Lost Man's River (110 page)

A man came in out of the fire mist, crossing the shadow land of the killed woods. He drifted, disappeared, and came again through smoke and blackened thorn, moving from willow clump to bush like a panther traveling across open savanna.

Coming downriver from the inland passage, Crockett Senior Daniels had slipped ashore above the Bend and made his wary way in through the thickets. Now he straightened and came forward, and still he peered about him, trusting nothing. He said sharply, “Where the hell is Chicken?” They told him what had happened. Daniels cursed. When he turned slowly to contemplate the ruin, Lucius saw the stiffness in him, the old man. “Ol' Chicken,” Speck said. “Christ Almighty!” He did not seem very much relieved
that Addison Burdett had escaped death. He looked around him, arms folded on his chest, trying to take it in. “Ol' Chicken,” he repeated quietly. “I give him that name years ago when he first showed up at Gator Hook. Hopeless damn drunk, was all he was. Threw him out, then come across him a week later, holed up in a little chicken coop under the buildin!”

Speck groaned and muttered as his daughter watched him with something like concern. “Purty good old man,” Speck mourned. “Purty good friend of mine.” He raised his arms high and his hands wide, dropped them again.

He considered Lucius, not entirely without sympathy. “Poor ol' Colonel,” he said finally. “Stuck in the same ol' mud.” He jerked his grizzled chin toward the embers. “Even that old man layin in there understood the way things work better'n you.” After a while, he said, “Won't do no good to report 'em, case you're thinkin about it. Them people will only pump out more lies about the accidental death of a dangerous killer that throwed in with the Daniels gang.”

Speck listened for the helicopter, raising a hand every little while to still their voices. “I finally figured out what Dyer wants with Chatham Bend. Look at your charts! These forty acres we are standin on right here are the only good piece of high ground in the sixty miles of wild coast country between Chokoloskee and Cape Sable. All cleared off since Injun times for villages and fields. It ain't some swamp-and-overflowed that has to be drained and filled or even leveled. What's more, it ain't but a few miles crost the sloughs from the southwest corner of the old Chevelier Road. Pave that dirt road, build a couple of causeways crost them little shaller bays like they done at Chokoloskee, and there you are—the one place and the only place where a company could start right out with a land base for development that ain't goin to be wiped out by a hurricane. All they got to do is get the Park back! They do that, and right here where we are standin on could be the heart of the biggest damn development in Florida history. Regular West Coast Miami! Dig out the river mouths for harbors, dredge and fill—see what I'm gettin at? Today the Bend belongs to Parks and Watson Dyer can't do nothin with it, but tomorrow might be very, very different. That's what he's countin on. That is his big gamble. And his gamble is the best damn kind, cause it don't cost him nothin. His partners might not realize it yet, but the man who controls the Watson Place stands to make a fortune, and if it helps to be named Watson, he's nailed that down, too.”

They thought this over and they could not fault it.

“What if the Watsons contest him? I mean, real Watsons?”

“You think this Dyer ain't ‘real Watson,' Colonel? That was borned here
on the Bend, and you not even born in the state of Florida? Think them slick lawyers over to Miami won't cook up some bullshit argument out of that? Anyway, he's got the judges in his pocket. He don't need no ‘real Watsons' no more! You ain't goin to have one thing to say about this property!

“If I was you, I would walk away from it, drop the whole business. Just forget about it. You try involvin Watson Dyer in the death of that old man layin in them embers, know what he'll do? He'll put that killin on our Daniels bunch, get us charged with kidnappin and murder, maybe drag you into it for harborin known criminals—any ol' lie it takes to do the job. And they got the Sheriff and they got the judges and they will make it stick, cause with all the big money that's behind 'em, they ain't goin to tolerate no piss-ants such as us gettin in the way.

“Nosir, you ain't goin to stop a man like that. Have to shoot him if you aim to stop him.” Daniels licked his teeth. “If we was to take and shoot one of them big boys once in a while, when they push down too hard—that's about all fellers like us know how to do to make us feel better. They's plenty of good men out in the backcountry that holds to my way of thinkin, and we got us a few weapons put away. Get some fightin spirit goin in this country, we might get back the real America, y'know.”

But he lost heart in this. Asked why his men had not come back, Speck glanced upriver toward the east. “Cause they ain't as stupid as they look,” he snapped. “Least Junior ain't. Likely ducked into some hidey-hole in some li'l brushy creek until he's sure that fuckin helio-copter has gone for good. Only thing, the way that thing is circlin, it sounds to me like they got somethin pinned down. And they ain't but the one thing out there to pin down, and that's the airboat.”

He turned to Whidden. “You think that thing might of decoyed 'em out of hidin? Pretend to head home to the east coast, then circle wide and come in low behind 'em? Cause the noise of that chopper comin in could get drowned out by their own racket till it swooped down on top of 'em from behind.”

Harden nodded. “I been thinkin the same thing.”

“Lord,” Speck prayed, “don't let them morons get excited and start shootin.”

Circling restlessly, Daniels picked up a charred gator flat from the black earth and stood there slapping the hard scrap against his leg. “Damn stupid waste,” he said, tossing the scrap into the embers. Whidden said coldly, “Shootin so many when there weren't no market—that the waste you mean?”

