Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  One night, emboldened by two glasses of wine, expansive after a long day with Nina and Mariposa at the ShowBiz Pizza place, he forwent subtlety altogether. Or so he thought.

  “Maybe it would help to get married for citizenship,” he said. “Say if you were to find the right person.”

  “I’m Catholic,” she said to him. There was a certain stoniness in her voice, as if she was talking to a child. He wondered if she was maybe misinterpreting him.

  Their bottoms were in the sand. Herman the heron was legging in the shallows nearby, Mariposa saying, “Love it or leave it, Herman!”

  “What I mean is, a compromise.”

  As soon as the word “compromise” left his mouth, her eyes snapped at him. They were very white in the gloaming, almost aglow, against her beach tan.

  “Com…” she said, her lips reared back and showed her long white teeth.

  “Compromise, a convenience.”

  “I know what you mean.” Her eyes were upon him now with a kind of fierceness. Scorn. They were black and steady and they kept on his eyes without blinking.

  “After this? Compromise? Never. Do you think I’m weak?”

  “No.”

  “Why would I compromise then?”

  Reed Crowe glanced away, scratched his beard. The last light of day was bleeding into the world’s edge. Seafowl flew northward in three-score chevrons. He waited until the birds were out of sight before he said, “I never said you were weak. Never thought of it.”

  Her eyes were still latched onto him fiercely. “Why compromise?”

  He shrugged, gestured with an upturned hand.

  “Why?” she insisted.

  “They might send you back.”

  “What, you report me?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  Thirty yards or so away, Herman the heron winged off into the dusk. Mariposa called after him, “Phone home!”

  “I will never compromise.” She gestured, a broad sweep of the horizon. As if to say, I conquered all of that.

  “I have made it this far. I’ve gone this far.” Her chin was jutted upward at the fiery-edged clouds.

  Crowe swatted dejectedly at the gnats.

  “Midges comin’ out,” he said.

  “Never,” she said.

  BLACK HAIR FALLING

  AND AS THE DAYS WENT BY and their personalities showed, so did Nina’s beauty.

  Her intense eyes. The luster of her hair. Her long legs and fulsome hips. Her ripe chest.

  On a few occasions, Crowe told Wayne to cool it, his lascivious stares so flagrant.

  Whenever Nina caught him looking at her long and sideways and funny, she would say, “What? What is it? What do you want?”

  Her look was reprimanding, scolding. Her temper was showing now too. Despite the circumstances, when you thought she would have practiced discretion.

  Sometimes she got so pent up that guests would come out to the sound of her angry Spanish, watch her tempestuous exchanges.

  Wayne would rear his head back incredulously. He’d let loose a high and loud “Wow!” His eyes would rivet once more upon her ass, her breasts, her legs. Her curvaceous length.

  “Spicy!” he’d say.

  One day Crowe heard Wayne and Nina yelling outside. Nina was cursing Wayne out. And Wayne was chuckling his high yodeling chuckle. He was holding a spray hose and was watering the hibiscus bushes around the Emerald Island Inn sign.

  Wayne acted like the nozzle was a phallus and swiveled his hips, letting loose a wild meandering spray. “Whoa, nelly,” he hollered.

  Through the lobby windows Crowe watched Wayne squeezing off wild sprays of water like ejaculate.

  “Goddamn idjit,” Crowe said. He walked out from behind the check-in counter and went outside into the foul heat and confronted Wayne.

  The sun was so bright off the limestone it smarted his eyeballs.

  Nina had her middle finger shoved in Wayne’s face. She gave Crowe a curt sharp glance. Then she strode across the glary parking lot to her room and slammed the door, leaving Crowe to wonder what the hell he did.

  Crowe said, “Don’t make that lady uncomfortable.”

  Insolently Wayne would not look at Crowe. Now he was blasting water from the spray hose upon the stucco front of the building.

  “You hear me?”

  Wayne sucked an eyetooth, as if trying to loose some gristle. He blasted a wasp nest hanging like a grape cluster on the rain gutter.

