Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  And Mariposa. “Bonita,” she said about a willowy golden-haired girl in a Hawaiian print bikini as she crossed the walk before them at a stop sign.

  “Hussies,” Nina told her daughter.

  Then Nina caught her brother ogling and hissed a curse.

  And then Marlon grunted something back.

  Everywhere you looked, another group of women who looked like sauntering pinups. Oiled-up and tanned bodies, curves spilling out of bikinis. Some of the garments looked painted on. Others were three dinky triangles of bright cloth near diaphanous.

  “Hussies,” Nina said again.

  “Bonita,” Mariposa said again.

  * * *

  —

  At the Swap Shop Nina Arango and Mariposa forgot for a spell that they were strangers in a strange land. Forgot they were refugees. Probably because nobody looked at them like they were. Here were Haitian and Mexican faces. Vietnamese and Native faces. And faces they might have glimpsed in the streets of Havana or Santiago de Cuba.

  The Arangos stopped at stalls and kiosks to survey the wares. Clothes, sunglasses, cassette tapes.

  Crowe had lent the mother and daughter money. He had no expectation of ever seeing it again, but Nina insisted that it was a loan and kept careful tally of what she owed, down to the penny, scribbling the figure down on the little Emerald Island Inn notepad with the little Emerald Island Inn pencil.

  They came upon a cluster of Cuban booths and vendors. The glistening bright heaps of papaya and mango and passion fruit. Another vendor selling tres leches and churros and café Cubano. Someone’s tinny radio played soukous guitar.

  Crowe followed behind the Arangos, Nina holding Mariposa by the hand.

  Mariposa tugged her mother toward a toy vendor. Mariposa seemed to have no interest in the Cabbage Patch dolls or the Monchhichi. She went to the windup monsters and bugs. The plastic dinosaurs.

  Nina told her it was too expensive, to pick another toy. How about this doll, or this stuffed unicorn?

  But Mariposa wanted Lite-Brite. Crowe insisted on buying the toy for the girl. Nina said no. Crowe told her it was a gift. But as Crowe paid the cashier, he saw Nina reach into her purse and withdraw the pad and pencil. She added a new number to the list.

  Crowe was still trying to buy the toy when he saw the scar-faced man in the Havana summer suit of cappuccino silk coming his way.

  When Crowe saw him, his heart gave a little frog hop.

  The man first saw Yahchilane. He cut his assassin’s eyes Yahchilane’s way as if daring him to take another look. Yahchilane didn’t.

  Then his eyes lit on Crowe and they widened briefly and cut away but there was something in his posture and his bearing that told Crowe that he was waiting to look again.

  And then he did, keeping his stride, but his keen studying gaze fixed on Crowe.

  Crowe seized Yahchilane’s arm. “This way,” he said. “Come on.”

  Yahchilane jerked his arm away. “Hey, egghead. What’s your deal?”

  Crowe cut away and changed direction, moving in a half-trot, and Yahchilane reluctantly followed. Back in the van, Yahchilane asked Crowe if he knew the man with the scarred face.

  Crowe said nothing, ducking in his seat.

  “Get going,” he said.

  “You wiggin’?” Yahchilane said. “We gotta wait for them all.”

  The Arango family filed into the van. Yahchilane started the engine. Steered them out of the massive crowded lot and turned them toward the interstate.

  “You knew that guy.”

  “No,” Crowe said, half-believing himself.

  INFERNO

  CATFACE SMELLED THE FIRE. HE SMELLED the fire before he saw it.

  The stench of burning sulfur in the air.

  The Everglades was on fire but he was trying to catch the man riding along in the van and somewhere along the way he must have turned off, because now this.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Catface screamed, racing the stolen car.

  The smoke got so thick, a gray apocalyptic cloud, he had to slow the car.

  Finally he had to pull over to the side of the road and close his rooftop. He got back in the car. He rolled up the windows and closed the vents.

