walkway to dry land. There he squatted on his hunkers on the track, arms loose across his knees. Asked if he had come alone, he nodded. He identified himself as Tommie Jimmie, spiritual leader of the Shark River Mikasuki.
Where the track entered the woods, in the night shadow of the trees, Lucius could barely make out an ancient truck. “You came halfway across the Glades in that old junker to deliver this-”
“Burial urn. White feller sent it. Seen your notice in the paper about Bloody Watson.”
“Mr. E. J. Watson? Planter Watson? That what you meant to say?”
“Okay by me.” The big man shrugged. “Indin people down around Shark River, they always thought a lot of Mister Ed. Give ’em coffee, y’know, somethin to eat, when they come up along the rivers. Good moonshine, too. Killed some white folks and some black ones, what we heard, but he never killed no red ones, not so’s you’d notice.”
Lucius had to laugh, which hurt his head. Feeling stupid clutching the gun, he pointed its barrels at the ground. “This white feller,” he said. “What’s his name?”
“Went by the name of Collins when he first showed up couple years back. Course that don’t mean nothin. Them people out at Gator Hook don’t hold so much with rightful names. They call him Chicken on account of he’s so scrawny.”
“So Chicken said, ‘See that Lucius Watson gets this burial urn on the stroke of midnight.’ ”
The Indian nodded. “Stroke of midnight,” he assented slyly. “Them was his very words.”
The urn was a cheap one, ornamented with rude brassy angels. When Lucius stooped to pick it up, the sudden motion smote his temples. “Dammit! You come sneaking in here in the middle of the night-”
“Long way from Shark River.” Tommie Jimmie yawned. “Guess I’ll be gettin along.” Black eyes fastened on the gun, he made a move to rise, thought better of it. “Oh Lord,” Lucius said. He broke the gun and ejected the shells, which he stuffed into his pocket. “Who’s
“Down sick. Feller name of Mud come by my camp, told me Chicken wanted to see me cause I had a truck. Claimed Chicken been rottin in his bedroll goin on three days. So I went over there and Chicken told me where you was livin at. Said, ‘This here urn belongs to Lucius Watson, cause they’s bones in there that used to be his brother.’ ”
Lucius sank to his knees in the white sand, laying the shotgun on the grass. He lifted the urn and turned it carefully in both hands as the tears came. To clear his head, he took deep breaths of the night air with its heavy bog smell of low tide. He set the urn down again and used his sleeve to wipe his eyes. Whoever he was, this Chicken Collins must know what had happened to Rob Watson, being custodian of his remains before his siblings even knew that Rob was dead.
Tommie Jimmie rose, easy as smoke. “Gator Hook,” he said, and went away down the white road. At the wood edge, he looked back but did not wave. Then he vanished into the dark wall, leaving the white man alone with the brass urn under the dying moon.
IN THE BACKCOUNTRY
Perhaps a month after Tommie Jimmie’s visit, Lucius drove his Model T onto the new Tampa-Miami Trail, which forged east across empty savanna and the strands of giant cypress to the vast shallow marshes that the Indians knew as Pa-hay-okee, Grassy Waters. In the Seminole Wars, the Mikasuki had crossed these marshes to isolated hardwood hammocks where tropical forest hid their palm-thatch villages and gardens from the soldiers. Only in this last decade had the sparkling expanses been torn and muddied by steam shovels and drag lines, until wild human inhabitants, like its bears and panthers, could scarcely be imagined anymore. Yet the hidden dangers that had sapped the will of the U.S. Army were still present, Lucius thought with satisfaction, the tall scythes of toothed sawgrass, the quicksand and muck pools and solution holes in the jagged limestone of the ancient sea floor concealed beneath the silt that had torn the soldier boots to pieces: the biting swarms, the leeches and squat moccasins, opening white mouths like deathly blossoms, the coral snakes, the Florida diamondbacks, greatest of all rattlesnakes, whispering across the dry leaves on the hammocks.
