Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Crowe mentioned this in so many words. The kid was immediately defensive. His look turned dark and hooded. His pimpled brow lowered.

  “I’m not accusing you of bullshit,” Crowe said, “but you gotta look at it from my perspective.”

  “I’m no robber, mister.”

  “Hey, listen, I’ve shown you hospitality.”

  “I ain’t no robber.”

  Did the kid think he was racist? Jesus, he hoped not. How did this shit get turned around? “Eddie? All I know is somebody stole a bunch of sodas from Red, White and Blue Liquor.”

  For a moment they kept silent, both of them breathing scraping angry nose breaths. A billion bugs sang in the fierce green wilderness around them.

  “You know the place? Krumpp? The guy’s a wannabe cop, so I’d tell whoever to be careful.”

  “I don’t know where the colas are from.”

  “Not the good ship lollipop, Eddie.”

  “Don’t talk to me like a boy.”

  “Well, I’ll talk to you like a man then. You sell stolen stuff on my boat again?”

  “I don’t like this shit you make fun of my English.”

  “That’s not what’s happening here. Just watch it, is what I’m sayin’.”

  Eddie shook his head. Crowe barely understood what he was trying to say.

  Crowe was already rattled by his exchange with Eddie so he was doubly startled when he went into the gift shop and saw Henry Yahchilane.

  Yahchilane was at the register and without a word paid the fare. With a final hard sidelong glance at Crowe, he exited the gift shop and went outside and began wandering among the Mystery House exhibits.

  The cobwebby screen door squawked closed on its rusty hinges. Crowe glimpsed through it a few downtrodden tourists scuffing along the trail, walking into one of the pell-mell shacks and then on to the next. Yahchilane, attired as Crowe always saw him in denim and boots, strode over to the tortoise pool and stood for a time looking at Bogey with his thumb hooked in the belt loop of his jeans.

  “When he get here?” Crowe whispered to Wayne.

  “Tonto? Been hanging here ten minutes.”

  “Christ.”

  Crowe went with his cantaloupe to the mystery trail and fed Bogey the tortoise. Yahchilane was now perusing the exhibitions with the passel of tourists. The cabinets of curiosities, the dinky exhibitions, the jumbles of junk.

  Plaques with talking plastic fish. A stuffed peacock. The beer cans of the world collection. Specimens floating in formaldehyde in apothecary jars. Octopi, squid, a baby shark. Meteorites encased in glass cabinets and ensconced on shelves. Crystals, an Ordovician cephalopod, a mastodon tooth. Like many things in Reed Crowe’s life, the place started as a lark. A repository for his odd random findings. Over the years he’d accumulated such a tonnage of junk he figured he had enough for a kind of ad hoc roadside attraction.

  So he made one.

  One corrugated shed contained mannequins made to look like robots. Another room featured a mural of old-fashioned Ben Cooper Halloween masks. Another room full of glow lights and growing magic rocks. Another room full of tiki stuff. Masks, spears, monkey-head coconuts. Another yet, toy soldier dioramas depicting the adventures of Ponce de Leon and José Gaspar the Florida pirate. The Great Seminole War.

  And now, where Crowe had his grotto exhibit displaying what he’d found in the cairn over the years, Yahchilane lingered.

  During the ravages of the Great Depression, when Reed Crowe’s relatives were living in tent cities and shacks throughout the South. Hoovervilles, the New Deal program. One long-dead uncle went south to Florida. There he became a de facto archeologist, one of the first men in America to unearth indigenous artifacts. Burial sites and shelters and stone figurines.

  Most of the time Crowe’s grandfather had no idea what he was looking at. Getting paid to dig. People starving in other parts in the country, and here he was getting paid to dig holes in the ground, why question his luck?

  Some of the artifacts he gave to the government. Some he sold to collectors and museums.

  A few he kept for himself.

  Yahchilane looked at the Tinkertoy contraptions and the cheap dioramas. He spent some time examining the exhibits, lingering at the glass display where Crowe kept the finds from his digging.

