Red Grass River (33 page)

“
I dont never care to come to this snakepit town,” Old Joe says, “but this trip’s damn well worth it
.”

“
Hold on,” Bellamy says in halting voice. “Let’s talk this out
.”

Joe Ashley shoves the gun muzzle against Bellamy’s cheek and forces his head back into the pillow. Bellamy shuts his eyes and says tightly, “Listen, listen to me, we can work this out. We’re businessmen, you and me. We can work it out
.”

Holding the gun to Bellamy’s underchin Joe Ashley withdraws an ice pick from his belt and all in one fast action shoves it to the hilt in Bellamy’s heart and slips it out and steps back as Bellamy convulses but once and then lies still with eyes wide but done with seeing in this world. Joe Ashley pulls his mask up again and heads for the door. The girl whimpers into her fist at her mouth and her eyes are shut tight as if she would subvert the memory of this horror by not paying visual witness
.

He exits the way he came—past the belt-bound and sock-gagged guards who have not make effort to free themselves and down to the kitchen where the cocks are seated now and drinking coffee and Albert Miller is flirting with the maid. Albert pulls his bandanna down just long enough to give her a quick kiss on the lips and then follows Old Joe into the night
.

Every couple of weeks or so Laura presented herself at the kitchen door of Miss Lillian’s to be admitted by Wisteria, the daytime head-maid who adored Miss Loretta and delighted in the special charge of conveying Miss Laura to and from her room. A few weeks earlier Wisteria had told Loretta May of seeing a scruffy one-eyed marmalade kitten wandering about in the alley behind the house and being reminded of Mister John by it. Loretta had insisted that she go find the kitten and bring it to her and the maid had done so. Loretta named the cat Johnny and it had lived in her room ever since.

Laura always arrived shortly after sunrise, at which hour Miss Lillian and the girls were just retired until the midafternoon and no one was about in the house but the Negro help. If any of the domestics were curious about her visits they kept their curiosity to themselves. She would usually stay but an hour or two, sometimes longer. Sometimes they fell asleep in each other’s arms and in those instances the good Wisteria would do as Miss Loretta had instructed and tap on her door at one o’clock to rouse so she could be one her way before the rest of the house came awake.

They never questioned their actions together, these two. They held each other close and kissed and caressed and their mutual affections now and then were of such intimacy to render them both breathless. Sometimes they spoke of John hardly at all but he was ever on their minds. As they held each other close Loretta May would tell Laura in low voice what she had seen of him in recent dreams, what she had heard him say. She told of his lonely isolation and the things he called to mind to keep a steadfast spirit. Laura smiled at her renditions of his visions of their swampland world and of the sea—thought she was fearful of the ocean even more than he was and would not venture on
it. When Loretta spoke of the near-madness of his desire for them and the physical torment it caused him they both wept and Laura said she wished they could fuck him for real in his dreams and then cried the harder because they could not. When Loretta May announced one morning that John had been released from isolation, albeit he was now swinging a sledgehammer all day, Laura pulled her from the bed and danced her around the room as she sang, “Johnny’s in the sun again, Johnny’s in the sun again.” But another day when Loretta related the dream of seeing him stabbed, Laura was beside herself and demanded more details and grabbed the blind woman by the shoulders and shook her hard before collapsing in tears on her lap.

“He’ll be all right, honey,” Loretta May had crooned to her, stroking her hair. “It’s all I know for sure but it’s enough. He’ll be all right.”

“I made up my mind,” she said. “I’m moving to Jacksonville. Going next week.”

“That so?” Roy Matthews said. They lay naked under the bedsheet, the glowing tips of their cigarettes alternately brightening and dimming, a steady baybreeze belling the gauzy curtains of her bedroom window against which was framed a bone-white gibbous moon.

“My best girlfriend Rose Sharon says I can easy get me a job at the insurance company where she works because I know how to use a typewriting machine so well.”

“I thought you liked Miami. I thought you said it’s lot more lively than Jacksonville.”

