Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Krumpp smacked Crowe’s change onto the counter.

  “People saw a white truck and it was full of Mexicans and your boy was on it.”

  “He’s not my boy. Two, sounds like your fuckup. Three, what people?”

  “There’s your change.”

  Crowe stood there. “What’s your deal, man?”

  “Have a good night.”

  * * *

  —

  After Krumpp’s, Reed Crowe drove out of Emerald City and went down the narrow two-lane that cut straight through the pine flats on the edge of the county. There was a turnaround that was easy to miss to someone unfamiliar with it, especially in the dark, but Crowe knew the old logging trail. He bumped the hatchback off the road and took a shell road into dark Florida scrubland. Where the land became impassable, where his car tires couldn’t find purchase in the sand, Crowe parked his car.

  Then in the half-moon night he walked down a faint horse trail that wound through the wire grass and long leaf pines and sable palms, shovel and pick and trowel in a canvas bag slung over his shoulder, Coleman lantern lighting the path.

  He went carefully, mindful of turtle burrows and crab holes. If his foot caught and he tripped: Fucked. Certain doom.

  He recalled what he once heard about Amelia Earhart on talk radio. An aviation historian hypothesized Earhart’s remains hadn’t been found because there were none. The coconut crabs had gotten to her. Torn her apart, dragged the bits and pieces into a thousand different hidey-holes.

  Next time he would tell someone before his excursion.

  Maybe Heidi, when she was back from Rennes.

  Whole weeks passed these days where they didn’t speak. He wondered if she was seeing someone else. Wondered if she’d tell him if she was. If it was over between them. He hoped not. They used to say I love you to each other, but that was a long time ago, in their days of romance. Before their girl died.

  Sometimes they were on good terms. Every so often they slipped when they were drunk and slept together, which they were trying to give up, because it only confused them and led to problems.

  Other times, they would go out of the way to avoid each other, that six months out of the year Heidi was on the island.

  The other six months, she traveled.

  She scrimped and saved and before the last time she left, she had other news to share. She’d sold a canvas.

  She invited Crowe over for dinner, to celebrate.

  Heidi and Crowe were still learning to be friends.

  Now, Crowe was hunching into an inner chamber of the cave when he heard a sound like distant thrashing rain. The dim lantern was set on the ground before him. He stopped. The sound grew louder. His disorientation was such he couldn’t tell if the noise was coming from inside or outside.

  Then he was beset by a cyclone of leathery wings. A blizzard of bats.

  Hundreds, maybe thousands, flapping all around him.

  Rodent squeals pierced his ears. He rolled into himself like a pill bug, hugging his knees to his body, ducking his head between his knees.

  When the onslaught ceased there was a sudden shocked silence. His voice, fuck fuck fuck, echoing into the limestone bowels of the sinkhole.

  For a minute he thought a heart attack would kill him. He would rot here and they would find his skeleton years from now, decades from now, if even then. A hunting dog nosing through the bracken would pick up the scent of his remains. What the crabs and turtles left of him.

  But he caught his breath, his slowing heart herky jerky like a broken toy. He slapped the dirt off his body and raked his shaking fingers through his hair, his beach bum beard.

  “Good goddamn,” said Reed Crowe.

  Reed Crowe, half-assed spelunker, picked up his tools and went toward the hole.

  * * *

  —

  In the canvas bag with the tools were dishwashing gloves. Crowe slipped on the big yellow rubber gloves and lifted the skull with both hands. Blew a beetle off. The bug buzzed like a busted party favor and smacked the dirt. It stayed on its back, working its angry legs.

  Crowe turned the skull this way and that, holding it far from his body. Hamlet examining the skull of Yorick.

  On the back of the skull was a large crack, a missing shard of bone.

  Beaned, this dude. Either that or he fell from a great height.

  Unlikely.

  Florida, flat as a billiard table.

  Then Crowe saw it. The eyetooth, gold.

  The tendrils of hair, the remnants of a ponytail.

