Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  A small Christmas Eve party was under way. Crowe could see the people through the lit windows. Someone must have spotted Crowe and his lantern because after a little while a figure walked down the boardwalk and crossed the dunes and met him on the beach.

  It was Yahchilane. He was in his denim and boots. But he also had on a corduroy jacket to ward off the unusual cold.

  “I did a bad thing, Yahchilane,” Crowe said.

  “Come inside, warm up,” Yahchilane said, as though he hadn’t heard. He leaned his head, pointed his chin.

  Crowe’s face was raw from the cold wind. His lips were chapped and his nose was running. “I did a real bad thing.”

  “No.”

  “I gotta tell you.”

  “Don’t tell me anything.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I do. I do exactly.”

  The surf was crashing loudly behind them. The smell of cold seaweed was sharp in the air.

  “I did a thing that’s gonna send me to hell. I don’t believe, but I don’t know. I did a fucked thing.”

  With a sternness almost fatherly, Yahchilane said, “No, you did not, Crowe.”

  Enough of this, he meant.

  Bury it, he meant.

  “Listen to me,” Yahchilane said, “you did not.”

  “I killed him. I killed somebody.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “We were like brothers.”

  “Enough, Crowe.”

  They stood in the lamplit windy dark.

  “Let’s get out of the goddamn wind,” Yahchilane said.

  They started up the boardwalk that wound over the sand dunes. The sea oats thrashed and hissed. From the back veranda bamboo wind chimes clanged. Cocktail talk and cocktail laughter floated their way. The smells of a chimney fire burning, hickory wood, of roasted turkey, mulled cider.

  A fifteen-foot Christmas tree stood in the barrel-shaped house’s grand room, its big-bulbed lights shining colorful through the windows. The old-fashioned parti-colored bulbs Crowe remembered as a kid. Otter liked the little ones, probably because he called them fairy lights and pixie lights.

  A sudden pang of nostalgia swept through Crowe like a mistral wind.

  “I’m starting to forget her face, Yahchilane.” It just came out of Crowe, the confession.

  Yahchilane didn’t break his stride. But there was a ruminative set in his shoulders. And something, Crowe couldn’t quite peg it—relieved. Relieved, probably because Crowe had dropped the subject of Wayne Wade.

  He’d never get over it.

  Yahchilane offered, “Well, you haven’t. You haven’t forgotten her. That’s what’s important.”

  No more was said. Such was their rapport at this late stage. And for the time being, for at least this very moment, this sufficed.

  As an added consolation, Yahchilane threw a glance over his shoulder and said, “You still a wino, egghead? I bet you are. Let’s get you some good wine, besides that shipwreck shit you’ve been drinking. You ever hear of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, you philistine?”

  Together they walked toward the shaggy-shingled barrel-shaped house, toward the cocktail laughter, the yuletide light.

  A NEW YEAR

  IT WAS THE DAWN OF A new decade, years into Crowe’s recovery.

  The New Year came and Heidi throughout the winter sent him postcards from Paris. From Berlin. From Oslo. From Rome.

  They used to come a few times a month.

  Then one every other month.

  Little pedestrian details that could have come from anyone.

  Heidi Karavas, after living all this life, was becoming with each passing year more of a mystery to him. Stranger.

  Absence, in Crowe’s experience, did make the heart grow fonder. But it also made the heart forget.

  It made the heart stronger, harder.

  * * *

  —

  He remembered Heidi now in fragments. But fragments so tangible and corporeal they might as well have been slides in a picture-show carousel. The images fossilized in the amber of memory.

  He remembered her hair. How he’d loved that wild curly hair. How it hung slicked back from her brown forehead and her green-hazel eyes when she emerged from the Gulf after a swim. He loved the way her hair dried in wild sea-smelling curls.

  How her head smelled like the sea that night.

  He remembered how he could spot her figure a mile distant on the beach. Her gait. Even in a crowd he could spot her figure. The curve and sway of her hips. Her low-slung buxom body, short and round and warm and tan throughout the year.

