Naked Came the Florida Man

by Tim Dorsey

  It was ten minutes of dubious directions from the youth. “Take this left. Wait, the next left, that’s it. No, that’s not right. It’s farther up.”

  “Are you sure you know where we’re going?”

  “Positive.” Ricky clutched the hundred as if it was life itself. “Uh, could we go back to town and start again? I can figure it out better if we’re coming from Main Street. From this other way, I’m not so good.”

  “Jesus,” Crack said under his breath. But greed had gotten the better of him, and he was locked in for the ride, seeing nothing but piles of those coins.

  The Crossroads.

  If the intersection had one of those signposts with wooden arrows pointing different directions with names of places and mileage, all the arrows on this post would have said Nowhere.

  Three of the corners were empty except for concrete-block ruins with collapsed roofs, and weeds now grew where there had been carpeting.

  On the fourth corner sat a gas station that sold as much malt liquor as unleaded.

  Signs said No Loitering, at least under the spray-paint graffiti.

  Three young men lounged on a stoop. All high school graduates, all football players, all with onetime dreams of making the NFL. Now they spent their days here. This was not the NFL.

  Wasn’t their fault. Life had dealt them truly cruel hands of cards. If you take a hundred successful Wall Street types and have them born at the very bottom with no breaks, see how far they go. This particular trio all had jobs. The operative word was had. When the economy coughed, The Muck got pneumonia, and layoffs were a lifestyle. The three currently had a bunch of job applications submitted all over town, but where were the jobs? So they hung out here until something turned up.

  “Remember that pass I caught in the fourth quarter? Right sideline?”

  “You and that one freaking pass! All we ever hear: ‘Remember? Right sideline?’ Shit, I had three receptions that game.”

  “But all short yardage over the middle.”

  “Moved us into scoring position, didn’t it?”

  “Both of you are bullshit,” said the third young man. “Just remember who threw all those passes.”

  They stopped talking and watched as a lone vehicle slowly rounded the corner at the station and accelerated east. Magnetic door sign for a boat-towing company. They all sprang to their feet.

  “That son of a bitch!”

  “He’s back!”

  “And he’s got Ricky!”

  They piled into a low-riding Datsun and took off.

  “I knew that asshole was up to something, but I didn’t know what. He’s a pedophile!”

  “He’ll kill Ricky for sure if we don’t stop him!”

  “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

  “Screw that! We can take care of our own . . .”

  A mile out of town, Ricky pointed. “Turn here. This time I’m sure.”

  “If you say so.” The Dakota made a skidding left onto a dirt road.

  Moments later, a tricked-out Datsun sailed by the turnoff. “I don’t see his truck anymore.”

  “Drive faster. We’ll catch up . . .”

  Back in the cane field, Ricky hopped down from the pickup’s cab and climbed through a couple rows of stalks. “It was right around here somewhere.”

  “You don’t seem that sure.”

  Ricky stopped and stomped a foot into the black soil. “Right here.”

  “Exactly?” said Crack.

  Ricky nodded vigorously. “Take me back now.”

  “Are you joking? I gave you a hundred. Show me!”

  “How?”

  “Dig!”

  “What?”

  “If you’re so fucking sure, dig!”

  Panic now. Ricky got on the ground and scooped dirt with shaking hands.

  “Don’t keep looking up at me!” yelled Crack. “Pay attention to what you’re doing! Dig! . . .”

  Up the road, parked on the right shoulder, more panic. “We just got Ricky killed!” said the wide receiver.

  “Don’t say that!” yelled the tight end.

  “I knew we should have called the police,” said the quarterback.

  “What’s done is done. We need to chill out and figure this thing out. What would a pedophile do?”

  They looked all the way around the horizon. “Bring him out in a cane field,” said the wide receiver. “For privacy and body disposal.”

  “Don’t say that!” snapped the tight end.

  “He must have taken a turnoff.” The quarterback swung the car around. “Keep your eyes open . . .”

  Somewhere out in the stalks, small hands flung dirt. A whimper.