  Crowe smacked the nozzle out of Wayne’s hand. The metal spray gun went flying and clattered in the dirt.

  “Hey!” Wayne said. “What the fuck?” He slanted away, goober teeth showing in incredulity. His eyes were pinched and irked beneath the overlarge Miami Dolphins cap.

  “Then listen, goddamn it.”

  “What’s it with you and that lady?”

  Before Crowe could answer, they heard a woman shouting. “Hey, you! You, cabeza de mierda!”

  They looked. Nina stood on the catwalk outside her room and she leaned over the second-story railing. She was holding scissors. Without a mirror, looking straight at Wayne with those eyes so intense they seemed kohl-rimmed, she snipped off a hunk of hair.

  “Wow,” Wayne said.

  Another shiny black clump fell.

  “Nina,” Crowe called.

  Another clump.

  “You don’t wanna do that.”

  “Nina,” said her brother from within the room.

  “Shut up,” she told him without looking.

  She looked at Crowe as she scissored off more. “Oh, why not?”

  “You don’t wanna do that.”

  “I’m doing it. So I do. It’s what I want to do. Obvious.”

  Polaroid glasses riding low on his nose, Crowe turned to Wayne and glared. His head was hot and pounding in the hotcake heat. He felt his blood pressure in his temples.

  This man, this idjit, would give him a heart attack yet.

  Wayne said, “I’m cuttin’ her hair? I’m the one who invented scissors?”

  Crowe hollered to Nina again. “I don’t know what that’s going to solve.”

  “You wipe your ass, don’t you?”

  Crowe had zero clue what to say to this. He stood there wincing in the sirocco heat, arms akimbo.

  Snip, snip, snip went the busy scissors.

  BORIS KARLOFF

  LOW TIDE HE SOMETIMES WENT HUNTING for shells with the girl. Tulip shells, whelks, angel wings.

  The water was so clear and tranquil certain nights you could see beneath the water the rills and scallops of the sand. The ghostly sand crabs scuttling sideways with their claws raised. Their movements stirred up little cloudlets of sand. The baitfish moved through the shallows, flocks of flashing silver-blue needles moving in sync.

  One evening, with just as much clarity, his very first childhood memory struck him. It was of strolling along just such a sandbar, kicking through the foot-deep water, flicking big conch shells into a tin pail. His mother would pay him ten cents a shell because of the conch inside. He remembered the heft of the pail, the sun in his hair warming his scalp, the taste of shaved lemon ice in his mouth.

  Crowe decided it was time, past time, to visit his mother.

  * * *

  —

  There were wild budgies on the loose in Fort Lauderdale. That afternoon you would hear them cawing in the seed and berry-bearing trees flanked along the Intracoastal Waterway. A bright green flock of about a hundred.

  Crowe’s mother, Shelly, asked, “Remember Boris Karloff, the budgie?”

  Crowe did. Surprising, the things she would remember.

  There were things he hoped she forgot for good. The beatings.

  Near the publ
ic grounds gazebo under the big fat sea grape tree was a group of old octogenarian men playing bocce ball. The clack of the balls carried over to where Crowe and his mother sat. The sound of their New York City accents. Mostly Jews and Italians, a few Greeks. A small group of old Cubans played dominoes at a picnic table.

  Behind them stood Pier Sixty-Six, the white crown of the rotating bar twenty-five or thirty stories high.

  Crowe remembered the Fort Lauderdale of his youth. Fort Lauderdale and Miami, there was still wilderness between them back then. Pockets of swampland and saw grass when you got off I-95.

  He remembered a time when if you took US 1 to Boca Raton there was nothing but Bermuda cottages and the odd Spanish-style mansion. Now all that territory was built up. High-rises of glass and stucco for the snowbirds and retirees.

  Now, the Atlantic, you only caught glimpses and flashes between the palm trees and condos.

  Crowe asked his mother, “Hey, Ma, great-grandpa who laid the railroad tracks?”

  “The Thompsons?” She sipped from her big Styrofoam cup of ice and ginger ale.

  “The Crowes.”