  Her tan lines. Like being clothed and nude at the same time.

  He remembered all the days she spent under the beach umbrella with her sketchpad. He remembered how the pictures changed almost as quickly as she changed. The strokes and lines of her watercolors becoming confident. Quick, assured.

  He remembered her laughter. Loud and long and hearty. She was quick to laugh at his silliness. One thing he could say about her big Greek family, they were good laughers.

  Good drinkers, good laughers, good cooks.

  Maybe that’s why they lived so long.

  Maybe their longevity had something to do with living near the water.

  Crowe knew his did. Without the water he probably would have been dead years ago. Some trouble or another.

  KRAKEN

  THE CALENDAR OVERHANGING THE CARPORT WORKSTATION still said February, but on a springish day Crowe was slouched back with his legs stretched in his beach bum chair close to the surf, his first sip of the first beer of the day not yet swallowed, when he sensed a presence behind him.

  He looked over his shoulder.

  Yahchilane.

  Yahchilane strode long and easy, in his gangly well-oiled way, toward him. A gait Crowe would have recognized from a distance even if it weren’t for the vulpine carriage of the man.

  Crowe swallowed his beer. Winced against the cold sting in his teeth. The cold burn in his chest. He put the can in the holder and stood. Waved and watched Yahchilane in his jeans and sleeveless denim shirt cross the distance.

  They shook hands.

  It was almost noon.

  “What’s the chisme, man?” Crowe was in an expansive mood, the sun on his face and in his hair.

  Yahchilane, “Say what?”

  “The chisme,” said Crowe, behind his big green Polaroid sunglasses.

  “I have no idea, the chisme,” said Yahchilane.

  “The gossip.”

  “Gossip. I have no gossip.”

  Sometimes Crowe wondered if Yahchilane were from a different planet.

  “How’re you doin’, Yahchilane?” Crowe scratched his white beach bum beard.

  “Fine.”

  They stood there looking at the sea. A trio of pelicans in chevron formation flew past, gliding inches above the water with wings outstretched to pocket the sea breeze.

  Finally Yahchilane told Crowe that there was something Crowe needed to see.

  Crowe asked what.

  “You have to see it.”

  “Just as mysterious as ever, Yahchilane.”

  They walked up the beach and got into Crowe’s hatchback.

  With Yahchilane inside the car seemed a toy. His knees poked up gangly and gigantic, his legs shoved up against the dash.

  Yahchilane fumbled for the seat lever and fooled with it.

  “Far as it goes back,” Crowe said. “Don’t bother.”

  They were quiet as the road unspooled and took them to the southern tip of the island. On the right side of them, a beachfront property rearing every now and then on the horizon. On the left, the bay-facing houses behind skeleton-skinny sand pines.


  At Yahchilane’s barrel house something had washed ashore.

  Some kind of kraken or sea monster. A giant squid, a goliath cephalopod. Like something from a mythological lithograph. As long as a bus, maybe longer. It was sheened like a porpoise, a graphite silver shot through with purple and green.

  “Holy shit, man,” said Crowe. He moved forward for a closer look. The stench was incredible. He gagged, retched.

  Yahchilane stepped aside. “Not on my boots,” he said.

  Crowe blocked his mouth and nose with his forearm. “Oh god, this motherfucker stinks.”

  The creature’s tentacles were enormous, covered in suckers. Its snout protuberant. Its teeth donkey-like. Its eyes goat-like. Flatulent pustules squirted a stinking cheese. Hundreds of jewel-shiny bottle flies swarmed.

  “What is this?” Crowe asked Yahchilane.

  “No clue,” Yahchilane said. “Ever see anything like it?”

  “Shit no.”

  They studied the kraken.

  “Jules Verne shit,” Crowe said.

  Yahchilane asked Crowe if he wanted a beer.

  Crowe told him he wouldn’t mind a beer.

