Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  * * *

  —

  But there were the repercussions to reconsider. Nina would lose her citizenship. And the girls. What would happen to the girls? And if he so much as brought up the possibility of a divorce, Nina was Catholic to the bone. She’d butcher him in his sleep sooner than sign divorce papers. She’d somehow get Pope John Paul II involved. Shit, that guy would throw up his hands. I give up. Show me the door to hell.

  * * *

  —

  One morning not long after Eddie stepped sullenly on the boat with his regular good morning grunt. Crowe volleyed back with his usual, “Hey, man.”

  A cloudless October day, an early north wind.

  Crowe prepped the lines and tackle and leaders. Eddie stocked the icebox.

  The thing Reed Crowe most appreciated about Eddie, he was quiet. Comfortable with silence.

  But today as they prepped the lines and the tackle and they baited the hooks Crowe knew something was different but couldn’t figure out.

  Then, “Your mustache. Why’d you shave, Eddie?”

  “I look estranged?”

  Eddie years ago told Crowe to always correct his English when he was wrong. Which he hardly ever was these days, but now, “Strange.”

  “Strange.”

  “Always, Eddie. You’ve always been strange.”

  “Serious. I hate it.” His fingers kept returning to the bald patch above his lip.

  “Why?”

  “Nina said I looked stupid.”

  “Nah.”

  “You’re smiling.”

  “Takes getting used to.”

  “You’re smiling.”

  “You look twelve.”

  Eddie kept brooding.

  A trio of pelicans waited in the water, brown wings tucked close to their body. Crowe threw them the chum scraps. They yawned their gigantic beaks wide and swallowed the mullet pieces whole, heads tipped back, flappy throats working.

  Finally the pelicans winged off.

  Crowe spray-hosed the bait cutting board. “Maybe stand up for yourself, Eddie. You wanna mustache, grow the mustache. Take a stand.”

  “Stand.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hit her?”

  Crowe stopped spraying. “Jesus Christ, no.”

  Eddie was looking at him.

  Crowe put down the spray nozzle. He fingered up his green aviators so the lenses were nested in his beach bum cedar and gray hair. He put his hands on his hips. “You think I’d suggest that? Goddamn, Eddie. First, she’d rip your head off and use it as a bowling ball.”

  “This is true,” Eddie said.

  Crowe remembered his father. How he used to backhand his mother. Several times Crowe saw this happen in his boyhood. He had no idea if such a thing was common back then. He had no other boyhood to compare it to.

  His old man. He wanted to hate him, couldn’t. He loved him.

  But he sure as hell didn’t like him.

  That one Christmas, when the old man was bourbon-and-eggnog drunk. He backhanded Crowe’s mother and she cried and Reed, nine years old, jumped on his father’s back and tried to fend him off.

  And his father’s history, there was a lot he didn’t know and could never know. All those old Conchs were dead now.

  His father, dead. Crowe remembered when he was a teenage boy, looking through the kitchen window above the sink, his father climbing into the black sedan for another weeklong business trip. He had a red McIntosh apple in his hand and it fell. The apple rolled in the driveway. He collapsed to his knees. Through the kitchen window he saw his father buckle, clutching his chest. He fell and then was still.

  A heart attack, fifty-five.

  His father’s voice. Once in a while he’d hear it still. Clear.

  Get out in the sun, son.

  Go on and have a glass of cold water and go run in the sun.

  Now he told Eddie, “I don’t know shit about life, Eddie. But the second you lay a hand on that woman, it’s over.”

  Eddie nodded. “My father. Not nice to my mother.”

  “I understand,” Crowe said. And he did. Yes, he did. He told the young man, “Try to be friends with her, Eddie. Be honest. Kindly honest. That’s all I know about women.”

  HURRICANE ANDREW

  BY 1992 THE SHAGGY-SHINGLED BARREL HOUSE needed serious renovation. As much as it pained Henry Yahchilane to admit, the house had fallen into disrepair. Much to his chagrin. He had always prided himself a fastidious man. A man who took care of his own property and maintained it and did all the work with his own hands.

  But that year in June, Yahchilane fell off the ladder while cleaning leaves out of the gutter pipes of the barrel house. He dropped five feet before striking the cedar porch board smack on his side.

  Yahchilane was well into his sixties.

  He went to Dr. Vu, who told him he was lucky he didn’t break his hip.

  Her eyes were scolding above the rims of her round glasses. “What are you doing on a ladder?”

  “Cleaning gutters.”

  “Lucky you’re not paralyzed.”

  Later that year, when his son, Seymour, came for a visit in August before his classes at Tulane began, he said nothing about the blight, which was somehow worse, because usually such a sorry sight would have occasioned some ball breaking.

  Instead, Seymour only said, “We gotta get somebody out here, Pop.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “What’s that, you’re limping? Something happen?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got old. Nothing. Leave me alone.”

  * * *

  —

  That summer the blossoms fell early from the trees and bushes. A bright confetti of jacaranda and bougainvillea petals gyred on summer scorched winds.

  In the kitchen of the barrel house the speck-tiny sugar ants filed in quick black lines up a groove in the grout and into a pinprick hole. As if intuiting something beyond his comprehension.

