Red Grass River (12 page)

Hands at his armpits. Lifting him, pulling him out of the car, turning him over and easing him to the ground on his back and he choked on the blood of his wound and turned his head to let the blood gush onto the grass. Then Bob was dragging him by the armpits to a pine tree a few yards away, helping him to sit up with his back against the trunk. Blood running off his chin and sopping the front of his shirt. His left eye throbbing now, its vision redly hazed but functioning. Bib looking close at it—then touching his jaw and pain bursting incandescent in his skull and he flinched from Bob’s hand.

Bob asked if he was hit anywhere else and he was able to say quite clearly, “No.”

“July missed that eye,” Bob said. “Dont know if you been hit twice or one bullet went through your whole entire head to end up in your mouth like that.” He smiled weakly. “Lucky for you it was in the head, hey? Not much to hit in there.” And then: “That
goddamn
Bobby Baker!”

“Wasnt Bobby’s doin,” Kid Lowe said. He stood over them and told what happened.

“Well, God
damn
it,” Bob Ashley said, glaring up at him. Kid Lowe looked off to the woods.

“Aint his fault,” John Ashley said. His voice deeply nasal, his tongue clumsy and feeling like an alien appendage. He marveled that he could talk at all, never mind with clarity.

And now here came Claude Calder on the run and shouting, “They’re coming! Both damn cars!”

“Let’s get our ass in the swamp the other side of his pineywood,” Bob Ashley said. He tried to help his brother to his feet but John Ashley felt the ground undulate and he almost passed out from the
effort of trying to stand. He slumped back against the pine trunk and waved his brother away. “Go! Go on!” he said, his voice gargled with blood. “I be arright,
Go!
”

“I aint leaving you!” Bob Ashley said. They could hear the police cars closing in.

“
GO!
” John Ashley said. “Won’t help nothin they catch you too.
GO!
”

“Come
on
, Bob,” Kid Lowe called from the edge of the pines. He held the croker sack of money. “Cant help him if you aint free. Come
on!
” And now Claude Calder was beside the Kid and the two of them turned and vanished into the trees.

“Go on, bubba—Goddamn it,
GO!
” John Ashley said, pushing at his brother. The police cars came shrilling around the curve into view and Bob Ashley said, “Shit!” and bolted for the trees.

The cop cars braked hard to a halt, raising a cloud of limerock dust. The driver’s door of the sheriff’s car swung open and the driver came out with a pistol in hand and from around the other side of the car came the other deputy and Bob Baker and both of them with shotguns. Now the Stuart policemen got out of their car too and stood beside the county officers and all of them looked down the grassy incline at the figure of John Ashley watching them from where he sat under the pine. John Ashley raised his hands slightly to show them he was not armed. He was sure they were going to shoot him anyway. He was conscious of the feel of the ground under him, the swell and fall of his chest with each breath, his heartbeat pulsing steadily against his ribs. He brushed the blood from his eye.

Bob Baker said something to the others and they started down the grade, spreading out and moving slowly. All of them keeping their weapons trained on the wrecked Model T but for Bob Baker who held his twelve-gauge pointed at John Ashley’s chest.

“Anybody in that car?” Bob Baker said as he drew near. John Ashley shook his head and pain streaked through his skull like a cat afire.

Bob Baker gave a hand signal and the others began shooting the Model T. They stormed it with buckshot and .38- and .45-caliber rounds and they emptied their weapons into it and reloaded and continued shooting and shooting and the car seemed to flinch and sag under the fusillade and its glass flung in shards and John Ashley who sat but a few feet from the vehicle covered his head with his arms and reflected that A.R. was going to be mighty dismayed when next he saw his car. The cops fired on the Model T for a full minute before
they finally stopped. John Ashley lowered his arms and saw that he’d been cut on a elbow and felt now a stinging on his neck and put his hand to it and his palm came away bloodstained.

