Lost Man's River(272)

Late into the night before, the gunrunners had roared upriver with their cargoes. With no help from the one-armed man, only rough orders, Mud and Dummy heaved the heavy crates, and by midnight Mud was stumbling with exhaustion.

The men had provided moonshine for their old friend Chicken (Ad stated proudly that he had refused it), assuring him that his death seemed unavoidable. “We’re all tore up about it,” Mud Braman told him. “Gonna hurt us worse than it does you.” Mud’s teasing seemed very cruel to Ad, who could not believe these men were serious.

When he warned his brother that at his age, hard drink would be the death of him, Rob only smiled. Though Rob was frightened by the act of dying, the prospect of being dead upset him not at all. Holding forth over his cup of shine, he told Ad what he’d told Speck Daniels, that he was sick and tired of the ordeal of his life, he’d had enough. His one ambition was to stay drunk until the end.

Much of the night, they had lain listening to the gunrunners, who were drinking on the porch. Old Man Chicken, they agreed, would be better off dead than returned to prison “for the rest of his natural life,” as Mud Braman put it, raising his voice to make sure that the old fugitive inside the house could enjoy the discussion. “Yessir, they’d just throw away the key on that mean old feller!”

Rob told Ad he meant to thwart any attempt to establish this house as a monument to a damn killer. Though he sympathized with his young brother about the waste of his fine paint job, he hoped to see the “House of Watson” burned down to the ground, obliterating the bloodstain on the floor of the front room and the remains of a thousand wasted alligators—“the desecration of Creation,” the old man yelled toward the porch, while admitting to Ad that he could take gators or leave them. Purification by fire, he believed, was their family’s last hope of exorcism and redemption. So long as this house of evil stood, he had declaimed—as the gunrunners shouted at him to shut up, and threatened gagging—their family name would be synonymous with murder!

When Ad quoted Lucius, who had said that most of the old Watson stories were just rumors, Rob just shook his head. “Luke has to believe that,” he told Ad finally. “It’s his whole life.”



Early this morning, the last munitions crates had been dragged out of the house and slung onto the airboat platform with loud metallic bangs and booming thuds. The men set the brothers free outside the house on the condition that they salvage the best gator flats and stack them by the water’s edge and throw the rest into the river to destroy the evidence. If they did a good job, Ad’s skiff would be fetched from the far bank when the airboat returned, and the prisoners would be free to head downriver.

Rob told the men that Speck had promised that his old revolver would be returned to him, since it had come down from his dear departed daddy. Retrieving it from Dummy’s toolbox, Mud inspected it, saying, “If this damn thing belonged to Bloody Watson, it’s worth money!” Crockett snatched it away from him, cursing Dummy’s fecklessness when he saw that the old weapon was still loaded. He shook its cartridges onto the deck before lobbing it toward the old man on the bank, then bellowed at Dummy to let go the line. The airboat backed off the bank and turned up current.

“Things always come out right in the end,” Ad told Rob, watching them go. “That’s what they say, all right,” Rob said. Eyes squinted in the glare and smiling oddly—smiling and frowning both, it seemed to Ad—he seemed deaf to his half brother’s plea that he help with the sorting and stacking of the hides so that they could leave as soon as the airboat returned.

“They might not be back,” Rob told him, indicating his satchel, which Mud had flung off the airboat onto the bank. He pointed toward the helicopter, thumping the heavy clouds in the eastern distance.



Whidden and Sally had brought Andy from the boat, and they, too, were listening to Ad, from a discreet distance. “I know where they off-load them weapons,” Whidden said. “In a airboat, it ain’t ten minutes up this river. If they was coming back, they would of been here.” Gazing at Ad’s pathetic stack of alligator hides, he looked disgusted. “Them hides ain’t no use no more to nobody. They knew that. They was finished with this place!”

When the airboat had gone, Rob had gone down to the water’s edge and hefted a five-gallon can of fuel. A cigarette was hanging from his mouth, and seeing the red can, Ad yelled a warning. Oblivious, Rob gazed a moment at the river, then lugged the red can to the house and up onto the porch. There he set it down and took off one high sneaker and shook out what looked like a small cartridge, which he held up to the sun like an elixir. His grin looked strange. “Take care of yourself, Ad.” Leaving that lone sneaker behind, he limped into the house.