Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  Among old-timers in the bars and on the docks along the coast, the legends of Cox and Watson never died. Lucius could not take all these stories seriously, but because Gator Hook with its anonymous inhabitants was so remote and little-visited, this particular rumor had troubled him long before the visit from Billie Jimmie. And now there was a real old man who claimed to have information about Watson. Was it possible that Leslie Cox had changed his name to Collins?

  The sun, ascending, drew soft mist out of the cypress. From the sharp corner where the spur met the dead end, he headed east again, and in time the land rose slightly and the bright water withdrew beneath a ridge of pine. Blurred trails wandered aimlessly into the thornbush and palmetto, and here and there, half-hidden, the rusty red of a tin roof showed through the greens. In the roadside ditch bald tires languished among bedsprings, beer cans, rain-rotted packaging, unnatural objects of bad plastic colors, strewn through the catclaw and liana at the wood edge.

  At a makeshift car dump in a corner of the road, four old men were playing cards on a sawhorse table. The stiff figures turned toward him as he passed, but no hand rose to return the stranger’s wave. None of the four reminded him of Cox, though it was unlikely that he would have recognized the man, not having laid eyes on him since mid-September of 1910, on the same day he last saw his father. He had only a dim memory of that husky, sullen, and unshaven figure, hands in pockets, slouching apart from the small knot of people who were waving good-bye to Lucius from the riverbank at Chatham Bend. Yet seen up close, even an aging Cox would not have lost those small neat ears set tight to his head, as in minks and otters, nor the dim crescent of the mule hoof that had scarred one cheekbone, nor the dull, thudding voice, abrupt and heavy as the grunt of a bull gator.

  The Gator Hook Bar was a swaybacked cabin, greenish black, perched on posts as a precaution against high water, and patched with tin and tarpaper against the rains. As the only roadhouse in this remote region, it served the rudimentary social needs of the male inhabitants and their raggy squalling females—lone backwoods crazies of both sexes, he had heard, apt to poke a weapon through a rusty screen and open fire on any unfamiliar auto making its slow way through the potholes, blowing out headlights as it neared or taillights as it fled and sometimes both. According to the legend of the place, the one victim unwise enough to stop and make an inquiry about this custom had been shot through the heart. (“Them boys sure appreciate their privacy,” someone had said.)

  The roadhouse was entered and departed through a loose screen door at the top of a steep narrow wooden stair, down which its customers were free to tumble at any hour of the day or night. Beside the stair was a pink limousine with mud flaps and bent chrome which had come to rest among three rusty refrigerators, a collection of oil drums, triangular sections of charred plywood, a renegade toilet, and a fire-blackened stove of that marbled blue so ubiquitous on old American frontiers. The limousine’s rear axle was hoisted on a jack—high as a dog’s leg on a hydrant, Lucius thought, noticing the dog lying beneath it—and the wheel had been missing for some years, to judge from the weeds grown up around the hub.

  Through the torn screens came wild hoots, hee-haws, and tremendous oaths rolled into one blaring din by the volume of the country music from the jukebox. As Lucius Watson emerged from his old car, he was greeted by “Orange Blossom Special,” which burst forth in fine cacophony and wandered out over the swamp north of the road.

  On this morning of late spring, dilapidated pickups and scabbed autos had emerged from the swamp woods well before noon, and an airboat—a sled-shaped tin skiff with a seat raised above the caged airplane engine and propeller in the stern—was nudging the bank of the open marsh across the way. Parked askew was a new black pickup truck on high swamp tires. Passing the cab, Lucius jumped backwards, startled by the thump of a heavy dog, which had not barked, simply hurled itself against the window. The silent dog—a brindle pit bull male—seemed to churn and froth in its need to get at him, stiff nails scratching on the steamy glass.

  “Now don’t go pesterin ol’ Buck!” A scraggy man in red tractor cap and dirty turquoise shirt whacked the screen door wide and reeled onto the stoop. When Lucius said he was looking for a Mr. Collins, the drunk waved him off. “Ain’t never heard of him!” The man had long hard-muscled arms, tattoos, machete sideburns, and a small beer belly. Half-blinded by the sun, he cocked his head, trying to focus. “Ain’t you a damn Watson?”

