Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  Lucius Watson nodded. 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 that Papa had liked that river in the first place—and even the few tourists who could read a chart might ream out their boat bottom on the oyster bars. Because of the huge drainage canals in the Glades headwaters, the rivers ran shallow, with big snags and shifting sandbars, and there were no channel markers because moonshiners such as Crockett Daniels rigged lines to them and dragged them out.

  Speck considered him a moment. “Yep, they’re set to burn your daddy’s good old house right to the ground.”

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

  Speck Daniels cocked an ugly eye. “Don’t the Bend belong to all of us home people?” His voice had risen in a spurt of anger, and Crockett Junior turned their way. “Same as the whole Thousand Islands, the whole Everglades? Why, Godamighty, they’s been Danielses out here for a hundred years! I lived and hunted in this country my whole life! You tellin me them greenhorns got more right to this backcountry than I do?” He spat hard at the floor. “Anyways, what the hell kind of a tourist would beat his way three-four miles back up a mangrove river to take a picture of some raggedy ol’ lonesome place walleyed with busted windows, and the doors all choked by thorn and vines? Not to mention bats and snakes, wasp nests and spiders and raccoon shit—smell like a kennel! That house ain’t had a nail or a lick of paint in years! Screen porch is rickety, might put your foot through, and the jungle is invadin the ground floor. That blow last year hit one hundred fifty at Flamingo. Them winds tore out the last of your daddy’s windows, tattered the roof, just lashed and blasted that strong house till she looked gray and peaked as a corpse!”

  Despite his vehemence, Speck Daniels’s green eyes kept moving, as if much of his fury was feigned and the rest exaggerated, and when he spoke again, his voice was calm. “Well, you know somethin? That storm never done her no real harm at all. Tore up the outside, which is all them greenhorns look at. Inside, she’s as solid as she ever was, cause your daddy used bald cypress and Dade County pine. She’ll be standin up there on her mound for another century!” What had saved the place to date, he said, was its location far across the Glades from the Park headquarters at Homestead. Alone and unvisited, way back in a forgotten river, and long hard miles by land or sea from the nearest road, the abandoned house did not justify the cost of its own destruction, and anyway, all the bureaucratic details—the burning permits, the requisition chits for fuel, not to speak of the fire crew, boat crew, and boat—had never been assembled in the same place at the same time.

  “Hell, there ain’t nothin to burnin down a house, you know that good as I do!” Daniels banged his glass down on the bar. “Any Injun nor nigger, woman nor child could turn a pine house to hellfire in four minutes flat! Toss a coffee can of boat gas through the winder, flick your cigarette in after it, and go on home! I mean, Christamighty! But they ain’t done that, and you know why? Cause they’d rather blow up a paper storm, waste our tax money in some big-ass federal operation, make some bureaucrat look like he done somethin important!”

  “You paying taxes these days?” Lucius inquired. The moonshine was spreading through his body, which glowed with a deadly calm.

  “Why hell, yes, Colonel! First man to step up to the window ever’ year!”

  They grinned together briefly, without pleasure.

  A couple of months before, Daniels confided, he’d been contacted by a lawyer in Miami who was seeking a court injunction against the burning and was trying to reach the Watson heirs. He wanted someone on the place to make sure the house did not burn “by accident” before the case could get to court, and also to learn if the Park would force the issue by seeking to evict his caretaker. He wanted to gauge the strength of the government’s legal position as well as its resolve.

  “Parks ain’t tested it so far, and they know I’m on there.” Speck cocked his head with another sly smile. “Course I was on there anyway, takin care of my own business, so ever’thin worked out purty nice.”

  The Miami lawyer had a big reputation, big connections. He was a crony of politicians and a “fixer.” Lucius must know him, Daniels said, because he’d been born on Chatham Bend, Ed Watson’s namesake.

  Affecting indifference, Lucius shrugged, but he resented this, as Daniels knew he would. Why would Watson Dyer pay a moonshiner and gator poacher to protect that house before getting in touch with the Watson family? To hell with that, he thought, I’ll go myself. I’m going home. They can’t burn down the Watson house with a Watson standing in the door!

