by Tom Cooper
One of the guys was big as a behemoth. The other skinny and tall with tattoos on his forearms.
Wayne started down the aisle. But with the two Mexicans walking abreast there was so little berth that Wayne Wade knocked into the big Mexican. Or the other way around.
Whatever, the collision nearly knocked Wayne Wade out of his checkered Vans and on his ass. He slewed sideways, knocked over packages of Goody’s headache powder. Condoms.
But he regained his footing and kept hold of his six-pack.
Wayne’s expression went quickly from bewilderment to embarrassment. “Watch it, goddamn it,” he said.
The Mexicans went into the beer cooler.
By the time he fetched up to the register back again on sea legs, his face was maroon with rage.
Behind the register, the owner Krumpp was smiling faintly.
“You see that?”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m laughing.”
“You gonna let that happen in your store?”
“No. Pick it up.”
“What?”
“Pick that shit up. I ain’t your granny.”
“It’s the spics done it.”
“You walked right into that guy. I saw it.”
“I had the right of way.”
Krumpp studied him from behind his tinted glasses, his acne-scarred face scowling. “Look at your pupils. I was a cop, I’d arrest you on the spot.”
“I’d commit you to the asylum, Krumpp.”
“I’d shoot you dead.”
“Fuck you, Krumpp.”
“You know what, maybe it’s you I gotta worry about.”
“You’re stroking, Krumpp. You’re fadin’ fast. You’re wiggin’. Go to the doctor.”
“Hey, fuck you. Two, shut the fuck up. Three, let me listen to Shula.” There was a small transistor radio playing. They were talking about replicating the perfect lossless season of 1973 this year.
Wayne stomped down the aisle. He made a show of picking up the merchandise and putting it back on the racks. When he returned to the register, digging wadded one dollar bills out of his jean shorts, he said, “Happy?”
“Four,” Krumpp said, “get the fuck out.”
The Mexicans, each toting six-packs, were chuckling low and secret when they came out of the cooler.
Wayne took his change and went out of the store. He stood waiting, brooding in the jungly Florida twilight. A fingernail moon hanging above the tops of the sand pines and palmetto scrub.
When the Mexicans came out, Wayne Wade said to the big one, “I might be small, but fuck you.”
The big Mexican pawed him aside, kept walking.
Wayne Wade followed on his heels, smacking his chest. He’d put his six-pack down by the standing ashtray.
“I might be a small piece of shit but I will destroy you. You can’t take me down. Think so? Let’s go. You can’t take me down.”
“Go home,” said the man.
“Fuck you. My mama died right on over down there, down the street.”
The big man’s friend said, “Go home, jefe, you’re stoned.”
“What’chu call me?” Wayne Wade grabbed at his side for his jackknife. “What’chu say?”
“Nothing. Friend. Dude. Man. That’s all it mean.”
“You can’t win because I can’t lose,” Wayne went on even as the men walked away toward their pickup truck.
“Because you know why? My mama died right down the street in a car crash. I never once needed her help. She’d help me if I needed it. She’d kill you, her spirit. She’s standin’ right behind you.”
“Loco,” said the smaller one.
Wayne Wade, full of Dutch courage, dizzy-drunk, charged with his knife.
The big Mexican turned. “You’re on crack, jefe. A knife? Shit.”
“So let’s go. I live for this shit right here. Swing.”
Wayne lunged.
The sumo-sized Mexican man, usually a paragon of patience, so much so his friends had nicknamed him the Chocolate Buddha, swung. He swung a big right hook to the underside of Wayne’s jaw that sent him flying. He was socked off his feet, flung backward. It was like a cartoon. Any other man of Wayne’s featherweight size would have been knocked cold. But dazed though he was Wayne, no doubt coked up, or cracked up, scrabbled up from the ground with an uncanny insectoid energy.
He tottered toward the pair of Mexicans with his fists up. Spat out little pieces of teeth like shrapnel. After a few wobbly steps he slewed sideways and sat with his back against the garbage dumpster, chin dripping bloody drool onto the front of his Panama Jack shirt.
The two Mexican men had their doors open. The skinny man got behind the wheel. The man nicknamed Chocolate Buddha said, “I tried to warn you.”
“Fuck you, fat tubba shit.” Wade’s lips bubbled blood.
“You need an ambulance?”
“Go eat your mama.”
He climbed into the rusted blue truck and slammed the door. The truck lurched away, turned onto the two-lane blacktop and geared down the flat straight road.
Wayne kept muttering in a bloody drunken slur with an audience of five or six stars shining above the incandescent-lit lot. The bugs filled the jungle night with their lusty song.
All this time Krumpp stood waiting behind the glass door, his calfskin holster with its firearm dangling at his hip. Only when the blue truck was a ways down the road did he step outside. He walked halfway across the lot in his tasseled loafers, the sweltering night air fogging the lenses of his gray-tinted glasses, so much was the difference between the air-conditioned cool of the store and the muggy jungle night.
“You need an ambulance?” His pitted face squinted.
“No.”
His glasses defogged. “Then move your ass. You ain’t exactly a glowing advertisement for business.”
