Lost Man's River (33 page)

And what of Mr. Watson's brain? Lucius tended to discount April Collins's suggestion that his father had been brain-damaged by Ring-Eye's beatings. Violence begetting violence—that seemed indisputable—yet by no criteria he knew about had Papa seemed deranged. He had farmed successfully for forty years after leaving Carolina, and established and maintained good relations not only with his neighbors but with various women and their children. All but Rob.

At the motel there was no word from Arbie. What awaited him was a hand-delivered note scrawled in crude carpenter's pencil on lined yellow paper. Well, well, he thought, excited and surprised. He returned to the motel room and poured himself a drink.

Before leaving for Columbia County, he had sent a letter to the chubby shy little half sister whom he had not seen in over forty years.

There had been no answer to that letter, nor to a postcard notifying her that he would spend a few days in Lake City before heading south. Summoning forth this secretive creature was like whistling to an unknown bird
hid in the leaves, to judge from the scared and flighty silence that returned to him like the echo of a shot across the miles of silent swamp, red hill, and muddy river.

Lucius had suffered a mild paranoia. Even his stepfamily was turning away from him, cutting him off, having no wish to be put in touch with their Watson past. But now word had come, and on the very day that their brother Rob, who had never met this youngest Watson family, had risen from the dead. He sat on the bed and sipped his drink before opening the letter.

In a formal tone contrasting strangely with the writing implements, the note advised him that Mrs. Ruth E. Parker had shown his letter to the undersigned, who wished to inform him that Mrs. Parker could not imagine how she could possibly assist his research, since she'd been but five when her father died, remembered nothing, and was quite unable to converse on this painful subject.

He poured himself another drink and reread the letter, which was signed A. Burdett. He had hardly finished when the phone rang—Rob! Instead, a strange voice, gruff and heavy, said, “Did your damned attorney deliver my damned note? Because I represent the Burdett family.” In grudging speech, A. Burdett said that, despite the note, Mrs. Parker would “receive” Lucius Watson after all. He did not say why she had changed her mind but merely said that he, Burdett, would be present at any meeting “to protect her interests.”

“Nonnie resides in a town here in the lake country that will go unnamed,” he added—for the pure love of that phrase, it appeared, since without being privy to its name, Lucius could not have sent his letter to Mrs. Parker. Downing his bourbon to calm himself, he gasped in agreement, waving excitedly for Sally's attention as she came through the door. “Where's Arbie?” she whispered, and he only shrugged, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. “It's
Addison
!” he whispered. To the telephone he said, “You want me to meet Nonnie after all.”

“It's
you
who wanted to meet her, if I'm not mistaken.”

“And you've decided to accommodate me. Why?”

The caller paused, taken aback. “She told me to get hold of you! Told me that before she dies, she wants to learn about Ed Watson—‘the good, the bad, and anything in between,' she said!”

“Why?” Lucius repeated, groping for any sort of clue that might help to explain his own obsession.

“Now you just hold on a minute! Are you drunk?”

Sally leaned and whispered, “You trying to scare him off?” She shook her head and went into the bathroom.

“I mean,
why
does Ruth Ellen want to know?”

“What's that? Why
not?
He was her father!”

“Yours, too. Mine, too. You seem unhappy about this—”

“Look, I don't know you! I don't even like
talking
to you!” Burdett cried. “I think you're drunk! There's something funny going on! Your damn attorney showed up here day before yesterday, using your name! Not so much as a phone call! Wanted us to support some useless claim to the Watson house down in the Everglades!”

“Well, good! I hope you will!”

“Hell, no, I won't! I told my sister about it, and she got all flustered up, fished your damn letter out to show me. You claim to be her long-lost brother!”

“Addison? Yours, too.”

Burdett's laugh was forced. He made no answer.

“Look, Ad, I'd like to see you. I haven't laid eyes on you since 1911. You were four.”

From the telephone came trapped breathing and more silence.

“How about tomorrow?” Lucius said, banging down his glass and standing up as if ready to set off this very moment. If Burdett liked, they could meet at Ruth Ellen's house. This made the point that he knew the address and could have gone there without Addison's permission any time he wished. “I wouldn't want to upset her, of course,” he added quickly. “Wouldn't want to intrude.” More silence. “I have no wish to see her until she wishes to see me.” Though this was calculated to dispel Burdett's wariness, it also happened to be true.

“I'll call back,” Burdett blurted abruptly, and hung up.

