Shadow Country (91 page)

The knife fell as Bass spun away and down onto his knees. When I came around in front of him, he stared past blindly, grizzled jaw dropped open. “Well, shit,” he muttered thickly—his last words, and as sensible as any, I suppose.

THE BOUNTY HUNTER

I followed Granger out the back and rode around to the new jailhouse. I was Tommy's hero now, I had saved his life, so he gladly agreed to tend my horse and keep him ready while I went in to collect my reward.

Bass's body had drawn a crowd to the saloon. Out in the road, they shot their guns into the air as newcomers asked who'd done it. A voice hollered, “Ask that gunslinger who rides for Durrance!”

The sheriff arrived shortly in bad temper, mouth tight as a sprung trap. He wasn't sorry Quinn was dead nor was he happy about what he would have to deal with. “A lot of them ol' boys out there are Bass clan first and Bass clan foremost, Watson. Most of 'em know you done this town a favor but that don't mean that they won't string you up. And all the rest is just a-rarin to help out for the pure fun and the justice.” He wouldn't advise me to loiter in this town, he said.

Informed I was only awaiting my reward, he asked me coldly how it felt to be a bounty hunter. When I reminded him I was his deputy, he wrenched my star off my new shirt, leaving a tear. “Not no more you ain't,” he said, as Durrance came through the door.

Durrance was anxious to inform me that the sheriff 's reward took care of his own obligation as a private citizen, while the sheriff said it sure looked to him like a gunslinging stranger had baited a local man into an altercation with intent to kill him in cold blood. I reminded them I had done just what they wanted so I sure hoped they would not try to back out of their obligation. I held the rancher's eye. “I sure would hate to tell the Bass clan, Will, about your private bounty on Quinn's head.”

Howls rose from without and a great banging on the door: the sheriff refused to lock me up for my own protection. “You better get goin while the gettin's good,” he said. I went to the window and looked out. “The gettin don't look so good to me,” I said. I entered an empty cell and slammed the door. Lying back on my bunk, hands behind my head, I suggested he do his bounden duty and send out for some drink and a bite of supper for his prisoner.

“Get the hell out of my cell! You're trespissin, layin in there like that! I ain't gettin my new jail burned down for no bounty hunter!”

“Arrest me for trespissin, then.”

He came up to the bars. “Who the hell are you, anyway? And don't give me no name that you can't prove: we got a telegraph.”

I told him my new name and lawful occupation: E. Jack Watson, farmer.

“Pretty handy with weapons for a goddamn farmer.” He shook his head while we listened to the yells and banging. “You seen that crowd out there. How come you didn't keep on riding, mister?”

“You fellers pay what I've got coming and I'll ride.”

Brooding about justice and injustice, the sheriff grunted low down in his chest like an old boar. “You might not have much use for your dirty money when that crowd catches you.” However, he went to fetch me my reward and I waved Durrance over to my bars. “I bet you hoped that crowd would have me hung by the time you got here, Will. Better luck next time.”

Durrance reached into his jacket, his brow all beetled up with honest worry over good money lying loose in a lynched man's pocket. “Jack, it ain't like you done this just for me—”

“You offered me blood money, Will. Want them to know?” I nodded toward the window. His fingers had emerged empty from his pockets but now they crept back in. Scowling, he forked over a small bag of gold coins, twenty dollars each.

The sheriff returned with the reward in hundred-dollar bills. He walked me to the jailhouse door, recommending that I leave at once. The Grangers were outside around the corner, tending my horse. They would empty their six-guns in the air when the door opened, to scatter the crowd and give me a head start. “Them citizens ain't lookin to get shot,” the sheriff said. “Not for Quinn Bass.”

These two seemed cheerful in their confidence that their cash would be retrieved from my remains. Swinging open the jailhouse door, Durrance wished me luck. “Same to you,” I said. I yanked him in front of me and poked my weapon hard into his back, trotting him over to the horses. The Grangers were already yipping, shooting into the air, and the groaning crowd was milling, stupid as spooked steers at the slaughterhouse gate. Durrance hollered, “Don't shoot, boys! It's me!” Right then, some fool opened fire and a bullet whined too close past my ear. I mounted quick, dragging Durrance up behind to cover my back.

Taking no chances, I rode Durrance to the river. He fell off, sore-assed and stiff, still belly-aching about his money: he claimed that my new Winchester was not part of the deal. Not wishing to risk my good fortune by being greedy, I tossed him the rifle. He didn't thank me, only whined about wild beasts. I scattered a few cartridges onto the ground and galloped to the ford. The night was dark, just a sliver of new moon, as I crossed over the Peace River into new country.

