Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Crowe, a tumbler of hot buttered rum in hand, surveyed the hundreds of hardback spines peering augustly down from the walls.

  There was a big Oxford English Dictionary on the pedestal. The pages were onion-skin thin and slick to the touch. The kind of book you found yourself wiping your fingers on your pants before touching. An august tome, big as a gravestone, as imposing.

  In it was a rawhide bookmark that said CATAWBA. His eye skimmed and lit upon a word.

  “ ‘Haecceity’—the quality that makes a person, being or thing describable as ‘this’; its ‘thisness,’ the property that declares an entity’s singularity, performs its individuation.”

  * * *

  —

  For the meal Yahchilane sat at the head of the big Viking table under the stained glass chandelier the size of a lemon tree. Across from him was Natasha. Catty-corner from Natasha, Crowe. He tried not to stare at the woman. Her pretty eyes.

  Natasha must have caught a whiff of potpourri because she eyed him. “Why do you smell like frankincense?” she asked.

  “Say what now?” Crowe said.

  Natasha smiled a small knowing smile. Her black hair spilled down her back lustrous as a raven wing. Crowe tried not to think of Nina’s black hair. Every so often he still felt a heartsick pang for the woman. Then he’d feel foolish. Maybe he more missed that time in his life, so unlike the eras before and after.

  The waning evening showed through the big beach-facing windows. A few ruby fingers of daylight left. A melancholy lavender settling over the sea.

  The glass threw back their reflections. The lot of them sitting at the long Viking table under the brassy light of the chandelier. The fire crackling in the big coral-rock fireplace.

  He held up his fork, heaping with the gravy-soaked mashed potatoes. So warm steam was still wafting off. The comforting warmth of the food in his stomach. Piano, Professor Longhair, played softly on the stereo. Notes quick and rippling soft like the burble of a water fountain.

  Crowe could not recall food this delicious. His standard meals were austere. Fish and chicken, peppers from the garden because he liked his food spicy. The rare concession to green vegetable matter.

  But this food. The almond haricot beans. The cranberry sauce that tasted faintly of orange zest. The stuffing with bourbon-soaked pecans dusted with brown sugar. The buttered biscuits that he used to sop up the peppery gravy.

  “God, this is great. Thanks, folks.”

  “Daddy cooked it. Not me.”

  “Yahchilane. A cook.”

  Natasha said, “A curmudgeon.”

  “Haecceity,” said Reed Crowe. “Ha.”

  “Here we go with the nonsense,” said Yahchilane.

  There was a man at the table, Seacoffee, who said he could trace his heritage back to twelve hundred AD. Timucuan Indians. He told the table that his ancestors lived in a small village built atop a shell mound. Oyster shells, left over from what they ate to survive.

  Seacoffee asked them, “You ever notice those hill-like things when you’re driving through Florida? Easy to spot, ’cause the state’s so damn flat. I seen one as far north as Paines Prairie one time. Just south of Gainesville. Still got buffalo there. And still got some mounds. Couple’a stories, wouldn’t you say, Yah?”

  Yahchilane finished chewing his food. Swallowed. Wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Sometimes, I’ve seen some as tall as sixty feet.”

  “Well, my relatives come from one of those mounds you seen. Not the sixty-foot. My Uncle Bert was afraid of heights.”

  “Bert?”

  “It was a joke, Crowe,” Yahchilane said.

  Crowe stroked his beard. He looked at Seacoffee. “You know, I’ve found these things. Maybe you ought to take a look.”

  Crowe explained the artifacts to Seacoffee and to the rest of the table. About half a minute into his spiel he regretted the impulse. Ill-begotten at best. He worried that he sounded like a blathering drunk.

  “And one time Yahchilane said it looked like the guy was smoking,” Crowe heard himself saying. He could feel his face redden, the scorch of embarrassment in his cheeks. He was thankful for the concealment of his beach bum beard.

  He went on, “I said it looked more like a snake. Like maybe he had snakes coming out of his head, you know? But maybe smoke makes sense. Did they smoke back then? Tobacco, I mean? Or anything? Snakes, I thought snakes because it looks like a crown, you know?”

