Red Grass River (2 page)

February 1912

S
HE WAS A BOBHAIRED SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BLONDE WITH FULL
breasts and smoothly round hips and a wide sensual mouth. And she was blind. She’d shown up at Miss Lillian’s house in the tenderloin district of West Palm Beach eight months ago in the company of a stranger named Benson who drove a brand new Model T. This Benson raised eyebrows by leaving her to sit in the parlor and be leered at by other patrons who jutted their chins at her and grinned and winked at each other while he took his pleasure with one of the girls upstairs. When he was done with his business he raised brows higher still by getting his hat and slipping out the side door and abandoning her. The girl cried less about it than one might have expected. She told Miss Lillian her name was Loretta May and that Benson had proved himself a son of a bitch in so many ways already that this further proof came as no surprise. But she said she’d rather starve out in the road than return to Atlanta and the only living kin she had, a sister she hated who’d grudgingly taken care of her for all seven years she’d been blind due to a swiftly degenerative disease of the retina. “Only reason I run off with the likes of Benson is I couldn’t stand another day more with Berniece,” she said.

Miss Lillian felt sorry for her and offered to let her stay in a small room off the kitchen in exchange for whatever light housekeeping she might manage in her handicap. The girl said she never was much of one for housekeeping even when she could see what she was doing
but she’d never been much of a shrinking violet either and one thing she knew she could do real well even blind was what she’d been doing with Benson in hotels every night since leaving Atlanta. She reasoned that from now on she might as well get paid for it and asked outright and with blushing cheeks if Miss Lillian was of a mind to hire her to work upstairs. Miss Lillian had already favorably appraised the girl’s pretty face and fine figure but she’d never worked with a blind girl before. She was sure some men wouldn’t care at all for a girl who couldn’t see what they were made of. Still, she liked this girl and was impressed with her grit, so she said, “Loretta May, honey, welcome to the house.” And although the madam been right that some of her patrons wouldn’t even consider humping the blind newcomer, others did it at least once just to see what it was like, and some of them liked it so much they wanted her every time thereafter. The girl more than earned her keep.

Among those who favored her was John Ashley. He’d been patronizing Miss Lillian’s since turning sixteen some two yeas before and the madam was fond of him and thought him handsome with his mop of black hair and wide amused mouth, his quick lively eyes that seemed to miss nothing. His visits were irregular but whenever he presented himself early in the week when the house’s business was at its slowest, Miss Lillian would let him have the whole night with Loretta May for the bargain rate of five dollars.

He liked that Loretta May’s skin smelled naturally of peaches and her short yellow hair was always freshly washed. She was the cleanest woman he’d ever put hand to, by far the best natured, the most ardent in the practice of her trade. He mentioned this last to her one time and she’d giggled and told him she was not so enthusiastic with others as with him. He thought she was lying but he could not deny the pleasure he took in the lie. Nor could he deny to himself how much he liked that she could not see him looking on her nakedness. He would often caress one part of her even as he secretly gawped upon another. Because she could not know where his gaze was set or see his face and whatever unguarded yearnings might show there, he felt possessed of a strange and keenly exciting power. But her defenselessness against his eyes also made him feel vaguely ashamed, and the way she sometimes smiled as he caressed her made him suspect she sensed his shame and that her knowledge of it gave her a kind of power too. His times with her were the best he’d had with a woman.

One cool Monday evening he arrived at Miss Lillian’s in the company of his brother Bob, who never tired of chiding him for sporting
with the same girl on every visit. “Might’s well get married, you gone do
that
,” Bob had said to him more than once. He himself insisted on a different whore every time and sometimes would enjoy two of them on a single visit, sometimes in the same bed, sometimes by turn, but in any case he kept strict account of his rotation among girls of the house. The only girl he did not include in the rotation was Loretta May, whom he’d tried once and then no more. “She’s a fine-lookin thing, but it aint no real fun in it if the woman cant see Captain Kidd standin tall,” he said, referring to his member by the name he’d given it when he was twelve years old.

