Red Grass River (27 page)

Bellamy’s voice was without accent and strained for sincerity. He said he wanted an end to their differences. It was costing him too much in lost product, he said, in lost trucks and reduced manpower. “You’ve run off a lot of my workers,” he said to Joe Ashley with a small smile void of all cheer. “A bunch more got scared just hearing the stories about your people and took off too. It’s all James here can do to put a truck crew together anymore.” He looked at John Ashley. “And you got a couple of my Brownings. I paid top dollar for those guns. They shoulda been enough to keep anybody off those trucks.”

“A gun’s only as good as the man to use it,” John Ashley said with a smile. Old Joe nodded like an approving professor.

“Looks that way,” Bellamy said. “Anyhow, they’re my guns and I’d be grateful if you gave them back.”

John Ashley laughed. “And I guess people in hell would be grateful for icewater. The thing is, I reckon we earned them guns.”

Bellamy’s smile thinned. White and Stokes and Davis wore no expression whatever. Bellamy turned to Gordon Blue and asked, “What do you think, Gordy? You’re an attorney-at-law. These boys got right to those Brownings?”

Blue seemed taken aback. “Well ah, I dont know, Nelson,” he said. “I guess so. I mean, your boys
did
start shooting first, so I guess—”

“Who says they shot first?” Bellamy said, voice and eyes going tight.

“Well, actually,” Gordon Blue said—looking nervous now, ad-
justing his tie—“he did.” He gestured at John Ashley, who smiled and nodded at Ballamy.

“Oh, I see,” Bellamy said. He nodded at John Ashley. “If
he
said so, then it
has
to be true, is that it?
That’s
the way the law works.”

Joe Ashley chuckled and grinned at John and Bill, but Gordon Blue saw no humor in his situation. He gestured awkwardly and said, “No, Nelson, thats not what—I dont—what I mean is it seems like—”

Joe Ashley cut Blue off with a handwave. “Look here, Mister Bellamy,” he said, “I aint the least innersted in settin here watchin you scare ole Gordy who aint all that hard to scare anyways. All I wanna know is are you and me gone do business or aint we?”

Nelson Bellamy’s hard gaze cut to Joe Ashley and then back to Gordon Blue for a moment longer—and then his face abruptly softened and he leaned back in his chair and lit another cigarette. “By all means, Mister Ashley,” he said, “let’s do business.”

“Good. I guess Gordy told you what we want?”

“He did,” Bellamy said. “And I’ve given the matter some thought. The only question is, how much? What’s the percent?”

“Twenty,” Old Joe said without hesitation.

“That’s pretty damn steep,” Bellamy said. “I was thinking ten would be more like it.”

“I guess you
would
think so.”

“I cant see twenty.”

“I guess we could set here the rest of the day and argue about it,” Old Joe said.

“What say we split the difference and put it to rest?” Bellamy said.

Joe Ashley affected to ponder this suggestion. “Fifteen percent?”

“It’s still damn steep but I’ll shake on it if it’ll put an end to the trouble between us.”

“It might could if we’re talkin fifteen percent of
every
load that comes through Palm Beach, land or sea.”

“We are.”

“We got people who’ll be keepin count. Cant a load go through we wont know about it.”

“I’m sure thats true, Mister Ashley. I’ve heard about the grapevine you got up there. They say even the local cops cant get near you.”

“They say correct.”

“Well, we’ll be square with you on the count—trust me. What say to payment on the fifteen of every month, starting next month?”

Old Joe looked at Bill, who put the last bite of a doughnut in his mouth and licked the cinnamon sugar off his fingers and nodded.

Good enough,” Old Joe said to Bellamy and they shook hands on it over the table.

“See there?” Bellamy said. “It’s not hard for reasonable men to come to agreement. Most people have no idea.”

In truth he was seething about Gordon Blue’s siding with the Ashleys in the matter of the automatic rifles. And it had occurred to him that fifteen percent was probably the cut this redneck old goat Ashley’d had in mind from the start. Now the sonofabitch would go around telling everybody he’d got the best of Nelson Bellamy. He smiled and smiled at Joe Ashley across the table and hated him and all his trash kind.

He asked if they’d care for a drink but Joe Ashley politely declined for them all and the Ashley party took its leave. Gordon Blue went with them.

