Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  “But my old man and his kind, they aren’t poor white trash, the way people say. They are rich white trash who aim to live in the same poor-white-trash way their daddies did. Those shacks might look like they’re ready to fall down, but the occupants are in there sitting on big bank accounts from gator hides, guns, moonshine, God knows what. You fight your way through the tin door of that li’l doodad trailer over there, you’d be blasted back out by a new TV the size and voltage of the electric chair up there at Raiford, spang in the middle of their six-pack redneck mess!”

  When disgusted, Sally dropped her educated accents and spoke with a harsh and grotesque humor which (though he knew better than to mention it) reminded Lucius of her rich-white-trash daddy. She stared out of the car window like something trapped.

  “Whidden Harden married me because I had some spirit. My batteries weren’t dead the way they are in most of the worn-out females around here.” She tossed her chin at the dilapidated houses. “And he married me because I felt ashamed about the way the Hardens had been treated, and because he hoped our marriage might help heal the feud between our families.”

  Lucius glanced back at Andy, who had closed his eyes.

  “Yes, the feud! Are you two going to pretend you don’t remember how my damned uncles murdered those young Hardens at Shark River?”

  Andy House opened his eyes again. “That was back there in the Fish Wars, Sally. Very hard times and hard feelins. Them young Carr boys lost their heads. That don’t mean there ain’t plenty of fine men in your family. I’ve known ’em since I was a boy, and most of ’em are First Florida Baptists who don’t touch a drop—honest, self-respectin folks who are trying to get by best way they can, same as they always done. Most of ’em ain’t smugglers nor ‘rich white trash,’ neither. They are poor people. And they are poor because this is a fishing village where the fishing has died out and the huntin along with it, and even tourists stay away because there ain’t no bathing beaches back here in the mangroves, not even a Gulf breeze, only mosquitoes.

  “So men gets desperate to support their families, and some of ’em turn to night trades like their daddies done, and their granddaddies, too. This town is getting a rough reputation, cause moonshiners and smugglers don’t like outsiders. Honest citizens who got lawbreakers in the family don’t like ’em neither, so why would any visitors want to come here, let alone come back?”

  “Mr. House, your dad left the Bay when you were still a boy, and most of the other Houses are gone, too!” Sally cried shrilly. “Gone to someplace civilized like Naples or Fort Myers where there’s something to do after supper besides screw your sister! Something besides high-school basketball and church bingo, is what I mean!” she finished desperately, raising her hands up to her face. The break and tearing in her voice startled them more than what she’d said, and all three fell quiet, not knowing what to say.

  In midafternoon there was no one in the street, and no car moving, only a dusty road-gang truck manned by a plier-faced guard whose sunglasses twitched in their direction like the hard eyes of a fly. Two black convicts and two white ones, in juxtaposed pairs, stood on the truck bed. The young whites swayed recklessly in the center of the bed, thumbs hooked in the hip pockets of their jeans, while the two blacks, indifferent, maintained easy balance with one fingertip each on the high side boards. When Sally Brown looked out her window, the black convicts looked past her, while the white boys cocked their pelvises and whistled.

  She gazed about her at the empty streets. “Great to be back home,” she said, “if you like home.” She was watching the black pickup truck, which came up from behind and slowed, then rumbled past, leaving a loud wake of country music.

  The huge mahogany that had volunteered along the Haiti Potato River in the nineteenth century still guarded the old Storter trading post, now the hotel. The rambling white building was the last of the Old Everglade that Lucius had known at the turn of the century when he came from Chatham River to board with the Storter family during school days. Here they left Andy, who hoped to find Hoad Storter. “Don’t have to walk me,” he protested at the door. “My old shoes still know where to go.”

  Sally Brown would stay with Sandy Albritton, one of the last old-timers who had actually witnessed the shooting of Ed Watson. The Albrittons lived at Half Way Creek, an old Bay settlement east of the new causeway built in recent years to connect Chokoloskee Island to the mainland. In front of the house was an old sign reading COLD BEER AND BAIT. A faded mullet boat was up on blocks in Sandy’s yard, and beside it sat an ancient coupe whose paint had been beaten to a grainy brown by years of sun and rain. The front porch screen was diaphanous with rust, and the porch space overflowed with yellowed newspapers and assorted litter.

