Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  “You’re a grown man who’s never been to Europe.”

  “That flight, no way.”

  “I don’t know why you’re stuck there.”

  “I’m not stuck here.”

  And he didn’t think of it that way.

  Crowe loved the old beach house. Its simplicity. Cypress and Ocala lime block and floor-to-ceiling windows. He loved the coffee table and shelves made from driftwood. The jars of sea glass, the hunks of coral. He loved opening all the doors in the spring and fall, letting the trade winds breeze through.

  He loved the terrazzo floor, how it kept cool during even the hottest summers, its foot-deep gleam. How he always saw new patterns and shapes in the tiny chips of quartz and mother-of-pearl and abalone shell.

  And Emerald Island. Emerald Island was the Rum Jungle and the Blue Parrot diner. Emerald Island was where all his ghosts lived.

  Emerald Island was where the light fell on Heidi in a poetic way. The tang of citrus and dried ocean salt on her lips in summer. The sheen of coconut oil on her body, her shiny sun-brown hips, her eyes mossy hazel and aglow in her tan. The big brown macaroon of her nipple in his mouth as he entered her and she moaned in his ear.

  STAY IN ONE PLACE

  WHAT IS IT SHE ALWAYS SAID? Stay in one place long enough, the old adage went, the world came to you.

  Horseshit, Reed Crowe knew. But in his three and a half decades on earth, he’d witnessed wonders.

  The Perseid meteor showers. A solar eclipse. A few lunar eclipses too.

  And once he saw what he would swear was a Soviet submarine. At first he mistook it as a whale. But then he saw the gleam of metal and heard a large engine straining and he saw the periscope emerge from the water, a cyclopean stalk eyeing him from a distance. Alien.

  Crowe threw up his hands. “Hey, I don’t give a shit.”

  The periscope inched down. The gray hump of the submarine sank back into the depths. Then the vessel was gone, vanished back into the Gulf.

  Another time he saw lightning strike a pelican as it flew midair. He was fishing and lightning cracked like an incandescent whip out of the clear blue sky. Unpredictable Florida weather. His heart jolted as if horsewhipped. Even from his beach chair Crowe felt the heat on his face. By the time it hit the water the bird was cooked. It hissed like a hot cast-iron skillet and a puff of steam rose from the surface.

  James Caan. One day in the late seventies Crowe saw Caan, Sonny Corleone himself, flying a Japanese box kite with his toddler son. Nice guy, asked for a cigarette. Crowe didn’t have one, but Caan told him a Polack joke nonetheless.

  Sophia Loren. If it wasn’t Sophia Loren, then her doppelganger in beauty. A woman wearing a green and white banyan-patterned two-piece. Cinnamon skin, Persian eyes, amphora figure. She walked barefoot by him, French manicured toes, and he said hello and she said hello. Then he was left with her effluvia, her musk. He waited for hours sitting in his beach chair to see her again. To maybe say something, anything, because he knew he’d regret not. And it would be a story. But she must have taken another route because she didn’t pass him again.

  A huge school of incandescent jellyfish in the shallows of the Gulf. They glowed with sapphire bioluminescence. Like a constellation fallen to earth. Like a planetarium under the sea.

  And one night he saw a UFO. Not a weather balloon, not some mysterious celestial phenomenon, not foxfire or aurora borealis.

  A UFO. Bona fide.

  A lozenge-shaped vessel, like a flattened blimp. It hovered low on the horizon among the stars and the lights of distant ocean liners and oil tankers. After ten minutes of perfect stillness, it zipped away, meteor quick, leaving only a lingering scribble of light on his retina.

  O-X-NXW-W-VER-VAR-LEGUA 1/10 O-X-SWXW-VER-VAR-HASTA X

  WAYNE WADE WAS DEAF TO REASON. Ten at night, worked up in a fervor, words coming out of him in a torrent, telling Reed Crowe on the phone that he had to come over pronto. Wayne had something big, something incredible, something fucking mind-blowing, he wanted to show Crowe.

  A revelation, Wayne said.

  Strange language. Even for Wayne Wade.

  It was a few months after Heidi’s leaving.

