Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  He grew belligerent, leered.

  He bought a new tropical drink. Umbrella, tiny plastic pirate saber speared through cherries and a big slice of pineapple. He went into the hotel pool in his beach trunks and sleeveless T-shirt and blue velour Kangol bucket hat. In his inner tube he drifted here and there among the groups of girls.

  “Booger sugar?” Wayne sidemouthed, sipped from his curly straw.

  A young Colombian woman in a coral two-piece told him, “From you? Get lost.”

  “Dykes,” Wayne said under his breath.

  He floated over to the next group, a Japanese trio standing around the artificial waterfall.

  “What you girls into? ’Ludes? Uppers?”

  “I’m into my husband. Over there. Ready to rip your dick off.”

  “You folks have a nice vacation.”

  Wayne floated on.

  Finally someone from management came. A middle-aged man in an elegant butterscotch summer suit, designer shades. He was holding a leather-bound ledger. He told Wayne Wade he had to leave.

  “Paying customer,” Wayne said, still in the pool. “I’ll have to talk to your manager, chief.”

  “I own the hotel.”

  “Wow, even worse. How you stay in business? You treat guests like this?”

  “You’re no guest.”

  “Whoa, wild accusation.”

  “Your room number?”

  “Hell. My lawyers will make your head spin.”

  “Room.”

  “Hell.”

  “Room.”

  “Three oh eight.”

  Now two hulking security personnel stepped out of the wings and flanked the hotel owner. The owner consulted his book. “Your name is Moheem Kasaab?”

  Wayne Wade frog-legged in his inner tube to the edge of the pool and as if beleaguered set down his drink on the epoxied Chattahoochee stone. He sighed and clambered the ladder. The swimmers and sunbathers watched.

  Some of the girls in the pool clapped.

  An old guy who looked like a mahogany Chef Boyardee, shirtless, said, “Adios, asshole.”

  Now people were catcalling and whistling.

  Once out of the pool Wayne stepped out of the inner tube and he reached into his wakeboard shorts and rooted inside. But then he whirled around and ran, vaulting over someone’s chaise, vaulting over the wrought-iron bars of the pool fencing before the security men could catch up.

  GROUPER SANDWICH

  AT THE BLUE PARROT DINER OVER his grouper sandwich Henry Yahchilane was incredulous. He was incredulous that Wayne Wade was still alive. Incredulous that Mariposa saw what she did. He shook his head. “Can’t be. Somebody like that, never survive.”

  A windy night, twin red flags snapping on the public beach.

  “I’m telling you, Yahchilane,” said Crowe. “He’s out there. Doin’ god knows what down south. Mariposa saw him. Hardware Charley saw him.”

  There were some days he sounded as though a stroke had never befallen him. Especially when he was full of conviction, as he was now.

  “The girl suffers from flights of the imagination,” Yahchilane said. He put down his sandwich. With a napkin he wiped the crumbs from his mustache. Then he balled the napkin and tossed it atop his half-eaten meal. He shook his head. “Say he didn’t bleed out. But I just don’t see how. Think of who killed him. A man like that does not make mistakes.”

  “It sounds crazy. But I know she’s right. Talk to her. You’ll know. You’ll know she’s right. In a heartbeat. Her eyes. All you gotta do is talk to her.”

  “Last fuckin’ thing I’m bringing up to that poor girl.”

  “Then go ask Charley.”

  For a moment they sat with the subject hanging between them, a change in the air. A dark charge.

  They pulled from their beers.

  There was no one else at the Blue Parrot except SnoBall Larry and Adele the honey girl at the cabana bar. Both of them were sloshed on Moscow mules. Talking about UFOs. Oblivious.

  Crowe asked, “We have to assume it’s true, right, Yahchilane?”

  Yahchilane said nothing.

  “What if?”

  “Well, that changes everything.”

  A pause.

  Then, Yahchilane, “He must be stopped.”

  They said nothing else. There was no reason. The dark notion had incubated in Crowe since Mariposa told him. He scratched his scruff, trouble lines creasing his forehead. “Isn’t our place.”

