Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  “Course them old-time wardens was laid off when the Park took over. Charlie Green was a local man and knew how to act proper, but most of these Park greenhorns is outsiders, like Speck says. One time a couple of that kind come to Turkey Key and told us we had to pay cash for federal licenses to fish commercial ‘in Park waters,’ never mind that back in them days, folks never had no cash money at all. So one of them young Browns sings out, ‘Well, we been here since 1880, and you been here since 1947—now which one do these Everglades belong to?’ Then his brother hollers, ‘How fast will your boat go?’ And when the ranger told him, young Brown says, ‘If you get goin right this minute, that might be about fast enough to haul your dumb ass out of here before it gets shot off’—”

  “Whidden? I’m serious. I want to know if the Harden family ever heard or saw any good evidence that E. J. Watson killed his help rather than pay them.”

  Risking his teeth, Whidden bit off a rusty knot of linen line and spat the bitter end into the scuppers. “Charlie Green had a young helper on Duck Key, and somebody had lent this boy a contraption to try out—early-type metal detector, not even on the market yet, might been the first one ever made, for all I know. I seen it once, hell of a lookin thing—heavy ol’ black box with tin earphones, wouldn’t hunt down but about two feet.

  “This was still Depression times, and very few jobs anywhere. Henry Short had no steady work, so he spent a lot of time huntin for gold. Henry had heard about this new-fangled machine, and he got the loan of it for a few days, wanted to try it out. He was convinced that the Calusa—or maybe the Frenchman, or maybe Mr. Watson—had left buried treasure on Chatham Bend.

  “One day Henry shows up at South Lost Man’s. I believe you must of been away. For such a calm man, he was fevered and upset, but finally he sat down and ate something. Lee Harden said, ‘How come you’re so worked up? You find your treasure?’ Henry shook his head. He shoved a rusty ax head and a big ol’ screw-lid jar acrost the table. That jar was full of belt buckles and metal buttons and cheap one-blader pocketknives, part steel, part brass, except the steel was all et out by rust. And a few—a very few—spent bullets. Accordin to Henry, he found this stuff in an unfarmed piece up in the northwest corner of the Bend. All that box had picked up near the building, Henry said, was metal scrap and a few busted tools.

  “Lee Harden grew very very quiet. He said, ‘You find anythin else?’ And Henry said, ‘Bones.’ ‘Well hell,’ Pa said, ‘he had cows on there and pigs, even a old horse at one time, so bones ain’t nothing!’ ‘Skulls,’ said Henry. And three or four had holes that might been made by bullets.’ Said them bones was laying in these shaller graves along with the knives and buckles. About half the graves had a single bullet lay in in amongst the bones, and one grave had three.

  “Pa was still resistin Henry’s story. He went and mentioned that old horse again, and bones of old-time Injuns that used to live there, and this time some color come to Henry’s face. Says ‘Darn it, Lee, there ain’t no mistakin a human skull, not for no horse or hog! And anyways, domestical animals don’t generally wear belts and buttons, and only a very few will tote a pocketknife!’

  “Lee Harden lit up his cob pipe, took a few puffs to settle down his nerves. He was very surprised to hear Henry Short snap out at him that way, and Henry looked startled, too, but he didn’t quit or nothin. He said, ‘And they ain’t no old-time Injuns, neither! You know who them poor souls were just as good as I do!’ My pa put them pathetical things back in that big jar while he got a bridle on his temper. Then he said, ‘All right. How many skulls?’ And Henry tells him nine or ten and probably some more where them ten came from.

  “Pa went back with him to Chatham that same day. He seen for himself them molderin green bones in the dirt and leaves. Straightened up to get his breath and looked south through the trees at the back of the Watson Place out on the river, and the sight of that old walleyed house give him the shivers.” Here Whidden paused. “He told Henry that Colonel Watson might not care to have them graves dug up nor even spoke about. He said, ‘Let’s you’n me fill in them graves and cover ’em up and never speak of ’em again.’ I reckon Pa and Henry never spoke of it again. Pa never told nobody except only me, and this was some years later.”

  “How did Speck Daniels hear about it, then?”