  “First time he called, it seemed to me I knew the voice, but some way I couldn’t place it,” Speck was saying. “The man was complainin how he never could catch up with the Watson boys. I told him, Well, the oldest boy ain’t never been heard from since the turn of the century, and the next one, Eddie, don’t want nothin to do with that old place. Course Colonel might be interested, I says, but you’ll have trouble comin up with Colonel, cause he moves real quiet and makes hisself real scarce and always did.” Speck Daniels laughed, but his green eyes weren’t laughing. “Ain’t goin to tell me what you’re lookin for out here?”

  The more Lucius thought about going home, the more excited he became, though he tried not to show it. “So what does Dyer want? With Chatham Bend, I mean.”

  “Might want a ronday-voo for his pet politicians, wouldn’t surprise me—booze-and-girlie club, y’know. I been thinkin I might join up to be a member.” But there was no mirth in Daniels’s wink, and he got right back to business. “All I know is what I picked up on the phone. But he must be up to somethin big. Went to a lot of trouble to find out that Crockett Senior Daniels knew the Watson Place and might be just the feller he was lookin for.”

  Asked what he had been doing on the Bend before he took up caretaking, Daniels lit a cigarette and squinted through the smoke. “That ain’t your business.” He winked to show he was only joking, which he wasn’t. “Maybe I been study in up to get me a good job as a Park Ranger, on account of I done more rangin in their Park than all them stupid greenhorns put together.”

  Sipping the white lightning, Lucius said “You make this stuff at Chatham Bend? When you’re not out caretaking, I mean?”

  Daniels measured him. “You ain’t obliged to drink it, Colonel. You ain’t obliged to drink with me at all.”

  Asked about the airboat and the new black truck, Speck remained silent, but Lucius persisted. “Run this stuff up here at night by airboat? Lost Man’s Slough? Broad River? Gator hides, too?”

  “That airboat’s his’n, and the truck.” Daniels jerked his chin toward Crockett Junior. Asked next if he owned the Gator Hook Bar and if this place was an outlet for his product, Speck gave up trying to be genial. “Still askin them stupid questions, ain’t you, Colonel? You ain’t changed much, boy, and I ain’t neither, as you are goin to find out if you keep tryin me. It’s like your daddy said that day, ‘I ain’t huntin for no trouble, boys, but if trouble comes a-huntin me, I will take care of it.’ ”

  “He never said anything that stupid in his life!”

  Daniels grinned at him. “Is that a fact?” He reached to refill Lucius’s cup, to smooth things over. “Course I weren’t nothin but a boy, but I knew your dad, y’know, to say hello to.”

  “Knew him to say good-bye to, might be more like it. One of the last to see Watson alive, one of the first to see him dead—whichever.”

  In a gravelly voice, Speck Daniels growled, “I asked you real polite what you was up to, out this way.” He rapped his glass down. “Asked you twice.”

  Lucius set his own glass on the bar, pushed it away from him, trying hard to focus. He was sick of talking. “I’m out here looking for a man named Collins.”

  “No you ain’t.” Speck shook his head. He looked over the crowd, then announced loudly, “You are a damn liar.” They watched Crockett Junior push himself clear o
f the wall and move toward them. “I ain’t seen you in maybe twenty years and all of a sudden, you show up out here, way to hell and gone off of your territory. You think I’m some kind of a fuckin idjit?” Still watching his son, Speck persisted in a low flat tone, “Think I don’t know why you’re snoopin around where you don’t belong?”

  “Easy now. Hold on a minute—”

  “You been snoopin and skulkin all your life, you sonofabitch! Nobody never knowin where you was at, let alone what you was up to. Maybe you don’t know it, boy, but you come pretty close to gettin yourself killed, back in the old days!”

  “By you?”

  “Could be.”

  “You threatening me, Speck?”

  The one-armed man moved in behind him, and the man called Dummy had drawn closer, too. The room went silent. The crowd waited beady-eyed for some stray scrap of event, like hungry crows. Lucius said, “The man I’m looking for calls himself Collins. Old Man Chicken, Billie Jimmie calls him.”