  “Then whose is it?”

  Crowe was silent.

  “Some people the world is better without. Pure and simple.”

  * * *

  —

  At the Elbow Room on the Fort Lauderdale beach strip Crowe and Yahchilane sat at the cabana bar on barstools facing the Atlantic. A breezy calm night but still with the smell of the rainstorm the day previous, ocean wind stirring the palms ranged along the promenade. The neon-tinged air, the glimmer of bar and motel signs dancing on the black water.

  They pulled from their beers, waited. There was no conversation.

  From a nearby hotel pool came the sounds of revelry. Whooping, giggling. Radio music carried from passing convertibles. Trop rock carried from an oyster bar farther down the street. Smell of lobster rolls, Old Bay Seasoning. Someone’s coconut suntan lotion.

  Boom-boom-boom went the convertibles cruising past.

  They were into their third beers when Crowe thought he saw him approaching from a distance. There he was, yes, his impish shape loping from afar on the sidewalk. His telltale walk with the hitch in it, though slower now, stiffer the gait. What with the snake bites, the infections, the beatings.

  What with time.

  He held a small camcorder by his side, gripped by its strap.

  Crowe nudged Yahchilane. Yahchilane looked. Groaned.

  “Goddamn it,” he said.

  They set down their beers. They angled their faces away, watched Wayne discreetly from a distance. Across the street, catty-corner, Wayne sat on the seawall facing the sidewalk, the pedestrians. For a while he’d stay where he was, casually smoking a Swisher Sweets cigar. The camera was set beside him on the seawall, positioned waist-level.

  He watched the passersby. The thighs. The asses. The tits.

  Once women and girls passed, he would nudge the camera so the lens pointed at their jiggling parts from behind. Women in their twenties, girls in their teens, girls hardly even yet budded.

  Wayne Wade filmed them all.

  They had no idea. Oblivious.

  Crowe and Yahchilane watched Wayne for an hour and a half carrying on in this fashion before he went down the street and returned to his room in the Jolly Roger Hotel.

  “You wait here,” Yahchilane told Crowe. “Sit at the bar. Order something. Any kind of piss. Pay cash. Get the receipt. Keep it. Make sure you’re seen.”

  “Let me,” said Crowe.

  Yahchilane looked at Crowe. Just with his look Yahchilane made words unnecessary. You ever kill a man before? his eyes asked. You ever kill someone you know before?

  “There are other ways,” said Crowe.

  “Order your beer,” Yahchilane said. “Tell some jokes. Ask for the time. Make sure you’re seen.”

  Crowe watched Yahchilane walk to the convenience store down the street. After a minute Yahchilane exited the mini-mart with a plastic bag. He took a soda can out of the bag and popped it and drank it in three long pulls. He crushed the can and flung it into the trash. Then he pocketed the plastic bag and headed farther up the strip until he reached the JOLLY ROGER HOTEL sign.

  Crowe waited for what seemed to him a very long time at the bar. He did exactly as Yahchilane told him. He ordered a Jameson shot with a beer chaser from the septuagenarian
bartender, asked for the time.

  Every atom of his body wanted to shoot up from the stool. Chase after Yahchilane before it was too late. He knew what was happening. Yet he stayed put.

  He ordered another shot, downed it, tried to still his jangling nerves.

  He wondered if now was the moment that Yahchilane, jack-of-all-trades, was jimmying the lock to Wayne’s room. Wondered if now was the moment, now as he downed the first sip of his beer chaser, that Yahchilane slipped the plastic bag over Wayne’s head as he slept. If this was the moment that he thrashed and kicked, held down until he drew his last desperate breath.

  He waited, rubbing his sweating palms up and down on his wakeboard shorts, waiting for a subtle recalibration in the air, the earth sloughing off another soul he once knew, but he felt nothing.

  Nothing but nausea.

  At last Yahchilane approached the Elbow Room from down the street, his pace casual. Once returned to the bar he sat down heavily next to Crowe.

