Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  Or so I was counseled by that promising young farmer Edgar A. Watson, first cousin to Colonel Robert B. at Clouds Creek in South Carolina and justly proud of that man’s good opinion. Plain Ed Watson or E. Jack Watson, accused killer and prison fugitive, was another matter. E. Jack Watson had his heart set on Durrance’s bounty and the sheriff ’s reward both.

  Thus my mind went back and forth and forth and back, never admitting until after it was over that I knew all along I would kill Quinn Bass. For a Watson of Clouds Creek, this was dishonor. I had to accept that, and I did, and I do today. I will only say that many a prosperous businessman and proud American honored for his enterprise in his community got his start in unmentionable dealings such as these.

  “All right,” I told Durrance, “let me think about it.” I went over to the jailhouse and got deputized by the sheriff, then went back to Durrance, told him I’d thought about it till my brain hurt and here were my damn terms, take ’em or leave ’em: “You pay me half your bounty in advance and I will do it.” He yelped, “Hell, no, I ain’t payin no advance! Suppose somethin goes wrong?” However, he shortly came around to my position.

  QUINN BASS, DEAD

  One evening later that same week, I was standing at a bar with Tommy Granger when the man I awaited came banging through the doors and paused to scan the place. What I saw in the bar mirror was a whiskered runt whose lumpy hat and a big lumpy tobacco chaw made his head look too big for his squat body. To avoid being noticed, Granger turned away too quick—a bad mistake with a mean dog that has a nose for fear. When Bass caught his movement, Granger froze—mistake number two—then nudged his drinking partner with his elbow—number three. “That’s him,” this idiot informed me.

  When Bass strutted up, I took no notice, didn’t even turn around. Annoyed, he sought my eyes in the bar mirror, sizing me up in an uncouth curled-lip way that told me the sheriff had wasted no time letting slip that he had deputized a stranger who was after that reward. “Lookit these two stupid turds! You boys signed on with any outfit yet? Will fuckin Durrance, maybe?” He spat on the floor between our boots. “Any sorry sonofabitch would take his orders from that shitty bastard ain’t no kind of a man at all.”

  Not wanting to toss him any bone to gnaw on, I inspected my drink, which of course enraged him. “You some kind of a dummy, mister?” He slapped my upper arm with the back of his hand. “I’m talking to you, shithead. What’s your goddamned name?” He had half a mind, he said, to put me out of my fuckin misery right here and now, because I sure looked like some skunk on the run from someplace where folks would take my execution as a favor.

  Arcadia in 1893 was no different from any pest hole in the backcountry: not to defend yourself against abuse only invited more violence. I could tell by the show of his dirt-colored teeth that Bass had mistaken my silence for a coward’s fear, yet was galled by the fact that my gaze in the mirror was steady. Either this stranger was ignorant of Quinn’s reputation or indifferent to it—unforgivable!

  He was panting. “Let’s me and you two yellerbellies get acquainted,” he said in a curdled voice. When Granger grinned, too eager to oblige, Bass hoisted a tobacco-yellowed forefinger in front of his nose. “Yank this lever, friend,” he said, shifting his chaw to the other cheek. “Just for the fun.”

  Tommy’s stiff grin, pasted on his face, might have looked more natural if he were dead. He pretended to grab his pecker through his pants—“How about you yank this one, Quinn?” When Bass ignored this, waiting for him, he yanked Quinn’s finger, knowing full well that when he did, the other would open that brown mouth—here comes the joke—and let fly a jawful of tobacco spit into his face. Having permitted this, Granger turned to me with an aggrieved expression, wiping his nose and mouth with the back of his sleeve—a backwoods ruse, because his long frame was already uncoiling. Being drunk, Bass followed Granger’s eyes and the roundhouse punch cracked him hard in the black bush of his chin and knocked him sprawling.

  Tommy had all the time in the world to put Bass out of commission by kicking him fairly and squarely in the balls. Having failed to do so, he was in fatal trouble. Already Bass was reared up bloody-lipped onto his elbows, his knife upright in his hand. Savoring what was coming, he shook his head to clear it before rolling up onto his feet. “self-defense,” he reminded the onlookers almost amiably, and after that he was not smiling anymore.

