Lost Man's River (89 page)

Stiff-legged, the dog circled the two strangers, leg by leg, the bristles of its nape as stiff as wire. A rank canine smell rose from its hide, and from its clamped jaws came a low steady rumble. Lucius's instinct was to freeze and not look down, as if the least twitch might betray his fear to this morose animal. That in these stark instants he could still hear the light
tsik-teriu-tsik
of the vireo would strike him later as the furthest reach of hallucination.

Sally had sunk onto the gunwale, weak with fear, perhaps trying to defuse the situation. Not sure what was happening, Andy House folded his arms and clutched his elbows, as if holding himself quiet by main force.

“Junior,”
Crockett mimicked Sally. He jumped down from the pilot seat as his men swung aboard the
Cracker Belle
. Covered by Dummy, Mud pushed Andy aside and poked the muzzle of his carbine into the boat cabin.

“We're not armed,” Whidden said, face set and drawn. The pit bull turned toward his voice and jammed its snout against his calf and left it there.

“If I tole him to,” Crockett muttered heavily, “that dog'd go for a bull gator.”

“That a fact?” Whidden's voice was amiable and easy, but their eyes were locked like adversaries in a fight. “Yessir, you stupid fuck,” growled Crockett, “that is a fuckin fact. I lay a T-bone by Buck's nose and go out to the store, he won't never touch it.”

“You got him trained up good, all right.” Whidden risked a downward glance at the rigid dog. “Course I ain't seen Buck since a pup. Might not remember me.”

“Buck don't forget.” Crockett's voice had turned aggrieved and bitter. “Buck don't never forget. He ain't like you.”

“We're supposed to meet Watson Dyer here, and the Parks people,” Lucius explained. As Sally hissed at him to stay out of this, he pointed at the skiff across the river. “My younger brother—” But he stopped as the one-armed man yanked a third carbine from a rack on the helmsman's platform and the dog turned toward him.

Whidden whispered, “You shut up, okay?”

“No safety on this thing,” Crockett warned Lucius, “cause I ain't learned to work a safety with my teeth.” He swung the short rifle like a crutch and pointed the black hole of it at Lucius's eyes.

“We ain't lookin for no trouble, Junior,” Whidden said. The rifle swung toward him, and again the pit bull pushed its muzzle hard into his leg, bulk shivering. Whidden let all expression fade. With his eyes half closed, he looked almost sleepy.

“Whidden boy? You never read our sign?” The carbine swung toward the sign reading
KEEP OUT
and swung right back again. “You're lookin to get some people killed,” he muttered.

House cleared his throat. “You don't mean that, son.”

The one-armed man breathed noisily. “Mr. House?” he grated. “No disrespect. You shut the fuck up, too.”

Mud's head emerged from the cabin of the
Belle
. “Nothin down here, Junior,” he told Crockett, who tossed his head sideways toward the house itself. Mud circled the house, checking the doors and windows. “Okay,” he called. Reboarding the airboat, he leaned his gun against the platform. “Your old home sure stinks,” he said to Lucius.

Crockett whistled to the dog—“Come in here, Buck!” He climbed back up onto his seat, yelling at Whidden. “Get off this river, boy!”

When Lucius called desperately, “Now wait a minute!” Sally cried, “Let Whidden handle this!”

“Let Whidden handle this!” But there was no heart in Crockett's sarcasm. He seemed to brood, easing the airboat slowly off the bank. To his own men,
his quiet appeared ominous, for both moved aft, out of Crockett's line of fire, Whidden spoke quietly to Mud Braman, “How come you fellers won't tell Mister Colonel his brothers is all right? That ain't askin so much.”

“Dammit, Whidden! Just do what he says!” Mud was very uneasy, and even Dummy adjusted his genitals through his greased coveralls.

