Red Grass River (10 page)

“You were on these boards
first
?” the point man said sardonically. He laughed. “Well, hell I guess that fucken well settles
every
thing, now dont it?”

“What the hell you doin
arguin
with these sonsofbitches?” said one of the other derbied men as he stepped off the plank and came around from behind the point man, his shoes sucking through the mud. The point man grabbed him by the arm and said, “Goddammit, Logan, I know how to deal with these hicks.”

Logan shook off the man’s grip and turned to John Ashley and brought a snapblade knife out of his pocket so fast and smoothly it was as if the weapon had been in his hand all along. The small
snick
of the blade snapping open seemed to John Ashley to make the air go thinner.

“Fucken hillbillies,” Logan said and took a step toward John Ashley just as Kid Lowe came slogging up alongside the planks and delivered a grunting kick to the knifer’s balls that raised the man to his toes. John Ashley heard the hiss of Logan’s sharp suck of air and even as the man started to sag Bob Ashley stepped forward and struck him with a huge roundhouse that sent him sprawling back into the mud and Kid Lowe set to kicking the man in the head.

The point man caught John Ashley by the throat with both hands and they staggered off the planks and into the mud and John Ashley could not breathe. He grabbed the man’s arms tight at the elbows and planted his feet and swung him around hard into the wall and the man’s breath blew out of him. John Ashley broke free and grabbed him by the neck with one hand and by the hair with the other and rammed the back of the man’s head into the wall a hard half-dozen times and then let him fall to a sitting position and drove his knee into his face and felt the man’s front teeth give way as the man’s head snapped back to strike the wall yet again with a hollow thunk. The man fell over sideways and lay still.

Kid Lowe and Bob Ashley were facing off warily against the third man who was armed with the jagged rum bottle he’d broken against the wall. He was feinting first at Bob and then at the Kid, making one and then the other jump back as from a striking snake. Now Kid Lowe said, “Fuck this,” and pressed forward and the man slashed at him several quick times and the Kid fended with his hands but kept advancing and he backed the man against the wall and then charged into him with fists flailing. Bob leaped in and grabbed the man in a headlock and wrestled the bottle from him and drove it into his face and the man screamed. Now the Kid had the man by the hair and was biting
into his ear and the man screamed again as his ear came away in the Kid’s teeth. Bob and the man fell together in the mud and the kid kicked the man in his gashed face again and again and the man stopped screaming now and Bob was cursing and yelling “You kicking
me
, goddammit!” and turned loose of the man and rolled away from the Kid’s frenzy.

John Ashley was laughing as he grabbed Kid Lowe by the collar and yanked him back and caught him in a bear hug from behind and said, “All right there, killer, all right, I believe you done made your point on the fella.” Kid Lowe’s breath was heaving, his lean muscles twitching under John Ashley’s grasp.

Now Gordon Blue came forward from the shadows where he’d sought refuge and said, “Jesus Christ Almighty! Are they dead, any of them?”

Bob Ashley made a quick examination of the fallen and verified that all were alive, though none was conscious and the one whose face he and the Kid had mutilated was bleeding badly from a gash in his neck and breathing erratically. “This one aint like to make it,” he said.

“Oh
Christ
,” Gordon Blue said, and took a look around to see if there might be witnesses. “Let’s get the hell out of here—
now
.”

The Kids fury had abated and he said, “You can let go me now.” He put his hands to John Ashley’s arms to free himself of his embrace and John Ashley felt their touch slicked with blood.

“Damn, Kid, let’s see them hands.” He pulled the Kid over closer to the street where the light was better. “I need some kinda bandage here,” he said.

Bob Ashley stripped the shirt off the Logan fellow and tore it in two and John Ashley held the Kid’s dripping hands out while Bob bandaged them tightly each in turn. He told the Kid the niggerwrap job would have to do till they got him home and Ma could tend to his wounds proper. Both brothers were grinning as Bob finished tying off the bandages and remarked how damned glad he was that Kid Lowe was on their side because he sure didnt fancy fighting somebody who was half-crazy and half-cannibal besides. Kid Lowe was grinning with them now and saying the ear didn’t taste half bad and maybe he ought to have cut the other one off him to have for breakfast in the morning. They all three laughed.

