Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  The document leaves open another urgent question—did one man execute him with the first shot, and the others fire reflexively in the confusion? Though House denies this, the evident need to deny it—and a certain defensive tone—suggests some missing circumstance behind the rumor. If there is truth in it, then who was this man who fired first? Whom was Bill House trying to protect?

  The most critical question is whether or not Cox killed those people under the influence or direction of Mr. Watson, as “the Negro” first stated but subsequently denied. Another much debated question is whether or not Watson executed Cox (as he would claim) when he returned to Chatham Bend after the hurricane. If so, did he act in a spirit of justice or in retribution? Or did he do it—as some continue to maintain—to eliminate the only man who might testify against him, knowing that if he came to trial, the black man would be discounted as a witness?

  In the climate of fear in the community, almost no one believed that Leslie Cox had been killed by E. J. Watson. For many years afterward, a dread persisted that Cox was still alive back in the rivers, ready to strike again. But if Watson did not kill Cox, then what became of him? With the passage of years it seems less and less likely that we shall learn the fate of that cold-blooded killer who appeared so suddenly and wreaked such havoc, then vanished into the backcountry of America. Somewhere in the hinterland, a man known in other days as Leslie Cox may still squint in the sun, and spit, and revile his fate.

  Caxambas

  In his old cabin lighter up Caxambas Creek, Lucius Watson sat straight up in the shard of moonlight, ransacking torn dreams for the hard noise that had awakened him—that rattling bang of an old car or truck striking a pothole in the sandy track through the slash pine wood north of the salt creek. No one else lived out here on the salt marsh, nor was there a mailbox on the county road, a half mile away, which might betray the existence of his habitation.

  A dry mouth and stiff brain punished him for last night’s whiskey. He licked his lips and squinched his nose to bring life back to his numb skin, then rose and peered out of the window, certain that some vehicle had come in from the paved road and eased to a stop inside the wood edge where the track emerged onto the marsh—the point from where the black hulk of the lighter, hard aground in the shining mud of the ebbed tide, could first be seen by whoever had come down along the creek on midnight business. And still he heard nothing, only small cries of the earth, forming on the surface of the great night silence. Tree frogs shrilled from the freshwater slough on the far side of the road, in counterpoint to the relentless nightsong—chuck-will’s-widow! chuck-will’s-widow! chuck-will’s-widow!—which came from the whiskery wide gape of a mothlike bird hidden in lichens on some dead limb at the swamp edge, still and cryptic as a dead thing decomposing.

  The Gulf moon carved the pale track and black trees. Having come in stealth, the intruder would make the last part of his approach on foot, and—Lucius’s heart leapt—there! A blur against the wall of the moonlit wood detached itself from the tree shadows and moved out onto the track.

  An Indian, he thought at once, though how he knew this he could not have said. The figure paused a moment, looking and listening. Then he came on again, following the sand track’s mane of grass, at pains to leave no sign. Caught by the moon, the object that he carried on one arm was glinting.

  Lucius moved quickly to drag pants and shirt onto his bony frame. He lifted the shotgun from its rack and cracked the cabin door, cursing himself yet again for isolating himself way out here without a telephone—or plumbing or electricity, for that matter. Yet the simplicity of this houseboat life contented him. It was simplicity he needed, as another might need salt. A cracked cistern and a leaning outhouse which had served a long-gone fish shack at the bog edge, a Primus stove and a storm lantern with asbestos filament—these took care of his domestic needs. Perhaps once in a fortnight, he retrieved his negligible mail at Goodland Post Office and bought his stores, and had a meal and a few whiskeys at the roadhouse.

  Above the mangrove on the creek edge rose high wind dunes—highest point on Marco Island, where in the old centuries the Calusa Indians had taken refuge from seasonal hurricanes. Eventually the Spanish had come, and the fishing settlement, and the clam-canning factory. Now developers of creekside land had burned the old factory and the last of the old fish shacks and cleared the sabal and the gumbo-limbo to make way for hard artificial lawns for northern buyers.