His head slightly askance, Speck Daniels squinted at him. “You wasn't with us, boy? I could of swore you was in on all that gator huntin, right alongside of us.”

“I got regrets about it—that's the difference.”

“That's
one
difference.” Speck gazed at all of them, contemptuous. “I ain't ashamed of huntin in this Park and never will be. I'd shoot the whole damn mess of 'em again tomorrow if it weren't such a damn waste of ammunition.”

Speck yanked old leather gloves from the hip pocket of his jeans and set to work, heaving the last charred scraps of gator hide into the embers. He worked in silence, stopping every little while to listen. At one point he crouched a little, head cocked sideways, hand behind his ear, then stared bleakly at Harden. “You hear that? They called in reinforcements.”

“Them boys might be okay. They might be hid. Ain't nothing over that way but mangrove and water, there ain't no place to set them damn things down.” But Whidden's voice died as the distance broke apart in the popping roll of automatic weapons.

“
Shee
-it!” Speck yelled with all his might, slamming his parrot hat onto the ground, raising black dust. “If Junior is waitin on his old man to go over there and mix it up with two damn helio-copters, he better think again!” Already on his way upriver toward his boat, he turned and, walking backwards, howled at Whidden. “Don't you try follerin me, boy, cause I ain't goin! It won't do no good!”

Stiffly his daughter walked toward him, as if sleepwalking. He glared at her, furious, anticipating protest, and when she was silent, his thick brows shot up in surprise. She actually appeared to nod in acquiescence, although her face was so deathly calm as to seem utterly without expression. Uneasy, he dusted his parrot-feather hat. He paused another moment as they gazed at each other, holding the hat over his head like a poised lid. Then he ran his fingers through his hair and set the painted hat back on his head. “All right,” he muttered vaguely. Under his daughter's gaze, he looked spent and haggard, and perceiving the man's solitude and life fatigue, Lucius felt an unexpected start of pity.

Speck beckoned to him. They met halfway.

“Don't let him bring her, Colonel. She don't need to see nothin like that.” He sucked his teeth and spat, in greatest bitterness. “Unless them boys was very, very lucky, there ain't nothin left there but a bloody mess. Not only that, but them choppers will be back, so you people ain't goin to be no help, and you might get hurt.” Speck watched his daughter as he spoke. “Sally knows as good as I do where Junior was headed, ever since the first day he
come home. If it weren't today, it would of been tomorrow. Kind of like your daddy that way,” he added carelessly, peering bleakly at Lucius for the first time. “Speaking of which—”

From beneath his shirt, he dragged his string of thirty-three spent slugs, which he gathered up and tossed at the other's chest. “I reckon that belongs to ‘the real Watsons,' ” Daniels said, and turned, and kept on going.

By late afternoon, there was little left of the old Watson house except small cement pillars which had held the floor above the flood in time of hurricane. Levering away black timbers, burning the leather of their shoes, they uncovered the charred and twisted form, the crusted skull with the teeth stretched wide around the dying scream. They tugged it onto a soiled blanket from the boat. Soon Harden found the blackened revolver with the lone empty cartridge in the chamber. The fire had discharged the weapon, which lay yards from the body. It could not have killed him.

Getting his breath, Lucius leaned on the syrup vat, now a rusting vessel of dead rain and green algae and mosquito larvae. He thought about that scary day in the year after their arrival when Rob, in a fit of rebellious rage, had shot the family dog in a foolish accident, then fled from his own act, running round and round the house until Papa came out suddenly and intercepted him.

And he thought about Rob sailing away with Papa on the eve of Carrie's wedding to Walt Langford, loyal to the banished father whom he adored and hated even then, Rob's slim quick figure waving wildly from high on the schooner's mast, in silhouette on the Gulf sky. And dear kind Mama on her deathbed three years later, in the grip of cancer, in and out of coma, eyes dark with pain in her graying face, worried about the stepson who had fled. “Lucius honey,” she whispered, “Rob is wandering somewhere in the world, he is all alone. Oh, Rob has so much good in him! When you are older, you must find him, let him know we love him!” But he had not found Rob. Rob had found him.

As a sort of offering, Lucius brought the manuscript of the biography. Laying it in the embers, he watched the page corners turn brown and darken as his life's labor curled up into nothingness. He had not told the others. He supposed they understood what he was doing.

In a small grave spaded out between the two old poincianas by the river, they buried the scant remains in the stained blanket. Until he could return
here with a casket, he would defer his brother's wish to be buried in Columbia County, but he murmured the old hymn as Rob had wished.

They adorned the grave with crimson coral bean and scarlet poinciana, which reminded Sally of Rob's flagrant red bandanna. “What's the matter with me?” Sally sniffled, dabbing her eyes. “I hardly even knew that poor old man!” But of course she was mourning the lost brother, the long-lost lover, and refused to be comforted even—or especially—by Whidden. Nor had she cried out when shortly after her father's departure, the shooting stopped and the helicopters departed. “I could feel it coming,” she whispered intensely. “I could
feel
it.” After that, she would not speak and could not stop weeping. Even so, in a subdued way, she seemed at peace, and gentle and affectionate with everyone, even the blind man.