Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  TWICE A MONTH, EVERY OTHER SUNDAY, Crowe visited his mother. The Poinciana Nursing Home was in Fort Lauderdale, on the opposite coast of Florida, a three-hour drive across the dicktip of the state. South down I-75, east across Alligator Alley, north up I-95.

  Before going to the nursing home Reed Crowe went to a place called Fran’s Chicken Haven on Federal Highway and Glades in Boca Raton, the best fried chicken ever in his considered opinion.

  His mother’s too.

  They sat at one of the white concrete benches near the hibiscus garden in the nursing home commons. Picking at the chicken and macaroni salad. Wiping the grease off their fingers and lips with paper napkins. Watching the anhingas in the pond with the fountain in it. Sipping through straws their fountain ginger ales from the giant Styrofoam cups before the ice got too melted.

  They talked about random things. The weather. The crime in Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Oprah Winfrey. Crowe’s mother, Shelly, loved this new talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

  There was no longer much family left living to speak about. Her kin scattered like dandelion thistle. Good-hearted, wholesome Scottish Conchs, a tight-knit clan, but now all over the map and with Fort Lauderdale so deep south it was just about the tropics.

  Her room was large and sunny. And always when Crowe visited there were other people in her room. At least a few of her retirement village friends. A nurse or two. And if it wasn’t in her room he found her, it was in the aquatic center or dining room or garden. The bingo hall.

  Sometimes Crowe would have to explain things to her like a child. This was in the beginning, when Crowe was telling her the truth. But it was too difficult, because he’d have to tell her the truth over and over again. Every visit.

  “There’s been an accident, Mama,” he used to say, willing patience into his voice.

  She’d lift her head off the pillow of the nursing home bed. She blinked at him, her foggy emerald eyes uncomprehending. She thought he was talking about a broken bone, a knocked-out tooth.

  Not life or death stuff.

  It was almost as though he needed to tell her his life story every time he saw her.

  A Magic 8 Ball, his mother’s head. Much like his, except the wine and pot was probably to blame. Except was it? There was no way of knowing, since Crowe eschewed the doctor. He saw Dr. Vu as little as he could.

  He had a troglodyte’s fear of doctors.

  Other times his mother mistook him for her high school sweetheart.

  Other times, she’d recognize him as her son and he’d have to explain where Otter was all over again.

  “Otter?” she asked. “Otter’s in the hospital? Is she in the hospital? Is she on this floor? Let’s go see her. We’ll get ice cream sundaes.”

  This time, his mother asked, “How’s Otter?”

  Her roommate was watching Sanford and Son on the television. The theme playing.

  “She’s good.”

  “I keep on forgetting the grade.”

  “High school,” Crowe would say.

  “My. Already? Already? And what schools, what schools is she going to? She will be going to school, right? A home wife, no life for Otter.”

  “Elizabeth, this is the big one,” said the character Fred Sanford to his son. “Elizabeth, this is the big one.”

  Twenty minutes later, Crowe’s mother asked, “And Otter? How is Otter? She’s in school today?”

  Crowe said she was, just as if he hadn’t answered the question minutes ago.

  “I miss her.” She sipped her ginger ale through her straw.

  “She misses you too,” Crowe said.

  IN THE CLINK

  IN THE BROWARD COUNTY JAIL, IT was bologna sandwiches for meals. Baked beans. Apple slices, the flesh long turned brown.

  The smell. The smell, by god. In the way of a lavatory they had a single aluminum toilet, flat out right in the open, for some twenty-five or thirty criminals. Some mere miscreants, others shrieking bedlamites, still others outright murderers.

  All with one pot to shit and piss in.

  One guy, a grown man with an abnormally small head, coconut-sized. Wayne Wade would have placed from Alabama by his accent was bashing his head into the bars over and over again. “Mama. I need you. Mama. Mama.”

  “Stomp that motherfucker’s head like an acorn,” one black man said. He was tired of the caterwauling.

  “Do it,” said the guard down the hall.

  “Stomp that motherfucker’s head flat as a pancake,” the black man said.

  “Do it,” said the guard.

  When the black man rose and the small-headed man turned and noticed, he at once realized the gravity of his situation. Coconut head or not, he wasn’t so dim-witted after all. He shut up and went to the corner where he sat despondently.

  Mostly the men were taciturn. Their hard-bitten faces said, Don’t you fuck with me.

  Florida men of the hardest sort.

  Still, there was occasional palaver.

  “What they got you for?” said one man to another.

  “Ridin’ a horse on I-95.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No shit. I didn’t know you can get a DUI ridin’ a motherfuckin’ horse.”

  “How can you get a DUI on a horse? No, you cain’t.”

  “Oh, yes, you fuckin’ can.”

  “You ride a horse. You don’t drive it.”

  “No shit.”

  “That don’t make no sense.”

  “No, it don’t.”

  “You should’a called your lawyer. You got fucked.”

  “I did. I did call my lawyer. And as soon as I get outta here, I’m gonna kill him.”

  Wayne watched and listened all the while from his corner, one bony butt cheek hanging off the edge of the hard metal bench.

