Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  With the completion of the cross-Florida highway, modern times thundered right past Everglades City, down there in the mangroves eight miles off the Trail, and this community died back down to nothing. In the Depression, the Collier Corporation dumped its brave new county back on the federal government, and as usual, the taxpayers picked up the bill. Some of it was set aside as the Big Cypress preserve, and the rest would be called the Everglades National Park. The Park dedication in 1947 was the first ceremony of significance ever held in this Collier County Courthouse, and the last one, too, because the county seat was moved to Naples.

  They contemplated the white courthouse on the empty circle, the sterile facade set about with planted palms. They recalled the brass band and the flags and windy speeches, and also the stony grief of the Mikasuki—the ragtag “Cypress Indians”—who stood off to one side, watching the Muskogee Creeks in their bright-striped blouses who stood beside the white people hailing the new Park. These government-sponsored “Seminoles,” who had never inhabited these southern Glades, ignored the silent witness of the Mikasuki, who long ago had withdrawn into the Grassy Waters, Pa-hay-okee, still undefeated by the U.S. Army, only to be vanquished by bureaucrats a century later. Excluded from their hunting and fishing grounds around Shark River, they camped like refugees on the north boundary of the Park, along the canal banks of the Trail. The president of the United States was declaring the new park a grand beginning, but for the silent Mikasuki, this great day was the beginning of the End.

  Lucius never forgot the bitterness in those black eyes, tight as currants stuck into brown dough. One big strong Indian had drunk too much and fallen off the bridge before he had hardly set out on his long walk home, and Lucius and Hoad had waded in and dragged him out. This man was said to be descended on his mother’s side from the “Big People”—the vanished Calusa, later called Spanish Indians, because a few found refuge with the Spaniards in Cuba. This despairing man was in spiritual training, and not long thereafter he had disappeared, taking along the sacred Green Corn Bundle. What became of him the Mikasuki did not know, they only knew that without the sacred bundle, the old ways must wither. The story was that he had gone to Oklahoma in search of the Creek Nation elders, whose counsel might teach him how to help his people find their way in a time of change and terrible desecration of the Mother Earth. Not until some years had passed had the man returned with the sacred bundle, and not until this moment—he recalled that dim sense of recognition at Caxambas—did Lucius realize with a start that the Indian could only have been Billie Jimmie.

  “Billie Jimmie. Yep. That was him,” Hoad agreed.

  The Miami Herald had sent a reporter to the Park ceremony. Inevitably, she had dragged Lucius’s father into her article, reporting that he was still “a touchy subject.” Lucius quoted from memory: “If everybody who says he shot Watson actually shot him, the dock must have been a frightful mess.” This reporter would write a fine book about the Everglades in which E. J. Watson was awarded three whole pages, including the misinformation that Watson shot and wounded C. G. McKinney (who had not been present), and was thereupon killed by a white fisherman, Luke Short.

  “So that’s where Ol’ Luke came from!” Hoad cried, remembering the query from the Naples audience. “Luke Short! He on your list?” The old friends laughed.

  At the bridge, they circled back downriver, passing the fish houses and the stone crab and mullet boats along the docks and the stacked crab pots, gray-green with dried algae. It was near twilight. A few old cars came and went.

  “Uncle George was Justice of the Peace when he sold out to Barron Collier, so he was made the first county judge there at the courthouse. Funny thing was, the two cases that most interested him never came to trial. The first one was the Watson case—was Watson lynched?—and the second was the mystery of those two young Hardens who disappeared in the late twenties down around Shark River.”

  Lucius nodded, “One was Roark, Whidden’s older brother. Roark and his cousin were murdered.”

  “That so, Lucius? It’s like the Watson case—depends on who you talk to. Suspicious circumstances, Uncle George called it. Maybe those boys had it coming, maybe not.”

  Lucius changed the subject. “Lots of For Sale signs around here. Looks like too many houses up for sale and too few takers.”

  “Naturally. The place is dead. Only reason I come back here is because I’m homesick, but I sure don’t care much for this ‘Everglades City.’ Can’t hardly find old Everglade no more, can’t hardly make head or tail of the whole place. Big trees gone, old houses, too, got all these power lines and trailer homes and plywood houses that look more like chicken coops. Instead of citrus, bougainvillea, they pave the whole yard, nothing but driveway. Brick barbecues, y’know, and tin flamingos. Got their plastic boat parked on the concrete alongside the car.

