Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  “Your standard license only covered the looting and desecration.” Lucius spun toward him on his stool. “Look. This isn’t funny.”

  Rob swiveled instantly to meet him. “Lad Exhumes Dad. You don’t think that’s funny?”

  “I don’t think it’s true. You’d have to be crazy.”

  “I guess I’m crazy, then,” Rob said.

  The brothers measured each other.

  “You really hated him that much?”

  “Who hated first? It wasn’t Sonborn.”

  “He didn’t hate you at the end. In fact, he mentioned your nerve and skill, sailing his boat to Key West. Alone. At night. He said, ‘That boy is a real seaman, I’ll say that for him.’ ” Lucius watched Rob’s face. “Papa made terrible mistakes, I know, but he wanted to be a decent father.”

  “He didn’t make it.” Rob threw his whiskey back and signaled rudely for another. The bartender refused him. “You was notified,” he growled, “before this other party come.” Told by Lucius that the other party would take responsibility, the man shrugged. “Just watch your mouth,” he advised Rob, who merely drummed his fingers on the bar, awaiting his new drink. “The Watson brothers,” he said again, sardonic. “Anything else you need to know?”

  “Tell me where you’ve been.”

  “Mostly at your place.” He glanced at Lucius, looked away again. “Then here in town. Nell Summerlin’s.”

  “In your life, I mean. After you left Lost Man’s. 1901.”

  “I know what year it was.” Rob recounted how he’d left Key West on a freighter and wandered the earth as a merchant seaman for nine years before taking work ashore. “Learned to drive, got good at it, got special jobs.” On a night job as a trucker hauling bootleg liquor during Prohibition, he got caught up in a shooting at a warehouse in which a guard was killed. Most of his life since, he said, had been spent in prison.

  Lucius had suspected this—the dead hair, pallor, the quick eyes and sideways whispered speech. But seeing his sympathetic wince as just more skepticism, Rob instantly broke off his account. “You wanted my story, bud,” he muttered. “That’s what you got. Take it or leave it or shove it up your ass.”

  Those wild sharp eyes had suddenly gone shiny. On impulse, Lucius took him by the shoulders and, as Rob stiffened, gave him a quick brotherly hug. Rob’s heart was beating in his scrawny chest like the heart of a stunned bird felled by its own reflection in the window. Lucius took the stool beside him, saying brusquely, “All right. And Gator Hook?”

  “Heard about it from a feller in the pen, friend of Crockett Daniels. Made my way out there after I missed you at Lost Man’s River. Very good place to lie low if you don’t mind low company.”

  “So you’re a fugitive.”

  “R. B. Watson is the fugitive. I’m R. B. Collins, remember?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this in the first place?”

  “Because if you knew and you failed to turn me in, you’d be aiding and abetting a known criminal. You’d wind up in prison. Anything else?”

  “The Tuckers. Did he do it? Just tell me yes or no.”

  Rob pressed his cold glass to the deep furrows parting his brows. “No yes-or-no,” he said after a while.” It’s complicated. You’d better read what I wrote.”

  “All right. Where is it?”

  “It’s up in my room,” Rob said, sullen again. He was very drunk.

  “Who’s paying for your room here? Nell?” That was the bourbon talking. His brother ignored him.

  THE CARVER

  Lucius had arranged with Watson Dyer to meet for supper at the Gasparilla on Dyer’s way through town. They awaited the attorney in the lobby. When he failed to appear, they left word at the desk and went into the restaurant without him.

  The Buccaneer Grill had a hearty buffet topped off by a blood-swollen roast beef. The meat’s custodian, in chef ’s apron and high hat, was a big roly-poly black man with a swift red knife and a line of chatter that had the whole room smiling.

  “Oh yeah! Yes suh! Tha’s it! Tha’s right! How you folks this evenin? Y’all havin a good visit to Fo’t Myers? Doin okay? Tha’s jus’ fine, my frien’! Bes’ have some o’ this fine roast! Oh yeah! Yes suh! Tha’s it! Tha’s right! Red for the gennleman, pink for the lady? Jus’ a li’l bit more, now, jes’ a l’il bit—all right? Aw right!”

