Red Grass River (18 page)

His car jounced over the uneven trail and out of sight of the house. He blew a long breath.

All right then, he thought, you gave him a chance to do something about it and not a one of them can say you didnt. And if he did show the pictures to any of the rest of them, well, they’d just had their chance to do something about it too, didnt they? He figured that counted for plenty, going there and giving them the chance to do something about it. Took some balls—damn if it didnt. His shirt sopped now with sweat.

He wouldnt go back there again, nor go hunting after him. He’d given warning and that was enough. As for the Calder boy, hell, he’d been found out sure and done for. They’d somehow come to know he was fingering the lookouts and they’d done him in and fed him to the gars in one of the hundred creeks back in the pine swamps. No surprise to it. It’s what every snitch had coming to him sooner or later and one way or another.

He figured he’d been clear enough: keep out of the county towns, keep to the Glades from here on, keep to your whiskey camps you got left. Keep to your ground and we’re quits. It was a damn fair deal and just show him somebody who could say it wasnt.

His hands tremored on the steering wheel and he cursed the rugged car trail that shook the car so.

After they’d made love Loretta May brought him up to date on the happenings around the place in the nearly four years he’d been gone. She told him Miss Lillian had steadily gotten bitchier as she got older but had been nice enough to give Jenny the Horse a big wedding and reception right there in the house when Jenny married a hardware dealer who had been visiting her every Tuesday night for almost a year. Jenny and her husband had gone to live in Delray and she every now and then wrote a letter addressed to all the girls to let them know how married life was going and to break the news when she was pregnant the first time and to announce when her first kid was born. Quentin the redhead had run off one night with some trick and never even said goodbye to any of them but nobody really cared since no
body had ever liked the bitch anyway. Sheryl Ann had gotten married too but it only lasted about five months before she’d come right back to Miss Lillian’s.

She said she’d cried when she first heard about his eye. She asked if he’d really got a glass one and when he said yes she sat up in bed and asked if she could touch it. He took the eye out and place it in her hand and watched as she felt of its slight heft and rolled it between her fingers. She dropped it from one palm to the other and back again and giggled. What shade of blue was it, she wanted to know. “Real light,” he told her. “Like the sky was today when it’s sunny and cool and there’s no clouds at all.”

“Pretty,” she said. She placed it between her breasts and rolled it from one to the other and her caramel nipples puckered enticingly and he gently plucked at one and she smiled. She reached out and found his face and the empty socket and gently fingered its ridge. “Oh baby,” she breathed, her face soft with pity. He leaned forward and lightly kissed each of her cheeks and then held her face between his hands and kissed her mouth.

He put his eye back in the socket and she put her fingers to it again and smiled. “I bet you seen some real interestin things with that one.”

He said he didnt know what she meant.

“Yes, you do,” she said. She lay back and pulled him down beside her and held him close and hid her face against his throat. “You said before you couldnt hardly ever remember what you dreamed but it was like you was seein true things while you were dreamin them. Now you rememberin a lot of what you dream, aint you?”

He tried to pull back to look at her but she held him fast and burrowed her face under his chin.

“It’s some eyes cant see any of the awake world but can see a whole lot in the sleepin world,” she said barely above a whisper.

“I think you turned crazier’n a coot while I was gone,” he said. But he suddenly felt uneasy and couldnt have said why.

“I saw you sometimes while you were away,” she said, her voice so low now he had to strain to make out her words. “Not every night and most times not real clear and sometimes I’d wake up before I could see exactly what you were doin. But I saw you.”

They lay in silence for a time and then he said, “What’d you see?”

She told him. Told of seeing him standing at a steaming tub and stirring clothes in it with a wooden pole and that she could smell the strong lye soap he was smelling. Told of seeing his bare shoulder real
close up and a sharp instrument dipped in dark ink and its nib pecking into his shoulder and the image of a skull taking shape there. As she spoke she slid her hand up his arm to his shoulder and her fingers found the black skull with the paleskin eyes and nosehole and teeth.