  Granger threw me a whipped look, backing up against the bar. “We sure ain’t lookin for no trouble, Quinn! Hell’s fire, Quinn, you wouldn’t want no man for a friend who let another feller spit his chaw into his face, now ain’t that right, Quinn?” He turned to me because he could not face that knife one moment longer. “Ain’t that right, Jack?” He aimed to drag me into this, he was counting on Oklahoma Jack to save his ass.

  Quinn had backed off enough to give them fighting room. “Come on,” he rasped, holding the knife high.

  Granger fumbled his Bowie out and stared at it as if astonished to find a weapon on his person. When Bass shot me a warning look—Stay out of this—Tommy’s nerves let go and he kicked off from the bar, launching himself with a godawful squawk like a dying goose. In a moment, they were down rolling around, holding each other’s wrists. Granger was big, rangy, and strong, and pretty quick he had Bass’s arm twisted up behind his back. Dropping his knife, Bass squawked, “Ah fuck! Okay, okay!,” growling at Tommy to let go. “Okay by me, Quinn!” that fool cried with a kind of sob and let go his own knife, too.

  Bass grabbed his knife and sprang astride Granger before he could get up, holding the weapon to his throat; Tommy stretched his arms wide as the Christ Himself on the sawdust floor. His eyes were darting, trying to find mine; he was coughing pitifully, too scared to talk. Because Granger had struck first, in front of witnesses, Bass could play with him or take his life for free or maybe both. He poked the man’s chest with small stabs through his shirt, drawing red blots, then raised the point to the tip of Granger’s nose. “Slit nostril, maybe?” Bass panted, very excited and all set for the last panicky thrash of self-defense that would trigger and excuse the fatal thrust.

  Never having met a man I disliked so much so quickly, I already had enough of him to last a lifetime. Stretching out my boot, I toed Quinn in the buttock. He twisted around on me quick as a viper. “That your fuckin boot?”

  “Looks like it, don’t it.”

  With a hard grunt, he came for me, knife blade to the front, held flat and low; at this moment, his sole aim in life was to carve my guts. He was only checked by the sight of my revolver, aimed point-blank. One more step and I would have shot him dead. But like Tommy Granger, I had hesitated, I had failed to finish it—a common oversight among amateurs who aren’t natural-born killers—and now he would feel honor-bound to seek my death another day. I would have no control over those circumstances, whereas in this place I had a dozen witnesses that the fugitive killer Quinn P. Bass had come at me with a knife. All this went through my mind in a split second. But if I aimed to claim self-defense, an instant choice had to be made here, and I made it. He was opening his mouth to jeer when I pulled the trigger.

  The knife fell as Bass spun away and down onto his knees. When I came around in front of him, he stared past blindly, grizzled jaw dropped open. “Well, shit,” he muttered thickly—his last words, and as sensible as any, I suppose.

  THE BOUNTY HUNTER

  I followed Granger out the back and rode around to the new jailhouse. I was Tommy’s hero now, I had saved his life, so he gladly agreed to tend my horse and keep him ready while I went in to collect my reward.

  Bass’s body had drawn a crowd to the saloon. Out in the road, they shot their guns into the air as newcomers asked who’d done it. A voice hollered, “Ask that gunslinger who rides for Durrance!”

  The sheriff arrived shortly in bad temper, mouth tight as a sprung trap. He wasn’t sorry Quinn was dead nor was he happy about what he would have to deal with. “A lot of them ol’ boys out there are Bass clan first and Bass c
lan foremost, Watson. Most of ’em know you done this town a favor but that don’t mean that they won’t string you up. And all the rest is just a-rarin to help out for the pure fun and the justice.” He wouldn’t advise me to loiter in this town, he said.

  Informed I was only awaiting my reward, he asked me coldly how it felt to be a bounty hunter. When I reminded him I was his deputy, he wrenched my star off my new shirt, leaving a tear. “Not no more you ain’t,” he said, as Durrance came through the door.

  Durrance was anxious to inform me that the sheriff ’s reward took care of his own obligation as a private citizen, while the sheriff said it sure looked to him like a gunslinging stranger had baited a local man into an altercation with intent to kill him in cold blood. I reminded them I had done just what they wanted so I sure hoped they would not try to back out of their obligation. I held the rancher’s eye. “I sure would hate to tell the Bass clan, Will, about your private bounty on Quinn’s head.”