  “Don’t know when to quit,” Rob said too loudly. Reaching for his whiskey, he almost tipped her tray before the waitress could set down his glass. “Man’s playing these old tourists like a school of catfish,” he said unpleasantly, “snuffling through the mud after a bait.”

  He was still bitching when Attorney Dyer came up from behind, yanked out a chair, and settled with a heavy grunt, without a greeting. He considered their liquor glasses before noting coldly that they had not waited for him. “You boys in a big rush or what?” His smile looked rigid. “I thought I was the busy feller around here.” That delicate shiver of the skin around the corners of the mouth, as if the inner man was trembling with hidden rage, reminded Lucius once again of Papa. Under the scrutiny of those bald eyes, there seemed no doubt that Dyer was a Watson, yet it seemed unnatural to think of him as such since they had nothing else in common, brotherly affection least of all.

  Dyer was wearing a white windbreaker with “U.S.A.” emblazoned over the heart. “United Sugar Association jacket,” he said, touching the red letters encircled by blue stars. “Nice way to show our industry’s appreciation of Old Glory and this great land of opportunity.”

  Considering how much federal land Big Sugar is grabbing for next to nothing, Lucius thought, I would certainly hope so. But he stifled his protest, knowing it would be wasted.

  The year before, climbing the high dike on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee, Lucius had stared in disbelief at the endless vivid greens stretching away to southward and the high stacks of the U.S.A. factory that violated the clear sky of the waterland and the wall of oily smoke downwind that shrouded the horizon like a dark front of oncoming bad weather. The tons of chemicals dumped into the pristine waterlands, the wretched slave camps for the migrant workers—the price of progress, Papa would have called it, celebrating any and all such evidence of the Twentieth Century cavalcade.

  Rummaging among his papers, Dyer scarcely noticed his companions. “Lucius H. Watson residing at Chatham Bend shows up on the 1910 census, the last living Watson to reside on the property—that might help obtain life tenure on the place.” The attorney cleared his throat, anticipating resistance. “Naples,” he said. For tomorrow night’s meeting of the Naples Historical Society, Lucius would be listed on the program as L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.

  Lucius shook his head, annoyed. “Too many people know me on this coast, I told you that.” He would have to notify the audience right from the start—

  “The speaker advertised—the speaker whose lecture fee is being paid by U.S.A.—is Professor Collins. The newspaper will cover a lecture by Professor Collins, ‘A New Look at the Edgar Watson Story.’ ” Dyer was straining to be heard over the rollick of the meat carver, his annoyance rising with his voice. “So why do you insist—” Nostrils flared, he yanked his chair around. “What’s that godawful racket? Is that nigger poking fun at white folks?”

  “Poking fun!” Rob parried and poked his butter knife toward the neighboring table. “Poke, poke!” He made a thrusting gesture, winking dirtily at the diners. “Poke, poke!” But when they turned their backs on him, his grin faded, replaced by a dangerous cast of eye. He lurched to his feet and reeled away in the direction of the buffet, addressing the near tables as he passed, though not loudly enough to override the black man’s boisterous patter. “You men aim to let that nigra get away with poking fun at these white ladies and still call yourselves men? No sir! Poking fun at customers that has paid down our good money to stuff our gullets? No sir!”

  Rob was well ahead by the time his brother rose and hurried to overtake him. “I surely do appreciate this kind of old-time darkie,
full to the brim with Southren hospitality!” Rob sang out in cracker twang, as an old lady ahead of him turned to offer a sweet smile—“Oh that’s so true!”—and Rob smiled beamishly. “Yes, ma’am. God’s truth!” He dropped his voice to a stage whisper, confiding in her from behind his hand, “Long as he knows his place.” When the woman hushed him, glancing fearfully to see if the carver might have overheard, Rob leaned toward her, cupping his ear. “Beg pardon, ma’am? Uppity nigger, you said?” The woman recoiled from him in shock. “He’s drunk!” she told her husband, whose sun-scabbed pate only hunkered lower in the line.