The car listed like a ship afounder. Its tires were shot to ruin, its bodyshell pocked like something diseased, its glasswork reduced to sparse jagged remnant, its top in tatters. The two Stuart cops advanced cautiously through a thin haze of gunsmoke with their revolvers raised. They carefully peered into the car and now one of them jerked open each door in turn and then the cops lowered their pistols and one called to Bob Baker that the car was empty.

Bob Baker went to John Ashley and squatted down beside him and leaned on his shotgun like a staff. He pushed back his straw hat and mopped the sweat from his face with a bandanna and smiled at John Ashley. John Ashley smiled back and his whole face felt numbly weighted and overwide. One of the county deputies started to come their way but Bob Baker waved him off and the deputy shrugged and looked about and then headed into the woods.

Bob Baker smiled. “Guess you right there’s nobody in the car,” he said. His gaze moved over John Ashley’s bloody and distorted face. “How you been keepin?”

“Doin all right, Bobby,” John Ashley said. “How bout youself?”

“Lot bettern you, by the look of things.” He leaned forward for a close examination of the wounds and John Ashley felt his breath warm on his face. “Pretty good shootin, hey?”

“Wasnt your bullet done it.”

“Hell it wasnt,” Bob Baker said. “Your face in the back window like that, I couldnt hardly miss. Had you square in my sights. But it wasnt really good shootin. I was tryin to blow your brains out.” The yellow teeth of his closeup grin were huge. “I seen that Calder boy doin the drivin. And your brother Bob, seen him too. Who’s the other one? The little fella?”

John Ashley shrugged.

“Whoo! Would you just look at this eye! How you seein out that eye, Johnny?”

“Still seein all right with it, Bobby, thank you.”

“Well, I seen some bloodshot peepers before but nothin like this. Dont believe I ever seen a eye lookin so bad and still workin.” He put his fingers to the shattered and swollen jaw and John Ashley winced and sucked air through his teeth and Bob Baker said, “I bet that does smart.” He looked around and John Ashley followed his eyes and saw that none of the other policemen were about.

New Bob Baker leaned closer still and gently laid a hand on the left side of John Ashley’s face. “
Who’d
you say that other fella was?”

“Billy the Kid.”

“Oh yeah,” Bob Baker said. “I heard of him.” He slid his thumb up to the corner of the bloody eye and John Ashley locked his jaws against the pain and the surge of bile in his throat. Bob Baker’s teeth loomed large.

Came a whisper: “You ever even wondered what it’s like not being whole?”

“Like somebody we know, you mean?” His head now felt to be swelling with pain, the very skullbone itself.

“I reckon I owe you, Johnny.”

John Ashley tried to smile. “Ah hell, Bobby, forget it. I aint never been one to call a man’s marker if he’s down on his luck.”

Bob Baker’s thumb went into the socket and John Ashley screamed and saw behind the eye a radiant skyrocket burst of red light and then darkness.

February—October 1915

T
HE DOCTOR WAS A HEAVYSET BEARDED MAN NAMED
B
OYER
. W
ITH
the assistance of a horse-faced nurse called Rachel he worked on John Ashley’s jaw in the narrow confines of an isolation cell of the Palm Beach County Jail. He was able to remove all bullet fragments and was obliged to scrape much less of the shattered jaw than he had thought would be necessary on his initial examination. He set the jawbone, then clamped it with a wire brace, and he put John Ashley on a liquid diet for the next few weeks. He assured him that there would be only a slight perceivable disfigurement to his face once the scars healed. The overall tissue damage had also proved much less severe than it had seemed to Boyer at first sight, though John Ashley’s voice now registered lower than before and his sinuses would evermore trouble him at night and the wound in his hard palate would never heal completely and would occasionally become slightly infected. He had lost but two teeth—a bicuspid and adjoining molar.

