Red Grass River (3 page)

Ten minutes later the Ashley brothers were having a drink and laughing along with a clutch of fawning girls who persisted in their excited babble about the fight when Miss Lillian’s Negro cook Jewel came into the parlor and quietly informed John Ashley that there was someone at the kitchen door who wanted to talk to him. He asked who but she couldn’t say—the man was holding back in the shadows like he didnt want to be recognized. John Ashley thanked her and stepped into the hallway to check the revolver and ensure it carried five ready cartridges, and then he went to the kitchen but saw no one at the door. He held the gun low against his leg and slipped out the screen door and stood fast in the shadow of the overhang and studied the moonlit sideyard.

A voice in the dark said, “Over here, Johnny.”

He made out the figure of a man standing in the moon-dappled shadows of an umbrella tree beside the pump shed and then saw that the man wore a uniform and then recognized Buford Moore, a Palm Beach County deputy sheriff whose family were longtime acquaintances with the Ashleys. John Ashley’s father had once carried Buford’s daddy on his back for more than five miles after coming on him in the Glades where he’d broken his knee on a limerock outcropping and had been struggling along on a makeshift crutch for almost a day.

Buford Moore looked around nervously as John Ashley came up and said, “Hey, Buford, what you doin out here in the dark?”

“Get out of the light, Johnny,” Buford whispered. “It won’t do to have nobody see us talkin.”

John Ashley stepped into the shadow of the umbrella tree and slipped the pistol into the waistband at the small of his back. “Damn, bubba, what’s all the mystery about?”

“Listen, Johnny,” said Buford Moore, “I got somethin to tell you.” He asked if he remembered the dead Indian that was dredged out of the Lauderdale canal about six weeks ago. “His face was pretty bad but his daddy knew him right off. He anyway had a panther head tattoo on his shoulder made it certain who he was. Name’s DeSoto Tiger. His daddy and uncle both some kind of high-muckety chiefs. Made a lot of noise about wantin justice for his nephew and yackety-yack-yack. Remember?”

John Ashley said he had a vague recollection of all that. He took out his fixings and began to roll a cigarette.

Well, Moore told him, just last week a couple of sheriff’s deputies arrested an Indian breed trying to break into Willis’ Grocery over near Delray. It was about the fifth or sixth time they’d caught this son of a bitch thieving and this time Sheriff George meant to put him away for a good while. But the breed said he knew something the sheriff might like to know and he’d tell it to him if he let him go. The sheriff asked what and the breed said he knew who killed DeSoto Tiger. Sheriff George said who and the breed told him. The sheriff asked how did he know and the breed said because he saw him do it. Sheriff George said the breed’s say-so wasn’t hardly good enough and asked could he prove it and the breed says it shouldn’t be too hard since the fella stole about a thousand dollars’ worth of DeSoto Tiger’s otter furs and all the sheriff’s got to do is find out if this same fella’s sold about that much worth of otter furs to anybody lately.

John Ashley ran his tongue along the edge of the paper and sealed the cigarette and asked Deputy Moore if he had a match. The deputy dug one out and struck it and held it cupped to him. John Ashley took a deep drag and said, “And so?”

And so, deputy Moore said, Sheriff George had sent people out to check with all the fur buyers along the coast. They checked all the way down to Miami and bedamn if the Girtman Brothers hadn’t paid twelve hundred cash money for a load of otter skins brung to them by the very same fella the breed had told Sheriff George about. Sheriff George had got up a murder warrant last night and was sending it all over.

“Well now, Buford,” John Ashley said, “let’s be real clear about this. Exactly who’s the warrant for?”

“Well, John,” Buford Moore said, “exactly, the warrant’s for you.”

John Ashley nodded and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said. “Figured it might be. Where’s that breed now? All safe and sound in a jail cell?”

“Nuh-uh. Sheriff George did like he promised and let him go this afternoon. You know Sheriff George—trusts everybody to keep his word till they give him reason not to. But he made the breed promise to report to him once a week and told him if he broke his word he’d see to it he got sent to a turpentine camp for the rest of his days. That might could be enough reason to make the breed hold to his promise.”

