by Tom Cooper
“I must use your bathroom,” he said.
“No bathroom, mister. Sorry.”
“Where do you relieve?”
“Where do I live?”
“Where do you relieve!”
“Pardon?”
These gringos and their bathrooms. Places more holy, more sacred, than El Cobre. Than San Lazaro. “Do you shits in your hand?”
The young man, shaking his head in mute consternation, was still out of sorts, reeling with shock from the sight of Catface.
“I’ll buy big firework, okay?” Catface said to the young carrot-haired man, already striding toward the back of the building where there was a hallway. On one side was an office door, on the other a lavatory.
“Sir,” the man called after him.
Catface said, “Big, big firework, hey, okay?” His voice was small and echoey in the vast space of the warehouse, tall aisles deserted of customers.
“I gotta ask the manager,” the young man, weak-voiced, called after him. “Sir. Hello?”
In the bathroom Catface relieved himself. Then he washed up at the sink and cupped his hands under the spigot and splashed water in his face. He raked a comb through his hair. He blotted his face with a wad of paper towels and tossed them into the garbage. Then from his coat pocket he took out the butane torch and crack pipe. He lit a rock, inhaled the smoke deeply.
On the porcelain lip of the sink he left the torch with its gas still hissing like a snake.
When Catface emerged from the bathroom the young man had the phone picked up, finger poised above the rotary dial.
“Down!” Catface bellowed. A Pentecostal injunction.
The man’s shoulders jerked and then he stood frozen, indecisive, still clutching the receiver.
In a voice still raised and hard, Catface said, “Put that phone down, conyo.”
Now the man was shook. Catface could see even from this distance. The clerk set down the phone.
Catface went down one of the aisles, arms akimbo, surveying the wares.
“It’s okay, sir,” the man said in an odd, strangled voice.
“What’s okay?”
“You don’t need to buy nothin’.”
“No, I want a big, big one.”
“You already used the bathroom, no need.”
“Grande.”
“No need.”
“In a hurry to get rid of me?”
“No, sir. No.”
Catface went down one aisle and then the next. His alligator loafers clicked sharply. He clasped his hands behind his back. He whistled two bars of “La Chambelona.” Then he hummed the Miami Dolphins rally.
The kid stood there.
He clapped and stomped. “Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins.”
The kid, pale-faced, nodded.
“Miami Dolphins. Miami Dolphins.”
With his chin, Catface motioned him to join. “Miami Dolphins,” the kid said in bleak agreement. “Miami Dolphins.”
“Greatest football team!”
Then Catface changed his tune. “Wasting Away in Margaritaville,” he crooned. His voice echoed in the tiled space. “Some people say a woman there’s to blame. No, officer, mi dick, motherfucker.”
Catface moseyed with arms behind his back, surveying the wares. He passed a display of Black Cat fireworks, the howling black cat in the middle of the yellow logo. Catface eyed it, muttered something in Spanish.
Finally he stopped and selected from the gaudy shelves a large cinderblock-sized explosive: WICKED PISSAH CATEGORY SIX THREE-PRONGED SHOCKER! On the brightly colored box was a round yellow logo with a yowling black cat in the middle. Catface took the explosive to the register, toting it both-armed, it was so big and heavy. As big as a hatbox, as heavy as a bowling ball. Catface had to carry it at a fastidious remove, so as not to sully his clothes.
Catface studied the kid’s T-shirt. Tie-dyed, with a big round yellow happy face on the front.
“I like that. I like that shirt.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Good shirt.”
The young man thanked him again.
“Happy face.”
“Yes.”
“You are happy?”
The kid’s posture was befuddled, helpless.
“Are you happy?”
The clerk said nothing.
Catface showed the clerk the pirate logo on his necklace. “Hey, look, they hombres, see? Only mine’s got one eye and isn’t so happy.”
“Sir,” the young man said glumly. A look of dread twisted his face.
“I like your shirt. It’s okay.”
With that Catface exited the store lugging the firework. He was halfway across the lot with it when he whirled and went dashing back into the store.
Catface put the firework down on the floor. He unpocketed his lighter and crouched to light the fuse.
The clerk was saying no, no, no, but Catface already had the three-pronged shocker lit. As it sparked, Catface went scrambling away. A tittering jack-be-nimble.
When Catface was backing his car out of the lot, he could see the young man running from behind the counter with a broom. The pandemonium of fire like a miniature volcano. Jumping jacks of copper-green flame.
* * *
—
Catface, hurtling 120 miles per hour, had already put a mile between the car and the warehouse when a station wagon about three hundred yards away came toward him. Then the explosion came. He felt the force of the detonation buffet the car. He felt the heat radiating through the glass of his back windshield.
The kid must have just then thought all the mayhem over, the final flames extinguished to embers, when a drifting cinder kissed the butane gas and blammo, the inferno, the white hot instant of his death.
Now the column of fever-hued flame boiled and rose, a cyclone of psychedelic pumpkin orange and wild electric green.
The man driving the station wagon stomped the brakes, burning skid marks.