  Reed Crowe knew then that the skull was Jerry Vogel’s, an old Conch who’d gone missing about a decade and a half ago, in the sixties, around the time of Hurricane Betsy.

  Jerry Vogel, a notorious pain in the ass. The bartender at the Rum Jungle until he left for Puerto Rico on his yacht with two college girls and a ton of cocaine.

  Until the big storm of 1968. His yacht, dashed to smithereens. Sunk. The insurance, invalid. Whatever damage, it happened out of the zone of coverage.

  That yacht was everything to Jerry Vogel.

  And once it was gone?

  Vanquished Jerry Vogel returned to Emerald Island.

  There were only two bars on the island and Jerry Vogel was already banned from one of them. And damned if he was going to drink alone on his shitty houseboat for the rest of his life.

  So the Rum Jungle it was, where his ex worked. His ex, whom he’d left unceremoniously, cruelly. His ex, who had a new boyfriend named Henry Yahchilane.

  Jerry Vogel told his ex, “I made a mistake.”

  The ex told him, “You must be kidding.”

  “Don’t forget the vows.”

  “You forgot. You forgot our vows. Party over. Too bad.”

  “Sickness and health,” Jerry insisted.

  And he kept insisting for weeks, angrier and drunker by the day, until he disappeared for good.

  * * *

  —

  Now Crowe put old Jerry Vogel’s skull back down. It glared up at him. He took off the gloves. He put the gloves on top of the skull to cover it up. He shook his head. Put on the gloves again. He picked up the skull as if it were a bomb that might detonate, holding it far away from his body, averting his twisted face. He shoved it into the canvas sack.

  And it was then that Crowe saw something else in the same collapsed alcove. A gleam of obsidian in the dirt. At first he thought it was the back of a big shiny black beetle, some cave insect, but when Crowe nudged it with the toe of his shoe, it didn’t move.

  He picked it up. At first he mistook it as a chess piece.

  Examining the stone closer to the lantern, Crowe saw that it was a stone figure. An artifact of some kind of idol or god wearing a crown that looked like a nest of snakes.

  Crowe held the carving close to the lantern and when the light caught it he saw the angry face, the overlarge mouth with enraged teeth bared, the angry brow bent in a V. “Well, what the fuck, brother,” Crowe said softly in the quiet in the cave, and giving the face a final look he slipped the carving in the pocket of his madras shorts.

  GROTTO

  THE GROTTO.

  For years Henry Yahchilane thought it a safe hiding place.

  Say the place was discovered. You’d be a fool to try to descend its depths, the crater was so perilous, its walls so sheer and plumb. Even a novice spelunker would be a fool.

  But Yahchilane knew another way, another route, and this evening he took it, sweeping his walking stick a pace before him through the bracken. His other hand a tight-fingered spade thrust into the pocket of his jeans.

  Right at the witch hazel bush and left at the moat, another right through the cabbage palms and the mangrove tree. Then you crossed an old cedar plank spanning a brackish ribbon of cre
ek and at last in the clearing in the middle of the slash pine you saw the hole in the ground, the grotto that led underground to another grotto, and that into another.

  A cave system.

  A karst.

  After leaving the Rum Jungle, after hearing the nincompoop blathering on about the skull, Yahchilane drove across the bridge and through Emerald City to a place on the outskirts of town where he knew a path that led through the Florida bracken to the grotto. He parked his van on the shoulder of the road, took the faint trail with flashlight in hand.

  Yahchilane squatted at the edge of the clearing. He stayed that way in the purpling shadow of a ficus tree. The metallic ratcheting of the bugs in full chorus.

  He watched Crowe from a distance as the man shoveled possessed.

  He lit a cigarette.

  After a while Crowe smelled the smoke. His head stuck gopher-like out of the hole in the ground and pivoted. His eyes were white in his tan dirty face with the beach bum beard.

  Yahchilane stayed where he was. Exhaled smoke through his nose.

  He rose from his crouch.