  “Yeah,” was all he said. “I couldn’t. Finish your beer. Let’s go.”

  BLACK RUBBER BAG

  BE BRAVE, REED CROWE WOULD REMIND himself, though he felt anything but. One hundred sixty-three mornings of protein shakes. One hundred sixty-three mornings of exercises with the physical therapist. One hundred and sixty-three lunches of fresh-caught fish and greens. One hundred and sixty-three afternoons, alternating days of lifting ankle and wrist weights and swimming in the Emerald City YMCA pool. One hundred and sixty-three evening walks along the shoreline, sometimes south, sometimes north, every time the drag marks left by his right foot growing fainter by the day. One hundred and sixty-three mornings and afternoons and nights thinking about Wayne Wade. Wondering, dreading, what he was up to down south. And on the hundred and sixty-fourth morning of his regimen he found himself able to make a fist with his right hand. A tight closed fist around his glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. His grip was firm, steady. His fingers did not tremble.

  On that one hundred and sixty-fourth day he went to the bathroom and from the cupboard under the sink got out the electric clipper. In front of the sunny mirror with steady hand he started buzzing his shaggy gray beard, grown full again after the hospital.

  “Pussy beard,” he said as he trimmed first with the buzzer-clipper. “Pussy stroke,” he said as he whisked the razor. Aiming for levity. Almost getting there.

  It was true as people said. Once shorn of the beard he did look like a different man. Younger, though his vexed and bedraggled eyes gave away his age.

  His history. Sad green eyes which made people think, “This guy’s been through something. Something bad. I don’t even want to know what the fuck.”

  1989

  MANY NIGHTS CROWE WATCHED WAYNE WADE from afar, trying to work up the nerve.

  A small obstinate part of him still didn’t want to believe, refused to believe, though the rest of him knew it in brain, heart, blood, bone.

  Crowe knew how to get into the room. That wasn’t a matter. He used to own a goddamn motel. He could get into a room with a stick of gum and a match, MacGyver-style.

  But he would have to get drunk to work up the nerve. But not so drunk he’d get sloppy and make a mistake.

  If he botched the job? Crowe wasn’t worried about the cops or legal repercussions. A man wanted by the cops wasn’t going to the cops. No, Crowe was worried about Wayne, what he’d do, the lengths to which he’d resort, if he knew Crowe tried to murder him and failed.

  Oh, Wayne would come after him, no doubt. Betrayed three times?

  The key, the code, getting into the room, was no problem. A maid on her lunch break, a master key left on a hook in the break room, a thirty-minute trip to the locksmith around the corner from the motel, easy.

  The rest? Killing Wayne?

  Jesus Christ.

  * * *

  —

  When Wayne Wade flipped on his motel room light switch and saw Reed Crowe sitting there on the edge of the bed you could see Wayne Wade’s mind cartwheeling. His pinched eyes shunting underneath the grimy Dolphins cap.

  He didn’t recognize Crowe without the beard. So much time had passed since he’d seen Crowe without it. Since they were kids.

  And quid pro quo Crowe hardly recognized Wayne, so derelict he’d become, so stooped, so wizened.

  “Who the shit,” Wayne said. He whirled and took the doorknob and yanked but it would not budge. He shouldered into it. Still it would not give. He cussed. Kept trying.

  Finally Wayne Wade turned, showing his rotted teeth.

  “Look,” he began, assuming Crowe was a bookie, a goon, or worse. Someone after Mr. Video.

  But then Wayne’s face changed. He squinted and leaned and hunched in goober-toothed incredulity and saw that it was Reed Crowe.

  “Hey, Reedy, whoa, scared the everliving shit.”

  Seeing the look on Crowe’s face Wayne tried the door again. Useless.

  Wayne shouted for help.

  Also useless. A pool party outside. The girls shrieking laughter, the huh-huh-huh of the frat boys, guttural beery laughter.

  Before he could change his mind Crowe sprang off the bed. He snared Wayne’s head in the black triple-ply garbage bag. He cinched it around his neck, tightened his hold on the knot.