  Rob called, “I just purely love to see all us good folks fixin to set right down to a big ol’ plate of fatty beef that’ll half kill us, with a heapin helpin of our Christian fellowshippin on the side! We’ll realize maybe for the first time in our whole lives how much we like these durned ol’ neg-ros that’s waitin on us hand and foot, and what a grand country we have here in the good ol’ U.S. and A where coloreds can talk to white folks just so nice and friendly you’d almost think they was human beins same as us!”

  Before the poor woman could chastise him, Rob turned on her with a beatific smile. “Don’t y’all love pickaninnies, honey? So much cuter than our pasty white ones, ain’t that right?” The woman moaned, utterly routed.

  The big black man had fallen quiet. Slowly he turned in Rob’s direction, poised knife dripping blood, not because, as Lucius feared, he was outraged by this drunken pest but because he had intuited the anarchic spirit behind this man’s parody of that safe racism considered suitable for family gatherings and other comfortable occasions in the American home.

  The candidates for fine roast beef, not realizing what Lucius was up to, had resisted his attempt to advance himself wrongfully in the line. but when they realized that this line-jumper was trying to overtake the outrageous disturber of the peace, they made way for him gratefully. “Regardless of race, color, or creed!” Rob was crying senselessly as Lucius grasped his arm.

  “Race, color, nor creed!” the carver hooted. “You tell ’em, man!”

  Now Watson Dyer was barging past, and the carver, sensing danger, withdrew behind his jolly patter. “Aw right, suh! How you feelin this fine evenin? You fixin to try our beautiful roas’ beef?” And Dyer snapped in a hard voice, “Never mind the minstrel show. Just carve.” In the sudden silence in the room, people stopped eating and turned toward them in alarm.

  “Mins’rel show?” The carver’s smile congealed and his eyes tightened. “Well, now! Y’all had you a nice day, suh? Look like you needin a big cut of this fine beef.”

  “Shut up and carve,” said Dyer with terrific anger, solid and efficient anger, smooth as polished stone.

  The carver’s knife was poised over the roast. He stood transfixed like a sculpture called The Carver. Phalanxes of pale faces stared and waitresses clustered in pink-and-white bouquets by the buffet.

  The black man squinted at the point of his raised knife. “Hold on, nigguh! You ain’ heard that gen’leman tell you, ‘Cut that mins’rel shit, jus’ carve the roast’?” He honed his knife, snick-snick, snick-snick, appraising the patriotic windbreaker, the cerulean hard eyes. Snick-snick, snick-snick.

  “Carve, boy,” Dyer growled in his inexplicable fury. “You’re not paid to play the fool for these old farts.”

  “Oh my goodness!” An old fart dropped a radish as her spouse harrumphed in scared protest and the line, milling in panic, clutched its plates. “For Christ’s sake, Dyer!” Lucius, who was right behind him, felt hated by his fellow farts for being associated with a cruel villain out to ruin their heartwarming encounter with this delightful negro personality.

  “Playin the fool, tha’s right. Tha’s what you doin, black boy. You ain’t heard the man?” The carver’s voice was low and hard as grated pebbles. “Tha’s all you doin, Mistuh Black Man. Playin the fool.”

  “Carve,” Dyer panted, out of breath in the ecstasy of his all-purifying anger.

  Summoning him closer with a big mad grin, the carver leaned forward to whisper in his ear as if to share a secret. But the real secret was the knife, which he slid across the carving board on the flat of its handle, just far enough to pink the other’s belly through his shirt. And his pebbly voice grated, “Back off, mothafuck. Get outta my face.” When Dyer sprang back, jarring a table, the carver straightened up again, quaking with mirth, as if this customer had told him some hilarious story. “Yassuh, that sho’ is right!” Using his blade, he was dumping so many slices on Dyer’s plate that the attorney had to lift it high to fend off more bloody meat. “Had enough, my frien’? Doan go to spillin good blood gravy on yo’ shirt.”

  Dyer raised his gaze from the big knife and its heaped meat to the bloodshot eyes in the carver’s shining face. The room was still but for the thin scrape of a chair. Lucius watched the black man lick his lower lip, watched his fury weaken, watched his glare slide sideways and the slices fall from the knife.

  Dyer dumped his heap of meat onto the cutting board. The carver replaced it with a modest helping. Finding his voice, he mumbled, “Doin my job, tha’s all it is, suh. Makin folks feel good, way they wants it.”

