by Tom Cooper
“Hey,” Crowe said.
Beautiful Natasha, her long black hair shining in the porch light, asked Crowe if she woke him.
“Course not. You?”
“Did you wake me?”
“What? No. Is everything okay?”
“I’m horny.”
Crowe stood there mistrusting what he’d heard. His hearing, dodgier and dodgier these days.
He cleared his throat, scratched the crown of his head.
“I’m horny,” Natasha said again. Matter-of-factly, with no bashfulness. “It’s cold outside. Won’t you let me in?” Her dark wine-sleepy eyes full of light, her dramatic nose. A simper on her lips.
Crowe recalled what Yahchilane told him in the kitchen between coffee and the brandy. “Keep your dick away from my daughter or I’ll cut it off.”
Crowe was opening the door wider to let Natasha into the house when Yahchilane leapt out of the hedges flanking the walk. He was brandishing giant garden shears over his head, a handle in each hand.
“I warned you, you son of a bitch!” he shouted.
Crowe reared back, forearm raised as if to block a blow.
Then Yahchilane stopped and lowered the shears and laughed his panting dog laughter.
His daughter joined in, a feminine version of the same laughter.
For an instant Crowe was pissed. But almost as suddenly he was laughing with them.
“We couldn’t take my big mouth son anymore,” Yahchilane explained. “A hardcore Christian conservative. My own son. Can you believe it?”
“He got started on politics and now he and Tyrone are at it. We needed a break and snuck out,” said Natasha.
“Your face, the shears,” Yahchilane said.
That night they laughed and joked and listened to records, drank a few bottles of Crowe’s shipwreck wine until the wee hours of morning.
EBENEZER MCFORNICATION
SOME NIGHTS, WHEN HE WAS HELPING Eddie out with the Emerald Island Inn for extra cash and for something to keep him out of trouble and get him out of the house, Crowe night-managed the old motel. One night a woman complained about someone’s wee-hour debauch. There were, according to the woman, sounds of fornication coming from one of the rooms. Her words. The right side of her face was puffy and pink, somehow babyish, as if she’d just woken. It was past two in the morning and she wore a moss-green anorak rain jacket over her bedclothes. Crowe would have put her in her late fifties. She was tan and had a mole above her lip and her bottle-blond hair was clasped back with a hasp.
“There’s got to be some decency,” she said. Crowe reckoned her accent from Alabama.
Crowe, helping out like he did on occasion for Eddie, was in no mood. He asked the woman what room she was in.
She told him.
Honeymooners, Crowe explained. This was true. A check-in, earlier that day.
“It sounds like a porn shoot.”
“Who knows,” Crowe said. “Maybe it is.” Deliberately flip. This isn’t the Cincinnati HoJo, lady, he wanted to say. With her hand—without a wedding band, Crowe noticed—she clutched the collar of her coat together. He had in all his years of terminal bachelorhood and tomcatting made it a habit of looking there first.
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Ebenezer.”
A tight quick shake of the head. “What?”
“Ebenezer McFornication.”
“Goddamn you,” the woman said.
Crowe knew he was being an asshole. It was his girl’s birthday. His girl Otter’s birthday. Were she alive today she would have been thirty. It didn’t seem real to Crowe.
The woman demanded the manager.
Crowe bowed like a butler, flourish of the arms and all.
The woman eyed something on the side of his head. The joint tucked behind his ear. Half-finished and forgotten before now. Crowe, defiantly, made no gesture to remove it.
“You know what, I don’t like your attitude.”
He pointed to the complaint box, marked as such in handwritten Sharpie, standing atop the pamphlet rack. A repurposed orange crate from Webster Brothers Co. St. Cloud, Florida.
Shocking, how many people fell for this con over the years. Marching over there like they were going to save the world. Like they were amending the Constitution.
The Alabama woman spent a surreal three minutes writing on a complaint card. She slipped it in the box. She glared over her shoulder on the way out.
She was halfway across the lot going to her room when Crowe came out with the woman’s complaint card, lit it with his plastic lighter, and used the flame from the complaint card to ignite his joint.
She might not have noticed his presence if it weren’t for the flick of his BIC.
The woman in the overcoat turned. He’d not exhaled his first puff when she began to cry.
“Well, Jesus Christ, lady.” Suddenly Crowe felt awful. Like a cretin. “It’s just a joke. I’m the manager.”
There she stood in the crushed shell parking lot near the sizzling pink and turquoise neon of the sign. She put her face in her hands and kept crying.
Crowe stepped half the distance.
“Lady, I’m so sorry. Don’t cry now. I was just bein’ a jackass. I’m the manager. I’m the owner. Used to be. I was demoted. I was just joking.”
“Why would you do that?” she asked.
Her face was stricken with so much grief Crowe was at a loss. He flicked his joint, which now seemed doubly inappropriate, like a party hat at a funeral, into the crushed shell.
He heeled it out with his zorie.
The woman said, “I just got back from my ex-husband’s funeral.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry, lady. I was just having a bad day.”
It was a sticky windswept night, a taste of rain in the air. Thunder voicing out of the Gulf. Soon there would be one of those predawn downpours.
