Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Crowe moved his eyes, but not his head. “What is it?”

  “Open. Now.”

  Crowe reached slowly for the box, like a man about to defuse a bomb. He placed the box on his lap. He ripped the wrapping, lifted the lid. He gaped at what was inside. Something resembling a desiccated gray toadstool.

  The odor, a foul sardine.

  Crowe knew what it was. And for a moment he was strangely relieved. Because he’d expected worse. Beyond the powers of his imagination.

  Crowe moved to set the box down on the nightstand. Catface snicked out his switchblade. Crowe froze.

  Catface motioned with the blade. Crowe flinched. “Nothing stupid.”

  Crowe put the box down and returned his hands to his lap.

  Catface said, “Guess what.” Then he gaped his jaw as far as it would go. A grotesque pantomime of childish glee. He kept his face this way, leaning closer.

  Crowe could smell beneath the catfaced man’s cloying floral cologne, the sharp chemical stink of some mind-altering drug.

  Crowe said, “I know what it is.”

  Catface watched Crowe for a reaction. “You don’t like?” His face twisted now in clownish dejection. His version of it, what the scar tissue would allow.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Oh, oh, that’s the wrong question. The question should be whose is it. Not what.”

  Crowe felt suddenly queasy. Eddie’s? Why Eddie’s? Yahchilane’s? No sense.

  “Wayne,” Catface said. “Your friend.”

  Crowe retched. His gorge rose and it flew out before he could stop it. And before Catface could dodge the spate it spackled one of his loafers. His face twisted in fury. This time there was no clownishness.

  He slashed out and sliced Crowe’s left arm deep at the shoulder.

  Crowe was vomiting and shrieking at once. He clutched at the gash.

  Still pointing his blade Catface looked down at his shoe, all the while keeping one eye fixed on Crowe. His trouser cuff, soiled. Keeping his eyes on Crowe he jerked his leg, shaking off vomit.

  Catface sat again. And his expression changed again, with switchblade swiftness. Clownish glee once more leapt to his face. “So you like it? Goo!”

  Crowe sat there with his head hung like his neck was deboned. “So he’s not dead,” Crowe said. His voice was dry and tremulous, barely audible.

  Catface’s face changed quickly. Like a curtain dropped. The possibility had not occurred to him. Then his expression altered again, once more composed, a kind of bemused malicious serenity. “Wouldn’t that be something. But no. He is dead.”

  Crowe said nothing.

  Catface ticked his head back, a small incredulous rearing. His eyes narrowed. “Would you prefer him alive?”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Crowe was quiet.

  An angry spark leapt to Catface’s eyes. “He es dead, cock. Truss me.”

  Crowe thought such a thing would make one of those headlines. Shit, too gruesome not to make the news. FLORIDA MAN GETS HIS DICK SLICED OFF IN PENSACOLA. Crowe didn’t want to know and he didn’t want to guess.

  Catface’s voice was harder now. He said, “Dead. And it was agony. Bloodbath. Not goo.”

  Catface watched Crowe for a moment.

  Their breathing in the musty air-conditioned room. The crickets and frogs outside like shrieking detuned violins.

  Finally Catface said, “You do not care.”

  “No.”

  “Disappointed I must admit.”

  Silence.

  “I can do seventy-five grand,” Crowe said. “Eighty maybe. It would take a few days.”

  “That’s not even in the same universe of what you’d need.”

  “How much?”

  “No earthly sum. It es no longer about money.”

  With this Catface stood. Crowe pulled away. Catface took out a wad of bills half as thick as a brick from his trouser pocket. He threw the money on the floor. With Crowe watching a few feet away, Catface unzipped his fly and took a minute-long piss on the cash.

  When he was empty, Catface zipped up his fly, sat back on the edge of the bed. He looked at the floor. “Housekeeping?”

  “Mister,” Crowe said, weak-voiced.

