The hall was locked and the street was empty. Caves of gloom isolated the few streetlights which waned strangely in the rush and clacketing of the Gulf wind.
Across the street, headlights flicked on. Owen Harden rolled down the car window. Owen had joked a little with Speck’s crew on the way into the hall, he said, and loose-mouthed Mud Braman had let slip that they were on the lookout for a man they knew as Chicken Collins.
At their insistence, Lucius locked his car and went home with the Hardens, confiding Rob’s situation on the way. “I’m scared,” he said. Owen nodded. “Who knows where they took him?” he said. “Big swamp out there.” Squashed between them in the truck’s front seat, Sarah hushed her husband. “He’s probably fine,” she said, hugging Lucius’s arm. Even in Rob’s emergency, her scent and warmth stirred a twinge of his old longing: “Probably they just took him back to Gator Hook,” she said, to comfort him. However, she removed her arm when he mentioned having gone to visit Henry in the hospital with Bill House.
At their new cottage in north Naples, she sat him at the kitchen table and asked if he’d like coffee. “I bet he’d like whiskey a lot better,” her husband said, and Sarah said, “You gave that up along with Speck, remember? We don’t keep liquor in this house,” she notified their guest. She rose with a bored cold exhausted look. “I bet you two have lots to talk about,” she said, and left the room.
Owen Harden’s wheaten hair had iron wisps in it and the sun-squinted green eyes had crow’s-feet in the corners. He drummed his fingers, glanced at Lucius, looked away again. “Darn it now if my own wife ain’t put me in mind of some bush lightnin. Care to join me if I stumbled over some?”
“You know something? I bet I would.”
His host came back with blue tin cups and a brown jug. “I reckon Bill House would remember stuff about your daddy, cause he’s still goin on about Ed Watson. Never got over it, y’know.”
“Know why? Cause he feels guilty.” From the doorway, Sarah glared at their tin cups. “How come you would listen to a House about Henry Short? Owen’s family knew Henry a whole lot better than those flea-bitten Bay people who still sling it around about Bloody Watson. Always bragging on how they told Watson this and he said that. The little they know that’s not hand-me-down from their daddies comes straight out of the magazines and books, mostly made up.”
She accosted her husband, “Didn’t your daddy call Old Man House ‘the leader of the outlaws’?”
Owen said quietly, “The House boys thought what they done that day was right. They did not back away from it or talk around it, not like some.”
Disgusted, his wife went to bed. The two men drank awhile. Owen contemplated his guest with affection. “Ever think back on them good old times we had down Lost Man’s Beach?” Owen smiled.
Lucius nodded, half distracted by fear and worry. Too much was happening too fast. In his exhaustion, all his defenses had unraveled. On impulse, before going to bed, he asked Owen what the Hardens might have heard about “Watson Payday.”
Owen gazed straight ahead. When Lucius cleared his throat, to prod him, he gave a start, as if just awakened. “For a long time, we never paid no attention to them Payday stories.”
“But?”
Owen was silent, selecting the right words. “Maybe a year ago,” he resumed slowly, “the warden there at Duck Rock rookery had a young helper who treasure-hunted up and down the coast in his spare time. He was tryin out a early-type metal detector not on the market yet, might been the very first model. I seen it once. Hell of a lookin thing-heavy ol’ black box with tin earphones, wouldn’t hunt down but about two feet.”
“Owen-”
“So Henry Short got the loan of that black box to try her out on the Watson place where he reckoned the old-time Calusa or maybe the Frenchman or your daddy might have buried gold. Next day he shows up at Daddy Richard’s cabin on Wood Key-first visit in some years so Daddy knew it had to be something important. Henry was all fevered up and agitated, walking all around. Then suddenly he set down and shoved a big ol’ wide-top jar acrost the table. That jar was full of rusty belt buckles and metal buttons, a few spent bullets. Near the house and along the river, he said, all that black box could pick up was metal scrap and a few busted tools: this stuff in the jar come from shaller pits in that unfarmed northwest corner off the cane field.
