Lost Man's River(4)

In the Depression, the sagging sheds and dwellings of the Trail construction crews at Gator Hook became infested by fugitives and gator hunters, hobos, drunkards, and retired whores, in a raffish community with a reputation for being drunk on its own moonshine by midmorning. This lawless place, eight miles due west across the cypress from the Forty-Mile Bend on the Trail, was cut off from the rest of Monroe County by hundreds of square miles of southern Everglades, which, together with the Ten Thousand Islands, formed the largest roadless area in the United States. In the forties, the old road was decreed a northern boundary of the new Everglades Park, but Gator Hook remained beyond administration, to judge from the fact that the Monroe County Sheriff had never once made the long journey around the eastern region of the Park to this isolated and unregenerate outpost of his jurisdiction.

For a number of years there had been rumors of an old drifter out at the Hook who talked incessantly of E. J. Watson, and it had occurred to Watson’s son that this drifter might be the killer Leslie Cox, yet this seemed so unlikely—was that his honest reason?—that he had never bothered to come out here to find out. Most local people still believed that Cox had escaped (perhaps with Watson’s help) and made his way to the wild Mikasuki still living down around Shark River. Since the Seminole Wars, those undomesticated Indians had sheltered outlaws and other fugitives from white men just as, in the old century, they had sheltered runaway slaves. Under a half-breed identity (and Lucius could remember the man’s Indian black hair and heavy skin), Cox had laid low for years back in the hammocks. Avoiding west coast settlements where he might be spotted, so it was said, he would sometimes accompany Indian trading parties to the east coast at the Miami River, where he traded otter pelts and gator hides for coffee and flour, moonshine, axes and steel traps, rifles, ammunition. With the advent of the cross-Florida highway Cox had drifted to the shack community at Gator Hook, hiding his identity from the inhabitants.

Among old-timers in the bars and on the docks along the coast, the legends of Cox and Watson never died. Lucius could not take all these stories seriously, but because Gator Hook with its anonymous inhabitants was so remote and little-visited, this particular rumor had troubled him long before the visit from Billie Jimmie. And now there was a real old man who claimed to have information about Watson. Was it possible that Leslie Cox had changed his name to Collins?



The sun, ascending, drew soft mist out of the cypress. From the sharp corner where the spur met the dead end, he headed east again, and in time the land rose slightly and the bright water withdrew beneath a ridge of pine. Blurred trails wandered aimlessly into the thornbush and palmetto, and here and there, half-hidden, the rusty red of a tin roof showed through the greens. In the roadside ditch bald tires languished among bedsprings, beer cans, rain-rotted packaging, unnatural objects of bad plastic colors, strewn through the catclaw and liana at the wood edge.

At a makeshift car dump in a corner of the road, four old men were playing cards on a sawhorse table. The stiff figures turned toward him as he passed, but no hand rose to return the stranger’s wave. None of the four reminded him of Cox, though it was unlikely that he would have recognized the man, not having laid eyes on him since mid-September of 1910, on the same day he last saw his father. He had only a dim memory of that husky, sullen, and unshaven figure, hands in pockets, slouching apart from the small knot of people who were waving good-bye to Lucius from the riverbank at Chatham Bend. Yet seen up close, even an aging Cox would not have lost those small neat ears set tight to his head, as in minks and otters, nor the dim crescent of the mule hoof that had scarred one cheekbone, nor the dull, thudding voice, abrupt and heavy as the grunt of a bull gator.

The Gator Hook Bar was a swaybacked cabin, greenish black, perched on posts as a precaution against high water, and patched with tin and tarpaper against the rains. As the only roadhouse in this remote region, it served the rudimentary social needs of the male inhabitants and their raggy squalling females—lone backwoods crazies of both sexes, he had heard, apt to poke a weapon through a rusty screen and open fire on any unfamiliar auto making its slow way through the potholes, blowing out headlights as it neared or taillights as it fled and sometimes both. According to the legend of the place, the one victim unwise enough to stop and make an inquiry about this custom had been shot through the heart. (“Them boys sure appreciate their privacy,” someone had said.)

The roadhouse was entered and departed through a loose screen door at the top of a steep narrow wooden stair, down which its customers were free to tumble at any hour of the day or night. Beside the stair was a pink limousine with mud flaps and bent chrome which had come to rest among three rusty refrigerators, a collection of oil drums, triangular sections of charred plywood, a renegade toilet, and a fire-blackened stove of that marbled blue so ubiquitous on old American frontiers. The limousine’s rear axle was hoisted on a jack—high as a dog’s leg on a hydrant, Lucius thought, noticing the dog lying beneath it—and the wheel had been missing for some years, to judge from the weeds grown up around the hub.