  Captain Crack had gotten back into the Johnnie Walker, swinging the bottle by his side. “What the hell are you crying about!”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Shut up and dig!”

  “I want my mommy.”

  Ricky never saw the open-handed slap coming. It cupped the side of his head over his ear and sent him sprawling.

  Louder crying now. “I didn’t find the coin. A girl did.”

  “You’ve been lying to me all along?” Slap. “Who is this girl?”

  “I don’t know! I swear!”

  Slap.

  “Kathy? Karen? I can’t remember . . .”

  Back on Highway 98, a Datsun was on a slow roll.

  “Wait! Stop!”

  “What is it?”

  “Back up! I saw his truck!”

  The quarterback threw the car in reverse, then barreled down the dirt road toward the parked Dakota. It skidded to a stop just as Ricky came bursting through the cane stalks, bloody nose, crying, ripped shirt.

  The quarterback got down on a knee and hugged the boy tight.

  Then another voice from an unseen source a few cane rows over. “Come back here, you little fucker!” The boat captain broke through the final row and stopped.

  The quarterback stood up. Without looking down at Ricky, he placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Go wait in my car.”

  Crack Nasty pointed at them with the hand not holding the bottle. “Now you listen here! I gave him a hundred dollars and we had a deal!”

  It was a short chase.

  They gang-tackled the captain only a few steps from where he started. The ensuing beating was not for the squeamish. Savage kicks to the ribs and head as Crack desperately tried to crawl for sanctuary that wasn’t there. More kicking and stomping in rage. It wasn’t thug life. It was family life. One of them found a stick and smashed it over his neck. Another hit him with a rock. A few more kicks and Crack finally rolled onto his back, an unconscious, bloody mess. But the kicking continued.

  The quarterback jumped in and grabbed the others. “Guys! Guys! Stop or you’ll kill him!”

  “So what?” Kick.

  “I feel the same way, but if you think our lives are shit now . . .” He looked back at the Datsun. “Plus we need to get Ricky home. His mother must be worried sick.”

  They took turns spitting on Captain Crack.

  Then the Datsun drove away.

  Chapter 22

  Port Mayaca

  The gold Plymouth picked up two-lane State Road 710, also known as the Bee Line Highway: an odd, almost perfectly diagonal shot northwest up through the unpopulated part of Palm Beach County, along the railroad tracks, through the Loxahatchee Slough, up past the old Pratt & Whitney aircraft-engine plant that brought thousands of transplants to the county in the early sixties. They reached Indiantown, and turned decidedly west on Route 76, into more and more nothingness.

  Coleman petted the pouch on his chest and looked out the window at scraggly woods. “Are we actually heading anywhere?”

  “Lake Okeechobee,” said Serge. “Another of our crown jewels, so huge it dominates photos taken from the Space Shuttle. And to hell with it: I’m going on the record right now, and will take on all comers. At seven hundred and thirty square miles, Okeechobee is the largest freshwater lake in the country. O
h, sure, everyone else says it’s the second biggest, behind Lake Michigan. But that one’s open at the top, mixing with Canadian water. How is that the record? Where were the referees on that one?”

  “It’s just not fair.”

  “Canada, Christ.” Serge shook his head. “Our lake is a damn force of nature. I like to think of it as Florida’s moon.”

  “How is it a moon?”

  “Give me some latitude on this, Judge Coleman, and I will show the relevance,” said Serge. “Earth’s moon is an oddity of our solar system, far closer and proportionately larger than any of the other planets’ moons. So much so that it creates our ocean tides, affects the seasons and even stabilizes Earth’s rotation, doing nothing less than making life possible at all. On a smaller scale, same thing with our freakishly large lake. Most Floridians have never seen it, and even fewer realize the overwhelming effect it has on the rest of the state. First, it collects much of the watershed in Central Florida, from the Kissimmee River and other sources. Then below it, the lake feeds the Everglades. And the extensive matrix of canals that were dug to channel its runoff created entire agricultural industries and—even more mind-blowing—the very dry land that allows much of South Florida, from Miami to Fort Lauderdale, to even exist. Otherwise, all the residents would be tits-deep in lily pads and gators instead of blissfully working skimming nets to scoop leaves from their swimming pools.”