  She shook her head. “Grandpa Crowe?”

  “His company. Who laid all those tracks with him down there?”

  “What railroad? What on earth? Oh, don’t get me started about the Crowes.”

  ANOTHER HAVANA

  ONE AFTERNOON REED CROWE WAS ON his way home from the Hoggly Woggly when just before crossing the bridge he saw the sign. At the last turnaround, a gravel shoulder, it stood gaudily new among other handmade signs.

  DON’T TURN EMERALD ILAND INTO A HAVANA, it said, hand-painted, on cardboard.

  ILAND.

  Stupid pig ignorant sonofabitch, Crowe thought.

  He slammed the brakes and bumped onto the shoulder of crushed shell and limestone where there was a small picnic area by the shallow edge of the bay. Standing on the shore in rubber boots was an elderly black man with a cane pole. He watched as the door of the orange hatchback flew open. He watched Crowe get out and stalk over to the sign. He yanked it out of the ground.

  Crowe noticed the man watching and tendered a nod from behind his big green sunglasses.

  “How you doin’,” said Crowe, pitching the sign into the trunk.

  “How you doin’,” said the man.

  On the way back to the Emerald Island Inn, the sign in the hatchback trunk, Crowe tried to give Wayne the benefit of the doubt.

  Increasingly difficult these days.

  Wayne was doing Duncan yo-yo tricks behind the register when he found him. “You calling me stupid?”

  Crowe stabbed his sunglasses up his nose with his finger. “You know what, Wayne, you know what? Yeah.”

  For a time Wayne said nothing. His small pinched eyes working angry and upset behind the glasses with the smudged lenses.

  Crowe, feeling bad, “This time you forced me. Sometimes you just got to call things as they are.”

  “Now I know the truth,” Wayne said. “What a thing to say. You goin’ round calling me a fool. Well, I guess I am.”

  “How’d this shit get turned around? You do something fucked, now I’m the villain.”

  “You don’t even know it was me, that sign.”

  “Wayne. Eye-land. Remember? Eye-land?”

  Wayne asked what he was talking about.

  Crowe shot out a scoffing breath. “The way you spelled it. And your handwriting. I know your handwriting, Wayne. Don’t shit in my face and tell me it’s Thanksgiving.”

  “I ain’t gonna be made a fool of,” said Wayne.

  “You want the cops here? The government? Think. Think, goddamn it.”

  Then Wayne grinned.

  “I don’t get it,” Crowe said. “I don’t get you.”

  “Mark my words, I’m right about this one. You’re wrong.”

  “You’re fired, Wayne.”

  “Yeah, right, whatever.”

  He slipped an envelope across the Formica top like a blackjack dealer. “Love letter,” he said. “Ma Bell.”

  A bill, already opened.

  “Came in the mail this morning. Myrtle had to special deliver it.”

  Crowe looked at the envelope. Pink, a warning color. Then he looked at Wayne. Still grinning.

  Crowe, shaking his head, filching out the bill, “Fuck’s wrong with you?”

  Crowe saw the figure, moved the bill closer to his face to double-check: $545.77.

  Phone calls to Cuba, Havana.

  Five hundred forty-five dollars and seventy-seven cents from the Cubans’ room.

  Crowe looked up from the bill at Wayne. Still grinning. “Fuck’s so funny?”

  “I tried to tell you, man,” Wayne said in a kind of singsong, “I tried and tried.” He raised his hands in the air as if letting a hot potato drop.

  One ass cheek on the wicker-topped stool, the other lifted as he tooled with a glow-in-the-dark Duncan yo-yo. The Gong Show played on the little portable black-and-white television. The unknown comedian with the paper bag over his head. The shepherd’s cane hooking around his neck.

  “No wonder this place falling to shit.”

  Wayne still yo-yoing, “Where do I start?”

  “Sweep. Look at this.” Crowe gestured at the floor. A dead palmetto bug. “You just gonna leave a dead roach?”

  Wayne said he didn’t see it.

  “It was there yesterday.”

