Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  So Crowe’s relatives built miles of road into terra incognita. And they took the land. They took plenty of it.

  Including Emerald Island.

  And it was Reed’s father, Reed Senior, who oversaw the bridge from the mainland to the island. But before then, there were the roads to lay across the wilderness. How were the roads built?

  That was a story.

  A story involving the first Calusa Indians and then Seminoles and Miccosukee. And the story also included the great floods and hurricanes. The great sicknesses.

  Reed Crowe had no doubt the roads were paved in the blood and sweat and tears of Indians. And blacks.

  Slaves under a different name.

  So, if there was such a thing as curses.

  If there were such a thing as karmic retribution.

  As far as he was concerned, his birthright was an accident, a mere coincidence.

  Which absolved him.

  * * *

  —

  “It could have been the flu,” Crowe said to Yahchilane.

  “They worked on a railroad and they didn’t want to pay up the money and they killed him.”

  “And you think I have something to do with this.”

  “No.”

  “I’m implicated.”

  “We’re all implicated.”

  Crowe put his finger to his lips and gazed skyward as if absorbing a great profundity. Then, “Riddles. We’re dying here. Fuck’s it with you?”

  “Hey, watch it, egghead.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Watch the tone. I’ll knock your fuckin’ head off.”

  They were silent. A yammering bird went yuk-yuk-yuk over the surround-sound bugsong.

  Crowe, “You think I care about Vogel? I don’t give one jack shit about Vogel.”

  * * *

  —

  It was their fourth day in the grotto when at dawn the sound of an engine roused them from sleep. Diminutive and bug-like in the Florida immensity. Crowe knew too little about engines and their workings to identify the kind of motor, the horsepower.

  But Yahchilane could. He could tell the engine belonged to a Jeep. About two or three hundred yards away Yahchilane could discern this much.

  Yahchilane asked Crowe if he knew anybody who drove a Jeep.

  Crowe said he did. Heidi.

  Whoever it was had driven as far as they could because the engine abruptly ceased. Whoever it was, they’d parked because they’d made it as far as they could in the marshy ferny bracken of the Florida pine flats.

  For ten minutes both men shouted their voices ragged and raw.

  Then, so faint and distant, so high and reedy Reed Crowe feared it might be a hallucination, a voice.

  A woman.

  There was a quickening of her steps.

  “Reed?” said the woman.

  “Heidi,” screamed Crowe.

  Then Heidi was peering down at them as they peered up at her.

  Filthy woebegone revenants, faces bruised and bumpy and bloody. Eyes crazed. Mouths swollen, caked with dried mucus.

  “Lord Jesus Christ,” said Heidi.

  * * *

  —

  Heidi returned to the island to find Crowe’s house locked and empty. The backyard stray cats, their food and water dishes empty too.

  Not like Reed, dunderhead though he often was.

  And that note, no letter, no answer when she called his number.

  Maybe Crowe was out of town on business, she figured. Visiting his mother. Shacking up with one of his girlfriends.

  Reed Crowe, who knew.

  But then she remembered the visit from Henry Yahchilane, the man asking for the archeology book.

  She remembered the skull.

  Reed’s digging, the artifacts.

  Maybe he’s in trouble, she thought.

  And when Heidi discovered the men trapped in the grotto, she came back with a ladder and rope. Once the men, battered and half-dead, were in her Jeep, she told them she was taking them to the hospital.

  “No way,” Crowe said, one eye swollen shut, his top lip split. Black blood dried all over his face. “Can’t afford it.”

  Heidi driving them through Emerald City, looked at him sharply. “Can you afford being dead?”

  Crowe, crammed between Heidi and Yahchilane in the middle of the front seat, said, “Inflation these days, probably not.”

  “You two stink,” Heidi said.

  Neither of the men denied it.

  As they were passing Red, White and Blue Liquor, Yahchilane asked Heidi to stop.

  “For beer?” she asked incredulously.

  “Cigs.”

  Heidi shook her head, bumped the Jeep into the lot and parked in a space.

  “Grab me a beer?” Crowe said.

  Heidi and Crowe watched Yahchilane hobble wretched and mud-spackled and bloody into the store. They watched the man behind the counter, Andy Krumpp, the owner, gawk at Yahchilane. Yahchilane looked every bit like a man who’d escaped a mine collapse.

  He went to the cooler, fetched three tall boys. Then at the counter he paid for them and a pack of cigarettes.

  Back in the car, Yahchilane gave a beer to Heidi and Crowe and kept one for himself.

  “Mind?” he asked, before he lit a cigarette.

  Heidi shook her head. She took one for herself, lit it. She cracked open her window and Yahchilane cracked his. The sound of tires singing on asphalt filled the cab.

  Heidi and Yahchilane were smoking and they were almost to the Emerald Island bridge when Yahchilane laughed his short gruff laughter.

  Crowe eyed Yahchilane, swallowed from his beer.

  Heidi asked what was so funny.

  “Krumpp,” Yahchilane said. “When I walked into his store.”

