by Tom Cooper
Then Catface in the stolen black Bonneville headed from whence he came, eastward toward Fort Lauderdale, away from the bearded man who left him burning in the swamp.
WIGGING
CROWE DID NOT FORGET THE CATFACED man. But after a week he convinced himself that maybe he’d imagined the whole episode. Maybe the man was scarred and in a suit, yes, but with all the violence in Miami? Maybe he was simply a man who looked like the other man he glimpsed that day at the Broward County jail.
Within a few weeks the episode was relegated to the back of Crowe’s mind.
There were troubles enough at the Emerald Island Inn.
One day Marlon during one of his visits down from Miami came with Yahchilane to the reception desk on a night when Crowe was working. Yahchilane said that Marlon was going to kill Wayne Wade.
The girl. Wayne Wade had touched the girl. The brother, Marlon, had seen Wayne stroking the child’s leg and had come running and chased Wayne into his room, where he was now barricaded.
* * *
—
Crowe pounded on Wayne’s door.
“What now,” Wayne Wade said, muffle-voiced. “My god. Fuckin’ Chinese laundromat.”
Crowe rattled the knob, cracked the door, but the burglar chain was latched.
“Let me in, imbecile.” He kicked at the door.
A few doors down SnoBall Larry stuck his head out. Mellow as fuck, as usual. Zonked. “Hey, buddy.”
“Hey, Larry,” Crowe said.
Larry’s stoner grin. “Thought it was my door.”
“Nah. Just Wayne’s.”
“Oh, jeez man, good luck.”
SnoBall Larry disappeared back into his room.
Crowe kicked at the door again, remembering some time ago when he asked Nina what the matter with Mariposa was. She had not been acting like herself. Quiet and withdrawn, sulky. Her eyes avoided Wayne Wade whenever he entered a room or came near.
“She thinks she sees faces in the wall,” Nina explained to him.
Crowe told her he didn’t understand.
“Eyes,” she said.
Crowe shook his head.
“In the wood. The walls. She thinks she sees eyes.”
“Bad dreams? Nightmares?”
Nina was adamant. “No, no. She’s awake when she sees them.”
Now Wayne called from behind his door, his voice high with pique. “Hold your shit, damn it. Whatever happened to privacy?”
Inside the room Crowe inspected the wall Wayne shared with the Cuban family. With his hands on his hips, he studied the plaster and stucco for holes. He looked behind the potted rubber tree. He looked behind the television.
Wayne said, “Look at this,” as if to another person in the room. As if there was a studio audience.
Crowe kept searching.
“What’chu doin’?” He was finally hovering behind Crowe, nervously stroking his rattail. “Lookin’ for your mind? Lost that long ago, man.”
Crowe moved aside the wastebasket and then he saw it, the gouged-out place in the wall. A hole the size of a gumball.
“What’s this?” Crowe said.
“Should I know?”
“You make this hole?”
“Hole? There’s a hole?”
Crowe gave him a look: Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.
“Maybe call Orkin, man. Pest control.”
“You did this.”
“Why’d I put a hole in the wall I’d have to shove my face down that far? Yeah, I’m gonna stick my dick through that hole.”
“Wouldn’t put it past you.”
“Some thing to say.”
Crowe stood with his arms tightly crossed. “Tell me the truth.”
“Believe what you want to believe.”
“Did you touch that girl?”
“What? Who?” Wayne got up and went to the fridge and looked for a beer, his back turned to Crowe. The motel room was an ad hoc living space. The black light. The Scarface poster. The hot plate. The minifridge stocked with beer and knockoff Publix Dr Peppers.
Wayne was popping a beer when he turned and was surprised to find Crowe a few steps closer.
“Breathin’ down my neck,” Wayne said. He sat down, eyes angled away from Crowe.
“You touch her? Say your hand went the wrong place? An accident.”
“Come on with this shit.”
“Wayne, goddamn it.”
“She got it all twisted around.”
Now Crowe was pacing. Wayne stiffened in his chair, as if preparing to fend off an attack.
“My god, Wayne. My god.” Crowe was breathing hard through his hand, which was clamped over his mouth as still he paced. “They’re gonna kill you.”
“Come on.”
“Out, out.”
“Out what?”
“Out by tomorrow.”
“Here? Out from behind the desk.”
“From the room. From the job.”
“Bullshit. Reed, come on, now.”
“First thing tomorrow.”
“Reed, man. You’re wiggin’. Where’m I gonna go?”
“Little girl. I’d kill you myself, you fuck.”
“Some way to talk.” Then, using his old childhood nickname, “Come on, Reedy.”
“Get outta here.”
Wayne brooded. For a moment he was slumped in frustration. His face the epitome of vexation and defeat. Then there were a few quick clicks in his eyes. Scheming already.
“Calamine lotion, Reedy. All those no-see-ums. Chiggers.”
Crowe shook his head.
“I was putting lotion on the bites.”
Crowe pinched the bridge of his nose.
“That’s the confusion.”
“Get outta here, Wayne.”
“Reedy.”
“You gotta go.”
“Some thing to say.”
“You gotta go.”
“Reedy.”
