Anyway, Mrs. Langford comforted poor Faith about this Indian in the high silk hat, saying, “No, child, that is Mr. Conapatchie, he’s not here to kill little girls but only to enjoy an ice cream soda.” And Billie Conapatchie hiked up that long skirt to seat himself more comfortably, I guess, and he didn’t have on a single stitch beneath! Sat down and dropped the skirt over the stool and picked his ear while waiting to be served!

A few years later, Mama sent me to apologize to Mrs. Langford for picking a beautiful rose which grew out through her fence onto public property, and Miss Carrie invited me inside for a cookie. She was gracious and well-mannered, beautiful, everyone loved her. Soft brown hair and rose complexion—oh, a lovely person, and a good, good woman. We became fast friends, and that friendship has lasted all our lives.

Since her menfolk would never talk about Mr. Watson, Miss Carrie had no clear opinion about his guilt or innocence, she only knew that she missed her “Papa” dreadfully, and was very confused and upset about what her own feelings and position ought to be. After his death, it just seemed best to hush up and go along with the men’s silence. But Lucius felt no such obligation, and poor Miss Carrie became mortally upset when her younger brother became estranged from the family. She admired his loyalty towards his father, but she also felt that his refusal to be silent was a lot easier for a footloose brother who could leave Fort Myers—and go to college, go to war, and finally disappear in the Ten Thousand Islands—than for her and Eddie, married with small children, who had to stay home and suffer the stares and whispers.

Poor Lucius Watson could never settle down for long—a “lost soul,” as his sister often called him. Eventually, he borrowed from Mr. Langford’s bank to go to college. There he studied Southern history and wrote his thesis on the history of the Everglades and southwest Florida. For fear people might laugh at him, he told no one about it except nosy Lucy, declaring that she was the only one who would ever take him seriously as a historian!

Having been born the year Lucius’s mother died, Miss Dyer was now sweet sixteen—which was when most girls married, back in those days! Lucius was in his late twenties then, still modest and handsome, with that natural ease in his own body. One would look up to find him watching from nearby, head slightly averted in that wary and quizzical way that was so dear to me. That shy bent smile (which came straight from his mother, according to Miss Carrie) was his only greeting. He would leave in the same way, slipping away without a word, leaving no trace. On the rare occasions he lingered long enough to hold a conversation, he would lightly flex fingers and knees, keeping them limber, as if at any moment he might be called upon to spring to a high perch or limb or fly away.

During World War I, only months before receiving his degree from the university, Lucius returned home in profound melancholia. As usual, he kept silent about his darkness, and soon he was drinking so relentlessly that his family more or less gave up on him. The one person he saw regularly was Lucy Dyer, who was always ready to walk with him and listen, too, on those rare occasions when he felt like talking.

This young hussy would shamelessly recount her fond memories of his father in order to win the favor of the grieving son. Thus she became his confidante and friend. She loved him dearly—so dearly that within that year, they committed “mortal sin” together. How immortal—how amazing and mysterious!—it seemed! The fond and foolish thing was overjoyed, knowing they would soon marry and have children (and live happily ever after!). She did not notice that her somber swain had lain beside her as if dead, utterly incapable of speech. And when finally he croaked a few poor words, it was not of love but only of the dishonor he had brought upon them both.

Alas, their love had only deepened the despair of Lucius Watson. Not until she pled for an explanation did her true love confess that he passed most of his days in darkness in which even the red rose and blue sky withdrew their colors and the air turned ashy, filled with fire smudge and hellish vapors. At those times he could scarcely get his breath, let alone remember joy and beauty, or maintain a thought, or rest in sleep. Though he never mentioned suicide, and assured her he was fine, he seemed to be drifting ever faster toward some fatal act. At these times he drove away his shy new lover, afraid she might be drawn down with him into that “undiscovered country,” as he called it.

But we are together, she would cry. I am your lover!

One day in 1917, not telling anyone, not even lovelorn Lucy (who was mortally wounded, sobbing inconsolably, on the point of hurling herself into the river etc. etc.), Lucius joined the Navy and went off to the Great War and was gone for well over a year. When he finally came home, he seemed almost sheepish that he had survived, and his drinking was worse than ever. Asked what the matter was, he muttered cynically, A man can’t even go and die for his own country anymore! In another person, this might have been self-drama, but in Lucius, that dark laconic irony—so like his father’s, though it never became cruel—masked a deeply pessimistic spirit.

By now Lucius was twenty-nine years old and his life was wandering away from him. He had some education, yes (and his history of southwest Florida, still half written), but in his opinion, he had no real profession and no prospects. Even worse—as his family would ceaselessly point out—he had no ambition. “Stop this drinking, go find yourself a job, get married, go to church, get on with life!” That’s their life they are talking about, he told young Lucy, but it isn’t mine.

Lucius had always been skillful with his hands, and very competent as a commercial fisherman. In 1919, fishing was poor on this part of the coast—at least that was his excuse—and late in the year, without warning his Lucy, he left Fort Myers and returned to the Ten Thousand Islands—the last place on earth one would imagine that a son of the late Mr. Watson would care to go. His sudden departure alarmed his family and broke his Lucy’s heart. When he returned the following year for Walter Langford’s funeral, he discovered that his faithful Miss L had succumbed during his absence to the adoring blandishments of Mr. Summerlin, an older man with a good generous heart as well as a secure place in our society. She had done this—oh Lucius!—because once again our hero had abandoned her without a word and never written even once to say he loved her, until finally his own sister urged the girl to forget this distracted and recalcitrant young man who could only be counted upon to hurt his dear ones.

Poor dear Carrie, who worried so about her baby brother, invited young Mrs. Summerlin to tea on the terrace of the Royal Palm Yacht Club. There his womenfolk agreed that their sweet Lucius was still haunted by his father, and also by the lost home in the Islands, the only place he could remember being happy.

Poor Lucius looked so scruffy at Mr. Langford’s funeral—the long wrists in the old dark Sunday suit, always too small for him, the fisherman’s weather lines and lumpy hands. What a shame it was, his sister said, that such a sensitive and educated person had lost himself among rough, uneducated people who had killed his father and might do as much for him! He had banished himself, condemned himself, to exile in that lonely wilderness, and for what? for what?