  Catface said, “I thought, He’ll forget our paths ever crossed. He’ll spend all that money and smoke all that grass and have a nice life and you did. Goo for you. It es over now. How I pictured this. The day I’d tap you on the back. The look on your face. It kept me alive in the swamp. The hospital.”

  Now Catface fell silent. He studied Crowe. The toothpick roiled ruminatively between his lips.

  Meanwhile, Crowe kept glancing at the man with little side movements, infinitesimal, of his eyes.

  He took the toothpick from his mouth and placed it in the glass ashtray on the nightstand. He stood and rummaged in the coat pocket. Almost debonair, this Catface, in his café-au-lait summer suit of Havana silk. A latter-day Bogart.

  But the face. The face.

  The pissed-on money on the carpet.

  Catface withdrew his Mutiny Hotel lighter and crack pipe, lit a rock, inhaled.

  He was not through exhaling his second lungful when Crowe sprang up from the bed and picked up the old-fashioned rotary phone one-handed and hurled it at his face. The cord snapped and the glass pipe shattered and Catface let out a sound that was part yell, part laugh.

  Crowe sprang wildly at the door and opened it and went running as Catface cackled behind him.

  “Goo,” he said. “Goo. Run! Let’s have some fun, conyo!”

  WERE IT A DIFFERENT SEASON

  IF THE SEASON WAS DIFFERENT THE old Conchs in the nearby beach houses might have spotted Catface from afar. Drawn by the headlights to their windows, they would have beheld a strange sight. A brand-new peach-colored Cadillac. Kind of a loud car around here.

  Curious.

  And pulled alongside the desolate beach road.

  Emerald Island was a place of jalopies and trucks and vans and RVs.

  Not brand-new peach-colored Cadillacs that looked just rolled off the lot.

  This was a car of the sort you’d see around Miami.

  No matter. There was no one around to witness.

  The door of the Cadillac eased open without a sound. A slight man wearing an oatmeal-colored suit emerged. He clicked neatly in his burnt orange alligator shoes to the trunk. He popped it and took out what looked like a length of rope with a small anchor or grappling hook on each end.

  No, a chain, a chain of spikes.

  Stringer spikes.

  The man in the suit pulled the stringer spikes across the tarmac. They raked like claws. Little blue-orange sparks spat up from the macadam. The heavens were massive above him, the sky a billion-stars strong.

  Catface secured one anchor of the stringer spikes on one side of the road and then the other. Then he stood from his crouch and he smacked the sand off his hands fastidiously.

  He got back into the champagne Cadillac and drove onward to set the next trap with like impunity.

  A BLAST FROM THE PAST

  JUST AS CATFACE KNEW HE WOULD, Crowe fled home. He fled home when he should have gotten into his hatchback car—the idiot, the conyo—and crossed the bridge and never looked back.

  Instead, right into the trap. The game.

  On the island side of the bridge Catface hotwired a skiff from the harbor. He motored the boat under the bridge, where high in the vaulted underbelly of the viaduct seagulls and pigeons settled in their night roosts. Wickery nests made of dried seaweed and marsh grass and soda straws.

  The air was fuggy with the reek of guano and dirty wet feathers. The brackish smell of low tide.<
br />
  In the sweep of his flashlight the water glowed murky emerald green. Twenty-odd yards underwater Catface could see three huge bull sharks patrolling among the pylons like submarines. Wondering what manner of life he was. Deeming him some species inedible and not worth their while.

  Catface, Maglite clenched between his teeth, set an explosive at the foot of the pile. He fixed it to the barnacled post with ballistic clay. A makeshift bomb, fashioned from nitroglycerine and mercury fulminate and ammonium nitrate. The compound encased in a PVC pipe crucible and outfitted with a firing exciter and timed fuse.

  Amazing what a gram of cocaine could get you in Miami. At the Mutiny Hotel especially. Some ex-con named Arana, “Oh, I could do that for you easy.”

  Now Catface boated to the other stanchion, set up a second explosive.

  Hundreds of bird eyes, obsidian seeds, peered down as he worked.

