Red Grass River (15 page)

It was a dim place but cool and comfortable and the Kid sat on a stool at the makeshift plank bar and threw down two quick shooters before taking a third more slowly with a beer back. His very bones seemed to sigh with pleasure. An hour later he was glass-eyed drunk and ruminating bitterly about the way things had gone in Miami. A beefy fellow came in and straddled the adjacent stool and looked over
at him and wrinkled his nose and said, “Whoo! Been a while since you was last near a tub of water, aint it, shorty?”

Kid Lowe squinted blearily at him and wondered if he’d been insulted and seeing no smile on the man’s face decided that he had. In a single smooth motion remarkable in one so drunk he slid off his stool and punched the man squarely in the mouth and man and stood went over onto the floor and the half-dozen other patrons cheered and applauded with delight at this entertaining turn.

The man sat on the floor and gaped up at the Kid less in pain than in astonishment. He put his hand to his bleeding mouth and one of his front teeth came away in his fingers. Someone among the spectators said loudly, “Hey, Turner, you forgot to duck!” and there was a chorus of laughter.

“You half-pint son of a
bitch!
” The man scrambled to his feet and started for the Kid who in a sudden drunken panic perceived his antagonist as fearsomely and unstoppably huge and in an unthinking defensive reflex drew his pistol from under his shirt and from a distance of less than three feel shot the man though the throat. The man staggered backward with his hands patting at the blood jetting from his neck and spattering those nearest him. He reeled and crumpled to the floor and made rude guttering sounds and the blood was fast pooling round his head.

Now the bartender had the Kid in a headlock and was gripping his gun hand and several others fell to him in the midst of much angry shouting. The gun was wrested from him and the Kid went down flailing. They were cursing him and kicking him and it seemed to him a long time before they stopped. He was hauled to his feet and held by a man on either side of him and he could barely focus on the man before him who told him he was under arrest.

His arm was broken, his nose and ribs and one of his feet. Because he did not know his standing with the organization in Chicago he did not contact anyone there for legal help. He was sure that if he called on Joe Ashley the old man would come to Macon solely to kill him. And so when he went to trial still relying on a crutch and with his arm yet in a cast, he was represented by a court-appointed lawyer named Soames who smelled always of peppermint and had trouble remembering his client’s name. The trial began at nine o’clock in the morning and an hour later he stood convicted of murder in the first degree and the afternoon was sentenced to life imprisonment in the state penitentiary.

Within the year he would escape from the Okeefenokee penal camp
where he’d been confined. But he would get lost as he made his breathless way through the sunless depths of the swamp and unwittingly bore ever deeper into that wilderness where even the dogs could not follow. No one in the world would ever know that he plunged into a quicksand bog and drowned and his bones would remain in that muck to the end of time.

There had been no one in the garage but a mechanic at the far end of the room who was busy replacing a tire on a wheel and when he saw Claude Calder enter he called out that he would be with him in a minute. Claude said for him to take his time, he was in no hurry, and headed straight for a Ford touring car exactly like their own. He had just cranked up the motor when he heard the gunshot from somewhere out in front of the building and he was confused, thinking that Bob and the Kid and John Ashley were already making their break from the jail and he wondered how they’d managed to move so fast.

He got behind the wheel and saw the mechanic hurrying toward him saying, “Say there, mister, what you think—” when the shotgun blasted across the street. Both of them glanced in that direction and then Claude kicked the car into gear and worked the throttle and the car clattered forward. The mechanic came running as if he would jump into the car with him and Claude brought his gun into view and the mechanic veered and took cover behind a car.

He heard more pistolshots as he braked at the garage door and he expected to see Kid Lowe and the Ashleys shooting it out with police in front of the jail, but the jailhouse door stood deserted. Gunfire sounded to his right and he hunkered in the car seat as he looked down the street and saw policemen running around the corner. He drove after them as more gunfire sounded.