One day a young woman who identified herself as Lucius’s half sister came all the way north from Caxambas to seek Carrie’s help in persuading “their” brother to leave the Islands for good. This Miss Pearl Watson (Pearl Jenkins, Carrie calls her) also talked with Lucy Summerlin, who joined her plea to theirs. For such a gentle and obliging person, Lucius Watson can be astonishingly stubborn, and on the question of leaving the Islands, he would only say that the Islands were his home! It soon became plain to Lucy Summerlin that he had changed entirely—not only his closed, remote expression but that coarsening of the face and hands as well as clothes and speech, and an ingrained odor of whiskey and tobacco.

Like Carrie Langford, Lucy was distressed that a man of such intelligence and promise had thrown himself away among those people, but he only said, “ ‘Those people’ take me as I am.” “So do we!” she cried. “We!” he exclaimed, waving her away. His thought was never completed, but plainly he meant that in their hearts, his brother and sister and their families—all the “good families” of Fort Myers—had dismissed Lucius Watson as a hopeless failure.

In consequence, Lucy’s marriage to Mr. Summerlin was seen by Lucius as clear proof that his dearest friend had dismissed him this same way, but of course it was only Lucius who discounted Lucius. What he saw reflected in the eyes of other people was only his poor opinion of himself.

Everything she’d written in her “Life of Lucius Watson”—the girlish exclamations, the old stories, the longing and sweet lies—was a cry of pain over a bitter loss of hope for which he himself had been responsible.

Lucius sat awhile, sorting himself out.

A faded envelope had fluttered from the journal, to lie as if awaiting him in the white dust. He picked it up. The envelope had Rob’s name on it, and a letter from Rob’s brother Lucius was still inside.

Dear Rob,

I have entrusted this letter to Mrs. Lucy Summerlin, to hold for you in case you come back through Fort Myers. I am sorry I missed seeing you when you came to Lost Man’s. I certainly hope this finds you well.

The enclosed list of the so-called Watson Posse is all I have to show for life at present. Eddie and Carrie would certainly disapprove of it, and none of us are in touch with our father’s third family, who went away to north Florida and changed their names, so it looks like there’s no one left but you who might be interested. You or your son if you have one might know what to do with it. I put this list together for some reason, but I never had Papa’s code of Southern honor (or his guts either, if that’s what’s required to take a human life).

I think of you often, hoping you are safe somewhere, happy and well. Being cut off from our family, I miss you all the more. Is it true that you were searching for me? If so, that is a great relief, but it is probably just as well you didn’t find me. I might have been off on a drunk someplace, and anyway, I had to lay low for a while because of rumors about this list, which has made my neighbors leery of a useless fellow who couldn’t harm them even if he wanted to! (You’ll think I exaggerate my drama, and no doubt I do!)

If you come again (please do), Lee Harden and family will know where to find me. (Ask for Colonel—that’s what they call me these days around here.)

Hope you have more to show for life than I do.

Your loving brother, Lucius

P.S. Let’s try to meet before our lives get away from us entirely.

P.P.S. I believe this list is accurate to the last name.

Lucy had rejoined him. “He never came back,” she murmured. “He never got that letter.” Rob had turned up just that one time, when his freighter was in dry dock in Port Tampa, looking very pale for a man who lived at sea. He had written to Lucius, receiving no response, and was concerned about Lucius’s safety in the Islands. On his way south, he planned to stop off at Caxambas to talk with Pearl Watson, having learned that Pearl and Lucius stayed in touch.

“That made Carrie feel terrible, and me, too, I’m afraid. By then I was friends with Carrie, who had taken pity on me. Rob found out from Carrie that I might know where you were. He thought I might know something that the family didn’t.” Instead she had to confess to Rob that she had scarcely laid eyes on Lucius since his return from overseas, two years before. Very disturbed, Rob had exclaimed, “He was safer overseas than in the Islands, Miss, I will tell you that!”

“This was the first time you had met him?”

“Yes. I wrote you about our meeting, don’t you recall? And after Mr. Langford’s funeral, you gave me this letter.”

“And the list.”

“And the list,” she whispered.

“Which you misplaced. In the excitement of getting married, I believe your letter said. And you never found it.”

“I never lost it. Surely you knew that.” Her eyes had been cast down at her lap but now they rose to face him. “Please, Lucius. This inquisition is unworthy of you. With your romantic idea of family honor, we—your family—were already terrified you might do something rash down in those islands! That list was proof!”

“I’d already given up on rash behavior. Doesn’t this silly note to Rob make that quite clear?”

Lucy said she wouldn’t know, since she’d never felt she had the right to read his note. She took a deep breath, contemplating her own hands. “But I saw the list, saw what it was, and I simply could not bear so much responsibility. I went to Carrie. Poor Carrie became frightened, too, and showed the list to Eddie, telling him he must bring you back at once. But Eddie only shouted, ‘He won’t listen to me!’ He took the list to Sheriff Tippins, who would not return it, claiming he needed it for evidence—can you imagine? We had no idea that the Sheriff was still brooding over Mr. Watson’s death! And finally Eddie told me that before the Sheriff retired and moved over to Miami, that list was stolen. Nobody could imagine who might have wanted it!”

Lucius nodded. “So you are saying that you never read this letter?”

“I told a lie. Feel better? I told a white lie to spare Lucius Watson his absurd embarrassment over revealing an honest sadness and affection.” She took his hand. “You can still give it to him, Lucius. He’s come back. He phoned this morning, asking if you’d been in touch with me. He will be at the bar of your hotel this afternoon, in case you wish to see him.” And she walked away.

“Lucy? I’m sorry! Thank you!” he called after her, groaning when she did not turn. Despite all her innocence and flutter, Lucy had always known when not to turn. Once again, he had driven away the only person he had ever opened his heart to, the only one who knew who he was and loved him anyway.

But she returned, bringing a copy of his History. Watching him inscribe it—“For Dearest Miss L”—her eyes filled again. “The hole in my heart was so deep and dark!” She wept in bitterness, and when he reached to take her hand, she made a fist of it, withdrawing. “Everybody needs a place where they belong. Because of gossip”—here she glanced at him, without malevolence—“I lost what little place I had in this community. I have it back, thanks to that kind old man. And now I’m ‘that nice Miss Lucy Summerlin’! The Widow Summerlin!”

