Shadow Country (125 page)

Alderman was morose and scared at the same time. I disliked lodging where we were so unwelcome, but Will Wiggins had moved north to Fort Myers, McKinney's was stacked to the rafters with storm refugees, and Smallwood's had been seriously damaged, with boards torn away on the ground floor and no escape from the sweet reek of drowned chickens, caught by high water in a wire pen under the store.

In an endless day lost to engine repair, I stalked all over Chokoloskee, worried because Tippins might arrive before I left. Maintaining my innocence to anyone who asked, I refused to lie low. The shotgun on my arm was warning against interference. People mostly stayed out of my way but eyes were watching everywhere I went. Those men who were not off hunting fresh water or lost boats were biding their time until the sheriff 's arrival, but their mood was dangerous. Though she didn't dare say so, it was clear that Marie Alderman wanted us out of her house and her house out of the line of fire before the men organized to come and get me.

While Mamie rummaged through the piled-up goods for some double-ought loads for my shotgun, I slipped my boots off and stretched out on their long counter. Ted promised to warn me if anybody came. Within moments, I was dead asleep, and was still unconscious when Old Man House barged through the door, shouting for Mamie. I sat up quick, grabbing my revolver. D. D. had seen me now but did not approach to shake my hand. He turned quickly and went out. Ted Smallwood said, “Darned if I know how that old feller got past me!” I thought, I can't trust Ted either.

D. D. House returned with Charley Johnson, Isaac Yeomans, a young Demere. By that time, I had my boots back on and my shotgun handy on the counter where his posse could see it. Old Man Dan told me I must wait for the sheriff, give some testimony. Casual, I picked up the gun, saying, “Nosir, Mr. House. I already talked to the sheriff at Marco, told him all I knew: what I'll do now is go to Chatham Bend and tend to Cox.”

Those men stepped outside to consult. D. D. House came back, saying, “Well, we'll send men with you.” And I said, “Nosir, you will not. As I told the sheriff, that boy is a good shot and will shoot to kill any man who tries to stop him. If I go alone, he will suspect nothing. I can get the drop on him and bring him in.”

They thought that over. When I saw their resolve gathering again, I added that if Cox gave me any trouble, I would bring his head.

“His head?” House looked startled. “You'll bring him in dead or alive, that what you're saying?”

“Might wind up somewhat more dead than alive, is what I'm saying.”

“This is no joke, Watson!”

Though they were unhappy about letting me go, House had surely mentioned the revolver and they could see the shotgun for themselves. Again they went outside to consult. They were arguing. Charley Johnson got excited: “Hell, boys, he ain't crazy! He'll keep goin sure'n hell! Won't never dare come back here to the Bay whether he shoots that skunk or not!” In short, they were persuading themselves that if I left, Chokoloskee had seen the last of E. J. Watson.

Mamie brought me a few loads, explaining that they were storm-swept, kind of waterlogged. “I wouldn't count on 'em,” Ted warned, “not if I was dealing with a man like that.” I broke my gun to try them. The shells were too swollen to slide into the chambers, but I took a few anyway, saying the wind might dry them out on the way south. They glanced at each other, startled when they saw that my shotgun had been empty all the while I talked those men out of detaining me. It was still empty, since I couldn't load these shells; for all they knew, my revolver, too, might be unloaded. They did not report this—not while I was there—to Mamie's daddy and those men, who were still muttering and shifting on the porch, but whether that was fear or friendship, I will never know.

“Good-bye, E. J.,” Ted said somberly, shaking my hand as if for the last time. No longer wishing to seem close to Watson, he did not come outside to see me on my way. From the shadows just inside their door, my old friends watched me walk to the boat landing, shotgun on my arm, lifting my free hand to my silent neighbors in parting.

THE KILLER

In the wake of great storm, the broken coast lay inert as a creature run to earth, ear weakly flicking toward the passing sounds. An egret with wing dragging hunched in the mangrove roots, a drowned deer leaping upside down among the branches. And still the Glades was emptying in gray-brown raining rivers, washing through the mourning walls of broken mangrove. With every channel choked by limbs, I headed westward out the Pass to the exhausted Gulf, turning south along a salt-burned coast to Chatham River.

