14.2
Shit Pail waves her arms frantically for several seconds, though Rupert had stopped talking and had been looking right at her.
“Did you know . . . ?” she begins.
Ah, great.
“ . . . that a manatee named Philbert survived three shipwrecks during World War Two—the Bismarck, the HMS Cossack, and the HMS Ark Royal, only to die peacefully in—”
Rupert had been shaking his head since the word “shipwrecks.”
“That was a cat named Sam.”
“I had a cat named Sam, who died . . . ” She didn’t pause.
“Am I boring you?”
“ . . . in a . . . ”
“Are you bored?”
“ . . . a . . . ”
“Are you—?”
“Yes.”
“—bored?”
“A bit.”
Rupert sighed.
“Manatees are boring.”
“Not this one.”
“Oh, because . . .”
“Can I continue?”
“ . . . I had a . . . ”
“Can I—?”
“ . . . catatee . . . ”
“Stop.”
“Okay.”
* * *
Jesus watched the hump, still nodding, and looked about to say something, when a man crashed through the bushes next to them. He ran straight into Jesus, knocking him back a bit—he looked like he was running from someone. For a second, it appeared Jesus was about to put a whuppin’ on the guy, but Rupert saw recognition on his friend’s face and then Jesus rolled his eyes. The guy, though, didn’t appear to know Jesus. The guy didn’t seem to know much of anything, except that someone was after him and he needed to act quickly. In the coming twilight, Rupert had just enough illumination and time to see that the man had suffered a pretty horrible burn at some point. Not recently, but sometime in the distant past. His eyes, crazed and red-rimmed, had no lashes, nor did he have eyebrows, except for a few hairs that sprouted on the outside edge of where the left one should have been.
I’d pluck those, Rupert thought, and then lamented that his brain worked this way.
The guy’s lips were functional, but not so much lip-shaped, and his nose was absent more cartilage than anyone would feel comfortable still calling a nose. The rest of his face, with the exception of a palm-sized patch on the jaw line and lower part of the left cheek, looked waxy and taut in some places, wavy and abstract in others.
As far as they could tell, no one was after him. Rupert had noticed as he exploded through the foliage that he’d been accompanied by a liquid-sloshing sound, but he couldn’t tell exactly where it came from.
“(Incoherent) fuzz, man! (incoherent!)” the guy said as his frantic but cloudy eyes scanned the water and landed on the hump of the slow-moving manatee.
Another glance around and Rupert could see there was definitely no one in pursuit. The only people interested in this guy were the tourists who looked on in shock and horror. Then:
“(Incoherent) gonna ride that sumbitchin’ sea cow outta here! (Incoherent!)” With that, the man with the melted face took a few steps back, ran, and launched himself into the water of the boat launch, toward the grey hump. Jesus had put up his hands, perhaps to stop the crazy man, but it was too late.
Here, two things happened:
1) At take-off, a plastic Superade bottle fell down and out of the guy’s pant leg, and rolled to a stop at their feet; and 2) the guy flailed and landed directly onto the manatee, which was indeed a manatee, though not a live one, and rotting from the inside. The guy popped through the decomposing hump, into and through the putrefying carcass, and now he struggled to free himself.
The stench was awful and instant, and everyone moved away from the canal, except for Rupert and Jesus who could only stare in revulsion. They watched him for a few minutes. He didn’t seem much closer to freedom.
“That’s Bucket,” Jesus said.
“What?”
“He’s kind of a fixture.”
Rupert was about to ask more about Bucket, but he then noticed the Superade bottle near his feet, which was murky inside, filled with a dirty, chalky-looking residue that had been jostled in the fall and was now settling. Rupert pointed to it.
“He dropped that. What is it?”
“Shit, son, that’s a bomb,” Jesus said, and with that, he jumped over a low hedge and commenced a brisk, yet nonchalant stroll away from the scene through a small gravel lot where people parked their boat trailers.
It didn’t look like a bomb to Rupert, so he stood there a little longer, watching Bucket thrash in the water, working the putrid manatee flesh from his limbs and yelling incoherencies and marginally more coherent expletives. Rupert felt a little sorry for the exhausted man named Bucket and his heroic battle with this dead manatee—he thought the least he could do was help him out. But the stink of the disintegrating offal was too much to get any closer.
In fact, by this time, Bucket’s struggling had pushed him and the manatee carcass closer to the edge of the launch, and Rupert saw that Bucket was not only engulfed in rotting manatee meat, but also a tangle of tubes, rods, and what Rupert thought was a glass beaker.