  Near the sheds, the Indian’s silhouette turned in a slow half circle, sifting the night sounds like an owl before passing behind the leaning outhouse and Lucius’s old auto and some rusted oil drums and the hulk of his old boat and pausing again at the foot of the spindly low dock over the salt grass. He was big and short-legged and round-shouldered, with a small flat butt. In the cold shine of the moon, he glided out over the bog, slat by split slat, and the dock creaked and swayed a little as he came.

  Breaking the gun, Lucius Watson dropped two buckshot shells into the chambers and snapped it to. At the click of steel, the Indian stopped short, his free hand rising in slow supplication. He stared at the black crack of the opened door. Very slow, he bent his knees and set some sort of canister down on the dock with a certain ceremony, as if the thing were dangerous or sacred. Slowly he straightened, hands spread-fingered, arms out to the side. His big swart pocked face was expressionless. He tried a smile. “Rural free delivery,” he said.

  Widening the door crack with the shotgun barrels, Lucius stepped outside. Under the moon, the glinting canister appeared to pulse. “Get that damned thing back over to the road,” he told the Indian.

  “It ain’t a bomb or nothin,” the man murmured. The Indian’s raven hair was dressed in red wind band and long braid, and he wore a candy-striped Seminole blouse and black leather vest, blue jeans and sneakers, with a beaded belt tight on a junk-food belly. He raised his eyebrows, awaiting some change of heart, but when the white man only motioned with the gun, he shrugged and bent and retrieved his offering in one easy motion and returned over the centipedal walkway to the land.

  On his hunkers on the road, arms loose across his knees, the Indian awaited him, watching the gun. Lucius pointed the barrels down along his leg. Back in the night shadow of the trees, he could just make out the hulk of an ancient pickup.

  Asked if he had come alone, the Indian nodded. Asked who he was, he identified himself as a spiritual leader of the traditional Mikasuki out on the Trail.

  Lucius said, “You came halfway across Florida in that old junker to deliver this—”

  “Burial urn. The old man sent it.” With a generous wave, the Indian invited him to admire the urn. “He seen your ad in the paper about Bloody Watson.”

  “Mr. E. J. Watson? Planter Watson? That what you meant to say?”

  The big Indian sighed. “Our old-time Indin people down around Shark River, they always thought a lot of Mr. Watson, cause he give ’em coffee, somethin warm to eat, whenever they come up along the rivers. Had good moonshine, too. Folks say he killed some white people and black ones but he never killed no red ones, not so’s you’d notice.”

  Lucius Watson had to laugh. This hurt his head. “What old man?” he scowled.

  “Call him Chicken-Wing.”

  “Chicken-Wing. So Chicken-Wing said, ‘See that Mr. Lucius Watson gets this burial urn on the stroke of midnight.’ Am I right so far?”

  The Indian nodded. “Stroke of midnight,” he assented slyly. “Them were his very words.”

  “Christ.” Lucius tried to focus on the urn, which was a cheap one, ornamented with crude brassy angels. “And you don’t know his real name.”

  The Indian shrugged. “Used the name Collins when I first come acrost him, some years back. Course that don’t mean nothin. Them people out where he is livin at don’t hold so much with rightful names. Call him Chicken on account of he’s so scrawny—”

  Lucius hoisted the gun, and the sudden motion hurt his temples, making him curse. “Come on, dammit! You come snea
king in here after dark—!”

  “Just brung that urn, is all. The way I told you.” His black eyes remained fastened on the gun. “Guess I’ll be gettin along,” he said, easing to his feet.

  Lucius broke the gun and ejected the shells and stuffed them into his pocket, feeling ridiculous. “You better come on back over to the boat, have some coffee before heading back. Who’s that in the urn? Let’s start from the beginning. If this old Collins wants to see me, why didn’t he come here himself?”

  “He don’t feel so good.” The Indian eased his nerves with a low belch. “Other day, one them frog hunters lives back out there come by my camp and let me know Old Man Chicken wanted to see me. Told me Chicken been rottin in his bedroll goin on three days, hardly a twitch, so them men figured he was close to finished. Soon as I got there, Chicken says, ‘For fifty years I been standin in the way of my own death.’ I weren’t so sure what he meant by that, but it sounded like he had about enough.

