Lost Man's River (101 page)

“Anyways, your daddy had no chance that time Mr. Short killed him, cause when he come ashore, them men was waitin on him. Old Man Lloyd House, had a fish dock at Flamingo for a while—Barrelhead House, we called him, cause he liked hard cash—Mr. Barrelhead was in on the whole plan, and in later years he told me all about it.” He cocked his eye to observe Lucius as a hawk might eye the creature in its talon prior to feeding. “Course I was in Chok that day myself, I was what you might call a eyewitness. But bein so young and comin there that day from Fakahatchee, I weren't asked to join up, so I follered my uncle across to Smallwood's landin and joined up in that crowd all by myself.”

Andy said, “Lloyd House told you they
planned
it? That sure weren't the way his brothers told it!”

“I can't he'p it,” Speck said airily, waving off the interruption. “Talkin about Fakahatchee, Aunt Emmeline Daniels over there is one of the last ones left alive around south Florida who knew Mr. Desperader Watson from the early days. They give her a family party every year since she broke ninety, and some years she will draw three hundred head, all kissin kin. Don't have no idea at all who the hell they are but gets into the spirit of it all the same. She used to say Ol' Desperader Watson had the neatest foot in all the world,
looked like a ought-seven shoe, she couldn't get over it. Smallest foot for a man his size I ever saw, she'd say, and a sparklin personality to go with it.”

His daughter demanded, “Do you
ever
speak the truth?” He rumbled like a sleeping dog but would not look at her.

“Back in the last years of the century, Mr. Watson would come through Flamingo on his way to Key West, stop over sometimes to sell bird plumes to Mr. Gene Roberts. Mister Gene and Desperader was the best of friends, and when Mr. Gene was rentin Andrew Wiggins's place on Chokoloskee, he always stayed at Chatham Bend on the way through. Mr. Watson would say, ‘What time do you aim to get goin in the mornin, Gene?' And next mornin he would wake him up, shake him real gentle. That's what Gene remembered—the gentle way that Desperader shook him. ‘Come on, Gene, time to get up!' Didn't hurry him off or nothin, just woke him up and give him flapjacks, put him on his way. I reckon that's where Colonel got them fancy manners.

“Yessir, ol' Mr. Gene thought the world of E. J. Watson. Later years, when Colonel Watson showed up at Flamingo, the Roberts boys told the local men not to run him off or sink his boat but let him fish that country. Gene Roberts said, ‘Boys, I fished with Colonel Watson many's the time, and drank his whiskey with him, cause he likes his whiskey and a lot of it, same way his daddy did.' And Gene would say how E. J.'s boy had the sweetest nature he ever come across, said he never seen him mad in all his life. Never caught on that this man's sweetness weren't but weakness.”

Speck met Lucius's eye. “I always heard you was a alky-holic,” he said softly. “Any truth to that?”

Sally cried out, “Oh for God's sake! Why can't you men stand up to him?” To her father, she said, “You're a brutal and cynical and vicious man and you always were!”

And still her husband and the blind man remained silent. All four men knew that Lucius had to deal with Speck in his own way.

“Come to think about it, might been Mr. Gene who told this story,” Daniels was saying. “Ol' Desperader had two niggers stackin cordwood on a payday, and one nigger said, ‘All right now, Cap'n, we is about done!' And Watson said, ‘Well, you better stack it straight, cause that's your last one.' And he give Gene Roberts a big wink when he said that. The next week when Gene come through on his way back south from Chokoloskee, them two black boys was gone, there weren't a sign of 'em. Ed Watson's Nigger Payday some men called it. Mr. Gene admired hell out of Colonel's daddy, but he never doubted that ol' Desperader done away with 'em. And them two weren't the only ones, not by no means.”

“That's the rumor, all right,” Lucius snapped. “I've never seen a single scrap of evidence!”

“Me neither.” Speck yawned at him, indifferent. “I just heard about it.”

“So you pass along vicious lies.”

