by Tom Cooper
“I know the back roads.”
“And the side ways. And the byways. The down roads, the up roads. Florida lady. Florida woman.”
“I’d beg you to leave,” Heidi said. “I guess I already did.”
Yahchilane was looking at Heidi.
“What’s this look?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I just remember you walking on the island. When you were a little girl. I guess you were almost a teenager. I was already a geezer. Used to see you and Reed walking on the island.”
“We used to see you too.”
“I used to think, Wow, those two sure look happy.”
“We were. For a while.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know that story all right.”
Heidi’s look changed. “I used to have a crush on you.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true. I thought you were very mysterious. God, I was a baby.”
“I know. You still are.”
“You’re so full of shit. Henry, it’s the end of the world. What’re we doing?”
“Coffee to go?”
“Stop it,” Heidi said.
“Florida woman,” Yahchilane said.
“Florida broad,” Heidi Karavas said.
“Florida dame.”
“Florida bitch.”
“Come on, now, young lady.”
“I bet Reed called me that all the time. Bitch.”
“Never ever once and I’ll swear on it.”
“I trust you, Henry.”
“Few plants? I got succulents. Cacti. Going cheap.”
“Stop it, you.”
“Yeah, you’ll be driving in rivers. Go, go.”
They embraced. Awkwardly at first, but then they loosened and hugged like old familiars. As if the same realization struck them both at once.
This was it. Never again would they see each other.
“Okay, man,” said Henry Yahchilane to Heidi Karavas’s back as she went into the slate gray ripping curtains of rain, her yellow poncho blowing and snapping.
“Okay, man,” she said. Yahchilane couldn’t tell from her strained voice if she was crying or laughing or both.
And then she was in her car, taillights fading and finally vanishing in the howling rain.
BUTTERBEAN
LATER THAT EVENING HE WAS LOOKING out at the gray bluster when he sighted the silhouette of a stout man staggering near the waves. He appeared to be sweeping with a broom. Then Yahchilane realized: metal detecting.
Lunatic, Yahchilane thought.
FLORIDA MAN METAL DETECTS DURING THE END OF THE WORLD.
Perhaps it was an old man escaped from the nursing home in Emerald City. One of those old time Elks or Kiwanis, a World War II vet, thinking he was minesweeping before the cavalry stormed the beach.
“Hey, mister,” Yahchilane called, yelling as loud as he could. Yelling as loud as a one-lunged man could.
Futile. Like shouting into a typhoon.
Yahchilane went into the house to fetch the flashlight and binoculars. Outside he beamed a signal with the flashlight. Then he peered through the binoculars, glassed the horizon.
The man, whoever he was, gone.
Vanished in the tempest haze.
But then Yahchilane spotted something else. What appeared to be a huge moving sand dune.
He wondered if he was hallucinating, in the grip of some wild fantasia. A stroke.
But he saw the shape move again. Then a neck emerged, a head.
A gargantuan turtle.
He wondered if it was Bogart, Crowe’s old turtle from the Florida Man Mystery House, but if he recalled correctly that was a freshwater.
This one, just as big, though.
It waddled slowly, stolidly, into the raging surf, the pounding waves.
Yahchilane set down the flashlight and binoculars.
He groaned and reached and yanked down the last storm shutter, the rusted bearings crying as it jerked down.
* * *
—
The electricity went out after midnight. In the dark Yahchilane flicked his cigarette lighter and went up the stairs.
And as the storm grew louder and darkness grew darker, into greater darkness he went, retreating into the bedroom of his shaggy-thatched barrel-shaped house. Not the thinnest tracery of outside light showed. Dark as death.
But he knew the way blind. These steps to his bed taken so many times through the years that a path was worn in the floor, a sickle-shaped trail grooved into the wood.
He sat on the edge of the bed and he unlaced his boots. He took them off and set them neatly side by side on the floor. Then he took off his socks and he rolled them up and shoved them in the throats of his boots. Wearing his jeans and denim shirt he lay flat on his back above the covers. Just as he used to when he was a baby when his mother found him quietly awake in the middle of the night. His brothers and sisters were colicky and loud and quarrelsome and would cry over anything.
But not Yahchilane.
His mother would find him awake and above the covers in the dark, “Everybody always fussing, but you little butterbean, why don’t you cry, Mr. Little Butterbean?”
Now the wind cried in the cracks of the house. The storm wept in the timbers. All around him the tempest raged like a curse finally arrived. A cosmic comeuppance. The leviathan, the kraken, coming to suck him and everyone and everything left on Emerald Island into the black drink.
But it was a good house. Looking back Yahchilane surmised them the best years of his life, sleeping on the beach in the tent, building the house.
How deeply he slept those nights, under the stars. How careless were his dreams then. The bark flakes in his hair and the good smell of fresh-cut wood still on his hands in the mornings.
