Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  Coming upriver to the Bend, Ruth Ellen had been stunned to see that lonely house. It seemed to her she had seen it in a dream. Ruth Ellen had known almost nothing about her father and did not ask too many questions, but finally she said, very low and shy, ‘What did he look like?’ And when she saw the big old cistern on the east side of the house, she recalled in a faint voice how one day she was picked up off the ground and held way out over the black and murky water. And she heard a deep voice warning her she must never play around the cistern, because if she fell in, she would surely drown, and her soul would be lost forever. For long years after, she imagined that this voice was God, but now she believed it was her father, holding her out over the dark waters.

  More and more, her childhood days were starting to seep back. Returning downriver, she recalled a morning when she was playing in a skiff tied to the dock. The children were warned they would be punished if they played around the boats because of the giant crocodile which was often seen in that part of the river. The skiff came loose and drifted away with her, and the poor thing was so terrified of that huge crocodile that she could not even cry out. She crouched down in the bottom of the skiff and did her best to pray. As the boat drifted downriver, there was nothing left in all the world but the blue sky above and the sun and silence, and the swift current whispering among the mangroves, whispering and whispering, telling that dreadful monster where to find her. She saw a white bird crossing the blue, the sun piercing its wings, and she prayed that it might be her guardian angel. Then there came a great bump against the boat, and she started to cry, knowing the crocodile had found her. She closed her eyes and scrunched down tight, holding her breath, hoping and hoping it was all a dream.

  A blackness crossed the sun, and she thought, Death. But when she gasped for breath to scream, she caught a smell of spirits and tobacco—a half century later, that’s what she remembered. This was the only time in all her life she recalled seeing her father, and what remained with her was the great strength of him, and the warmth of his arms as he lifted her from the bottom of that skiff without a word. She couldn’t remember the face leaning over, only the circle of fire on the rim of the black hat shutting out the sun.

  At the old McKinney store, moved to a higher ground from the island’s northwest point after the Hurricane of 1926, the two swamp trucks, dark gurry red, dull crankcase black, were parked outside the small and faded building. On their huge tires, which jacked the beds high up off the shell road, the new machines seemed top-heavy and out of place in this island backwater of sand tracks, shacks, and ancient autos, loose-fendered, with fallen mufflers. The old broken boats nearby were gray-bearded with dried algae. Scummed rainwater bred mosquitoes in the bilges.

  Mud and Dummy lounged against the trucks, watching him come. On the red truck’s door was painted in black lettering—WILD HOG JAMBOREE—and on its rear bumper was a sticker with blue stars and red stripes—WHEN YOU TAKE MY GUN, YOU TAKE MY FREEDOM. Below the rifle rack in BAD COUNTRY’s rear window was this printed notice:

  GOD, GUNS, AND GUTS

  MADE IN AMERICA

  LET’S KEEP ALL THREE

  In the flat light on the Sunday island, Lucius felt thirsty. His first impulse had been to keep on going, but he had taken a deep breath and slowed and turned, and parked.

  Bare-chested, in greasy overalls and soiled red galluses, the silent Dummy appeared torpid and indifferent, but Mud grinned like a hound. Both men wore black buckled boots, black baseball caps, rough beards. Mud had one boot hitched up behind on a rear fender.

  Crockett Junior lay sprawled across BAD COUNTRY’S hood, using a big hunting knife to scrape crisped insects off the windshield. Unaware of Lucius, he wheezed with his exertions, levering his torso with bare and hairy shoulders, thrashing on the stump of the lost arm. A heavy key chain at his belt scraped the truck paint as he shifted position. “This sucker don’t go nowhere at all he ain’t got a beer can stuck into his face!” Crockett was yelling. “He don’t know fuck-all, this stupid fuck! I ain’t lettin him nowhere near my rig, not in no truck-pull! Wouldn’t have fuckin nothin left of it, time he got done!” Lucius supposed that Dummy was the man referred to, but if so, he seemed utterly indifferent, kneading his testes in a languid manner.

  Through the window, Lucius said, “You damn near ran us off the road this morning.” Mud Braman hooted. “We’ll do better next time.” He glanced at the one-armed man for his approval, but Crockett neither turned nor laughed, just kept on scraping. Behind his head, the crude head of his dog loomed in the windshield.