“How’d you…
see
that,” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “The laundry at Raiford…the tattoo?”

She murmured into his neck but he could not make out the words. And then she told of seeing him in a cramped dark place. And though it was dark she knew he was naked and knew too that it was so cold and damp in that place it made his bones ache. “I saw you and could feel how much it hurt to be so cramped like that. I could feel how thirsty you were and how…lonely I swear I could smell how awful bad it stunk in there. Tell me, Johnny…where were you at?”

In the hole, he told her. He’d been put in there for three days and nights the first time for backsassing a guard. That had been in winter and he’d been colder than he’d ever been in his life. The next time was in late summer and he was put in there after a fight with a convict who’d tried to get ahead of him in the chow line. He’d stabbed the con in the face with a fork and the guards had both of them headlocked and manacled before the fight really got started and they’d each been given a week in the hole. In this season the hole had been an oven and it baked the human waste sliming the floor and walls, the foetor nearly palpable and the steamed air a labor to breathe. The cockroaches so many they felt like a crawling blanket. Rats squirmed into the cell as he slept and bit him awake into a panicked hollering and always escaped his wild blind grabs for them in his rage to kill them with his hands. He’d been too weak to stand when his time was up and they’d had to drag him out by the heels, rife with festering sores and sightless against the sudden light of day and nearly rank as a dead man.

She’d seen him too in bright sunshine once when he was dancing back and back and flinging his arms out to the side each time he leaped rearward and another man in striped pants like his own was lunging at him and both of them barechested and then there were bright red stripes across John Ashley’s chest and stomach. As she spoke her hand went to his chest and belly and her fingers trailed softly along the scars there. She’d seen then that the other man had a knife and they were fighting near piles of brush. John Ashley tripped the man down and ran to a stack of tools and grabbed a shovel and she saw other convicts gathered around and watching. She could see them cheering though she could not hear them and she saw too a man in a uniform and holding a shotgun and he too was watching and grinning
as the man with the knife came running after John Ashley. She saw John strike him in the head with the shovel and the man fell and John straddled him and with both hands gripping the shovel handle he drove its blade into the man’s throat as if he were plunging into the earth with a postdigger. She saw the man’s head come loose of its moorings and his face of a sudden looked sleepy and the gaping neck heaved a bright gout of blood four feet in the air and it splattered back on the face of the killed and on the shoes of his killer like a quick fall of red rain.

“Burchard,” John Ashley said lowly. “I didnt have no idea why he come at me. Somebody said later he’d thought I was the fella his wife run away with in Tallahassee. He was always looking hard at me but he never said word one to me, not even when he just all of a sudden was standin in front of me and started cuttin at me, the son of a bitch.”

He stroked her hair and put his face to it and breathed deeply of its sweetness. “I didnt get in no trouble over it. The walking boss, Sobel, he was a old boy from Alva where my family used to live, and me and him got along pretty good and he didnt care for Burchard at all and was glad to see him get it. He told the warden the truth—that Burchard had went crazy and attacked me with a knife he wasnt supposed to have and I didnt do nothin but defend myself. The warden never questioned it, neither, even though all the cons on brush detail that day saw what happened and some were saying I didnt have to kill him. Hell, sometimes I wish I hadnt. Took me a while to quit thinkin about…about what he looked like after. A time like that, you just wanna stop the other fella, just make sure he cant cut you no more. I admit I was blackassed about gettin cut. Anyway, the bosses dont like a fella they dont care much what happens to him or who does it.”

They lay quietly for a while. Then she said: “This other time, I seen you sitting on your bed in a little-bitty room and you, well, you were cryin. You had some papers in your hand and you were cryin. I couldnt see but the back of them. Whatever they were, they made you so awful sad I couldnt stand it. I didnt have that dream but two minutes before I woke up and I was cryin too. I cried all that day and didnt even know why. What was it, Johnny, made you feel so bad?”

He shrugged. “I dont recall nothin about it.”

