Red Grass River (23 page)

After the war the Ashley boys started going to Miami more often than ever. The town was building up a boom that wouldnt do nothing but get bigger and bigger till it’d finally get blowed away by the hurricane of nineteen and twenty-six—but by then the Ashley boys were history, all but one. Once Prohibition become the law there wasnt any kind of fun a man couldnt find in Miami. The Ashleys still went there to gamble sometimes and to sport with the fancy ladies like they always had, but by now they all of them had a steady girl and they liked to go down to Miami in a bunch and have a big time together.

Frank had took up with a gal from Stuart named Jenny, a real pretty thing with black hair to her waist. Ever chance he got he’d take her for drives in his roadster. Now and then people saw them having a picnic in the harbor park. Ed’s girl and named Rita somebody. She was a reclusive thing and nobody’d ever seen much of her till she became Ed Ashley’s girl. She was half-Indian and a few years older than Ed and lived somewhere midway of the St. Lucie canal near an Indian camp. They say she had tits like grapefruits and an ass like a perfect turned-over heart—a body to make a man just howl with want. But her face was another story. They say one side of it was real pretty but the other side of it was a scary thing to behold. The story is, she got that face when she was about fourteen from a bad Indian named Tommy Fox Shadow who later got killed in a fight with a game warden who caught him taking egret plumes. One night in a drunken argument the Indian hit her across the face with a flaming chunk of pinewood off the campfire and knocked out a coupla upper teeth on that side and embers got stuck in her cheek and just burned her to the bone. After that nobody ever saw her to smile nor heard her to say a word. But if her face wasnt much to look at, well hell, neither was Ed’s, what with that scarred mouth and all. It was lots of jokes on the quiet about how the two of them must of had to put a bag over each other’s head just to do the deed.

Hanford Mobley was said to of fallen for some redhead in Miami, and Clarence Middleton had a girl in St. Lucie he has sweet on. Clarence would go off by himself to see her and hardly ever went to Miami with the others. Roy Matthews now, he never did have a steady girl as far as anybody knows. From the time he joined the gang he pretty much took his pleasure where he found it and they say he found it everwhere. For reasons no man’s ever understood, women just cant seem to resist a naturalborn sonofabitch and they say Roy Matthews could have his pick of them like oranges off a tree.

The way we heard it, the boys were taking their girls to Miami nearly ever weekend. They say Old Joe had foaming fits about them spending so much time in the city. He believed all cities were naught but sin pits and he was fearful his boys might get too fond of Miami’s ways. The fact is, the Ashley boys liked Miami plenty well. They liked wearing snazzy city suits and going dancing in the Elser Pier hall. They liked eating in fancy restaurants and going to the moviehouses and singing along to the music at the park bandstand. They for damn sure must of liked them big hotel beds for fooling on. As for their women, well, they loved the city. They didnt have to work while they were there. Didnt have to cook nor wash laundry nor chop wood nor nothing. They could take bubblebaths, they could wear perfume and pretty theirselfs up. Those visits to Miami were to only times Laura Upthegrove was ever known to put on lipstick and a dress.

October 1920—January 1921

T
HE
E
LSER
P
IER WAS AN ORNATE THREE-STORY BUILDING THAT
stood at the foot of Flagler Street and extended on pilings into Biscayne Bay. It was as big as a warehouse and from its blazing confines every evening came a rich medley of smells of waft through the streets on the inshore breeze—a redolency of popcorn and roasted peanuts, hot dogs, cotton candy, pastries. This was the place to go in Miami for almost any sort of fun that wasnt illegal. The Pier contained a dancehall and an arcade comprising food stands, a shooting gallery, a tattoo parlor, game booths where fast-talking pitchmen challenged every passing fellow to win for his sweeties a teddybear or gewgaw of colored glass by throwing a baseball at a pyramid of wooden blocks or pitching a penny into a cup or tossing a plastic doughnut at a peg, by shooting an arrow at a fistsized balloon or lobbing a horseshoe at an iron stake in a box of sawdust. There were viewing machines in which one could see short loops of moving pictures by depositing a penny in a slot and turning the crank on the side of the machine—slapstick scenes, quickdraw Western gunfights, exhibitions of horseback highdiving. One viewer showed Hawaiian hula dancers in grass skirts and every night this machine did a brisk trade. Here and there along the arcade aisles were benches and small tables where one might sit with an ice cream cone or a bottle of pop and observe the passing parade. Each time the Ashley gang visited Miami with their women, the Elser Pier was where they took their fun.

