Florida Man Read online

  Florida Man beats chess opponent with brass knuckles after losing game. Florida Man urinates on uncle’s coffin during funeral service. Florida Man caught fornicating in SeaWorld exhibit. Florida Man, coke-addled, calls 911 to ask for number for 911. Florida Man tries to conceal stolen ham in rectum, fails. Florida Man arrested for teaching parrot death threats made to IRS. Florida Man armed with iguana robs herpetophobic mini-mart clerk.

  Now the feral beach cats slunk and sniffed around the chasm, their tails arrowed down.

  Some growled. Others looked at Crowe as if he was responsible.

  The cats were the descendants of felines brought in from the early days of sugarcane. Those days, the days of the first old Conchs, the rats chewed their sugarcane crops to shit, gnawing acres to stubble.

  All the poisons they tried didn’t work, so the sugar barons brought in cats from the south. They had their field hands sail to the Keys and corral as many strays as they could find. Poor souls in the middle of the night chasing after ferals in the mosquito-plagued islands, in the wild Florida dark. They loaded the cargo ship with hundreds. Tabbies, Russian grays, tortoiseshells. Never mind the surreal trek back home, the reek of cat piss and shit, the hissing and clawing that kept the crew awake, the fleas feasting on them, the mosquitoes, the insects on their skin so many they looked like they were in blackface.

  Once loosed on Emerald Island the cats feasted and fucked and ran amok. Multiplied. Before long there were hundreds. To this day their descendants inhabited Emerald Island. And the same posse of thirty or forty stuck to the eastern tip of the island around Crowe’s house.

  He recognized a host of them by sight.

  Many of the cats took a shining to Crowe and he to them. He gave the cats names. Lulubelle. Lady Marmalade. Leibowitz. Dr. Dynamo. Beelzebub. Frank. Elvis. Fats Domino. Carlos the Jackal. Edwin Patridge the Third.

  Crowe said to the cats, “Don’t look at me, man. Nothing to do with this shit. Maybe it was you? How about you? You, over there, you do this?”

  They eyed the hole from a distance, noses working.

  His thoughts drifted to Heidi, what she’d say about the sinkhole.

  Then he thought about their last conversation before she left. So stupid.

  What he said, for instance, to his ex-wife, in January, before her departure for Rennes. Her first art residency, at last, after years of watercoloring Emerald Island beachscapes, after moving on to still-life sketches of wading birds on the island, and then slowly after that finding her own style.

  She kept a gallery of her paintings in her arts-and-crafts bungalow during tourist season.

  And one day a few years ago a yachtsman bought one of her paintings, hung it up in his living room in Manhattan. The yachtsman threw a New Year’s party; 1977, this was.

  An art critic from The New York Times attended the celebration, where Heidi’s painting, hanging above the man’s couch, caught his eye.

  But that was it. For years. Until, by fortuitous coincidence, the art critic vacationed in Emerald Island a few summers later. One of those rare men who remained true to his word, he made it a point of visiting Heidi’s shop, where he was impressed anew with Heidi’s budding style. The art critic knew people at Columbia University, who knew people at NYU, who knew people at the consulate, who knew people at the Franco-American Institute in Rennes.

  One thing begot another.

  And on the eve of Heidi’s departure, Reed Crowe, about to turn thirty-three in October, felt an urgency he hadn’t felt in years. Heidi, his ex-wife, the mother of their child, was thirty-one.

  “Maybe you should stay here,” Crowe said, meaning that maybe they should start over. This before her ten-hour flight across the Atlantic was about to depart from the Miami-Dade airport.

  He clutched her shoulders at the boarding gate. He was always struck anew by her beauty before she left him—her Mediterranean tan, her sun-kissed dark curly hair, her big wonderful ass—but only when she was going away.

  Heidi shook her head.

  Thinking she misunderstood, Crowe went on, “Everything. Us. Let’s try again. Life on the island.”

  He meant another shot at marriage.

  Another child.

  Another shot at life.

