Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  People waited. Dr. Vu licked her wind-chapped lips with the tip of her tongue. She pushed up her round-framed glasses with her forefinger. Her bobbed black hair whipped in the wind. “So I come over. No dinner. Well, no chicken potpie. There’s chicken. A few pieces, fried, mini-mart chicken. Gas station chicken. And there’s pie. A frozen apple pie. And there’s pot.”

  An uncertain chuckle passed among the mourners.

  “He was high as a kite.”

  Then everyone joined, grateful for the opportunity to laugh.

  A windy beat of silence passed. People were waiting for someone else to speak. Somehow most of the glances fell upon Yahchilane.

  He wasn’t expecting to speak.

  Yahchilane could have many stories. A treasure trove. You live so long in Florida, even on a remote island, especially on a remote island, you were bound to have stories.

  To live them.

  An island itself was a story, when you thought about it. As was Florida. But imagine saying this at someone’s funeral. They’d throw the big butterfly net over you and haul you off in a white van.

  Henry Yahchilane did not tell the story about the time of the assassin, or the time of the refugees, or the time of Wayne Wade, or the time of getting stuck in that grotto for days on end.

  Once upon a time there were two eggheads. One egghead was named Reed Crowe. The other egghead was named Henry Yahchilane. Two Florida men. Two Florida eggheads.

  Two Florida eggheads who braved out Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

  * * *

  —

  Yahchilane told the story about the sugar cubes.

  Yahchilane went to Crowe’s for shelter when the first bands of the storm lashed the island. Yahchilane was afraid how the old shaggy-shingled barrel-shaped house would fare. More than half a century old, hewn of weather-cured wood, some of the lathing giving way in places.

  He drove the van through tempest winds and airborne debris like buckshot to Crowe’s.

  Crowe, “Oh, it’ll take a last-minute turn. Like it always do.”

  Wrong.

  It was late at night, into the early morning, when the storm scythed across the state. Yahchilane and Crowe drank beers and watched the news and when the reception of every television station fizzled, they played Neil Young records. Loud.

  Sometime in the evening Yahchilane, poker-faced as always, had told Crowe he was on LSD. At first Crowe didn’t believe it.

  Crowe told him, “I can’t picture you on LSD.”

  Yahchilane kept mum.

  “I mean, no offense? You’re so fuckin’ serious.”

  “I prefer not to make a fool of myself.”

  “What’s the implication?”

  “It wasn’t an implication.”

  “An outright insult?”

  To this Yahchilane offered no reply.

  “Strong stuff?” Crowe asked.

  “It works,” Yahchilane said with a shrug in his voice.

  “Let me buy some?”

  “No. I’ll give you some.”

  Crowe was immediately animated. “Am I going to see bats with my mother’s face and shit, Yahchilane? What should I expect?”

  “It works differently for people.”

  “Let’s do this.”

  They popped the sugar cubes and let them dissolve on their tongues. They played records on Crowe’s stereo.

  “Oh man, I can taste these sounds,” Crowe said. This confession as John Coltrane’s “Bakai” was blaring on the hi-fi stereo speakers.

  “You ramblin’ about, egghead?”

  “It’s incredible, Yahchilane. I can’t describe it.”

  Thirty minutes later Crowe started wigging out, thinking maybe they’d made a huge mistake, not fleeing the storm. The hurricane blew demonic over the island.

  The island was by then a mess of downed utility poles, power lines ripped apart and tangled. Other power lines still live and whipping like hell-bent electric eels. Trees had boards and shards of glass driven straight through them. Palm trees were felled atop roofs and cars. Boats in the bay capsized and half-sunk. Others knocked together and busted apart like Tinkertoys. Cottages and bungalows wiped away.

  Now Yahchilane told the people at the funeral what he finally told Crowe once he started panicking. Crowe was telling Yahchilane, “Oh god, I think I’m losing my mind, Yahchilane. Do you feel him outside? The grim reaper?” when finally Yahchilane put the poor guy out of his misery and told him.