The man who ran the shooting gallery would groan at the sight of them headed for his concession. The first time they’d come to Elser Pier each of the men had taken several turns shooting with the pellet rifle and they cleared the pitchman’s shelf of every prize it held. They would have required a sizable sack to bear away their booty except the man looked so dejected they took pity on him and gave back most of it. He’d suggested that thereafter they just give him their fifteen cents and point out the prize they wanted and he’d hand it over and they’d all save some time. The brothers laughed and said that wouldnt be sporting. But on every visit since, they’d made only a single trial apiece with the little rifle, each in turn always shooting a perfect score and laying claim to whatever trophy his ladylove desired off the shelf. Later the girls would give away their prizes to children in the arcade or to women in the dancehall who looked to need cheering up.

The lot of them loved to dance and would still be taking a turn on the floor when the bandleader announced the night’s final number. The dancehall was on the second floor and had tables along the walls and several tall windows to either side overlooking the bay and admitting the seabreeze to swirl the haze of cigarette smoke in the dim yellow light. From these windows the music carried out to the shadowed sidewalks to draw in happy couples and hopeful stags and the always and ever lonely. When the band was between sets you could hear the bayswells slapping at the pilings under the building. Laura loved the Elser Pier dancehall. She told John Ashley it made her feel like she was dancing on a ship at sea.

One warm October night when John and Laura came off the dancefloor to sit at a table and cool off with a glass of lemonade they were approached by a lean man wearing a seersucker suit and a white skimmer. “Pardon me,” the man said. His angular face seemed carved of stained oak. He leaned on the table and said in lower voice, “Might you be John Ashley?”

He spoke with a soft drawl that was neither of Florida nor Georgia. John Ashley wondered if he might be a cop even though his manner bespoke the city and he did not look the type common to the local police department. The Miami chief was partial to hiring beefy young crackers for his force, most of them plowboys whom he enlisted off farms all over Florida and even up in Georgia by way of itinerant agents he’d send out on recruiting missions a few times a year. The plowboys were all tough and afraid of nothing and deeply beholden to the chief for a livelihood other than the backbreaking dullness of life on a farm. They were loyal to him as dogs. And as cultural kin
to South Florida crackers they spoke a common language. This lean fellow of quick dark eyes was of another tribe.

John Ashley casually leaned on the table and surreptitiously put his hand to the pistol under his jacket. The day before, he had delivered his father’s monthly contribution to the Miami Police Chief’s “civic fund,” and he did not really think this was a plainclothesman sent to serve warrant. The chief held no quarrel with the Ashleys—nor with any other association of entrepreneurs, however outside the law their enterprise might be—so long as they did not commit robberies or public violence within the city limits and so long as they made regular donation to his fund. The chief would not in any case have sent a lone man to arrest an Ashley and never mind three of the brothers at once. This one could be a detective thinking to solicit for some civic fund of his own. The world was full of fools who knew no better and John Ashley thought this might be one of them.

“Who’s askin?” John Ashley said.

“Somebody who might put you onto somethin I think you’d like to know about. Somethin that might make us some money.”

“
Us?
” John Ashley said. He exchanged a look with Laura who seemed somewhat amused by the stranger.

