Red Grass River (30 page)

A man laughed loudly behind him and John Ashley abruptly felt a great sagging weight in his chest. He turned and saw him standing there, large and beaming, his thumbs in his gunbelt, his yellow grin showing teeth the size of thumbnails.

“Hey, Johnny,” Bob Baker said. “How you keepin?”

Hardee County Sheriff John Poucher relinquished custody of the prisoner to Sheriff Robert Baker who’d brought him the tip about the hooch drop at Goren’s fish camp and who had a handful of outstanding warrants to serve on the bootlegger. By the following sunrise John Ashley was once again in the Palm Beach County Jail.

The jail had just begun to undergo renovations and the clamor and dust of construction was daylong. He was manacled by both wrists to the solid-piece iron bunnk in one of the windowless isolation cells along the back wall of the block, the chain just long enough to allow him to sit up but not stand fully. The single other furnishing was a half-gallon tin can for his waste. The only light was a black-crossed yellow shaft angling in through a small barred window in the door. Just outside the cell a pair of guards with shotguns were stationed round the clock. They were under Sheriff Baker’s orders to shoot the prisoner dead if anybody tried to break him out. Two more guards were posted in the outer room and two more just outside the front door. The rein
forced fence around the jail was patrolled by a dozen cops with carbines. For the whole time John Ashley was in the Palm Beach County Jail Bob Baker put most of the sheriff’s department on duty there. It was a plum time for robbers and burglars and holdup men working in other parts of the county.

He was permitted no visitor but his lawyer, one Ira Goldman, who’d been recommended to Joe Ashley as the best criminal defense attorney in Miami. Goldman was at his side at every court session and filed a steady progression of motions and briefs all of which were rejected just as quickly as the judge scanned them. Goldman forth-rightly informed Joe Ashley that there was no chance of keeping John from going back to prison to serve out the rest of his original sentence—plus time added for his escape. Old Joe refused to believe he couldnt buy John out of jail one way or another. “Just find out who we got to grease,” he told Goldman. “The judge, the guards, whoever. No matter how much they want, I’ll get it.”

Goldman told him to forget it. There wasnt a thing the judge could do. As for the guards, their fear of what Bob Baker would do to them if John Ashley should escape was even greater than their greed. No payoff of any size, Goldman said, not to anybody, would suffice to get John free. Not right now anyway. He’d heard they even planned to shut him up in solitary confinement at first—and no, they couldnt buy him out of that, either. There had been too many escapes off the road gangs the last few years. Too much written in the papers about corruption in the penal system. John Ashley was the perfect example for them to show they meant business up in Raiford. In a couple of years, Goldman said, they might be able to make some arrangement with somebody up there. “When our chance comes,” Goldman said, “it’ll cost us plenty. But first John’s going to have to do some time.”

Old Joe glared at Goldman and nearly quivered under the urge to kick him until he hollered that yet, there was a way to get John Ashley out of jail. But he held his fury in check. In his bones he knew Goldman was right. John Ashley wasnt just a captured fugitive from the law—he was a political issue. The newspapers were crowing about the arrest of Florida’s most notorious desperado. Politicians from Fort Pierce to Miami were blowing hard about this being the beginning of a long-overdue effort to rid South Florida of its festering criminal element. Day after day Bob Baker smiled for the cameras and reminded reporters that he’d sworn to bring John Ashley to justice and now he’d done it. He wanted to thank the people of Palm Beach County for putting their trust in him by electing him to office and he hoped they
would continue to support him in his fight against crime. Up at Raiford the warden awaited the desperado’s transfer and told reporters it would snow peach ice cream in hell before John Ashley was assigned to a road gang again where it would be easier to try another escape. Mister Ashley, he said, was going to become very familiar with the penitentiary’s walls.

