Naked Came the Florida Man Page 8

  Another assistant coach sidled up to Lamar Calhoun. “What’s going on over there?”

  “Where?”

  The other coach pointed. With all the players on the sidelines now, the view was clear to the far side of the field. Two rows of truck tires were lined up for high-stepping agility drills. A tiny person was running through them. Or trying to. There was a trip and fall every few tires. The person got right back up for the next several tires and promptly went down again.

  “Oh geez,” said Calhoun.

  “You know who that is?”

  Lamar nodded. “Can you take over for me a few minutes?” He headed across the field.

  A whistle blew behind him, and the boys lined up again to scrimmage.

  Lamar reached the tires. “What are you doing?”

  Chris pushed herself up from the vulcanized obstacle course and managed a couple more steps. Plop. “I’m practicing, Coach.”

  Calhoun’s voice was more perplexed than angry. “Okay, first, I’m not your coach, and second, you can’t be out here.”

  “Why not?” Huffing and turning around at the end of the tires, then heading back.

  Lamar watched as she ran by and fell again. “Because only players are allowed on the field.”

  “I’m going to be a player.”

  “Please don’t make me throw you out,” said Lamar. “It’s . . . insurance. Yeah, insurance.”

  Chris stopped. A resigned “Allllll right.”

  Calhoun watched with conflicted emotions as the young girl slunk off the field. He scratched his head and had no idea what to make of it . . .

  Chapter 9

  Central Florida

  A 1969 Plymouth Satellite sat quietly and alone in the shade of an oak tree. It was lunchtime.

  Coleman finished chewing a bite and swallowed. “What are we doing here?”

  Serge stuck a fork in his mouth. “Eating pie.”

  “No, I mean here,” said Coleman. “This place.”

  “It’s our next stop.” Serge chased the bite with more coffee. “The Antioch Cemetery, a few miles east of Micanopy and Cross Creek.”

  “I’m surprised you picked this one,” said Coleman. “It’s small and kind of dumpy. Just dirt with some brown grass and weeds.”

  “That part’s a disappointment, but one Floridian buried here makes it more than worthwhile.”

  “So who is it?”

  “Hold on,” said Serge, digging in again with his fork. “I’m letting the moment build with pie. This is a celebration of astounding dimensions.”

  “If it’s a celebration, I would have guessed you’d buy a cake.”

  “I’m done with cake!” said Serge. “Cakes are flashy and get way too much attention compared to pie. All that garish frosting. It’s just gratuitous.”

  Munch, munch. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because cakes are the pole dancers of the bakery world, but a pie is the girl you take home to Mom. If cakes had names, they’d be Jazmine, Sunshine, Cinnamon, Duplicity; pie would answer to ‘Sarah’ and ‘Beth.’”

  “Never thought of it that way.”

  “There are defining times in your life when you just have to speak up.”

  “I can dig it.” Coleman took another bite. “And I have to say it’s pretty damn good pie. But I’ve never tasted anything like it.”

  “It’s sour orange pie.” A fork scooped.

  “Never heard of it.” Munch.

  “Almost nobody has.” Serge chewed and slurped from his coffee mug. “But it’s one of our state’s most fantastic native dishes ever, made from centuries-old family recipes that are now virtually forgotten. Key lime pie gets all the headlines today. And Key lime’s great, don’t get me wrong. But sour orange is nirvana. And because it’s so unknown, you have to work like the devil to get it. The main ingredient was brought here by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and now grows wild across the peninsula, characterized by its extra-bumpy and thick skin, like a giant citrus golf ball. Just finding the fruit is a bitch, involving hiking boots and trespassing, or long drives to specialty grocery stores like Cuban bodegas in Miami, where they’re sold to make mojo sauce—I like saying ‘mojo.’ Then boil to a syrup, add eggs and sugar, graham-cracker or saltine-crumb crust, whip more syrup into the meringue, and the crowd goes wild. I found several recipes online, including one in an article for Gardens and Guns.”

