Red Grass River (21 page)

She dropped her hands and turned to him, her face bright with tears, he eyes bloodshot. “All I want is to get em back,” she said. “It’s all I want to do. But nothin ever works out right, not a goddamn thing! Now the goddamn car’s no good and I cant get out there to get em back.”

“Get
what
back?” he asked. “What all you talkin about?”

“My kids, goddamn it—my
kids
. They all I got and I want them back and I dont know how I’m gonna get out there to get them without no goddamn
car
!”

“Kids?” he said, as though he’d never heard the word.

“It’s all I want from him,” she said. “But
noooo
, he cant let me have em. Says they ruther be with him, the liar.”

“
Who
wont let you have em?”

“My son of a bitch
husband
, who you think? Lord Jesus, I wish he’d drop dead this minute. I wish he’d dropped dead a long time ago. I wish his momma’d sat on him when he was just a baby. Goddamn it, I wish I had a
car
!”

“Hey, darlin,” he said, “
I
got a car. And thats the same as you got one.”

She wiped at her nose with her sleeve and looked at him.

“I’d be proud to take you to get them children.”

Once again her eyes went thin. “Oh yeah? And just why you want to do that? You dont even know me.”

“Well I know you’re a nice person. And I know you need a car to go get your kids. And I know I can help you with that. What else I got to know? Let’s just say I got a hankerin to help. Course now, if you don’t
want
my help….”

His hankering went well beyond wanting to help out, of course, but he knew that the best way to approach these nervous half-crazy ones was slowly and roundabout.

Her name was Laura Upthegrove. Her husband was E. A. Tillman but she had never taken his last name for her own. She called him Eat.

She sat leaning against the passenger door as John Ashley drove his Model T roadster over the narrow and dusty rockfill road flanking the St. Lucie canal that ran through scrub pine and palmetto prairie in a long easy curve of about twenty miles southwestward from the lower fork of the St. Lucie River to Indiantown and then went on another dozen miles or so to Lake Okeechobee. The sky was palely
blue and fathomless, the sun as light yellow as a baby chick. The wind was from the south, soft and redolent of rips sawgrass and spawning bream. Osprey nests showed in the high pines and the parents raptors wheeled in hunt far out over the savannah.

She’d wanted to bring her shotgun but John Ashley wanted no part of spousal murder and had told her there’d be no need of it. He’d given it to a passing boy to take across the street to Toomey for safekeeping.

“Eat’s not only his initials, it’s what he likes to do best,” she said. “And it’s about what he’s done to ever old boy who ever messed with him—just eat him up.”

She looked at him carefully when she said this last, and he grinned and said, “Well I aint fixin to mess with him. I’m just takin a friend to get her children is all.”

Snakebirds stood on the canalbanks with their pointed beaks up-thrust and their wet black wings spread to the sun. White herons—which some called johnny cranes—winged gracefully over the prairie and bore south to roosting destinations in the sawgrass country.

He asked if Eat Tillman had been the one to black her eye and she nodded. “I guess I give him reason,” she said, biting her thumbnail and looking out at the passing pine stands and the vast stretch of savannah grass behind them. He tried not to gawk at her shirted breast where it swelled out from under the overall bib or at the snug cling of the denim to her crossed things. “I just did miss takin his head off with a frying pan,” she said. “Caught him a little on the ear is all. Shoulda seen, though—it was swole it up like a damn plum. I was just fixin to swipe at him again when he laid one on me to make me see stars for the next night and day.” The fight had been ten days ago when she tried to take the kids from him. She said she wished she’d thought to shoot the bastard while she had the chance but she was so addled from the punch she didnt think of it until she was miles away from Indiantown and by then the sun was set and she was feeling too low to turn around and go back and kill him.

“Just as well you didnt,” John Ashley said. “If you’d killed him and the police run you down for it, you’d gone to prison and been separated from your kids anyhow. Most like for a long time.”

She looked at him. “I aint afraid of the damn police.” She said this as though it were something he ought well have known. “I didnt think you were neither.”

