Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  It ain’t like the old-time gator poachin—Joe Lopez and Tant Jenkins, a few other fellers, skiff and pole and rifle and a pot for coffee. Swamp rats has to keep up with the times the same as ever’body. With gators so few, we rigged us a couple them new airboats so’s to cover more country, even rented an ol’ crop-duster biplane to map out every last damn gator hole in the Big Cypress. Pretty soon, them Cypress gators was all gone, the only gators left to hunt was the ones across the boundary in the Park. So one night, bouncin along over them Loop Road potholes, Speck says, “Boys, this ol’ swamp over here to south’ard is supposed to be some kind of a national damn park, and what I’m lookin for is a damn boundary marker so’s we don’t go breakin no federal law. Any you boys see any sign of that darn boundary? Cause I can’t never make it out too good, nighttimes especially.”

  Well, us poor fellers always did believe that the Glades was took away unfairly by the U.S. government, so when Speck said, “Boys, we best go get them gators”—well, that is what we done. Swooped in and out of there like hawks. That national park become national headquarters for poachers, to where we had strangers infestin in the Glades from other counties and from all over the South. Gator Hook was where we divvied up and where we partied, we had us a regular Redneck Riviera! Shipped hides by the damn thousands right up there to Q. C. Plott Raw Fur and Ginseng in Atlanta, which was doin real good with wild animal parts in the hide export business.

  Takes a smart feller like Speck Daniels to work out all the fine points. Sets up his moonshine still and huntin camp inside the Park out of harm’s way, where he ain’t got no damn local sheriffs nor state cops snoopin around that has to be paid off. Don’t hardly make no bones about it, because that’s his own home territory, the way he sees it. Old Man Speck sets back on his old boat and counts his money while his lawyer takes care of somebody at Parks who keeps them patrols away from Chatham River.

  I reckon you know that Speck’s camp is at Chatham Bend. Works real good for his night runs by airboat. Follow the rivers back up into the Glades, head northeast over the sloughs and out over the saw grass to his drop-offs along the Loop Road. Or sometimes he uses them broad levee banks where his buyers can bring a truck south from the Trail. After the feds got on to that, Speck would be tipped off before the rangers, never lost a cargo. Stead of headin north up to the roads where they was waitin for him, he run his hides downriver to the Gulf. Hauls ’em offshore to a coast vessel that runs up a new Panama flag, crates ’em up as caiman hides marked “South America,” then imports ’em back into Florida at Tampa Bay.

  Course today the feds are keepin the wildlife trade under surveillance, they are crackin down inside the Park and out. But one thing they ain’t done yet is catch Speck Daniels. Can’t catch that man out in that wilderness, can’t run him down in the shaller rivers on this coast. He drags out their channel markers fast as they put ’em in, leaves any boat that tries to chase him stranded high and dry on some ol’ orster bar. No matter what they try, he stays one jump ahead.

  Huntin gators was good business for a while. A lot of Chokoloskee men done that when it was legal, me included, and a few of us went ahead after it weren’t. Tant Jenkins and the Lopez boys, they never paid much attention to the law, and a couple of them Browns, they was real professionals, and other fellers done it on the side. But all of ’em has quit the business now, because them poor dumb things are mostly gone.

  Still got the laws but ain’t got no more gators. Speck don’t hardly poach no more cause they ain’t enough gators left to bother with. Few years’ time, there won’t be no place to hunt except way south around Florida Bay, and no place to ship the few hides a man might get. But God created Crockett Senior Daniels to take and sell just about anything so long as it ain’t his, so if he has to, he will rob rare bird eggs, or butterflies or ferns or orchids, or green tree snakes, or a coral snake, or maybe them peppermint-striped tree snails that’s mostly gone now off the hammocks. A dealer he’s got over to Miami knows how to get them pretty things to rich collectors, them very few that don’t die along the way.

