Red Grass River (22 page)

“They’re
my
children too, Eat,” she said, her voice strained.

The man turned to the front door and called, “Billy! Rayette! Come on out here.”

The two kids came in view behind the screen door and hesitated, and then the boy pushed it open and he and his sister stepped out on the porch. “You kids,” the man said, “your momma’s still wanting you to go with her. Either of you changed you mind and wanna go, you can. Do you? Either you?”

Both kids shook their heads and the man said, “You gotta says yes you do or no you dont. Say it so she can hear.”

“No,” the boy said, glowering at his mother. He looked at his sister and nudged her and she said, “I dont
wanna
go with her.”

“All right,” the man said. “Get back inside.” The kids disappeared into the interior darkness. The man looked at the woman and turned up his palms. “I guess it aint nothin else to say, is there? Why dont you just quit all this anymore and go on and leave us be?”

“I
want
them kids, Eat.” Her voice was drawn to an edge. She smacked her fists on her thighs. She turned now to John Ashley who thought she looked becrazed. He was suddenly sorry he’d come out here, but there was nothing to do now but see the thing through. He stepped forward and said, “Look here Mister Tillman, everybody knows kids ought be with their momma. It’s the most natural—”

“Who the hell are
you
?” Eat Tillman asked, his voice utterly absent the placatory tone he’d used with his wife.

“I’m a friend of Laura’s come to help her take her children home.”

“They
are
home, hoss, not that it’s any your business.”

“I aint leave without them kids, Eat,” Laura said. “Not this time.”

“You sure’s hell not leavin with em,” Tillman said, looking from John Ashley to her and back to Ashley.

“You talk like some kinda hardcase,” John Ashley said. “You a hardcase, mister?” He noted now how very large Eat Tillman’s hands were, noted their scars and sizable knuckles.

“I’m all I need to be to deal with you.”

“You fixin to deal with me with that skinner?” John Ashley said, gesturing at the knife Tillman wore on his belt.

They were slowly sidestepping further out into the yard where they would have more room. Tillman withdrew the knife and half-turned and threw it end over end to impale quivering into the porch pole opposite the one with the rattlerskin.

“I don’t need no weapon,” Tillman said. “Not for you.”

John Ashley reached around behind him and brought out the Colt. Tillman’s eyes narrowed and his mouth went tight and he nodded as though confirming his own suspicions that this stranger was not a man to be trusted. For an instant John Ashley considered holding him at gunpoint while the woman snatched up the kids. How much easier it would be that way. Then he turned and held the pistol out to Laura and said, “Hold this. That’s
all
you do with it, hear? Just hold it.” Then he took the glass eye out of its socket and handed it to her too. “And this while you at it.” For a moment she stared at the eye in her
palm like it was some object of rare imagination, and then smiled at him and put it in her overalls pocket.

He turned to Eat Tillman and said, “Winner says who gets the kids.”

Tillman was gaping at the empty eyesocket in John Ashley’s head. “I dont know I can fight a man got but one eye,” he said. “Dont seem fittin.”

“How fittin’s it gonna seem to you when that one-eyed man stomps your sorry ass whether you fight back or not?” John Ashley said.

Tillman shook his head resignedly. “All right, mister, suit yourself,” he said. He started to take off his shirt and John Ashley hooked him hard to the belly and crossed him to the jaw. The man staggered back a few steps but his eyes held their focus. His thick belly was firm as a shipping-sack of sugar and his jaw stung John Ashley’s hand. Well hell, John Ashley thought. And knew he was in for some pain.

Fifteen minutes later his fact felt overlarge and numb and his vision was blurred and every huffing breath ached in his ribs. He had thrown up his breakfast and had to spit blood constantly to keep from choking on it. Now Eat Tillman hit him in the face again and again he fell down. He saw the blue sky whirl and he rolled over and pushed up on hands and knees and rested a moment. He tasted mud and blood. The first time Tillman put him down, the man had kicked him even as he tried to get up and Laura had cursed her husband and shrieked for him to fight fair goddammit. John Ashley had told her to shut up. But Tillman had not kicked him again.

