The rain had stopped, leaving black puddles on the ground. The dull thumping of the helicopter, still circling in the eastern distance, had come and gone in the close silent air, but now the sound came again, and grew much louder. There was no time to move the Belle, or even hide. Ad Burdett relapsed into his moans, his big hands twitching, and Lucius called to him, “It’s all right, Ad! It’s all right!” But Harden whispered, “It ain’t all right. Not if they decided—” But he left this thought unfinished, since it was too late.
In ricocheting wind and racket, the glinting thing roared low over the river, and the mad leaves danced as it cleared the trees and rocked to a stop in midair over their heads. Shattering the sun and light, the blades spun fire sparks and smoke into sudden dust devils and small tornadoes. An emblem on the fuselage behind the portholes resembled an American flag, yet the covert machine was not identifiable with the armed forces. Perhaps it was assigned to anonymous agencies. Perhaps the vast federal apparatus and its armed might, and all the war-oriented industries behind them must be invested in this shining thing.
Binoculars peered at them out of the portholes like submariners goggling at abyssal life. Was one of these lens-eyed creatures Watson Dyer?
In a shift of wind came a metallic squawk and static, and a moment later, the machine shot skyward. Soon it was far out to the west, rising high over the Gulf where the sky was clearing. Higher and higher the great dragonfly rose, black on the sun. Then it whirled downwind, returning toward the east in its silver gleaming, magnificent in its indifference to the small figures below.
Peering after it, Lucius was dismayed when his eyes misted, and he felt an impulse to salute the power of that swift and shining thing—God Bless America!
Whidden crossed the river to fetch Ad’s skiff while Lucius waited with his brother on the bank. Ad had relapsed into a brooding silence, and the two stood together in discomfort, pretending to watch the Cracker Belle while struggling to make sense of what had happened. Ad burst out, “This house, and Rob, all this bad old-time stuff—it’s none of my damned business! I only came to paint the house!”
The fire steamed. An iron sun loomed through the mist and was soon gone. On the gnarled roots of the scorched poincianas beside the river, the rough bark was blackened on the side nearest the fire, and there was no shade because the leaves had burned away. “I’m sorry, Ad,” Lucius said finally.
“I think Rob told the truth!” Ad cried. “And I don’t care!”
“All right.” Lucius kicked an old scrap of gator hide into the water.
“You knew all these things? All your life?”
“Well, yes and no. I knew it and I didn’t. There were dreams …”
“And you’re putting that bad stuff into your book? About those bodies? Weren’t you the one who made excuses for him? In Neamathla?”
Across the river, the Belle had the blue skiff in tow and was starting back.
“There won’t be any book.”
Lucius had not realized he had decided this until he said it. How could he celebrate his father’s real accomplishment while pretending ignorance of what he knew. And after all, he had been warned, long, long ago that Papa was an unfit subject for biography.
How bitter it seemed that the “truths” he’d learned in long hard years of research had turned out to be only marginally more dependable than the Watson myth. The only “truths” of E. J. Watson were the intuitions rising at each moment—for example, that during his long years on the Bend, his driven father, whether or not he had ever paused to listen, had heard the song of an ancestral white-eyed vireo, all but identical to the dry wheezy trill which even at this moment came and went over the thump and pop of the rain-banked fire. The Calusa Indians had heard it, and the Harden clan and the old Frenchman, and a pretty little girl named Lucy Dyer, and even the lean and hungry Cox, alone on this storm-battered river, awaiting the return of Mr. Watson. In the stark wake of hurricanes and fire, the delicate bird went on and on about its seasons, oblivious of the mortal toil of man.
Addison was sneaking looks at him, in hope of something. But the long silences which had started to occur between them would only become chronic, Lucius knew, should they try to graft kinship onto loss, for there had been no twining of their vines since those fallow days here on the Bend fifty years before. In those days, Edna’s Little Ad was solid as a meteor, rushing to Lucius in his churning run, falling forward all the way from the place he started to the point of impact on his chest. His joyful voice had accompanied every activity, even maniacal banging on pots and pans. That headlong rush for life would always be his fondest memory of Ad, who seemed to have sprouted with insufficient sap and was already browning and awaiting death. He would part with him sadly, yet without sorrow. They were not true brothers. Their roots were too long separated, dug up, dried out. Their only tie had been this house at Chatham Bend.