  Every now and then a feather drifted down in a somnolent spiral.

  After he had the explosives placed he motored to the boat launch. At the dock he tied the motorboat to a cleat. Then he stood on the end of the pier with the remote detonator in hand. He reached into the front pocket of his silk shirt and he took out a toothpick and put it in his mouth. Mosquitoes and gnats swarmed at his face. He waved them off.

  Catface pressed the detonator button.

  Silence. The babble of waves. The hum of insects.

  Then one explosive went off like a thunderclap. The sound echoed hugely over the bay.

  Then another report blasted before the first was finished echoing.

  Hundreds of birds flew panicked through the night, their cries querulous over the rumbling of the bridge.

  A large chunk of concrete dropped. Another. Then another, one as big as a washing machine. It walloped the water massively, threw fish into the air. The silver of their scales caught the moonlight and firelight.

  Decking collapsed. Girders toppled and splashed. Part of the parapet crumbled.

  Catface stepped back before his shoes were soaked by the leaping waves.

  The whole west side of the bridge started collapsing. Like a great dying beast losing its footing and sloughing on its haunches to rest.

  Catface watched the avalanche. The rolling of rocks and rubble into the water.

  Across the water was Emerald City, its warren of beach cottages and bungalows, the odd mission-style stucco manse with a cigar boat in the boatlift. The pier lights twinkling along the shore.

  Maybe some of them had caught a glimpse of the explosion through their windows as it happened. Thought it the end of the world.

  Catface imagined their vexed faces peering out at the blood-colored night. Faces washed orange by the light of the distant fire.

  He laughed darkly.

  Just the beginning.

  * * *

  —

  Reed Crowe felt the island tremble beneath his feet.

  Crowe was outside throwing another box of mementos and keepsakes in the trunk of his car when he heard the concussion like a falling mortar.

  Where the westward span of Emerald Island bridge met the island a huge column of smoke rose, lit within by a gyre of cobalt and copper-green flame.

  Crowe went back into the house to the hallway closet. Rummaged among the shelves and the mementos, thinking, What the fuck are you doing. Go. Leave.

  He had the wine crate full of mementos in his arms and was headed out when he saw one of the beach cats shoot through the front door pet pass.

  A tortoiseshell.

  She came up to him with her tail puffed and lowered. She stood gopher-like on her haunches and growled while peering through the back-facing windows of the house. Her mouth was ajar, tasting threat in the air.

  Past his own reflection, past the lamplit room mirrored in the glass, he saw the wake of the vessel, a phantom thread stitching quickly across the water. A Jet Ski, he realized, from the small sound of motor. About a mile out someone was riding a Jet Ski straight east. Straight to shore, straight toward the beach house.

  Straight toward him.

  And he kept waiting for the Jet Ski to curve away, hook in another direction, but it was coming still and now a half mile out.

  Crowe took the binoculars from next to the seashell lamp. He went to the sliding glass doors. He trained the binoculars. Through the glass he saw a man riding in hunch-shouldered silhouette.

  Then he was gone.

  Then Crowe saw him again. The madhouse grin slashed across the disfigured face.

  The Jet Ski’s white rooster tail kept coming, a fan of fast foam across the dark. Then the Jet Ski slowed. It slowed to a stop. The light went dark.

  Crowe went outside.

  Crowe’s hands shook holding the binoculars and he swung the glass wildly left to right across the horizon.

  Where the fuck was he?

  What was he doing?

  Where did he go?

  Then the light snapped back on.

  Crowe focused.

  The Jet Ski grew closer. A searing meteorite flying shorebound across ocean. Yes, like a meteorite, but also like a skipping stone. A skipping meteorite coming closer and closer.

  Crowe was sure the man would stop, at least slow. He did not. Full speed he reared ashore, cutting across the sand. Crowe glimpsed the scar-faced man trudging out of the surf. He staggered cackling across the beach.

  Now he was about a hundred yards off, walking straight to Crowe’s house. Crowe dropped the binoculars into the sand.

