by Tom Cooper
The denizens of Emerald City and Emerald Island.
Various beach codgers. A metal detector enthusiast researching the legend of Gasparilla the pirate. A square-headed trivia junkie, the island auto mechanic and boat mechanic. Another man with a face pockmarked like stucco who won the lottery in the 1970s and had a very young beautiful Vietnamese wife who everybody left alone because the pockmarked man was said to be in the Witness Protection Program. A mean Mississippi woman, a wino, a marine biologist prone to maudlin bitter crying when drunk, and Crowe would listen for a time. Some of the best sex he ever had in his life.
There were tour boat captains. There was a burnout or two. There was a hippy couple, camping granola types, barefoot, dreadlocks. There were the drifters-through that stayed for weeks at a time at the Emerald Island Inn. There were the anglers and the hunters, less and less often these days. And the investors.
Who would put a snake in his mailbox?
There was Josie Regent the Irish-Italian guy who ran the angler’s shop and bait store. Short-tempered as hell was the worst you could say about him. Usually he was very drunk and jolly.
There was a retired bird-watching couple who were studying the migratory and mating habits of blue herons for a book for some academic avian society. Oddly, they reminded Reed Crowe of birds. The man a stork or egret, leggy and long-necked with a convex beakish face, a bony ridge of nose. The wife like a puffin, a small tight ball of a woman, very affectionate and jolly and always calling everyone pumpkin or honeybun.
The island had its fair share of hermits and cranks and there were more than a few people who you couldn’t imagine surviving elsewhere.
There were strange guys, sure, like anywhere. There was that taxidermist he bought his weird shit from, no doubt that guy was scrambled in the brain. He used to live in the Emerald Island Inn. But he had kicked no one out of there. He had slighted no one.
Then there was a hulking man, a half-assed body building type, with a shockingly small head. The head looked like a baby pumpkin on an overstuffed scarecrow. What in blue royal fuck, Crowe thought the first time he saw him. He later felt bad about it. The man’s name was Lloyd Barret and he was fully functional and normal. Articulate, well-read, a suave radio voice. A retired art therapy professor from FSU. And an avid spearfishing enthusiast.
And of course there were women. Barmaids and waitresses and single mothers and divorcees. One retired scuba instructor. Another equestrian.
Every few months they’d bump into each other at the bar, get drunk, joke and laugh. Four or five times out of ten fuck.
Most desired a long-term commitment no more than he. Kindred spirits, that way.
Crowe was still wondering who it could be, wondered if it could be the man named Henry Yahchilane.
THE SEA CAVE ARCADE
THE SEA CAVE ARCADE. HENRY YAHCHILANE was known to frequent the place, always with a roll of quarters in his jeans pocket. Overkill, since a few coins would last him the whole evening on the pinball machines.
Yahchilane could keep a ball careening for hours at a time. Every now and then ducking and grabbing his beer and taking a quick pull and then setting the beer back down before shooting upright once more. All with the liquid alacrity of a yogi.
Then he would slap at the flippers again, the ball shooting up chutes and banging bells. The scoring reel flipping in a wild blur.
Next door to the Sea Cave was a putt-putt course, too hot to play on during the long Florida summers. The chlorine-reeking tourist kids would bang and flip-flop into the arcade. They’d look Yahchilane over, elbow each other, consort in whispered voices, but would give Yahchilane wide berth.
His inscrutable black squint. Two knife slits cut in clay.
And at night, when they turned on the black lights in the Sea Cave, when the Day-Glo jellyfish lit on the walls, he looked even spookier. His teeth and his slivered eyes stained lavender in the black light.
The kids stuck around the flight simulator. The air hockey table. Centipede and Asteroids.
Those rare occasions the kids did bother him, Yahchilane spooked them.
Asked them strange questions without prologue, “I see you’re looking at me, but can you imagine me in ten years looking at you?” His thumbs hooked in the saggy jeans.
Another time, to a teenage hippy girl who’d bumped into him and caused him to miss his ball, “Patchouli. Invented to mask the smell of the dead.”
* * *
—
Yahchilane was playing Kiss pinball one Friday evening when Crowe barged into the Sea Cave Arcade.
Crowe went up to Yahchilane. His eyes and teeth glowed lavender.
“Hey, Yahchilane.”
Yahchilane said nothing. He played ball. He slapped the buttons and the ball caromed.
“Hey, Yahchilane.”
“What.”
“What’s your deal, man?”
Yahchilane slapped the buttons, said nothing.
“You work in the serpentarium,” Crowe said.
Yahchilane shook his head and told Crowe, “Go home, egghead.”
“You work at the serpentarium. I know it. You put snakes in my mailbox, Yahchilane?”
Now, a minor miscalculation, a misfire, the ball clunked down the shoot. “Hey, fuck,” he said.
Yahchilane turned his fierce black squint on Crowe.
“Whatever you think, you’re wrong,” Crowe said.
DOWN IN THE HOLE
WHATEVER YOU THINK YOU’RE WRONG.
Yahchilane turned the words around his head for days. He replayed how Crowe said it on loop, the inflection, the tone, the volume.
