Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  He twisted Crowe’s arm.

  Crowe wailed on the empty beach. He fell to his knees. Contorted, pinioned.

  Yahchilane let go and Crowe backed off a few paces.

  Yahchilane flicked his cigarette in the sand and faced Crowe. His face rancid. His lank curls hanging sweaty.

  Crowe charged at Yahchilane with his arms thrown wide. The green beach bum shades flew off his head.

  Yahchilane wrapped him up in his bear arms and the two men lumbered and groaned and tottered like two rabid warring beasts.

  They toppled. Yahchilane pinned Crowe and mashed his face in the sand. He grabbed Crowe’s hair. Held him down.

  Crowe felt the bite of small shells digging into his cheek. Like little fangs. Crowe kicked like a trapped anole in a beach cat’s mouth.

  Yahchilane said, “You gonna calm the fuck down? Gonna come at me again?”

  Crowe breathed angry scraping breaths through his nose, his face mashed.

  “Gonna let you go,” Yahchilane said. “You come at me, then I’m gonna put you down. Quick.”

  Yahchilane stood up and tugged his denim shirt straight. One of the sleeves was ripped at the shoulder. Yahchilane let it dangle. He sat down where he was before. He fumbled with an already-swelling hand in his pocket for his cigarettes and took out the smashed pack.

  He withdrew a cigarette. Broken. He flung it aside. He withdrew another. Broken. He broke off the end, lit the good half.

  The men sat catching their breath. Crowe slapped the grit off his cheek. Little nicks of blood were welling, scoring his face.

  Then Crowe put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and kept his face hidden as he made a choking crying sound. He did this for almost a full minute.

  Then he took his hands from his face and looked wet-eyed at Yahchilane. “There were other options.”

  “No,” Yahchilane said.

  “I’ve known that man my whole life.”

  “I understand.”

  “You killed him.”

  “Nothing to be done,” Yahchilane said.

  “You’re a sick fuck.”

  “Your judgment is clouded.”

  Yahchilane, staring at the water, sat with his shoulders hard and straight.

  “I grew up with him,” Crowe said.

  When Yahchilane said nothing, when he only kept smoking, Crowe stood and lunged as if gearing for another attack. He swatted the cigarette out of Yahchilane’s mouth.

  Yahchilane glared. Crowe glared back.

  Then Crowe with his beaten face hobbled back from where he came.

  MELON HEAD

  YET WAYNE WADE DID NOT DIE. Miraculously he did not die. And when Reed Crowe learned the news, a thousand new worries beset him.

  What now? Would Wayne Wade go after Yahchilane? Would Wayne Wade think he was complicit, co-engineer of some diabolical plan? Would Wayne go after him?

  Where in everliving blue fuck did they go from here?

  Reed Crowe didn’t have a notion.

  * * *

  —

  Doubting himself, doubting Yahchilane, doubting every fucking thing that had happened in his life thus far, Crowe went through the rooms of the Emerald Island Inn.

  The peepholes, at least one per room. Sometimes two or three. Behind the television, behind the thrift store wall-hangings of lighthouses and seashells. Behind headboards and nightstands and hutches.

  Maybe mouse holes, he thought.

  Termites, silverfish, some other kind of pest.

  Hey, maybe it was normal wear and tear from the weather and storms.

  He wanted desperately to believe this.

  But going through the motel the more he discovered. The more he discovered, the more they began to resemble one another, dime-sized holes bored into the wall with a drill or file.

  Identical.

  Imagining Wayne Wade crouching, imagining him peering through the holes, imagining what he saw and what he did, Crowe went to the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet and puked.

  * * *

  —

  Crowe spent that night thinking about Wayne Wade.

  Drinking alone. Brooding in silence. Looking out at the ocean from his BarcaLounger in the beach house sunroom, looking out at the night surf under the planetarium sky.

  From his somber expression and his thousand-mile stare, Crowe might as well have been looking at a cinderblock wall.

