Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  They searched the little adobe house. Nothing. And with each passing minute the mother grew increasingly frantic.

  Hector Senior, for the first time in his life, was frightened of the woman. What she might do. But then, when he saw what he saw through the kitchen window, his legs gave. They buckled and he held on to the edge of the chair to steady himself.

  His child. Hector Junior.

  The child had swum out of the canal and had come back home all this way. Now he was under the blighted mango tree, crawling through an ant pile, his face and arms and legs teeming with insects.

  The mother flung open the door and went running to the child across the scrubby hardpacked yard.

  * * *

  —

  Among Catface’s associates in the syndicate, the rumor was that he was touched. So they always treated him warily, gave him wide berth.

  Look at what happened to the man in the Everglades, for instance. The airplane crash, the fire. Even that he survived.

  So by 1980, once Catface was conducting business in America, he had already vouchsafed a reputation.

  Within his first few months in Miami, he killed three men, all by hand, all by knife. He made enough from those killings to buy a brand-new midnight-blue Mustang convertible, cash.

  He drove the Mustang right off the lot with the price sticker still in the windshield.

  From the auto dealership he drove to the Holiday Inn where he had a young black couple duct taped naked to one of the beds. They’d stolen a kilo of cocaine from one of Catface’s cohorts.

  The man was a pimp and aspiring drug dealer, the black girl his whore. They were naked, injected with psychedelics. For days they insisted they had no idea where the drugs went.

  “Shatter every bone in your body,” Catface told them. “One by one. Es ever heard of the stapes? Baby bones in ears? One by one. Work my way to the femur.”

  On the third day, the pimp finally told Catface all he needed to know.

  Catface sliced their throats open with a filleting knife anyway.

  * * *

  —

  In the summer of 1980, Catface took residence in the Mutiny Hotel. The room like a captain’s quarters, a mahogany ship wheel mounted on the wall. The balcony, shaped like the prow of a ship, overlooking the horseshoe-shaped bay with hundreds of pristine gleaming white boats. Yachts as big as three football fields combined.

  The room was called the Emerald Island suite. This remarkable coincidence would not strike him for many years to come. And what a mazy twisted path would it be, the culmination of that fortuity, that coincidence, so improbable as to seem nigh occulted, like providence.

  * * *

  —

  The early eighties were a time of anarchy in Miami. Race riots. Massacres. Rapes. Shoot-outs. Holdups. Drug deals gone wrong. So many murders, so many citizens shot and stabbed and slaughtered in the streets, the Miami morgues were crammed full. The city started stacking corpses in a Burger King freezer.

  The Hotel Mutiny was the epicenter of the Miami madness, where criminals of every stripe conspired and consorted. Murderers. Arms dealers. Mercenaries. Assassins of overthrown narco-republics. Gunrunners. Dictators deposed from third world countries and ad hoc Panama republics.

  Men with names like Tarantula, so nicknamed for the spider-shaped birthmark on the side of his neck. Yoyo, on uppers and downers. Barbo Rojo, a man with a green parrot on his shoulder, a golden grenade clipped to his belt.

  Some of the men were twice as big as Catface, assassins and henchmen and outright coked-out murderers. Yet they treated him with a certain deference, nigh servile.

  Si, senor. No, senor. Perdón, senor. Si, si, de nada.

  Looking Catface in the eyes, but not for too long.

  Downstairs was a private club where you had to be a special member. Members got a special gold card with the club’s winking pirate logo.

  Catface had the card, the cigarette lighter, the medallion on his necklace, the signet ring. The key with the fob that was also embossed with the pirate face.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t only his appearance that gave people pause. If it wasn’t for his face, he would be a handsome and formidable man.

  His black grayless hair, his widow’s peak.

  His even white smile, a game show host’s.

  His finely tailored bespoke clothes.

  But his face.

  And it wasn’t only his face.

  A feral black energy crackled around him. An occulted charge.