  Finally Yahchilane went into the cryptozoo shack, studying the strange menagerie. From the wood-paneled walls a host of fey creatures gazed. A lizard-headed bat. An antlered human skull attached to the body of a lapdog. A frog with eagle wings. A two-headed goat. A panther with human ears and grinning dentures. A snake-necked monkey with a forked tongue.

  They stared from their nooks and crannies with catawampus eyes.

  Some were rigged with buttons. These, of Crowe’s design. Press a buzzer and they’d tell you a joke. A skunk with a leprechaun’s green top hat said, “Let me outta here. This guy’s bat, no, skunk, sheet.” A snake-necked monkey with a forked tongue that said, “Come over here, baby, kiss me.”

  “Sick shit,” Yahchilane remarked to Crowe. “You make it?”

  “What’re you trying to start, mister?”

  Yahchilane shot a breath through his nose. He strode away, joining the tourists straggling across the picnic rest area toward the boat. He walked the length of the gangplank, his size making it quake. He gave Eddie the money and sat on the far end of the bench stern and portside, away from the tourists. An Asian couple honeymooning. A young Canadian family from Quebec.

  The tourists eyed Yahchilane.

  The Canadian kids were brazen with their stares.

  Henry Yahchilane paid them no mind.

  Crowe chugged away from the Mystery House pier into the calm dark-water canal canopied by mangroves and cypress. Bugsong and birdsong. Pondskaters embroidering little lacy wakes on the surface of the water.

  Eddie walked up and down the length of the boat, carrying the cooler on his bare tan back. “Coca-Cola, dollar,” he said. “One dollar. Ointment. Coppertone.”

  “Four colas,” said the Canadian father. The sunburn on his face was peeling. He and his wife seemed to use the same hair dye. A port color, blackish gray at the roots. The kids were middle-school-aged and looked parboiled too in their Disney T-shirts.

  Canadian accents.

  The man gave Eddie a five. Told him to keep the change. Eddie reached into the ice and pulled out four cans, two in each hand, his long fingers wrapped.

  Yahchilane, his gigantic hands resting on his splayed knees, stared with vatic intensity at trees, the jigsaws of broken green light falling through the leaves.

  “And here you have the anhinga, an odd bird, the anhinga. Some say serpentlike.”

  Crowe heard his voice, his faltering delivery. This man’s presence, Yahchilane, made him self-conscious. Nervous.

  Crowe singled out a girl. “Name, young miss?” He thumbed sweat off his forehead.

  “Crayola,” she said.

  Crowe was certain he’d misheard—his hearing, worse and worse every year—but it didn’t matter. Now people were getting up and crowding starboard.

  A big manatee rolled in a clear water spring.

  The Canadian boy asked what the deep scars raked along its back were from. It looked like someone had taken a three-pronged hoe to the manatee’s elephantine hide.

  Crowe told the kids the truth. Propellers.

  “Oh no,” said the young Canadian girl with pigtails. “Poor Mr. Manatee.”

  “He seems to be getting along okay,” said Crowe. This didn’t seem enough. He added, “We all got scars, right?” He wondered if he sounded whacked. The Yahchilane man had him nervous.

  The Canadian father pointed at the mangroves with his chin and asked what the plants with the far leaves were.

  “Mangroves.�
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  “No, the plants on the plant.”

  “Water plants. Mother of a thousand plants.”

  Yahchilane cleared his throat.

  The tourists looked. Crowe looked.

  “Alligator plant,” said Yahchilane. “The devil’s backbone.”

  The Canadian girl asked, “It is evil?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Yahchilane. “Just doing what it does.”

  The plants had been a gift from Crowe’s mother some years ago. One single leaf. A jade-colored succulent leaf as fat as a chandelier crystal. He recalled the plastic bag, foggy with the leaf’s sweat. They were at her kitchen table, and she’d made him his favorite. Gnocchi. His twenty-fifth birthday. Long ago now.

  “Mother to a thousand trees,” she’d told him. “Even someone with black thumbs, presto.”

