering and settling into the pea soup water as if returned from a mere stroll.
Crowe figured him one hundred and fifty years old, maybe more. The two hundred on the billboard: probably slight hyperbole, but possible. Old Bogey’s back was covered in a fur of moss and there were deep nicks scarred on his shell. From alligator’s teeth, perhaps arrowheads from way back.
The turtle would eat anything. Pumpkins. Chef Boyardee out of the can.
And now Crowe gave the turtle the head of lettuce. Bogart turned to it, wrapped his serrated beak-like mouth around the lettuce. Bogart sheared off half in one bite.
A few of the tourists watched as Bogart chowed down. Crowe told them, “Get your gewgaws before the boat tour if you wanna, folks. Don’t forget to say goodbye to Bogart the turtle. Poor guy’s only got another hundred and fifty years to live. Might be your last chance.”
* * *
—
Outside Eddie had the SS Merman already started at the dock. Crowe climbed aboard, got behind the wheel.
The round-faced Idaho-looking tourist family filed up the gangplank. Eddie took their money, five dollars a head. A honeymooning young black couple joined. Then another family, a snowy-haired Scandinavian couple, with two daughters.
The youngest was around the same age his daughter, Lily, would have been now. On the cusp of puberty.
Crazy to think.
Time was getting away.
Even in the small patch of shade under the Bimini top, it was hot enough to raise sweat on his brow. Crowe swiped his forehead with his wrist. Ten-thirty in the morning and already the heat was a blue-ribbon sonofabitch. He didn’t want to think about what the summer had in store.
Eddie untied the mooring rope from the dock cleats. Bow, then stern. Soon Crowe was steering away from the Florida Man Mystery House, headed into the hothouse jungle of the Everglades.
The shacks and sheds drifted away behind them.
Crowe delivered his customary spiel on autopilot, a folksy automaton.
Still thinking of the sinkhole, still picturing his house swallowed whole, Crowe talked about de Soto and Ponce de Leon and the fountain of youth. He spoke of shell Indians, how they regarded the
manchineel tree as grand inquisitor. How it was believed Ponce de Leon was felled by an arrow dipped in manchineel juice.
The chupacabra. UFOs. The fountain of youth. The devil’s chair of Cassadaga. The demon of round cypress.
Mermaids, pirate treasure, haunted sinkholes, cases of spontaneous combustion.
Pirates. He talked about pirates. Gasparilla.
“Legend has it,” Crowe said, “Gasparilla before he died buried his treasure somewhere off the Gulf Coast. Could be here. Could be in Tampa. He did write a secret code on a stone. This is confirmed fact. Wild, right? To this day? Still haven’t figured the dang thing out.”
Here Crowe turned away from the wheel, fished out of his madras shorts a laminated square of paper, business card–sized.
O-X-NXW-W-VER-VAR-LEGUA 1/10 O-X-SWXW-VER-VAR-HASTA X, said the typewriting. Another Florida cracker legend, this of Gasparilla the pirate secreting his stash somewhere among the land of ten thousand islands.
Crowe handed the card to a fat kid with Red Hots gunked in his braces.
“Any one of you figure that out,” Crowe said, “split the loot with you.”
“Dr Pepper!” shouted Eddie. “Pesticide!”
“Pirates are gay,” Billy from Idaho said.
“That’s it, no red steak,” said Hon from Idaho.
Crowe said, “What? Pirates? You know how many women pirates had, man? They had concubines. Harems.”
“What’s a harem?” asked Billy.
Crowe wanted to say, More pussy than you can handle, you fat little shit, but instead he said, “More girlfriends than you can handle. Whole mess of lady friends.”
The mother asked the boy, “You want your red steak tonight, Billy? Cool it.”
The Lily-aged girl, studying the card with the code on it, furrowed her brow, handed the laminated slip of paper to her father.
“Coppertone girl ointment!” shouted Eddie.
They serpentined their way through the labyrinths of tamarind and strangler fig toward the place where the interior opened into the Everglades.
The Lily-aged girl said, “Scary.” Something else had caught her attention. She pointed at a tumorous bole sprouting from a pine tree. “What is that?”
“That’s a catface.”
See, Crowe thought. Not all of them are little shits like red-steak Billy. He asked the girl what her name was. Mellicent.
Crowe explained to Mellicent that turpentiners slashed pine trees to sap them. The deep cuts in the wood looked like V’s, or cat mouths. When the holes scarred over with bumps and swells and the resin petrified, what looked like deformed faces peered from the tree trunks.
“See how it kind of looks like a face, Miss Mellicent?”
“Spooky,” said the girl.
A few tourists snapped pictures of the tree.
“Coca-Cola,” shouted Eddie, walking the length of the boat with the cooler on his back. “Ointment. Pesticide.”
Finally they reached a place in the crooked canal where the water broadened out into a slough of water cabbage. Nailed onto the trunk of a gumbo-limbo tree was a pointed plank-board sign.
SKUNK APE CROSSING, it read.
Crowe cut the motor.
The chant of insects. The drone of cicadas. The hum of gnats.
Hidden in one of the hammocks was a deer stand where Wayne in his bogman costume—an ape outfit, but made of moss and peat, accoutered with pockets where he could secret his whiskey flask and marijuana pipe and pornographic magazines to while away the time—waited to come charging out of a swamp lily patch.
“Now’s a good time to put on that ’pellent, you got some,” said Crowe. “And if you have none, Mr. Eddie has some to offer.”
“ ’Pellent, Dr Pepper, Coca-Cola, ointment, Coppertone.”
