Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

He was feeling at rest in the present, neither here nor there. “Where to?” his voice said, though he’d already turned toward home. Did this wild creature want him to make love to her? She laid her hand upon his arm and leaned to blow smoke into his ear. “Can I lay low on your old barge if I stay out of your way and don’t cause trouble?”

“Lay low,” he heard his voice agree. And now this strangely languid and unbridled person draped herself across his arm and shoulder. Cocking her head, she peered close around his chin in comic awe until her lips brushed the corner of his own.

“Better back off.” He kissed her hard without slowing the car, stirred by the sweet smell of her hair.

“Just a-hangin on my darlin’s every word, is all it is.”

“Stay away from bad girls, Mama tole me-”

She hushed his mouth with another fulsome kiss. “Oh, I ain’t so bad,” she murmured huskily, surfacing again. “Under my glitterin ve-neer, a plain ol’ cracker gal is what I am. First Florida Baptist bad-ass cracker, that is me.” She lay her head back and went pealing off into some private laughter.

“And how do your Baptist forebears feel about your sinful tendencies?”

“Sickens ’em. Just purely sickens ’em. They feel like pukin.” Suddenly her smile was gone, her scowl was real, she looked as if she might well puke on purpose. Something anarchic surfaced in her eye which he tried to deflect before she blurted something they might both regret, and in his distraction, on a curve, he rolled two wheels onto the shoulder, coming too close to running the car into the roadside canal.

Sarah took this near-disaster calmly, ignoring his apology. In guilt, her mood had turned bitter and morose. Brooding, she peered out the window. Then she said in a peculiar voice, “Stay on the gray stuff, all right? You’re getting your balls in a uproar.”

He felt the heat rush to his face. “Hey, come on now.”

“Go stick it in the mud. You stick it into me, by Jesus, you will goddamn well regret it! I’ll tell Owen.”

“Oh Lord-”

“And another thing”-she was yelling now-“stop lookin me over like some mutt dog eyin meat! You always done that, since the first day you showed up at Lost Man’s! Think I never noticed? Go find your own damn woman! Find that widder you was mopin about ’stead of trickin young women that’s already spoken for into your tin tooter!” She banged the outside of the car door. “What are you anyway, some kind of a fanatic? That why she give up on you? Cause your daddy’s death is all you care about? The past?”

She fell back, spent, gasping for breath.

He held his tongue, drove on in silence; how could he have considered an affair with a friend’s wife, this drug-crazed cracker, when what he really needed was a wise and gentle person such as Nell-but here good sense quit him and he turned to the fray.

“Miss?”

“ ‘Mrs.’ Mrs. John Owen Harden to you. Your ol’ buddy’s everlovin little wife, case you forgot.”

“Wasn’t it my ol’ buddy’s wife who came slipping around to Caxambas to renew acquaintance? Who’s been flirting for the last three hours-”

“You want me to get out and walk? That what you’re saying? Slow down, Buster!” But moments later, weeping, she subsided. “I’m a mess. I drink too much, Prof. So do you. In fact, come to think of it, this fight is all your fault.” Though she fished out a hankie and blew sniffles, she could not hide her smile. Soon she laid her head against his shoulder and languorously touched his leg, trailed her fingertips along his inner thigh. When she sat back, sighing, the backs of her fingers rested in his lap, light as a kiss.

In awe of their wordless decision, they drove in silence to Caxambas and made their way in half-embrace out the walkway to the barge, where they drank up the last of his whiskey and made urgent love on the narrow cot, in an intoxicating mix of body smells, grain alcohol breath, and needy lust. By turns shy, rapt, omnipotent, he felt like a man lost and then returned among the living. He heard himself cry out that he loved her, which in that moment was true.

In the morning, yawning, she rolled languidly away from his attempt to take her in his arms, saying she must first go brush her teeth; she left him to doze, never to return. When he awakened, she was dressed and restless, making coffee. He must take her to Naples right away, she said, to meet with Owen and the lawyer.

“Today, you mean?” He could not accept the idea of losing her just when he’d found her. Yet he knew his panic was not reasonable and his shock not entirely honest; lying there before desire overtook him, he’d even wondered if an early parting with his old friend’s estranged wife might not be best.

“Are you sorry, Sarah? You regret what happened?”

“I’ll never regret it, sweetheart. It was always in our future and I always knew it. But I also know it’s all we’re going to get.” She touched his cheek. “I have to let you go while I still can.” To disguise her real upset, she parodied a country lyric: “Darlin’, ah swore ah wouldn’… nevuh be… tore up bah yoo.”

“Please, listen-”

She put her hand over his mouth. “Gonna miss me, sweetheart?” Her eyes misted. She said fiercely, “You’re a good man, don’t you know that? Think it’s easy to give you up, a man like you?”

“Can’t I come see you? We have to talk-” He was routed by her expression. His heart felt open and exposed as a shucked oyster on the half-shell, mantle curling at the first squirt of the lemon.

Returning home one afternoon of spring, Lucius was met halfway along the walkway by the molasses reek of a cheap stogie. In the tattered hammock on the deck, a thin man in tractor cap and discolored army overcoat lay sifting pages, the bent cigar a-glower between his teeth. On the floor beside him sat a dog-eared satchel and a sagging carton of old papers. Removing the cigar, the man spat bits of tobacco, the better to recite from Lucius’s notes on Leslie Cox.

“ ‘… an old man known by some other name may still squint in the sun, and sniff, and revile his fate.’ Not bad! Same way I write,” Chicken Collins said, his very tone renouncing the Gator Hook derelict in favor of this jaunty new identity. He rested the notes on his belly. “Yep,” he said. “I heard Cox was seen down at Key West and another time in the river park there at Fort Myers. Then this Injun friend of mine who used to be a drunk up around Orlando told me that a feller of Cox’s description had been holed up for years out at the Hook. I was curious so I went out there to look, never made it back.” He resumed reading.

Lucius took the worn blue canvas chair. “And if you’d found him?”

Collins lowered the manuscript again. “I’d probably pretend I hadn’t. Make a list or something,” he added meanly.

“You’ve seen my list?”

“Rob Watson gave it to me.”

“I was told Rob never received it. Anyway, it was supposed to be a secret.”

“Only one who thought it was a secret was the damn fool who wrote those names down in the first place.” He winked at Lucius, blowing smoke.

“And you’re the one who showed it to Speck Daniels. That’s how he learned about it.”

Collins shrugged. One evening out at Gator Hook, noticing the name Crockett Daniels on the list, he’d called it to Speck’s attention. “Just for fun, y’know.”

“Speck think it was funny?”

“Nosir, he did not. Said you were lucky you never got your head blown off.”

“I’d like that list back, Mr. Collins.”

“It’s not yours. Property of the late Robert B. Watson, who left it to yours truly.” Rob Watson, he explained, had died the year before in the Young Men’s Christian Association in Orlando. He had left instructions for cremation, and the YMCA had shipped the remains, together with a few clothes and some papers, to his cousin Arbie. He pointed at himself. “Cousin Arbie, at your service.” Asked how the YMCA had known where to send it, Collins scowled at the pointlessness of such a question, and Lucius let it go. “Rob never married?” he inquired. “Never had children?”