  “How dare you,” she told him in a rough shaking whisper. Ire burned in her eyes.

  Crowe was dumbstruck. He asked his ex-wife what the matter was.

  “You’re something else, you know that?” Heidi told him, and with that she shouldered her carry-on and turned and joined the queue filing into the plane.

  He knew it best not to follow. Her stiff shoulders, her indignant clipped stride.

  Even her knock-out ass looked somehow angry.

  Only later that evening did it occur to him why Heidi reacted the way she did. Only later did he realize it was selfish and misguided to say what he did before such a titanic sea change in her life.

  * * *

  —

  These things were on Crowe’s mind when his friend Chill Norton finally arrived later that afternoon in his dump truck full of oyster shells. Chill, the proprietor of the Pervy Mermaid just beyond the outskirts of the township. It was beyond Crowe who would eat all-you-can-eat raw oysters in an all-nude strip club on a Friday night, but far be it from him to question his own good fortune.

  After the two-ton cacophony of the shells had ceased, and after the hole was filled, Chill asked, “This place insured?”

  “What you think?”

  “Oh man.”

  “No shit.”

  Crowe was off the books. A cipher. A nonentity. Like many under-the-radar types on the island, he paid his taxes, as little as he could get away with, and as for the rest, he was self-sufficient.

  The sun was setting tangerine and bronze and they popped fresh beers, swatted away mosquitoes.

  Chill asked Crowe how Heidi, Reed’s ex-wife, was doing.

  “In Rennes,” Crowe told him.

  “Fuck’s that?”

  “France.”

  They tipped back their beers, watched the cats watching them from within the jungle foliage hemming the backyard.

  “Hey, assholes,” Chill told them.

  HENRY YAHCHILANE

  HENRY YAHCHILANE HEARD IT TOLD BY the slow-witted man at the Rum Jungle.

  If memory served, the dimwit man was in the employ of the man known as Florida Man. Something Crowe. The man who owned that ramshackle attraction on the mainland. The Florida Man Mystery House.

  A shithole.

  A bonafide tourist trap if he ever saw one.

  Once in a while, during his long evening beach strolls on the island, Henry spotted Crowe in his Hawaiian bathing trunks or madras shorts kicking through the waves. Slouching along, head down, hands shoved in his pockets. The bright tourist shop T-shirts with the dumb slogans. Too baked to give a fuck.

  The sun-scorched hair, the witness protection beard.

  The zories, the loafers.

  A silly man, Henry Yahchilane considered him. An egghead.

  Sometimes he’d think, Oh, there goes the egghead. There goes the idjit.

  Nonetheless they’d tender amiable half-waves from a distance. Like all the other islanders.

  This guy, Crowe’s de facto factotum, had a reputation for running at the mouth. And that night after chasing his third tequila shot with his third beer, the man in his typical shitmouth torrent said, “Yeah, he had this fuckin’ head. I don’t know, man. A skull, not a fresh head.”

  A coterie of regulars was giving him an ear. Beach bums. A ship captain or two. Salty dogs.

  Yahchilane listened too.

  Yahchilane pegged the guy as a nincompoop. His choppy rube’s haircut, from the looks of it self-styled. Either that or clipped at the Salvati
on Army, where every second Sunday in Emerald City they gave out free haircuts to the needy.

  Yahchilane often saw the nincompoop around the pool halls just outside of Emerald Island. He saw him in the Red, White and Blue Liquor store scratching his Florida Lottery scratch-offs at the counter as the owner with the pocked greasy face watched with unconcealed spite. And he’d seen him a few times in the wing hut way outside the county limits, wheeling and dealing with a bunch of pill heads and cokeheads.

  And he’d see him driving that death-trap contraption, an ad hoc moped which was really just a BMX bike with a weed whacker engine attached. Yahchilane got stuck behind the idjit because passing was impossible on the two-lane road because the idjit was weaving in and out and Yahchilane’s van was so big he knew he’d clip him.

  The guy would fetch daredevil looks over his shoulder, motioning him to pass, leaning over the chopper-style handlebars.

