Lost Man's River(280)
Speck yanked old leather gloves from the hip pocket of his jeans and set to work, heaving the last charred scraps of gator hide into the embers. He worked in silence, stopping every little while to listen. At one point he crouched a little, head cocked sideways, hand behind his ear, then stared bleakly at Harden. “You hear that? They called in reinforcements.”
“Them boys might be okay. They might be hid. Ain’t nothing over that way but mangrove and water, there ain’t no place to set them damn things down.” But Whidden’s voice died as the distance broke apart in the popping roll of automatic weapons.
“Shee-it!” Speck yelled with all his might, slamming his parrot hat onto the ground, raising black dust. “If Junior is waitin on his old man to go over there and mix it up with two damn helio-copters, he better think again!” Already on his way upriver toward his boat, he turned and, walking backwards, howled at Whidden. “Don’t you try follerin me, boy, cause I ain’t goin! It won’t do no good!”
Stiffly his daughter walked toward him, as if sleepwalking. He glared at her, furious, anticipating protest, and when she was silent, his thick brows shot up in surprise. She actually appeared to nod in acquiescence, although her face was so deathly calm as to seem utterly without expression. Uneasy, he dusted his parrot-feather hat. He paused another moment as they gazed at each other, holding the hat over his head like a poised lid. Then he ran his fingers through his hair and set the painted hat back on his head. “All right,” he muttered vaguely. Under his daughter’s gaze, he looked spent and haggard, and perceiving the man’s solitude and life fatigue, Lucius felt an unexpected start of pity.
Speck beckoned to him. They met halfway.
“Don’t let him bring her, Colonel. She don’t need to see nothin like that.” He sucked his teeth and spat, in greatest bitterness. “Unless them boys was very, very lucky, there ain’t nothin left there but a bloody mess. Not only that, but them choppers will be back, so you people ain’t goin to be no help, and you might get hurt.” Speck watched his daughter as he spoke. “Sally knows as good as I do where Junior was headed, ever since the first day he come home. If it weren’t today, it would of been tomorrow. Kind of like your daddy that way,” he added carelessly, peering bleakly at Lucius for the first time. “Speaking of which—”
From beneath his shirt, he dragged his string of thirty-three spent slugs, which he gathered up and tossed at the other’s chest. “I reckon that belongs to ‘the real Watsons,’ ” Daniels said, and turned, and kept on going.
Northward
By late afternoon, there was little left of the old Watson house except small cement pillars which had held the floor above the flood in time of hurricane. Levering away black timbers, burning the leather of their shoes, they uncovered the charred and twisted form, the crusted skull with the teeth stretched wide around the dying scream. They tugged it onto a soiled blanket from the boat. Soon Harden found the blackened revolver with the lone empty cartridge in the chamber. The fire had discharged the weapon, which lay yards from the body. It could not have killed him.
Getting his breath, Lucius leaned on the syrup vat, now a rusting vessel of dead rain and green algae and mosquito larvae. He thought about that scary day in the year after their arrival when Rob, in a fit of rebellious rage, had shot the family dog in a foolish accident, then fled from his own act, running round and round the house until Papa came out suddenly and intercepted him.
And he thought about Rob sailing away with Papa on the eve of Carrie’s wedding to Walt Langford, loyal to the banished father whom he adored and hated even then, Rob’s slim quick figure waving wildly from high on the schooner’s mast, in silhouette on the Gulf sky. And dear kind Mama on her deathbed three years later, in the grip of cancer, in and out of coma, eyes dark with pain in her graying face, worried about the stepson who had fled. “Lucius honey,” she whispered, “Rob is wandering somewhere in the world, he is all alone. Oh, Rob has so much good in him! When you are older, you must find him, let him know we love him!” But he had not found Rob. Rob had found him.
As a sort of offering, Lucius brought the manuscript of the biography. Laying it in the embers, he watched the page corners turn brown and darken as his life’s labor curled up into nothingness. He had not told the others. He supposed they understood what he was doing.
In a small grave spaded out between the two old poincianas by the river, they buried the scant remains in the stained blanket. Until he could return here with a casket, he would defer his brother’s wish to be buried in Columbia County, but he murmured the old hymn as Rob had wished.