He awakened with an eyepatch and a burning sensation under it. The doctor was at a loss to explain how the bullet could have done so much damage to the eye, which was outside the trajectory that took the round through the nosebone and palate to lodge in the jaw. He spoke of major trauma to the sclera and cornea and ciliary processes, of the loss of vitreous humor and of massive damage to the retina. John Ashley stared at him with his bloodshot right eye and saw him in a world gone skewed and narrow and he quite suddenly knew that the darkness under the
eyepatch was greater than human vision could perceive and realized the socket was empty and thats what the doctor was trying to tell him. He had a instant’s vision of Bob Baker’s huge yellow teeth in the moment before his thumb set off the red explosion in his skull.

Bob Baker stopped by twice. The first time in the company of Sheriff George, who’d come to notify John Ashley officially that in addition to the charges of murdering Jimmy Gopher and escaping from custody, he now also stood charged for bank robbery and the attempted murder of five police officers. Sheriff George was all business and looked at John Ashley as if he were a stranger. Bob Baker said nothing but stood behind his father and smiled all the while. He looked wellrested. When Sheriff George turned to leave, Bob Baker put a thumb up to his own eye and turned his hand in a sharp corkscrew motion and shut the eye under the thumb and made a face of mock pain. Then he opened both eyes and grinned hard at John Ashley and left. Doctor Boyer watched the whole thing, and when Bob Baker had gone he sighed and shook his head.

A week later John Ashley lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head and thought of blind Loretta May and felt closer to her by virtue of his own half-blindness. He recalled the peach smell of her and the freshness of her yellow hair, the pale smoothness of her skin. He was enjoying the feel of the partial erection pressing snug in his pants when he sensed someone at the cell door. He looked over there and saw a pair of shadowed eyes at the small slotted window and even in the dim light he recognized them. “Hey, Bobby,” he said. “How you keepin?” Come on, he thought—step in here for just a minute. The eyes pinched up in deliberation or amusement and a moment later they were gone.

He had begun to have dreams now such as he’d never had before. He saw things in his sleep and felt that what he saw was somehow real, though at times he knew too—without knowing how he knew—that what he saw had not yet happened. In one such dream he saw a woman he did not recognize, saw her vaguely. She smelled of the swamp, and under that redolence he caught the scents of her skin and hair and sex as keenly as if she were standing beside him. She seemed to loom over him as a wavering pale figure and he felt the heat of her skin and then her face was right in front of his and still he could not see her clearly but for her green eyes and a tiny gold quarter-moon in the iris of one of them.

In another dream he saw Kid Lowe in prison stripes and on a crutch and with a bandaged head, saw him redfaced and shouting and though for some reason he could not hear him he knew somehow that
the Kid was cursing because he’d been proved right about the bank holding out on them. And so, when Gordon Blue came to visit and told him that the Stuart bankers were crowing to the newspapers about how they’d managed to withhold some ten thousand dollars from the bandits by simply not emptying all the cash drawers into the money bag, John Ashley was both irritated and a little embarrassed but not really surprised.

He was permitted no visitors but his lawyer, and Gordon Blue apprised him that the state’s attorney had revived his motion to move his trial for the murder of DeSoto Tiger to Dade County. “I’m playing every ace I’ve got to keep it from happening, Johnny, but I have to tell you the odds aren’t good. They mean to have the trial in Miami come hell or high water.”

Gordon Blue told him of Old Joe’s fury on leaning that Bob Ashley had been in on the job after he had expressly forbidden any of his sons but John from acting on it. “I was going over some accounts with your daddy at Twin Oaks when Bob and Kid Lowe showed up and told him what happened. Your daddy was so mad at Bob for being in the holdup he took a strop to him like he was some disobedient
child
. I couldnt believe Bob would stand for it, but he took off his shirt and leaned against the side of the house like Joe told him to, and Joe let him have it with that strop a good dozen times. I mean, he gave him a hell of a hiding. Some of those welts were thick as your finger. Marked up his whole back all red and purple. Big as he is, Bob might’ve taken that strop away from Joe and beat
him
with it. It just
amazes
me that he stood for it.”