To avoid crowds of gawkers and the possibility of confederates trying to free John Ashley in transit, Bob Baker made no announcement public or private of when he would move the prisoner to Raiford. One humid morning an hour before first light ten armed sheriff’s deputies escorted him from his cell to the train depot. The only witnesses on hand besides cops were the station agent and the train crew. He was hustled aboard a prison car which on the outside looked no different from the other boxcars but whose interior contained a cell with bars as thick as baseball bats and a padlock the size of a bible. He looked around for Bob Baker as he boarded the car, curious to see his expression of the moment, but he did not spot him among the policemen milling in the station platform’s weak lamplight. During the weeks he had been in county custody they had seen each other only at the court sessions and had not exchanged a word since his arrest. He’d expected Bobby to say something about the pictures of his brother in the morgue, to at least make some allusion, and he’d decided to try to strangle him with his manacle chain if he did. In court he’d a few times caught Bobby staring at him, his expression each time unfathomable in the instant before he realized John was staring back and his face broke into a yellow grin.

By sunrise he was miles to the north and bearing for the penitentiary. The transfer detail planned to arrive at Raiford at midmorning of the following day and the officer in charge so notified the warden by telegraph from the Titusville station. The warden and his assistant met them at the prison’s front gate. They had tipped local reporters to the infamous desperado’s arrival and now smilingly obliged the photographers by posing for a picture of themselves aflank the prisoner. In their black suits and smiling pallors they looked like celebrant undertakers. Dressed in white and his aspect rueful John Ashley looked bound for the grave.

Liars Club

A
FEW MONTHS AFTER
J
OHN WENT BACK TO PRISON
E
D AND
F
RANK
Ashley went on a whiskey run to Grand Bahama like they’d done a hundred times before, only this time they didnt come back. Nobody was sure where that story came from but at first nobody believed it. We all thought it was a phony rumor put out by the Ashleys themselfs for some reason of their own. Ed and Frank were hiding out from somebody and the Ashleys wanted everybody to think they were dead—that was what we told each other.

But the story persisted and picked up a little more detail as it made the rounds. After a time we had to believe it. We heard Old Joe sent Clarence Middleton to West End to ask after Ed and Frank. Clarence was told they’d been there and bought the biggest load they’d ever taken on—more than seven hundred cases of Canadian whiskey done up in burlocks. The Ashley boys packed the hams into every foot of space in the
Della
’s hold. With that much whiskey on board, the
Della
’s gunwales couldnt of showed hardly more than a foot of freeboard. To make it worse a black storm was bearing in from the northwest. The harbormaster advised the boys to wait it out. They just laughed and said the
Della
was sealed tight as a cork and they were old hands at crossing the Stream in ever kind of weather. They cast off and set for home and that was the last anybody saw of them. The storm was a rough one and tore through West End a half-hour after the Ashley boys left. The harbormaster told Clarence it likely caught
up to them before they’d cleared the Gulf Stream and took them down.

They said Old Joe refused to believe the boys had drowned. He said they were too good a sailors, Ed and Frank, and the
Della
was too good a boat. What they’d done was, they’d taken the load someplace else for some reason and would show up any day and explain things. They say Joe Ashley held tight to that idea for more than a month. Then one night everybody at Twin Oaks was woke up in the dead of darkness by what sounded like a yowling panther got into the house. It wasnt but Old Joe, wailing with realization that his sons were dead at the bottom of the sea.

All the happened in the fall of nineteen and twenty-one.

Bobby Baker was reelected sheriff in 1922. He campaigned on his record for cutting crime in Palm Beach County and as the man who put John Ashley back behind bars. Even some of the folk who liked the Ashleys couldnt help liking Bobby Baker too. The man was becoming a real smooth politician. He gave talks to political organizations, to women’s clubs, to classrooms full of schoolchildren. He showed up at ever damn civic function in the county, at ever holiday parade. He almost always wore a suit with vest and tie now, even in the summer heat. He passed out little American flag pins to everybody he met. He’d never been one to take his family out in public, but now you’d see him at the moviehouse with his wife and three little girls. You’d see the whole family of them at a restaurant or eating a lunch together on a blanket under a tree after he’d give a speech at some holiday picnic. She was a quiet but gracious woman, his wife Annie, and his little girls were always perfectly well behaved. More and more the pictures you saw of him in the newspapers had his family in them too.