  “Tell me who’s speaking, please,” Crowe said. Stoned. Wine-headed.

  “Stop shittin’,” Wayne said.

  “Private line here. No soliciting.”

  “Fuck you. Come over.”

  “Reveal your revelation tomorrow.”

  Wayne was obstinate.

  Crowe got into his beeswax orange hatchback and drove two miles north in the primal dark of the island. The headlights did little to dispel the darkness. Ordovician insects flitted in and out of the beams. Flying beetles the size of walnuts. Gargantuan cockroaches and palmetto bugs. A chartreuse green katydid.

  Beyond the light’s reach was pure pitch black. This night, a new moon. Steep sand dunes, tall as escarpments and generations old and sculpted by time and tempest, flanked the narrow road. This dark and late, Crowe could have been driving on the dark side of the moon.

  When Crowe got to the trailer Wayne was apoplectic with excitement. Pacing. Wild-eyed.

  “You on something?” Crowe asked him. Grabbed a beer from the mini-fridge. Sat at the Formica table.

  “No.”

  “Coked up, man?”

  “No, man, no.” Then, Wayne sat across from Crowe with his own fresh beer. Popped it. “You remember that code you’re always talking about?”

  Crowe stroked his beach bum beard. Leaned back, scratched his stomach. “Code?”

  O-X-NXW-W-VER-VAR-LEGUA 1/10 O-X-SWXW-VER-VAR-HASTA X, was what Wayne Wade wanted to show Reed Crowe. He’d come across the letters and numbers, seeming gobbledygook, carved upon a rock near the grotto. He’d written the code, whatever it was, on the back of a mini-mart receipt which now sifting through all the scrap and trash on the counters he couldn’t find.

  No surprise. Wayne was known to clean his house with a leaf blower. He’d open the two side doors and let the machine rip, blasting the trash out the doors into the yard. Gum wrappers, rolling papers, cigarette packs, fast-food bags. A bizarre sight, if you were witnessing from afar. As though a storm were raging from inside the house, blowing debris outward.

  Now Crowe was about to tell Wayne he was going home when he saw, or would have sworn he saw in the corner of his vision, the rooster clock on the kitchen wall move.

  The trailer ticked and groaned.

  Crowe, “That sound? You hear that?”

  “Just the heat. Hold up.”

  “Your clock, it moved.”

  “You’re high, motherfucker.”

  “I’ll remind you, I’m your employer.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Listen. Shut up. Listen.”

  Then the cataclysm was upon them as swift and violent as a mortar blast. And Crowe and Wayne were in free fall, everything in the trailer topsy-turvy in the air. Like one of those fairground rides where the floor plummets from under you. Some surreal alternate universe where furniture could leap on its own volition like Jesus-drunk revelators.

  The toaster oven and ashtray and green glass bong shaped like a dragon’s head. The beer cans and the table between them. The chairs in which they sat. Crowe and Wayne themselves.

  The bong struck the back of Crowe’s head and shattered. The walls buckled and warped. The sofa went tumbling and flying. Windows imploded inward. Glass shards flew. Bulbs busted. The electricity flickered and went black. A pipe popped. A spring of well water sprung. There was another rupture. Foul, septic.

  In the midst of this tempest, Crowe caught vertiginous glimpses of Wayne’s anguished face. His mouth stretched in a soundless scream.

  Wayne close.

  Far.

  Close again.
<
br />   Like a Halloween horror fairground ride.

  Then it was over in a huge jarring whomp. They lay like rag dolls on the floor.

  Twenty-odd feet above them was the opening of the chasm. The roof was sheared off, rolled up like the top of a sardine tin. Florida sky gazed down upon them. Prehistorically dark. Crowded with so many stars you could barely make out the constellations. Oddly tranquil, after the half minute of bedlam.

  Wayne’s dumb doggish eyes fixed on Crowe through the darkness. Wayne lay with the upended trash bin atop his back.

  “Wayne,” Reed Crowe called.

  Wayne, thunderstruck, said nothing.

  Debris settled. Glass pieces fell and shattered and slid. There was moaning and groaning of metal settling. The mini-fridge was canted with its door yawed open. Jars and bottles slid and hit the floor and rolled and busted.

