Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Crowe still said nothing. He made a mental note. The candles. The candles might pose a fire risk. Not that he was about to admit so to Wayne. He would talk to Nina next time he saw her.

  Crowe looked at Wayne. “I don’t want you skulking around the room anymore.”

  “Skulking! What the fuck is skulking?”

  “Read a book, whipdick.”

  The fat boys overheard and laughed. They watched in their swimming trunks, chewing their candy bars.

  Wayne Wade shot them a look. Then shot Crowe a look. “Something to say.”

  “Stay away from the room, Wayne.”

  “I don’t like bein’ talked to like some kind of errand boy.”

  “Wayne? I got news. I could give a flying shit.”

  PICK YOUR BATTLES

  FOR A WHILE THERE WERE OTHER near altercations between the men. None of them devolved into violence, but Crowe knew deep in his nuts it was only a matter of time.

  Invariably he tried to reason with Marlon as much as he could. Everybody had their limits. Crowe couldn’t blame the kid.

  He would draw the young hotheaded man aside, separate him from Wayne Wade. “This is not a threat. This is just simply a fact I’m about to tell you, okay? They’ll put you in a detention camp—but it’s really just another kind of prison. They’ll separate you.”

  Marlon said nothing. He was looking down at the ground, away from Crowe, composing himself. His breathing through his nose was a heavy rasp. His arms were folded tight around his chest, his hands clamped under his armpits as if he didn’t trust what they’d do if he let them free.

  “It’s not Disney World. They’ll throw your ass in jail. And your sister. And Mariposa.”

  Marlon scratched the side of his nose, a quick agitated gesture. Tucked his hand under his armpit again.

  “It’s no camp. I know you know it isn’t. I know you know better than me. But what you think happens? In those camps? Kids get lost. Kids get, shit, I don’t even want to imagine much less say it. You get me, Marlon?”

  “I just don’t want to see this man. I don’t like him.”

  “All right. I got it. But, just, you know? Pick your battles. Ignore him. You want Schaffer around?”

  Grudgingly Marlon shook his head, the desire to knock the piss out of Wayne Wade still making him grind his jaw.

  DOGGY DOCTOR

  IN THE LITTLE ROOM THE STINK of the old man’s sickness was overwhelming. The stench of incontinence, night sweats. The air-conditioning strained and rattled futilely against the cloistered stuffiness. Leon Caesar Arango’s breath was weak and trembling, rotten with fever. While half in dream he muttered to ghost-friends and ghost-relatives, people from his past long gone. He slipped in and out of consciousness. He slipped in and out of truth and dream. He slipped in and out of time. One moment he was back in Cuba guarding his mule from thugs. The next he was sitting in his open-air kitchen with his wife as she cooked tostadas on the cast-iron skillet, drinking black coffee as the morning pearled the sky and yard birds pecked at his feet. The next yet, here he was, in this strange cramped room among his grandchildren suddenly grown, one with a child of her own he could barely recognize, and about him strange boxes and cans, brightly lit, slogans he couldn’t read.

  * * *

  —

  Crowe raided his medicine cabinets for antibiotics and pain relievers. He raided Heidi’s. Yahchilane raided his own bathrooms, though he couldn’t recall the last time he went to the doctor. This, despite his persistent sludgy cough.

  The expiration dates on all the labels, long past. Decades.

  They debated whether to enlist Dr. Vu. At very least confide in her, asking if she was amenable. I got this friend, see, Dr. Vu. One could never be too sure, this part of Florida. You never knew where a person’s allegiances lay.

  These reprobates and renegades, these beach bums and misanthropes and runaways: Often their only allegiance was to themselves.

  Finally they confided in Myrtle the mailwoman, who knew an old girlfriend on Marco Island. A vet. Otherwise, there might be a specialist in Miami, a real doctor, but that would entail traveling to see the doctor, a trek down south. A reasonable journey if you were able-bodied and healthy. A risk if you were old and sick and had to ride in the back of a near-stranger’s van.

