At the Gasparilla, Lucius went directly to the Swashbuckler Bar, which overlooked the river. Bony hind end hitched to the farthest stool toward the window, the resurrected Rob had apparently provoked the bartender, who was banging bottles to let off steam while he reorganized the shelf behind him. Other than these two antagonists, the place was empty.
To give his feral brother room, Lucius sat down several stools away, still sorting through the tumult in his breast aroused by Nell, letting the charcoal fume and heat of a stiff bourbon well up through his sinuses into his brain,
“The Watson brothers,” Rob muttered finally, shaking his head at the sheer folly of it all. Lucius recognized the pallid sweaty glaze of that late stage of inebriation after which his brother managed to go right on drinking without seeming drunker. Eventually he might sag down for good but he would not stagger.
“Listen, Arb-”
“Robert is the name. Robert B. Watson, at your service.” He lifted his glass to the other image in the bar mirror. When Lucius asked Rob why he had changed his name. Rob said he’d taken his mother’s name because he no longer wished to be a Watson. Talking out of the side of his mouth, still facing the bar mirror, he had yet to look his brother in the eye. “I’ve written down that Tucker stuff for your Watson whitewash,” he said. “Anything else you want to know?”
“Yes. Who’s that in the urn?” He grinned. “Just dog biscuits?”
Rob did not grin back. Turning his glass to the river light, inspecting the gleaming amber in the ice, he said, “Last time I looked, it was Edgar ‘Bloody’ Watson.”
On his way through Fort Myers in the early twenties, heading south to Lost Man’s in search of Lucius, Rob had visited the cemetery on a night of drink with a plan to piss upon his father’s grave. At the scene, however, this gesture seemed inadequate. With a spade from the caretaker’s shed, starting at the head end, he chipped down through the limestone clay and punched through the lid of the rotted coffin. His revised plan was theft of his parent’s skull for use or perhaps sale as a souvenir but the grisly effort required in separating the brown bullet-broken skull from the tough spine had sobered and exhausted him and his palms were badly blistered. However, he persevered.
Lucius jolted down his drink. “Is any of this true? Your father?” He was horrified. He still hoped Rob was joking.
“My ever-loving daddy. Did my heart good.”
“You beheaded your father but you didn’t piss on him.”
Rob shook his head, disappointed in himself.
Filling the hole, mounding the grave, he returned the spade to the caretaker’s shed, where he wrapped his prize in a piece of burlap. Later that day, he bribed a funeral parlor handyman to smash it into manageable pieces and install it in that inexpensive Greek-type urn. “As the rightful owner, I thought I got to do the smashing,” Rob said slyly, as his brother glared at him in the bar mirror. “Turned out I had to have a smasher’s license.”
“Your standard license only covered the looting and desecration.” Lucius spun toward him on his stool. “Look. This isn’t funny.”
Rob swiveled instantly to meet him. “Lad Exhumes Dad. You don’t think that’s funny?”
“I don’t think it’s true. You’d have to be crazy.”
“I guess I’m crazy, then,” Rob said.
The brothers measured each other.
“You really hated him that much?”
“Who hated first? It wasn’t Sonborn.”
“He didn’t hate you at the end. In fact, he mentioned your nerve and skill, sailing his boat to Key West. Alone. At night. He said, ‘That boy is a real seaman, I’ll say that for him.’ ” Lucius watched Rob’s face. “Papa made terrible mistakes, I know, but he wanted to be a decent father.”
“He didn’t make it.” Rob threw his whiskey back and signaled rudely for another. The bartender refused him. “You was notified,” he growled, “before this other party come.” Told by Lucius that the other party would take responsibility, the man shrugged. “Just watch your mouth,” he advised Rob, who merely drummed his fingers on the bar, awaiting his new drink. “The Watson brothers,” he said again, sardonic. “Anything else you need to know?”
“Tell me where you’ve been.”
“Mostly at your place.” He glanced at Lucius, looked away again. “Then here in town. Nell Summerlin’s.”
“In your life, I mean. After you left Lost Man’s. 1901.”
“I know what year it was.” Rob recounted how he’d left Key West on a freighter and wandered the earth as a merchant seaman for nine years before taking work ashore. “Learned to drive, got good at it, got special jobs.” On a night job as a trucker hauling bootleg liquor during Prohibition, he got caught up in a shooting at a warehouse in which a guard was killed. Most of his life since, he said, had been spent in prison.
Lucius had suspected this-the dead hair, pallor, the quick eyes and sideways whispered speech. But seeing his sympathetic wince as just more skepticism, Rob instantly broke off his account. “You wanted my story, bud,” he muttered. “That’s what you got. Take it or leave it or shove it up your ass.”
Those wild sharp eyes had suddenly gone shiny. On impulse, Lucius took him by the shoulders and, as Rob stiffened, gave him a quick brotherly hug. Rob’s heart was beating in his scrawny chest like the heart of a stunned bird felled by its own reflection in the window. Lucius took the stool beside him, saying brusquely, “All right. And Gator Hook?”
“Heard about it from a feller in the pen, friend of Crockett Daniels. Made my way out there after I missed you at Lost Man’s River. Very good place to lie low if you don’t mind low company.”
“So you’re a fugitive.”
“R. B. Watson is the fugitive. I’m R. B. Collins, remember?”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this in the first place?”
“Because if you knew and you failed to turn me in, you’d be aiding and abetting a known criminal. You’d wind up in prison. Anything else?”
“The Tuckers. Did he do it? Just tell me yes or no.”
Rob pressed his cold glass to the deep furrows parting his brows. “No yes-or-no,” he said after a while.” It’s complicated. You’d better read what I wrote.”
“All right. Where is it?”
“It’s up in my room,” Rob said, sullen again. He was very drunk.
“Who’s paying for your room here? Nell?” That was the bourbon talking. His brother ignored him.