DIGGING A HOLE
AS SUMMER SHOWED SIGNS OF WANING around him the hillocks grew in the grotto clearing. Reed Crowe pried and hacked through roots. He heaved great clods of earth.
He grew to look forward to these mornings and evenings. An odor of warm turned earth and hummus, somehow evocative of childhood. His insect repellent.
As he dug he was sweating so much he peeled off his sodden shirt and wrapped it bonnet-style around his head, the knot under his chin. No one was around to tell him he looked ridiculous. Crowe in the skim of lamplight laboring with the shovel under the big spring-glutted leaves of the banyans and cyads.
The clearing around the cavern’s entrance looked ravaged by gophers, groundhogs. Trenches and holes of varying depths.
In the grottoes he came across troglophiles. Millipedes and cave frogs and newts and salamanders. Larvae so ghostly pale they seemed to glow. Tiny translucent frogs no bigger than a fingernail. Eyeless worms. Anthropoids with palpating feelers and antennae. Pale spiders with huge red eyes and white hairs sticking from their legs.
Some nights he’d find two or three fossils.
All kinds of bones. No more of them human.
So far.
He found cane and bamboo and charcoal in the pits. Hawk skins. Old feathers turned to jerky. Fish bones and shark teeth. Cups made of shells.
Every so often, sweating and out of breath with his heart racing, he’d lean on the handle of his shovel to rest and light his joint and peer into the restless Florida dark.
Stridulating insects. Croaking frogs. Piping alligators. Cawing nightbirds.
Sometimes he rose and got dizzy-headed and worried about his blood pressure. His arms tingled from shoulder to fingertips. He wondered about his heart. He thought of his father, felled by a heart attack at fifty-five.
BIG GORILLA FIREWORKS
THE FIREWORKS EMPORIUM OUT ON THE edge of the co
unty had been open as long as he could recall. A hangar-like building of sheet metal painted blazing red and yellow, jutting up from the ferociously green Florida landscape like a hematoma. A fifteen-foot inflatable gorilla hulked beside the door, glowering with its fangs bared.
BIG GORILLA FIREWORKS, yelled the sign.
Three exclamation marks.
Crowe in Polaroid sunglasses and flip-flops wandered the tall wide aisles among the spinners and poppers and rockets and mortars. The tang of gunpowder. Remembering coming here as a boy with his father.
Every so often Crowe stopped to inspect one of the packages of rice paper with screaming cartoon animals and Chinese lettering. And every so often he’d pick up one of the explosives and consider it. Toss it in his wire basket.
A kid wearing a Pink Floyd shirt, the one with the prism, came up to Crowe, asked if he needed any help.
“Ya’ll got any of those M-80s?” Crowe asked the kid.
“Oh, they outlawed them, mister.” Braces, his face stippled with acne like a pelting of buckshot. “Swap shop. Gun show. Only places you’ll get that stuff now.”
Crowe reached for one of the brightly colored boxes on the shelf. Black Cat. “Combine some of these, added them up?”
The kid’s grin snagged on his braces. “Oh, I can’t recommend anything like that.”
“I want to blow the shit out of my ex-wife’s birthday party.”
“Far out.”
Crowe asked him, “How you people stay open, man? No offense.” Crowe looked around. No one else. “I just don’t see it.”
“One guy’ll come in here and really make your day.”
“What’s the most you ever saw one guy spend?”
“Seventy-five grand.”
“Grand?”
“Yessir.”
“Grand.”
“Yessir.”
“Man. Was he crazy?”
“Coked up.”
They were still chuckling when the kid rung him up at the register. The kid told him he had to sign his name, spelled out, and then his signature, and the date, on a list that was on a clipboard. The law.
“I gotta put my full name down middle and all?”
“Just sign a name.”
“Any name.”
“They don’t check.”
Crowe wrote down a bullshit name out of nowhere. Gerald Macandu Macnamarra.
“Hey, what happened to the older red-haired fella worked here?”
“My dad.”
“Gary?”
“Yessir. He passed.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. What’s your name, son?”
“Barry.”
“Barry, I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m real sorry to hear it.”
KABOOM
THAT EVENING AT THE WORKSTATION IN the garage Crowe sat under the bug zapper knifing the small firecrackers apart and making a pile of the gunpowder. The transistor radio was tuned to Miami, a station playing afrocuban.
A can of Hamm’s sweated at his elbow. Before him on the table, a book, The Poor Man’s James Bond Vol. 1 by Kurt Saxon, lay open. An acquisition from an underground bookstore and porno magazine stand and metal detector repair shop in Fort Lauderdale. He’d picked it up out of idle curiosity and read the back. ABOUT THIS BOOK: It is bad to poison your fellow man, blow him up or even shoot him or otherwise disturb his tranquility. It is also uncouth to counterfeit your nation’s currency and it is tacky to destroy property as instructed in Arson by Electronics.
Instant purchase.
Now the book was open to a page with a heading that said “Cannon Cracker Composition.” Illustrations of dynamite pipes, their construction. The cases for crackers are rolled similar to rocket cases except that paste is used only…
Pain shot through his thumb, a small loud spike. He leapt from the stool. The knife clattered to the floor. Sucking his bleeding thumb he hobbled cussing to the bathroom and bandaged his hand.
