Lost Man's River (76 page)

The air turned black, came light again. His forearm was scraped and his brain ringing. He rested on his knees a moment before staggering to his feet.

“You hurt?”

He shook his head. He could not make out the storekeeper through the dark mesh, only the paleness of his shirt. The paleness brought back an odd memory from the old days: Cap had always enjoyed a meal of mayonnaise, spooned from the jar.

Cap said, “Been a few years, ain't it? You sure don't change much, Colonel. Only thing, these younger ones don't know you good as we do. You snoop around askin them questions, how they s'posed to know you ain't a fed?” When Lucius shrugged, the voice behind the screen continued, “What they mainly heard about is that ol' list.”

Lucius spat out dust. “A list of dead men!”

“Crockett's daddy ain't dead, lest he died yesterday. And there's another one. If he ain't on there, he sure ought to be.”

“I haven't kept that list in thirty years, goddammit, Cap! If revenge was what I'd wanted—” But not knowing what he'd wanted, he fell silent, slapping angrily at his dusty pants.

“That a fact? If you was Speck, would you take a Watson's word for that? After
another
Watson showed up here just lately, wantin to be took down to the Bend? Where Speck is caretakin?”

“Wait a minute! What—?”

“All these brothers slippin around all of a sudden has got to strike folks kind of funny, Colonel, when we ain't hardly seen a Watson on this island since your old man was shot in 1910. Also, we heard how you been askin whether them men
planned
to kill your daddy.”

Lucius stopped slapping the white dust. He straightened and moved slowly toward the steps, trying to locate the storekeeper behind the screen. “Cap? Does everyone know where my brother is except for me?”

“Them boys won't hurt him none without Speck says so.”

“I can't count on that. I'll have to call the state police.”

The storekeeper was silent a long moment. When he spoke again, his tone had shifted and turned cold. “Let me tell you somethin. With boys like these, all war-wounded, kind of half-loco, I would not call in no law if I was you.” The voice diminished as it withdrew from the screen and the paleness faded back into the gloom.

“Cap? I'm thirsty. I could use a soda pop or something—”

“Store's closed,” the voice said.

It was now midmorning. In his desperate need to act, he drove at high speed north and east to Gator Hook. There were no trucks or autos and the place looked closed. The door at the top of the roadhouse steps was padlocked, and
a yellow rat snake, gathering sun into its coils on the wood stoop, slipped without haste into a rain-rotted crevice. He called out, but there was no answer, only frogs chugging in the cypress, and forlorn odd cries of gallinule and limpkin.

Nailed to the door was a stained scrap of paper reading “Gone to Church.” In the same scrawled hand, splotched with spilled coffee, were rough directions to a “wild hog jambaree and truck pull, free 6-pack with admision.” The truck pull would take place this afternoon off the Copeland Road in the Big Cypress, at the same roadhouse where BAD COUNTRY had been parked the day before.

He drove the eight miles east to Forty-Mile Bend, then west again along the Trail to the first Indian camp, a collection of palm-thatched
cheke
roofs mostly hidden behind a high stockade fence. Knocking at the gate, he asked the woman who eventually appeared where he might locate Billie Jimmie. A small crowd gathered, mostly children. After a long silence in which nobody would look him in the face, he was pointed toward his car and told to wait. When Lucius said he could not wait, the command was repeated and the gate was shut. Within a few minutes, Billie Jimmie emerged, wiping his mouth, and squashed into the car without explanation.

He had not seen Chicken, Billie Jimmie said, before Lucius could ask him. Yes, he had been brought to Gator Hook, just as Lucius suspected. The Indian ignored the white man's question about how he had found out. Knowing Chicken was there, he had walked cross-country through the Cypress, coming in behind the roadhouse. Driven off by drunks, he found no way to talk with him. Now the old man was gone. Asked how he knew, the big man winced again. “Indin business,” he said this time, wanting nothing to do with the dangerous incredulity of white men.

Lucius wondered aloud if the old man might be found at that wild hog jamboree on the Copeland Road? The Indian sat expressionless. “South,” he said finally, with a hand gesture indicating distance. “Pavioni.” Lucius recognized the Mikasuki word for the vanished Indian village on Chatham Bend. After that, they sat in silence for a while, contemplating the purple morning glory blossoms on the stockade wall.

“No damn good,” Billie Jimmie pronounced gloomily. He was worried, too.

Lucius reminded him that they had first met on the occasion of the Park inauguration at Everglade. “Drunk Injun,” Billie Jimmie grunted, relating how he owed his life to Chicken, who had cured him of drink and returned him to the spiritual path of the Old Way.

“Rob cured you of drink? Returned you to the spiritual path?”

The Indian waited politely for the white man's amusement to subside, then reminded Lucius that the Park ceremony at Everglade had been a very dark day for his people, who were banned forever from Hatchee Chok-ti, or “Shark River.” And he related his own grief and his flight into spiritual darkness. All this had ended one hot summer afternoon on the roof of the Young Men's Christian Association of Orlando, where his friend Mr. Collins had provided a fresh jug of his favorite corn whiskey, Okeefenokee Moon. “Only white feller I ever come across could drink himself drunker'n a Indin and still sit up straight,” Billie Jimmie marveled, with a fine mix of admiration and disgust.