  Marlon was outraged. Crowe could understand little of his Spanish, so quick and angry, but Crowe surmised the gist. His grandfather, treated like a dog. A literal dog. Dying in the care of a doctor for dogs. A vet.

  BIG CYPRESS

  IN THE MORNING THE SIBLINGS FOUND him stiff in the bed and Nina came to the front desk of the Emerald Island Inn and told Crowe. There were no tears in her eyes. Her voice was composed, calm. Her black hair was braided back.

  “Where’s the child?” Crowe asked Nina.

  “In room.”

  “With the body?”

  Nina seemed surprised that Crowe was surprised.

  It was the brother, Marlon, who lost his bearings, his bawling from the room alarming the neighbors.

  Marlon was so worked up and loud that the motel guests called reception to complain and Henry Yahchilane reasoned with him. A day would not have made a difference. Not even a week. And say by some miracle they could have procured the best doctor on the Gulf Coast of Florida. No matter the man’s expertise, the advancement and acuity of his instruments, nothing could have cured congestive heart failure overnight.

  “Somebody passed,” Crowe said to people who asked what the matter was. “They’re upset.”

  “My god, somebody died in here?” This from an Alabama man who sounded as though a murder were committed. As if Crowe committed the murder himself.

  “Yes, people die in motels, man,” Crowe told him. “I don’t know what to say.”

  The siblings argued outside on the landing. The young girl Mariposa was in the motel courtyard pool, splashing on the steps in the shallow end.

  “They want a Catholic burial,” Henry Yahchilane explained to Reed Crowe at the stairs. He was smoking a cigarette.

  Crowe, “It’s not happening.”

  Yahchilane jetted smoke out his nose. “No shit.”

  Marlon pointed at Crowe, cursed at his sister.

  “Why’s this dude screaming at me?” Crowe asked Yahchilane.

  “His grandfather just died.”

  Nina said something in angry whispered Spanish to her brother. He set his jaw, hands on hips, pacing in tight circles. She took him by the forearm and led him around the corner of the landing, where the vending machine and icemaker were.

  While Yahchilane and Crowe were waiting in the room with the old dead man and the girl, there was a knock on the door. Crowe answered, kept the chain hasped.

  Wayne.

  “What’s goin’ on in there?”

  “None of your business, Wayne.”

  Wayne glanced over Crowe’s shoulder at the old man in the bed. Eyed the shrine, the religious paraphernalia.

  “That guy looks dead.”

  “He is dead.”

  Wayne stared.

  “We’re figuring out what to do,” said Crowe.

  “Man, I told you you were getting into some fucked-up shit.”

  “Just go back to the desk. Do whatever you do. Do nothing.”

  “I’m managing the place.”

  Crowe unfastened the chain and stepped outside. He got close to Wayne and said in a lowered voice, “It’s my place.” He shut the door behind him.

  “The cops. People on the island have been talkin’.”

  “Who?”

  “People.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Krumpp. Red, White and Blue Liquor.”

  “Fuck him. Who’s he, ambassador?”

  * * *r />
  —

  In Henry Yahchilane’s van they transported the old man’s body to the Seminole reservation outside Big Cypress.Yahchilane met with a second cousin who would make sure the body was properly interred.

  “I thank you, Horace,” Yahchilane said.

  “Oh, it will cost them.”

  Both men stood close together but their arms crossed in the discount cigarette shop.

  “I was hoping for a favor, Horace.”

  “This is a favor.”

  Yahchilane asked about the logistics.

  Horace gestured: better not to ask.

  He saw the look on Yahchilane’s face. The looks on the Cubans’ faces. “There will be proof,” Horace reassured them. “From a confirmed Catholic priest.”

  They settled on a price.

  When Crowe learned how much it was he was shocked. More than Crowe could afford. He was glad Yahchilane offered so quickly, since Crowe was self-insured and these days almost always nearly broke.