He was still working later that night, insects popping against the zapper, when the rain came crashing down all at once like a broken water main.
A luna moth as big as a hand fluttered languidly and clung to the garage wall.
In the crushed shell driveway, small green tree frogs hopped, shiny as gewgaws in the floodlights. Beyond was a vale of night so black and profound it might as well have been a dropped stage curtain of black velvet.
Crowe every so often glanced up and couldn’t shake the feeling the darkness was looking straight at him.
Glowering.
* * *
—
Next night he took the homemade explosive to the grotto and set it alight in the rocks, scrambled away. Watched from a distance under the trees in the lavender and plum sunset.
He heard the crackling hiss.
Bats winged above him, snatching insects out of the air in soundless swoops.
Nothing.
Bugs flying from stalk to stalk in the clearing, grasshoppers and katydids flitting off, diaphanous sparks in the late slant of sun.
Nothing.
Some bird about ten yards away going, yuk-yuk-yuka-tuk-tuk.
Then the detonation, the noise rolling terrifically into the night.
“Holy fuck, man.” Crowe cackled.
Surely people for five miles square heard.
A hail of stones. A mushroom of gunmetal smoke.
Birds winged into the night, screaming in rebuke.
Still chuckling, ears still ringing, he ducked through the rubble and went into the chamber.
The limestone boulder, gouged and charred.
But the passageway, still blocked.
Crowe put his hand on the rock, still warm from the blast. There was a lingering bite of gunpowder in the air. Crowe would swear his skin caught the kiss of a draft. There were a few cracks in the rock, horsehair-fine. He would hold up his palm a centimeter from the stone, keep it there until he thought he felt the sigh again.
A SURPRISE PACKAGE
ONE NIGHT A DIMINUTIVE METALLIC CLACKING pulled Crowe out of sleep. One of the cats fooling around with the mail slot, he thought, groping blindly for a throw pillow. He flung it across the room.
He was drifting back to sleep when small tinny clicking started again.
Crowe reared upright on the couch and blinked into the dark. No cat in the room.
But Crowe saw the mail slot pried open. And an eye peering at him through the hole. A human eye.
His heart flipped.
Before he was on his feet he saw something fall through the mail slot. It looked like a two-foot length of black rope. But when the mail hole snapped shut and the rope hit the floor it started moving. A quick liquid squiggle across the room. A scaly whisper against the terrazzo floor.
A snake.
It whipsawed across the room and jettisoned toward the couch. Crowe reached for another throw pillow and flung it. The snake stopped, knotted into a tangle, tasted the air with its tongue. Then it unraveled and slithered to the corner of the room where it curled up behind the potted ficus tree.
Crowe stood. “Who is it,” he said, aiming for menace. Gelded, even to his ears.
“Shit’s there? Fixin’ to get shot.”
He went to the foyer closet and got his aluminum baseball bat and flashlight. Then at the door he shouted he was coming out. He brandished the baseball bat with one hand and flung the door open with the other. No one. He stepped into the night. Scanned the yard with the flashlight, the feeble beam catching the elephant eared plants fringing the yard. The few ghost-pale geckos sipping dew off leaves.
Wind gusted off the ocean and rustled the sea oats.
Crowe waited, squinting i
nto the dark.
Back inside he got the broom from the kitchen. In the corner the snake was still knotted into a tight coil. Crowe nudged the snake with the broom bristles. The snake hissed, tightened its knot. Crowe pushed it again and it unraveled. It slithered across the terrazzo and over the door’s threshold and into the sand.
He waited. The humid night. Tropical flowers breathing their hot breath. Lizards and frogs rustling in the leaves.
THE MENTAL CENSUS
THE NEXT MORNING WHEN HE WOKE Crowe wondered if it hadn’t all been a bizarre dream. The snake wriggling across the floor. The scaly whisper across the terrazzo.
But no, there it was in the morning. The broom propped against the writing desk.
Crowe, “What the fuck, man,” scratching his beach bum beard, scratching the bird’s nest of his crispy sun-bleached hair.
While the coffee was still brewing he rummaged in the garage for superglue. Then he went out to the side of the house where he started gluing the mail slot shut.
Out of commission anyway, a remnant from days of yore before navigable roads on the island, when the barefoot mailman delivered letters the old-fashioned way, lugging his satchel down the length of the beach. Besides notes from neighbors and Heidi, the mail slot was out of commission. His mail was routed to a post office box across the bridge on the mainland. Sometimes Myrtle the mailwoman would make special deliveries across the bridge, but those were packages, not letters.
When he was done gluing Crowe tested the metal flap with the crook of his finger. Sealed shut.
A few of the cats had slunk up to him, curious about his activity, and as they walked in circles with their tails up and their eyes on the mail slot, as they tipped their noses up, sniffing, Crowe said to them, “Guys’re like Wayne, you know. Useless. Earn your keep.”
* * *
—
In the coming days Crowe tallied his enemies. A mental census.
Were there any?
Did he have any?
A panoply of faces drifted through his mind.
The man with the scarred face.