Speck Daniels watched his son without expression. “They heard this same ol’ shit in here a thousand times,” he said.
“Now I ain’t got nothin personal against that ranger,” Crockett Junior was saying, choked by strong emotions. “Might could be a real likable young feller, just a-tryin to get by, same as what I’m doin. Might got him a sweet lovin wife and a couple real cute li’l fellers back home waitin on him, or maybe just the sweetest baby girl—same as what I got! Ain’t no difference between him and me at all!” He looked around him wide-eyed to make sure these people understood how astonishing it was that he and this park ranger both had wives and children, and how large-hearted his concern for that ranger’s family was. “But if’n that boy tries to take my gators, well, I got my duty to my people, ain’t that right? Got my duty to take care of my little girl back home that’s waitin on me to put bread on the table! Ain’t that only natural?” He looked around the room. “So all I’m sayin—and it would be pathetical, and I am the first one to admit it—all I’m sayin, now, if any such a feller, and I don’t care who, tries to keep me from my hard-earned livin?” Shaking his head, he fixed his gaze on Lucius once again. “Well, I’d sure be sorry, folks,” he growled, as his voice descended to a hoarse hard whisper, and he pointed southward toward some point of destiny in a far slough. “I surely would be sorry. Cause I reckon I would have to leave him out there!”
The hard whisper and the twisted face, the threat, had finally compelled the crowd’s attention, and it turned a slack and opaque gaze upon the stranger.
Speck Daniels snickered. “Tragical, ain’t it? Leave him out there! I reckon that’s about the size of it.”
“That a warning?” Though Lucius spoke casually, his heart quickened with fear.
“Yessir,” Speck said, ambiguous. “Out in this neck of the woods, a stranger got to watch his step. That is a fact.” And still he did not look at Lucius but gazed coldly at the huge maimed man holding the floor. “Junior there, he went clean acrost the Pacific Ocean to fight for freedom and democracy, and he killed plenty of ’em over there just like they told him to, and he give his right arm for his country, too, while he was at it. Uncle Sam give him a purty ribbon, but that boy would of had a whole hell of a lot more use out of that arm.”
He nodded, somber. “Course they’s some of these dumb country boys is proud to give their right arm for their country—least their daddies is proud and Uncle Sam is proud, and the home folks gets to march in a parade. But I reckon I don’t feel that way, and Junior, he don’t neither, not no more. We know it’s our kind that does all the fightin, and our kind that gets tore up and killed, long with the niggers, while the rest of ’em stay home and make the money.” He kept nodding. “That big boy there had to learn them things the hard way, and he’s still hot as hell. If he don’t get a hold on his ragin pretty quick, there is goin to be bad trouble for some poor feller that don’t know enough to get out of his way.”
Speck licked his teeth. “When he’s like this—all this uproarin, I mean—Junior sleeps like he is dead or he don’t sleep at all. Won’t talk to nobody, only them other vets. Might not say a word to his own daddy for two-three days, then busts right out with the answer to some damn question you forgot you asked him. Either way, he is crazy as all hell, and dangerous, and them other shell-shocked morons he keeps with him might be worse. Mud Braman ain’t nothin but a crazy drunk, don’t know what he’s doin from one minute to the next, and that other one with all the personality”—he pointed at Dummy—“his uncles was in that bunch that killed that lawman at Marco back in Prohibition, so whatever the hell is the matter with that feller, he comes by it natural. Might break loose and shoot everyone in sight and you’d never have no idea why he went and done it.”
Speck Daniels sighed. “Some days I think ol’ Junior might be better off if I was to take him out into that swamp back there and shoot him. Before he shoots somebody else, out of his natural-borned suspicion. Maybe some stranger who just wandered in here off that road.”
Daniels contemplated Lucius, sucking at his teeth as if tasting something bad. “You plannin to tell me what you’re huntin for out this way, Colonel? Ain’t me, I hope.”
Lucius shook his head. “You live here now?”
“Nosir, I sure don’t. When I ain’t livin on my boat, I got me a huntin camp back in the Cypress, got a surplus tent and a good Army stove and a genuine plastic commode, also a nice Guatemala girl that come by mail order. But these days,” he whispered—and he cocked his head to see how Lucius would receive this information—“I’m campin in your daddy’s house, down Chatham River.”