She laid her head ever so lightly on his shoulder. Overcome, he did not respond, and in a moment she sat straight again, neatening her cuffs. “I have often wondered if Lucius my darling really knew the first thing about love,” she murmured coolly.

He feared—indeed he had always feared—that what she’d said was true, that when it came to love, he was some sort of cripple. Hearing her speak those words aloud sent his mind spinning into that ever-waiting dread of lost love and life wasted, of a hollow old age and a long lonely death. Somewhere he had missed the point of life entirely.

Sensing the grief in him, she lowered her head to his shoulder again, hugging his arm. “Now never mind, dearest, all the girls adored you, one especially.” But instead of taking her into his arms, he stared at the old hands clenched on his knees. In our need, he thought, we may draw too close before we are really ready. I may do more harm.

He said dully, “And your brother?”

“And my brother.” She sat up, stung by the abrupt change of subject, and the makeshift question, as Lucius described her brother’s legal efforts to save the Watson Place. “Did he ever go back to Chatham Bend?”

“He remembers nothing about Chatham. To the best of my knowledge, he has never gone back. He has no interest in the past—too busy manipulatinging the future, I suppose. My brother is a very ambitious man.” She cocked her head to consider Lucius’s face, then gazed away across the white haze of the cemetery. “The truth is, I don’t know my brother,” she continued tersely. “We have nothing in common. We lost touch years ago. I think it’s safe to say that I don’t interest him. He lives over in Miami now, at least that’s the address that he uses. He’s always on his hunting circuit, like a wolf. He has never married. As for his romantic life, if he has any, I don’t care to think about it.”

“You dislike your brother. Our half brother.”

“Well, thank goodness I’m not your half sister!” Her laugh came as a small shriek, like a caught mouse.

“I love you, Lucy Summerlin,” he said, taking her hand. “I always have and always will.”

Lucy nodded, her hand cool and inert. “I understand you’ve been traveling with a young woman.”

“My research assistant.” Irrepressible Rob must have mentioned Sally Brown. “Anyway, she’s gone.”

“Let her stay! What difference does it make!” She turned away. Out of tact, he let go of her hand, which she raised up and inspected like some sort of curio. When he tried to return her journal, she waved him away. “It’s yours. It always was. You can burn it if you want.” She was in tears. “It’s this woman you should have traveled with, Lucius! All your life!”

Sudden and silent as an owl, age had her in its grasp. Before his eyes, age bled, wrinkled, and dried her. Lucy said, “Everyone loves Lucius. Is that enough for you? Don’t you ever miss the happy man you might have been?” She closed her eyes. “Forgive me.” She gathered up her things. “Life is full of joy and anguish, wouldn’t you agree?” Affecting irony and nonchalance, she was straining to subdue hysteria, and her gallantry was of no use to either of them.

“Please go,” she whispered, shutting her eyes tight, gathering herself in a hard knot against his going. He touched her shoulder, rose, and moved away.

At the great banyan, Lucius turned to wave. She had not stirred. Poised on the white gravestone as if just alighted, palpitating like a rare soft moth of faint dusty lavender, she appeared transparent. In the heat shimmer of late afternoon, Death shook her small shoulders, mocking grief and laughter.

Rob Watson

At the Gasparilla Inn, he went straight to the bar, a place of refracted light and glitter which overlooked the brown Calusa Hatchee. There he found the resurrected Rob with what was left of his hind end hitched to the farthest stool toward the river windows. He seemed to have had a dispute with the bartender, who was banging bottles and wiping the bar mirror. Other than these two, the place was empty.

To give his feral brother room, he sat down several stools away, and neither spoke until Lucius was served. After his upsetting day, Lucius eased his nerves with a double bourbon, gasping in relief as the charcoal essence warmed his sinuses and welled into his brain.

“The Watson brothers,” Rob muttered finally, shaking his head at the folly of it all.

“Having fun?”

“Good clean fun,” the old man said, “and a lot of it.” Dead mean drunk, he lifted his empty glass to toast their images. Lucius said, “Well, we have to start somewhere. Who’s that in the urn?” And his brother said, “His skull. Last time I looked, it was Edgar ‘Bloody’ Watson.”

Turning his glass to the light to inspect the amber shimmer in his ice cubes, Rob related how, in 1921, before leaving Fort Myers on his search for Lucius, he had visited the cemetery late at night with the excellent plan of pissing on his father’s grave. While performing this act, he wondered if there might not be a market for the head of such a famous desperado. He broke into a caretaker’s shed and borrowed a spade and chipped his way down through the limestone clay to the rotted coffin, from which he extracted the brown, bullet-broken skull, wrapping it in burlap from the toolshed. He filled and tamped the hole, returned the spade. The digging had sobered him somewhat, but he was too tired to carry out a revised plan to dig up the grave again and restore the skull. Next day, lacking any plan at all, he installed it in a Greek-type urn acquired at a funeral parlor whose proprietor had hammered the skull into small pieces.

Lucius jolted down his drink. “Is all this true? Your father?”

“My own father. Yep. That was the fun part,” Robert Watson said. “Did my heart good. Made a nice keepsake.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble,” Lucius said finally. “I don’t know that I believe this story.”

“You might as well believe it, son, because it’s true.” Talking out of the side of his mouth, facing the bar mirror, Rob had yet to look him in the eye.

At a loss—what could he say?—Lucius told him about the visit with their Collins cousins, describing what their father had looked like in the large oval photograph in the Collins house. Morose, Rob said, “I know what that maniac looked like.” Asked after another silence why he’d changed his name, Rob said he’d adopted his mother’s name because he no longer wished to be a Watson.

After fleeing to Key West in 1901, Rob had wandered the earth as a merchant seaman. Eventually, he had learned to drive an automobile, and in Prohibition, he had found a job running trucks for liquor dealers. Unfortunately he’d become involved in a warehouse robbery—“the driver,” he said—and because a guard was killed, he had done hard time in prison. He had been in and out of prison ever since. Though Lucius had suspected this, he squinted suspiciously at Rob, to warn him not to make up any stories, and after that Rob refused his questions—unwilling, he said, to discuss his life with some idiot who was calling him a liar. “You’ll see,” he added, ominous. “I’ve been writing down my side of your Watson story.”