  Seacoffee said to Crowe, “Well, I wouldn’t go having a mudpull over them.”

  “Yeah. No. Of course not.”

  Yahchilane told his friend Seacoffee that Crowe had been in touch with some academics from the state universities, which seemed to satisfy Seacoffee.

  Seacoffee told Crowe, “I don’t know what that cult-ass stuff is you’re talking about, but I can tell you it’s not my tribe.”

  The badinage grew drowsy. The firelight waned.

  Crowe cleared his throat. He proposed a toast. Cleared his throat again. He started to stand, knees knocking the underside of the table. But the table was so imposing and sturdy no one took notice. Crowe sat back down. Everyone at the table watched. Waited. An expectant air presided over the table.

  He cleared his throat again. Then he hoisted his glass. “I want to drink to Yahchilane calling me an egghead. I don’t mind it.”

  “All right, cool it, Christmas Eyes.”

  The grandchildren, four kids middle-school-aged, sat on the other end of the table, talking about something called Super Mario Bros.

  “I know nothing of your father,” Crowe said to Yahchilane’s kids. “He’s a complete enigma.”

  Henry Yahchilane sat there stoically chewing his bread.

  The clink and clatter of forks and knives on plates.

  A friend of Yahchilane’s, a black man named Tyrone who’d served with Yahchilane in the war, said, “We called him the Enigma, the platoon.”

  “No kidding?”

  Tyrone nodded, laughed, sipped his wine.

  “He hates talking about himself,” said the daughter, Natasha.

  “He hates talking, period,” said the son, Seymour.

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “He’s the worst conversationalist,” said the son.

  “It drove our mom crazy,” said Natasha.

  “You gotta pick your battles,” said Yahchilane. “The woman’s a motormouth.”

  “Let’s watch it,” said Seymour.

  “I couldn’t hear any more. It was just another noise in the room.”

  There was a four-foot-and-a-half nut-brown woman with snow-white hair, a cousin of Yahchilane’s, next to Crowe. So far quiet, now she said, “We always thought he was mysterious. All my girlfriends had a crush on Hank.”

  Natasha, “But he always says he loves us.”

  Crowe, again, “He calls me egghead.”

  Now Yahchilane’s kids were laughing.

  Crowe, “This is delicious. Thanks, folks, for having me.”

  They were finished with dinner and everyone was still drinking wine when Natasha and Seymour shared humorous stories about Yahchilane’s childhood.

  Crowe egged the kids on. Everybody started getting a little tipsy. Tyrone said he’d chip in money. Crowe got his red-wine face. His coarse-grained Scots-Irish teeth showing purple as he threw his head back with laughter.

  “Go on, go on, more, man, you’re makin’ my night, man.” Crowe pouring wine for everybody as Yahchilane chewed stolid, turtle-like. “I’ll pay you for more stories. Five bucks a story. Ten bucks a story.”

  Crowe lifted a buttock, groped for an imaginary wallet.

  “Keep on smoking dope, Christmas Eyes,” said Yahchilane.

  “Daddy,” said Natasha.

 
; “It was a joke. You guys joke. I can joke.”

  “You’re so deadpan, Daddy, maybe he doesn’t know,” said Natasha.

  “The deadpan enigma,” said Tyrone.

  Crowe, “I’ll agree with you except the pan part, Natasha.”

  Yahchilane chewed on his bread.

  “Okay, I got one for you,” Natasha said. “My daddy worked for Burdines Department Store. It’s true. A model. That’s how he met our mother.”

  “They gotta have separate Christmases,” Yahchilane’s son said. “Because they act like infants. They can’t act like adults. So they split Christmases up.”

  “I won’t say a bad word about your mother.”

  “You’ve been sayin’ bad about her all night,” said Seymour.

  “Oh, I mean it affectionately.”

  “Motormouth, a term of endearment?”

  “Oh, enough horseplay,” said Natasha.

  “I’m sure I deserve it. I’m difficult to live with. Which is why I live alone.”