  A few days before the storm they were calling Andrew made landfall, Yahchilane began patching some of the storm windows, the splintering boards, the warped and weatherworn places, but too little too late and by the time he drove out to Charley Alexoupobulos’s hardware store the place was all but ransacked.

  Rumor was, Andrew was going to be a big one.

  * * *

  —

  It was just when the first bands were whipping the island, the barrel house beginning to moan and creak and groan, some of the siding flying wild into the night, when Yahchilane braved the sojourn to Reed Crowe’s house. He brandished a tin garbage can lid as a makeshift shield, a colander as a makeshift helmet.

  If the direst of the predictions proved true, Andrew would blast Yahchilane’s house into tinder sticks.

  Crowe had decided to ride out the storm. And when Yahchilane came out of the night with his shield in one hand and the flashlight in the other, Crowe at first jerked in shock. Then he seemed temporarily heartened by the new company.

  “Jesus, this is a lot worse than I thought,” Crowe joked. “The storm too.”

  Crowe had the bathtub full and he had the patio furniture in the house. The electricity was out but the kerosene lamps were burning inside. And Crowe had a small generator running. He had a big cooler full of ice and water and beer. He had sterno burners and canned goods.

  Remarkably, Yahchilane made another grudging admission to himself, the egghead was more prepared than he for the storm.

  * * *

  —

  On the dawn of August 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew cut through the state like the grim reaper’s scythe.

  Like many old Conchs, most of the Emerald Islanders decided to stick
it out.

  Crowe hadn’t expected the storm to hit as hard as it did.

  All was blindness for the next day. Dark rain raking away shutters and shingles and road signs. Coconuts flew off the palms. Gales tossed them like bocce balls across the land.

  The sand blew like snow.

  The flags snapped against their poles, machine gun fire.

  Homestead, devastated.

  Southern Miami, leveled.

  On the southwest coast, boats in the wharf had smashed together, broken apart like tinker toys. Mobile homes were ripped asunder. The energy was out for three days. But for the most part, the island and its homes and buildings were spared the full brunt.

  The Florida Man Mystery House, ramshackle and rickety as it was: pilloried.

  So in this manner the matter was decided.

  A storm named Andrew made the decision for him.

  THIS IS IT, EDDIE

  ONE EVENING THEY WERE DRINKING BEERS at the Rum Jungle and Crowe told Eddie, “This is it. The boat tour. I don’t want to deal with the stuff anymore. I’m getting tired. I think I’m just fishing from now on.”

  His hearing in particular had been giving him problems of late on the tours. Some tourist would introduce themselves as Senelarium or Orbadelia and Crowe was left wondering what the hell he’d heard or if such names really existed.

  Crowe was closing in on fifty.

  “I understand,” Eddie said.

  Crowe asked the young man, “You gonna be okay on your own?”

  Eddie laughed.

  Crowe asked what was so funny.

  Eddie shook his head. “It’s okay, Reed.”

  It was a mellow evening, the September sun setting bronze and peach, a flame-colored swath as wide as a highway in the Gulf.

  “Was it that bad?”

  “No. No. You’re happy.”

  Crowe shook his head. He did not consider himself so. Nor did he consider himself unhappy. “I’m fine, yeah,” he said.

  There was still a smile in Eddie’s voice. “You’re okay.”

  “Yes. I’m okay. Eddie? What’re we talking here?”

  “You’re okay now. We worried about you. Even Nina.”

  Crowe didn’t know whether to be touched or insulted. “What! Jesus.”

  “No, I worried. Worried. No longer.”

  “Did you? Shit. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Just ask me.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “I don’t get you, Eddie.”

  “You’re good.”

  They drank the beers with the lime wedges squeezed into the necks for a quiet minute. The crashing Gulf murmured, a distant susurrus. There was slow lazy conversation between two old rummies at the other end of the bar. One of the old rummies would not stop referring to Don Shula as “the brainstem.” The other kept calling Dan Marino “the statue of liberty.” “No maneuverability in the pocket,” was a frequent refrain.

  Two bar dogs, Labrador and hound mixes, barked at each other, fighting playfully under the big-bulbed Christmas lights. Then one of the beach dogs went over to the four-foot glowing plastic Santa Claus and lifted its leg and pissed.

  Eddie and Crowe themselves got to talking about the Dolphins and their season when a commercial for soda came on CNN.

  “Remember that time I asked you about the stolen Cokes?” Crowe asked Eddie.

  Eddie nodded, gave him a side eye with his elbows cocked on the bar. He was looking out at the water, the sea birds diving after baitfish, their caws carrying from about a quarter mile off.

  “What did you think? How angry were you?”

  “I wanted to knock someone’s block off.”

  “Mine?”

  “Anyone’s.”

  Crowe stroked his beard. “You were so quiet. You still are. But then? The shit you took.”

  “I had no choice.”

  * * *

  —

  The Florida Man Mystery House, whole weeks went by when he didn’t give the place a thought.

