Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Looting. Drug trafficking. Human trafficking.

  Criminals went about business with nigh impunity. Meanwhile, coke orgies in the clubs. Uzis, semi-automatics, bazookas, grenades sold from the trunks of DeLoreans.

  Catface was watching the commercial, tugging on a sock. A guy was dancing down the street. Right down the sidewalk. Some kind of cha-cha, because his diarrhea had gone away. He was cha-cha-ing down the street high-fiving the mailman and the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker because a pill had solved his diarrhea problem.

  Catface stuck a toothpick in his mouth, chewed. He imagined killing the man. The man cha-cha-ing up to him on the street. He flicking out his knife and ripping him open like a shoat. Blood everywhere in the street. An abattoir. Everybody horrorstruck, their mouths agape.

  Slaughter on Goosefuck Avenue.

  The thought, so clear in his mind, made Catface chuckle.

  The gold-plated phone beside the bed rang and he picked it up. He listened, toothpick rolling in his mouth.

  “Goo,” he said. “A girl, you say? A girl called? Southwest Florida. No name? Small motel? Hello? That is all you have. I see. She was phoning home?”

  HOLIDAY ROAD

  INTO THE SAVAGE GREEN JUNGLY HEART of Florida Catface drove, looking for the island where he’d crashed so many years ago.

  Looking for an island that had a pink and purple sign.

  Land of ten thousand islands, they called this place.

  In his travels Catface had fights major and minor. Catface usually needed only to reach into his inside coat pocket and produce a blade with a grease-jointed movement as quick as the flick of a scorpion tail. A few men he had to cut. In the parking lot of a pancake house in Cape Coral he stabbed a man for calling him a quote unquote shit-ugly spic.

  “Cheeseburger in paradise,” Catface crooned, toothpick in his mouth, as he knifed him in the gut. “Wasting away in Margaritaville. Oh, yeah, baby.”

  A move Catface might have forwent had he not been high as a weather balloon after freebasing in the IHOP bathroom.

  * * *

  —

  Onward he drove.

  Some places were no bigger than glorified fishing hamlets.

  Now here was one. Captiva Island.

  An ice cream parlor, an antiques emporium, a taffy shop in the thoroughfare. A shop of gewgaws, the door propped open with a hunk of coral. Inside was a ladder-back chair, upon it sitting a human-sized sponge man. Some marine equivalent of a scarecrow made of sea sponges, an effigy, sea shells for its eyes and mouth and nose.

  At the four-way intersection in the center of town, Catface braked his stolen canary-yellow Buick and surveyed the scene. The late afternoon sun fell mellow on the storefronts and awnings. The windows glared bronze.

  The somnolent hour close to supper.

  Spread out on the cream leather passenger seat next to Catface was a Rand McNally map. Catface was studying it, toothpick switching from one side of his scarred mouth to the other, when he glanced up and saw a tourist family beginning to cross the road. A young middle-aged couple with two young daughters old enough that a kind of petulant boredom had cemented on their faces. One daughter was around nine. The other about fourteen in a halter top and hoochie shorts.

  When the father saw Catface his expression curdled.

  Catface took off his sunglasses.

  Then the man’s mouth gawped.

  Catface’s very white wide eyes cut to the daughter and lingered on her tawny legs. He flicked the toothpick in his mouth. He meant the look as instigation. Nothing else. Little girls were not his kink.

  “Your daughters,” Catface said to the man. “Thumbs up. Meet you at the movies.”

  Some odd combination of anger and fear seized the man’s face. “What about them, mister?”

  “Hey, why so angry?”

  “Don’t ever talk about my daughters, mister. Don’t even look at them.”

  The man’s wife was tugging on his hand. And you could tell he wanted her to. He didn’t want to be the hero, not this time. “Come on, Richard,” she told him.

  Now Catface’s toothpick angled speculatively, the toothpick staying pointed upright in the corner of his mouth, his eyes squinted and assaying. “Are you a hero?”

  The man didn’t budge.