The woman stood in the light of the Emerald Island Inn sign, pretty in the pink and turquoise neon. Distressed, but pretty.
“Oh,” someone cried in one of the rooms. The apish grunt of a man deep in the throes of eros.
“Oh god, fuck me, daddy,” cried a woman.
“Oh, shit, baby,” said the man.
Even with their door closed and the curtains drawn, even from this distance, even with the first storm winds rattling the banyans and palms, they could hear the couple.
“Good god,” Crowe told the woman. “You weren’t kidding.”
She had her key fob in her hand. Her face was writhing with small tics, as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or shout.
“I’m sorry. So sorry. The room’s on the house.”
“No need.”
“Please, I insist.”
“We both had bad days.”
There they stood apart from each other, some emotional standoff, ten paces away.
The woman knuckled sudden tears from her cheeks. “Oh god, here I am. Crying in front of a perfect stranger. I mean, here I am. This is life.”
“I cry in front of strangers all the time.”
The man hollered again from the neighbor’s room. “Good goddamn fuck.”
“Serious fornication,” Crowe said.
The woman let out a little snort.
“I’m sorry for your husband. Wanna know something? Let me tell you something.”
“Tell me.”
“I was sad about my little girl tonight. Gone too. I took it out on the wrong person. That’s the truth. That’s it. As much as I understand myself.”
“I’m sorry for your girl.”
“It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s been a long time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’m sorry. Good night.�
�
She was at her door and Crowe was watching her key into her room when she said without turning, “Maybe we should try being nicer to one another, you know?”
“Yes,” he said, “I think you’re right. Truce.”
They approached each other with arms held out. They hugged a friendly hug. Crowe patted her on the back. He started to pry away but she held on. She drew him closer. She put her face into his T-shirt.
Later, he was on top of her and inside of her and she was clutching him and trying to pull him closer and deeper.
“How about the people next door?”
“Nobody there.”
“Over there?”
“Yeah. Nobody. Positive.”
And he was positive. Next door was Wayne Wade’s old room.
Crowe said into the woman’s ear, “God, you smell good.”
“Sh.”
“Are you sure this is okay?”
“Sh.”
“Goddamn, woman,” Crowe said as he thrust. “Yes.”
They lost themselves in each other as only people who would never see each other again could. They went at it like kids and every so often they laughed at themselves. They laughed into each other’s mouths. They were still at it when the first fits of the deluge fell.
And when the phone rang at the Emerald Island Inn reception desk, a complaint about a banging headboard, it went unheeded.
HER NAME WAS GABBY
HEIDI STILL CALLED ON OCCASION, TO check in, to ask about life on Emerald Island. She asked about Yahchilane. Nina and Eddie and their kids. Usually she could not disclose her whereabouts. She was in charge of ferrying works of art across countries, across continents, and there were always art thieves looking to hijack their vans and trucks in transit.
Sometimes she asked if he’d seen the doctor.
At her insistence he did, and this time, in his middle fifties, Dr. Vu surprised Crowe at the end of her visit by finally saying yes to one of his jokey advances.
“Really?” Crowe said, buttoning up his shirt on the paper-lined examination table.
The woman was an inscrutable imp to him.
Her answer was, “I don’t like your triglycerides. And I heard a heart murmur.”
“Do you like Italian?” Crowe asked her.
Her name was Gabby. He made lame jokes about her name. The gist being that she hardly spoke at all. Instead, Crowe was the gabby one. He found himself apologizing. “I like your voice,” she told him flatly, on one of their first dinner dates, perhaps the first compliment she’d tendered him.
“What is this?” he asked her.
“Does it have to be anything?”
The woman had a point. It was what it was.
“I think that’s the first compliment you’ve given me.”
“I like your general air of dishevelment,” she said, spearing a gnocchi with her fork and munching it.
“You think I’m disheveled.”
“It’s endearing.”
“I never considered myself disheveled.”
They saw each other once or twice a week, for dinner, a movie.
He caught her stealing occasional affectionate looks. Her small hands. Her smell, sandalwood and pomegranate shampoo. They spent many wordless evenings in the kitchen with Crowe’s stereo playing softly, she acting a line cook to his chef. Sometimes as he stirred the garlic sautéing in the skillet with a wooden spoon she would sneak up from behind and plant a kiss on the back of his neck.
Sometimes she’d spend the night. She was quiet but ferocious in bed. She liked being on top.
It was what it was.
One night he asked her what changed her mind about him. “Out of curiosity,” he said.
They were at his place in the sunroom, sitting on the reclining BarcaLoungers and watching the purpling sky above the Gulf. She curled her forefinger. She was mid-bite, her gnocchi. She finished chewing, not quickly, but at the same pace. The forefinger still curled before her cherub lips.
One of her little quirks that Crowe liked.
Finally she said, “I used to think you were silly.”
“I am.”
“Yes. Sometimes. But I used to think you were ridiculous.”
“A girl used to call me silly a lot.”
“Your daughter?”
“No, no.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay.” And it was.
Crowe thought of Otter less often. Until at last he thought of her only a few times a week. Around the holidays, around the girl’s birthday.
