Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

The attorney was trying to reach the Watson heirs. “He was complainin how he couldn’t catch up with the Watson boys. I told him, ‘Well, the oldest run off from a killin at the turn of the century and the next one is a upright citizen around Fort Myers, don’t want nothin to do with swamps and such. Course Looshush might be interested,’ I says, ‘but you might have trouble findin Looshush cause he makes hisself scarce and always did.’ ”

Affecting indifference, Lucius shrugged. “So who is he? What’s his name?”

Mr. Watson Dyer, Speck continued, had big connections in this state; he was a crony of politicians and a fixer. “Wants a nice ronday-voo for all them fat boys, wouldn’t surprise me-booze ’n girlie club, y’know. I been thinkin I might join up to be a member.” But there was no mirth in Daniels’s wink, he was watching Lucius closely, and Lucius maintained his flat expression, not wishing to show his astonishment- Watt Dyer! -nor how much he resented the idea of Crockett Daniels infesting Chatham Bend. After Bill House left, Papa’s remote house on its wild river had been looted and hard used by squatters, hunters, moonshiners, and smugglers, and Daniels was all of these and more-the Bend just suited him. From offshore, no stranger to that empty coast could find the channel in the broken mangrove estuary where Chatham River worked its way through to the Gulf-one reason why Papa chose that river in the first place-and even boatmen with a chart might ream out their boat bottom on the oyster bars. But these days, with the new canals draining the Glades headwaters for more sugarcane plantations, the rivers to the south ran shallow, with snags and shifting sandbars, and smugglers such as Daniels and his gang had to rig chains to the few channel markers and drag them out.

“Looshus.” Speck considered him a moment. “Course if this big Glades park goes through, they’ll likely burn your daddy’s house down to the ground. Raggedy ol’ place three-four miles back up a mangrove river, windows busted and doors all choked by thorn and vines? Not to mention bats and snakes, wasp nests and spiders and raccoon shit-smell like a bat cave in there. That house ain’t had a nail or a lick of paint in years. Them damn Chok people that was in there, they just let her go. Screen porch is rickety, might put your foot through, and the jungle is invadin into the ground floor. Hurricanes has stripped off shingles, took the dock and the outbuildins, too.”

“Why do you care? It’s not your place.”

“Not my place?” Speck cocked a bloodshot eye. “You sayin the Bend don’t belong to us home people? And the whole Glades backcountry along with it?” Hearing Speck’s voice rise in a spurt of anger, Junior Daniels turned their way. “Why, Godamighty, they’s been Danielses usin this backcountry for half a hundred years! I hunted here all my damn life! You tellin me them fuckin feds and their fuckin park has got more rights than I do?”

But Lucius noticed that much of his outrage was feigned and the rest inflated. In fact, Speck laughed, pleased by his own performance. “Know the truth? Them squatters has stole everything that weren’t nailed down and quite a lot that was but they never done your daddy’s place real harm. Storms tore the outside, which is all them greenhorns look at, but inside she’s as solid as she ever was, cause your daddy used bald cypress and hard pine. That man liked ever’thing done right. His house might look gray and peaked as a corpse but she could stand up there on her mound for another century.”

“Mind telling me what you’re up to on the Bend? When you’re not caretaking, I mean?”

Daniels lit a cigarette and squinted through the smoke. “That ain’t your business.” Reaching to refill Lucius’s glass, he winked to show he was only kidding, which he wasn’t.

Lucius sniffed at the white lightning. “You make this stuff down there?”

Daniels measured him. “You sure ain’t obliged to drink it, Looshus. You ain’t obliged to drink with me at all.” Asked if he owned Gator Hook and if this bar was an outlet for his shine, Speck took a hard swallow and banged his glass down. “Still askin stupid questions, I see. You ain’t changed much, bud, and I ain’t neither, as you are goin to find out if you keep tryin me.” In a gravelly voice, he growled, “I asked you extra polite just now what you was up to out this way. All these folks in here want to know that. So we ain’t feelin so polite no more about not gettin no answer.”

Lucius pushed his glass away, trying to focus. He was sick of baiting Daniels, sick of being baited. “I’m not a fed. I’m looking for a man named Collins.”

“No you ain’t. You’re a damn liar.” Speck announced this to the room. “Here I ain’t seen you in dog’s years and all of a sudden you show up way to hell and gone out in this swamp. Think I’m a idjit? Think I don’t know why?” When Speck raised his voice, Junior pushed himself clear of the wall and started across the room, and the one called Dummy followed. “All these years you been snoopin and skulkin, makin up your damfool list! You know how close you come to gettin shot?”

Lucius tried to keep his voice calm. “You the one who winged that bullet past my ear, down Lost Man’s River?”

In the quiet the customers awaited them. Crockett Daniels told the room, “Mr. Gene Roberts at Flamingo thought the world of E. J. Watson, said he was as nice a man as ever lynched a nigger. So in later years, when Watson’s boy here was layin low down there, Mr. Gene told them Flamingo fellers not to run him off or sink his boat but let him work that coast. Told ’em he’d fished with E. J.’s boy and drank his whiskey with him, cause Looshus here liked his whiskey and a lot of it, same way his daddy done. Gene would say how E. J.’s boy had the sweetest nature he ever come across and all like that”-Speck turned to him-“not knowin that his sweetness weren’t but weakness.”

“Course it’s possible,” Speck said, holding his eye, “that Looshus here would do you hurt if you pushed him hard enough. But I believe this feller is weak-hearted. He just wants to live along, get on with ever’body, ain’t that right, Looshus?” He paused again, then added meanly, “Makin a list of them ones that killed his daddy but afraid to use it.”

Speck cocked his head, looking curiously at Lucius as if to see how far he’d have to go to make him mad. “I always heard you was a alky-holic,” he said softly. “Any truth to that?”

Lucius turned away from him. “The man I’m looking for calls himself Collins,” he told the onlookers. “Has a nickname-Chicken.”

“Chicken Collins?” a woman called. “He ain’t but four damn feet from where your elbow’s at. He’s comin off his drunk under the bar.”

Annoyed, Speck followed Lucius around behind the bar. The man lay on a soft bed of swept-up cigarette butts, wrapped in a dirty olive blanket black-poxed with burn holes. Daniels toed the body with a hard-creased boot, eliciting an ugly hacking cough. “When this feller first washed up here, Colonel, we made him janitor, paid him off in trade. All he could put away and then some and he’s still hard at it. Come to likker, the man don’t never quit! Don’t know the meanin of the word.” Speck toed the body harder. “Come on, Chicken. Say how-do to your visitor cause he’s just leavin.”

Greasy tufts emerged from the olive blanket, then reddened eyes in a soiled, unshaven face. This wasn’t Cox. The ears were wrong and the mule hoof scar was missing.

From beneath the blanket rose a stale waft of dead cigarettes, spilled booze, old urine. At the sight of Lucius, the eyes started into focus. A scrawny claw crept forth to grasp the tin cup of mixed spirits from abandoned drinks which Dummy ladled for him out of a tin tub; he knocked the cup back with one great cough and shudder. Then the head withdrew. “Go home,” he muttered from beneath the blanket.