  A woman with gray-streaked raven hair down to her hips and a prominent mole under her left eye appeared at the front door in a mauve bathrobe. “That you, Sally? Don’t know no better than to come in at the front? Who’s that old feller fetchin your valise? You got you some kind of a sugar daddy or somethin?”

  Annie Albritton waggled her fingers at Lucius Watson from behind the screen. “Only foolin, Colonel, darlin!” she said coyly. “I knew that you was who you was soon as I seen you!”

  “Cousin Sally,” came an old man’s voice. “That purty little gal and me is kissin cousins.”

  “Maybe she don’t admit to it,” said Annie, unhooking the screen and waving them inside. “What y’all waitin on? You like miskeeters?”

  Sandy Albritton said, “Colonel? Is that really you? We heard you was here some place but we never believed it!” The two men exchanged a bony handshake. “I knowed this feller from way back when we called him Lucius! We used to visit at the Bend, see Mr. Watson’s trained-up pig by the name of Betsy! Ain’t that somethin?” He stood back a little, hands resting on Lucius’s shoulders. “Well, time ain’t been kind to you, it sure ain’t, but you look better’n me, I will say that!”

  Sandy Albritton was frail and pale-haired, with hard drink marks. His wife was younger, a whiskey-voiced wild swamp darling of yore gone slack and rueful but still itched by her old demons. She jumped right in, beating her husband to their common memories.

  “Well now, let me think back. After 1910, the Willie Browns who were my Brown cousins—Sally here don’t think too much of ’em, but I enjoyed ’em—they got the quitclaim to the Watson Place, cause they was very best of friends to Mr. Watson. Us kids got to visit Chatham every summer! I recall one time we come in without warning, scared poor Aunt Fanny so darn bad she dropped a whole pot of fresh milk. She said her nerves was shot to hell around that place, cause she expected Leslie Cox at any minute! Us little girls was always scared down there, wanted to sleep in bed between the bigger kids. The boys wanted us in there, too, but their reasons was different, if you get my meanin.” Pinning her hair with a rhinestone barrette in the form of a red-eyed alligator, she winked at Sally. “Nosir, they never got the blood up off that floor.”

  Sandy said, “She ain’t even from here. She’s one of them damn Lowes from Marco. I don’t believe she ever went to Chatham in her life.” He glared balefully at his wife. “So I can’t figure your damn story out too good.”

  Sally asked, “Has he always been as rude as that?”

  “You know why I’m rude.” Sandy’s sneer expressed the sincere disgust in which decent men viewed the deceits of women.

  Annie shook her head. “He was all lovey-dovey when I married him. He was after young meat, that dirty feller. I didn’t know what I was in for, marryin a fisherman. Up at three A.M. to get his breakfast for him, that was the worst part, and even at three A.M. he was all over me—”

  “She’s still doin it,” Sandy confided to Lucius. “Makin my breakfast, I mean.” He contemplated his wife with mixed emotions. “Before she got so fat she looked all right—hard to believe that, ain’t it? I don’t guess nobody would have her now,” he added gloomily.

  Holding Lucius’s attention, Annie waved him off. “The days I’m talk
in about, o’ course, was when Walker Carr was on Chatham Bend in the Depression. His boys was all after me—”

  “Listen to that! Them Carr boys wasn’t after you, they was after Edie Harden, same as I was!”

  “Now in them times,” his wife persisted, “there was still a lot of Injuns coming into Chokoloskee, used to set around that great big pot of sofkee grits, pass the wood spoon. The women had their babies under Smallwood’s store, they’d go out in the water to wash off—I seen that a time or two myself. My husband here—he married me when I turned thirteen, filthy old feller—he used to sell moonshine to the Injuns, then go drink with ’em till he got back most of what he sold!”

  She gazed at Sandy, who gazed right back with the same rancorous affection. “I think you was a drunk,” she said. “You used to scare me. His best friend was the medicine man, ol’ Doctor Tiger, remember, Colonel? Still wore that old-time Injun skirt and neckerchief and blouse, and Injun turban?”