On the dancefloor with redhaired Glenda—more than a year older than he and two inches taller, even in flats—Hanford Mobley whispered in her ear that he couldnt wait to give Mister Cooter a kiss when they got back to their room at the hotel. Mister Cooter was their pet name for the small green turtle he’d a week ago persuaded her to have tattooed just below her navel. The tattoo artist had done the job behind a drawn curtain and had smiled the whole time he worked on her smooth belly under the skirt bunched at her waist. Now Hanford Mobley caught sight of the skimmered man talking to John Ashley and he danced Glenda over toward the bandstand in front of which Ed Ashley was whirling with Rita the Breed to the strains of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Some of the couples nearest Ed and Rita would gape on catching sight of her face and she’d whisper to Ed and he’d turn to the gawkers and they’d gawk no more.

Hanford Mobley tapped Ed’s shoulder and gestured toward the table. Ed looked over there and nodded and then deftly maneuvered Rita through the other dancers until they were near enough to Frank and Jenny for him to catch Frank’s eye and direct it to the stranger with John. Then all three couples danced their way toward the table.

The man made bold to sit without invitation. He removed his hat to expose freshly barbered brown hair neatly combed straight back and
brightly oiled. He smelled of bay rum. His upper lip was lighter than the rest of his face and John Ashley suspected he had recently shaved a mustache. A short broad scratch was crusted darkly on his left cheekbone. “
Us
is me and you all,” he said. He put his hand out to John Ashley across the table. “Name’s Matthews. Roy Matthews.”

John Ashley regarded the hand for a moment. The fellow might be city mannered but the calluses and knucklescars on his hands informed that he had known both hard work and skirmish. Any Miami policeman was likely to have such hands but something of this Matthews’ aspect and in the cast of his eyes now decided John Ashley that the man was no cop. He shook the proffered hand and leaned back and said, “If you tryin to interest me in the real estate around here, bubba, save it for the suckers.”

“What if I was tryin to innerest you in somebody who’s runnin whiskey through Palm Beach County?”

John looked at Laura who raised her brow. And now Frank spun Jenny so close to their table her skirt brushed John Ashley’s arm. Then Hanford Mobley whirled Glenda past the table and John Ashley grinned at his narrow-eyed nephew.

Roy Matthews glanced up at them too. Then said to John Ashley: “
Besides
you all I mean.”

John Ashley’s smile eased off his face. “What you mean?”

“There’s somethin I wasnt first.”

The number ended and Frank and Ed Ashley came to the table with their arms around their girls to listen in and look more closely on the stranger. Hanford Mobley moved up behind John and Laura, Glenda beside him and holding to his arm with both hands. When Roy Matthew’s gaze fixed on her for a moment, she flushed and averted her eyes.

“I asked you what you mean,” John Ashley said.

“I want in,” Roy Matthews said. “Whatever you do with this, I want in on it.”

“On
what
, dammit?”

The band surged into “Second-Hand Rose” and the floor once again began to spin with dancing couples.

“Tell me I’m in.”

“You might could be in your grave you dont tell me what I’m askin.”

Roy Matthews sighed deeply and regarded John Ashley with a bored look. “I aint been scared in so long I dont even remember what it feels like. I’m gettin up and leavin if you dont say I’m in.”
Hanford Mobley said, “You aint doin a damn thing but what we—”

John Ashley cut him short with an impatient wave of his hand. Hanford reddened but held silent. John stared at Roy Matthews as if trying to hear the man’s thoughts. Then smiled. “Bedamn if you dont believe you some kinda hardcase, dont you? What’d you say you name was—Ray?”

“Roy.”

“All right,
Roy
, you’re in. There.
Now
tell me what I just let you in on.”

Roy Matthews smiled tightly and leaned over the table and said in low voice, “This bunch from Chicago, they’re bossing a big clan of moonshiners in Georgia and they’re runnin the stuff from there camps down to Miami.”

John Ashley stared at him. “That’s right,” Roy Matthews said. “Right down the Dixie Highway. Right through Palm Beach. And I dont mean a few cases at a time. I mean they’re runnin truckloads. Sometimes one truck and sometimes two or more at a time. Might be only a coupla hundred cases come down one time and then five or six hundred the next. Depends on how many trucks and how big they are.”