Ad hurried down the embankment to his boat. At a loss as to how to comfort him, Lucius trailed him to the water’s edge, where Ad stared uncomprehending at his proffered hand. Lucius seized Ad’s hand and shook the lifeless thing and let it drop.
“You don’t want to wait a little longer, Ad? For the burial, I mean?”
“I have to go!”
Having fumbled their parting, the brothers tried to mend things in a rough embrace, and Lucius was relieved that Andy House, who stood nearby, had been spared such a disconcerting spectacle. Uncomfortable and abrupt, they had banged foreheads painfully. In that disjointed moment, hugging the stiff bulk of his unbathed brother, Lucius sensed his fundamental hollowness, as if long ago, due to deprivation or disease of spirit, a strong skeleton had failed to form inside him.
In his last years, their father had grown rather heavy, but not in the way of this youngest of his sons, who was already in his mid-fifties, or about Papa’s age on the day that Papa died. Aunt Josie Jenkins had once remarked that when she hugged her Jack—and it turned out she had hugged him almost to the end—he was firm as ever, not merely well-muscled but as hard inside as the huge pit of a mango, scarcely contained within the sheath of flesh. Only in those final months, realizing that for all his hard work and the risks taken he could no longer outstrip his lifelong failure, had the furious furnace of Jack Watson’s spirit started to die. That steel inside him turned to lead as he drank more and became sodden. By the end of it, all he spoke about with love was the lost plantation at Clouds Creek, his boyhood home in Edgefield County, South Carolina.
Duly the two brothers vowed that one day they would meet again, to get to know each other. Lucius even agreed to a return visit to Neamathla. Knowing the meeting would never take place, these honest men toed and kicked the ground in great discomfort. Then Ad broke away, lurched down the bank, and sprawled into the skiff, shoving her off without first starting the motor. He was out in the current yanking at the pull cord when the motor, which he’d left in gear, took hold with a roar and drove the boat out from beneath him. While he sprawled and thrashed to regain his balance, the skiff carved a tight half circle on the current before straightening on a downriver course. Lucius waved but Ad did not look back. He sat hunched in the stern like some strange outgrowth of the motor, rusted solid.
A man came in out of the fire mist, crossing the shadow land of the killed woods. He drifted, disappeared, and came again through smoke and blackened thorn, moving from willow clump to bush like a panther traveling across open savanna.
Coming downriver from the inland passage, Crockett Senior Daniels had slipped ashore above the Bend and made his wary way in through the thickets. Now he straightened and came forward, and still he peered about him, trusting nothing. He said sharply, “Where the hell is Chicken?” They told him what had happened. Daniels cursed. When he turned slowly to contemplate the ruin, Lucius saw the stiffness in him, the old man. “Ol’ Chicken,” Speck said. “Christ Almighty!” He did not seem very much relieved that Addison Burdett had escaped death. He looked around him, arms folded on his chest, trying to tak
e it in. “Ol’ Chicken,” he repeated quietly. “I give him that name years ago when he first showed up at Gator Hook. Hopeless damn drunk, was all he was. Threw him out, then come across him a week later, holed up in a little chicken coop under the buildin!”
Speck groaned and muttered as his daughter watched him with something like concern. “Purty good old man,” Speck mourned. “Purty good friend of mine.” He raised his arms high and his hands wide, dropped them again.
He considered Lucius, not entirely without sympathy. “Poor ol’ Colonel,” he said finally. “Stuck in the same ol’ mud.” He jerked his grizzled chin toward the embers. “Even that old man layin in there understood the way things work better’n you.” After a while, he said, “Won’t do no good to report ’em, case you’re thinkin about it. Them people will only pump out more lies about the accidental death of a dangerous killer that throwed in with the Daniels gang.”