When the old man threw his whiskey back and signaled rudely for another, the bartender refused him, telling him he’d already had too many. “I notified you,” the barman reminded him, “even before you was joined by this other party.” Told by Lucius that the other party would take responsibility, the barman shrugged. It was true that Rob had already been drunk when Lucius first came in, but now he was in that advanced phase in which he could keep drinking without seeming drunker, except for a subtle thickening of features and a sweaty glaze. Until that point when he fell down for good, he would not even stagger.

“The Professor.” Rob nodded, very, very weary. Closing the subject of Rob Watson, he asked to hear his colleague’s theory on the first man to shoot a bullet at their parent. “I mean, who was Bill House trying to cover for in that deposition?” Awaiting his drink, he drummed his fingers on the bar. “That day you came hunting me at Gator Hook? Well, after you left, Speck was raging around, and he started yelling how Henry Short was in that line of men. He said he fired.”

“In Jim Crow days? In Chokoloskee? I don’t think so!”

“No? I read that deposition, Professor. They all admitted shooting. So why would House try to cover up for someone, unless it was a black man?”

“I’m not sure House was covering for anybody.” Lucius shook his head. “I’ve heard that rumor about Henry Short. It might be a case of ‘pin it on the nigger,’ Arb.”

“Rob is the name. Robert Briggs Watson. Remember me?”

“Look, I knew Henry pretty well. All his life Henry paid attention to every step he made, like a man wading a slough full of alligators. Even if he was told to follow the House men to Smallwood’s landing, but he would never let himself be seen toting a gun. And even if he had a gun, he would never shoot it at a white man.”

Rob had already lost concentration. “The Watson brothers,” he said again, sardonic.

At the desk a message had come that Major Dyer might join them for supper on his way through town. They located Rob’s satchel and took it to the room. Lucius assured him that Dyer didn’t know a thing.

“Know a thing about what?” Rob’s snarl was paranoid. Then the fight went out of him. Astonished to see those sharp old eyes go soft and shiny, Lucius approached him gingerly and drew his brother’s scrawny frame into his arms. How thin Robert Briggs Watson was! There was nothing left of him.

They went downstairs and waited in the lobby. When Dyer did not appear, they left word at the desk and went into the restaurant without him.

The Gasparilla’s Swashbuckler Restaurant had a hearty buffet topped off by a huge blood-swollen roast beef. The meat’s custodian, in chef’s apron and high hat, was a big roly-poly black man with a swift red knife, a rich and rolling laugh, and a rollicking line that had the whole room smiling.

“Oh yeah! Yes sir! Yes indeedy! Tha’s it! Tha’s right! How you this evenin? Y’all had you a good visit? You doin all right? All right, my frien’! Bes’ have some o’ this good roast! Oh yeah! Yes sir! Tha’s it! Tha’s right! Red for the gentleman, pink for the lady? Bes’ have jus’ a li’l more, now, jes’ a li’l bit—all right? All right!”

“He don’t know when to quit,” Rob said too loudly, reaching out for his new whiskey, almost tipping her tray before the waitress could set down the amber glass. “He’s playing these old tourists like a school of catfish, snuffling through the mud after a bait!”

Spoiling for trouble, the old man was still sniping when Watson Dyer came up from behind and yanked out a chair and settled on it with a heavy grunt, without a greeting. He considered their liquor glasses a few moments before noting coldly that they had gone into the dining room without him. “You boys in a big rush or what?” His smile looked terrible. “I thought I was the busy feller around here!”

Under the scrutiny of those hard pale eyes, Lucius could no longer doubt that this man was the natural son of E. J. Watson. It was hard to think about him in that light, since they had nothing else in common, brotherly affection least of all. Until this year, his last experience of Wattie Dyer was on the dock at Chatham Bend in 1905. The mail boat captain had been young Dan House, a youth of his own age, and Dan’s mate was another boy, Gene Gandees, and both would be present, five years later, in the line of men who gunned his father down at Smallwood’s landing.

At the time he departed Chatham Bend, that hot and squalling Dyer child had not yet opened his eyes, which were never to gaze upon his natural father. According to Lucy, Watt was already a schoolboy by the time Fred Dyer spread the tale of his own cuckolding. The boy had challenged the story from the start, punching schoolmates bloody, but his fury only spread the rumor up and down the coast, until finally Watt turned his back upon his family, hitching an auto ride across the state on the new highway. Finding work in Miami, scrabbling to achieve an education, he freed himself from his own history as fiercely as a wolf gnawing its own paw to escape a trap.

Eventually people forgot about Watt Dyer, and forgot the rumors, all but those old-timers who had known Ed Watson. Years later, when Dyer’s law practice required visits to the Gulf coast, certain elders might squint as soon as they laid eyes on him. “Hell, don’t I know that feller?” In the time it took to wipe their glasses, someone else had whispered, “Ain’t that Watson’s boy?”

Dyer was wearing a new windbreaker with the letters—U.S.—embroidered on the breast pocket in red letters encircled by small blue stars.

“A Fed,” Rob Watson said. “I should have known it.”

“United Sugar.” Dyer yanked out a chair. “Those men are grateful to this great land of opportunity. They are proud of Old Glory, and they don’t mind showing it.”

“Not surprising,” Lucius observed, “considering the federal subsidies they rake in.” Years before, crossing Florida by way of the south shore of Okeechobee, he had beheld those endless canefields, draining their tons of nitrates and pesticides into the Everglades, and the huge sugar factories and thick high walls of oily smoke shrouding the flat horizons like dark fronts of oncoming evil weather. Recalling this, he was ever more uneasy about corporate sponsorship of his biography of E. J. Watson. Not that Papa would have minded—on the contrary! The ruined land south of the dykes, the poor poisoned small towns of the migrant workers—the price of progress!, Papa would have said.

Dyer was rummaging intently among his papers. Finally he looked up. “Lucius H. Watson shows up on the 1910 census as residing at Chatham Bend, the last resident Watson on the property—that could help. The least we should get is a life tenure on the place, like that old man who lives on Possum Key. That precedent is strong enough to tie this up in litigation and appeals almost forever—or long enough for our purposes, at least.”

“Our purposes?”

“Let’s see now.” The attorney peered into his briefcase, saying casually, “You planning another interview with Henry Short?”

“I might, if I knew where to find him. Why? What’s Henry got to do with it?”

