Lost Man's River(224)
“Let Whidden handle this!” But there was no heart in Crockett’s sarcasm. He seemed to brood, easing the airboat slowly off the bank. To his own men, his quiet appeared ominous, for both moved aft, out of Crockett’s line of fire, Whidden spoke quietly to Mud Braman, “How come you fellers won’t tell Mister Colonel his brothers is all right? That ain’t askin so much.”
“Dammit, Whidden! Just do what he says!” Mud was very uneasy, and even Dummy adjusted his genitals through his greased coveralls.
The gorgon head of the one-armed man high on his perch was cocked back oddly on his shoulders as he spun the airboat. “You Watsons are a bunch of lunatics, you know that? I ought to take and blow the heads off them two crazy brothers, and yours, too!” He revved the airplane motor to a roar so loud and battering in its own wind that they could hardly hear him in his maddened howling, then slowed the engine to a sudden idle, as leaf and bark bits torn from the old poincianas spun down into the water, to drift away in the slow spirals of the current.
Crockett sat motionless against the sky. In the river light, the world seemed fixed in a frieze of stillness, a silvered dance of death. The pit bull’s hackles rose, and its nails clicked on the metal deck. The pit bull whined. Crockett leaned and said something to Braman, then looked sleepily away. In a hoarse whisper, Braman said, “Get goin, Whidden. Make camp on Mormon so we know right where you’re at, then head for Lost Man’s first thing in the mornin.”
The airboat, taken by an eddy of brown current, drifted gradually from the bank. Lucius shouted, “But we have to be here day after tomorrow!” And Mud screeched back, “He ain’t talkin about day after tomorrow! He is talking about now! Get movin now!”
Lucius cast off the Belle’s lines and followed Whidden aboard. He shouted, “Why the hell can’t they at least tell us that those men are alive!” Sally seized Lucius’s arm, but he wrenched free of her, as Whidden gunned the engine of the Belle to blur his shouting and the old boat’s bow swung off into the current. “He told you,” Whidden said. “Sayin he ought to blow their heads off was Junior’s way of saying he ain’t done it yet.”
Even now, headed downriver, they were scared and agitated. In the stern, the blind man sat unnoticed. No one felt like speaking. Finally Sally went aft and hunkered down beside his chair, to draw him back into their company.
Below the bend, Harden cut the motor, letting the boat drift in a slow orbit as they listened. “They ain’t leavin. We would hear that motor. Only pretended they was takin off to see if we’d try sneakin back. And Crockett is listenin the same as we are, right this minute, and when he don’t hear our motor, he might come have a look.” He cranked the motor and, shaking off Lucius’s questions, ran his boat downriver toward the Gulf.
Whidden guessed that both brothers were in the house, tied up and gagged. “Probably heard us callin but they couldn’t answer.”
Andy House agreed. “When Sally and me was settin on the porch, there come this little kind of thump and scrapin. Figured it must be raccoons, but now that I think about it, that don’t seem likely.”
Whidden supposed that the Daniels gang was clearing its contraband out of the house before Parks arrived the day after tomorrow. Lucius scarcely listened. He was trying to imagine his two misfit kinsmen, born more than a quarter century apart. One called himself Burdett, the other Collins. They had finally laid eyes upon each other for the first time in their lives only to find themselves—if Whidden was correct—bound captives in their father’s house, perhaps entirely unaware that they were brothers.
Crockett Junior Daniels, Sally said in a tense flat voice, had been exposed all his life to an evil influence. “Speck was smart and Speck never got caught. He let his big dumb son get caught instead! Know where he spent his sixteenth birthday? In the county jail! Judge released him on probation if he would join up in the Marines, go get his head blown off for God and country.” He might have come out all right, she said, if he had not gone to war, since he’d always hoped to attend college, but when he returned from Asia, he was angry and bitter, boozing and brawling and breaking things and doing harm. It was only a matter of time before he sank back down into the swamp beside his goddamned father.
“Whidden honey,” she finished bitterly, “you are so darn smart for a man who has wasted the best years of his life making moonshine and skinning alligators! I bet you were the brains of that whole outfit!”
“This fine young woman here got me back on the straight and narrow path, and bound for Glory,” Whidden told the others. Holding his wife’s eye, he added, “We wasn’t such terrible bad fellers, Sal. Only kind of crooked.”