Now Crowe, casting his voice, “You folks familiar with Bigfoot? Miss Mellicent, you hear of Mister Bigfoot? Well, we got our own version this part of Florida. Dude usually hangs around here.”
And on cue Wayne screamed a bestial scream, crashed through waist-deep water toward the boat.
The tourists flinched and gasped.
The Lily-aged girl screeched.
“It’s okay, folks,” said Crowe. “Only Wayne.”
Wayne took off the head of the costume. Miserable-looking in the heat. He started climbing the starboard ladder onto the boat, the head cradled under his arm. “Hi, folks,” said Wayne.
And Crowe, on script, “Put that head back on, would you, Wayne? You’re scaring the kids.”
THE SKULL
THE NEXT PART OF THE MYSTERY tour was the grotto.
To reach it on the mainland you had to venture off-road and drive down a washboard limestone trail. And even then that was only half the way. Then you had to park the car because the land turned to swampy mush. Then you had to put on mud boots and slog through the brambles and bracken until you reached a ferny clearing bowered over with huge-limbed oak. A place where the shadows smelled like rain and peat and Spanish moss.
By water, the route was much simpler, accessible by high-floating, low-bottomed boats such as the SS Merman.
Crowe nudged the boat up to the dock. Wayne still in his bogman outfit sans head tied the mooring rope to the cleats.
Crowe said, “Watch your step, folks. And keep hydrated. Pace yourself. Don’t forget your sunblock. If you got a bucket of ice to dump over your head, even better. Don’t wanna end up like Wayne.”
“Coca-Cola,” said Eddie. “Dr Pepper. Ointment. Pesticide.”
The tourists trooped out of the boat and down the gangplank. They went down the grade, Crowe leading the way over the boardwalk through clutches of paurotis palms and saw grass.
Grasshoppers and katydids flew.
The Lily-aged girl squealed. Round-faced Billy from Idaho swung at the flying insects with his fists.
His mother made a few more red steak threats. “Go ahead. You’ll watch us from the hotel window walking to Steak and Ale tonight.”
At the bottom of the path they reached a choke of rocks concealing the bunnyhole of the opening. “Watch your heads now, watch your heads,” Crowe told the tourists. “Don’t wanna end up like Wayne, kids. No life, I tell you, being a bogman. Miss Mellicent, you might wanna take note.”
They filed into the first chamber. A room of dripstone and flowstone the size of an airplane hangar lit by string lights and miners’ bulbs.
At the cavern entrance was a milk crate full of small flashlights and pickaxes. Crowe told the tourists to help themselves. The kids, lugging their tools, split from the group, flashlight beams cutting through the cloistered mineral-smelling dark.
Before long one of the tourist kids shrieked. A macabre sound in the cave. People whipped their heads, gaped pop-eyed.
The Lily-aged girl wandered off into one of the far corners.
Before these excursions Crowe secreted fossils and bones here and there for kids to find. Like an Easter egg hunt. Arrowheads and sharks’ teeth and woolly mammoth molars.
Now he went over expecting one of these. A palmetto bug, a lizard, something ordinary.
But what he saw shocked him.
A skull.
A human skull, sheathed in mud and lichen. A lone clicker beetle darted out of a nostril hole and scuttled into the other. Tendrils of wispy gray hair, still tied in a ponytail, hung from the crown.
The head lay on the ground in a niche that must have freshly opened since Crowe’s last tour. Likely the same seismic disturbance that had opened the sinkhole in his backyard. Almost certainly.
They happened from time to time, new nooks and crannies yawning wide in the limestone sinks of Florida, usually nothing life-threatening or dangerous.
But this.
The tourists crowded b
ehind Crowe, gawking.
Crowe was agog too. Thankfully they couldn’t see his face.
He ran his hand through his salt-stiffened beard. He composed himself, or tried to. He put on what he hoped was an approximation of a showman’s smile. He turned. Chuckled a forced odd chuckle. “Looks real, right, missy ma’am? Just a trick.”
The Idaho father remarked that it looked awful damn real.
“Doesn’t it, though?” Crowe said. “Made in China.”
The young black fiancé said, “That looks way real to me. Sick.”
Outside, Eddie was yelling, “Ointment! Lotion! Pest control!”
“Fifty bucks. China. Sorry I gave you a scare there, girl. Might’ve gotten more than I bargained for, huh? You like hermit crabs?”
Crowe made toward the exit. Hoped to God he didn’t sound as rattled as he felt.
Reluctantly the tourists followed, casting doubtful glances behind their shoulders at the skull.
Back on the SS Merman, Wayne Wade, now changed back to his T-shirt and jorts, asked, “What’s all this about a skull?”
“Nothing. Prop.”
Wayne Wade screwed up an incredulous eye.
“Wayne? Let me think. I gotta lot on my mind. Let me be alone with my thoughts, okay?”
The sinkhole. Heidi’s imminent return to the island. His mother in the goddamn nursing home. All the goddamn bills.
He had enough to worry about without goddamn Wayne Wade.
THE PERVY MERMAID
WHEN HE GOT HOME THAT AFTERNOON from the swamp tour Crowe moved all the potted plants in the small garden. He moved them so they sat arranged around the small chasm in his backyard, circumscribing its perimeter. The cacti and succulents and hearty tropical flowers a warning barrier.
Crowe sat in his folding beach bum chair stroking his beach bum beard while studying the hole. He tossed in pieces of bone-white shell. Tossed in little pebbles and chunks of coral.
The skull and the sinkhole. It almost sounded like the beginning of one of those tall tales. One of those Florida Man stories Reed Crowe was reading about all the time, especially lately.