  “He didn’t. The rumor Speck heard—Andy mentioned it day before yesterday—come from that one body that showed up on the bar down from the Bend. That’s where that whole story got started, back in your dad’s lifetime.”

  Whidden checked his line, picking off weed. “I sure am sorry, Mister Colonel.”

  Lucius remembered that torn sodden body, and how it was shown to him by a black man who came south with Papa from north Florida. Over the years, as he now recognized, he had sealed away the entire episode, and “Black Frank” with it, so resolutely that he might have gone to his grave without recalling it—well, no, not quite. Reese’s name had resurfaced in those court documents in Columbia County. And even before Andy’s mention, that dead man on the bar would rise to the surface of his dreams from the farthest reaches of unknowing, as petroleum rises in strange rainbow traces in black marshland pools.

  “So Henry found his buried treasure after all,” Lucius felt poisoned by his own bitterness. “I mean, dammit, Whidden, where’s that boy with the black box? Where’s that damn button jar? There has to be evidence for this kind of story!”

  “That young feller went adrift, I reckon—we ain’t never heard about him. Charlie Green, he’s acrost on the east coast someplace.”

  “You never saw those graves and bones yourself.”

  Whidden shook his head. “Dig out all that hard shell ground back in that thorn? With all them rattlers that’s back in there?”

  “It’s a colorful story,” Lucius decided. “But without evidence it’s only hearsay, like all the rest.”

  “Think it’s hearsay?” Whidden looked up. “Who you aimin to call a liar, Mister Colonel? Me? Lee Harden? Maybe Henry Short?”

  “Oh no. I don’t mean that, Whidden. No, no. Somebody killed somebody, all right.” A terrible despair choked off his voice. “Yes, that’s quite a story,” he repeated stupidly.

  The Fire

  From far off, faintly, came strange heavy thumping. The sound agitated Lucius, but moments passed before he awoke to what it was. “Damn,” he said. A moment later, Whidden, who had dozed a little, sat up straight to stare off toward the north. The sound was muffled in high white haze and clouds. Then the air shifted and the thumping changed to the hard chatter of a helicopter. The sky to the northeastward opened in a broad slow flare of light, and in moments a plume of dark smoke rose and broadened swiftly, shrouding the huge thunderheads over the Glades.

  Whidden grabbed his knife and cut the fish lines and scrambled to yank the pull rope on the outboard. Boring downriver, the skiff threw plumes of brown tannin water and a seething wake. Whidden was shouting—sonsabitches … come in a day early!—but the voice was whipped away across the wind.

  Hearing the howl of the outboard, Sally had guided the blind man aboard the Belle, dumped the bedding and loose cooking ware into the cockpit, even cranked the engine. Whidden eased the Belle into reverse as Lucius hauled on her stern anchor line. Then she was clear, and the current carried her on a turning drift downriver past the bars. Towing the skiff, she crossed the delta and the sandy emerald flats to deeper water, where she picked up speed, heading north along the island coasts.

  The skiff yawed wildly back and forth across the wake. “Bridle her!” Whidden yelled, tossing Lucius a line. Lucius’s hands remembered how to rig a tow line to a bridle, and for a moment he took comfort from the feel of the old rope, the hot hard chafe and pull of coarse tarred hemp, and the good smell of it, so familiar from his long days on the water. But the dread lay and curled up in his lungs like a hard black worm at the stem of an apple.

  The Belle was north of Plover Key when the helicopter came in view, looming out of the glintin
g pall of fire smoke inland. A sharp tacketing like gunfire came and went as it turned and hovered, probed with a loud snap-whacking of the rotors, then rose away like a great maddened dragonfly.

  In the delta, the odor of the burning was heavy on the heavy air. Whidden drove his boat recklessly upriver, scattering dark water birds before the bow, churning brown waves from the shallow channel that crashed among the red mangrove stilts along the banks.

  The explosion of hard pine in the Watson Place had blasted black pitch high into the clouds, but already the smoke plume was thinning, drifting back inland, casting its sepia pall on the Glades thunderheads. On Chatham Bend was a shadow presence where the house had stood, and the forest all around was gray with ash. Gaunt, blackened trees formed an amphitheater around the dying flames, behind thick oily shimmerings of melted air.

