Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Behind the dune they watched the bright yellow sparks of the burning fuse. And in the distance now, about a mile down the beach, appeared the minuscule figures of a couple on an evening beach stroll. They were holding hands.

  The explosion went off like a claymore mine. The kraken blew apart, chunks hailing down onto the beach. Gobbets thudded in the sand and smacked the water. A flock of shrieking seagulls started to descend and baitfish thrashed in the shallows.

  The couple froze in the distance.

  It was one of the first and last times Crowe heard Henry Yahchilane laugh. A gruff short laugh like clearing the throat.

  That evening they laughed hard and long.

  MR. WHY

  CROWE WAS SURE THEY WERE A different breed these days, kids. He remembered when they had their Spider-Mans and Supermans. Smurfs and Strawberry Shortcakes. There were lost blankies and teddy bears he used to have to fetch. He-Man figures lost in the bog.

  Rubik’s Cubes. Plastic light sabers.

  How quaint, all of that now.

  Now half the kids were on glorified methamphetamines. Adderall. They were hopped up on the stuff. Ten-year-old tweakers.

  Yet with Yahchilane their interest was piqued. Something about his gravelly stentorian voice.

  Dude might be an old fuck, you could see them thinking, but dude isn’t fucking around.

  “The Everglades,” Yahchilane told them, “is no longer really the Everglades. That’s just a name people have for it. A baloney name.” Yahchilane went on. “See the quote unquote real Florida. You see those signs? Miss Tonya, you ever see those signs?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  Yahchilane explained how the Everglades had been rerouted and dredged, gouged away and parceled out, the original landscape so butchered by development and agriculture and pollution it no longer resembled the swampy wild of his youth.

  The sky looked different.

  The clouds hung lower, dirtier.

  The water was darker, a boggy molasses. Some years brushfires burned throughout the summer.

  On these trips Yahchilane spotted oddities he scarcely believed. He saw insects he’d only seen in documentaries about Tanzania, New Guinea. He saw poison spiders and giant purple grasshoppers and salamanders mottled to look like lichen.

  Ersatz herpetologist that he was, he knew the insects and reptiles didn’t belong here.

  They weren’t native.

  They were invasive.

  The strange snakes and the reptiles, Yahchilane knew they were exotic pets escaped from their owners. Run amok in the Florida wild. Or, somehow, one way or another, they’d found their meandering way here from an improbable distance. By stream and canal, by shipwreck and by storm. By hook, by crook. By fin, wing, tail.

  “See that right there?” Yahchilane would point out. “Karum tree. We never saw these three years ago. This year I’ve counted twenty.”

  “Are you very interested in trees, Mr. Why?” That’s what the kids called him. Mr. Why. Easier than Yahchilane, which they had a hard time getting their mouths around.

  “Not more than most people,” he’d tell them.

  “You seem to know a lot about trees.”

  “You know how old I am?”

  “No.”

  “I’m so old our television was trees.”

  HIS TOURS CHANGED

  ON OCCASION, IF THERE WAS A big field trip from a middle school in a neighboring county, Reed Crowe would take the Merman out for a boat tour. But his swamp tours changed. He told the tourists and kids the truth instead of what they wanted to hear.

  Whether Yahchilane or Crowe, they told them wild tales about Okeechobee. The mammoth lake that took up a huge swath of central Florida, how sheer limestone bluffs over one hundred feet tall bracketed the water. How these bluffs were riddled with innumerable caves. And how these caves housed monkeys—face-eating monkeys!—and spiders the size of a man’s head, spiders that spun webs that could ensnare a man whole.

  And there were Native ambushes. Developers and surveyors attacked from all sides in a terra incognita they could not fathom, let alone map. There was no charting these territories.

