by Tom Cooper
“You ever hear’a Mr. Video?”
“You’re the one? With the cassettes? With the recordings, in the motel rooms?”
Wayne went silent. His lips clamped. He turned away with some secret proud knowledge, basking in his mystery.
DER KOMMISSAR
LATER IN THE EVENING, FROM THE depths of his cappuccino silk suit, the scar-faced man took out a small glass vial and sprinkled a neat line on the brass bar.
Wayne didn’t move.
Catface motioned Wayne in the fashion of a game show host. “Por favor,” he said.
Hesitatingly, Wayne partook.
“Por favor,” Catface said again. “Please.”
In the rubicund bar light they shared a few lines on the brass railing. Right in plain sight of the management, who stood at a remove with the vexed and helpless faces of hostages.
A harried yellow-haired woman in a neon bikini lit a cigarette and looked away at a Miller High Life sign.
A pair of bikinied women were at the jukebox. A skinny girl wearing a thong was pressing the buttons.
A song called “Der Kommissar” played.
On the sixteenth bar, Catface leapt from his chair Michael Jackson style and executed a series of dance moves. The patrons had no idea whether to laugh or applaud or join along or watch in admiration. Everyone was so wary of Catface by then, so unnerved, they feigned blindness to the spectacle.
Everyone aside from Wayne Wade, who egged him on with the fervor of a revelator. After all the excitement Wayne Wade said he needed to piss and went to the bathroom.
Wayne was pissing at one of the urinals when Catface came at him from behind, grabbing his rattail. The man began to turn his scrawny neck and was in the middle of a curse and still pissing. He howled like a butchered goat. Catface was already whirled around and had the bloodied blade snicked back into the handle as Wayne Wade collapsed shrieking to his knees, groping the floor for his severed manhood.
And with the same stealth, like a cat burglar, Catface stepped out of the bathroom and went out the strip club exit, deafening disco beat following him outside into the sultry night, drowning out the man’s screams.
DREAD ENVELOPES
NOW AND THEN, SMALL BEACH ISLAND and small beach city where they lived, Crowe saw Yahchilane. And Yahchilane saw Crowe.
One grocery over in Emerald City, a few bars on the island, a few on the mainland. Five restaurants, one on the island, four in the town.
Inevitable that their paths should cross.
One two-lane road extending the length of the skinny island like a spine.
One bridge connecting the island with the mainland.
Inevitable.
In those days of yore, before Crowe found the skull in the cave so many years ago, they might have exchanged a perfunctory greeting from afar. A small nod, a half-wave, a peace sign flicked off their steering wheels. The same courtesy they would have extended any familiar car or truck so few were the denizens in these parts. Perfunctory.
Now, nothing. Not so much a tick of the eyes, a middle finger.
* * *
—
And when Crowe did drive across the bridge he would pass the Lilliputian post office where on temperate days Myrtle sat in her aluminum beach chair in the lee shade of the building.
In December every time Crowe passed, there was Myrtle. She would stand and wave, try to flag him down. He would wave back.
The envelopes, how Crowe dreaded the envelopes. Resented the envelopes. He wanted to murder the envelopes.
The envelopes changed color. They went from plain white to a weird baby blue and then to an odd hot pink and finally there were red envelopes, which had to contain dire news, so these he ripped in half and then quarters and then in pieces so tiny they couldn’t be torn any more and he shoved them unseen and unread in the garbage.
The envelope this time, a warning from the IRS. Back taxes. Legalese about property forfeiture. Legalese about outstanding debts from Reed Crowe, Sr.
Crowe’s third or fourth trip that month across the bridge Myrtle stood and waved yet again and Crowe waved back but this time Myrtle trotted toward the road and gestured frantically, moving her arms in wide swaths like an air flight controller minus the glowing batons.
The charade was over, Crowe realized.
He slowed the hatchback and bumped into the lot.
When he got out of the car they hugged like old chums.
“Hell’s your problem, Crowe?” Myrtle asked him. Thirteen years ago before Myrtle went full lesbian she gave him a hand job at a Christmas party. A vague recollection to them both, they were so drunk on the spiked cider and the eggnog. They never mentioned the hand job to each other again. Better that way.
Now, Crowe told her, “Myrtle, just throw it out, whatever it is.”
“You know I can’t do that, Crowe. Government duty.”
“Well, leave it there in the box then.”
“Like Schrodinger’s cat.”
Crowe blinked at Myrtle. Swatted the gnats away from his head. He had his shades on but had to scrunch his face against the fierce August sun.
“The cat in the box,” Myrtle said. “That philosopher. I know I’m mispronouncing it, philosophy course, Broward Community College. There’s a cat in a box, right? But maybe there isn’t. It depends if you open the box.”
“If a tree falls in a forest,” Crowe said.
“Kind of like that. Cat waiting inside for you.”
* * *
—
The mail was from a tax collection agency and threatened liens on Crowe’s house and properties.
Word of Reed Crowe’s predicament spread across the island like the mother of all plants.