  Near the charred uprights, in the pulse and glowering of fallen timbers, a spectral figure raised a slow uncertain hand. Even at a distance, that hand appeared to twitch, like a chronometer calibrating old slow seconds.

  The man did not move when Lucius jumped ashore and ran toward him. The face, the hair and clothes and heavy shoes, were ashy, and the ash was wet, caked and runny with green algae, as if this figure had arisen from the swamp. All around on the blackened ground lay rotted gator hides. Closer to the fire, the hides lay twisted and curled into black crusts, and a stench of charred flesh infiltrated the rank smell of the dead house in the hellish air.

  Addison Burdett appeared slow and passive, like a retarded person left to await the bus. Next to Ad’s big work shoe was Rob’s satchel. Lucius reached out to him, pushing gently at his shoulder when he did not respond. “Ad,” he murmured. “Ad? Where’s Rob?” At his touch, his brother commenced weeping. The red shine of the mouth and eyes were wounds in the caked ash, and his tears, descending, made smooth tracks on his ash skin, and the spent teeth in the gray mask were chattering.

  “I stink,” Ad said.

  Lucius could not reach out to his brother. It was less the outlandish appearance, the wet reek of him, than because—in his own need to hold himself together—he feared that touching him might shatter some fragile surface tension, causing Burdett to come apart entirely.

  “Ad? Where’s Rob?” His brother turned slowly and pointed at the fire bed of the old house. It was so hot, Ad whispered. Then his yelps came, slurred by tears and mucus, and the gray face twisted out of shape as if his head had been run over. Shocked by that dark macabre image, Lucius Watson took his brother in his arms.

  Late into the night before, the gunrunners had roared upriver with their cargoes. With no help from the one-armed man, only rough orders, Mud and Dummy heaved the heavy crates, and by midnight Mud was stumbling with exhaustion.

  The men had provided moonshine for their old friend Chicken (Ad stated proudly that he had refused it), assuring him that his death seemed unavoidable. “We’re all tore up about it,” Mud Braman told him. “Gonna hurt us worse than it does you.” Mud’s teasing seemed very cruel to Ad, who could not believe these men were serious.

  When he warned his brother that at his age, hard drink would be the death of him, Rob only smiled. Though Rob was frightened by the act of dying, the prospect of being dead upset him not at all. Holding forth over his cup of shine, he told Ad what he’d told Speck Daniels, that he was sick and tired of the ordeal of his life, he’d had enough. His one ambition was to stay drunk until the end.

  Much of the night, they had lain listening to the gunrunners, who were drinking on the porch. Old Man Chicken, they agreed, would be better off dead than returned to prison “for the rest of his natural life,” as Mud Braman put it, raising his voice to make sure that the old fugitive inside the house could enjoy the discussion. “Yessir, they’d just throw away the key on that mean old feller!”

  Rob told Ad he meant to thwart any attempt to establish this house as a monument to a damn killer. Though he sympathized with his young brother about the waste of his fine paint job, he hoped to see the “House of Watson” burned down to the ground, obliterating the bloodstain on the floor of the front room and the remains of a thousand wasted alligators—“the desecration of Creation,” the old man yelled toward the porch, while admitting to Ad that he could take gators or leave them. Purification by fire, he believed, was their family’s last hope of exorcism and redemption. So long as this house of evil stood, he had declaimed—as the gunrunners shouted at him to shut up, and threatened gagging—their family name would be synonymous with murder!

  When Ad quoted Lucius, who had said that most of the old Watson stories were just rumors, Rob just shook his head. “Luke has to believe that,” he told Ad finally. “It’s his whole life.”

  Early this morning, the last munitions crates had been dragged out of the house and slung onto the airboat platform with loud metallic bangs and booming thuds. The men set the brothers free outside the house on the condition that they salvage the best gator flats and stack them by the water’s edge and throw the rest into the river to destroy the evidence. If they did a good job, Ad’s skiff would be fetched from the far bank when the airboat returned, and the prisoners would be free to head downriver.