Speck Daniels sat up on his elbows for a better look at him. “You callin me a liar, Colonel? Can't swaller the truth? How come you wasted all these years in diggin up the truth if you cover it right up again when you come across it?”

Speck reeled to his feet and jerked his head in the direction of the point. “We got some business.” Lucius followed him a little distance down the beach, and they talked standing.

Speck said, “We got Old Man Chicken in the house, him and his damfool brother. You people wasn't ten feet from 'em when you was on the porch the other day.”

When Lucius had gone hunting him at Gator Hook, day before yesterday, Rob was already on his way to Chatham Bend, where the men meant to hold him until Speck arrived. Coming downriver from the inland bays, Speck's men had heard a helicopter in the distance. Next, they came around the Bend to find a skiff tied up to the old pilings. The Watson Place was as white as a lighthouse, and the painter was up under the eaves on the west wall on his high ladder, paying no attention to their arrival.

The three men gathered at the ladder's foot, staring upward, as Speck put it, “like red-tick hounds with a fat coon up a tree.” The bulky housepainter would not even look down but instead cried cheerily over his shoulder that the old place would look a whole heck of a lot better once he had finished this second coat of paint. Next, he asked if there was anything that he could do for them. “For a start,” roared Crockett Junior, “you can haul your ass down off that ladder and tell us what you think you're doin on this posted property! Never read our sign? Says,
‘This Means You!'
 ” The stranger kept right on with his painting, promising he would be with them shortly. Not until Crockett shook his ladder hard would he finally look down, and even then they could not make out whether the big man was snarling or smiling. Lucius concluded that Ad's fearful grimace was intended to disarm them, or possibly persuade himself that he'd only imagined the apocalyptic roar of an approaching airboat and that ugly dog built like a keg which was circling the ladder and these hard-looking men with heavy boots and automatic weapons who had swarmed ashore like drunken militia at a public hanging.

On pain of death he gave his name as A. Burdett of Neamathla, Florida, come to give his childhood home a coat of paint. Despite his name, Ad cried,
he was a Watson. He said he'd been urged to come here by his brother Lucius, and assured them that a venerable institution such as the Park would never destroy such a fine-looking house once it realized how much the old place meant to the Watson family! Surely that sign saying
KEEP OUT
must be illegal, since everyone knew that all Park land belonged to the American people. Also he'd been unpleasantly surprised to find the doors padlocked and the windows boarded, thwarting his plans to sleep beneath his father's roof. Furthermore, there was an awful smell which seemed to come from behind those boarded windows—one would almost suspect something had
died
in there!

Having started, Addison could not stop talking, until finally he said with a forced laugh more like a shriek that he hoped that what he was smelling in there was not bodies!

“Shut the hell up!” Crockett Junior bellowed, at wits' end. To make his point, he shoved the ladder hard, sending it scraping down the house side in a long slow arc. “Hey, wait!” the painter hollered. The ladder described a crescent down the wall, then fell to the hard ground, where the pit bull Buck, awaiting orders, took up a position at the stranger's throat. Still clutching his brush, unhurt except for splotches of white paint and his bruised feelings, he picked himself up and pointed at the unsightly gray scrape marks made by the ladder. “Let's not go spoiling my nice paint job, fellers!” They watched in astonishment as he poured new paint and raised the ladder and clambered up with a fresh bucket and set to work at once, painting out scrapes.

Apparently, Dummy had raised his gun, intending to shoot this loony off the ladder like a big turkey, but Mud deflected him, warning the stranger to get the hell off this river before that helicopter arrived with the outlaw gang which would put him to death at once because he knew too much. But seeming incapable of leaving his second coat unfinished, the man only increased his pace, burrowing deeper into his work like a child pulling the covers up over its head. If that “whirlybird” arrived, he cried, he would do his best to talk some sense into the heads of those darned criminals! With this, Speck's men abandoned hope of reasonable discussion. The
real
whirlybird, as they now recognized, was this wild-eyed Watson on the ladder, slathering paint on that doomed house as if his life depended on it, which it did.

