Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  A dry mouth and stiff brain punished him for last night’s whiskey. Licking his lips and squinching his nose to bring life back to his numb skin, he rose softly and peered out through the screen, certain that some vehicle had come in from the paved road and eased to a stop inside the wood edge where the track emerged onto the marsh—the point from where the black hulk of his old cane barge, locked in the shining mud of the ebbed tide, would first loom into the view of whoever had come down along the creek on midnight business.

  For a time he saw nothing, heard nothing, only the small cries of earth that formed within the ringing of the great night silence. Tree frogs shrilled from the freshwater slough on the far side of the road, in counterpoint to the relentless nightsong—wip-wip-WEE-too—from the whiskery gape of the gray-brown mothlike bird half hidden by lichens on a dead limb at the swamp edge, cryptic and still as something decomposing.

  The Gulf moon carved the pale track and black trees. An intruder would make the last part of his approach on foot—there! A shape had detached itself from the tree shadows. An Indian. How he knew this he could not have said. The figure paused to look and listen then came on again, walking the sand track’s mane of grass in order to leave no sign.

  Lucius yanked pants and shirt onto his bony frame. Lifting the shotgun from its rack, he cracked the cabin door, wondering briefly (as he often did) why he would isolate himself way to hell and gone out on this salt creek without neighbor or telephone, or plumbing or electricity, for that matter. Yet simplicity contented him, simplicity was what he needed, as another might crave salt. A cracked cistern and a leaning outhouse near the burned-down shack on shore, a small woodstove and a storm lantern with asbestos filament. Once in a fortnight, he retrieved his negligible mail at Collier’s Marco Store, bought a few stores, then took a meal with a few speakeasy whiskeys at Rusty’s Roadhouse.

  Approaching the sheds, the intruder’s silhouette had stopped and turned in a slow half circle, sifting night sounds like an owl before passing behind the outhouse and old boat hull and pausing again at the foot of the spindly walkway over the salt grass. Then he came along the walkway, gliding out over the bog, in silhouette on the cold shine of moonlit mud. Whatever he carried on one arm was glinting.

  Breaking the shotgun, Lucius dropped two buckshot loads into the chambers, snapped it to. Though the click of steel was perhaps thirty yards away, the Indian stopped short, his free hand rising in slow supplication. He stared at the black crack of the opened door. Very slowly then, he bent his knees and set his burden down on the split slats with a certain ceremony, as if it were fragile or sacred. When he straightened, his hands were held out to the side, pocked face expressionless. “Rural free delivery,” he told the door crack, trying a smile.

  Under the moon, the canister appeared to pulse. Widening the doorway with his shotgun barrels, Lucius stepped outside. He pointed toward the shore. “Move,” he said. “Take that thing with you.”

  “It ain’t a bomb or nothin,” the Indian murmured. He was a big man, round-shouldered and short-legged and small-buttocked, long black hair bound in a braid by a red wind band: he wore a candy-striped Seminole blouse, old pants and sandals, with a beaded belt slung below the curve of a hard belly. When the white man only motioned with the gun, he bent and retrieved the canister in one smooth motion and, as Lucius followed, returned over the walkway to dry land. There he squatted on his hunkers on the track, arms loose across his knees. Asked if he had come alone, he nodded. He identified himself as Tommie Jimmie, spiritual leader of the Shark River Mikasuki.

  Where the track entered the woods, in the night shadow of the trees, Lucius could barely make out an ancient truck. “You came halfway across the Glades in that old junker to deliver this—”

  “Burial urn. White feller sent it. Seen your notice in the paper about Bloody Watson.”

  “Mr. E. J. Watson? Planter Watson? That what you meant to say?”

  “Okay by me.” The big man shrugged. “Indin people down around Shark River, they always thought a lot of Mister Ed. Give ’em coffee, y’know, somethin to eat, when they come up along the rivers. Good moonshine, too. Killed some white folks and some black ones, what we heard, but he never killed no red ones, not so’s you’d notice.”

  Lucius had to laugh, which hurt his head. Feeling stupid clutching the gun, he pointed its barrels at the ground. “This white feller,” he said. “What’s his name?”