John Ashley spat. “Goddamn breed.”

“I thought you oughta know,” Buford Moore said. “I been scoutin for you all day. I finally come here and seen the police wagon out front and I figured they’d maybe already got the word somehow, but
when they come out you wasnt with them.” The deputy licked his lips. “Listen Johnny, I
got
to give the city cops this warrant”—he tapped a long folded paper in his shirt pocket. “Sheriff George’ll have my hide if they dont get it tonight. I been carrying it since this mornin. You understand, dont you?”

John Ashley said he surely did and he thanked Buford Moore for the information. The deputy took a nervous look around and said, “Listen Johnny, the last time you and me saw each other was over a week ago, all right?”

“Sure enough, Buford,” John Ashley said. The deputy smiled and shifted his weight awkwardly and said, “All right, well, you take care, hear?” He raised his hand in farewell and hastened away around the corner of the house.

John Ashley went back into Miss Lillian’s parlor and took his brother aside and whispered to him what Buford Moore had said. He then went upstairs and told Loretta May something had come up and he had to go take care of it. He kissed her goodbye and said he’d see her soon. As he went out the door she stared after him with her sightless eyes.

They bid Miss Lillian and the girls goodbye and exited by the back door and made away into the shadows of the pine forest.

They jogged over a vague trail through the pineywoods, navigating the darkness with the sureness of bats. After a time they came out from the trees onto a grass prairie illuminated pale blue under a bone-pale gibbous moon and in another quarter mile came to the Loxahatchee Canal. From the thick palmettos along the bank they withdrew a canoe they’d hidden there and slipped it into the moon-silvered water and began paddling north at a strong steady pace. Before they’d gone half a mile the palmettos fell away and ghostly bluegreen vistas of moonlit sawgrass opened to all points of the compass.

As they bent to their paddles Bob cursed once again Jimmy Gopher for a loose-lipped son of a bitch and swore he was going to track down that red nigger and put a slug in his brainpan. At his knees lay the .30 caliber Winchester carbine with which he intended to do it. John Ashley told him to do no such thing, that they had enough trouble as it was. “We’ll let Daddy say what to do.”

“I already know what Daddy’s gonna say,” Bob said, “and so do you. He aint never been abidin of them who tells tales to police.”

“Well, we’ll just let him
say
what to do,” John Ashley said. He
looked at his brother over his shoulder. “Dont be goin off half-cocked like you prone.”

Bob Ashley snorted and spat in the passing water. A moment later his conversation turned to the fine time he’d had with Sheryl Ann and he told his brother of a new technique she’d taught him. “That gal’s
always
got some new trick to show,” he said. “Wonder where-all she gets them?”

“Where you think?” John Ashley said and turned to his brother with a white grin. “It’s some men just natural-born good teachers.”

Bob Ashley splashed him with his paddle and said, “You lying sack!”

As they stroked their way upstream and Bob talked on about Sheryl Ann, John Ashley tried to anticipate what their father might say about all this, but his thoughts kept drifting to Loretta May, to images of being spooned against her fine ass with his face in her sweet-smelling hair.

Bob at last fell silent and the only sounds were of their paddles cutting through the water and of animals rustling into the shorebrush at the canoe’s approach. At one point as they passed through the closing blackness of a hardwood overhand a huge bull gator let a resonant grunt so close to the boat that both brothers flinched and yanked their paddles from the water and then giggled at their start.

“We ought take the hide,” Bob Ashley whispered, straining his eyes into the passing darkness to try to make out the gator. “I bet that grandaddy sumbuck goes sixteen feet if he goes a inch.”

“Aint got the time and you know it,” John Ashley said, resuming his stroking. “From the sound of him we’re lucky he didnt want
our
hides, you ask me.” They chuckled softly as they emerged from the hollow and into the brightness of the moon and the clustered stars.

They paddled in silence for a time and then Bob said softly: “Hey? You ever think about the future?”

“What?” John Ashley said, stroking easily.

“The future,” Bob said. “You ever think about what you want in the days to come.”

John Ashley let off paddling and looked at him over his shoulder. “In the days to come?” He could not see Bob’s eyes under the shadow of his hat brim.

