An old man stood in the back of the skiff, his hand on the outboard throttle, a “Sanibel Biological Supply” fishing cap on his head. Yellow rubber waders with suspenders. The man had risen at precisely four-thirty, as he did every morning, and stepped onto the porch of his stilt house, eye level with the coconuts in the trees, barely visible in the blackness. Unseen water lapped the rock revetment; palms rustled. He grabbed the balcony railing and concentrated on being thankful. Then he went downstairs and turned on the Weather Channel. There was a rim of light on the horizon when he headed down the dock with a mug of Sanka and an insulated sack of tuna sandwiches. He mixed gasoline and oil in the two-stroke fifty-to-one ratio and jerked a bucket of frozen mullet from a dockside freezer. He pulled the cover off the outboard, wiping spots with a rag, spraying points with silicone, replacing the cover. The davits clicked as he cranked the skiff down into the water. Soon he was planing up across the bay, snaking between the islands, until he was in the thick of the floating Styrofoam. The man throttled down.
He idled the boat and reached for one of the balls with a long-handled gaff, grabbing it and pulling up the crab trap tied underneath with rope. He pushed the outboard throttle stick to the side, turning the propeller starboard and putting the skiff in a perpetual clockwise circle as he shook blue crabs out of the trap and into a seventy-gallon cooler. Then he reached in a gray bucket for a dead fish and rammed it into the empty trap’s wire-mesh bait hole and threw it all back over the side, the Styrofoam ball bobbing in the wake a few times as the trap settled back to the bottom. The man motored up for the next float and repeated the process, again and again, float after float — the whole time drinking coffee, eating sandwiches, juggling gaff, bait, traps, throttle. Back-country ballet. But he only stopped at the green floats; the orange and pink belonged to the other guys, and you didn’t mess with them unless you wanted to get shot. Back-country justice. The man tossed his last trap in the water and headed home. He knew he was getting close when he saw the toilet seats.
On the north side on Plantation Key, the approach from the bay was extra shallow and rocky, and a channel had been cut long ago. The pass was known as Toilet Seat Cut or Little Stinker. It was originally designated with regular nautical markers, but the locals had since hung toilet seats on all of them. They were painted in vibrant colors, with names and dates and little drawings of people and pets. The old man looked off to the side. Spoonbills chiseled at tide-exposed oysters; tarpon fins slit the surface. An ibis stood frozen in an inch of water among the mangrove roots, then snapped its neck forward, spearing a fish with its beak. A pink toilet seat went by.
The sun finally rose as the old man cranked the skiff back up the davits and flushed fresh water through the lower unit with rabbit ears. He hoisted the cooler of crabs into the back of a pickup and headed for market.
The man had come into a modest amount of money in the sixties and bought a house and several commercially zoned parcels in the Florida Keys. Now their worth was in ransom range. The rental checks from the gas stations and seashell shops were steady, and the man no longer had need for the crab money. That wasn’t work; it was religion.
He loved the stilt house. Two stories, tin roof, screened-in wraparound balcony. Inside, you couldn’t see the walls for all the built-in bookshelves. You knew he was a book guy by the way the shelves were filled, not just packed rows of vertical spines, but more books crammed in on top. It might have been a space problem except the man only collected one other thing: beer signs. The shark Bud Lite sign, the palm tree Corona, the flamingo drinking Miller. At night, the neon came on, and so did the strands of white Christmas lights tracing the porch’s eaves. People driving by on US 1 often mistook it for a tavern and pulled over. “Hello? Anyone here?” — climbing the stairs and knocking on the screen door — “Is the bar open?”
The old man would trudge across the porch and reach for the handle. “It is now.”
That’s how he started his third collection. He collected friends, many of whom he met when they were on vacation and initially thought his place was a pub. They returned year after year. He kept a refrigerator on the porch, stocked with beer. There was a basket of colored markers on top, and he told his visitors to “sign the guest book,” and the refrigerator was now covered with names and hometowns from across the USA and parts of Europe.
He was a big hit with the neighbors, too, something of a local celebrity. But that had taken a little more time. The man may have been old, but he wasn’t weak or withered. In fact, he was scary. A burly, tight fist of a man, he kept fit swimming in the bay and pulling crab traps. His face was hard and leathery, and the shaved skull made him look like Mr. Clean. The neighbors were afraid of him at first; they aggressively avoided his property and gave him wide berth in town. There was talk he used to be a professional wrestler or a Green Beret or a bagman for the mob. But then they saw all the people dropping in from the highway, laughing on the porch late into the starry night. The bravest neighbor tiptoed up to the porch during one of the happy hours and knocked timidly.
“Frank! Come on in!” said the old man. Expansive smile and expansive, muscular arm that went around the neighbor’s shoulders and jerked him off the steps into the party.
“You know my name?”
“Sure, Frank. You’re my neighbor. I was wondering when you were going to drop by. Beginning to think you were afraid of me or something…. Hey, everybody! This is Frank!”
“Hi, Frank!”
“Frank, you want a beer? There’s the fridge. Help yourself. And write something if you want…”
Another knock at the door.
“Gotta get that. Make yourself at home…”
The old man became an institution. So did his parties, which sometimes lasted days, people sleeping or passing out all over the house, prompting the man to install a bunch of hammocks. Half the time strangers were cooking breakfast in his kitchen when he got back from crabbing.
“I grabbed some of your eggs. Hope you don’t mind,” said a young woman in a long University of Miami T-shirt and nothing else, stirring a frying pan. “Want some?”
“Sorry, can’t stay. But have at it.”
During his gatherings, the man was content to sit on a stool in the corner of the porch, smiling, not saying anything, letting others have the spotlight. It only grew the legend. When a shrimpy guy is humble and quiet, well, that’s just pitiful, but when it’s a genuine tough guy, people can’t resist building the story. The neighbors took to him like a lovable circus bear. That he was. Except when someone was being bullied; then he became a grizzly.
The old man liked the Caribbean Club at Mile Marker 104, where signs still made a big deal about a snippet of Key Largo putatively being filmed there. The usual crowd had gathered around the man’s stool one Friday night when they heard a woman’s protests from the pool tables.
“Ow! You’re hurting me!”
A tall young man in a workout jersey had her by the arm. “We’re leaving.”
“Let me go!”
Nobody intervened as he dragged her out the door.
“Excuse me,” said the old man, setting down his draft and getting off his stool. “I’ll just be a minute.”
Sixty seconds later, the woman ran back into the bar, followed by the old man, who casually returned to his stool and picked up his beer. “Where were we?…” Then they heard the ambulance siren.