  Case you might think I am tellin all Speck’s secrets, none of this ain’t no secret at all, not to nobody around the Glades country. Ol’ Speck been gettin on in years, claims he’s retired now, lives on his old boat out of Flamingo on account of the heat his boys is drawing around here. Into his sixties and still gives the wardens fits. Don’t need the money, he has made so much, and that ain’t even where he’s makin it, cause wild things today ain’t nothin but his hobby. He’s got his boys runnin guns for South America, in and out of the Ten Thousand Islands, just like he run bird plumes and liquor in the old days.

  While Speck was over to Miami settin up deals for moonshine and gators, and payin people off, he seen that by our Florida law there weren’t no kind of damn firearm you couldn’t buy over the counter, and that runnin weapons to the Caribbean or Latin America, where they are kind of loose about their licenses, might be a nice sideline for a gator hunter who was huntin himself right out of business here at home. Speck went right over into haulin guns, and he’s already thinkin about haulin marijuana, because that is where the real big money will be comin from ten years from now, in Speck’s opinion.

  You know and I know that our federal government don’t put nothin in the way of businessmen, don’t matter how greedy or cold-blooded dirty that business might be. If marijuana gets goin good, the big tobacco companies will take it over from the little fellers, put it out in fancy packages, you wait and see. Them corporations pays big money to get their errand boys elected, and after that, they tell ’em what kind of laws to write and how to get ’em passed. Hell, them weapons makers, they do just as good in peace as they do in war! Only hassle they might come up against is right here at the Florida end, with all the paperwork.

  But ol’ Speck says, “Why Godamighty, boys, them forms and export permits don’t mean nothin! I aim to get them weapons out or know the reason why!” Next thing you know, he’s buyin up heavy-duty ordnance that’s labeled for home use or huntin or whatever kind of sportin fun us rednecks might get up to while there’s still a few wild critters left to kill—assault rifles for turkey shoots, bazookas for blowin deer away. Lob a hand grenade into good cover, you might come out with a whole covey of quail! Some of that sportin hardware is so big, it comes on wheels! Truck that ordnance over here to the west coast so’s not to mess with federal surveillance at Miami. Collect enough for a big shipment, haul it out beyond the three-mile limit to that Panama amigo, and run that cargo south to them poor countries where they got some kind of a cryin need to kill people.

  It’s like Speck told me once before I quit—“What they do with them weapons ain’t none of our damn business, Whidden, on account of the customer is always right.” Says, “Ain’t that the motto that made this country great?” Told us about the American Dream and all like that. Ol’ Speck talked so doggone patriotic, it like to brought tears to my eyes, least when I was drinkin.

  All the same, I quit. I’d been thinkin about quittin anyway, because them boys was gettin too darn ornery even for me. Killed out gators all across the Glades, kept killin till it made no sense. Had gator flats piled up by the damn thousands when there just weren’t no call for ’em no more. We was waitin on a market that weren’t goin to come back, not before them stacks of hides moldered and rotted.

  I hated that part worst—the waste of life. Felt like my own heart was leakin, some way. So when Speck’s baby daughter asked me to quit and left me when I didn’t, I thought about it awhile, then said okay. Sally could live with the moonshine business, she could take or leave the gators, but gun-runnin was somethin else, because innocent people was goin to come up killed.

  Course Speck will tell you how some shipments of his weapons was used to put a stop to some damn revolution. Felt pretty proud about his war against godless Commonists, I can tell you. But Sally found out that most of them guns was goin to dictators and criminals, and most of the victims was Injun people dow
n in them poor countries who made the mistake of tryin to resist gettin burned out, run off their land, maybe stomped and killed, just to make Speck’s customers more money. Seems like small brown people are always in the way.

  Whidden stopped talking to listen, then tossed off his cup as Lucius did the same. His legs came off the table and he hauled himself upright in his chair, and his boot heel nudged his jug back underneath it as Sally appeared in the door. “A while back you was askin about Henry Short. Bill House had a son could tell you something.” He stretched and yawned as if unaware of Sally. “Andy House, he’d know about Henry good as anybody. Might even tell you where to find him. And Andy knows some things about your daddy, too, cause Bill House talked about Ed Watson all his life. Ted Smallwood’s children would remember things, and Old Man Sandy Albritton in Everglade, and some of them older Browns at Chokoloskee.”