“Me?” He smiled. “What you know about me?” He had told her only that his name was John.

“I know who you are,” she said. “The law’s been after you forever.
I heard about them different color eyes, how you got one shot right out of your head. I reckon you must be tough to kill as a gator gar.”

He looked at her and then back at the road ahead. “I guess so far,” he said.

“They say you killed a half-dozen Indians. Killed a coupla white men too, they say—some gambler in Miami, and a guard when you made your getaway from prison. They say there aint a bank in South Florida you aint robbed.”

“
They
say a hell of a lot, dont they?” he said, irritated by such reckless general surmise about his crimes but a little proud of his notoriety as well. “Too bad
they
dont know what in the hell they’re talkin about.”

“You mean you aint done all them things?” she said in a tone of disappointment. Because she wasnt smiling he couldn’t be sure if she was teasing. He couldn’t see her eyes in the shadow of her hat brim.

“I expect there’s probably a bank or two I aint robbed.”

“Not yet, anyway. Desperado like you, you’ll get around to them, I’m sure.” And now she smiled out at the road and he felt himself grinning.

“If I’m such a dangerous fella and all, how come you ridin with me way out here in the big empty where any ole thing might happen?”

“Oh I’m scared to death,” she said in a voice of mock fright. “I’m just hidin it real good. And I’m ridin with you cause you takin me to get my kids.” She looked out at the road ahead for a moment and then back at him. “I never woulda figured such a bad man like you bein scared of the police.”

“Oh yes, mam, all the damn time.”

“You are not, neither.”

They rode in silence for a time and then she said: “And I wouldnt of thought a man like yourself would hold with a man beating up on a woman.”

“I didnt say I hold with it,” he said. “I said you’da made things worse for youself if you’da killed him. My daddy raised us to know there aint never a right excuse to hit a woman.” He mulled for a moment before adding, “Unless she be looking with some other fella. But thats the
only
reason.” He paused again, and then: “
Or
if she tried to steal your money. But thats it, them’s the
only
two reasons. No, wait—there’s one more: if she kicks your dog. For damn sure if she kicks your dog.” He twisted his face in mock hard thought. “
Or
if she’s late with supper on the table, almost forgot that one.
Or
if she
wont leave you be.” He looked sidelong at her and saw that she was trying to look put out but her smile would not be restrained.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, “It aint no excuse but whatever one you got to hand.” They both laughed.

She told him Eat Tillman was a dredge operator her daddy had brought home to supper one evening after Eat had stopped to help him get his car out of the mud. It was raining hard and the shoulder of the South Shore road had given way and he daddy’s car had sunk on its right side to midway up the wheels. Eat chained the cars together and after several tried in which he’d almost got his own car stuck, he managed to tug her daddy’s car free. They put up the cars at Bobby Raines’ shop in South Bay and got in her daddy’s skiff and went down the canal a few miles and then portaged the skiff over the canalbank and into the sawgrass channel and poled a few hours more out to the Thousand Hammocks. She said Eat started making eyes at her from the minute they were introduced. Two months later they were married and living in Indiantown where Eat had inherited a small house from his daddy who managed a trading post. That was seven years ago.

“I didnt do it cause I loved him,” she said. “I liked him well enough I guess, but what I really wanted was to get away from home and, I dont know, do somethin
else
. Somethin…
excitin
.”

They were clear of the pines now and she looked off to the savannah horizon and blew a long breath. “He’s the quiet sort, old Eat. Dont never get drunk and hardly ever raises his voice and never hit me but a few times and never once used his fist. Not till this last time, and I guess any man would at least use his fist if you took a frying pan to his head. The thing is, what he most likes to do when he aint out workin on the dredge is sit home and play his harmonica. Lord.” She rolled her eyes.