  Through the bug-smeared windshield he saw smoke boiling against the glaring Florida afternoon. The voracious fire roiled demonic. An inferno.

  But Catface drove on.

  A few miles outside the conflagration Catface came across a makeshift convoy. Some Lilliputian beach hamlet’s chamber of commerce turned into an ad hoc deputation of park rangers. A gold Buick was parked so it blocked most of the road. Standing alongside the car was a pear-shaped man with a mustache and red-haired secretary ten years his junior. The woman had on a beige woman’s suit and her top was mussed.

  From what Catface could discern, the pear-shaped man had a raging hard-on.

  The two had been at it. At first they feigned nonchalance. Then when Catface drew closer in the car and when they glimpsed his face, their expressions dropped.

  Catface came to a stop and rolled down his window.

  “Hello, sir,” said the pear-shaped man.

  “Hello, sir,” said Catface.

  “You can see for yourself, up ahead.”

  “Yes. Fire.”

  “Crazy.”

  “Looks crazy,” said Catface.

  “You prolly wanna turn around.”

  “No.”

  The woman said, “There’s a fire. You can’t just drive through.”

  “I will try.”

  The man, “Well, it would be suicide.”

  “It woo scar me?”

  “What?” the man asked.

  “It woo scar? The fire? Not goo?”

  “Gonna have’ta insist, mister. Ain’t about to let some man kill himself.”

  “Insist what?”

  “Insist you turn around.”

  Catface asked the man what started the fire.

  The man had not anticipated this line of questioning. He palmed the sweat off his face. “Just my job here. Why this grief?”

  “What started the fire?”

  “Lightning. Probably. This time of year.”

  And as “year” was leaving the man’s mouth Catface said “Goo luck!” and stomped on the gas and the car was off like something sling-shot.

  Mud flew, spackling the couple’s legs. In the side mirror Catface saw their stunned faces.

  Catface laughing darkly shot down the road into the heart of the inferno.

  BIG CAT GAS

  CATFACE SAW THE BILLBOARDS FOR MILES on the highway. Time flayed and weather worn, but legible through the fungi and lichen and vine, the occasional gang graffiti tag. Cuban, Colombian.

  BIG CAT GAS! COME SEE DORIS “THE BIG CAT” AT MR FONG’S WORLD FAMOUS GAS/CIGS/ICE COLD BEER!

  At Mr. Fong’s Big Cat Gas Catface went inside to prepay. A diminutive Asian man, presumably Mr. Fong, was smoking on a stool behind the register. Flipping through a magazine and about to draw from his cigarette. When he saw Catface his arm halted midway to his mouth. The small bitter lines around his mouth massed and ticked.

  Catface asked the man if there was a problem.

  A wizened bitter gnome, childlike in stature, the man shook his head. He put down his magazine. Gallery, read the front. A large breasted cherub-mouthed gringa was splayed atop a cheetah-covered bed, fully nude. Her fulsome ass and titties, her fuck-me-daddy lips and eyes.

  TRACI LORDS FULL FRONTAL INSIDE!

  Young for Catface’s taste.

  “Shit her,” said Catface.

  The man’s baggy neck quaked roosterishly. “What!”

  Catface looked around the mini-mart for a door. “Lavat
ory.”

  “Closed.”

  “Why?”

  The man drew from his cigarette, exhaled a quick irked puff. “Night.”

  “Give me the key.”

  “Look, why problem?”

  “Give me the key.”

  The man gestured, the cherry of his cigarette toppling. “Too many problem. People, funny business.” Another fierce head shake, the chin wattle wagging in sympathy.

  “Give me the key.”

  “No.”

  “Give me the key.”

  The man fell into a fit of coughing. Angrily he held up a finger. The coughing did not subside. It got worse. Angrier still, the man groped under the register and slapped the key onto the counter. Still hacking the man gestured with a nicotine-yellowed forefinger. He looked like he was about to fall apart like a dollar-store egg-timer.

