Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Crowe looked. Already a big bearded man who looked like Bluto from Popeye was standing off his bench seat, a fistful of Wayne Wade’s Dolphins jersey in his grip.

  Crowe dropped his can of Tab and threw the boat into idle and ran over and put himself between the men. He shoved Wayne away. The man let go but kept glaring like he wanted to rip Wayne Wade’s head off and kick it soaring over the mangroves.

  Wayne Wade sat.

  The man told Crowe in no uncertain terms that Wayne had exposed himself. His genitals. To his daughters.

  “Say what now? Like full-on?” At first Crowe thought he misunderstood. He shook his head.

  “That man showed his goddamn dick to my daughters. He knows exactly what he did.”

  Crowe looked at the daughters. Two redheaded preteens who looked mortified. Then Crowe looked at Wayne, sitting red-faced and sheepish and abashed with his head lowered and with his pecker in his pants.

  His shorts were high-hemmed red rayon jogging shorts with white piping.

  “Wayne, go steer the boat. Get us back. Let’s get these people back.”

  Wayne didn’t move.

  “So help me god, Wayne.”

  Wayne went quickly to the wheel.

  “Honey, please,” the man’s wife pleaded. Also redheaded. None of the kids had inherited Boston Bluto’s black-haired genes. Maybe Bluto was their stepfather.

  The wife continued, “This was supposed to be a vacation. Honey. Take a pill. It’s just too hot for this.”

  “Please, sir,” Crowe said.

  The man was beginning to deflate.

  “Daddy, please,” said one of the girls.

  The miserable methane-smelling heat. The gnats. Crowe swatted a nimbus of them away but they came right back.

  “Yes, Daddy, sit and take a pill. We’re okay.”

  Finally the man sat.

  “You need to fire that man. Something’s not right.”

  “I do. I fire him every day. Sometimes twice.”

  When they got back Reed Crowe drew Wayne Wade aside in the gift shop. They stood behind the postcard rack.

  Wayne said, “I guess it fell out. Shit.”

  The sweaty tourists slouched back into the shop.

  Crowe said in an angry whisper, “I don’t wanna hear it. I don’t wanna even start to imagine.” He grabbed Wayne’s shoulder. How long had it been since he’d seized him this way, shook him like this? Years. Probably around after when his girl died. When he was lost in the black monsoon of drunken depression. Now Wayne jerked righteously away, knocked into a View-Master. It fell off the shelf and clattered onto the wood-plank flooring.

  Crowe pointed close to his sneering red face. “I want you to go and I want you to hide because that’s the kind of guy we’re dealing with here. He’ll come back in here with an axe. Get lost and get lost quick.”

  Wayne Wade snuck through the back of the gift shop to the mystery trail.

  The Boston family filed back into the gift shop for their refunds. Crowe tendered them the money and apologized at least a dozen times. He apologized to the other tourists just as many times. To the other vacationers Crowe gave complimentary alligator claw backscratchers.

  As the Boston family plod out of the shop, Crowe called after them, hand aloft, waving from behind the register, “Again, folks, my apologies. Grab you a Mystery House shirt on the way out?”

  Boston Bluto scoffed but didn’t turn. “Shirts? To wipe my ass?”

  COMPLAINT BOX

  BESIDE THE GIFT SHOP EXIT HUNG the customer remarks box. An old-fashioned, wall-mounted community suggestion box of the cast-iron variety, an antique painted to look like a frog. A child’s drawing. It gleamed bright cartoon colors of green and yellow, cherry red for the tongue.

  Lily’s frog. Lily’s painting.

  Tarnished now, so many years had passed, but there it would remain as long as the Florida Man Mystery House was standing.

  Crowe blamed SeaWorld and Disney World and all the other big Florida attractions.

  The waterparks with putt-putt and go-carts and arcades. Chuck E. Cheese, ShowBiz Pizza.

  Crowe blamed those too.

  Oh, yeah, and the fucking Sea Cave.

  * * *

  —

  Kids were tuning him out these days more than ever before.