John Ashley stood up and swayed and wiped blood from his good eye. Tillman waited with fists ready, showing one swollen eye and bloated lips and an ear outsized and purple. But he could still see clearly and looked hale in contrast to John Ashley. He moved with the quickness of a truly dangerous big man.

John Ashley charged with his head down and grabbed him about the waist and tried to pull him off his feet, hoping to straddle him, pin his arms with his knees and then punch him until he couldnt punch anymore. But Tillman stood fast and hooked him hard with left and right to the ribs and kidneys and then braced himself and brought his knee up hard and John Ashley went sprawling.

He got to hands and knees and then set one foot on the ground and rested with an arm on the raised knee. And now heard Laura crying and wanted to tell her to stop it but the effort of speech was too great to muster. He tried to stand and his head spun and he fell
over on his side. And then hacking and gasping began the struggle to rise again.

A gunshot shook the air and John Ashley flinched on all fours and looked up to see Laura with her arms stretched in front of her and holding the revolver in both hands and pointed at Eat Tillman. She was crying and Eat Tillman’s hands hung at his sides and he was staring at her and looking very tired. “I’ll put the next one in your teeth.” she told him. She snuffled hard.

“You gone have to shoot me you want them kids,” Eat Tillman said in a voice now deeply nasal.

“Just dont you hit him anymore,” she said. She looked at John Ashley and said, “Get on up and kick him in the balls if you want.”

John Ashley spat blood and sat back up his heels with his hands on his thighs. He slowly shook his head. He could not stand by himself, never mind kick anyone. She sidled over to him and held a hand to him. “Come on, baby,” she said.

John Ashley took her hand and she helped him to his feet. With an arm about each other they shuffled to the car and she helped him get in on the passenger side. Then she went around and got in behind the wheel and kept the pistol on Eat as she held out the crank to him and told him to turn the motor. He did it and the engine fired up and he handed the crank back to her and stepped away from the car.

John Ashley said, “I dont think it’s anymore need of that gun, do you?” but so battered was his mouth that she did not understand what he said and he had to repeat it before she nodded and laid the pistol on the seat.

As she backed the car around in the yard John Ashley saw the children come out of the house and go to their daddy and each one hug tightly to one of his legs while he stroked their heads and told them it was all right, there was nothing to cry about, not anymore.

Then they were rattling down the road and past the pines and then came to the crossroads and turned toward Indiantown and sent up a flutter of chickens that had wandered out from a nearby yard. As they went through the hamlet they once again drew stares. And then they were down the road and around the bend and Indiantown fell away behind them.

“Eye,” he said, and held out his hand. She gave him the glass eye and he fitted it in place and then put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes and thought of nothing at all.

After they’d driven in silence for a time she pulled over one the shoulder and stopped the car. He sat up and saw but the road ahead
and behind and boundless blue sky and nothing else to see in the world but open prairie and distant hammocks and the bluegreen horizon shimmering hazily in the rising heat like a world badly imagined.

She slid across the seat and up against him and hugged his neck and kissed his battered face. He flinched and her face drew with concern and she kissed him more softly. He said he was sorry he didnt get her children back. She said she wasnt. She said that while he was fighting for her she’d come to understand that what she’d been missing wasnt the children at all but something she hadnt even known existed. What it was she’d been missing in her life was him.

She straddled him on the seat and kissed him again and then stroked his hair and looked down into his one-eyed face. Her eyes bespoke a tenderness beyond any he’d ever known. He saw then for the first time that her eyes were green. And that one of them held a tiny gold quarter-moon.