“Bill House’s son would know his whereabouts.” Dyer scribbled the phone number of Andy House on the bottom corner of a legal pad, tore off the yellow scrap, and handed it to Lucius. “Let me know if you come up with something.” He resettled himself heavily in his seat, clearing the air for a shift of topic. “Naples,” he said. For tomorrow night’s meeting of the Historical Society, Lucius would be listed on the program as L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.

Lucius shook his head, annoyed. “That won’t work here on this coast. I told you that. Too many people know me. Anyway, I learned my lesson in Fort White.” He would notify the audience that the name on the program was a pen name.

“The speaker advertised—and paid—by the Society is Professor Collins. And the newspaper is covering Professor Collins’s lecture as an update on the Watson story. Also, your historian’s credentials will count heavily in our favor at next week’s meeting with the Park Service.” Dyer was straining to be heard over the rollick of the meat carver, his irritation rising with his voice. “So why insist—Jesus! What is that damn racket!” Nostrils flared, he yanked his chair around. “What is that! You think he’s drunk?” He glared. “He’s poking fun at the damn customers!”

“He’s poking fun!” Rob, who had been buttering a roll, parried and poked his knife toward the neighboring table. “Poke, poke,” he confided with a thrusting gesture, winking dirtily at the diners, who turned away. “Poke, poke,” he repeated. But already, his drunken grin was fading, replaced by that dangerous cast of eye which Lucius remembered all too well from the ugly episode in the Columbia County Courthouse. Before Lucius could stop him, Rob lurched to his feet and took off in the direction of the buffet. “Poking fun at paying customers stuffing their gullets?” he was calling. “No sir! Not in this man’s restaurant, he don’t! You men going to let that nigra get away with that? And still call yourselves men?”

By the time Lucius got there, the quick old man was well ahead of him in line. Grinning back at Lucius, he sang out to the other diners, “Oh Lordy Lordy, I surely do appreciate this kind of polite-type happy nigra, just overflowing with our grand ol’ Southren hospitality!”

An old lady turned to offer a sweet smile—Ain’t it the truth!—and Rob smiled back at her. “Just so long,” he told her beamishly, “as his dang ol’ nigger sweat don’t go to falling in our food.”

“Now that’s not nice!” When the woman hushed him, glancing fearfully at the carver, Rob leaned toward her, cupping his ear. “Eh?” he exclaimed. “Nigger, you say?” The woman was humiliated, furious. “He’s drunk!” she told her husband, whose sun-scabbed vacation pate only hunkered lower down between his shoulders.

Rob launched forth in a homely cracker twang for increased emphasis and audibility, though not so loud that the black man, at the head of the long line, could make it out over his own boisterous patter. “Yes sirree, we’ll set right down to a big plate of beef that’ll half-kill us! And not only that but a heapin helpin of fine interracial fellowshipin on the side! We’ll realize maybe for the first time in our whole lives how much we love these durn ol’ Neg-ros, and why in the heck can’t our durn kids see the Negro Problem the same way we do, and what a great country we have here in the good ol’ U.S. and A., where black folks can talk to white folks just so nice and friendly you’d almost think they was real people after all!”

The candidates for the roast beef, who had manfully resisted Lucius’s attempts to advance himself wrongfully in the line, realized at last that he was trying to reach Rob, and now made way for him only too gladly. He grasped the old man’s bony shoulder, shook him hard. “That’s enough,” he said. Ahead of them, the entire line looked stiff with shock. Even the carver had slowed his chanting and was looking around with the poised knife, sensing something disagreeable in the air.

“Irregardless of race, color, or creed!” Rob was struggling in Lucius’s grip, exalted, and again the old lady turned to him, but before she could chastise this terrible old man about the evils of race prejudice, he checked her with a wink and a glad smile. “Don’t y’all love pickaninnies, ma’am? So much cuter than them pasty ol’ white babies, what do you think?” The woman moaned, utterly routed.

And then, quite suddenly, Rob self-deflated, turning in upon himself, soul-poisoned, muttering.

Watson Dyer barged past Lucius, intent upon the carver. Though wary now, the black man was still chanting. “All right, sir! How you doin this fine evenin? Care to try our beautiful roas’ beef? All right? All right!” And the Major snapped, in a low hard voice accustomed to command, “Knock off this minstrel show, okay? Just carve that roast.”

The man stopped carving and stood absolutely still. In the silence, all over the room, people stopped eating, the tables wheeling in phalanxes of pale faces, the pink-and-white waitresses clustered in bouquets.

The carver maintained his broad smile. “Well, now! Ever’thing all right wit’ you, my friend? Y’all had you a nice day?” His eyes had tightened and his words conveyed a small hard irony, a note of warning. “What you might need is a cut of this fine beef!”

“Just carve,” the Major ordered calmly, with terrific anger, solid and efficient anger, smooth as polished stone.

The carver squinted at the point of his raised knife. “Yo, Nigger! You ain’t heard de man? Cut dat minstrel shit right now! You jus’ carve dat meat like you been told!” The carver honed his knife, snick-snick, snick-snick, appraising Dyer’s age and weight, the patriotic windbreaker, the cerulean hard eyes. Snick-snick, snick-snick. “I been where you been, man,” the carver muttered, in sure and sudden insight. “Oh, I been there, okay!”

“This what you risked your neck for, boy, over in Asia? To come home and play the fool for these old farts?”

“Oh my goodness!” The old fart behind the Major dropped a radish as her elderly husband harrumphed in scared protest. The line, milling and wheeling, clutched its plates. “For Christ’s sake, Dyer!” Lucius said, feeling old-fartish. The whole room hated them for spoiling their heartwarming fellowship with this delightful Negro personality, and their good supper, too. “Just carve, boy,” Dyer repeated softly. His smile was exhilarated and his tone pitying in the purity of his cruel and righteous anger.

The carver nodded. “Playin de fool, dass it.” The carver’s voice was intent now, in Dyer’s key. “Dass what you doin, Black Boy. Playin de fool, oh yes!” Motioning to the Major to come closer, he leaned forward with a great big grin to whisper his stentorian secret into Dyer’s ear. These two had a secret, from long, hard seasons of war. “Hard to put yo’ finger on de fool, now ain’t dat right?” But the real secret was the carving knife, which he slid across the board on the flat of its handle. His pebbly voice grated, “Back off, mothafuck. Get outta my face.” And his grin twitched as the bright tip pinked the Major’s belly through his shirt.