  Just sugar cubes.

  Of course, reticent and taciturn speaker that he was, Yahchilane related the anecdote in a version greatly abridged. The whole time he stood with his head hung down and his eyes on the ground, calloused fingers folded, working, as if they were kneading a hat he’d removed out of respect.

  People tightened their collars and bunched their shoulders against the gusts. They remained silent for a minute in the dove-gray afternoon, the chevrons of whitecaps arrowing toward shore, spangles of sand sidewinding down the desolate expanse of the beach.

  IN THE BEGINNING OF AUTUMN 2008, Yahchilane was besieged with a two-week cough that wouldn’t go away. In the mornings, his hacking was so loud and constant the blackbirds were scared out of the pines surrounding his house. The coughing got so bad he couldn’t hide it from his kids when they were on the phone. At their behest, expecting the worst, he went to see Dr. Vu.

  She took blood tests and X-rays. Lung cancer, aggressive. Dr. Vu told him his only chance was removing the lung, excising it entire from his body like a pea from a pod.

  In the small windowless examination room, Yahchilane absorbed this information without change of expression. His mouth stayed set as concrete. He nodded.

  Finally Yahchilane rose from the examination table and thanked the doctor. As if the doctor had merely given him directions to the highway.

  “Thank you? Henry, you heard me, right?”

  “Yeah, yes.”

  She asked if there was anything he wanted. A drink of water. Anti-anxiety meds.

  Yahchilane told her he was fine.

  Dr. Vu asked, “Henry, what can I do for you right now?”

  Yahchilane said he wanted a cigarette.

  Dr. Vu went outside with Yahchilane. A muggy day, the big clown grasshoppers rattling from deep within the croton bushes, mating.

  Yahchilane and Dr. Vu stood under the awning of the medical office, ninety-five degrees in the shade.

  As Yahchilane smoked, Dr. Vu referred him to an oncologist in Fort Lauderdale. Her cousin, a specialist.

  “Will you see him, Henry?” she asked.

  He said he’d consider it.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Henry,” said Dr. Vu. “It’ll be ugly. You’ll need chemo. But we caught it in time.”

  “No chemo.”

  “You say that now. Try telling your family.”

  Yahchilane said nothing.

  “There’s counseling.”

  “Okay, Dr. Vu.”

  “Don’t write it off. Don’t be an asshole.”

  Yahchilane thanked the doctor. He wished her a good day, stubbed out his cigarette in the gravel of the standing ashtray. He got into his van and gripped the wheel and exhaled a long shuddering breath before falling into a fit of coughs.

  COFFEE BEAN

  HENRY YAHCHILANE SURVIVED THE SURGERY, EMERGED from the procedure one-lunged and twenty pounds lighter, a gaunt, sharp-featured old man with a huge scar on his body that made one side of his torso look like a coffee bean shell.

  He got along fairly well considering he was a walking dead man. A cat with his tenth life.

  He felt like shit. Sure. Shit on a shoeheel. But he felt like shit before.

  When during a follow-up visit a few months later Dr. Vu told him she’d witn
essed a miracle, that he was cancer-free, Henry Yahchilane accepted the good news much the same as he did the bad.

  “All right,” he told Dr. Vu.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Henry,” she told him. “You’re gonna be around for a while longer.”

  It was only a one-minute walk across the lot to his van, but even that short a distance left him gasping, the back of his denim shirt sweated through.

  He lit a cigarette.

  Took a puff, retched, rolled down the window, flicked the cigarette out.

  In the rearview mirror he saw his face, wan and yellow and exhausted.

  “Well, here we go,” Yahchilane said. “Whoopdy-fuckin’-do.”

  STRANGE WEATHER

  THE NEXT DECADE THERE WERE DAYS Henry Yahchilane had trouble keeping up with the days. There were years he had trouble keeping up with the years. He used to keep track by the change of the seasons, but that was no longer a reliable measure. The weather was getting weird, unpredictable. Irate.