“So Daddy Richard said, ‘Find anythin else?’ ‘Bones,’ Henry said. ‘Well hell,’ said Daddy. ‘Ed had cows on there and pigs, even a big old horse, so bones ain’t nothin.’ ‘Skulls,’ whispers Henry. ‘And three of them four skulls had holes in back that looked like they was made by bullets and all had a lead slug layin in amongst the bones and one had three.’
“Course my folks was still resistin Henry’s story. Daddy got stubborn, argued back and forth, kept mentioning them livestock and them old-time Indins until Henry couldn’t handle it no more, he was just too fevered. Finally he said, ‘Mr. Richard, there ain’t no mistakin a human skull for horse or hog. Anyways, your domestic animals don’t generally wear belt buckles and buttons and only very few will tote a pocket knife.’
“Richard Harden lit his pipe, took a few puffs to settle down. That was the first time and the only time that Henry Short ever talked back smart to him that way. Henry looked kind of startled, too, but did not back down. One by one, he was droppin them pathetical ol’ scraps back in that jar. Then he said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Richard, I spoke out of my turn, but you know where these four fellers come from as good as I do.’
“So Daddy Richard went upriver with him, seen for himself them molderin green bones in the dirt and leaves. Daddy Richard warned Henry that Lucius Watson might not know about them bones and even if he did, he would not want ’em dug up. Said, ‘Henry, let’s just you’n me fill in these holes, scatter some brush, never speak no more about it.’ ”
Owen looked up. “Henry went along with that, stuck by it, too. I believe I am the only one my daddy ever told and I never spoke of it except right now and never will.” He watched Lucius, concerned. “I sure hope that’s the kind of truth you wanted. I’m sure sorry.”
“You never saw those graves yourself.”
“Hunt through all that thorn that’s growed up now? With all them bad snakes that’s back in there?”
Lucius emptied his glass. “It’s quite a story,” he decided, “but without evidence, it’s just another story like the rest.”
Owen bridled. “Who you lookin to call a liar, Colonel? Me or Henry?” He jumped up and headed toward the back.
“Oh no, sorry, I don’t mean that, Owen!” Lucius called after him. “Somebody killed somebody, all right,” he concluded stupidly, as despair choked off his voice. Then Owen was back. On the table he placed a shoe box bound in tarred hemp line. He said, “We been keepin this for Henry.” Slowly Lucius opened it and removed the jar and forced himself to look at its rusted contents: four tin belt buckles, old buttons, three small one-blader pocket knives rusted solid, a few spent bullets, and three copper pennies.
“See them pennies?” Owen said quietly. “Abe Lincoln pennies, minted in 1909. Kept a new Lincoln penny in their pockets for good luck.”
Lucius closed the box and clumsily retied it. Who knows about this? Hardens. Nobody else? Owen looked impatient: Lucius could take his word or not, it was up to him. Either way, Owen wanted him to take the box away.
“Think it might of been Cox?” Owen said finally when his friend was silent.
“I’d sure like to believe that. Thank you.”
They went to bed without finding a way to ease things.
Lucius awoke at the sound of Owen’s truck. Through the thin wall, he could hear his friend’s wife in her bath. Unrested, restless, he was bedeviled by the rub of her firm buttock on the tub. He got up and dragged his clothes on. In his dark mood, weighed down by dread, he felt disgraced by lust for Sarah and growing exasperation with his brother: what could be done for a fugitive so self-destructive? Lone pursuit of the Daniels gang would be insane as well as useless and he could not notify the law. Even if Rob escaped them, where could he go? What was to become of him? How long would it be before he was in trouble again?
Steamy and fresh as a big pink shrimp in her white towel bathrobe, barefoot Sarah fixed his breakfast. Watching her hips shift at the stove, he cursed himself-here he was with his brother in mortal danger, still a damned hound dog.
Sarah could feel him. Over her shoulder, she murmured, “Please don’t look at me that way.” She said her life with Owen was going better: she was mainly cross because her husband had come to bed so drunk and was cranky with Lucius all the way to Naples. Still nagging him for seeking out Bill House instead of Hardens, she dropped him at his car, in no mood to understand his reasons. “You’re listening to people who raised Henry up to be their slave!” She was very upset. Later it occurred to him that Owen must have told her Henry was dying.