Florida Man

by Tom Cooper

  Then the weatherman came on. “Get outta Dodge!” he said with Pentecostal aplomb. “FEMA says this is gonna be a doozie!”

  * * *

  —

  Before the bitch named Aphra made landfall, Henry Yahchilane hustled. He lugged the potted plants from the back porch to the garage. But soon the garage was full and he had to start hauling the plants inside the house.

  He moved over five dozen bushes and small trees. He carried cacti and succulents and myriad tropical flowers and what spices and herbs would grow in the fierce Florida climate. The bigger plants Yahchilane had to haul with a wheelbarrow. The potted fig tree. The pepper tree.

  By the time he had them all inside the house, it looked like some atrium. A jungle sprouted indoors.

  Yahchilane’s back was on fire with knots of pain. His knuckles and joints felt like there was sandy glass in them.

  He thought of himself as a living fossil. Winnowed down to a flint knapping. One damn lung. He belonged in one of the Florida Man Mystery House exhibits.

  Gone to jungle and rot long ago, that place. Another relic. Weeds standing two or three stories tall out of the cracked concrete. Plywood. NO TRESPASSING signs. As if anyone would have the desire.

  THE SERPENTARIUM

  HENRY YAHCHILANE HAD MOST OF THE storm shutters rolled down and all the plants and bushes of his garden sheltered and he was about to hunker down and wait out the storm when something occurred to him.

  It occurred to him when he overheard a public service announcement on the radio about remembering to take care of the animals, the pets.

  * * *

  —

  The zoo. The shitty three-acre zoo in Emerald City. A moribund place that should have been shut down and condemned long ago. Why anyone would want to pay good money to see these miserable half-dead creatures so estranged from their natural habitats had been beyond him.

  Hard to believe that was more than half a century ago, working at the serpentarium. And hard to believe he still had his key, but he never handed it in and he had no reason to think that they’d changed the locks in the time since.

  And, knowing the locals, Yahchilane had no reason to believe anyone in their haste to leave had given thought to the animals.

  Yahchilane got on his poncho and got out his Coleman lantern and he plodded from the house against stinging needles of rain. He got into his van and drove across the deserted bridge. Waves broke, exploding foam over the sides. It was early evening but dark as night. He flicked the headlights on. In the beams he saw small silver catfish flopping in the road.

  * * *

  —

  Henry Yahchilane watched through the rain-blinded windshield, waiting for a break in the storm. The serpentarium key was already picked out of the ring and gripped in his aching pruned fingers. He was sopping and shivering and short of breath and what he was about to do hadn’t even started.

  In the first hurricane winds, palm trees and banyans and jacarandas thrashed, branch shadows jigging in the sodium arc lights.

  When there was a lull between gusts Yahchilane hobbled from the van across the empty lot. His ill-fitting poncho was ripped at the shoulders. Rain ran down his collar and down his back. It collected in his lung scar.

  His galoshes crashed through muddy limestone puddles. “This is bullshit,” he said into the chain-mail rain. “Those guys just leaving, assholes, pure bullshit.”

  Inside the serpentarium, the electricity was out. The emergency exit signs glowed red. Lightning flared in the windows and filled the cypress-paneled main room with phosphor light.

  Glass dioramas the size of shoeshine boxes hung on the walls. In the lightning flashes, the taxidermied snakes and scorpions and tarantulas were imbued with sudden fleeting life. Their shadows stretched, quivered, recoiled, darted back to their cages.

  In the reptile room the lights that usually glowed above the terrariums were dark. But Yahchilane could see in the red strain of the emergency lights and in the glow of his lantern the many lizards and toads and snakes. The skinks and geckos. Every time the thunder rumbled, the shelves trembled. The cages and terrariums shook. The reptiles darted into tiny plastic human skulls. Lizards retreated into small clay caves. Toads reared against the glass. Snakes tightened their coils and tasted the air with their dancing tongues.