  “When he got drunk, Doc Tiger used to hint how he knew what become of Leslie Cox.” Sandy Albritton coughed up some catarrh. “I seen that feller Cox a time or two, so I was fixin to ask Doc Tiger all about it, but that ol’ Injun’s secret went down with him, if he ever had one.”

  “Oh my, them were the days! That night this old man settin here, he was so darn drunk he was snowed under, and Doc Tiger right along with him. That ol’ heathen was down to just a-mumblin. Sandy jumped up hollerin how that mumblin must mean that Doc Tiger wanted to head home, so we pushed him off in his dugout, aimed him east. Might of pushed too hard, cause darn if that ol’ dugout don’t turn turtle! First time we ever seen a Injun so drunk he capsized his dugout! We kept an eye peeled for a while, but nope, there weren’t no sign of him. That old medicine man weren’t nowheres to be seen, just his poor dog swimmin round and round, barkin, you know.” Annie chuckled at the memory, shaking her head.

  “I think we drowned him,” her husband agreed. “That old redskin was never laid eyes upon again.” Lucius searched their faces for some sign of irony or regret and felt a little chill when he found nothing. “Them were the days, all right,” Annie repeated.

  “Now them old-time Injuns,” she said, “they wasn’t just dirty redskins, they was our friends. Them days we didn’t have nothing but a skiff and a set of oars. This old man here would take me coon hunting down around Chevelier Bay, go up them creeks. Prettiest sight in all the world, to see them Injuns setting quiet around their fire, and the firelight glinting off them beads that their women wore in stacks around their necks.” Her fingers played a little at her throat. “My life with the Injuns was the most beautiful time of my whole life. If I tried till doomsday I could never tell you how beautiful it was or what it meant to me.” She looked momentarily confused. “Even I don’t hardly know what all it meant to me, I only know it tore me up and broke my heart.”

  “Well, she had me tore up a good while before that, so she had it coming,” her husband said, sour again.

  Annie ignored him, still thinking about Indians. Her face, which had been close to tears, turned sullen. “Colonel? You been up on the Trail lately?” she said accusingly. “You seen them faked-up Injun villages they got there for the tourists? Rasslin alligators? Genuine-type Injun jewelry from Hong Kong and New Jersey? Well, them people ain’t beautiful no more! They ain’t even real Injuns no more, and that’s the truth!”

  During their visit the phone rang twice, and Annie Albritton’s response made clear that these callers wished to know exactly what their visitor was up to.

  “Why he ain’t no such of a thing! Just asking a few questions, is all. What? Not nosy questions! Asking about his daddy, s’all it is. Old-timey things! What’s that? Course I’ll be careful!” She listened a moment, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. “You ain’t workin for the federal gov’ment, are you?”

  “You’ve been spotted for a fed,” Sally whispered, gleeful.

  Sandy frowned and muttered. The feds were not a joke. “Way them boys figure, you might be informin. Revengin on your daddy that way,” Sandy said.

  Annie put down the phone with care and picked her way like a sick cat back to her place. The little house had fallen silent, all but the relentless tick-tack-ticking of that rickety alarm clock in the kitchen that seemed to be dogging Lucius’s steps all over Florida. The Albrittons stared imploringly at Sally, who was enjoying the whole business and perversely refused to clarify the atmosphere.

  Annie hummed a little, kicked the bent dog away—“Spot’s just the lovinest dawg!” Settled down again, she marveled, “Colonel Watson!” and hummed a little more. “I like to eat good, don’t you, Colonel? That’s all us old folks can still do, so we might’s well do it good.”

  “I been thinkin I’ll prob’ly take up sex again,” her husband said.

  “Now Lucius Watson was a fisherman for years,” Annie told Sally in a dreamy voice. She glanced at Lucius slyly, humming a bit more. “It was only later on they called him Colonel. I was scared of him because he was exactly like my daddy said his daddy was—bow to you, wouldn’t let you pay for nothing, too goody-goody altogether. One time he bought me a ice cream, I weren’t but fourteen-fifteen years of age. Bought my husband here a beer while he was at it. Oh, Colonel was always so polite, like his daddy before him; do anything you want, then he might kill you. Colonel Watson’s manners, they was just upstanding.”

