Lost Man's River (5 page)

“That war vet you're lookin at is Crockett Junior Daniels,” Speck said in a speculative voice, not sounding pleased about it.

“Yessir, folks,” Crockett Junior roared, “that big ol' sucker might could chomp your leg off! Might be holed up way deep in his cave, and you proddin down in there tryin to find him with your gator hook, nudge him up under the chin, try to ease him slow, slow, slow up to the surface where you got a shot, and him gettin more uproared all the time. First thing you know, he has got past the hook some way, he's a-comin up the pole, he's just a-
clamberin
! And there you are, up to your fool neck in muddy water and no hope at all to make it to the bank—if there
is
a bank, which mostly there ain't, out in that country!” He looked around the room. “Them kind of times, all you can do is stand dead still, hope that scaly sonofabitch gets by you in the rush!

“Now, that ain't a experience you are likely to forget, I'm here to tell you! You go to huntin gators in the backcountry, you gone to earn ever' red cent you make! And that's all right, that's our way of life and always has been, takin the rough nights with the smooth. But since the Park come in, you go out there”—he was pointing south again—“and go to doin what your daddy done, and grandpap, too, and next thing you know, you find yourself flat up against some feller in a green frog outfit that the federal fuckin gov'ment got sneakin around back in our swamps! Know what he wants? Hell,
you
know what he wants! Wants to steal your hard-earned money! Put your pore ol' cracker ass in jail!”

The big man pointed a thick finger at Lucius Watson. “Or maybe he ain't in a green suit! Maybe he just come walkin through that door there, tryin to look like ever'body else!”

Speck said calmly, “Folks here at the Hook ain't got no use for invaders,
notice that?” He turned to Lucius. “Mind tellin us what you're doin out here, Colonel?” He grinned at Lucius in unabashed dislike. “That's what your friends call you, ain't it? Colonel?”

“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 throat and face. Like bristling dogs, they avoided eye contact, pretending to watch the one-armed man, whose anger was rising.

“Thing of it is,” Crockett Junior bawled, “them damn Park greenhorns and their spies will belly right up to that bar, pertend to be your friend; keep a man from supportin his own family! And you out in that dark ol' swamp night after night, way back in some godforsook damn slough you can't even get to in a boat, and half-bled to death by no-see-ums and miskeeters. One night out here is worse than a month in hell! And finally you're staggerin home across the saw grass, cut to slivers and all cold and wet and more'n half dead, and thankin the Lord that you're comin out alive, cause you got two thousand dollars' worth of gator flats humped on your back. And sure enough, one them rangers has you spotted, or maybe he's layin for you near your truck back at the landin.”

Here the big man paused in tragic wonderment, and when he resumed speaking, he spoke softly. “Speakin fair now, what's a man to do? If that ranger goes to chasin you, I mean, or tries to stop you? Or tell you you're under arrest, throw you in jail?”

Speck Daniels watched his son without expression. “They heard this same ol' shit in here a thousand times,” he said.

“Now I ain't got nothin personal against that ranger,” Crockett Junior was saying, choked by strong emotions. “Might could be a real likable young feller, just a-tryin to get by, same as what I'm doin. Might got him a sweet lovin wife and a couple real cute li'l fellers back home waitin on him, or maybe just the sweetest baby girl—same as what
I
got! Ain't no difference between him and me
at all
!” He looked around him wide-eyed to make sure these people understood how astonishing it was that he and this park ranger both had wives and children, and how large-hearted his concern for that ranger's family was. “But if'n that boy tries to take my gators, well, I got my duty to my people, ain't that right? Got my duty to take care of my little girl back home that's waitin on me to put bread on the table! Ain't that only natural?” He looked around the room. “So all I'm sayin—and it would be pathetical, and I am the first one to admit it—all I'm sayin, now, if any such a feller, and I don't care who, tries to keep me from my hard-earned livin?” Shaking his head, he fixed his gaze on Lucius once again. “Well, I'd sure be sorry, folks,” he growled, as his voice descended to a hoarse hard whisper, and he pointed southward toward some point of destiny in a far
slough. “I surely would be sorry. Cause I reckon I would have to leave him
out
there!”

The hard whisper and the twisted face, the threat, had finally compelled the crowd's attention, and it turned a slack and opaque gaze upon the stranger.

Speck Daniels snickered. “Tragical, ain't it?
Leave him out there!
I reckon that's about the size of it.”

“That a warning?” Though Lucius spoke casually, his heart quickened with fear.

“Yessir,” Speck said, ambiguous. “Out in this neck of the woods, a stranger got to watch his step. That is a fact.” And still he did not look at Lucius but gazed coldly at the huge maimed man holding the floor. “Junior there, he went clean acrost the Pacific Ocean to fight for freedom and democracy, and he killed plenty of 'em over there just like they told him to, and he give his right arm for his country, too, while he was at it. Uncle Sam give him a purty ribbon, but that boy would of had a whole hell of a lot more use out of that arm.”

He nodded, somber. “Course they's some of these dumb country boys is proud to give their right arm for their country—least their daddies is proud and Uncle Sam is proud, and the home folks gets to march in a parade. But I reckon I don't feel that way, and Junior, he don't neither, not no more. We know it's our kind that does all the fightin, and our kind that gets tore up and killed, long with the niggers, while the rest of 'em stay home and make the money.” He kept nodding. “That big boy there had to learn them things the hard way, and he's still hot as hell. If he don't get a hold on his ragin pretty quick, there is goin to be bad trouble for some poor feller that don't know enough to get out of his way.”