  Crowe marveled at how long he’d let this state of affairs with Wayne Wade go on.

  Decades.

  How was it possible?

  Yet he was blind to so much of it, willfully blind.

  * * *

  —

  Next morning Reed Crowe went to the intensive care ward to see Wayne Wade. If not for the rattail, if not for the telltale goober teeth, Crowe wouldn’t recognize him. His face warped, his head swollen as big as a melon, his skin hived and blistered, his legs swaddled in gore-soaked bandages.

  Crowe succumbed to a brief spell of pity.

  He thought of Wayne’s childhood. There weren’t many kids who attended their little beachside school in Emerald City. It started as a damn one-room schoolhouse, for god’s sake. But of course Wayne immediately became the brunt of the jokes, the punching bag.

  There always had to be one, no matter where you went.

  Now, looking at Wayne in the bed, he remembered all this, but then he remembered Mariposa sitting Indian-style on the edge of the motel bed, watching Mr. Rogers. Won’t you be my neighbor? He thought of Mariposa watching 3-2-1 Contact. He thought of “Fish Heads” by Barnes & Barnes. He thought of the girl who used to give him rocks and dirty socks for presents, wrapped in gift paper.

  Within a half minute, the spell of pity dissipated.

  “Well, Wayne,” Crowe began. His voice was strained. “I’m sorry it had to come to this. I really am. But I think you brought this upon yourself. You can’t speak. I know. The nurses told me.”

  Crowe shook his head. Looked down at the green and white linoleum. “I don’t know what your plans are. I didn’t want you dead. I didn’t want you dead.” Crowe looked up. “Know that. I just wanted you gone. Goddamn it, you should’a stayed gone.”

  There were tubes shoved in Wayne’s mouth and nostrils and into his arms. About him machines blipped and wheezed. A heart monitor. A ventilator.

  Now Wayne huffed like a bellows. He writhed in torment. The restraints around his wrists and ankles kept him in place. He was pinioned.

  Crowe went on, “You get Schaffer or anybody involved in this, you know what’s gonna happen. That’s a promise. You’ll die in jail. They’ll fuck you raw in prison.”

  Wayne’s eyes wept pus.

  The blipping on the monitor quickened.

  “I’m sorry. Bullshit, I’m not sorry.” Part of Crowe wanted to grip Wayne Wade around the throat and end it right now.

  Instead he backed away from the bed a few steps. He said in a hissing whisper, “When you get out of here you get out of here. They’ll kill you. And I won’t lift a finger. You hear? It’s over. For good. Disappear. Get.”

  OPERATION TARANTULA (IMPROBABLE PALACES)

  ONE MIGHT WONDER HOW A YEAR passed for a man such as Catface. They might imagine chapters of such a man’s life passing in cinematic montage. Catface, with stiletto blade, hiding behind shower curtains patterned with tropical fish. Catface, with a bauernwehr dagger hiding behind hotel drapes and venetian blinds. Catface lurking in the wings of a dictator’s palace or plantation or hacienda with his assassin’s knife.

  All vignettes pretty much true.

  And an assassin’s trade took him to improbable places. Midnight Cessnas to Medellin, to Los Cabos.

  The world of dictatorships and c
oups and cartels.

  But most people might not imagine such a man watching the Pink Panther films of Peter Sellers. Imagine such a man mailing a brown butcher paper envelope containing a brick of American money to the children’s sick ward at Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital, mailing bricks of one-hundred-dollar bills to the churches and the orphanages clustered along the banks of the Rio Grande.

  Catface saw them on the news all the time these days. The refugees. He remembered being one himself.

  He was one.

  He would always be an alien. Here, everywhere. Not only in America, but in Cuba, his birthplace. Even there, especially there, he was alienated. There were some moments he felt an alien of Earth. And, like an alien, he felt immune to laws, impervious to human restrictions and mores.