  “Chicken-Wing?” a woman yelled. “He ain’t but about four damn feet from where your elbow’s at! Under the bar!”

  Despite the heavy humid heat, the man who lay beneath the bar on a soft litter of swept-up cigarette butts was covered right up to his closed eyes in dirty Army blankets poxed with black-edged burns. “He’s comin off a drunk,” Speck Daniels snarled. He toed the body with a hard-creased boot, and the body emitted an ugly hacking cough, then a gasping rattle that might have been some sort of deathbed curse. “When Chicken-Wing washed up here years ago, we made him barkeeper, ain’t that right, Chicken? Paid him off in trade. All he could put away and then some, and he’s still hard at it! Come to drinkin, he don’t never quit! Don’t know the meanin of the word!”

  “Crockett Senior Daniels!” the voice said bitterly from beneath the blankets. “Damn redneck know-nothing!”

  Speck grinned. “I know my ass from a hole in the ground, which you ain’t known in years!” In good humor now, he winked at Lucius and kicked the body harder. “Come on, Chicken! Say how-do to Colonel, boy, because he’s just leavin!”

  Hair like greasy wet tufts of a duck emerged from the olive blankets, followed by a soiled, unshaven head, a sad reek of booze and urine. The old man lifted the singed blanket to his mouth before turning toward Lucius, so that only the eyes showed, peering out through hair and beard like a wild man peering through a bush. Lucius thought he glimpsed something familiar, but he saw at once that this man was not Cox. A scrawny claw crept forth to grasp the tin cup of mixed spirits and tobacco juice which Dummy, at a sign from Speck, had ladled from a slops bucket under the bar. The old man grasped it avidly, knocking it back with one great cough and shudder.

  At the sight of Lucius, the eyes came blearily into focus, then misted over before closing tight. The head withdrew. From beneath the blanket came dire curses and more coughing. “Don’t a dying man get no privacy?” he yelled.

  Lucius went down on one knee beside the pile of blankets. “Mr. Collins? You wanted to see me?”

  “Go on back where you come from, boy!”

  “We have to talk,” Lucius said urgently. “You can stay at my place till you’re better.”

  With his good arm, Crockett Junior Daniels lifted Lucius off the floor, turned him away. The drunk yelled after him, “Don’t mess with ’em, boy! I’ll see you down the road!”

  At the door, Mud Braman tried to block his way. “You’re Mister Colonel, right? Mister Colonel Watson!” At a sign from the one-armed man, Dummy thrust his palm against Mud’s face so that the nose and bulging eyes stuck out between his fingers, then shoved hard with one thrust like a punch, sending Mud back through the screen door. Striking the rail, he spun into his fall, making a half turn in the air before he dropped from view. A scaring bang rose from the bottom of the steps.

  Lucius jumped after him down the stairs as Speck Daniels observed them. “Poor ol’ Mud has flew down them steps so many times you’d think he’d get the hang of it, but he just don’t,” Speck said.

  Mud Braman, on hands and knees, was red-eyed with pain and disillusionment. “See how they done? I tried and I tried to be in friendship with these peckerheads, done my best to help out where I could! It ain’t no use!” Yet when Lucius tried to help him up, Mud cursed him. Wiping the blood from his gashed brow with the back of a grimy hand, he tottered through the dirt and weeds to the pink limousine and dragged himself into the backseat like a sick cat, pulling the door shut with loud creaks because the hinges were all bent and rusted and the rank growth of weeds kept it from closing. “Anybody thinks that Mud R. Braman is goin to take any more shit off these skunks better think again!” came the voice from within.

  Speck Daniels yelled at the pink auto, “You ain’t hurt none, boy! You can thank the Lord you got skunks for friends, cause otherwise you wouldn’t have none at all!” Seeing Lucius headed for his car, Speck raised his voice to a hoarse shout. “Lucius Watson! Lucius Watson ain’t nowhere near the man his daddy was, ain’t that right, Lucius?”