He made the turn and slowed the car almost to a stop at the sight of a dozen armed cops on the next block where a truck was crumpled and steaming against the smashed back end of a car. Shattered bread boxes littered the limerock pavement. A policeman and another man lay in the street and even at this distance Claude Calder could see that the street under them was stained with blood and that likely both of them were dead. And now he recognized Bob Ashley as one of the two bodies and he pondered the situation for one long moment and then wheeled the car around and headed for home.

He was slow about making his way back. He made frequent stops to take a glass of beer in the backrooms of filling stations and cafes, to shoot a game of pool in one roadhouse or another. When he was
in sight of the beach he sometimes parked the car and stripped to his underwear and dove into the breakers to cool off. He knew he would have to go to the Ashleys and tell them what happened but he did not like the idea of having to face Old Joe. Two days after the break attempt he arrived at the oystershell road leading to Twin Oaks. He was hoping John Ashley would not be home, that the old man might be out at one of his whiskey camps.

The trail wound for several miles through palmetto thickets and heavy pine stands and he knew the Ashley lookouts had seen him from the moment he’d turned off the Dixie Highway and had already sent word to the house of who was coming. Now the Ford reverberated over a hundred-yard stretch of jarring corduroy road that carried him through a wide muddy slough flanked by shadowy stands of oak and gumbo limbo hung with vines as thickly as a jungle. The car’s clangor raised a horde of storks from the shallows and up into the trees. And then he was off the logs and on a narrow sandy trail and the bushes scraped along both sides of the car. He negotiated a final sharp turn and the trees suddenly fell away and he came into a wide sunlit clearing and the house stood just ahead. The air was full of dragonflies hovering on blurred wings.

He saw Frank and Ed Ashley sitting on the front porch smoking and drinking and watching him come. He parked directly in front of the house and cut off the engine and got out of the car.

“Hey, boy,” he said, and was just starting up the steps when the front door flew open and Old Joe burst out like and unleashed hunting hawk and swooped down the steps and onto him and struck him on the head with a grub hoe handle and Claude Calder never had a chance to say a word before Old Joe hit him again and again, grunting hard with every blow he delivered. Claude fell and got up and fell again and was trying to fend with his hands and he felt bones break under the slashing hoe handle and now there was blood in his eyes and Old Joe kicked him in the face and he felt his front teeth stave. And now he could not get up and the blows continued to fall but he felt little pain and only later would he find out that Frank and Ed had at last came down the steps and pulled Old Joe off before he killed him.

He was put up in a backroom of the Twin Oaks house while he healed. But he was permanently purblind in his left eye and would never again have full use of his left hand nor replace the two front teeth he’d lost. His bullet-maimed ear now seemed insignificant to him. Nor would his spirit ever fully recover. Evermore he would jump at sudden sounds and sometimes be the object of ridicule for it. He would
for the rest of his brief life have bad dreams that woke him in the night in a soaking sweat.

Even after Claude was up and about, Frank and Ed had insisted that he stay on the place and they gave him simple tasks to let him feel he was earning his keep. Old Joe did not speak to him directly until nearly two months after the beating. One afternoon he came out to the Yellow Creek dock west of the house where Claude was cleaning a string of catfish. He expressed admiration for Claude’s catch and sat on the edge of the dock and offered him a drink from his personal jug. He told Claude that he would always have a place to live, that even if he married and started a family he could live on the Twin Oaks property. Claude knew Old Joe was apologizing the only way he knew how, knew the old man might even actually be sorry for what he’d done to him. When Joe got up to go, he handed Claude the jug and said, “Here, son, you keep this.” He accepted the jug with a smile and said thanks and watched Joe Ashley head off. And the thought of someday getting even with the old bastard was so sweet he could almost taste it. And then he thought of what would happen if Old Joe ever thought him faithless turned the taste to brass.

