Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  Arcadia

  Arcadia had been known as plain Tater Hill Bluff until the advent of a post office in 1886 encouraged the choice of a more classic name. After the Manatee County seat was moved from Pine Level to Arcadia, this capital claimed such frontier comforts as hard drink, whoring, gambling, free-style manslaughter, and common brawling. According to one reminiscence, “There were as many as fifty fights a day,” with “four men killed in one fight alone.” In addition, the untended stock on the roadless unfenced range encouraged a spirit of free enterprise in which cattle were confiscated by the herd. In 1890 four luckless strangers, denying to the end that they were rustlers, were hanged without formalities from the nearest oak. The range wars attracted desperados from the West, and revenge by knife and bullet was an everyday event when a fugitive from Arkansas named E. J. Watson turned up in Arcadia and, according to the memoirs of his friend Ted Smallwood, claimed he slew “a bad actor” named Quinn Bass. The date of Watson’s arrival in Arcadia, the length of stay, his means of livelihood—no such details were recorded, only that Watson had paid his way out of his fatal scrape with Bass before leaving town.

  Since Smallwood’s narrative was the only known account of his father’s sojourn in Arcadia, Lucius was anxious to verify the story. Next morning, he tracked down a Bass kinsman in Kissimmee who told him over the telephone that his forebears had been cattle drovers who moved south from Georgia in 1834 and settled on the Kissimmee Prairie north of Okeechobee. “Getting killed in Arcadia don’t mean Quinn came from there. Most likely he came from right where I’m at now.” The original Christian name was Quincy, and the variations—Quin, Quinn, Quinton, LeQuinn—came along later. At any rate, they were all known as Quinn Bass. “The feller I’m thinking about—and I reckon he’s the one you’re after—is the only one I know of who died violently, but nobody in this family cares to remember how. That tells you right there he was a bad ’un and there was a scandal. His branch of the family is dying down, there’s only a few old ladies left, all very testy. They hung up on me last time I called for some family information, and I was asking about something pretty small. I don’t imagine they will help you out on this one.”

  Manatee County had become De Soto after Watson’s time, and the De Soto County Sheriff’s Office had none of the old records, but a deputy directed them to the county clerk’s office at the courthouse, a stately edifice on the main square, where Sally located the earliest Criminal Docket Book stored in the basement. They found no mention of any malefactor named E. J. Watson nor any record of the killing of Quinn Bass. However, a LeQuinn Bass had been arrested on September 19, 1890, for carrying concealed weapons, and again on October 23 of the next year, this time for murder. Bass had been acquitted on November 6, 1893—his last appearance in the record. Surely this man was the “bad actor” of Smallwood’s account, since there was no mention of any other Bass in this record of every felony committed in this county between 1890 and 1905.

  On the way south again, Sally spoke in a flat voice about her marriage to Whidden Harden, referring finally to the ancient feud between his clan and her own. “That old feud was one reason I married him, and also one reason I stayed with him as long as I did. I couldn’t bear to have our families see us fail.

  “Since we were kids together in school, Whidden and I had some idea that we could change the ugly racism in our community. But Whidden is too easygoing, too agreeable. He wants to heal the feud between our families by pretending it’s all over, and that just won’t work. He won’t act on his own decent instincts, he stays loyal to those mean no-necks, especially the one who taught him to live his life outside the law—my own damned father.” She shook her head. “Whidden is a kind good man who works with no-good people. He’s not one of them, although he thinks he is, and if it comes to trouble, it’s Whidden who will go to the state pen. He kind of knows that, but he’s stuck in some old Island way of thinking.

  “One night he admitted he didn’t much respect those men because they were ignorant and lazy, always blaming the government for their way of life—that’s their excuse. All they’re looking for, he said, is a free ride. Too bad you don’t know that well enough to quit, I said. You have no respect for Whidden Harden or you wouldn’t work with them. He thought a minute and then he said he reckoned it was his wife, not him, who had no respect for Whidden Harden. This wasn’t true, but I thought it might be good for him to let him think that, so I just shut up. By this time my old man was moving over into running guns, and making money off of people dying—that about finished it. I told Whidden I was moving out, and when he didn’t quit, I did.”