  Howls rose from without and a great banging on the door: the sheriff refused to lock me up for my own protection. “You better get goin while the gettin’s good,” he said. I went to the window and looked out. “The gettin don’t look so good to me,” I said. I entered an empty cell and slammed the door. Lying back on my bunk, hands behind my head, I suggested he do his bounden duty and send out for some drink and a bite of supper for his prisoner.

  “Get the hell out of my cell! You’re trespissin, layin in there like that! I ain’t gettin my new jail burned down for no bounty hunter!”

  “Arrest me for trespissin, then.”

  He came up to the bars. “Who the hell are you, anyway? And don’t give me no name that you can’t prove: we got a telegraph.”

  I told him my new name and lawful occupation: E. Jack Watson, farmer.

  “Pretty handy with weapons for a goddamn farmer.” He shook his head while we listened to the yells and banging. “You seen that crowd out there. How come you didn’t keep on riding, mister?”

  “You fellers pay what I’ve got coming and I’ll ride.”

  Brooding about justice and injustice, the sheriff grunted low down in his chest like an old boar. “You might not have much use for your dirty money when that crowd catches you.” However, he went to fetch me my reward and I waved Durrance over to my bars. “I bet you hoped that crowd would have me hung by the time you got here, Will. Better luck next time.”

  Durrance reached into his jacket, his brow all beetled up with honest worry over good money lying loose in a lynched man’s pocket. “Jack, it ain’t like you done this just for me—”

  “You offered me blood money, Will. Want them to know?” I nodded toward the window. His fingers had emerged empty from his pockets but now they crept back in. Scowling, he forked over a small bag of gold coins, twenty dollars each.

  The sheriff returned with the reward in hundred-dollar bills. He walked me to the jailhouse door, recommending that I leave at once. The Grangers were outside around the corner, tending my horse. They would empty their six-guns in the air when the door opened, to scatter the crowd and give me a head start. “Them citizens ain’t lookin to get shot,” the sheriff said. “Not for Quinn Bass.”

  These two seemed cheerful in their confidence that their cash would be retrieved from my remains. Swinging open the jailhouse door, Durrance wished me luck. “Same to you,” I said. I yanked him in front of me and poked my weapon hard into his back, trotting him over to the horses. The Grangers were already yipping, shooting into the air, and the groaning crowd was milling, stupid as spooked steers at the slaughterhouse gate. Durrance hollered, “Don’t shoot, boys! It’s me!” Right then, some fool opened fire and a bullet whined too close past my ear. I mounted quick, dragging Durrance up behind to cover my back.

  Taking no chances, I rode Durrance to the river. He fell off, sore-assed and stiff, still belly-aching about his money: he claimed that my new Winchester was not part of the deal. Not wishing to risk my good fortune by being greedy, I tossed him the rifle. He didn’t thank me, only whined about wild beasts. I scattered a few cartridges onto the ground and galloped to the ford. The night was dark, just a sliver of new moon, as I crossed over the Peace River into new country.

  From the shack cluster at Alva, I crossed the broad Calusa on the cattle barge and rode down the south bank into Fort Myers, where I boarded my lame horse at the livery stable, bought a new set of clothes and boots (there were no stores south of here, only frontier outposts), and asked some questions about life on this far southwest coast. After a few days, one jump ahead of an inquiry from Arcadia, I sailed downriver to the Gulf of Mexico on the schooner Falcon, which rolled and pitched south past Cape Romaine to the Ten Thousand Islands.

  My first impression of the great might of the sea dismayed me, the vastness of it and the unforgiving emptiness and the rough seas that threatened to engulf this craft and all its puking sinners, myself included. But eventually the wind moderated and I splashed my face and struck up acquaintance with the captain, William Collier, who straightened me out with a tin cupful of dark fiery Jamaica rum. Captain Bill imparted a few fundamentals of coastal piloting and entrusted me for a time with the ship’s helm so that I might feel the workings of the deep.