  They seemed hopped up too. Ritalin they were calling this new shit, but it was basically speed. Truck driver amphetamine pills painted a different color and called a different name.

  These kids, to Crowe, were just unbelievable. They sounded ready for the mental ward. “Mom. Mom. Mom. Dad. Dad. Dad.”

  Just because they wanted a Popsicle or needed batteries for their Pac-Man.

  Goddamn speed freaks at eight years old.

  “You got AIDS!” said the kids to their younger brothers and sisters. “You were found in the orphanage. The AIDS orphanage! I found semen all over your bunk bed!”

  AIDS jokes, evidently, were all the rage these days with the kids.

  Maybe it’s time, Crowe would think. Maybe it’s time to forgo this whole kit and caboodle.

  * * *

  —

  All that summer the tourists wrote on the remark cards with the little green golf pencils, on occasion throwing surreptitious looks over their shoulders.

  As if Crowe wasn’t standing right there crunching on his Granny Smith apple.

  As if Wayne wasn’t standing behind the register thumbing his nuts.

  Finally they’d shove the cards into the frog’s mouth. Usually they were chucked straight into the trash without so much as a glance. But morbid curiosity one day compelled Crowe to gander.

  There were just so many.

  There were the usual crude drawings of pussies and dicks, courtesy of the kids.

  And there were many references on the cards to the “little fella.” Or to the “small man.” One remark referred to Wayne Wade as “small fry,” which gave Crowe a chuckle.

  Small fry seems a bubble off plumb.

  Obviously a tax scam, said one remark card. Get help, said another. Another said, You ramble but you seem like a nice man. Maybe a little more pizzazz? Another said, It said grotto on the sign and there was no grotto and my kids were looking forward to it and i can promise you i will not be returning and you both reek to high heaven of something probably marijuana. Another said, You guys are obviously on drugs and it’s amazing no one’s sicked the FEDS on you yet.

  Crowe wondered what the people expected. Kansas’s World’s Biggest Ball of Twine. It wasn’t like he was running the Massachusetts Plumbing Museum. Some kazoo shrine. What did these motherfuckers expect for five dollars? He wasn’t asking for their mortgage and their firstborn like Disney.

  * * *

  —

  Some days he wondered why he still bothered. Aside from the obvious need to get out of the house. Out of his head. Off his ass.

  What else was he going to do at this point, take a correspondence course in stenography? Spearfish? Conquer Poland?

  He supposed it was the only time in his life he still felt boyish, these trips into the Everglades. The thrill of not knowing what you’d encounter. The critters and creatures and oddities. The feeling of a jungle safari into the heart of the unknown. And once in a while on these trips there would be a kid who reminded him of himself as a boy. And once in a while there was a little earnest inquisitive girl who’d remind him of Lily.

  It would ease his worry about the state of the world, the fate of man, the purity of her heart.

  “Oh really, mister, you’re a real captain?” one pigtailed Japanese girl said. “Oh wow, can I take your picture?” Later, “Captain Crowe, what’s the weirdest thing you ever seen out here? Captain Crowe, you ever seen a real live monster?�
�

  Crowe had to turn away, he was so choked up.

  * * *

  —

  Soon the nights grew too hot to dig. Even the nights: heatstroke hot.

  But in Crowe’s dreams he still spelunked. That boyish part of him never went away, even after the cave collapse with Henry Yahchilane. In his dreams he explored the nether regions of the grotto, discovered new alcoves and caves. In his dreams he tunneled and dug and he crawled within chambers that gave way to other chambers. On hands and knees he went through rocky labyrinths.

  One night in one of these spelunking dreams Crowe came upon a grotto where there was a large silver puddle in the middle of the floor. The water was as shiny as a mirror. He crawled to it, parched, like a desert revenant to an oasis.

  He was halfway to the puddle when a child’s forearm shot out, tiny hand grappling the air, seeking rescue.

  He’d wake with his voice shredded and red and raw from screaming, his arms reaching, his hands clasping.

  After three straight nights of such dreams he went to Dr. Vu for sleeping pills.