“Yeah, well, it’s gettin a little
too
lively, you ask me. Hardly a week goes by there’s not a shooting or some other kind of murder going on. There’s no being safe here anymore, not for any respectable girl, anyhow. You can’t even walk down the street anymore without total strangers giving you the wolf whistle or saying something so awful nasty you just cant believe your ears.”

“That’s what I hear,” Roy Matthews said, snuffing their cigarettes in a bedside ashtray. “Damn town’s just chock fulla criminals and bad actors and no-counts of all kinds. It’s no place for a right citizen like me or you to live.”

“Ho ho, look who’s talkin,” she said.

He kissed her shoulder and said, “You gonna give me a number so I can call you I’m ever up there?”

“Oh you with all your girls. You wouldnt call me.”

“Sure I would. I’m gonna miss you plenty, sweetheart.”

“Oh,
you
.”

They lay facing each other and he slid his hand under the sheet and held her breast. “Does he know you’re goin?”

“Well of course he does. He’s not real happy about it, naturally. I
told
you he wants to marry me.”

Roy Matthews chuckled and lightly tweaked her nipple and she slapped at his hand through the sheet. “If he wants to marry you why you goin to Jacksonville?”

“Cause he says he doesnt wanna live nowhere except down here in South Florida is why. You know he built a house up there where the Ashleys live?”

“Sure. For his momma and daddy. Cleared and filled some ground a quarter-mile from Twin Oaks and built the place and laid down a trail and everthing. He lives there too. So what?” His feigned puzzlement was belied by his grin.

“Dont
you
shine me, mister,” she said. “When I first met him all he talked about was how much he wanted to travel around and see the country. That’s exactly what I always wanted to do—travel around, see things,
do
things, you know, while I’m still
young
, damn it. For more than two years he’s told me it’s what he wanted to do too.
Now
he tells me he wants to stay where his roots are. His
roots
!” She snorted with disgust. “I told him, ‘You know what I want and you know where I’ll be. You got Rose Sharon’s address and I guess you know how to write. I guess you know how to get to Jacksonville from here if you want to come see me.’ That’s exactly how I told him.”

Roy Matthews laughed and said, “Good for you, girl. Hell, you dont need that peckerwood no way. I’ll go up and see you now and then and help you keep your mind offa him.” He squeezed her breasts and nuzzled her neck.

“Oh you.” She pushed his hands out from under the sheet and drew it around her breasts and made a face at him. “You’re
such
a liar. You and all your girls.”

He grinned and tried to insinuate his hand under the sheet again but she rolled onto her back with the sheet held to her chest under her crossed arms and affected to glare at the ceiling. “And I used to think you were a nice fella. Jeepers!”

“I
am
a nice fella,” he said, kissing her bare shoulder. He pulled the sheet off her breasts and she said, “Oooo,
chilly
,” and put her hands over them. He pushed one hand aside and ran his tongue over the erect nipple and prickled aureole and she made a low purr and rolled into his embrace with a smile.

September 1923

T
HEY HIT THE
S
TUART BANK FIVE MINUTES AFTER IT OPENED FOR
business on a warm and humid morning. Although Hanford Mobley was disguised as a woman his voice and demeanor identified him to the two tellers on duty who had done business with him in the past. A bank patron who ran a haberdashery and had once sold Mobley a pair of trousers recognized him as well. The tellers were also certain that one of the other two robbers—both of whom wore bandanna masks—was Clarence Middleton. Neither the tellers nor the customer were so foolish as to let the bandits know they’d been recognized. The identities of the third robber and the getaway driver were yet mysteries.

They rushed from the bank with guns in hand and people fell away from their path. A rumbling green Dodge sedan waited at the curb, Laura at the wheel in overalls and large sunglasses and with her hair tucked up under a highcrowned hat of wide floppy brim. The holdup men tumbled into the car and she gunned it away northbound on the Dixie Highway.

