Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“No sir, it sure ain’t, cause I am on here first. And next time, sir, you go to trespissin without my say-so, sir, I will blow your fuckin head off. Any questions?”

“Not a one,” said I in the same carefree tone. I signaled for my boat. While waiting, I ventured to look around a little more, thinking how much my Mandy might enjoy these two big red-blossomed poincianas. “Yessir, a fine day on the river. Makes a man feel good to be alive.”

He spat his phlegm again.“You got maybe ten more seconds to feel alive in, mister. After that you ain’t goin to feel nothin.”

Under my coat, the.38 lay along my forearm, set to drop into my hand. To drill this polecat in his tracks would have been a mercy to everyone concerned, especially his poor drag-ass females. Instead I climbed into the skiff and headed downriver. What I needed more than anything right now was a reputation as an upright citizen, so I put aside my motto of “good riddance to bad rubbish” in favor of “every dog must have its day.” This dog had had his day at Chatham Bend and mine would come next or my name wasn’t Jack Watson, which it wasn’t.

Will Raymond observed our skiff until we passed behind the trees on the next bend. His figure stood there black and still as a cypress snag out in the swamp, his old Confederate long rifle on his shoulder like the scythe of Death. Out on the coast again, looking back, I noted with approval that the mouth of Chatham River, all broken up by mangrove clumps, would pass unseen by any vessel, even from a quarter mile offshore.

At the end of that week, sailing to Key West, I had my first look at Lost Man’s River, said to be the wild heart of this whole wilderness. In Shark River, farther south, huge dark mangroves rose to eighty and a hundred feet in an unbroken wall: the boy happened to know these were the largest in the world. From Shark River, the mangrove coast continued to Cape Sable, the long white beach where Juan Ponce de Leуn and his conquistadors went ashore in heavy armor and clanked inland in wet and heavy heat to conquer the salt flats and marl scrub and brown brackish reach of a dead bay.

From Cape Sable our course led offshore along the western edge of great pale banks of sand, with turquoise sand channels and emerald keys on the port side and a thousand-mile blue reach of Gulf to starboard. Erskine pointed when he heard the puff of tarpon as one of these mighty silver fishes leapt clear of the sea: farther offshore, giant black manta rays leapt, too, crashing down in explosions of white water.

In late afternoon the spars of an armada of great ships rose slowly from the sunny mists in the southern distance. Cayo Hueso or Bone Key. Early in the nineteenth century, Bone Key, now called Key West, had been built up as a naval base to suppress piracy on the high seas, but these days Key West pirates lived on shore as ship’s chandlers, salvagers, and lawyers.

On a southwest wind, the Veatlis passed the Northwest Light and tacked into the channel. Who would have imagined such a roadstead as the Key West Bight, so far from the mainland at the end of its long archipelago of small salt keys? Or so many masts, so many small craft, so much shout and bustle? New York merchantmen and Havana schooners mixed with old sailing craft from the Cayman Islands, fetching live green turtle to the water pens near Schooner Wharf for delivery to the turtle-canning factory down the shore, Erskine explained. Tacking and luffing, servicing the ships, were whole flotillas of “smackee” sloops with baggy Bahamian mainsails, dropping their canvas as they slipped up alongside-reef fishermen with live fish in the sloop’s well, hawking snappers to the Key West Market and king mackerel to the Havana traders. The sponges drying in open yards ashore were shipped to New York on the Mallory Line, which supplied and victualed this city.

Having unloaded our cordwood cargo into horse-drawn carts backed down into the shallows, we went ashore. Key West is a port city, with eighteen thousand immigrants and refugees of every color-eighteen times as many human beings as could be found on the entire southwest coast, all the way north two hundred miles to Tampa Bay. The island is seven miles by three, and the town itself, adjoining the old fort, is built on natural lime-stone rock. The white shell streets are potholed, narrow, with broken sidewalks and stagnant rain puddles and small listless mosquitoes. Coco palms lean over the green-shuttered white houses in shady yards of bright flowers and tropical trees. Sweet-blossomed citrus, banyans, date palms, almonds and acacias, tamarind and sapodilla-so an old lady instructed me when I inquired about which trees might do well on a likely plantation farther north in Chatham River.

While in Key West, I paid a call on the Monroe County sheriff, Richard Knight, in regard to a certain notorious fugitive depicted on the Wanted notice in the post office. The murderer Will Raymond, I advised him, could be found right up the coast in Chatham River. The sheriff knew this very well and was sorry to be reminded of it. He sighed as he bit off his cigar. My report would oblige him to send out a posse when, like most lawmen, enjoying the modest graft of elected office, he much preferred to defer these thorny matters.

Taking the chair the sheriff had not offered, I said I sure hated to cause trouble for Mr. Raymond, but as a law-abiding citizen, I knew my duty. Looking up for the first time, Knight said, sardonic, “That mean you won’t be needing the reward?”

Sheriff Knight and I understood each other right from the first, and our understanding was this: we did not like each other. But a few days later, a sheriff ’s posse laid off the river mouth until three in the morning, then drifted upriver with the tide (as I’d advised them), and had four men ashore before they hollered to Will Raymond to come out with his hands up. Will yelled he’d be damned if he’d go peaceable, and whistled a bullet past their heads to prove it, but he was peaceable as he could be by the time the smoke cleared. They flung his carcass in the boat and offered his widow their regrets along with a kind invitation to accompany the deceased on a nice boat ride to Key West, and the widow said, “Why, thankee, boys, I don’t mind if I do.”

On my next visit, when I went to the sheriff ’s office to offer my congratulations, I happened to mention the information which brought justice to Will Raymond. Wincing, he slid open a drawer and forked over $250 in hard cash reward without a word.

I never kept a penny of that money. I went straight over to Peg’s boardinghouse on White Street and offered it to the Widow Raymond as a consolation in her time of bereavement. By now, the Widow was looking a lot better or at least a good deal cleaner. Perky, she said, “Mr. Stranger, this sure is my lucky day and you sure are my savior, bless your heart!” She offered corn spirits and a simple repast, then took me straight to bed, out of pure gratitude and the milk of human kindness.

Buttoning up, I mentioned the late Mr. Raymond’s quit-claim, and she implored me to accept it with her compliments, declaring her sincere and fervent hope that she would never set eyes on that cursed place again. Altogether, a touching story with a happy ending. I strode away to the docks with a lilting heart, confident at last that my path in life had made a turning in the right direction.

On my next voyage to Key West, I encountered Captain N. N. Penny, a fine, fierce fellow with a cigar thrusting from the very center of his mouth who had made his mark hauling freed slaves to Liberia after the Civil War; However, his clipper ship would arrive in port somewhere up the coast only a few days later without its cargo; also missing was the heavy anchor chain he was rumored to replace after each voyage. Even today Cap’n Penny was renowned as a practical man who would march his cargo overboard rather than risk capture by a federal vessel. We exchanged but a few words before he recognized me as another man who meant to get ahead in life and entrusted me with the information that the commerce in human beings which had made our nation great was by no means dead. Chinese coolies and other illegal immigrants would gladly pay enterprising captains to set them ashore in Florida, where most wound up as indentured labor for the new railroad companies, resort hotels, large-scale drainage schemes, and development enterprises seeking to bring both of Florida’s wild coasts into the modern world. It made his red blood tingle and his pockets jingle, quoth this jolly patriot, to contribute prime “Chinks” to Florida’s exciting future.