  South of Marco Island, the few small settlements lay hidden in the bays behind the barrier islands: the wall of green was as faceless as the sea. Yet the prospect of so much virgin coast awaiting man’s dominion filled me with excitement, even hope. I was still a fugitive, ever farther from my family, but for the first time in my life, I had the capital to establish my own enterprise on my own land, which was here for the claiming. I would find good soil, get a first crop under way while I built a cabin, bring in pigs and chickens, send for Mandy and the children—that was all the plan I needed for a year or two, but all the while, I would look around for opportunity. This Everglades frontier was a huge wilderness to be tamed and harnessed. I had the strength and an ambition made more fierce by so much failure. It was up to me.

  CHAPTER 4

  TEN THOUSAND ISLANDS

  Three miles inland from the open Gulf, between the Islands and the mainland, Chokoloskee Bay was a broad shallow flat almost nine miles long and up to two miles wide. At low tide, it was so shallow that herons walked like Jesus on the pewter shine a half mile from shore, and all around looked like the end of nowhere—mudbanks and islets gathered into walls of mangrove jungle, with strange stilt roots growing in salt water and leaves which stayed that leathery hard green all year around. For a man from the North, used to the hardwood seasons and their colors, this tide-flooded and inhospitable tangle that never changed was going to take a lot of getting used to.

  That professor at last year’s World Fair in Chicago who told the country it had no more frontiers had sure as hell never heard about the Everglades: in all south Florida, there was no road nor even a rough track, only faint Injun water trails across the swamps to the far hammocks. This southwest coast, called the Ten Thousand Islands, was like a giant jigsaw puzzle pulled apart, the pieces separated by wild rivers, lonesome bays, and estuaries where lost creeks and alligator sloughs, tobacco-colored from the tannin, continued westward through the mangrove islands to the Gulf as brackish tidal rivers swollen with rain and mud, carving broad channels.

  Early in 1894, the Falcon set me on the dock at Everglade, a trading post on a tidal creek called Storter River. George Storter Junior ran the trading post and his brother ran its trading schooner. Captain Bembery Storter, who became my good friend, shipped farm produce, sugarcane and syrup, charcoal, otter furs, and alligator hides, bringing back trade goods and supplies for the three small settlements—Everglade, Half Way Creek, and Chokoloskee Island—that perched along the eastern shore of Chokoloskee Bay.

  Smallwoods and McKinneys from Columbia County had joined the few families on Chokoloskee, a high Indian mound of 150 acres at the south end of the Bay. Both men farmed and set up trading posts, and C. G. McKinney was learning from a book how to pull teeth or babies, all de
pending. Both were smart self-educated men, among the few on this long coast who knew how to read. Smallwood had even poked around in the Greek literature, swapping books with an old French hermit down the coast named Chevelier, who had scraped acquaintance with every field of knowledge, said McKinney, except how to get on with other human beings.

  I took some rough work cutting sugarcane for Storters, who had their plantation down the Bay at Half Way Creek (halfway between Everglade and Chokoloskee). Cutting cane was mean hard labor for drifters, drunks, and nigras, but I never was a man afraid of sweat, and any old job suited me fine while I figured out how a man might work this country. I saw straight off that these palmetto shack communities, backed up against dense mangrove, were no place for a wanted man without a boat who never knew when some lawman from the North might come here hunting him.

  Mr. William Brown at Half Way Creek liked the way I went about my business. He accepted a down payment on a worn-out schooner, the Veatlis, and a Chokoloskee boy named Erskine Thompson signed on to teach me the sea rudiments. As soon as we got our stores aboard, we headed south into the Islands, cutting cordwood to sell down at Key West and shooting a few plume birds where we found them. It was Erskine who showed me the great bend of Chatham River which became my home.

  In all of the Ten Thousand Islands, Chatham Bend was the largest Indian mound after Chokoloskee, forty acres of rich black soil disappearing under jungle because the squatter on there with his wife and daughter would not farm it; they were mostly plume bird hunters, living along on grits and mullet. Like more than one Island inhabitant, Will Raymond Esq. was a fugitive and killer, glowering from Wanted posters all the way from Tampa to Key West. He liked the Bend because it was surrounded by a million miles of mangrove, giving the lawmen no way to come at him except off the river.