“Your Collins clan,” the historian concluded, turning off the highway, “was among those early pioneers. They founded the Methodist community called Tustenuggee.”
“Well, I never knew too much about ol’ Alligator,” Arbie admitted, peering out at the concrete oversprawl of strip development crisscrossed by highway overpasses under soaring signs of noble motor inns. “But I first saw the light of day in Columbia County, and rode up here to the county seat in a damn wagon. Lake City was a pretty nice town back then! Wasn’t all this shit, piss, and corruption they call progress.” Arbie sighed. “All the years I was on the road, I had this dream I would come home to this county, marry a local girl, you know, put me down some roots. It never happened. I never came close.” The old man looked straight ahead again, contemptuous of his own sentimentality. “Just as well, from the look of the damn place, not to mention me.”
From sun-glinted smog rose the billboard of the Royal Alligator Motel, where Watson Dyer was to join them the next day on his way north to Tallahassee. In their room the old man, high black shoes unlaced, reclined on the zinc green nubble of the spread while Lucius forced open a mean gimcrack window to air out the stink of sanitizing sprays and cheap cigar smoke. The old man had already closed his eyes by the time Lucius located in the phone book a grandson of E. J. Watson’s sister, Minnie Collins. Asked to ring his relative, Arbie groaned and shuffled his shoulders, complaining that he had been interrupted just when he was getting off to sleep.
Lucius was still shy from the reception he’d received when he’d come north in search of Rob, decades before. To his relief, the voice cried out how much “the family” had heard about “Cousin Lucius” and bade him a warm welcome to Lake City. But when Lucius mentioned the purpose of his visit, his relative declared that even if he knew anything—which he assured him he did not—he would have to abide by the family decision never to discuss Great-Uncle Edgar.
“Look, I’m his son.”
“So’s Cousin Ed,” the terse voice said.
“But Eddie was living here back then, he knew what happened. I never did know, and I’m trying to find out.”
“May I ask why?”
A moment later, when the call was finished, Arbie sat up, holding his palms to his temples. “He may be named Collins, but he’s a Watson, too!” He fell back on the motel bed. “They just won’t talk about him! If you hadn’t mentioned your damn biography, he might have asked you to the house, out of common courtesy, and you might have learned something!”
“I don’t want to be sneaky about what I’m doing,” Lucius said. “Anyway, I’m not ashamed of him!”
Since the library and municipal offices were closed for the day, they went to the Lake City Advertiser, where Lucius’s ad requesting information on an E. J. Watson, “arrested for murder in this county around 1907,” had failed to smoke out a response from the Collins family. However, there was one soiled letter, in smudged pencil:
Sir:
I suppose I am one of the few people still living in this area that knew Edgar Watson, having been raised in the same community near Fort White. I only know a couple of people that are old enough to remember much about those days and I do not know how well their memories are working.
As a small boy I knew the Tolens, the Getzens, and many details about Watson’s reputation. The Betheas were our neighbors and close friends. I was too small to play on the old Tolen Team, a country baseball club. I picked up fowell balls and threw them in as the team could not afford to waste balls. I thought Leslie Cox was the greatest pitcher in the world. My brother Brooks was the catcher. They played such teams as Fort White and High Springs, and most always won if Leslie was pitching. The Coxs were our friends until all this trouble started.
Grover G. Kinard
Lucius’s heart gave a small kick—not just that casual mention in the second paragraph—Leslie Cox!—but the replacement of Cox the Backwoods Killer with Young Leslie, Star Pitcher of the Tolen Team, pockets stuffed—as he imagined it—with a country boy’s baseball cards and fishing twine and crumbs and one-penny nails, in those distant days before World War I when every town across the country had a sandlot ball club, when Cy Young, Ty Cobb, and Smoky Joe Wood were the nation’s heroes. Leslie Cox, whiffling fastballs past thunderstruck yokels on bygone summer afternoons, doubtless bruising more batters with his untutored hurling than Iron Man Joe McGinnity himself! The crack of a bat in the somnolent August pastures, the yells of boys and cries of girls and the dogs barking, all innocent of the workings of the brain behind the young pitcher’s squinted eyes in the shadow of that small-brimmed cap, which was surely all most of the teams had worn in the way of uniform.