Whatever you think you’re wrong.
He thought about the words during the weekend when he played pinball in the Sea Cave Arcade.
He thought about the words when he shingled roofs under the Florida sun.
He thought about the words when he cleaned the reptile cages at the serpentarium.
* * *
—
Late one Wednesday after a thunderstorm had cooled the air and the jungly bracken, Yahchilane came down the path with his mage stick. He paused a distance away from the cave.
Crowe. The fucking egghead.
It was still light yet but two tiki torches were lit around the cave’s mouth to fend off the mosquitoes.
Yahchilane propped the stick against a gumbo-limbo tree. He came charging through the fiddlehead ferns. When he got to Crowe he lifted him whole off the ground. He scrabbled and kicked like an upturned pig in a slaughterhouse.
He kicked at Yahchilane’s shins.
Kneed Yahchilane’s balls.
Yahchilane let him go.
Crowe crawled away on his hands and knees. When he looked over his shoulder Yahchilane was getting up.
Crowe picked up a rock. Grapefruit sized.
He pleaded, “Yahchilane! Yahchilane!”
Yahchilane was deaf to his entreaties. He charged like a stevedore.
Crowe’s first swing with the rock Yahchilane ducked and dodged. But as Yahchilane rose from his crouch Crowe swung again and this time the rock cracked him upside the head. There was a sickening hollow knock. A crunch of bone. Yahchilane groaned. A spurt of blood erupted from his temple. His eyes rolled and his knees buckled. He looked like he was about to fall. He shook his head and his eyes found their focus again.
They seared on Crowe with murder.
He lunged at Crowe. His callused thick fingers gripped his throat. Crowe felt blood ballooning to his head. Heard the dull hollow roar of his pulse. His vision swam and started to go white.
Yahchilane’s seamed visage eclipsed all. The deep lines bracketing his mouth. The sharp cheekbones. Hair matted and sticky with blood. Teeth gnashed and crazed in his blood-gored face.
They came at each other again. The men locked arms like wrestlers. They went twirling and spinning and tripping.
They floundered. They flailed.
“Cocksucker.”
“Motherfucker.”
“Fuck your heart.”
“Fuck your mother.”
Then there was a rumble and their curses were cut silent and suddenly there was nothing beneath them, the rocks holding them up toppling.
Down they went in free fall, helter-skelter.
They slammed to the ground, another cave below the one they were in. Now they were in a chamber beneath the chamber. Some kind of burial site. A crypt. An orchard of old bones. Some ten or twelve skeletons scattered around.
Crowe scrabbled back, slapped at his clothing. Hopped about, but everywhere there were bones. Brittle, clacking. Scowling skulls. Here and there a tea-colored rictus.
Beetles and roaches scattered, scurried under clavicles and hip bones.
Crowe reached blindly on the ground for another rock but came up instead with a large brown toad.
Crowe mashed the toad into Yahchilane’s face. The toad croaked and let loose a blatting fart. Its intestines squirted out of its mouth and asshole. The black and green guts ran into Yahchilane’s mouth. His face twisted in disgust. He gagged. He retched. Bile exploded out of Yahchilane and spackled Crowe.
Crowe backed away retching and wiping his face with his fingers. His gorge rose. He knelt and puked.
Finally they staggered from each other and sat with their backs against the wall of the cave. Fifteen-odd feet separated them.
They stayed put, catching their breath, the rasp of their gasping loud in the sepulchral space of the cave. They regarded each other with battered and busted faces. Teeth missing. Hair sticking up, sweaty and bloody.
* * *
—
The cave was the size of a small hangar. Crude petroglyphs marked the walls. Memento mori drawn by hand in blood upon the stone. Crowe recognized familiar figures. Alligators and bobcats and warrior hunters. Pictures of corn.
As with the sinkhole in his backyard that opened that past spring, Crowe surmised, there must have been a similar shift in the earth many hundreds of years ago. Perhaps thousands. And the sinkholes and the limestone collapses sealed off the inner chamber, turning it into a big time capsule.
An ossuary.
A burial ground.
The walls were sheer plumb. Impossible to gain purchase. Still for a while Crowe tried desperately, clinging, thwarted, clinging again, thwarted.
Meanwhile Yahchilane watched the floundering futility of it all.
Out of breath Crowe looked at Yahchilane. Gasping, hands on hips. “Nothing? Zero? Just gonna sit like a lump’a turd?”
Yahchilane didn’t answer.
Rocks were scattered about the cavern floor. Some no bigger than baseballs. Others loaves of bread. Others horse saddles.
Yahchilane saw Crowe assessing them. He said, “If you think about coming at me with another of those rocks, I’ll fuck you up dead.”
Crowe gathered and stacked the bigger rocks. Once he had a stack about three feet tall he stood upon it and jumped high. He grasped at an outcropping of rock, but the limestone broke apart.
Crowe fell and he reached for something to grab but there was nothing and he hit the ground on his side.
A fresh score of agonies erupted throughout his body.
Crowe wailed.
He picked himself off the bone-littered cavern floor. He sat on one side of the cave and Yahchilane another, their backs against the limestone. Their faces were swollen and gashed with cuts in the tenebrous light.