  “Next thing, he told me where you was livin at. Said, Take this here urn to that man Lucius Watson, he’s my rightful hair. Tell him he better come see me, cause I got me a whole ar-chive here on his old man—whole carton of documents and such. And if that don’t do it, you just tell him that them bones in that urn used to be his brother.”

  “That’s Rob in there?” Lucius laid the shotgun on the grass and sank to his knees in the white sand beside the urn. He lifted and turned it carefully in both hands in a tumult of emotions. Rob Watson! To clear his head, he took deep breaths of the night air, filling his lungs with the heavy bog smell of low tide. He set the urn down again and stared at it.

  Using a bird bone taken from his shirt, the Indian drew a sort of spiral in the sand. “He reckons you owe him a visit. He’s the one sent you them old papers where some man tells how them Chokoloskee fellers killed your daddy.”

  “My God.” Lucius sighed. “Tell him I’m coming.” Whoever he was, this old Collins knew what had become of Robert Watson, having somehow come by his remains before Rob’s own siblings even knew that he was dead.

  Pressing huge smooth hands to his knees, Billie Jimmie rose as slow as smoke, to such a height that Lucius Watson, a tall man himself, had to step backwards. “Gator Hook,” the Indian said. He set off down the white moon road without a wave. At the wood edge, he half-turned to look back, then disappeared into the dark wall of the forest, leaving Lucius alone with the strange urn, under the moon.

  Gator Hook

  The day after the Indian appeared out of the forest, Lucius Watson drove eastward on the Tamiami Trail through the Big Cypress, which opened out into wet saw grass savanna. A century ago, in the Seminole Wars, the Indians still crossed their Grassy Waters, Pa-hay-okee, to the high hardwood hammocks where palm-thatch villages and gardens lay concealed from the white soldiers. Since then, the bright waters had been girded tight by the concrete of progress, and a wilderness people, like the native bear and panther, could scarcely be imagined anymore. Of the half-hidden dangers which in the nineteenth century had sapped the spirit of the U.S. Army and led at last to its defeat, what remained were the tall scythes of toothed saw grass and the poison tree called manchineel, the treacherous muck pools and jagged solution holes in the skeletal limestone, the insect swarms which could drive lost greenhorns to insanity, the biting insects and thick water moccasins, opening their cotton mouths like deadly blossoms, and the coral snakes and diamondbacks on the high ground.

  Beyond the tiny hamlet at Ochopee, Lucius crossed the small bridge over the shady headwaters of Turner River, which flowed south through shining grasslands and the brackish mangrove coast to the backwaters of Chokoloskee Bay. In the fiery sunshine which arose from the Atlantic horizon, the stately pace of his antiquated auto, putt-putting and rumbling like an old boat, permitted a calm appreciation of the morning. Strings of white ibis crossed pink sky, and egrets hunched like still white growths on the green walls of subtropical forest that had taken hold on the higher ground along the Trail. Over the savanna flew a swallow-tailed kite which, in recent days, had descended from the towering Gulf skies, at the end of its northward migration from the Amazon.

  Delighted, Lucius stopped the car and climbed onto its dented roof to follow the bird’s hawking course over the Glades. Before him, the bright expanse spread away forever, seeping south and east over the infinitesimal incline of the ancient seafloor which formed the flat peninsula of southern Florida. In the distance, like a green armada sailing north against the sky, rose isolated hardwood hammocks, tear-shaped islands in the slow sparkling sheet of grassy river. The hammocks were rounded at the northern end and pointed at the south from long ages of parting the broad water that the Indians knew as River Long or Hatchee Chok-ti, transcribed by the early white men as “Shark River”—“the Undiscovered Country,” Lucius’s father had called it, evoking not only the remoteness of that labyrinthal wilderness but its mystery. “From whose bourn no man returns,” Papa intoned. In those days, there was no sign of man, only fine cracks in the floating vegetation made by narrow cypress dugouts, which left scarcely more trace than the passage of great birds in the Glades skies.

  Placing one hand on the hot metal, Lucius made the jump down to the road. Though the road jarred him, he was grateful he could still do this without undue creaking. He straightened and stretched and gazed at the silent savanna all around. How terrible and beautiful it was! At one time, Mikasuki water trails had traversed the Glades from the east coast to the west, and permitted a passage of one hundred miles from great Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. In recent years, with the advent of the Park, the Indians had been banished from Hatchee Chok-ti, and the last of the wild Mikasuki—Billie Jimmie’s people, who refused to join the acculturated Indians on the reservations—lived in small camps along the Trail canal, guarding their old ways as best they could behind vine-shrouded stockades which hid all but the roofs of the thatched chekes.