A few minutes later they were all in the Ford touring car and Clarence Middleton drove them out onto the Dixie Highway and headed for home.

“What you think, Daddy?” John Ashley said. “We trust Bellamy to pay us every month like he said?”

“I wouldnt trust him if he had one hand on a stack of bibles eight feet high and the other one glued to his dick,” Old Joe said. “We’ll just see. A deal’s a deal and we’ll hold to our end of it. But the first time he dont pay our cut we’ll be right back to jacking his damn trucks and every fucken boatload he puts down on our beaches is what we’ll do.”

That night John Ashley had a dream in which he saw Gordon Blue sitting crosslegged in some hazy setting. His suit was sopping wet and he was staring at him with unmistakable sorrow and then opened his mouth as if he would tell him something and his tongue became a fish and swam away on the air. The dream was still nettling him the next morning, but at breakfast Gordon Blue was in high spirits and joking with Ma Ashley and feeling very optimistic about the deal they’d made with Bellamy, and so John Ashley shrugged off his lingering unease. That afternoon Blue took his leave and Albert Miller drove him back to Miami.

Three days later as Gordon Blue came out of his office building at the end of the day, the man Stokes appeared at his side and took him by the arm and said, “We got business to discuss, Counselor.” A car was idling at the curb with Alton Davis at the wheel and its back door open wide. James White was seated in the back and beckoned Blue
into the car. Gordon knew that to resist would be folly. Stokes could snap his arm like a broomstick if he took the notion—and he looked to have it in mind.

They drove west through the heavily trafficked streets and then the town buildings were behind them and the road turned to packed shell. They went through a few small but well-kept neighborhoods and then the road went to rutted dirt and now there were no more residences but for occasional shacks. Nobody made conversation. Now the road was flanked by dense palmetto scrub and slash pines and Davis turned south onto a rough narrow road hardly wide enough for one car. A few minutes later they came to a clearing on the north bank of the Miami River at a point about two miles from town. They parked in back of an empty fishhouse that looked out on a pair of rotted piers where Indians had until recently come to trade. The sun had lowered behind the redbark gumbo trees and the western sky was the color of raw meat. As he got out of the car Gordon Blue looked hard at the trees and at the long shadows they cast on the river surface. A flock of white herons was winging toward the fiery sunset and the deeper reaches of the Devil’s Garden. It had showered earlier and the grass was still wet and frogs rang in the high reeds. Blue breathed deeply the ripe redolence of vegetation and pungent muck and he rued that he’d never spent much time outdoors. Then he was steered inside the dark fishhouse whose windows were covered with burlap and he was made to sit at a small table that was the only furnishing in the room. The table held an oil lamp and James White lit it.

White did the talking. He reminded Blue that not long ago he had mentioned in passing to Mister Bellamy that the Ashleys were about to expand their whiskey distribution to places where they didnt have the legal protection they enjoyed along the southeast coast. Mister Bellamy, White said, was very interested in knowing where these new distribution points would be.

Gordon Blue said he didnt know. He’d now and then overheard the Ashleys discussing the possible expansion of their business, but he had no idea which places they had in mind as new drops. They did not share such information with him.

Bo Stokes let a heavy sigh and took off his jacket and hung it carefully over the back of a straight chair. James White told Blue that Mister Bellamy had been disappointed by his having sided with the Ashleys in their claim to the automatic rifles. White suggested this would be a good opportunity for Blue to prove to Mister Bellamy that he was truly on
his
side. Mister Bellamy didnt expect Blue to know
all the new places where the Ashleys would be delivering whiskey, but he would be grateful if he would pass on the name of at least one or two of those locations.

Stokes lit a cigarette and expelled a stream of smoke at the oil lamps. Alton David stood leaning against the wall, idly picking at his crooked brown teeth with a matchstick and looking on without expression.

Gordon Blue’s throat was tight, his mouth spitless. He’d never even pretended to be physically brave. His bladder was in distress.

Mustering all the sincerity possible to him he said he’d like to help Mister Bellamy, he truly would, but he really did not know much about the particulars of the Ashleys’ business. If he knew where the Ashleys intended to sell their whiskey he’d say so. And why not? He didnt owe them anything except his legal counsel. It wasnt like they’d ever done anything personal for him.