As John rapped on the door with the horseshoe knocker that hung there, Bob said it was feeling like a two-time night to him. They were admitted to the plush red-satined parlor by a husky and jovial moonfaced man named Easton whose duty it was to defend the house tranquillity against troublesome patrons. Miss Lillian greeted the brothers affectionately and they nodded hello to Sherman the Negro piano player and to a derbied man they knew who worked at the train depot. The only others in the parlor were a pair of strangers in suits and ties—one burly, one lean—who sat on a sofa with a couple of girls and looked with urban disdain at the brothers in their faded denim and worn brogans. In their eagerness to get upstairs the Ashleys paid them no heed. A minute later Bob was ensconced in a room with a greeneyed girl named Sheryl Ann and John Ashley was rapping lightly on Loretta May’s door and hearing her call, “Get on
in
here, you bad old gatorskinner, you.”

As always she first bathed him in the large clawfoot tub Miss Lillian had placed in her room so that she would not have to use the common bath room the other girls shared—and so popular was she with the others that none but redhaired Quentin, who was quarrelsome by nature, had carped about her special privilege. After the bath she dried him and then dusted him with rose powder despite his usual happy protests. And then, because the moon was nearly full and its blue-silver blaze suffused the room, he extinguished the lantern and described to her the moonlight’s play in her bright hair and on her pale flesh stretched on the bed under the tall open window. She drew him to her and they entwined limbs and tongues and he entered her. They rocked together smoothly and when she emitted a small gasp deep in her throat that signaled her readiness he groaned in satisfaction and permitted himself to climax. He did not know if she truly came at such times or if she was simply putting on an act. He asked her one time, saying that he didn’t need any such pretense to enjoy himself,
and she’d smiled and said, “Well, if you dont know, I aint gonna tell you.”

Then lay in the moonlight and smoked cigarettes and she put her fingers to his cheek and then his neck and said it felt like his cuts were almost completely healed. “Feels like there wont be hardly no scar at all,” she said. The first time he’d come to her she’d felt the freshly scabbed wounds he’d received in the fight with the Indian and when she asked where he got them he’d told her an alligator bit him. She laughed and said he was lying, that a gator bite would have done him a lot more damage, even she knew that. He said it was an old gator with only two teeth left in its head and thats why he only had the two scabs. She’d laughed even louder and kissed him hard on the mouth.

He’d only just fallen asleep with his face in her hair when he was awakened by a heavy crash from downstairs followed by shouts and curses and in the tumult he heard his brother’s angry voice. He sat up and Loretta May grabbed his arm and said, “What?” He shook her off and scrambled from the bed and put on his pants and snatched up the pistol he’d sneaked in under his shirt. Miss Lillian expressly forbade guns in her house and he knew she would give him hell for it. He hurried shirtless and barefoot down the hallway and every head that appeared in other doorways as quickly withdrew at the sight of the pistol.

Down in the parlor Bob—wearing but his trousers—was trading kicks with the leaner of the suited men even as he tried to shake off the burly suit who held him fast in a bear hug from behind so that his arms were pinned at his sides. The three of them reeled in an awkward cursing dance, banging into walls and furniture and upsetting chairs and tea tables and breaking various things of glass. Easton the bouncer lay on the floor as though listening for activity in the crawlspace below and Sherman stood bigeyed before his piano with his palms out as if he would deflect the fight from it. A trio of swearing girls in states of undress were delivering kicks of their own at the suited men and shrilling and jumping aside each time the fight lurched their way. The stairway behind John Ashley was bunched with clamoring spectating whores and from the foot of the stairway his cry of “Hey!” was lost in the uproar.

All he could think to do was shoot. Without aiming he fired at the wall over the combatants’ heads and hit a framed photograph of former president Theodore Roosevelt whom Miss Lillian worshipped and the gunshot shook the air and rained shards of glass on them. The room fell silent but for the ragged gasping of the principals who were seized
in a tableau of contention—clothes awry, hair amuss, faces florid and wild and turned toward John Ashley as he pointed the pistol from one to the other of the two suits and said, “Hands up both you boys.” As the suits put up their hands Bob Ashley drove a knee into the crotch of the burly one who’d held him and the girls cheered to see the man go bug-eyed and fall gagging to all fours. They cheered again when Bob struck the other suit a terrific roundhouse that spun the man three-quarters around and dropped him to his knees with blood running through the fingers of the hand he clasped to his broken mouth.