  “Is that a real magazine?” asked Coleman.

  “I thought it was a joke, too, but it’s quite real,” said Serge. “I can just see the early organization board meeting to come up with a name: ‘We need a concept that appeals to the broadest possible audience covering the entire spectrum, something no other magazine has ever dared! Let’s shoot it around the table . . .’ Second place was probably Kittens and Whiskey.”

  “I’d buy a subscription to that.”

  “This pie delivers more than a taste-bud party.” Serge yanked the napkin from the neck of his shirt. “Symbolically harkening back to the glorious time and place of the legend laid to rest here. It was out in these sweltering pioneer badlands of Central Florida near Lochloosa Lake, where she had the fruit trees growing off her veranda, and it’s a safe bet she baked sour orange pie. Today, a couple of local rustic restaurants in her area are among the few places left where you can still order the real deal.”

  “So that’s why we made that long detour on the way here.”

  Serge opened the door. “We have rubbing a-callin’.”

  They strolled across the field until they came upon a slab with no tombstone, just statues of a family of deer, mom, dad, and baby.

  “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.” Serge got down on his knees with an oversize sheet of paper. “Most known for her classic novel The Yearling, hence the animals on her grave.”

  “They look cute.”

  Rub, rub, rub. “This tour stop is special, and not just for Rawlings. It marks a turning point in our odyssey, where we’ve picked up the beginning of a long strand of Florida connective tissue that will bring our trip to a fever pitch of heritage, lore and motel antics.”

  “So where to now?”

  “It’s amazing how you can jump across the shoulders of Florida giants.” Serge stood with his finished page. “By no coincidence, our next stop involves one of Rawlings’s writing students . . .”

  Four Years Earlier

  They call it the Treasure Coast.

  Why not?

  Florida already had the Gold Coast and the Space Coast, and above that, the First Coast with St. Augustine and all its oldest-everything-in-the-United-States signs.

  That left three counties in the middle—Indian River, St. Lucie and Martin—orphaned with no coast of their own. It was hurting business.

  Then, in 1961, a group of treasure salvagers made international headlines by discovering wrecks from a silver-and-gold-laden Spanish fleet that disappeared in a hurricane in 1715. A total of eleven ships were lost after departing Havana and ultimately sinking off the Sebastian Inlet near Vero Beach. The local Press-Journal newspaper swung into action and coined the term Treasure Coast.

  Today, there is an annual pirate festival commemorating the 1715 wreck, and souvenir maps are sold everywhere with the locations of the ill-fated ships. Divers still search the well-known and charted sites, occasionally finding an artifact. And after hurricanes, children digging holes in the beach—as they are known to do—are said to unearth a doubloon or two. There are even guidebooks telling metal-detector enthusiasts where to look when visiting the Treasure Coast. And even as late as 2015, a salvage team would rework one of the wrecks thought to be depleted, and recovered another $4 million in gold.

  Of the eleven lost ships, three have never been found.

  One of the people still looking for them was a crusty salvage operator named Cale Munson, but everybody knew him as “Captain Crack Nasty.” You don’t want to know where the nickname came from. Cale tried to shake the moniker for years, then embraced it. He figured it was alway
s good for a seafaring man to have a gritty air of reputation, even if it resulted from personal grooming.

  On his business card, Crack wasn’t a true treasure salvager, but the regular kind. He operated one of those boat-towing services for when engines blew at sea or a vessel began taking on water. His fees were steep, like all the others in his field, because it was a sellers’ market. But the real money came when a boat went down, thanks to state and federal law. The government sought to provide high incentive to rescue unfortunates on the water, as well as mitigate ecological damage from a grounded ship. The statutes so heavily favored salvagers that it meant this: If a boat went down and was raised, the salvager now owned it and could sell it back to its original purchaser.