Bob spat into the passing water. “Yeah,” he said. He looked about at the measureless compass of starry sky and the dark surrounding wilderness and said, “You know what
I
want?” He swept his arm before him and said, “
This
.”

John Ashley looked around as though Bob might have indicated
something he had not seen before. Then turned back to his brother and said, “This
place
? Hell boy, you got it.”

Bob laughed softly. “I know. Jesus Johnny, look at it!
Smell
of it! Of all the damn places in the world we might of got born in, we’re some lucky sumbucks to get borned here.”

John Ashley regarded the immense expanse of shadowed sawgrass and the near and distant hammocks silhouetted under the moon and he thought of the shallow bankless river that flowed through it all and was the lifeblood of his great wilderness. He breathed deeply of the night air pungent with the smells of ripe vegetations and raw earth and water richly seasoned with matter living and dead. We are, he thought. We are.

Bob spread his arms as if he would embrace all the starry night and all the world both visible and enshadowed. “Just
look
at it, man! Aint it
beautiful
?” He laughed with a low vehemence, like one near to madness with a secret joy. And John Ashley laughed with him.

Two hours later the trees drew in close on both banks of the canal. Against the moonbright sky they spotted the high black silhouette of a lightning-charred oak that served as their landmark. They put in against the bank and pulled the canoe out of the water and Bob Ashley removed the carbine and they hid the boat in the brush. They pressed ahead on foot and followed narrow winding trails through hardwood forest and underbrush. As they went they listened intently for anything that sounded out of place but heard only the calls of owls and night-hawks, the scuttling of creatures in the brush, the rantings of frogs, the keening mosquitoes at their ears. Their plan was to gather the gator hides they’d left to dry at their waycamp by the north bend of the Loxahatchee River and then make for home and tell their father the news about the Indian.

The eastern sky was showing a pale band of pink light as they drew close to their camp. When they werent slogging through mud they had to step carefully over vinecovered ground. Up ahead the trees abruptly fell away. They paused at the edge of the woods to listen hard and survey the open ground to the east where it came up against a dense palmetto thicket and the pinewoods beyond. Their waycamp lay in a natural clearing a hundred yards into those pines. In addition to the gator hides, they had a wagon in there and a tethered mule. On the far side of the camp was a corduroy track of pine timbers they’d laid over the mucky ground for a distance of a quarter-mile to where the ground was higher and the track became a solid limestone trail.
From there the going in the wagon was easier the rest of the way to their father’s whiskey camp at the edge of the deeper swamp and but a few miles from Twin Oaks.

But now they heard the chugging of a motorcar and made out dim headlamps coming along the open ground. The lights progressed on a narrow raised-rock road a timber company had once used to take out pine logs. After clearing the trees for twenty yards on both sides of the road the company went broke and abandoned the site and the Ashleys had since used the road for their own purposes. It originated at the Dixie Highway about a mile to the east and terminated at the palmetto thicket.

“Who you reckon?” Bob asked, looking off at the coming lights.

“Nobody we call friend, I’ll wager,” John Ashley said.

They made for a better vantage point closer to the road as the motorcar came on. They were hiding in the high shrubs near the end of the road when a Model T sedan came clattering into view in the dawn gloam and halted. The motor shut off and the headlamps extinguished and two uniformed county deputies got out of the car and stood staring at the seemingly impenetrable palmetto thicket before them. One of the men said something the brothers couldn’t hear clearly and the other said, “Maybe so but Daddy said check it and thats what we going to do.”

“Bobby Baker,” Bob whispered. “And Sammy Barfield with him. How you reckon they know about this camp?”

“No tellin who’s seen us comin and goin on that road,” John Ashley said. “It’s too open. I told Daddy we ought of quit this camp.”

The deputies now found the narrow path the Ashleys had cut through the palmettos and they trudged into the thicket in the direction of the camp. The Ashleys set out after them, following at a short distance and moving easily as shadows. Halfway to the camp the path abruptly opened into a small clearing where the Ashleys had felled most of the pines they’d used to make the corduroy track—and now John Ashley raised his fist in signal to Bob and they quickly closed in on the lawmen.