  “Dyer says you’re supposed to let him go.”

  Crockett Junior Daniels lay his knife down on the hood and hiked himself onto his stump. Then he took hold of his big belt buckle with his freed hand the better to hike and shift the belt and jeans, in what looked like an instinctive move to free a weapon. The maneuver took considerable effort, and he gasped noisily, a wet snarl twisting his stubble. Then he said in a low voice, “Fuck Dyer. That old man is goin to get his fuckin neck broke. Maybe you, too.”

  Mud Braman whinnied. “Hell, Colonel, you ain’t the only one out huntin him! Come on the radio this mornin!” He squinted one puffy eye. “Ol’ Chicken sure turned out to be a mean old feller! Armed and dangerous! Attempted murder! He’s getting too damn old for stuff like that!”

  Lucius got out of the car. “I want to know where I can pick him up.”

  “You got a boat?”

  Crockett pointed his big knife at Mud. “Motor Mouth here don’t know nothin. He talks.” He gazed malevolently at Mud, who cursed and kicked the tire. The knife point switched toward Dummy, who appeared to be in suspended animation. Crockett said, “Looks like a idjit, don’t he? But the real idjit is this one can’t keep his mouth shut.”

  “Hell, Dummy ain’t no idjit! He ain’t even extra stupid. Only quiet. Quiet as the grave.” Mud winked at Lucius. “Good soldier. Very very good. But one day when us three boys and Whidden was on patrol, over there to Asie, this man stopped talkin. Said ‘Fuck it’—them were his last words. I believe he has lost the hang of human speech.”

  Dummy said nothing, then or later, gazing past Lucius’s head, but the corner of his eye tracked every movement.

  Crockett growled, “Get goin, Mister.” He turned to his scraping, as if unable to endure Lucius’s appearance. In the sun-shined air and Sunday silence, the knife blade squeaked on the dry glass.

  “I could charge you guys with kidnapping—that what you want? You know how serious that is?”

  Mud jeered, “How come you ain’t done that before now?”

  “Dyer—” Lucius started, and Mud said, “Fuck Dyer,” and the one-armed man slid off the hood and backed Lucius up against his car at knife point. “You don’t listen good,” he murmured, moving forward.

  Lucius let all expression leave his face, averting his eyes like a dog showing its throat. Dummy was watching now, his mouth half open, while Mud stood ready to snarl or jeer according to the one-armed man’s first shift in mood.

  Mud yelled at Lucius, “Never heard Junior tellin you, ‘Get goin?’ You keep pesterin with them stupid-ass questions, he might set that dog on you, run your sorry ass right off this island!”

  Cocking the knife blade back under his wrist, Crockett used this knife fist to punch Lucius’s chest, driving him back against the car. He went back to his work and did not speak again.

  Mud Braman took a long swallow of beer and came up gasping with relief, shaking his head over Lucius’s close shave. But when Lucius asked where he might find Bill Smallwood, Mud merely belched, wiping his bearded mouth with the back of his hand. “Nosir,” he snarled. “Nosir, we cain’t help you. And that is because we are dumb-ass fuckin rednecks that don’t know fuckin nothing about nothin. Only fuckin thing we know to tell you is the fastest fuckin way off this here island!”

  An amorphous form loomed in the store’s screen door like abyssal life rising palely from the deeps. “We sure don’t care none for that kind of
talk, not on a Sunday. You boys was sure raised up better’n that.” Slowly the man came outside, blinking in the hard noon light, an elderly, clean-shaven man with thinning hair slicked down on a pale scalp and a line of white skin along the hairline. “Well brung-up young Christian men, talkin like New York City or some darned place,” he complained wearily. “How-do, Colonel,” he said.

  “Cap?” Mud complained. “He’s lookin to pester Cap’n Bill, is what it is.”

  Cap Brown ignored this. “You want Bill, you foller that white road around to the marina. Likely find him in a trailer house up from the office.” To the three young men, the storekeeper said, “I knowed this man since I was your age. He ain’t out to harm nobody.” Contemplating the huge new trucks, he shook his head before going back inside.