Catface glimpsed the family in passing. Their faces were shocked. Their mouths were screaming holes. There was a blond-bearded, sandy-haired father with his bottle-blond wife and three sunburned kids, all blond too. And there was a Labrador barking hysterical barks.
All of this Catface registered in a hot wild moment and then laughing he sped onward toward Emerald Island.
A FLOCK OF FLAMINGOS
CROWE FLIPPED THROUGH THE CHANNELS. A Three’s Company rerun, the actor Richard Kline. A local access talk show, beamed from down in the Keys, called Reef Talk. A nature documentary, a flock of flamingos flying over a sunset-dappled bay.
Then Crowe flipped upon the rerun of the eleven o’clock news and sat up. They were showing the Big Gorilla Fireworks emporium engulfed in flame. It was a towering inferno, a boiling wicked column of fire. The camera shot was from at least a mile’s distance.
Crowe thought of the kid Barry. “Oh Christ,” he said. He ran his hand through his beard.
They were interviewing a deputy now. He couldn’t look more haggard and harried. He looked as stymied as a second grader in algebra class.
Then neither could the next interviewee. Barry the fireworks kid, a little older now, a little more crinkled around the eyes, but alive.
Crowe felt a rush of relief for the kid. Kid, shit. A man now.
Watching the raging conflagration, Crowe said, “Look at that, holy moly.”
THE BUCKET BRIGADE
WHEN SHERIFF SCHAFFER GOT THE CALL about the explosion he was coked out of his mind. “Yes, sir, oh sweet Jesus,” he said, voice clogged with postnasal drip, “I got it.” He hung up the phone. Cussed. Sniffed. Pinched the last scintilla of cocaine from his septum and shoved on his county sheriff hat.
When he
stepped outside into the heat and saw the mushroom cloud of smoke billowing strong and unabated some fifteen miles away, he said in his salt-cured cracker voice, “Oh that dumb motherfuckin’ kid finally blown himself up. Of all days.”
The kid had always been a bit on the dim side. The bent spoon in the drawer, as his mother used to say.
And now.
Five miles away, he could see the fire tinting the sky. He passed people in Emerald City pulled over on the side of the road, standing on the shoulder, gawking at the spectacle. They tendered anemic waves. Grim-faced, he waved in return, the rack light strobing, his siren shrieking.
The sky was murky with falling ash. He flicked on his high beams.
About a mile from the fire, he parked on the shoulder and got out. A young officer, butter-haired, big-eared, was already on the scene. Officer Petrowski.
“Is this the craziest thing you ever saw?” he asked. Schaffer heard Polk County in Petrowski’s voice. They wouldn’t have him there, evidently, so they got rid of him in this outpost. This unincorporated part of Florida, a place of nebulous jurisdiction and jury-rigged justice.
Schaffer pinched the brim of his felt hat and doffed it but didn’t answer the young officer. He put on his sunglasses to keep the sting of smoke out of his eyes. The road tar was gummy under his tooled-leather roper boots.
The flames by now were reduced to tufts but every now and then there was a new eruption in the conflagration. A supernova of fire. New black smoke boiled up demonically into the sky.
“Are you okay, Sheriff?”
Schaffer was damp-haired and harried and his porcine face was a choked livid red. He appeared a man on the verge of both lethal heart attack and heatstroke. “What? Why? Why’re you askin’?”
“It looks like?”
“Should I get a lawn chair?”
“Looks like you’re fixin’ to laugh.”
Fixin’, definitely Polk County or thereabouts.
Schaffer shook his head. He felt a rush of blood to his face. By god, had he been smiling? He was conscious suddenly of his face and yes, he felt his muscles grinning. The sight of the fire, it was massive and gorgeous, it was true. You’re high, Schaffer thought. Get the fuck out of here.
Schaffer blurted, “Well, son, look at what we got here.”
“It’s a situation, all right.”
“God, look at those dummies in the helicopter.”
“Sir?” The earnest bumpkin Petrowski disbelieved his ears.
Schaffer had said it aloud without intending. He palmed the cold sweat off his forehead. This shit they had in Miami, mind-blowing. And none of it he’d ever bought. He stopped cars with young adults driving, under any flimsy pretext, and if they had drugs in the car, which was almost always the case, he confiscated them. And if it was a woman by herself, he’d give her a choice. “Either you suck my dick, or you’re going to jail for a long time.”
Their looks would be horrified, disbelieving.
If you acted authoritative enough, Schaffer had discovered over the years, there was no limit to what some people would do or believe.
Schaffer would tell them, “Not only are you gonna suck my dick, I’m going to take a Polaroid. For my collection, see. And if you ever tell anybody about it”—here he would inspect the name and the address on the license—“I’ll mail the picture to your grandma on Valentine’s Day. How about that?”
So far Schaffer had collected forty-seven Polaroids, forty-seven different women, not an outstanding figure, given all the years he’d been on the job.
The helicopter hovered closer to the burning building. More would soon be on the way. They would want interviews with the firemen and they’d want interviews with Schaffer. About a mile away, where the air was so hot it quaked and shimmied, a squadron of county firemen were spraying borate. Their figures were wobbly in the mirage heat. Little more than a bucket brigade. Several men in turnout coats were a mile closer to the fire than Schaffer and Petrowski. They wore pack pumps and were spraying.