  “Tell me. I’m not a mind reader.”

  Crowe, “Sweep. And put some Visine in your dumb goddamn eyes.”

  Wayne, “Some way to talk.”

  * * *

  —

  Crowe went to the Cubans’ room with the bill in his hand like a summons.

  The brother, Marlon, at last understood. Nodded. Opened the bedside drawer and took out a ziplock bag full of quarters. He gave the bag to Crowe.

  “Money for phone,” Nina explained.

  At first Crowe was incredulous. Maybe they were mocking him. The brother, at least. But then he saw their earnest faces.

  “Hundreds and hundreds of dollars,” Crowe attempted.

  From his vehemence the seriousness of the situation must have finally struck the brother and sister.

  The brother kept talking to her in Spanish, with increasing anger.

  Crowe asked Nina who they’d been calling.

  Nina shook her head. Shouted at her brother. Pointed her finger.

  “I did not,” the brother screamed. “One call is all.”

  Marlon started searching the room, overturning cushions. He rifled through drawers.

  He was talking about the number, that much Crowe could gather from his limited Spanish and from where he stood.

  He’d lost a number.

  It was a scrap of paper he was searching for, a list of contacts he’d brought all the way from Cuba.

  “You lost it,” Nina accused him.

  “I did not lose it. I traveled across the ocean with that paper.” The brother was indignant.

  “You lost it, you fool. Stupid. Paper and ink. In the ocean.” She told him he should have gotten the numbers tattooed. If he had half a brain.

  * * *

  —

  Marlon’s frustration mounted into indignation. Why the few calls he made would add up to so much.

  Marlon, so quiet, what Crowe knew about him he’d gleaned from the sister, who herself was taciturn. Crowe knew he was swept up in an anti-Castro force. As a new recruit he crop-dusted the town with anti-Castro pamphlets. By stealth, in the heat of night two or three hours before dawn. Nina talked about the persecution. The anarchy. Imprisonment. Neighbors backstabbing one another to spare their families, their sons and daughters.

 
Now, Marlon thought the quarters, the brown paper bag of quarters he’d squirreled away, would be enough. And when his sister insisted it wasn’t enough, his indignation erupted into anger. Their voices grew hot and quick and loud, Spanish obscenities volleyed back and forth.

  Estupido. Estupido. Cabeza de mierda.

  It was fifteen or twenty minutes before Marlon and Nina seemed to puzzle something out. They went to the window and looked outside down at the pool where Mariposa in her watermelon one-piece sat on the second step of the shallow end and splashed her hands.

  Wayne Wade was at one of the patio tables in the shade of a striped beach umbrella, watching the girl.

  The girl seemed suddenly wary and shy of Wayne, but maybe it was Crowe’s imagination.

  SLAUGHTER ON GOOSEFUCK AVENUE

  CATFACE SAT ON THE EDGE OF the hard motel bed, tugging on his black silk socks. He got a toothpick out of his alligator skin wallet, put it in his mouth. He picked up the remote, turned on the television.

  On the television, Jack Horkheimer, aka the Star Hustler, strolled down the catwalk of cosmic stardust. Members Only Jacket, mustache, toupee.

  Every week on WPBT2 out of Miami, PBS, Horkheimer the astronomer would give you the astral run-down. Comets, meteor showers, planets, constellations. “Greetings! Greetings, fellow star gazers, and this week, yes indeedy, we have quite a doozie.”

  The doozie was the Jupiter Effect, a once-in-an-eon astronomical occurrence. All of the planets in a row, aligned on one side of the sun.

  He delivered this news with great excitement. His voice like a summer stock actor’s. Hands clasped before him. Fingers wriggling. Brow beetling.

  “In ancient times,” Horkheimer said, “some believed the Jupiter Effect betokened the end of the world! Seven planets in a row!” He mentioned something called syzygy. Then, “And remember to keep looking up at the skies!”

  He turned back from where he came, strolling away on that fanning cosmic ray like the yellow brick road.

  That night, after Horkheimer’s broadcast, riots broke out throughout Miami.