  “Went by the name of Collins when he first showed up couple years back. Course that don’t mean nothin. Them people out at Gator Hook don’t hold so much with rightful names. They call him Chicken on account of he’s so scrawny.”

  “So Chicken said, ‘See that Lucius Watson gets this burial urn on the stroke of midnight.’ ”

  The Indian nodded. “Stroke of midnight,” he assented slyly. “Them was his very words.”

  The urn was a cheap one, ornamented with rude brassy angels. When Lucius stooped to pick it up, the sudden motion smote his temples. “Dammit! You come sneaking in here in the middle of the night—”

  “Long way from Shark River.” Tommie Jimmie yawned. “Guess I’ll be gettin along.” Black eyes fastened on the gun, he made a move to rise, thought better of it. “Oh Lord,” Lucius said. He broke the gun and ejected the shells, which he stuffed into his pocket. “Who’s in that thing? How come this Collins didn’t bring it here himself?”

  “Down sick. Feller name of Mud come by my camp, told me Chicken wanted to see me cause I had a truck. Claimed Chicken been rottin in his bedroll goin on three days. So I went over there and Chicken told me where you was livin at. Said, ‘This here urn belongs to Lucius Watson, cause they’s bones in there that used to be his brother.’ ”

  Lucius sank to his knees in the white sand, laying the shotgun on the grass. He lifted the urn and turned it carefully in both hands as the tears came. To clear his head, he took deep breaths of the night air with its heavy bog smell of low tide. He set the urn down again and used his sleeve to wipe his eyes. Whoever he was, this Chicken Collins must know what had happened to Rob Watson, being custodian of his remains before his siblings even knew that Rob was dead.

  Tommie Jimmie rose, easy as smoke. “Gator Hook,” he said, and went away down the white road. At the wood edge, he looked back but did not wave. Then he vanished into the dark wall, leaving the white man alone with the brass urn under the dying moon.

  IN THE BACKCOUNTRY

  Perhaps a month after Tommie Jimmie’s visit, Lucius drove his Model T onto the new Tampa-Miami Trail, which forged east across empty savanna and the strands of giant cypress to the vast shallow marshes that the Indians knew as Pa-hay-okee, Grassy Waters. In the Seminole Wars, the Mikasuki had crossed these marshes to isolated hardwood hammocks where tropical forest hid their palm-thatch villages and gardens from the soldiers. Only in this last decade had the sparkling expanses been torn and muddied by steam shovels and drag lines, until wild human inhabitants, like its bears and panthers, could scarcely be imagined anymore. Yet the hidden dangers that had sapped the will of the U.S. Army were still present, Lucius thought with satisfaction, the tall scythes of toothed sawgrass, the quicksand and muck pools and solution holes in the jagged limestone of the ancient sea floor concealed beneath the silt that had torn the soldier boots to pieces: the biting swarms, the leeches and squat moccasins, opening white mouths like deathly blossoms, the coral snakes, the Florida diamondbacks, greatest of all rattlesnakes, whispering across the dry leaves on the hammocks.

  Though the new road was rough, the stately pace of his old “T” putt-putting along permitted a calm appreciation of the morning. In the fiery sunrise, strings of white ibis flapped and sailed toward hidden destinations. In hawking course over the savanna flew a swallow-tailed kite that in recent days had descended from the towering Gulf skies at the north end of its migration from the Amazon. In time the Trail crossed the shady head-waters of Turner River, where in boyhood Lucius and the Storter boys came hunting, working upstream in a canoe from t
he salt mangrove coast of Chokoloskee Bay to the freshwater grasslands.

  Beyond the trees at Turner River, the glittering expanse spread away forever. In the distance, isolated hardwood hammocks, shaped like tears by the remorseless southward flow, sailed ever north against the sky like a green armada. The hammocks parted the broad watershed that the Indians knew as River Long or Hatchee Chok-ti, transcribed by early white men as “Shark River,” which in other days had betrayed no sign of man except dim shadow paths in the floating vegetation made by narrow dugouts. Only in recent years had the Shark River Mikasuki, drifting north, erected thatched chekes on the spoil banks of the black canal that ran along this new “Tamiami Trail.” In this past year, with the near completion of the road, it seemed certain that the last Indians would be driven from Shark River to make way for a huge wilderness park.