  “All this makes him sound so bad,” Natasha told Crowe. “Daddy always told us he loved us. Every night.”

  ZEST

  REED CROWE REMARKED THAT YAHCHILANE’S CRANBERRY sauce was probably the best he’d ever tasted. He lifted a hand, showing a palm. As if swearing on a courtroom Bible.

  “Wow, you really dig the cranberry sauce,” said Tyrone, Henry’s war friend.

  “Never cared for it. But this? Love it.”

  “Cranberry sauce man,” said Tyrone.

  “I’m a convert. Full-blown.” Crowe asked what the secret was.

  Yahchilane, a brow cocked, tearing off a hunk of his biscuit, said, “Secret?”

  “The cranberry sauce. The secret ingredient. Because I’m getting something.”

  “Orange zest,” Yahchilane said. He chewed the chunk of his biscuit.

  “Orange zest,” Crowe mused. “I would have never guessed.”

  “Orange zest man,” said Tyrone. “The man digs zest.”

  “I’ve never seen anybody so excited over zest.” Natasha laughed. “You sound like you’re about to break into song.”

  “The zest man,” said Tyrone.

  Over the course of the evening, Crowe had learned that Natasha worked at an investment firm in New York, inside the Twin Towers. Crowe was unsettled by how attractive he found Yahchilane’s daughter. Because she was Yahchilane’s daughter.

  Natasha had her father Henry’s same sharp cheekbones. But her eyes were very large, big indigo eyes. Her laughter was earnest and full-bodied, smoky and quick. Not like Yahchilane’s gruff bark. Which Crowe had heard all of how many times? Seven, eight? Surely he could count on both hands.

  Her brother, Seymour, who was an adjunct professor, art therapy, seemed more like his father. Dour.

  Over the course of the evening Crowe had been aware, peripherally, of Seymour’s mounting ire. Truth of the matter, his attention was fixed on Natasha. But at one point he overheard Seymour mention Rodney King. Another time it was the misallocation of Florida Lottery funds.

  Now it was on to Thanksgiving. Which, according to Seymour, was complete bullshit.

  “You see me in a damn pilgrim outfit?” Yahchilane asked his son.

  Sitting catty-corner to Crowe, Tyrone shot Crowe a covert look of supreme wariness from across the table. He mouthed quickly, very distinctly, “Every year.”

  “I’m just saying, here we are. Thanksgiving.”

  Yahchilane told his son that his broadsides were sophomoric. “I like turkey. You see me with a musket and a powder horn?”

  “You two cool it,” said Natasha.

  “How are those Seminoles this year?” Yahchilane asked. He made a tomahawk gesture with his arms.

  Tyrone hummed the Florida State Seminoles war chant.

  Seymour was looking down at his plate, chewing small quick bites of his food.

  “What an evening,” Crowe said, to break the tension.

  Seymour turned to Crowe and asked what he meant.

  Crowe stroked his beard. He gestured vaguely.

  In the great coral stone fireplace a log crumbled. Embers helixed up, blue and orange sparks. There was a soft tumbling ashy sound. Charles Mingus, Pithecanthropus Erectus, played faintly on the stereo speakers.

  It was a beautiful evening, Crowe remarked. He looked around the table. And meant what he’d said. The pastel gradients of the Gulf dusk laddering down into the horizon. The fire cracking, and in the huge glass windows facing the sea the room was full of mellow honey light, reflected and superimposed over the panorama of the beach.

  “What’s your last name again?” Seymour asked Crowe.

  “Crowe.”

  He leaned forward, one forearm on the great Viking table. “Why are you laughing? I’m asking a serious question.”

  “Would you like more cranberry sauce, Reed?” Natasha asked.

  Natasha passed the blue china tureen. Crowe helped himself to a few dollops while Seymour brooded. He had his elbows on the table and his hands stitched together over the plate.

  Seymour asked about Crowe’s family history in the area. His ancestry.

  Crowe cleared his throat. “A lot of that stuff, lost in hurricanes. Ledgers, records, yeah.”

  “Convenient,” Seymour said.