  “Can’t hardly tell boats from cars no more, with all the shine and chrome. And the noise of them big outboards—Lord! Scaring the last fish out of the bays! Hit the throttle when they hit the water, take off howling, throw up waves that bash our old wood boats against the bulkheads. No experience of fish or tides or weather, no knowledge of the backcountry, no idea where in heck they might be headed for, let alone why, just roaring around bouncing off each other’s wakes like damn fool chickens with their heads cut off!”

  Stopping to get a breath, Hoad glared at Lucius, poking his stick at the insolent hard weeds that pushed through big cracks in the broken sidewalk. “Even this darn weed only come here lately!” He smiled unwillingly. “Well, dammit, Lucius, a man’s boat has no business in his yard! That ain’t Everglade! Might be Everglades City but it sure ain’t Everglade! That Yankee never done this place one bit of good!”

  Hoad stopped waving his thin arms and resumed walking. “Lord!” he groaned, disgusted with himself. “No wonder people hate crabby old men! I can’t live with what I’m turning into! Heck, my family got nothing to complain about—I know that. Storters sold our old home place, so it’s our own darn fault! Sold out our paradise for paper money—not greenbacks even, just numbers in the bank that only exist in thin air! Traded in our fine old home for a pink ranchette on a grid street in a new subdivision on a hot bare stretch of bulldozed scrub inland. The same thing Andy done! Big show window with a ugly view of the same darn ugly thing cropping up next door!”

  He frowned and smiled at the same time, trying to air out his dyspeptic humor. “Ranchettes sure ain’t much to leave your grandchildren. They sure ain’t nothing much at all when you go comparing ’em to the wood homes we used to have here on this good old river. The mullets jumping and the pelicans, and all that good ol’ family living that we lost.”

  He paused again to stare balefully at Lucius, who could think of no way to console him. Torn and incomplete, the two old friends stood ruminating in the dusk. At the end of every street, the encircling green mangroves lay in wait, as if this dense forbidding growth might come in after dark to smother the small town, returning the former Haiti Potato Creek to coastal jungle. “Our family had our good out of this place, and we never came back,” Hoad Storter said. “My dad died the year the Park came in—good thing for him!—and my brother Claude’s gone, too. That sign might still say Storter Avenue, but there aren’t too many living there today who would even remember who the Storters were.”

  Taking cold bottles of beer, they sat on crab pots on the dock, looking out across the tidal river, where the sun falling to the Gulf out to the westward was firing the highest leaves on the mangrove wall. When darkness came, they went up onto the hotel porch, where Andy joined them for a stone crab supper. There was still no word from Rob or Dyer, and in the absence of word about his brother, the talk made Lucius unbearably restless. He said good night and went into the bar, which was almost empty.

  Sally Brown lay drunk and half-reclined across a tiny table. She must have heard some rumor about Lucy Summerlin, for she was regaling the barman in her local dialect about “Ol’ Colonel” and his “wid
der woman.”

  “Now this here widder woman’s friend run and told the widder, says, ‘Guess who I seen only this minute, down to the Jif-Quik Convenience Store! Your ol’ schooldays sweetheart Mr. Lucius H. Watson, buyin hisself a six-pack of Ol’ Fishhead Beer! He come a-slippin through the vestee-bule as I was leavin!’ So that ol’ widder jumps into her finery and runs down to the Jif-Quik for a look! Sure enough, there’s good ol’ Colonel, homin right in on the chunky peanut butter plus the high-grade cat food that’s one hundred percent certified safe to eat by senior citizens!