Scratchley ventured out of the Devil’s Garden but once every three or four months, poling his dugout through the sawgrass channels and along the creeks leading in serpentine fashion to the canal connecting to Jupiter, there to get a new supply of matches and lamp oil and other such luxuries as he could not wrest from the Everglades itself like he did all the essentials of life. The money for these items he regularly received from Joe Ashley. To earn it he was required only to keep close watch in the swamp for any signs of encroaching strangers or known lawmen and, if he ever saw any—which he rarely did—to report the sighting at once to Joe’s whiskey camp in the Hungryland Slough. The camp lay a few miles west of his weathered pinewood cabin in the Loxahatchee and he would go there once a month in any case to receive his stipend from Joe and take a cup of whiskey with him before poling back home. He was one of dozens—white, black and Indian—who served Joe Ashley in this employ all over South Florida.

On this late sun-bright Friday afternoon he had poled back up the canal from Jupiter with a fresh cargo of wheat flour and sugar, matches and lamp oil, a case of soda pop and sacks of rock candy, which was his weakness, and had just turned off into the creek leading to the Loxahatchee sawgrass channels when he saw another dugout laying to in the shadows of a live oak overhanging the creek ahead. Its three
occupants were watching him and he knew there was no reason at all they would be there except they were waiting for him. To try to back up and outdistance them on the canal was out of the question. Two of the men had poles and they would overtake him easily. And so he slowly pushed ahead and closed the distance to them.

He saw now that the man in the middle—the one without a pole—was deputy sheriff Bob Baker. The forward man was one he’d sometimes seen roaming deep in the sawgrass country to the southwest, a halfbreed who seemed to know his way in the Devil’s Garden. The fellow sitting behind Deputy Bob he’d seen before too, but could not recall exactly where nor if he knew his name.

He knew what they wanted and was already resolved to go to jail rather than give them the information. As his dugout drew near theirs he said, “Might’s well just go on and take me in, Bobby, because I dont know a thing.”

Bob Baker smiled. “Another fella was tellin me just yesterday he didnt know a thing neither and he didnt sound truthful to me anymoren you do. So I figured I’d test him. And do you know that not ten minutes later he was just jabberin like a parrot? I reckon I could make you do the same, Scratch, but truth is, I dont really need your information anymoren I needed his.”

Scratchley hove up within ten feet of the deputies’ boat. “Well then, what-all you want?”

“I want you to know you been makin a big mistake workin for the Ashleys,” Bob Baker said. “You and all them others. And now you know it.”

The breed stood up and it was as if the twin-barreled shotgun had materialized from the very air, so suddenly was it in his hands. He took aim and one of the muzzles flashed bright yellow and the buck-shot load blasted through the forward hull of Scratchley’s dugout and the great blue herons feeding along the banks broke for the sky in a terrified frenzy of wingflaps.

The impact jarred the boat under Scratchley’s feet and he almost lost his balance and the dugout prow was already sunk as the breed raised the barrels and Scratchley saw the man’s blue eyes behind the dark muzzles settling on him and the last thing he ever saw was the grin or grimace of the man behind Bob Baker who lacked both front teeth. Then the shotgun boomed again and he felt himself moving blackly through the air and then there was nothing.

Just after sundown they dumped his bloodymeat remains in a gator hole some five miles deeper in the Devil’s Garden.

The Liars Club

T
HERE WASNT ANYBODY TO GET EVEN WITH, THAT WAS
O
LD
J
OE’S
problem. The man who killed Bob Ashley was killed by Bob himself in return and thats all she wrote. There wasnt nobody else at fault. Nobody ordered the cop who shot Bob to do it. Old Joe didnt have nobody to blame for Bob’s killing, not even Dade Sheriff Dan Hardie. Truth be told, he was in Dan Hardie’s debt for saving John from a lynch mob. Some said the old man snuck a whole carload of his best stuff out to Hardie for a present and the sheriff was appreciative. Anyhow, they say Old Joe went around for months looking like a man searching for something he couldnt even put a name on.