  “Is that the whole story? Of Whidden and Sally, I mean?”

  “It’s all the story you are going to get until I’m good and ready.” She tried to smile. “Why don’t you tell me the Lucius Watson story instead?”

  “No, Sally, I don’t think I will. I’m sick of it.”

  “I know it anyway, at least from the Harden family’s point of view.” She looked him over, nodding. “As a boy, my husband worshiped ‘Mister Colonel’ Watson. Still does, far as I know.” She was feeling guilt about the night before and so was he.

  Lee County

  On the north side of the Calusa Hatchee River, they stopped at a bar. Sally made a few phone calls, and when she rejoined him, said matter-of-factly that someone was in town who would pick her up and take her south for her meeting in Naples with Whidden and their lawyers.

  “Today, you mean?” Stung by her willingness to leave him so abruptly, he felt abandoned, and a little panicky. He felt laid wide and as fatally exposed as an oyster on the half shell, mantle curling to escape the squirt of lemon. He knew his feeling was not reasonable—in fact, already suspected that an early parting might be for the best—but he could not endure the idea of losing her just when he’d found her. “You regret what happened, Sally?”

  “I’ll never regret it, Mister Colonel,” Sally murmured, taking his hand. “But I’m going to let you go while I still can. Because I know better—and I know you better—than to take us seriously.” Trying to smile, she sang along with the loud jukebox: “ ‘Ah swore ah wouldn’ never be tore up bah yoo-hoo.’ ”

  “I do take it seriously!” When she hushed him, he said, “When will I see you? I’ll be in Naples tomorrow—” Again he was routed by her strange expression, knowing that “his” sweet Sally was beyond recall.

  Within minutes, a black swamp truck crossed the windows. When a huge silhouette barged through the doorway, Lucius recognized Crockett Junior Daniels, who avoided looking at him and responded to Sally’s introductions with truculent silence. Offered a drink, Crockett growled, “I’ll wait outside.”

  Following the one-armed man across the parking lot, Sally took Lucius’s arm. “Going to miss me, Professor?”

  “Plain Lucius will do, I think, after last night.”

  “Plain Lucius, you’re blushing.”

  “No fool like an old fool, ever hear that one?”

  “Hey, I like that hokey kind of stuff!” She laughed, but her eyes were serious. “You think it’s easy to give you up, a man like you?” And her eyes misted. “Do you have any idea how rare you are?”

  On the truck’s door panel, the name BAD COUNTRY had been slashed in crimson lettering. Crockett Junior hunched over his wheel, a cigarette hanging on his lower lip. Flatulent with beer, he gave Sally a befuddled squint, meant to be ironic. The big wild hair on his shaggy head tossed to the blare of music from the radio while the fingertips of his left hand tappeted on the cab roof in time to bass rhythms whappeting his brain.

  “King of the Road!” cried Sally Brown, slapping the truck. “Va-room, va-room! Let’s move it, Junior!” she yelled as she got in. Slamming the door, she reached over and honked the horn twice, loudly and sharply—“Toot back if you love Jesus!”—and the big black-visaged man slammed the swamp truck into gear and fishtailed around and up onto the curb and bounced it hard onto the highway shoulder.

  Lucius calle
d after her, “Watch out for his damned dog!”

  “Ol’ Buck? Hey, that dog loves me! My leg, anyway!”

  Depressed by her exhilaration, he hoped she would return his wave, but she did not, only gazed back at him out the cab window, no longer exhilarated, but hollow-eyed and drained. The black truck forced its way into the traffic. The last he saw of Sally Brown was her sunny hair and soft tan arm in the southbound flow of shiny metal toward the bridge.

  Rob was to meet him at the Gasparilla Inn, a new high-rise motel in the royal palms on the river, where Watson Dyer would join them for supper. Inquiring at the desk, he found no word. Depressed by all the chrome and mirrors, he hurried back out into the sun and walked the old riverfront streets he had known since childhood. He paid a visit to the library, then the newspaper, noting some Watson references and dates. Eventually he visited the offices of the Lee County Sheriff, where he laid a copy of his History on the counter to prepare the ground for his request for the old records. The huge ledgers levered from the stacks by bemused clerks had been so long unopened that their stiff leaves exhaled the breath of a half century of desiccation, and the faded ink, once sepia, was almost as faint as the blue watermark.

