Red Grass River (36 page)

Hanford Mobley sat on his bunk smoking a cigarette and grinned. It galled him plenty that Matthews was the only one of them to escape being caught at Plant City, especially since it had been the bigmouth’s fault that him and Clarence had been taken. If Matthews hadnt told that bitch in Sebring about Lakeland the cops never wouldve known where to hunt for them. Hanford couldnt help feeling a little lowdown for taking pleasure in a partner getting caught, but he didnt really mind the guilt. He was glad Roy Matthews had been caught while humping some whore and no use to deny it. The jailer had said Matthews would arrive at the Broward jail tomorrow. Hanford Mobley expected to be long gone by then.

“They sky ever man in the house come into the hallway and all of em crowdin at the door and makin fun of the nekkid fella and gawkin at the girl in the bed with the sheet up to her chin and just cryin her eyes out,” Glover said. “That sheriff up in Duval, he can be a good old boy or he can be one mean sumbitch, all depends, and this
time he was feelin mean. Told the both of them to get their clothes on and never made a move to close the door to give them the least bit of privacy from the them old boys lookin on. They say the gal really got to cryin then and said would they turn they backs and the men all just laughed. The sheriff told her it was the price a person paid for a life of crime. She said she aint never led no life of crime and he said they’d see about that. Hell, he knew she wasnt no member of you all’s gang, he was just blackassed about havin to foller Matthews over half of Duval County in the blazing sun and sweatin like a hog.”

“Figured he’d make her blush some, hey?” Hanford Mobley said, He began to roll another cigarette.

“Made her damn good and mad too is what he did,” Glover said. “At
ever
damnbody, includin the Matthews fella. When the sheriff asked him his name he said Reynolds, but the girl hollers no it’s not, it’s Matthews, Roy Matthews, and he’d a no-good son of a bitch criminal who never brung her nothin but trouble is who he is. Whooo, she was hot! They say the Matthews fella looked like he wanted to kick her all the way go Georgia.”

Mobley laughed. “That’s the way it is with whores aint it—cant trust a one of them. I bet the sheriff made her get out of bed nekkid anyhow.”

“Damn sure did. She tried to keep her arms crossed over her titties, but hell, she couldnt keep everthin covered all at once and get herself dressed too, could she now? Right goodlookin too, they say. Nice jugs on her. Real nice ass.”

“You best quit tellin me such,” Hanford Mobley said with a chuckle. “It aint polite to get a man all hot and bothered when he’s in the can and cant do nothin about it.”

“I wouldnt of minded seein that show my ownself,” Glover said. “They say she was a
real
redhead that one, if you get my meanin and I reckon you do. Say she had a damn tattoo. A little turtle, like, right down here, just over her pussy.”

Hanford Mobley sat with the cigarette to his mouth and a ready match in his hand and stared hard at something that was not there.

When Hicks the night jailer came on duty Hanford Mobley called him over to the bars and said he wanted to postpone things till the following night, His partner was being brought in tomorrow and he wanted to take him out with him.

“Whoa now, bubba,” Hicks whispered, looking about and leaning
against the bars. “That aint the deal. Old Joe paid me just for you. He didnt say nothin about nobody else.”

“You’ll get paid for it,” Mobley said.

“How I know that?”

Hanford Mobley stared at him. Hicks licked his lips. “You’ll tell Old Joe
you
asked for your partner too?”

Hanford Mobley turned and spat on the stone floor and then looked at him again.

“Goddamn, man, I just wanna be sure I get paid for it is all I’m sayin.”

They brought Roy Matthews into the jail that afternoon and put him in a cell at the far end of the lockup. As Matthews went past Hanford Mobley’s cell they looked at each other but neither said anything.

