Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  “Rope,” said Crowe.

  “You’re making a rope.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “You think you’re gonna escape with four roots tied together.”

  “Ever hear of a lasso?”

  Crowe’s face, riddled with mosquito bites, was filled with so much rue and conviction that Yahchilane leaning back in his corner laughed. “Spider-Man,” he said.

  Crowe’s fingers didn’t slow.

  “Lasso what?” Yahchilane asked.

  “The Pope.”

  The rose and plum of morning was just beginning to turn the sky aglow. Rousing doves cooed their liquid babble from a distance.

  GIVE ME YOUR BELT BUCKLE

  AT NOON, THERE WERE SEVERAL MINUTES when the sun came straight down through the leafage of the trees and beamed directly down into the grotto.

  A plane stitched a thin contrail against the glaring sky. It passed overhead, its roar silencing the bird and bug sound. Crowe in his brain-dead fatigue found himself staring at Yahchilane’s sterling silver belt buckle. Oval, inlaid with filigree. So old it wore a patina of tarnish.

  “What,” Yahchilane said.

  Crowe rubbed his beard speculatively. Flakes of dried mud fell. “Let me see your belt buckle.”

  “No.”

  “Lemme.”

  “Why, egghead?”

  “I’m gonna run away with it? Fly outta here and pawn it?”

  Yahchilane waited.

  “Flash a signal,” Crowe said.

  Yahchilane waited more.

  “To a plane?” Crowe said.

  A taciturn, one-syllable chuckle.

  “I’m trying. I’m trying here.”

  “You think someone in the plane is going to notice a belt buckle from two miles away. A belt buckle in the jungle.”

  Crowe swept his parched tongue over lips dry as trace paper.

  “Addle-brained.”

  Crowe didn’t argue otherwise. He leaned his head back against the cool cavern wall in gloomy rue.

  * * *

  —

  Another night in the cave.

  Amazing, Crowe thought, how Yahchilane could sleep at a time like this.

  Every now and then Crowe heard the scuttle of roaches and beetles. Darting, pausing, darting again.

  He heard the burrowing of creatures that would eat them as soon as they got the chance. Moles and rats. Turtles. The huge coconut crabs that dug underground warrens down to fifty feet. Those crabs would make quick work of them with their pincers. Shear their faces into mincemeat.

  Sleepless late that night, Crowe saw on the cavern wall his handprint, of blood, from when he tried to climb out.

  Years later should some archeologist or spelunker come picking among the ruins they’d find his bloody handprint dried on the rock, a spread hand somehow desperate, beseeching through the ages.

  * * *

  —

  “Yahchilane.”

  Zero from Yahchilane.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  “Why a snake in my mail slot, Yahchilane?”

  “Fuck’re you talking?”

  “Not gonna call the cops at this point.”

  Yahchilane shook his head.

  “Why, Yahchilane?”

  “Why what, egghead?”

  “Why’d you put a snake in my mail slot?”

  “Brain’s goop from drugs.”

  Now it was Crowe’s turn to brood. In a broken voice he said, “What a way to die.”

  * * *

  —

  Crowe thought of his mistakes.

  He thought of Heidi.

  He thought of his dead daughter, Otter.

  He thought of the babysitter, her life going on. As it should have, he knew on a deep gut level, but still.

  And it was his fault, leaving the pot there. The babysitter got stoned. The babysitter invited her boyfriend over. The boyfriend and the babysitter fucked around on the couch while the child was in her bed. The child wandered off through the back door and she went into the neighbor’s backyard. Into their pool.

  How often in the past had Reed Crowe pinioned himself on the torture rack of guilt going over the minutest details.

  It stymied Crowe to this day.

  It just didn’t make sense.

  How Otter could have gotten out and how Otter could have drowned.

  Why would Otter sneak out in the middle of the night to swim?

  And say she did, how would she drown?

  She took after her grandmother Shelly. Crowe’s mother, a mermaid at the Weeki Wachee Mermaid Show, nineteen, when Reed Senior met her.

  Lily was the child’s name. But they called her by her nickname, Otter. Not only because of her acrobatic swimming in the water, but because the first time she laughed, as a baby, it was at a trio of dancing otters at SeaWorld.

  Would his child have drowned if he didn’t have that pot in the freezer, if the babysitter hadn’t found it?

  You had to wonder, mother of a thousand plants, one tendril of circumstance begetting another.

  Mother of a thousand mistakes.

  * * *

  —

  Their faces were shadowy and scary in the dark. Nightmare faces. It was three or four hours past midnight.

  The night was sweaty and buggy. The insects were trilling.

  Crowe couldn’t sleep. Mosquitoes hummed in his ears.

  Crowe watched a palm-sized luna moth drift down through the cracked roof of the cave. It floated languidly toward him. Mistaking the paleness of Crowe’s eyes and the farmer’s tan of his bare chest as some kind of glow or luminescence.

  The moth was about a foot away from Crowe when it sensed he was nothing worth further investigation. It flapped softly away, up and out of the cave.

  Crowe caught Yahchilane watching the moth too. Maybe a similar thought was passing through his head. A dumb shithawk moth able to escape, and here they were.

