On the River Styx: And Other Stories

by Peter Matthiessen

  Because none of the mangrove islets had dry land, they went ashore at midday on one of the spoil banks of white marl and fossil shell along the channel to the open Gulf used by the fishing boats and a few private craft. Here Alice could stretch her legs a little, and go behind a bush. But the dry marl was baked hard, there was no place for her to sunbathe, and with Dickie nearby, sighing with hunger, they felt obliged to share both food and conversation.

  One day Burkett brought along their bottle of rum, to make the trip slightly more festive. Because it was awkward to exclude the guide, he ignored his wife’s raised eyebrows and offered Dickie a drink, well mixed with tonic. Dickie looked startled, but he did not turn it down. He even smiled after a pleasant interlude, asking Alice if he might listen through her earphones. Clearly she had mixed feelings about this, but she handed them over cheerfully enough, and Dickie enjoyed a little Mozart. He asked how much the tape player cost, and when she said uncomfortably, “Oh, a couple hundred dollars,” he gave in to an impending fit of nervous laughter. “You bes’ tip me good, ah gone get me one!” Exhilarated by the first social occasion they had enjoyed since they had arrived, Burkett included Dickie in a second round, which Alice refused to share.

  Dickie put down his empty glass, sighed, shook his head, and smiled. “You folks wants somethin in dis ol’ town, you jes’ ask Dickie,” he said, excited. “I de number-one cullud around here, de number-one.” Still smiling, he glanced from one to the other. Then—neither forthright nor furtive—his long hand slipped slowly as a snake into the basket and removed a sandwich. Having gone this far, he lost his nerve, and dared not eat in front of them. He cocked his head toward the rumble of a boat motor behind the islands, and on this pretext, swaying and laughing, moved away to do something with the skiff.

  Burkett was always aroused by rum and the smell of sunburn cream; he wanted to touch his wife. But Alice was intent on Dickie. Against the water shine that haloed his dark head, they could see the silhouette of earphones, as if he were tuned in to outer space.

  She shifted, restless, under his hand. “Listen, I love your idealism, and your curiosity and good intentions. I do. How else could I have married a damn bureaucrat?” She took his hand to soften what was coming. “But I think what you’re doing with Dickie is stupid as hell.” She waved away his protest. “You just don’t have to come on so hard as his white fishing buddy. I think you should stick to catching that weird snewk.”

  The wall of islands parted to release a broad white boat. High in the bow, with a deckhouse and a long low work deck, she threw a deep wake that struck the spoil banks of white shell on either side of the narrow channel. The wave carried outward, slapping noisily into the mangroves.

  Burkett watched the boat through binoculars. He grinned when he saw someone with binoculars observing him through the deckhouse window. The unused nets had a new linen color, and unlike other shrimp boats they had seen, this one seemed to ride too high out of the water. Burkett waved to a pale man in a black T-shirt who came out on deck. The man did not wave back, and Burkett jumped to grab the rum bottle and basket as the boat’s wake surged high onto the spoil bank, washing down again with a brittle tinkling of old shells.

  “Sonofabitch! No shrimps in that boat!” he cried out to the guide.

  Refloating the skiff, Dickie stared off in the wrong direction.

  “You see that?” Burkett demanded of his wife, who raised her eyebrows, gazing after the departing boat as if she had missed something. “See how clean she looks? That shrimper never carried shrimps, I’ll tell you that!”

  “You don’t know that. You just want to believe it because you’re my square darling and you’re a little drunk and it would make your vacation more exciting for some reason.”

  “Goddamnit, Alice, they run enough dope through this place to turn on the whole state—” He checked his outburst, seeing Dickie standing there holding the skiff. Angry, he said, “Goddamnit, Dickie, tell her what that boat is really used for!”

  The black man was silent for a moment.

  “Shrimp boat, suh.”

  “How come she rides so high out of the water? Pretty light cargo, wouldn’t you say? And how come she’s heading out so late in the day?”

  “New boat, suh. Jes’ checkin her out, what dey calls shakedown.” Dickie steadied the skiff as they got in. “Shrimps comes to de surface in de night. Fish dem at night.”

