“Well, that’s just gossip, Sally,” Andy said. “Sadie always had it in for the Carr family. It might been anybody who came here after the shooting.”
“People felt free to lug away all they could carry!” Lucius said. “Why was that, do you suppose? Because of my father’s reputation? Because they thought that he deserved no better?”
Andy looked impatient. “Because he was dead, and because you Watsons had abandoned the damned place, and because if the first comers didn’t take that stuff, the next bunch would. You take them thieving Houses, now, them people stole Ed Watson’s pine deal table!” Andy’s laughter was infectious. “Course he’d been gone for sixteen years by the time we done it.”
It was getting late. Harden lowered the binoculars. “Okay?” he said. “We better have a look.” Gunning the engine in reverse, he backed the Cracker Belle into the current, then drummed upstream while letting the current carry her across the river. Wide of the dock, he cut back on the throttle, taking the binoculars from Sally.
“Nobody home,” she said.
“Got to be sure.”
As the boat lost headway, drifting back downstream, he studied the frame house. In its fresh paint, the old building on the mound looked stripped and naked on its cement pillions, which lifted the main floor two feet above ground to permit high storm water to rush beneath. Loose roof shingles lay scattered on bare earth from which most of the vegetation had been scoured by the high salt tides of last year’s hurricane.
“In the late thirties some Miami sports come over here, used this place hard, remember, Mister Colonel? Huntin and fishin, plenty of booze, and loud blond women. Them men had no respect at all, and the place was pretty much let go. Nobody fixed no broken screens nor windows, let alone rain gutters. All the same, I seen this house after last year’s storm and Parks could of touched her up without no trouble. Storm damage is only their excuse for doin somethin they been itchin to do for years.”
Whidden eased his boat upstream again, letting the current sweep her in against the leaning skeleton of the old dock and leaving her engine running even after Lucius took a turn around a post. Lucius made no hitch or knot, making sure the line could be slipped quickly.
DANGER. TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN.
BY ORDER OF SUPT.
U.S. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
Near the official notice, nailed to a stake jammed into the bank, was an unofficial sign painted in rude black letters on a driftwood board:
KEEP OUT!! THIS MEANS YOU!!
“That sign weren’t put up by no damn Park Service and it ain’t meant for tourists,” Whidden said, “cause nobody never seen no tourist back in here.” He cut the engine. In the wash of silence came that hard licking at the bank as the brown current searched along under the branches, in the whisper of leaning trees in the river wind, and the boat’s exhaust stink was replaced by the musk of humus and that scent of hot wild lime in the dry foliage which stirred Lucius Watson’s heart and brought him home.
Lucius went forward to rig a bow line, and Whidden jumped ashore, running a stern line to a mangrove. In the noon silence, the only answer to their shouts and calls was the dry, insistent song of a small bird from the wood edge. A heavy odor came and went on the shifting wind. “That ain’t the housepainter, if that is what you’re thinkin. That is gators. Might of shot one or two of ’em myself.” Whidden whispered this in Lucius’s ear, keeping a wary eye on Sally, who had guided Andy onto the bank, and led him toward the house. “Gator hides!” he yelled when they stopped short and turned and looked back, uneasy.
Whidden had been with the Daniels gang when it first came to the Watson Place, which Speck liked to refer to as “my huntin camp.” Because a tight roof and dry ground-floor rooms with solid floors were needed for heavy storage, they had boarded up and nailed the windows and installed big chains and padlocks on the doors. On the south side of the house, facing the poincianas and the river, was a screened porch from which the screens were missing. Whidden went up onto the porch and checked the padlocked door. He knocked and hollered, “Anybody home?” He spat away the bad taste of the stench. “I never thought they’d cure them hides as poor as that!”
When Speck was around, the hides had been cured properly, said Whidden, but his men had let things go after he left. They knew little about the Watson Place and had no curiosity about its history, and they had used it in the same hard way as the Miami men, ripping off porch steps and posts and the old storm shutters for their cooking fires. Meanwhile, they ranged out into the Glades country, killing every last gator they came across, big and small. “Course gator poachin was only part of it. Speck’s distillery ain’t a hundred yards back in the bushes. Ran his barrels of shine by airboat far as Gator Hook, and from there by truck east to Miami. He found customers as fast as he could brew it, never stored a pint. Never got caught neither. Same thing for the gator hides while there was a market.”