The gorgon head of the one-armed man high on his perch was cocked back oddly on his shoulders as he spun the airboat. “You Watsons are a bunch of lunatics, you know that? I ought to take and blow the heads off them two crazy brothers, and yours, too!” He revved the airplane motor to a roar so loud and battering in its own wind that they could hardly hear him in his maddened howling, then slowed the engine to a sudden idle, as leaf and bark bits torn from the old poincianas spun down into the water, to drift away in the slow spirals of the current.

Crockett sat motionless against the sky. In the river light, the world seemed fixed in a frieze of stillness, a silvered dance of death. The pit bull's hackles rose, and its nails clicked on the metal deck. The pit bull whined. Crockett leaned and said something to Braman, then looked sleepily away. In a hoarse whisper, Braman said, “Get goin, Whidden. Make camp on Mormon so we know right where you're at, then head for Lost Man's first thing in the mornin.”

The airboat, taken by an eddy of brown current, drifted gradually from the bank. Lucius shouted, “But we have to be here day after tomorrow!” And Mud screeched back, “He ain't talkin about day after tomorrow! He is talking about
now!
Get movin now!”

Lucius cast off the
Belle
's lines and followed Whidden aboard. He shouted, “Why the hell can't they at least tell us that those men are alive!” Sally seized Lucius's arm, but he wrenched free of her, as Whidden gunned the engine of the
Belle
to blur his shouting and the old boat's bow swung off into the current. “He
told
you,” Whidden said. “Sayin he ought to blow their heads off was Junior's way of saying he ain't done it yet.”

Even now, headed downriver, they were scared and agitated. In the stern, the blind man sat unnoticed. No one felt like speaking. Finally Sally went aft and hunkered down beside his chair, to draw him back into their company.

Below the bend, Harden cut the motor, letting the boat drift in a slow orbit as they listened. “They ain't leavin. We would hear that motor. Only pretended they was takin off to see if we'd try sneakin back. And Crockett is listenin the same as we are, right this minute, and when he don't hear our motor, he might come have a look.” He cranked the motor and, shaking off Lucius's questions, ran his boat downriver toward the Gulf.

Whidden guessed that both brothers were in the house, tied up and gagged. “Probably heard us callin but they couldn't answer.”

Andy House agreed. “When Sally and me was settin on the porch, there come this little kind of thump and scrapin. Figured it must be raccoons, but now that I think about it, that don't seem likely.”

Whidden supposed that the Daniels gang was clearing its contraband out of the house before Parks arrived the day after tomorrow. Lucius scarcely listened. He was trying to imagine his two misfit kinsmen, born more than a quarter century apart. One called himself Burdett, the other Collins. They had finally laid eyes upon each other for the first time in their lives only to find themselves—if Whidden was correct—bound captives in their father's house, perhaps entirely unaware that they were brothers.

Crockett Junior Daniels, Sally said in a tense flat voice, had been exposed all his life to an evil influence. “Speck was smart and Speck never got caught. He let his big dumb son get caught instead! Know where he spent his sixteenth birthday? In the county jail! Judge released him on probation if he would join up in the Marines, go get his head blown off for God and country.” He might have come out all right, she said, if he had not gone to war, since he'd always hoped to attend college, but when he returned from Asia, he was angry and bitter, boozing and brawling and breaking things and doing harm. It was only a matter of time before he sank back down into the swamp beside his goddamned father.

“Whidden honey,” she finished bitterly, “you are so darn smart for a man who has wasted the best years of his life making moonshine and skinning alligators! I bet you were the brains of that whole outfit!”

“This fine young woman here got me back on the straight and narrow path, and bound for Glory,” Whidden told the others. Holding his wife's eye, he added, “We wasn't such terrible bad fellers, Sal. Only kind of crooked.”

“Crooked,” she said. With Lucius watching, she went stiff when Whidden put his arm around her shoulders.

