by Tom Cooper
“To you.”
“To the planet. You got work in an hour.”
“Like this? I got Wayne to handle it.”
“Surely you’re kidding.”
Inside the house he turned down the music, changed the record to Fleetwood Mac. Then he went to the kitchen and poured an Arnold Palmer for Heidi. One of Crowe’s prized possessions, one of his most cherished creature comforts, was a small freestanding icemaker at his wet bar. He gave her a full scoop of the small artisanal cubes she loved.
“Well, welcome back, Heidi,” Heidi said.
“Welcome back, yeah, welcome back.”
As she sipped at the diner booth in the sunny alcove, she looked over the archeology book on the table. The crude sketches of the grotto system, of Crowe’s own design, on grid paper, the kind from trigonometry class senior year.
“What is this now?” Heidi asked. Wary already.
Crowe, wearing his sunglasses still, sat across from Heidi. Licking his joint, twiddling the paper between his fingers. “Nothing.”
“Up to no good.”
“I wish. There’s no no good ’round here.”
“It’s called bad, I think.”
“Let me write that down.”
Heidi’s eyes were still questioning.
Crowe, “Okay, if you really want to know.”
“Oh god.”
“You want to know? Just don’t freak out.”
“Reed.”
“I found a head.”
“Human?”
“Yeah.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“A skull. Old.”
Heidi was silent. Her face was stricken. She put down her glass, sat back. “Are you stupid. Call the cops.”
The cops. Crowe almost laughed. Schaffer, his corruption and ineptitude. A laissez-faire spirit prevailed on the island. The islanders would have no other way. There was no need for meddlesome authorities. They caused little trouble among themselves. There were few people and places and things to trouble.
“It’s old old, like artifact caveman shit.”
Heidi slapped her hands on the table. “Reed, tell me you’ll call.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Yeah. You’re a foggy-headed buffoon is what you are. Yeah.” Then, something occurring to her, “You into some funny business with that Yahchilane guy?”
“Who?”
“You know who damn well.”
“Native fella?”
“He came looking for a book the other night.”
“Sounds like a weirdo.”
“He came looking for an archeology book and here you are.”
“Hey, listen,” Crowe said. He looked troubled, wanted to change the topic.
“Oh god.”
“That stuff at the airport. It wasn’t fair.”
Heidi looked at Crowe, took this in, forgot about Yahchilane and the archeology book.
SPRING BREAK
TAIL END OF APRIL, THE ANNUAL spring break horde filled the rooms of the Emerald Island Inn and scrummed the beach. College students from the state universities who for one reason or another couldn’t make it down to Fort Lauderdale.
Every day Wayne could be found hustling among the young sunbathers, the beach revelers. From as far up as the motel Crowe could hear his yodeling cracker voice. His “woo-hoo” cackling. He was in high heaven.
Crowe would catch him loafing around the sea-facing catwalk connecting the rooms. Forearms folded on the railing, scrawny, tube-sock-clad ankles crossed, a spliff smoldering between his pinched grubby fingers as his eyes slavered.
One particular girl on the beach, Crowe noticed, Wayne had his eye on. A willowy blond girl, pixieish, bird-boned. Small nipples on bugbite breasts poking through the apple-green top of her two piece.
“I were Sheriff Schaffer,” Crowe said to Wayne, “I’d cuff your ass right now.”
“Hotter than a Hawaiian volcano,” Wayne said to Crowe, pinched gray eyes on the girl through wraparound shades.
“Child.”
“Eighteen at least.”
“A child.”
“Tell that to her body.” He stroked his rattail, took a toke from his spliff.
“Jesus fuck Wayne.”
“Since when’s this Disney?”
* * *
—
Crowe was blasting the lime stains off the stucco side of the Emerald Island Inn with a spray hose when he saw and heard commotion on the beach.