The Liars Club

L
ORDY, THE STORIES WE HEARD ABOUT
J
OHN AND
L
AURA
! T
HE
kinda stories no one could know were true or not except for the two of them their ownselfs. Stories about the sort of things they’d do in the house Laura was give by her daddy. They say it was way down in the Devil’s Garden, that house, down in the Thousand Hammocks where there’s nothin for miles around but sawgrass and snakes and gators, hooty owls and skeeters and frogs ranging on your ears all the night long. Nights out there just black as blindness. It wasnt any way at all to get within a mile of that house but by the twisty sawgrass channels out there where the grass was just shy of sufficient height to hide you. By the time you’d get close enough to see just a tiny bit of the house through the highground pines, a lookout up in the trees would of had you in his gunsight for a half-an-hour. They say there was getaway sawgrass channels all around that hammock that nobody but Laura knew about and the only one she ever told about them was John Ashley. It was probly the best hideout house John Ashley ever had. Them wild-ass lovebirds didnt live out there all the time, only when they wanted to be alone for a few days and nights way off where there wasnt no law of man nor God to keep em from doin whatever they felt like as loud as they felt like. Ever now and then some hunter or frogger would claim to’ve been out in that part of the glades of an early evening and from a mile away heard em howling like a couple of painters. We heard that when they first moved into the sidehouse
on the Twin Oaks property Old Joe couldnt stand the ruckus they made when they went at it late at night. He said if they were going to carry on so awful loud they could damn well do it someplace where they wouldn’t keep everybody awake by it. The Ashleys liked Laura real well and everybody in the family was glad John had found him a true love and all, but we heard the whole family was bad to joke about the caterwauling John and Laura’d make out in the sidehouse.

And so the lovebirds started going out to her house every now and again. Out there they could make all the noise they wanted and nobody around to make fun of them for it nor tell them to quit.

In the spring of nineteen and twenty Sheriff George Baker whose health hadnt been gettin nothin but worse woke up sicker than usual one morning and stayed home in bed and only got worse and by that night he was dead. Bob Baker was appointed to finish out his daddy’s term and then in November he ran for election to the job. He had a photographer take his picture throwin his hat in a ring like he was Teddy Roosevelt. Dont none of us recall who it was ran against him that November. It didnt matter. Bobby was about popular as religion by then and there wasnt a chance in hell he wouldnt be elected—and he was. In his victory speech he said his number one aim was to rid Palm Beach County of what he called the criminal element. Actually he’d been claiming credit all during the campaign for having cut crime a goodly bit already. There hadnt been a bank robbery in the county in nearly a year and he promised the voters there’d not be another one, not while he was sheriff. He didnt mention the Ashley Gang by name but everbody knew that was who pulled the last bank job. It pretty soon became clear, though, that as long as the Ashleys didnt show their face to Bob Baker or any of his officers nor harm any of the good citizens of the county, Sheriff Bob wasnt gonna go out hunting for them. In a way it was like he was letting bygones be bygones as long as the Ashleys didnt do any new crimes, not in Palm Beach County—not in public anyway. Oh he knew they were runnin booze, everbody knew it, but hardly anybody around here saw moonshiners and rumrunners as criminals anyhow, except for some of the good Christian people who’d favored the damn Prohibition laws in the first place.

If the Ashleys had done their booze business out in the open like some bootleggers were doin in some places, Sheriff Bob wouldnt of had no choice but to come down hard on them. But they was careful and quiet about the way they made deliveries to their Palm Beach
County customers and Bobby knew better than to work too hard at stopping them. Just about all the hotels and restaurants had speakeasies and they couldnt have done much business without em. And the fish camps liked to keep spirits on hand for their customers who liked a cold beer or a drop of something stronger after a day of fishing. If Bob Baker had put a stop to the Ashley bootlegging in Palm Beach County he’d of hurt a lot more businesses than just Old Joe’s. And if you do something that harms a man’s business, he aint about to vote for you come next election—not him nor his family nor his friends.

