Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  “You my friend now, Speck?” Lucius drank his glass off to the bottom and came up with a gasp and a warm glow in the face. The moonshine was colorless, so purely raw that it numbed his mouth and sinuses and made his eyes water.

  The big man’s self-stoked rage was building.

  “Damn fed might belly right up to that bar, pertend to be your friend, then turn around and stop a man from supportin his own family!” Crockett Junior bawled. “And you out there in that dark swamp night after night, way back in some godforsook damn place you can’t even pole to in a boat, half bled to death by no-see-ums and miskeeters, worn out, wet, and froze with cold, and damn if one them stupid shits don’t have you spotted! Maybe just waitin to step out of a bush where you left your truck back at the landin!”

  Here Crockett Junior paused in tragic wonderment. Softly he said, “Speakin fair now, what’s a man to do if that feller tries to haul him off to jail?” He gazed about him, shaking his head over such injustice. “Now I ain’t sayin he’s a real bad feller. Might could be a likable young feller just tryin to get by the same as me. Might got him a lovin little wife waitin on him at home. Couple real nice little fellers, or maybe just the sweetest baby girl—same as what I got!” Crockett Junior looked around him wide-eyed, making sure his listeners understood how remarkable it was that gator hunter and game warden might both have wives and kiddies, and also the depth of his concern for the warden’s family. “But!” He looked around some more, and the soft voice grew more and more confiding. “But if that ol’ boy tries to take away my gators? I got my duty to my family, ain’t that right? Got to take care of my sweet baby girl at home, ain’t that only nacherl?”

  “We heard this same ol’ shit in here a thousand times,” Speck said, disgusted.

  “You folks recall that plume bird warden that Bloody Watson killed down around Flamingo?” Junior nodded with the drinkers. “Now I ain’t sayin what ol’ Bloody done was right. All I’m sayin is—and it would be real pathetical, break my damn heart—all I’m sayin, if any such a feller tries to keep me from my livin?” Here he fixed his gaze on Lucius once again, raising his good arm to point southward toward some point of destiny in a far slough. “Well, you folks know that Crockett Junior Daniels would be heart-broke, all tore up, but that feller ain’t left me no damn choice.” He dropped his voice to a hoarse hard whisper. “I reckon I’d just have to leave that sumbitch out there!”

  The clientele turned its slack gaze upon the stranger. “Tragical, ain’t it?” Speck Daniels snickered. “Leave that sumbitch out there. That’s about the size of it. Invaders got to watch their step in this neck of the woods and that’s a fact.

  “Course Junior there, he’s crazier’n hell, and them other morons he keeps with him might be worse. Mud Braman been a drunk since the day his balls dropped, don’t know where his ass is at from one minute to the next, and that other one with all the personality”—he tossed his chin toward Dummy—“he might bust loose any minute, shoot this place to pieces, and you’d never know why in the hell he done that, and him neither.”

  Waiting for Daniels to make his point, Lucius said nothing.

  “Leave him out there! Yessir!” Speck Daniels sighed. “Some days I think ol’ Junior might be better off if I was to leave him out there. Run his dumb ass into the swamp back here and put a bullet in his head for his own damn good, ’fore he gets us in trouble shooting some stranger who just wandered in here off that road.”

  “You threatening me, Speck?”

  For the first time, the poacher turned and contemplated Lucius Watson, sucking his teeth with distaste. “What you huntin for out this way, Colonel? Ain’t me, I hope.”

  Lucius shook his head. “I never knew you lived here.”

  “Well, I don’t. When I ain’t livin on my boat, I got me a huntin camp back in the Cypress, big army stove and a regular commode, nice fat Guatemala girl that come by mail order. But these days,” he whispered—and he cocked his head the better to enjoy Lucius’s reaction—“I’m caretakin in your daddy’s house, down Chatham River.”

  A couple of months earlier, Daniels explained, he had been contacted by a Miami attorney who was seeking to reinstate E. J. Watson’s land claim on Chatham Bend; the attorney wanted somebody camped on the Bend to keep an eye on the place until the claim was settled. “Man heard that Crockett Senior Daniels knew the Watson place real good and might be just the feller he was lookin for.” He gave Lucius a sly glance.