  Dyer moved on past. Sending his plate to the table with a waitress, he went straight to the door. A manager was summoned. He displayed his bloodied shirt. Both looked at the carver as they spoke.

  Observing this, the black man turned a furious scowl upon Rob Watson, slapping meat down on Rob’s plate. “Happy now? Got what you wanted?” He waved him past with the big knife which he pointed at Lucius’s eyes. “Yes, suh! You know them gen’lemens?”

  Lucius nodded. “My brothers.”

  “The three brothers! Lo’d A’mighty!” The carver detained him by pressing the knife blade down hard on his plate, pinning the china to the butcher board. “How ’bout you? Got somethin smart you want to say?”

  “I want to say that I’m extremely sorry.”

  The black man had been summoned from his post. “Sorry?” He stabbed his knife into the carving board, upright and shivering, as the food line yawed and fell away in fright. “I’se the one gets to be sorry! And my woman! And my kids! On account they’s hard times comin in this country and you damn gen’lemans has los’ me my damn job!” He stripped off his bloody apron, balled it up, and hurled it across the steam tables of vegetables onto the soups before banging his way out through the pantry doors.

  POWER OF ATTORNEY

  The waitress wore a gold chain on her rhinestone glasses, and her ears stuck out through lank black hair like a horse mane. With alarm she watched Dyer attacking his red meat, the knife blade and fork tines grating on the porcelain. “How you folks doin this evenin?” she ventured. “Ever’thin all right?” Unnerved by the attorney’s glare, she fled.

  Watson Dyer stabbed at his roast beef, forked it away. He made no mention of the carver. Lucius felt too roiled to eat. Rob was muttering, “It’s all my fault. I’d better go tell his boss.”

  “Do it, then,” snapped Lucius.

  “Save your breath.” Dyer spoke through a crude mouthful of meat, not looking up. The management, he said, had already expressed gratitude to a valued customer for reporting an outrage by a loudmouth nigger who had never learned his place; their dinner would be complimentary, the culprit fired. He forked another mouthful and chewed swiftly, processing his food while going through his papers.

  Dyer briefed them in a rapid-fire manner. Two days hence, a public hearing on the Watson claim would be held in Homestead. He had been assured by colleagues in the judicial system that the claimants might be awarded lifetime use and historical status for the house. Time was short. What he needed at once was full power of attorney, which would give him the authority to make decisions without prior consultation with the family. “It’s quite customary in these matters,” he assured them, pushing a form toward Lucius for his signature. “Authority to act swiftly might be critical.”

  Lucius felt rushed. “My signature has to be notarized, isn’t tha
t true?”

  “I happen to be a notary,” Dyer said, impatient, already digging in his briefcase for his seal.

  Something seemed wrong or missing here but Lucius, still shaken by the episode with the carver and anxious to be done with the whole business, said to hell with it and scrawled his signature.

  Rob whistled in alarm. “Oh boy,” he said.

  “I want this witnessed by all Watson heirs here present. No exceptions,” Dyer added, turning to Rob. “Not even you.” Extending his pen, he contemplated Rob’s shock with open pleasure.

  Rob rose in a lurch of plates, overturning his water glass. He glared at his brother before telling Dyer, “I won’t sign a fucking thing.” The attorney grasped his upper arm and held him by main force. “Hold your horses, Robert.” When Rob stopped struggling, Dyer released him and placed another document beside his plate, rapping it sharply with his knuckle. “Read this first,” he said. Rob glanced at the new document, dropped it on the table, rose again, and headed for the door, where he paused briefly to remonstrate about the carver—in vain, it appeared, for after a brief arm-waving dispute he disappeared.

  Dyer addressed his baked potato, which he ate in stolid silence. “How much do you know about him?” he asked finally. “Or should I say, how much do you want to know?”

  “His life is his own business.”

  “But you suspected something, right?” Dyer put down his fork to make a note. “Why did you never tell me he was Robert Watson?”

  “I didn’t know that when we last spoke—not that I would have told you anyway without his permission.”

  “Any idea why he changed his name?”

  “Why is that any of your concern?” He shrugged. “He hated his father. Took his mother’s name when he ran away.”