  At the Monroe Station rescue post for pioneer motorists, Lucius turned south then east again on an abandoned byway pocked by limestone potholes and marl pools; the road was all but hidden in hot crowding brush that raked and screeched at the old Ford’s sides as it lurched along. Farther on, the track was flooded by clear water, and sprinklings of sun-tipped minnows shot back and forth between the silvers of pond cypress swamp to northward and the warm gold of the marshlands to the south. This track had been cut by the Chevelier Development Corporation, so named because its destination, never to be reached, was Chevelier Bay in the Lost Man’s River region in the intoxicated days of the Florida land boom; Lost Man’s Beach had been envisioned as the new “Gulf Coast Miami.” The Depression had deflated the boom utterly, and the Chevelier Road, still ten miles short of its destination, was abandoned to this wooded swampland.

  On a pine ridge along this road was Gator Hook, a shack community where the vacated sheds and decrepit dwellings of the road construction crews had been usurped by fugitives and drifters, also gator poachers, moonshiners, and retired whores, in a raffish society often drunk on its own moonshine before noon. Cut off from the rest of Monroe County by hundreds of square miles of roadless Glades, the Hook lay beyond all sane administration, to judge from the fact that the Monroe County sheriff had never set boot in this isolated and unregenerate outpost of his jurisdiction.

  Lucius Watson had heard stories of a drifter at the Hook so obsessed with the tale of Leslie Cox and E. J. Watson as to stir speculation that he might be Cox himself. Many still believed that dreaded killer had made his way to the wild Mikasuki, who would shelter a white fugitive as in the past they had absorbed runaway slaves. With his high cheekbones and straight black hair, Cox might have passed for a breed Indian, remaining unrecognized year after year, before drifting to this backwater at Gator Hook. However, the whole story seemed so unlikely that Lucius Watson had never been inspired to go find out.

  By mid-morning the sun had clouded over, casting a pall of gloom over the swamp. His sunrise mood evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius’s moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a leaden melancholy dragged at his spirits. In forcing his way into this lawless country, he seemed to push at a mighty spring which would hurl him backwards at the first faltering of his resolve.

  Gradually the clear water withdrew and the track ascended onto a low rise where blurred paths wandered into thornbush and palmetto. The red rust of a tin roof showed through the shrouds of graybeard lichen; in the roadside ditch, bald tires languished. Strewn through the catclaw and liana lay rain-rotted cartons, bedsprings, gimcrack objects in bad chemical colors, bottles and tin cans. At a road bend, in an informal dump, four men playing cards at a sawhorse table turned to watch him pass, but no hand rose to return the stranger’s wave. None of the four reminded him of Cox, though of course he might not have recognized the man, having last laid eyes on him in September of 1910, more than fifteen years before. He retained only a dim memory of that husky, sullen figure on the bank at Chatham Bend, standing apart from the small knot of waving folks whom he was to murder scarcely a fortnight later. However, Cox would not have lost those small ears set tight to his head, as in minks and otters, nor the dim shadow of the mule hoof on the left cheekbone, nor the dull, thudding voice, as heavy as the grunt of a bull gator.

  “Gator Hook Bar”—the name was slapped crudely in black paint on the outside wall of a sway-backed cabin of greened wood set high on posts as a precaution against flood and patched with tarpaper and rusted tin against the rains. In the rank growth alongside was a rust-spotted white refrigerator, some rust-rotted oil drums, a charred stove of that marbled blue so ubiquitous in rubbish heaps throughout backcountry America. Near the blue stove sat a big pink touring auto with mud flaps and bent chrome. The auto’s rear axle had been hoisted on a jack and its right rear wheel had been missing for some time, to judge from the heavy growth around the hub.

  By reputation, Gator Hook served the rudimentary social needs of the swamp’s male inhabitants and their raggy squalling females—backwoods crazies of both sexes, he had heard, apt to poke a weapon through a screen and open fire just for fun on any unfamiliar auto wending its slow way amongst the potholes, blowing out headlights as it neared or taillights as it fled and sometimes both. On this morning of late spring, a few dilapidated pickups and scabbed autos had emerged from the woods well before noon. Through the door screen came hoots and hee-haws rolled into one screech by a gramophone blare that escaped outside to die away in the pond cypress swamp north of the road.