Speck listened for the helicopter, raising a hand every little while to still their voices. “I finally figured out what Dyer wants with Chatham Bend. Look at your charts! These forty acres we are standin on right here are the only good piece of high ground in the sixty miles of wild coast country between Chokoloskee and Cape Sable. All cleared off since Injun times for villages and fields. It ain’t some swamp-and-overflowed that has to be drained and filled or even leveled. What’s more, it ain’t but a few miles crost the sloughs from the southwest corner of the old Chevelier Road. Pave that dirt road, build a couple of causeways crost them little shaller bays like they done at Chokoloskee, and there you are—the one place and the only place where a company could start right out with a land base for development that ain’t goin to be wiped out by a hurricane. All they got to do is get the Park back! They do that, and right here where we are standin on could be the heart of the biggest damn development in Florida history. Regular West Coast Miami! Dig out the river mouths for harbors, dredge and fill—see what I’m gettin at? Today the Bend belongs to Parks and Watson Dyer can’t do nothin with it, but tomorrow might be very, very different. That’s what he’s countin on. That is his big gamble. And his gamble is the best damn kind, cause it don’t cost him nothin. His partners might not realize it yet, but the man who controls the Watson Place stands to make a fortune, and if it helps to be named Watson, he’s nailed that down, too.”
They thought this over and they could not fault it.
“What if the Watsons contest him? I mean, real Watsons?”
“You think this Dyer ain’t ‘real Watson,’ Colonel? That was borned here on the Bend, and you not even born in the state of Florida? Think them slick lawyers over to Miami won’t cook up some bullshit argument out of that? Anyway, he’s got the judges in his pocket. He don’t need no ‘real Watsons’ no more! You ain’t goin to have one thing to say about this property!
“If I was you, I would walk away from it, drop the whole business. Just forget about it. You try involvin Watson Dyer in the death of that old man layin in them embers, know what he’ll do? He’ll put that killin on our Daniels bunch, get us charged with kidnappin and murder, maybe drag you into it for harborin known criminals—any ol’ lie it takes to do the job. And they got the Sheriff and they got the judges and they will make it stick, cause with all the big money that’s behind ’em, they ain’t goin to tolerate no piss-ants such as us gettin in the way.
“Nosir, you ain’t goin to stop a man like that. Have to shoot him if you aim to stop him.” Daniels licked his teeth. “If we was to take and shoot one of them big boys once in a while, when they push down too hard—that’s about all fellers like us know how to do to make us feel better. They’s plenty of good men out in the backcountry that holds to my way of thinkin, and we got us a few weapons put away. Get some fightin spirit goin in this country, we might get back the real America, y’know.”
But he lost heart in this. Asked why his men had not come back, Speck glanced upriver toward the east. “Cause they ain’t as stupid as they look,” he snapped. “Least Junior ain’t. Likely ducked into some hidey-hole in some li’l brushy creek until he’s sure that fuckin helio-copter has gone for good. Only thing, the way that thing is circlin, it sounds to me like they got somethin pinned down. And they ain’t but the one thing out there to pin down, and that’s the airboat.”
He turned to Whidden. “You think that thing might of decoyed ’em out of hidin? Pretend to head home to the east coast, then circle wide and come in low behind ’em? Cause the noise of that chopper comin in could get drowned out by their own racket till it swooped down on top of ’em from behind.”
Harden nodded. “I been thinkin the same thing.”
“Lord,” Speck prayed, “don’t let them morons get excited and start shootin.”
Circling restlessly, Daniels picked up a charred gator flat from the black earth and stood there slapping the hard scrap against his leg. “Damn stupid waste,” he said, tossing the scrap into the embers. Whidden said coldly, “Shootin so many when there weren’t no market—that the waste you mean?”
His head slightly askance, Speck Daniels squinted at him. “You wasn’t with us, boy? I could of swore you was in on all that gator huntin, right alongside of us.”
“I got regrets about it—that’s the difference.”
