Lost Man's River(8)
Lucius maintained his flat expression, not wishing to show how much he resented the idea of this man living on the Bend. Since his father’s death, the remote house on its wild river had been looted and hard-used across decades by hunters, moonshiners, and smugglers, but now the Watson Place was deep inside the Park. To reveal to a man he knew disliked him that he was flouting federal law by camping in the old Watson Place seemed strangely out of character, unless Speck meant this as some sort of provocation.
“Parks is talkin about burnin down your house.” Speck grinned a little, meanly. “Claim she’s so banged up by hurricanes that she’s a hazard to Parks visitors!” His grin shifted to a snarl. “Stupid lyin bastards! In all the years since Parks took over, they never had one visitor at Chatham Bend! Not even one!”
Lucius Watson nodded. From offshore, no stranger to that empty coast could find the channel in the broken mangrove estuary where Chatham River worked its way through to the Gulf—one reason that Papa had liked that river in the first place—and even the few tourists who could read a chart might ream out their boat bottom on the oyster bars. Because of the huge drainage canals in the Glades headwaters, the rivers ran shallow, with big snags and shifting sandbars, and there were no channel markers because moonshiners such as Crockett Daniels rigged lines to them and dragged them out.
Speck considered him a moment. “Yep, they’re set to burn your daddy’s good old house right to the ground.”
“Why do you care? It’s not your house.”
Speck Daniels cocked an ugly eye. “Don’t the Bend belong to all of us home people?” His voice had risen in a spurt of anger, and Crockett Junior turned their way. “Same as the whole Thousand Islands, the whole Everglades? Why, Godamighty, they’s been Danielses out here for a hundred years! I lived and hunted in this country my whole life! You tellin me them greenhorns got more right to this backcountry than I do?” He spat hard at the floor. “Anyways, what the hell kind of a tourist would beat his way three-four miles back up a mangrove river to take a picture of some raggedy ol’ lonesome place walleyed with busted windows, and the doors all choked by thorn and vines? Not to mention bats and snakes, wasp nests and spiders and raccoon shit—smell like a kennel! That house ain’t had a nail or a lick of paint in years! Screen porch is rickety, might put your foot through, and the jungle is invadin the ground floor. That blow last year hit one hundred fifty at Flamingo. Them winds tore out the last of your daddy’s windows, tattered the roof, just lashed and blasted that strong house till she looked gray and peaked as a corpse!”
Despite his vehemence, Speck Daniels’s green eyes kept moving, as if much of his fury was feigned and the rest exaggerated, and when he spoke again, his voice was calm. “Well, you know somethin? That storm never done her no real harm at all. Tore up the outside, which is all them greenhorns look at. Inside, she’s as solid as she ever was, cause your daddy used bald cypress and Dade County pine. She’ll be standin up there on her mound for another century!” What had saved the place to date, he said, was its location far across the Glades from the Park headquarters at Homestead. Alone and unvisited, way back in a forgotten river, and long hard miles by land or sea from the nearest road, the abandoned house did not justify the cost of its own destruction, and anyway, all the bureaucratic details—the burning permits, the requisition chits for fuel, not to speak of the fire crew, boat crew, and boat—had never been assembled in the same place at the same time.
“Hell, there ain’t nothin to burnin down a house, you know that good as I do!” Daniels banged his glass down on the bar. “Any Injun nor nigger, woman nor child could turn a pine house to hellfire in four minutes flat! Toss a coffee can of boat gas through the winder, flick your cigarette in after it, and go on home! I mean, Christamighty! But they ain’t done that, and you know why? Cause they’d rather blow up a paper storm, waste our tax money in some big-ass federal operation, make some bureaucrat look like he done somethin important!”
“You paying taxes these days?” Lucius inquired. The moonshine was spreading through his body, which glowed with a deadly calm.
“Why hell, yes, Colonel! First man to step up to the window ever’ year!”
They grinned together briefly, without pleasure.
A couple of months before, Daniels confided, he’d been contacted by a lawyer in Miami who was seeking a court injunction against the burning and was trying to reach the Watson heirs. He wanted someone on the place to make sure the house did not burn “by accident” before the case could get to court, and also to learn if the Park would force the issue by seeking to evict his caretaker. He wanted to gauge the strength of the government’s legal position as well as its resolve.