  Hunched and wincing from the volcanic pain in his back Yahchilane carried the reptile cages one by one and set them on the back porch under the awning. After twenty minutes he had all the terrariums and aquariums outside. His knees and his arms and his shoulders were on fire with pain. But Yahchilane kept moving. He unscrewed the lids, tipped the open cages sideways, away from the building.

  He stood back and watched as the snakes and toads and lizards crept warily, almost reluctantly, into freedom.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward Yahchilane went down the zoo’s main concourse, his lantern swinging by its handle, its light feeble and wobbly, a measly island of illumination.

  Ripping gales made his progress halting.

  Cold rain bulleted his face.

  Styrofoam cups and beer cans and potato chip wrappers flew in dervishes through the dark.

  From their pens, their wigwams, their jungle gyms and concrete grottos, the spooked animals watched him. Their eyes were forsaken, accusatory. As if he were their jailer, the engineer of this pandemonium.

  He went down the main thoroughfare and opened the cages one by one, fumbling through the beehive-sized wad of keys. “Motherfuckin’ eggheads,” Yahchilane spat into the pissing rain.

  He went along opening gates, leaving them partially ajar, wary of what the animals might do with their perceived jailer. But the animals were just as wary of him.

  They took a tentative step, froze, another tentative step, sniffing the air for danger.

  A grim gray-faced chimp with cataracts frowned in the rain.

  Onward.

  An orangutan stared blearily, like a philosopher, at the dark weeping sky.

  Onward.

  A goat with a tumor-riddled back screamed in the downpour.

  Onward.

  Every so often Yahchilane would turn to see a head hung out indecisively. Inquisitively. It was hard at first to make out the kind of animal. Then he saw the stripe on the fur, the yellow eyes, the hunch of the hackled back.

  A hyena, peering at him from down the lane.

  “Get,” he said.

  The hyena growled. Advanced a step. Then it froze in a pouncing stance.

  “Get lost,” Yahchilane said. “Fuck you.”

  The hyena whimpered. But then its muscles relaxed, its tensed haunches loosened. By slow degrees it turned, casting a final backward look, baleful, at Yahchilane before loping away.

  Yahchilane moved along the zoo’s main concourse.

  Toucan. Bobcat. Gray fox. Weasels and minks. Nutria. Two black bears and their cub. Rabbits.

  Flamingos.

  Then Henry Yahchilane became aware of an animal behind him. A smell, a huge lurking presence.

  The hyena returned, he reckoned.

  No.

  Holy shit, no.

  A jaguar. A gray female jaguar fully grown.

  The animal looked at him. He looked at the animal.

  The distance between them nothing for the animal to breach.

  Yahchilane stood defiantly, his mouth a tight slash. His black hair whipped in corkscrew tendrils around his face. The bitter slantwise rain bulleted down.

  The creature charged full bore.

  Yahchilane yelled out a garbled curse—gawfuckshi!—crossed his arms as if to fend off a curse. Futile. He was knocked hard and windless to the ground. The creature was on top of him, Yahchilane’s body trapped between the huge straddling legs. His face was sma
shed into the dirt and there was the taste of mud and blood in his mouth.

  Fireflies flew figure eights inside his head.

  The jaguar’s massive animal stink was enough to make him gag. Musk and hay and the fetid meat stewed in the acid of its belly.

  The jaguar lowered its face and breathed hotly on the back of Yahchilane’s skull.

  This is it, Yahchilane thought. Some way to go.

  Those zoo motherfuckers.

  The giant cat opened its mouth and swiped its sandpaper tongue down his neck.

  Then, purring, the jaguar stepped away and strolled into the night.

  Yahchilane struggled up. Shaking, nearly palsied, with adrenaline.

  At the end of the zoo’s main thoroughfare the animals were filing out.

  Donkey, goat, hyena.

  In the weird light they looked like the last creatures hoping to reach the ark before its departure.

  The last stragglers, belated and bedraggled and beset.

