by Tom Cooper
The engine sung higher, became a whine. Then the racket ceased.
Catface got out of the car cursing. Crowe could hear his voice coming from a distance. “Not goo,” he shouted.
He started toward the lighthouse. He made like he was striding straight toward it. Then he dashed out of the road toward the water. Then he was gone, vanished amid the dunes.
Crowe went crouching from window to window with a Wesson .25 aimed into the dark. Its small parts rattled he was shaking so hard.
Still no sign.
For a wild instant Crowe considered sounding the lighthouse foghorn. Beaming the lighthouse light, sending out a signal. As if there were a superhero or a god to save him.
An old Conch.
Crowe knew they’d never make it in time. If they were stupid and intrepid enough to be so inclined.
The permanent visitors in the derelict Emerald Island Inn: shit.
And no tourists, this kind of weather.
Still he waited.
Waited.
A fucking exploded bridge, for crying out loud.
Crowe heard sirens, but they might as well have been on Mars. They came from a vast distance, from the wooded reaches of the mainland, and once they reached the bay, then what?
The ocean wind carried a cold iron tang. Crowe’s cheeks stung. His leg ached. His back and his chest. The wind stung his eyes, a knifing silvery pain.
Then he saw the man appear again out of the dark. About a hundred yards away he dashed between the dunes, his light brown suit visible in the starlight.
Crowe fired the gun. The kick jolted him sideways. The tracer ripped a scar of light across the night.
Catface cackled, a fleet figure darting among dunes that stood as tall as slagheaps. Escarpments three, four hundred years old.
Closer, farther.
Ahead, behind.
The taunting voice and taunting laughter sounded as though it were coming from all points of the compass.
Disoriented and near delirious Crowe went from portal to portal.
He couldn’t catch his breath.
He couldn’t calm his heart. Its beating was crazed.
A hot coal of pain throbbed in his leg.
Behind this dune, behind that dune Catface went. As soon as Crowe thought he had a bead on the man, he was gone.
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Now Catface was close enough that Crowe could see his grin.
Crowe fired again. Missed. A spit of sand went flying.
He heard the man’s cracked-out woo-hoo laughter. “Not goo,” the catfaced man said.
Then the man disappeared. A long minute ticked past. Another.
Nothing.
Around the lighthouse was a skirt of hard-packed sand. Now Catface was dashing across it toward the door.
Crowe squeezed off another shot. The bullet struck sand. A thin echo rolled across the beach.
“Uh-oh,” the man, now out of sight, mocked. “One left. One bullet.”
Crowe pounded down the spiral stairs. He stopped cold when he saw Catface walk through the lighthouse door. He looked up at Crowe, regarding him with a jagged grin in his vivisection of a face. “Goo evening!” he said.
He took his first step up the stairs.
Crowe, aiming the gun, went down the staircase.
Catface, wielding his dagger, went up.
When only a landing separated them, several stairs, Crowe fired at the man’s head.
Missed.
The bullet bit out a divot in the wall. Pulverized plaster hazed the air.
Crowe kept coming down the stairs and when he was within spitting distance he threw the gun at the man’s head. The barrel struck his forehead, bounced off, clattered on the permastone. Blood welled in the gouge, filled the assassin’s eyes. The man’s neat widow’s-peak hair, raked vampirishly back, went flying, brilliantined licks of it falling into his gory face.
Crowe ran full force into him. The catfaced man, still shrieking, still clutching his head, slashed at him blindly with his free hand, slicing Crowe’s arm with his blade.
Crowe ran on, away from the lighthouse, toward the wharf.
Every nerve in his body shrieked with pain, but it momentarily vanished with the exhilaration of escape as he headed for the wharf.
He ran into the boathouse. A big corrugated metal shed with a high peaked tin roof where twenty-five or thirty vessels bobbed in their slips. He went down the dock scanning the boats.
Most wore their names big on their butts. Out Fishing, Yuck Foo, Old Feller. Sloops and pontoons and catamarans. Most familiar to Crowe. At the far end of the wharf he spotted a small sherbet-lime motorboat. Red Hamilton’s Chris-Craft. He ran to it. He knew Red Hamilton kept his keys in the center console because no one would ever want to steal the thing, was their joke.
Crowe was in the boat fumbling the mooring knot from the cleat when the headlights of the Cadillac fanned into the boathouse. The car came to a quick rocking halt. The door yawned open and a figure came running out with the car engine still going and the beams still spearing into the boathouse.
Crowe was still fumbling with the knot when he saw Catface striding down the dock.
Crowe ducked and stayed hunched.
Catface’s eyes found Crowe. Their whites seared in the darkness. Even from so many paces away they glowed starkly white. They were latched onto Crowe with demonic intensity.
Catface stalked forward. “I see you. Comin’ right at you.”
The tin roof was so corroded there were holes in places. A spear of moonlight shot through one of them and lit the man’s maimed face.
