Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Lucius said, “But another eyewitness in the parking lot spotted a white man shooting at the victim’s car from a hotel window; saw him plenty well enough to testify that it wasn’t some big black man in a white cook’s outfit who got loose some way on the sixth floor.” He turned to meet Dyer’s eye. “Anyway, you don’t know Rob. He’ll never let that black man go to jail for him. He feels bad enough that we got him fired.”

“That your testimony?” Dyer glared in disbelief. “You’d let your long-lost brother get locked up for the rest of his life just to save some black maniac who assaulted a white man with a carving knife? Slit his stomach?” He drew his power-of-attorney form out of his briefcase. “We both know you’re not going to sacrifice Robert so why don’t you just sign this and shut up.”

“What’s missing here? Why is it suddenly so important to you to be E. J. Watson’s bastard? I’m talking about that affidavit you extracted from your former father.”

The attorney was disagreeably surprised and could not hide it. Lucius recalled Speck Daniels’s warning but he was on the scent now and it was too late to stop. “Do I smell big money, Wattie? Big land development? Maybe Papa’s old scheme to control all the high ground on the southwest coast? West coast Miami?”

Dyer rapped his document. “Sign it,” he said.

“You’re a real Watson now? Attorney Watson Watson?” But having no choice, he scribbled his signature. “Where’s Rob?” he said.

Watson Dyer did not bother to answer. Tucking away his paper, he yanked his car around and headed back toward the church hall. He said slyly as Lucius got out, “You ever find that nigger you’ve been looking for?”

Christ Almighty. Of course. “You’re the sonofabitch with the sniper rifle.”

Dyer actually laughed. “Why, Brother Lucius! I always thought that was you !” Abruptly he stopped laughing. He regarded Lucius for the length of a held breath. “ ‘Watson honor’?” he jeered softly as they neared the church hall. “ Somebody had to take care of it, right? When none of you ‘real Watsons’ had the guts?” He drove away before Lucius remembered.

“How about Rob?” he yelled. “Where’s Rob?”

The hall was locked and the street was empty. Caves of gloom isolated the few streetlights which waned strangely in the rush and clacketing of the Gulf wind.

Across the street, headlights flicked on. Owen Harden rolled down the car window. Owen had joked a little with Speck’s crew on the way into the hall, he said, and loose-mouthed Mud Braman had let slip that they were on the lookout for a man they knew as Chicken Collins.

At their insistence, Lucius locked his car and went home with the Hardens, confiding Rob’s situation on the way. “I’m scared,” he said. Owen nodded. “Who knows where they took him?” he said. “Big swamp out there.” Squashed between them in the truck’s front seat, Sarah hushed her husband. “He’s probably fine,” she said, hugging Lucius’s arm. Even in Rob’s emergency, her scent and warmth stirred a twinge of his old longing: “Probably they just took him back to Gator Hook,” she said, to comfort him. However, she removed her arm when he mentioned having gone to visit Henry in the hospital with Bill House.

At their new cottage in north Naples, she sat him at the kitchen table and asked if he’d like coffee. “I bet he’d like whiskey a lot better,” her husband said, and Sarah said, “You gave that up along with Speck, remember? We don’t keep liquor in this house,” she notified their guest. She rose with a bored cold exhausted look. “I bet you two have lots to talk about,” she said, and left the room.

Owen Harden’s wheaten hair had iron wisps in it and the sun-squinted green eyes had crow’s-feet in the corners. He drummed his fingers, glanced at Lucius, looked away again. “Darn it now if my own wife ain’t put me in mind of some bush lightnin. Care to join me if I stumbled over some?”

“You know something? I bet I would.”

His host came back with blue tin cups and a brown jug. “I reckon Bill House would remember stuff about your daddy, cause he’s still goin on about Ed Watson. Never got over it, y’know.”

“Know why? Cause he feels guilty.” From the doorway, Sarah glared at their tin cups. “How come you would listen to a House about Henry Short? Owen’s family knew Henry a whole lot better than those flea-bitten Bay people who still sling it around about Bloody Watson. Always bragging on how they told Watson this and he said that. The little they know that’s not hand-me-down from their daddies comes straight out of the magazines and books, mostly made up.”

She accosted her husband, “Didn’t your daddy call Old Man House ‘the leader of the outlaws’?”

Owen said quietly, “The House boys thought what they done that day was right. They did not back away from it or talk around it, not like some.”

Disgusted, his wife went to bed. The two men drank awhile. Owen contemplated his guest with affection. “Ever think back on them good old times we had down Lost Man’s Beach?” Owen smiled.

Lucius nodded, half distracted by fear and worry. Too much was happening too fast. In his exhaustion, all his defenses had unraveled. On impulse, before going to bed, he asked Owen what the Hardens might have heard about “Watson Payday.”

Owen gazed straight ahead. When Lucius cleared his throat, to prod him, he gave a start, as if just awakened. “For a long time, we never paid no attention to them Payday stories.”

“But?”

Owen was silent, selecting the right words. “Maybe a year ago,” he resumed slowly, “the warden there at Duck Rock rookery had a young helper who treasure-hunted up and down the coast in his spare time. He was tryin out a early-type metal detector not on the market yet, might been the very first model. I seen it once. Hell of a lookin thing-heavy ol’ black box with tin earphones, wouldn’t hunt down but about two feet.”

“Owen-”

“So Henry Short got the loan of that black box to try her out on the Watson place where he reckoned the old-time Calusa or maybe the Frenchman or your daddy might have buried gold. Next day he shows up at Daddy Richard’s cabin on Wood Key-first visit in some years so Daddy knew it had to be something important. Henry was all fevered up and agitated, walking all around. Then suddenly he set down and shoved a big ol’ wide-top jar acrost the table. That jar was full of rusty belt buckles and metal buttons, a few spent bullets. Near the house and along the river, he said, all that black box could pick up was metal scrap and a few busted tools: this stuff in the jar come from shaller pits in that unfarmed northwest corner off the cane field.

“So Daddy Richard said, ‘Find anythin else?’ ‘Bones,’ Henry said. ‘Well hell,’ said Daddy. ‘Ed had cows on there and pigs, even a big old horse, so bones ain’t nothin.’ ‘Skulls,’ whispers Henry. ‘And three of them four skulls had holes in back that looked like they was made by bullets and all had a lead slug layin in amongst the bones and one had three.’

“Course my folks was still resistin Henry’s story. Daddy got stubborn, argued back and forth, kept mentioning them livestock and them old-time Indins until Henry couldn’t handle it no more, he was just too fevered. Finally he said, ‘Mr. Richard, there ain’t no mistakin a human skull for horse or hog. Anyways, your domestic animals don’t generally wear belt buckles and buttons and only very few will tote a pocket knife.’

“Richard Harden lit his pipe, took a few puffs to settle down. That was the first time and the only time that Henry Short ever talked back smart to him that way. Henry looked kind of startled, too, but did not back down. One by one, he was droppin them pathetical ol’ scraps back in that jar. Then he said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Richard, I spoke out of my turn, but you know where these four fellers come from as good as I do.’