We didnt hear anymore such stories, neither, as we used to about what Bobby Baker had done to the Ashley whiskey camp lookouts. Some who used to believe them stories now said they always knew they was bullshit. Bobby Baker wasnt the kind of man to do such a thing, they said, they could see that now. That’s what a lot of folks said. But there was some of us always figured it took a special kind of man to handle himself with the Ashleys, and if Bobby Baker was that kind, well, then there
had
to be sides to him nobody wanted to believe or even think about.

July 1921—August 1923

H
E WAS LOCKED INTO A SEVEN-BY-NINE CELL IN A SPECIAL BLOCK
set apart from the rest of the prison and he did not come out again for one year and eleven months and four days. The door was of iron bars and faced a narrow dimly lighted corridor. If there were any other cells close by he could not see them nor did he raise response when he hallooed loudly from his door. The concrete floor was slightly concave and in its center was a shithole three inches wide and engirt with the umber wastestains of countless convicts over the decades. Once a week a guard flung a pail of water through the door to give the cell a rudimentary rinse. John Ashley quickly learned to anticipate these occasions and would sit naked near the door to receive the brunt of the water and thus wash himself somewhat.

In the rear wall was set a small barred window eight feet above the floor. It was a foot square in dimension and its top was even with the ceiling. It was brightest with daylight in the late afternoons. Through it came birdsong, leaves off a looming water oak, the frost of winter nights. During hard storms of westerly wind the rain spattered into the cell and he positioned himself to receive the drops on his face. He loved the thunder and sporadic flaring of lightning at the window. His narrow bunk was bolted too far from the window to serve as a platform and there was nothing else on which he might stand, and so the only way he could look out was to pull himself up by the bars and hold there by arm strength and with his toes effecting
the barest purchase on the wall. In this way would he gaze out on the trunk and branches of the oak that stood almost near enough to touch, on a portion of a highwalled weedgrown yard littered with broken wagon wheels, torn harness, and rusted parts of automobiles and other machines. At various times of the day he would cling to the window until the burning in his biceps became unbearable and he’d drop back to the floor. To straighten his cramped arms was then so painful he’d nearly cry out.

He never saw nor heard anybody in the little yard but often saw birds—mostly jays and crows and mockingbirds—come to feed on insects in the grass. He sometimes spied cats hunting in the yard and once saw a scruffy tortoiseshell catch a mouse and devour it on the spot in less than a minute. One time a sparrow flew into the cell and couldnt make its way out again and it flew wildly until it hit the wall in exhaustion and lit on the floor. He picked it up and felt its tiny heart quivering against his palm and the light in its eyes dimmed as if some wick within were being turned down and it died in his hand. He pulled himself up to the window and dropped the bird outside and felt foolish in his notion that it was now freer than he was.

Since the day of his arrival at Raiford he’d not again seen the warden nor anybody else except the guards who twice a day brought his meals on a tin plate they slid through a narrow slot at the bottom of the door. In the beginning he’d tried to make small talk but neither of the hacks ever made reply nor even looked directly at him and so he quit trying. He was as hungry for conversation as he was for food but would be damned if he’d let them know it. Almost without variance he was fed on fatback, cornbread, molasses and coffee every morning, on blackeyed peas, greens, rice and water every night. Occasionally his plate held a thin watery stew of pork or rabbit. Besides the exercise of holding himself up to the window several times a day, he also did daily pushups and situps and stretching routines of every sort. He took to punching the wall every day, one hundred times with his right fist and then one hundred with his left. He punched the rough stone lightly at first but as the months went by and his knuckles enlarged and gained thicker callus he could hit harder and harder without breaking the skin. He stood on his head for a count of two hundred every morning and again every evening because he’d heard that the habit improved your upright balance and that such regular infusion of blood to the head would make you smarter.