  “Billie Jimmie around?”

  “No Injuns allowed. You’re Colonel Watson, ain’t you? You sure come to the wrong place.” The man jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. In a harsh whisper, he said, “Don’t you go no further, Mr. Watson, lest you want some trouble.” He nodded his head over and over. “Don’t remember me?” He stuck his hand out, grinning. “Name is Mud,” he said, just as this name was shouted by a rough voice from inside. Turning, he lost his balance, almost falling. He clutched the rail and sagged down onto the steps, denouncing someone in a pule of oaths and spittle.

  Mud’s red cap had fallen off, and Lucius picked it from the steps as he ascended. By now he had recognized Mud Braman from Marco Island, gone drink-blotched, and near-bald. Seeing his pallid scalp at eye level, the livid eruptions and scratched chigger bites, the weak hair and ingrained grime—seeing the soiled and scabbed human integument that could barely contain the furious delusions trapped within—Lucius perched the red cap gently on his head. “I knew your dad,” he murmured, stepping around the rank cinnamon smell of him and continuing up the stair.

  Inside, a man was loudly narrating a story. At the appearance of a silhouette in the torn screen, a silence fell like the sudden hush of peepers in the marsh, stilled by the shadow of a heron, or by a water snake, head raised, winding through the tips of flooded grasses. When the stranger entered, two scraggy men on the point of leaving sank back into their places, and the dancing women in their pastel slacks and helmet hairdos, breasts on the roll in baggy T-shirts, squawked and catcalled.

  Lucius was stopped inside the door by a husky barefoot man, sun-creased, with old dirt in the creases. From hard green coveralls—his only garment—rose a rank odor of fried foods and sweat, spilled beer and cigarettes, crankcase oil and something else, something rancid, a smear of old mayonnaise, perhaps, or gator blood, or semen. Expressionless in big dark glasses, this figure crowded him without a word, as if intent on bumping chests and backing the stranger out through the screen door. Then that same rough voice which had yelled at Mud now bellowed “Dummy!” and the man stopped and removed his glasses, and dull eyes gazed past Lucius with indifference as he turned away. His dark sun-baked back and neck and shoulders were matted with black hair.

  The man who had yelled was Crockett Daniels, who had recognized Lucius Watson, too, and nodded sardonically at Lucius’s grimace. Daniels crossed the room to confer with a big one-armed man who leaned on the far wall, then went to the makeshift plywood bar, where he poured two glasses of clear white spirits from a jug. Brusquely he offered one to Lucius, who accepted it with a bare nod. The moonshine was colorless, so purely raw that it numbed Lucius’s mouth and sinuses and made his eyes water. The two stood grimly side by side, elbows hitched back on the plywood, faced out across the room, and they sipped moonshine for a while before they spoke.

  “Speck” Daniels was a strong short man with a hide as dark and hard-grained as mahogany, and jutting black brows and a hawk beak, and dark grizzle in a fringe around a wry and heavy mouth. Straight raven hair, gone silver at the temples, fell in a heavy lock across his brow, and his green eyes were bright and restless, scanning the room before returning to the big black-bearded man in combat boots and camouflage pants and a black T-shirt with a wrinkled red stump in the right sleeve.

  Fixing Lucius with a baleful glare, the one-armed man resumed a story interrupted by Lucius’s arrival. “One time down in Harney River country”—and he pointed his good arm toward the south, toward the Park—“I shot me this gator at night, nailed that red e
ye, and damn if that sucker don’t sink straight down into black water, could been nine foot deep! I don’t generally miss, but I got this kind of a creepy feelin, and didn’t rightly want to go in after him. That big ol’ bull might had plenty of fight left, he might been waitin on me! Made sense to leave him where he lay. At night, it ain’t the same as what it is in the broad open daylight. When a man gets to feelin uneasy, in the night especially, well, he best mind that feelin, or he got bad trouble.”

