Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

With the appearance of a stranger’s silhouette in the torn screen, the voices within went silent in sudden hush, like marsh frogs stilled by a water snake winding its way through flooded grasses. Two men on the point of leaving sank back into their places, and two squawking women with hard helmet hair stopped their raucous dance.

Inside the door Lucius found himself blocked by a husky barefoot man whose sun-baked back and neck and shoulders were matted with black hair. From hard green coveralls-his only garment-rose an aroma of fried foods and sweat, spilled beer and cigarettes, crankcase oil and something else, a smear of rancid mayonnaise, perhaps, or gator blood, or semen. The man crowded him without expression and without a word, as if intent on bumping chests and backing him out through the screen door onto the landing. But now the harsh voice that had bellowed “Mud!” yelled “Dummy!” and the barefoot man, dead-eyed, indifferent, turned away.

The yell had come from a man waving him across the room to the makeshift bar who merely sneered in sardonic response to the newcomer’s wince of distaste at the sight of him. Raven-haired, with a hide as dark and hard-grained as mahogany and a dirty grizzle all around a wry and heavy mouth, Crockett Daniels had thickened but not softened since Lucius had last seen him in the Islands. Filling two cracked coffee cups with spirits from a jug, he shoved one at Lucius, who acknowledged it with a bare nod.

The two leaned back against the bar, sipping for a while before they spoke. Daniels’s green eyes were restless, scanning the room but always returning to a big bearded man, shirtless in dirty jeans and a black leather vest and missing his left arm; the big man leaned on the far wall, fixing the stranger with a baleful glare. A hard brush of coarse black hair jutted from his crown like a worn broom; on his upper right arm was a discolored tattoo-the American flag with fasces and an eagle rampant, talons fastened on a skull and crossbones. The red and white of the stars and stripes were dirtied and the blue was purpled, all one ugly bruise.

Intent on Lucius, the big man resumed a story interrupted by his entry. “Like I was sayin, you go to huntin gators in the backcountry, you gone to earn ever’ damn red cent you make! And that’s okay, that’s our way of life, takin the rough nights with the smooth. But these days when you go out there and go to doin what your daddy done and your grandpap, too, you might could find yourself flat up against some feller in a green frog outfit sneakin around for the federal fuckin government. Know what he wants? Hell, you know what he wants! He wants our huntin country for a fuckin park ! Wants to confuscate your gator flats, clap your cracker ass in jail!”

The big man turned, pointing a thick finger at Lucius Watson. “Or maybe that fed slunk through the door there, tryin to look like ever’body else!”

“That big boy you are lookin at calls hisself Crockett Junior,” Daniels informed Lucius, not sounding pleased. “Wants to know what you’re doin out here, Colonel. That’s what your friends call you, ain’t it?”

“You my friend now, Speck?” Lucius drank his glass off to the bottom and came up with a gasp and a warm glow in the face. The moonshine was colorless, so purely raw that it numbed his mouth and sinuses and made his eyes water.

The big man’s self-stoked rage was building.

“Damn fed might belly right up to that bar, pertend to be your friend, then turn around and stop a man from supportin his own family!” Crockett Junior bawled. “And you out there in that dark swamp night after night, way back in some godforsook damn place you can’t even pole to in a boat, half bled to death by no-see-ums and miskeeters, worn out, wet, and froze with cold, and damn if one them stupid shits don’t have you spotted! Maybe just waitin to step out of a bush where you left your truck back at the landin!”

Here Crockett Junior paused in tragic wonderment. Softly he said, “Speakin fair now, what’s a man to do if that feller tries to haul him off to jail?” He gazed about him, shaking his head over such injustice. “Now I ain’t sayin he’s a real bad feller. Might could be a likable young feller just tryin to get by the same as me. Might got him a lovin little wife waitin on him at home. Couple real nice little fellers, or maybe just the sweetest baby girl-same as what I got!” Crockett Junior looked around him wide-eyed, making sure his listeners understood how remarkable it was that gator hunter and game warden might both have wives and kiddies, and also the depth of his concern for the warden’s family. “But!” He looked around some more, and the soft voice grew more and more confiding. “But if that ol’ boy tries to take away my gators? I got my duty to my family, ain’t that right? Got to take care of my sweet baby girl at home, ain’t that only nacherl?”

“We heard this same ol’ shit in here a thousand times,” Speck said, disgusted.

“You folks recall that plume bird warden that Bloody Watson killed down around Flamingo?” Junior nodded with the drinkers. “Now I ain’t sayin what ol’ Bloody done was right. All I’m sayin is-and it would be real pathetical, break my damn heart-all I’m sayin, if any such a feller tries to keep me from my livin?” Here he fixed his gaze on Lucius once again, raising his good arm to point southward toward some point of destiny in a far slough. “Well, you folks know that Crockett Junior Daniels would be heart-broke, all tore up, but that feller ain’t left me no damn choice.” He dropped his voice to a hoarse hard whisper. “I reckon I’d just have to leave that sumbitch out there!”

The clientele turned its slack gaze upon the stranger. “Tragical, ain’t it?” Speck Daniels snickered. “Leave that sumbitch out there. That’s about the size of it. Invaders got to watch their step in this neck of the woods and that’s a fact.

“Course Junior there, he’s crazier’n hell, and them other morons he keeps with him might be worse. Mud Braman been a drunk since the day his balls dropped, don’t know where his ass is at from one minute to the next, and that other one with all the personality”-he tossed his chin toward Dummy-“he might bust loose any minute, shoot this place to pieces, and you’d never know why in the hell he done that, and him neither.”

Waiting for Daniels to make his point, Lucius said nothing.

“Leave him out there! Yessir!” Speck Daniels sighed. “Some days I think ol’ Junior might be better off if I was to leave him out there. Run his dumb ass into the swamp back here and put a bullet in his head for his own damn good, ’fore he gets us in trouble shooting some stranger who just wandered in here off that road.”

“You threatening me, Speck?”

For the first time, the poacher turned and contemplated Lucius Watson, sucking his teeth with distaste. “What you huntin for out this way, Colonel? Ain’t me, I hope.”

Lucius shook his head. “I never knew you lived here.”

“Well, I don’t. When I ain’t livin on my boat, I got me a huntin camp back in the Cypress, big army stove and a regular commode, nice fat Guatemala girl that come by mail order. But these days,” he whispered-and he cocked his head the better to enjoy Lucius’s reaction-“I’m caretakin in your daddy’s house, down Chatham River.”

A couple of months earlier, Daniels explained, he had been contacted by a Miami attorney who was seeking to reinstate E. J. Watson’s land claim on Chatham Bend; the attorney wanted somebody camped on the Bend to keep an eye on the place until the claim was settled. “Man heard that Crockett Senior Daniels knew the Watson place real good and might be just the feller he was lookin for.” He gave Lucius a sly glance.