The
Belle
anchored off a little beach in the lee of Mormon Key, where Sally said she needed some time alone. Whidden tossed the dinghy overboard and she jumped down neatly on the thwarts, pushing off at the same time, taking up the oars. “Look at that Sally Brown!” her husband called. “Real old-time Island gal!” He opened a beer and sat on the boat transom and watched his darling row away to Mormon Key. Finally he turned and said to Lucius, “Mister Colonel? I don't believe them boys will hurt 'em lest they has to.”

Crockett Junior is messed up and he is violent. He killed plenty over there in Asia, but he weren't a natural killer before he went and he ain't today. When he first come home, Junior used to say, “Them flag-wavin old farts up there to Washington, D.C., has lost me my damned arm, but that don't mean they can take away my livelihood.” That poor feller is so angry that he can't hardly get his breath, and I don't see how any good can come of it. Got a terrible need to blow the head off somethin. That's what Speck knows and that's why Speck stays away.

Dummy now, he don't care if he kills or if he don't, he don't care nothin about
nothin
, and that's dangerous, too. But most of the time Dummy ain't there. He's still in Asia, talkin to them voices in his head. So Mud is the feller that we have to work with. Ol' Mud is tough and he is wild, but he is pretty good-hearted behind all his hot air, and he tries to keep them other two out of trouble. Mud has hero-worshiped Junior since a boy and he'll go down in flames with Crockett if he has to, and Dummy will go right along with 'em for the goddamn hell of it.

I ain't sayin that Junior ain't pretty good at his daddy's business, never mind that he ain't got but the one arm—fact he's better'n most that has all their equipment. But when Old Man Speck first seen the way them boys was spendin up their money, he made hisself real scarce from that day on. Sally's mother was long gone by then, and Sally, too, so he turned his shack over to Junior, threw his gear down in his boat, and run her south around Cape Sable to Flamingo. Meets those boys on business at the Bend or Gator Hook, then disappears again. “I ain't doin no association with known criminals,” is what he told me. “I told Junior I don't aim to be around when they run up against the law and start to shootin. I'll turn my back on 'em like I never seen 'em in my life and head on down my road, same as I always done.”

Speck is out for Speck and always has been. Even his own family never put no trust in him. But I will say this for Crockett Senior Daniels, he knows every last foot of this Glades country. Learned it the hard way, which is just about the only way a man can learn it. Put in many a long day alone out here, and long nights, too. I admired that when I threw in with him, and I still do. This wilderness out here, or what is left of it, might be the one thing in his life he loved, when you come to think about it. Speck don't know he loves it, naturally, and wouldn't hardly admit to it if he did.

Course he always poached and smuggled and made moonshine, always broke the law. But you fellers know as good as I do that Speck ain't only just a common outlaw. He was a expert hunter, too, and a expert fisherman, until Parks come along and put him out of business. He can tinker motors,
pretty fair country mechanic. He builds good shacks and boats and traps, and hangs nets, too. If Speck ever decided to go straight, he's got a half dozen trades that he could choose from. That's another difference between him and them. Cause unless there's some kind of a call for a militia, mercenary soldiers, them boys of his have no idea how to make a livin. They'd have trouble makin a day's pay inside the law.

This new breed don't care nothin about wilderness. All they know is how to use it hard, same way they use their women and their gear. Shoot everythin that moves in case some other feller beats you to it, find out later if it's any use—that's their damn attitude. That's why they got all them gator hides rottin in there. Never look ahead and don't look back, got no respect at all for land nor life. Maybe this country could use a dose of Speck's old-time outlaw spirit, but not this kind.

Them boys got handed every bit of that man's hard-earned knowledge, and they don't appreciate it. Sure, Speck is dead ornery and ignorant, and greedy, too, but he been known to leave a little room for other people long as they don't get in his way. These younger ones don't leave no room for nobody, and their war experience give 'em their excuse. To their way of thinkin, the country owes 'em a free ride for sendin 'em halfway around the earth to get mangled up in some stupid Asia war that nobody give a shit about in the first place.