John Ashley gave Gordon Blue a puzzled look. “Hell, Gordy, what else he gonna do
but
stand for it? It’s our
daddy
, man. You dont hit your daddy, he hits you. It’s who a daddy is—the one to hit you when you done wrong. Bob done wrong and he knew it.”

Two weeks later the judge granted the state’s motion to have the trial moved to Dade County. Within an hour of the judge’s ruling a rock with a note wrapped around it came crashing through the window of the jail office and so tense were the police in the room that pistols cleared holsters before everyone realized what happened. The note said that if John Ashley wasnt released from jail immediately Sheriff George’s house would be burned to the ground and no matter who might be inside it at the time. It was signed “the Ashley Gang.” Sheriff George sent two armed deputies to keep watch on his house and family and deputized several friends to add to the jail guard force.

Barely an hour later a county deputy found a note on the seat of his motorcar. It read: “Tell Sheriff George to let johnnie go or perpare to pay the consequences. We mean bisness. The Ashley gang.”

Sheriff George affected to shrug it off, but his men could see the anger working in his jaw, the sudden distance in his eyes. He made secret plans with his son Bob and two evenings later and without advance notice to anyone he showed up at the jail a little past midnight and ordered John Ashley brought out of his cell. They manacled his hands behind him and put leg irons on him. They flanked him with guards carrying shotguns and hustled him out into a touring car with tarp covers tied over both sides of the rear of the car and put him in the backseat with two guards. Another guard got in the front with the driver and held a shotgun over the seat with the muzzle within inches of John Ashley’s chest. John Ashley laughed and said, “Goddamn if you boys aint makin me feel like Jesse James.”

Sheriff George appeared at the car window and put a finger in John Ashley’s face. “One more word out of you, just one more—and Deputy Bradford’s gonna blow a hole in you big enough to throw a dog through. Go ahead, say something. See if I dont mean it. I had all the trouble from you I aim to stand.” John Ashley could see that Sheriff George was scared and absolutely serious.

“He opens his mouth again, Bradford,” Sheriff George said, “it’s the same as trying to escape and I want you to blast him, you understand?” The deputy holding the shotgun on John Ashley said, “Yes-sir.” John Ashley heard Bob Baker laugh somewhere out in the darkness.

Sheriff George withdrew from the car and called, “Bobby, you and Freddie lead off. Let’s go.”

Bob Baker and Freddie Baker got into a roadster and led the prisoner vehicle out of the jailyard. Sheriff George and another deputy followed in a chattering coupé. They drove to the railroad station and the train was there and waiting. They put John Ashley aboard the baggage car and left the chains on him and put a double lock on the inside of the doors and kept two shotguns trained on him for the entire trip.

When the following sunrise broke like bright fire out of the distant rim of the Atlantic Ocean, John Ashley was watching it with his single eye from a barred window of the Dade County Jail.

“No,” Old Joe said. “
No
. There aint gone be no tryin to break him out. It’s just no need for anything risky as that. And hear me good, boy—you write even one more a them notes to George Baker
and I’m gonna take a grub hoe to your head. You understand? You aint helpin a damn thing with them fucken notes.”

“We got to do
some
thing, Daddy,” Bob Ashley said. “They beatin on him ever day. They whippin him like a damn dog, whippin him all the time. They spittin in his food, pissin in his coffee. They wont empty his slop pail. You heard about it same as us.”

“I heard it from people who dont know the facts of it anymore’n you do.” Old Joe said. “Gordy saw him just yesterday again for about the tenth damn time and you heard him say it aint any of it true. They’re feedin him all right and they aint pissin in his coffe or none of that bullshit. Gordy says he aint got a mark on him but from being shot in the face—and we know it wasnt
them
who did that, dont we?” He gave Kid Lowe a look and the Kid fixed his gaze on a sparrowhawk in the upper branches of a slash pine.

They were seated at a puncheon table alongside the Twin Oaks house—Old Joe and his four unjailed sons and Kid Lowe and Gordon Blue. The woman were at washing clothes in big steaming tin tubs behind the house. The cicadas were loud in the oaks and a great flock of white herons was wingbeating across the purpling sky and past a low orange sun. Mosquitoes keened at the men’s ears. The ripe smells of encroaching summer were on the air: hot wet earth and spawning bluegills and fresh nests of cottonmouths along the waterway banks.