  Sally was glaring at Whidden’s blue tin cup. “Smallwoods! Houses! Browns! How about Hardens? Your family knew him a lot better than these flea-bitten old-timers who are still slinging it around about Ed Watson, how their daddies told Watson this and he said that! Just to show they know something important, which they don’t! The little they know that’s not hand-me-down lies and bragging from their daddies comes straight out of the magazines and books, most of it wrong!” This was true and Lucius nodded but Sally ignored him. Her gaze remained fixed upon her husband with a look that promised she would settle with him later. “Lee Harden called Old Man D. D. House ‘the leader of the outlaws.’ So why would you send Mister Colonel to listen to a House?”

  Whidden said quietly, “The House boys thought what they done that day was right. They did not back away from it or talk their way around it, not like some.”

  But Sally knew he had been drinking and went storming off to bed, and after that, they remained silent for a while. Looking forward to putting his boat into the water, happy they were headed for the Islands, Whidden contemplated his guest with affection. “Seems to me,” he said at last, “I been settin around with Mister Colonel Watson since the world began. And them good old times are startin to come back.” Swaying erect, heading for bed, he nodded and smiled, eyes shining with fond reveries, but for an hour afterwards, before Lucius finally slept, he could hear the reverberation of their voices, rising, falling.

  Next morning when Lucius awoke, Whidden’s truck was gone. He listened to Sally run a bath, heard the rub of her pretty hip on the porcelain tub, and suffered a sad aching sense of loss. When she came in, she smiled affectionately and said, “Plain Lucius!” but she wasn’t flirting.

  Barefoot, Sally fixed his breakfast, steamy and fresh as a pink shrimp in her white towel bathrobe. Observing her movements at the stove, he longed to retreat between her legs, never to be seen on earth again. Feeling weak and hungover, he murmured finally, “You are very beautiful this morning, Mrs. Harden. And I miss you.”

  She turned to investigate his expression, the long fork dripping grease into the pan. “Don’t, Lucius. Please.” She turned her back on him. “I’ll take you to Naples as soon as you’re finished,” she said coolly and carefully, in warning to them both.

  In a while, her voice came brightly, “Ol’ Mister Colonel! Whidden sure talked about ol’ Mister Colonel after he came to bed! Just went on and on about the old days!” She faced him again. “Made me feel funny, as if I’d lied to him about you, though I haven’t. He has never asked. I just lay there listening, as if I knew hardly anything about you!” Her eyes were misty as she turned back to his bacon.

  WHIDDEN HARDEN

  After E. J. Watson’s death, folks reckoned they’d seen the last of that man’s family. Camped and squatted in the Watson Place just as they pleased, and over the years they took away pret’ near everything, nailed down or otherwise. So it must of been hard for his younger boy to come home to the Islands and see what that old place had come to.

  When he first showed up around nineteen and nineteen, Lucius Watson—he was still called Lucius—spent a fortnight at his daddy’s place, then kept on going south to Lost Man’s River. First thing he done was offer Chatham to Lee Harden, on the condition he could live there, too, in the little Dyer cabin down the bank. Pa told him how a certain family had sold the quitclaim to the Bend to the Chevelier Corporation, and he got all hot and bothered, saying his dad’s title was still good, no matter what.

  Only trouble was, Pa didn’t want the place, no more’n my Grandpa wanted it before him. Hardens was fishermen, not farmers. They did not care to see forty acres of good ground goin to waste. Also, most local fishermen had motorboats by then, so Chatham River was already too close to Chokoloskee. And though Pa hated to admit it, the Bend spooked him.

  Lee Harden had always been uneasy on the Bend, right from a boy. Bad power there, that’s what he was told by his cousin Cory Osceola. Finally Lucius Watson gave up on the Bend, moved south, built a small shack on our shell ridge back of Lost Man’s Beach. And after that day, in all the times he went up Chatham River with Lee Harden, he hardly never went ashore, not even when Pa stopped to pick guavas or ladle up some water from the cistern. Fell dead silent, passin that gray house and that big old raggedy plantation out behind it, hardly never took a look in that direction. Colonel Watson was the lonesomest person on the earth, that’s what my ma told me.