Bucket pushed himself up onto the concrete edge of the launch, fell over, rested, but wheezed for about ten seconds, and then attempted one last violent squirm out of the whole mess, the bulk of which plopped back into the brown-black water. Finally, he sat up, inhaled deeply a few times, and tried to stand. Rupert hoped very much he would not have to steady him, because he had no idea how long it took to get the smell of dead manatee out of one’s skin.
But Bucket succeeded in righting himself on his own, and he looked down around his feet at the leftover meat and tubing, then started to pat down his pants, as if looking for something.
“Pretty sure I just had the bottle in there, not a whole set up,” Bucket said and cackled, but turned serious again when he didn’t find what he looked for. He scanned the bushes. Rupert pointed to the bottle where he and Jesus had been standing, still looking at the manatee mess—Rupert had been in country long enough to recognize the remains of a box lab amongst the decomposing manatee flesh. What the hell?
Bucket ran over to the bottle—Jesus’s “bomb”—gave it a couple of shakes, which made Rupert wince, then walked back over and tried to shake Rupert’s hand. Rupert did everything in his power to avoid this.
“I’m Bucket,” the guy said. “Kids call me Bucket. Everyone does.”
Rupert hoped this man had not procreated.
“Nice to meet you, Bucket.” Again, Rupert couldn’t help but notice a drop in anxiety whenever he interacted with those whom society deemed unpalatable.
Bits of manatee meat had found their way into the melted flesh creases of Bucket’s face, and Rupert felt his ta’amia with shrimp start to rise. The combination of the rotting manatee flesh and Bucket’s burn-scarred face was like an olfactive-visual battle of entropic proportions—two things, falling apart, and never meant to have ever made contact. He wondered if he could go three days without puking. No one warned him about all the vomiting one would do when visiting Florida.
“Whatchya got there, Bucket?” Rupert asked, pointing to the bottle.
Bucket looked at the bottle for a moment, and then back at Rupert, perplexed.
“Meth.” Bucket said this like one would say, “bread,” or “socks.”
Rupert looked at him. Slowly, Bucket came around.
“Shake n’ Bake, brother,” he said. “You interested?”
Rupert was now possessed of two competing thoughts:
1) That Bucket made his own meth and might be unstable enough to be convinced to teach Rupert; and 2) he was almost positive that dead manatee contained a small, possibly-functioning meth lab, and that fact was so baffling, it was hard for him to conduct business. Was there nowhere these Floridians could not make meth? But Rupert persevered.
Bucket squeezed canal and manatee juice from his already too-big t-shirt, stretching it out further. He’d either forgotten anyone had been chasing him, or thought that he’d gotten away.
“So, this,” Rupert said, pointing to the bottle again. “That works?”
“Works? Hell, I’ll show you!” Bucket answered, delighted. Rupert found this disconcerting, which was a real feat under the circumstances.
“But I gotta warn you,” Bucket continued, then leaned closer to Rupert than was welcome. “It’ll put a crimp in your masturbation routine. I mean, if you got a schedule. I mean, if you wanna work it in your pants, like I do when I’m out and about.”
“I’m flexible.” That was easy enough. Confusing and gross, but relatively simple.
“Yeah, I’ll teach you, no problem,” Bucket said, unnatural lips undulating, lashless lids still squinting out toxic-canal/meat juice and other revolting things. “I’m at Vailima.”
“Robert Louis Stevenson?” Rupert asked, pleasantly surprised.
“Who?”
Let down.
Bucket turned, hopped the same low hedge Jesus did and trotted across the lot, dripping and shouting, “Freeze! Hands Up!” Two black labs came out of nowhere, barking and slobbering, tails wagging, and followed Bucket. A small group of black tourists, also sandaled and covered in tropical print, craned their necks to see who shouted, but upon seeing Bucket, quickly moved back down the shopping area, joining their white counterparts in a rare display of social solidarity.
Rupert watched impassively as Bucket and the dogs disappeared into the neighborhood, then turned back to the section of the boat launch nearest the canal, when there on the other side of the deep end of the launch was the guy he’d seen at the FFG on his very first day in Sarasota. He peered out from behind a bush, but Rupert saw the fringed jacket and the feathers in his hair. The guy shook his head in sorrow, and though the dusk had grown darker than it was just ten minutes before, Rupert swore he saw a single tear run down the man’s face.
Rupert turned to yell for Jesus and when he looked back, the mysterious man was gone.
A lone gull screeched its garbage-eating, beach bum cry in the distance.
Sock it to me...