  “You mind scooting over a bit?” he asked the man next to him.

  Nothing.

  “Hey, buddy?”

  Nothing.

  Wayne gave up.

  He tried not to look at the faces. He didn’t want to invite trouble. The merest glance might set off god knows what. He did not want his head stomped like an acorn. Or a pancake.

  * * *

  —

  It was among this motley crew of felonious riffraff that a man by the name of Hector Morales, alias Catface, was ushered into the overcrowded holding pen by a bullfrog-faced bailiff. The man, Hector Morales, wore a bespoke Panamanian suit of fine butterscotch silk. His face was ravaged with scars. The face looked like a mass of scored putty.

  There were a few cat whistles once he entered. A few double takes. A few looks of unguarded repulsion. The kind of naked wonderment a child might wear after beholding roadkill. An animal slaughter on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

  “Ugliest motherfucker I ever seen,” said one man. This the same big bald black man as earlier.

  At first Catface seemed not to have heard. He stood with a kind of prim soldierly vigor, but looser in bearing, his loafers spaced evenly apart, his arms clasped behind his back. He stood this way for thirty seconds, until the clocking of the bailiff’s footsteps retreated down the hall and then turned.

  Finally Catface turned and went up to the man who’d made the remark.

  “Yes. That’s me. How es you?” He held out his hand for a handshake. The “how es” cartoonish, lampooning himself.

  The man cast a dubious look around at his cellmates. “You dig this ugly motherfucker?” Then, turning to Catface, he said, “Get lost.”

  Catface kept his hand out. “No shake?”

  “You better get lost before you get stomped.”

  “Stomp?”

  “Smash your buttfuck ugly bacon-looking head like a grape.”

  Catface kept h
is hand out, no change in his posture. He appeared almost a statue, frozen in this amiable stance. A petrified city park mime.

  The cellmates watched, their craggy felonious faces waiting to see how this episode would unfold. Another story of the many in their books, this.

  When the black man rose from the bench ready to belt him, Catface lashed out.

  Wayne Wade did not see the blade. No one saw the blade. It must have been a razor, playing-card flat, secreted in some fold of his bespoke clothing. A hidden pocket. The blade was out like a catclaw and then it vanished just as quickly, but in the interim the man’s arm was slashed deep at the wrist.

  The man screamed and blood was everywhere. Spraying. The man was so enraptured and repulsed by the sight of his own blood that he’d all but forgotten the catfaced man.

  Then the man with the face like a vivisection started clapping rhythmically. He stomped an alligator skin shoe against the concrete floor. In a mellifluous throaty tenor he hummed a few bars of a familiar song. Then he sang, “Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins number one.”

  Wayne Wade marveled, how quickly the Cuban roused the whole motley lot of them.

  Catface gestured between claps.

  As soon as one man stood and tentatively started to sing then another man joined and then five voices became seven and before long most of the reprobates in the cell were stomping like a group of revelators, smacking their hands, stirring up a gospel tent racket.

  “Yes,” they sang, “we’re the Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins number one.”

  The bald man banged his head on the jail cell bars. He kept wailing for his mother.

  The criminals crooned on, their voices drowning his. “We’re in the air, we’re on the ground, we’re always in control.”

  The guard shouted from down the hallway. “All right, assholes.”

  His footsteps approached, a peevish clip. But then they turned away, and his own singing trailed off. “And when you say Miami, you’re talking Super Bowl.”

  Their voices grew. Their stomping. Now the chorus was so loud Wayne Wade’s tinnitus flared up. A shrill treble trembled in his inner ear.

  “All right, assholes,” the guard said again, but now there was a smile in his voice. He joined in. “Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins.”

  When the chant reached a crescendo, the scar-faced man stepped onto the supine man’s skull. He pressed down with his loafer.

  The voices started to peter. But then the Cuban motioned preacher-like, gesturing expansively with his arms in exhortation.

  Uncertainly the men resumed their chant.

  “Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins, Miami Dolphins.”

  They watched, some enthralled and others aghast. Mostly, though, and most frightening to Wayne Wade, they looked indifferent.

  As though they’d seen worse. Far worse.

  The Cuban stepped harder, harder.

  The man’s head began to cave like a rotting gourd, his berserk yelling drowned out by the hollering.

  Then the eyeballs popped out of the man’s skull. His swollen tongue lolled out with a gush of blood. With a final wracking spasm the man went still.

  Dead.

  The Miami Dolphins chant abruptly stopped.

  “Mama!” wailed the bald man.

  The noise drew the guard back and they could hear his big bulge of keys jangling against his thigh.

  The men, eyes dropped noncommittally to the gray institutional concrete, would say nothing when the guard came.

  He gaped at the bloody pulpy mess on the floor. “What happened here?” he said. “What the fuck is this?”

  The motley crew kept mum.

  “All right,” the guard said. “All right, you fucks. Have it your way.”

  “Chuck!” the guard yelled.

  “Yeah,” Chuck, the youngest and newest guard, the lackey, said back.

  “Get a mop. Somebody’s head got smashed.”

  The young man’s aggrieved voice came down the hall, “Oh jeez, you gotta be kidding me.”