  But the swamp boomers and swamp barons forged on undeterred. They thought they could grow plums, pineapples, sugarcane, coffee, tobacco, bananas, all kinds of tropical fruits. And they thought settlers would come later, drawn by this land of opportunity. They brought their rollers and their riggers and shovels and tractors and dredgers. They braved fevers. They were slashed by saw palmettos and saw grass. No-see-ums and mosquitoes sapped their blood. The sun sapped their strength. Hurricanes and tropical storms killed half of them off. Crowe knew himself too soft a man to have made it through half the ordeals.

  Crowe told them about how the swamp magnates set about building a railroad and for every mile the new Florida tycoons built the federal government gave them a parcel of land. Nobody wanted the tractless waste. A quagmire of saw grass and water cabbage and water hyacinths. An outpost run amok. Mile long hammocks of sable palms and coconut palms. Innumerable beasts and reptiles and insects, bloodthirsty enough to eat a man whole. Alligators and bobcats and bears and jaguars and panthers. Mosquitoes thick as smoke. The smudgepots and palmetto fans were useless dispelling them.

  All the work that went into trying to tame this outpost, the Natives no doubt played a big part. Digging postholes under water, logging and clearing the way for massive steamboats that tore through the lettuce bogs.

  Sometimes Crowe wondered about the skeletons he found all those years ago with Yahchilane. Who knew. Yellow fever might have done those people in. Maybe they perished in a storm.

  Worst-case scenario, Reed Crowe supposed, was that white men murdered them after services were rendered. White men who reneged on their bill.

  Crowe thought of his great-grandfathers and sundry kin from days of yore. He wondered if they played any part in dirty business, to what degree. You had to wonder. He’d heard rumors over the years. On the other hand, this part of Florida, the town so small and sequestered, so much of its history was based on folklore and hearsay and Florida cracker bullshit.

  That stuff about Al Capone, for instance. All those bootleggers and trappers. During Prohibition Al Capone was rumored to have run a distillery in the swamp.

  Every so often a tourist would ask a question about Capone if Crowe didn’t work a mention of him in that day’s spiel.

  And every so often, rarer, but it happened, a tourist would ask about Krait Isle.

  “It true there’s an island out there with hundreds of deadly poison snakes?”

  Crowe would think of Catface and that night and splinters of ice would shuttle through his veins.

  “Only two kinds of snakes my dad used to say,” Crowe would say, keeping it short. “A live one and a dead one.”

  And that was about as much as Crowe wanted to talk about Krait Isle.

  BUTTERFLY

  LAST THURSDAY EVERY MONTH REED CROWE would meet Mariposa for a late lunch at the Blue Parrot diner. One Thursday, the last Thursday of winter, on the cusp of spring, a friend accompanied her. A girl with long hair dyed scarlet. Her skull was shaved on one side and the hair drawn back in a ponytail so it jutted out like a kind of tail.

  Her name was Tonya. But she went by Tee. Tee took in the musty ambience of the place. “Michelin-rated?”

  “It’s seen better days,” Crowe said. He was sitting across at the booth and glanced from behind his menu.

  Tee said, “When? Ponce de Leon?”

  “Interesting fact about Ponce. He took his prom date here. It’s true. Didn’t tip the waiter or anything. Real asshole.”

  Crowe excused himself to the bathroom. Sliding out of the booth he said to Mariposa, “Order me a conch chowder, kid?”

  “Hold the pubic hair,”
Tee said.

  The girls giggled.

  After his piss when Crowe exited the bathroom he had a shock. Thankfully the girls had their heads turned. They were leaning close to each other. They were kissing on the lips.

  After what seemed a long moment to Reed the girls parted.

  Crowe quickly composed his face and coughed loudly into his fist. He slid back into the booth. He took a napkin from the dispenser, wiped his mouth.

  The girls were looking at him. He was looking at the girls.

  Crowe looked around for a place to put the napkin, finally put it in the pocket of his safari shorts. “Order that chowder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With the pubes?”

  THIRTY

  ONE DAY EDDIE CONFIDED IN CROWE as they cleaned the charter boat that he could stand life with Nina no longer.