  Absolutely not, was the doctor’s steadfast stance.

  “Maybe I should get a second opinion.”

  Dr. Vu told him it was a free country.

  This was neither the answer Reed Crowe was hoping for or expecting. “Where am I going to get a second opinion within driving distance?”

  Dr. Vu rattled off a list of names from outside Emerald City. There was Herve Cordele in Naples. There was France Beauregard on Sanibel Island.

  Crowe said nothing.

  Dr. Vu told him, “Exercise.”

  Crowe said he was active.

  “More. Exercise more. And don’t mix all this stuff. Booze, pills, pot.”

  In his mint-green gown Crowe shifted on the paper-lined examination table. “I’m not a sot,” he said. “Assumptions. Do you know that Krumpp at Red, White and Blue Liquor the other day called me a hippy?”

  “I am familiar neither with this Krumpp nor this liquor store.”

  She wrote.

  He eyed her askance. Her tiny ears. The shiny straight black hair that threw off the white light of the room. The catty unimpressed eyes behind round-framed glasses.

  “Doctor,” he began.

  “No,” she said.

  1983

  THAT SEASON MUCH OF THE NEWS was about Operation Everglades. A dragnet of Feds swarmed a town outside Naples, busted a bunch of boat captains and their loaders. They’d gotten greedy, reckless. Fifty thousand cash a night if you were a captain, ten grand if you were a loader.

  Crowe could understand.

  Hard to blame them.

  The captains would launch their boats from the mainland late at night, rendezvous with giant freighters stationed several miles off the coast. They’d load and ferry the cargo back to the mainland, where they divvied it up in the wharfs and fish houses. From there the drugs were transported all over the state in trucks and vans.

  Mother of all plants.

  Little towns like Everglades City, population five hundred, give or take, local yokels were suddenly driving Ferraris and Porsches. Speedboats. Jet Skis. All bought with cash.

  Only a matter of time before someone with a big nose sniffed something rotten in Denmark.

  And, now, the reckoning.

  * * *

  —

  Crowe was on one of his evening strolls when he saw the raft far out beyond the ten-fathom sandbar. At first he thought it was a large piece of driftwood. Maybe an abandoned pirogue or canoe.

  He sat up near the big sand dunes where the breeze kept the mosquitoes at bay and he lit up a joint and watched. He had it half-smoked when he saw a head.

  And then another.

  Crowe looked around. No one on the beach. Desolate. The orange-red fire of the wild Florida sunset. The ocean calm and shining pewter in the evening.

  The gnats and no-see-ums buzzing at Crowe’s face and ankles.

  He swatted and swiped.

  He went ankle-deep into the surf and cupped handfuls of seawater and dribbled them over his head. Then he waded out into the water up to his knees. “Hey,” he said through cupped hands, “hey, man, hello.”

  The heads lifted a bit and turned. Hard to tell how many from this distance. And Crowe, stoned and nearsighted. “Hey, you folks okay?” he called across the water.

  Four heads now he counted.

  Crowe slogged out into surf. A wave smacked the roach out of his fingers. He waded farther. Another wave smacked and soaked his nuts.

  He saw black hair. Dark faces and necks. Victims of shipwreck, perhaps.

  Crowe splashed out to the people.

  An old man. A young couple in their twenties.

  All of them wore ragged tattered clothes, filthy. Their lips were parched, flayed. The girl regarded him with eyes glassy and fevered and frightened. The old man looked nearly dead.

  Crowe smelled their stink of sweat and piss and shit.

  “Okay,” he said. “Hey, man, I promise. Okay, it’s okay, man.”

  For the life of him he couldn’t at the moment think of a Spanish word. Not that he knew many.

  He clung one-armed to the lip of the boat, pulling it, fighting against the undertow. A jerry-built thing, a sardine boat with a Port-O-Let door for a roof. A jib, a sail. The hull buoyed by all manner of junk—plastic milk jugs, child floaties, Styrofoam containers.