That evening W. W. Hicks came into the cell block with his heels clacking on the stone floor and a clipboard under his arm. Besides Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews, there were but five other inmates in the lockup this night and some of them observed the proceedings with idle curiosity. Hicks went to Hanford Mobley’s cell and called out loudly in his official jailer’s voice, “All right, Mobley, you’re on cleanup detail tonight and I dont want no fucken argument about it and no slackin on the job neither! You and…” He made a show of looking at his clipboard, of running his finger down a sheet of paper. “You and the fucken new fish…Matthews.” He unlocked Hanford Mobley’s cell and Mobley followed him down to the end of the block where Roy Matthews sat on his bunk and stared out at them. “Get on out here, new fish,” Hicks said. “Dont nobody get free room and board, not in this jail. You gone earn you keep with a bucket and mop.”

He led them to a closet just outside the barred door to the row and from it they took a broom and a mop and a bucket. “Now I want you boys to start out here in the store room where they was unpacking stuff this week and it’s a real mess,” Hicks said, still addressing them in his official voice as he guided them down the hall to a thick door he unlocked with his ring of keys. They went in and he closed the door behind them. The room was littered with broken boxes and small crates and baling wire and torn canvas tents.

“All right, you boys,” Hicks said, “there it is.” He pointed to a skylight nearly ten feet over the center of the room. The glass was thick and iron-framed and locked shut with a padlock through an eye
ring. A slim crowbar about two feel long lay on a box and Hicks took it up and said, “This oughta do for her.” Roy Matthews took the crowbar from him and tested its heft.

“Now you got to tie me up good,” Hicks said as he rummaged in the debris. “Make it look right.” He came up with some thick strips of canvas. “This here’ll work good as rope. Then you put a gag on me and get youselfs out that skylight and thats all she wrote. You just a coupla jailbirds got the jump on me and made away.”

“Maybe that rope there be better for tying you,” Roy Matthews said.

“What rope’s that?” Hicks said, turning to look where Matthews pointed. Matthews swung the crowbar against the back of his head with a soft crack and Hicks fell as if his bones had gone to milk.

“God
damn
, man!” Hanford Mobley said. “What you do that for?” He stepped over Hicks so he could watch Matthews ever as he squatted to check the fallen man.

“Make it look right, didnt he say?” Roy Matthews said. “Well, this’ll look right and didnt take near as long. What the hell, he aint but a fucken jail hack.”

“He’s a friend of Grandaddy’s, who he is,” Mobley said. He probed for a pulse under Hicks’ jaw and could not find it and was sure Hicks was dead and then he felt it. Mobley stood up. “He’s alive, no thanks to you.”

They both looked up at the skylight and then around the room. “Dont look like any these busted crates any good for standin on,” Roy Matthew said.

“Give me that iron and make a stirrup with you hands,” Hanford Mobley said.

Roy Matthews looked at him.

“I’m lighter than you,” Mobley said. “You boost me up and I’ll bust the lock. Then we’ll make a rope of them pieces of canvas and I’ll brace myself and haul you up.”

“Real good plan, sonny,” Roy Matthews said. “What’s to keep you from going on without me once you make the roof?”

“You damn fool. You think I couldnt of got out of here before now? I been waitin on you. Not cause I give a shit about you—cause I dont. It’s only cause Grandaddy wanted me to. Now we gone stand here arguin all fucken night or we gone get out of here?”

Matthews gave him the little prizing bar and interlaced the fingers of his hands to form a stirrup and Hanford Mobley stepped into it and Matthews heaved him up and braced Mobley’s foot at belly level.
Mobley caught hold of the frame around the skylight with one hand to steady himself and worked the bar into the padlock yoke. On his third hard pull the yoke broke open. He took the lock out of the eye-ring and tossed it aside and pushed the skylight window up and it fell open onto the roof with a loud bang and it was a wonder the glass did not shatter.

“Shitfire!” Roy Matthews grunted under Hanford Mobley’s weight on his hands. “Think you might can be a little noisier about it?”

Hanford Mobley laid the crowbar on the roof and called down, “Higher! Boost me higher.”