It didnt help Old Joe’s spirits any that John Ashley was in jail down in Miami all this while. He was allowed one visitor at a time but they had to sit on the other side of a wide table from him and there was no touching allowed and there was always two guards standing right there and listening to everything was said. But Sheriff Hardie did allow Old Joe to bring John in some special dishes and treats Ma Ashley baked for him.

They dropped the attempted murder charges since there was no way they could prove he fired any of the shots at the cops who’d chased the Stuart bank robbers. But he stayed in the Dade County Jail under heavy guard for another year and a half before they finally let him out from under the murder of DeSoto Tiger. He mostly passed the time playing cards and exercising to keep from going soft. They
say he got so he could do all kinds of card tricks and wouldnt none of the other jailbirds play him for money because he could deal himself any card he wanted and nobody could catch him at it. When he wasnt playing cards he was doing pushups and situps and such. He’d put his back to the cell door and take hold of the bars over his shoulders and then lift his legs straight out in front of him. He could do that a hundred times in a row. They say after a few months his belly looked like it was wrapped with rope and there wasnt a white man in that jailhouse could beat him at arm rassling.

The state said finally it was dropping the Indian murder case against him.
Nolle Prosqui
they called it—a high-sounding way of saying, “We cant prove it so we quit.” Some said it was because they never could find their chief witness Jimmy Gopher anywhere—but they hadnt found him the summer before either and that didnt stop them from going ahead with the trial. Truth is, there was talk that Old Joe had passed a hefty sum of money to the judge and prosecutor by way of Gordon Blue and that the reason it took so long to bring the case to trial was all the negotiating over the deal. Supposedly the state’s attorney and the judge each wanted ten thousand dollars. Back then that wasnt nothing less than a small fortune and Old Joe thought they were out of their mind to ask so much. He figured five grand each ought be way more than enough. But the prosecutor and the judge said they wouldnt even think about it for less than eight and they finally told Joe take it or leave it and he couldnt do a thing but take it.
Then
they argued about exactly what that sixteen thousand dollars would buy. Old Joe didnt see what there was to argue about. He naturally thought
all
the charges ought be dropped. Supposedly the prosecutor was willing but the judge wouldnt hear of it. The way the story goes, the judge was willing to see the murder charge dropped but Johnny would have to stand trial for the bank job—and plead guilty. If John pled not guilty and made the prosecution work for his conviction, the judge swore he’d give him thirty years, but if he pled guilty he’d only give him ten. Joe didnt like that deal for shit. Him and the prosecutor argued about it for a time before they finally agreed to a five-year sentence.

So John Ashley went to trial for the bank robbery and pled guilty—and the judge gave him seventeen years. Old Joe sat there like he’d been pole-axed. He musta felt like the fella who paid for a pearl and got him a pebble. The prosecutor looked at him and shrugged like he didnt know what was going on either and then quick skeedaddled. They say the judge was smiling as he left the bench, that the seventeen
years was his way of letting Joe know he shoulda paid the ten thousand. The courtroom was about empty when Joe finally got up and walked out with Frank and Ed. The story goes that when he got outside he looked up at the sky and hollered, “The law aint nothing but a untrustworthy double-crossing son of a bitch!” Like it might of just come as news to him.

They transported John Ashley to the state penitentiary at Raiford in November of nineteen and sixteen. He was still there when the country went to war against the Hun. None of the Ashley boys went off the to the army—Old Joe’s view was that the family had enough enemies right here in Florida without having to go fight a new bunch a them on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Besides, he needed his boys to help him run his business. In 1917 the feds passed a wartime prohibition law that made it illegal to use grain for making whiskey, and a short time later they extended the law to include beer and wine. Naturally, the moonshine business just boomed.