Crowe jerked the cord and the outboard motor coughed and spluttered. The Chris-Craft lurched away from the dock. Catface picked up his pace and lifted his arm to throw a knife. Crowe dodged sideways. He heard the lethal whistle of the blade passing through air.
Then the knife hit the water and flashed like a shiny mackerel showing its side before plunging down and disappearing.
Crowe watched Catface standing at the end of the dock ready to leap, his body poised as he gauged the distance.
No. Too far.
The boathouse fell back out of sight as Crowe motored out where the channel opened into the bay. The hot salt-smelling air battered his face as he sped. Gnats and beetles and mosquitoes pinged his skin.
* * *
—
A mile into the bay Crowe cut the motor and waited. And waited. Desolate this time of night. Oil riggers like spaceships far out in the Gulf. Freighters.
Satellites blinking and crossing the big starry Florida sky.
Crowe strained to hear any other boat and finally he heard the small whining engine coming from a distance. A Jet Ski.
Catface’s shrieking laughter cut through the night. It came at him sourceless, echoing through the black veldt of the swamp.
Then Catface materialized from the night like a nightmare, his face crazed in the half-light. A dread comic book hobgoblin.
The Jet Ski was headed straight at the boat but about ten yards away it hit a sandbar and flew airborne. As the Jet Ski went soaring over the boat, Crowe could hear Catface’s bellow above the motor.
The Jet Ski walloped back into the water like a meteor.
The catfaced man looped the Jet Ski around. He crouched and bent into the turn, ripping up a white spume. The Jet Ski skipped like a stone over the waves. It ramped up a bigger wave and then Catface slalomed and slewed.
The Jet Ski moved again toward Crowe.
Crowe had one hand on the tiller and the other in the stowage box. Crowe groped an emergency flare, jerked the string with his teeth, aimed, fired it at the Jet Ski. The tight bright ball of flame soared over the water. The firebal
l struck the catfaced man’s arm. His sleeve caught fire. The catfaced man slapped at the flame and with both hands off the handles the Jet Ski wobbled and slewed and canted sideways.
Then the catfaced man was in the water bellowing and flailing as Reed Crowe motored away.
* * *
—
Finally Crowe aimed the boat toward Krait Isle. The tennis-court-sized barrier island teeming with snakes. Serpents with poison so virulent it could turn a man immobile in five minutes. Stop his heart and kill him in twenty.
On the lee side of Krait Isle Crowe cut the motor and got the flashlight out of the stowage box and beamed it through the mangroves.
So the catfaced man would see.
And he did.
Crowe could see the approaching gleam of the Jet Ski headlight. When it was about fifty yards away Crowe flung the flashlight into the thick black trees. It flipped and arced high over the catclaw branches. A branch snagged it before it hit the ground and the beam trembled and swung as if in a panicked man’s clutch.
An egret winged huge into the night.
The flashlight trembled and wobbled.
“I see you,” Catface said. “Stupid fuck!”
Crowe crouched in the dark, waiting.
The night was teeming with bug calls and frog calls.
On the other shore Crowe could hear Catface grounding the Jet Ski. He could make out the beam of his flashlight through the twisted mangroves. Crowe heard his wading through the water. His cursing. The snapping of twigs and the rustling of brush in the deeper reaches of the island.
Then there was a howl of agony.
Another scream as a third or fourth snake struck.
By now, Crowe knew, the venom was shuttling through the catfaced man. Flooding his heart.
Finally the bobbling flashlight fell and came to rest. And then finally, too, the shouting and cursing on the island went silent.
Crowe hunkered in darkness on the skiff.
He waited for any sign that Catface was escaping the hammock.
The wash of waves rocked him. The mosquitoes and gnats buzzed bloodthirsty at his ears.
He watched the darkness of the hammocks, ink blots on the bigger darkness of the Everglades night.
No other boats out but pinpoint glimmers miles out past the dead coral reef, so far away they too looked like stars.
Minutes passed before Crowe thought he heard the voice of a motor. An angry wasp sound growing louder from some direction and distance Crowe couldn’t determine.
No. Impossible.
Then came the human cackle, sickeningly familiar, over the din of the engine.
His ears had to be playing tricks.
It was panic. Exhaustion.
Then Crowe saw the white boiling wake like a white line in the water arrowed straight at him. The line growing longer, thirty feet away, now twenty.
Catface on his Jet Ski materialized specter-like out of the dark. He switched on his headlamp. The sudden gamma ray blinded Crowe as the Jet Ski came straight at him.
Catface overshot. Looped around in a wild gyre, cackling, the Jet Ski spinning like a haywire fairground ride.
He kept looping, spinning, churning up a wake.
Crowe sped shorebound. The skiff skipped over the pummeling waves.
Next time Crowe glanced behind his shoulder he saw Catface aimed again his way. Gaining. Reaching for something in his pant leg. Something strapped to his ankle.
The man was close enough now that Crowe could discern the man’s face. The head, filled with poison, swollen grotesquely like a melon.
A kind of rabid foam dripped from Catface’s lips.
