Lost Man's River (52 page)

“Keep an eye out, Rob. They might be looking for you.” He pointed at the satchel. “Maybe you better let me have that gun.”

Rob fished the revolver from his satchel, but after holding it a moment, he put it back. “I'd better hang on to this. Family heirloom, y'know,” he added cryptically, and Lucius shrugged, handing over the cartridge dropped in the hotel room. Rob tossed the cartridge on his palm. “That's my lucky bullet. I always kept that one separate—you just never know!”

He took out the large envelope, considered it a moment, put that back,
too. “Rob Watson's memoirs. For your archives. You might not be ready for it yet.” He bent at the window to peer in. In the reflected light from the night neon, his cheeks and stubble glistened, and he coughed. “I'm not a killer, Luke. Just you remember that. No matter what.” Then his head was gone, and a moment later he was hurrying away across oily black mirrors of the parking lot in an old man's stiff run toward the roadhouse. The door opened in a crack of light and wail of country music. Then the light closed again, and Rob Watson was gone.

Lucius drove south to Caxambas under a gibbous moon. Making his way out over the narrow dock toward the dark hulk of his home on the creek, he caught himself taking pains to approach quietly, as if stalking something not quite known. Down the still creek, a raccoon fishing mud clams at the water's edge sat upright and peered around at the night silence. The atmosphere seemed strangely changed by the presence of that urn—that broken skull uprooted from its grave not once but twice.

Touching the latch, he was overcome by old and unnameable premonitions. He wrenched the door like one forcing himself to jump into cold water. Framed in the window, the urn awaited him, in silhouette against the silver creek. He paused in the doorway, in a tumult of unsorted feelings.

Papa had kept a “souvenir” human skull, of obscure provenance, which Edna had not permitted in the house. Papa fastened it to the boat shed wall as inspiration to the field hands, using rough charcoal to scrawl beneath it a “classical” inscription—“from the Greek,” he said.

Explaining that skull to the young children, enjoying their squeals of delighted fear, Papa would make “giant” noises by blowing across the mouth of his empty jug. One Sunday in the boat shed shade, gazing out over the river as the children fled toward the house, in flight from the twilight onset of mosquitoes, Papa's mind had wandered from that hollow jug to ruminations on the great hollowness of man's existence, and the horror of his isolation in the universe, alone with the knowledge of oncoming darkness—what he called “the Knowing.”

Alone with that knowing, Lucius went to the cupboard and poured himself a drink. This calmed him somewhat. He set the urn outside on deck, out of his sight. He murmured, “Rest now, Papa,” not certain what he meant, then returned inside and lay down wide-eyed on the moon-swept cot.

According to the morning paper, the driver of the damaged vehicle had escaped unhurt in the shooting episode the night before outside the Gasparilla. Already in custody was the enraged meat carver (the “disturbed veteran,” the “furious Negro”) who earlier that evening had waved a big knife at the victim and “terrified” the other diners. Apparently Dyer had not suspected Rob, for if he'd thought that Rob had tried to kill him, he would surely have reported him, citing his identity as a longtime fugitive. Or would he?

At the Naples church hall, Lucius wondered if Dyer would appear. He worried that if Rob turned up, he might not have sense enough to stay out in the dark. He hoped that Sally Brown was still in Naples.

The Program Director of the Historical Society caught up with him at the side entrance near the podium. Already upset by his tardy arrival and failure to report to her at once, this brisk thistly little person was aghast at his decision to present himself as Lucius Watson, assuring him that “her” audience had not paid good money to hear about Mr. Bloody Watson from his son! Her implication was that the son could not be trusted, and indeed, she mistrusted him herself, having caught him with a plastic glass, complete with swizzle stick. “As you know, Professor Collins, intoxicating spirits are strictly prohibited in multidenominational places of worship.”

“Mineral water,” Lucius advised her. “With a twist of lemon,” he added brightly when she looked daggers at the citrus wedge.

She sniffed. “I see.” And warned him anew that “these very unique senior
citizens” (whom she also described as “very special human beings”) might “not exercise the option” of “sharing their cultural heritage,” far less “interfacing with the facilitator,” if they suspected they weren't getting what they paid for—in short, a bona fide professor, namely L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.

Still patient, Lucius pointed out as he had to Dyer that Naples was not far from Caxambas, and that some old-timer in the audience was sure to spot him. It seemed more honest—and a great deal safer—to identify himself right from the start.

She would not listen. Closing her eyes, she shook her head throughout and then said, “No.”

“I'm afraid I've made up my mind,” he said.

“So have I.” She waved an envelope which he took to be his check, and her thin lipstick flickered in a basilisk smile less withering than withered. “I owe it to my audience,” she told him. She swept inside to greet a wealthy patron and get her settled up front near the podium.

The Gulf wind clacking in the palms unnerved him, as if all the defenses of his reclusive life were blowing away. He sucked such comfort as he could from the solid glass of ice and vodka in his hand. It was one thing to pass as a historian in north Florida and quite another to use a bogus name with a local audience which knew him well as a broken-down drunk fisherman and chronic loser.