  “Egghead,” Yahchilane would say, watching the man swerving and wobbling in the headlights.

  * * *

  —

  And what did the islanders know about Yahchilane?

  Much of it was common knowledge, simply by virtue of the fact that the island was so small, the population so scant, and Yahchilane’s stay here so long.

  A true local. When Henry Yahchilane was born, it was the tail end of an era when his forefathers, tanners and plumers and traders, lived off the land. This before the days of conservation. After Roosevelt and Audubon and all of them. After the oil magnates and Henry Flagler the investor and the railroad men laying tracks across the state. After the government started hacking away at the swamp, draining the Everglades, devouring the land with steam shovels, flooding their land and homes.

  After forced immigration and extradition, those years when chickees were taken apart, whole villages packed in huge wooden crates, loaded on freight trains, and transported across the United States and reassembled in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas. Even Canada. These places for the Seminoles who’d known only the subtropics of Florida most of their lives might as well have been the moon.

  Uncles and aunts and cousins named Eagle, Deer, Panther, all estranged and scattered to different points of the compass. Like dander, like dust.

  Yahchilane’s family, at least, was spared this misfortune and indignity. His family hailed from Seminoles from the tip of Florida to the north of Okeechobee, relatives scattered in Brighton Reservation and Big Cypress.

  The new roads in Florida brought the tourists, and ushered in the so-called tin can tourism age. Droves of Americans trekked south in their Model T’s and Studebakers, deep into the jungly terra incognita of the state.

  In those days, Florida was still an exotic place. The primordial subtropical wild. The closest a red-blooded American could get to Timbuktu without leaving the country.

  Tourists treated the natives as an attraction. Uncle Joe wrestling his alligators in the muddy slop pens. The wigwams and chickadees. The hides and pelts at hokey souvenir shops. Beads and trinkets. Wallets with beads. Patchwork purses.

  Tourists took pictures of their children with a so-called Indian chief. For a few bucks, they could try on a so-called authentic headdress.

  Yahchilane then was of an age that his memories of this era were clear. Post–World War II ecotourism. The thirty-foot billboard outside of Hialeah. The pylons made to look like totem poles flanking the entrance. The village enclosed by palmetto fronds. Bananas, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, chickens and pigs and dogs. The animal safaris. The monkey shows. The alligator wrestling.

  As the tourists openly stared, the Seminole families sat painting rawhide calfskin drums.

  The Seminoles stared wordlessly back.

  One of Henry Yahchilane’s uncles, a drunk and pothead, muttered nonsense. The tourists took it all as gospel. As if they were privy to something sacred, secret, solemn.

  The toddlers got the most money from the tourists. They would walk up to the tourists in their patchwork outfits, hold out their hands without a word, palms waiting. Sometimes Henry would make more money in an afternoon than his father with all his wood carvings and hides and hunting in a week.

  Henry sat with his mother and his older brothers in the shade of their chickee huts. The tourists snapped pictures with their Brownie cameras and Polaroids. Without permission.

  If it was one of his days off from the department store, Henry’s father would sit in the shade of the hut and not move an inch aside from his constant whittling. He would not shake hands, even when the tourists offered them. And they did. Often.

  Little Henry Yahchilane rattled his tin cup for tourist money while his dad kept mum and hawked his bird whistles and tomahawks and knives.

  His family was a dramatic bunch predisposed to loud quarrels and sometimes outright fistfights. Disputes over land, government, alcohol. Certain relatives seemed almost to relish being bitter and angry. They clung covetously to grudges as if they were their lifeblood.

  Even before puberty hit he knew. Yahchilane wanted no part of federal restitution save for being left alone. He wanted no part of the tribal councils and politics. That fraught and fractious world of self-appointed goodwill ambassadors. Village managers and treasurers and spokespeople.

  Not Henry Yahchilane.

  Yahchilane had a few estranged nephews. Listless ne’er-do-wells one and all. The father and the mother’s fault. Both dipshits. Their run-ins every few years were the only times they communicated. Emerald City was a small place. Inevitably their paths crossed. And when they did, words were exchanged. On more than one occasion, punches thrown.

