His daughter demanded, “Do you ever speak the truth?” He rumbled like a sleeping dog but would not look at her.
“Back in the last years of the century, Mr. Watson would come through Flamingo on his way to Key West, stop over sometimes to sell bird plumes to Mr. Gene Roberts. Mister Gene and Desperader was the best of friends, and when Mr. Gene was rentin Andrew Wiggins’s place on Chokoloskee, he always stayed at Chatham Bend on the way through. Mr. Watson would say, ‘What time do you aim to get goin in the mornin, Gene?’ And next mornin he would wake him up, shake him real gentle. That’s what Gene remembered—the gentle way that Desperader shook him. ‘Come on, Gene, time to get up!’ Didn’t hurry him off or nothin, just woke him up and give him flapjacks, put him on his way. I reckon that’s where Colonel got them fancy manners.
“Yessir, ol’ Mr. Gene thought the world of E. J. Watson. Later years, when Colonel Watson showed up at Flamingo, the Roberts boys told the local men not to run him off or sink his boat but let him fish that country. Gene Roberts said, ‘Boys, I fished with Colonel Watson many’s the time, and drank his whiskey with him, cause he likes his whiskey and a lot of it, same way his daddy did.’ And Gene would say how E. J.’s boy had the sweetest nature he ever come across, said he never seen him mad in all his life. Never caught on that this man’s sweetness weren’t but weakness.”
Speck met Lucius’s eye. “I always heard you was a alky-holic,” he said softly. “Any truth to that?”
Sally cried out, “Oh for God’s sake! Why can’t you men stand up to him?” To her father, she said, “You’re a brutal and cynical and vicious man and you always were!”
And still her husband and the blind man remained silent. All four men knew that Lucius had to deal with Speck in his own way.
“Come to think about it, might been Mr. Gene who told this story,” Daniels was saying. “Ol’ Desperader had two niggers stackin cordwood on a payday, and one nigger said, ‘All right now, Cap’n, we is about done!’ And Watson said, ‘Well, you better stack it straight, cause that’s your last one.’ And he give Gene Roberts a big wink when he said that. The next week when Gene come through on his way back south from Chokoloskee, them two black boys was gone, there weren’t a sign of ’em. Ed Watson’s Nigger Payday some men called it. Mr. Gene admired hell out of Colonel’s daddy, but he never doubted that ol’ Desperader done away with ’em. And them two weren’t the only ones, not by no means.”
“That’s the rumor, all right,” Lucius snapped. “I’ve never seen a single scrap of evidence!”
“Me neither.” Speck yawned at him, indifferent. “I just heard about it.”
“So you pass along vicious lies.”
Speck Daniels sat up on his elbows for a better look at him. “You callin me a liar, Colonel? Can’t swaller the truth? How come you wasted all these years in diggin up the truth if you cover it right up again when you come across it?”
Speck reeled to his feet and jerked his head in the direction of the point. “We got some business.” Lucius followed him a little distance down the beach, and they talked standing.
Speck said, “We got Old Man Chicken in the house, him and his damfool brother. You people wasn’t ten feet from ’em when you was on the porch the other day.”
When Lucius had gone hunting him at Gator Hook, day before yesterday, Rob was already on his way to Chatham Bend, where the men meant to hold him until Speck arrived. Coming downriver from the inland bays, Speck’s men had heard a helicopter in the distance. Next, they came around the Bend to find a skiff tied up to the old pilings. The Watson Place was as white as a lighthouse, and the painter was up under the eaves on the west wall on his high ladder, paying no attention to their arrival.
The three men gathered at the ladder’s foot, staring upward, as Speck put it, “like red-tick hounds with a fat coon up a tree.” The bulky housepainter would not even look down but instead cried cheerily over his shoulder that the old place would look a whole heck of a lot better once he had finished this second coat of paint. Next, he asked if there was anything that he could do for them. “For a start,” roared Crockett Junior, “you can haul your ass down off that ladder and tell us what you think you’re doin on this posted property! Never read our sign? Says, ‘This Means You!’ ” The stranger kept right on with his painting, promising he would be with them shortly. Not until Crockett shook his ladder hard would he finally look down, and even then they could not make out whether the big man was snarling or smiling. Lucius concluded that Ad’s fearful grimace was intended to disarm them, or possibly persuade himself that he’d only imagined the apocalyptic roar of an approaching airboat and that ugly dog built like a keg which was circling the ladder and these hard-looking men with heavy boots and automatic weapons who had swarmed ashore like drunken militia at a public hanging.