  In the flourished script on the speckled and stained pages, the one name of interest was Green Waller, tried in 1896, 1898, and 1901 for “larceny of hog.” This inveterate pig thief was none other than that Old Man Waller who later found sanctuary at the Watson Place, where he could commune with these estimable animals to his heart’s content. Green’s name appeared also in the Monroe County census for May 1910, where he was listed in the E. J. Watson household as “servant and farmhand.” A John Smith was similarly described, and a Mrs. Smith was cook. The last entry for this household was “Lucius H. Watson, mullet fisherman.” His own name startled him, flying off the ancient page of this old Domesday Book like a trapped moth.

  Lucius thought he remembered Green as rather elderly, but according to the census he was five years younger than his employer, Mr. Watson, and therefore plausible if not entirely suitable as the lover of the mountainous Hannah Smith, with whom he would perish at the hands of Leslie Cox. John Smith could be the alias of someone on the run—presumably Cox himself or his third victim, the outlaw Herbert Melville, a.k.a. Dutchy, whom Lucius recalled as a lively young devil whom he had rather liked.

  As in Arcadia, the strange dearth of information about E. J. Watson in these ledgers seemed astonishing. The Sheriff’s records for 1910 made no reference whatever to the triple murder at Chatham Bend on October 10, nor to the violent execution at Chokoloskee of the noted planter Mr. E. J. Watson two weeks later, nor to any testimony in regard to either crime. Since Sheriff Frank Tippins had held a hearing at Fort Myers in regard to Watson’s death, how was it possible that no trace of that hearing—not even a mention of the Bill House deposition—appeared anywhere in these exhaustive pages?

  That the records in this case were missing (or had never been transcribed) was all the more peculiar in light of the fact that the crimes had been well covered in the Fort Myers Press for October 20 and 27, and in the Tampa Morning Tribune for October 25. True, the triple murders had occurred across the Monroe County line, but the news accounts specified that Lee County Sheriff Frank B. Tippins had traveled south to investigate both events, and that the unnamed “Negro” being held as an accessory to the massacre had spent at least a fortnight in the Fort Myers jail before being turned over to Monroe County Sheriff Clement Jaycox. It seemed incredible that in these records, where a prisoner’s race was invariably noted, there was no evidence of any black man taken into custody in October of 1910, not even a brief notation in the Sheriff’s fees book, which recorded the transport and feeding of all prisoners.

  A sketch of Sheriff Tippins’s life in a Fort Myers history found in the library had claimed that Tippins, who “arrested many desperate criminals during his career and acquired a statewide reputation for fearlessness,” had been frustrated for the remainder of his days by the “unsolved killing of Ed Watson. Due to the fact that Watson was said to have killed the notorious Belle Starr and had been suspected of killing many of his employees to escape paying them their wages, his murder attracted national attention and stories about him are still being printed.”

  How interesting that Sheriff Tippins (or whoever transmitted Tippins’s recollections to the local historian) would refer to the “murder” of Ed Watson. Since the account made special mention of the thirty-three bullets found in Watson’s body, the choice of that term seemed to reflect the Sheriff’s skepticism that an armed crowd of at least twenty men, putting so many bullets in the victim, had acted in self-defense, as Bill House claimed.

  Had the most notorious murder case in Tippins’s long career gone unrecorded simply because it was never brought to a grand jury? Or had the records been eradicated from the books? If so, the culprit must be Eddie Watson, the deputy court clerk at the Bill House hearing, who might also be able to explain why there was no mention of the notorious Ed Watson in the criminal dockets in Arcadia. He would have to go find Eddie and inquire, knowing his brother had never answered questions about Papa and was very unlikely to start now.