He talked to himself to keep in the practice of speech and hear a human voice if only his own. He described the splendors of the Devil’s
Garden, the vast sawgrass horizons and the skies without limit, the veils of heat that rose and shimmered in the heart of summer midday as if the air itself had been crazed by the sun. He held forth on thunder-heads that swelled like encroaching mountains of coal until they overwhelmed the sky and sparked with lightning and detonated with thunderclaps and burst into storms as explosive and incandescent as heaven’s own war. He remarked on the ripe smells of verdure and muck that followed hard rain. He talked of whitetailed deer bounding through the pinewoods in misty dawn silence, of redtail hawks wheeling in graceful hunt over wide savannahs, of the dogbark call of alligators and the ruby glint of their eyes just above the waterline where the lanternlight found them in the dark. He spoke of the cold blue colors and fast deep currents of the Gulf Stream, of the exhilarating sight of porpoises cavorting alongside a boat far out to sea, of the sound of ocean nightwinds and the strange faint melodies they sometimes carried which graybeard sailors said were ancient songs of drowned women whose undying love had transformed them to mermaids. To cockroaches skittering across the floor he confessed that the sea had always scared him.

He was determined not to break under the weight of his isolation nor to dwell on the length of his sentence. But he sometimes found himself thinking he’d missed forever his chance to even the score with Bob Baker and he cursed himself aloud for not havin settled things with him when he had the chance and to hell with his daddy’s order to leave Bobby alone. Such ruminations made him want to howl like a dog forlorn. He’d punch the walls till his knuckles looked like purple grapes.

On clear nights he stood with his back against the door bars and gazed on the small patch of stars framed in the window and among the oak branches. In phases of the lunar cycle he’d see the moon for brief periods of the night and his chest would tighten with the beauty of it. He sometimes saw the moon showing after daybreak like a bruised pearl or a segment therefrom against a soft patch of blue sky.

Excepting the mermaids and their sea-songs he did not speak of women, not even to the cockroaches. He tried hard to keep women from his waking mind. But from the start of his isolation he dreamt almost nightly of Loretta May who was blind but could see across time and distance and into the heart of things, she whose nipples were sometimes the color of caramel and sometimes of brown sugar, depending on her state of excitement, whose skin smelled of peaches and her hair of daybreak dew. And he dreamt of course of Laura who
smelled always of the swamp and whose joy in sex was as abandoned as a cat’s. He dreamt of dancing with her at Elser Pier to plinking ragtime and blatant jazz bands. In his sleep he sometimes revisited the three occasions on which they had all frolicked together in Loretta’s bed and he sometimes ejaculated as he dreamt and he sometimes woke with a throbbing erection that flexed like a snake in his hand as he came. He dreamt also of seeing them together without him, kissing and caressing each other’s bare flesh, and he knew the dream was true but he did not mind that they took comfort from each other that way. He could not have explained how he knew they were doing it as much for love of him as for any other reason. But so rousing were these visions that by the end of his fourth month in isolation he was masturbating several times a day. He continued this excess for weeks. The deepest reach of his rectum developed a chronic ache. Not until his raw and discolored cock became infected and too painful to touch was he able to free himself of the mania. Once his penis was hale again he refrained from choking the chicken—as he and his brothers had called it since boyhood—but a few quick times a week. Over the next months the practice palled to the point that he abandoned it altogether. He thereafter spent himself only as he dreamed of Laura and Loretta May.

In his sleep one cool night of his first October in isolation he saw his brothers out at sea. It was like watching a moving picture show without the accompanying piano music—all action and no sound at all, not even the whirring of the projection machine. He knew somehow that his brothers were on the back leg of a whiskey run, knew they were in the Gulf Stream and bearing westnorthwest. The
Della
rode low on the gathering swells under an amber crescent moon running through ragged purple clouds. High black thunderheads were closing from the west, sporadically backlit by shimmers of sheet lightning. Ed was at the wheel, smiling and talking, and though he could not hear his words John Ashley knew he was relating some recent sexual adventure with Rita the Breed. Frank clung one-handed to the cabin railing and laughed.

But now the brother both looked out into the night and John Ashley knew they were hearing the sound of powerful marine engines. The boats materialized from the cloud shadows into the brightness of the moon, two sleek craft and each perhaps thirty feet long and running without lights, one bearing on the
Della
from southwestward and the other coming at her from the north. Ed opened the throttles wide as Frank swooped belowdecks and came back up with a Browning Auto
matic Rifle. The
Della
cut smoothly through the water but even though the engines were churning at full speed the bow was hardly raised at all, so heavy was their cargo, and the speedboats were closing fast.

