“Speck think it was funny?”
“No, he sure didn’t.”
“Mr. Collins? I’d like that list back.”
The old man resumed reading, raising the page to hide his face. “That list is the lawful property of Robert B. Watson, who left his estate to me.”
Lucius sat down carefully on a blue canvas chair. “Are we related? Through the Collinses in Fort White?” This old man, washed and clean-shaven, reminded him of his Collins cousins—slightly built and volatile, black-haired, with heart-red mouths and pale, fair skin.
“Sure looks like it!” Arbie waved the title page, derisive. “ ‘L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.’!”
Sheepishly, Lucius explained that the publishers had insisted on a pseudonym and also on citing his degree. That “Ph.D.” was ridiculous; he had not bothered to attend his graduation, much less used his title. In fact, he was not really an historian—
“A historian.” Arbie grinned slyly at his host’s surprise.
This raffish old man was somewhat educated. He was also careless, dropping and creasing pages, flicking ash on them. Finally Lucius stood up and crossed the deck and snapped his notes off Arbie Collins’s stomach, exposing the white navel hair that sprouted through the soiled and semibuttonless plaid shirt. “You certainly make yourself at home!” he said.
“Well, I’m a guest. You invited me, remember? You sure don’t act too glad to see me—”
“I don’t like people rooting through my notes—”
“I found ’em.” Arbie Collins sat up with a grunt and swung his broken boots onto the deck. “Right where you left ’em, on the table inside. And they look to me like notes for a damn whitewash.” He stood up spryly and performed a loose-boned shuffle, snapping his fingers. “ ‘Notes on the Ol’ Family Skeleton.’ ” He cackled. “Clackety-click.” Like a skeleton danced on a string, the old man shuffled jerkily through the screen door. In a moment he was back, lugging a big loose weary carton. “The Arbie Collins Ar-chive,” he announced, setting it down.
Politely, Lucius rummaged through the carton, in which dog-eared folders stuffed with clippings were mixed with scrawled notes copied out of magazines and books—mostly lurid synopses and brimstone damnations from the tabloids, dating all the way back to the newspaper reports from October and November of 1910. Most of the items were well-known to Lucius—the usual “Bloody Watson” trash, all headline and no substance. None was as interesting as the fact that this old man had made a lifelong hobby of Ed Watson.
One coffee-stained packet of yellowed clippings slid from Lucius’s lap to the porch floor. Retrieving it, he recognized the top clipping in the packet, which had come from the official tourist guide to the state of Florida—ripped from a library copy, from the look of it. It described how the young widow Edna Watson, informed by her husband’s executioners that she might reclaim the cadaver by following the rope strung from its neck to a nearby tree, had inquired coldly, “Where is his gold watch?” That was certainly not poor Edna’s character, and anyway Papa had sold that watch to help pay off his legal debts, as Edna knew.
Disgusted, he put the packet down, asking the old man how he had met Rob Watson. Arbie explained that he had helped his cousin Rob escape his father on a freighter out of Key West after E. J. Watson’s murder of those poor Tucker people back in 1901. He was the only relative, he said, whom the grateful Rob had stayed in touch with till the day he died.
“Alleged murder of the Tuckers,” Lucius corrected him. “It was never proven. E. J. Watson was never even charged.”
Arbie hurled his cigar butt at a swallow that was coursing for mosquitoes over the spartina grass along the creek. “L. Watson Fuckin Collins, Ph.D.!” he yelled. “Too bad poor Rob is not alive to hear his brother say something as bone stupid as that!” The old man was fairly shivering with fury. “Before you go to writing up this damn whitewash of yours, you better talk to the Harden men, talk to that black feller Henry Short, cause they were the ones who had to deal with the damned bodies!”
Calmly, Lucius returned the subject to Rob Watson, who had ended up a hobo, Arbie told him. “Seems to me he was always on the road. Rob never had an address, had no bank account, never paid taxes in his life. Never had to, cause they had no record of him—he was never on the books!”
For many years, Rob had worked as a “professional driver”—“the first professional in the U.S.A. to drive an auto more than twenty miles an hour.” Thanks to his road flair and big company limousine, Rob had been much in demand in the night liquor trade. He had finally been offered “a lucrative position in that industry.” In Prohibition, he became a trucker, and in later years, he operated an enormous mobile auto crusher in which he had traveled up and down the county roads all over the South, compacting car bodies and selling the product to small steel mills on small ruined rivers at the edges of the small cities of America.