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 Leуn 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
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?”