  Rob told the men that Speck had promised that his old revolver would be returned to him, since it had come down from his dear departed daddy. Retrieving it from Dummy’s toolbox, Mud inspected it, saying, “If this damn thing belonged to Bloody Watson, it’s worth money!” Crockett snatched it away from him, cursing Dummy’s fecklessness when he saw that the old weapon was still loaded. He shook its cartridges onto the deck before lobbing it toward the old man on the bank, then bellowed at Dummy to let go the line. The airboat backed off the bank and turned up current.

  “Things always come out right in the end,” Ad told Rob, watching them go. “That’s what they say, all right,” Rob said. Eyes squinted in the glare and smiling oddly—smiling and frowning both, it seemed to Ad—he seemed deaf to his half brother’s plea that he help with the sorting and stacking of the hides so that they could leave as soon as the airboat returned.

  “They might not be back,” Rob told him, indicating his satchel, which Mud had flung off the airboat onto the bank. He pointed toward the helicopter, thumping the heavy clouds in the eastern distance.

  Whidden and Sally had brought Andy from the boat, and they, too, were listening to Ad, from a discreet distance. “I know where they off-load them weapons,” Whidden said. “In a airboat, it ain’t ten minutes up this river. If they was coming back, they would of been here.” Gazing at Ad’s pathetic stack of alligator hides, he looked disgusted. “Them hides ain’t no use no more to nobody. They knew that. They was finished with this place!”

  When the airboat had gone, Rob had gone down to the water’s edge and hefted a five-gallon can of fuel. A cigarette was hanging from his mouth, and seeing the red can, Ad yelled a warning. Oblivious, Rob gazed a moment at the river, then lugged the red can to the house and up onto the porch. There he set it down and took off one high sneaker and shook out what looked like a small cartridge, which he held up to the sun like an elixir. His grin looked strange. “Take care of yourself, Ad.” Leaving that lone sneaker behind, he limped into the house.

  Faced with the empty doorway, Ad called his brother’s name and heard no answer. Recounting this, he broke out in a sweat, starting to shudder. “ ‘Take care of yourself, Ad!’ That’s all he said! And he went in there and set that house afire!” Ad stared at them in disbelief. “I mean, seein him lug that gasoline in there, I thought, What in the heck can that old feller be up to? He sure is pretty strong for an old-timer!

  “Then it hit me! I ran toward the porch, hollering Stop! I yelled with all my might! That door stayed black and empty. And right about then there came this big soft boom—”

  “—darned cigarette!” cried Andy.

  “—and the heat exploded through the door, it burned my face!” Like a child witness, frantic to exorcise what had frightened it, Ad waved away their voices, raising his own. “And
that’s when he shrieked how he’d dropped the gun, how he couldn’t see!”

  In moments, the front room filled with fire, driving him back out onto the porch as the first flames licked through the smoke behind the window. Fire rushed upward through the house in a deep thunder. But over that thunder Ad imagined he heard screaming, and he screamed back, though what he might have screamed he did not know.

  Andy House said, “Addison? I knew this house. That screechin you heard might of been the workin of that iron-hard old pine in so much heat. Them uprights and old beams—”

  “It was my brother! Burning alive! I couldn’t get to him!” He sank down, face sunk in his hands as he coughed and blithered.

  “Never heard no shot? Think that old gun misfired? Jesus!”

  “Oh, Lord, Mister Colonel! We’re so sorry!”

  Sally Brown had stood there with closed eyes, pressing her fingers to her temples, but now she came weeping to hug Lucius.

  Addison had run around the house to the kitchen door and poked his head in, calling. But there was no outcry anymore, only that thunder and loud crackling of pine, and the beams creaking, the black choking smell of burning pitch. By the time he retreated (he couldn’t help but notice), the fire leaping upward from the windows was charring and curling his new paint. Through the old shingles, the roof seemed to glow, as if the house were swelling with trapped heat, holding its fiery breath. Then flames licked out in devil’s tongues along the peak. Through a thickening pall, the hollowed house loomed and vanished like an apparition.