Word must have reached Yahchilane because Reed Crowe had caught a small whiting fish in his hand and was trying to get it off his hook when he saw Yahchilane approaching from the dunes. Yahchilane topped the boardwalk spanning the sea oats and came long-strided, hands spaded in his jean pockets.
It was the first time they’d been face-to-face since the fistfight. Not since the Python Rodeo had they spoken.
“Yahchilane,” said Crowe.
“Crowe,” said Yahchilane.
Crowe tossed the fish back into the ocean and washed his hands off in the waves and shook the water off them and rubbed his hands dry on his madras shorts.
Yahchilane shared the news he’d come to share. Told Crowe that a surveyor had been staying in his motel, taking measurements of the island.
“You sure he’s a surveyor? Not some wildlife photographer?”
Not hard to figure out, Yahchilane told him. The man had a hunter orange vest and a yellow hard hat and he had a grade pole and a surveying tripod.
“They can’t do that. They can’t just take over land you own for a pipeline.”
“They sure as fuck can. They took my cousin’s land away from him. And he’s registered Native.”
Herman the big blue heron legged into the water. He poked the water a few times with his beak and picked up the whiting. With the fish snapped up in his beak he winged off.
Crowe’s beard by this time was fully white. His hands and arms and forehead were freckled with benign melanoma. He had not been to a doctor in some time and he was afraid to start now. The pot was gone. The stuff they had these days, too strong, mixed with chemicals. So he drank more. His face was ruddier, webbed with broken vessels.
Crowe asked, “How much they gave him for the land?”
“Four hundred dollars.”
“Four hundred thousand?”
“Hundred.”
“Well, there’s no amount of money.”
“It doesn’t matter. Bet your ass they can. Take it right away from you.”
“We’ll see.�
��
“Yeah, you will. Quick.”
Crowe was silent.
“I think you’re serious.”
“There’ll be a standoff, I guess.”
“They’ll poison you the fuck out of here, believe it,” Yahchilane said. “They’ll shotgun you out. Tear gas. Grenades. Won’t even hide the fact. Shit, they’ll televise the shit. Make you out one of those compound nuts.”
THE PLANE, THE PLANE (WHAT WOULD AN ASSASSIN DO?)
CATFACE HIT THE ROAD, TREKKING UP the Florida coast via stolen cars. He was not afraid of taking his time. Other business to attend to on the way. And he knew the man Reed Crowe, the man whose name he learned from the rattailed degenerate known as Mr. Video, the cocksucker who’d left him burning alive in the Florida Everglades like a pinchos de pollo, was good as anchored to the island where he lived.
Crowe was going nowhere.
Also, there was the matter of what Catface would do after. Of course the thought had occurred to him. He had an assassin’s heart. It burned in the core of him, a fiery gem. What did an assassin do after slaying his ultimate quarry?
He would have to find another. Monumental.
Who? The President of the United States, he supposed.
For now, though, Crowe. Reed Crowe. The roach.
In seedy beach-smelling motel rooms he watched the local news stations when he couldn’t find Three’s Company or The Jeffersons or Fantasy Island. Once in a while he’d take out the matchbook with the number for the Emerald Island Inn front desk. He would call it.
Sometimes a young man would answer and introduce himself as Eddie. Other times the receptionist was a woman named Bertha.
He wondered if these people would end up dead too.
Reed Crowe would certainly. And it would be heinous, slow.
Delicious.
* * *
—
Catface would sit on the edge of the bed, phone cradled between shoulder and ear, one loafer dangling from his toes as he filed his heel with the emery board. Then he sanded the other, shish-shish, working the callus as hard as pumice.
Whenever Reed Crowe answered, Catface stayed quiet for a while.
Shish-shish.
“Hello?” he’d say. “Seventh damn time tonight. I got you on a trace.” His breath nervous.
Then Crowe would hang up the phone. Catface would call right back.
Catface cupped his hand over the mouthpiece, turned his head away. Even his laugh was a menacing whisper.
On the television a rerun of Fantasy Island played. Catface rose from the bed with the phone stand in one hand and the receiver in the other. He twisted the volume knob on the television and put the mouthpiece up to the speaker as the midget Hervé Villechaize in his white tuxedo and black bow tie pointed up to the tropical sky and told his boss, “The plane, the plane.”
Then Catface, full of savage glee, cackling goblin laughter, slammed down the phone.
PHONE CALL FROM HADES
THE RINGING PHONE JARRED REED CROWE out of shallow sleep. It was half past midnight, graveyard shift, and he was slumped on the chair behind the reception desk, the Sun Sentinel sports page spread open before him. Stuff about Coach Don Shula, quarterback Dan Marino.
No one said anything when Crowe answered. But on the other end of the line was a slow, measured breathing.
A presence.
Maybe it was a crank call. A wrong number.
“Emerald Island Inn,” Crowe repeated. “Reception.”
He was about to hang up when the whispered sandpapery voice said, “Reed Crowe?”
A man.
Crowe straightened in the chair. “Who is this?”
Silence. Still the raspy breathing.
Shish-shish.
“Wayne?” Crowe said.
He waited. He felt his blood quicken.
He said, “Wayne, this you?”
