Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

The deputy had made no effort to keep his voice down, and approaching the cell door, he pitched it louder for the inmate’s benefit. “When this feller was booked, I told him, ‘Man, you are in real bad trouble this time. You are goin straight to prison to pay for all them felonious activities.’ And he says, ‘Nosir, I sure ain’t, cause they know I’d take half the elected idiots in south Florida to the pen with me.’ ” The deputy laughed loudly as he fiddled with his keys, shaking his head in admiration. “Ol’ Speck! He’ll be back out in the Glades in two days’ time, moonshinin and bootleggin, shootin the livin shit out of the gators.”

Lucius stopped short- “Speck?” But it was too late, the deputy had banged open the cell door. “Yessir. How many Specks y’all acquainted with? This Speck you’re lookin at is Crockett Daniels, that right, Speck?”

Crockett Daniels, sitting on the bunk edge, had been bent over tying up the laces on his sneakers, in feral instinct to be ready for whatever was coming at him down the hall. When the iron door swung open, he withdrew beneath the upper bunk in a kind of coiling, reminding Lucius of a cottonmouth’s sidewinding retreat among the buttress roots of a swamp cypress before coming to rest half hidden in the shadows.

“Goddammit, Depitty, you pat him down good? This crazy sumbitch been threatenin my life!” When the deputy just laughed and slammed the door, Daniels cursed him. Eyes fixed on Lucius, he emerged slowly and perched on the bunk edge in the bad light from the fly-specked bulb high overhead. “That smart-mouth peckerhead is goin on report. Prisoners’ rights ain’t only just the rules, they’re the damn law !” He glowered at his visitor, hard face fringed with dirty stubble. “God A-mighty! What do you want? Ain’t laid eyes on you in years, then all of a sudden you show up way to hell and gone out to the Hook, and next thing I know, you track me right into my cell in the county jail.” He raised his voice to shout after the deputy, “Stupid bastard! Locks me in with a damn Watson and don’t even frisk him!”

Lucius turned and spread his arms, palms to the wall. “Go ahead,” he offered, baiting Speck’s nervousness. He regretted this when Daniels sprang and collared him and banged his chest violently against the wall before pat-ting him down, then gave him a contemptuous hard shove before returning to the bunk, where he stretched out in the shadow, watching his visitor from beneath the arm flung across his eyes. “I’m waitin on you, boy. If you ain’t here to shoot me, you better remember pretty quick why the fuck you come.”

Lucius said he’d heard that a man back in the holding cells might tell him something about Sheriff Tippins’s final conclusions on the Watson case.

“Tell you somethin? Sumbitch who put my name on a damn death list? I won’t tell you fuck-all about nothin !” But when Lucius mentioned the queer absence of any reference to E. J. Watson in the sheriff ’s records, Daniels grew curious despite himself. Frowning upward at the old straw and broken springs that thrust down from the bottom slats of the upper bunk, he rubbed one temple with a scarred brown knuckle to summon up old talks with Tippins that might hold a clue.

“That day the sheriff brought that bunch here to the courthouse? Them men hollerin self-defense when every last damn one admitted they had went to Smallwood’s with guns loaded, set to shoot? Malice aforemost, just like Tippins said. And after he seen how much lead tore up that body, he could never believe their Chokoloskee story. He’d get to fumin like a big ol’ bear with a stung snoot and no honey to show for it. Ten years later he’d still holler, ‘Dammit, Speck, you was right there, boy, you seen it. Them men must of emptied out every last load. Thirty-three slugs, not countin buckshot! Filled a damn coffee can! If thirty-three struck home, how many missed? And they’re tryin to tell a lawman that was self-defense ?’

“Sheriff always aimed to summon a grand jury and reopen up the case but the family was dead set against it and anyway he never could figure how to prosecute, not with his whole posse confessin they took part. Not your common prosecution case at all! Still and all, he couldn’t let it go cause by now he’d heard some crazy story how a nigger was first man to fire at Ed Watson. Now that would eat at Frank P. Tippins, I can tell you! Sheriff got on pretty good with Injuns but niggers was another breed entirely. This snitch told Tippins he had swore a oath he would never reveal that nigger’s name and he never had to, cause there weren’t but the one colored man on Chokoloskee.

“Now Henry Short were known to be a purty good ol’ nigger, but Frank Tippins could not tolerate that any colored man would think to raise a gun against a white man, and when the white man in the case was E. J. Watson, who had every coon in southwest Florida scared up a tree, he flat refused to believe it, especially when none of his damn suspects would confirm that story. Said they never needed no damn nigger to take care of their business. And from the hard way they said this, Tippins concluded that some of these fellers if not all of ’em knew what that day’s business was before Watson’s boat ever come in and struck ashore.

“All of the same, that rumor ate at him. For years Frank was huntin an excuse to take that black boy into custody and work some truth out of him. Only thing, he couldn’t come up with him. Short was gun-shy and kept movin cause Tippins weren’t the only man was huntin him. Somebody else was gunnin for him, I always heard. Maybe still is.

“When Prohibition come along and me and the sheriff done some business, he was still bothered. Asked me straight out, ‘Dammit, Speck, did that darn nigger shoot at Ed or didn’t he?’ Well, I never seen it if he did, that’s what I told him, not carin to admit I was so far in the back I couldn’t see nothin at all. By the time I got my chance to fire, your daddy was already down, deader’n dirt.”

“But you fired anyway. Snuck in there and fired a.22 into his head, is what I heard.”

Speck raised his hand. “Now don’t go barkin up all them wrong trees: we’re talkin about niggers, ain’t we? That other colored in the case? One you was askin about that ain’t on the sheriff ’s books? I always heard he drowned some way on the trip south to Key West but Tippins heard they got him there, then let him off. Give him a new shirt and sent him home, up Columbia County. Sheriff Frank was just a -boilin mad. ‘That’s Key West jusstice for you, Speck! Nigger-lovin Yankees, all them foreigners! I mean, God a’mighty, Speck! That boy confessed how he had his black hands all over that big lady!’ ” Speck shook his head. “Feller was tellin me the other day how two different niggers in Key West was claimin to be the one escaped off of the Watson place after them killins. And I told him, ‘Why, goddammit to hell, we got another one up to Fort Myers claims the same damn thing!’

“Anyways, Tippins believed till the day he left here for Miami that us fellers took and lynched Ed Watson, concluded we was waitin on the shore to gun him down. Said, ‘Maybe you held your fire till he raised his gun, maybe you didn’t.’ Said Bill House was sincere, all right, believed the hell out of his own story, but somethin was missin all the same. Sheriff called your daddy’s death an unsolved crime where most wouldn’t call it no damn crime at all.

“That was the first time, Frank would say, that he never done his duty. Course it weren’t the last time by a long shot, but he didn’t know that in his early days. I believe it was the Watson case that made that feller say to hell with it and give up on common justice.