At the Bend, the riverbank had sagged away into flood silt so thick that a man could hoe the water. My dock was gone, all but one piling, and the boat shed leaned precarious over the current.

No one appeared out of the house and my shout was met with silence. And yet . . . a waiting in the air, something out of place, half-sensed, half-seen, half-hidden—
there!

Three copper figures had risen from the reeds in a little cove upriver. One raised an arm and pointed at the house and left his arm extended.

Dressed in old-time banded skirts and blouses and plumed turbans, they bore two muskets and a long flintlock rifle. The formal dress and antiquated weapons—there was ceremony here, but what it signified I could not know.

Bare-legged on its cement posts, wind-tattered peak and broken panes, my house looked old. The lower walls, the steps and porch, the Frenchman's poincianas, were caked with pale clay marl in a heavy odor of earth rot and carrion. Diamondbacks stranded by high water, seeking warmth, had gathered on the cistern concrete, sliding and scraping with a soft chittering of rattles as I circled the house. One by one the flat heads turned, ob-serving the intruder through vertical gold slits: black forked tongues ran in and out in their quick listenings.

One boot on the porch step, I stopped. “Ho! Les! You in there, boy?” Through the window came the light clicking of a spun revolver, meant to be heard. For a long time the house held its breath. I crossed the porch, rapped on the torn screen, feeling the presence tensed behind the door: who was he now? Pursued down endless nights and days by the slaughtered and their ghosts, terrified by solitude and storm, he might have howled and cracked and come apart and now in madness attack whoever came, even the one man who might help him to escape.

The voice was guttural from disuse. “Come slow,” it said. “My nerves ain't good.”

Pushing the door quietly, I was affronted by the iron reek of rotten blood. Not quite familiar and yet unmistakable, it turned my stomach. On the pine table, pointed at the door, lay Dutchy's big matched pistols. From my chair, dirt-bearded, red-eyed, Cox watched me gag. He looked less mad than crazily aggrieved.

In his hands he cupped my brown clay jug. “Good ol' Unc,” he muttered. “Never come back for his pardner.” He was staring drunk in the glazed way of a man who has drunk for many days. Annoyingly, he wore the Frenchman's hat, swiped from its old peg by the kitchen door.

“I came back before the storm. I hailed the house. Nobody answered.” I turned from the sight of the dark viscous matter on the floor and stairs, mortally sickened.

“Nobody answered,” he repeated with a queer laugh. He had tried to escape inland, on a hopeless trek across the salt flats: that's where he'd been when I came the week before. When his hope and water were exhausted, he made his way back, retracing his uncertain steps across the marl. Relating this defeat brought tears to his eyes. He had not eaten in days.

“Never come back,” he repeated. “Left me all alone in Hell. IN HELL ALONE!” he shouted suddenly, raising a revolver toward my face.

Alone because you killed everyone else.

“Easy, Les.” I raised my open hands, brought them down again slowly. “I figured some fisherman came by, took you people off.” I cleared my throat, hawked that clotting taste into my kerchief. “Where is everybody, Les?”

He lowered the gun but would not meet my eye; he shook his head back and forth over and over. “Alone in Hell,” he grieved. “You never come.”

“Where's Green and Hannah, Les? Where's Reese?”

Crafty, he said, “How come you ain't askin after Dutchy?” Fully awake now, he raised the revolver. In a while, he said, “Them old fools got agitated up when I shot Dutchy. Got ugly with me, Unc, is what it was. Got on my nerves.” He shrugged, not certain where I stood. “Good riddance, right? What with you owin 'em so much?” He spun the chamber of the gun. “I figured, hell, ain't I the foreman? Ain't I paid to clean up Unc's damn mess for him? Course I ain't been paid yet neither—”

“Green and Hannah were my friends.”

My tone startled him. “Ain't you the one told me you couldn't pay 'em? It ain't fair gettin hard with me for doin what you wanted done back in the first place. I sure do hope you won't go blamin all your troubles on a young country feller as was only tryin to help out.”