Sheriff Bob Baker was attending an outdoor inauguration ceremony for a new circuit judge in West Palm Beach when Deputy Henry Stubbs sidled up to him and whispered that the Stuart bank had been robbed ten minutes ago. The sheriff made apologies to the judge’s party and took his leave. As they hurried to Sheriff Bob’s unmarked car Stubbs told him that Hanford Mobley and Clarence Middleton
were among the robbers. “I knew that little son of a bitch would be trouble,” Sheriff Bob said. “Knew it the first time I laid eyes on him.”

He strove to affect a cool demeanor but his blood was in a fury. He had been fair with them, damn it. More than fair. After he’d put John away he’d let that peckerwood family be. He hadn’t bothered their moonshine business since way before John went back to prison. Hellfire, he’d let them hijack
other
bootleggers at will. He was no friend of the Ashleys and never would be (never again, anyway) but what was past was done with, and his past troubles with John hadnt kept him from doing the smart thing, which was to let the Ashleys go about their whiskey business any way they wanted, so long as they didnt upset the good citizens of Palm Beach County. As long as the Ashleys didnt make him look bad as sheriff he’d cut them slack. They knew that. It was a condition unspoken but understood. And now look how they’d gone and broken their side of the bargain. And for what? For putting John back in the pen? For not bothering to keep his pleasure a secret when he heard two of the Ashley boys got drowned during a least. Why would they wait so long to do something about it? But
if
thats why they’d done it—
if
they’d put personal feelings above good common sense,
if
they couldnt see that bygones were bygones and live and let live was the way to go—then they were just plain damn stupid, thats all, so damn stupid they were dangerous. Crazy goddamn swamprats. Hell, you didnt see
him
going around eating himself up with wanting to get even with John Ashley, and he sure enough had plenty of reason. Whoever lived in the past was dead to the present—he’d heard that somewhere and thought it was sure enough true. If
he
could let the past go, why in the purple hell couldnt they? (He had the briefest flash of a thumb gouging an eyeball, of a dick at a dead man’s mouth—and instantly had to remind himself of being stripped of his leg and pistol. Of being coldcocked in the jailyard in the rain. Of Julie. Julie who he loved.) Anyway, it wasn’t as though it was
his
doing Frank and Ed Ashley went down in the Stream. Old Joe had no reason to go and rob a bank in
his
county where a bank had not been robbed in years. He’d given that crazy old man no call to make him look bad in the public eye. But by God if this is how the bastard wanted it, well, they’d just see who got the last laugh. He’d put
all
their asses in jail or know the reason why. In jail or in the ground.

Made no damn difference. Not to him. Not anymore.

Stubbs told him the robbers had fled north. As he got in his car Bob Baker told him to send a bulletin to all police departments as far
north as Jacksonville and as westwards as Tallahassee. He asked where Heck Runyon was and Stubbs said he was still in the Everglades tracking an Indian wanted for murder—but Fred Baker was in Fort Pierce. Bob Baker told him to send word to Freddie to put up roadblocks at that town’s exits. It’d likely be too late to catch them going into town but if the robbers lingered there for any reason it might not be too late to catch them trying to come out. He also wanted Freddie to have two fast unmarked cars ready to go—and six good men with arms and ammunition. Stubbs ran off to send the messages and Bob Baker headed off to Ford Pierce.

He paused in Stuart long enough to go in the bank and make quick interrogation of the robbery witnesses. The tellers said they had no doubt whatever that Mobley and Middleton were two of the bandits. George Doster who appeared to be ill said he wasn’t so sure as all that. Sheriff Bob accepted the majority opinion. He dispatched four deputies to the Ashley place at Twin Oaks with explicit order not to engage in a fight should they find Mobley or Middleton on the premises. “If they’re there, you just let me know,” Bob Baker instructed them. “Dont do anything but keep the sonsofbitches under watch till I get there.”