  Wayne kicked and thrashed and his legs slewed and his checkered Van sneakers banged against the wall, leaving marks. Crowe threw Wayne onto the bed and tightened his hold on the bag. Wayne struggled and gasped and writhed.

  Even with the curtains drawn the room was bathed in pink and blue neon, a sickly cough syrup hue. Wayne’s legs scissored wildly. On the wall the shadows of his legs were also wild.

  “Lily,” Crowe said. “I know what you did.”

  Wayne grunted. Said something indecipherable.

  “I know it,” Crowe said. He could not believe what he was doing. He knew he would never believe it even after it was done.

  Wayne’s mouth gulped. It looked obscene. Like a hyperventilating sea anemone. An alien snuff film.

  Then, as if attempting to provoke him, as if resorting to a last-second gambit to throw Crowe off guard, Wayne tittered. Hehehehe, like a comic book villain.

  Crowe’s hold remained obstinate.

  Crowe’s hold stayed true until the last seizure wracked Wayne’s body and until the man he knew almost all of his life went dead still.

  A VERY HENRY YAHCHILANE CHRISTMAS (CHATEAUNEUF-DU-PAPE)

  AROUND THIS TIME OF YEAR CROWE would think of his girl Lily.

  The sound of her quick elfin laughter, its memory by the year was growing fainter, ghosting away inside his head.

  How old would you be tonight, Otter? he’d think. How old would you be this Christmas?

  Scratching his beach bum beard he scratched out the sad arithmetic in his head.

  Would you be a little shit, Lily? Yeah, you probably would. Almost definitely.

  He would tell her in his head, You were born on the night they said Hurricane Cleo was coming. And like Cleo you came howling into the world. You were just a natural-born hellion. I loved you at once. Right away. And the next day, I loved you more. I didn’t think it possible, Otter.

  I had no idea love could grow like that.

  * * *

  —

  These days he was drinking too much. Alone. Staring at the wall, he could not banish from his mind the picture of Wayne Wade with the black bag over his head, his skinny legs kicking before going still.

  Some nights he felt doomed. Occulted. He thought about those artifacts he dug up. The ones that used to be in the Florida Man Mystery House before Wayne stole and sold them.

  The phone would ring at odd hours of the night, jarring him from a stupor, from nightmares where he had his hands wrapped around a catfaced man’s throat. His hands wrapped aro
und Wayne Wade’s throat.

  Other nights, he’d wake clutching air, groping for a girl’s arm, trying to pull her out of the water.

  Normally Crowe would ignore the ringing. But Heidi. He always hoped, though the hope winnowed by the day, that it was Heidi.

  It wasn’t.

  “We are looking for Reed Crowe.” Invariably some hotline operator from a far-flung Eastern province.

  “It’s pretty late. Senior or Junior.”

  “Senior.”

  “He’s passed.”

  “There’s still a score to settle.”

  “Pardon?”

  “A balance.”

  “He’s passed.”

  “Is this the junior?”

  “Did you hear me? He’s passed. He died years ago.”

  “May I have your Social Security number?”

  “May you what? Shit. Look, who the hell is this? Are you even in this country?”

  “Just the digits, please, sir.”

  “The digits like shit!”

  * * *

  —

  On Christmas Eve shrieking black gales buffeted the island. Reed Crowe could not recall a winter this cold, not since January of 1977. The winter Heidi Karavas’s new life started. The night the yachtsman bought one of her paintings, a painting he later hung up in his Manhattan living room. A few months later the New York Times critic saw it on the man’s wall during a party.

  Early in the night, as the wind cried in the cracks of the beach house, Crowe belted two fingers of Jameson to calm his nerves but it did no good.

  If anything, a mistake.

  He was too far gone in his own head. He felt claustrophobic. He paced the terrazzo back and forth the same he always did when he felt the past closing in on him. He paced so much he spooked the beach cats. From outside some of them stared like, What the fuck?

  Finally Crowe got on his navy woolen peacoat and with a wine bottle in one hand and a Coleman lantern in the other journeyed to Yahchilane’s house.