He could feel that she knew he was lying. The papers had been photographs. Four of them. They had come for him in an envelope with no return address and bearing a Tampa postmark. In the first picture Bob was sitting up and naked and his open eyes were dead as
glass and his mouth shaped into a grotesque smile and he held his own shriveled dick in his hand. In the next he was still showing the horrid smile but this time holding a pistol to his head, his hand supported by the large hand of someone standing beside him but out of the picture. In the next, his head was turned sideways toward the same large man standing very close to him and holding Bob by the hair with one hand and a penis to his mouth with the other so that the skinned-back glans was between his lips. In the last photograph Bob was lying on his back and someone visible only from the waist down was standing beside him on the table with one booted foot on his chest in the manner of a hunter posing with his trophy. On the front ankle of the boot was embossed a white star.

He had looked and looked at the pictures and sobbed in his fury and his helplessness. He did not want to risk that anyone else might ever see them and so had studied them very hard for a while longer and then burned them to ash.

How could he have told his father? Told anyone? The day Bob Baker had stood at the foot of the porch steps while he watched from the window above with a .45 cocked in his hand and his daddy sitting in bed beside him, it had been all he could do not to shoot the bastard then and there. He dreamed of those pictures more often than he did not and would waken enraged in the dark of night, his jaws clenched and aching.

“What’re you thinkin?” Loretta May said. “You’re wantin to hurt something. Not me, is it, baby? I didnt say nothin wrong, did I?”

He heard uncertainty in her voice and blew a deep breath and kissed her shoulder and stroked her hip and said, “How’d you
see
all that?” His breath was tight in his chest. “You some kinda geechie woman?” He hoped she wouldnt say she was a witch because he did not believe in witches but had no trouble believing in her.

“I dont reckon,” she said, still nuzzling his neck. “I just see things in my sleep sometimes.” She pulled back and held her face toward him. “You had any more of them dreams you told me about? Them that seem like they’re trying to tell you somethin but you wake up and cant remember?”

“Yeah,” he said, “sometimes. I can recollect some of them fairly clear ever once in a while.” The dreams always disquieted him, and even now, simply thinking about them, he felt his pulse quicken.

“I
told
you the time would come when you’d start to remember them.” She said, smiling. “I dont reckon you’ll ever see as much as I do because you only blind in
one
eye. Tell me one you remember.”

He thought for a moment and then said, “i recent had one about a funeral. It was in St. Augustine. I could see the old fort out yonder of the graveyard and see the ocean behind it. But it was strange because it was like the graveyard was on top of a high hill. There wasnt anybody there but me and a woman with real red lipstick and it was like she didnt even know I was there. I could see the casket down in the grave but it didnt have no top to it and you could see the man lying in there. I knew him. A fella name of Tom Maddox. He’d been with me in prison and he come with us when Frank and Ed busted me free of the road gang. He went to Daisy’s with us and met a girl in Jacksonville with red lipstick and said he was gonna stay with her a few days and catch up with us at Twin Oaks but he never did show up. I looked down at him in that grave and I knew it was real, even though it aint real that people get buried in coffins with no tops and there aint no big hill like that in St. Augustine. But I knew it was true he musta gone to Augustine with that girl and died there for some reason and was buried and thats why we never saw him no more.”

“You could go and find out if he’s really buried there.”

Dont have to. I know he is.”

“What do you reckon happened to him?”

“I dont know. Somethin.”

“Do you care to find out?”

“No. It was his own business.”

They lay in silence for few minutes and then she said, “Tell me another one. A nicer one.”

“Well, it’s one I had it a few times now,” he said. “It’s a woman in it but not one I ever knowed. I dont see her, not really. More like I…
sense
her, like she’s
right
there but I cant really see her too clear. I swear I can almost smell her. She got this thing in her eye…like a little gold piece of the moon, it looks like.” He glanced at Loretta May and saw her smiling and he flushed and looked away. “Ah hell,” he said.