  Mister Colonel—that’s how I called him then, how I still think of him—was kind of my adopted uncle, and Lost Man’s River was his adopted home. For the better part of thirty years, he lived just down the beach there at South Lost Man’s. He was a well-built and good-lookin man maybe six foot tall, fair hair bleached out by the sun but thick dark brows and a brown skin from long days on the water. According to his sister Pearl up to Caxambas, he took after his mother, kind of wishful-looking, same gray eyes and little sideways smile. Spoke very soft when he spoke at all, and had real nice manners like his daddy. Mr. Lucius Watson was a real old-fashioned gentleman—a regular Kentucky Colonel, that’s what my ma called him. Tant Jenkins heard that, and one day sung out, “Good mornin, Colonel!” And pretty soon the man was goin by that name, though us kids put a Mister to it, out of respect.

  Mister Colonel never cared for his new name. “I am no Colonel, sir,” he’d say when he was drinking. “I am Machinist’s Mate Second Class Lucius Hampton Watson! U.S. Navy!” He’d put on a loony dangerous look when he talked like that, to make us children laugh, but all the same, he kind of enjoyed the sound of that old stuff. “I was born in the Indian Country in 1889, the year that Belle Starr died by an unknown hand!”—he enjoyed the sound of that one, too. I’ve heard him come out with it even when he thought he was alone, just to let the birds in on what ailed him.

  Us Hardens sure liked Mister Colonel, everybody on this coast liked Mister Colonel, even them men who was afraid of him, but nobody could figure out just what he wanted. He was pretty close to thirty then but acted like a lanky homesick boy—a homesick boy who talked too quiet, walked too quiet, and could shoot pretty near as good as the man who taught him. He could drill a curlew through both eyes so’s not to waste no meat, and that kind of shootin scared them men that was ready to be scared of Watsons in the first place. They figured Ed Watson was crazy, and if the father was crazy, the son might be, too.

  By the time he come home to the Islands, the tales about his dad was worse than ever, and them terrible stories made the son withdraw from people. Even Browns and Thompsons who was his dad’s friends was very uneasy around Watson’s son, they couldn’t figure what this man was thinking, they didn’t really want nothing to do with him.

  Course Mister Colonel made things worse by askin questions of anybody who might tell him anything about what happened that October day of 1910. A lot of ’em he spoke to knew more than they let on, and some knew less, but nobody didn’t care none for his questions. Then one day he was seen writin somethin on a scrap of paper, and next thing you know, them rumors started that Colonel Watson was takin down the names of all the men who fired at his daddy. If Colonel wer
en’t such a sweet-natured feller, some edgy darn fool would of put a bullet through him long ago, that’s what my pa said. Said if that man don’t move very careful, they might do it yet.

  Every man down in the rivers had growed leery, and maybe Bill House and his brothers most of all. Once that family heard that Watson’s boy was back, they kept a real sharp eye out, cause they never knew when he might be comin nor what he might do after he got there. There weren’t no knowin where he might be headed, and he didn’t always wave. He was a loner. A man might sense something and glance around, get maybe no more’n a glimpse of that blue skiff crossin a narrow channel between islands. Hardly no wake at all, no more’n a alligator. On land, that man could come up on you soft as a panther, even on a crunchy old shell beach, and he could disappear in that same way. You looked around and that blue skiff was gone.

  Mister Colonel fished up and down the coast, but his home was with our Harden clan at Lost Man’s River. The men of Chokoloskee Bay was feudin with our family, and Watson’s son throwin in with us that way—though we was glad to have him—made things more dangerous for him, and for us, too.

  I was born at Lost Man’s River and grew up mostly with my folks, so I grew up with Colonel Watson, too. Hardens had knew his daddy well but nobody spoke too much about him, only me. After I heard about how he died I asked Mister Colonel some hard questions, sneakin up on him real crafty so’s he wouldn’t know what I was gettin at. And he tolerated this because I was a young boy, and also because he was good-hearted and knew the Hardens meant him well no matter what. And over the years he told me what he knew.