  The attorney was trying to reach the Watson heirs. “He was complainin how he couldn’t catch up with the Watson boys. I told him, ‘Well, the oldest run off from a killin at the turn of the century and the next one is a upright citizen around Fort Myers, don’t want nothin to do with swamps and such. Course Looshush might be interested,’ I says, ‘but you might have trouble findin Looshush cause he makes hisself scarce and always did.’ ”

  Affecting indifference, Lucius shrugged. “So who is he? What’s his name?”

  Mr. Watson Dyer, Speck continued, had big connections in this state; he was a crony of politicians and a fixer. “Wants a nice ronday-voo for all them fat boys, wouldn’t surprise me—booze ’n girlie club, y’know. I been thinkin I might join up to be a member.” But there was no mirth in Daniels’s wink, he was watching Lucius closely, and Lucius maintained his flat expression, not wishing to show his astonishment—Watt Dyer!—nor how much he resented the idea of Crockett Daniels infesting Chatham Bend. After Bill House left, Papa’s remote house on its wild river had been looted and hard used by squatters, hunters, moonshiners, and smugglers, and Daniels was all of these and more—the Bend just suited him. From offshore, no stranger to that empty coast could find the channel in the broken mangrove estuary where Chatham River worked its way through to the Gulf—one reason why Papa chose that river in the first place—and even boatmen with a chart might ream out their boat bottom on the oyster bars. But these days, with the new canals draining the Glades headwaters for more sugarcane plantations, the rivers to the south ran shallow, with snags and shifting sandbars, and smugglers such as Daniels and his gang had to rig chains to the few channel markers and drag them out.

  “Looshus.” Speck considered him a moment. “Course if this big Glades park goes through, they’ll likely burn your daddy’s house down to the ground. Raggedy ol’ place three-four miles back up a mangrove river, windows busted and doors all choked by thorn and vines? Not to mention bats and snakes, wasp nests and spiders and raccoon shit—smell like a bat cave in there. That house ain’t had a nail or a lick of paint in years. Them damn Chok people that was in there, they just let her go. Screen porch is rickety, might put your foot through, and the jungle is invadin into the ground floor. Hurricanes has stripped off shingles, took the dock and the outbuildins, too.”

  “Why do you care? It’s not your place.”

  “Not my place?” Speck cocked a bloodshot eye. “You sayin the Bend don’t belong to us home people? And the whole Glades backcountry along with it?” Hearing Speck’s voice rise in a spurt of anger, Junior Daniels turned their way. “Why, Godamighty, they’s been Danielses usin this backcountry for half a hundred years! I hunted here all my damn life! You tellin me them fuckin feds and their fuckin park has got more rights than I do?”

  But Lucius noticed that much of his outrage was feigned and the rest inflated. In fact, Speck laughed, pleased by his own performance. “Know the truth? Them squatters has stole everything that weren’t nailed down and quite a lot that was but they never done your daddy’s place real harm. Storms tore the outside, which is all them greenhorns look at, but inside she’s as solid as she ever was, cause your daddy used bald cypress and hard pine. That man liked ever’thing done right. His house might look gray and peaked as a corpse but she could stand up there on her mound for another century.”

  “Mind telling me what you’re up to on the Bend? When you’re not caretaking, I mean?”

  Daniels lit a cigarette and squinted through the smoke. “That ain’t your business.�
� Reaching to refill Lucius’s glass, he winked to show he was only kidding, which he wasn’t.

  Lucius sniffed at the white lightning. “You make this stuff down there?”

  Daniels measured him. “You sure ain’t obliged to drink it, Looshus. You ain’t obliged to drink with me at all.” Asked if he owned Gator Hook and if this bar was an outlet for his shine, Speck took a hard swallow and banged his glass down. “Still askin stupid questions, I see. You ain’t changed much, bud, and I ain’t neither, as you are goin to find out if you keep tryin me.” In a gravelly voice, he growled, “I asked you extra polite just now what you was up to out this way. All these folks in here want to know that. So we ain’t feelin so polite no more about not gettin no answer.”

  Lucius pushed his glass away, trying to focus. He was sick of baiting Daniels, sick of being baited. “I’m not a fed. I’m looking for a man named Collins.”