  Outside Catface stuck the gas nozzle into the stolen Bonneville’s tank and flicked the automatic lever and kept the gas pumping.

  Adjacent to the gas station lot was a clearing where concrete dinosaurs stood in the tall weeds and grass, behind them the black-green jungly wilderness of Florida. A Mesozoic tableau. The hulking gray shapes of the dinosaurs in the dark.

  Catface looked at them.

  A T. rex. An Edmontonia. A brachiosaur. A stegosaurus.

  A few others Catface could not identify.

  He remembered their shapes and names from the burn ward. The picture books he used to flip through that whole year he was bedridden, bound in traction.

  After gassing the car Catface went to the lavatory to freebase. He lit the small portable butane torch and the flame lit the white rock. Catface sucked in the smoke from the pipe. Exhaled. Within moments, the rush rocketed to his head.

  He felt like he could break a fist through the concrete wall. Shit lightning.

  Every particle of him was vibrating. Every atom of his body felt on the verge of cumming.

  Catface went to return the key and pay for the gas. “Where is the big pussy?”

  “What!” The man’s scrotal chin accordioned when he recoiled.

  “Big cat.”

  A fresh-lit cigarette smoldered in the man’s mean crimped mouth. His sweaty forehead looked jaundiced. “Look, you use bathroom. You got gas. Why problem. Good night.”

  “Where is the big cat?”

  The man’s nostrils worked and he seemed to smell the burned chemical odor wafting off Catface. “Sleeping!”

  “Where?”

  “Why problem?”

  “Where.”

  “Other side of building!”

  Catface stood looking at the man.

  “Something on fire. Funny business. Why problem.”

  “I don’t like you,” Catface said.

  “Who care?”

  “You should,” Catface said.

  Outside, on the other side of the building, Catface found the pen. An enclosure of chicken wire, not much larger than a dog kennel. Sleeping inside was a big black cat, slat-ribbed and shit-slathered. A Florida panther. Its haunches and sides were piebald from living so cramped.

  Catface stepped forward, touched his fingers to the metal mesh. The animal’s piss and shit stench hit him like a slap to the face. Gnats clouded around Catface’s head. Absentmindedly he slapped them away.

  “Right away!” cried a voice in the night.

  Were Catface a jumpier man he would have startled. Instead he only looked, fingers still hooked around the mesh.

  It was Mr. Fong, loping toward Catface with hand upheld to stop him. “Get away right now from the cage!”

  The big cat sniffed Catface. Cracked an eye. Moaned. Stirred. Cracked its other eye.

  Mr. Fong now held a small pearl-handled pistol and was pointing it level at Catface. Catface jerked his arm. A dagger materialized in his hand. One of many such blades secreted on his person, within the folds of his tailored suits.

  An assassin’s legerdemain.

  Then the blade was whistling through the air like an evil insect.

  Mr. Fong howled. The gun dropped and clattered to the pavement with two of his fingers still clutching it.

  Catface’s mad, cracked-out laughter rang into the night. He shucked the latch of the pen and flung open the door and stepped aside like a toreador. The door squawked on its rusty hinges.

  Mr. Fong’s eyes popped, custard-yellow and wide in the dark. He crabbed backward toward the mini-mart door. His two fingers and pearl-handled gun still on the asphalt.

  The cat hesitated, regarded Catface. Growled.

  Then it moved and slunk from the cage. It scuttled ten or fifteen feet, low-bellied, from the pen, moving toward the gas station door. Mr. Fong watched through the glass, his face shrieking.

  The cat looked at Mr. Fong. At Catface. At the dinosaurs standing in the dark field.

  Then the huge black cat pounced away, a sleek phantom through the grass zigzagging around the dinosaurs, keeping its distance from the concrete monsters as it rushed into the Florida wild.

  * * *

  —

  Not even a full song had played on the Bonneville’s radio since Catface drove away from Big Cat Gas when his headlights swept over the panther.

  It lay twisted in the middle of the road, its spine snapped and its legs twisted.