  “Wayne,” Crowe said.

  “Somebody bombed us,” Wayne said.

  Crowe coughed. Pain knifed through his ribs.

  Another jar shattered.

  “We’re gonna die here,” Wayne said. He coughed. Spat. “Fuckin’ lip. Shit.”

  “Did you break anything?”

  “Somebody bombed us.”

  “A sinkhole. My rib. Shit.”

  They rose groaning and cussing. They were covered in dust and bloody nicks.

  Panic overcame Wayne. “Holy shit. We’re gonna die here. In this hole.”

  Dirt and pebbles fell. Then the sound diminished to a trickle of scree.

  Crowe rubbed the back of his head. Felt warm blood. He looked at his fingers. Black and slick with it.

  “We’re gonna die down here.”

  “Wayne? Whole damn island probably heard. Somebody’s on their way.”

  True. The dinky siren was coming from the Emerald City side of the bridge. And dogs were barking in the distance. His far-flung neighbors’ dogs.

  Wayne’s half-concussed gaze roved the ground. Searching.

  Crowe, “You okay, man?”

  His eyes flicked dully. “Huh?”

  “You okay? What you lookin’ for?”

  Wayne shook his head. “Nothin’. I don’t know.”

  SHIT ON A SHOEHEEL

  AFTER WAYNE WADE TOOK UP PERMANENT residence at the Emerald Island Inn, the summer dragged on like shit on a shoeheel. Days upon days passed of what-the-fuck-are-we-doing heat.

  A few times Wayne and Eddie almost came to blows. All over nothing. Bullshit. A wrong word, a wrong glance, a wrong facial expression. An RC Cola thrown by Eddie into the garbage bin just a little too loud and close for Wayne Wade’s refined taste.

  Crowe had to wedge between them, pry them apart.

  It was always Wayne’s fault. Always.

  Crowe would warn him to drop it.

  Wayne wouldn’t.

  Crowe would snap. “Listen, you apple-headed son of a bitch, you think this is funny?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck me. Hey, I’ve got news for you. There’s a HELP WANTED sign up in Arby’s. Saw it yesterday. Free to go explore your options.”

  Wayne asked him what side he was on.

  “Mine.”

  * * *

  —

  Some days so few tourists showed that it would have been a waste to make the trip. Crowe offered nonetheless, acting contrite and hangdog, as if the greatest disappointment were his, “Oh, we don’t mind going out, folks,” all crestfallen, “that’s why we’re here.”

  Arms akimbo, head hanging. Like he couldn’t bear it.

  “On the other hand, you know, lightning,” gesturing at the black swag-bellied thunderclouds, “what’re you gonna do.”

  Almost always the tourists had sense enough, mercy enough, to forgo the boat tour.

  Other days they had no choice but to cancel the tour. The rains of summer crashed down. Downpours that turned the ground to mud within half a minute.

  They’d eat their brown bag lunches under the awning of the picnic table, waiting for the storm to break. Jawing their white-bread sandwiches in grim silence as white rain roared down around them. Even the strangler fig tree looked defeated with its drooping festoons of moss.

  Crowe would often have to let Wayne and Eddie go early. He’d tell Wayne Wade to go clock some hours at the Emerald Island Inn.

  “Got something to do today,” Wayne, who was on the payroll for four hundred a week cash, told Crowe about eight times out of ten.

  “That right? Like what? Move out of your motel room? Where you’ve been staying gratis? When’s the U-Haul coming? Sign me up.”

  Wayne caught Eddie grinning over his ham and cheese sandwich. “Something funny, pussy lips?”

  “Wayne? You better get on your bike and go. I’m telling you.”

  And with bristly chin jutted upward, Wayne Wade would rise and stalk away and go about his half-assed way through the day’s errands. With indignant dispatch, making a show with the broom, chucking errant beer and soda cans into the trash like they’d insulted his mother.

  * * *

  —

  If it wasn’t Wayne Wade and his bullshit, it was the kids Crowe had to contend with.

  And holy shit.

  The sugar, the heat, the hormones, the pent-up energy from being cooped up all those hours in the van.

