Red Grass River (14 page)

Bob Ashley shot him in the face and the cop spun sideways and dropped from view. People screamed and fled in every direction and the other car sped away. He struggled with the door and it sprang
open and he fell out onto the sidewalk. He got to his feet and the ground pitched slightly but he recovered his balance and looked about and saw here and there faces peering at him from around doors and from behind ashcans. He swept the pistol over them and they vanished as if he’d done a magic trick.

He thought to drive off in the Buick and went around the front of it to get to the driver’s side. As he stepped into the street he saw the cop sitting alongside the truck. A small dark hole showed under one eye and he held his revolver raised and pointed. The gun cracked and Bob Ashley felt himself roughly shoved backward.

“You son of a bitch,” he said—and shot the cop in the chest and the cop grunted and shot him in the belly and then they fired simultaneously and the cop’s hair jumped and he fell over and lay still and his blood darkly stained the pale limerock paving.

Bob Ashley regarded the unmoving cop for a moment and then his legs quit him and he sat down hard. He looked down at his own bloody stomach and tried to curse but choked on something and he put his hand to his throat and his fingers came away bloodstained. He groaned wetly and looked at the cop and shot him again. Then felt in his stomach a pain beyond any he’d ever known and he could not help but holler with it. He tried to get to his feet but the ground tilted and he fell on his back and saw a pair of gulls winging overhead.

“Bob! You hear me, Bob?”

He opened his eyes to find himself on his side on a bunk. Sheriff Dan Hardie stood before him with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. Bob touched a thick bandage at his throat and then regarded his bloody fingertips. “Hey, Dan,” he said in a voice gargly and foreign to him. “You still puttin it to that high-yella girl over in Little River?” The effort of speech felt such in his chest that he knew he was bad off. His feet were cold. Though the light was dim he could see he was in a jail cell. “Johnny in here?” he asked. “
Johnny?
” His intended shout came out a croak.

“He cant hear you, he aint in this block,” Sheriff Hardie said. “Listen, Bob, I got to tell you straight. It dont look like you’re goin to make it.”

“Dont feel like it a whole lot, neither,” Bob said, his face clenched against the pain in his belly. He saw now that there were two other men in the room and both of them in black suits and with serious faces pale as frog bellies and he knew at once who they were. “I’ll
wager you boys done got me measured for the coffin already,” he said and coughed a gush of bright blood onto the bunksheet.

“Come on, boy—come clean of it,” Hardie said. “Tell us who the others were. We know it was at least two more. Was it your brothers?”

“No,” Bob Ashley managed to say through his teeth. “They never. Wasnt nobody but me in this.”

“Bullshit!” the sheriff said. “Look, Bob, I been a friend to you and yours and you know it. I aint never braced any you. I always let you boys do your business and have your fun. But now—well hell, you’re going over the river, son. Make a clean break of it and tell me: who was in it with you?”

Bob Ashley looked up at him and sighed wetly. With effort, he raised his hand and beckoned Sheriff Hardie closer. The sheriff squatted beside the bunk and leaned forward with his ear close to Bob Ashley’s mouth.

Bob Ashley whispered, “Fuck you, Danny.” And then a long exhalation issued from his throat and was gone into the world’s vast mingle of last breaths.

Even before Sheriff Hardie had began his interrogation of Bob Ashley, word had come to him that a mob was forming in front of the jail and demanding that John and Bob Ashley be delivered to it.

“It’s a hundred of em if it’s one, Sheriff,” a deputy had told him. “They got guns, hatchets, clubs, ropes, ever-damn-thing. It’s lots of Wilbur’s friends out there and lots of old boys who knew J.R. too.”

J. R. Riblett was the patrolman Bob Ashley had killed in the street. The deputy reporting to Hardie was barely nineteen years old and not yet four months on the force. He tried mightily not to let the sheriff see that he was afraid but Hardie heard the fear in his voice and smelled it on him. He put a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and the gesture seemed to calm the boy. The sheriff then ordered that every man on the county force be called in to defend against and assault on the jailhouse—and now a force of some twenty deputies was standing between the jail doors and a mob of hundreds.