  “Well, that smart widder props her hair up, dabs her lips, and comes sailin right on down the aisle, big bosom first, she plows smack into him. Pops her big eyes open wide and hollers, ‘Oh my goodness!’ like this Mr. Lucius Watson were some kind of a visitation that the Merciful Lord sent down to that convenience store. She went all soft, fell up against him bosom first, till he had to grab her to keep her from swoonin dead away and bringin down a few racks of comestibles right along with her. When she come to in his manly arms, she batted her eyes like just the cutest l’il girl and sighed and thanked him ever so sweet for savin her pore life, and when she recovered, which she done real quick, she struck up some of that snappy conversation she is knowed for. Well, poor ol’ Mr. Lucius Watson—who might not of talked to nothin but stray dogs for a month of Sundays—poor ol’ Lucius never knew what hit him. Next thing he knew, she had him wrapped up like a ham, ready to take home and eat for dinner!”

  Hearing Lucius laugh, Sally whirled and glared, embarrassed but too dazed to be apologetic. As he came forward, she sat up straight and crossed her legs and produced a sort of smile but did not ask him to sit down and have a drink with her. “Don’t tell Whidden, for Christ’s sake,” she said. She lit a cigarette, her crossed leg twitching like the stiff tail of a cat, eyes looking past him toward the door. “You see Mr. House out on the porch? He’s waiting for you.” Then Crockett Junior filled the doorway, and she closed her eyes and groaned and said, “Oh boy.” She blew her cigarette smoke from her mouth, watched it disperse.

  On his way out, Lucius told Crockett that if Rob Watson failed to show up by tomorrow, he would call the Sheriff and report a kidnapping. “Call him, then,” said the one-armed man and shouldered him aside. He crossed the room and yanked out the other chair at Sally’s table, shouting roughly at Lucius that somebody was expecting him at the front door.

  The black car had its motor running, and the passenger door swung open when Lucius appeared. They drove in silence down along the riverfront, under the moon. Where the tidal river widened near its mouth, Dyer swerved and stopped with a hard yank, so close to the bulkhead that the large eagle ornament on the front of the car hood stuck out over the water. He did not turn the motor off and he left the car in gear, foot on the clutch. Fists clamped on the top rim of the steering wheel, he confronted the wide portal in the mangroves where the river opened out onto the Bay.

  Beyond the portal, a moon-spun silver tide hurried west between pale spoil banks of the channel to Indian Key Pass and the barrier islands on the Gulf horizon. He’s looking right at everything and he sees nothing, Lucius thought. This strange brother of his, staring right at it, had never seen that brilliant tide in all his life. And he had to wonder if their father had seen it, either.

  “I guess you know that crazy old man tried to shoot me,” Dyer said at last.

  “Shoot out your car tires, you mean? How can you be certain it was Rob when so many others seem to have it in for you?”

  “Brother Lucius,” Dyer pronounced slowly, still facing straight ahead. In the glare of the old streetlamps, his face was a fungus white. “Brother Lucius knows about my tires. Brother Lucius knows all about that shooting.” Dyer turned to look at him. “You knew Robert Watson was armed and dangerous. You didn’t warn me.”

  “Old and harmless, you mean.”

  “Aiding and abetting in a double murder? No jury in this state is going to call that ‘harmless’!”

  So Dyer had seen that packet in Rob’s satchel, or had heard about it, probably from Crockett Junior. Lucius said carefully, “Even if Rob happened to be present, whatever occurred took place more than fifty years ago, and nobody can show what preceded it—what caused it.”

  “You know what I’m referring to, I see. And probably you also know that there’s no statute of limitations on first-degree murder.”

  “Nobody was ever charged with murder. That case was never on the books. No hearing, no indictment, and no evidence.”

  “You’ve read the written statement? The confession?”

  “Yes,” he lied, feeling all twisted. Perhaps he did not want to read Rob’s statement (though it had his name on it). Why read the thing? He saw no point in it. Even if Rob had his facts straight about the Tucker case, it might only mean that Papa had lost his senses on that one occasion—temporary insanity or something. One could scarcely dismiss his whole career on the basis of one aberrant episode!

  Dyer’s bloodless hands clenched the top rim of the steering wheel, as if, at any moment, he might release the clutch and let the car lurch off the bulkhead into the channel. He was relating in his courtroom tone that the police had found a cartridge casing “consistent with” the slugs taken from Dyer’s tires. That evidence cast strong suspicion on Robert Watson, but probably insufficient to convict, without the weapon. “There’s other evidence, of course. The suspect’s brother Lucius had pointed the finger at Robert Watson at a public meeting in Naples before a hundred witnesses. It’s on the record. However,” Dyer added coolly, turning to Lucius, “we might not use your … testimony? … unless we had to, since drawing attention to the Tucker case could be counterproductive in our effort to rehabilitate your father.”