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  A FEW WEEKS PASSED BEFORE THE siblings’ gloom lifted. On Fourth of July night Mariposa laughed for the first time since her great-grandfather passed, pirouetting on the beach, twirling, pinwheeling her arms with sparklers in her hands. One green, one red.

  Dusk. A painting of a night. Volcanic Florida pastels. A ghostly sliver of moon.

  There were three big beach dogs, Labrador and retriever mixes, Myrtle the mailwoman’s, and they frolicked around the girl, snapping playfully at the sparks, snouts chomping air.

  Crowe was watching the girl and then he was watching the mother, Nina, watching the girl, when something broke in his heart. The toss of her shiny black hair over her brown shoulder. The whorl of baby hairs on the nape of her neck. The fine complicated muscles of her arms.

  The woman was beautiful.

  Once in a while the dogs ambled away for a sprint or two, sniffing in the sand, chasing a ghost crab into its hole.

  Myrtle and her girlfriend, Moe, watched from their Coppertone girl beach towel, drinking wine spritzers from the bottle. Bartles & Jaymes.

  And some of the motel guests and quasi-permanent itinerants drank and barbecued around the pool. A fat kid in a Pac-Man T-shirt cannonballed into the pool. “Thad, you got the buns wet. You better hope that dangdog store’s open on the Fourth ’cause you just soaked the buns.”

  The sharp tang of gunpowder, from fireworks, hung in the air. The smell of chlorine and burning charcoal briquettes.

  A rare July night breeze kept the mosquitoes and sand flies and no-see-ums at bay.

  Herman the heron, about as high as Mariposa, stood back at a wary distance, knee-deep in the slackening tide. Mariposa at first would chase the bird but Crowe explained to the girl that he’d come to her if she didn’t scare him away. Just give him time, Crowe told the girl. And after a time, Herman did strut up to her, a yellow eye on the sand castle she was making while sitting pooch-bellied by the ways.

  “Hermano,” said the girl that first time.

  Every so often from one of the small balconies of the Emerald Island Inn, a bottle rocket or a Roman candle would streak color against the darkening night. The chemi-luminescent fire reflected in the small chop of the water. The trails of smoke tattering apart, but the haze staying in the becalmed night, dulling the emerging stars.

  It was dark and a few people had started a bonfire with a stack of driftwood on the beach. The small girl, Mariposa, built no differently than a toddler boy except for the missing privates, wore a two-piece bathing suit and she found pieces of driftwood up and down the beach, running to toss them into the fire.

  She was throwing the fourth or fifth stick into the mounting fire when Crowe spotted Wayne Wade sitting a distance up the beach. He was looking straight at the girl. Crowe looked away. Waited a beat. Then he looked again at Wayne Wade, whose eyes were still on the girl. Whose eyes stayed on the girl.

  Crowe counted ten Mississippi’s inside his head. Still Wayne’s eyes went up and down the girl’s length. It wasn’t a dreamy abstracted stare. It was a roving riveted stare.

  Wayne at last noticed Crowe. His glasses propped up on his head, his green eyes fixed sharp on Wayne.

  Wayne looked away. Crowe didn’t.

  Wayne got up after a minute, his posture stiff, that of a man watched.

  * * *

  —

  Next night at the Rum Jungle Crowe told Wayne, “Watch how you look at that girl.”

  A trio of seagulls were lunging, trying to get through the wire cats-cradled over the picnic tables, but the birds winged away thwarted. Myrtle and Moe were drinking with their trivia and karaoke friends at the other end of the bar. Their three big shaggy beach dogs frolicking in the sand.

  Wayne had a half-finished grouper sandwich in the newspaper-lined basket before him. He took a belligerent swig from his beer bottle. Then he set his bottle down a little too hard. “Fuck you.”

  Myrtle the mailwoman and Moe and their several friends glanced.

  “Watch it, would you,” Crowe said.

  Crowe half-waved at the women. Grinned a friendly kernel-toothed grin. He looked at the dogs, play wrestling in the white sand tinted under the big-bulbed Christmas lights. “Nothin’ better than three old dogs in the sand,” Crowe told the women.

