Caxambas
In his old cabin lighter up Caxambas Creek, Lucius Watson sat straight up in the shard of moonlight, ransacking torn dreams for the hard noise that had awakened him—that rattling bang of an old car or truck striking a pothole in the sandy track through the slash pine wood north of the salt creek. No one else lived out here on the salt marsh, nor was there a mailbox on the county road, a half mile away, which might betray the existence of his habitation.
A dry mouth and stiff brain punished him for last night’s whiskey. He licked his lips and squinched his nose to bring life back to his numb skin, then rose and peered out of the window, certain that some vehicle had come in from the paved road and eased to a stop inside the wood edge where the track emerged onto the marsh—the point from where the black hulk of the lighter, hard aground in the shining mud of the ebbed tide, could first be seen by whoever had come down along the creek on midnight business. And still he heard nothing, only small cries of the earth, forming on the surface of the great night silence. Tree frogs shrilled from the freshwater slough on the far side of the road, in counterpoint to the relentless nightsong—chuck-will’s-widow! chuck-will’s-widow! chuck-will’s-widow!—which came from the whiskery wide gape of a mothlike bird hidden in lichens on some dead limb at the swamp edge, still and cryptic as a dead thing decomposing.
The Gulf moon carved the pale track and black trees. Having come in stealth, the intruder would make the last part of his approach on foot, and—Lucius’s heart leapt—there! A blur against the wall of the moonlit wood detached itself from the tree shadows and moved out onto the track.
An Indian, he thought at once, though how he knew this he could not have said. The figure paused a moment, looking and listening. Then he came on again, following the sand track’s mane of grass, at pains to leave no sign. Caught by the moon, the object that he carried on one arm was glinting.
Lucius moved quickly to drag pants and shirt onto his bony frame. He lifted the shotgun from its rack and cracked the cabin door, cursing himself yet again for isolating himself way out here without a telephone—or plumbing or electricity, for that matter. Yet the simplicity of this houseboat life contented him. It was simplicity he needed, as another might need salt. A cracked cistern and a leaning outhouse which had served a long-gone fish shack at the bog edge, a Primus stove and a storm lantern with asbestos filament—these took care of his domestic needs. Perhaps once in a fortnight, he retrieved his negligible mail at Goodland Post Office and bought his stores, and had a meal and a few whiskeys at the roadhouse.
Above the mangrove on the creek edge rose high wind dunes—highest point on Marco Island, where in the old centuries the Calusa Indians had taken refuge from seasonal hurricanes. Eventually the Spanish had come, and the fishing settlement, and the clam-canning factory. Now developers of creekside land had burned the old factory and the last of the old fish shacks and cleared the sabal and the gumbo-limbo to make way for hard artificial lawns for northern buyers.
Near the sheds, the Indian’s silhouette turned in a slow half circle, sifting the night sounds like an owl before passing behind the leaning outhouse and Lucius’s old auto and some rusted oil drums and the hulk of his old boat and pausing again at the foot of the spindly low dock over the salt grass. He was big and short-legged and round-shouldered, with a small flat butt. In the cold shine of the moon, he glided out over the bog, slat by split slat, and the dock creaked and swayed a little as he came.
Breaking the gun, Lucius Watson dropped two buckshot shells into the chambers and snapped it to. At the click of steel, the Indian stopped short, his free hand rising in slow supplication. He stared at the black crack of the opened door. Very slow, he bent his knees and set some sort of canister down on the dock with a certain ceremony, as if the thing were dangerous or sacred. Slowly he straightened, hands spread-fingered, arms out to the side. His big swart pocked face was expressionless. He tried a smile. “Rural free delivery,” he said.
Widening the door crack with the shotgun barrels, Lucius stepped outside. Under the moon, the glinting canister appeared to pulse. “Get that damned thing back over to the road,” he told the Indian.
“It ain’t a bomb or nothin,” the man murmured. The Indian’s raven hair was dressed in red wind band and long braid, and he wore a candy-striped Seminole blouse and black leather vest, blue jeans and sneakers, with a beaded belt tight on a junk-food belly. He raised his eyebrows, awaiting some change of heart, but when the white man only motioned with the gun, he shrugged and bent and retrieved his offering in one easy motion and returned over the centipedal walkway to the land.