Lost Man's River: Shadow Country Trilogy

by Peter Matthiessen

  Speck dismissed her with a grimace and turned back to the men. “See, folks was only scared of Colonel on account of his last name. Even Flamingo people was a-scared of him when he fished down there in the twenties, after his fool list made things hot for him up around home. Feller name Maxwell was Parks ranger up Little Coot Bay, and he was gettin on to Colonel for some reason. And a feller says to him, ‘Maxwell, you best leave that man alone! You keep on messin, one of these days you gone to come up missin! Don’t you know who that man is? Hell, Desperader Watson was his daddy!’ Well, that news took Maxwell’s cold, cold heart and turned it right around, and after that, them fellers always said, they never seen nobody nicer than what this Maxwell was to Colonel Watson.”

  “I believe Sandy Albritton was the one who told me how when Edgar Watson first come to southwest Florida, the train stopped someplace—was it Arcadia?—and there was a man had another feller man down and was beatin on him somethin pitiful. So Mr. Watson swung down off that train and he walked over there and said, ‘How come you onlookers don’t stop this man from beatin this here feller half to death?’ ‘No, no,’ they said. ‘They ain’t nobody can’t stop him, cause that is Quinn Bass, the meanest hombre in all Manatee County!’ So Desperader Watson said, ‘Well, I can stop him.’ And darned if he don’t step over there and shove his revolver into the burl of that man’s ear. Never advised him to quit or nothin, he weren’t the kind to tell another man his business. Just squeezed the trigger and climbed back on the train and went on south.”

  Infuriated, unfairly defeated, Lucius had returned and sat down across the fire. Sally leaned toward him and whispered, “I don’t believe Sandy Albritton ever told any such story!” Her father gave her a funny smile, then reached and whacked her blue-jeaned thigh above the knee. She reared around at him, tears in her eyes. “Keep your cotton-picking hands to your damned self!” Father and daughter measured each other, tasting old bad episodes in their past history, and he raised his brows in unabashed appreciation of her pretty bosom, which was heaving in emotion, Speck picked a broken horsefly off the sand by the gauze wing and turned its glass green body between thumb and forefinger, catching the firelight. “Sharpshooters,” he said. “That’s what old-timers used to call ’em.” He turned to Lucius.

  “Anyways, your daddy had no chance that time Mr. Short killed him, cause when he come ashore, them men was waitin on him. Old Man Lloyd House, had a fish dock at Flamingo for a while—Barrelhead House, we called him, cause he liked hard cash—Mr. Barrelhead was in on the whole plan, and in later years he told me all about it.” He cocked his eye to observe Lucius as a hawk might eye the creature in its talon prior to feeding. “Course I was in Chok that day myself, I was what you might call a eyewitness. But bein so young and comin there that day from Fakahatchee, I weren’t asked to join up, so I follered my uncle across to Smallwood’s landin and joined up in that crowd all by myself.”

  Andy said, “Lloyd House told you they planned it? That sure weren’t the way his brothers told it!”

  “I can’t he’p it,” Speck said airily, waving off the interruption. “Talkin about Fakahatchee, Aunt Emmeline Daniels over there is one of the last ones left alive around south Florida who knew Mr. Desperader Watson from the early days. They give her a family party every year since she broke ninety, and some years she will draw three hundred head, all kissin kin. Don’t have no idea at all who the hell they are but gets into the spirit of it all the same. She used to say Ol’ Desperader Watson had the neatest foot in all the world, looked like a ought-seven shoe, she couldn’t get over it. Smallest foot for a man his size I ever saw, she’d say, and a sparklin personality to go with it.”

  His daughter demanded, “Do you ever speak the truth?” He rumbled like a sleeping dog but would not look at her.

  “Back in the last years of the century, Mr. Watson would come through Flamingo on his way to Key West, stop over sometimes to sell bird plumes to Mr. Gene Roberts. Mister Gene and Desperader was the best of friends, and when Mr. Gene was rentin Andrew Wiggins’s place on Chokoloskee, he always stayed at Chatham Bend on the way through. Mr. Watson would say, ‘What time do you aim to get goin in the mornin, Gene?’ And next mornin he would wake him up, shake him real gentle. That’s what Gene remembered—the gentle way that Desperader shook him. ‘Come on, Gene, time to get up!’ Didn’t hurry him off or nothin, just woke him up and give him flapjacks, put him on his way. I reckon that’s where Colonel got them fancy manners.