  “Seymour,” Natasha said.

  Crowe went on. “A little bit of everything. Scots-Irish on my mother’s side. My father’s side, all mixed up.” He continued, almost involuntarily, so unnerved he was by Seymour’s interrogator’s gaze. “My grandfather was a rum runner. That I know. I know he worked with Capone. That’s fact. I have the pictures somewhere. I’ll show you sometime. If you like.”

  Truth was, Crowe couldn’t help but wonder if they were somehow culpable, his relatives, in the abuse of the Natives. He supposed they were. No doubt they had to employ some Seminoles and Calusa Indians. He thought of the Seminoles digging postholes under water. How they labored and cleared the way, backbreaking work in the hammering Florida sun, all for pennies, so the massive steamboats could lumber and tear like beasts through the lettuce bogs.

  Finally, nodding, as though agreeing with himself, Crowe said, “So, a lot of stuff in the bloodline.”

  Seymour said, “You can take tests these days.”

  “Genetic you mean?” Crowe said. “Do they extract your zest?”

  “Zest man,” said Tyrone.

  Natasha laughed.

  Even Yahchilane’s Fu Manchu mustache moved a little.

  “You think it’s a joke,” Seymour said.

  “I’m sorry. Just trying to liven things up.”

  The small nut-brown woman with cotton-white hair who’d said nothing all night put a hand on the sleeve of Seymour’s brown corduroy suit. “You’re beginning to sound like one of those crazies.”

  “Come on, Aunt Georgette.”

  Yahchilane, looking levelly at his son, said, “He gets mixed up in these political causes and he’s getting scammed. Oh, oh, blood quantum this, blood quantum that. That whole fucked-up political world.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s important. But don’t try to be something you aren’t. You ate Cheerios like everybody else. Acting like you were born in a wigwam.”

  “You did. You grew up in a village.”

  “So what? That makes you more authentic? You? I was forced to do that.”

  The kids went back to gabbing about Nintendo. The bamboo wind chimes clanged mellowly.

  After dinner, Yahchilane stepped up to Crowe in the kitchen. “Hey, man.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You look at my daughter, I’ll cut off your dick.”

  Crowe was shocked. “What?”
r />   Tyrone stepped up to Crowe. “Relax, brother. He’s fooling with you. Have a beer.”

  Crowe sipped the fresh beer. He asked, “What’s that mean, Christmas eyes, Yahchilane?”

  At the big Viking table, the kids were now playing Uno, arguing about who’d bent one of the cards in the corner. “I’ll whip your face, motherfucker,” said one.

  “Cool it,” said the small nut-brown woman. Her voice was surprisingly large and commanding.

  The kids settled.

  Yahchilane told him, “Christmas eyes. Your eyes. Red, green, and white.”

  “In that order?”

  * * *

  —

  The last time Crowe heard Henry Yahchilane laugh was later that night. The party sputtered out and Crowe knew it was time to leave after the card game though he would have happily stayed. Wanted to stay. But he told everyone good night and they rose from their chairs and shook his hand and asked him if he was sure he didn’t want a nightcap.

  Bushed, Crowe told them.

  Yahchilane and Natasha walked Crowe down to the beach. It was almost eleven. A light winter-kissed breeze. Sweater weather.

  “Sure you don’t want a ride?” Natasha asked.

  “He’s fine,” Yahchilane said.

  “I’m good,” Crowe said. And he was. He started walking home. Waved over his shoulder.

  The clouds were gone and the moon was late and small, a sharp pewter dime high in the sky. The yuletide stars many.

  “Hey, egghead,” Yahchilane called. “Just remember, go straight. Left, that’s the ocean.”

  “Daddy,” Natasha said, mock-scolding.

  About forty-five minutes later, Crowe had his clothes off and was in his robe when there was a soft inquisitive rapping at his front door.

  “Hello?” Crowe called.

  “Reed,” a woman said.

  “Natasha?” Reed said.

  “Hey, you still awake?”

  Crowe went to the door. Locked, and with the burglar chain clasped, a precaution he never observed before Catface.