  Who knew what the fuck their deal was, but the kids were pure blue-ribbon menaces, no denying.

  They snapped one another’s ears with rubber bands. They gave one another Indian burns. Wedgies. There was some new thing called titty-twisting. There was a lot of titty-twisting. They called one another shit-for-brains and dick-nose and butt fuckers. The boys let off stink bombs in the back of the gift shop. Brothers got into outright fistfights. They balled up Little Debbie snack cakes so they looked like big pieces of human feces and they left the grotesque boluses near the restrooms as though someone hadn’t quite made it in time.

  BOSTON BLUTO

  THE DAYS OF THE FLORIDA MAN Mystery House wore on. The days at the Emerald Island Inn.

  One day they launched into the savage green Everglades, Crowe steering the boat away from the Florida Man Mystery House, and over his shoulder Crowe glanced at the passengers through his sunglasses. One young woman elbowed her husband in his side. What a gyp. Or, Why are we here again? was the impression Crowe got.

  There was another man, older, with buzz-cut red hair and a red angry bulldog face. He kept patting his forehead with sodden wads of Dairy Queen napkins. His wife, also redheaded, looked on the verge of heatstroke.

  Cicadas shrilled.

  “What’s your name, missy ma’am?” Crowe asked a young girl wearing a sun visor.

  “Olga,” she said.

  He said, “What’s those you wearing, missy ma’am?” Crowe pointed at her shoe. “Those’re neat.”

  The girl looked dubious. The girl told Crowe they were called jellies. They weren’t for boys. Or adults. Just girls.

  Crowe looked down at his battered brown docksiders, the barrel lace of one of the boat shoes untied. He left it alone.

  “How ’bout captains?” Crowe asked. “I can’t wear ’em? No jellies for Captain Crowe?”

  “No,” she said. Peeved, as if he was a party crasher about to bum rush her shindig.

  “Maybe I can wear jams?”

  “It’s your life, mister,” Olga told him. She seemed fatigued of the topic.

  Olga’s father, Otto, nodded. “It’s a free country.”

  Crowe turned away and commandeered the wheel. Feeling old, out of it before his time. Or maybe it was after his time and he didn’t even realize.

  These kids, he thought.

  Jellies. Pac-Man. Rubik’s Cube.

  Crowe just didn’t know what
the fuck anymore.

  The pontoon boat cleaved through a patch of swamp lilies. The dragonflies stirred and flitted, translucent wings sparking in the late morning slant of sun. Through the mangroves shafts of light streamed. The dragonflies fluttered back onto the big white flowers.

  Crowe eased the boat around a bend and started down the next mangrove tunnel.

  Small mammalian life moved in the woods. Snapping twigs, crackling leaves.

  “Jellies,” Crowe heard himself saying into the PA system, “that reminds me.” He cleared his throat explosively. A few tourists jerked. “You folks wanna hear something I heard on Jacques Cousteau the other night? Jellyfish can technically live forever.”

  The tourists blinked, waiting. A few looked like, This man is without a shadow of a doubt on drugs.

  Crowe went on. “Technically, they can. They could. A million years, maybe more. If they didn’t have any predators. Without predators, they’d be immortal. Same with coral. Coral can live forever.”

  “But didn’t Emerald Reef die?” Otto asked.

  “That’s right, yes, it did. A tanker scraped over it and that was it for the reef.”

  “What kind of tanker?”

  “Insect repellent, if you can believe it. Roach spray.”

  “That’s depressing,” said Olga.

  “Yes, it is, missy ma’am. Yes, it is.”

  Then, as if she wanted to rescue him from the awkwardness of the situation, as if taking mercy on his soul, the girl with the birthmark shaped like Cuba on her knee pointed to a place in the mangroves. On one of the trees was a place in the bark where a tumorous bolus grew. It resembled a face. A goblin face, bumpy and warped and melted.

  The girl with the birthmark asked, “What’s that? Spooky.”

  “That’s a catface, missy ma’am.”

  * * *

  —

  Near the end of the Everglades tour Crowe was helming the wheel, boating back to the Mystery House, when he was startled from his stupor. A man with a Boston accent shouting angrily, “Is that true? He did? He did what? His dick?”