John Ashleys was another matter. There was a warrant on him and arresting him wouldnt of put Joe Ashley out of business. But John Ashley was mostly keeping to the Devil’s Garden or down to Miami, where Bob Baker couldnt touch him. As far as anyone knows, the only times he showed hisself publicly in Palm Beach County anymore were now and then when he’d bring a load of hides to a buyer. He never caused trouble on those visits and never of hides to a buyer. He never caused trouble on those visits and never stayed long, and he seemed to know exactly when neither Bob Baker nor any of his main deputies would be around. Sheriff Bob have to of known about those appearances but he didnt seem to care all that much. All in all, over the next few years it was like there was an unspoken truce between Bobby and John.

Which aint to say the Ashleys didn’t have their troubles in that time—especially once national Prohibition came along. Supposedly a gang of Yankee bootleggers tried to run hooch through Palm Beach County and the Ashleys took exception to the intrusion on their territory. None of us knew—then or now—what the real truth of all those stories was, but we heard a lot of things. We heard the Ashleys was hijacking ever booze shipment the Yankee rumboats were landing on the local beaches. There were rumors of gunfights out on boondock stretches of the Dixie Highway where they was stopping every Yankee rum truck to come down the road. There was stories of men gettin shot dead. Mind you, we only
heard
most of this—the local newspapers hardly ever mentioned any of it. There was talk that Sheriff Bob had told them not to print any stories to worry the public with secondhand reports of things that were not threat to the civic order, of things going on in the dead of night way out in the lonesome reaches of the Dixie Highway or on stretches of beach where not a soul lived for miles around. More than one person made bold to whisper that Bob Baker didnt want anything to put an end to that whiskey war because he was hoping every one of the Ashleys would get killed in it.

Miami really started booming during the Great War and just kept at it after the Armistice. When Deering finished building his Vizcaya estate in 1915 the town lost a lot of jobs—then the war come along and everthing got all better in a hurry. Thousands of servicemen got stationed in Miami and at the end of the war some of them stayed. All the military branches—army and navy and marine corps—set up flying centers of one kind or another in Miami and us kids loved to watch them military planes making their practice flights ever day. We were all just crazy for aeroplanes. Some of us are old enough to remember the first aeroplane flight in Miami back in nineteen and eleven. The mayor wanted to do something special to celebrate the town’s fifteenth birthday so he passed the hat and scraped up a whopping $7,500 to pay the Wright brothers and they sent down an aeroplane on the train and a pilot named Gill to fly it.

It was one of them old bi-wing jobs that looked like a giant dragonfly. They hauled it out to the country club golf course and when Gill took off you didnt hear nothing but his motor and a coupla thousand people going “
Ooooh!
” and it was one or two ladies fainted from the excitement. The plane went up over the pines and a bunch of the girls from the Hardieville houses had come out to watch and they waved their white hankies at the pilot as he flew over them and he wagged his wings from side to side and you could see his big white grin under his goggles. But the plane scared the daylights out of a herd of cattle in a neighboring pasture and them cows went right through the fence and come stampeding across the golf course just as the plane circled around low and started coming back our way. All the horses and mules started rearing and bucking in the traces and the drivers were yelling “Ho! Ho now!” and trying to rein them in as hard as they could, but here come the cattle stampeding at us and here come the plane not more’n fifty feet overhead with its motor loud as bejesus and them horses and mules were flat terrified and there was no holding em back. They lit out with their teeth showing and their eyes big as baseballs and the drivers and passengers went ass over teakettle off the wagons and out of the buggies. People were shrieking and scattering out of the way of the cattle and the runaway vehicles and some folk went tumbling into the sand traps and some fell in the ponds. All you heard was the rapping of that aeroplane motor and the cattle bawling and horses and mules galloping and whinnying and women screaming and men cussing and kids laughing and…well Lord, aint none of us who was old enough to be there have yet forgot that fifteenth birthday celebration and the first aeroplane to fly over Miami. We found out
later that one fella drowned in the water trap in front of the sixteenth green and wasnt found till the next day when a golfer’s fairway shot bounced in front of the hazard and ended up between the dead man’s shoulder blades, which was about all of that was showing above the water. Some say the golfer waded on in and played the lie off the fella’s back before reporting the body, but likely as not thats just a mean story. Anyway, not six years later we were watching the navy’s flying boats—flying
boats
, mind you—takin off and landing from the bay at Dinner Key and asking each other what they’d think of next. But by the end of the war we’d seen so many planes we didnt even look up anymore when one flew over. A body can get used to anything, no matter how mysterious or strange, and it pretty soon becomes a commonplace, even if its mystery aint any better understood than it ever was.