  It seemed to Crowe a very long time before his toes grazed the sandy bottom. And then he hopped for a distance before his feet fully touched.

  Staggering high-kneed he dragged the dinghy the rest of the way through the surf, pulled the small boat a few yards up into the sand. All he could manage before collapsing. He gasped and coughed, the coppery bitter sting of seawater filling his mouth and nose and eyes.

  The young black-haired man who was missing the top of one ear toppled out of the boat and tried standing. He took a few slewed steps sideways before his legs fell from underneath him. He stayed on his side groaning. Bare-chested, slat-ribbed. His stomach protruding in that malnourished way.

  “Es bien,” Crowe said. “No policia.” You learned a bit of Spanish, this far down into Florida. It was all around you. The radio. What you heard in the stores south of Emerald Island.

  Even Crowe, as challenged as he was with learning the language, knew enough to talk to the refugees.

  “Un amigo,” Crowe told them. “Comrade.”

  The young woman had black hair and green-hazel eyes. The girl, her sister Crowe assumed, resembled her.

  They wore makeshift hats of cardboard and straw.

  Cubans, Crowe knew.

  They must have launched with the intention of shoring south. But the storm rerouted them and their boat jettisoned here.

  The girl, in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, was yammering in fevered sleep. The old man muttered a prayer in Spanish, his voice thin and frail.

  Crowe told them in broken Spanish to stay put. Mimed with his hands.

  Needless. Stupid. They were going nowhere. They were half-dead.

  AN UNEXPECTED REUNION

  HE COULDN’T CALL THE AUTHORITIES. HE couldn’t call a doctor. Couldn’t call Heidi because she was away on one of her vision quests.

  Irrational, the anger, he knew. But so many of his feelings toward Heidi were.

  He loped up to his house. Still catching his breath, a cramp searing his sides.

  He thought about calling Wayne Wade, holed up over in the Emerald Island Inn ever since his house went in a sinkhole.

  No. Definitely not Wayne.

  And he thought about calling Eddie, but he didn’t like the idea of involving the young man in trouble.

  He called Henry Yahchilane.

  �
�What,” Yahchilane answered the phone.

  “Yahchilane,” said Crowe.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Crowe.”

  “Yeah, egghead. What.”

  The men had not spoken for several months, if not a year.

  Crowe told Yahchilane about the Cubans.

  “Okay,” said Yahchilane, hanging up without another word.

  * * *

  —

  Crowe put them up in the Emerald Island Inn. He tried giving them two separate rooms for space, but the Cubans wouldn’t have it. Separation anxiety. And after all that time on the cramped dinghy, the room with the two queen beds and the color television and the mini-fridge probably seemed palatial.

  From the depths of one of Heidi’s closets Reed Crowe scrounged out a miscellany of clothes. Blouses and skirts and beach hats. Sarongs and wraps. T-shirts. Panties. What he scavenged would have to do until a proper trip south. Emerald City was so small, he’d probably draw attention, suddenly buying a lot of girl clothes. “He was out there buying clothes, oh yeah. Reed Crowe. Strawberry Shortcake stuff. Guy’s finally gone off the deep end.” He was sure he had some of his girl’s old clothing stored away somewhere, but the girl was probably too big, and honestly Reed Crowe was worried that just the sight of the clothes, just the smell, would crack his heart in half.

  The Cubans got washed and fed. And the next morning Yahchilane drove his van to an outlet mall in Hialeah where he bought clothes for the family. Clothes that didn’t look picked out at random from a mini-mart or gas station.

  Crowe told Yahchilane he’d reimburse him.

  “Unnecessary,” said Yahchilane.

  It turned out Yahchilane knew Spanish. Fluent. He spoke to the family. The young woman in her twenties did most of the talking. The old man so fevered and addled in his bed they could make no sense of his ramblings.

  From Yahchilane Crowe learned that the old man was the grandfather of the two young adults, who were siblings. The young girl was not their sibling. The girl was the young woman’s. The young man, Marlon, was the girl’s uncle. The girl’s father was dead now five years, a casualty of the Castro resistance.