  Burkett winked at his drinking companion, but Dickie’s face had closed again, and his wife’s face was closed, too. He resented her superior attitude, but he also knew he had behaved stupidly, and he got into the skiff in a foul humor. In the afternoon sun, the rum had given him a headache. He prodded a mangrove snapper with a sneakered toe. The gray fish lay stiff on the skiff floorboards, mouth stretched painfully.

  The tide was low when they got back, and the dogs, old people, and children, moving out of the shadows of a giant banyan, stared straight down at the sun-parched foreigners with the red knees and comic hats. Every day this small convocation included old dock fishermen in tractor caps wearing bright white T-shirts under nylon shirts despite hot weather, and a washed-out child with one hand on a smaller brother and the other jammed between her legs.

  Rum-and-sun-struck, Burkett rose, spreading his hands for balance. The folks laughed. “Give you a hand, Dickie?” he said.

  “Nosuh.” Dickie braced the skiff and waited, averting his gaze from them as if ashamed. He seemed to efface himself against the bulkhead. The onlookers murmured when Burkett, helping his wife onto the dock, had to push her buttocks from below, exposing the painful red line between thigh and hip (“Beach or no beach,” she had said, “I’m not going home without a tan!”) and again when she clambered a little way on hands and knees before rising and turning, waiting for Dickie to hand up their gear. “Ahs got ’em,” Dickie said ungraciously. He had not offered to take their things the day before, and later they attributed his newfound manners to the presence of Judge Jim Whidden. Arms folded on his rolling chest, Judge Jim observed them from an overturned boat under the banyan.

  Whidden rose and tipped a pearl-gray hat. He was a fat man but not soft, with a strong face hard-packed in lard, and a twitch of humor.

  “You folks make out all right?”

  “No snook yet,” Burkett said. “Nice snappers, though.”

  “Why, that’s fine, Lawyer, that’s fine. We’ll fry ’em up for you this evenin.” Judge Jim beamed from one to the other. “Dickie take care of you good?” The man’s big voice carried easily to Dickie and the onlookers, and Burkett started down the dock, unable to focus or dispel his irritation and anxious to remove himself from the whole scene.

  “Oh, Dickie was fine!” Alice was saying, with the haunted look she always wore when she had to pee.

  Judge Jim caught Burkett’s elbow as he went past. “I told him take care of you folks good when you first come here. Ain’t a nigger in town knows them holes like Dickie there.” He gave Burkett a confiding wink. “Or Nigra, neither.” To the onlookers, he said heartily, “Got to take care of our tourists good, y’know, bein as how we ain’t got hardly any!” He patted Burkett’s shoulder, setting him free, in sign that this afternoon’s jokes and hospitality were at an end.

  Whidden’s tossed chins commanded Dickie to get these people’s stuff up to their cabin. Burkett thanked Dickie, who hurried past them. Aware of being watched, they walked up the street to the cabin on the white sand yard behind the “Whidden Building,” two stories of worn white clapboard that housed post office, the Judge’s office, and the kitchen, bar, and restaurant of the Calusa Motel.

  At the door of their cottage they were welcomed by the yard man, who presented them with the baskets left by Dickie. As far as the Burketts could determine, this small black Johnny in red sneakers had the only friendly face in town. “We gone fix dem snappuhs nice fo’ you! Dass right! In de ol’-time way.”

  Alice squirmed past and rushed into the bathroom, which had a hook lock, a pink plasti
c tub, and a wide gap under the door. When she emerged, poking her hair, the funny hat and the white paste were gone. “You’re getting a nice tan,” he said, to cheer her. Acting pleased, she raised her fingertips to her fiery brow, and touched by her gallantry, he said by way of apology, “I guess I thought there would be other people here, someone to talk to.”

  She nodded brightly, and he went into the bathroom, still fuzzy from the rum at noon. How sick he was of drinking rum from thin bathroom glasses, in the long evenings confined to this damn cabin! They couldn’t even sit outside because of all the holes in their porch screen, and nowhere else in town did they feel welcome.