And now Henry Yahchilane lay back easy. He lived this long and he’d gone this far, he’d done and seen so much, he could think of nothing else left to do, and where else would he do it but here, right here?
He was a Florida man.
It’s where he belonged.
Few dead men have such good fortune.
To my brother, Michael Paul Cooper
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My mother, Lynn Elizabeth McIlvaine, above all. I love you, Mom, and if it wasn’t for you I’d surely be a devious drug-addicted con-artist. Well, it’s not too late! Let’s see how this book fares.
My brother, Mike Cooper, one of my most perspicacious and generous early readers.
My long-suffering partner, Kathy Conner, the same.
Old chums Richard Pearlman and Claudia Sanchez.
My mother’s fiancé, Greg Smith, for being a good sport for more than a decade. I’m glad I got to spend time with your brother and thanks for telling me your stories.
Josh Joseph, Jesus Christ, brother, the pep talks. And the loans!
To the memory of Lily and Cleo, two great cats who died in my arms, a year apart, during the writing of this book. You were my little gremlins and I don’t give a shit about how much “cat lady” ribbing I get.
To the memory of all the dear idols we’ve lost in the last five years. It’s been a slaughterhouse. I can name the names. You know them. But for me, my “idols”—as close as I have to any—died when I was writing this. I thought of them and how much they inspired me over the years, and that’s the only way I could really wrap my head around the loss. Right now. RIP, David Berman, David Bowie, and Mark E. Smith.
I also wish to thank the independent booksellers throughout America and Europe who championed The Marauders and gave it a second life. I wish I was the kind of person who wrote thank-you notes. But once that Hallmark shit gets started, there’s no end. This is not a slippery-slope fallacy. Send one, then everybody
wants a card. So I can never just send one. You understand. Big prize people, well, that’s different and you just have to because otherwise you seem like a barnyard animal.
But I digress.
I thank Forrest Anderson and the people at Catawba College for being such generous and gracious hosts. The same for the people behind Festival America, in Vincennes, especially my editors Francis Geffard and Carol Menville. Also, thank you to all the staff at one of the best bookstores in France, Millepages, for taking care of me when I was writing a terrible second novel. I didn’t know it. You didn’t know it. But here we are and I’m happy that you finally have a second book to sell. Ha!
The same for the folks involved with the Crooks’ Corner Prize in Chapel Hill. The same for my sponsors and friends at La Marelle, Marseille, where a good portion of Florida Man was written. Thank you for your hospitality. It’s because of generosity like yours I was impelled to slog forward when I wanted to forgo the damn thing.
The kindness of strangers. We can use a little more of that these days, eh? Well, you showered it upon me. Thank you.
Apropos, thanks as well to all the good people in Switzerland who work at the Librairie du Midi, especially Marie Musy, who brought me an audience I might not have otherwise enjoyed.
Thank you to Germany’s internationales literaturfestival for its hospitality when I began this book in the autumn of 2017 in Berlin.
Thank you to Lee Ofman for letting me use his “Miami Dolphins Fight Song.”
I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank some other people. The krewe at New York Pizza, Magazine Street, New Orleans. You encouraged me through periods of doubt and hardship.
Thank you to my New Orleans friends who did the same. You know who you are. It’s been a tough few years. On all of us. But we’re getting through.
Thank you to my agents and editors who work so hard on my behalf—in America, in particular Duvall Osteen, Ben Greenberg, Clio Seraphim, and Dennis Ambrose. Thanks for believing in me. This book was a real goddamn mess.
Thanks to the libraries and book clubs.
Thank you, reader.
Best,
TC
FLORIDA MAN
9-6-17
to
8-21-19
WORKS CONSULTED
The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to Casino Gaming, by Patsy West, 1998.
Weird Florida, by Charlie Carlson, 2005.
National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Southeastern States, by Peter Alden and Gil Nelson, 1999.
Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature, by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, 1999.
Totch: A Life in the Everglades, by Loren G. “Totch” Brown, 1993.
Pulphead: Essays, by John Jeremiah Sullivan, 2011.
Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami, by Roben Farzad, 2011.
Histories of Southeastern Archeology, edited by Shannon Tushingham, Jane Hill, and Charles H. McNutt, 2002.
Southeastern Ceremonial Complex: Chronology, Content, Context, edited by Adam King, 2007.
The Story of the Chokoloskee Bay Country, by Charlton W. Tebeau (with the reminiscences of pioneer C. S. “Ted” Smallwood), 1976.
Death in the Everglades: The Murder of Guy Bradley, America’s First Martyr to Environmentalism, by Stuart B. McIver, 2003.
Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, by Joy Williams, 2001.
The Florida Keys: A History & Guide, by Joy Williams, 2003.
A New Deal for Southeastern Archaeology, by Edwin A. Lyon, 1996.
BY TOM COOPER
The Marauders
Florida Man
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOM COOPER was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He now lives in New Orleans. The Marauders was his first book and Florida Man is his second.
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