Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Lucius jolted down his drink. “Is any of this true? Your father ?” He was horrified. He still hoped Rob was joking.

“My ever-loving daddy. Did my heart good.”

“You beheaded your father but you didn’t piss on him.”

Rob shook his head, disappointed in himself.

Filling the hole, mounding the grave, he returned the spade to the caretaker’s shed, where he wrapped his prize in a piece of burlap. Later that day, he bribed a funeral parlor handyman to smash it into manageable pieces and install it in that inexpensive Greek-type urn. “As the rightful owner, I thought I got to do the smashing,” Rob said slyly, as his brother glared at him in the bar mirror. “Turned out I had to have a smasher’s license.”

“Your standard license only covered the looting and desecration.” Lucius spun toward him on his stool. “Look. This isn’t funny.”

Rob swiveled instantly to meet him. “ Lad Exhumes Dad. You don’t think that’s funny?”

“I don’t think it’s true. You’d have to be crazy.”

“I guess I’m crazy, then,” Rob said.

The brothers measured each other.

“You really hated him that much?”

“Who hated first? It wasn’t Sonborn.”

“He didn’t hate you at the end. In fact, he mentioned your nerve and skill, sailing his boat to Key West. Alone. At night. He said, ‘That boy is a real seaman, I’ll say that for him.’ ” Lucius watched Rob’s face. “Papa made terrible mistakes, I know, but he wanted to be a decent father.”

“He didn’t make it.” Rob threw his whiskey back and signaled rudely for another. The bartender refused him. “You was notified,” he growled, “before this other party come.” Told by Lucius that the other party would take responsibility, the man shrugged. “Just watch your mouth,” he advised Rob, who merely drummed his fingers on the bar, awaiting his new drink. “The Watson brothers,” he said again, sardonic. “Anything else you need to know?”

“Tell me where you’ve been.”

“Mostly at your place.” He glanced at Lucius, looked away again. “Then here in town. Nell Summerlin’s.”

“In your life, I mean. After you left Lost Man’s. 1901.”

“I know what year it was.” Rob recounted how he’d left Key West on a freighter and wandered the earth as a merchant seaman for nine years before taking work ashore. “Learned to drive, got good at it, got special jobs.” On a night job as a trucker hauling bootleg liquor during Prohibition, he got caught up in a shooting at a warehouse in which a guard was killed. Most of his life since, he said, had been spent in prison.

Lucius had suspected this-the dead hair, pallor, the quick eyes and sideways whispered speech. But seeing his sympathetic wince as just more skepticism, Rob instantly broke off his account. “You wanted my story, bud,” he muttered. “That’s what you got. Take it or leave it or shove it up your ass.”

Those wild sharp eyes had suddenly gone shiny. On impulse, Lucius took him by the shoulders and, as Rob stiffened, gave him a quick brotherly hug. Rob’s heart was beating in his scrawny chest like the heart of a stunned bird felled by its own reflection in the window. Lucius took the stool beside him, saying brusquely, “All right. And Gator Hook?”

“Heard about it from a feller in the pen, friend of Crockett Daniels. Made my way out there after I missed you at Lost Man’s River. Very good place to lie low if you don’t mind low company.”

“So you’re a fugitive.”

“R. B. Watson is the fugitive. I’m R. B. Collins, remember?”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this in the first place?”

“Because if you knew and you failed to turn me in, you’d be aiding and abetting a known criminal. You’d wind up in prison. Anything else?”

“The Tuckers. Did he do it? Just tell me yes or no.”

Rob pressed his cold glass to the deep furrows parting his brows. “No yes-or-no,” he said after a while.” It’s complicated. You’d better read what I wrote.”

“All right. Where is it?”

“It’s up in my room,” Rob said, sullen again. He was very drunk.

“Who’s paying for your room here? Nell?” That was the bourbon talking. His brother ignored him.

Lucius had arranged with Watson Dyer to meet for supper at the Gasparilla on Dyer’s way through town. They awaited the attorney in the lobby. When he failed to appear, they left word at the desk and went into the restaurant without him.

The Buccaneer Grill had a hearty buffet topped off by a blood-swollen roast beef. The meat’s custodian, in chef ’s apron and high hat, was a big roly-poly black man with a swift red knife and a line of chatter that had the whole room smiling.

“Oh yeah! Yes suh ! Tha’s it! Tha’s right! How you folks this evenin? Y’all havin a good visit to Fo’t Myers? Doin okay? Tha’s jus’ fine, my frien’! Bes’ have some o’ this fine roast! Oh yeah! Yes suh! Tha’s it! Tha’s right! Red for the gennleman, pink for the lady? Jus’ a li’l bit more, now, jes’ a l’il bit - all right? Aw right !”

“Don’t know when to quit,” Rob said too loudly. Reaching for his whiskey, he almost tipped her tray before the waitress could set down his glass. “Man’s playing these old tourists like a school of catfish,” he said unpleasantly, “snuffling through the mud after a bait.”

He was still bitching when Attorney Dyer came up from behind, yanked out a chair, and settled with a heavy grunt, without a greeting. He considered their liquor glasses before noting coldly that they had not waited for him. “You boys in a big rush or what?” His smile looked rigid. “I thought I was the busy feller around here.” That delicate shiver of the skin around the corners of the mouth, as if the inner man was trembling with hidden rage, reminded Lucius once again of Papa. Under the scrutiny of those bald eyes, there seemed no doubt that Dyer was a Watson, yet it seemed unnatural to think of him as such since they had nothing else in common, brotherly affection least of all.

Dyer was wearing a white windbreaker with “U.S.A.” emblazoned over the heart. “United Sugar Association jacket,” he said, touching the red letters encircled by blue stars. “Nice way to show our industry’s appreciation of Old Glory and this great land of opportunity.”

Considering how much federal land Big Sugar is grabbing for next to nothing, Lucius thought, I would certainly hope so. But he stifled his protest, knowing it would be wasted.

The year before, climbing the high dike on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee, Lucius had stared in disbelief at the endless vivid greens stretching away to southward and the high stacks of the U.S.A. factory that violated the clear sky of the waterland and the wall of oily smoke downwind that shrouded the horizon like a dark front of oncoming bad weather. The tons of chemicals dumped into the pristine waterlands, the wretched slave camps for the migrant workers-the price of progress, Papa would have called it, celebrating any and all such evidence of the Twentieth Century cavalcade.

Rummaging among his papers, Dyer scarcely noticed his companions. “Lucius H. Watson residing at Chatham Bend shows up on the 1910 census, the last living Watson to reside on the property-that might help obtain life tenure on the place.” The attorney cleared his throat, anticipating resistance. “Naples,” he said. For tomorrow night’s meeting of the Naples Historical Society, Lucius would be listed on the program as L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.

Lucius shook his head, annoyed. “Too many people know me on this coast, I told you that.” He would have to notify the audience right from the start-