Near the water a passel of college kids were playing volleyball. There was a net set up near the water. The sounds of their game, the thunk and thwack of the ball, their taunts and cat whistles, drifted from a distance in the afternoon. The mellow surf.
Crowe wasn’t paying them much mind until there was a scream from the beach.
“Something’s wrong, dude,” Crowe could hear some kid saying, “something’s fucked, oh holy shit.” The young man was talking to his friend, who was telling him to shut up and relax.
Crowe dropped the nozzle and sprinted.
On the beach a bocce ball match stopped. Then a game of Frisbee. Now a full-fledged audience was gawking as two young men hauled the young blond skinny girl. The bird-boned pixie of a girl Wayne had his eye on. Her nose was bleeding. Her head was slack on her rubbery neck. She was stumbling and mumbling and her eyes were half-mast.
But she was alive. And ambulatory, as two young men dragged her away from the water up to the dunes.
“It’s all right, folks,” Crowe called. He waved. “Everything’s okay. Everything’s cool. She’s gonna be okay.” He waved some more, smiled like a warped game show host. “Enjoy your day. We got this.”
Crowe followed the trio. “I don’t want any of this shit at my motel,” he said in a hissing whisper.
“Okay.”
“I need you out.”
“Come on, man.”
“Out.”
The kid looked at Crowe. “All right, mister.”
“I’ll call the cops myself. If that girl dies in my motel, so help me God.”
The college boys were so shaken they had no fight in them. “Okay, mister, we’re outta here, just, come on? Ten minutes, dude?”
“What room you in?”
“Two eighty-one.”
“Well, get the fuck going. Quick.”
The girl would be fine, Crowe saw. A savage gleam was already rising in her eyes. Defiance. And aimed toward him, of all people, as if he was spoiling her fun.
“Oh, eat my ass,” said the girl.
“All right,” Crowe said.
* * *
—
Crowe was at the checkout desk examining the Emerald Island Inn ledger, seeing what room the girl was checked in to when the phone rang.
A man said, “I hate to be the party crasher.” It was Sheriff Schaffer.
Crowe told him he had the situation under control.
“Certain things I’m willin’ to overlook. Whatever the shit you’re peddling, no.”
“You come over here, Schaffer. Search. Search my house.” Crowe wondered how Schaffer caught word so quick, figured it must have been one of the older tourists. If not, then one of the locals.
“I’m getting calls,” Schaffer said.
“I’m inviting you.”
On the checkout desk was an avalanche of mail. Catalogues and circulars and weeklies. And bills. The fucking bills.
A horsefly started buzzing around Crowe’s head and Crowe swatted at it but the fly came back at Crowe with vengeance and doubled fury. Crowe grabbed an issue of Time magazine from the stack—PARADISE LOST, it read, in kind of retro postcard font, over a picture of Florida State—and whacked
the thing away until it loop-de-looped out the cracked-open door.
Schaffer was still talking. “I can’t be having any of that shit going on now. Whatever cocaine bullshit you got. Whatever crack bullshit. You hear what’s going on down south?”
“I’m inviting you. I’ll mail you an invitation. Come on over.”
By the time he’d finished talking the line was dead.
* * *
—
Crowe went right away to Wayne Wade’s room.
“That girl out there. You give her any shit?”
“What happened to knocking?”
“Wayne, you sell any shit to that girl?”
“Home office call you or somethin’?”
“Cut the shit.”
“I sell shit. That’s what I do, Reed.”
“Cocaine. Pills. Heroin.”
Wayne Wade stroked his rat-colored rattail, turned away from Crowe’s rancid look.
“Man, you’re wiggin’. I don’t know what else to tell you. Wiggin’. Some thing to say.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I can’t control what the kids’re bringin’ to the island.”
“Now they’re kids. Not so long ago, grown ladies. Now kids.”
