Lost Man's River(256)
On pain of death he gave his name as A. Burdett of Neamathla, Florida, come to give his childhood home a coat of paint. Despite his name, Ad cried, he was a Watson. He said he’d been urged to come here by his brother Lucius, and assured them that a venerable institution such as the Park would never destroy such a fine-looking house once it realized how much the old place meant to the Watson family! Surely that sign saying KEEP OUT must be illegal, since everyone knew that all Park land belonged to the American people. Also he’d been unpleasantly surprised to find the doors padlocked and the windows boarded, thwarting his plans to sleep beneath his father’s roof. Furthermore, there was an awful smell which seemed to come from behind those boarded windows—one would almost suspect something had died in there!
Having started, Addison could not stop talking, until finally he said with a forced laugh more like a shriek that he hoped that what he was smelling in there was not bodies!
“Shut the hell up!” Crockett Junior bellowed, at wits’ end. To make his point, he shoved the ladder hard, sending it scraping down the house side in a long slow arc. “Hey, wait!” the painter hollered. The ladder described a crescent down the wall, then fell to the hard ground, where the pit bull Buck, awaiting orders, took up a position at the stranger’s throat. Still clutching his brush, unhurt except for splotches of white paint and his bruised feelings, he picked himself up and pointed at the unsightly gray scrape marks made by the ladder. “Let’s not go spoiling my nice paint job, fellers!” They watched in astonishment as he poured new paint and raised the ladder and clambered up with a fresh bucket and set to work at once, painting out scrapes.
Apparently, Dummy had raised his gun, intending to shoot this loony off the ladder like a big turkey, but Mud deflected him, warning the stranger to get the hell off this river before that helicopter arrived with the outlaw gang which would put him to death at once because he knew too much. But seeming incapable of leaving his second coat unfinished, the man only increased his pace, burrowing deeper into his work like a child pulling the covers up over its head. If that “whirlybird” arrived, he cried, he would do his best to talk some sense into the heads of those darned criminals! With this, Speck’s men abandoned hope of reasonable discussion. The real whirlybird, as they now recognized, was this wild-eyed Watson on the ladder, slathering paint on that doomed house as if his life depended on it, which it did.
Speck’s men soon realized that they could not let a witness leave before their cargoes were safely off the Bend. Also, it seemed easier to let him flap along under the eaves than to have him descend and get in their way. For the moment they went on about their business, lugging Chicken ashore—he was bound and gagged because they were sick of his abuse—and setting him in the thin shade of the poincianas. Then they unlocked the house and heaved outside the stacks of reeking gator hides, which stuck together in various states of putrefaction from mold rot and roof leak and humidity as well as maggots.
The gator hides were camouflage for the tarpaulins and heavy crates beneath—contraband weapons and munitions, Lucius deduced, recalling what Whidden had told him, which had to be lugged out one by one and stacked along the bank, in preparation for airboat transfers to a second depot.
From Whirlybird’s peculiar expression, Speck’s men suspected that his docile return to work was a ruse to throw them off the scent of some escape plan. (Lucius imagined Addison’s plan as strange, formless incipience, spinning in his white-speckled head like primordial matter in the cosmos.) When they went inside for the last crates, they sat down for a smoke, and watched through the door as Whirlybird executed a stealthy descent and tiptoed toward the old man under the trees.
“How does she look?” he was heard to whisper, turning with his hands upon his hips to sincerely admire his own handiwork, as the old man, still gagged, glared at him in hatred. Knowing Rob, Lucius could well imagine the beetling brows and sparking eyes of that infuriated oldster, gargling at the mad housepainter to free him. “What in the heck is going on around this place?” Ad wished to know. Rob rolled his eyes and eventually Ad freed him.
Not long thereafter, they discovered they were brothers—nearly thirty years apart, Lucius reflected, and irrevocably opposed in temperament, but sired by the same red rooster, E. J. Watson. During their long conversation, Rob was seen to weep a little, though whether this was exasperation with his brother or fear for his own life, the onlookers were unable to determine.
When the Cracker Belle arrived toward noon next day, Speck’s men were on their way upriver with a cargo. The bound-and-gagged brothers were lashed down on bunks inside, unable to signal their rescuers a few yards away. Once the Belle had departed for Mormon Key, they were set free long enough to eat and stretch their legs, then bound again while the exhausted crew got a little sleep. This morning, when Speck arrived, Whirlybird was sent back up his ladder, while Rob was settled on the porch, in the musky and rain-rotted ruin of a plush settee.