  Grinning, Speck stood rocking on his heels on the top step, hands in hip pockets. “Lucius? You don’t aim to say good-bye? And here you ain’t even told me yet how that ol’ list of yours is comin along!” Getting no answer, he yelled louder. “How come Henry Short ain’t on your list? Ain’t never died off yet that I ever heard about. Or don’t a nigger count, the way you look at it?”

  Lucius backed his old car around, the tires spitting mud. He idled in neutral in the ruts as he cranked his window down, the better to contemplate the furious man on the top step. Behind Daniels’s head, over the roof peak, a turkey vulture made trackless circles through the sky, the red skin of its bare head glinting like a blood spot on the sun.

  Speck licked his lips. “You and me is very different, Lucius, I am proud to say. If I believed a certain man helped to kill my daddy, Lucius, I sure wouldn’t go to drinkin with that feller, Lucius, like you done just now. 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 Senior 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 old clutch into gear, he exulted at the flicker in Speck’s grin, and drove off chortling, yet he knew he had pushed his luck, and his heart was pounding. A man as ruthless and wary as Speck Daniels would hear those last words as a threat, and a threatened man, as Papa used to say, was not a man to turn your back on in the Glades country.

  The List

  In December of 1908, E. J. Watson had been acquitted in a murder trial in north Florida, a notorious event that had required Gov. Napoleon Broward’s intercession to prevent a lynching. Eddie Watson and their sister’s husband, Walter Langford, had testified for the defense, yet upon their return to Fort Myers, these two refused to discuss the trial with the younger brother, asserting that stern silence in this matter was “a family decision” made with their Collins cousins in Columbia County. The silence deepened two years later when “the head of the family”—Eddie’s snide way of referring to his father—was killed by the Island men on Chokoloskee.

  Taken in custody by Sheriff Frank B. Tippins and brought north to Fort Myers, the Islanders had been deputized as “the Watson posse,” although their quarry was already dead and buried. This stratagem, which avoided worsening the scandal with a public trial, was approved by Banker Langford and by Eddie Watson, who soon thereafter left his employ as deputy court clerk in order to take a job in Langford’s bank. Eddie refused to discuss the hearing with his brother or reveal to Lucius the identities of those who had participated in their father’s death, lest Lucius attempt to seek revenge or otherwise “act crazy.”

  From the start, Lucius Watson had lashed out at the whole business as hypocritical disloyalty to Papa. For a time, he had an ally in his sister, Carrie Langford, who had also loved their warm and jolly father and would not believe that Papa had been guilty of the alleged crime
s. (Carrie was especially tormented because in recent years—since the murder trial in Columbia County—she had turned her father from her door, to protect her husband’s business reputation.) Sharing grief and bewilderment as well as the hope that somehow dear Papa would be vindicated, the two were stoic in their stifled rage at the street whisperings, the stares in church, the seething gossip which attended the reburial of the blood-blackened, half-rotted corpse exhumed from Rabbit Key and reburied almost furtively in Fort Myers Cemetery. Only the Langfords’ prominence and wealth had protected the family from public disgrace. But eventually Carrie, too, would adopt the code of silence, telling Lucius that she could not bear any further talk about dear Papa. Walter and Eddie were right, she had decided. For the sake of her poor children, Carrie wept, she must cut Papa from her life and mind as best she could. When she begged Lucius not to mention him again, he turned and left her house without a word, completing his estrangement from the family.

  Clearly, his upright siblings in Fort Myers had no wish to learn “the truth” about their father, perhaps because they lived in dread of what such ancestry might signify if even one of the terrible tales proved to be true. And despite his loyalty, Lucius himself was uncomfortably aware of shrouded memories, half-hidden, half-forgotten—specters of the half-light, dimly seen, which drew near the surface of certain dreams and threatened to burst forth into the waking day. If Papa had deserved his reputation, then what did it mean to be the get of such a man, the biological consequence, the blood inheritor?

  “You’re drunk! You’re talking crazy!” Eddie had shouted when Lucius asked these dire questions at a Thanksgiving celebration at the Langfords, scarcely a month after the death. And all reminded him of the clan decision never to speak of their ancestor again.