  RUM JUNGLE

  THE MEN MET ONLY ONCE AT the Rum Jungle and they agreed to leave the remains of the Seminole Indians be. This bothered Crowe at first, leaving the bones out there like they were nothing, nobody knowing about them, eternal anonymity, but Yahchilane pointed out that the bodies were where they wanted to be. “We got no other way of telling, do we?” Yahchilane asked him.

  “I suppose not.”

  Jerry Vogel, another matter.

  Yahchilane knew Crowe would never approach Schaffer about the matter because he had his own proverbial skeletons, and vice versa.

  Everybody had secrets this part of Florida. Somewhere so small, word got around quickly, so you had to keep certain things to yourself. Emerald Island, if one person knew, everybody knew.

  So mysteries would remain about Reed Crowe and Yahchilane and Vogel. About Schaffer.

  “Just tell me, what happened?” Crowe asked Henry Yahchilane.

  “He came at me. It was self-defense. But Schaffer wouldn’t’a thought of it that way.”

  Crowe stroked his beach bum beard. “No, he wouldn’t have either.”

  NIGHT OF A THOUSAND CASKS

  THE REST OF THAT SUMMER HEIDI would come over in her clamdiggers and culottes more nights out of the week than not. Her white poplin shirts tied calypso style. They drank and they talked and they shared joints in the beach twilight. Over the weeks their tans grew darker, her tan lines he so loved. They listened to the discography of Fleetwood Mac. Rumours and Tusk. Crowe moved his big Bose speakers so they faced out the open sliding glass doors.

  The tiki torches kept the insects at bay.

  In the dusk the beach cats chased scuttling tailless geckos.

  Sometimes Herman the heron would flap in like an apparition from the dark and stand back at a distance, waiting for pompano scraps, redfish leftovers.

  Crowe would make ceviche, grill African pompano on the backyar
d grill. Heidi made Cuba libres.

  Every so often Crowe would go over to the spot where the hummingbird tree once stood. Making a show of it for Heidi, he’d toe the spot. Then he would set down a tentative foot, slowly. Then he would stomp his zorie. Then he’d stomp both.

  Crowe drunkenly romped for a while like this.

  Heidi kept telling him, “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re tempting fate.”

  “I thought you were the big explorer.”

  “I’m not going to go jump into a volcano like an asshole.”

  “This is solid ground.”

  “Says who?”

  “I got it checked professionally.”

  “Oh yeah. Who?”

  “Chill Norton.”

  “Oh god. Now I really got to get my ass off this chair. You’re gonna believe Chill Norton? Chill Norton’s the scientist now. You might as well just pack up and move. We’re going under.”

  “Seismic tests. The newest technology.”

  * * *

  —

  On one of his moonlit jaunts Crowe saw in the distance a few square containers washed ashore. He quickened his step.

  Four old wooden crates. Maybe crab traps. Maybe not. Maybe he’d lucked upon one of those fabled marijuana or cocaine bales of yore.

  Oh man, he hoped. Wildly hoped.

  Crowe ran, crashing splay-footed and awkwardly through the surf. His plastic tumbler with the seashell applique slopping white wine and ice cubes.

  He pawed one of the boxes apart one-handed. The thin wooden slatting and the sodden timber snapped easily. Crowe in his excitement flung the plastic tumbler onto the beach. Then he tore the wood with both hands and glimpsed the corner of a paper label.

  “Oh goddamn,” Crowe said. “Oh man.”

  Crowe reached. The cool curve of a wine bottle. Intact. The dark emerald gleam of wine filled colored glass. There was a label flaked and frayed, the color of tea-stained ivory, so old. Crowe could hardly read it in the dark. French, calligraphy. 1838, said the label.

  Crowe glanced about. No one around for a mile and a half in either direction. The moon on the lace of the surf. The pretty luminous curd feathering in boomerang shapes.

  Still Crowe ran. He sprinted. He ran himself gasping and he got a wheelbarrow out of the garage. Like a maniac crazed with a plow he shoved through the sand. An ordeal. The whole thing an ordeal, back and forth four times with all that wine, bottles clanking, all the weight, the sand, the wheel getting stuck in the sand, Crowe thinking he would die of a heart attack by the end of it all.

  He put three of the crates in the garage. He shoved the crates under the workstation table. He hid the crates under a deflated rubber pool. The fourth crate he opened, the old cork still intact after all this time, and he tried it straight from the bottle, a small sip, very small, keeping it in his mouth, tasting, thinking he might have to spit it out.

  But the wine was good. A taste of old berries and nutmeg and smoke. It was like time and age. You tasted the centuries. The spice of time.

  He called Heidi. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  Heidi came.

  Then some neighbors came and then some others and after a while half the island was getting shitfaced and they spent many hours on the beach drinking one entire case of the wine. They burned a driftwood pyre on the beach. Someone dragged out Crowe’s hi-fi equipment onto the back porch and blasted the music so loud you could hear the bass and beat even halfway down the beach. Motown. They danced. Their shadows elongated and capered on the sand. They made up idiotic songs about wine. Wine, wine, won’t you be mine, well, you are mine, all mine, wine, wine, wine…

  After everyone straggled off, Crowe and Heidi stripped off their clothes. He lay with his back in sand as she rode on top of him.