  She was right. Within months the plant thrived and blossomed. Begot other fat-leaved plants. And before the season was over the backyard beach garden was teeming with pots filled with the alien-looking clusters.

  And after his mother was committed to the home Crowe would spot the plants popping up here and there on Emerald Island. The wind spread them over the dunes and the pine flats. Sprinkled them around mailboxes and at the edge of parking lots. They proliferated. Within the span of several years, he saw them all over. He even saw a patch growing in the gravel of the standing ashtray in front of Krumpp’s liquor store.

  And now here they were in the swamp, the plants, Yahchilane pontificating about them.

  “What’s your name, sir?” the girl named Crayola asked.

  “Yahchilane.”

  “Are you a chief?”

  “No. Nothing like that now.”

  The earnest pigtailed girl with the freckled face and PAC MAN FEVER T-shirt wrote in her notebook. The pencil, one of those big huskies, the superthick ones. BIG CHIEF, it said on the side.

  BACK FROM RENNES

  HEIDI KARAVAS, BACK THE FIRST NIGHT from Rennes, was in her bungalow kitchen sautéing Amatriciana sauce—Bordeaux in the wineglass, Michael Jackson on the honeytone radio—when she heard something, someone, treading outside.

  She turned down the radio. Set the wooden spoon down in the ceramic flamingo holder.

  It was the gait of a man, large, long-strided, scuffing in the oyster shell drive.

  The man went up the porch steps. A heavy stride. A big man.

  The screen door squealed ajar.

  Then there was a knock. Firm, three times.

  It was after nine, late enough and dark enough that the automatic porch light was switched on.

  Heidi’s heart skipped. She wondered who it could be. “Reed?”

  “No,” came the voice, gruff and deep. A middle-aged man’s rasp. “You open?”

  “Open? Please go away. I don’t know you.”

  “The bookstore, lady. The sign says open. It’s glowing.”

  It took Heidi a moment to realize what he meant. Many were her various beach jobs to make ends meet over the years, as was the case with many of the natives, and the small used-book store had been one of the few to fall by the wayside.

  She stepped to the door and looked through the peephole. In the wan porch light his face was in chiaroscuro, the deep creases, his wedge of nose throwing a shadow like a sundial.

  She recognized the man from the island. Yahchilane something. Always polite.

  Heidi opened the door a half-foot. The burglar chain still fastened. “Hello.”

  The man stepped back. Moths and june bugs fluttered through the corona of the porch light. “I apologize,” he said. A low deep voice, the accent studied, almost bland.

  “Just, you caught me off guard.”

  “I apologize, ma’am,” said the man. “I’ll come back business hours.”

  He turned, began to walk.

  Heidi unlatched the chain, opened the door wider. She peered outside. The sign, glowing blue. “It’s my fault,” Heidi said. “Forgot to turn off the sign.”

  His stride slowed but he kept going. “I’ll come back another time.”

  “What’re you looking for?”

  He paused, half turned. “Archeology book. Picture guide.” His thumbs were hooked in his jean pockets. “Another time,” he said, half-lifting a hand in valediction. “Evening.”

  Then went down the drive, turning south at the access road in the quarter moon dark.

  RILING THE BEEHIVE

  CROWE WENT TRUDGING THROUGH THE SPIKY Florida scrub toward the grotto, the canvas bag slung over his shoulder. One hundred feet of nylon boating rope was coiled inside, pick and spade propped over his shoulder like a work bound miner of yore.

  Surprising, but despite all these years in Florida, despite his sundry cracker enterprises, he could fashion only a few reliable knots.

  Basic boating knots, fishing rig knots.

  Other knots, he compensated. Improvised.

  And now around the trunk of a gumbo-limbo tree he fashioned a knot so byzantine, so cats-cradled, he was certain it was sound.

  He assumed a tug-of-war stance, leaned full-bodied against the rope, testing it with all his might.

  Satisfied at last Crowe went to the lip of the hole and peered down and then did an about-face. Backward, like a spelunker, he descended.