“God
damn
,” Roy Matthews said. He grit his teeth and raised Mobley’s foot up almost to his chin, elevating him high enough so he could pull himself up onto the graveled roof by arm strength. Mobley took a moment to catch his breath and then slipped the crowbar into his belt and lay on his belly to look down at Roy Matthews who was quickly trying together some of the strips of canvas. Matthews then tied a loop in one end of the line and slipped it under his arms like a sling and tossed up the other end of the line to Mobley who took up the slack and wound it around his back for support and then sat at the edge of the skylight with his legs drawn up and his heels braced against the frame of it. He leaned forward into the opening and reached as far down on the line as he could and got a tight two-hand grip and then slowly straightened and leaned back and pushed himself away from the window frame with his legs and thus raised Roy Matthews up high enough so he could grab onto the skylight frame and work himself up on the roof.

They scurried to the corner of the building and shinned down the drainpipe there. They paused to listen for sounds of alarm but heard none and then raced across the moonbright stretch of grass to the woods beyond and plunged into the pines. They made their way to Turtle Creek and followed it eastward through the swamp where little light of the waning gibbous moon did penetrate. They came at last to the lagoon which formed a portion of the intracoastal waterway and they began searching for the skiff. The clouds of mosquitoes were so thick they could be clutched by the fistful and squeezed to bloody paste in the palm. They flailed at the maddening whine at their ears as they tramped through the brush and stumbled on mangrove roots along the lagoon bank and finally both of them dug dripping scoops of malodorous muck and coated their faces and arms with it against the rage of mosquitoes.

They found the skiff lashed to a mangrove in a small cleared por
tion of bank about twenty yards north of the creek. In it was a jug of water and a croker sack containing a dozen oranges, some smoked mullet and cornbread, a box of matches and a sheathed skinning knife. They gobbled down the food and Hanford Mobley put the knife on his belt. Then Roy Matthews set himself in the fore of the boat and Mobley pushed them off and took up the pole and stood near the stern and began poling north for Skeet Massey’s fishcamp at Pompano.

Roy Matthews turned once and grinned palely in the moonlight and said, “We done er,” and Hanford Mobley said, “Yeah we did.”

They spoke no more as the skiff glided through the water with a barely visible green-yellow glow in its wake. The mosquitoes were not so severe out here on the water where there was at least a small breeze to help keep them at bay. From the dark pine came a deep hollow hooting of an owl. An enormous school of mullet broke the surface ahead of them in a great phosphorescent shimmer like a shattering of burning glass and both of them sucked their breath at the sight.

The moon rode high and made slow progress across the black heaven and its spangled of stars. After a time the mangroves drew in on them from both sides and shadows dappled the skiff and again mosquitoes closed on them in a densely humming mass.

Hanford Mobley put down the pole and slipped the skinning knife from its sheath. The blade was eight inches long and felt razorous to his thumb. He had intended to use the crowbar but a knife was so much better. An engine of keener intimacy. Used properly a knife allowed for at least a moment’s mutual reflection between the principals and thus a truer sense of reckoning. He stepped forward lightly as a cat.

Roy Matthews noted the slowing of the boat and started to turn around as Mobley’s shadow fell over him and he felt a sudden horrid pain at his neck and knew in the instant that his throat had been slashed to the neckbone.

His hands went to his wound in a desperate pawing and he tried to get up but Hanford Mobley kicked him in the chest and he sprawled in the rocking bow and felt the blood coursing hotly down his chest and sopping his shirt and his horror was such that he would have screamed but for windpipe and voice box having been severed as well. The sound from his mouth was the deep gurgle of a drain abruptly unplugged and blood rushed into his lungs and he choked and saw the dimming moon above the through his last loud try for breath he heard Hanford Mobley asking if she’d been worth it.

The Liars Club

T
HE RUMOR WAS EVERYWHERE THAT
O
LD
J
OE
A
SHLEY’D HAD A
hand in Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews slipping out of the Broward jail, and might could be he did or might could be he didnt. Only thing for sure about that rumor was the same as always: nobody had a lick of proof for it.