Though the new road was rough, the stately pace of his old “T” putt-putting along permitted a calm appreciation of the morning. In the fiery sunrise, strings of white ibis flapped and sailed toward hidden destinations. In hawking course over the savanna flew a swallow-tailed kite that in recent days had descended from the towering Gulf skies at the north end of its migration from the Amazon. In time the Trail crossed the shady head-waters of Turner River, where in boyhood Lucius and the Storter boys came hunting, working upstream in a canoe from the salt mangrove coast of Chokoloskee Bay to the freshwater grasslands.
Beyond the trees at Turner River, the glittering expanse spread away forever. In the distance, isolated hardwood hammocks, shaped like tears by the remorseless southward flow, sailed ever north against the sky like a green armada. The hammocks parted the broad watershed that the Indians knew as River Long or Hatchee Chok-ti, transcribed by early white men as “Shark River,” which in other days had betrayed no sign of man except dim shadow paths in the floating vegetation made by narrow dugouts. Only in recent years had the Shark River Mikasuki, drifting north, erected thatched
At the Monroe Station rescue post for pioneer motorists, Lucius turned south then east again on an abandoned byway pocked by limestone potholes and marl pools; the road was all but hidden in hot crowding brush that raked and screeched at the old Ford’s sides as it lurched along. Farther on, the track was flooded by clear water, and sprinklings of sun-tipped minnows shot back and forth between the silvers of pond cypress swamp to northward and the warm gold of the marshlands to the south. This track had been cut by the Chevelier Development Corporation, so named because its destination, never to be reached, was Chevelier Bay in the Lost Man’s River region in the intoxicated days of the Florida land boom; Lost Man’s Beach had been envisioned as the new “Gulf Coast Miami.” The Depression had deflated the boom utterly, and the Chevelier Road, still ten miles short of its destination, was abandoned to this wooded swampland.
On a pine ridge along this road was Gator Hook, a shack community where the vacated sheds and decrepit dwellings of the road construction crews had been usurped by fugitives and drifters, also gator poachers, moonshiners, and retired whores, in a raffish society often drunk on its own moonshine before noon. Cut off from the rest of Monroe County by hundreds of square miles of roadless Glades, the Hook lay beyond all sane administration, to judge from the fact that the Monroe County sheriff had never set boot in this isolated and unregenerate outpost of his jurisdiction.
Lucius Watson had heard stories of a drifter at the Hook so obsessed with the tale of Leslie Cox and E. J. Watson as to stir speculation that he might be Cox himself. Many still believed that dreaded killer had made his way to the wild Mikasuki, who would shelter a white fugitive as in the past they had absorbed runaway slaves. With his high cheekbones and straight black hair, Cox might have passed for a breed Indian, remaining unrecognized year after year, before drifting to this backwater at Gator Hook. However, the whole story seemed so unlikely that Lucius Watson had never been inspired to go find out.
By mid-morning the sun had clouded over, casting a pall of gloom over the swamp. His sunrise mood evaporated with the dew, giving way to restlessness, disquiet. All his life, Lucius’s moods had been prey to shifts of light, and now a leaden melancholy dragged at his spirits. In forcing his way into this lawless country, he seemed to push at a mighty spring which would hurl him backwards at the first faltering of his resolve.
Gradually the clear water withdrew and the track ascended onto a low rise where blurred paths wandered into thornbush and palmetto. The red rust of a tin roof showed through the shrouds of graybeard lichen; in the roadside ditch, bald tires languished. Strewn through the catclaw and liana lay rain-rotted cartons, bedsprings, gimcrack objects in bad chemical colors, bottles and tin cans. At a road bend, in an informal dump, four men playing cards at a sawhorse table turned to watch him pass, but no hand rose to return the stranger’s wave. None of the four reminded him of Cox, though of course he might not have recognized the man, having last laid eyes on him in September of 1910, more than fifteen years before. He retained only a dim memory of that husky, sullen figure on the bank at Chatham Bend, standing apart from the small knot of waving folks whom he was to murder scarcely a fortnight later. However, Cox would not have lost those small ears set tight to his head, as in minks and otters, nor
