Lost Man's River (107 page)

The men had provided moonshine for their old friend Chicken (Ad stated proudly that he had refused it), assuring him that his death seemed unavoidable. “We're all tore up about it,” Mud Braman told him. “Gonna hurt us worse than it does you.” Mud's teasing seemed very cruel to Ad, who could not believe these men were serious.

When he warned his brother that at his age, hard drink would be the death of him, Rob only smiled. Though Rob was frightened by the act of dying, the prospect of being dead upset him not at all. Holding forth over his cup of shine, he told Ad what he'd told Speck Daniels, that he was sick and tired of the ordeal of his life, he'd had enough. His one ambition was to stay drunk until the end.

Much of the night, they had lain listening to the gunrunners, who were drinking on the porch. Old Man Chicken, they agreed, would be better off dead than returned to prison “for the rest of his natural life,” as Mud Braman put it, raising his voice to make sure that the old fugitive inside the house could enjoy the discussion. “Yessir, they'd just throw away the key on that mean old feller!”

Rob told Ad he meant to thwart any attempt to establish this house as a monument to a damn killer. Though he sympathized with his young brother about the waste of his fine paint job, he hoped to see the “House of Watson” burned down to the ground, obliterating the bloodstain on the floor of the front room and the remains of a thousand wasted alligators—“the desecration of Creation,” the old man yelled toward the porch, while admitting to Ad that he could take gators or leave them. Purification by fire, he believed, was their family's last hope of exorcism and redemption. So long as this house of evil stood, he had declaimed—as the gunrunners shouted at him
to shut up, and threatened gagging—their family name would be synonymous with murder!

When Ad quoted Lucius, who had said that most of the old Watson stories were just rumors, Rob just shook his head. “Luke has to believe that,” he told Ad finally. “It's his whole life.”

Early this morning, the last munitions crates had been dragged out of the house and slung onto the airboat platform with loud metallic bangs and booming thuds. The men set the brothers free outside the house on the condition that they salvage the best gator flats and stack them by the water's edge and throw the rest into the river to destroy the evidence. If they did a good job, Ad's skiff would be fetched from the far bank when the airboat returned, and the prisoners would be free to head downriver.

Rob told the men that Speck had promised that his old revolver would be returned to him, since it had come down from his dear departed daddy. Retrieving it from Dummy's toolbox, Mud inspected it, saying, “If this damn thing belonged to Bloody Watson, it's worth money!” Crockett snatched it away from him, cursing Dummy's fecklessness when he saw that the old weapon was still loaded. He shook its cartridges onto the deck before lobbing it toward the old man on the bank, then bellowed at Dummy to let go the line. The airboat backed off the bank and turned up current.

“Things always come out right in the end,” Ad told Rob, watching them go. “That's what they say, all right,” Rob said. Eyes squinted in the glare and smiling oddly—smiling and frowning
both
, it seemed to Ad—he seemed deaf to his half brother's plea that he help with the sorting and stacking of the hides so that they could leave as soon as the airboat returned.

“They might not be back,” Rob told him, indicating his satchel, which Mud had flung off the airboat onto the bank. He pointed toward the helicopter, thumping the heavy clouds in the eastern distance.

Whidden and Sally had brought Andy from the boat, and they, too, were listening to Ad, from a discreet distance. “I know where they off-load them weapons,” Whidden said. “In a airboat, it ain't ten minutes up this river. If they was coming back, they would of been here.” Gazing at Ad's pathetic stack of alligator hides, he looked disgusted. “Them hides ain't no use no more to nobody. They knew that. They was finished with this place!”

When the airboat had gone, Rob had gone down to the water's edge and
hefted a five-gallon can of fuel. A cigarette was hanging from his mouth, and seeing the red can, Ad yelled a warning. Oblivious, Rob gazed a moment at the river, then lugged the red can to the house and up onto the porch. There he set it down and took off one high sneaker and shook out what looked like a small cartridge, which he held up to the sun like an elixir. His grin looked strange. “Take care of yourself, Ad.” Leaving that lone sneaker behind, he limped into the house.

Faced with the empty doorway, Ad called his brother's name and heard no answer. Recounting this, he broke out in a sweat, starting to shudder. “ ‘Take care of yourself, Ad!' That's all he said! And he went in there and set that house afire!” Ad stared at them in disbelief. “I mean, seein him lug that gasoline in there, I thought, What in the heck can that old feller be up to? He sure is pretty strong for an old-timer!

“Then it hit me! I ran toward the porch, hollering
Stop!
I yelled with all my might! That door stayed black and empty. And right about then there came this big soft
boom
—”

“—darned cigarette!” cried Andy.

“—and the heat exploded through the door, it burned my face!” Like a child witness, frantic to exorcise what had frightened it, Ad waved away their voices, raising his own. “And that's when he shrieked how he'd dropped the gun, how he couldn't see!”

