Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Though the new road was rough, the stately pace of his old “T” putt-putting along permitted a calm appreciation of the morning. In the fiery sunrise, strings of white ibis flapped and sailed toward hidden destinations. In hawking course over the savanna flew a swallow-tailed kite that in recent days had descended from the towering Gulf skies at the north end of its migration from the Amazon. In time the Trail crossed the shady head-waters of Turner River, where in boyhood Lucius and the Storter boys came hunting, working upstream in a canoe from the salt mangrove coast of Chokoloskee Bay to the freshwater grasslands.

Beyond the trees at Turner River, the glittering expanse spread away forever. In the distance, isolated hardwood hammocks, shaped like tears by the remorseless southward flow, sailed ever north against the sky like a green armada. The hammocks parted the broad watershed that the Indians knew as River Long or Hatchee Chok-ti, transcribed by early white men as “Shark River,” which in other days had betrayed no sign of man except dim shadow paths in the floating vegetation made by narrow dugouts. Only in recent years had the Shark River Mikasuki, drifting north, erected thatched chekes on the spoil banks of the black canal that ran along this new “Tamiami Trail.” In this past year, with the near completion of the road, it seemed certain that the last Indians would be driven from Shark River to make way for a huge wilderness park.

At the Monroe Station rescue post for pioneer motorists, Lucius turned south then east again on an abandoned byway pocked by limestone potholes and marl pools; the road was all but hidden in hot crowding brush that raked and screeched at the old Ford’s sides as it lurched along. Farther on, the track was flooded by clear water, and sprinklings of sun-tipped minnows shot back and forth between the silvers of pond cypress swamp to northward and the warm gold of the marshlands to the south. This track had been cut by the Chevelier Development Corporation, so named because its destination, never to be reached, was Chevelier Bay in the Lost Man’s River region in the intoxicated days of the Florida land boom; Lost Man’s Beach had been envisioned as the new “Gulf Coast Miami.” The Depression had deflated the boom utterly, and the Chevelier Road, still ten miles short of its destination, was abandoned to this wooded swampland.

On a pine ridge along this road was Gator Hook, a shack community where the vacated sheds and decrepit dwellings of the road construction crews had been usurped by fugitives and drifters, also gator poachers, moonshiners, and retired whores, in a raffish society often drunk on its own moonshine before noon. Cut off from the rest of Monroe County by hundreds of square miles of roadless Glades, the Hook lay beyond all sane administration, to judge from the fact that the Monroe County sheriff had never set boot in this isolated and unregenerate outpost of his jurisdiction.

Lucius Watson had heard stories of a drifter at the Hook so obsessed with the tale of Leslie Cox and E. J. Watson as to stir speculation that he might be Cox himself. Many still believed that dreaded killer had made his way to the wild Mikasuki, who would shelter a white fugitive as in the past they had absorbed runaway slaves. With his high cheekbones and straight black hair, Cox might have passed for a breed Indian, remaining unrecognized year after year, before drifting to this backwater at Gator Hook. However, the whole story seemed so unlikely that Lucius Watson had never been inspired to go find out.

By mid-morning the sun had clouded over, casting a pall of gloom over the swamp. His sunrise mood evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius’s moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a leaden melancholy dragged at his spirits. In forcing his way into this lawless country, he seemed to push at a mighty spring which would hurl him backwards at the first faltering of his resolve.

Gradually the clear water withdrew and the track ascended onto a low rise where blurred paths wandered into thornbush and palmetto. The red rust of a tin roof showed through the shrouds of graybeard lichen; in the roadside ditch, bald tires languished. Strewn through the catclaw and liana lay rain-rotted cartons, bedsprings, gimcrack objects in bad chemical colors, bottles and tin cans. At a road bend, in an informal dump, four men playing cards at a sawhorse table turned to watch him pass, but no hand rose to return the stranger’s wave. None of the four reminded him of Cox, though of course he might not have recognized the man, having last laid eyes on him in September of 1910, more than fifteen years before. He retained only a dim memory of that husky, sullen figure on the bank at Chatham Bend, standing apart from the small knot of waving folks whom he was to murder scarcely a fortnight later. However, Cox would not have lost those small ears set tight to his head, as in minks and otters, nor the dim shadow of the mule hoof on the left cheekbone, nor the dull, thudding voice, as heavy as the grunt of a bull gator.

“Gator Hook Bar”-the name was slapped crudely in black paint on the outside wall of a sway-backed cabin of greened wood set high on posts as a precaution against flood and patched with tarpaper and rusted tin against the rains. In the rank growth alongside was a rust-spotted white refrigerator, some rust-rotted oil drums, a charred stove of that marbled blue so ubiquitous in rubbish heaps throughout backcountry America. Near the blue stove sat a big pink touring auto with mud flaps and bent chrome. The auto’s rear axle had been hoisted on a jack and its right rear wheel had been missing for some time, to judge from the heavy growth around the hub.

By reputation, Gator Hook served the rudimentary social needs of the swamp’s male inhabitants and their raggy squalling females-backwoods crazies of both sexes, he had heard, apt to poke a weapon through a screen and open fire just for fun on any unfamiliar auto wending its slow way amongst the potholes, blowing out headlights as it neared or taillights as it fled and sometimes both. On this morning of late spring, a few dilapidated pickups and scabbed autos had emerged from the woods well before noon. Through the door screen came hoots and hee-haws rolled into one screech by a gramophone blare that escaped outside to die away in the pond cypress swamp north of the road.

The makeshift roadhouse was entered and departed through a loose screen door on the small landing of a steep ladder-stair down which drunk clients were at risk of tumbling at any hour of the day or night. A scraggy man in brown cap and soiled shirt whacked the screen door wide and reeled onto the stoop: “State yer damn business, mister!” When Lucius said he was looking for Mr. Collins, the drunk cocked his head, trying to focus, then waved him off, disgusted: “Never heard of ’m!” The man had long hard-muscled arms, tattoos, machete sideburns, a small tight beer belly. “Don’t I know you, mister? Ain’t you some kind of a damn Watson?”

“Tommie Jimmie around?”

“No redskins ain’t allowed. You Colonel Watson? You sure come to the wrong place.” The man jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Don’t go no further, Colonel, lest you want trouble.” He nodded over and over. “Name is Mud.” He grinned when that name was bellowed by a rough voice from inside. Turning, Mud lost his balance, almost falling. He clutched the rail and sagged down onto the steps in a pule of oaths and spittle.

The man’s cap had fallen off: Lucius retrieved it from the stair. By now he had recognized this no-account Braman from Marco, prematurely drink-blotched and near bald. Confronted by Mud’s scalp up close as he ascended, the eruptions and scratched chigger bites, the weak hair and the ingrained grime in the pale skin, Lucius perched the brown cap gently on his head, stepping around his stale rank smell and continuing up the steps.