  He ran inside the house.

  He could hear the man calling behind him, but from his distance he only caught scraps. “Donde esta el niño?” he heard.

  Then tittering.

  Then something that sounded like, “Goo luck!”

  THE CAT AND THE MOUSE AND THE LIGHTHOUSE

  AS CROWE WENT THROUGH THE BEACH house he could see the man moving in the backyard. By the porch light he saw the catfaced man in the bespoke suit walk up to a chaise lounge and heave it above his head.

  He hurled the chair at the sliding glass door. The chair flipped end over end and struck the door and the glass spiderwebbed for what seemed to Crowe an elongated moment before shards broke on the floor.

  Catface stepped through the maw, one alligator-skin shoe after the other.

  Crowe backed away. “I thought ya’ll were dead. I’d never leave a dying man in the Everglades.”

  “Liar,” Catface said. “Not goo.”

  In a few strides the man crossed the distance between them. He looked at the wine crate in Crowe’s arms. The crate with memorabilia. Hanging out was a blanket with lavender elephants on it.

  Otter’s.

  Crowe could see the man’s face better now. Scars fanned outward from his mouth like whiskers. And in the hand of his dangling arm was a knife, a blade of exotic make. An assassin’s knife.

  Crowe turned and bolted for the door and Catface whipped his arm in a jackknife motion and the blade went whistling through the air. Crowe felt the hot small flare of pain in his leg.

  He hobbled away.

  Crowe got into the hatchback and he started it and just as the suited man with the deformed face came running out the front door, Crowe slammed his foot on the gas. For an instant the car went nowhere, spinning in place, bald tires spitting out gouts of limestone and powdered shell.

  Then the hatchback shot backward.

  Driving one-handed Crowe executed a wild five-point turn, tires screeching. Once on the main beach road he was speeding away, pulling the knife out of his leg. He let loose a sickly animal groan and wail. He tossed the knife on the passenger-side floor.

  Crowe wasn’t half a mile from the beach house and he was trying to staunch the gush of blood with his hand when there was a double detonatio
n.

  One explosion, then another a split second later.

  Like two gunshots. That startling.

  The hatchback tires, ripped to tatters by the stringer spikes.

  The steering wheel leapt out of Crowe’s hands like something alive. He tried to wrangle the wheel, couldn’t. The car went careening and swerving. The rims scraped concrete, raising orange and blue sparks. Then the hatchback went off the road and beached itself into the sand.

  Crowe got out of the car. He glanced over his shoulder. Still the catfaced man was approaching his own car, a Cadillac. Now he was getting into his car, climbing in slowly, almost leisurely, behind the wheel.

  As if he had all the time in the world.

  As if he were fucking with Reed Crowe.

  Mocking him.

  * * *

  —

  Crowe went hobbling down the limestone road toward the island lighthouse. He would not make it to the wharf, not in his state. Not in time to evade the scar-faced man.

  The bridge was blasted.

  Even if it wasn’t, he could never cross what remained of it on foot. If enough of the bridge remained to cross.

  Crowe limped onward.

  Now halfway to the lighthouse.

  Above him the heavens were enormous. Ursa Minor. The North Star. The Loon.

  A meteorite slashed across the sky. The island night was so quiet Crowe could hear it sizzling as it split the atmosphere. Then the only sounds he heard were his own breathing, quick and raspy. The soft crashing surf beyond.

  By the time Crowe reached the Emerald Island lighthouse he saw the headlights of the Cadillac approaching.

  He went pounding up the steps, clutching the rail, gasping for air. He took the stairs two at a time. A trail of blood followed him, slicked the concrete. Crowe hardly felt the pain in his leg. Every nerve in him shrieked.

  The keep’s three portal windows overlooked the vast dunes.

  Crowe moved from one to the other, squatting, clutching his gun, arms quaking.

  Where Crowe’s car was mired, the catfaced man now steered his car around the stringer spikes. But then the Cadillac got stuck in the sand on the other side of the road.