  Poor old Fisher Woman, he thought, with a rush of affection. We’ll make love.

  She was sitting on the bed edge, the lunch basket in her lap, as if trying to remember something. She ignored his fingertips on her neck. “Dickie forgot to bring the rum,” she said. “It’s not in the basket.” Her voice had an edge, but she shrugged off his inquiry.

  “Hell, I’ll go get it,” he said, bothered, too.

  “Be careful,” she murmured unaccountably, following him out onto the porch, and he made a pantomime of fighting off giant mosquitoes, which did not amuse her. “I mean, don’t get him in trouble,” she called after him. He stopped.

  “Why not?” he said. He told her his new opinion of the guide, how much he disliked this sullen ungrateful man. Wasn’t it patronizing and hypocritical, wasn’t it reverse racism, to indulge a shifty-eyed sonofabitch like that just because he was black?

  He expected her to defend Dickie but she said quietly, “I don’t like him either. He’s sneaky and he’s aggressive. I’ve watched how he sucks up to Whidden and how he bullies that nice Johnny, and the old lady who cleans up. The man’s a fascist, or at least a shit.” When her husband laughed, she said, “But maybe we encouraged him or something, okay? So don’t get him in trouble.”

  He went down to check the boat, certain now that the search would be in vain. When he climbed back up onto the dock, a thin local man in a worn felt hat and white long-sleeved Sunday shirt buttoned at the neck was standing there under the banyan, hands in hip pockets. His flat gaze warned the stranger that he had his eye on him. Burkett almost explained what he was doing in the boat. Instead he said sharply, “Can I help you?”

  The man bared his upper teeth, to suck them. He watched Burkett go.

  Up the street, laughing and frowning simultaneously, Johnny agreed that it was a nice evening. He said he was waiting for his ride, that he did not know where Dickie was. His gaze darted up and down the street.

  It was near twilight, the mosquitoes were convening, and by the time Burkett reached the bar door of the café, he was running. He jumped through the screen door and yanked it shut.

  Without taking their eyes off Burkett, two men on the point of leaving moved back among the tables in the rear, feeling behind them for their chairs. They sank down slowly, watched him with the others, not with hostility or curiosity, but in the same relentless way they had watched the plastic colors of the TV screen over the bar.

  The front end of the bar was strewn with a litter of candy and cigarettes and peanuts, and the shot bottles were lined up on a shelf behind. A dark outline marked the former location of a mirror. On three unattached stools at the far end perched three old men in stained straw hats. They were drinking beer with an old woman who sat on a fourth stool behind the bar. Because the stranger appeared to be looking for somebody, she did not come forward, and Dickie, who was wiping off an empty table, refused to let Burkett catch his eye. Their eyes met for a single moment as, gathering up abandoned glasses, he drank one off defiantly between bar and kitchen. Then the door swung to behind him.

  Cocking his head to observe the stranger, one of the old men pushed his hat back. “Lemme have one of them beers,” he muttered. The old woman reached back into the cooler without turning around and fished him out a bottle, which he opened carefully with a knife. “I reckon this here is number eight.” The old man looked at the bottle with surprise, turning it slowly in his hand.

  The woman nodded. “Close onto it, anyways,” she grunted.

  Dickie did not reappear, and Burkett shifted from one foot to the other, intent on the old advertising cards for plug tobaccos.

  “I guess you know it ain’t me is gonna pay for it.” The old man worked the wet label from the bottle with his thumb, looking belligerent.

  “Judge Jim don’t give a good goddamn who pays. You talk to Jim.”

  “Why, goddamnit to hell, my boy takes care of me! Makes more than he know how to spend! He told me, ‘Pap, go drink it up, and welcome!’ ”

  She glanced at Burkett. “He’d tell you, ‘Pap, you shut up your fool mouth,’ if he was here.” She climbed off her stool and shuffled down the bar to Burkett, who realized that Dickie was not going to come back.

  “Yessir. Coffee? Black or integrated?”