  Yahchilane trudged up to the shaggy-shingled barrel house and when he returned with the icy cans Crowe was prodding the creature with a length of driftwood he’d found on the beach. Flies buzzed in a frenzy, like angry television static.

  They popped the cans, drank.

  Crowe said, “We gotta call somebody.”

  Yahchilane shook his head.

  Crowe coughed again at the stench. Turned his head away and tucked his nose into his shoulder. He picked up an end of his Guy Harvey T-shirt and covered his face with it like a mask. His eyes were asking why not.

  “Imagine all the assholes. Like them flies.”

  Crowe knew Henry Yahchilane was right. A circus. A media frenzy for a week. And on Henry Yahchilane’s land. Then what? Their privacy invaded. Their anonymity forfeited.

  All their secrets revealed.

  Some people wanted to remain anonymous.

  Shit, just about everybody on Emerald Island.

  Why they’d sought refuge here in the first place.

  * * *

  —

  Crowe and Yahchilane were in the beeswax orange hatchback again, headed outside the city limits of Emerald City toward the fireworks emporium. Yahchilane said there was no firework in the world that would blow up the decomposing kraken. Crowe told Yahchilane that he was going to make a big firework out of little fireworks. “Trust me,” said Crowe.

  Yahchilane, “You some kind of pyro?”

  Crowe considered this. “Maybe.” He chuckled behind his big green aviator sunglasses. Scratched his beach bum beard. “I’ll tell you what, no bigger pyros than this family running the fireworks shop. Their place blows up, everybody almost dies? Fuck it, open up another place.”

  Yahchilane grunted cryptically.

  Crowe turned on the radio. Buffett. He switched the radio off. “Fuckin’ Buffett.”

  For a few minutes the tires sang on the mirage-bright tarmac.

  Crowe finally broke the silence. “What percentage they say? The ocean? What they discovered, Yahchilane?”

  “What?”

  “In the ocean. What they discovered. Creatures.”

  “No idea.”

  “Something like ninety?”

  Yahchilane moved his eyebrows.

  “Ninety percent of shit, man, they got no idea.”

  They went through Emerald City. A four-way intersection with a stoplight, a non-denominational church, a small post office no bigger than a snow cone stand.

  Out of Emerald City he turned on a narrow two-lane that cut straight through pine flats. Stunted swamp scrub, hammocks of bog cabbage and saw palmetto. The occasional lagoon where carpets of swamp lilies blazed white under the radioactive eye of the sun.

  They passed a man in a Panama Jack shirt and olive galoshes fishing with a cane pole in an irrigation ditch, his cranberry Tercel backed up to the levee with the doors flung open and the car stereo playing Creedence Clearwater. Reared behind him were the remnants of the old Dinosaurium, another forsaken attraction from the fifties tourism boom. Big Cat Gas.

  Now the gas station was closed and concrete dinosaurs stood abandoned and neglected, grown over with ivy.

  Crowe, “I keep a crab trap, man, over by the dock? I checked it, crab had teeth. Fucking human. No kidding. Fucking human teeth.”

  “Strange,” said Yahchilane.

  “No shit, man,” said Crowe. “Strange, you said it. No shit.”

  “You think you’re paranoid, Crowe?” Yahchilane said.

  “Why you ask?”

  “The pot.”

  “I’m not paranoid.”

  “You think you’re a pyro?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Sometimes, the things you deny the most are the truest.”

  Crowe considered this. Said, “I’m not hung like a Tasmanian donkey.”

  Crowe stopped the hatchback to let a gopher turtle cross the road. About a minute passed before another vehicle appeared. A service truck for a brick and tire company. It slowed and inched to a stop until it was almost bumper to bumper with Crowe’s car.

  The driver slammed the horn.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, this guy,” Crowe said. He rolled down the window. He gestured with his arm, pointing at the road. “There’s a turtle here, man,” he yelled at the driver.

  He looked middle-aged, a man who wore his hair in a highly sheened Afro.

