Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  “You dislike your brother. Our half brother.”

  “Well, thank goodness I’m not your half sister!” Her laugh came as a small shriek, like a caught mouse.

  “I love you, Lucy Summerlin,” he said, taking her hand. “I always have and always will.”

  Lucy nodded, her hand cool and inert. “I understand you’ve been traveling with a young woman.”

  “My research assistant.” Irrepressible Rob must have mentioned Sally Brown. “Anyway, she’s gone.”

  “Let her stay! What difference does it make!” She turned away. Out of tact, he let go of her hand, which she raised up and inspected like some sort of curio. When he tried to return her journal, she waved him away. “It’s yours. It always was. You can burn it if you want.” She was in tears. “It’s this woman you should have traveled with, Lucius! All your life!”

  Sudden and silent as an owl, age had her in its grasp. Before his eyes, age bled, wrinkled, and dried her. Lucy said, “Everyone loves Lucius. Is that enough for you? Don’t you ever miss the happy man you might have been?” She closed her eyes. “Forgive me.” She gathered up her things. “Life is full of joy and anguish, wouldn’t you agree?” Affecting irony and nonchalance, she was straining to subdue hysteria, and her gallantry was of no use to either of them.

  “Please go,” she whispered, shutting her eyes tight, gathering herself in a hard knot against his going. He touched her shoulder, rose, and moved away.

  At the great banyan, Lucius turned to wave. She had not stirred. Poised on the white gravestone as if just alighted, palpitating like a rare soft moth of faint dusty lavender, she appeared transparent. In the heat shimmer of late afternoon, Death shook her small shoulders, mocking grief and laughter.

  Rob Watson

  At the Gasparilla Inn, he went straight to the bar, a place of refracted light and glitter which overlooked the brown Calusa Hatchee. There he found the resurrected Rob with what was left of his hind end hitched to the farthest stool toward the river windows. He seemed to have had a dispute with the bartender, who was banging bottles and wiping the bar mirror. Other than these two, the place was empty.

  To give his feral brother room, he sat down several stools away, and neither spoke until Lucius was served. After his upsetting day, Lucius eased his nerves with a double bourbon, gasping in relief as the charcoal essence warmed his sinuses and welled into his brain.

  “The Watson brothers,” Rob muttered finally, shaking his head at the folly of it all.

  “Having fun?”

  “Good clean fun,” the old man said, “and a lot of it.” Dead mean drunk, he lifted his empty glass to toast their images. Lucius said, “Well, we have to start somewhere. Who’s that in the urn?” And his brother said, “His skull. Last time I looked, it was Edgar ‘Bloody’ Watson.”

  Turning his glass to the light to inspect the amber shimmer in his ice cubes, Rob related how, in 1921, before leaving Fort Myers on his search for Lucius, he had visited the cemetery late at night with the excellent plan of pissing on his father’s grave. While performing this act, he wondered if there might not be a market for the head of such a famous desperado. He broke into a caretaker’s shed and borrowed a spade and chipped his way down through the limestone clay to the rotted coffin, from which he extracted the brown, bullet-broken skull, wrapping it in burlap from the toolshed. He filled and tamped the hole, returned the spade. The digging had sobered him somewhat, but he was too tired to carry out a revised plan to dig up the grave again and restore the skull. Next day, lacking any plan at all, he installed it in a Greek-type urn acquired at a funeral parlor whose proprietor had hammered the skull into small pieces.

  Lucius jolted down his drink. “Is all this true? Your father?”

  “My own father. Yep. That was the fun part,” Robert Watson said. “Did my heart good. Made a nice keepsake.”

  “Seems like a lot of trouble,” Lucius said finally. “I don’t know that I believe this story.”

  “You might as well believe it, son, because it’s true.” Talking out of the side of his mouth, facing the bar mirror, Rob had yet to look him in the eye.

  At a loss—what could he say?—Lucius told him about the visit with their Collins cousins, describing what their father had looked like in the large oval photograph in the Collins house. Morose, Rob said, “I know what that maniac looked like.” Asked after another silence why he’d changed his name, Rob said he’d adopted his mother’s name because he no longer wished to be a Watson.