  “Adios mios,” Catface said. “I think you are.”

  The man got pissed again. “Fuck you, buddy.”

  “Richard!” said the wife.

  The older girl was grinning. Braces.

  Catface said, “Your daughters, very bored. Take them to Disney World.”

  “What!”

  “I take them to Disney World.”

  “You’re not taking them anywhere!”

  “Hm. How much do you weigh?”

  “Weigh! Fuck you.”

  “Why rude? That es not goo. I just ask.”

  “I weigh two hundred and thirty pounds, mister, and if you’re saying something about my weight, I’m working on it.”

  “Huh.”

  Silence. Catface stared with his toothpick moving.

  The man could stand the impasse no longer. “Look,” he said, beyond exhaustion, a pissed quaver in his voice, “it’s not a contest.”

  “Oh, it is,” Catface told him.

  The man was dejected, baffled.

  Which irritated Catface. Plus, the drugs, the bugs, the heat. “Everything is a game, conyo. Everything. Crossing this street is a game. I can run you over. Everybody out to win these days. I’m playing a game. You’re playing a game. What else is there, conyo? Games! I win everything, conyo! Girls, Uncle Hector wins everything! Go with Cuban man with big fat cock who take care of you, bonita, si?”

  Catface often wondered what kept these guys ticking. After thirty, as good as neutered and euthanized.

  Married? Over.

  They all needed a good long weekend of rawboning in a Nevada whorehouse.

  Finally Catface grinned his jagged grin at the man. A beaming game show host smile, but mutilated. And in broad daylight. Reeking of some kind of weird drug that smelled like a burned-up shower curtain. “Thumbs up! Meet you at the movies!” He poked up a thumb.

  “Richard!” said the wife again to her husband, who was standing there like a lawn jockey, but stupider. And no cojones.

  And as if in confirmation of this, the woman finally got her husband to move away, the girls following quickly, the encounter burned in their brains forever.

  Another memory for the Kodak slide carousel.

  FLORIDA TRIP 1985.

  * * *

  —

  Catface watched them go to the box office of the tiny beach town movie theater. The father, still casting angry red-faced looks over his shoulder, paid for his family’s admission and they went inside. Catface parked the car and paid the meter and barely noticed the tickettaker’s shaking hands as he paid the two-dollar admission. By the time he got into the theater the lights were down and the curtains drawn. Catface sat in the back.

  No one took notice of his ingress.

  During the advertisements Catface freebased in the back of the packed theater.

  On the screen, a cartoon played. Anthropomorphic characters—popcorn, candy, soft drink—danced a kind of jitterbug in a conga line.

  “Let’s all go to the lobby,” they sang. “Let’s all go to the lobby.”

  The air was already thick with cigarette smoke. A hovering gray haze like chalk dust.

  No one noticed Catface smoking at first. But then someone whiffed a gamy steam in the air and looked. Their eyes widened with the double shock of seeing the man. His mutilated face, his bespoke caramel suit of Panamanian silk.

  Catface stared back.

  Five minutes into the film Catface was lighting up his pipe again when an usher
wearing a maroon coat with gold piping on the sleeves came down the aisle. He pointed a flashlight at Catface’s face.

  Catface turned. A prison escapee in a spotlight.

  People looked Catface’s way again. The pimple-faced usher gawked. The father from the crosswalk turned and when he saw Catface he jerked and then his posture went completely rigid with shock. It was as though he expected a bullet fired through the back of his skull any moment.

  Toddlers started to cry. One boy shrieked.

  The usher jerked the beam away and hurried out of the theater.

  Heads turned back to the movie.

  Catface stayed put.

  The heads kept resolutely forward, the necks stiff.

  A couple of families waited a few minutes before leaving. Others stayed the whole duration. And when Catface, lighting his glass pipe again, yelled, “Fly, conyo, fly” as the boy Elliott soared off into the sky on his bike, the alien in his handlebar basket, no one dared turn.