  * * *

  —

  It was a miracle he was here, really.

  He was so high and out of his mind near the end of his stay in Cuba that his last memories were loose-leaf, scattershot. A constellation of impressions. The grubby embassy. The rib-skinny dogs in the street, gnawing on chicken bones. Riots between Castro loyalists and the rebellion.

  Busted jaws, broken hips, children wailing in the pandemonium.

  Propaganda on leaflets, everywhere.

  A busted cafe window. The owner beating someone’s head in with a bocce ball mallet. Then the man’s brother later coming to gun the man down to succotash with an AK-47.

  * * *

  —

  One night one of his cohorts hired a blind prostitute. Thinking it was just the face. She went with Catface to the Elbow Room in Fort Lauderdale, a private booth, to see a rock-and-roll singer Catface understood to be Timmy Boffett.

  Jimmy Buffett.

  A man opened up for Buffett, a comedian who smashed watermelons with a sledgehammer. Catface understood him to be the “melon hombre.”

  After his show Catface requested that the man he called “Timmy Boffett” come to the table.

  He did. A man in a Hawaiian shirt and a lobster-red sunburn, escorted by a small entourage of bodyguards and security and restaurant personnel.

  “She likes the concert and I like the concert,” Catface said.

  Buffett, still recovering from the shock of Catface’s face, still in the grip of his handshake, “Well, thank you, sir.”

  “The real Mr. Timmy Boffett. Why not you play the lime in the coconut song?”

  Buffett laughed a fake laugh.

  Catface still hadn’t relinquished his hold, clutching the hand though he’d stopped the pumping of his arm. “Why not though? Your best song.”

  The smile fell off Buffett’s face. “It’s not mine, dude.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Catface sang it. People turned in admiration. His singing voice was a mellifluous tenor. But then they saw his face and their eyes went holy fuck and then they turned quickly away. The singing stopped with the abruptness of a switched spigot and then Catface resumed in his rough whisper. “Everybody wants lime in the coconut.”

  Buffett puffed up and started to pivot away. “Hey, fuck you.”

  Catface kept his hold.

  Buffett tugged.

  Catface kept his hold.

  Buffett cocked his fist.

  Catface sprung and took Buffett’s right arm. Yanked him back and pinned his head to the table, cheek mashed against the surface.

  “Pardon?”

  Buffett was hissing spitty breaths between gritted teeth.

  The personnel, “Sir, sir, senor, please.”

  Catface would not let go. He took out a switchblade, flicked it, pressed the blade against Buffett’s neck, the tip poking the flesh with just enough pressure to birth a quivering ruby of blood. “Request from the crowd. Lime in the coconut. From Mr. Timmy Boffett.”

  And Buffett then moaned a few bars of the song.

  But ten minutes later the cops came into the Elbow Room and arrested Catface for aggravated assault.

  LIKE A
GRAPE

  NOW, HECTOR MORALES, THE CATFACED MAN, was looking around the jail cell for a space and finally sat next to Wayne Wade.

  Wayne looked up, willing his glance anywhere besides toward the catfaced man. On the ceiling he saw a gecko in the corner licking drops off the water pipe. Its eyes looked like golden BBs in the shale-gray light of the cell.

  When Wayne looked down again he saw that the catfaced man had his hand on the thigh of his butterscotch silk trousers. On his pointer finger was a gold ring with an insignia. Wayne recognized it from the news. It was the pirate logo, from a place called the Mutiny Hotel.

  He’d seen the stories on the television. The machine gun massacres, the machete slaughters.

  Catface must have noticed Wayne’s attention. “You like that?”

  “Sorry, mister?”

  “The ring.”

  “That’s a real nice ring.”

  “You know what that es?”

  Wayne’s voice came out in a dry nervous click. “Oh yeah, I do.”

  “Es okay, you can look, amigo.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  “Hector.” The man extended his hand.

