Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“In my mind, too. Still is.”

“Evidently, the sheriff claimed your list had been taken from his desk. We worried so about who might have wanted it.” She gazed at him. “Your letter seemed so sad.”

“I believe you just told me you had never read this letter.”

“That’s what I told you, all right. Another shameful lie.” Nell’s hurt and anger were rising to meet his. “I told a white lie knowing you’d feel embarrassed because I had learned shameful secrets which of course I’d known for years-I was your lover, for goodness sake!-that you missed your long-lost brother and were incapable of killing for honor or revenge.”

Yet from a safe distance, as a sniper, he had killed certified enemies, unlucky youths as young and frightened as himself, executed one by one as they popped up and down out of their trenches like bird heads from behind a log at a huge turkey shoot. Sanctioned slaughters century after century in the ultimate lunacy of the only insane animal ever loosed upon Creation. And finally that last weedy kid who brought him to his senses even as he destroyed him, that defenseless boy taking a crap at such close range that he could smell him…

Nell was peering at him. “Listen,” she murmured when he only stared, not quite present. “No more secrets, all right? I want to tell you something. A few days ago, I drove down to Caxambas to thank you for your book, get you to sign it-my excuse for seeing where this L. Watson Collins lived. You were gone, which was just as well. But someone was there, struggling to write something he’d promised you-”

“The long-lost brother. He’s all right, then.”

“No, he’s not all right. He seemed very discouraged, way out on that salt creek with no auto and no food to speak of and the place a mess. He looked just dreadful. I felt sorry for him. I told him that until you came back, there was plenty of room at Mr. Summerlin’s. He could finish what he was writing there without having to bother about trying to feed himself.”

“He accepted?”

“Yes, he did. Why not?”

“You live there alone?”

“There’s a house servant who comes in-”

“I see.”

“I wonder if you do.”

“Enlighten me, then. A few years ago, you were so concerned about appearances that you felt you had to marry that old man-”

“Not one word of that is fair. Be careful, Lucius.”

“Sorry. Mr. Summerlin. Anyway, I assume it was quite proper-”

“What right have you to assume anything ? It’s none of your darned business. Isn’t it a little late for you to worry about my reputation?”

In Fort Myers, she resumed after a silence, Rob had been very uneasy, he would not go out. He finally confided he was wanted by the law. Though he tried to make a joke of that, he had a great fear of what he called “a half-lived life wasted in prison.”

They sat awhile. “He’s afraid he might be traced here or someone might report him. He has to leave. He’s just waiting in Fort Myers to see you before he goes. Wants to turn his paper in,” she added, a little meanly. “Wants to talk to you about it.”

“What else might he want to talk to me about?”

“You sound jealous. You needn’t be. Please listen: your brother’s desperate. He made me a little afraid. And he’s scared you might think he told you Rob was dead to make a fool of you, when actually he was trying to protect you from getting in trouble for ‘harboring a fugitive’-his words, not mine. If I doubted his story, he said, I could find his name on the public enemy notice at the post office.” When he looked skeptical, she said, “Yes, I did. I wanted to be sure. He’s been on the run for years. Did you suspect that?”

“It crossed my mind.” He could not concentrate. He didn’t want to look at her.

“He’s talking wildly. He didn’t sound sorry for himself but he did say he’ll shoot himself before he goes back to prison because the punishment for his escape would be added to a life sentence and he would die there. But he has no idea where to run anymore and no place to hide.” Irritated by his inattention, she said, “Listen to me! He has a pistol, Lucius. He might harm himself.”

“That’s just Papa’s old revolver,” Lucius said, as if that circumstance took care of everything. Then his fear for Rob caught up with him. “Where is he now? At your house?”

“I’ll leave him a message that you might be at the hotel bar at five this afternoon, all right? What’s the matter?” she asked when Lucius rose abruptly. He needed to get away from her, needed to quell this absurd jealousy before he could trust himself to speak with her any further.

Nell neatened her cuffs. “Running off again?” Never before had he heard disdain in her voice. “I’ve often wondered if the love of my life ever understood what true love is.” He feared-he had always feared-this might be true, that when it came to constancy, he was deficient, crippled.

“I do love you, Nell. I always have.”

“How do you tell?”

They longed to find each other but could not. They stared at the white stones. She said, “Lucius? Do you ever mourn the happy man you might have been?” Her words cast him back into his dread that he would miss the point of life, all the way down into the caverns of old age.

“Forgive me,” she whispered. “You had better go.”

He walked toward the gate. Under the banyan tree, he turned to watch her. Very slowly, arms opening and closing like the wings of a gray-green luna moth, she gathered up her things. In the heat shimmer on the stone, his lost love seemed to palpitate as if just alighted.

At the Gasparilla, Lucius went directly to the Swashbuckler Bar, which overlooked the river. Bony hind end hitched to the farthest stool toward the window, the resurrected Rob had apparently provoked the bartender, who was banging bottles to let off steam while he reorganized the shelf behind him. Other than these two antagonists, the place was empty.

To give his feral brother room, Lucius sat down several stools away, still sorting through the tumult in his breast aroused by Nell, letting the charcoal fume and heat of a stiff bourbon well up through his sinuses into his brain,

“The Watson brothers,” Rob muttered finally, shaking his head at the sheer folly of it all. Lucius recognized the pallid sweaty glaze of that late stage of inebriation after which his brother managed to go right on drinking without seeming drunker. Eventually he might sag down for good but he would not stagger.

“Listen, Arb-”

“Robert is the name. Robert B. Watson, at your service.” He lifted his glass to the other image in the bar mirror. When Lucius asked Rob why he had changed his name. Rob said he’d taken his mother’s name because he no longer wished to be a Watson. Talking out of the side of his mouth, still facing the bar mirror, he had yet to look his brother in the eye. “I’ve written down that Tucker stuff for your Watson whitewash,” he said. “Anything else you want to know?”

“Yes. Who’s that in the urn?” He grinned. “Just dog biscuits?”

Rob did not grin back. Turning his glass to the river light, inspecting the gleaming amber in the ice, he said, “Last time I looked, it was Edgar ‘Bloody’ Watson.”

On his way through Fort Myers in the early twenties, heading south to Lost Man’s in search of Lucius, Rob had visited the cemetery on a night of drink with a plan to piss upon his father’s grave. At the scene, however, this gesture seemed inadequate. With a spade from the caretaker’s shed, starting at the head end, he chipped down through the limestone clay and punched through the lid of the rotted coffin. His revised plan was theft of his parent’s skull for use or perhaps sale as a souvenir but the grisly effort required in separating the brown bullet-broken skull from the tough spine had sobered and exhausted him and his palms were badly blistered. However, he persevered.