  “Yessir, ol’ Mr. Gene thought the world of E. J. Watson. Later years, when Colonel Watson showed up at Flamingo, the Roberts boys told the local men not to run him off or sink his boat but let him fish that country. Gene Roberts said, ‘Boys, I fished with Colonel Watson many’s the time, and drank his whiskey with him, cause he likes his whiskey and a lot of it, same way his daddy did.’ And Gene would say how E. J.’s boy had the sweetest nature he ever come across, said he never seen him mad in all his life. Never caught on that this man’s sweetness weren’t but weakness.”

  Speck met Lucius’s eye. “I always heard you was a alky-holic,” he said softly. “Any truth to that?”

  Sally cried out, “Oh for God’s sake! Why can’t you men stand up to him?” To her father, she said, “You’re a brutal and cynical and vicious man and you always were!”

  And still her husband and the blind man remained silent. All four men knew that Lucius had to deal with Speck in his own way.

  “Come to think about it, might been Mr. Gene who told this story,” Daniels was saying. “Ol’ Desperader had two niggers stackin cordwood on a payday, and one nigger said, ‘All right now, Cap’n, we is about done!’ And Watson said, ‘Well, you better stack it straight, cause that’s your last one.’ And he give Gene Roberts a big wink when he said that. The next week when Gene come through on his way back south from Chokoloskee, them two black boys was gone, there weren’t a sign of ’em. Ed Watson’s Nigger Payday some men called it. Mr. Gene admired hell out of Colonel’s daddy, but he never doubted that ol’ Desperader done away with ’em. And them two weren’t the only ones, not by no means.”

  “That’s the rumor, all right,” Lucius snapped. “I’ve never seen a single scrap of evidence!”

  “Me neither.” Speck yawned at him, indifferent. “I just heard about it.”

  “So you pass along vicious lies.”

  Speck Daniels sat up on his elbows for a better look at him. “You callin me a liar, Colonel? Can’t swaller the truth? How come you wasted all these years in diggin up the truth if you cover it right up again when you come across it?”

  Speck reeled to his feet and jerked his head in the direction of the point. “We got some business.” Lucius followed him a little distance down the beach, and they talked standing.

  Speck said, “We got Old Man Chicken in the house, him and his damfool brother. You people wasn’t ten feet from ’em when you was on the porch the other day.”

  When Lucius had gone hunting him at Gator Hook, day before yesterday, Rob was already on his way to Chatham Bend, where the men meant to hold him until Speck arrived. Coming downriver from the inland bays, Speck’s men had heard a helicopter in the distance. Next, they came around the Bend to find a skiff tied up to the old pilings. The Watson Place was as white as a lighthouse, and the painter was up under the eaves on the west wall on his high ladder, paying no attention to their arrival.

  The three men gathered at the ladder’s foot, staring upward, as Speck put it, “like red-tick hounds with a fat coon up a tree.” The bulky housepainter would not even look down but instead cried cheerily over his shoulder that the old place would look a whole heck of a lot better once he had finished this second coat of paint. Next, he asked if there was anything that he could do for them. “For a start,” roared Crockett Junior, “you can haul your ass down off that ladder and tell us what you think you’re doin on this posted property! Never read our sign? Says, ‘This Means You!’ ” The stranger kept right on with his painting, promising he would
be with them shortly. Not until Crockett shook his ladder hard would he finally look down, and even then they could not make out whether the big man was snarling or smiling. Lucius concluded that Ad’s fearful grimace was intended to disarm them, or possibly persuade himself that he’d only imagined the apocalyptic roar of an approaching airboat and that ugly dog built like a keg which was circling the ladder and these hard-looking men with heavy boots and automatic weapons who had swarmed ashore like drunken militia at a public hanging.

  On pain of death he gave his name as A. Burdett of Neamathla, Florida, come to give his childhood home a coat of paint. Despite his name, Ad cried, he was a Watson. He said he’d been urged to come here by his brother Lucius, and assured them that a venerable institution such as the Park would never destroy such a fine-looking house once it realized how much the old place meant to the Watson family! Surely that sign saying KEEP OUT must be illegal, since everyone knew that all Park land belonged to the American people. Also he’d been unpleasantly surprised to find the doors padlocked and the windows boarded, thwarting his plans to sleep beneath his father’s roof. Furthermore, there was an awful smell which seemed to come from behind those boarded windows—one would almost suspect something had died in there!