The mob’s chanting cries for Ashley blood carried into the jail and down the corridors and into the cell where Bob Ashley lay dying—and carried deeper still to the corridor where two sweating deputies with shotguns stood outside John Ashley’s cell. “Give us Ashley! Give us ASHLEY! Give us
ASHLEY!
”

The guards had told John about Bob’s attempt to free him and of his failed try at a getaway. Since then they’d been receiving second-
hand reports of Bob Ashley’s condition and passing it on to John. The latest word was that Bob had choked to death on his own blood. John Ashley showed no expression when they told him. He lay on his bunk and listened to the mob’s call for vengeance and it seemed to him but an echo of his own heart’s cry.

When the sheriff appeared at the jail doors and the undertaker and his assistant behind him, the mob became frenzied as a zoo at feeding time. The officers on guard looked terrified to a man. Sheriff Hardie knew that if the mob should rush them, his men would start shooting or start running, one or the other, and of his untried officers it was hard to say which of them would do which.

The sheriff raised his hands to try to quiet the mob so he might address it but their cries for Ashley only grew louder. He turned and beckoned into the jail and two deputies came out bearing a sheet-draped body on a stretcher. The mob’s chanting slowly gave way to a snaking murmur. And then one of the men at the front of the crowd cried, “It’s a trick! They sneaking one out under the sheet like he’s dead but he aint!”

“Let’s see!” hollered another. In an instant the chant went up: “Let’s see!
Let’s see! LET’S SEE!
”

Hardie went to the stretcher and yanked the sheet away to expose the bloody corps of Bob Ashley and the mob abruptly fell mute.

“Take a good look!” the sheriff shouted. “This here’s Bob Ashley and he’s as dead as he’s ever gonna get! Now what you hardcases wanna do? String him up anyway? Wanna beat on him a while? Set him afire maybe? Wanna shoot him some? You all wanna bring your womenfolk up here to see him? Want your
kids
to have a good look?”

There were mutterings in the crowd but nobody spoke up. Dan Hardie pointed at the jail doors and shouted, “John Ashley’s
still
in there, but he didnt have a thing to do with any the killing today. That man will stand trial for murdering a damn Indian and if he’s convicted he’ll be hanged. But he aint gonna be hanged today, not by you all or anybody else. Anybody goes in that jail without my say-so is gonna be one sorry son of a bitch and thats a goddamned promise.”

He stood with his hands on hips and swept his gaze over them and every man’s eyes jumped away from his.

And now in softer tone he said, “You all move aside now and let Doctor Combs get this body out of here. I dont want it stinking up my jail.”

And move aside they did.

An hour later Bob Ashley’s body lay alongside those of Wilber Hendrickson and J. R. Riblett in W. H. Combs’ funeral parlor. By then more than a thousand people had gathered outside the parlor and were insisting on seeing the desperado’s remains. Combs became fearful and telephoned the sheriff who advised him to let them look.

So the undertaker placed Bob Ashley’s body in a room by itself and then permitted the public to come in and view it—men and women both, but no children under twelve. He posted a man next to the body to keep people beyond reach of it and prevent them from taking locks of hair or other mementos. The line of gawkers snaked through the front door and into the viewing room and out the side door to the alley through the rest of the afternoon. At nightfall Undertaker Combs pled exhaustion and promised he would show the body again in the morning.

At sunrise, the line of people waiting to go inside was already a block long. Word had spread that Bob Ashley’s corpse was on display to any who cared to see him, and thrillseekers had come from as far off as Palm Beach. Combs was coming up the street toward the parlor when he was approached by two strangers in suits, one of them carrying a camera and rolling a toothpick in his mouth. The other, who looked too big for his clothes, said, “Mister Combs, sir, I’d like a word with you.”

He guided Combs into the alley out of sight and earshot of the waiting line—and though his touch was gentle on Combs’ arm the undertaker could feel the ready strength in his hand. The man said his name was Hal Croves and he would pay Combs thirty dollars for ten minutes in the room with Bob Ashley’s body and no one else in attendance but the photographer.

“Oh, I’m afraid not, Mister Croves,” the undertaker said. “We have a strict policy, you see—to protect the deceased from souvenir takers and such.”

The big man laughed but his eyes roused in Combs a sudden unease. “
We
,” the big man said. “There aint no
we
. It’s just you. It’s
your
policy.” The man’s teeth showed large and yellow and Combs felt the grip on his elbow tighten slightly. “Fifty dollars,” the man said.