  The people, too: strange.

  He suspected the economy was to blame. The dearth of jobs. The oil in the water. The tainted oysters and lobsters and shrimp and fish.

  The heat. It got to people’s heads.

  Plus, all the newfangled drugs popping up around this part of the panhandle. Like the mother of a thousand plants.

  One night at the Rum Jungle, some guy started pushing around another guy just because he looked at his lady friend the wrong way. The bartender told them to take their bullshit outside. They did. They brawled behind a midden of oyster shells. They threw wild drunken punches and pounded and walloped each other into minced meat and every time Yahchilane thought someone was about to go down the man recovered his sea legs and brawled anew.

  All the while the seagulls flew circles above the hill of shells, shrieked their witchy shrieks into the night.

  A cop finally arrived and broke up the fight. But by that time both guys were so mutilated and concussed they were ambulanced to the emergency room fifty miles away in Cooper City.

  Those guys, who knew what the hell drugs they were on. Surely on some heavy-duty shit, Yahchilane surmised.

  One of the new drugs, the little foil packages looked like condom wrappers. You could buy the stuff at sketchy mini-marts and gas stations. How it was legal, anybody’s guess.

  A kid in Miami snorted the stuff. Two hours later, he was eating off a guy’s face in Coconut Grove Mall. Just tackled the poor old janitor down in the food court and gnawed off his nose.

  Finally the cops arrived and told the kid they’d shoot if he didn’t stop. The kid looked over his shoulder and growled, the man’s eyeball hanging out of his mouth.

  The police shot him dead in front of all of those families.

  Scarred for goddamn life, those kids.

  * * *

  —

  One year, 2019, a four-day fog fell over the island. Fog so thick that walking through it left Yahchilane’s denim clothes soaked. Fog so thick the bridge appeared swallowed in the distance, bifurcated. Yahchilane had never seen such fog on the island, could not recall such strange weather.

  The fog collected in Yahchilane’s black hair like jewels.

  A hundred yards out all was lost in an opaque pearlescent curtain. A ghost world. The purse seiners and sardine boats were dark lurking shapes that might as well have been phantom galleons risen from the depths, summoned by the occulted weather.

  * * *

  —

  As Henry Yahchilane’s cancer remained in remission he noticed big changes in the weather. On the television news. Right on Emerald Island, at his doorstep.

  The flash floods were fiercer now, the droughts drier and longer, the summers so brutally hot that breathing the air felt like sucking gelatin into your lungs. Your mind swam. You saw mirages in the distance, summer specters evanescing and shimmering, as if beheld through the warp of melting glass. The tar roads turned gummy under the gamma ray sun. Yahchilane thought of the La Brea Tar Pits. A woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger bones mired in sludge.

  One day Yahchilane saw a group of eight or ten turkey vultures swarm upon a live raccoon. The animal was tottering alongside the road nosing through the wickery wildflowers for grub and then suddenly, all at once, the birds swooped upon him.

  A horrifying spectacle. Like a gang rape. They didn’t even wait for the raccoon to die. The evil black wings flapped up a tempest.

  Yahchilane caught a glimpse of the animal’s face, the pure abject terror, its fangs bared in a shocked rictus, its yellow eyes rolling wide, as the birds ripped it apart, guts stretching like pink taffy.

  Holy Mary Mother of god, Yahchilane thought.

  * * *

  —

  Some years there were no winters at all. No denying, water was encroaching toward the shaggy-shingled barrel-shaped house, a few feet every year. Numbers and figures on the news: bullshit. It was worse than anybody speculated. Ancient though he was, Yahchilane knew damn well what he saw.

  Worse. Far worse.

  Across the bridge, on the mainland? These midsummer tempests, only a matter of time before the dilapidated remains of the Florida Man Mystery House were swept away and swallowed under.