  Warily Wayne took it. Then he relaxed when he realized it wasn’t a ruse. The man’s hand was soft, manicured. But the handshake was firm.

  “And your name?” Hector asked.

  “Wayne Wade.”

  “Oh, these es a bunch of motherfuckers in here, Mr. Wade?”

  Wayne Wade agreed this was the case.

  A short while later the bailiff’s voice boomed down the hall and called out Wayne Wade’s name. He’d made bail.

  Once they were in Crowe’s baking hatchback, Crowe asked Wayne, “How many times have I told you? No hard stuff.” He was apoplectic.

  And Wayne, drained, exhausted, famished, still shaken up from his encounter with the scar-faced man, said, “Reedy.” He stank of jail.

  “Don’t Reedy me nothing.”

  “Can we just get going?”

  “Cool Papa Lemon,” Crowe said.

  “You’re wiggin’. Come on.”

  “Cool Papa Lemon, that shit I seen on the news. Was it you?”

  “Holy shit, Reedy. Listen to yourself. Can we get goin’?”

  “We’re gonna have a long, long talk, Wayne.”

  Crowe was backing out of the space when the door of the municipal jail swung open. The glass caught the late afternoon light and sent an amorphous specter of reflection gliding across the hatchback’s windshield. Crowe was temporarily blinded. The scar-faced man, just released on bail, was the first to see Crowe. When Crowe’s eyes adjusted and he glimpsed the man, he near recoiled with shock.

  The man with the scarred face locked eyes with Crowe. As if he were struck by some ineffable déjà vu.

  The man recognized Crowe somehow.

  Crowe pressed harder on the gas, shot out onto the access road, peeled away. He kept one eye fixed on the rearview mirror.

  “That guy know you?” asked Wayne.

  “What? No.”

  “Looking at you real weird.”

  “Weird lookin’ guy.”

  “Yeah, he was. Seen him kill a guy, maybe kill him, right in the cell. One of them Miami guys on the news.”

  “Kill a guy? Jesus. In the cell?”

  The afternoon light was in Wayne Wade’s eyes and he squinted, put down the sun visor. “In the fucking cell. Yeah. So maybe we talk shit tomorrow? Right? Thank you.”

  Crowe told Wayne not to get wise. Then he asked how the man killed the other man.

  “He smashed the guy’s head. The eyes went flying and everything.”

  “Punched him?” Crowe asked.

  “No, he stomped him. Not stomped him. It was, I don’t know, he just stood one-legged, you know? Stood on the guy. Like some weird yoga pose. Put all his weight on the guy’s head, and pop like a fuckin’ grape, man.”

  Crowe stroked his beard anxiously.

  “So,” Wayne said, “how was your night, man?”

  They were silent for a while, hot asphalt whining beneath the tires.

  Crowe asked Wayne what the guards did.

  “Shit their pants. Nothing. Craziest thing of it all. You could see the blood on his pants. Right there. Cuff to ankle. The guard could see it. No doubt in my mind. They didn’t do shit. Nobody did shit. And the guy’s head, like a fuckin’ grape.”

  SPRUNG

  AS THE HATCHBACK SHUDDERED AND COUGHED and bucked out of the lot Catface ran to his car. There was a kid around twenty-five at the wheel, caterpillar mustache. His face registered a double shock. It was the kid who’d sprung him out of jail. Catface jerked open the door so hard that the kid clutching the handle almost flew out of the car. Still clinging on to the handle the kid tried to compose himself and started rising, but it was too slowly. Catface grabbed a fistful of the Haitian kid’s silk gigolo shirt and when that tore he grabbed the thick gold chains around his neck and hauled him one-armed out of the car. “Bailed your ass,” the kid protested. He cursed and fell on his side and elbow onto the hot asphalt.

  Before he could rise Catface was behind the wheel. He stomped the gas and took off shrieking. He shot out of the lot and onto the two-lane access road and gave chase.