  Crockett climbed into BAD COMPANY and slammed the door, yanking the gargling dog aside by its leather collar. Dummy got into the red truck beside Braman, who eased WILD HOG JAMBOREE into gear. Gunning his motor, Mud jolted ahead as Lucius yelled and stepped forward to detain him. Dummy’s paw shot out and seized his shirtfront and yanked him hard against the truck door. Though he fought to get loose, he was dragged out onto the road before the hand released him, sending him spinning hard to the hard ground. BAD COMPANY honked in approval and salute as both trucks wheeled away, the triumphant jeers commingled with bare sunlight and white Sunday dust.

  The air turned black, came light again. His forearm was scraped and his brain ringing. He rested on his knees a moment before staggering to his feet.

  “You hurt?”

  He shook his head. He could not make out the storekeeper through the dark mesh, only the paleness of his shirt. The paleness brought back an odd memory from the old days: Cap had always enjoyed a meal of mayonnaise, spooned from the jar.

  Cap said, “Been a few years, ain’t it? You sure don’t change much, Colonel. Only thing, these younger ones don’t know you good as we do. You snoop around askin them questions, how they s’posed to know you ain’t a fed?” When Lucius shrugged, the voice behind the screen continued, “What they mainly heard about is that ol’ list.”

  Lucius spat out dust. “A list of dead men!”

  “Crockett’s daddy ain’t dead, lest he died yesterday. And there’s another one. If he ain’t on there, he sure ought to be.”

  “I haven’t kept that list in thirty years, goddammit, Cap! If revenge was what I’d wanted—” But not knowing what he’d wanted, he fell silent, slapping angrily at his dusty pants.

  “That a fact? If you was Speck, would you take a Watson’s word for that? After another Watson showed up here just lately, wantin to be took down to the Bend? Where Speck is caretakin?”

  “Wait a minute! What—?”

  “All these brothers slippin around all of a sudden has got to strike folks kind of funny, Colonel, when we ain’t hardly seen a Watson on this island since your old man was shot in 1910. Also, we heard how you been askin whether them men planned to kill your daddy.”

  Lucius stopped slapping the white dust. He straightened and moved slowly toward the steps, trying to locate the storekeeper behind the screen. “Cap? Does everyone know where my brother is except for me?”

  “Them boys won’t hurt him none without Speck says so.”

  “I can’t count on that. I’ll have to call the state police.”

  The storekeeper was silent a long moment. When he spoke again, his tone had shifted and turned cold. “Let me tell you somethin. With boys like these, all war-wounded, kind of half-loco, I would not call in no law if I was you.” The voice diminished as it withdrew from the screen and the paleness faded back into the gloom.

  “Cap? I’m thirsty. I could use a soda pop or something—”

  “Store’s closed,” the voice said.

  It was now midmorning. In his desperate need to act, he drove at high speed north and east to Gator Hook. There were no trucks or autos and the place looked closed. The door at the top of the roadhouse steps was padlocked, and a yellow rat snake, gathering sun into its coils on the wood stoop, slipped without haste into a rain-rotted crevice. He called out, but there was no answer, only frogs chugging in the cypress, and forlorn odd cries of gallinule and limpkin.

  Nailed to the door was a stained scrap of paper reading “Gone to Church.” In the same scrawled hand, splotched with spilled coffee, were rough directions to a “wild hog jambaree and truck pull, free 6-pack with admision.” The truck pull would take place this afternoon off the Copeland Road in the Big Cypress, at the same roadhouse where BAD COUNTRY had been parked the day before.

  He drove the eight miles east to Forty-Mile Bend, then west again along the Trail to the first Indian camp, a collection of palm-thatched cheke roofs mostly hidden behind a high stockade fence. Knocking at the gate, he asked the woman who eventually appeared where he might locate Billie Jimmie. A small crowd gathered, mostly children. After a long silence in which nobody would look him in the face, he was pointed toward his car and told to wait. When Lucius said he could not wait, the command was repeated and the gate was shut. Within a few minutes, Billie Jimmie emerged, wiping his mouth, and squashed into the car without explanation.

  He had not seen Chicken, Billie Jimmie said, before Lucius could ask him. Yes, he had been brought to Gator Hook, just as Lucius suspected. The Indian ignored the white man’s question about how he had found out. Knowing Chicken was there, he had walked cross-country through the Cypress, coming in behind the roadhouse. Driven off by drunks, he found no way to talk with him. Now the old man was gone. Asked how he knew, the big man winced again. “Indin business,” he said this time, wanting nothing to do with the dangerous incredulity of white men.