Speck's men soon realized that they could not let a witness leave before their cargoes were safely off the Bend. Also, it seemed easier to let him flap along under the eaves than to have him descend and get in their way. For the moment they went on about their business, lugging Chicken ashore—he was bound and gagged because they were sick of his abuse—and setting him in the thin shade of the poincianas. Then they unlocked the house and
heaved outside the stacks of reeking gator hides, which stuck together in various states of putrefaction from mold rot and roof leak and humidity as well as maggots.

The gator hides were camouflage for the tarpaulins and heavy crates beneath—contraband weapons and munitions, Lucius deduced, recalling what Whidden had told him, which had to be lugged out one by one and stacked along the bank, in preparation for airboat transfers to a second depot.

From Whirlybird's peculiar expression, Speck's men suspected that his docile return to work was a ruse to throw them off the scent of some escape plan. (Lucius imagined Addison's plan as strange, formless incipience, spinning in his white-speckled head like primordial matter in the cosmos.) When they went inside for the last crates, they sat down for a smoke, and watched through the door as Whirlybird executed a stealthy descent and tiptoed toward the old man under the trees.

“How does she look?” he was heard to whisper, turning with his hands upon his hips to sincerely admire his own handiwork, as the old man, still gagged, glared at him in hatred. Knowing Rob, Lucius could well imagine the beetling brows and sparking eyes of that infuriated oldster, gargling at the mad housepainter to free him. “What in the heck is going
on
around this place?” Ad wished to know. Rob rolled his eyes and eventually Ad freed him.

Not long thereafter, they discovered they were brothers—nearly thirty years apart, Lucius reflected, and irrevocably opposed in temperament, but sired by the same red rooster, E. J. Watson. During their long conversation, Rob was seen to weep a little, though whether this was exasperation with his brother or fear for his own life, the onlookers were unable to determine.

When the
Cracker Belle
arrived toward noon next day, Speck's men were on their way upriver with a cargo. The bound-and-gagged brothers were lashed down on bunks inside, unable to signal their rescuers a few yards away. Once the
Belle
had departed for Mormon Key, they were set free long enough to eat and stretch their legs, then bound again while the exhausted crew got a little sleep. This morning, when Speck arrived, Whirlybird was sent back up his ladder, while Rob was settled on the porch, in the musky and rain-rotted ruin of a plush settee.

Having heard the report of the abduction from the Naples church hall and the various disreputable adventures since, Speck contemplated his irascible old friend, shaking his head. “Public Enemy Number One!” he said. “Ol' Chicken-Wing!”

“The same,” Rob Watson said. He accepted a jam jar of Speck's moonshine and raised his glass to the man under the eaves—“To my long-lost baby brother Ad Burdett, a painting fool out of north Florida!”

While his crew ran another cargo up the river, Speck poured himself more shine, and Chicken, too. “One for the road,” Speck teased him, lifting his glass, and the prisoner cursed him. They sat on the porch in the dead quiet of the river day to think things through. When Whirlybird descended and nagged at Speck to return him to his boat and let him go, the older brother backed him up, declaring that the Watson heirs did not care to be ill-treated in their own ancestral dwelling, especially on their first visit home in a half century. Surely, Rob said, Mr. Daniels owed some consideration to the sons of E. J. Watson, having helped to kill him. Whirlybird stared in disbelief as these two laughed.

However, not knowing what to do with these damned Watsons, Speck was growing irritable. “Ain't
you
here to kill me?” he jeered. “How about that weapon and that list?” Unlike his men, Speck doubted very much that Chicken Collins had ever meant to kill him, but whether or not he could keep them from killing Chicken was another matter. He tied Rob up again, gagging his snapping mouth so tight that his bloodshot eyes bugged out. “I always enjoyed the hell out of old Chicken,” Speck told Lucius. “Us two fellers got along real good yesterday evenin, considerin he might wind up gettin shot.”