“I'll be amazed if you ever hear from him again.” Sally sat down on the bed edge, took his hand. “You drink too much, do you know that, Professor?”

“Arbie tell you to say that?” He tried to smile. “You've been known to take a drink yourself.”

“What's
my
drinking got to do with it? You're supposed to be a biographer, researching a damn book! And here your long-lost brother calls and you screw it up!”

“That the tone you always take with your employer? Anyway, I didn't screw it up.”

The reproof hushed her. But he was unsettled by her gaze, aware that Sally's acquiescence had nothing to do with regret, far less submission. He also knew that she was right—he drank too much, and he had probably screwed it up. However, Burdett called back in a few minutes. Without mentioning his sister, he said he would meet Lucius in two days' time, at noon, at the motor inn at the highway interchange outside Neamathla.

Next morning Lucius called Hettie Collins to apologize and say good-bye. She seemed relieved to hear from him, saying she quite understood why he felt he had to disguise his identity. In fact, she had worried about him all that evening, realizing how upset he must have been about “R. B. Collins.” How happy the Collins clan would be to welcome Rob Watson back into the family after all these years! And Rob's brother Lucius, too, she added, her smiling voice warming his heart. He asked if one day he might pay another visit, and she told him shyly that she dearly hoped he would. “Come soon,” she said, rather suddenly, and he said, “I will,” and put the phone down, his heart pounding. She knew she was dying, he decided.

The police had received no report of any stray old man, dead or alive. Probably Rob was on a bender and holed up someplace, in which case he might be gone for days. When Lucius rang Sally to let her know that they were leaving, she cried, “You can't abandon that old man!”

“He's a very tough old man. He can take care of himself. He always has.”

“But you saw how upset he was, leaving that cemetery! He was weeping! And small wonder!” She sounded on the point of tears herself. “Probably saw his poor young mother's grave for the first time in his life!”

“Sally, he knew I'd learn the truth, that's why he needed an excuse not to come with me. He's sleeping off a drunk someplace. He'll meet us in a day or two. You'll see.”

He left a note at the motel desk in a sealed envelope containing money for bus ticket and food and the address of the Gasparilla Inn in Fort Myers. He addressed the envelope to “Mr. R. B. Collins” but the note said he would be delighted to be reunited with his long-lost brother. In an effort to cheer up the old man, he told him that, whatever his damn name was, he'd better not spend the enclosed money on more liquor, but get his old ass onto the bus down to Fort Myers and identify the occupant of that damned urn.

A. Burdett, checking his watch in the parking lot outside a gas station in Neamathla, turned out to be a heavy man in an ill-fitting steel gray windbreaker, baggy khakis, and paint-splatted high black shoes. Glimpsing a female asleep in the backseat, he jerked his head away. He wore pale spectacles under a big brow with thin hair plastered back on a balding pate, and his pale auburn brows and thin downturned mouth closed a gray face. He was built like his father, Lucius thought, and earlier in life must have been strong, but now—too early—he had the hollow look of someone whose woman had left him years before. The ears and loose-skinned neck and knobby hands seemed too large for his body, and he seemed unsteady, as if he had suffered a small stroke. Without looking at Lucius, he identified himself—“A. Burdett”—at a loss as to what he might possibly say next.

“A for Addison, right?” Lucius smiled to make amends for having rattled this poor fellow over the telephone. Burdett looked wary. A man's Christian name was his own business, that look said, as Lucius struggled to dispel the clotting atmosphere. He said, “Last time I saw you, Ad, you were just a little boy, playing around Papa's dock at Chatham Bend.”

“Papa,”
Burdett said, tasting the word. “That's what us kids called Mr. Herkie …” His voice trailed off and he wiped his palms down the sides of his pants, lowering his gaze in gloomy resignation. “Papa,” he repeated, aimless.

A bit desperate, Lucius gazed about the little town. Was it true that Neamathla had taken its name from the great chief of the Mikasuki Creeks?

“How's that?”

“
Do you suppose … I am like a bat that hangs by its claws in a dark cave, and that I can see nothing of what is going on around me? Ever since I was a small boy I have seen the white people steadily encroaching upon the Indians and driving them from their homes and hunting grounds. When I was a boy, the Indians still roamed undisputed over the country between the Tennessee River and the great sea of the south, and now when there is nothing left them but the hunting grounds in Florida the white men covet that. I will tell you plainly if I had the powers I would tonight cut the throat of every white man in Florida!
”