  Yahchilane looked away, tilted his head back against the wall, shut his eyes.

  Crowe, “Question, Yahchilane.”

  Yahchilane’s eyes stayed shut but Crowe could see the little ticking movements beneath the lids.

  “Yahchilane,” said Crowe.

  With his eyes still closed, “Shut up.”

  “Why sever Vogel’s head?”

  Yahchilane slowly opened his eyes. The slits stayed on Crowe without blinking. The expression on his face telluric.

  The cicadas and crickets droned on.

  Crowe asked again, “Why sever the head, Yahchilane?”

  “You think I severed the head?”

  “Yeah.”

  Yahchilane shot breath through his nose.

  Crowe set his jaw. “I’m not a sick fuck who severs heads.”

  “Talk to me again that way. Your head’ll get knocked clean off.”

  Yahchilane settled back. He looked at Crowe stonily for a time, as if assessing. “Coconut crabs carried those bones away. Whatever had meat on it, they carried it away.”

  The image of the crabs carrying away the gobbets of flesh, hauling away minuscule bones in their pinchers, would not leave Crowe’s head.

  He belched and coughed up phlegmy strings that tasted like acid.

  There was nothing in his stomach to throw up.

  When the fit subsided Crowe lay on his side and pointed his face at the cavern wall. He shut his eyes and tried to sleep. Tried to banish from his imagination the clickety-clack sounds of crab claws.

  They were quiet for a while. Crowe dozed. His empty stomach was keeping him awake. His stomach was gurgling its own acid. Crowe was in a semi-sleep, head tippe
d on the limestone wall, when he heard eating sounds. Munching, swallowing.

  Crowe cracked his eyes and looked through bleary slits. When he saw Yahchilane grab a fat white grub from the dirt wall and palm it into his mouth like a peanut Crowe dry-heaved.

  There was nothing else to eat now. Root and grubs and if they were suddenly to develop pica dirt. Yahchilane already scoured the cavern for edibles. Old muscadine grapes. Purslane. Acorns.

  Yahchilane swallowed the grub. Looked at Crowe.

  “Jesus Christ,” Crowe said.

  Yahchilane found another wriggling grub. Pinching it with pantomimed delectation, like a bonbon, he dropped it in his mouth. Munched while keeping a steady stoic eye on Crowe.

  Crowe marveled. “Maniac.”

  Yahchilane said nothing.

  “Maybe there’re some roly-polies around here,” Crowe said. “Lemme look.”

  “Wanna know something?”

  “Bugs taste like chicken.”

  “You’re a pussy.”

  “ ’Cause I don’t eat beetles and shit. Fuck yourself.”

  “You’re a pussy and an egghead.”

  A big wind moved through the trees.

  They were silent again.

  * * *

  —

  Next morning Yahchilane woke to Crowe talking in his sleep. “Otter. Otter.”

  Crowe lay curled on his side like a child, his hands groping.

  When Crowe awoke Yahchilane was still watching him.

  A groggy moment passed and then Crowe seemed struck by fresh horror. The reality of their predicament.

  He stood. He shouted.

  He shouted his voice ragged into the vast Florida pine flats.

  When he tired and his voice frayed, Crowe slumped on the floor of the cave.

  With a small quick movement of his Swiss army knife blade Yahchilane cut off a piece of root. He tossed it with a disdainful flick of the wrist, without looking, at Crowe. The same way you’d toss a scrap at a dog. The snip landed in the dirt at Crowe’s bare feet.

  Crowe looked up, incredulous.

  A trick, perhaps.

  But he was delirious from hunger.

  Their jaws worked bovine, grinding the white-green roots.

  “Thanks,” said Crowe after a while. Swallowing was hard, his throat so raw and dry.

  Yahchilane said nothing but there was a simper on his face.

  Let him laugh, Crowe thought. Like I’m the freak.

  Crowe assumed the grinning was over, but then it started again.

  Crowe couldn’t help himself. “Real funny. Fixin’ to die in a hole with a bunch of bones.”

  The frogs. The crickets. The other small swamp vermin trilling and fluting.

  “I know who you are,” Yahchilane said at last.

  “The guy who you attacked in the woods for bullshit?” Crowe slapped at a mosquito on the back of his neck.

  “Seen you on television one time.”

  Crowe wiped the smear on his shorts. “That’s right. Johnny Carson.”

  Yahchilane was still grinning.

  “Go back to sleep, man,” Crowe said.

  “Cops were arresting you,” Yahchilane said.

  Crowe was silent.

  “Television show, public service announcement,” Yahchilane said. “They were mashing your face. They were mashing your face against the pavement.”

  * * *

  —

  Crowe, yes, once he was on television, his arrest televised locally as a cautionary tale. A “remember to stay off dope, kids” kind of deal.

  “Look, it’s you,” his mother said.

  This was one of his most recent visits at the nursing home.

  Crowe glanced at the television. At once he was incredulous. The man’s resemblance was remarkable. Uncanny, really.

  Crowe watched with mounting shock. Struggling to maintain his poker face. Wondering if he was wigging out, hallucinating.