They say Joe was paying protection money by the wheelbarrowful to the high sheriffs of three of four counties and to deputies and police chiefs and cops all up and down the East Coast and all around Lake Okeechobee. Supposedly he even had him a judge or two on the payroll. The more successful he got the more it was costing him to stay in business. Probably the only ones not on the Ashley payroll were the Bakers, but it wasnt no secret Joe Ashley had some of Sheriff George’s deputies in his pocket and for sure Sheriff George knew it. By now George Baker’s health was staring to go bad and he was giving Bob more and more authority to run the department in his place. Bobby knew a lot of the deputies were friends to the Ashleys or on Joe’s payroll and he didn’t trust many of the cops on the force except for about seven or eight he knew real well—the main ones being the Padgett brothers and Henry Stubbs and Grover Pass and Slim Jackson, a coupla others. His cousin Freddie was his closest bubba and sort of his personal lieutenant. He was a good old boy and easily the most popular policeman in Palm Beach County.

The rest of the department got to calling Bobby and his bunch the Baker Gang, and some say the most valuable man in the bunch was Heck Runyon. Even after Sheriff George was forced to fire him for killing a prisoner, he kept using him as what he called a special public agent. He said he needed him because there wasnt anybody on the county force as good at tracking a man in the Devil’s Garden, and there wasnt. But there were rumors he used him to fight crime in other
ways too, ways maybe not all that legal but ways Heck Runyon was awful good at. Hardly anybody was too bothered by these rumors because Heck wasnt really a policeman anymore and because when you got right down to it nobody really cared how Sheriff George and Bob Baker got rid of criminals, just so they did.

John Ashley hadnt been in Raiford but about six months when Bob Baker and his gang raided one of Old Joe’s whiskey camps set in a clearing in the Hungryland Slough about twelve miles into the Devil’s Garden west of Juno Beach. Old Joe himself was there and got caught redhanded along with two nigger helpers and a big old cracker boy named Albert Miller. They later on admitted they got took by such surprise they didnt even try to fight nor make a run for it. Bobby and his boys used axes to ruin the boiling kettles and bust up all the other whiskey equipment at the camp. They confiscated two of Joe’s trucks and every weapon they found and all the cash money Joe had with him at the time which was said to be several thousand dollars. Bob Baker had wanted the judge to give them jail time but the judge—who some said was a friend of Joe’s—made Bobby give back Joe’s money and his trucks and then made Joe pay a fifty-dollar fine for himself and the same for Albert Miller and let them go.

Bob Baker was hopping mad but Old Joe was plenty put out himself. He even went to George Baker’s office to complain about Bobby busting up his camp but Sheriff George told him he’d authorized Bobby to deal with moonshiners any way he saw fit and Joe would have to settle the problem with him. Old Joe told Sheriff George he could unauthorize Bobby just as easy as he’d authorized him and the sheriff said he didnt need anybody telling him how to do his job. They say you could hear the two of them a half a block away, they was hollering at each other so loud. When Joe Ashley came out of the office he looked ready to spit bullets and people just jumped out of his way.

That raid was the talk of the county for a month after. It was hard to believe anybody could find any of Joe’s whiskey camps in the first place, never mind be able to sneak up on them if they even knew where they were at. Old Joe had about eight or nine camps by then—four or five round about Palm Beach County, the others strung out from south of Lake Okeechobee to just west of Miami—and it was common knowledge he had eyes working for him everywhere in the Devil’s Garden, a whole grapevine of lookouts to send warning if the law ever started closing in on any the camps. The lookouts were said
to be posted a good ways from the camps so that even if you caught one you still might never find the camp he was watching out for.

Bob Baker said he’d been able to find the Hungryland Slough camp because Heck Runyon knew his way in Devil’s Garden as well as anybody. Maybe so—but not real likely. There was hardly a fullblood Indian who could find John Ashley’s whiskey camps, never mind some halfbreed who’d lived way off in DeSoto County for seven years of his young life. More likely, at least one of the lookouts ratted. The talk was that Bobby had somehow found out who Joe’s lookouts were for the Hungryland still and he’d run them down and made them tell where the camp was. Then ruther than put them in jail, he let Heck Runyon deal with them.

