Florida Man by Tom Cooper

Author:Tom Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

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They went to Miami Beach and South Beach to scan the faces. They sat on the benches among the art deco motels and restaurants and bars and the sports cars and the hordes of scantily clad women.

Nina by comparison looked almost nunnish and prim.

Nina in her apricot sundress, her white sandals, watching the passing faces. The constellation of moles and freckles showing on her neck and her shoulders and her arms. They looked as intense and stubborn as her somehow. No, not stubborn. Unapologetic.

The moles polka-dotted the dark burnished gleam of her shoulders.

To Crowe everything about the woman was a vision.

They continued watching the parade of South Florida through the windows. So many faces, so many scantily clad bodies.

Crowe remembered when he was a boy, the time when Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale were veritable shtetlach. Kibbutzim. They’d picnic there when he was a kid, before his father started beating his mother. Before his father got into all the trouble with those Dade County criminals.

Back then, Yiddish was more common in the streets than English. Holocaust survivors living there called the place Little Jerusalem. And for a while, it was a mecca. A sun-kissed halcyon Xanadu. What the old men and women so much deserved. A place so different from the camps it was like an afterlife.

Collins Avenue was another Broadway, another Vegas Strip. Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, those kinds of guys played on Tuesday nights to packed houses. Shit, it wasn’t like the old coots had a job to report to in the morning.

But things had changed.

The times had changed.

The McDuffie riots. The “Paradise Lost” issue of Time. The boatlift.

All that round-the-clock coverage on television, that new cable channel CNN showing all that gruesome and gory footage, you’d think Miami was San Salvador. You’d be just about half-right.

But the water. The fucking water. That looked the same, for the time being.

Here was the Florida sun and glittering water of the beach. The convertible cars coasting along the strip, red Mustangs and yellow Camaros gleaming like candies. The art deco buildings and stucco homes like pastel macaroons, pink and yellow and turquoise. And here were the new downtown skyscrapers standing on the edge of the water.

He remembered when the place was an outpost. Now? A different country.

Shit, almost a different century.

Crowe tried not to look too long at the women, for the sake of the girl, for the sake of Nina, but he stole glances. As did Yahchilane.

And Mariposa. “Bonita,” she said about a willowy golden-haired girl in a Hawaiian print bikini as she crossed the walk before them at a stop sign.

“Hussies,” Nina told her daughter.

Then Nina caught her brother ogling and hissed a curse.

And then Marlon grunted something back.

Everywhere you looked, another group of women who looked like sauntering pinups. Oiled-up and tanned bodies, curves spilling out of bikinis. Some of the garments looked painted on. Others were three dinky triangles of bright cloth near diaphanous.

“Hussies,” Nina said again.

“Bonita,” Mariposa said again.

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