  THE TERRARIUM

  A FEW HOURS LATER THE FIRST hard ragged bands of the hurricane were flaying the island when an SUV came jouncing up the drive of Henry Yahchilane’s shaggy-shingled barrel-shaped house.

  A figure emerged. A woman in a ragged poncho hunched and running through the gray tumult of rain. Late seventies, maybe somewhere in her eighties. Acajou skin, dark hair turned lavender gray. The hoodie of the olive drab poncho was cinched tight around her face.

  Heidi. It took a moment for Yahchilane to recognize her, the rain was so blinding.

  It had been so many years. How many? The last time he’d seen her, it was to deliver the news of Reed Crowe’s passing. She had no idea of it because of the nature of her art-transporting job. Yahchilane had met her at a brasserie in the shadow of the Centre Pompidou. It was a gray day late in October, a bite of autumn in the air, the city trees turning to rust.

  As soon as she sat across from him, she knew from his face, from his dour mien, that he was the bearer of bad tidings. “Is he gone?”

  She’d expected this, Yahchilane realized.

  And now her worst suspicion was proven true.

  Smally, soberly, with closed eyes and lowered head, he nodded.

  She asked how Crowe died. If he was in pain.

  “Heart gave. He felt nothing.”

  She closed her eyes. As if trying to memorize a word. Or remember one. She inhaled a long quivering breath. Exhaled. “Oh god,” she said. She pinched the bridge of her nose with shaking fingers. Then she opened her eyes and asked for a cigarette.

  Yahchilane fished out his pack and shook it so a cigarette tip stuck out. She reached for it. Then Yahchilane reached across their tiny outdoor table and lit the cigarette with his sterling silver flip-top lighter. A raw wind was rising. Heidi’s cheeks were rosing up.

  “Was he alone? In general.”

  “He was dating a woman. Dr. Vu?”

  Maybe the cigarette, something in Heidi’s eyes snapped and they found their focus. “What’re you doing here, Henry?”

  He lit a cigarette for himself. “Just smoking.”

  “Come on.”

  “Never been. Getting old.”

  “Getting?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her smile was sad and small and jittery, her eyes shiny with tears, but none spilled. “I hope you didn’t come all this way to tell me.”

  Yahchilane said he was meeting his daughter in Amsterdam. A wedding gift.

  Heidi raised her eyebrows. On the honeymoon? she meant.

  “Her other wish was getting me out of the house and on a plane. So.” He explained that they were a month into their honeymoon already, and it was a lifetime dream of hers, to see the Van Gogh Museum with her father.

  “Nice guy?”

  “Van Gogh?”

  “I see Reed had an unfortunate influence on you.”

  “Pretty awful,” Yahchilane joked. “A huge asshole, actually.”

  Not true at all. The young man, Torrie, was a math professor from George Washington University. The first African American math professor of the institution. Yahchilane called him Bo Paradiddly because the kid could play the drums like a red-hot motherfucker. Krupa, Rich. James Brown shit.

  “The only way drums should be recorded is mono,” the kid told Yahchilane.

  Yahchilane couldn’t agree more.

  In this manner the young man endeared himself at once to Yahchilane. He’d expected to be wary of the kid. Because he was wary of most people. And this was his daughter the man was marrying. Yahchilane could not imagine a better husband or son-or-law and considered himself lucky in this regard.

  Yahchilane had also visited Heidi to deliver a letter. He’d discovered it in Crowe’s sunroom, atop the scroll-top armoire. Dear Heidi, it began. Yahchilane glimpsed through several pages. Not out of nosiness. The last thing Yahchilane had wanted to know about was any kink or strangeness or secrets now that Crowe was dead. They already had too many fucking secrets. But no, this was a love letter, Yahchilane could tell from just a cursory glance.

  Love. Sorry. Lily. Otter. Mistake. Love. Mistake. Otter.

  These words leapt at him.

  And, though the letter was unfinished, perhaps owing to the fact of Reed Crowe’s pathological aversion of the mail, or owing to the fact of his habit of seldom finishing what he started, he saw a few lines that stayed with him.