From the shack cluster at Alva, I crossed the broad Calusa on the cattle barge and rode down the south bank into Fort Myers, where I boarded my lame horse at the livery stable, bought a new set of clothes and boots (there were no stores south of here, only frontier outposts), and asked some questions about life on this far southwest coast. After a few days, one jump ahead of an inquiry from Arcadia, I sailed downriver to the Gulf of Mexico on the schooner
Falcon,
which rolled and pitched south past Cape Romaine to the Ten Thousand Islands.

My first impression of the great might of the sea dismayed me, the vastness of it and the unforgiving emptiness and the rough seas that threatened to engulf this craft and all its puking sinners, myself included. But eventually the wind moderated and I splashed my face and struck up acquaintance with the captain, William Collier, who straightened me out with a tin cupful of dark fiery Jamaica rum. Captain Bill imparted a few fundamentals of coastal piloting and entrusted me for a time with the ship's helm so that I might feel the workings of the deep.

South of Marco Island, the few small settlements lay hidden in the bays behind the barrier islands: the wall of green was as faceless as the sea. Yet the prospect of so much virgin coast awaiting man's dominion filled me with excitement, even hope. I was still a fugitive, ever farther from my family, but for the first time in my life, I had the capital to establish my own enterprise on my own land, which was here for the claiming. I would find good soil, get a first crop under way while I built a cabin, bring in pigs and chickens, send for Mandy and the children—that was all the plan I needed for a year or two, but all the while, I would look around for opportunity. This Everglades frontier was a huge wilderness to be tamed and harnessed. I had the strength and an ambition made more fierce by so much failure. It was up to me.

CHAPTER 4

TEN THOUSAND ISLANDS

Three miles inland from the open Gulf, between the Islands and the mainland, Chokoloskee Bay was a broad shallow flat almost nine miles long and up to two miles wide. At low tide, it was so shallow that herons walked like Jesus on the pewter shine a half mile from shore, and all around looked like the end of nowhere—mudbanks and islets gathered into walls of mangrove jungle, with strange stilt roots growing in salt water and leaves which stayed that leathery hard green all year around. For a man from the North, used to the hardwood seasons and their colors, this tide-flooded and inhospitable tangle that never changed was going to take a lot of getting used to.

That professor at last year's World Fair in Chicago who told the country it had no more frontiers had sure as hell never heard about the Everglades: in all south Florida, there was no road nor even a rough track, only faint Injun water trails across the swamps to the far hammocks. This southwest coast, called the Ten Thousand Islands, was like a giant jigsaw puzzle pulled apart, the pieces separated by wild rivers, lonesome bays, and estuaries where lost creeks and alligator sloughs, tobacco-colored from the tannin, continued westward through the mangrove islands to the Gulf as brackish tidal rivers swollen with rain and mud, carving broad channels.

Early in 1894, the
Falcon
set me on the dock at Everglade, a trading post on a tidal creek called Storter River. George Storter Junior ran the trading post and his brother ran its trading schooner. Captain Bembery Storter, who became my good friend, shipped farm produce, sugarcane and syrup, charcoal, otter furs, and alligator hides, bringing back trade goods and supplies for the three small settlements—Everglade, Half Way Creek, and Chokoloskee Island—that perched along the eastern shore of Chokoloskee Bay.

Smallwoods and McKinneys from Columbia County had joined the few families on Chokoloskee, a high Indian mound of 150 acres at the south end of the Bay. Both men farmed and set up trading posts, and C. G. McKinney was learning from a book how to pull teeth or babies, all depending. Both were smart self-educated men, among the few on this long coast who knew how to read. Smallwood had even poked around in the Greek literature, swapping books with an old French hermit down the coast named Chevelier, who had scraped acquaintance with every field of knowledge, said McKinney, except how to get on with other human beings.

I took some rough work cutting sugarcane for Storters, who had their plantation down the Bay at Half Way Creek (halfway between Everglade and Chokoloskee). Cutting cane was mean hard labor for drifters, drunks, and nigras, but I never was a man afraid of sweat, and any old job suited me fine while I figured out how a man might work this country. I saw straight off that these palmetto shack communities, backed up against dense mangrove, were no place for a wanted man without a boat who never knew when some lawman from the North might come here hunting him.

Mr. William Brown at Half Way Creek liked the way I went about my business. He accepted a down payment on a worn-out schooner, the
Veatlis,
and a Chokoloskee boy named Erskine Thompson signed on to teach me the sea rudiments. As soon as we got our stores aboard, we headed south into the Islands, cutting cordwood to sell down at Key West and shooting a few plume birds where we found them. It was Erskine who showed me the great bend of Chatham River which became my home.