  “I had no idea.” Coleman held his beer away from the pouch and looked down at his chest. “You’re not old enough.”

  “But here’s the kicker, and it’s a beauty . . .” Serge slowed and tracked their position on a GPS. “The Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 is still whipping up changes in the way we live, even to this day!”

  “How can a storm that old still be messing with us?”

  “I’ll tell you!” The Plymouth slowed even further. “The three thousand souls that were lost made it the second-worst natural disaster in the nation’s history, behind only the Galveston storm in 1900. Nobody saw it coming. Everyone was always preparing for storm surges from the ocean, but then that monster storm made a direct hit on the lake. And if you ever doubt how big that body of water is, imagine a tidal wave covering hundreds of square miles, much higher than virtually every house. First the storm’s rotation flooded all the communities along the southern shore. Then the backside of the hurricane hit, pushing water north through the city of Okeechobee. After all the burials, the federal government stepped in to prevent such a tragedy. They built the enormous Herbert Hoover Dike, a thirty-foot-high, one-hundred-and-forty-three-mile-long earthen berm surrounding the lake. That’s why so many people crisscrossing the state above and below the immense body of water never see it; they just dismiss it as a long grassy hill and have such screwed-up priorities that they aren’t curious to take one of the access ramps to the top and marvel. That’s why I’ve decided to carve out time and make the lake the culmination of our tour. Zora led us here.”

  “So we’re almost at the end?” asked Coleman.

  “Actually just beginning, but time folds in on itself.” The gold Satellite pulled over on the side of an empty road without a sign of life. “I intend to drop anchor, explore the lake in every detail and get a bone-deep understanding of her people. It’s an amazingly disparate culture: the old-cracker cattle ranchers up north with their rodeos, western-wear shops and steak houses; the impoverished farmworkers to the south; and all around, the visiting bass fishermen hoping to land that prized lunker.”

  Serge got out of the car with another large sheet of paper. He approached a green metal historic marker and began rubbing.

  Coleman arrived with the ferret peeking around. “Where are we?”

  Rub, rub. “Can’t you read?”

  “My eyes are having that focus problem again.”

  “We’re at Port Mayaca, a ghost town with ghosts.” Rub, rub. “Out in that field somewhere lie the remains of sixteen hundred victims of the storm. As usual, people finally realized they needed to erect this sign decades later.”

  “Sixteen hundred?” Coleman blinked a few times.

  “Right under our feet.” Rub, rub. “It’s important to remember.”

  “Shit! Dammit!”

  “I know the storm was a heartbreak—”

  “No, not that!” Coleman pointed.

  “How’d you let Mr. Zippy get away?”

  “He was too fast.”

  They began running around the field.

  “Hold on,” said Coleman. “I think I have some Doritos in my pocket.”

  “In your pocket?”

  “Just in case.” Coleman tossed one forward. “I think he’s going for it.”

  “Here, let me have one.” Serge crouched down and extended a hand. “It’s working.” The ferret stopped to nibble, and was gently picked up. “Give me that pouch!”

  “No!” Coleman turned sideways and clutched it. “I want to carry him.”

  “You’re obviously a bad influence,” said Serge.

  “I can change.”

  “Are we going to have a custody battle? The courts won’t look fondly on your substance intake.”

  “What about you waxing dudes?”

  Serge walked the legal proceedings through his head and saw them inevitably leading to foster care. “Okay, for now. Just keep on top of him.”

  The Plymouth drove a short distance farther west, over the train tracks, reaching Highway 98 and more emptiness. “Port Mayaca is another Florida settlement abandoned by time. Besides the cemetery, about the only other thing left, like a sore thumb out here, is that big white plantation-style house coming up on our left: the historic Cypress Inn, currently a private residence and on the National Register. Hard to imagine now that there was ever enough business to support the hotel, but once upon a time the constant, northbound winter railroad traffic of fresh vegetables made this a bustling corridor.”