They say when Bob Baker heard about the escape him and Freddie Baker drove straight down to Fort Lauderdale and he went right into the high sheriff’s office there and asked where that goddamn jailer Hicks was at. The sheriff said he was in the hospital with a skull fracture. Said he wished he’s never accepted the two bank robbers into his jail because he sure as hell didnt need all this bad newspaper publicity. Bob Baker called the sheriff a dumb lazy peckerwood loud enough for everbody in the jailhouse to hear him. He stomped back out to his car and Freddie drove him over to the hospital and Bob Baker told the doctor he had to ask the injured jailer a few important questions. The doctor said all right, but the patient was in a bad way, so go easy on him. But Sheriff Bob wasn’t in no go-easy mood, not with the fella responsible for his prisoners getting away laying right there in front of him. He grabbed Hicks by his hospital gown and shook him like a dog with a rabbit. Called him a lowdown shiteating son of a bitch and said he knew he’d helped the prisoners break out and he would by God prove it and send him to prison for the rest of his miserable life. They say Hicks’s bandage was slipping down over his eyes and he was
screaming for somebody to help him. It took the doc and Freddie both to pull Bob Baker offa him. That’s the story we heard Another thing we heard was that a couple of days later Heck Runyon was seen at side door of the county jail one evening and Freddie Baker let him in and they say Heck didnt come out of there again until late at night.

Hicks got fired sure enough. He told the newspaper he was being made a whipping boy. Said it was unfair to be blamed for being attacked from behind. He never really recovered from that whack on the head with a crowbar. It left him part-crippled and strange in the head for all his days after. He couldnt walk in a straight line but had to bear at a slight angle to the direction he really wanted to go, and one eye was always half-closing on him. He got to talking to himself, even when he was walking down the streets and there was people all around. He’d sit on a park bench sometimes and get into mean whispering arguments with himself. He took bad to drink. A coupla years after the jailbreak he killed a fella in a drunken fight or some such and got sent to prison for life. That’s a true fact.

As for Mobley and Matthews, some said Old Joe sent them both out of Florida to lay low for a while. Others say it was only Mobley he sent away—sent him off to wherever John Ashley had hid out a dozen years before when there was a warrant on him for killing the Indian. Wherever it was Hanford Mobley went, he came back about a year later—which was the worst mistake of his life.

Most stories about Roy Matthews said he went off on his own, out to California or up to Tennessee or over to Mexico, depending on which story you wanted to believe. But nobody never saw hide nor hair of him again, not in South Florida. A Palm Beach County deputy who was visiting kin in Cleveland a few months after the jailbreak said he saw him working as a cook in a restaurant on Lake Erie. Said he got up from the table and headed for the kitchen to ask him a few questions but the fella saw him coming and ran out the back way and flat disappeared. Deputy
swore
it was him. Another story was that Matthews had gone up to Atlanta and took up with a gal who had a jealous boyfriend and the fella caught up to them one night and cut his dick off. Another rumor said he got killed in a bank holdup in Springfield, Missouri—him and some skinny Ozark gal he taken for a partner. Lord, there was some stories about him! Some even said he never left Florida at all, said he’d been hiding out with the Ashleys at Twin Oaks and got drunk one night and picked a fight with Joe Ashley and Old Joe brained him with a hatchet and killed him graveyard dead. Fed him to the gators to get rid of the evidence. It was ever
kind of story about Roy Matthews and no telling which was true or if any of them was. The only thing we can say for a absolute fact is nobody we knew ever saw him again.

Clarence Middleton went to trial with his jaw still wired shut. When the judge read the charge against him and asked how he pled, guilty, or not guilty, he said something through his clamped teeth and the judge said “What?” and his lawyer said “That means guilty your honor.” Middleton’s lawyer was a Miami sharpie named Ira Goldman. The story was, Goldman made a deal with the state for Clarence to plead guilty in exchange for a fifteen-year sentence instead of the thirty years the state said it was gonna call for and the judge said he was gonna give him if they was put to the trouble of a trial. The whole thing didn’t take twenty minutes. Two days later Clarence Middleton was on his way to Raiford. That was in October of nineteen and twenty-three.

