Lost Man's River (37 page)

“Clinch is the Clinch and Dade is the
daid
.” Relapsing comfortably into her cracker accent, Sally took another drag and passed the smoke. “Clinch is the Clinch and I don't care who knows it! Couldn't wipe them redskins out with powder and ball, so his paleface spirit has come back, fixin to
nuke
'em!”

“How come you're speaking in the cracker tongue, Mis Sally?”

“Because under my glitterin veneer of international sophistication, a
plain ol' cracker gal is what I am. First Florida Baptist bad-ass cracker, that is me.”

“And how do your Baptist forebears feel about your licentious behavior and rough language?”

“It sickens 'em. Just purely
sickens
'em. They feel like pukin.” Oddly Sally's scowl was real, her mind was in a twist, she looked as if she might up and puke on purpose. Rolling another cigarette on the faded denim of her knee, licking the paper, she said quietly, “I
do
know something about Osceola which you whiteboy historians don't put in the books. Learned it from Whidden, whose grandma was descended. Osceola was a breed named Billy Powell who was ashamed of his white blood. These days there's plenty of mixed people would be better off with Osceola's attitude—ashamed of the white blood, not the dark—but that is neither here nor is it there. Osceola claimed to be pure Creek, claimed he didn't speak English, but his daddy was a white man, he was stuck with it. And later on, he took black wives along with a few red ones, probably had children on every doggone one. Most of his warriors were black Seminoles, what they called maroons, which might account for the mixed-up bunch that's running around backcountry Florida today.” She cocked her head slyly. “I bet you damned historians never knew
that
!”

“Oh, we knew that. Some of us, anyway.” He reminded her that mixing of the races had been widespread since colonial times—in fact, the first soldier to die in the American Revolution was a black-Indian.

“Heck, I seen Injuns got a nap so thick you couldn't put a
bullet
through it! And ‘white' men, too!” Her hoarse smoker's laugh had a deep rue in it, and he laughed with her. He couldn't help it, her quirkiness delighted him, he loved her. Their mirth eased the erotic tension, and they set each other off again, over and over and over, down the road. “It's so nice to see this ol' gloom-ball professor
laugh
this way!” Sally cried happily.

But saying so put merriment to death, and she scowled crossly, banging his knee with her own. “
Anyway
, folks weren't particular in frontier days. Some of those people around Chokoloskee Bay who are so darn mean about the black people better not go poking too hard at their own woodpiles. Might be some red boys in there at the very least!” She socked his leg. “Don't laugh at me! I know what I'm talking about! Better'n you!”

A wildness had come into her eye which he sought to deflect before she blurted something angry they might both regret. “Remember those nineteenth-century edicts?” he asked her. “ ‘Eminent domain'? ‘Manifest Destiny'? Pretending to legalize the seizure of Indian lands when we knew those seizures were gross violations of our Constitution? Even today, good jurists understand that this was lawlessness, a dangerous flaw in the very
foundation of our nation's history, but no one talks about it, not even historians, it's just too dangerous—” He stopped short, for her slight smile was mocking him.

“Dangerous, huh? You some kind of troublemaker, boy? Some kind of a damn ol' Commie
faggot
?”

She sat up straight, trying to look bigoted, but after a moment she lay her head back and went pealing off into laughter so gleeful that she brought her knees up to her chest and kicked her cerise sneakers. She did not intend to be provocative, but that heart-shaped round of her bottom in tight jeans, the denim cleft, glimpsed on a curve, caused him to roll two wheels onto the shoulder. Since the ground was soft, he came so close to running the car into the ditch that an egret sprang skyward with a strangled squawk.

Sally took this near-disaster calmly, ignoring his apology, but her mood had swerved toward something bitter and morose. Brooding, she peered out the window. After a while, she said in a gritty voice, “Stay on the gray stuff, all right, Pop? You're getting your old balls in an uproar.”

He felt the heat rush to his face. “Hey listen—”

“Student-fucker,” she said quietly. “Don't you try fucking
me
. Don't even
try
it.”

“Oh Lord—”

“And another thing”—she was yelling now—“I hated the way you abandoned that poor old man back in Lake City! That was the most heartless thing I ever saw! What are you, some kind of a fanatic, with all your fucking notes, your fucking boneyards! Is that all you care about? The past?”

Injured and furious, he drove in silence, disgusted with himself for even considering anything so grotesque as a romantic liaison with this dope-warped young woman. What he needed was a wise and gentle person closer to his own age, a lovely widow such as Lucy Summerlin or even Hettie Collins—Hettie was no blood relation, after all. He turned to his erstwhile admirer with as much hauteur as he could muster.

“Miss?”

“ ‘Mrs.' to you, Pop. I'm another man's wife, in case you were forgetting.”

“I notice, Mrs., that you jumped into my car. You're not back in Lake City tending to that poor old man unless I'm much mistaken.”

“You want me to get out, hitch a ride back?
That
what you're saying? Slow down, Buster!” But a moment later, weeping and snarling, she subsided. “Sorry. I'm a dope fiend. Reefer madness, Prof. I'm really sorry. I'm a mess.” She fished out a pink tissue to blow sniffles.

Soon she lay her head against his shoulder. After a while, she let her fingertips trail from his knee along his inner thigh. When she sat back, sighing, into her own seat, the backs of her fingers were resting in his lap, light as a kiss.