In all of the Ten Thousand Islands, Chatham Bend was the largest Indian mound after Chokoloskee, forty acres of rich black soil disappearing under jungle because the squatter on there with his wife and daughter would not farm it; they were mostly plume bird hunters, living along on grits and mullet. Like more than one Island inhabitant, Will Raymond Esq. was a fugitive and killer, glowering from Wanted posters all the way from Tampa to Key West. He liked the Bend because it was surrounded by a million miles of mangrove, giving the lawmen no way to come at him except off the river.

The boy had heard about this mangy bastard and was scared to death. We drifted down around the Bend, keeping our distance. There was a loose palmetto shack on there, and smoke, but when I hailed, no answer came, only soft mullet slap and the whisper of the current, and a scratchy wisp of birdsong from the clearing. The boy slid the skiff along under the bank, put me ashore. I told him to row out beyond gunshot range but stay in sight as a warning to Will Raymond that there was a witness. Not till the skiff was safe away did I call out once or twice, then stick my head above the bank to have a look. Nothing moving, nothing in sight. I rose up slow, keeping my hands well out to the sides, and nervously wasted my best smile on a raggedy young girl who retreated back inside the rotted shack.

All this while, Will Raymond had me covered. I could feel the iron of his weapon and its hungry muzzle, and my heart felt naked and my chest flimsy and pale beneath my shirt, but I was up there in one piece with my revolver up my sleeve, smiling hard and looking all around to enjoy the view.

Hearing a hard and sudden cough like a choked dog, I turned to confront an ugly galoot who had stepped out from behind his shack. Unshaven, barefoot, in soiled rags and an old broken hat, he stunk like a dead animal on that river wind. Even after I presented my respects, his coon rifle remained trained on my stomach, his finger twitching on the trigger. I'd seen plenty of this scurvy breed in the backcountry, all the way from Oklahoma east and south, knife-mouthed piney-woods crackers, holloweyed under black hats, and lean-faced females with lank hair like horses and sour-smelling babes in long hard stringy arms. Men go crazy every little while and shoot somebody. Seems Will had done that more'n once in other parts, got the bad habit of it. With his red puffy eyes like sores, Will Raymond looked rotted out by drink but also steady as a stump—a very unsettling combination in a dangerous man.

The muzzle of a shooting iron at point-blank range looks like a black hole leading straight to Hell but I did my best to keep on smiling. Mr. Raymond, said I, I am here today with an interesting business proposition. Yessir, I said, you are looking at a man ready and willing to pay hard cash for the quit-claim to a likely farm on the high ground—this place, for instance. Two hundred dollars, for instance (a fair offer for squatter's rights in this cash-poor economy, Erskine had told me).

Will Raymond wore a wild unlimbered look and his manners were not good. He never so much as introduced me to his females, who kept popping their heads out of their hole like the prairie dogs back in Oklahoma. In fact he made no response at all except to cough and spit in my direction Whatever he dredged up from his racked lungs. However, that mention of cold cash had set him thinking. His squint narrowed. While estimating how much money might be removed from my dead body, he was considering that boy out on the river, who was doing his best to hold his skiff against the current. Will Raymond had reached a place in life where he had very little left to lose.

He coughed again, that same hard bark. “If you are lookin for a farm at the ass end of Hell, seventy mile by sea from the nearest market, and have a likin for the company of man-eatin miskeeters and nine-foot rattlers and river sharks and
panthers and crocky-diles and every kind of creepin varmint ever thunk up by the Lord to bedevil His sinners—well then, this looks like your kind of a place.”

“That's right, sir!” I sang out cheerily.

“No sir, it sure ain't, cause I am on here first. And next time, sir, you go to trespissin without my say-so, sir, I will blow your fuckin head off. Any questions?”

“Not a one,” said I in the same carefree tone. I signaled for my boat. While waiting, I ventured to look around a little more, thinking how much my Mandy might enjoy these two big red-blossomed poincianas. “Yessir, a fine day on the river. Makes a man feel good to be alive.”

He spat his phlegm again.“You got maybe ten more seconds to feel alive in, mister. After that you ain't goin to feel nothin.”

Under my coat, the .38 lay along my forearm, set to drop into my hand. To drill this polecat in his tracks would have been a mercy to everyone concerned, especially his poor drag-ass females. Instead I climbed into the skiff and headed downriver. What I needed more than anything right now was a reputation as an upright citizen, so I put aside my motto of “good riddance to bad rubbish” in favor of “every dog must have its day.” This dog had had his day at Chatham Bend and mine would come next or my name wasn't Jack Watson, which it wasn't.