  About matters large and small, Crowe observed over the years, she had proven relentless.

  He didn’t think there was any residual ill will about this sentiment.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can take it, Reed,” Eddie told him. Finally, after all these years, Eddie was calling him by his first name.

  Maybe something about Eddie turning thirty.

  “Eddie,” Crowe told the young man, “look at me. I’m the last guy you should be asking for advice. I’m a beach bum.”

  Buddha-eyed Eddie, “You’ve been with many women.”

  “Nah.”

  “How many?”

  Crowe waggled his hand. “Not so many.”

  “You’ve been married.”

  “Yeah, and look at me.”

  “You seem okay.”

  Crowe shrugged: I’m okay.

  “Do you get lonely?”

  “I was more lonely with her. We both were. We made each other lonely.”

  Grief, Crowe came to learn belatedly, could draw people closer just as easily as it could cleave them apart. Grief could keep them together. And Reed Crowe and Heidi Karavas stayed together longer when they might not have had the girl lived. They loved each other but they were also tired of each other. Sickly tired. The way she put ice cubes in the glass from his beloved icemaker, tossing them in there to make a point. The way he would leave sand and grit in the bed from his beach bum feet.

  Then she’d go abroad for months at a time, longer and longer these days, and when she returned she had that girlish glow about her again. He saw her with eyes anew.

  “Look at you,” he’d tell her. “You’re something else.”

  He’d try to rekindle a dalliance for a few months when she visited, but more often than not these days, she’d accuse him of nostalgia. Of sentimentality.

  “Well. Yeah. I suppose so.”

  MARIPOSA, SURFER ROSA

  THERE WERE OTHER DAYS WHEN EDDIE accompanied him that Crowe could just tell things were wrong. Something amiss once again in the casa de Maldonado. The heaviness of the poor kid’s face. Kid. He was a man now. Crowe had to remind himself, even though Eddie looked so much older than that skinny whippet of a teenager, that kid with the black fuzz on his upper lip, who started selling Coca-Colas on the Merman so many years ago.

  Now, he had his own daughter with Nina, Maribelle. His hair was a steely gray and worry lines were graven around his eyes and mouth, across his forehead.

  Life with Nina and the girls had taken its toll on Eddie, especially since Mariposa’s quinceañera. Shrieking fights every other night, schisms worthy of a telenovella.

  After the melees Nina would stay holed up for days in her room.

  When Eddie accompanied him on the fishing charters he’d relate a lot of this to Reed Crowe.

  To Crowe it all sounded to him like standard kid shit. Black lights, magic mushrooms, weed.

  Then he’d remind himself he was responsible for the girl’s distress. Partly, at very least. And that was a generous perspective.

  Other times during these talks Crowe would feel a pang of bereavement. Less keen these days, but he had to wonder what would have become of Lily. His Otter. He had to wonder if they would have experienced similar troubles. With him as a father? Shit.

  Lily would have been a full adult now. And if their situations were reversed, if it were Lily they were talking about instead of Mariposa, would he have been as flip?

  * * *

  —

  Dinners were wars, Eddie hunkered down like a soldier in a foxhole half-chewing, half-swallowing his meal. Maribelle, the quiet one, had her eyes someplace else, her mind far away, tuning them out. His girl almost seemed not to hear any of it. On her face she wore an improbable look of serenity. An introspective child, quiet. A reader. First in her class, always.

  Mariposa was very different. Eddie loved the girl like his own—he considered her his own—but she was so very different. And so very much like her mother.

  Just one night’s peace, Eddie told Crowe. That’s all that Eddie wanted at this point. Just one night’s silence.

  His poor daughter Maribelle would sit there every meal, her eyes somewhere else, an expression of near serenity on her face. She seemed barely listening to the idiotic arguments over their oxtail soup on Sundays, the albondigas soup on Wednesdays.