  Having started, Addison could not stop talking, until finally he said with a forced laugh more like a shriek that he hoped that what he was smelling in there was not bodies!

  “Shut the hell up!” Crockett Junior bellowed, at wits’ end. To make his point, he shoved the ladder hard, sending it scraping down the house side in a long slow arc. “Hey, wait!” the painter hollered. The ladder described a crescent down the wall, then fell to the hard ground, where the pit bull Buck, awaiting orders, took up a position at the stranger’s throat. Still clutching his brush, unhurt except for splotches of white paint and his bruised feelings, he picked himself up and pointed at the unsightly gray scrape marks made by the ladder. “Let’s not go spoiling my nice paint job, fellers!” They watched in astonishment as he poured new paint and raised the ladder and clambered up with a fresh bucket and set to work at once, painting out scrapes.

  Apparently, Dummy had raised his gun, intending to shoot this loony off the ladder like a big turkey, but Mud deflected him, warning the stranger to get the hell off this river before that helicopter arrived with the outlaw gang which would put him to death at once because he knew too much. But seeming incapable of leaving his second coat unfinished, the man only increased his pace, burrowing deeper into his work like a child pulling the covers up over its head. If that “whirlybird” arrived, he cried, he would do his best to talk some sense into the heads of those darned criminals! With this, Speck’s men abandoned hope of reasonable discussion. The real whirlybird, as they now recognized, was this wild-eyed Watson on the ladder, slathering paint on that doomed house as if his life depended on it, which it did.

  Speck’s men soon realized that they could not let a witness leave before their cargoes were safely off the Bend. Also, it seemed easier to let him flap along under the eaves than to have him descend and get in their way. For the moment they went on about their business, lugging Chicken ashore—he was bound and gagged because they were sick of his abuse—and setting him in the thin shade of the poincianas. Then they unlocked the house and heaved outside the stacks of reeking gator hides, which stuck together in various states of putrefaction from mold rot and roof leak and humidity as well as maggots.

  The gator hides were camouflage for the tarpaulins and heavy crates beneath—contraband weapons and munitions, Lucius deduced, recalling what Whidden had told him, which had to be lugged out one by one and stacked along the bank, in preparation for airboat transfers to a second depot.

  From Whirlybird’s peculiar expression, Speck’s men suspected that his docile return to work was a ruse to throw them off the scent of some escape plan. (Lucius imagined Addison’s plan as strange, formless incipience, spinning in his white-speckled head like primordial matter in the cosmos.) When they went inside for the last crates, they sat down for a smoke, and watched through the door as Whirlybird executed a stealthy descent and tiptoed toward the old man under the trees.

  “How does she look?” he was heard to whisper, turning with his hands upon his hips to sincerely admire his own handiwork, as the old man, still gagged, glared at him in hatred. Knowing Rob, Lucius could well imagine the beetling brows and sparking eyes of that infuriated oldster, gargling at the mad housepainter to free him. “What in the heck is going on around this place?” Ad wished to know. Rob rolled his eyes and eventually Ad freed him.

  Not long thereafter, they discovered they were brothers—nearly thirty years apart, Lucius reflected, and irrevocably opposed in temperament, but sired by the same red rooster, E. J. Watson. During their long conversation, Rob was seen to weep a little, though whether this was exasperation with his brother or fear for his own life, the onlookers were unable to determine.

  When the Cracker Belle arrived toward noon next day, Speck’s men were on their way upriver with a cargo. The bound-and-gagged brothers were lashed down on bunks inside, unable to signal their rescuers a few yards away. Once the Belle had departed for Mormon Key, they were set free long enough to eat and stretch their legs, then bound again while the exhausted crew got a little sleep. This morning, when Speck arrived, Whirlybird was sent back up his ladder, while Rob was settled on the porch, in the musky and rain-rotted ruin of a plush settee.

  Having heard the report of the abduction from the Naples church hall and the various disreputable adventures since, Speck contemplated his irascible old friend, shaking his head. “Public Enemy Number One!” he said. “Ol’ Chicken-Wing!”