Will Raymond observed our skiff until we passed behind the trees on the next bend. His figure stood there black and still as a cypress snag out in the swamp, his old Confederate long rifle on his shoulder like the scythe of Death. Out on the coast again, looking back, I noted with approval that the mouth of Chatham River, all broken up by mangrove clumps, would pass unseen by any vessel, even from a quarter mile offshore.

CAYO HUESO OR BONE KEY OR KEY WEST

At the end of that week, sailing to Key West, I had my first look at Lost Man's River, said to be the wild heart of this whole wilderness. In Shark River, farther south, huge dark mangroves rose to eighty and a hundred feet in an unbroken wall: the boy happened to know these were the largest in the world. From Shark River, the mangrove coast continued to Cape Sable, the long white beach where Juan Ponce de León and his conquistadors went ashore in heavy armor and clanked inland in wet and heavy heat to conquer the salt flats and marl scrub and brown brackish reach of a dead bay.

From Cape Sable our course led offshore along the western edge of great pale banks of sand, with turquoise sand channels and emerald keys on the port side and a thousand-mile blue reach of Gulf to starboard. Erskine pointed when he heard the puff of tarpon as one of these mighty silver fishes leapt clear of the sea: farther offshore, giant black manta rays leapt, too, crashing down in explosions of white water.

In late afternoon the spars of an armada of great ships rose slowly from the sunny mists in the southern distance. Cayo Hueso or Bone Key. Early in the nineteenth century, Bone Key, now called Key West, had been built up as a naval base to suppress piracy on the high seas, but these days Key West pirates lived on shore as ship's chandlers, salvagers, and lawyers.

On a southwest wind, the
Veatlis
passed the Northwest Light and tacked into the channel. Who would have imagined such a roadstead as the Key West Bight, so far from the mainland at the end of its long archipelago of small salt keys? Or so many masts, so many small craft, so much shout and bustle? New York merchantmen and Havana schooners mixed with old sailing craft from the Cayman Islands, fetching live green turtle to the water pens near Schooner Wharf for delivery to the turtle-canning factory down the shore, Erskine explained. Tacking and luffing, servicing the ships, were whole flotillas of “smackee” sloops with baggy Bahamian mainsails, dropping their canvas as they slipped up alongside—reef fishermen with live fish in the sloop's well, hawking snappers to the Key West Market and king mackerel to the Havana traders. The sponges drying in open yards ashore were shipped to New York on the Mallory Line, which supplied and victualed this city.

Having unloaded our cordwood cargo into horse-drawn carts backed down into the shallows, we went ashore. Key West is a port city, with eighteen thousand immigrants and refugees of every color—eighteen times as many human beings as could be found on the entire southwest coast, all the way north two hundred miles to Tampa Bay. The island is seven miles by three, and the town itself, adjoining the old fort, is built on natural lime-stone rock. The white shell streets are potholed, narrow, with broken sidewalks and stagnant rain puddles and small listless mosquitoes. Coco palms lean over the green-shuttered white houses in shady yards of bright flowers and tropical trees. Sweet-blossomed citrus, banyans, date palms, almonds and acacias, tamarind and sapodilla—so an old lady instructed me when I inquired about which trees might do well on a likely plantation farther north in Chatham River.

While in Key West, I paid a call on the Monroe County sheriff, Richard Knight, in regard to a certain notorious fugitive depicted on the Wanted notice in the post office. The murderer Will Raymond, I advised him, could be found right up the coast in Chatham River. The sheriff knew this very well and was sorry to be reminded of it. He sighed as he bit off his cigar. My report would oblige him to send out a posse when, like most lawmen, enjoying the modest graft of elected office, he much preferred to defer these thorny matters.

Taking the chair the sheriff had not offered, I said I sure hated to cause trouble for Mr. Raymond, but as a law-abiding citizen, I knew my duty. Looking up for the first time, Knight said, sardonic, “That mean you won't be needing the reward?”

Sheriff Knight and I understood each other right from the first, and our understanding was this: we did not like each other. But a few days later, a sheriff 's posse laid off the river mouth until three in the morning, then drifted upriver with the tide (as I'd advised them), and had four men ashore before they hollered to Will Raymond to come out with his hands up. Will yelled he'd be damned if he'd go peaceable, and whistled a bullet past their heads to prove it, but he was peaceable as he could be by the time the smoke cleared. They flung his carcass in the boat and offered his widow their regrets along with a kind invitation to accompany the deceased on a nice boat ride to Key West, and the widow said, “Why, thankee, boys, I don't mind if I do.”