Crowe’s broken nose was swelled like a kiwi.
Yahchilane’s lip was split, a fat purple worm bisected.
* * *
—
For about an hour Crowe shouted for help before finally tiring and giving up, slouched in defeat.
“Why, Yahchilane?”
Yahchilane was silent.
“You think I gave a shit about Jerry Vogel?”
Yahchilane’s eyes lifted. His expression stiffened.
“Hello?” Crowe said. “Earth to Yahchilane?”
“Why do you keep on saying my fuckin’ name like that, egghead? There’s two people in the cave.”
“You really thought I didn’t know about Vogel?”
Yahchilane was silent.
“Half the island suspects, Yahchilane.”
“I didn’t do anything to Jerry Vogel.”
“Everybody wanted Jerry Vogel dead. You did the world a favor.”
There was a spell of silence.
Nightbirds.
“Some people the world is better without.”
* * *
—
It was true. Jerry Vogel, some people might have balked, raised their eyebrows at the dubious, old Conch way of meting out justice. But such people knew nothing about life in Emerald Island. And such people weren’t acquainted with Jerry Vogel.
Emerald Islanders were. All too intimately. Vogel’s mother was dead. He had no wife or kids or much of a family. No one noticed him missing. No one gave a shit except for a few of his fair-weather friends.
Jerry Vogel had no shitstorm friends.
And you could say Jerry Vogel had it coming. It was only a matter of time.
Hubris.
The Colombians wanted nothing to do with him after his boat was destroyed. He asked for a loan, to buy another. They laughed in his face. When he threatened to snitch, they told him if he didn’t shut the fuck up and disappear, they’d chainsaw him into a hundred pieces.
It was over for Vogel.
Vogel returned to Emerald Island vanquished. How close to the sun he’d flown, and now he was a burnout. A vagrant without a dime. For four years, caviar and cocaine and Dom and sex with eighteen-year-old Puerto Rican girls, now he didn’t have a tin can to redeem for five cents.
And the home he left no longer existed.
Jerry Vogel wanted to return home.
Impossible.
But Vogel would not go away.
Vogel no longer belonged.
There was one man in town, Ziggy Schaffer, who cared. His friend. The sheriff.
One of the few people who never knew what really happened to Jerry Vogel. And didn’t need to know.
Just as the laws sometimes worked oddly in latitudes and longitudes, so did lies and secrets. Who you told, who you didn’t.
* * *
—
The Florida stars. The gibbering of small Florida animals and lizardy sounds in the leaf litter.
Crowe eyed Yahchilane. Just sitting there.
“I always figured you as a church bomber. I don’t know why. I know you don’t bomb churches.”
Another silent half minute passed.
“Or who knows. Maybe you do. Bomb churches. But you know how you sometimes assume the worst. How you imagine things. Look, I don’t give a shit. But you see a person over the years, you wonder. Course you do.”
Zero from Yahchilane.
“Oh, there goes Yahchilane. With his walking stick. Where’s he going? He gonna bomb a church? Fuck some lady in Panacea?”
Yahchilane leaned against the wall of the cave, his head tipped back, his legs drawn up. An arm draped across the knees. Craggy face limned in light. Long feet bare in the dirt. His boots off and resting to the side with white socks rolled an
d stuffed in their mouths.
Outside, an owl screeched, a small lonely sound in the night coming from a great wooded distance.
Knowing he was going too far, half hoping Yahchilane would sock him just to distract him from their doom, “You throw tomahawks at raccoons? That your hobby, Yahchilane?”
Finally Yahchilane spoke. “Hey. Watch it, that shit.”
This time it was Crowe went silent.
Yahchilane, “Watch it before I rip your head off and shit down your neck.”
LASSO THE POPE
SOME HOURS LATER YAHCHILANE WAS DREAMING of the war.
The flies and rats swarming over the bodies. Dogs and cats carrying away the chunks and gobbets of their masters.
No one was in charge. Orders were passed along, garbled in translation. A game of telephone.
Human beings.
Cooked like meat.
* * *
—
Sometime in the night Yahchilane awoke from nightmares to a thin trickling rain of dirt. Figuring it a roach or mouse or lizard, Yahchilane kept his eyes closed. He tried to fall back under, waited for the black dreamless smother. Wished away nightmares.
But then there was a ripping sound, like fabric rent asunder. Then there was an industrious rustling.
Yahchilane cracked his eyes open.
At first he thought the man was in the middle of a perverse act. In the darkness Crowe was manhandling something resembling a tuber, his hands twisting and working.
But when Yahchilane blinked away the rheum of sleep he saw that Crowe was holding on to a carrotlike white root he’d ripped from the gullet of the hole.
Crowe was knotting together a crude rope. Already he had four or five roots tied together.
“Fuck’re you doin’?” Yahchilane asked.
Their eyes met briefly, a rancid glance. Crowe was the first to break it.
The birds were just beginning to sound their dawn chorus. The first pink-gray blanching the sky. Against this backdrop, the pine tops, just the silhouette of their crowns, so deep they were in the hole.