And then a handful of police came through the front door and the donnybrook was done.

The sergeant in charge was named Abel Watkins and when he saw that the Ashleys were on the scene he wasn’t surprised. He’d known them for hellions since their boyhood. The brothers’ clothes were retrieved from upstairs and while they got dressed and some of the girls helped Easton up onto a sofa and tended to him, Bob Ashley gave Sergeant Watkins an account of events.

After having his sport with Sheryl Ann, he had come downstairs to see what other girls might be available for his second go-round and found three of them sitting with the two men in suits. “You city boys sure take your time about pickin your pleasure,” Bob said, and beckoned Jenny the Horse to him. But the burly one of the suits caught Jenny by the wrist and said in a Yankee accent, “Hold on there, sugar. I haven’t decided who I want and it might be you.” Bob said that if the suit was going to pick Jenny, then pick her, and if not, he was taking her upstairs himself. The suit responded that he’d take all the damn time he wanted to make his choice and no white trash son of a bitch was going to tell him different. Bob’s response to that had been to kick the man in the face with the heel of his bare foot and send him over backward together with the sofa. Easton came on the run from the kitchen and grabbed Bob by the arm and Bob punched him backwards toward the other suit who bonked him on the crown with a half-full bottle and took him out of the fight. Then the first suit was up again and grabbed Bob tightly from behind and the other one commenced kicking him and hitting at him with the bottle. “Sonofabitches mighta put a hurt on me if Johnny didnt get their attention like he did,” Bob told Watkins. He was sporting a swollen purple eye and Sheryl Ann pressed a wet cloth to his scalp to stem the blood running from his hair.

The city men looked even worse. The burly one had a broken
cheekbone and half of his face was grotesquely engorged. His gait was that of an old man, so bruised were his testicles. The lean one showed an upper lip like a large wedge of peeled plum and the fresh lack of a top front tooth. As Bob gave Sergeant Watkins his account of the fight, John Ashley heard the lean suit mutter to the other, “I
told
you we oughta come packing. But
nooo
, you said, whatta we need to
pack
for, you said. The fuck can happen in a damn cracker whorehouse, you said.”

They told Sergeant Watkins they were from Chicago and en route to Miami for a fishing vacation. The burly one gave his name as Johnson, the lean one said he was Bode. They insisted that Bob had started the fight for no reason except jealousy over one of the girls who’d been keeping them company. But the three girls said that wasn’t so, that the Johnson one started it by calling Bob trash.

“Christ,” the Bode one said. “
thats
no reason to kick a man in the face.”

Sergeant Watkins glowered and said, “You sure’s
hell
from up north, aint you?”

He charged the Chicagoans with felonious battery and disorderly conduct but was willing to close the case on payment from each of a twenty-five-dollar fine if they also paid Miss Lillian one hundred cash dollars apiece to cover the damages to her parlor.

“Money wont patch up the insult to Teddy’s eye,” Miss Lillian said, looking at the skewed photograph dangling on the wall and at the bullet hole in Roosevelt’s spectacles. “But thats somebody else’s doing anyhow”—and here she gave John Ashley a tight-lipped look.

The suits muttered about it but they paid up. Everyone gaped at the roll of bills the Johnson one produced from his coat to peel off the requisite 250 dollars. Watkins then ordered the two men escorted to the depot to await the Miami train.

Sergeant Watkins concluded that Bob had acted in self-defense and so filed no charge against him. But he had to charge John Ashley. “It’s too many people heard that gunshot, Johnny,” he said. “The captain’s gonna hear about it in the mornin and ask me where’s the report. I dont charge you on it he’ll sure-God skin me good.” The captain was new to West Palm Beach, a hardliner from Jacksonville with a reputation for doing things by the book.

John Ashley said he understood. He agreed to a charge of reckless discharge of a firearm in the city limit and gave Watkins a bond of $25 which, rather than go to court, he would be able to forfeit as a fine. Watkins gave him back his pistol and the matter was closed. At
the front door the sergeant exchanged winks with Miss Lillian and she waggled her fingers after him and said “Come back soon, Abel—but not in that uniform, you hear?”