  And now, good for him, Crowe thought, Eddie Maldonado and his brothers and cousins were making money hand over fist, the need for builders in south Florida was such after the clobbering of Hurricane Andrew.

  The Florida Man Mystery House stuff, all the bric-a-brac and hokey junk, languished in storage.

  * * *

  —

  Reed Crowe bought a forty-foot catamaran. A few times a week, several if it was peak fishing season, he chartered the boat.

  He rediscovered his boyhood love for fishing. He’d grown bored with shore fishing. He always ended up catching the same kinds of fish. Whiting and sail cats and stingrays. Hardly worth the time or bait. And their razor-sharp dorsal fin sand-whipping rapier tails could rip right through your skin. And red drum, he wasn’t a fan, too fishy for his palate. He was a catch and release guy unless it was pompano, which he caught less and less often these days. Maybe he’d lost his touch. Or maybe there were just fewer in the Gulf.

  The deeper waters of the Gulf, though, where the shelf fell and the ocean deepened to dark blue, hosted species stranger.

  When fishing season arrived, a few times a week Crowe took out charters, rough-hewn Florida types, jolly, always mildly beer-drunk. DUI on Wednesdays every so often was the extent of his trouble. A little too loud at the rodeo, but in a “Hey, buddy!” kind of way.

  Good old boys.

  One day Crowe had a guy from Bacon County, Georgia, named Buddy Bigalow and his brother, Bobby Bigalow.

  The fish was like nothing Crowe ever saw.

  It was three feet long and shaped like a whipping paddle and had green-purple scales and a flesh-colored head. It also had a foot-long thing, flesh-colored, that looked exactly like a human cock.

  “What in sweet baby Jesus Christ is that,” Buddy said, his meaty bulldog face sweaty and red.

  For a second Crowe was going to pretend he knew what species it was. He was going to make up a name. Lavender cockfish, but he just shook his head.

  “Holy shit, man. I have no idea.”

  Buddy said, “Thing’s got a bigger dick than you do, Bobby.”

  The brothers, laughing, took pictures with the fish.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes, if the anglers were capable enough, he went it alone without other crew. Sometimes Eddie accompanied him. On rare occasions, about a few times a year, Henry Yahchilane, and then only to dip his own line in the water for a big fish that would feed him for a while.

  Grouper.

  Tuna.

  Swordfish.

  All fewer these days.

  Mangrove snapper. Red snapper. Yellowtail. Fewer too.

  Still, they had their lucky days out in the Gulf Stream.

  He’d forgotten. He’d forgotten how much he missed these days out in the sun, out in the water, on the boat far away from his problems and anxieties. How much he missed fishing those long peaceful blue hours out at sea, a line with bait sunk fathoms deep. Never knowing what he’d catch. What amazing oddity.

  The grouper as big as dune buggies out of the shipwreck depths. The amberjack, the wahoo, the cobia, the red snapper, the mangrove snapper, the yellow tail snapper. The African pompano. The triggerfish.

  DEEP SEA FISHING

  CROWE AND YAHCHILANE WOULD SPOT EACH other on the island and sometimes across the bridge and they’d tender a cursory wave or nod of the chin. And then when they did finally speak after a spell, Crowe was always taken by surprise how much time had passed since their last encounter. Several months, a year. The time, both men agreed, was sneaking up on them, all the more so with Crowe, so undifferentiated and foggy-headed were his days. When Yahchilane visited Crowe
’s beach house, it was to cadge a quarter or a half of ganja, which would tide him over for a year.

  * * *

  —

  Some years, Yahchilane would bring over some oddity or another in a mason jar with holes knifed out of the screw top lid. Look what turned up in my garden. Look what washed ashore. You ever seen anything like this?

  A kiwi-sized beetle, fever-hued, fluorescent pink with black speckled wings and a horn crowning its head.

  Never, Crowe would tell him. Not in his nature guides and illustrated books, not on his boat tours, which he was making less and less often these days.

  Or once it was a translucent squid the size of a pickle which, when it got dark or when you turned off the lights, pulsated with a soft lavender bioluminescence.

  Crowe would ask Yahchilane, “Ever tell you that time I saw a crab with, like, human teeth, man?”

  “Yeah. At least a dozen.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “A dozen.”

  On such occasions Crowe would worry that his memory was failing him, like what happened to his mother. Hard to tell how much was hereditary, how much was a result of his bad habits.

  MEET ME AT THE BEACH HOUSE

  A NURSE FROM THE POINCIANA NURSING Home called Crowe one blazing hot February morning. The nurse told him of his mother’s recent episodes. One, a stroke so small a few days ago that they were unsure if it was a stroke at all. Then another spell in the night.

  Spells. Episodes.

  Crowe didn’t have to ask questions. He knew from the faltering, soft-voiced way the woman was delivering the news.

  It was time, he knew.

  Time to bring his mother home to the beach house.

  Transporting her in the orange hatchback wasn’t an option. He went to Henry Yahchilane to borrow his van. Yahchilane told him he wasn’t about to let an egghead drive his van off the bridge and into the ocean. But he also said he was willing to drive. “Got errands to run down there anyway,” Yahchilane told him.