Lost Man's River (4 page)

Gator Hook was a shack community on a large piney-woods hammock south of the Trail. The hammock lay on the old road named for the Chevelier Corporation, which was named in turn for an irascible old Frenchman—an ornithologist and plume hunter—who had once attempted a citizen's arrest of Lucius's father. In the intoxicated days of the Florida Boom, back in the twenties, the Chevelier people had pioneered a track due west from the Dade County line through the cypress swamps and coarse savanna drained by the upper creeks of Lost Man's River. Its destination was Chevelier Bay in the Ten Thousand Islands, a wilderness region advertised as “the Gulf Coast Miami.” The developers were confident the authorities would approve
their road as the middle section of the cross-Florida highway, but at Forty-Mile Bend, the engineers had turned “the Tamiami Trail” toward the northwest, into another county. The Chevelier Road was still ten miles short of its destination when the Hurricane of 1926, followed three years later by the Wall Street Crash, put an end to the last development schemes ever to be attempted in the Ten Thousand Islands. By the time the Trail was finished, in 1928, the Chevelier Road had been all but abandoned.

In the Depression, the sagging sheds and dwellings of the Trail construction crews at Gator Hook became infested by fugitives and gator hunters, hobos, drunkards, and retired whores, in a raffish community with a reputation for being drunk on its own moonshine by midmorning. This lawless place, eight miles due west across the cypress from the Forty-Mile Bend on the Trail, was cut off from the rest of Monroe County by hundreds of square miles of southern Everglades, which, together with the Ten Thousand Islands, formed the largest roadless area in the United States. In the forties, the old road was decreed a northern boundary of the new Everglades Park, but Gator Hook remained beyond administration, to judge from the fact that the Monroe County Sheriff had never once made the long journey around the eastern region of the Park to this isolated and unregenerate outpost of his jurisdiction.

For a number of years there had been rumors of an old drifter out at the Hook who talked incessantly of E. J. Watson, and it had occurred to Watson's son that this drifter might be the killer Leslie Cox, yet this seemed so unlikely—was that his honest reason?—that he had never bothered to come out here to find out. Most local people still believed that Cox had escaped (perhaps with Watson's help) and made his way to the wild Mikasuki still living down around Shark River. Since the Seminole Wars, those undomesticated Indians had sheltered outlaws and other fugitives from white men just as, in the old century, they had sheltered runaway slaves. Under a half-breed identity (and Lucius could remember the man's Indian black hair and heavy skin), Cox had laid low for years back in the hammocks. Avoiding west coast settlements where he might be spotted, so it was said, he would sometimes accompany Indian trading parties to the east coast at the Miami River, where he traded otter pelts and gator hides for coffee and flour, moonshine, axes and steel traps, rifles, ammunition. With the advent of the cross-Florida highway Cox had drifted to the shack community at Gator Hook, hiding his identity from the inhabitants.

Among old-timers in the bars and on the docks along the coast, the legends of Cox and Watson never died. Lucius could not take all these stories seriously, but because Gator Hook with its anonymous inhabitants was so remote and little-visited, this particular rumor had troubled him long before
the visit from Billie Jimmie. And now there was a real old man who claimed to have information about Watson. Was it possible that Leslie Cox had changed his name to Collins?

The sun, ascending, drew soft mist out of the cypress. From the sharp corner where the spur met the dead end, he headed east again, and in time the land rose slightly and the bright water withdrew beneath a ridge of pine. Blurred trails wandered aimlessly into the thornbush and palmetto, and here and there, half-hidden, the rusty red of a tin roof showed through the greens. In the roadside ditch bald tires languished among bedsprings, beer cans, rain-rotted packaging, unnatural objects of bad plastic colors, strewn through the catclaw and liana at the wood edge.

At a makeshift car dump in a corner of the road, four old men were playing cards on a sawhorse table. The stiff figures turned toward him as he passed, but no hand rose to return the stranger's wave. None of the four reminded him of Cox, though it was unlikely that he would have recognized the man, not having laid eyes on him since mid-September of 1910, on the same day he last saw his father. He had only a dim memory of that husky, sullen, and unshaven figure, hands in pockets, slouching apart from the small knot of people who were waving good-bye to Lucius from the riverbank at Chatham Bend. Yet seen up close, even an aging Cox would not have lost those small neat ears set tight to his head, as in minks and otters, nor the dim crescent of the mule hoof that had scarred one cheekbone, nor the dull, thudding voice, abrupt and heavy as the grunt of a bull gator.

The Gator Hook Bar was a swaybacked cabin, greenish black, perched on posts as a precaution against high water, and patched with tin and tarpaper against the rains. As the only roadhouse in this remote region, it served the rudimentary social needs of the male inhabitants and their raggy squalling females—lone backwoods crazies of both sexes, he had heard, apt to poke a weapon through a rusty screen and open fire on any unfamiliar auto making its slow way through the potholes, blowing out headlights as it neared or taillights as it fled and sometimes both. According to the legend of the place, the one victim unwise enough to stop and make an inquiry about this custom had been shot through the heart. (“Them boys sure appreciate their privacy,” someone had said.)

The roadhouse was entered and departed through a loose screen door at the top of a steep narrow wooden stair, down which its customers were free to tumble at any hour of the day or night. Beside the stair was a pink limousine with mud flaps and bent chrome which had come to rest among three
rusty refrigerators, a collection of oil drums, triangular sections of charred plywood, a renegade toilet, and a fire-blackened stove of that marbled blue so ubiquitous on old American frontiers. The limousine's rear axle was hoisted on a jack—high as a dog's leg on a hydrant, Lucius thought, noticing the dog lying beneath it—and the wheel had been missing for some years, to judge from the weeds grown up around the hub.