A poster tacked up on the wall caught Crowe’s attention. Scarface. Crowe stalked over to it as if intending to rip it down. Instead he stood with his arms akimbo, grimacing. On the picture was Al Pacino in a pinstripe coke lord suit, brandishing a tommy gun, his face twisted, dusted with cocaine.
Crowe asked Wayne Wade, “Are you some mental defect, this shit?”
“My room.” Wayne was sitting at the end of the bed on the grungy conch-patterned bedspread, knees spread, his unlit cigarette lipped. “Decorate it how I like.”
“I’m gonna tell you something.”
“Get the fuck outta here, Reed.”
“Any woman comes here, she’s gonna think you’re a serial killer.”
COOL PAPA LEMON
THAT SPRING A RARE SERIES OF thunderstorms slammed the coast. One right on the heels of another, three in swift succession. And an odd red tide washed up from the sea depths, seaweed and wrack spangling the high tide line, thousands of burgundy wigs infested with white crabs tiny as lice ranged up and down the beach. After that poison purple jellyfish filled the shallows, so fewer people filled the rooms of the Emerald Island Inn.
Meanwhile the receipts and debts and bills mounted. There was the upkeep of the Emerald Island Inn to consider, the colossal power bills during the summer, the air-conditioning units always straining and rattling against the heat. And there were the bills for his mother’s care Crowe had to pay. The monthly fees for the nursing home.
Crowe was always loath to dispatch Wayne Wade on any serious errand. Let alone one felonious. But circumstances demanded once more this spring. What with the recession and the middling business of late at the Florida Man Mystery House. What with the upkeep of the motel, the property taxes. The interest rates, the late fees, the penalties.
Everybody over the bridge, the old Conchs, got a post office box, since Myrtle was the sole employee of the U.S. Postal Service for both Emerald Island and Emerald City. Unless it was a special circumstance, an emergency, Myrtle let the old Conchs get the mail their own asses, as she was wont to put it.
It was so ill-used, the post office, when you stepped inside, motes of dust swirled in the fuggy wood-paneled room. When the sunlight struck through the front glass of the converted Payless Shoe store, the dust rising through the old blue carpet looked like luminescent spore.
The mailbox was one of those old brass jobs of yore. And one could walk in the post office whenever they pleased. The place was kept open 24/7, all days of the year. There was nothing to steal.
“King Canute fightin’ back the waves,” Crowe would say to himself.
These days nightmares about his mounting debts kept him awake. Sometimes his dreams seemed to consist only of a floating blackness, some kind of embryonic space in which he floated astronaut-like with his only company Myrtle the mailperson’s voice in his head, sweet, but with a mocking motherly edge, “You got mail, Reed.”
* * *
—
It was after one of these sleepless nights in spring, brought upon by just such a visit to the Emerald City post, that Crowe woke and raided his ganja stash in the kitchen freezer and parceled out chunks of marijuana into ziplock bags. Halves and ounces. They no longer fucked with quarters. And so adroit was Crowe with this task he no longer required a scale. He did it by sight, touch.
With the small bags in a king-sized Swap Shop plastic bag, Crowe drove to the Emerald Island Inn and went to Wayne Wade’s so-called office, a room he’d appropriated years ago as a makeshift break room and headquarters.
He rapped on the door. Nothing. Loud AC/DC on the boom box. “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.”
Crowe kicked at the door.
The music was quickly turned down, an angry twist of the knob.
“What now,” Wade said, birdy pique already in his voice.
“It’s me.”
“No shit. Open.”
Crowe found Wayne Wade atop the bedcovers with his legs crossed and his back against the headboard and his grimy Miami Dolphins cap crooked and low on his head. His arms were crossed behind his head with belligerent insouciance.
He was expecting an upbraiding for one thing or another.
Instead, Crowe said, “Gonna need you to go to Fort Lauderdale.” As if it pained him. And he was wincing, though Wayne Wade couldn’t discern it behind the shaggy beach bum beard.
“Fuck yeah,” said Wayne Wade, already rising from the bed.
