Red Grass River (24 page)

Ed Ashley said, “Hell, you could fire a machinegun in this town and nobody’s hear it a block away or pay it any mind if they did, it’s always so damn much noise in the street.”

“Why they wanna shoot you and your partner anyway?” Frank Ashley said.

“
Why?
” Roy Matthews said. “Well I’d guess old Cormac probly irritated the man some, dont you reckon? Irritated or scared him, one. Maybe he told him pay up what he owed us or else, and Bellamy figured or else meant he best shoot Cormac while he had the chance—then me too for bein the partner. Hell man, I dont know why and I dont give a damn. Coupla sumbitches—scuse me ladies—coupla fellas come at you with guns in they hand you dont stand there and ask how come they upset.
Why
dont matter a damn.
What’s
all that counts—and they tried to shoot me is the what of it.”

John Ashley smiled. “So you’re gonna get even by tellin us where they’re landin the stuff and we take it from them.”

“And, I get a cut,” Roy Matthews said.

“Hell, boy, what makes you think we need your help to find where they landin their booze?” Ed Ashley said.

“I guess you dont,” Roy Matthews said. “I’m just hopin you’ll do the sportin thing and let me in on it since I’m the one who told you.”

Hanford Mobley snorted and said sardonically, “The
sportin
thing.”

“We’re of heard about it soon enough,” Frank Ashley said. “Dont nothin happen in Palm Beach County we dont hear about it soon enough.”

Roy Matthews nodded. “I reckon. Still, I’m the one brung it to you first.”

Hanford Mobley said maybe they ought to go over to the Taft Hotel and see this Bellamy fellow and ask him if Matthews was telling the truth. “If this one’s tellin us true.” Hanford said, gesturing at Roy
Matthews, “we can take care of Bellamy right then and there. And if this one’s lyin, well, we can take care of that too.”

John Ashley chuckled. “Hey now, Hannie, we dont want to go startin no war.” He looked at Roy Matthews. “He’s sore-assed about them smoke rings is what it is. Tell him you didnt mean nothing by it.”

Roy Matthews glanced at Hanford Mobley and then turned back at John Ashley with a look that wondered if he was kidding.

“Be best if you tell him,” John Ashley said. “He dont fool that way with other people and dont care to have them fool that way with him.”

Roy Matthews shrugged and turned to Hanford Mobley and said, “Sorry boy. I didnt mean ary thing.” He put his hand out to him.

Hanford Mobley stared at him. Glenda nudged him and stage-whispered, “
Han
-nie! Dont be mean. Do it.” Hanford exhaled loudly and took Roy Matthews’ hand.

“All right then,” John Ashley, “let’s get on over to the hotel where we can talk some more about this over a jug.”

As they all headed out of the dancehall and toward the stairway the band was playing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” Frank and Ed Ashley were groping at their girls who squealed and pulled away in feigned protest at their liberties. John Ashley was pointing out to Laura a particularly graceful pair of dancers and Hanford Mobley was admiring them too. None among them saw Glenda glance back at Roy Matthews over her shoulder nor see the wink he gave her nor the quick wide smile she showed him in return.

They took Roy Matthews out to Twin Oaks and introduced him to Old Joe and let him tell their father what he’d told them. Lambent sunlight filtered through the tall oaks flanking the house and made pale yellow mottles on the pine-needled ground. A family of scrub jays clamored in the high branches. Old Joe listened to Roy Matthews and then spat off the porch and went through the ritual of loading and lighting his pipe before saying he wasnt surprised the Yankee gangsters were brining their booze through Palm Beach. “Hell, they bound to been doin it for a while and we just now findin out about it because we aint been payin no kinda attention worth a damn.”

Bill Ashley sat beside his father on the porch. He took off his spectacles and held them up against the light to check for cleanliness. “I told you this problem was like to come up,” he said.

Old Joe turned a thin look on him. There were times when Bill’s know-it-all manner could wear on him as much as it did on his broth
ers. “Yes, you did tell me that, boy. And I told you we’d do somethin about it when it happened.”

Bill fit the glasses back on his face and looked at his father for a moment without expression and then stared off at the swamp pines.

“It aint right, Gramps,” Hanford Mobley said. “Them bringin they whiskey right smack through our territory without so much as a by-your-leave.”

Old Joe grinned wide at Hanford Mobley and turned to his sons and said, “Listen at him. Damn pit bull, ready to tear ass.”

