Lost Man's River(29)

A postscript to Kinard’s letter said, “Might think about paying a visit pretty soon, because my heart is not exactly on my side, the way it used to be.” Lucius telephoned at once, and Mr. Kinard came on the line. After a few alarming sounds not unlike death rattles, he advised his caller that he was feeling poorly but would agree to entertain a visitor in two days’ time. Oh please don’t die, prayed Lucius. Keep that ol’ ticker going!

He rushed to compare Grover Kinard’s letter with the Herlong clipping. “Herlong referred to the Getzens, too,” he told Arbie excitedly.

Edgar and Minnie grew up and married in that section. Edgar rented a farm from Capt. T. W. Getzen. Minnie married Billy Collins and raised a fine family.… Watson came back to Columbia County a few months later. His closest friends were Sam and Mike Tolen.… One day Sam Tolen and his horse were found on a little-used road, both shot to death. Suspicion pointed to Watson and he was arrested and jailed. There was talk of a necktie party and the sheriff moved him to Duval County Jail. He got a change of venue to Madison County.



“You’ve read me that letter maybe three times already, and now you’re reading me Herlong again!” Arbie complained.



That evening he called Sally Brown in Gainesville. He brought her up-to-date on the biography, and told her amusing stories about Arbie, but finally he was defeated by her silence. “You okay?” he said. No, she was not “okay,” Sally said, because she had to go back south and find a lawyer and talk to Whidden Harden and clean the rest of her stuff out of their house for the divorce. “Anyway, you sure took your sweet time before you called me!”

Why, he wondered, did this pretty young woman give a damn whether he called or not? Until now, he had supposed that Sally cared for him only as a friend of the Hardens, or because he was her professor, or because the poor thing, in her distress over her marriage, had shifted her feelings of affection to a “father figure” or whatever. A little perplexed, he said he was sorry, he had not wanted to presume—“Presume!” she exclaimed. He could not tell if she were weeping, but that she had been drinking was quite clear. He told her he was headed south in a few days—would she like to come? “You and me and your mean-mouthed old sidekick? I’ll have to think about it.” But she took down the name of the motel.



Watson Dyer, seated squarely in the lobby, turned out to look like nothing so much as his own account of himself over the telephone, a major in the U.S. Marines (Reserve) and an attorney “specializing in large-scale real estate development and state politics.” And in fact, his bulk was clad in the big suit and damp white shirt that Lucius had always associated with politicians. He was a heavyset man but not a fat one, with silvered auburn hair in a hard brush around a moonish face. Strong brows were hooked down at the corners, hooding pale blue eyes, and the left eyebrow but not the right was lifted quizzically as if in expectation that whatever stood in his way must now get out of it. White crescents beneath the pupils made his eyes seem to protrude, though they did not. The eyes seemed inset in the skin, like stones in hide.

“Major Dyer?” Lucius presented the old man beside him. “Mr. Arbie Collins.” Though Arbie was more or less shined up for the occasion, the Major’s hairline was so crisp that Arbie, by contrast, seemed disheveled, and his red neckerchief, lacking its usual flair, made him look raffish, even seedy. “And I’m Lucius Watson.”

Creasing his newspaper, Dyer considered this presentation before responding to it, as if how these people were to be addressed was for W. Dyer to decide. His eyes seemed to be closing very slowly, as in turtles, and when they opened once again, Lucius noticed a rim of darker blue on the pale blue pupils, and also a delicate shiver on the skin surface around the mouth, as if within, for his own fell reasons, this man was trembling with rage. When Dyer grinned, which he did sparingly, inexplicably, those delicate shivers played like mad around a snub nose (like a wen, Arbie said later), though these phenomena had little to do with mirth. It was almost as if he laughed unwittingly, perhaps by accident.

“So you’re calling yourself Watson,” Dyer said finally, heaving himself onto his feet in a waft of shaving lotion. Flashing the meaty good-guy grin of the corporate executive or politician, he extended a well-manicured hard hand.

“That’s his name,” Arbie said sharply, glaring at Dyer with such bristling suspicion that Dyer stiffened with a bearish grunt. Stepping forward to have his own hand shaken, the old man winked conspiratorially at Lucius, who ignored this.