  He was closing in on the hatchback. At first the driver waved him onward, thinking he was someone else. Or not knowing who he was. What he was. That dirty hippy look of dishevelment about him, he was likely oblivious. Just look at the scuffed-up dirty pumpkin of a car, the crooked bumper, the duct tape on the passenger-side mirror.

  As Catface closed closer still, closer yet, he saw the man’s green Polaroid sunglasses in the mirror.

  Then the orange hatchback shot forward, doubled the distance. Catface in the Mustang could have breached it in an instant but something black shot into the road as quick as an apparition. A black snake the size of a fire hose.

  He ran right over it.

  The carcass of the thing thumped and thudded and rattled against the undercarriage. It caught in the chassis and the car started skidding. Sidewinding wildly. Catface went swerving, tried to straighten the car. The road was arrow-straight and flat, new asphalt, and around it was a veldt of saw grass.

  No exits within sight.

  Nowhere to go.

  He could have easily had the man who left him burning in the swamp, but for the fucking snake.

  The car’s right front axle got mired in the muck. It got stuck. The wheel span and shrieked and threw ropes of mud and slime.

  Catface kicked the brake and the car slewed to a stop.

  Catface got out of the car. He watched the hatchback disappearing west. Going, going, gone. Vanished, not so much as a speck left on the heat mirage quivering of the horizon. Catface spat curses in the profane heat.

  Then he heard the distant siren coming from the east. He looked. The small rack lights of a police car glinted jewel-like in the tropical glare.

  Catface screamed in rage. On the asphalt lay the bifurcated body of the snake. Cut in half, the snake still whipped and hissed. He stomped the skull. It popped under the heel of his alligator shoe.

  Then Catface composed himself. He got back into the car and put his hands on the wheel and watched the cop car coming closer in the side mirror. He waited with the driver side window open.

  The heat. The bugs. The gnats. The sulfur stench of baking mud.

  The cop car nosed behind the car with the stolen tags. The officer, Nate Sternberg, got out of the car. He caught a glimpse of the man’s face in his side mirror. Minced meat. A half-cooked hamburger steak with eyes and a mouth and a feline stub for a nose.

  Nate Sternberg asked for the man’s license and registration.

  “Of course,” Catface said. He reached for the
glove compartment.

  “Both arms where I can see them, sir.”

  With one hand held up and the other opening the glove compartment Catface kept his eyes on the young officer.

  Smiling crooked eyes. None of the features on the face plumb level.

  He handed the documents over to the officer. All fake, all fraudulent.

  Catface saw the man’s hand trembling.

  The young officer said, “Sunglasses off, sir.”

  In the Florida glare Catface’s ugliness was shocking. But amid the scarred-over face was a congenial smile. Kempt teeth straight and white.

  “May I ask why the stop, officer.”

  “A moment,” the young man said. His eyes drifted from the license to Catface’s face. From the registration to Catface. Even his eyeballs were slightly atremble, aquake with fear.

  Now Catface was regarding the small black bugs flying around the officer. There were dozens everywhere, every one of them paired with another, every one of them mating while flying in the air. Catface, friendly, curious, “What are these things?”

  The officer said nothing.

  Now the man was writing on his clipboard.

  “What do you call these bugs, officer?”

  “Lovebugs.”

  “Lovebugs?” Catface chuckled.

  “How about I ask the questions?”

  “Why are you getting upset?”

  “Sir.”

  “Why are you shaking?”

  “Hands on the wheel, sir.”

  “I comply. I do everything you ask.”

  “No sudden movements.”

  “Lovebugs,” Catface said.

  “Hands on the wheel, sir. I’m warning you.”

  “Looks like they are a’fucking,” Catface said. “Why not fuckbugs?”

  The officer reached for his holster.

  Within an eyeblink Catface like a magician produced one of the wafer-thin daggers secreted in his shirtsleeve. Quick as a cobra the knife slashed. The man’s neck gushed. His voice gurgled. He fell to his knees even as his hand was still reaching for the belt.