And now Gordon Blue was tugging at John Ashley’s arm with one hand and at Bob Ashley’s with the other and saying, “Let’s
go
, let’s
go
!” and the look on his face made them all three laugh the harder. And then they cleared out of there fast.

Two days later Kid Lowe was living in a small pinewood cabin behind the outside kitchen of the Ashley home. And three weeks after that, Ma Ashley’s good stitches now removed from his hands and his hands almost completely unstiffened, he went with John and Bob Ashley on his first alligator hunt. Although cracker by blood, he’d been raised fatherless and brotherless, without masculine mentor of any sort, and thus had not been taught the usual wildland skills most crackers early acquired. He owned all the natural inclinations, however, and took to poling an Everglades skiff as one long practiced at it. At supper that night the Ashleys listened in high amusement to him tell all about how well he’d learned from John Ashley to bark like a dog to call alligators into open water for easier killing. He could not stop talking of the three gators he’d killed and the two he had skinned mostly by himself after the brothers taught him how to take the hide off the first one. None of the Ashleys minded listening to Kid Lowe’s story three times over as they sipped at cups of old Joe’s best. They knew the little cracker from the city was but happy to be among his own kind.

The next time they saw Gordon Blue he told them there had been but one recent mention in the Miami newspapers of a dead man found in an alley but the alley in question was not the one where they had fought the three men. “If that fella in the alley didnt, ah, make it,” Gordon Blue said, “his friends must’ve taken him away from there.”

John Ashley still slipped into West Palm Beach every now and then to visit Miss Lillian’s and be with blind Loretta May. They were easy with each other now as they were with no one else, and had for a while even played a game whereby they would make bets as to what part of her he was looking at while they caressed each other’s nakedness. At first they bet a dollar each time but after she lost the first five times she suggested they raise the bet to five dollars, saying maybe she could do better if there was more at stake. He said all right, but he hated taking advantage. She said he shouldn’t feel guilty about it because after all it was her who wanted to raise the ante. She won the next five times in a row before he realized she’d conned him thoroughly, that she knew exactly where his eyes were on her at all times, and how she knew this did not trouble him as much as the fact that she used the knowledge to hornswoggle him. One more time, he said. On the next bet she said that he was looking at her left breast, which he was, but he told her she was wrong, he was looking at her belly, and she laughed with such delight that he knew she knew he was lying
and he had to laugh too. He tried to summon a proper degree of indignation. “I dont know how you know what I’m lookin at, but knowin it and pretendin you dont know just cause you’re blind, thats the same as cheatin.” At which she could only laugh. “And it aint cheatin to make bets with a
blind
person about what you lookin at?”

After their lovemaking one night she asked if he had many dreams. Did she mean dreams like things he wanted to do real bad before he died, he asked, or dreams like things you see in your sleep at night. “Night dreams,” she said. He said it was funny she should ask that because, truth be told, he knew he’d been dreaming a lot lately but he could never remember the dreams when he woke up.

“Funny thing is,” he said, “while I’m havin the dreams it’s like I know they’re showin me things that’re real, or…
true
somehow. I mean, when I wake up thats the
feelin
I have, that I just dreamt about somethin true, only I cant remember what it was.”

“You will,” she said. “The time’ll come you will.”

He looked at her for a long moment, unsure whether to ask her what she meant. And now, as he stared at her smiling face, she said, “You’re looking at my mouth—thats another five dollars you owe me.”

He gave a mock roar and fell on her, saying, “You bat-blind little witch!”

And laughing, wrestling happily, they made love once again.

Gordon Blue’s estimation of how long it would take to resolve Kid Lowe’s Chicago troubles proved overly optimistic and two months later the Kid was still residing with the Ashleys, though he didn’t at all mind and neither did the family. He was proud that the largest of the three turkeys Ma and the girls roasted for Christmas dinner was one he’d shot. In addition to taking him hunting and trapping with his brothers, John Ashley now allowed him to come with him on whiskey drops to the Indians and Kid Lowe marveled at the alien wonders of these primitive villages in the heart of the Devil’s Garden.