“No more Reedy shit.”
“Some thing to say.”
“Hear me? Pack your shit up and get the fuck out before I kick your teeth in.”
* * *
—
Wayne Wade left Emerald Island and Emerald City. Like a latter-day hobo jumping a boxcar with his bundlestaff, except Wayne on his modified bike with his yellow neon knapsack bulging Quasimodo–style from his back.
Two weeks passed, three. No calls from Wayne, no begging, no remonstrations.
Crowe was surprised. Relieved.
Then one morning he was unlocking the sheds of the Mystery House trail exhibitions. There used to be no need, but these days, the economy, the crackheads, all the Florida men running amok, you never knew. Crowe was walking on the trail jingling the ring of keys and found one of the sheds broken into. The archeological exhibit. The metal door was hacked, mangled, crowbarred open. Crowe walked in, broken glass crunching under his zories. All the artifacts and trinkets gone.
Stolen.
Crowe had little doubt as to the culprit.
THE BIG BAD PYTHON RODEO
YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT A MAN in circumstances such as Wayne’s, a man who’d been all but driven out of town by a torch-wielding mob, would have stayed away for good.
No.
Wayne?
Shit.
This was Wayne Wilson Wade. Triple fucking W. Yet, Crowe hoped against reason and precedent the man would stay away. Perhaps the idjit had accrued some modicum of common sense after all these years.
The football season was nearly halfway done, and the Dolphins were hopelessly in the hole, and Crowe was just beginning to think they’d rid themselves of Wayne Wade for good—whole days passed wh
en he gave the idjit nary a thought—when he received a call.
He was outside pinning up his T-shirts and Bermuda shorts on the backyard clothesline when he heard the phone ringing in the house. He went inside and answered.
It was Henry Yahchilane. “He’s back,” he said, “the Python Rodeo.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Crowe said. Then he told Yahchilane to turn him away.
Yahchilane told Crowe that Wayne Wade showed up drunk, with a semi-automatic. It took Yahchilane ten minutes to talk Wayne into putting the gun back and locking it away into the storage of his moped.
“What the hell do we do?” Crowe asked Yahchilane.
Yahchilane said he’d worry about his end. “Just make sure to god Marlon doesn’t get word. He’ll come over and kill the guy. Shit, there’ll be a shoot-out.”
* * *
—
For the twentieth straight year Henry Yahchilane oversaw the ill-advised and misbegotten annual Python Rodeo in Emerald City.
The zoo people, eggheads that they were, had assumed him endowed with some kind of communion with nature because of his heritage. Now, twenty years later, he could boast this prowess. He’d become the person, by sheer accident, they thought they’d hired.
The chicken and the egg.
And this year, as always, a rowdy fraternity presided over the event. Beers cracked and swilled under the hot morning sun, a Florida Saturday. Knockoff cigarette brand cigarettes smoked. Skoal spat.
Some seven or eight dozen men.
You could smell their insect repellent and truck stop jerky. Their beer. Seagulls hectored around the oil drum trash cans, fighting for nachos and hot dog buns. Boom boxes played Buffett and Dire Straits.
There was a man at one of the small picnic tables, bare-chested, a scar running the length of his torso on the side. He looked like someone who’d lived through an autopsy. The small gaunt man went around shirtless nonetheless. Smoked cigarettes one after another. Pall Malls, filterless. The guy, “See, that’s how we roll. That’s how we roll in Florida. I don’t know where you from, but where we is right here.” He had a raspy phlegm-clotted laugh. “Don’t matter who it is. This woman might have accused me of rape. I’d still rescue her. Kentucky? This guy right here, I don’t know him, but he’s my friend, see.”
Around ten, just as the locusts were beginning to screech full-throated, a few men went off singly into the scrubby pine flats. They brandished sticks and held sacks and pillowcases. They clutched beers in cozies advertising oyster shacks and adult entertainment establishments.
Then groups of two and three and sometimes four scattered away from the picnic pavilions and went off on the hiking trails.
No supervision. No demonstration. No training.
What could go wrong, deep in the heart of wild, wild Florida on the outskirts of the Everglades?
* * *
—
Yahchilane went with Wayne Wade, who at ten-thirty in the morning was already drunk. Not beer drunk, but Jameson drunk. He’d already been starting problems at the pavilion, singing nonsense songs, shaking his ass lewdly in front of someone’s twenty-five-year-old blond Mississippi wife.
“Cool it,” Yahchilane told him.
“Ancient Indian wisdom,” Wayne sung.
Yahchilane followed Wayne warily into the bracken, Wayne wailing a mocking rendition of the Florida State Seminoles Native chant song. If it wasn’t for Reed Crowe, he might have throttled the moron then and there.
“Oh, oh, oh,” he bellowed into the pine slash and cypress. The morning sun had turned late and the air murky and pollinate, a dingy yellow pall.
Wayne went stumbling along with his stick, whacking the ferns. “Oh, oh, oh.”
Yahchilane eyed the back of the man’s brick red neck.
“Hell you leadin’ us?” Wayne asked him, glancing over his shoulder.
Yahchilane followed from several paces behind. His eyes were clenched against the sun chinking through the leaves.