  Captain Crack mulled these codicils as he became increasingly bitter about towing the ultra-wealthy back to shore. He wanted to be wealthy, too, like the owners of the mini-yachts he aided, and especially like the now-famous treasure hunters who pulled up millions in precious metals and gems. He already had scuba equipment from his current gig, which could easily reach a sunken galleon. All he needed was a break. Only one problem: He was lazy. The successful treasure finders did extensive homework, even flying to Spain and spending hours in special libraries poring over parchment ship manifests from the eighteenth century. Crack just put on his scuba suit and dove to scour a site that someone else had already put in the elbow grease to find, like being the second person to discover the Titanic. After years of diving, he had exactly one cannonball to show for his efforts.

  On a sunny afternoon, Crack was motoring out to a fancy disabled boat that was sitting lower than usual in the waves. The emergency call over the radio said it wasn’t a fast leak, but would eventually turn fatal without intervention. From a distance, Crack could tell it was one of those boats where people didn’t fish but sipped champagne. He began thinking about salvage laws again. He pulled back on his throttle. Another call over the radio. What’s the holdup? Crack answered that everything was under control. He leisurely arrived at the boat to find a bunch of polo and tennis people standing in shin-deep water.

  “No problem,” said Captain Crack, climbing aboard with an assistant. “Have you out of here in no time.” He explained the procedure with the water-pumping machine back on his vessel and the hoses he was sticking down in their bilge. Plus the temporary patch to help the pump outpace the leak.

  A half hour later. “We have a problem.” He said the patch wasn’t holding and the leak was faster than his pump. He didn’t tell them that he was running his pump at one-third steam. “Everyone grab your valuables and get on my boat! We don’t have much time!”

  The theatrics worked. They were actually grateful as they watched their pleasure craft disappear beneath the water. And after bringing the thankful party back to shore, the good captain went back out, strung inflatable bladders under the sunken hull and raised the boat. This time he used a real patch and quickly pumped her dry. Not a bad day’s work for $200,000.

  From there it was the rhythm of routine. Distress calls came in, and Crack waved off all the other salvagers, saying he was closest. Closest but not fastest. He built in delays and excuses and deliberately incompetent water pumping, until once again: “Everyone on my boat! Hurry!”

  And so it went, scuttling vessel after vessel. Captain Crack suddenly had a lot of money. But to him, it wasn’t real money. That required treasure. He sat in his dockside office one afternoon, windows open to the cross-breeze, staring at the cannonball on his desk. He got an idea. He wouldn’t dive for Spanish wrecks that had already been salvaged. He would go after sites that were still being worked. Which was highly illegal because of the claims filed by the rightful discoverers. Which meant cover of night. Crack went down to a government auction and bought on the cheap a sleek black ultra-fast cigarette boat that had been seized from a cocaine cartel. He promptly put her back into criminal service.

  The Treasure Coast officially stops at the Palm Beach County line, where the Gold Coast begins with Tequesta and the surrounding communities. But hurricanes don’t take their orders from the chamber of commerce.

  A highly professional salvage crew began faithfully showing up at the same spot offshore for two weeks. The descriptions in their claim were deliberately downplayed: just exploring for scant artifacts. But rumors began sweeping the treasure-hunting crowd. Could they have found one of the three missing ships from the 1715 fleet?

  Captain Crack anchored a safe distance away and staked them out with a telescope. Divers were making too many trips up to the boat for simple historical excavation. Handing too many baskets of whatever up to a deckhand.

  After three days of surveillance, Crack headed out at night with two trusted assistants he had handpicked because of their prison records. They anchored over the site and dove.

  Jackpot.

  The only pressure was time, and it wasn’t how long it took to find the loot, but how fast they could fill their baskets. Gold, silver, rubies, sapphires. It all went up to the cigarette boat.

  After the sixth dive, the baskets came aboard. Suddenly: “Uh-oh.”

  A bright search beam shone in the distance. It came at them fast from the deck of a speeding vessel. Then a megaphone. “What the fuck are you doing on our site?”