“God
damn
,” Frank said. John Ashley glared at him and Frank said, “Well I dont like it, Johnny, and I dont give a shit who knows it.”

“I didnt quess you would care for it,” Roy Matthews said. “Nary you.”

“Daddy aint gonna be real happy about it for damn sure,” Ed said.

“It aint all,” Roy Matthews said. “They bringin in stuff from the islands too. But there’s so much Coast Guard off Miami and Lauderdale it’s too big a risk anymore to beach the booze there. A coupla weeks ago they started puttin some of it off in Palm Beach and drivin it down the rest of the way.”

The Ashley Gang men exchanged narrow looks.

“Might innerest you to know,” Roy Matthews said, “some New York fellas tried gettin in on the Miami trade too but the Chicago boys pretty quick discouraged them. Chicago wants Miami for theirself, I mean to tell you.”

“Discouraged them New York fellas how?” Ed Ashley asked.

“How?” Roy Matthews said. “Told them they wanted to talk about bein partners. Took a couple of them for a boat ride on the Gulf Stream. About a mile out they got the jump on them an tied them
hand and foot and hung a concrete block around their neck and gave them a little push over the side. All but their ears. Sent their ears back to their bosses in New York by way of the U.S. mail.” He took his time about lighting a cigarette. “They know all about you fellas. Know all about your daddy bein the big-dog moonshiner round here. They probly gonna want to see him pretty soon, talk some business. They probly wanna talk to him about bein partners.”

John Ashley’s eyes were gone thin. “Tell me somethin, Roy. How you know so much about it?”

Matthews blew a blue plume of smoke at the overhead lights. “I was workin for them Chicago boys until recent. A friend of mine in Memphis knew a fella who knew a fella who got us hired on as load runners to Miami. Job like that, you hear things now and then, here and there. You know how it is.”

“How come you tellin
us
?” John Ashley said.

Roy Matthews took a deep drag and exhaled a series of small perfect smoke rings to sail slowly between John and Laura and bear directly for Glenda’s nipples jutting against the clinging bodice of her satin dress. Hanford Mobley abruptly batted the rings to haze before they lit on her. Glenda had started to smile and then blushed brightly and seemed not to know where to direct her eyes. Hanford Mobley glared furiously at Roy Matthews who affected not to notice.

“The fella who runs things for Chicago in this town,” Roy Matthews said, “is a sumbitch named Bellamy—excuse my language, ladies.” He smiled with boyish rue at the women, who all showed smiles in return. Frank looked at Ed and rolled his eyes.

“Anyhow,” Roy Matthews said, “him and my friend Cormac never did like each other for spit. He shorted us on our cut the last two deliveries we made and we knew it. So last week we went over to the Taft Hotel to see him about it. Now it so happens I dont like this Bellamy even more than Cormac dont like him, so Cormac figured it’d be better if just him went up to see him and I wait downstairs. That was all right by me. So I’m waiting around in the lobby and old Cormac hadnt been up there five minutes before there’s gunshots. I look over and the desk clerk’s gone, the bellboy, everdamnbody’s gone. It’s just me in that lobby. Then I hear them comin down the stairs and I can tell it’s more than one and I’m already headed for the back door when they come off the landing and I see they got guns in their hands and brother I hit that door on the fly. I hear
bam
and a chunk of wood tears off the doorjamb yay close to my head and thats how I got this scratch here. I run down so many alleys and crawled under
so many cars and clumb over so many fences that by the time I was sure I’d lost them I was damn well lost myself. I looked like somethin the cat drug in, I mean to tell you.”

“They were shootin in a goddamn
hotel
?” Frank Ashley said. “Didnt it bring a bunch of cops down no them?”

“Well now I wasnt around to find out. But the Taft’s been their headquarters since before I started runnin hooch for Bellamy and ever cop I ever saw in there was gettin his palm greened or was havin hisself a drink or was there for a free one with one of the third-floor girls. I’d say if the shootin brung any cops it was only from upstairs to tell them hold the noise down.”