  At Monroe Station, the old aid and rescue post for early motorists, Lucius turned south on the narrow spur which joined the Trail to the old Chevelier Road. Known these days as the Loop Road, the track had been reduced by decades of disuse to a narrow passage pocked and broken by white limestone potholes and marl pools. In places it was all but lost in the coarse crowding undergrowth of the subtropics, and brush and thorn raked and screeched at the car’s doors as it lurched along. Farther on, the road lay submerged beneath risen water of the spring rains, and frogs and crayfish and quicksilver sprinklings of sun-tipped minnows moved freely back and forth between the warm gold of the marshes to the south and the soft silvers of the pond cypress to the northward.

  But now the sky had clouded over, casting a pall of gloom over the swamp, and his sunrise mood of early morning evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius’s moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a dread and melancholy dragged at his spirits, as heavy as the graybeard lichen which shrouded the black corridors between the trees. In forcing his way into this road, he seemed to push at a mighty spring which, at the first faltering of his resolve, would hurl him outwards.

  Gator Hook was a shack community on a large piney-woods hammock south of the Trail. The hammock lay on the old road named for the Chevelier Corporation, which was named in turn for an irascible old Frenchman—an ornithologist and plume hunter—who had once attempted a citizen’s arrest of Lucius’s father. In the intoxicated days of the Florida Boom, back in the twenties, the Chevelier people had pioneered a track due west from the Dade County line through the cypress swamps and coarse savanna drained by the upper creeks of Lost Man’s River. Its destination was Chevelier Bay in the Ten Thousand Islands, a wilderness region advertised as “the Gulf Coast Miami.” The developers were confident the authorities would approve their road as the middle section of the cross-Florida highway, but at Forty-Mile Bend, the engineers had turned “the Tamiami Trail” toward the northwest, into another county. The Chevelier Road was still ten miles short of its de
stination when the Hurricane of 1926, followed three years later by the Wall Street Crash, put an end to the last development schemes ever to be attempted in the Ten Thousand Islands. By the time the Trail was finished, in 1928, the Chevelier Road had been all but abandoned.

  In the Depression, the sagging sheds and dwellings of the Trail construction crews at Gator Hook became infested by fugitives and gator hunters, hobos, drunkards, and retired whores, in a raffish community with a reputation for being drunk on its own moonshine by midmorning. This lawless place, eight miles due west across the cypress from the Forty-Mile Bend on the Trail, was cut off from the rest of Monroe County by hundreds of square miles of southern Everglades, which, together with the Ten Thousand Islands, formed the largest roadless area in the United States. In the forties, the old road was decreed a northern boundary of the new Everglades Park, but Gator Hook remained beyond administration, to judge from the fact that the Monroe County Sheriff had never once made the long journey around the eastern region of the Park to this isolated and unregenerate outpost of his jurisdiction.

  For a number of years there had been rumors of an old drifter out at the Hook who talked incessantly of E. J. Watson, and it had occurred to Watson’s son that this drifter might be the killer Leslie Cox, yet this seemed so unlikely—was that his honest reason?—that he had never bothered to come out here to find out. Most local people still believed that Cox had escaped (perhaps with Watson’s help) and made his way to the wild Mikasuki still living down around Shark River. Since the Seminole Wars, those undomesticated Indians had sheltered outlaws and other fugitives from white men just as, in the old century, they had sheltered runaway slaves. Under a half-breed identity (and Lucius could remember the man’s Indian black hair and heavy skin), Cox had laid low for years back in the hammocks. Avoiding west coast settlements where he might be spotted, so it was said, he would sometimes accompany Indian trading parties to the east coast at the Miami River, where he traded otter pelts and gator hides for coffee and flour, moonshine, axes and steel traps, rifles, ammunition. With the advent of the cross-Florida highway Cox had drifted to the shack community at Gator Hook, hiding his identity from the inhabitants.