`Lost Man's River' -- A Tale Of Murder, Loss And A Son's Search For The Truth In Wilds Of Florida

---------------------------------------------------------- "Lost Man's River" by Peter Matthiessen Random House, $26.95 ----------------------------------------------------------

"Out in this neck of the woods, a stranger got to watch his step," someone warns us near the beginning of this panoramic journey into the steamy natural, historical and psychological landscapes of not-quite-forgotten frontier Florida.

But, of course, even in this unyielding territory where one's chances of surviving the isolation, heat, mosquitoes, hurricanes, drought and red tide often were directly related to an unwavering bumper-sticker faith in God, Guts and Guns, we are not really strangers. And neither is our guide, Peter Matthiessen, whose adventurous heart is vast and forgiving and whose eyes and ears are always keenly alert to the fine details.

Matthiessen may have been born in New York City, but he is marvelously at home in the world's rawest places, among the cays and reefs off Nicaragua, in the Himalayas of Nepal, in the Amazonian jungle, in the Gabon rain forest of the Congo basin. When he washes up in southwest Florida's Ten Thousand Islands and hunkers down among the grassy rivers, cypress heads and mangrove-lined inlets of the Everglades, he does not miss much: not the cryptic night song of a chuck-will's-widow, not the diamond flash of sunlight on a listless bay, not even the grotesque fleshiness of lichens sprouting from a dead tree.

`Killing Mister Watson' sequel

In 1990, Matthiessen offered us "Killing Mister Watson," a National Book Award-nominated reimagining of the ambiguous life and death of Edgar J. "Bloody" Watson, the successful sugar-cane farmer and rumored serial killer who was shot to death by a posse of neighbors on the beach at Chokoloskee in 1910. In Matthiessen's hands, the Watson story fused elegant tale-telling with the terrible realities of the scratched-out desperation of people dependent on land and water that sometimes nourish, sometimes betray.

"Lost Man's River" is that novel's more deeply textured and demanding sequel, the second installment of a planned trilogy. Its premise intrigues: Five decades after Watson's death, the murdered man's third son, Lucius, a scholar one reckons to be in his early 70s, vows to set the record straight. Already the author of a respected, pseudonymously published history of southwest Florida, Lucius has never believed the rumors about his notorious "desperader" parent - that he had killed perhaps more than a dozen people, including some of his own employees and outlaw queen Belle Starr.

"Ed Watson was his own man, done what he thought was right," the alternately endearing and repulsive swamp rat-'gator poacher-gun runner-moonshiner "Speck" Daniels reassures him. "Never killed a livin soul who didn't need some killin."

Years before, Lucius, whose life has been punctuated by periods of drink and drifting, had assembled a list of those involved in his father's death. Although this act sprang more from a desire for the truth than for retribution, it had brewed an icy suspicion, cost him friendships and loyalty and imposed decades of rootlessness, introspection and melancholy.

So why is he bothering to stir things up again? Lucius' clearly appalled younger stepbrother, Addison Burdett, who had witnessed their father's murder at age 3, pleads that their sister, Ruth Ellen, is still so mortified by the scandal that she will not mention their father's name, "not even to us! And you intend to write about it!"

On this framework, Matthiessen hangs a roiling, complex story that follows Lucius on a meandering car trip to gather signatures on a petition to save the old Watson farmhouse from demolition, poke through yellowed courthouse files and interview the surviving members of the Watson clan and the cracker families to which they are, through sometimes uncomfortable and inexplicable tangles, attached.

As in "Killing Mister Watson," Matthiessen effectively employs the oral-history monologue, and his ear for the apt colloquialism is right on the money: "(M)y old man and his kind," the too-progressive-for-her-own-good Sally Harden grouses at one point, "they aren't poor white trash, the way people say. They are rich white trash who aim to live in the same poor-white-trash way their daddies did."

Family saga with a darker agenda

But clearly there is more going on here than embarrassing memories, mangled feelings and genteel spew. "Lost Man's River" is a family saga full of regret and shattered lives, but Matthiessen, who first heard the Watson story as a teenager fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, also has a far broader and darker agenda.

Lucius Watson's tale is a story of the great losses that threaten anyone who dares to fall in love with Florida's wild places: lost innocence, friendships, faith, dreams, love, honor, livelihoods, principles - even lost wildlife, cultures and traditions and, most important, an all-but-lost ecosystem.

Warning: "Lost Man's River" is not unalloyed pleasure. There is gritty, sad, sometimes stomach-turning stuff everywhere, particularly when we are forced to deal with the well-connected, avaricious Miami lawyer Watson Dyer, Lucius' mysterious older brother, Rob, or the peripatetic Speck, whose obvious model was the late smuggler and gator poacher, Totch Brown. Moreover, Matthiessen's references to serial killer Bud Tendy (read, Ted Bundy) seem misappropriated and contrived, and the book's peripheral characters sometimes blur annoyingly.

Still, the novel's wild and tragic ending and consistent, palpable sense of place force us to understand that this is not Mister Watson's story anymore. It is not even Mister Matthiessen's. It is ours. (Copyright, The Miami Herald)

Margaria Fichtner is the book editor at The Miami Herald.