  Not when it came to those poor kids.

  If they were lucky the kids ended up at a shelter on the Mexican side. Because the other side, without their parents? If the children didn’t end up black market babies, they ended up camp detainees.

  A dark world out there. A dark country. A dark time. He’d made the acquaintance over the years of many men who slavered over girls not even made it yet to their quinceañeras.

  He gave such men wide berth.

  Not for fear of them but for fear of what he’d do to them.

  When Catface was in the company of such men, he got so high before he killed them that he believed he was an alien.

  An extraterrestrial.

  What was it those cabrona comedians were saying on television these days?

  Cocaine: hell of a drug.

  MR. VIDEO

  IT WAS BY A SHEER STROKE of luck, finally, that Catface happened upon the information that led him to Reed Crowe. He was in a strip club near Punta Gorda, Florida, the Pink Pony, one of many such seedy establishments scattered up and down the coast, when a scrawny, cracker-voiced man on the neighboring barstool caught his attention.

  It was a shadowy place so you wouldn’t see the stripper’s crow’s-feet or C-section scars.

  Nor, evidently, did the scrawny man next to him see Catface’s scars because the first thing he noticed was the necklace. “Hotel Mutiny?”

  Catface regarded the man. The man’s lips clamped over his goober teeth. He had on cutoff jeans, a Timex watch, white-and-black-checkered shoes. A shark’s tooth hung from his plated necklace. The plating was so cheap that Catface could see the faint green ring rimming his collar.

  “That’s right,” Catface told him.

  “All those stories true?” The man’s eyes were half-lidded, inebriated.

  Catface shrugged.

  “I bet they’re true. I’d like to check that place out. Man, oh man, I bet it’s wild.”

  And now, finally, the man named Wayne Wade noticed Catface’s face. A moment of clarity seized him. For an instant he was aghast. Then his face underwent a series of contortions. As if he suspected himself dosed, in the grip of some mind-altering drug.

  Here was a man he’d met before, a man whose head was shaped oddly catlike, the scars on his face like bacon for whiskers.

  Wayne Wade picked up the red glass votive holder to look at. The candle flame guttered. From the far end of the bar the ’roided-up bar backs shouted to Wayne that he was getting thrown out if he didn’t put the candle down.

  “Hey,” Catface said, his voice cutting through the disco.

  The man looked at Catface. Catface held up an imperious hand.

  The bar back turned away.

  “Man, you got the ring too, look at that,” the scrawny man said, recovering from his shock. “You must be loaded.”

  The men had to speak over the loud disco pumping out the speakers. A black-haired woman with a leg brace moved topless around the stage pole.

  Catface told him, “Not so much.”

  “You like history, mister?”

  Catface told him, “It seems the older I get, the more interested I get in the past, and less in the future.”

  Wayne blinked groggy cracker blinks at him.

  “Yes,” Catface told him, “I like history.”

  Now the man flashed a grin. He rummaged in the depths of his jorts pockets. He set something on the bar before Catface.

  The bar back inserted himself into the conversation again. “Hey, I told you, no sellin’ shit in this place.”

  He was striding toward them. Catface stalled him with his hand. Then he pointed and said nothing. Just pointed.

  The bar back started to puff up but then the raven-haired barmaid clutched his forearm and said, “Chet.”

  “Your name is Chet?” Catface asked the man. Catface’s eyes widened in surprise for an instant before they slitted again. Through his toothpick he grinned.

  Now even the man’s eyes looked steroidal.

  “Clit, get us another round.”

  The bar back took a scuffing step toward Catface with his fist beginning to bunch but the barmaid stalled him again with her hand. She whispered in his ear. The bar back’s face changed. His eyes went to Catface’s necklace, then his ring. The hulk composed himself.

  Catface said, “Flex, baby, flex.”

  Wayne was not used to this kind of respect. Immediately his attitude changed. His posture inflated with pride. Now that he could laugh with impunity, he put some gut in it.

