Shadow Country (38 page)

The makeshift roadhouse was entered and departed through a loose screen door on the small landing of a steep ladder-stair down which drunk clients were at risk of tumbling at any hour of the day or night. A scraggy man in brown cap and soiled shirt whacked the screen door wide and reeled onto the stoop: “State yer damn business, mister!” When Lucius said he was looking for Mr. Collins, the drunk cocked his head, trying to focus, then waved him off, disgusted: “Never heard of 'm!” The man had long hard-muscled arms, tattoos, machete sideburns, a small tight beer belly. “Don't I know you, mister? Ain't you some kind of a damn Watson?”

“Tommie Jimmie around?”

“No redskins ain't allowed. You Colonel Watson? You sure come to the wrong place.” The man jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Don't go no further, Colonel, lest you want trouble.” He nodded over and over. “Name is Mud.” He grinned when that name was bellowed by a rough voice from inside. Turning, Mud lost his balance, almost falling. He clutched the rail and sagged down onto the steps in a pule of oaths and spittle.

The man's cap had fallen off: Lucius retrieved it from the stair. By now he had recognized this no-account Braman from Marco, prematurely drink-blotched and near bald. Confronted by Mud's scalp up close as he ascended, the eruptions and scratched chigger bites, the weak hair and the ingrained grime in the pale skin, Lucius perched the brown cap gently on his head, stepping around his stale rank smell and continuing up the steps.

With the appearance of a stranger's silhouette in the torn screen, the voices within went silent in sudden hush, like marsh frogs stilled by a water snake winding its way through flooded grasses. Two men on the point of leaving sank back into their places, and two squawking women with hard helmet hair stopped their raucous dance.

Inside the door Lucius found himself blocked by a husky barefoot man whose sun-baked back and neck and shoulders were matted with black hair. From hard green coveralls—his only garment—rose an aroma of fried foods and sweat, spilled beer and cigarettes, crankcase oil and something else, a smear of rancid mayonnaise, perhaps, or gator blood, or semen. The man crowded him without expression and without a word, as if intent on bumping chests and backing him out through the screen door onto the landing. But now the harsh voice that had bellowed “Mud!” yelled “Dummy!” and the barefoot man, dead-eyed, indifferent, turned away.

The yell had come from a man waving him across the room to the makeshift bar who merely sneered in sardonic response to the newcomer's wince of distaste at the sight of him. Raven-haired, with a hide as dark and hard-grained as mahogany and a dirty grizzle all around a wry and heavy mouth, Crockett Daniels had thickened but not softened since Lucius had last seen him in the Islands. Filling two cracked coffee cups with spirits from a jug, he shoved one at Lucius, who acknowledged it with a bare nod.

The two leaned back against the bar, sipping for a while before they spoke. Daniels's green eyes were restless, scanning the room but always returning to a big bearded man, shirtless in dirty jeans and a black leather vest and missing his left arm; the big man leaned on the far wall, fixing the stranger with a baleful glare. A hard brush of coarse black hair jutted from his crown like a worn broom; on his upper right arm was a discolored tattoo—the American flag 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 was purpled, all one ugly bruise.

Intent on Lucius, the big man resumed a story interrupted by his entry. “Like I was sayin, you go to huntin gators in the backcountry, you gone to earn ever' damn red cent you make! And that's okay, that's our way of life, takin the rough nights with the smooth. But these days when you go out there and go to doin what your daddy done and your grandpap, too, you might could find yourself flat up against some feller in a green frog outfit sneakin around for the federal fuckin government. Know what he wants? Hell,
you
know what he wants! He wants our huntin country for a fuckin
park
! Wants to confuscate your gator flats, clap your cracker ass in jail!”

The big man turned, pointing a thick finger at Lucius Watson. “Or maybe that fed slunk through the door there, tryin to look like ever'body else!”

“That big boy you are lookin at calls hisself Crockett Junior,” Daniels informed Lucius, not sounding pleased. “Wants to know what you're doin out here, Colonel. That's what your friends call you, ain't it?”

“You my friend now, Speck?” Lucius drank his glass off to the bottom and came up with a gasp and a warm glow in the face. The moonshine was colorless, so purely raw that it numbed his mouth and sinuses and made his eyes water.