Then the man said, “Goo luck.”
Crowe asked who in the blue motherfuck it was, but by then the dial tone was humming in his ear.
Crowe got up from his chair. He went to the lobby window and looked out. His ghostly spooked face was reflected on the glass, superimposed upon the island night. The Emerald Island Inn sign glowing pink and purple, the swaying palms and sea grape trees awash in neon.
Night. Just the night staring back at him.
He knew it was irrational, but Crowe expected the caller awaiting him beneath the porte cochere. Magically materialized, as if via teleportation or conjuration.
He stepped outside and for a while stood listening to the muggy dark. Moths and june bugs fluttered around the globe lights flanking the entrance. Their birdlike shadows gliding big upon the seashell lot.
The occasional nightbird, their shadows like model planes.
Bamboo stalks moved in the beach breeze. Chuckling, as if with dark rumor, a sinister secret.
SPEED TRAP
THE SMELL OF ORANGE BLOSSOMS. A grapefruit orchard flat and stretching far as the eye could see, an infinity of evenly spaced trunks as tidy as a watercolor painting. Horse fields. Boat launches jutting out into the waterways. 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.
Occasionally he passed a lightning scorched cypress, always topped with a shaggy nest that looked like a wig made of hay and twigs and wicker. Buzzard nests. Osprey nests.
On the side of the road were the hides of run-over alligators. Hundreds of grasshoppers the size of ladyfinger bananas. One on top of the other, mating season.
This was the terra incognita beyond even the Indian casinos on the outskirts of the Everglades. The jai alai frontons. The massage parlors and tug-off joints.
So desolate this far out that often ten minutes would pass before he spotted another car on the two-lane road.
They’d shoot past each other, the wind of their passing making the Mustang shimmy.
Then alone again in the purgatorial darkness. Alligator and frog eyes glowing jewel-like in the saw grass. A raccoon flitting out of the headlights, a furry hind leg darting out of view.
The flattened remains of a boa constrictor, like a fire hose run over several times.
The flying insects so big in the headlights they looked like fairies. Pixies.
* * *
—
It was past midnight when Catface hit I-75, headed north. Fifteen miles outside of Emerald City he passed a weather-flayed billboard advertising THE FLORIDA MAN MYSTERY HOUSE AND SWAMP TOUR.
“Who Can It Be Now” on the radio, WSHE FM out of Miami.
Behind the billboard waited a police cruiser and after the midnight blue Mustang shot past, its klaxon bleated and its blue lights spun. The police car bumped onto the road and followed the car.
A speed trap.
Catface eased to a stop on the highway shoulder. Waited. His hands rested at ten and one on the wheel.
The cop car nosed up behind the Mustang. In the rearview mirror Catface saw the silhouette of the cop’s head. The man scribbling notes on his clipboard.
Then the door swung open and the officer stepped to the car. He rapped his knuckles on the glass. Beamed a penlight into Catface’s face and bent down to better regard him.
Catface rolled the window down halfway. The sweltering night air hit his face like a rag. Mosquitoes and gnats hummed. The frogs and crickets roared.
“Everything okay tonight, sir?”
“Yes, officer,” said Catface. He looked straight at the officer. Hands very relaxed on the wheel.
The young man’s expression jerked. Then his face ticked back to its composure. Or some semblance of it.
The officer, “Know why I stoppe
d you tonight?”
Catface studied his badge. The name tag. Ziggy Schaffer, Jr. “Was I speeding, officer?”
The officer was about to answer but then looked at the thin gold chain of Catface’s necklace. The first two buttons of his shirt were loose and in the V of his scarred chest rested a gold medallion. A logo of a round cartoon pirate face. Like the Mister Donut logo you saw around the South. The same jaunty wink, the same rakish slant of the hat.
“Is it you?” Schaffer Junior asked.
“It all depends.”
The man’s expression changed. “My mistake, sir,” he said.
“No mistake. No problem. It es goo.”
“My advice, watch the speedometer.” A small tremble in his voice.
“Well, you have a goo night now.”
“You too.”
The officer waved him onward.
“Goo luck.”
Then Catface went on his way. In the rearview mirror the officer already was turning to his car in the red stain of the Mustang’s taillights.
WICKED PISSAH CATEGORY SIX THREE-PRONGED SHOCKER!
SO VAST WAS THE TERRA INCOGNITA in this part of Florida that Catface drove for miles without seeing sign of civilization. About twenty miles away from Emerald Island, Catface’s guts were twisted. Knots of hot agony. He had to take a volcanic shit. He sped up the Eldorado, his latest stolen car. He was about to pull over on the side of the road and burst out of the car and tear down his pants and relieve himself in the saw grass when he saw it evanesce on the heat-hazed horizon. A three-story windowless warehouse of sheet metal, fire-engine red, like an inflamed sore against the jungle-green backdrop of the trees.
BIG GORILLA FIREWORKS, the big black letters of the yellow sign exclaimed.
In the fireworks emporium Catface went to the clerk. The clerk noticed him at once and his face dropped.
Catface already knew the young man would die. He just didn’t know how.