With the same authority Schaffer showed those young women over the years, Schaffer told the officer, “Listen, I want you to talk to those news people.”
The officer seemed part surprised, part excited. “What you want me to say?”
“Shit, just say big fire.” His heart pounded harder with each moment. He was not prepared for this. Not today. And he did not trust himself to appear before a camera. He was likely to come across as a whackjob.
Schaffer said, “I have seen many a damn strange thing in my time, son, and though this is one of the fuckin’ strangest, it is also something I was expecting.”
The young officer waited.
“That kid? Courting disaster for years. He left a Pop-Tart in the toaster too long. Lit a doobie. Who knows. But there’s nothing to say that you can’t tell them.” Schaffer said this with great authority.
The young officer mentioned the string of crimes in recent months up the southwestern coast.
“And the guy decided to burn down the building just for the hell of it?”
Petrowski said nothing.
Schaffer clapped him on the shoulder as if he’d won a prize. “You take care of the interviews, how about that, kid? Have the girl at the station call your mother and get out the VCR. You gonna make her real, real proud.”
“Really, sir?”
“Hey, fixin’ to be her pride and joy.”
“Thank you, sir, thank you, really, I won’t let you down.”
“Hey, diamond in the rough. You’re gonna be a real good sheriff one day, son. Real good sheriff.”
ROOM SERVICE
HE BROKE INTO THE ROOM AT the small motel and in the room Catface waited until night, the shift change. Then he called the reception desk and the man Reed Crowe answered. Catface, in his cordial and measured voice, said, “Problem with the water closet.”
Reed Crowe was standing behind the check-in desk of the Emerald Island Inn when the call came from room 292. There was no one checked in to the ledger, unless one of the night clerks, one of Eddie’s cousins, made a mistake, which was unlikely. They were good workers.
“You said you’re in room 292?” asked Crowe.
There was a brief silence. A sound almost like a swallowed hiccup. Or a stifled laugh. “Yes,” he said, whisper-voiced. “I need toilet paper.”
Again, that strange choking sound, the noise of the man’s palm over the receiver.
Then he hung up the phone.
Crowe not knowing what to expect locked up the reception office and went walking to room 292 with a few rolls of toilet paper under his arm.
Crowe knocked on the door and the man said come in.
The door opened and when Crowe saw Catface sitting in his suit upon the end of the bed his face drained bloodless. Algor mortis. Then, holding the toilet paper still, he angled to turn, ready to dash.
All flight, no fight.
But Catface stood, slapped his thighs as someone would if he was awaiting a belated friend who finally arrived. “Come in. Sit. Let’s talk.”
Crowe began to blurt.
Catface cut his finger across his throat and rattled his tongue on the roof of his mouth and made a hissing rattle.
“Close the door,” he said.
He shut the door on the dark buggy swelter, the Florida night.
“Sit, conyo.”
Crowe began to cross the room with the toilet paper.
“Put the shit down at the door,” said Catface. “Stupido.”
Crowe placed down the toilet paper and went to the twin bed farthest from the door. Dejectedly, he sat. He stroked his beard with a shaking hand.
“You think I left you there,” Crowe said.
“You did. I know. Not think. Know.”
; “I didn’t know.”
“Oh, you did.”
The men regarded each other for a moment, Crowe’s eyes unable to settle for more than a moment on Catface’s face.
He was at an abject loss.
“You’re sure of something that ain’t true.”
“I said to myself, He’ll forget me. But he won’t forget my face. You saw me. You saw me. I was burning alive.”
“I did not.”
“I was alive in that swamp for days. I came out. I survived.”
“I’m glad.”
Catface showed his teeth in a clean even smile. He put a toothpick in his mouth. “No, you’re not. You are the very opposite of glad.”
Crowe said nothing.
“Do you know how I survived? I will tell you. I thought, it might be thirty years from now. It might be his granddaughter’s wedding. A Fourth of July barbecue. A beach vacation. Wherever.”
“Mister,” Crowe began.
“I said to myself, I will get this man. I will find him and I will wait until he has the most to lose.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“Shut up.” He went on, “I just pictured the day. That’s how I survived. Pictured the day of torturing you.”
“Goddamn it. This is crazy. You were already dead.”
“You might believe that. Maybe it’s been so long you believe that. So long you’ve deceived yourself. Because the opposite?”
“You want money?”
At this Catface laughed.
Then his face changed. He placed the forefinger of his free hand to his lips, circumspect, as if just remembering something he’d almost forgotten. “Oh,” he said. “Yes.” He opened the top drawer of the bed stand. With both hands Catface presented the small box gift wrapped in silvery foil to Reed Crowe.
Crowe didn’t move.
“A gift for you. For goo luck.”
Crowe shook his head.
Catface placed the gift down on the nightstand. He watched Crowe for a moment. “Rude,” he said. He tsked.
Crowe kept his eyes on the floor.
“Open it,” Catface said. “Or I’ll slice your throat. Believe it.”