Shadow Country (108 page)

Pretty soon there were three spongers up on deck: Cap'n Walt, small, mean, and quick, and his offspring Tom and that scraggy feller the Hardens called Coot Ethridge who had been belowdecks on this boat when Guy was murdered. And I said, “You know who I am. Cast off your lines.”

Smith crossed over to the rail and took a leak in our direction to relieve his feelings. In that silver early-morning calm, in that dead silence, in that red sun rising from the fiery shimmer of the banks off to the east, that tinkle of his worn-out bladder would have woke a crocodile a half mile off. While he pissed at us, his glasses glinted and his brain buzzed as he figured out what he was going to do next. Finished, he shook the last acid drops in our direction, hawked, spat, and farted. If he could have mustered up a shit, he might have done that, too. Taking his time, he straightened up and stuffed his mean old prick back in his pants, all the while squinting toward the southward, as if confident that help would show up any second on that horizon.

Seeing him being so obnoxious, his crew got nervous, and Coot's voice broke as he called over, “Mr. Watson, we ain't lookin for no trouble so there ain't no call to go pointin them guns.” Hearing that, Smith whipped around so quick that he damn near tore off his own pecker. “This vessel was abandoned and we found her first. We are aboard of her right now. That's the law of salvage. Law's the law.”

My temper came up quick as his. “How about Bradley? How about all the lies you told to put the blame on Watson? Law was the law, you sonofabitch, you would have hung!” When I raised my shotgun, his crew dove for cover. “Anyway, you're not aboard my schooner and you're not going aboard her, either, cause she's on the bottom. So you cast off real quick, the way I told you, cause I don't aim to explain it all again.”

The Hardens had raised their rifles, too, and the oldest, Webster, interrupted Walt Smith's thoughts before he could speak again. “You're thinkin its your word against our'n, now ain't that right? Only thing is, your word ain't worth a shit no more on this whole coast nor your ass neither if you don't get movin.”

Smith did not like hearing such hard words, never mind looking down so many gun barrels, but he reckoned this was not the time to say so. He gave Webster a wink to let him know that accounts would be settled later. “We got witnesses,” he snarled, as the Smith boy and Coot had jumped to clear their lines, “and they will be showin up here any time now.”

In the still air, Smith's ketch moved hardly at all on the weak current. They had drifted clear but were still in gun range. Finally Smith called across the water, “You'll need hands to raise her, Watson, let alone careen her. We can split the salvage.” I called back, “The damned cargo is spoiled. The ship is mine. No salvage. One day's wage.”

That's how we settled it. Rigged a block and tackle amidships and more lines fore and aft, raised her inch by inch between the boats like a drowned whale. Took till noon before her gunwales surfaced, that's how slow and hard that winching was. Then all hands bailed till her deck came up out of the water, and she wallowed.

A ship rose on the horizon after midday, drew near in early afternoon. I sat back in the stern where I could cover all three boats with my gun sticking up where all could see it. I was well known at Key West. There wasn't one man on that other boat who wanted trouble.

By now a little breeze was picking up. At high tide, we towed the
Gladiator
eastward, ran her aground on a bar. We careened her six hours later when the tide was down, long about midnight. The hull came out undamaged but her cargo was a total loss, a mess of busted eggs and slimy vegetables, waterlogged chickens, a drowned milk cow, swollen hogs.

The Smith crew refused to help us clean her out. “Where's our money?” Walt Smith said. The sea salt crusted on his glasses made this old wharf rat look more vicious than before. I said he'd have to wait till the next time we sold a cargo in Key West. He cursed vilely. “Don't go drinkin it all up before we get what's owed us,” Walt Smith said.

Six hours after that, the tide floated her again. She was riding as high as a white gull next morning when the sun came up like a fireball over the Keys.

SHOOTING

We dropped Thompson's ketch at Lost Man's and the Hardens at Wood Key and Lucius took the
Gladiator
home. I told Short to come with me on the
Warrior,
I would take him to House Hammock through the inland bays. Owen Harden said, “You come see us, Henry”—his way of warning me to be good to Short in case I was still upset over that cargo. Henry shook hands with Owen and Webster and got into my boat without a word and put away his rifle. At a sign from me, he took the helm and entered Lost Man's River. Passing Lost Man's Key, he did not glance over that way even once.