The applause startled him. He was being introduced. With a murderous smile, the Program Director was summoning and beckoning “Professor Collins”—damn!—and he hurried to the podium before he had composed himself. Seeing the glass he had neglected to set down, she raised her eyebrows to the vanishing point, even reared back a little, to separate herself from any blame for his behavior. He resisted her attempt to relieve him of his glass, and they actually tussled for one hate-filled moment before she would let go.

In hard, flat light, he found himself confronted by a wary assemblage of elders, fanning the worn-out heat with their clutched programs. These old-timers had whitish aureoles around their heads like a light manna of star-dust, drifted down out of the firmament in blessing. The women wore gloomy floral prints, home coifs, and pastel glasses, while their consorts—mostly smaller, as in hawks and spiders—favored thin steel specs and nylon pastel shirts, broad collars splayed to reveal the snowy singlets worn beneath. From the aseptic glint of lenses as the heads bent and whispered, he feared that the true identity of “Professor Collins” was already being bruited about the hall.

Though the back rows were mostly empty, a few young men lounged in the rear doorway—rough shaggy sunburned men in black baseball caps and black T-shirts, restless and out of place. One of them whistled and another clapped, urging the speaker to get on with it. The Professor raised his glass in a vague salute and drank off the last of it, all set to go. But when he said, “Good evening,” his audience unaccountably looked elsewhere, as if he had turned up in the wrong room. Resistance to his renovated E. J. Watson would be doughty, he knew that much, for to these old-timers the truth was far less precious than the “Mister Watson” of tradition, who was not to be trifled with by some outsider.

“Tonight,” he began in modest tones, “I'd like to tell you what I've learned about E. J. Watson, who he was and where he came from, and also about his foreman Leslie Cox, who as most of you know committed the three murders for which Watson was executed by his neighbors—and also, as you may
not
know, at least five other murders in north Florida. And if you folks disagree with anything I say, or have heard other versions of these stories, just raise your hand and we'll get things straightened out.”

In his vodka euphoria, the silence led him to suppose that the audience was open to his reasoning if not yet entirely on his side. Filled with sudden fondness for these tough old-timers, he actually leaned outward over the podium, spreading his arms in symbolic embrace as if yearning for his flock in the manner of the evangelicals whom they were used to. As he did so, he upset his emptied glass, noting from the corner of his eye the dismay of the Program Director in the first row, who clearly imagined that her speaker was on the point of toppling off the podium entirely.

“Now you folks have read for years and years that somebody called Bloody Watson was a psychopathic killer, that he killed dozens, that he killed his help rather than pay them—you all know these stories! There's no end to them! But none of these writers ever saw Ed Watson, never shook his hand or heard him laugh—they never
knew
him! Whereas some of you folks here tonight probably knew the man to say hello to, at least your parents did. So perhaps we can clear the record just a little—”

“Now hold on a minute!”

“—because despite all these stories,” Lucius persisted, holding up his hand in a plea for patience, “
despite
all these stories, there were never any witnesses, no damning evidence—in fact, no proof whatever that he killed
anybody
! On the contrary, we have plentiful testimony that he was a fine farmer and strong family man, much admired as a businessman and as a neighbor. And as you know, most of his neighbors weren't afraid of him at all!”

A stir of disbelief had charged the air. Sensing this, Lucius backed off a little,
speaking briefly about Edgar Watson's early life in South Carolina, Oklahoma, and north Florida, about which almost nothing has been written. “Ted Smallwood, whom so many of you knew, wrote in his memoirs that E. J. Watson, coming from Arcadia, arrived in the Chokoloskee Bay area about 1892 or 1893. Based on my research in Arcadia, late 1893 or early 1894 would be more accurate. At some time in 1895, perhaps early 1896, down at Key West, he had a dispute with Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee—”

“
Dispute?
I guess so! Slit his throat! Pretty close to killed him!”

“Hey! How about them Tuckers?”

“Mister, who the hell are you to come and tell us local people what we know a hell of a lot more about than you do?”

Sally Brown, coming down the aisle, lifted her hand in a small, ironic wave, as Lucius said, “Good! Good! Correct me! I welcome any information!”

An old man rose and took his hat off. On his turkey throat a green shirt was tight-buttoned, and he wore blue galluses. His pupils, enlarged by thick lenses, gave him the round-eyed appearance of an aged child. “I'm Preston Brown,” he told the hall at the precise moment that Lucius recalled who he was. “I'm ninety-four and had a stroke so I ain't as good as what I was—ain't as good-lookin neither, so they tell me—but most days I got a pretty good idea what I am talking about. And these old eyes I'm lookin out of here tonight seen E. J. Watson in the flesh many's the time, and this old voice has talked with him, and this old hand shook his'n. They ain't too many in this room can say the same.