  “What’re you up to?” Yahchilane asked.

  “What you mean?”

  Crowe looked at the shovel in his hand.

  “Yeah. No shit. What for?”

  Crowe leaned his shovel against the lip of the hole. “Is this your property?”

  Henry Yahchilane told him it wasn’t.

  Crowe was breathing heavily still from his work. He leaned on the handle of his shovel. Raked his fingers through his sweaty hair. “Well, man. I don’t see how it’s your business.”

  Yahchilane took the last few drags of the cigarette without speaking. He flicked the cigarette to the ground and heeled it out. Turned.

  “Hello?” Crowe said.

  Yahchilane strode away into the buggy jungle night.

  “Hello?”

  GROTTO CLOSED

  WHAT DID REED CROWE KNOW ABOUT Henry Yahchilane?

  A war veteran. Decorated.

  This the Emerald Island residents knew, which also gave Henry Yahchilane latitude.

  And rumor was that Yahchilane hailed from one of Florida’s vanished and vanquished tribes.

  Ais. Jororo. Calusa. Tequesta. Jaega. Timucua.

  A loner about fifteen, twenty years older than Crowe. Nothing wrong with that. Plenty of loners on Emerald Island.

  He was seen always dressed in a denim shirt laundered thin and near colorless. The shirt was always tucked into the jeans, no belt. His hair looked dried wet and it hung in stiff black loose curls about his face. Like maybe he bathed in salt water. His fingernails were long. But clean underneath. Scrubbed. The hands of a banjo player, perhaps, a guitar picker.

  People took him to be in his early fifties, about twenty years older than Crowe.

  He took up all kinds of odd jobs throughout the county to make ends meet. He cleaned pools, hung wallpaper and Sheetrock, shingled roofs, paved asphalt, seal-coated decks, dragged dead animals out of attics, hauled trash.

  Mostly he was known as a snake handler.

  The resident ersatz herpetologist. Part-time. One of Henry Yahchilane’s many odd jobs around the county.

  It was in the third or fourth year of his tenure at the Emerald County Zoo that a team of scientists discovered a small island two miles off where they were studying the encroachment of nonnative species. This being a loci of the nonindigenous species horned vipers and black mambas, puff adders and forest cobras. Boomslangs and kraits.

  At one point the state offered Yahchilane money to get the snake population under control.

  Staving off the inevitable.

  Fool’s errand that it was, Yahchilane did as they asked. He spent a good many hours corralling them. The state was paying for it.

  Hey, it was money.

  In the tiny city hall that was housed in a moribund Emerald City strip mall Yahchilane stood before the city council every year arguing against the state-sanctioned Florida Python Challenge. He also advocated closing the town zoo.

  The Florida Python Challenge, each year the Fish and Wildlife Commission offered a bounty to the hunter who caught the biggest snake. A second cash prize to the man who collected the most.

  A disaster waiting to happen, Yahchilane had argued. This on record in the local weekly paper. And he made no short order telling the city council so.

  Plus, he needed the money and no one else wanted the job.

  The board, “Let’s not be dramatic.” This their gist. Of course they wanted the pythons gone. They were in their yards. And they wanted the tourism.

  Never mind the black bears and the alligators and the crocodiles and the cougars. The countless other perils of the Florida wild.

  * * *

  —

  Another thing about Henry Yahchilane was an anecdote of such legend and renown just about everyone on the island knew it. Just about everyone on the mainland too.

  There used to be some disparaging talk about his lineage. The typical Florida cracker badmouthing. De rigeur bigotry. Early seventies, this was. Around that time, there was a commercial on television night and day. The commercial about pollution, the commercial with the gaunt middle-aged man, Native American ostensibly, crying on the side of the road, tears trailing down his craggy face.

  One night at the Rum Jungle some loudmouth from Cooper City, Jerry Vogel, gave him lip, calling him Chief Crybaby and Chief Boo-hoo-hoo.