Lots of mysterious things happened around that time. There was a story in the newspapers about a baby born in Fort Lauderdale that no sooner came out of his momma’s womb that he said just clear as a bell, “It will rain for forty days and forty nights.” And bedamn if it didnt start coming down that very evening and rain from Lauderdale to the keys all through the next day and all the day after that. Newspaper reporters went to the baby’s home and asked his momma and daddy to ask the infant what was going on but apparently the child had spoke his piece and wasnt about to say another word about rain or anything else. You can imagine how people carried on when the rain kept falling and falling day after day. Some good Christian folk sold everything they owned and got ready for the second coming of Noah’s Flood. Most the houses in town put a boat ready in the yard and loaded it with provisions. In the worst flooded neighborhoods alligators swam across the yards and ate ever dog around. Ever day there was news of somebody got bit by a water moccasin. The churches did steady business in sinners stopping in to make theirselfs right with the Lord. Others went the other way and took to the bottle. They say half the men in Miami didnt see a sober hour during that steady fall of rain. There were drunken public fistfights ever day and the cops mostly didnt did anything about them except make bets on who’d win. We heard that some men drowned in the streets when they feel down and were too drunk to even lift their heads up out the water. It rained ever single day for three either weeks before it finally quit and the sun come out again and started to dry out all the craziness. Some said the rain was God’s way of punishing Miami for its wicked ways but others said that was just superstitious nonsense and that the real reason for
the rain was them enormous Krupp guns the Germans was using to shell Paris from seventy-five miles away. They said the blasts of them huge guns was upsetting the atmosphere and causing all kinds of strangeness in the weather all over the world.

Then there was the Spanish Lady. That’s what everbody called the influenza that went around so bad during the war. For a time it seemed all South Florida was sick, the whole damn world. People pretty much stopped visiting with their neighbors for fear of sickness in their house. Some of the grownups called catching the flu being kissed by the Spanish Lady. It was a kiss to make you out-of-your-head sick is what it was. For some it was the kiss of death. Everbody knew somebody who was took by the influenza. It was lots of people in mourning dress at that time. For reasons nobody ever figured out, the only ones in Miami who seemed immune to it was the Hardieville girls. Some said it was because God had meaner ends in mind for them sinful women and wasnt about to let them die of anything so easy as the flu.

Anyhow, the war brought more servicemen to Miami than you could shake a picture postcard at and the doughboys brought money and things were mostly good most of the time during the war and got even better afterward. Business was fine all over town—it was money money everwhere. Some restaurants were open for business round the clock. Clothing stores couldnt resupply their stock fast enough, there was so much demand for the latest fashions. Every man wanted a silk shirt and a white boater. Pink and yellow were the favorite colors for shirts during the war but after Armistice candy-striped became most popular. Wages went way up—but so did prices. A carpenter who used to make two dollars a day now got paid a dollar an hour but his twelve dollars for a day’s work was about what one of those new silk shirts cost.

Of course what them doughboys wanted more’n anything else during the war was whores and booze and gambling games—and of course the town was quick to provide all they wanted and no matter it was all illegal. The Hardieville houses never closed. Some of the houses had gambling and some didnt but damn near ever hotel in town had at least one room reserved for dicing and cards at any hour. The politicians and cops were gettin rich on the payoffs. With all them cathouses and gambling rooms doin round-the-clock business the call for booze was constant and the Ashleys had all they could do to satisfy it. When Prohibition came in after the war the market for hooch in Miami was so great it’s no wonder the gangsters from up north wanted in on the action.