The astounded white man sprang back, jarring a table.

The meat carver stood straight again, sharpening his knife, snick-snick, snick-snick. He appeared to be quaking with mirth, as if this nice customer had just told him a great story. “Yassuh, tha’s right!” he cried, flashing his blade, dumping too much bloody meat on Dyer’s plate, then more, then more. “You had enough, my friend? Don’t go spillin dat blood gravy, now!” He laughed oddly in warning. “See what I’m tellin you? Lookit what you done to dat nice shirt!”

Still poised on the knife were three or four more hacked and heavy slices, which the man still threatened to heap upon the plate. The room was still but for the timid scrape of a shifted chair. But now the carver seemed transfixed by what he saw in the face of Watson Dyer, who had lifted the plate high like a pagan offering. The Major considered the red knife and its heaped meat, then raised his pale gaze to the bloodshot eyes in the carver’s shining face. Patient, he watched as the black man licked his lower lip. His fury weakened and the reality of his doomed rebellion overtook him and his gaze slid sideways. In that instant the meat heaped on the knife was transmuted from bloody threat into damning evidence. The carver waited passively for what was coming.

When the Major saw that the man was defeated, he took the knife out of his hand and dumped its load and scraped most of the slices off his plate onto the cutting board.

The black veteran of Asian combat found his voice and whispered at the white one. “Just doin my job, is all it is. Jus’ makin my feller Americans feel good, you know? The way they want it.”

Dyer handed back the knife and moved on past. Giving his plate to a waitress, he went to the hostess near the door. Soon a manager was summoned, and he hiked his bloodstained shirt to display his stomach. All looked at the carver as they spoke.

Observing this, the black man turned a furious gaze upon Rob Watson. He slapped some meat onto Rob’s plate—“Had enough now? You sure bout dat?”—then pointed the dripping knife straight at his eyes.

Then he waved Rob past, confronting Lucius. “Yes, sir! Them gentlemens with you?”

Lucius nodded. “They are my brothers. My half brothers.”

He detained Lucius for a moment, pressing the knife blade down hard on his plate, pinning the heavy china to the butcher board. “The three brothers!” He shook his head. “Your turn now. Got anything smart you want to say to a man of color?”

Lucius flushed. “I want to say I’m extremely sorry.”

“Sorry!” Wildly the carver slashed at the roast on the bloody board. “You sonsabitches has lost me my damn job!”

The Major brought his mood back to the table. Lucius was too roiled to speak, and only Dyer ate with any appetite. He stabbed at his roast beef, forked it away, as if oblivious of the small knife slit in his epidermis.

Their waitress wore a gold link chain on rhinestone glasses, but her ears stuck out through long and lank dark hair like a wild horse mane. With alarm she watched the Major slashing at his meat, the knife blade and fork tines grating angrily on the porcelain. “How you folks doin?” she ventured finally. “Everythin all right?”

“What does it look like?” Dyer snapped, not looking up. The woman fled. Rob was intent on the carver. Beckoned from his post by emissaries from Management, the big man howled in the agony of his plight and stabbed his knife into the carving board, upright and shivering, as the food line yawed and fell away from him in fright. He stripped off his bloody apron, balled it up, and hurled it across the steam tables of vegetables onto the soups and dressings on the salad bar, then banged out of the room through the pantry doors.

Rob muttered, “I’m going to tell ’em it was all my fault.”

“Save your breath,” Dyer advised him. As a decorated veteran, the man had received preferential hiring, the Major had learned from Management, which soon became aware, however, that this war hero was very angry and unstable. In fact, they had expressed gratitude to Major Dyer for reporting the “assault” and providing cause for getting rid of him which could not be challenged by the veterans’ organizations or the unions. Dyer had been offered free restaurant privileges for a five-year period, which would not, however, guarantee this place protection from a hefty lawsuit.

The Major forked another mouthful, chewed it up, processing his food while glancing through his papers. Officious, in a hurry now, he briefed them in a military manner. He had filed for an injunction against the burning of the house, pending a court decision on the validity of the Watson Claim. Two days hence, the judge would hold a public hearing on that claim in Homestead, without which no injunction could be granted. Once the injunction was in place, he was confident that it could be extended, several times if necessary, permitting them time to apply for permanent historical status for the house.

After attending the Professor’s talk at Naples tomorrow evening, Dyer would go to Homestead for the hearing. If all went well, he would return to Everglade for a meeting with “the Watson family” and the Park attorneys. Time was short. The Park might attempt to burn the house before that injunction could be granted, which was why he had stationed a caretaker on the place, to make sure that no such “errors” would occur. What he needed at once was full power of attorney, in case his authority should be challenged and he could not reach them.

The form Dyer pushed at him to sign made Lucius feel rushed and uneasy. “This gives you authority to make all legal decisions—take any of these steps—without consulting the family?”

“Well, that’s customary in these matters. You trust your attorney or you don’t. And things are moving fast,” he added, “so authority to act swiftly might be critical.” Moving smoothly past Lucius’s query, Dyer complained that he had received no response from Addison Burdett or from the sisters. Over the telephone, Mrs. Parker had told him that Addison was away, and that their sister would never cooperate. He frowned at Lucius, whom he seemed to hold responsible for this truancy, then rapped the power-of-attorney form and proffered his pen.

“My signature has to be notarized, isn’t that true?”

Dyer waved him on, impatient. “I’m a notary,” he said.

Something was wrong or missing here, but Lucius, rather tired and drunk, was still too unraveled by the cruel and senseless episode with the carver to think it through. To hell with it. Abruptly, he scrawled his signature.

“Oh boy,” Rob said.

“I’d like this power of attorney endorsed. And the petition documents on the claim should be signed by all the Watson heirs. No exceptions,” Dyer added, and he turned to Rob. “Not even you.” Extending his pen, he contemplated Rob’s shocked expression with real pleasure. “Well, Robert?” he said. “How about it?”

Rob was sure that Lucius had betrayed him. “I’m not signing a fucking thing,” he told Dyer hoarsely. He rose in a lurch of plates, overturning his water glass, but before he escaped, the Major grasped him by the shirt and yanked him forward over the table, his fork points inches from Rob’s face. “Sit down,” he ordered. And he took out yet another document and laid it beside Rob’s plate and rapped it, sharply, with his middle knuckle.