  Soon they were side by side in the water. Because of the lawlessness of the seas, everyone out there has guns, and now they were all drawn in a standoff.

  Captain Crack tried to chill it out with lies. “We had no idea the site was claimed.”

  “Bullshit! Give us everything you have on your boat!”

  “We didn’t find anything yet,” said Crack.

  “Then we’re coming aboard!”

  “Then we’ll kill you,” said Crack. “And we’ll get away with it under federal piracy laws for illegal boarding at sea.”

  The professional crew fumed. They were hardened, but not tough enough to get in a gun battle over a fraction of their find. Their leader finally waved his rifle toward shore. “Get out of here and never come back! Or next time we will shoot!”

  Chapter 10

  Central Florida

  The back road ran through God’s country.

  Town after small town. Little Florida places with names like Weirsdale, Citra, Lochloosa, Waldo, Starke and several more that were so tiny they didn’t appear on maps. Volunteer fire departments, hardware stores, barbershops, old movie theaters on Main Street playing only one film, always rated G. Signs at the city limits indicated the Kiwanis and Rotary Club were still at it. Other signs were handmade by Girl Scouts for a spaghetti dinner that Friday. There were antiques stores and ice cream stands, billboards for salvation and speed traps, water towers of all shapes, some celebrating high school championships.

  And the churches.

  Bright white wooden churches, red-brick churches, and churches in converted farm buildings. Some houses of worship sat crowded together in competition; others alone in cattle pastures.

  There were short steeples, tall steeples, and open-sided steeples with big bells. Lutheran, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, and AME Zion. Baptist, Anabaptist, and Primitive Baptist. Some had lighted signs with attempts at humor: Eternity: Smoking or Nonsmoking? Choose the Bread of Life or You Are Toast. Some unintentionally so: Accepting Applications for Missionary Position.

  The back road was actually several roads, stitched together on an old gas station map the night before by Serge. It would be a long drive to the next tour stop, and he shuddered at the thought of spending all that time on an interstate.

  The ’69 Plymouth entered Ocklawaha. Soon, a two-story country home with a sweeping front porch came into view. Serge’s camera was out the window again. Click, click, click.

  “It’s just an old house,” said Coleman.

  “And one so historically important that when the land was sold from under it, they barged the whole thing across Lake Weir to this location.”

  “So what’s its deal?”

  “Back during the Depression, the i
nfamous Ma Barker Gang terrorized the nation with a spree of bank robberies and kidnappings. In 1935, the FBI finally traced the outfit to Florida and this house, where Ma Barker—also known as Machine Gun Kate—was hiding out under an assumed name with several associates. A gun battle ensued, and the house was sprayed with more than four thousand bullets. Apparently the holes have been patched.”

  “That’s a stone trip,” said Coleman.

  “It was a different era,” said Serge. “They actually laid out the bullet-riddled bodies and sold the photos as postcards to mail back to loved ones: ‘Having a great time in Florida, unlike these assholes.’”

  Serge stowed the camera and sped north. They passed citrus stands and boiled-peanut stands and someone in overalls walking along the side of the road with a sewing machine in a wheelbarrow. They continued on over hill and dale. One of the countless churches was coming up. Threshing machines worked the field next door. It was a Sunday morning, and the last service had long since let out.

  As Serge passed by, he noticed three people on the front steps. A pastor was comforting a distraught couple. The woman cried inconsolably.

  “Uh-oh,” said Serge. “That’s my bat signal.”

  He made a fishtailing U-turn in the middle of the lonely road and sped back. He ran up to the steps in no time. “Pardon me, but I couldn’t help but notice you’re upset.”

  The pastor had an arm around the woman’s shoulders. He looked up. “It’ll be fine.”

  “No, it won’t!” sobbed the woman.

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?” said Serge.

  “Excuse me,” said the preacher. “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” said Serge.