Now he fixed his attention on Clarence Middleton who was sitting on the ground beside the porch steps with his back against the lattice-work fronting the crawlspace, legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded on his stomach, eyes closed. He’d just returned from another night with his girlfriend Terrianne in St. Lucie and his face was sagged with fatigue and lack of sleep. Every few minutes he’d wince and hustle his balls to ease the ache of their strained condition. Over the past two months he seen the girl every night that he wasnt out on a rum run, and his exhaustion was beginning to tell.

“You, Clarence,” Old Joe said, and Clarence Middleton opened one watery red eye to look up at him. “You best ease up on all that hunchin or we gone have to wrung you out that girl’s bedsheets one these mornings. You listening to me, boy?”

Clarence sighed heavily and shut his eyes.

Old Joe smiled at him and then turned to Roy Matthews. “Tell me, young fella, you know boats?”

“Grew up in Myrtle Beach and learned to sail when I was but ten year old,” Roy Matthews said. “Know motors too. Aint ary kinda boat I cant handle nor motor vehicle I cant drive.”

“Real high-powered package, aint he?” Hanford Mobley said with heavy sarcasm. Old Joe gave him a smiling glance. Roy Matthews ignored him.

“Myrtle Beach, hey?” Old Joe said to Roy Matthews. “That aint where you spent your first years though was it? You didnt learn to talk in no part of South Caroline. Say you was borned in Tennessee?”

“I didnt say,” Roy Matthews said.

“You surely did, boy,” Old Joe said. “Said so with the first word come out your mouth. East part I say.”

Roy Matthews grinned. “You say about right. Borned and spent my first years just outside Rogersville.”

“Reckoned it was thereabouts,” Old Joe said. He leaned back and scratched his chin, then swept his hard gaze over them all and said:
“Anybody brining whiskey through our territory has got to pay us a tax.”

The others looked at each other. Then Frank Ashley whooped. “A
tax
! Damn, daddy! Who you think we are, the
government
?”

“Well boy, if we aint the government of ourselfs, who is?” Old Joe said.

Ed Ashley laughed. “Bobby Baker’s have an answer to that.”

“Piss on Bobby Baker,” John Ashley said. “Him and the mangy-ass dog he rode in on.”

The Ashley boys and Hanford Mobley all laughed and grinned at each other. Clarence Middleton chuckled with his eyes closed. And even Bill Ashley’s eyes were bright with excitement behind his spectacles.

They posted lookouts along the Dixie Highway about ten miles apart and ranging from Fort Pierce in St. Lucie County all the way down to just about Palm Beach County’s southern line. Each lookout was kin or a trustworthy hired man of Joe Ashley’s and each was positioned near a telephone. Some were set up on secondary roads that connected with the main highway at points between Stuart and Delray. Three or four of the gang at a time were now living in a pinelands camp just outside of Boynton Beach near the south county line and a scant quarter mile from highway. Their Boynton lookout could get word to the camp in twenty minutes of any suspected whiskey carrier reporter by telephone to be coming their way, and in minutes the gang could be on its way to intercept the load.

Their first stop was a truck just south of Jupiter. They got report of the truck and its description from their Fort Pierce lookout and then drove north to a desolate spot flanking Hobe Sound and parked the car on the highway’s narrow shoulder alongside the palmetto thickets. John Ashley and Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews got out and hid in the bush. Clarence Middleton raised one of the Ford’s hood flaps and stood smoking a cigarette and leaning on a fender. The midmorning was bright and clear and passing traffic was sparse. One motorist stopped and asked if he needed help and Clarence thanked him and said help was on the way and the motorist waved and went on.

When the truck came into view Clarence stepped out on the road and raised his hand. The truck slowed and started to go around him but he sidestepped in front of it again and the driver braked hard and the truck halted on the wrong side of the road. The man sitting on the passenger side was wearing a Chicago White Sox baseball cap and he
stuck his head out and began to curse Clarence for a fool. Then John Ashley and Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews came out of the trees with shotguns ready and the man shut up.

John Ashley directed the driver to park the truck on the shoulder and turn off the motor. The two men then got out of the truck as ordered and John Ashley told them to keep their hands down at their sides while Hanford Mobley quickly searched them and found a revolver on each one. On the floor of the truck cab he found a shotgun and he took it and the pistols to the Ford and laid the weapons on the rear seat. He put up their own shotguns too and they went to their .45’s.