“They hittin him where it dont show is why Gordy dont see no marks on him,” Bob said. “They dont clean his cell not give him nothing fit to eat but when Gordy goes to visit.”

“How is it you know so much more than everybody else?” Bill Ashley asked. Though he was Old Joe’s chief advisor, it was a rare thing for him to appear at a family council and even rarer for him to speak up at one. When he was in attendance he usually passed the time doodling in a notebook while everyone else did the talking. His brothers sometimes did not see him for weeks at a time. Unlike their own hands and necks, which were burned red-brown by the sun, his had the pallor of indoor life. He wore suspenders and sleeve garters and bow ties and wire-rim spectacles. He never asked any of them to visit his home and none of them had seen his wife but once or twice since the day of his marriage. In some ways he was less familiar to them than Kid Lowe or Gordon Blue.

That distance between him and his youngest brothers had widened even more after John and Bob robbed the Stuart bank. Bill thought they were fools to hold up a bank, which he saw as excessively risky. “There’s too many other ways to make as much money,” he’d said
to Old Joe, “without near as much chance of something going wrong like it did in Stuart. As soon’s whiskey’s illegal all over the country you’ll see what I mean.”

Old Joe had shrugged and let the matter drop. A part of him knew Bill was right. He felt like a fool for having given John permission to rob the bank. He felt at fault that John was now one-eyed and in jail. But another part of him could not deny the pleasure of having more than $7,000 of the bank’s money, having it because his boys had been bold enough to take it. He already had in mind a boat he could buy with that money—a sleek fast craft that with a few modifications would be perfect for carrying whiskey. But the news that the bank had cheated them of some ten thousand dollars was enraging. And it infuriated him further to think that Sheriff George might have convinced the bank that all the Baker money was with the cash the bank had saved and none of it gone off in Johnny’s croker sack.

Now Bob Ashley gaped at Bill, at once surprised at hearing him speak up and angry at what he’d said. “Hey bubba,” Bob Ashley said, “When I want shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head.”

“Ah hell, Bob,” Frank Ashley said.

“Real bright,” Bill Ashley said, looking at Bob with disdain. “You’re a natural-born fool, you know that?”

“Go to hell, Billy,” Bob Ashley said. “This aint never gonna be none your business—not while you sittin on your ass all day and markin in books while some of us are out there
doin
things.”

“That’s enough, the both you,” Old Joe said. “Now I
told
you all how it’s gonna be. We’re gonna wait and see can Gordy get the murder charge dropped. If he can do that, then the bank robbery trial’ll come back to Palm Beach and like as not we’ll get us a good jury for it.”

“He been in there more’n three months already,” Bob said. “He’s gonna serve life in prison before he ever gets to trial.”

“Have a little patience, Bob—these things take time,” Gordon Blue said. “You know how slow the law works.”

“Dont
you
be tellin me too what I got to do!” Bob Ashley said.

Gordon Blue sighed and looked away.

“Daddy, look we just got to—” Bob Ashley began, but Old Joe held up a hand to cut him short.

“
No
, I said. That’s the end of it.”

A week later Bob Ashley, Kid Lowe and Claude Calder sat at a corner table in the dim recesses of the Flamingo Restaurant across the road from the Fort Lauderdale depot and just two blocks removed
from one of their favorite brothels, at which establishment they had passed the earlier part of the evening. They surreptitiously poured whiskey into their cups long since emptied of coffee and once more went over the details of the operation. They had been three days in Miami, ensconced in a rundown hotel a block from the Dade County Jail. They had watched carefully, made notes, followed people to and from the jail, established routines, set up an escape route to the Dixie Highway and an alternate route westward from Miami and into the Everglades. They had also been drinking steadily the while, a factor none among them considered important.