There’s a lot nobody’s ever been able to figure out for sure about what exactly happened in the next few weeks after that, but there’s no disputing the basic facts. It’s a fact that when Clarence Middleton got to Raiford he was back together with John Ashley. And it’s a fact that Ben Tracey—a convict friend of John’s—finished his sentence and was set loose about a week or so after Clarence got there. Three days later Tracey was seen driving a brand new blue Chevrolet sedan on the streets of Tallahassee, about sixty miles southeast of Marianna, which is right near where the road camp was that Clarence Middleton got sent to after just a couple of weeks at Raiford. Ray Lynn, another prison pal of John Ashley’s, got sent there with Clarence—thats a fact too. Finally, it’s a fact that sometime in the first week of November and barely three weeks after he went to prison, Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn escaped from the Marianna road gang. They did this just one day after John Ashley someway or other broke out of the penitentiary a Raiford.

All thats a fact. The rest is just stories. A lot of guessing and supposing and probly. What probly happened is Old Joe spread some money around to the right people at Raiford. That’s what
probly
happened.

As time went by, the most popular story we heard about how Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn escaped was they somehow picked the lock to their legchains just before the gang was lined up at the end of the workday to get put in the truck back to camp and next thing anybody knew, the two of them was gone into the pineywoods. The
main highway wasnt but a few miles off and there wasnt no time to go get the dogs from back at the camp, so a couple of the guards with rifles took off after them. Said they damn near caught up to them. Said they saw them getting into a blue Chevy sedan and heading off down the road in the twilight and could hear them laughing. Said they fired at them but if they even hit the car they didnt do enough damage to stop it. That was the story we heard. Most times, whoever was telling it would wink when he said Clarence and Ray “picked” the lock to their chain, a wink meaning that like as not the “pick” used on the lock was a guard’s key. There was lots of winks went with that story. Besides using their key, the guards might of been paid to run slow when they went after them, or to be sure to miss when they shot at them. In them days money could buy you a whole lot of cooperation from prison guards, who the state never did pay any bettern coolies. Everbody knew that. Old Joe had found out it was true the first time John went to prison.

It was money that got John Ashley out of Raiford too—leastways the way we heard it. One afternoon he told a rockpile guard he was feeling sick and so the guard took him over to the infirmary. The guard was spose to stay with his prisoner ever minute, even while the doc looked him over. But so happened the doctor wasnt in his office when they got there and the clerk didnt know where he was at. The guard told John Ashley to sit tight in the doctor’s office where there wasnt even a window, and he told the clerk in the outer office to give a holler if the prisoner so much as stuck his head out the door. Then he went off to look for the doc. When they got back fifteen minutes later the clerk wasnt there and neither was John Ashley. The clerk told the investigators he’d forgot John Ashley was in the office and so he’d gone over to the guards’ mess for a cup of coffee. The warden ordered an immediate lockdown and every foot of the prison got searched but they couldnt find him nowhere. They figured the only way he coulda got out of the walls was on one of the rockpile trucks that delivered boulders that afternoon. When the cops went out to the quarry company to talk to the drivers they couldnt round up but five of the six. They never found the other one, not then nor ever after, and so they were sure he’d been the one to help John Ashley to escape. It’s as good an explanation as any, but that dont mean it’s the true one. The only true thing anybody can say about that escape is that it was awful damn easy. The kind of easy you get only by paying for it.

Of course nobody could
prove
nothing, not even after they investigated everybody in the prison who might of had anything to do with
John’s deliverance or with Ray Lynn and Clarence Middleton escaping from the road gang. Nobody knew a damn thing—not the warden nor his assistant nor the doctor nor the guards not the truck drivers. No-damn-body. The only thing to come of the investigation was three men got fired—the assistant warden, for poor judgment in assigning two dangerous felons to a road camp, and the guard and the medical clerk who both left John Ashley alone in the doctor’s office. They say that less than a month later the assistant warden was hired as the jail supervisor by some county up in the panhandle and the fired guard and clerk were hired along with him.