Five feet away now and Catface had the blade in his hand. He coughed so hard he tightened his grip on the knife. He coughed again, so hard his body was wracked. The dagger dropped. Catface cursed.
Coughed, spat up blood, whipped his head sideways, hawked blood into the water.
He reached for his other ankle. The foam from his mouth started frothing out pink. Then pinker. Then red.
Now the stuff coming out of his mouth looked like melted red and purple candle wax mixed together.
He was gurgling, retching, screaming, reaching for the knife.
His body jerked with seizure and he pitched forward, draped over the steering bars.
The engine choke switched on and the Jet Ski fuel line was cut.
The Jet Ski sputtered and coasted to a stop, canting sideways. Catface slumped slack and lifeless as a feed-sack along with it.
Then the scar-faced man toppled into the water. The floating body receded, receded, vanished, as Crowe shot through the immensity of the Everglades.
His heart was galloping wildly.
He saw shooting stars. Fireflies. But no, they were in his head, floating little bright dots.
Oh, how had he gotten here?
How had he fucked up so much?
His wife, his girl.
Wayne.
Mariposa.
He thought of that night many years ago, the night the plane fell down from the sky, the men burning alive in the swamp. He remembered the smell of burning flesh. Remembered the eye of the man fixing on him, hexing him, through the dark.
So much strife, so much agony and horror since then.
The mother of all plants, one thing begetting another.
One error begetting the next. One fuckup.
If you believed in such things.
Reed Crowe never did, but on occasions such as these you had to wonder. You had to wonder because now, despite himself, he was praying. Praying not because he believed. He was praying because there was nothing else he could do.
And he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. Fiercely he wanted to live even as the night now seemed to grow darker.
MILD TO MEDIUM
HE WOKE UP TO INCANDESCENT LIGHTS glaring down on him. For a moment he wondered if he was on the verge of dying. One final big bang of blinding white light before he was flung into the wild black yonder.
But then a nurse’s face entered his frame of vision. A woman of about sixty-five with curly gray hair and a dainty-featured cherub face. A beatific country aunt in a Norman Rockwell Christmas painting.
He tried to move and couldn’t. Tubes were in his nostrils and mouth and arms. His breath scraped painfully in his throat.
“You’ve had a stroke, Mr. Crowe,” said the nurse. “You’re going to be okay. Everything will be fine. Don’t panic. Oh, honey, let me get a doctor.”
He tried to talk. Gobbledygook came out. As if someone shot his jaw through with Novocain.
He willed his arms to move. His legs. Like trying to move a cinderblock with his thoughts.
He whimpered, moaned.
He heard the nurse trotting away down the hall, her soft-soled shoes squeaking on linoleum.
In the empty room humming with machines and monitors Reed Crowe allowed himself to cry.
His tears felt strange.
Then he realized why. They’d shaved his beard. For the first time in decades his face was bare.
* * *
—
A stroke, according to Dr. Abramowitz. Mild to medium.
Was it permanent? Would he ever walk again? Talk? Would he be in a wheelchair? Reed Crowe’s head flooded with such questions.
Would his dick ever work again?
How about the right side of his body?
So many questions. He was incapable of asking one.
* * *
—
Yahchilane had to ask questions on his behalf. For instance, how long his recovery would last.
They were outside the room standing in the hallway. They thought they were out of earshot, but Crowe could hear them.
The doctor told Yahchilane, “I’ve seen people fully recover in two months.” He was an old man with a New Jersey accent. “It depends on the person. And it depends on how committed they are to rehabilitation. There’s no question, it’ll be difficult.”
There was mention of forty percent chances, seventy percent chances.
Rehabilitation and neuroplasticity.
Recovery times of two months to ten years.
* * *
—
For a while after the bridge was blown away there was talk on the island and on the news of a federal investigation. Some pundits speculated that the demolishing was the work of environmental terrorists.
Yahchilane was called into questioning five times.
Crowe’s interrogation would have to wait until his recovery.
It would probably become another one of those bits of local apocrypha. You remember the big storm of that year? Remember the year it snowed on the beach? Remember that year the goddamn Emerald Island bridge blew up?
Some Florida Man lost his shit that year, all right.
OTHER BREAKING NEWS
OF COURSE THERE WERE QUESTIONS FROM state and federal authorities. And even at an outpost such as this, a whole bridge exploding in the middle of nowhere? Well, holy shit. Prime-time news.
Another Florida story to cover.
Another freak show to add to the litany of tragedies and comedies and massacres. And so not five hours passed since the bridge’s explosion before a convoy of news trucks migrated en masse from the violent streets of Miami, making its way through terra incognita to Emerald County, Florida.
A horde of locusts. Nineteen eighty-six, the dawn of round-the-clock news. A gold mine, this.
What could it be? Who? Was it a terrorist group? What kind? An environmental terrorist cell?
What could have been the motive? Drugs?
Satanists?
Nihilists? Anarchists?
Donahue, Morton Downey, Jr., Sally Jessy Raphael, all the talk show hosts had a field day.