Shadow Country

the walkway to the barge, where they drank up the last of his whiskey and made urgent love on the narrow cot, in an intoxicating mix of body smells, grain alcohol breath, and needy lust. By turns shy, rapt, omnipotent, he felt like a man lost and then returned among the living. He heard himself cry out that he loved her, which in that moment was true.

In the morning, yawning, she rolled languidly away from his attempt to take her in his arms, saying she must first go brush her teeth; she left him to doze, never to return. When he awakened, she was dressed and restless, making coffee. He must take her to Naples right away, she said, to meet with Owen and the lawyer.

“Today, you mean?” He could not accept the idea of losing her just when he’d found her. Yet he knew his panic was not reasonable and his shock not entirely honest; lying there before desire overtook him, he’d even wondered if an early parting with his old friend’s estranged wife might not be best.

“Are you sorry, Sarah? You regret what happened?”

“I’ll never regret it, sweetheart. It was always in our future and I always knew it. But I also know it’s all we’re going to get.” She touched his cheek. “I have to let you go while I still can.” To disguise her real upset, she parodied a country lyric: “Darlin’, ah swore ah wouldn’… nevuh be… tore up bah yoo.”

“Please, listen-”

She put her hand over his mouth. “Gonna miss me, sweetheart?” Her eyes misted. She said fiercely, “You’re a good man, don’t you know that? Think it’s easy to give you up, a man like you?”

“Can’t I come see you? We have to talk-” He was routed by her expression. His heart felt open and exposed as a shucked oyster on the half-shell, mantle curling at the first squirt of the lemon.

ARBIE COLLINS

Returning home one afternoon of spring, Lucius was met halfway along the walkway by the molasses reek of a cheap stogie. In the tattered hammock on the deck, a thin man in tractor cap and discolored army overcoat lay sifting pages, the bent cigar a-glower between his teeth. On the floor beside him sat a dog-eared satchel and a sagging carton of old papers. Removing the cigar, the man spat bits of tobacco, the better to recite from Lucius’s notes on Leslie Cox.

“ ‘… an old man known by some other name may still squint in the sun, and sniff, and revile his fate.’ Not bad! Same way I write,” Chicken Collins said, his very tone renouncing the Gator Hook derelict in favor of this jaunty new identity. He rested the notes on his belly. “Yep,” he said. “I heard Cox was seen down at Key West and another time in the river park there at Fort Myers. Then this Injun friend of mine who used to be a drunk up around Orlando told me that a feller of Cox’s description had been holed up for years out at the Hook. I was curious so I went out there to look, never made it back.” He resumed reading.

Lucius took the worn blue canvas chair. “And if you’d found him?”

Collins lowered the manuscript again. “I’d probably pretend I hadn’t. Make a list or something,” he added meanly.

“You’ve seen my list?”

“Rob Watson gave it to me.”

“I was told Rob never received it. Anyway, it was supposed to be a secret.”

“Only one who thought it was a secret was the damn fool who wrote those names down in the first place.” He winked at Lucius, blowing smoke.

“And you’re the one who showed it to Speck Daniels. That’s how he learned about it.”

Collins shrugged. One evening out at Gator Hook, noticing the name Crockett Daniels on the list, he’d called it to Speck’s attention. “Just for fun, y’know.”

“Speck think it was funny?”

“Nosir, he did not. Said you were lucky you never got your head blown off.”

“I’d like that list back, Mr. Collins.”

“It’s not yours. Property of the late Robert B. Watson, who left it to yours truly.” Rob Watson, he explained, had died the year before in the Young Men’s Christian Association in Orlando. He had left instructions for cremation, and the YMCA had shipped the remains, together with a few clothes and some papers, to his cousin Arbie. He pointed at himself. “Cousin Arbie, at your service.” Asked how the YMCA had known where to send it, Collins scowled at the pointlessness of such a question, and Lucius let it go. “Rob never married?” he inquired. “Never had children?”

“Nope,” said Collins, adding sourly, “Only mistake that feller never made.”

For his arrival in Caxambas, the erstwhile Chicken had perked up his worn amorphous clothes with a bright red rag around his throat; Lucius had to admire this flare of color, this small gallantry. Despite his long hair and scraggy beard, Arbie Collins reminded him of his Collins cousins-black hair, fair skin, slight, wiry, and volatile. “Look,” he said, “are we related in some way?”

“By marriage, I reckon. I’m kin to Rob on his Collins side.” Raising the manuscript, he resumed his careless reading, dropping pages, creasing them, flicking ash on them, until finally Lucius stood up and crossed the deck and snapped his notes off the man’s stomach, exposing the navel hair that sprouted between slack button holes of a soiled thin shirt of discolored plaid.

“I’m fussy about strangers rooting through my notes without permission-”

“Found ’em inside,” Arbie explained cheerfully. “Look to me like notes for a damn whitewash. Notes on the Family Skeleton!-how’s that for a title?” He sat up with a grunt, swung his broken boots onto the deck, and dragged his big loose weary carton within Lucius’s reach. “Official Robert Watson archive,” he announced. “Better read it, son. Might learn something.”

Expecting no surprises, finding none, Lucius leafed politely through the carton. Dog-eared folders full of yellowed clippings mixed with scrawled notes copied from magazines and books-sensational exposйs, inventions, lies, and brimstone editorials from the tabloids, dating all the way back to newspaper reports from October 1910- the usual “Bloody Watson” trash, of far less interest than the provenance of this collection.

Anticipating questions, Collins related how he’d helped Cousin Rob Watson sell his father’s schooner and escape on a freighter out of Key West after Watson’s murders back in 1901; he was the only relative, he said, with whom the grateful Rob had stayed in touch throughout his life.

“Alleged murders. Nobody was ever charged, far less convicted.”

“Never charged?!” Collins winged his cigar butt at a swallow coursing the salt grass for mosquitoes. “Is that all that matters to L. Watson Fucking Collins, Ph.D.?!” The man’s dark eyes glowed in repressed fury.

Lucius persisted. “Did Rob tell you what actually happened that day?”

“Of course. I know the whole damned story.”

“Tell me,” Lucius said, after a moment’s hesitation which the other noticed.

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.” Arbie shifted, irritable. “That was kind of long ago.”

Lucius set the urn on a white cloth on the small table inside, placing beside it a small pot of red geraniums grown on his cabin roof. He poured two whiskeys and they drank in silence, considering the writhings of the urn in the play of light and water from the creek. That this garish canister enclosed all that was left of handsome Rob filled Lucius with sadness. The family would have to be notified about his death but who would care?

“Rob came to find me a few years ago but I never saw him,” he muttered finally. “I haven’t laid eyes on my own brother since I was eleven.”

Collins picked up the urn and turned it in his hands. “Well, you might not care to lay eyes on him now ’cause he don’t look like much.” He shifted his hands to the top and bottom of the canister and shook it. “Hear him rattling in there? People talk about ashes but it’s mostly bits and pieces of brown bone, like busted dog biscuits.” To prove it, he shook the urn again.

“Don’t do that, dammit!” When Lucius took it and returned it to the table, Arbie Collins cackled. “He won’t mind,” he said. And Lucius said, “I mind. It’s disrespectful.”

In the next days, Arbie sorted his yellowed scraps. “I been updating Rob’s archives, Professor,” he might say, picking up one of Lucius’s pipes and pointing the pipestem at its owner before clearing his throat and quoting from