  He too rolled down his window to shout at Crowe. “Fuck him.”

  “You want me to run over a turtle? Serious road rage, man.”

  For a moment the driver stared blankly, eerily, at Crowe from behind mirrored shades. Crowe could even see a tiny version of himself reflected, his head jutting out of the open window, his hand aloft in a vexed gesture.

  “Jerry Garcia–looking, tomato-ass-looking motherfucker!”

  “Holy shit, man, you need to chill.”

  “Hijo de puta!”

  Then Crowe saw also reflected in the shades the passenger-side door of his car open. He saw Yahchilane emerge, a giant rising slow and easy from a clownishly picayune car.

  He stared down the driver.

  “I got a family to feed,” the man said.

  Yahchilane, arms akimbo, stood there.

  The driver cranked his window up angrily.

  Yahchilane stepped over to the front of the hatchback, where the gopher turtle was still waddling across the road. At Yahchilane’s approach the turtle darted its head and legs into its shell. Yahchilane picked up the shell, carried it over to the saw grass, set it down gently.

  At last Yahchilane got back into the hatchback and they were on the move again, the truck following a few car lengths behind. Cautiously.

  * * *

  —

  At the fireworks emporium, Big Gorilla Fireworks, Barry the redheaded manager greeted them with near exultation. “Far out, man,” he said when he saw Crowe.

  “Barry Boone, there he is!” Crowe remembered the kid’s name. He always thought when he saw the kid: There goes Barry Boone, Daniel’s redheaded stepbrother. Not in a bad way.

  They high-fived. Executed an elaborate jive handshake.

  “When’s this new place gonna blow up?” Crowe asked.

  “Today, I hope.”

  “Help me out, man,” Crowe told him. “Fixin’ to blow up another wedding. Ex-wife number two.”

  “Far out, man.” Barry chuckled, his teeth perfectly straight now from his orthodontia.

  Yahchilane and Crowe went down the high, brightly colored aisles, Crowe clutching a shop
ping basket and throwing in the most lethal fireworks his eyes lit on.

  “Tell me why I had to come,” Yahchilane said. He was walking with his thumbs tucked into his jean pockets.

  “You’re paying for this shit, Yahchilane. You think I’m Goodwill?”

  Yahchilane, grim-lipped, seemed none too pleased by this development, but nonetheless the men strolled along, Crowe every so often rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in delectation. Shades half-perched on his nose.

  Yahchilane remarked that all the fireworks were the same.

  “You want that rot off your property, don’t you?”

  “Look at you. You’re a pyro.”

  “I didn’t have this planned today,” Crowe said. “I’m trying to help you out.”

  Yahchilane paid for the fireworks, cash. One hundred and eighty dollars.

  “Gonna have to ask you to sign, sir,” said the young man to Henry Yahchilane.

  Yahchilane hesitated, lifted an eyebrow.

  Crowe took the pen from Yahchilane. Signed a name.

  Jebediah Marmalade Johansson III.

  * * *

  —

  Around sunset Crowe returned to Henry Yahchilane with his jury-rigged stick of dynamite.

  Yahchilane eyed the duct-taped PVC pipe with the long green fuse. Like something out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

  Crowe, his voice aquiver with boyish excitement, said, “Just get behind the dune. Enjoy the show.”

  “Gonna blow yourself up.”

  “Get behind the dune.”

  Watching Crowe, Yahchilane smoked a cigarette behind the dune. Crowe ranged stork-like down the beach with his hands on his hips. After a distance he spotted something and picked it up. A large pin seashell. With the seashell he scooped a divot out of the rotted flesh of the kraken. Retching at the stink. Blocking his face every now and then with his forearm.

  Then he shoved the explosive into the squid’s body.

  It took a few flicks of his BIC with Daisy from Dukes of Hazzard emblazoned on the side to get the fuse burning. Then Crowe scampered away in a low crouch, coughing, almost barfing. “Oh, shit, motherfucker stinks,” he said, shielding his face with his forearm.