“That’s one difference.” Speck gazed at all of them, contemptuous. “I ain’t ashamed of huntin in this Park and never will be. I’d shoot the whole damn mess of ’em again tomorrow if it weren’t such a damn waste of ammunition.”
Speck yanked old leather gloves from the hip pocket of his jeans and set to work, heaving the last charred scraps of gator hide into the embers. He worked in silence, stopping every little while to listen. At one point he crouched a little, head cocked sideways, hand behind his ear, then stared bleakly at Harden. “You hear that? They called in reinforcements.”
“Them boys might be okay. They might be hid. Ain’t nothing over that way but mangrove and water, there ain’t no place to set them damn things down.” But Whidden’s voice died as the distance broke apart in the popping roll of automatic weapons.
“Shee-it!” Speck yelled with all his might, slamming his parrot hat onto the ground, raising black dust. “If Junior is waitin on his old man to go over there and mix it up with two damn helio-copters, he better think again!” Already on his way upriver toward his boat, he turned and, walking backwards, howled at Whidden. “Don’t you try follerin me, boy, cause I ain’t goin! It won’t do no good!”
Stiffly his daughter walked toward him, as if sleepwalking. He glared at her, furious, anticipating protest, and when she was silent, his thick brows shot up in surprise. She actually appeared to nod in acquiescence, although her face was so deathly calm as to seem utterly without expression. Uneasy, he dusted his parrot-feather hat. He paused another moment as they gazed at each other, holding the hat over his head like a poised lid. Then he ran his fingers through his hair and set the painted hat back on his head. “All right,” he muttered vaguely. Under his daughter’s gaze, he looked spent and haggard, and perceiving the man’s solitude and life fatigue, Lucius felt an unexpected start of pity.
Speck beckoned to him. They met halfway.
“Don’t let him bring her, Colonel. She don’t need to see nothin like that.” He sucked his teeth and spat, in greatest bitterness. “Unless them boys was very, very lucky, there ain’t nothin left there but a bloody mess. Not only that, but them choppers will be back, so you people ain’t goin to be no help, and you might get hurt.” Speck watched his daughter as he spoke. “Sally knows as good as I do where Junior was headed, ever since the first day he come home. If it weren’t today, it would of been tomorrow. Kind of like your daddy that way,” he added carelessly, peering bleakly at Lucius for the first time. “Speaking of which—”
From beneath his shirt, he dragged his string of thirty-three spent slugs, which he gathered up and tossed at the other’s chest. “I reckon that belongs to ‘the real Watsons,’ ” Daniels said, and turned, and kept on going.
&n
bsp; Northward
By late afternoon, there was little left of the old Watson house except small cement pillars which had held the floor above the flood in time of hurricane. Levering away black timbers, burning the leather of their shoes, they uncovered the charred and twisted form, the crusted skull with the teeth stretched wide around the dying scream. They tugged it onto a soiled blanket from the boat. Soon Harden found the blackened revolver with the lone empty cartridge in the chamber. The fire had discharged the weapon, which lay yards from the body. It could not have killed him.
Getting his breath, Lucius leaned on the syrup vat, now a rusting vessel of dead rain and green algae and mosquito larvae. He thought about that scary day in the year after their arrival when Rob, in a fit of rebellious rage, had shot the family dog in a foolish accident, then fled from his own act, running round and round the house until Papa came out suddenly and intercepted him.
And he thought about Rob sailing away with Papa on the eve of Carrie’s wedding to Walt Langford, loyal to the banished father whom he adored and hated even then, Rob’s slim quick figure waving wildly from high on the schooner’s mast, in silhouette on the Gulf sky. And dear kind Mama on her deathbed three years later, in the grip of cancer, in and out of coma, eyes dark with pain in her graying face, worried about the stepson who had fled. “Lucius honey,” she whispered, “Rob is wandering somewhere in the world, he is all alone. Oh, Rob has so much good in him! When you are older, you must find him, let him know we love him!” But he had not found Rob. Rob had found him.