  “No you ain’t. You’re a damn liar.” Speck announced this to the room. “Here I ain’t seen you in dog’s years and all of a sudden you show up way to hell and gone out in this swamp. Think I’m a idjit? Think I don’t know why?” When Speck raised his voice, Junior pushed himself clear of the wall and started across the room, and the one called Dummy followed. “All these years you been snoopin and skulkin, makin up your damfool list! You know how close you come to gettin shot?”

  Lucius tried to keep his voice calm. “You the one who winged that bullet past my ear, down Lost Man’s River?”

  In the quiet the customers awaited them. Crockett Daniels told the room, “Mr. Gene Roberts at Flamingo thought the world of E. J. Watson, said he was as nice a man as ever lynched a nigger. So in later years, when Watson’s boy here was layin low down there, Mr. Gene told them Flamingo fellers not to run him off or sink his boat but let him work that coast. Told ’em he’d fished with E. J.’s boy and drank his whiskey with him, cause Looshus here liked his whiskey and a lot of it, same way his daddy done. Gene would say how E. J.’s boy had the sweetest nature he ever come across and all like that”—Speck turned to him—“not knowin that his sweetness weren’t but weakness.”

  “Course it’s possible,” Speck said, holding his eye, “that Looshus here would do you hurt if you pushed him hard enough. But I believe this feller is weak-hearted. He just wants to live along, get on with ever’body, ain’t that right, Looshus?” He paused again, then added meanly, “Makin a list of them ones that killed his daddy but afraid to use it.”

  Speck cocked his head, looking curiously at Lucius as if to see how far he’d have to go to make him mad. “I always heard you was a alky-holic,” he said softly. “Any truth to that?”

  Lucius turned away from him. “The man I’m looking for calls himself Collins,” he told the onlookers. “Has a nickname—Chicken.”

  “Chicken Collins?” a woman called. “He ain’t but four damn feet from where your elbow’s at. He’s comin off his drunk under the bar.”

  Annoyed, Speck followed Lucius around behind the bar. The man lay on a soft bed of swept-up cigarette butts, wrapped in a dirty olive blanket black-poxed with burn holes. Daniels toed the body with a hard-creased boot, eliciting an ugly hacking cough. “When this feller first washed up here, Colonel, we made him janitor, paid him off in trade. All he could put away and then some and he’s still hard at it. Come to likker, the man don’t never quit! Don’t know the meanin of the word.” Speck toed the body harder. “Come on, Chicken. Say how-do to your visitor cause he’s just leavin.”

  Greasy tufts emerged from the olive blanket, then reddened eyes in a soiled, unshaven face. This wasn’t Cox. The ears were wrong and the mule hoof scar was missing.

  From beneath the blanket rose a stale waft of dead cigarettes, spilled booze, old urine. At the sight of Lucius, the eyes started into focus. A scrawny claw crept forth to grasp the tin cup of mixed spirits from abandoned drinks which Dummy ladled for him out of a tin tub; he knocked the cup back with one great cough and shudder. Then the head withdrew. “Go home,” he muttered from beneath the blanket.

  Lucius went down on one knee and shook his shoulder gently. “Mr. Collins? It’s Lucius Watson. You sent for me.”

  From beneath the blanket came more coughing. “Hell, no. Get on home, boy.”

  “Come with me, then. We have to talk.”

  With his big hand jammed under his armpit, Crockett Junior hoisted Lucius to his feet. “That man’s sick!” Lucius protested. “I’ll take him with me!” But Junior impelled him toward the screen door where Braman, entering, got in the way. Placing his palm against Mud’s face with fingers on both sides of his nose, Dummy shoved hard with one thrust like a punch, sending the man out through the loose screen door and down the outside stair. A scaring whump rose from the bottom of the steps. Stepping outside onto the landing, looking down, Speck shook his head. “That fool has flew down them damn steps so many times you’d think he’d get the hang of it but he just don’t.”

  On hands and knees, panting with shock, Mud wiped the blood from his gashed brow with the back of a grimy hand. “See how they done?” he complained to Lucius, who had jumped down the stair to help him. Braman waved him off, crawling away through the weeds to the pink auto and dragging himself into the backseat. He tried to shut the door behind him but the rusted hinges and rank weeds kept it from closing. “Any man,” Mud hollered from within, “thinks Mud R. Braman gone to take any more shit off them dirty skunks better think again!”

  Lucius walked toward his old Ford as Speck called from the landing. “Looshus Watson! Ain’t nowhere near the man his daddy was.”