You’d of thought that when he heard about three of the Ashley Gang breaking out from prison within a day of each other and just six weeks or so after Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews escaped from the Broward jail, Bob Baker would of let a holler you could hear to Pensacola. But he didn’t. They say when he got the news about John getting away from Raiford for the second time in his life he was sitting at his office desk and trimming a cigar. It was Slim Jackson who told him the news and he said later that Bob Baker just looked at him with no expression at all and then went right on trimming the cigar. Slim sat down and waited to hear what Bob might have to say about it but he never said a word. Just trimmed at the cigar till the leaf came apart in his hands and he dropped the mess on the floor and brushed his hands and took his pipe out of his shirt pocket and started cleaning that. Slim sat there about ten minutes and then got up and left. They say Bobby just sat there and fiddled with his pipe and smoked it some and didnt say a word till some reporters came to ask what he thought of the escapes. He said he expected all three fugitives to be recaptured before long and he hoped the next time they were locked up in stronger jails and looked after by more honest guards. They say the reporters laughed but Bob Baker didnt smile when he said it.

Lots of folk was feeling sympathy for him. They saw him as a good man and a good sheriff and had come to respect him plenty. His cousin Freddie was probly the only lawman in all Palm Beach County who was more popular. The Ashley had always had friends and admirers who appreciated their independent spirit but, little by little, more folk were leanin to the Bakers’ side of the matter. They could see how things was changing. The Ashleys was the sort whose day was done. The frontier life their kind had always lived was slipping away. More and more of the Everglades was giving way to what they call development—to more canals and landfills and roads, to a whole new world.
Whole regions of the Glades was little by little getting drained and burned clear and built on. You could see it happening from year to year. Some said a goodly portion of the Devil’s Garden would one day mostly be the Devil’s parking Lot. You could say that Twin Oaks was a good example of the old ways and Miami was a good example of the new ones, and at the time we’re talking about they was passing each other by in opposite directions. The old ways of the crackers was folks living apart and independent and making do on their own, setting troubles between themselfs. The new ways being forced on them and everbody else was people living close together and lots of them strangers and all of them having to depend on courtroom law. It was a world getting a whole lot unfriendier to such as the Ashleys—and a whole lot more needful of such as Bob Baker.

They say Bob Baker seemed different for a time after he heard about John Ashley’s escape. They say you could see it in his eyes, that even when he looked at you he seemed to be lookin at something somewhere else, something cold and mean and not all that far away. You never say him with his wife and daughters anymore. Some said he didnt bring them out in public because he was certain the Ashley Gang was gonna try to kill him and he didn’t want to put his family at risk. You never saw him now without some of his special gang of deputies around him. It was like he was waiting for something but wasnt quite sure what it was. Lots of folk had the same feeling. They said it was like a bad storm building just over the horizon but there wasnt any sign of it yet that you could point to. Like it was building without sound nor smell nor quiver but everbody seemed to know it was out there and headed this way.

One sunny morning in late November not even a month after he broke out of Raiford John Ashley and his gang robbed the bank at Pompano. Him and Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn. The charged into the bank like Wild West outlaws whooping and waving their guns. Witnesses said Middleton and Lynn had a .45 in each hand and John Ashley carried an automatic rifle. They scared hell out of everbody. They none of them wore masks. They got nearly thirty thousand dollars in cash and securities and when they were ready to go Ray Lynn signaled from the door and here came a damn taxi driven by Ben Tracey, judging by the descriptions give of him by witnesses. He was blaring the klaxon and weaving down the street and scattering people ever which way. The gang tumbled into the taxi and they took off
laughing. The people who saw it say it all happened so fast and loud it didnt hardly seem real.