Twenty-five minutes later he rolled up to the south town limits of Fort Pierce where Fred Baker stood waiting beside his own police car. They’d found the green Dodge getaway car in an alley at the west end of town. It had been stolen. A witness saw four men get out of the Dodge and into a Ford sedan and head out on the Yeehaw Road. Fred had two cars ready to go and in them sat the Padgett brothers, and four other Baker Gang deputies, all of them as heavily armed as soldiers.

Bob Baker bit off the end of a cigar and spat it out and tugged down his hat and looked off to the flat horizon in the west. “I figure they got less than a hour’s headstart. Let’s go!”

They were unaware they’d been identified in the bank. As he stripped off his female disguise Hanford Mobley yelled, “Anybody comin?” Roy Matthews was looking out the car’s rear window and said, “Nary soul.”

Clarence Middleton watched Mobley taking off his woman’s clothing and now hollered as though at a cooch show, “Put it
on
, baby, put it
on
!” Roy Matthews laughed and said Mobley was sure enough about the skankiest woman he’d ever seen. Hanford Mobley told them to fuck themselves, the disguise had been a real smart idea.

“That’s right, honey,” Laura said, glancing at him sidewise and grinning as she sped them down the dusty road. “Pretty is as pretty
does and dont you let these peckerwoods tell you different.” But she couldnt help laughing along with Clarence and Roy. “And you watch your goddamn language, hear? There’s a lady present in case you didnt know.” Mobley glared at her but held his tongue.

He swiftly counted the take and said, “Forty thousand, my sorry ass. It aint but a little over twenty-three thousand here.”

“I think Old Joe ought to figure Doster’s five percent out of the difference,” Roy Matthews said.

“I think he should pay Doster
with
the difference,” Laura said. “He ought say, ‘Hey bubba, you know that seventeen grand that wasnt there? Well it’s all yours. And it’s
all
thats yours.’”

Hanford Mobley put twenty thousand dollars in one satchel and the rest of the money in another. Laura slowed as they came in sight of Fort Pierce. They followed the highway through town and saw but one police car and it parked in front of a cafe. Near the north city limits and the Yeehaw Road she turned down a street and then into an alley behind a closed roadhouse where Clarence had parked a Ford sedan he’d stolen in Vero before sunrise that morning. They abandoned the Dodge and got into the Ford and did not see the bum watching them from his nest of crates and cardboard twenty yards away—he who would wait till they drove from sight on the Yeehaw Road and then be rummaging through the Dodge when a police car pulled up and a pair of cops pointed guns at him and told him to freeze or die. They had no inkling of the telephone call Fred Baker was receiving even as they swapped cars, no notion that ten minutes after their departure on the Yeehaw Road every exit from Fort Pierce would be posted with police.

Thirty miles west at the Okeechobee crossroad they were met by Albert Miller in a coupé. Laura took the twenty thousand dollars and got in the car with Albert and they headed back the way Albert had come—south to the town of Okeechobee and around the lake’s east side to the Indiantown Road and then east through the swamp and pineywoods toward the road to Twin Oaks. Hanford Mobley took the wheel of the Ford and he and Matthews and Middleton pressed on to westward, bound for Lakeland. The plan was for them to take refuge with Mrs. Ella Fingers, a trusted woman friend of Joe Ashley’s whose lucrative business was to shelter and feed men on the dodge, no questions asked. There the three would lie low for a week or so until Old Joe sent word whether they could return to Palm Beach County without fear of arrest or would have to slip back surreptitiously.

They did not think they were being followed but thought it the wiser course to proceed as though they were. Rather than take the
Sebring Road they drove on a narrow dirt road flanking the Seaboard rail line. The road was of sand and rock and even more rugged than most backcountry routes. The Model T jounced and pitched as it made its way through pinelands thick and dark that periodically gave way to marshy savannah rife with palmetto scrub. A covey of white herons took to wing like fluttering scraps of paper falling upward. A hawk swooped into the prairie grass near the edge of the road and arced back for the sky with a rabbit flailing in its talons.