James White studied Blue’s eyes closely as if he would read the truth there. Then moved away from the table and gestured to Davis. Davis came to Gordon Blue and locked an arm under his chin and pulled his head back and held it fast. Blue could hardly draw breath. His attempt to plead with them emerged as a strangled groan.

Stokes took a deep drag off the cigarette and then blew on its tip to produce a red glow. “You let me know, now,” he said as he loomed over Gordon Blue’s terrified upturned face, “just as soon as you start remembering.”

She never knew when he’d show up. She might come home from her typist job at the Seward Land Title Company and find him waiting on her stoop, smoking a cigarette and reading the sports items in the newspaper in the light of the late afternoon, his skimmer tilted back on his head. He’d look up with a smile full of devilment and she’d laugh and rush through the front gate of the apartment-house yard and into his arms and he’d fondle her bottom as they kissed and men driving past would toot their horns or whistled at them and grin. Five minutes later they’d be in her second-floor apartment, entwined naked on her bed. Or she might be reading a magazine after super and listening to her phonograph when there would come a soft tapping at her door and she’d open it to find him leaning against the hall wall with his ankles crossed and his thumbs hooked over his belt buckle and a toothpick waggling between his grinning teeth. Sometimes, after not hearing from him for two or three weeks, she’d be startled awake in the middle of the night by his hand clamped on her mouth and his
other hand stripping her of her pajama bottoms and she’d feel his hard cock against her and his warm breath at her ear whispering fiercely, “I’m Captain Dick the Pirate and I’m gone fuck you till you faint.” Her heart would jump and her breath leave in a rush and she’d seize his erection and hasten him into her. Later she’d feign pique and slap at his chest and tell him he was awful for scaring her like that. She’d every time say she was going to change the lock on her door and he’d laugh and say the doorlock hadnt been invented he couldnt tease open.

Roy Matthews came to see her only when Old Joe sent Hanford Mobley off with a crew on some assignment that would keep him away for days—picking up beach unloadings or making deliveries to middlemen in the deeper Glades. Joe Ashley never put him on a crew under Hanford Mobley’s charge. Old Joe wanted no confrontation between them that might jeopardize a delivery or a pickup, and so he had begun using Roy for most of his one-man jobs—collecting delinquent payments for deliveries, meeting secretly with law officers on the Ashley payroll to give them their monthly bribe, making drops of bush lightning to some of their smaller clients from Fort Pierce to Miami. Sometimes he would not see her for weeks, sometimes he’d be with her for two or three nights running.

Hanford Mobley was with her every Sunday, as well as whenever the Ashley gang came to Miami with their girls to make a high time of it. He had but recently declared his love for her and had begun to hint about marriage at some time in the nebulous future when he would be rich and carefree and could afford to give her the best of everything and take her everywhere. She liked Hannie, liked his devotion to her, his boyish enthusiasm for sex. Liked above all his outsized phallus, which, as she’d measured it from base to slit with a seamstress’ tape, stood at very nearly nine inches in its enpurpled readiest state. It was her bad luck that the boy owned no discipline whatever. Within seconds of entering her he would be pumping wildly and ejaculating like a firehouse.
He
had wonderful times. She—despite that supremely thrilling moment when he entered her with that elephantine thing—would be left in a tight tangle of frustration.

Roy Matthews was the dark side of the moon. He never spoke of love and she knew he never would. She had tried to make him jealous by speaking in awe of Hanford’s huge member but he had affected to be unimpressed and came back at her with the ancient male bromide, “It aint the size of the tool, it’s the knowin how to use it.” And he did know how to use it, Roy did, she had to give him that. He knew how to use every tool God gave man for pleasing a woman—cock,
fingers, mouth, words. For all his jokes about Dick the Pirate, he very nearly
would
make her swoon every time they did it. She’d once rather tentatively urged Hanford to kiss her farther down than Mister Cooter, her turtle tattoo, and he’d gaped at her and said, “You mean…down
there
?” as if he’d been asked to put his face in a chumbucket. She’d been glad for the darkness that hid her furious blush and she had not broached the matter with him again. But she couldnt help thinking sometimes how Hannie was
such
a boy.