Cox ranted on in his relief at having somebody to talk to. “One time up to Silver Springs before I run away, the road boss caught me lookin at the woods. Hauls out this long-barrel revolver, says, ‘Best not go runnin on me, kid. See this shootin iron I got here? She shoots real good and one round got your name on it.' While he's talkin, he's pickin cartridges out of his gun, one after the other, holdin each one up to the light before he drops it back into the chamber. ‘Got her right here, bud. Not this'n—nope. Not this'n—nope. It's this'n here. Yep! C-O-X! Got your damn name wrote right
on
there, cracker boy!' ”

His mirthless laugh showed his brown-coated teeth.

“C-O-X.” I nodded wisely. “That spells Cox, all right.”

He hoisted the six-gun and pointed it between my eyes. “You funnin with me, Unc? I'd surely hate to have to haul back on this trigger.” But Leslie wouldn't shoot, I knew that. Anyway—I knew this suddenly, at just that moment—I didn't care. I didn't. I no longer cared. Whatever held body and soul together was stretching and weakening, letting go softly like an old rawhide lace.

Cox sensed I was somewhere out beyond his reach. He saw that deadness in my eyes and whimpered, blaming all that had befallen him on my bad influence.

When Cox heard the
Warrior
coming upriver and ran over to the shed to waylay Dutchy, he almost collided with the Mikasuki girl, who had hung herself from a boat shed crossbeam. Loomed at him out of the shadows, stirred a little in the draft. Those big deer eyes in the purpled face, watching him come, scared hell out of him. Hung right behind him while he hurried to get set for that damned spick pistolero who had come to kill him. “Lookin right over my shoulder, Unc!” he cried. “She watched me do it!” Next morning, the corpse was gone. “Injuns been skulkin around. You reckon they come took her?”

“Looks like they got business with you, boy.”

“They come any closer, I'll shoot 'em!” Leslie scowled without much heart. “Then Frank run off on me. You seen him anywheres?” He lost his thread again when I didn't answer. “Know what I been thinkin, Unc? All them bad nights alone?” He was pointing that damned gun at me again, sighting with one eye, and his drunken trigger finger made me nervous, also angry. “When you never come, I got to thinkin maybe ol' Unc sent that fuckin Dutchy over to the shed to murder me. That what you wanted?”

I ignored this, awaiting my chance to disarm him. “Why Green and Hannah? Harmless drunk? A woman?”

“Them two was troublemakers, better off dead. Disrespected me, that's what they done.” Disillusioned, he shook his head. “Them old warts was drinkin. Green started in to hollerin about the Injun hangin out there. See what I mean? Disrespectin me! Then Hannah went to wagglin her fat finger in my face. Says, ‘It's all your fault! Weren't no call to go rapin that lost child the way you done.' Dirty squaw girl, and here she was callin me a raper! My daddy always told me, ‘Boy, don't never let nobody go callin you a raper, cause that damn word will hang onto a man worse'n stink onto a dog.' ”

“So you taught Hannah a lesson.”

“I done Green first. We had some words. Burned his belly out under this table with this here six-gun. I seen my cup jump with the
boom,
or maybe he give the table leg a kick, and his mouth dropped open and I heard his shootin iron hit the floor. Had it right there acrost his lap! Man might of killed me! Next thing I knew, his woman grabbed her big two-blader ax from behind that door, near took my head off! Out to murder me the same as he was! Dropped her ax after I winged her, tried to run up the stairs. Lookin for some weapon on the second floor to kill me with, I reckon.”

“You're lucky to be alive,” I said. Leslie was lying. Green never had a weapon all the years I knew him. “How come you never cleaned up all that blood? You had two weeks.”

“That was her job or the nigger's: I'm the foreman.”

I had to finish this. “And those four harvest hands?”

He set down his revolver and slumped back in his chair, grinning a little. “Ain't your worry, Boss. Cuttin costs, that's the foreman's job. Locked 'em in the bunkroom before Dutchy come so's they wouldn't go gettin in the way. Couple days later, I marched 'em back out yonder same way you done.”

“God almighty, boy!” My gut too twisted to sit still, I got to my feet. He sprang up, yelling, “Nosir! You ain't leavin! Not without me you ain't!” He was so panic-stricken about being abandoned that for a moment he forgot Dutchy's weapons. I reached across and pulled them in and pointed one at his forehead; he shied back, then shut his eyes and waved his hands before his face to wish that gun away.

Shoving the other into my belt, I waved him toward the door. “Let's go,” I said.

“It weren't only me! Frank
helped,
goddammit!”