The big man's self-stoked rage was building.

“Damn fed might belly right up to that bar, pertend to be your friend, then turn around and stop a man from supportin his own family!” Crockett Junior bawled. “And you out there in that dark swamp night after night, way back in some godforsook damn place you can't even pole to in a boat, half bled to death by no-see-ums and miskeeters, worn out, wet, and froze with cold, and damn if one them stupid shits don't have you spotted! Maybe just waitin to step out of a bush where you left your truck back at the landin!”

Here Crockett Junior paused in tragic wonderment. Softly he said, “Speakin fair now, what's a man to do if that feller tries to haul him off to jail?” He gazed about him, shaking his head over such injustice. “Now I ain't sayin he's a real bad feller. Might could be a
likable
young feller just tryin to get by the same as me. Might got him a lovin little wife waitin on him at home. Couple real nice
little
fellers, or maybe just the sweetest baby girl—same as what
I
got!” Crockett Junior looked around him wide-eyed, making sure his listeners understood how remarkable it was that gator hunter and game warden might both have wives and kiddies, and also the depth of his concern for the warden's family.
“But!”
He looked around some more, and the soft voice grew more and more confiding. “But if that ol' boy tries to take away my gators? I got my duty to my family, ain't that right? Got to take care of my sweet baby girl at home, ain't that only nacherl?”

“We heard this same ol' shit in here a thousand times,” Speck said, disgusted.

“You folks recall that plume bird warden that Bloody Watson killed down around Flamingo?” Junior nodded with the drinkers. “Now I ain't sayin what ol' Bloody done was right. All I'm sayin is—and it would be real pathetical, break my damn heart—all I'm sayin, if any such a feller tries to keep me from my livin?” Here he fixed his gaze on Lucius once again, raising his good arm to point southward toward some point of destiny in a far slough. “Well, you folks know that Crockett Junior Daniels would be heart-broke, all tore up, but that feller ain't left me no damn choice.” He dropped his voice to a hoarse hard whisper. “I reckon I'd just have to leave that sumbitch
out
there!”

The clientele turned its slack gaze upon the stranger. “Tragical, ain't it?” Speck Daniels snickered. “Leave that sumbitch
out
there. That's about the size of it. Invaders got to watch their step in
this
neck of the woods and that's a fact.

“Course Junior there, he's crazier'n hell, and them other morons he keeps with him might be worse. Mud Braman been a drunk since the day his balls dropped, don't know where his ass is at from one minute to the next, and that other one with all the personality”—he tossed his chin toward Dummy—“he might bust loose any minute, shoot this place to pieces, and you'd never know why in the hell he done that, and him neither.”

Waiting for Daniels to make his point, Lucius said nothing.

“Leave him
out
there! Yessir!” Speck Daniels sighed. “Some days I think ol' Junior might be better off if I was to leave
him
out there. Run his dumb ass into the swamp back here and put a bullet in his head for his own damn good, 'fore he gets us in trouble shooting some stranger who just wandered in here off that road.”

“You threatening me, Speck?”

For the first time, the poacher turned and contemplated Lucius Watson, sucking his teeth with distaste. “What you huntin for out this way, Colonel? Ain't me, I hope.”

Lucius shook his head. “I never knew you lived here.”

“Well, I don't. When I ain't livin on my boat, I got me a huntin camp back in the Cypress, big army stove and a regular commode, nice fat Guatemala girl that come by mail order. But these days,” he whispered—and he cocked his head the better to enjoy Lucius's reaction—“I'm caretakin in your daddy's house, down Chatham River.”

A couple of months earlier, Daniels explained, he had been contacted by a Miami attorney who was seeking to reinstate E. J. Watson's land claim on Chatham Bend; the attorney wanted somebody camped on the Bend to keep an eye on the place until the claim was settled. “Man heard that Crockett Senior Daniels knew the Watson place real good and might be just the feller he was lookin for.” He gave Lucius a sly glance.

The attorney was trying to reach the Watson heirs. “He was complainin how he couldn't catch up with the Watson boys. I told him, ‘Well, the oldest run off from a killin at the turn of the century and the next one is a upright citizen around Fort Myers, don't want nothin to do with swamps and such. Course Looshush might be interested,' I says, ‘but you might have trouble findin Looshush cause he makes hisself scarce and always did.' ”

Affecting indifference, Lucius shrugged. “So who is he? What's his name?”