  “Better than two old dogs at the bar,” said Myrtle.

  Crowe pointed a finger gun across the bar at Myrtle. “Pow.”

  Wayne, low-voiced, swatting viciously at a gnat, said, “Accusing me of bullshit.”

  “I’m telling you cool it. Eleven years old.”

  “I’ll look where I like. I’m not gonna fuck her.”

  “They’ll kill you. Believe it, Wayne. That brother. That mother. That mother especially.”

  “Like’ta see ’em try.”

  Crowe said nothing. He drank his beer.

  “Sure doesn’t look eleven,” Wayne said. When Crowe said nothing, “You think she looks eleven.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Wayne. She is. If she looks forty, she’s still eleven.”

  “Wonder if they lyin’ about her age,” Wayne mused.

  “Why the fuck would they do that, Wayne?”

  “Legal reasons.”

  “Legal reasons? Think about what you’re saying.”

  “Sucker us. Make us more sympathetic.”

  “Wayne, let me just be in my head awhile. I want to be in my head with my thoughts if that’s okay.”

  * * *

  —

  Marlon started shuttling back and forth, spending six days out of seven in Miami working on the docks for shippers and wholesalers who couldn’t care less about his citizenry or papers. All for two dollars, three dollars an hour if he was lucky. From one end of the city to the other he’d take the public bus after twelve days of working in the malign Florida heat to visit the radio station once a day. This in the midst of one of the most violent summers in Florida history.

  The things he saw on public transportation. The things he saw on the streets. It reminded him of Cuba. Those last days, people beating one another with rocks and baseball bats in the streets. People stabbing other people because of a stolen chicken.

  Yet amid this pandemonium he visited the radio station once a day, shouldering into the throng, scanning with the rest of the Cubans the names of those who’d made it safe to shore.

  Most of the men and women turned away dejected, faces stricken.

  Months went on this way, once a week Marlon bussing back to Emerald City to check on his sister and niece. Yahchilane would pick him up at the bus depot on the edge of the county line.

  Crowe tried to keep the young woman and the girl occupied. He took them to the tiny zoo, which the girl and mother were right to find depressing. Yahchilane had warned
him against it. “I hate that place,” Yahchilane said.

  He was right, the arthritic and spavined creatures cramped in their piss-smelling cages.

  MR. CLOWNFISH

  OVER THE COMING WEEKS, THEY SPENT so much time together, Crowe was convinced he might love her. Both she and the child.

  He would think about Mariposa, saying, “America, love it or leave it.” Saying, “Peanut butter and jelly, love it or leave it.”

  One breezy afternoon they were on the bayside of the island, Mariposa out of earshot, standing in her zories at the edge of the seawall, balling boluses of stale bread from a Wonder Bread bag. The sheep head and the parrotfish that usually gnawed on the barnacles with their hard chitinous beaklike mouths finned up to her.

  “I want you to know I care for you,” Crowe told the girl’s mother. They were sitting thigh to thigh, knee to sticky knee.

  “I thank you,” she said.

  Reed Crowe waited a moment. “Do you know what I’m talking about, though?”

  “Yes. I understand.” She cut him a look. “I said I did.”

  Mariposa, in the background, said, “Hello, Mr. Clownfish. Only bread. Love it or leave it.”

  Crowe said nothing. His insides knotted.

  “I will always be very glad for you. You have helped us. We thank you. We are grateful.”

  Reed Crowe kept quiet, digging his fingers through his beach bum beard, scratching the scruff.

  LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, HERMAN

  HE HINTED ABOUT MARRIAGE IN A roundabout way. Of course he did, all those long summer days on the beach or on their road trips to the Swap Shop or to the radio station WIOD to check the list of names of the Cuban refugees who’d safely arrived ashore.

  Mostly, it was when they were sitting beside each other on the beach in the long evening hours, those nights when there was enough of a breeze to keep the voracious no-see-ums and mosquitoes at bay.