  “Phone home, conyo!” Catface yelled at the screen. “Phone home, baby!”

  * * *

  —

  Catface came to know America in a way he hadn’t before.

  Cape Coral. Naples. Sanibel.

  He meandered through the southwest quadrant of the state, looking for any sign that would stir his memory. Point him toward the man he sought. He veered oceanward where the back roads took him through small Gulf Coast hamlets.

  Land of ten thousand islands, they called this place.

  Catface knew he had to be careful. Sometimes caution required changing cars. He hotwired a Bonneville and went onward into the heart of Florida.

  Dogs, particularly the large slobbering breeds, loathed Catface on sight. Labradors and Dobermans and even docile retrievers would rear their lips back and show broad expanses of black gum and angry spittled fangs. They’d break into frenzied baying. They hurled themselves at him. Owners would have to yank their pets back on their leashes.

  And there were many glum children with brazen stares in Florida.

  In restaurants, people stared. Catface stared back. He could go without blinking for almost a minute.

  The people would wither under his gaze. Grown men, truckers, Hell’s Angels. Priests.

  Catface after a while would return to perusing the local paper. He’d started in the beginning of his trip with the Miami Herald. Then it was the Sun Sentinel. Now, the Fort Myers Beach Observer.

  He read about AIDS. The bloodbath murders in Miami. He read headlines about Florida men. FLORIDA MAN ARRESTED FOR CANNONBALLING ONTO SEAWORLD ORCA. FLORIDA MAN NAMED RONALD MCDONALD WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH FAST-FOOD HEIST.

  * * *

  —

  For weeks he worked his way up the coast, staying in motor courts and lodges. Stiff pillows, cheap mouse-brown curtains, scotch-guarded plaid sofas. At night, smoking crack, he’d look out the window of his room at the gravel parking lot, a sign saying VACANCY spelled out in aqua and pink neon.

  Every so often a couple headed to their room would pass and, seeing Catface’s face through the glass, they’d start. They’d glance quickly away, and you could tell by their postures, the slightly faster clip of their walk, that they were waiting until they were safely behind the locked and bolted doors of their rooms to talk about what they’d just witnessed.

  A few people were perspicacious enough to notice his ring, his necklace. Especially in the strip clubs they recognized the necklace. The logo from the Mutiny Hotel. Particularly barkeeps and strip club managers and especially exotic dancers.

  The cops. Rather than arouse their suspicions the necklace seemed to elicit from them a kind of craven deference.

  Onward.

  He saw myriad tourist traps and roadside attractions.

  Cabins on stilts. Mango’s. Chachi’s Cantina. Big Bahama Mama Raw Bar.

  Onward.

  Chapels by the sea. Coral castles. Lighthouses. Sea oats whispering in white-sand dunes.

  Sunday cracker enterprises. Honey. Oranges. Mangos.

  Onward.

  MANURE FOR SALE, said one sign, handwritten, a scrap of cardboard on a picket.

  A man selling manure, Catface thought.

  America, Catface marveled.

  * * *

  —

  This part of Florida, so far down south, brown guys with accents, not so unusual. Brown men wearing Miami suits of linen and poplin specially tailored for the heavy heat of the south, very unusual.

  The farther north he drove, the more suspicious the looks he received. They might have fucked with him, these Florida men the farther north he went, the farther away from Miami.

  But then they saw his face.

  His face spared him.

  Kids gawked. Toddlers cried.

  What had been a curse was now good luck.

  * * *

  —

  Waterparks and miniature golf courses and mermaid shows and jai alai frontons. Boat tours and fishing charters. Jungleland, Indian casinos, strip clubs, seafood joints, monkey sanctuaries, myriad roadside oddities.

  He crossed the vast saw grass prairies north of Miami and took I-75 north. The exits few and far between. The small communities with cookie-cutter stucco homes behind stucco walls, retention canals and ponds like moats.

  Then the vast wilderness again. The jagged saw grass marshes, their silhouettes reared against the twilight like black construction paper cut with toy scissors.