  Saying that, the big man slapped angrily at the stump of his lost arm. Chest heaving, he stared around the room, ready to challenge anybody about anything. The hard high brush of coarse black hair that jutted from his head like a worn broom gave him a look of grievance and surprise. On his good arm was a discolored tattoo—an American flag set about 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 purpled, all one ugly bruise.

  “That war vet you’re lookin at is Crockett Junior Daniels,” Speck said in a speculative voice, not sounding pleased about it.

  “Yessir, folks,” Crockett Junior roared, “that big ol’ sucker might could chomp your leg off! Might be holed up way deep in his cave, and you proddin down in there tryin to find him with your gator hook, nudge him up under the chin, try to ease him slow, slow, slow up to the surface where you got a shot, and him gettin more uproared all the time. First thing you know, he has got past the hook some way, he’s a-comin up the pole, he’s just a-clamberin! And there you are, up to your fool neck in muddy water and no hope at all to make it to the bank—if there is a bank, which mostly there ain’t, out in that country!” He looked around the room. “Them kind of times, all you can do is stand dead still, hope that scaly sonofabitch gets by you in the rush!

  “Now, that ain’t a experience you are likely to forget, I’m here to tell you! You go to huntin gators in the backcountry, you gone to earn ever’ red cent you make! And that’s all right, that’s our way of life and always has been, takin the rough nights with the smooth. But since the Park come in, you go out there”—he was pointing south again—“and go to doin what your daddy done, and grandpap, too, and next thing you know, you find yourself flat up against some feller in a green frog outfit that the federal fuckin gov’ment got sneakin around back in our swamps! Know what he wants? Hell, you know what he wants! Wants to steal your hard-earned money! Put your pore ol’ cracker ass in jail!”

  The big man pointed a thick finger at Lucius Watson. “Or maybe he ain’t in a green suit! Maybe he just come walkin through that door there, tryin to look like ever’body else!”

  Speck said calmly, “Folks here at the Hook ain’t got no use for invaders, notice that?” He turned to Lucius. “Mind tellin us what you’re doin out here, Colonel?” He grinned at Lucius in unabashed dislike. “That’s what your friends call you, ain’t it? Colonel?”

  “You my friend now, Speck?” Lucius drank his glass off to the bottom and came up with a gasp and a warm glow in the throat and face. Like bristling dogs, they avoided eye contact, pretending to watch the one-armed man, whose anger was rising.

  “Thing of it is,” Crockett Junior bawled, “them damn Park greenhorns and their spies will belly right up to that bar, pertend to be your friend; keep a man from supportin his own family! And you out in that dark ol’ swamp night after night, way back in some godforsook damn slough you can’t even get to in a boat, and half-bled to death by no-see-ums and miskeeters. One night out here is worse than a month in hell! And finally you’re staggerin home across the saw grass, cut to slivers and all cold and wet and more’n half dead, and thankin the Lord that you’re comin out alive, cause you got two thousand dollars’ worth of gator flats humped on your back. And sure enough, one them rangers has you spotted, or maybe he’s layin for you near your truck back at the landin.”

  Here the big man paused in tragic wonderment, and when he resumed speaking, he spoke softly. “Speakin fair now, what’s a man to do? If that ranger goes to chasin you, I mean, or tries to stop you? Or tell you you’re under arrest, throw you in jail?”

  Speck Daniels watched his son without expression. “They heard this same ol’ shit in here a thousand times,” he said.

  “Now I ain’t got nothin personal against that ranger,” Crockett Junior was saying, choked by strong emotions. “Might could be a real likable young feller, just a-tryin to get by, same as what I’m doin. Might got him a sweet lovin wife and a couple real cute li’l fellers back home waitin on him, or maybe just the sweetest baby girl—same as what I got! Ain’t no difference between him and me at all!” He looked around him wide-eyed to make sure these people understood how astonishing it was that he and this park ranger both had wives and children, and how large-hearted his concern for that ranger’s family was. “But if’n that boy tries to take my gators, well, I got my duty to my people, ain’t that right? Got my duty to take care of my little girl back home that’s waitin on me to put bread on the table! Ain’t that only natural?” He looked around the room. “So all I’m sayin—and it would be pathetical, and I am the first one to admit it—all I’m sayin, now, if any such a feller, and I don’t care who, tries to keep me from my hard-earned livin?” Shaking his head, he fixed his gaze on Lucius once again. “Well, I’d sure be sorry, folks,” he growled, as his voice descended to a hoarse hard whisper, and he pointed southward toward some point of destiny in a far slough. “I surely would be sorry. Cause I reckon I would have to leave him out there!”