So much time had passed.
He supposed he’d forgiven himself.
And even when Crowe did remember her now, it wasn’t with the heartsick knife-through-the-ribs feeling of regret, but instead with a throb of melancholy nostalgia.
Gone so long, that sweet girl. Sometimes when school let out for the summer and the families came down from up north he would swear he heard amid the chatter of the crowd her laughter pealing.
And he was again reminded of her voice for a spell.
But the pain was gone.
He’d changed.
Or time had changed him.
“It’s okay to be silly sometimes,” Gabby told him finally.
“I think so.”
“I wish I were more silly sometimes,” Gabby confessed.
“Well, I find you very, very silly, for what it’s worth.”
“Do you, now?”
“That’s my official diagnosis, yes.”
WHOMP
ONE SUMMER SUNSET HE WAS IN a wine-buzzed mellow mood, Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus playing low on the record player. He was sitting in his cream leather BarcaLounger chair in the sunroom with the lights turned low. He had just had lunch with Gabby at the Blue Parrot diner.
That evening through the big Gulf-facing windows Crowe could see past the dunes, the late low sun making a wide copper swath on the dusk-calmed sea. A golden bridge.
A speckled trout fillet was thawing on the kitchen cutting board. He was drinking a glass of red wine. He lifted one of the wine corks out of the bowl beside the chair and held it to his nose. Wondering if he was smelling its scent or just his memory of it.
It was then that a huge pain like a hurled bowling ball struck him square in the chest. He dropped the cork. He dropped the wineglass and it shattered on the terrazzo. He grabbed at his chest and said, “Oh, man.”
Blood whomped in his ears.
There was a roar as if he were falling through a black void, the tear of wind ripping past his ears, and then Reed Crowe was dead.
SUGAR CUBES
THERE WAS NO FUNERAL. AS REED Crowe would have preferred. And the wake was a modest affair held on the beach behind Crowe’s home on a blustery gray day in September. Many of the old islanders were in attendance, a passel of people from up and down the coast who’d heard the news. SnoBall Larry and Adele the clover honey girl. Eddie with his wife, Nina, and their daughters, Mariposa and Maribelle. An archeologist named Baxter PhD from Gainesville, Florida. Myrtle and Moe with their shaggy beach dogs. Some old Florida Conchs from the Keys who’d heard the news from other old salts in the Panhandle. Chill Norton from the Pervy Mermaid. A few of Reed Crowe’s woman friends from over the years. Dr. Vu.
And among the mourners was Marlon Arango, now a citizen, now married to a Lebanese-American phlebotomist. Marlon himself worked on the docks of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale as a yacht mechanic. He owned a shop near Bahia Mar within sight of the Pier Sixty-Six Hotel, the one with the giant crown on top of it. Henry Yahchilane knew it well, passing it before taking the Las Olas Bridge over the Intracoastal on the way to the Swap Shop and old Thunderbird Drive-In.
“I bet
you got stories,” Yahchilane said, and he meant it. Those huge gleaming mansions on the sea, lined up and down the canals below the drawbridge. Vessels worthy of kings and queens. Who the fuck knew what went down on them.
“Oh, you’d be shocked. Even you, Mr. Yahchilane. Best saved for another day.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re all set.”
“Thank you, Mr. Yahchilane. I’m sorry for your loss.”
The remark took Yahchilane by surprise. “Oh. Yes. Well. Thank you.”
The mourners were still crowded on the beach when Henry Yahchilane waded out to his knees wearing his brown corduroy suit, the first time anyone on the island could recall seeing him in attire aside from jeans and denim. He opened the plastic bag of cremains and cast Crowe’s ashes into the water where blue-silver fingerling baitfish rose to the surface with nipping mouths.
Almost certainly illegal.
Fuck it.
It’s where he belonged.
* * *
—
After the eulogy they shared memories and anecdotes about Crowe.
Myrtle and Moe talked about Crowe’s deathly fear of the U.S. mail and post. “He’d think he was invisible in that orange car of his. The beard. The green shades. Like I didn’t see him. Like he was going incognito for the FBI. I’ve never seen a man with such aversion to U.S. mail.”
Everyone seemed surprised when Dr. Gabby Vu cleared her throat softly and spoke. “One time Reed, I guess you all called him Crowe, invited me to dinner,” she said. “I asked him what he was having. Reed said chicken potpie. Would you like to come? And I said sure.”
It was Dr. Vu who found him the day after his death, 1999. A few months before the Columbine shooting. They’d made plans to go to the Salvador Dalí museum, a day trip to St. Petersburg. She rang the bell. Tried the door. Locked, since all those problems years ago, since the bridge explosion. She tried his landline on her cellphone. No answer. She circumnavigated the house, the feral cats darting among the bamboo stalks and the crocus plants and the beach scrub. In the backyard she saw him. She saw him through the sliding glass door. It was partially ajar. Some of the cats were at his feet. One was in his lap. He was sprawled on the BarcaLounger in the sunroom. A glass of wine, half-finished, on the end table. His hand dangling, a wine cork on the terrazzo as if just fallen out of his clutch.