  The Plymouth turned off the highway and drove up the incline of an access road. Serge got out with his camera, hitching a camping product to his belt.

  Coleman petted Mr. Zippy. “What’s that thing you put on your waist?”

  “Canteen for my coffee.” He uncapped it for a big chug, then re-capped it. “I just completed a blue-ribbon time-motion study on myself, and someone needs to get fired. The canteen was the number one recommendation in the report, because I’m so often reaching out a hand for coffee and coming up with a fistful of empty.”

  Coleman pointed in another direction. “Did we drive all the way to the ocean?”

  “No.” Click, click, click. “We’re on top of the dike. That’s the lake.”

  “That’s the lake?” said Coleman. “I can’t even see the other side. And we’re way up honkin’ high!”

  “That’s how it got its name.” Click, click, click. “The Seminole word for big water.”

  “There’s like a row of weird clouds all spaced out,” said Coleman. “Wait, each of them has a little thing stretching to the ground like a tornado. But they’re black like smoke. Is something on fire?”

  “That would be the sugarcane fields burning over the horizon on the opposite shore. The size of those clouds should give you some idea of the scale of those blazes. They need that to get rid of the leaves and weeds before the harvesting machines come through.”

  Coleman looked the other way, at something much closer. “What’s that?”

  “The Port Mayaca Lock and Dam.” Click, click, click. “Something else people don’t realize is that you can sail clear across the state of Florida, from Fort Myers to Stuart, along the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers. But there’s a series of five locks in order to raise the vessels to get to the lake, then a clear shot across a bass fishermen’s paradise before the rest of the locks lower the boats back down to sea level. Like the Panama Canal except bigger. Not as wide, but much longer. So I’m going on the record right now with that as well. Fuck ’em.”

  Coleman looked left and right. “If this is Port Mayaca, where’s the p
ort?”

  “Pretty much just that lock,” said Serge.

  “What’s the big gate-looking thing next to it? Part of the lock?”

  “No, that’s the spillway,” said Serge. “Remember when I told you the 1928 hurricane was still surprising people in ways they never dreamed?”

  “Not really, but go on.”

  “So remember when we were on the coast in Stuart last year? Remember the smell?”

  “Oh, my God! That stink is still in my head again,” said Coleman. “I’ve never smelled anything so nasty in all my life!”

  “That’s what everyone said.” Click, click, click. “And at first, because they don’t know how the state’s ecosystem is interconnected, they couldn’t figure it out. They just saw all this thick green sludge completely blanketing the coastal inlets, up through the Intracoastal Waterway to the boating canals behind homes, like an ice floe. The stench was so bad that it emptied beaches and restaurants, and residents were held prisoner in their homes with scented candles, praying the air-conditioning didn’t give out.”

  “What was it?”

  “It all started here, forty miles away,” said Serge. “The Hoover Dike is getting old, and the Army Corps of Engineers has been sounding the alarm for years that it’s in desperate need of repairs or the next hurricane could breach, just like the levees failed in New Orleans during Katrina. So when the water levels get too high, as a precautionary step they open the spillways, releasing millions of gallons of water. Same thing simultaneously happened on the Gulf coast when they opened the gates at Moore Haven.”

  “But how did that cause the stinky green slime?”

  “The Corps of Engineers caught a lot of flak, but it wasn’t their fault. Their only responsibility is protecting life and property from a dike failure. The problem is that, over the years, the lake has become chock-full of nitrogen-rich fertilizer runoff. Some is back-pumped into the lake by Big Sugar, but probably just as much or more was carried down the Kissimmee River from the pasture and cattle land south of Orlando. The resulting algae bloom could easily be seen from space—I’m kind of hung up on the reference point right now. But oddly, it didn’t get much national press, and if you weren’t there, you couldn’t imagine the extent of the environmental disaster. Beautiful, flowing waterways just choking to death, rotting fish, no-swimming signs. For the first time, thousands of people on both coasts became acutely aware of this faraway but dominant lake. Our moon.”