In moments, the front room filled with fire, driving him back out onto the porch as the first flames licked through the smoke behind the window. Fire rushed upward through the house in a deep thunder. But over that thunder Ad imagined he heard screaming, and he screamed back, though what he might have screamed he did not know.

Andy House said, “Addison? I knew this house. That screechin you heard might of been the workin of that iron-hard old pine in so much heat. Them uprights and old beams—”

“It was my brother! Burning alive! I couldn't get to him!” He sank down, face sunk in his hands as he coughed and blithered.

“Never heard no shot? Think that old gun misfired? Jesus!”

“Oh, Lord, Mister Colonel! We're so sorry!”

Sally Brown had stood there with closed eyes, pressing her fingers to her temples, but now she came weeping to hug Lucius.

Addison had run around the house to the kitchen door and poked his head in, calling. But there was no outcry anymore, only that thunder and loud crackling of pine, and the beams creaking, the black choking smell of burning
pitch. By the time he retreated (he couldn't help but notice), the fire leaping upward from the windows was charring and curling his new paint. Through the old shingles, the roof seemed to glow, as if the house were swelling with trapped heat, holding its fiery breath. Then flames licked out in devil's tongues along the peak. Through a thickening pall, the hollowed house loomed and vanished like an apparition.

As if drawn to the boom and thunder of the firestorm, the helicopter came whacketing in over the treetops like a tornado. A wild light blinded him, and whips of fire flayed his skin “like the terrible swift sword in the old hymn!” He screamed for mercy, certain this machine had come to hunt him down. Cringing from the heat and noise, too frightened to run out into the open, he was driven by terror to hide himself in the old cistern, clinging like a frog to the slimy wall. He screeched with all his might for the Lord's mercy, not only for himself but for that agonized old man whose mortal cries had died but whose coil lay charring in hellfire.

Here Ad broke down again. They retreated a little, giving him time. Lucius said softly, “Nothing you could do, Ad. Don't torment yourself.”

Ad did not believe that the helicopter had caused the fire, for it had materialized after that huge soft explosion. Yet he was convinced that as it passed, he had glimpsed something falling in a long swift arc, for the house had shuddered in a deep rumbling
boom
, followed by a rush of fire and black smoke, then a rain of burning bits and shingles. A minute later, when he dared to lift the cistern cover, the burning house was gone as if evaporated. There was only that devouring heat and the low rushing of the burning timbers. Where the house had been, through the oily emptiness and cindered air, he could see a swimming bird, far our on the broad bend of the river.

“Firebomb,” Whidden pronounced. “I had that idea the minute I seen that first quick flare at Lost Man's. Maybe the old man blew up that gas can, but it looks to me like they firebombed just to make sure. Or maybe,” he continued, trying to make sense of it, “the gas can touched off some explosives. Speck told me they was concentratin on the automatic weapons, cause there weren't no time to transfer all them cargos.”

“That's right!” Ad cried. “Those crates inside were stacked right to the ceiling!”

“Made a dawn run a whole day early to catch 'em inside,” Whidden decided. “And when they seen the smoke, they bombed her anyway, cause that was their damn orders. Very childish men. Enjoy all them big shiny toys, enjoy destruction, but they want it all wrote down on a paper, want it all official. Who or what might be inside, that ain't their business.”

Lucius, sick and dizzy, mumbled dully that the firebomb might have been
a mercy to the man burning. His brother's agonies were talons in his heart. The
uselessness
of Rob's self-immolation! The Watson house would have been destroyed without him!

Only last night, under the stars at Lost Man's Key, the death of that foredoomed old man—in the light of the alternative—had seemed an endurable idea. This was because it was just that—an idea, an abstraction, with none of the furious pain and terror of a death by fire, none of the stunning immediacy of Ad's “hellfire,” or even of that dog-eared satchel, huddled there like a reproach on the blackened ground. To perish screaming, mouth stretched wide as a black hole, twisting like the human damned in some Black Ages painting, the descent of sinners into Hell—

His lungs brought up an ugly sound like the hard cough of a choked dog. In the blackening air he lost his sight and sank onto his knees, pressing his hands to the scorched earth to keep from sinking further into darkness. Around him dim voices came and went, hoarse incantations from the netherworlds—

Rob
—one word, sepulchral, formed and vanished

Rob

Who was calling?

God have mercy

 … all right?

Old pine subsumed, crack and shudder of the burning, spiral goings and returnings, the blood, the suffering of sentient things purified to the last atom by blue mineral flame, primordial ash and ancient gases, gathered in by air and water and returned at last to ocean and to earth, world without end

Amen

Rob Watson

the whispering as he came clear again, the dim shifting of specters, the black tree silhouettes on the bend of silent river