  He’d dropped a few feet when the rope went suddenly loose and limp. Something gave.

  The rope unspooled, the coarse braid burning through his fingers.

  For what seemed a long and surreal spell Crowe plummeted. When he hit bottom he was jarred like a ragdoll. Pain jolted through his bones.

  Amid myriad agonies, needles of pain along his neck and arms. Splinters of fire.

  Hornets. A tempest of hornets buzzed around him. And now three or four dozen yellow jackets bulleted against his face, his arms. He glimpsed the mango-sized hive among the rocks on the cavern floor. Still more wasps seethed from a crack down its middle.

  The more he swatted the angrier they grew. The blitzkrieg gyred. Stingers stabbed through his sweated T-shirt.

  A poison prick to his earlobe.

  His brow.

  His elbow.

  Crying caveman cries into the Florida night, Crowe fumbled and picked up a rock and blindly swung. He smashed insects against the cavern walls. When the stone crumbled apart he picked up another and lambasted anew.

  And when he had most of the hornets pounded into jelly, he started jumping, fingers raking dirt as he clung for purchase. Pebbles hailed into his eyes and mouth. He grabbed the thick white root of a strangler fig and grabbed at another and then another.

  Above him the plum and mango of dusk. He swatted at the hornets still clinging to him and stabbing their stingers through his skin.

  In the twilight he staggered up and went through the brush toward his hatchback.

  * * *

  —

  In the bathroom mirror he regarded his face with revulsion. The wheals and bumps like bunches of grapes growing under his skin. His right eye shot through with vermillion.

  His head was a furnace with fever. His heart knocked catawampus.

  All the poison.

  He called Heidi. He tried explaining. His throat was swollen. His speech garbled.

  It had been a while since they’d spoken. Their last phone conversation ended in an argument.

  Now Heidi asked him, “Who is this?”

  Crowe garbled out the words. “Do. You. Have. Antibiotics.”

  “Reed?”

  “Hornets.” He said it a few times before realizing she might have mistaken him for an obscene phone caller making a lewd proposition. “Horny,” it sounded like.

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Hornets.”

  “Drunk.”

/>   “Anti. Biotics.”

  “Stop fuckin’ with the phone.”

  “Anti! Biotics!”

  It was a few minutes before Heidi understood the gist, and another long ten more until she arrived at Crowe’s beach house.

  When she first saw him she was aghast. She led him to the bathroom and sat him down on the fuzzy-covered toilet seat. She still knew the places of all the things, all the first aid stuff. She daubed his face with peroxide-soaked cotton balls. With Q-tips she swabbed the wheals with Mercurochrome. “Why do I do this?” she asked.

  “Sorry.”

  “Why do I get pulled in?”

  “Sorry.”

  She stooped on her knees and stuck Band-Aids on his cheeks and forehead. He smelled the faint musk of her skin, the eucalyptus and jasmine of her shampooed hair. That Heidi smell. He could feel her body heat, she was so close.

  “We can be friends.”

  They’d had the discussion many times.

  Crowe looking up like the elephant man. The pathetic, woebegone sight of him. Wretched.

  Heidi laughed. Tried to stifle the laughter, couldn’t stop.

  “Not funny! Hurt!”

  “Dummy.”

  “Hurt. Don’t laugh.”

  She was laughing.

  Crowe garbled out, “See, we can be friends.”

  “Then stop being nasty.”

  They were quiet for a time. Their faces close together. Their breath mingling.

  I FOUND A HEAD

  NEXT MORNING HEIDI CAME TO CHECK on Crowe. She found Reed Crowe in the backyard lounging in the hammock between the coconut palms. He was wearing a light poplin beach shirt, the buttons at his stomach open where one-handed he balanced a sweating bottle of Hamm’s. He had on green aviator polarized sunglasses. A ukulele lay beside him. He had the sliding glass doors thrown all the way open and the hi-fi was playing Neil Young.

  “Are you stoned?” Heidi asked. Clamdigger jeans, her white halter showing her tan shoulders.

  “Yes.”

  “Nine in the morning.”