* * *
—
Wayne Wade was several years ago eighty-sixed from the Elbow Room. So those few spring nights on the Fort Lauderdale beach strip he frequented the Mermaid Lounge. Lurking in the wings, hopped up, juggling his body from foot to foot with a kind of contained bristling energy, waiting for an open spot at the bar. And then quickly he would jackrabbit into the space and vouchsafe a stool. The elbows of the much bigger men at the bar would crowd him in.
He’d nurse his Budweiser beer until the dregs were room temperature, awaiting the next mermaid show. Every forty-five minutes the women in the silver-scaled bikini tops and big costume tails would dive into a pool, twisting and turning in the water like balletic seals. A fifteen-minute routine. You could see them through the glass behind the bar. Four Florida girls with spring break tans and sorority girl teeth.
Wayne Wade had his eye on the skinniest of the quartet. A gyring, ringlet-haired nymphet.
Next to Wayne Wade was a hunched man in an oatmeal-colored Members Only jacket. He was staring without expression at the swimming costumed women. They blinked into the dim bar, eyes open in the chlorine water, the corners of their smiles birthing strings of bubbles like necklaces.
Wayne leaned and mumbled to the man. “I got pixies.”
“Fuck off.”
“Love beans. Scooby Snax.”
“Who do you think I am, mister?” His face reddened. His eyes were intense, goiterishly abulge, behind big boxy bifocals.
Wayne Wade figured the man had misunderstood. “Snow? Maybe that’s your thing.”
“I’m from Kentucky. I don’t need your Florida shit.”
“Only askin’ if you like partyin’. Chill, dude.”
“Fuck off.”
“Kentucky tight ass.”
The man’s hand shot as quick as a snake for Wayne’s scrawny throat.
The barkeep lifted the bar flap and moved in swiftly, wedging himself between the two.
And in this manner the matter was decided. Wayne Wade was yet again banned from another Broward County bar.
* * *
Wayne Wade, sunburned after three days of spring break reconnaissance, moved like a jackrabbit amid the beach mob, among the towels and the Igloo coolers and the boom boxes.
“I got barrels,” Wayne Wade would sidemouth to the Grateful Dead–looking people.
“I got snow,” he would sidemouth to the kids in the pop collars and designer shades.
Mostly, it was snow kids were crazy about these days.
With the pockets of his jorts bulging Wayne Wade tippy-toed and jack-be-nimbled among the oiled buttocks and legs and stomachs, leering from behind his wraparound sunglasses. Among bright orchards of beach towels and umbrellas were young women in their neon pink bikinis. He smelled their aloe, their coconut oil. Their watermelon gum.
The spring breakers shot him looks. This man in checkered Vans and red-striped tube socks. A tie-dyed tank top that said I WRESTLED A BEAR ONCE in a kind of clawed, ripped-out font.
Wayne pssted and whispered, “Barrels. Scooby Snax. Snow.”
A man’s thunderous voice said, “Hey!”
Wayne Wade looked and saw two hulking men who he reckoned plainclothes detectives moving toward him.
Wayne ducked and scrambled away. The men quickened. Wayne’s checkered Vans spat out clods of sand as he veered to and fro among the sunbathers and spring breakers.
One of the policemen caught up with Wayne and poleaxed into him. For a moment scrawny Wayne Wade was airborne, flying sideways. Then he was pinned down by an officer into the sand as dozens of people gawked. His face was mashed as he flailed and kicked, his goober teeth showing in anguish.
“Touch your nose to the ground…no, your left…on your knees, stop right there…hands on your head…don’t move…don’t move, squirt…spit out the cigarette, small fry…What’s in the orange bag, sir? Is this a knife? Another knife here? What’s in the orange bag?”
The other cop, cuffing Wayne Wade, “Oh boy, this ain’t your day, sir. Now stay still. Because it still can get a whole lot worse.”
POINCIANA