  The billboards. Strip clubs. Asian spas. Bungee jumping. Scuba diving. Deep sea fishing. Spelunking. Walt Disney World. SeaWorld. The Mermaids of Weeki Wachee.

  A hand-painted billboard for a parrot circus where cockatoos and macaws performed stunts and tricks. SEE MISTER PECKER LIVE, said the sign. Three exclamation marks.

  Jai alai.

  Seminole Indian casinos.

  The monkey safari.

  The Baboon Lagoon.

  The serpentarium.

  The Pirate Tour of Gasparilla.

  Swamp tours. Snake hunts.

  The Florida Man Mystery House.

  EXCURSIONS

  YAHCHILANE’S VAN WAS A FAMILIAR VEHICLE over in Emerald Island as well throughout tiny Emerald City. His face, familiar. A few new Cuban faces, though, would draw notice from the locals, even if they were in Henry’s van. Especially if they were in Henry’s van, known loner that he was. So while they were driving through the island and the coast, Nina and Mariposa lay in the back. The root-beer-colored van had little submarine-like bubble windows, but they were tinted. The other windows had the shades drawn.

  “Think of it as an adventure,” Crowe would say to the girl of their excursions.

  “Que?” asked the girl. Mariposa was confused. She said, “Silly.”

  Like he used to for Otter, Crowe would pack brown paper bag lunches for the girl. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in ziplock bags, a banana, one of those glass apples with the juice, a cookie wrapped in tinfoil. Always something else wrapped in tinfoil, though Crowe insisted the girl leave it for last.

  Once it was a pine cone. Once it was a yellow rubber dishwashing glove. Another time it was a small canister of WD-40.

  “You’re silly, Mr. Reed.”

  “Love it or leave it,” Crowe would tell her.

  “Leave it,” said the girl.

  * * *

  —

  They went to Miami Beach and South Beach to scan the faces. They sat on the benches among the art deco motels and restaurants and bars and the sports cars and the hordes of scantily clad women.

  Nina by comparison looked almost nunnish and prim.

  Nina in her apricot sundress, her white sandals, watching the passing faces. The constellation of moles and freckles showing on her neck and her shoulders and her arms. They looked as intense and stubborn as her somehow
. No, not stubborn. Unapologetic.

  The moles polka-dotted the dark burnished gleam of her shoulders.

  To Crowe everything about the woman was a vision.

  They continued watching the parade of South Florida through the windows. So many faces, so many scantily clad bodies.

  Crowe remembered when he was a boy, the time when Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale were veritable shtetlach. Kibbutzim. They’d picnic there when he was a kid, before his father started beating his mother. Before his father got into all the trouble with those Dade County criminals.

  Back then, Yiddish was more common in the streets than English. Holocaust survivors living there called the place Little Jerusalem. And for a while, it was a mecca. A sun-kissed halcyon Xanadu. What the old men and women so much deserved. A place so different from the camps it was like an afterlife.

  Collins Avenue was another Broadway, another Vegas Strip. Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, those kinds of guys played on Tuesday nights to packed houses. Shit, it wasn’t like the old coots had a job to report to in the morning.

  But things had changed.

  The times had changed.

  The McDuffie riots. The “Paradise Lost” issue of Time. The boatlift.

  All that round-the-clock coverage on television, that new cable channel CNN showing all that gruesome and gory footage, you’d think Miami was San Salvador. You’d be just about half-right.

  But the water. The fucking water. That looked the same, for the time being.

  Here was the Florida sun and glittering water of the beach. The convertible cars coasting along the strip, red Mustangs and yellow Camaros gleaming like candies. The art deco buildings and stucco homes like pastel macaroons, pink and yellow and turquoise. And here were the new downtown skyscrapers standing on the edge of the water.

  He remembered when the place was an outpost. Now? A different country.

  Shit, almost a different century.

  Crowe tried not to look too long at the women, for the sake of the girl, for the sake of Nina, but he stole glances. As did Yahchilane.