About seven months ago she’d finally got to where she couldn’t stand the boredom of Eat Tillman another day. She packed a bindle and took her shotgun and a few tools and headed off in a skiff to live in her family’s house in the Thousand Hammocks. Her parents had left it to her when her daddy got his foot bit by a gator and was left too crippled to make his living by taking hides anymore. They had moved back up to Georgia to live with kin on a farm. She’d long ago learned to hunt and trap from her daddy and she got along just fine on her own, getting whatever money she needed by selling hides every now and then to Milt Jessup’s store in Jupiter or, lately, to Dolan’s in Salerno, which was worth the longer trip because she could usually
get a better price. She didnt say anything about her brother in the penitentiary and John Ashley didnt ask.

Eat didnt come looking for her. “I guess he was as glad I was gone as I was,” she said. The kids were five and four by then and she figured he could take care of them well enough. “I anyway didnt think I’d miss em all that much, truth to tell. And I didnt, not for the longest time, not till about last month. I asked Eat for em but he said no and so I stewed about it for a time and then last week I went and tried to take them anyway and thats when we had the fight.”

She stared out at the vista of scrub and grass. “I guess I miss em,” she said. “I mean, all of a sudden I come to have this feelin of somethin missin real bad and must be it’s them because it sure’s hell not him.” She paused and took out a pipe and tin of tobacco and packed the bowl and got it burning with the fourth match and puffed on it a few times and then looked over at John Ashley and said, “You know, I dont usually talk this much.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said—and they both grinned.

The sun was huge and pale and only slightly past its meridian when they hove into Indiantown, a hamlet sprung up around a longtime trading post. It was composed of a combination store, a grocery, a small tannery hung with drying hides of every description, a smokehouse, several boathouses, a small cafe, a few houses scattered near and about in the meager shade of scrawny oaks. A trio of men in widebrimmed fisherman’s hats stood smoking and drinking beer in front of the cafe and turned away from their conversation to watch them go by.

The air was cast in a thin haze of smoke. On the far side of the canal stood a cluster of Indian chickees—raised platform huts with open sides and roofs of palmetto fronds—and a row of dugouts along the bank where an Indian in white shirtdress and a black bowler was gutting a deer hung on a gumbo limbo branch. She directed John Ashley to drive on for another quarter-mile until he came to an abutting road and then turn onto it. The road was of raised rock and sank and ran through a stretch of marshland flanked by high pines. Then they were out of the trees again and a half-mile farther on arrived at a small shadeless house with a railed porch.

He turned into the sandy yard and shut off the motor. One of the porch posts bore the skin and rattles of a diamondback more than six feet long. A rusting old landaulet of uncertain make without canopy or windscreen stood just off the porch. Behind the house the pale green savannah extended flat as a carpet to the horizons west and south.

The children were playing in a dirt patch alongside the landaulet, the boy and his younger sister both wearing only short pants and digging with spoons and tin bowls and their faces and limbs smeared with mud. For a moment they sat gaping at the woman who stepped out of the car and smiled broadly and opened her arms wide to them. John Ashley slouched behind the wheel and rolled a cigarette. As the woman stepped toward them the children scrambled to their feet and ran around the side of the house, the boy yelling “Pa! Pa!” and the girl at his heels glancing back fearfully over her shoulder.

“
No!
” the woman called. “You get back here, Billy! I’m your
mother
, dammit!”

John Ashley lit his cigarette and reflected that unrequited affection was for certain sure one of life’s most melancholy circumstances. As the woman started after the kids, a man appeared from around the other corner of the house and she looked over and saw him and stopped as short as if she’d hit the end of a leash. The man was very large and his sleeves were rolled and his arms were blood to the elbow. He held a skinning knife in one hand and a raw length of indigo snakeskin in the other.

John Ashley came upright in the car seat. The man looked unhappy to see this woman who was yet his wife. He tossed the snakeskin onto the porch and wiped the knife on his pant leg and slipped it into a belt sheath. He glanced at John Ashley in the roadster and then shambled over to the woman and stood before her with his hands on his hips and said something to her that John Ashley couldn’t make out.

He reached under the seat and withdrew the .44 Colt and checked the loads and slipped the pistol into his waistband at the small of his back. He got out of the car and closed the door and stood leaning against it with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. The man looked at him again and then said to the woman, “I done tole you and tole you—they stayin with me. Hell, girl, you dont really want them except I do.”