  After fleeing to Key West in 1901, Rob had wandered the earth as a merchant seaman. Eventually, he had learned to drive an automobile, and in Prohibition, he had found a job running trucks for liquor dealers. Unfortunately he’d become involved in a warehouse robbery—“the driver,” he said—and because a guard was killed, he had done hard time in prison. He had been in and out of prison ever since. Though Lucius had suspected this, he squinted suspiciously at Rob, to warn him not to make up any stories, and after that Rob refused his questions—unwilling, he said, to discuss his life with some idiot who was calling him a liar. “You’ll see,” he added, ominous. “I’ve been writing down my side of your Watson story.”

  When the old man threw his whiskey back and signaled rudely for another, the bartender refused him, telling him he’d already had too many. “I notified you,” the barman reminded him, “even before you was joined by this other party.” Told by Lucius that the other party would take responsibility, the barman shrugged. It was true that Rob had already been drunk when Lucius first came in, but now he was in that advanced phase in which he could keep drinking without seeming drunker, except for a subtle thickening of features and a sweaty glaze. Until that point when he fell down for good, he would not even stagger.

  “The Professor.” Rob nodded, very, very weary. Closing the subject of Rob Watson, he asked to hear his colleague’s theory on the first man to shoot a bullet at their parent. “I mean, who was Bill House trying to cover for in that deposition?” Awaiting his drink, he drummed his fingers on the bar. “That day you came hunting me at Gator Hook? Well, after you left, Speck was raging around, and he started yelling how Henry Short was in that line of men. He said he fired.”

  “In Jim Crow days? In Chokoloskee? I don’t think so!”

  “No? I read that deposition, Professor. They all admitted shooting. So why would House try to cover up for someone, unless it was a black man?”

  “I’m not sure House was covering for anybody.” Lucius shook his head. “I’ve heard that rumor about Henry Short. It might be a case of ‘pin it on the nigger,’ Arb.”

  “Rob is the name. Robert Briggs Watson. Remember me?”

  “Look, I knew Henry pretty well. All his life Henry paid attention to every step he made, like a man wading a slough full of alligators. Even if he was told to follow the House men to Smallwood’s landing, but he would never let himself be seen toting a gun. And even if he had a gun, he would never shoot it at a white man.”

  Rob had already lost concentration. “The Watson brothers,” he said again, sardonic.

  At the desk a message had come that Major Dyer might join them for supper on his way through town. They located Rob’s satchel and took it to the room. Lucius assured him that Dyer didn’t know a thing.

  “Know a thing about what?” Rob’s snarl was paranoid. Then the fight went out of him. Astonished to see those sharp old eyes go soft and shiny, Lucius approached him gingerly and drew his brother’s scrawny frame into his arms. How thin Robert Briggs Watson was! There was nothing left of him.

  They went downstairs and waited in the lobby. When Dyer did not appear, they left word at the desk and went into the restaurant without him.

  The Gasparilla’s Swashbuckler Restaurant had a hearty buffet topped off by a huge 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, a rich and rolling laugh, and a rollicking line that had the whole room smiling.

  “Oh ye
ah! Yes sir! Yes indeedy! Tha’s it! Tha’s right! How you this evenin? Y’all had you a good visit? You doin all right? All right, my frien’! Bes’ have some o’ this good roast! Oh yeah! Yes sir! Tha’s it! Tha’s right! Red for the gentleman, pink for the lady? Bes’ have jus’ a li’l more, now, jes’ a li’l bit—all right? All right!”

  “He don’t know when to quit,” Rob said too loudly, reaching out for his new whiskey, almost tipping her tray before the waitress could set down the amber glass. “He’s playing these old tourists like a school of catfish, snuffling through the mud after a bait!”

  Spoiling for trouble, the old man was still sniping when Watson Dyer came up from behind and yanked out a chair and settled on it with a heavy grunt, without a greeting. He considered their liquor glasses a few moments before noting coldly that they had gone into the dining room without him. “You boys in a big rush or what?” His smile looked terrible. “I thought I was the busy feller around here!”