  NGANGA PALO MOYOMBE

  HIS NAME WAS HECTOR MORALES, ALIAS Catface, the man with the scarred face. A Cuban refugee from the Mariel Boatlift. Late April 1980, aboard one of the first waves Castro sent after the Soviet Union collapsed and cut off Cuba’s goods. Around that time Jimmy Carter granted a certain number of Cubans asylum. Castro, feeling betrayed, crammed the boats bow to stern with reprobates. Here you go, Jimmy.

  Child molesters and serial rapists and drug warlords.

  The immigrants who were trying to come legally, they had to wait for the lottery.

  The criminals, they got a first-class ticket.

  Catface, the man with the face so maimed even the most self-possessed people did double takes, was on one of the first boats.

  His face, like it had been shredded with a pitchfork, sewn back together by a maniac surgeon.

  The day’s ride across the water was a hellish odyssey. The biblical heat, the heavy chop of the waves roiling his guts. All of them massed and stinking on the boat, standing room only. Seasick men scrambled for a place to puke but there was nowhere except over the gunwale and sometimes they didn’t make it in time.

  One reedy straw-hatted man got sick on someone’s sandaled feet.

  The man in sandals stabbed the straw-hatted man in the gut with a box cutter. The man staggered off to a corner and sat whimpering with his back against the gunwale and his hand clutched to his stomach, his blood seeping blackly through his fingers.

  The other men kept their distance.

  Nothing to be done.

  After he slumped and bled out and died a few men consorted and finally threw the dead man overboard into the water. The man floated facedown, his white shirt so dirty and old it was the yellow of aged ivory. The khaki pleated pants, the sewn-up back pocket. A lone seagull lit on his back and watched the boat frothing away into the distance as the men with tight sun-cured faces watched the bird.

  A picture of the landing of Catface’s boat was on the front page of the Miami Herald, commemorating his first legal step on American soil. Men young and old and middle-aged shirtless and filthy from the journey stepping off the boat onto American soil. Men with hard-bitten faces. In the background among the mass of people, among these faces, was a visage so warped it appeared an optical illusion. A smudge on the lens. A trick of light.

  No.

  Catface.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, what a strange and twisted journey it was that delivered him to America. How far his travels from the domino tables of his youth, the hardpacked yard with the scraggly chickens and the slat-ribbed dogs, the droughted citrus trees reared against the dun hills.

  Catface’s father, a farm worker, believed him cursed.

  One morning Catface’s father found a small black cauldron left on the doorstep of their shack overnight. An occulted-looking thing likely crafted by witches in some old twisted wood. The cauldron was spiked with railroad rivets and barbed wire and sharp rusted metal, wrapped around with chains and old-fashioned padlocks. Amid the rust and dried blood were feathers, a small rodent bone, a hoof.

  A nganga, the cauldron.

  Black magic. The black arts.

  And this, a scary grimoire. The nephew knew it too.

  “Nganga Palo Moyombe,” he said.

  “Enough, boy,” Catface’s father told his nephew. “Get that fucking thing away.”

  “How?”

  “Up your ass, boy.”

  “Where?” the nephew asked.

  “I don’t care. In your mother’s ass. Get it out.”

  “Should I get gloves?” The kid would later describe the nganga to his friends as a rusted metal octopus. Tentacles of
barbed wire and chain and razor blades.

  Hector Senior said, “That thing will blast this whole neighborhood into eternal hell.”

  * * *

  —

  Catface, Hector Junior, was born with a cleft palate and Hector Senior, his father, a degenerate gambler and drunk, was convinced black magic was to blame.

  And believing his firstborn son cursed, Hector Senior tried to drown him when he was eight months old. One day when the mother was at the market he plucked the mewling ugly baby out of his crib and carried him out of the house and threw him into an irrigation canal. As if he were a sack of cornmeal.

  And while the infant choked and cried he strode calmly back to the house, poured himself a jam jar full of rum, sat in the recliner listening to futbol on the transistor radio.

  The mother, when she returned, was apoplectic. “Where’s Junior? Where’s Hector?”

  Hector Senior, indifferent, blasé, “No idea, woman.” He picked up his flyswatter. He took a vicious swipe at a buzzing horsefly. Missed.

  Catface’s mother, Esmerelda, “You were supposed to watch him.”

  “I did. I was.”

  “Well, he’s gone.”

  “You told me, woman.”

  Hector Senior swiped at the fly again and this time the insect went flying into the blades of the fan. There was an angry chattering like a misrouted BB and then the insect corpse pinged against the cracked stucco wall and fell to the floor.

  Junior’s mother, “What did you do, you bastard?”

  The father, sheepish, got off his recliner, searching around the room behind the furniture.

  The mother, “He’s gone.”

  “I’m looking, woman. All right?”

  “You did something. What did you do?”

  “Fuck, woman. Watch it.”

  The mother’s voice was soft, barely audible. But it was tight and trembling with anger. “You did something, you did something, I know it. Where is he? Where is my child?”

  Hector Senior gave his wife a dark hooded look. “Watch it. Look at me. Watch it. Don’t doubt it. Now find your child.”