  “Our father, you mean.”

  “There you go again.” Watt Dyer’s eyes closed in his slow tortoise blink. Otherwise his face showed no expression, only that queer shivering of skin above his lip. Slowly he looked back along the riverfront toward the hotel, then gazed fixedly again at the night river. There was no one in the street, and only Crockett Junior, Lucius realized with a start, knew where he’d gone. But for the moment, Lucius was much more concerned about the purring motor, still in gear—he shifted a little in his seat, opened his door a little.

  Dyer noted this. He said, “At any rate, we now have the revolver. If Robert Watson is turned over to the law, he returns to prison automatically as an escaped felon. If I turn the weapon over to the police, the ballistics tests will show that Robert Watson was guilty of attempted murder. He will be sentenced with due consideration of his prior record and will finish out his life in federal prison.”

  He drew a power-of-attorney form out of his briefcase. “On the other hand, if you people cooperate, the gun will be returned. That eliminates the ballistics evidence, without which there can be no case, even if I press charges, which I won’t.”

  “And the so-called confession?”

  “You can have that, too.”

  “How can I be certain you will keep your word? What if I refused to sign until this so-called evidence was returned?”

  “In that case, you will certainly delay—and jeopardize—the Watson Claim. Meanwhile you will endanger your brother and ensure my ill will, which as your attorney I do not recommend.” Dyer almost smiled. “You might as well cooperate, since you have no choice.”

  “And if I do sign, then you will release him?”

  “I haven’t got him. But if the men who have him know you are cooperating—”

  Lucius took the form, scribbled a signature, and sat back, strangely out of breath.

  Dyer snapped on the car light and put the document into his briefcase. He withdrew a clipping and read aloud from a newspaper feature about “Emperor Watson’s” frontier house on a “lost” Indian mound in a remote region of the Park where “most authorities agreed” that the legendary Fountain of Youth had been located, where Ponce de León had been slain by the Calusa, where the giant Chief Cheka
ika (who massacred the whites at Indian Key back in 1842 and was later caught and hanged on a Glades hammock by the noted Indian fighter General William Harney) had made his hideout—“This is all nonsense!” Lucius protested—and where the pioneer planter E. J. Watson had first developed the fine strain of Cuban sugarcane that seeded the vast agricultural empire at Okeechobee which helped put the sovereign state of Florida where it was today.

  Dyer thrust the clipping at him and he scanned it quickly. Quoted throughout was the well-known Miami attorney Watson Dyer, who had lately obtained a temporary injunction against the proposed burning of the house, citing the unextinguished land claim of the Watson heirs. According to the article, the Park was contesting the injunction on the grounds that any land claim E. J. Watson might have made was no longer valid, and that the historic traditions being ascribed to this site were “unproven or demonstrably untrue.” Nevertheless, attorney Dyer had expressed full confidence in the claim, which was supported by an amici curiae motion from several esteemed colleagues of the presiding judge. Leading businessmen and political figures in the state had interested themselves in the case and stood ready to endorse the Watson claim, attorney Dyer asserted.

  Unless the taxpayers protested the senseless burning of the Watson Place, the article concluded, what Mr. Dyer termed “the only tourist attraction in the whole Park” would be destroyed by the same technocratic lack of vision that was already obliterating the wildlife of the Everglades and the world-famous marine fisheries in surrounding waters. In that event, the journalist suggested, it was time to recommend that this tragically degraded region should be taken away from a remote and foolish federal bureaucracy and restored to the people of Florida before its utter destruction was complete.

  “How’s that?” Dyer grinned with satisfaction. Nevertheless, he had wanted to make sure that the Watson Claim was unassailable, that it would be sustained by the court in perpetuity. A preexisting building helped the claim, he said, because without the house, there was no historic monument. Since any man-made structure within Park boundaries could never be repaired or replaced, and because Park land could not be used for private purposes, the loss of the house might weaken the whole claim by making it appear frivolous, in fact pointless.