  Under the scrutiny of those hard pale eyes, Lucius could no longer doubt that this man was the natural son of E. J. Watson. It was hard to think about him in that light, since they had nothing else in common, brotherly affection least of all. Until this year, his last experience of Wattie Dyer was on the dock at Chatham Bend in 1905. The mail boat captain had been young Dan House, a youth of his own age, and Dan’s mate was another boy, Gene Gandees, and both would be present, five years later, in the line of men who gunned his father down at Smallwood’s landing.

  At the time he departed Chatham Bend, that hot and squalling Dyer child had not yet opened his eyes, which were never to gaze upon his natural father. According to Lucy, Watt was already a schoolboy by the time Fred Dyer spread the tale of his own cuckolding. The boy had challenged the story from the start, punching schoolmates bloody, but his fury only spread the rumor up and down the coast, until finally Watt turned his back upon his family, hitching an auto ride across the state on the new highway. Finding work in Miami, scrabbling to achieve an education, he freed himself from his own history as fiercely as a wolf gnawing its own paw to escape a trap.

  Eventually people forgot about Watt Dyer, and forgot the rumors, all but those old-timers who had known Ed Watson. Years later, when Dyer’s law practice required visits to the Gulf coast, certain elders might squint as soon as they laid eyes on him. “Hell, don’t I know that feller?” In the time it took to wipe their glasses, someone else had whispered, “Ain’t that Watson’s boy?”

  Dyer was wearing a new windbreaker with the letters—U.S.—embroidered on the breast pocket in red letters encircled by small blue stars.

  “A Fed,” Rob Watson said. “I should have known it.”

  “United Sugar.” Dyer yanked out a chair. “Those men are grateful to this great land of opportunity. They are proud of Old Glory, and they don’t mind showing it.”

  “Not surprising,” Lucius observed, “considering the federal subsidies they rake in.” Years before, crossing Florida by way of the south shore of Okeechobee, he had beheld those endless canefields, draining their tons of nitrates and pesticides into the Everglades, and the huge sugar factories and thick high walls of oily smoke shrouding the flat horizons like dark fronts of oncoming evil weather. Recalling this, he was ever more uneasy about corporate sponsorship of his biography of E. J. Watson. Not that Papa would have minded—on the contrary! The ruined land south of the dykes, the poor poisoned small towns of the migrant workers—the price of progress!, Papa would have said.

  Dyer was rummaging intently among his papers. Finally he looked up. “Lucius H. Watson shows up on the 1910 census as residing at Chatham Bend, the last resident Watson on the property—that could help. The least we should get is a life tenure on the place, like that old man who lives on Possum Key. That precedent is strong enough to tie this up in litigation and appeals almost forever—or long enough for our purposes, at least.”

  “Our purposes?”

  “Let’s see now.” The attorney peered into his briefcase, saying casually, “You planning another interview with Henry Short?”

  “I might, if I knew where to find him. Why? What’s Henry got to do with it?”

  “Bill House’s son would know his whereabouts.” Dyer scribbled the phone number of Andy House on the bottom corner of a legal pad, tore off the yellow scrap, and handed it to Lucius. “Let me know if you come up with something.” He resettled himself heavily in his seat, clearing the air for a shift of topic. “Naples,” he said. For tomorrow night’s meeting of the Historical Society, Lucius would be listed on the program as L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.

  Lucius shook his head, annoyed. “That won’t work here on this coast. I told you that. Too many people know me. Anyway, I learned my lesson in Fort White.” He would notify the audience that the name on the program was a pen name.

  “The speaker advertised—and paid—by the Society is Professor Collins. And the newspaper is covering Professor Collins’s lecture as an update on the Watson story. Also, your historian’s credentials will count heavily in our favor at next week’s meeting with the Park Service.” Dyer was straining to be heard over the rollick of the meat carver, his irritation rising with his voice. “So why insist—Jesus! What is that damn racket!” Nostrils flared, he yanked his chair around. “What is that! You think he’s drunk?” He glared. “He’s poking fun at the damn customers!”