  He could see the figure of a man crouched above the car-struck animal. His posture indecisive. His car, with its emergency lights strobing, idled on the shoulder of the road in the saw grass.

  Catface stopped the car in the middle of the road. Staggered out of the Bonneville as if gutshot.

  He knelt with the man in the middle of the desolate road. Shell and pebblerock bit his knees like teeth.

  Around them was saw grass and cattail and swamp as far as the eye could see. The two-lane road marooned and black-hole black in either direction, the only light from the skinny fingernail moon and the multitude of tropical stars. The headlights and taillights, minuscule, puny, against the massive Everglades night.

  The panther’s bones were broken in dozens of places. Its skeleton twisted, agonized. Gore spilled out its mouth and slicked its teeth crimson. Part of its stomach was split and its intestines slopped onto the pavement.

  The young man, red hair crew cut, face freckled and raw from crying, cradled the big cat’s head.

  Their faces were stained in the red taillights.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said the young man. His T-shirt, a polo, said, BIG GORILLA FIREWORKS.

  The young man seemed to have trouble looking directly at Catface. Too much, this nightmarish man, this nightmare of a situation, this big cat smashed in the road. He shook his head. “He was running,” he said in a stricken voice.

  “He run across road.”

  “I mean he was right there. I didn’t see him. Holy shit. A panther.”

  “Was he happy?”

  The kid swallowed. Dry-voiced, he said, “What?” He shook his head in abject consternation.

  “Happy?”

  “Me?”

  “The cat.”

  The young man looked down at the cat’s face. Its blinks sluggard, its torso barely stirring with breath.

  Catface asked again.

  “He just jumped. He jumped in front of me and then? Shit, mister. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Catface saw the tears slicking the young man’s face. He nodded. Withdrew a bolo knife from the inside of his jacket and told the young man to step away.

  Catface slit the animal’s throat. Its blood ran fast and thick onto the road. The puddle grew and spread. The cat’s eyes grew sleepy and vacant and then a dull matte overtook them.

  The scent of blood thickened salty and hot in the air.

 
The insects formed a kind of humming smoke. Mosquitoes and gnats and midges and no-see-ums.

  No doubt there were other things waiting, lurking, in the bush.

  Catface and the red-haired man stood facing each other in the road.

  “Hey,” Catface said, “you want feel better?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Feel goo?” Standing at the open door of his Bonneville Catface was lighting his glass pipe with the portable butane torch. He exhaled smoke. “Feel better?”

  “It’s okay. Thanks. I gotta get going, mister.”

  “It es help sometimes.”

  “I gotta get going, mister.” The young man was hurrying away into his car.

  “Don’t be scare. He die thinking he going to heaven. He die running.”

  Catface was telling the kid to wait when the phone rang in the trunk. One of those cumbersome newfangled contraptions, what they called a car phone. This a DynaTAC prototype not even yet on the market.

  Only one person had his number. Tarantula.

  Catface was obligated, was required, to answer.

  “Wait!” Catface screamed.

  The young man halted. Half-turned, shoulders sagged with dread.

  The bugs sounded orgiastic, insane. A bedlam of screeching. Beetles big as bats helixed in the headlamps.

  Still the mobile phone trilled.

  Catface popped the trunk and withdrew the leather black valise and he popped the latch and he brought the brick-sized receiver to his sweaty cheek. “Yes,” he said.

  He listened. “Fort Lauderdale? Tonight?” He listened again, batting away moths attracted to his tan silk suit one-handed.

  He hung up. He cursed anew. A liquidation. Tonight, at Pier Sixty-Six Hotel.

  Had the young man not been so distraught, had he not been crying, Catface would have filleted him right in the Florida jungle.

  “Okay, the kids need to be pick up from soccer practice,” Catface told the young man.

  The red-haired man dashed to his car and did not turn back.

  Catface put the phone back in the valise and the valise back in the trunk and then he got behind the wheel and executed an elaborate seven-point turn.