Where the river narrowed, Short peered around him at the mangrove walls as if seeing the darkness in them for the first time. More and more un-easy, he watched me sip my flask. He said again, “I sure am sorry, Mist' Watson.” But knowing how the
Gladiator
yawed when she was overloaded, and knowing Thompson knew that, I had decided that the only man responsible was Erskine, who had turned her over to an inexperienced hand despite the signs of storm. I said, “Well, I know you are, Henry, but you did your best, so never mind about it.”

After a time he gave a little cough, but not until I looked his way did he come out with it. “Sir? How might Miss Jane be gettin on?” I took a swallow of white lightning. “
Miss
Jane?” And he said, “Yessir.” “The mulatta gal?” He paused. “Yessir. The mulatta gal.”

That was a pause I didn't care for. I took another swallow, then a draw on my cigar, breathing the smoke into his face. I said, “She is aiming to get married off to a coal-black nigger by the name of Reese.” I saw the blood rise to his cheeks, which goes to show how light this feller was. “Something wrong, Henry?” I said.

Another pause. Then he said, “Nosir. Nothing wrong with it. Please give Miss Jane the respects of Henry Short.”

“Give Miss Jane the respects of Henry Short.”

“Yessir,” he said, scared but stubborn. “Miss Jane Straughter.”

“Give Miss Jane Straughter the respects of
Mister
Henry Short?”

“Nosir.”

We went inland up Lost Man's River and north through Alligator Bay. Henry flinched when I swung my gun up kind of sudden to shoot a white ibis passing overhead. I took the helm and he went to the stern to pluck our supper as we went along, and I recall how those white feathers danced and disappeared as the boat turned through the corridors of dusk in those narrow channels. It was a dark evening, overcast, no moon to travel by and dead low water. Twice the
Warrior
went hard aground before I quit and ran ashore at Possum Key. “We'll lay over here tonight,” I said.

Jungle vines had crawled over the Frenchman's grave and the door had blown off the front of the old cabin. Henry found a rusted pan and a bent pot and cooked the ibis. I sat there in the fire smoke to spite the mosquitoes, brooding over my lost cargo and wondering where the capital to put the Bend back into shape was going to come from. Henry watched me polish off that flask as if afraid I might get drunk and take his life.

“Fine eatin bird, suh. Call this ‘Chokoloskee chicken,' ” Henry said, serving me the breast on a leaf plate. I took my knife out.

“Well, I know that, Henry.”

Squatting down to eat out of the pan, he kept to my right side and behind me, where I'd have to swing against the grain to get a shot off.

More and more irascible, I picked a fight. “What's this Pentecostal?” I demanded, having heard him mention to the Hardens a new religion out of California that was signing up a lot of local Baptists, Henry included. Politely he tried to explain about Acts 2:4, the Day of the Pentecost, fifty days after Passover—“You some kind of a Jew, Henry?” I interrupted—when a mighty fire wind from Heaven rushed down into Jerusalem and the Apostles filled up with the Holy Spirit and went around speaking in strange tongues in sign of the world's end—

“That so? Let's hear some of their jabber.”

“Got to be in the Spirit, Mist' Edguh, befo' you kin speak in tongues.”

“In the Spirit. Speak in tongues.” I nodded wisely. “Helps to be dead drunk, too, I reckon.” And I drank off some more, mean and exhilarated. “Might get to be Jesus for a minute, or the Holy Ghost. What's your opinion, Henry?”

“Nosuh.” Henry's face had no expression. He scratched the fire-blackened earth with a small stick.

One time out there in the Nations—out of gun range, down the river narrows—I saw a panther come off a rock ledge, take a bay foal. That foal was a lot bigger'n the cat was, and the mare right there alongside, big horse teeth bared. These were half-wild Indian ponies, knew how to kick and bite. She could have run that cat back up that rock with no damn trouble. But that foal nickered just once and the mare whinnied, made a little feint, and it was over. Never even laid her ears back, the way horses do when they fight other horses. That mare and her foal, too, they just gave up, like offering the young one to that panther was in their nature. The mare went back to grazing before her foal was dead, not thirty yards from where that cat crouched, feeding.