Rob glanced at the new document, dropped it back on the table. He gazed at Lucius, a heavy shadow on his face. Then he got up and headed for the door, where he paused briefly to remonstrate about the carver—in vain, it seemed, for after a noisy arm-waving dispute Rob left the room.

Dyer turned to his sour cream and baked potato, which he ate in silence. “How much do you know about him?” he asked finally. “Or should I say, How much do you want to know?”

Lucius struggled to compose himself. “I guess if I’d wanted to know more, I would have asked him.”

“But you suspected something, right?” Dyer ate again, then put his fork down to make a note while he finished his slow mouthful. “Why did you never tell me he was Robert Watson?”

“I didn’t know that when we spoke last—not that I would have told you anyway without his permission.”

“And you don’t know why he changed his name?”

“Hated his father. Ran away. Took his mother’s name.”

“He’s still running away.” Dyer handed him the prison record, which Lucius glanced at and tossed back at him. “Not interested in how I found this out?”

“Now that I know your cop mentality, I can guess. You lifted his fingerprints. Lake City. The Golden Dinner, right? You swiped his spoon.”

“Cheap Golden Dinner.” Dyer nodded. “Fork.”

“You check everybody’s prints? On general principle?”

“When it’s appropriate.” Dyer retrieved the sheet and returned it to his briefcase. “So you are saying you never knew that Robert Watson did a lot of time? Bootlegging during Prohibition? Driver in a warehouse robbery in which a guard was killed? Prison escape? Fugitive from justice almost twenty years?”

Lucius shook his head, disgusted. “Come on, Dyer! He was only the driver! And he’s an old man! You going to turn him in?”

Dyer processed another mouthful, talking through it. “As an attorney and friend of the court, and as a reserve officer in the United States Marines, I don’t really have much choice about it.” And he ate some more.

“You pledged allegiance to your flag and to the republic for which it stands, is that correct?”

“Don’t get snotty with me just because you’re drunk.” He pointed an accusing finger at Lucius’s whiskey. “It may surprise you that a great many of your fellow citizens are proud to pledge allegiance to our flag. And worship at church and revere our Constitution. And feel no need for intoxicating spirits.” He raised his arm and pointed his finger straight at Lucius’s eyes, and his own eyes sparkled with a cold blue fire. “Anyway, I sure do hate to hear any American talk sarcastically about our flag. I really hate that.”

Lucius was startled by Dyer’s face, which was actually swollen and clotted with a fervid hatred. He took a deep breath. “What are you saying, Dyer? If Rob signs the land claim petition and endorses your power of attorney, you’ll set aside your bounden duty to report him, that what you’re getting at? Let him go his way?”

“We’ll see.” The Major nodded as he scraped his plate and masticated his last forkful. “Tell me,” he said casually, “will he be at Naples?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no idea.” Dyer leaned back in his chair and suppressed a belch. “If I were you, I would see to it that he accompanies you to Naples.” He nodded, as if falling asleep. “And when you are sure about it, I’ll expect a call.” He wrote a number on his paper napkin. “No need to leave your name, just his location.” The Major squinted at him. “All you have to do is call and then you’re out of it.”

“All I have to do is call and then I’m out of it.” Lucius stood up. “God, what a prick you are.” And he reached down and seized Dyer’s pen and crisscrossed and blotted out his own signature on the power of attorney.

Major Dyer blew like a surfacing manatee as he arose. He wiped his mouth, drank down his water. For all his self-control, he was incensed, and his napkin was still clutched in his fist when he left the table. Hearing a frightened “Sir?” behind him, he hurled the balled napkin at the waitress.

Overtaking Lucius in the lobby, Dyer took hold of the back of his upper arm. “You’re drunk. You better think this over,” he growled, propelling Lucius forward ever so slightly, as if he meant to run him out the door. “For your brother’s sake, I mean.”

“How about you? Aren’t you a Watson? Shouldn’t you be signing your damned documents, too?”

Releasing him, Dyer said in a thick voice, “Let me tell you something. You don’t want me for an enemy.” His moon face looked swollen again, and the shivers appeared in the skin around the mouth. “I’ll bring fresh documents to Naples,” Dyer said, and kept on going.

Rob’s old-style satchel was wide open on the bed, and a revolver cartridge glinted on the floor. Before Lucius could react, an explosion shook the bathroom door. “Oh Christ, Rob!” he yelled, socked in the heart. But he heard no body slump and fall, only a curse, then a second shot, a third, then a wild yell. Scared voices and the screech of tires rose from outside and below as Lucius forced the door. At the window, Rob blew smoke from the revolver muzzle, gunslinger-style, then gave another rebel yell—ya-hee!—and broke up in hoots of drunken laughter.

Lucius leaned from the window in time to see a big black car moving out into the street with both rear tires punctured, dully thumpeting. It traveled some distance before coming to a stop at a red light, where silhouetted figures approached cautiously from the street shadows, black as ants in the pool of light. The stick figures bent to look in at the windows. Nobody got out. The green light came and then the red and then the green again.

In the parking lot, people had gathered. One man was shouting, pointing up at Lucius, who kept his head and leaned farther out the window. “What’s going on down there?” he yelled, before retreating.

Rob was drunkenly crowing in the bedroom, waving the gun around. “Ran that sonofabitch clean off the property! Had him skedaddling like a damn duck!” Lucius grabbed the gun and collared the old man and rushed him across the corridor to the fire stairs. He gave him the name of a local bar where he should wait until Lucius came to get him.

“How about my stuff?” Rob yelled, back up the stairwell.

Rob’s stuff consisted of a spare pair of cheap under shorts, spare socks, spare shirt, a few loose cartridges, a rusty razor, worn toothbrush but no paste, and an old sweater. Beneath these was an empty cartridge box, a large envelope of manuscript, and a folded yellowed packet, sadly stained—the list. Lucius glanced at it, took a deep breath, refolded it—there were soft torn slits where the dark creases had worn through—and tucked it into his breast pocket.

The big envelope held a handwritten manuscript with Lucius’s name scrawled on the outside—had Rob written his “story,” as he’d threatened? He hefted it, stood there a moment, put it back, then took the posse list out of his pocket and returned that, too. He had no right to these things, after all. He had no right to read that manuscript until Rob gave it to him of his own accord, wasn’t that true? He closed the satchel and went back to the window.