  The flames danced, fitful wraiths. A pocket of sap popped, a spray of blue and green sparks spluttering up. The sparks helixed and scattered like fireflies.

  A sweet salt breeze played on their skin, balming their sunburns, keeping the mosquitoes at bay, drying the spit of his wine-sticky kisses off Heidi’s nipples.

  THE GOLDEN BRIDGE

  END OF SUMMER HEIDI TOLD HIM she was leaving again for Europe, Amsterdam, for how long she wasn’t sure. This time, she was not only helping transport art from gallery to gallery throughout Europe, but holding her own art show, a collection of her pieces, at the Franco-American Institute in Rennes, France.

  In Heidi’s bungalow on the eve of her departure he went among the paintings hung on the walls of her small gallery. Flame-colored celestial blots. Overheated colors. Startle colors. Mother-of-pearl phosphorescence. To someone else they might have looked very similar, the smudgy spectra, but to Crowe they were all very different.

  Crowe stopped at one of the canvases. “What’s this painting?”

  “The Golden Bridge.”

  “Heidi.”

  “What?”

  “This is something else.” He meant it.

  “You really like it?”

  “I love it. Why The Golden Bridge?”

  “You’re high.”

  “No. Yeah. A little. I like what I like. Tell me about The Golden Bridge.”

  “Is there a moment of the day you’re not doped up, Reed?”

  They were getting along, and then she told Crowe how long she was going abroad.

  Crowe felt his heart drop at the news, but he acted happy for her. Part of him was. She’d been through so much. Their child. Him.

  They toasted their wineglasses, sat down to a meal of conch fritters, one of Heidi’s specialties.

  After dinner, while they were washing the dishes, Crowe took her by the shoulders, tried kissing her.

  She leaned away. “Don’t.”

  “Come on. Who cares?”

  “Who cares? We have to stop this.”

  “But if it feels good?”

  “No.”

  “Just no?”

  “Yes.”

  Crowe tried again. And again Heidi leaned away.

  “All right,” Crowe said. “Shit, Jesus.”

  She pecked him on the cheek. “Here,” she said, taking him by the hand, leading him to the painting. The Golden Bridge. “It’s for you.”

  Crowe teared up.

  “Oh, Reed.”

  “Please don’t go, Heidi.” He hated how desperate he sounded, but so it was.

  “Oh, Reed.”

  On her bed was a modest hardshell suitcase. Into it she’d crammed her clothes in fastidious little rolls. Amazing, how much she could cram in such a small suitcase. Crowe could never accomplish such a feat.

  “You gonna water the plants?” she asked.

  “Come on.”

  “Well, are you? I need to know. Because if not I have to make the call tonight. I’m serious, Reed. I won’t be making calls from Europe. Let’s not shit around.”

  “Well, I walk by every day.”

  “So yes.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  * * *

  —

  But a month or so after she left, it was Crowe’s habit walking toward Henry Yahchilane’s barrel-shaped house. The other way, toward the bridge, was Heidi’s folk art bungalow. Bright as a children’s storybook, cobbled together with mirror shards and broken glass and mosaics made of ceramic bits of pottery. A bottle tree in the backyard. A garden of tropical flowers.

  Unmistakably Heidi’s abode. And the sight of it made Crowe miss her.

  Which he resented.

  So he got either Eddie or Wayne to water Heidi’s plants for him. Eddie did it for free. Wayne, though, “Gonna pay me?”

  Sometimes while on his evening jaunts his thoughts wa
ndered and he imagined Heidi with other men and other bedrooms. Her mouth on someone else’s. Her eyes looking at strangers with the kind of unguarded longing they used to share.

  Other men inside of her.

  * * *

  —

  He had his fuck buddies on the mainland. Women who sold jams and jellies and marmalades and Florida honey. Women who waitressed at the Rum Jungle. He felt great affection for them. Friendly love. No romance, but they flung and flailed at one another out of a kind of animal abandonment. Which was precisely the point.

  And if anything, the women were usually less sentimental than he. Yes, this was a different time, all right.

  But with Heidi whenever he walked there was some reminder. If he came across a piece of driftwood he’d carry it home. If he came across a piece of sea glass he would pocket it for Heidi.

  Fuck her, he’d say. Bitterly, when drunk and alone at night when one of their old songs played on the record player.

  But he meant it in neither head nor heart.

  In the morning he’d take the piece of sea glass out of the trash and wash it in the sink and place it with the others in the big mason jar that sat on the driftwood table next to the reading chair in the sunroom of his coral beach house.

  Heidi sent him postcards. She sent him pictures. But less often each year. Fewer each time she went away.

  She waxed rhapsodic about her travels.

  The museums and opera houses and brasseries of Paris. Amsterdam, the hash bars and canals and van Gogh museum. The pyramids of Egypt. Sea caves of Scotland. Ice castles of Salzburg. The blue deserts of Sinai. The wild wonders and huge oddities of Australia. The crabs in Christmas Island. Jerusalem, Bangladesh.

  He thought she would tire of her journeying with age.

  If anything, the opposite.

  * * *

  —

  There was once a time when Heidi invited Crowe along for her trips.

  “I can’t,” he’d say.