Thunderheads purple and blue as fresh bruises were shaping in the western sky. At the Kissimmee River the railtracks crossed on a narrow trestle but the road veered north and followed the river to a bridge at Fort Basinger two miles away. Not wanting to be seen by anybody who might inform pursuers of their passing, they chose to cross over on the trestle rather than show themselves at the bridge. Hanford Mobley eased the car slowly onto the elevated tracks and the Model T lunged and yawed as it advanced from tie to tie in the manner of a cautious cockroach. Roy Matthews and Clarence Middleton gaped at the green river rippling below the tracks and arched their brows at each other and clutched tightly to the door posts against the car’s erratic sway as it forged ahead. Hanford Mobley caught their stricken looks and laughed.

Once across the trestle they continued on the tracks for nearly another mile before the narrow backroad from Fort Basinger came curving out of the pinewoods and again ran alongside the track bed and Hanford steered the Ford down the embankment and onto it. Five miles farther on, the rail line met with the Sebring Road and ran parallel with it for almost ten miles to the north end of Lake Istokpoga before road and track once again diverged, the raised track bearing directly for Sebring through its bordering swampland and the highway curving around the swamp to come up into Sebring from the south. They had just gone around the bend of the lake when the radiator sprang a leak and began hissing loudly. A handpainted roadsign announced the Lorida Fishcamp just a mile ahead and down a narrow dirt lane to Lake Istokpoga. They drove on with steam keening before them and blowing back with a smell of hot metal and came to the camp under high wide oaks hung with Spanish moss. Here they bought cold bottles of bootleg beer and a raw egg. Clarence Middleton wrapped his hand with a bandanna and removed the radiator cap with a whoosh of steam. He cracked open the egg and dropped it into the radiator and while they drank their beer and chatted with a couple of locals about the best ways to rig a trotline the egg circulated in the steaming water and found its solidifying way to the leak and plugged
it. Clarence then filled the radiator with water from a dispenser can and replaced the cap. They finished off the beer with huge sighs and ripping belches and got back in the car and pushed on.

They drove into Sebring under an early afternoon sky darkening with storm clouds. A wind had kicked up and was shaking the trees. They topped off the gas tank at a filling station and then went to a cafe and bought sandwiches and bottles of soda and asked for the food to be bagged so they could take it with them before the rain hit. While they waited for their order they flirted with the waitresses. Roy Matthews told the prettiest, a blonde named Marybelle, that he was going to be visiting an uncle in Lakeland for the next week or two and asked if she ever got up that way. She said it so happened her best girlfriend lived in Auburndale which was only a few miles from Lakeland and she would be going to visit her this coming weekend. She gave him her friend’s telephone number and he winked at her and said he’d be sure to call on Friday night. Hanford Mobley had been first to speak and smile at Marybelle but after Roy Matthews caught her attention she had eyes for no one else. As they went back out to the car Mobley said it surely was pathetic to see a fella practically having to beg women for a date just because he couldnt get him a steady one. “I’m sure glad I got Glenda,” Mobley said. “She makes both them girls back there look like skanks.” Roy Matthews spat and laughed and let the remarks pass. Now they got on the paved main highway and bore north for Lakeland, still nearly sixty miles distant, but the roads from here on were all good and they would be there in two hours.

Barely fifteen minutes after the fugitives’ departure from Sebring a three-car caravan of Palm Beach County police officers swept into town in a crashing rain. At the Fort Basinger bridge fishcamp they’d learned that two men who’d been fishing from a skiff just upriver from the railroad had seen a Ford sedan drive over the trestle earlier that afternoon and Sheriff Baker knew it was the robbers.

“They say it was only three men in the car,” Fred Baker said as he drove off in the lead car with Bob Baker in the passenger seat beside him.

“Dont matter,” Bob Baker said. “One might of been laying down. One might of gone off on his own for some reason. I know it’s them, I
know
it. Let’s move, Freddie, goose this thing.”