Tongue loosened by the Okeefenokee Moon, Billie Jimmie had confided to the white man his undying shame that a hereditary chief and spiritual leader, entrusted with an ancient deerskin containing the medicine of the Green Corn, had hidden this sacred relic in a hollow tree “back in the Cypress,” then abandoned his people to become a drunkard. From that dark day onward, he had taken refuge from his life in the white man's cities, yet had never ceased to be tormented that the Green Corn Bundle was deteriorating in its hiding place, and the tribe's spiritual power along with it. To drown his sorrows over this calamity, he had taken a mighty slug of Okeefenokee Moon, set the jug down on the roof cinders with a doleful sigh, and cursed the fate that had afflicted him with a flawed character. But when he wiped the tears out of his eyes and was reaching once more for the jug, he found his solace out of reach and the old man pointing at him in a fury. “You're a damn disgrace,” his friend had yelled. “A big sloppy Injun drunk, and a disgrace!”

Billie Jimmie was too flabbergasted to respond. He felt as if his soul had been struck by lightning. Furthermore, his incensed companion was by no means finished with his abuse. “You get the hell up off your redskin ass,” this terrible old man was yelling. “You go get yourself sober and cleaned up, and then you go out in the woods and find all that sacred heathen crud and clean the dirt off of it! And from now on, you take care of your spiritual duties like your people told you!”

The Indian rose to his full height, ready to kill. He lifted the old man right off the cinders, prepared to cast him from the rooftop to the concrete sidewalk five stories below. “You crazy old sonofabitch!” he hollered, or words to that effect, “you ain't never drawed a sober breath in all the time I knowed you, you are the most unmercifullest drunk I ever come across, and I seen plenty! Who are you to talk that way to a hereditary chief!”

“You sure don't act like any chief I ever heard about,” Old Man Chicken told him, “and your breath ain't so hot, neither. Anyways, Bill,” the white
elder continued, rising up and brushing cinders from a bloody elbow where the Indian had flung him down, “that ain't the difference between you and me.” And he drew Billie Jimmie down beside him, keeping the corn liquor out of reach. “The difference is, I don't drink because I
have
to drink, like you. I drink because I
like
to drink, I'm a drunk because I
enjoy
being drunk, and I ain't all weepy and full of guilt about it, neither. I
like
bein a drunk, you understand? I
like
it! And the older I get, the
better
I like it. And if I die early, that is all right, too, cause old age ain't all that it's cracked up to be.” The old man said this more or less cheerfully, gazing out over the hot smog of the town. Then he added in a quiet voice, “If I thought I could do it, I would drink it all.”

“Might kill yourself,” the Indian warned him.

“You find a better way, you let me know.”

Cheerful again, Chicken waved a bony arm toward the city. “Life is great and life is terrible, there's just no end to the damned possibilities!” Then he turned to the hereditary chief and said in a stern voice, “You do like I tell you, Bill. You haul your redskin ass right off this roof and don't come back.” And when Billie Jimmie got riled up again, and demanded to know how the hell he could straighten himself out when the forked-tongue white man would not offer him so much as one puny hit of Okeefenokee Moon, to tide him over—just when, in fact, he was considering taking the jug by force—the old man polished it off himself, without haste or undue ceremony. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he said. “No more. Forever.” And with that, he slipped a green bill from his shoe into the Indian's hand. “Now you go get yourself cleaned up, get a new shirt,” Old Chicken said. “Invest in a toothbrush and a fresh pair of socks while you are at it.”

Rising to his feet, the Indian cast that money down with a great shout of contempt. Only then did he see that this frogskin was a century note, a hundred-dollar bill. Enraged, he went storming off the roof and down the fire stairs, reaching the bottom floor, still shouting, before it came to him why Indians so rarely got ahead in life, or even home. True, he had made some sort of moral point, but what good would that do him or his lost people? With not one penny in his pocket, nothing left him but his pride, he booted the fire door and banged out into the street, hoping his brave repudiation of white-man corruption would ring forever in that old man's ears.

Down from the heavens came a shrill whistle—like the voice of an eagle, Billie Jimmie said. He looked up in time to see the old man peering down over the roof edge. With the sun behind his head, his silver hair burned like a halo on the summer blue. “Looked like the Great Spirit,” the Indian said, still reverential. For between the old man's eyes and his own, a leaf-like thing was lilting downward, downward on the eddying breeze.

A moment later, the burning halo disappeared, the sky was empty, there was only that crisp ticket to the future, palpitating like a green butterfly on the hot sidewalk.

Billie Jimmie sighed, gazing at Lucius. He could never repay that good old man, not only for the money but for the dignity he had been granted, the solitude in which to stoop to pick it up. He had been sober ever since, he said, all thanks to R. B. Chicken, and had been restored as a spiritual leader of his people. “He is a very good old man,” Billie Jimmie said fervently. “A
very
good old man. He is not honored in the white man's world the way he should be.”