Speck licked his teeth. “When he's like this—all this uproarin, I mean—Junior sleeps like he is dead or he don't sleep at all. Won't talk to nobody, only them other vets. Might not say a word to his own daddy for two-three days, then busts right out with the answer to some damn question you forgot you asked him. Either way, he is crazy as all hell, and dangerous, and them other shell-shocked morons he keeps with him might be worse. Mud Braman ain't nothin but a crazy drunk, don't know what he's doin from one minute to the next, and that other one with all the personality”—he pointed at Dummy—“his uncles was in that bunch that killed that lawman at Marco back in Prohibition, so whatever the hell is the matter with that feller, he comes by it natural. Might break loose and shoot everyone in sight and you'd never have no idea why he went and done it.”

Speck Daniels sighed. “Some days I think ol' Junior might be better off if I was to take him out into that swamp back there and shoot him. Before he
shoots somebody else, out of his natural-borned suspicion. Maybe some stranger who just wandered in here off that road.”

Daniels contemplated Lucius, sucking at his teeth as if tasting something bad. “You plannin to tell me what you're huntin for out this way, Colonel? Ain't me, I hope.”

Lucius shook his head. “You live here now?”

“Nosir, I sure don't. When I ain't livin on my boat, I got me a huntin camp back in the Cypress, got a surplus tent and a good Army stove and a genuine plastic commode, also a nice Guatemala girl that come by mail order. But these days,” he whispered—and he cocked his head to see how Lucius would receive this information—“I'm campin in your daddy's house, down Chatham River.”

Lucius maintained his flat expression, not wishing to show how much he resented the idea of this man living on the Bend. Since his father's death, the remote house on its wild river had been looted and hard-used across decades by hunters, moonshiners, and smugglers, but now the Watson Place was deep inside the Park. To reveal to a man he knew disliked him that he was flouting federal law by camping in the old Watson Place seemed strangely out of character, unless Speck meant this as some sort of provocation.

“Parks is talkin about burnin down your house.” Speck grinned a little, meanly. “Claim she's so banged up by hurricanes that she's a hazard to Parks visitors!” His grin shifted to a snarl. “Stupid lyin bastards! In all the years since Parks took over, they never had one visitor at Chatham Bend! Not even one!”

Lucius Watson nodded. 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 that Papa had liked that river in the first place—and even the few tourists who could read a chart might ream out their boat bottom on the oyster bars. Because of the huge drainage canals in the Glades headwaters, the rivers ran shallow, with big snags and shifting sandbars, and there were no channel markers because moonshiners such as Crockett Daniels rigged lines to them and dragged them out.

Speck considered him a moment. “Yep, they're set to burn your daddy's good old house right to the ground.”

“Why do you care? It's not your house.”

Speck Daniels cocked an ugly eye. “Don't the Bend belong to all of us home people?” His voice had risen in a spurt of anger, and Crockett Junior turned their way. “Same as the whole Thousand Islands, the whole
Everglades?
Why, Godamighty, they's been Danielses out here for a hundred years! I lived and hunted in this country my whole life! You tellin me them
greenhorns got more right to this backcountry than I do?” He spat hard at the floor. “Anyways, what the hell kind of a tourist would beat his way three-four miles back up a mangrove river to take a picture of some raggedy ol' lonesome place walleyed with busted windows, and the doors all choked by thorn and vines? Not to mention bats and snakes, wasp nests and spiders and raccoon shit—smell like a kennel! That house ain't had a nail or a lick of paint in years! Screen porch is rickety, might put your foot through, and the jungle is invadin the ground floor. That blow last year hit one hundred fifty at Flamingo. Them winds tore out the last of your daddy's windows, tattered the roof, just lashed and blasted that strong house till she looked gray and peaked as a corpse!”

Despite his vehemence, Speck Daniels's green eyes kept moving, as if much of his fury was feigned and the rest exaggerated, and when he spoke again, his voice was calm. “Well, you know somethin? That storm never done her no real harm at all. Tore up the outside, which is all them greenhorns look at. Inside, she's as solid as she ever was, cause your daddy used bald cypress and Dade County pine. She'll be standin up there on her mound for another century!” What had saved the place to date, he said, was its location far across the Glades from the Park headquarters at Homestead. Alone and unvisited, way back in a forgotten river, and long hard miles by land or sea from the nearest road, the abandoned house did not justify the cost of its own destruction, and anyway, all the bureaucratic details—the burning permits, the requisition chits for fuel, not to speak of the fire crew, boat crew, and boat—had never been assembled in the same place at the same time.

“Hell, there ain't nothin to burnin down a house, you know that good as I do!” Daniels banged his glass down on the bar. “Any Injun nor nigger, woman nor child could turn a pine house to hellfire in four minutes flat! Toss a coffee can of boat gas through the winder, flick your cigarette in after it, and go on home! I mean, Christamighty! But they ain't done that, and you know why? Cause they'd rather blow up a paper storm, waste our tax money in some big-ass federal operation, make some bureaucrat look like he done somethin important!”

“You paying taxes these days?” Lucius inquired. The moonshine was spreading through his body, which glowed with a deadly calm.

“Why hell, yes, Colonel! First man to step up to the window ever' year!”

They grinned together briefly, without pleasure.

A couple of months before, Daniels confided, he'd been contacted by a lawyer in Miami who was seeking a court injunction against the burning
and was trying to reach the Watson heirs. He wanted someone on the place to make sure the house did not burn “by accident” before the case could get to court, and also to learn if the Park would force the issue by seeking to evict his caretaker. He wanted to gauge the strength of the government's legal position as well as its resolve.

“Parks ain't tested it so far, and they know I'm on there.” Speck cocked his head with another sly smile. “Course I was on there anyway, takin care of my own business, so ever'thin worked out purty nice.”