  There were plenty of eyewitnesses. Reliable eyewitnesses.

  Jerry Vogel called him Tonto. Called him Chief Boo-hoo-hoo. The man, belligerent on tequila, the last-place contender of a redfish tournament, a blue-ribbon asshole, would not quit.

  Yahchilane sat placid as stone on his stool. “You’re gonna get hit,” he warned plenty of times.

  “Boo-hoo-hoo.” Vogel was toweling a beer mug and he placed it in the overhead rack.

  “Okay,” Yahchilane said. “All right. Watch it.”

  “Chief Wah-wah-wah.”

  Finally Yahchilane put down his beer and turned on his stool and looked fully at the man.

  Vogel, sussing the gravity of the situation, said, “Cooper City. Better get away, Cooper City. Shit.”

  The man looked wider-eyed at Yahchilane. Then he slammed his beer down on the bar and picked up a cocktail napkin and wadded it in his fist and flung it to the sand. “Boo-hoo,” the man started.

  Yahchilane socked the man so hard, a full right hook, that the man’s eye popped out and hung by a vein.

  A thirty-thousand-dollar hospital bill in Hialeah to have the eye put back in his skull.

  Thereafter people gave Yahchilane a respectful berth. And there were no more Indian remarks.

  At least within Yahchilane’s earshot.

  Unless the man had a death wish.

  The man’s name was Jerry Vogel.

  * * *

  —

  A jack-of-all-trades, Henry Yahchilane.

  A renaissance man. With a perpetual slit-eyed scowl. A face that preempted being fucked with, his. A face that suggested he consorted with bad company. That he was perhaps the bad company itself. If he kept any company at all.

  Ask the locals, though, Yahchilane was congenial enough. Taciturn, but not impolite. He held doors open for people. He said “please” and “thank you” and “yes, ma’am” and “no sir,” but in a toneless flat voice. A manner that kept conversation to the minimum.

  He didn’t start trouble. To most locals this was fulfillment enough of his civic obligation.

  * * *

  —

  Reed Crowe’s reasoning about the skull: Nobody was looking for Jerry Vogel and nobody cared that he was gone. Few people remembered him. And those were the people he’d done wrong.

/>   Not much of a legacy.

  If Crowe called the police—small-town bumble-fuck Florida police around here, what a joke—then Crowe would have to show them where he’d found the skull. Which meant they’d never stop poking around. No doubt questions about the legality of the Florida Man Mystery House would come up. Codes, laws, safety, insurance. A never-ending quagmire.

  Emerald City, so sequestered in this jungly corner of Florida, operated more as a commonwealth. A jury-rigged skeleton crew upheld the laws in Emerald City and Emerald Island. Laws as mandated by public decree, within reason. If somebody wanted to erect a bat tower in his backyard, fuck it. If somebody wanted to use their John Deere tractor as a mode of transportation for seven years like Ward Kennedy—no relation to the Boston Kennedys—fuck it.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning before leaving for the Florida Man Mystery House tour Crowe rummaged in the carport and found an old empty Johnnie Walker box. He tore off one of the sides and in black ballpoint pen wrote GROTTO CLOSED until further notice. This seemed somehow insufficient. So Crowe added, in his sloppy caveman’s hand, We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Sincerely, Management. Near the bottom he started running out of room so had to cram in the last part.

  The smashed-up handwriting looked like a dispatch from someone desperate and deranged.

  A madman’s ransom note.

  Whatever. Reed Crowe nailed the scrap of cardboard onto the date palm tree outside the gift shop.

  * * *

  —

  He decided he would stay away from the grotto for the time being.

  Wait until Yahchilane, whatever his deal was, forgot he saw him there.

  Before going into the gift shop he walked through the picnic area, went to the dock where Eddie was prepping the boat. The Dr Peppers, maybe Eddie didn’t steal them himself, but one of his relatives? A distant cousin maybe. Whatever, Eddie probably bought them cheap somewhere. Ill-gotten, from an obscure remove.