  “What’s this?” Nina would say at the table, her eyes full of ridicule. “Who’s this ghoul sitting at the table tonight? You look like devil-worshipper.”

  “I have,” Mariposa said. “I’ve started to worship the devil. I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it on Sunday.”

  “What? What? Oh Jesucristo. Oh god.”

  Eddie pinching the bridge of his nose. “Please, Butterfly? Why? Why poke the bear? I beg of you.”

  Nina whipped her face toward him. “I’m an animal now? I belong in zoo?”

  “Dad,” Mariposa said, “I was just sitting here drinking my Tab. Thinking about what the devil and I are gonna do Saturday night.”

  Nina threw her silverware onto the plate and shot up from the chair and fixed her daughter with a look of ire. Then she went down the hall and slammed her bedroom door so hard the framed family portraits in the hallway trembled.

  * * *

  —

  Another day, after a Saturday afternoon in the Galleria mall, Mariposa came home with purple streaks in her black hair, safety pins rowed along the rim of her ear.

  Nina told her daughter she looked like a circus freak. A ghoul. “You show yourself in church like this? Like a clown?”

  “Why not? Church is a joke.”

  The mother seared the daughter with a look. Asked her to repeat herself. When Mariposa said nothing, Nina demanded.

  Eddie had to come between them.

  Nina followed her daughter down the hall. “What’s the smell? Cigarettes? Come here. Let me smell you.”

  Mariposa kept moving, blocking herself with her forearm.

  “I want to see. Open your mouth.”

  “I’ve been smoking crack with el diablo.”

  “Open your mouth, you monster.”

  “Crazy, crazy. I’m not letting you stick your nose in my mouth. So crazy.”

  Mariposa slammed her door so hard one of the framed portraits in the hall fell to the floor. The glass shattered.

  Nina flung the door open and barged into the room.

  “You look like a ghoul. Someone should tell you.”

  “Get out of my room. Get out!”

  Eddie came to the threshold. “That’s enough.”

  Mariposa and Nina were inches apart. Nina looked at Eddie. “Pardon me? I don’t get to tell my daughter she looks like some freak?”

  “No.”

  Nina was livid, incredulous, that Eddie had voiced even this little.

  He spoke again. “I said no. Enough. Enough of this. It’s like
living with lunatics.”

  Nina launched into a tirade. “I came here for this shit. I sailed across the sea for this shit. Your grandfather sailed across the sea for this shit. He died. For this shit. And for you. You. You, to be like this.”

  “Say it,” Mariposa said.

  “I did.”

  “Say what you really want to say,” Mariposa said.

  Nina’s wide angry eyes toured the room. The punk rock posters. The cassette tapes stacked on the bed stand and the bureau, the spines showing bubbly handwriting, little colorful doodles. Mix tapes from one of her girlfriends.

  Finally Mariposa’s mother went to one of the posters on the wall. She glared at it, shot a spiteful breath through her nose. On the poster was a photograph that appeared so old it might have been a tintype. A flamenco dancer caught mid-pose. She was topless, her fulsome breasts in plain view. Behind her, a crucifix on a stucco wall.

  PIXIES, said the poster. SURFER ROSA.

  “Sick, so sick, mierda,” Mariposa’s mother said. Then Nina let loose a litany of curses under her breath. They grew louder and angrier until she launched herself at the wall with her fingers curled like claws and started ripping the poster off the wall.

  Mariposa grabbed her mother by the shoulders, pulled her away.

  Eddie ran so he was between them and it was only when he said he could stand it no longer, that Maribelle could stand it no longer, that Nina left the room and shut herself into her own.

  The strife, the discord, the madness, escalated by the day. There were moments Eddie considered divorcing Nina. That time she waited up until one A.M. after the junior prom, sitting in the dark in the kitchen with an air horn because Mariposa had missed her eleven o’clock curfew, blasting it the moment Mariposa snuck in late through the house’s side door and flipped the light.

  This is it, Eddie would think.

  Divorce.