“Car comin!” Clarence Middleton called. John Ashley and Hanford Mobley hid their Colts against their legs and John walked up to the driver and put an arm over his shoulder in the manner of an old friend. A roadster made its way toward them. Hanford Mobley affected to engage the baseball-capped man in conversation as Clarence leaned over the sedan’s exposed motor like a man at repairs and Roy Matthews knelt in the grass and slowly retied his shoes. Now the roadster came abreast and at the wheel was a young man wearing a duster and goggles and a car cap and beside him a pretty girl in a summer dress who brushed her wild blonde hair from her face and smiled at them one and all as the car sped past in a pale could of dust. They all looked after the roadster a for a moment, and then Clarence Middleton said, “Kiss my ass if that aint one lucky sumbitch!”

The highway again lay deserted in both directions but for the turkey buzzards that lit from the pines to the shoulder some fifty yards up the road to feed on the crushed and moldering carcass of a possum whose stench came faintly to the men where they stood,.

John Ashley and Hanford Mobley again brandished their guns and the man in the Sox cap said, “What is this, a robbery? You want our money?” He was a tall lean man with prematurely gray hair cropped close as a convict’s. A short but vivid purple scar curved from the corner of him mouth to just under his chin.

John Ashley laughed at him. He went to the truck and loosened the rope holding a trap cover across the back of the enclosed bed and he lifted a corner of the tarp and looked in and gave a low chuckle. He asked the driver how many cases it was. The driver glanced at the man in the Sox cap and John Ashley looked at him too and the man hesitated and then said fifty. Hanford Mobley and Clarence Middleton grinned.

Now the main in the Sox cap spotted Roy Matthews and looked
at him hard and said, “Well hell now, look who’s here. I heard you and your Scotchman buddy had a fatal accident down in Miami.”

“I’d say you heard half-wrong, White,” Roy Matthews said. He was smiling broadly.

“So now you’re in with these jackers? Bellamy’ll have your ass for breakfast.”

“Bellamy best pray he dont never see me again.”

The man called White gave a derisive snort. “Bold talk.” He looked around at the others. “Must be all these hillbilly guns makes you so bold.”

“Who you callin hillbilly, you son of a bitch?” Hanford Mobley said.

“Hell, it aint hardly a hill
in
Florida,” Clarence Middleton said. “Everbody knows that except dumbass Yankees.”

White smiled and said, “Sorry, friend. I guess Roy’s just feeling brave because he’s in your company. I think I know who you gents are, but I’d rather not guess.” When he smiled the scar on his chin went thinner and lightened almost to blue.

“Name’s Ashley,” John told him. “Palm Beach is our grounds. You ask anybody. Any whiskey you bring through this county anymore is gonna cost you a tax of ten dollars a case. It’ll cost you five hundred dollars to take these here fifty cases on through.”

“A
tax
?” White said. He looked around as if suddenly unsure of where he was or if he ought to laugh. “Listen,” he said, “if I
had
the fucken money on me I wouldnt pay it, not to you guys. This here’s a public road, brother. We got as much right to use it as anybody.” He smiled at the folly of his own argument.

“I aint your brother,” John Ashley said. “And considerin how much you stand to make on this load in Miami, I’d say five hundred is a fair cut to us for lettin you take it by. It’s anyway cheaper than losin your whole entire load like you gonna do.”

White heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Do you know whose booze you’re stealing?”

“Sure do,” John Ashley said. “A fella’s who wouldnt pay us the tax on it.”

White showed a wry smile. “Say your name’s Ashley?”

“That’s right.”

“Which one are you?” White said.

“John. You heard of us, huh? What’s your name?”

“James White,” the man said. “Some people as soon as you’re introduced to them as James think it’s all right to call you Jim, but I
let them know pretty quick I dont care much of that name. Care even less for Jimmy.”

“Where you from, Jimmy?”

James White laughed. “Chicago.”

John Ashley said, “Ah.”

“You heard of it, huh?” James White said. “Listen, you gonna take the truck too?”

John Ashley spat to the side and grinned. “Well you dont reckon I’m gonna bust a sweat hauling all that booze out of your truck just to heave it up on mine?” He gestured at Hanford Mobley and the boy hastened to the truck cab and set the levers and got out the crank and went around to the front of the vehicle and cranked the motor and it fired up on the first try. He got in the driver’s seat and tooted the Klaxon in sheer exuberance, then put the truck in gear and it lurched into motion and he wheeled out onto the road. They all watched it move away down the highway until it clattered around a bend and was gone.