  Speck stood rocking on his heels, hands in hip pockets, grinning. “Don’t aim to tell us how that ol’ list of yours is comin?” Getting no answer, he rasped angrily, “What I hear, Nigger Short ain’t on your list, and he ain’t never died off that I heard about. Or don’t a nigger count, the way you look at it?”

  Lucius turned his old car around and cranked the window down so he could hear better. Over the roof peak, a turkey vulture circled, the red skin of its naked head like a blood spot on the blue.

  Speck said in a low voice, “You and me ain’t the same breed, I am proud to say. If I believed a man helped kill my daddy, I sure wouldn’t go to drinkin with that feller like you done this mornin and I sure wouldn’t need no damn ol’ list to tell me what to do about it, neither. That man would of come up missin a long time ago.”

  “Crockett Daniels.” Lucius pronounced the name slowly, as if to lock it in his memory. “I do believe that is the last name on the list.”

  Wobbling the clutch into gear, he exulted at the flicker in Speck’s grin, but as he drew away, his heart was pounding. A man as wary as Crockett Daniels would hear those words as a threat, and a threatened man, as Papa used to say, was not a man to turn your back on in the backcountry.

  WATT DYER

  One day at the Marco store where he picked up his mail, Lucius received a formal letter from Attorney Watson Dyer, in Miami. Attorney Dyer urged the family to refile the late Mr. Watson’s claim on Chatham Bend before the U.S. government condemned the property, which lay within the boundaries of the proposed Everglades park. In closing, he offered his own services and a phone number. Oddly, the letter made no mention of the fact that he was Nell’s brother, or that Lucius might remember him from years ago.

  Lucius went straight to the pay telephone. When Dyer answered, they barely exchanged greetings, far less spoke of Nell, before Watt got busy explaining that should the new park go through, any property under pending claim would revert to the federal government. Furthermore—pursuant to federal policy that a new park be returned to its natural condition as a wilderness—the last signs of man’s presence would be eradicated, not only the ramshackle habitations but docks, rain cisterns, crops, and trees. Even the well-built Watson house would not be spared unless it was established that a claim had been pending in advance of the first park proposals, in which case it might be approved as an in-holding within the park for which life tenure, at least, m
ight be negotiated—

  “What do they mean by ‘natural condition’?” Lucius inquired. “Before Indian settlement or after? Because if they want Chatham Bend the way it was, they will have to shovel the whole forty acres into the river. It’s nothing but shell mound, don’t they realize that? One huge Indian midden. To eradicate all the shell mounds and Calusa canals in the western Everglades would cost millions, and anyway, it couldn’t be done without gouging out far more man-made scars than they were eliminating.”

  Like an unseen presence in the dark, the lawyer’s silence commanded him to be still. Then Dyer said, “Indians don’t count.” His tone was less cynical than flat, indifferent. He went on to say that his specialty was real estate law and large-scale land development and that in this field, his extensive political contacts would prove useful. Would the family authorize him to pursue this matter?

  Lucius suggested that the Watson family might waive its claim if the new park would restore the house and take good care of it—perhaps make it a historic monument to pioneer days? Dyer sighed. An offer of waiver before the claim had been reinstated could only undermine its legal standing.

  “I’m afraid I can’t afford a lawyer—”

  “Pro bono. Sentimental reasons, you might say.” The lawyer forced a snort of mirthless laughter. He finally reminded Lucius that Fred Dyer was caretaker at Chatham Bend just after the turn of the century and that he himself had visited in summers as a schoolboy. “You don’t recall Wattie Dyer?” Another disconcerting snort. Lucius tried to picture the boy Wattie, wondering what the man at the far end of this phone line might look like. He hesitated. His sister had mentioned that Nell and her brother had never been in touch, not even after their mother died during the War. Small wonder, he thought, recalling now how Watt had bullied her as a little girl. Parting Nell’s hair to crack his hard-boiled egg upon her pate then exhaling his hated egg breath into her squinched face was a favorite diversion. Occasionally, Lucius had felt obliged to intervene. For this the boy had hated him as much as he loathed everyone else. From an early age, Watt Dyer had made himself disliked by everybody on the Bend. He was especially unlucky, Lucius reflected, because he had always known this without really knowing what he knew.