They drove in silence to Arcadia, on the Peace River. That night they drank whiskey, and bad wine at supper, and made love too urgently in the farthest motel cabin from the road. Lucius had thought himself long past this grand old mix of cigarettes and whiskey and intoxicating body smells and rough wild noisy carnal entertainment, and even now, he could scarcely believe that he was back among the living. He felt rapt, shy, and omnipotent, miraculously returned into his body. He felt enchanted.

Afterwards he lay unraveled in the glow and light sweet smell of her, wondering if his desperate devouring had offended her, and knowing it hadn't when after a time she awakened gently and rolled onto her knees and bent and kissed him as he had kissed her, letting her long hair fall over her face to shroud the act because she was shy about letting him see her do what (she confessed) she had never done before.

“Well, here goes,” the lovely naked creature warned him fearfully from behind the fall of hair, in a comic innocence which touched him so that he laughed joyfully, bouncing her head a little on his belly. He whispered, “Oh I love you so.” Gently he caressed the crown of the small earnest head to give her the courage of her own generous desire, crying out as he dissolved in flowers of delight and earthly gratitude.

In time she crawled back up into his arms and their skins melted one into the other and they lay quiet, listening to the dawn come to Arcadia. Although more happy than he could ever remember—as if he had caught up with his real life at last—his self-doubt was seeping back, he felt himself too old to be her lover. He flinched away, deciding he had better go and brush his teeth. Still half-asleep, she sighed, detaining him, hand straying as if tracking a dropped earring. And he surprised them both with a response—“Oh-fro!” she murmured.

Arcadia had been known as plain Tater Hill Bluff until the advent of a post office in 1886 encouraged the choice of a more classic name. After the Manatee County seat was moved from Pine Level to Arcadia, this capital claimed
such frontier comforts as hard drink, whoring, gambling, free-style manslaughter, and common brawling. According to one reminiscence, “There were as many as fifty fights a day,” with “four men killed in one fight alone.” In addition, the untended stock on the roadless unfenced range encouraged a spirit of free enterprise in which cattle were confiscated by the herd. In 1890 four luckless strangers, denying to the end that they were rustlers, were hanged without formalities from the nearest oak. The range wars attracted desperados from the West, and revenge by knife and bullet was an everyday event when a fugitive from Arkansas named E. J. Watson turned up in Arcadia and, according to the memoirs of his friend Ted Smallwood, claimed he slew “a bad actor” named Quinn Bass. The date of Watson's arrival in Arcadia, the length of stay, his means of livelihood—no such details were recorded, only that Watson had paid his way out of his fatal scrape with Bass before leaving town.

Since Smallwood's narrative was the only known account of his father's sojourn in Arcadia, Lucius was anxious to verify the story. Next morning, he tracked down a Bass kinsman in Kissimmee who told him over the telephone that his forebears had been cattle drovers who moved south from Georgia in 1834 and settled on the Kissimmee Prairie north of Okeechobee. “Getting killed in Arcadia don't mean Quinn came from there. Most likely he came from right where I'm at now.” The original Christian name was Quincy, and the variations—Quin, Quinn, Quinton, LeQuinn—came along later. At any rate, they were all known as Quinn Bass. “The feller I'm thinking about—and I reckon he's the one you're after—is the only one I know of who died violently, but nobody in this family cares to remember how. That tells you right there he was a bad 'un and there was a scandal. His branch of the family is dying down, there's only a few old ladies left, all very testy. They hung up on me last time I called for some family information, and I was asking about something pretty small. I don't imagine they will help you out on this one.”

Manatee County had become De Soto after Watson's time, and the De Soto County Sheriff's Office had none of the old records, but a deputy directed them to the county clerk's office at the courthouse, a stately edifice on the main square, where Sally located the earliest Criminal Docket Book stored in the basement. They found no mention of any malefactor named E. J. Watson nor any record of the killing of Quinn Bass. However, a LeQuinn Bass had been arrested on September 19, 1890, for carrying concealed weapons, and again on October 23 of the next year, this time for murder. Bass had been acquitted on November 6, 1893—his last appearance in the record. Surely this man was the “bad actor” of Smallwood's account, since
there was no mention of any other Bass in this record of every felony committed in this county between 1890 and 1905.

On the way south again, Sally spoke in a flat voice about her marriage to Whidden Harden, referring finally to the ancient feud between his clan and her own. “That old feud was one reason I married him, and also one reason I stayed with him as long as I did. I couldn't bear to have our families see us fail.

“Since we were kids together in school, Whidden and I had some idea that we could change the ugly racism in our community. But Whidden is too easygoing, too agreeable. He wants to heal the feud between our families by pretending it's all over, and that just won't work. He won't act on his own decent instincts, he stays loyal to those mean no-necks, especially the one who taught him to live his life outside the law—my own damned father.” She shook her head. “Whidden is a kind good man who works with no-good people. He's not one of them, although he thinks he is, and if it comes to trouble, it's Whidden who will go to the state pen. He kind of knows that, but he's stuck in some old Island way of thinking.

“One night he admitted he didn't much respect those men because they were ignorant and lazy, always blaming the government for their way of life—that's their excuse. All they're looking for, he said, is a free ride. Too bad you don't know that well enough to quit, I said. You have no respect for Whidden Harden or you wouldn't work with them. He thought a minute and then he said he reckoned it was his wife, not him, who had no respect for Whidden Harden. This wasn't true, but I thought it might be good for him to let him think that, so I just shut up. By this time my old man was moving over into running guns, and making money off of people dying—that about finished it. I told Whidden I was moving out, and when he didn't quit, I did.”