  The other Yahchilanes, including Henry Yahchilane’s older brother Cy, took the government reparations money. They had kids and a family and they took the money and within a year they had squandered it on drugs and stupid shit like a seven-thousand-dollar Fender Twin Reverb Amp and when they asked Henry for a loan, blood being blood, he denied them because he had no money.

  * * *

  —

  The goofy man with the rattail said, “He found a real human head. Okay, go ahead. Laugh. Laugh. No, I wasn’t giving head. Fuck you guys. I’m trying to tell you, a real whole human head.”

  They went on like this for a while and Yahchilane had already tuned them out and was about to order another beer when he heard the word “grotto.”

  The severed head was found in the grotto, the man who worked for Crowe was saying.

  Yahchilane tensed. Forwent the last beer. Laid down his money and shoved off his stool and left the bar.

  MIDNIGHT JAUNT

  WORRIES SWARMED AT CROWE THAT NIGHT, hectoring him awake. Heidi. The skull.

  He wondered whether he should call the cops. Quickly dismissed the notion, knowing the crooked ways and crooked justice that prevailed in this crooked place. Conch law. Laissez-faire. He thought of local Sheriff Schaffer, the crookedest crook of them all.

  Crowe forewent sleep. He got dressed and crossed the Intracoastal bridge at midnight, spade and pick in the trunk of his orange hatchback.

  He was on his way to the grotto, to see the skull, to see what else the collapse uncovered.

  * * *

  —

  On the way, Crowe stopped at Red, White and Blue Liquor.

  Krumpp was next to the standing ashtray smoking a long menthol cigarette outside the RWB, a repurposed Pizza Hut with the trademark roof, when Crowe came scuffing out of his beeswax orange hatchback.

  “Sergeant Krumpp!” said Crowe.

  Krumpp grunted and twisted out the cigarette and went inside, keys jingling. Crowe made a face behind Krumpp as he followed inside. Krumpp the immutable, always the same car salesman slacks, roomy and pleated, keys jangling from his hip’s belt loop, like some kind of grim jailer.

  No one ever robbed Krumpp because he never got through the police academy and thir
ty years later he was just waiting for the next guy to rob his store so he could blow his head off and talk about it on the television. Lord knew how many guns he had stowed behind the counter under the register.

  Crowe, to avoid RWB Liquor in Emerald City, restocked his sundries—beer and wine—at the big Kmart in Fort Myers, but sometimes, circumstance—such as the need to get ripshit drunk—necessitated a visit to RWB Liquor.

  Like tonight.

  Inside Crowe went into the beer cave—the frozen-type arced above the door of the walk-in—and got a twelve-pack and went to the counter.

  “You got a new guy working for you I hear,” Krumpp said.

  “How are you, Krumpp? How’s life?”

  “He work on your boat?”

  “Wayne?”

  “No. Sells sodas? The kid.”

  “Working for me? I ain’t a conglomerate.”

  “Whatever, that kid stole those sodas from me.”

  Crowe looked at the door. The cooler. At Krumpp. “Then I feel kind of bad. That’s kind of a long way.”

  “You think it’s funny, I got a business to run.”

  “How would somebody steal sodas from you? How?”

  “The delivery guy from Hialeah, he was in the beer cooler one minute, and one minute later, some Mexicans are speeding off in a white Ford truck.”

  “Some Mexicans.”

  “Dark people, what I saw.”

  “Where were you when the soda guy was delivering?”

  “The beer cooler.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It doesn’t make sense because maybe you’re stoned, hippy.”

  “Whoa, Sarge, how’d this escalate so quickly?”

  “I got a business to run and you’re crackin’ fuckin’ jokes.”

  “I didn’t steal your sodas. Why you so mad at me?”

  “Talk to the kid.”

  Crowe said, “Seems like an okay kid. I’d venture to even say good. Wouldn’t peg him as belonging to any soda syndicate.”