Through the torn screens came wild hoots, hee-haws, and tremendous oaths rolled into one blaring din by the volume of the country music from the jukebox. As Lucius Watson emerged from his old car, he was greeted by “Orange Blossom Special,” which burst forth in fine cacophony and wandered out over the swamp north of the road.

On this morning of late spring, dilapidated pickups and scabbed autos had emerged from the swamp woods well before noon, and an airboat—a sled-shaped tin skiff with a seat raised above the caged airplane engine and propeller in the stern—was nudging the bank of the open marsh across the way. Parked askew was a new black pickup truck on high swamp tires. Passing the cab, Lucius jumped backwards, startled by the thump of a heavy dog, which had not barked, simply hurled itself against the window. The silent dog—a brindle pit bull male—seemed to churn and froth in its need to get at him, stiff nails scratching on the steamy glass.

“Now don't go pesterin ol' Buck!” A scraggy man in red tractor cap and dirty turquoise shirt whacked the screen door wide and reeled onto the stoop. When Lucius said he was looking for a Mr. Collins, the drunk waved him off. “Ain't never heard of him!” The man had long hard-muscled arms, tattoos, machete sideburns, and a small beer belly. Half-blinded by the sun, he cocked his head, trying to focus. “Ain't you a damn Watson?”

“Billie Jimmie around?”

“No Injuns allowed. You're Colonel Watson, ain't you? You sure come to the wrong place.” The man jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. In a harsh whisper, he said, “Don't you go no further, Mr. Watson, lest you want some trouble.” He nodded his head over and over. “Don't remember me?” He stuck his hand out, grinning. “Name is Mud,” he said, just as this name was shouted by a rough voice from inside. Turning, he lost his balance, almost falling. He clutched the rail and sagged down onto the steps, denouncing someone in a pule of oaths and spittle.

Mud's red cap had fallen off, and Lucius picked it from the steps as he ascended. By now he had recognized Mud Braman from Marco Island, gone drink-blotched, and near-bald. Seeing his pallid scalp at eye level, the livid eruptions and scratched chigger bites, the weak hair and ingrained grime—seeing the soiled and scabbed human integument that could barely contain
the furious delusions trapped within—Lucius perched the red cap gently on his head. “I knew your dad,” he murmured, stepping around the rank cinnamon smell of him and continuing up the stair.

Inside, a man was loudly narrating a story. At the appearance of a silhouette in the torn screen, a silence fell like the sudden hush of peepers in the marsh, stilled by the shadow of a heron, or by a water snake, head raised, winding through the tips of flooded grasses. When the stranger entered, two scraggy men on the point of leaving sank back into their places, and the dancing women in their pastel slacks and helmet hairdos, breasts on the roll in baggy T-shirts, squawked and catcalled.

Lucius was stopped inside the door by a husky barefoot man, sun-creased, with old dirt in the creases. From hard green coveralls—his only garment—rose a rank odor of fried foods and sweat, spilled beer and cigarettes, crankcase oil and something else, something rancid, a smear of old mayonnaise, perhaps, or gator blood, or semen. Expressionless in big dark glasses, this figure crowded him without a word, as if intent on bumping chests and backing the stranger out through the screen door. Then that same rough voice which had yelled at Mud now bellowed “Dummy!” and the man stopped and removed his glasses, and dull eyes gazed past Lucius with indifference as he turned away. His dark sun-baked back and neck and shoulders were matted with black hair.

The man who had yelled was Crockett Daniels, who had recognized Lucius Watson, too, and nodded sardonically at Lucius's grimace. Daniels crossed the room to confer with a big one-armed man who leaned on the far wall, then went to the makeshift plywood bar, where he poured two glasses of clear white spirits from a jug. Brusquely he offered one to Lucius, who accepted it with a bare nod. The moonshine was colorless, so purely raw that it numbed Lucius's mouth and sinuses and made his eyes water. The two stood grimly side by side, elbows hitched back on the plywood, faced out across the room, and they sipped moonshine for a while before they spoke.

“Speck” Daniels was a strong short man with a hide as dark and hard-grained as mahogany, and jutting black brows and a hawk beak, and dark grizzle in a fringe around a wry and heavy mouth. Straight raven hair, gone silver at the temples, fell in a heavy lock across his brow, and his green eyes were bright and restless, scanning the room before returning to the big black-bearded man in combat boots and camouflage pants and a black T-shirt with a wrinkled red stump in the right sleeve.

Fixing Lucius with a baleful glare, the one-armed man resumed a story interrupted by Lucius's arrival. “One time down in Harney River country”—and he pointed his good arm toward the south, toward the Park—“I shot me this gator at night, nailed that red eye, and damn if that sucker don't sink
straight down into black water, could been nine foot deep! I don't generally miss, but I got this kind of a creepy feelin, and didn't rightly want to go in after him. That big ol' bull might had plenty of fight left, he might been waitin on me! Made sense to leave him where he lay. At night, it ain't the same as what it is in the broad open daylight. When a man gets to feelin uneasy, in the night especially, well, he best mind that feelin, or he got bad trouble.”

Saying that, the big man slapped angrily at the stump of his lost arm. Chest heaving, he stared around the room, ready to challenge anybody about anything. The hard high brush of coarse black hair that jutted from his head like a worn broom gave him a look of grievance and surprise. On his good arm was a discolored tattoo—an American flag set about with fasces and an eagle rampant, talons fastened on a skull and crossbones. The red and white of the stars and stripes were dirtied and the blue purpled, all one ugly bruise.