  The makeshift roadhouse was entered and departed through a loose screen door on the small landing of a steep ladder-stair down which drunk clients were at risk of tumbling at any hour of the day or night. A scraggy man in brown cap and soiled shirt whacked the screen door wide and reeled onto the stoop: “State yer damn business, mister!” When Lucius said he was looking for Mr. Collins, the drunk cocked his head, trying to focus, then waved him off, disgusted: “Never heard of ’m!” The man had long hard-muscled arms, tattoos, machete sideburns, a small tight beer belly. “Don’t I know you, mister? Ain’t you some kind of a damn Watson?”

  “Tommie Jimmie around?”

  “No redskins ain’t allowed. You Colonel Watson? You sure come to the wrong place.” The man jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Don’t go no further, Colonel, lest you want trouble.” He nodded over and over. “Name is Mud.” He grinned when that name was bellowed by a rough voice from inside. Turning, Mud lost his balance, almost falling. He clutched the rail and sagged down onto the steps in a pule of oaths and spittle.

  The man’s cap had fallen off: Lucius retrieved it from the stair. By now he had recognized this no-account Braman from Marco, prematurely drink-blotched and near bald. Confronted by Mud’s scalp up close as he ascended, the eruptions and scratched chigger bites, the weak hair and the ingrained grime in the pale skin, Lucius perched the brown cap gently on his head, stepping around his stale rank smell and continuing up the steps.

  With the appearance of a stranger’s silhouette in the torn screen, the voices within went silent in sudden hush, like marsh frogs stilled by a water snake winding its way through flooded grasses. Two men on the point of leaving sank back into their places, and two squawking women with hard helmet hair stopped their raucous dance.

  Inside the door Lucius found himself blocked by a husky barefoot man whose sun-baked back and neck and shoulders were matted with black hair. From hard green coveralls—his only garment—rose an aroma of fried foods and sweat, spilled beer and cigarettes, crankcase oil and something else, a smear of rancid mayonnaise, perhaps, or gator blood, or semen. The man crowded him without expression and without a word, as if intent on bumping chests and backing him out through the screen door onto the landing. But now the harsh voice that had bellowed “Mud!” yelled “Dummy!” and the barefoot man, dead-eyed, indifferent, turned away.

  The yell had come from a man waving him across the room to the makeshift bar who merely sneered in sardonic response to the newcomer’s wince of distaste at the sight of him. Raven-haired, with a hide as
dark and hard-grained as mahogany and a dirty grizzle all around a wry and heavy mouth, Crockett Daniels had thickened but not softened since Lucius had last seen him in the Islands. Filling two cracked coffee cups with spirits from a jug, he shoved one at Lucius, who acknowledged it with a bare nod.

  The two leaned back against the bar, sipping for a while before they spoke. Daniels’s green eyes were restless, scanning the room but always returning to a big bearded man, shirtless in dirty jeans and a black leather vest and missing his left arm; the big man leaned on the far wall, fixing the stranger with a baleful glare. A hard brush of coarse black hair jutted from his crown like a worn broom; on his upper right arm was a discolored tattoo—the American flag with fasces and an eagle rampant, talons fastened on a skull and crossbones. The red and white of the stars and stripes were dirtied and the blue was purpled, all one ugly bruise.

  Intent on Lucius, the big man resumed a story interrupted by his entry. “Like I was sayin, you go to huntin gators in the backcountry, you gone to earn ever’ damn red cent you make! And that’s okay, that’s our way of life, takin the rough nights with the smooth. But these days when you go out there and go to doin what your daddy done and your grandpap, too, you might could find yourself flat up against some feller in a green frog outfit sneakin around for the federal fuckin government. Know what he wants? Hell, you know what he wants! He wants our huntin country for a fuckin park! Wants to confuscate your gator flats, clap your cracker ass in jail!”

  The big man turned, pointing a thick finger at Lucius Watson. “Or maybe that fed slunk through the door there, tryin to look like ever’body else!”

  “That big boy you are lookin at calls hisself Crockett Junior,” Daniels informed Lucius, not sounding pleased. “Wants to know what you’re doin out here, Colonel. That’s what your friends call you, ain’t it?”