  “He’s poking fun!” Rob, who had been buttering a roll, parried and poked his knife toward the neighboring table. “Poke, poke,” he confided with a thrusting gesture, winking dirtily at the diners, who turned away. “Poke, poke,” he repeated. But already, his drunken grin was fading, replaced by that dangerous cast of eye which Lucius remembered all too well from the ugly episode in the Columbia County Courthouse. Before Lucius could stop him, Rob lurched to his feet and took off in the direction of the buffet. “Poking fun at paying customers stuffing their gullets?” he was calling. “No sir! Not in this man’s restaurant, he don’t! You men going to let that nigra get away with that? And still call yourselves men?”

  By the time Lucius got there, the quick old man was well ahead of him in line. Grinning back at Lucius, he sang out to the other diners, “Oh Lordy Lordy, I surely do appreciate this kind of polite-type happy nigra, just overflowing with our grand ol’ Southren hospitality!”

  An old lady turned to offer a sweet smile—Ain’t it the truth!—and Rob smiled back at her. “Just so long,” he told her beamishly, “as his dang ol’ nigger sweat don’t go to falling in our food.”

  “Now that’s not nice!” When the woman hushed him, glancing fearfully at the carver, Rob leaned toward her, cupping his ear. “Eh?” he exclaimed. “Nigger, you say?” The woman was humiliated, furious. “He’s drunk!” she told her husband, whose sun-scabbed vacation pate only hunkered lower down between his shoulders.

  Rob launched forth in a homely cracker twang for increased emphasis and audibility, though not so loud that the black man, at the head of the long line, could make it out over his own boisterous patter. “Yes sirree, we’ll set right down to a big plate of beef that’ll half-kill us! And not only that but a heapin helpin of fine interracial fellowshipin on the side! We’ll realize maybe for the first time in our whole lives how much we love these durn ol’ Neg-ros, and why in the heck can’t our durn kids see the Negro Problem the same way we do, and what a great country we have here in the good ol’ U.S. and A., where black folks can talk to white folks just so nice and friendly you’d almost think they was real people after all!”

  The candidates for the roast beef, who had manfully resisted Lucius’s attempts to advance himself wrongfully in the line, realized at last that he was trying to reach Rob, and now made way for him only too gladly. He grasped the old man’s bony shoulder, shook him hard. “That’s enough,” he said. Ahead of them, the entire line looked stiff with shock. Even the carver had slowed his chanting and was looking around with the poised knife, sensing something disagreeable in the air.

  “Irregardless of race, co
lor, or creed!” Rob was struggling in Lucius’s grip, exalted, and again the old lady turned to him, but before she could chastise this terrible old man about the evils of race prejudice, he checked her with a wink and a glad smile. “Don’t y’all love pickaninnies, ma’am? So much cuter than them pasty ol’ white babies, what do you think?” The woman moaned, utterly routed.

  And then, quite suddenly, Rob self-deflated, turning in upon himself, soul-poisoned, muttering.

  Watson Dyer barged past Lucius, intent upon the carver. Though wary now, the black man was still chanting. “All right, sir! How you doin this fine evenin? Care to try our beautiful roas’ beef? All right? All right!” And the Major snapped, in a low hard voice accustomed to command, “Knock off this minstrel show, okay? Just carve that roast.”

  The man stopped carving and stood absolutely still. In the silence, all over the room, people stopped eating, the tables wheeling in phalanxes of pale faces, the pink-and-white waitresses clustered in bouquets.

  The carver maintained his broad smile. “Well, now! Ever’thing all right wit’ you, my friend? Y’all had you a nice day?” His eyes had tightened and his words conveyed a small hard irony, a note of warning. “What you might need is a cut of this fine beef!”

  “Just carve,” the Major ordered calmly, with terrific anger, solid and efficient anger, smooth as polished stone.

  The carver squinted at the point of his raised knife. “Yo, Nigger! You ain’t heard de man? Cut dat minstrel shit right now! You jus’ carve dat meat like you been told!” The carver honed his knife, snick-snick, snick-snick, appraising Dyer’s age and weight, the patriotic windbreaker, the cerulean hard eyes. Snick-snick, snick-snick. “I been where you been, man,” the carver muttered, in sure and sudden insight. “Oh, I been there, okay!”

  “This what you risked your neck for, boy, over in Asia? To come home and play the fool for these old farts?”