  “Up north, them people like their coffee integrated,” one of the old men insisted when Burkett ignored the woman’s bait. “That’s what Judge Jim says.”

  “I’d like a bottle of rum, if that’s all right.”

  “All right by me, but we ain’t got none. Ain’t got but Seven Crown and John Begg, leastways in fifths.”

  “Seven Crown is fine.”

  The old woman raised her voice as a service to the customers. “What brand you folks use up there in Washington, D.C.?”

  To encourage his conversation, she sat down on the bar and folded her arms across an old blue dress. In the silence, he could hear the hum of flies against the ceiling.

  “I guess Mr. Whidden told you where we were from.”

  “Judge tole me hisself yest’day morning. That’s my boy, you know. Run this café for him.”

  “Well, well,” Burkett said. “So he’s a judge.”

  “Yep. Judge enough fer us.” She looked at him closely. “We ain’t got no federal men round here. Don’t have much call fer ’em.”

  He laughed. “I’m just a lawyer up there. Environmental lawyer.”

  “Ain’t got much law around here, neither.” This time she cackled, and the chairs shifted. “Judge Jim pretty well takes care of what law they is.”

  “I guess I’ll take that Seven Crown then, Mrs. Whidden.”

  “Your money, mister.”

  When she returned from the back room, the people watched Burkett take his change and the bottle of whiskey. “Don’t need no Seven-Up with your Seven Crown? We get a lot of call for Seven and Seven.”

  He shook his head. “Goodnight,” he said.

  “Come see us, hear?” She spoke over her shoulder.

  “WELCOME TO GLORIOUS Snook City!” To keep his spirits up, he gestured grandly through the skimpy curtains at the huge red sun in the black archipelago to westward and the long string of evening ibis, flapping and sailing down the sky. Opening the whiskey, he described his adventures to Alice, who was still distracted and did not laugh as he had hoped.

  “You’d think,” she said, “they’d have a nice saloon, to attract snewk-ers.”

  “They don’t want to attract snewk-ers, and guess why? Did you see Dickie’s face today when I pointed out that so-called shrimp boat?” Burkett poured himself a darker drink than usual and drank it with a loud gasp of relief.

  “Maybe that was just a shrimp boat. Maybe you should forget this whole drug business. What would they do to Dickie if they thought he told you?”

  “Hell, they’re not hiding it. I told you about that old guy in the bar.” Feeling irritable again, he rattled the ice in his thin glass. “Anyway, I thought you didn’t like him.”

  “I don’t,” she said, frowning at her drink. “But I’ve decided it’s societal conditioning. He’s been warped by heartless capitalist oppression.”

  He refilled his drink and gazed out at the sunset, sighing.

  “Stop stalling,” she said quietly, after a pause. “Did that Negro gentleman swipe our hootch, or didn’t he?”

  “We
have to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Okay. Because my tape recorder’s missing, too.”

  “You must have left it in the boat.”

  “You looked in the boat, remember?”

  “He couldn’t be that crazy, Alice! In this town?”

  “Maybe he didn’t steal it. He didn’t steal that sandwich, either. Maybe he just took it.”

  “I’m just not going to accuse him, that’s all!”

  “That’s the point right there. That’s what he knows.”

  “He couldn’t count on that. He wouldn’t chance it.”

  “A man might chance anything if he was angry enough. And drunk.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I believe he took my tape deck, isn’t that enough? And you do, too.”

  Burkett was silent. He thought about those people in the bar, and Dickie’s reckless rage, gulping that drink. He thought about the man in the white Sunday shirt, down by the boat. He thought of the big man in his pearl-gray fedora and the big damp patches under his arms. He told her he could not report the black man to Judge Whidden, but neither could he disregard the theft.

  “Why the hell not?” Alice said. In her outrage, she felt violated and seemed willing to do either one. “These rednecks like our money but they don’t like us, and boy, it’s mutual,” she said, voice rising. “I want to get out of this damned place!”

  NEXT MORNING, he was itchy-eyed from lack of sleep and felt disorganized and indecisive. “I just don’t think we can go around accusing people,” he complained.