“Watch your step.”
“Let’s stop here.”
“Go right.”
Wade veered right down a faint hiking trail.
“Why we goin’ so far?”
“You want to win this thing, don’t you?”
“Shitfire fuck I do.”
“Not doin’ this for my health.”
“You lead me to where the snakes are, watch me.”
They forged ahead, Wayne every so often slowing and cocking an ear when he heard movements within the branches and leaves.
“Nothing,” Yahchilane said. “Keep going. I told you, watch your step.”
“Oh, put a sock in your pussy. I know what I’m doing.”
Anoles flared their necks like red warning flags. They moved up and down on their legs like they were doing push-ups. Then they scaled up the tree trunks and changed color from green to brown.
Farther they went into the thickets through cycads and banyans and fiddlehead ferns, Wayne scuffling along with a kind of belligerent invincibility, mindless of his steps. He wore not even the proper footgear, but checkered Vans with tube socks that went halfway up to the ragged fringes of his jorts.
They went onward around clutches of serrated saw grass. The smell of camphor trees was rank in the air. Cicadas droned.
Yahchilane saw it before Wayne. Along the path lay a snake long and slick, diamond-patterned. Like a loop of rope it lay in the sun on a bed of rotting leaves, the color of ferns and moss. It tightened its coil, reared back its head. Then with switch knife quickness the snake sprang out.
Before the snake loosed its venom-dripping fangs from his ankle Wayne Wade let out a shrieking howl.
A demented sound in this deep wilderness. But no one would hear him now, not where they were, not this far.
Of that Henry Yahchilane was certain.
He was about to warn Wayne but before he could the man was shrieking and hopping around the path. Then he was on the ground, red-faced and grasping at his ankle.
“Fuck. I’ve been bit. Fuck. Holy fuck.”
Yahchilane watched from a distance.
Wayne’s sweated face was contorted. “Did you see that thing?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Snake.”
“Yeah. Fuck. You fuck.” Goober teeth showing. “What kind? Poison? Was it poison?”
“Yes,” Yahchilane told him.
Wayne’s face was woebegone, twisted. “I need help.”
Yahchilane put his hands in his jeans pockets, thumbs hooked out.
Wayne screamed into the gigantic Florida wild. He writhed on the ground. Curdled spit foamed in the corners of his mouth.
Yahchilane watched with slitted black eyes.
Wayne threatened Yahchilane. He apologized. Cursed him. Apologized again.
Then he started begging.
“I’ll give you whatever you want.” His face was wild and sweaty, his snakebit eyes crazed.
Yahchilane said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“You’re goin’ to hell, cocksucker.”
“Yeah,” said Yahchilane.
Wayne shot a glance, half angry and half fearful. He rose and took a few mincing, hobbling steps forward. He fell onto his ass. He got up and limped a few more steps before stopping and falling over once more.
Henry Yahchilane had led Wayne Wade into a nest. A breeding ground.
This time Wayne stayed on his ass in leaves. Crying. Whimpering. His beige face looked snotty and spitty like a toddler’s. “Please, please, Mr. Yahchilane.”
As Yahchilane strode, his gait easy and long, Wayne’s voice followed him, but it gradually diminished with each step, grew fainter in the green smother of the jungle, and mixed in with t
he wild drone of the insects, until falling silent within the vast acreage of summer-glutted leaves.
* * *
—
Word spread through the township. Crowe heard the news from Myrtle who heard the news from Eddie who heard about the so-called python harvest tragedy on the FM radio.
A man was bitten. A man was in critical condition.
No, a man was dead.
No, a man was on life support in Hialeah, Florida.
No name or identifying information until the next of kin was contacted, standard procedures followed, due course observed.
The Python Rodeo, cancelled out of respect to the victim. And out of concern for the safety of the hundreds of men who’d flocked to Emerald City for a weekend of life-endangering revelry.
* * *
—
Then the rumors came piecemeal on the phone, a puzzle none too hard to put together. Crowe heard from Eddie that Yahchilane strode out of the woods with no emotion, with the vague wariness of a man who’d done all he could do, reporting a man down.
A man snakebit.
Wayne Wade.
Late afternoon Crowe drove his beeswax orange hatchback to Yahchilane’s shaggy-shingled barrel house.
The front door, no answer. The side door, no answer.
Crowe went down the garden-flaked path to the beach and found Yahchilane sitting in the sand a stone’s throw from the water. He was smoking a cigarette, staring out at the water, low tide. From the tight set of his shoulders Crowe knew that Yahchilane sensed his approach.
Crowe, “What happened, Yahchilane?”
Crowe stood above Yahchilane. Yahchilane was still not looking at him.
“What happened, goddamn it, Yahchilane?”
“A snake bit the guy, what else is there to say?”
“How.”
“Call Sheriff Schaffer,” said Yahchilane. He drew deeply from his cigarette. Still not one glance at Crowe.
Crowe shot out a hand as if to grab Yahchilane’s hair and rip it out by the root. But Yahchilane still without looking and with the cigarette dangling in his mouth caught Crowe’s wrist and kept it seized in the vise of his hand.