  Lucius wondered aloud if the old man might be found at that wild hog jamboree on the Copeland Road? The Indian sat expressionless. “South,” he said finally, with a hand gesture indicating distance. “Pavioni.” Lucius recognized the Mikasuki word for the vanished Indian village on Chatham Bend. After that, they sat in silence for a while, contemplating the purple morning glory blossoms on the stockade wall.

  “No damn good,” Billie Jimmie pronounced gloomily. He was worried, too.

  Lucius reminded him that they had first met on the occasion of the Park inauguration at Everglade. “Drunk Injun,” Billie Jimmie grunted, relating how he owed his life to Chicken, who had cured him of drink and returned him to the spiritual path of the Old Way.

  “Rob cured you of drink? Returned you to the spiritual path?”

  The Indian waited politely for the white man’s amusement to subside, then reminded Lucius that the Park ceremony at Everglade had been a very dark day for his people, who were banned forever from Hatchee Chok-ti, or “Shark River.” And he related his own grief and his flight into spiritual darkness. All this had ended one hot summer afternoon on the roof of the Young Men’s Christian Association of Orlando, where his friend Mr. Collins had provided a fresh jug of his favorite corn whiskey, Okeefenokee Moon. “Only white feller I ever come across could drink himself drunker’n a Indin and still sit up straight,” Billie Jimmie marveled, with a fine mix of admiration and disgust.

  Tongue loosened by the Okeefenokee Moon, Billie Jimmie had confided to the white man his undying shame that a hereditary chief and spiritual leader, entrusted with an ancient deerskin containing the medicine of the Green Corn, had hidden this sacred relic in a hollow tree “back in the Cypress,” then abandoned his people to become a drunkard. From that dark day onward, he had taken refuge from his life in the white man’s cities, yet had never ceased to be tormented that the Green Corn Bundle was deteriorating in its hiding place, and the tribe’s spiritual power along with it. To drown his sorrows over this calamity, he had taken a mighty slug of Okeefenokee Moon, set the jug down on the roof cinders with a doleful sigh, and cursed the fate that had afflicted him with a flawed character. But when he wiped the tears out of his eyes and was reaching once more for the jug, he found his solace out of reach and the old man pointing at him in a fury. “You’re a dam
n disgrace,” his friend had yelled. “A big sloppy Injun drunk, and a disgrace!”

  Billie Jimmie was too flabbergasted to respond. He felt as if his soul had been struck by lightning. Furthermore, his incensed companion was by no means finished with his abuse. “You get the hell up off your redskin ass,” this terrible old man was yelling. “You go get yourself sober and cleaned up, and then you go out in the woods and find all that sacred heathen crud and clean the dirt off of it! And from now on, you take care of your spiritual duties like your people told you!”

  The Indian rose to his full height, ready to kill. He lifted the old man right off the cinders, prepared to cast him from the rooftop to the concrete sidewalk five stories below. “You crazy old sonofabitch!” he hollered, or words to that effect, “you ain’t never drawed a sober breath in all the time I knowed you, you are the most unmercifullest drunk I ever come across, and I seen plenty! Who are you to talk that way to a hereditary chief!”

  “You sure don’t act like any chief I ever heard about,” Old Man Chicken told him, “and your breath ain’t so hot, neither. Anyways, Bill,” the white elder continued, rising up and brushing cinders from a bloody elbow where the Indian had flung him down, “that ain’t the difference between you and me.” And he drew Billie Jimmie down beside him, keeping the corn liquor out of reach. “The difference is, I don’t drink because I have to drink, like you. I drink because I like to drink, I’m a drunk because I enjoy being drunk, and I ain’t all weepy and full of guilt about it, neither. I like bein a drunk, you understand? I like it! And the older I get, the better I like it. And if I die early, that is all right, too, cause old age ain’t all that it’s cracked up to be.” The old man said this more or less cheerfully, gazing out over the hot smog of the town. Then he added in a quiet voice, “If I thought I could do it, I would drink it all.”

  “Might kill yourself,” the Indian warned him.

  “You find a better way, you let me know.”