  Her husband ignored her. “I got bunions, do you?” he said to Lucius. “Want to see ’em? Worstest thing I ever got, and I had plenty.”

  “My dad said he was always scared of Mr. Watson, said they all were. They knew a desperado like Ed Watson would never let himself be taken, never had and never would, so every man on that landing knew what was coming. When E. J. Watson swung that gun up, them men froze.”

  “Colonel come here to find out about his daddy, and all you want to talk about is your old man, who was over to Marco and weren’t nothin much to talk about in the first place!”

  “So anyways”—Annie rolled her eyes—“Mr. Colonel Watson made him up a list of all them men.” She gave Lucius a crafty look. “Colonel? Where d’you suppose that list of yours has got to?”

  “Hardly anybody on that list is still alive,” Lucius said casually. The very mention of the list made him feel weary. “Anyway, it never meant much. Kind of a hobby.”

  Sandy Albritton looked skeptical and somber. “The sons are still around, and grandsons, too. Man lookin for revenge would not have to hunt far to find a target, especially a man who shoots like you done, man and boy—”

  “He’s not looking for revenge,” Sally declared in a firm voice. She had been smiling at Lucius’s discomfiture, but now she saw that the atmosphere was shifting and that the Albrittons, infected by small-town paranoia, were growing uneasy and afraid. “We had one of the sons in the car with us all morning, and if Mister Colonel wanted his revenge, Andy House was probably the one to start with.”

  “Hell, I trust Colonel and I always did.” Sandy got to his feet, motioning to his old friend to follow him outside. “That woman don’t know nothin about E. J. Watson,” Sandy told him, plenty loud enough for his wife to hear. The screen door banged behind them. He led the way down the rain-greened rotten steps and crept into the colorless old car, where he cranked the windows tight against mosquitoes. “My office,” he explained. In the stifling heat, through the cracked windshield flecked with broken insects, he glowered at the hulk of his rotting boat. “A man don’t need no aggravation whilst he’s talkin, that is all I’m sayin.”

  Old Man Sandy scrunched down in the seat, hiked his knees high as his nose, swung his black shoes onto the dashboard, and recited his eyewitness impressions of Mr. Watson’s death. When he was finished, he turned his head to see how his friend had taken it. When Lucius asked calmly if the men had planned it, Sandy gave no sign that he had heard this question, gazing out past his old mullet boat toward Half Way Creek.

  Eventually he said, “That feller who rung my telephone just a while
back? Crockett Junior.” Again he turned his head to peer at Lucius, to see how much he knew. “And that woman settin in my house is his damn mother. Sally tell you?”

  Lucius was astonished. “Annie?”

  “Annie. Yessir. That’s her name, all right.” He rolled down the window, spat, rolled it up tight again. “Life is a bitch, now ain’t it?”

  “Sally has never said a word. I even forgot until just lately that Speck Daniels was her father—”

  Sandy Albritton held up his hand. “Nobody mentions that name without my permission!” He worked up more phlegm and spat it forcefully out of the window, remaining silent until satisfied that Colonel Watson was ready to hear his story without interrupting.

  “Back in the Depression-time, we was pret’ near starvin around here, so me’n a couple of other boys, we took and killed a steer to feed our families. We was turned in, turned over to the law, and me and them other boys, we done a year at Raiford on the chain gang.”

  “I remember something about that,” Lucius said.

  “Well, you don’t remember what I aim to tell you, cause you never knowed about it, nor me neither. The baby boy that welcomed his daddy home from Raiford was still all red and wrinkled, hot out of the oven. But the mother told me, ‘No, no, honey! He is goin on three months of age, he was born just nine months to the day after our sweet partin!’ I was fixin to name the little feller Crockett Albritton after Speck, cause Speck was my best friend since we was boys, and he’d promised to look out for Annie while I was away. But my wife said, ‘No, no, honey!’ Said this baby boy was a chip off the ol’ block and she wanted his name to remind her of her darlin! Said her lovin heart was dead set on the name of Sandy Junior.