“Fif—!” Combs said. He glanced about for eavesdroppers, “Well…I suppose if you were to promise not to actually
touch
the deceased, and if…”—he took another quick look about—“if you could make it, say,
sixty
?”

The man laughed again. “Sixty it is,” he said.

Combs let them in by the alley door and showed them to the room
where Bob Ashley lay. “I’ll just wait out here,” he said. He consulted a pocketwatch. “Ten minutes.”

“Be just fine,” the big man said. Combs went out in the hall and the big man closed the door and Combs heard the latch slide home. He went to the front door and opened it and announced to the crowd that he was running a little late but they would be permitted inside in just another five minutes. He turned up his palms at the chorus of complaints as if the entire matter were one of those things that couldnt be helped.

When the two men came out again, Combs was waiting in the hall with his hands clasped before him like a penitent. He raised his brow at them. The man named Croves paid him thirty dollars and showed his big yellow teeth and Combs stood there gaping, looking from the money in his hand to the retreating backs of the two men. The big man’s laughter echoed in the high-ceilinged hall as he headed for the alley door.

At eleven o’clock that morning Edward Rogers, Bill Ashley’s father-in-law, arrived haggard and disheveled on the train from Hobe Sound and went directly to the Combs Funeral Parlor and made arrangements to ship Bob Ashley’s body the following day. He said no more than necessary and refused all reporters’ requests for interviews.

There were rumors in the street all day that Old Joe Ashley and his other sons had been in town in disguise, though nobody had any proof of it and nobody could offer a reasonable explanation for their presence other than the possibility that they intended to try to break John Ashley out of jail themselves.

The moment Bob Ashley shot the jailer, Kid Lowe knew the plan was gone to hell. And because he knew Claude Calder had abandoned the car, he figured his best chance for escape was by the alleyway in back of the house. He vaulted the railing at the end of the porch and jogged around to the backyard, holding his pistol low and close against his leg. He nearly jumped at the sound of the shotgun blast from the front of the house and he knew Bob had been at the wrong end of it and was certain he’d been killed.

In the backyard a pair of Negro yardmen stood like statues with their tools in their hands and stared at him in stark fear. He pointed the pistol at them and said, “You aint seen nobody, you hear me?” The two men nodded jerkily and dropped their gaze and Kid Lowe hurried away down the alley.

He walked fast, restraining himself from running even when he
heard a gunshot from somewhere near the jail. He reckoned Bob might yet be alive and was making a fight of it—or Claude Calder was. At the end of the alley he paused and heard now more gunshots but from greater distance. He slipped the pistol into his belt under his shirt and walked out onto the sidewalk and saw people hurrying toward the intersecting street that led back to the jail. He went in the other direction.

Two blocks away he stole a new Dodge sedan and made his way to the Dixie Highway and there turned north. At dusk he was just south of Stuart but did not even slow down at the branching oystershell road that led into the dark pinewoods and beyond to the Ashley Twin Oaks house at the edge of the swamps. The last man he wanted to meet with anytime soon was Old Joe Ashley.

He drove and drove and stopped only to take on fuel and buy sandwiches and soda pop beer where he could find it. Just before sunrise he parked within the sound of breakers and slept in the car for a couple of hours and then drove on. He had decided on returning to Chicago to see if he might make his peace with Silver Jack O’Keefe’s former competitors. If they should prove unforgiving he would push on to Detroit and try his luck there.

A few days later and just south of Macon, Georgia, the Dodge began to sputter and ten minutes later it quit altogether and coasted to a halt on the red clay road. In the absence of the motor’s clatter the countryside silence seemed huge. The Kid sat on the front fender and smoked cigarettes and drank his last warm bottle of beer and regarded a pair of redtails wheeling on the hunt over a distant pasture.

Some time later a farmer happened along in his two-mule wagon and they hitched the Dodge to the wagon’s rear axle with rope and the farmer towed it to a smitty shop at the edge of town. He absolutely would not accept the Kid’s offer of a dollar for his help. The smith said the trouble was likely in the fuel line and he could fix it in about a half-hour but wouldnt be able to get to it for an hour yet. He directed the Kid to a barbershop down the block where a man might get a haircut in the chair by the front window or a shot of spirits in the backroom.