What I mean, if Henry Short feared I might kill him, he had plenty of opportunity to get the drop on me and stop me. In Henry's place, ol' Frank Reese might have drilled me just for baiting him, then covered it up some way, taken his chances, because Frank was an outlaw raised up wild with no respect for whites who did not deserve any. But Henry Short would never raise his hand against a white or his voice either, not even if he thought he could get away with it. It just wasn't in his nature.

“Henry? You ever hear about that crazy nigger couple years ago who shot up a whole posse of New Orleans police before they tore apart his hide-out in a hail of bullets? All over the South, men were talking about Robert Charles, trying to figure where that boy learned to shoot.”

Henry was guarded. “I heard Mist' Dan House talkin sump'n about it, Mist' Edguh. That boy must been dead crazy, like you say.”

This boy I had here was very complicated. Not humble or subservient, not exactly, he kept his dignity to go with his good manners. It was more like he was doing penance and would bow his neck for any punishment that came his way—his own penance, I mean, not one imposed by whites. Not so much shamed as forever damned by his few drops of black blood. Having been raised by white people since a small child, in a community where other black men were rarely seen from one year to the next, the nigra in him was a man he scarcely knew for whom the white man in him took responsibility. In Henry Short, the brother and his keeper were the same and Judgment Day was every day all year. He figured he deserved his cross and he aimed to tote it.

“Henry? You prefer setting back there with the miskeeters?” I pointed at the ground closer to the fire. “Ol' Massuh ain' gwine whup you, boy.” I enjoyed talking black to Henry, who talked white, having no nigras at Chokoloskee to teach him his own language. Besides Nig Wiggins at Will Wiggins's cane farm out at Half Way Creek, the only other nigra was George Storter's man at Everglade, a stowaway from the Cayman Islands, blacker'n my hat; I don't think they ran across each other twice a year. As Kate says, “These poor darkies in the Islands must get very lonesome.”

Hearing Henry's voice, there was no way to tell what color he was, and seeing him, you could hardly tell it either. Henry Short looked a lot more Injun than nigra and a lot more white than Injun, come to think about it. But when I asked about his ancestry—which he knew I knew—he paused, then whispered, “Nigger. Nigger to the bone.”

Was that what Henry thought I wished to hear? I'd heard those words before and so they nagged me. I turned to look at him.

Then I remembered. Before it struck me that I might not want the answer, I inquired, “So your daddy's name was Short.
Mister
Short, maybe?”

“Nosuh, Mist' Watson, suh, ah doan rightly have no name, no suh. Dey gib me de name Sho't jus' fo' de fun, me bein so puny when ah was comin up.”

Henry's eyes could not hide his alarm. He had retreated into nigger speech and so I knew.

A hoot-owl called deep in the forest.
Hoo-hoo, hoo—aw-w.

“I b'lieves dey called him Jack. Somethin like dat.”

I emptied the bottle, hurled it over the black water. It made a small splash at the farthest edge of firelight. “I can't pay your wages for a while,” I said, unable to look at him.

“Ain't got nothin comin, nosuh,” Henry murmured. “Ah done sunk yo' boat.”

Long minutes passed. We watched the flask, which had gone under for a moment. Then the neck popped up like the small head of a terrapin back in the salt creeks, or the tip of a floating mangrove seed that has not yet taken hold on the shallow bottom.

“Tell you what.” I picked up his Winchester, which looked like the first model ever made. “We'll shoot for it. Double or nothing.” Despite all that Chokoloskee talk about Short's marksmanship, black men generally shoot poorly, not being mechanical of mind. I figured he might shoot better than most local men but nowhere near as well as E. J. Watson.

“Ain't got nuffin comin, Mist' Edguh, nosuh, ah sho' ain't.” Henry was scared. For this selfrespecting man, trying to speak like an ignorant field hand, I thought, was like a dog rolling over on its back to bare its throat. Disliking this, I fired fast to shut him up. My first bullet came so close that the bottle nose went under for a moment. “Your turn,” I said.

“Nosuh! Ain'no need! Yo nex' shot take care of it, Mist' Edguh!”

“Shoot.” I tossed the gun.

He shot and missed. I shot again. Over and over I sank that goddamned thing but it would not stay down, and the wavelet made by every bullet washed it a little farther back under the mangroves.