A rain which had threatened since late afternoon had begun softly, shining the pavements under the hard lights. The black car had not stirred and the crowd was larger, but whether Dyer was still inside the car—whether he had gotten out or had been removed from it—Lucius could not tell. On the fire stairs, he heard loud clangorous footsteps and the shouts of people bursting into corridors. In the parking lot, as he started his car, he heard the first siren of an ambulance.

Lucius set his glass on the dark wood of the booth and cupped it between his hands. “I hope you missed him, Rob.”

“I never shot at him. I shot his tires out, is all. Nailed both rear wheels on a moving vee-hickle with three damn rounds of a revolver!” He grinned at Lucius with wry pride. “Know who taught me? Seeing his boy shoot that way would have made ol’ Bloody proud!”

Lucius nodded but did not smile back. “Why should Dyer believe that you weren’t shooting at him?”

“Who gives a shit what he believes! It’s the damned truth!”

Lucius nodded. “That car’s still right there at the stoplight. As far as I know, nobody got out. That’s the damned truth, too.” They listened a moment to the sirens. “Let’s go,” he said, rising from the booth.

“You don’t believe me?”

“You think the law is going to accept that story? Slugs ricocheting all over the damn parking lot? Suppose one hit him?”

“Lucius?” The old man retreated deeper into the booth, as if to hide himself in the warm whiskey darkness. “It was kind of a joke,” he pleaded.

“Tell ’em it was a joke. See if they laugh.” Lucius tossed a few bills on the table. “You have a record, dammit! You’re a fugitive! At the very least they will rack your mean old ass for reckless endangerment or whatever they call it—firing a lethal weapon in a public place.”

He went outside. Rob darted out behind him. “Where we heading for? I’m not going to Chatham Bend with you, I’ll tell you that!”

Lucius unlocked the car door. “We’re going home.” He spoke without much heart. “They won’t come to Caxambas before morning.”

In the car, the old man was subdued. “I’m too damn old to be going back to prison, Lucius. And don’t start telling me I should have thought of that!”

“All right,” Lucius said. “I won’t.”

It was raining harder. For the next few miles, south on the Trail, they passed in silence through a wiper-washed phantasmagoria of strip development. Half-seen drowned buildings, lights, and signs streamed past in pools and glimmerings of gold-red light—as if they were newcomers to hell, thought Lucius, and were on their way in from the airport. In the tire slick and glare of the night highway, a dull dread had worn away the whiskey. He knew that Rob was doomed, and their flight useless.

Rob was banging on the outside of his door. “This here’s my stop,” he said. Lucius pulled in at the roadhouse, thinking the old man might need the toilet, but Rob was dragging his old satchel over the seat top. He clambered out and slammed the door. A warm waft of deep-fried foods carried across the rain. Rob spread his arms wide to the lights and rain as if summoning the night highways of America to take him back. “Don’t disappear, all right?” Lucius called. “You have a home now, Rob! You belong with your own family!”

“You’re my family?”

The old drifter bent to contemplate his brother, ignoring the rain that descended the deep furrows of his face. He, too, had sobered. “If they come hunting me, they’ll drag you into it. You get back to the hotel, work on your alibi, okay, Luke?” Rob was the only person who had ever used that name, which Lucius had not heard since early boyhood. “Luke!” he exclaimed, to conceal his emotion.

“All right,” Rob said, trying to smile. “I’ll be there tomorrow, Luke. I’ll be right there in the mob, throwing rotten eggs,” he yelled, voice rising in indignation. “Us folks won’t tolerate your damn whitewash of Ed Watson!”

“Keep an eye out, Rob. They might be looking for you.” He pointed at the satchel. “Maybe you better let me have that gun.”

Rob fished the revolver from his satchel, but after holding it a moment, he put it back. “I’d better hang on to this. Family heirloom, y’know,” he added cryptically, and Lucius shrugged, handing over the cartridge dropped in the hotel room. Rob tossed the cartridge on his palm. “That’s my lucky bullet. I always kept that one separate—you just never know!”

He took out the large envelope, considered it a moment, put that back, too. “Rob Watson’s memoirs. For your archives. You might not be ready for it yet.” He bent at the window to peer in. In the reflected light from the night neon, his cheeks and stubble glistened, and he coughed. “I’m not a killer, Luke. Just you remember that. No matter what.” Then his head was gone, and a moment later he was hurrying away across oily black mirrors of the parking lot in an old man’s stiff run toward the roadhouse. The door opened in a crack of light and wail of country music. Then the light closed again, and Rob Watson was gone.

Lucius drove south to Caxambas under a gibbous moon. Making his way out over the narrow dock toward the dark hulk of his home on the creek, he caught himself taking pains to approach quietly, as if stalking something not quite known. Down the still creek, a raccoon fishing mud clams at the water’s edge sat upright and peered around at the night silence. The atmosphere seemed strangely changed by the presence of that urn—that broken skull uprooted from its grave not once but twice.

Touching the latch, he was overcome by old and unnameable premonitions. He wrenched the door like one forcing himself to jump into cold water. Framed in the window, the urn awaited him, in silhouette against the silver creek. He paused in the doorway, in a tumult of unsorted feelings.

Papa had kept a “souvenir” human skull, of obscure provenance, which Edna had not permitted in the house. Papa fastened it to the boat shed wall as inspiration to the field hands, using rough charcoal to scrawl beneath it a “classical” inscription—“from the Greek,” he said.

I have been where you are now,
And you will be where I have gone.

Explaining that skull to the young children, enjoying their squeals of delighted fear, Papa would make “giant” noises by blowing across the mouth of his empty jug. One Sunday in the boat shed shade, gazing out over the river as the children fled toward the house, in flight from the twilight onset of mosquitoes, Papa’s mind had wandered from that hollow jug to ruminations on the great hollowness of man’s existence, and the horror of his isolation in the universe, alone with the knowledge of oncoming darkness—what he called “the Knowing.”

Alone with that knowing, Lucius went to the cupboard and poured himself a drink. This calmed him somewhat. He set the urn outside on deck, out of his sight. He murmured, “Rest now, Papa,” not certain what he meant, then returned inside and lay down wide-eyed on the moon-swept cot.