  Some summers the heat lingered unabated into Christmas. If it weren’t for the decorations in town, the lights and tinsel and grubby plastic Santas and reindeer bedecking the storefronts and the pastel cracker cottages, Yahchilane would have no idea it was the holidays.

  If it weren’t for the kids, he wouldn’t give a shit.

  He saw them less often these days. They were the matriarchs and patriarchs of their own big families and clans now. They were scattered and busy. Emerald Island was very far away.

  “If only you’d get your stubborn ass to Tallahassee and take a plane,” his kids and grandkids would gripe and wheedle over the phone.

  “Okay, honey, next year,” he’d tell them.

  * * *

  —

  Yahchilane never put much stock in his age. Only now he felt harbingers of death in his bones. Aches and pains beset his body. Not the sharp stomach-swooning agonies of his surgery and recovery so many years ago, but a constant minor-key fugue. And fogginess clouded his brain. Sometimes he’d find himself in front of the open refrigerator with no idea what brought him there.

  His lady friends came around less. That’s how he thought of them. Lady friends. And in turn, many of them would call him boyfriend, others man friend, and one woman named Janey the psychic called him a fuck buddy. But now, many of them were too old to drive. Or fuck, for that matter. Join the club, Yahchilane thought. One was blind. Another, she took a cab all the way from outside Emerald City to see him, the sweetheart, but that was the last time he saw her and that was going on three years now. He figured her dead.

  His walks around the island grew shorter. Some days he was so sapped he could only manage dragging the cheap aluminum chair to the edge of the sea and sitting with his face in the sun.

  At night there was still so little light pollution on the island that to look up into the sky was to fall into it.

  Galaxies upon galaxies.

  The mother of a thousand plants.

  The mother to a thousand galaxies.

  The spectacle made him acutely aware of his insignificance.

  The vastness of what he didn’t know and couldn’t imagine was a cold comfort.

  * * *

  —

  Some nights Henry Yahchilane would stand in front of the television and clutch the remote as if he was wringing a chicken’s neck, flicking through the channels, mashing the buttons with his knobby callused fingers.

  Always bad news.

  Bad news, pill commercials. More bad news.

  The news seemed to get worse and worse. He was
old enough to know it wasn’t just his imagination. Stabbings in airports. School massacres with assault rifles.

  As he watched the footage a look would siege Yahchilane’s face as if he’d bit into a rancid apple.

  Florida Man this, Florida Man that. Florida Man at large.

  It wasn’t really funny anymore, the Florida Man thing.

  FLORIDA MAN BOMBS SCHOOL. FLORIDA MAN IN KKK OUTFIT KILLS BLACK TEEN WITH PITCHFORK. FLORIDA MAN BULLDOZES MOSQUE.

  The biggest news these days: The current president, who Yahchilane only deigned to call President Shit-for-Brains, suffered from early onset of dementia, Alzheimer’s.

  People were already on edge. Earthquake weather. Wildfires swallowed swaths of the California coast. Fifty mile infernos. Tornado cells decimated Birmingham and Jackson and Mobile. Floods submerged New Orleans and New York City. A sinister brown fog blanketed Peshawar like atomized rust. A floating island of plastic blazed off the coast of Honduras. The raging conflagration, viewed from a space satellite, looked like a marooned island aflame in a sea of darkness.

  * * *

  —

  During the hurricane season one year, a series of demonic storms churned up in the Caribbean. Category five storms. Such storms the forecasters and scientists had never seen. Storms without precedent, though doomsayers among the meteorologists for decades had predicted the day.

  Now here it was.

  The time of reckoning.

  And they delivered this news with a kind of grim vindicated aplomb. Like I’ve been saying for years, folks. Here we go.

  Polar vortexes and frostquakes and fire tornados.

  They gave the storms human names, the names of boys and girls, men and women.

  Yahchilane remembered many of the big Florida storms. Donna. Camille. Carla. Andrew. Irma.