Mr. Watson Dyer, Speck continued, had big connections in this state; he was a crony of politicians and a fixer. “Wants a nice ronday-voo for all them fat boys, wouldn't surprise me—booze 'n girlie club, y'know. I been thinkin I might join up to be a member.” But there was no mirth in Daniels's wink, he was watching Lucius closely, and Lucius maintained his flat expression, not wishing to show his astonishment—
Watt Dyer!
—nor how much he resented the idea of Crockett Daniels infesting Chatham Bend. After Bill House left, Papa's remote house on its wild river had been looted and hard used by squatters, hunters, moonshiners, and smugglers, and Daniels was all of these and more—the Bend just suited him. From offshore, no stranger to that empty coast could find the channel in the broken mangrove estuary where Chatham River worked its way through to the Gulf—one reason why Papa chose that river in the first place—and even boatmen with a chart might ream out their boat bottom on the oyster bars. But these days, with the new canals draining the Glades headwaters for more sugarcane plantations, the rivers to the south ran shallow, with snags and shifting sandbars, and smugglers such as Daniels and his gang had to rig chains to the few channel markers and drag them out.

“Looshus.” Speck considered him a moment. “Course if this big Glades park goes through, they'll likely burn your daddy's house down to the ground. Raggedy ol' place three-four miles back up a mangrove river, windows busted and doors all choked by thorn and vines? Not to mention bats and snakes, wasp nests and spiders and raccoon shit—smell like a bat cave in there. That house ain't had a nail or a lick of paint in years. Them damn Chok people that was in there, they just let her go. Screen porch is rickety, might put your foot through, and the jungle is invadin into the ground floor. Hurricanes has stripped off shingles, took the dock and the outbuildins, too.”

“Why do you care? It's not your place.”

“Not my place?” Speck cocked a bloodshot eye. “You sayin the Bend don't belong to us home people? And the whole Glades backcountry along with it?” Hearing Speck's voice rise in a spurt of anger, Junior Daniels turned their way. “Why, Godamighty, they's been Danielses usin this backcountry for half a hundred years! I hunted here all my damn life! You tellin me them fuckin feds and their fuckin park has got more rights than
I
do?”

But Lucius noticed that much of his outrage was feigned and the rest inflated. In fact, Speck laughed, pleased by his own performance. “Know the truth? Them squatters has stole everything that weren't nailed down and quite a lot that was but they never done your daddy's place real harm. Storms tore the outside, which is all them greenhorns look at, but inside she's as solid as she ever was, cause your daddy used bald cypress and hard pine. That man liked ever'thing done right. His house might look gray and peaked as a corpse but she could stand up there on her mound for another century.”

“Mind telling me what you're up to on the Bend? When you're not caretaking, I mean?”

Daniels lit a cigarette and squinted through the smoke. “That ain't your business.” Reaching to refill Lucius's glass, he winked to show he was only kidding, which he wasn't.

Lucius sniffed at the white lightning. “You make this stuff down there?”

Daniels measured him. “You sure ain't obliged to drink it, Looshus. You ain't obliged to drink with me at all.” Asked if he owned Gator Hook and if this bar was an outlet for his shine, Speck took a hard swallow and banged his glass down. “Still askin stupid questions, I see. You ain't changed much, bud, and I ain't neither, as you are goin to find out if you keep tryin me.” In a gravelly voice, he growled, “I asked you extra polite just now what you was up to out this way. All these folks in here want to know that. So we ain't feelin so polite no more about not gettin no answer.”

Lucius pushed his glass away, trying to focus. He was sick of baiting Daniels, sick of being baited. “I'm not a fed. I'm looking for a man named Collins.”

“No you ain't. You're a damn liar.” Speck announced this to the room. “Here I ain't seen you in dog's years and all of a sudden you show up way to hell and gone out in this swamp. Think I'm a idjit? Think I don't know why?” When Speck raised his voice, Junior pushed himself clear of the wall and started across the room, and the one called Dummy followed. “All these years you been snoopin and skulkin, makin up your damfool list! You know how close you come to gettin shot?”