Now automatic fire sparked from both boats and John Ashley saw where the bullets spouted the water aft of the
Della
’s stern and then the shooters had the range and rounds were gouging into the hull and the after bulkhead and shattering the cabin ports. He saw Frank kneel at the transom and fire a long burst with the BAR—and then he jerked sideways and he fell down clutching at his forehead, the mouth wide and showing all its teeth. Ed looked back at him, yelling something, yanking at the throttle as though he might wrest greater speed from the engines through sheer will. And then he suddenly flung forward against the wheel and John Ashley saw the brilliant red blossoms on his back as Ed slumped to the deck with blood overrunning his scarred mouth.

The
Della
’s freed wheel wildly and the boat veered to starboard as bullets continued ripping into her and first one engine must have quit and then the other must have died too because the boat ceased its forward progress and rode the swells adrift. The shooting stopped and the speedboat pilots backed off their engines and the boats closed in slowly.

Now the moon was vanished into the roiling black clouds and enormous rays of lightning illuminated the night sea as bright as day and John Ashley in his tossing sleep felt the force of the thunderclaps he could not hear. He saw Frank rise to all fours in the gathered darkness and slashing rain and crawl to Ed. Saw the darkly gaping wound over Frank’s eye running with blood and rainwater. Saw him shake Ed by the shoulder. Frank was yelling now and Ed’s eyes opened. Grappling hooks lofted over the gunwales and caught hold and the hooklines went taut and Frank was searching the deck for the BAR and spied it several feet away and started for it but a booted foot planted on his hand. He looked up half-blinded for the blood in his eyes and John Ashley saw as Frank saw the grinning face of Bo Stokes above the cocked .45 almost touching Frank’s face. Saw too a tall lean man standing unsteadily over Ed in the pitching boat with a pistol in his hand. In a spectral cast of lightning the pitted face of Alton Davis. Ed stirring weakly and Frank’s mouth moving and John Ashley knew Frank was cursing them. Bo Stokes laughing. And then the pistols flashed and his brother fell still.

They found the other Browning belowdecks and passed both rifles to one of the other boats. They made no effort to unload the whiskey,
maybe because of the storm or maybe because they had no interest in it from the start. They emptied a gasoline can into the cabin and set a match to it and then hurried back onto their boats and made away just as the brunt of the storm rolled in.

The Della pitched and yawed to every direction and flames leaped from the cabin ports and hatch. The boat spun crazily and traced great sparking loops of fire above the bucking black sea and in the clarity of his dream he saw his brothers lying dead in the driving rain. Then the fire broke through the cabin deck and found the whiskey in the hold and the entire hull burst into flame. A huge wave have the vessel high and turned it on an awkward axis and the boat was poised on its stern for a long shimmering moment before capsizing and tumbling down the wave’s steep slope in scaling sheets of the and the wave broke over the upturned keel in a great raise of smoke and the
Della
whirled under the sea and was gone.

He woke in a soaking sweat, gasping for air as though he’d been drowning. Woke to the sounds of rain and weeping. And found that it was in fact raining. And that the weeping was his own.

In the late spring of 1923 he was removed from isolation and taken to a shower room where his first full soapy wash in two years gradually unloosed from his hide scales of dirt and clogs of casefied bodily exudates that ran off him as a rank gray gruel. His flesh was rashed and splotched and scabbed, coated with sores both old and fresh. Then to the prison barber who grinned at the sight of his wild shag and beard and cheerfully set to work upon him. His hair was cropped to a buzz and lice burrowed in the thick locks tumbled to his sheeted lap. His beard was scissored and then shaved with such dexterity he showed but two bloodspots when the job was done. The barber finished up by rubbing kerosene into his scalp. He was then led to the supply room and issued a fresh set of convict stripes and told to put them on. Then to the warden’s office where he learned he was being assigned to the Rockpile Gang.

“You wont be in general population,” the warden said, “but it’s better than that damned isolation cell, isnt it? Two years in isolation’s enough to make some men loony but you look to be all right in the head. Of course now, we cant always judge by looks, can we?” The assistant warden stood against the wall with his arms folded and looked to John Ashley like he was trying not to yawn.