Mind you now, there aint never been a bit of proof put out in public that Bobby Baker was responsible for the death or disappearance of any of Joe Ashley’s lookouts—but there
was
talk about it. Friends of the Ashleys said the talk was true and Bobby Baker was using Heck Runyon as his private executioner. Friends of the Bakers said it was a wicked lie of the sort nobody but the Ashleys was low enough to tell. Most of us didnt know what to believe—and still dont. It aint no denying that in them days bodies were always being found along the edge of the Devil’s Garden and ever time one was found with its skull stove-in or showing a bullet hole, there were some who said it was one of Old Joe’s lookouts. It was hard to say for sure because after just a coupla weeks in the swamp a body’s nothing but rot on the bone and cant hardly be recognized by its own mother.

Most of the lookouts who vanished never turned up anywhere at all. But it’s a true fact that a week or so after the Hungryland raid a nekkid dead man come floating up to the Jupiter docks with his throat cut. The men who first spotted him thought it was a fat nigger but it turned out to be a white man all swole up and rotted black. His name was Seth Thomason and he owned a house in Jupiter and he had a wife and baby girl. Nobody ever found out who done him in but the word quick got around that he’d been one of Joe’s lookouts for the camp Bobby Baker had busted up. There’d been another lookout for that camp too—a swamp rat named Dog Scratchley who lived in a shack somewhere in the Loxahatchee Slough—and he just flat vanished is what he did. His shack was found burnt to the ground but there wasnt a sign of him nowhere and never has been. Most of us couldnt but wonder what-all was going on. Joe Ashley was said to be wondering too—wondering how Bobby Baker had found out that Scratchley and Seth Thomason were his Hungryland lookouts.

That Hungryland raid was just the first of more to come. Sometimes Bob Baker hit a couple of camps within just a few weeks of each other but more often months would go by between raids. Every time there was a raid, though, it turned out that the lookouts for the camp to get raided had disappeared a day or two before Bobby came popping out of the sawgrass or the pine trees to tear up the still.

Bob Baker never did catch anybody except now and then a few more of Joe’s niggers. But he ever time busted up or burned all the equipment and stuff Joe and his boys were forced to leave behind in camp—boilers and kettles and barrels and tubing and jugs and sugar and mash and whatnot. He even burned up the vehicles the Ashleys had to abandon. He was tearing down Joe’s whiskey camps faster than Joe could afford to rebuild them. We heard Old Joe was going crazy trying to figure out how Bobby was finding out who his lookouts were. It was a war going on is what it was, and Bobby was starting to win because he was making it so damn expensive for Old Joe to keep at it.

While all this was going on, John Ashley was doing his time at Raiford. He was kept in the main prison for a little over a year and while he was in there he worked in the laundry and got himself fitted with a glass eye. His natural eye color was brown, but for some reason the only color glass eye they could get for him in prison was blue. Some say they could of got him the right color but they just wanted to devil him some more by giving him different color eyes. The joke was on them though because John Ashley liked having one eye blue and one brown. He always did say the state had done him a favor and made him even more interesting to women.

Then he got transferred to a road camp not too fat from Palatka there on the St. Johns River. And not three months later he escaped. The story has it that he was out with his road gang fixing up the ferry road north of Palatka one afternoon and two men wearing flour-sack masks stepped out of the bushes with shotguns and got the drop on the guards and manacled them to a magnolia tree. There’s always been stories about somebody at Raiford being paid off to assign John Ashley to a road gang but it’s just one more thing you hear that there aint never been no proof of one way or the other. Most stories say it was Frank and Ed who broke him out but there’s never been no proof of that neither. For certain sure the Ashley was behind the break—had to be. And they had to of planned the break real careful for it to work so smooth as it did. They freed all twelve cons on the chain but took only one with them, a fella named Tom Maddox who was a bank
robber out of North Florida and had got to be good friends with John Ashley in the road camp but who nobody never heard nothing about ever again.