  “The same,” Rob Watson said. He accepted a jam jar of Speck’s moonshine and raised his glass to the man under the eaves—“To my long-lost baby brother Ad Burdett, a painting fool out of north Florida!”

  While his crew ran another cargo up the river, Speck poured himself more shine, and Chicken, too. “One for the road,” Speck teased him, lifting his glass, and the prisoner cursed him. They sat on the porch in the dead quiet of the river day to think things through. When Whirlybird descended and nagged at Speck to return him to his boat and let him go, the older brother backed him up, declaring that the Watson heirs did not care to be ill-treated in their own ancestral dwelling, especially on their first visit home in a half century. Surely, Rob said, Mr. Daniels owed some consideration to the sons of E. J. Watson, having helped to kill him. Whirlybird stared in disbelief as these two laughed.

  However, not knowing what to do with these damned Watsons, Speck was growing irritable. “Ain’t you here to kill me?” he jeered. “How about that weapon and that list?” Unlike his men, Speck doubted very much that Chicken Collins had ever meant to kill him, but whether or not he could keep them from killing Chicken was another matter. He tied Rob up again, gagging his snapping mouth so tight that his bloodshot eyes bugged out. “I always enjoyed the hell out of old Chicken,” Speck told Lucius. “Us two fellers got along real good yesterday evenin, considerin he might wind up gettin shot.”

  Ad Burdett, upset when his skiff was towed across the river, expressed his sincere disapproval of his old brother consorting with known criminals, and demanded to know what gave these men the right to take him prisoner on these Park lands. Offering him moonshine, Speck cheerfully agreed that they had no right whatever, but pointed out that a caretaker’s solemn duties included protecting the place from whirlybirds and vandals. To illustrate, he pointed at the paint job. “If that ain’t unlawful vandalism of federal property, I don’t know what,” he said, winking at Chicken.

  “I traveled a long way to paint this house,” Ad moaned, in an onset of self-pity, “and I spent up all my vacation time and all my savings, so I deserve a better explanation than that one you gave me.”

  Fed up, Speck snarled, “Try this one, then. This damn ol’ house is goin up in smoke in a few days, and your paint job with it—all your hard work and time and money, and your stupid v
acation, and maybe your own self if you’re tied up inside, ever think of that?”

  This morning Speck had left there before noon, to make his way south by the inland creeks to Lost Man’s Key. He had not gotten far when he was apprehended by the helicopter, which he had not heard over the din of his own engine. Circling in the high distance, the machine had picked up the white wake of his boat when he left the Watson Place. From the shrouded sun, tracking his propeller roil across the copper bays, it finally descended in a tree-shattering racket to run him aground against the bank at Onion Key. There the Park rangers searched his boat and confiscated his tree snails and his orchids. (They were dead anyway, said Speck, who had had no time to tend them.) Finding no gator hides or guns or moonshine, they had let him go.

  Lucius said finally, “If you came here to let me know they were all right, then I’m much obliged.”

  “That ain’t why I come here, and they ain’t ‘all right.’ ” Speck whistled in amazement. “Are all you Watsons crazy? Between Chicken and that Whirlybird—”

  “Rob got off to a rough start in life. Addison, too. It’s not their fault.”

  “Ain’t Junior’s fault, neither,” Speck said grimly. “But that ain’t goin to help him, vet or no vet, not when that last screw lets go and he starts shootin at them fuckin helio-copters!”

  “Rob’s not going to shoot anybody! He was drunk—”

  “I am drunk right here this minute, you stupid bastard, and I ain’t shot you yet! In the old days, you was drunk most all the time, but you never shot nobody I ever heard about!” His voice rose to a shout. “I mean, goddammit, if you was them wild boys of mine, outside the law, what would you make of a man carryin a list like that, and a loaded weapon?” Before Lucius could speak, he said in a hard voice, “You might figure his crazy brother Colonel Watson put him up to it! I mean, it ain’t like we’re talkin about some poor old alky. It ain’t like he never killed before! Killed right here at Lost Man’s, for Christ’s sake! Killed right here on this key where we are standin on!” Speck raised his hand to block Lucius’s protest. “So you’re tryin to tell me it weren’t him took a shot at Dyer? And if he will shoot at Dyer, why not me?”