  For what it’s worth, the only time I felt kiddish in my heart was with you, Heidi. I love you, Heidi Crowe. I love you, Heidi Karavas. I always will.

  * * *

  —

  And now, here was Heidi Karavas, all this time later.

  Yahchilane threw back the hood of his poncho just to make sure. The wet tendrils of his black hair snapped at his skin. Heidi looked up at him. Gaunt and sun-beaten, cheekbones that knifed through his face. His clothes were still muddy from the zoo. Bits of chaff and bark and leaf litter stuck to him.

  “The hell happen to you, Henry? You get trapped in a tornado?”

  Yahchilane leaned closer, cupped his ear. The storm was so loud he couldn’t hear.

  Heidi tried again, “Tornado pick up your ass?”

  “Jaguar attacked me.”

  “Communication issues. This dang wind. Jeez Louise.”

  So her hearing was going too, like his. Hard to believe she was an old woman. Well, an older woman. Still youthful, especially compared with Henry Yahchilane’s old Jurassic ass.

  “Come inside,” he told her.

  “Henry, this place’ll be blown off the map.”

  “Your poncho is ruined,” Yahchilane told her. And it was, the plastic beneath the armpit ripped, the sleeve ragged and torn, a flap snapping in the wind.

  “Henry, you’re crazy staying.”

  “Yeah, lady, I know.”

  Far off in the foggy distance, gray and ghostlike, the ocean raged. Waves five, six men high. Tall as the masts of ships. Thirty-foot waves crested and toppled, erupting with volcanic explosions of foam.

  “Let’s go inside and get you a new poncho. One minute.”

  “One minute,” Heidi said.

  Inside the shaggy-shingled barrel-shaped house the porch plants and citrus trees and pepperbushes crowded the rooms with their leaves. Heidi laughed. An indoor jungle. And scattered here and there in the big main room were pots and pans pinging with rainwater. Small tinny plinks sounded all around them, some fey miniature tune from a broken music box.

  “Welcome to the jungle,” Yahchilane said.

  “You’re the only one left,” Heidi said. “Besides the crazies. The druggies. The alkies.”

  “My people.”

  “I gotta go, Henry. Let’s stop bullshitting. Come.”

  “I know, I know, boss
.” Henry Yahchilane motioned with his head, started walking to the hallway closet. “Get you sorted first.” He opened the closet and pulled the cord and the bare bulb lit. Arranged neatly upon the shelves were flashlights and hurricane lamps and candles and sundry other storm supplies. Canned goods. A first aid kit.

  And a stack of several ponchos, new and still wrapped in their cellophane bags.

  Yahchilane handed her one. “Not gonna do anyone any good with pneumonia.”

  Heidi took the poncho. “Are you okay? Your health?” Heidi asked.

  Yahchilane nodded. Waggled his hand. “Old as shit.”

  “Lovely. I wish we had more time to catch up.”

  Now Yahchilane asked Heidi where she was going.

  “Colombia.”

  “In this weather?”

  She told him she would return to Colombia, Bogotá, after the storm. Now, she was staying in Tarpon Springs. Volunteering, the evacuation effort.

  “Hell getting to Tarpon now,” Yahchilane told her.

  “Tarpon’ll be fine. This part, though.”

  “I’ve heard it before.”

  “But this time.”

  She was right, he knew. He lifted his eyebrows wearily. “Yeah, looks that way.”

  They were quiet for a moment. The storm raging like a kraken, bellowing into every crack and corner of the house. The wind shrieking like a mob of aggrieved ghosts in the eaves and flues.

  The kitchen phone rang. Heidi asked Yahchilane if he was going to get it. He told her no.

  “Probably Seymour. Five times today. Five times I told him I’m staying. Natasha got the hint after the second try.”

  “I’m wasting my breath, but here I go. Come and stay in Tarpon Springs. Family’s got a place. Hurricane shelter.”

  “Tarpon, you better get going.”