The Kid liked Twin Oaks but he loved the whiskey camps. He loved their wildness. He loved the stygian nights when the orange pinefires under the great copper kettles were the only light save that of the moon and stars to hold at bay an encompassing darkness greater than imagination could conjure. The fires raised trembling shadows against the closely standing hardwoods hung with moss and twisted vines that held to the earth like umbilicals. The blackness beyond the fireglow stirred and rustled and splashed and sometimes sounded of
fluttering wing. From the greater darkness came deep quivering grunts of alligators whose forebears had themselves looked upon dinosaurs. Came skin-tightening shrieks of panthers at mate, sporadic outcries of prey falling to predator. The night swamp was ever clamorous with blood. The air pungent with the redolence of muck and water seasoned richly with matter living and dead.

On nights as these they sat about the kettle fire into the late hours and smoked pipe and cigarette and sipped whiskey and told stories both real and invented to entertain each other. They never tired of hearing of the night John Ashley took a drive to Twin Oaks after several weeks of hiding out at whiskey camp and Ma Ashley stepped out on the porch and fired a doubleblast of her shotgun in the air to warn him of the policemen lurking in the surrounding brush.

“Old Johnny just hustled on up to the turnaround and stomped on the brake and kicked her into reverse and turned that Lizzie around on a damn silver dollar and right back out we went,” Ed Ashley said, who had been in the car with John that night. “Cut off the headlamps so they couldnt see us but then naturally we couldnt see a damn thing neither. Lord knows how many times we run into the palmettos on either side of that little-bitty trail getting back to the main road in the dark. We was bouncing
all
over hell and I about got throwed right out the damn car more’n once, I mean to tell you.”

It was early in the new year and their breath showed vaguely gray on the dark chill air. They were at the whiskey camp in the Hungryland Slough and about fifteen miles west of Juno Beach—John and Ed Ashley, Kid Lowe and Claude Calder, a rough and rangy bucktoothed youth, a longtime friend of the Ashleys and Old Joe Ashley’s main deliveryman to most clients north of Fort Pierce. On this night Bob and Frank Ashley were helping their father out at the Sand Cut camp on Lake Okeechobee.

John Ashley spat into the fire and laughed with the others at the memory of that wild night ride. “Bet when Ma let go with that shotgun,” he said, “then police in the bushes pissed their pants.”

“They say Sheriff George about had a fit when he heard about it,” Claude Calder said.

“He surely did,” Ed Ashley said. “Came out to the house next day and told Ma she could get in trouble for aidin and abettin a fugitive from the law. Ma just looked at him like he was simple and said she didnt know nothin about no abettin nor any such gamblin talk, she’d just been shooting at some old hooty owl been tryin to get at a new litter of pups under the front porch.”

“Them damn Bakers,” Claude said. “You all heard Sheriff George done made Bobby his chief deputy?”

“I know it,” Ed Ashley said. “That sumbuck Bobby’s gonna be the sheriff before you know it, just watch and see.” Even in the vague and shifting light of the fire, the cordlike scar across his mouth was visible and made him look about to laugh or about to cry, you couldnt be sure which. An Okeechobee catfisher had cut him with a filleting knife in a fight over a Hardieville whore named Della. Ed Ashley had then beaten the man senseless with a spitoon and had just snatched up the man’s dropped knife and was set to shove it into his heart when he was pried away by the bouncer and a sheriff’s deputy. He spent the night in jail and his father bailed him out the next day. He waited a couple of weeks until his wound was partially healed before he went back to Miami to see Della again but by then she had departed for places unknown. Another of the girls tried to console him by pointing out that he likely wouldnt have won her over anyway, not now, not with that awful scar, since Della always had been one to prize handsomeness. Ed Ashley had not spoken of her since, not even to Frank, but not a day passed that he did not think of her.

“Maybe Bobby’ll become sheriff before
Sheriff George
knows it,” Claude Calder said, and everybody laughed.

“I seen him up to Stuart just the other day,” Ed Ashley said as he worked open a fresh jar of whiskey. He took a tentative taste and worked his tongue around it and considered and then nodded his approval. “You know, I do believe daddy’s
still
gettin some better at his business, I truly do.”