  The disco blared.

  The old-timers went back to lollygagging over their harvey wallbangers and gin rickeys. They leered at the girls dancing beside the neon-faced cigarette machine.

  The object before Catface looked like a trinket or bauble of some sort.

  “Native American?”

  Wayne Wade hunkered, swung around a secretive look. Wayne told Catface it was. The genuine deal.

  In the dim bar light it looked like a figure or idol. Catface thought of Kalki. Of Vishnu. He thumbed the rough-hewn stone amulet. A talisman of sorts made of hard black rock, grain like soapstone.

  He rolled it in his well-manicured hand, held it up to his face for closer inspection in the wan bar light.

  The figure, a humanlike effigy, had an overlarge, angry-looking mouth like the face on a tiki stump.

  The statuette looked like it was wearing a wig made of black spaghetti. Maybe worms or snakes. Maybe tendrils of smoke. Catface pictured a chief or priest many years ago, from some prehistoric time, squatting aside a ceremonial fire, stroking the figure with his thumb as he was now, as if coaxing out a hex or curse, summoning a genie.

  Catface asked, “Why you selling this?”

  “Oh, employment opportunities run dry,” Wayne said. Then, “You hirin’?”

  “I’m an independent contractor, you might say.”

  “They used to call me Cool Papa Lemon.” The man admitted this with visible pride.

  “That right?”

  “Yessir.”

  Catface called for the bar back. Motioned for two more drinks.

  “Where you from?”

  “You familiar with the coast?”

  “Growing.”

  “Emerald Island, about fifty miles up from here. Little island.”

  Catface looked at Wayne.

  The hulk set the drinks before them. Catface waited until he walked away and said, “You worked there.”

  “I did. Until I was fired.”

  Catface asked, “Where did you work?”

  “Little motel. Mostly, though?” Again Wayne swiveled a secretive look around. “Grass.”

  Catface asked him if he grew it.

  “No, just sold it.”

  “Your boss?”

  “Grow it? Shit, no. That’s the bitch of it, see.” Another sneaky look around. “He found it. He just found it. Lucky, was all.”

  “You know, I might have be
en there. Emerald Island. Is the hotel pink and purple?”

  Wayne had to consider this for a moment. “The sign is.”

  Catface remembered flying over a barrier island. He remembered a motel sign. This little he remembered in the moments before the plane fell apart and the fuel line exploded and they went down burning in the swamp.

  On closer inspection, Catface believed he might have seen this Wayne before. He thought of all manner of people he came in touch with over the years. He could picture Wayne stepping in his zories and his too-short rayon shorts and Panama Jack T-shirt through the coconut-oiled scrum of people on a Fort Lauderdale strip beach. I got hippie flips and love pills and bumblebees and Quaaludes and purple microdots. If a cop stopped him, all he had to do was scamper away and duck into the jam-packed Elbow Room.

  Wayne asked him now, “Hey, you like artifacts?”

  “You already asked me that, amigo.”

  “How much you think this is worth? A hundred?”

  The man reared his head back in surprise.

  “Too little?”

  “Too little. Florida lottery.”

  “Happy to oblige.”

  “You okay, buddy. You okay.”

  Catface pocketed the figure. They finished their drinks and Catface motioned two-fingered for more.

  Now the dancers changed and there came onstage a young almost breastless woman who couldn’t have been a few weeks older than eighteen, if that. And it was this young nymphet that the scrawny cracker’s eyes settled on wolfishly. The tip of his tongue roved in the pocket of his cheek like a ball bearing.

  Catface, cold rising to his eyes, studied the man now in a different way.

  Catface looked at the stage. “Your type?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “We have very young girls at the Mutiny.”

  “How young?”

  “How young do you think?”

  Wayne leaned toward Catface, whispered, “I’m not only known by Cool Papa Lemon.”

  “Tell me more.”