  Not only did he and the man resemble each other. They could pass for brothers.

  Crowe stepped closer to the television.

  Twins, Crowe thought. We could pass for twins.

  It was then that Crowe realized with shock that the man on television was him.

  “You two could be cousins,” his mother said.

  There he was on the television, in an Ocean Pacific shirt he owned, in Bermuda shorts he owned, in the very same flip-flops he was wearing now. There he was, getting his face smashed into the hood of a car.

  Then he wondered if it was legal, airing this footage. Knowing himself, he’d probably signed the forms. If he didn’t recall the incident being filmed—hell, if he did not then why would he remember forms?

  “Your hair is much nicer than his,” his mother remarked.

  Crowe decided that instant he would burn that Ocean Pacific shirt and those Bermuda shorts.

  He stepped to the television and switched the channel to The Price Is Right.

  * * *

  —

  That television footage, Crowe wanted to explain the intricacies of the story, how he came to find himself in that situation. He wanted Yahchilane to know, for the record, that he wasn’t some asshole who liked to get his head pounded into pudding on national television. But Crowe knew his story would fall on deaf ears. He wouldn’t be halfway through the first sentence before Yahchilane said shut up egghead or some such Henry Yahchilane thing.

  What set him off the night he was arrested was when Heidi said, “Maybe you cursed her.” Meaning the child.

  Meaning Otter.

  They were in the middle of an argument. Drunk. A red wine argument, one of the worst kinds. He couldn’t remember how the blow got started or how it whipped up so quickly into a full-blown tempest.

  They were still raw. Seven months after the child Lily’s death.

  “What?” Crowe stood from the kitchen table, hurled the wineglass into the corner where it shattered. “What? What?” His voice was ferrous, strange-sounding, so heart-torn was the grief.

  At the kitchen table Heidi flinched. Slanted her body away from him.

  “What? I cursed my own child?” His voice bereaved. Berserk.

  She stared quiver-eyed at her glass. Her mouth drawn shut.

  Days later she would apologize. Tell him she meant something different. Something like karma.

  Karma. Curses.

  All the same.

  He’d lost her.

  She was just as lost to him now as Otter.

  * * *

  —

  Three days in.

  The men had relieved themselves in the farthest corner of one of the cave’s alcoves. Like cats they buried their waste, kicking dirt over the hole. Wiping their asses with ferns torn from the cavern walls.

  Their stench filled the cave.

  “We’re gonna die, Yahchilane,” Crowe said. “Don’t you care? You don’t got any ideas?”

  Yahchilane coughed.

  “Bet you want one of your cigarettes right now,” said Crowe.

  Crickets and frogs and toads. The whine of mosquitoes and gnats.

  Yahchilane coughed again and he rose and he cupped his hand and scooped water from the puddle in the stone and he drank it. He sat back down.

  The skeletons around them looked accustomed to their presence. And they to theirs. No longer menacing. Now they were benign.

  Just old bones.

  “Whose skeletons you think?” Yahchilane asked Crowe.

  Crowe said nothing.

  “Seminoles. Calusa. Shell Indians. Worked out on a railroad. They buried them here. Out in a pit.”

  “That’s not historical fact.”

  �
�It’s exactly true.”

  “Rumor.”

  His grandfather started a nutria farm. A farm of overgrown rats in Louisiana. Grim times. Grandpa Heath jounced out of Idaho in a shanty wagon with all their meager worldly belongings in tow. The wife and kids and dogs and Rudolph the pet canary in his brass wire cage crammed between the tottering boxes and trunks. His father and aunts amid the bedlam. No uncles.

  For three years or so Reed Crowe’s grandfather sold pelts. A lucrative enterprise, for a while. There was a need for fur coats, imitation, fashion being what it was at the time. But the coats started falling apart. They wouldn’t even last a whole winter before tattering away into fuzzy clumps.

  Word got around. Manhattan ladies no longer bought the nutria coats. That was that for the nutria.

  When the nutria enterprise proved ill-fated in 1923 the family again pulled up its stakes and embarked for the swampy thickets of Florida.

  Millinery and moonshining.

  For about a decade, the women in the big cities, so far away from this sweltering longitude, wore exotic feathers, sometimes whole birds, in their hats and bonnets. If you were in Gotham at a certain time in the late 1800s and looked down the length of Madison Avenue or one of those haute boulevards, you’d see all the feathers and birds in hats.

  His kin were opportunists. No denying. In the right place at the right time. The time of land grants and manifest destiny.

  Florida was the back of beyond in those days, trackless wild full of a million hazards. These were the days of the industrial revolution, of road and railroad building. Many a contractor promised to tame the land. More than a few gave up defeated and humbled. More than a few took the money and ran.

  Outlaws. Refugees. Desperados. Pioneers. These were Crowe’s kin.

  His grandfather was a construction foreman after pluming was outlawed. The Tamiami Trail. Then he decided to embark on his own enterprise. For every mile of road he built into the jungleland of Florida, the government granted him ten acres.

  Their reasoning: Who the hell would want it?

  And for decades, no one did. This before the boom of tin can tourism after the war. Before Florida became an exotic tourist destination.