  “Sheriff Thompson might know where them records are at and he might not,” a deputy concluded, picking Lucius’s History off the counter as if fingering strange fruit, then setting it down in unconcealed relief that he, at least, was not obliged to read it. “We got a feller in the cells back here who might know quite a lot about the Watson case, cause him and Tippins was real tight back in Prohibition. Them two purely loved to swap old yarns about Ed Watson, so what he’d tell might have some truth to it, if he’s feelin truthful.”

  The deputy chuckled, leading the way down the back hall. “This feller ain’t in jail exactly, he’s just restin his bad bones in our nice facility. The feds asked us to hold him for a hearin but it ain’t nothin but harassment. He’ll beat the charges same as always, he can walk out any time he wants. But he won’t check out until tomorrow, and that’s because he enjoys livin off the taxpayers when he’s up to town. Receives his business friends right in his cell, cuts deals, rigs payoffs. You’d be surprised who comes in here to hobnob with a swamp rat—politicians and businessmen, you know, that would never be caught out in broad daylight with this feller! County, state, and federal law knows all about him, but those few he ain’t paid off just can’t come up with him, he skitters out of it some way, time after time. Can’t even get him on his income tax, cause he don’t show no income on his books—ain’t got no books! Got all his money in big croker sacks someplace, I reckon!”

  Though they had arrived at the cell door, the deputy did not lower his voice but pitched it louder for the inmate’s benefit. “When he come in yesterday, I told him, ‘Boy, you are in real bad trouble this time! You are goin straight to the federal penitentiary to pay for all them felonious activities!’ And he hollers, ‘Nosir, I sure ain’t! They ain’t never goin to touch me, cause they know I’d take half the elected idiots in south Florida to the pen with me!’ ”

  The deputy grinned as he fiddled with his keys, shaking his head in admiration. “Claims them feds got nothin on him, and even if they did, they wouldn’t try nothin. Says Ol’ Speck can chew out Uncle Sam any way he wants! In two days’ time, he’ll be back out in the Park, moonshinin and runnin guns and shootin the livin shit out of the gators, same way he always done.”

  Lucius stopped short. “Who?” he said. But it was too late, the deputy had banged open the cell door. “How many Specks y’all acquainted with? This one you are looking at is Crockett Senior Daniels, that right, Speck?”

  Speck Daniels, sitting on the bunk edge, had been bent over tying up the laces on his sneakers, in some swamp instinct to be ready for whatever was coming at him down the hall, but when the iron door swung open, he sat up slowly, in a kind of coiling, like the sidewinding retreat of a big moccasin among the buttress roots of a pond cypress, then withdrew into the shadows underneath the upper bunk. The deputy s
howed his visitor into the cell and closed the door behind him.

  “Goddammit, Buzz, you frisk this man?” Daniels hollered. “You pat him down good?” When the deputy just laughed and kept on going, Daniels cursed him. Green eyes fixed on Lucius, he emerged slowly and perched on the bunk edge with his hands beside him gripping the thin mattress. In the bad light from the fly-specked yellow bulb high overhead, the saturnine heavy mouth in his hard face was fringed by a dirty stubble.

  “That smart-mouth peckerhead is goin on report,” he muttered, tossing his bristled chin toward the door. “Prisoners’ rights ain’t only just the rules, they’re the damn law!” He glowered at his visitor, who remained standing by the door because there was no chair. “What in the hell do you want? God A-mighty! Here I ain’t laid eyes on you in twenty years, then all of a sudden you show up way to hell and gone out to Gator Hook, and next thing I know, you track me to the county jail! You paid ’em off or somethin? Let you right in and lock the door behind, don’t even frisk you!”

  Lucius turned his back to him and spread his arms out wide, hands to the wall. In his dislike, he was baiting Speck a little, and he was astonished when Daniels sprang and collared him and shoved his chest hard against the cement before patting him down, then gave him an extra parting shove before returning to the bunk, where he cursed some more and stretched out in the shadow, one arm flung across his eyes.

  Lucius hunkered down against the wall, trying to compose himself, as Daniels shifted his arm and watched him from beneath his elbow, reading his thoughts. “I’m waitin on you, Colonel. If you ain’t here to shoot me, boy, you better remember pretty quick why the fuck you come.”