  The hard whisper and the twisted face, the threat, had finally compelled the crowd’s attention, and it turned a slack and opaque gaze upon the stranger.

  Speck Daniels snickered. “Tragical, ain’t it? Leave him out there! I reckon that’s about the size of it.”

  “That a warning?” Though Lucius spoke casually, his heart quickened with fear.

  “Yessir,” Speck said, ambiguous. “Out in this neck of the woods, a stranger got to watch his step. That is a fact.” And still he did not look at Lucius but gazed coldly at the huge maimed man holding the floor. “Junior there, he went clean acrost the Pacific Ocean to fight for freedom and democracy, and he killed plenty of ’em over there just like they told him to, and he give his right arm for his country, too, while he was at it. Uncle Sam give him a purty ribbon, but that boy would of had a whole hell of a lot more use out of that arm.”

  He nodded, somber. “Course they’s some of these dumb country boys is proud to give their right arm for their country—least their daddies is proud and Uncle Sam is proud, and the home folks gets to march in a parade. But I reckon I don’t feel that way, and Junior, he don’t neither, not no more. We know it’s our kind that does all the fightin, and our kind that gets tore up and killed, long with the niggers, while the rest of ’em stay home and make the money.” He kept nodding. “That big boy there had to learn them things the hard way, and he’s still hot as hell. If he don’t get a hold on his ragin pretty quick, there is goin to be bad trouble for some poor feller that don’t know enough to get out of his way.”

  Speck licked his teeth. “When he’s like this—all this uproarin, I mean—Junior sleeps like he is dead or he don’t sleep at all. Won’t talk to nobody, only them other vets. Might not say a word to his own daddy for two-three days, then busts right out with the answer to some damn question you forgot you asked him. Either way, he is crazy as all hell, and dangerous, and them other shell-shocked morons he keeps with him might be worse. Mud Braman ain’t nothin but a crazy drunk, don’t know what he’s doin from one minute to the next, and that other one with all the personality”—he pointed at Dummy—“his uncles was in that bunch that killed that lawman at Marco back in Prohibition, so whatever the hell is the matter with that feller, he comes by it natural. Might break loose and shoot everyone in sight and you’d never have no idea why he went and done it.”

  Speck Daniels sighed. “Some days I think ol’ Junior might be better off if I was to take him out into that swamp back there and
shoot him. Before he shoots somebody else, out of his natural-borned suspicion. Maybe some stranger who just wandered in here off that road.”

  Daniels contemplated Lucius, sucking at his teeth as if tasting something bad. “You plannin to tell me what you’re huntin for out this way, Colonel? Ain’t me, I hope.”

  Lucius shook his head. “You live here now?”

  “Nosir, I sure don’t. When I ain’t livin on my boat, I got me a huntin camp back in the Cypress, got a surplus tent and a good Army stove and a genuine plastic commode, also a nice Guatemala girl that come by mail order. But these days,” he whispered—and he cocked his head to see how Lucius would receive this information—“I’m campin in your daddy’s house, down Chatham River.”

  Lucius maintained his flat expression, not wishing to show how much he resented the idea of this man living on the Bend. Since his father’s death, the remote house on its wild river had been looted and hard-used across decades by hunters, moonshiners, and smugglers, but now the Watson Place was deep inside the Park. To reveal to a man he knew disliked him that he was flouting federal law by camping in the old Watson Place seemed strangely out of character, unless Speck meant this as some sort of provocation.

  “Parks is talkin about burnin down your house.” Speck grinned a little, meanly. “Claim she’s so banged up by hurricanes that she’s a hazard to Parks visitors!” His grin shifted to a snarl. “Stupid lyin bastards! In all the years since Parks took over, they never had one visitor at Chatham Bend! Not even one!”