Lost Man's River (111 page)

Smoke plumes rose from the darkening embers, wandering like companies of ghosts. Dark herons crossed the mangrove and the river. With his friends already in the boat, he paid a last visit to the grave. Off the bank, the snag of a drowned tree dipped and beckoned in the heavy current. The channel was shifting and the bend eroding as slabs of old alluvial earth were borne away into the Gulf of Mexico. He promised Rob he would come fetch him before his grave was taken by the river.

In the boat, the blind man murmured quietly, “Well, how
you
doin, Colonel? Goin to be okay?”

The
Cracker Belle
drifted down current before her propeller, gathering her weight, took hold of the muddy flow and churned her back upstream past the burned clearing. “Jungle will take this ol' place back before you know it,” Whidden said, with a last look around him. “Won't be nothing left of the old days for our kids to look at.”

Gazing downriver as the Bend turned and disappeared, Lucius saw how this wild river had looked before the first crafts of the aborigines rounded the point, in those ageless days innocent of human cry, only the puff of manatee and suck of tarpon, harsh heron squawk and shriek of tern on the gray sky, the mournful calling of the white-pated black pigeons. And he wondered if life would ever bring him back.

Following the inside route, the old boat headed east and north into the diadem of amber waters between the outer Islands and the coast, crossing the oyster bottoms and broad tannin reaches of the inner bays. Feeling the shift in her vibrations and the rise of water in her wake, Andy nodded in contentment. “Chokoloskee to House Hammock, we traveled these back bays, but as my granddad used to say, the water could be pretty skinny in through here.”

Lifting free from the green walls, white egrets crossed the bow, and hearing their guttural hoarse squawks, the blind man said, “Them white birds scare a whole lot easier than the blue ones, ever notice? Many years have come and gone since the last plume hunting, but them egrets has learned all they need to know, because they're still scared of anything two-legged.”

“Me, too!” cried Sally. She gave the blind man an impulsive hug. “Well, now, Mister Andy House, you happy you came with us? Cause
we
sure are!” On her way below to rest, she stuck out her tongue at the other two, and Harden smiled at Lucius. “You seen the way she took it? About Junior? I believe she has let go of something, don't ask me why. I believe she might be past the worst of it.” He grinned. “
Your ex-ex-wife
—that's what she called herself just now! I believe my ex-ex-wife is really back!” And Lucius smiled, too, in profound loneliness.

Whidden would drop his passengers at Everglade, then head back south to help Speck if he could. “Them boys was my partners,” Whidden said, dispensing with any further explanation. When Lucius asked him if Sally would mind the risk he might be taking, Whidden shook his head. “She knows I have to go,” he said, “and she knows that I won't stay.”

Crossing Alligator Bay, the
Belle
passed the mouth of the grown-over canal dredged originally by the Chevelier Corporation. “Follow that canal maybe six miles, you'll hit a good high hammock,” Andy told them. “As a young boy, Charlie Green was in there deer huntin with his daddy and the Robertses. They'd shot four or five curlew for their supper, so Charlie's dad said, ‘Well, we got enough to eat, so you boys go hunt us a good place to camp on that high hammock yonder.' Charlie and the Roberts boy found a good place, all right, but somebody was on there a good while ahead of 'em, cause his skull lay grinnin at 'em from the brush. Alongside the skeleton, fallin apart, was a flat-bottomed scull boat, hauled up and hid a little ways back in the hammock, and also an old rifle and old coffeepot and fry pan. Well, that was enough, they made camp someplace else!

“At Chokoloskee, Charlie told Ted Smallwood all about it, and some old feller in the store claimed he recalled that hunting pram from Chatham
Bend, and another chimed in, ‘Well, Old Man Waller that got killed by Cox was supposed to had a muzzle loader of that same description.' So they put their heads together and come up with the idea that what those boys had come across were the remains of Leslie Cox, laid low by snakebite! Uncle Ted was so excited, he called the whole island over to the store to hear tell about it! None of 'em could think who else that skeleton might be and by nightfall it was all decided: Leslie Cox hid that boat back in the bushes before makin camp, probably stepped on some big ol' rattler that swum on there to escape high water. The good Lord had His serpent lay in there just a-waitin for that evil-hearted feller!”

“Wouldn't hogs and gators pull that body all apart?” Lucius protested.

“Well, you'd sure think so. But they argued that Cox might been back there through the twenties, livin with Injuns, tradin plumes and hides. And maybe them wild things was so scarce and hunted out that they never come across the body. Buzzards'd never find him in that jungle, and bobcats nor panthers wouldn't never touch him, and anything smaller that might chew on him would leave him mostly in one piece. One or two has been found like that, across the years.”

“Well, I suppose so,” Lucius said doubtfully. Death by rattlesnake back in the Glades seemed too fortuitous to suit him. He preferred his own instinct that somewhere along the back roads of America, Cox was still living under a false name.

Coming down out of Lopez River in the twilight, they could see the weak small lights of Chokoloskee. A minute earlier, Andy House had called out from the stern, “Any lights yet, Whidden? Feels to me like we must be in the Bay.” He was pointing toward where Chokoloskee had to be even before the others saw the high dark shape of it.

“Course all they had back then was kerosene lamps,” Andy said, when Lucius went aft and sat beside him, “but that big dark mound rising up out of the dusk was what your daddy seen on his last evening.”

That evening, in bittersweet mood, Lucius placed a telephone call to Lucy Summerlin. He confessed to “Miss L” his lifelong shame about the way he'd acted years before, and his regret about “the happiness I threw away.” When Lucy was silent, he asked shyly if he might pay a call on her some time soon. After a moment, composing herself, Lucy asked her former lover if he had been drinking, and when he protested untruthfully that he had not, another pause made it clear that she knew better. Later he feared she had been weeping
and was struggling to compose herself, for he heard a discreet sniffling into a handkerchief.

Lucy murmured that their encounter in the Fort Meyers cemetery had been “just lovely” and had “done her old heart a world of good.” However, she did not think she should meet with him again any time soon. She would love him always, and wished him a long and happy life. When he pressed harder, she reproved him gently, saying that she might take him a bit more seriously if he were to ring her up again when he was sober.

“Are you doubting my word, Miss L?”

“I'm afraid so, sweetheart.”

“Well, I can't say I blame you.” He tried to laugh.

Making light of his drinking—surely that had been a bad mistake, worse than the whiskeys, worse than the dissembling. He would call back in the morning and apologize. But when morning came, he felt stunned and unravelled, sitting on the bed edge by the telephone for a long while before deciding it might be best to wait a decent interval before soliciting his beloved “Miss L” again. He must be patient, he must draw near with the greatest sensitivity and care. One day soon there was bound to come that limpid moment when they would melt into each other's eyes, in rediscovery of those illuminations of those fond lost days long, long ago.

Lucius had not told her of Rob's death, not wishing to win her favor by seeking sympathy. And although saddened by her refusal, he was also in-admissibly relieved, though he would not admit this to himself until days later.

Inexplicably Lucius thought about his father's urn. It seemed urgent now to restore those bones to the Fort Myers cemetery. Yet in his twisted state of mind, the brass urn spooked him—not the bones, the ancestral bones, but the raging spirit trapped in that container. Though he knew he was being superstitious or plain childish, he had no wish to lay eyes on the man or find himself alone with it at home.