Lost Man's River(271)
“It’s a colorful story,” Lucius decided. “But without evidence it’s only hearsay, like all the rest.”
“Think it’s hearsay?” Whidden looked up. “Who you aimin to call a liar, Mister Colonel? Me? Lee Harden? Maybe Henry Short?”
“Oh no. I don’t mean that, Whidden. No, no. Somebody killed somebody, all right.” A terrible despair choked off his voice. “Yes, that’s quite a story,” he repeated stupidly.
The Fire
From far off, faintly, came strange heavy thumping. The sound agitated Lucius, but moments passed before he awoke to what it was. “Damn,” he said. A moment later, Whidden, who had dozed a little, sat up straight to stare off toward the north. The sound was muffled in high white haze and clouds. Then the air shifted and the thumping changed to the hard chatter of a helicopter. The sky to the northeastward opened in a broad slow flare of light, and in moments a plume of dark smoke rose and broadened swiftly, shrouding the huge thunderheads over the Glades.
Whidden grabbed his knife and cut the fish lines and scrambled to yank the pull rope on the outboard. Boring downriver, the skiff threw plumes of brown tannin water and a seething wake. Whidden was shouting—sonsabitches … come in a day early!—but the voice was whipped away across the wind.
Hearing the howl of the outboard, Sally had guided the blind man aboard the Belle, dumped the bedding and loose cooking ware into the cockpit, even cranked the engine. Whidden eased the Belle into reverse as Lucius hauled on her stern anchor line. Then she was clear, and the current carried her on a turning drift downriver past the bars. Towing the skiff, she crossed the delta and the sandy emerald flats to deeper water, where she picked up speed, heading north along the island coasts.
The skiff yawed wildly back and forth across the wake. “Bridle her!” Whidden yelled, tossing Lucius a line. Lucius’s hands remembered how to rig a tow line to a bridle, and for a moment he took comfort from the feel of the old rope, the hot hard chafe and pull of coarse tarred hemp, and the good smell of it, so familiar from his long days on the water. But the dread lay and curled up in his lungs like a hard black worm at the stem of an apple.
The Belle was north of Plover Key when the helicopter came in view, looming out of the glinting pall of fire smoke inland. A sharp tacketing like gunfire came and went as it turned and hovered, probed with a loud snap-whacking of the rotors, then rose away like a great maddened dragonfly.
In the delta, the odor of the burning was heavy on the heavy air. Whidden drove his boat recklessly upriver, scattering dark water birds before the bow, churning brown waves from the shallow channel that crashed among the red mangrove stilts along the banks.
The explosion of hard pine in the Watson Place had blasted black pitch high into the clouds, but already the smoke plume was thinning, drifting back inland, casting its sepia pall on the Glades thunderheads. On Chatham Bend was a shadow presence where the house had stood, and the forest all around was gray with ash. Gaunt, blackened trees formed an amphitheater around the dying flames, behind thick oily shimmerings of melted air.
Near the charred uprights, in the pulse and glowering of fallen timbers, a spectral figure raised a slow uncertain hand. Even at a distance, that hand appeared to twitch, like a chronometer calibrating old slow seconds.
The man did not move when Lucius jumped ashore and ran toward him. The face, the hair and clothes and heavy shoes, were ashy, and the ash was wet, caked and runny with green algae, as if this figure had arisen from the swamp. All around on the blackened ground lay rotted gator hides. Closer to the fire, the hides lay twisted and curled into black crusts, and a stench of charred flesh infiltrated the rank smell of the dead house in the hellish air.
Addison Burdett appeared slow and passive, like a retarded person left to await the bus. Next to Ad’s big work shoe was Rob’s satchel. Lucius reached out to him, pushing gently at his shoulder when he did not respond. “Ad,” he murmured. “Ad? Where’s Rob?” At his touch, his brother commenced weeping. The red shine of the mouth and eyes were wounds in the caked ash, and his tears, descending, made smooth tracks on his ash skin, and the spent teeth in the gray mask were chattering.
“I stink,” Ad said.
Lucius could not reach out to his brother. It was less the outlandish appearance, the wet reek of him, than because—in his own need to hold himself together—he feared that touching him might shatter some fragile surface tension, causing Burdett to come apart entirely.
“Ad? Where’s Rob?” His brother turned slowly and pointed at the fire bed of the old house. It was so hot, Ad whispered. Then his yelps came, slurred by tears and mucus, and the gray face twisted out of shape as if his head had been run over. Shocked by that dark macabre image, Lucius Watson took his brother in his arms.