“Crooked,” she said. With Lucius watching, she went stiff when Whidden put his arm around her shoulders.
The Belle anchored off a little beach in the lee of Mormon Key, where Sally said she needed some time alone. Whidden tossed the dinghy overboard and she jumped down neatly on the thwarts, pushing off at the same time, taking up the oars. “Look at that Sally Brown!” her husband called. “Real old-time Island gal!” He opened a beer and sat on the boat transom and watched his darling row away to Mormon Key. Finally he turned and said to Lucius, “Mister Colonel? I don’t believe them boys will hurt ’em lest they has to.”
WHIDDEN HARDEN
Crockett Junior is messed up and he is violent. He killed plenty over there in Asia, but he weren’t a natural killer before he went and he ain’t today. When he first come home, Junior used to say, “Them flag-wavin old farts up there to Washington, D.C., has lost me my damned arm, but that don’t mean they can take away my livelihood.” That poor feller is so angry that he can’t hardly get his breath, and I don’t see how any good can come of it. Got a terrible need to blow the head off somethin. That’s what Speck knows and that’s why Speck stays away.
Dummy now, he don’t care if he kills or if he don’t, he don’t care nothin about nothin, and that’s dangerous, too. But most of the time Dummy ain’t there. He’s still in Asia, talkin to them voices in his head. So Mud is the feller that we have to work with. Ol’ Mud is tough and he is wild, but he is pretty good-hearted behind all his hot air, and he tries to keep them other two out of trouble. Mud has hero-worshiped Junior since a boy and he’ll go down in flames with Crockett if he has to, and Dummy will go right along with ’em for the goddamn hell of it.
I ain’t sayin that Junior ain’t pretty good at his daddy’s business, never mind that he ain’t got but the one arm—fact he’s better’n most that has all their equipment. But when Old Man Speck first seen the way them boys was spendin up their money, he made hisself real scarce from that day on. Sally’s mother was long gone by then, and Sally, too, so he turned his shack over to Junior, threw his gear down in his boat, and run her south around Cape Sable to Flamingo. Meets those boys on business at the Bend or Gator Hook, then disappears again. “I ain’t doin no association with known criminals,” is what he told me. “I told Junior I don’t aim to be around when they run up against the law and start to shootin. I’ll turn my back on ’em like I never seen ’em in my life and head on down my road, same as I always done.”
Speck is out for Speck and always has been. Even his own family never put no trust in him. But I will say this for Crockett Senior Daniels, he knows every last foot of this Glades country. Learned it the hard way, which is just about the only way a man can learn it. Put in many a long day alone out here, and long nights, too. I admired that when I threw in with him, and I still do. This wilderness out here, or what is left of it, might be the one thing in his life he loved, when you come to think about it. Speck don’t know he loves it, naturally, and wouldn’t hardly admit to it if he did.
Course he always poached and smuggled and made moonshine, always broke the law. But you fellers know as good as I do that Speck ain’t only just a common outlaw. He was a expert hunter, too, and a expert fisherman, until Parks come along and put him out of business. He can tinker motors, pretty fair country mechanic. He builds good shacks and boats and traps, and hangs nets, too. If Speck ever decided to go straight, he’s got a half dozen trades that he could choose from. That’s another difference between him and them. Cause unless there’s some kind of a call for a militia, mercenary soldiers, them boys of his have no idea how to make a livin. They’d have trouble makin a day’s pay inside the law.
This new breed don’t care nothin about wilderness. All they know is how to use it hard, same way they use their women and their gear. Shoot everythin that moves in case some other feller beats you to it, find out later if it’s any use—that’s their damn attitude. That’s why they got all them gator hides rottin in there. Never look ahead and don’t look back, got no respect at all for land nor life. Maybe this country could use a dose of Speck’s old-time outlaw spirit, but not this kind.
Them boys got handed every bit of that man’s hard-earned knowledge, and they don’t appreciate it. Sure, Speck is dead ornery and ignorant, and greedy, too, but he been known to leave a little room for other people long as they don’t get in his way. These younger ones don’t leave no room for nobody, and their war experience give ’em their excuse. To their way of thinkin, the country owes ’em a free ride for sendin ’em halfway around the earth to get mangled up in some stupid Asia war that nobody give a shit about in the first place.