Red Grass River (38 page)

They danced and drank and told funny stories and it was a fine party until Ben Tracey got overly bold in his manner of holding Scout to him as they danced and then laughingly refused to release her when she tried to wrest herself free. Laura saw what was happening and slipped out of John Ashley’s arms and kicked Ben in the leg and told him to let her go, goddammit. Tracey turned on her with a glare and John Ashley stepped up and said, “Do it, Ben. Raise you hand to her. See what happens.”

Scout got between them and said it was all right, Ben hadnt
done
anything, for Pete’s sake, she’d just been funning with him. Old Joe who was drunk asked what the hell was going on and why’d everybody quit dancing damn it. Ray Lynn pulled Ben aside and whispered in his ear and Ben nodded and looked hangdog and then told Laura he was sorry, he’d just been playing with the girl and hadnt meant any disrespect.

Ma Ashley entered the room as Ben made his apology and she gave Scout a hard stare and the girl shrugged as if to say
she
didnt know what was going on. Laura saw the girl’s impish look and shook a finger at her and then told Ben she was sorry she’d kicked him. Ben Tracey showed a small smile and made a dismissive gesture. John Ashley punched his shoulder lightly and told him to get himself another drink. The party then resumed but it had lost its momentum, and a few minutes later Bill put his banjo and he and Bertha took their leave and the celebration broke up shortly after.

In a still dark hour of that night, a lookout came to Old Joe’s window and woke him with the whispered information that a pair of sheriff’s cars had stopped out on the highway and let out a half-dozen men with rifles who were right now working their way through the woods toward the house.

By the time the sheriff’s men, muck-caked and mosquito-ravaged, had positioned themselves in the surrounding brush and trees where
they could keep the house under surveillance, the Ashley Gang was into the deeper swamp and making for the Crossbone camp.

He kept the rifle bullet in his pocket and throughout the day would take it out and finger it and roll it in his palm and then put it back. For more than a month now his anger had gripped hard inside his chest—squeezing heart and lungs so tightly he could feel his pulse behind his eyes and sometimes had to open his mouth to breathe. On the evening he’d arrived home after receiving John Ashley’s message his wife had looked at him and paled and said not a word. His daughters too had gone wide-eyed at the sight of his face and it seemed they all three might cry and their mother had pulled them to her skirts and taken them to another room. But even behind the door mother and children could sense his fury quivering in the walls, could smell his hate drifting through the house like a caustic vapor.

The next day she read in the newspaper all about the Negro and the rifle bullet, read of John Ashley’s arrogant challenge to her husband, of her husband’s aplomb in the face of it. Read of his sneering dismissal of the Ashley Gang as worthless swamprats who belonged in a zoo cage or on a taxidermist’s table more than in a jail cell. She read of his vow to bring them down. When she read of his promise to wear John Ashley’s glass eye for a watch fob she little knew this man she was wed to, the father of her children. He seemed unaware of the fear he was inspiring under his own roof.

After days of his oblivious and leaden silence she went to his den one evening and knocked lightly on the door and when she received no response knocked again and then entered. He sat at his desk and stared at her. “I just want you to know,” she said softly, “that I’m
here
.” He seemed not to recognize her nor care that he did not. He was rolling a bullet under his finger on the desktop. She retreated.

During the month that followed he came and went at all hours. Sometimes he slept at the jail. Sometimes he came home in the middle of the day and went to sleep and all the while there would be cops lolling in the parlor talking in whispers and laughing lowly. Cops in the front yard. His wife and daughters kept to other parts of the house. Christmas passed like a day of mourning. He would awaken and go back out after dark and not return until sometime the following day. He ate but little. And if at time there was whiskey on his breath he never seemed drunk, not to anyone.

“Guess who’s
heeere
!” Laura trilled from the doorway, John Ashley smiling beside her and Wisteria’s black face behind them showing a wide white grin. It was two weeks before Christmas and a wreath of fresh pine twigs hung on the open door.

“Well now, let me see…” Loretta May said. She was sitting in the middle of the bed and the room was bathed in bright morning sunshine. A marmalade cat sat tonguing itself on the bedside table and now looked up and John Ashley saw that it was one-eyed. Loretta’s crossed legs were exposed under her parted robe as was most of one breast. He could smell her yellow hair freshly washed. Looking on her smiling face he realized how little she had changed in the eleven years or so he’d known her. She looked hardly older than the seventeen she’d been the first time he’d come to her bed and he believed he’d never seen anything so beautiful as she looked at this moment.

She drummed her fingers on her bare knee and held her chin in affected thought and said. “Who
could
it be?”

“Oh
you
,” Laura said. “You
know
! I bet you even knowed he was loose before I did, didnt you? I bet you…you know…
seen
us? In the sidehouse? In the
tent
?”

“Do you know this girl’s blushin?” John Ashley said.

Loretta May smiled wide. “Sounds like she’s braggin too. And you know what, mister? You sound a whole lot like a bad old gator hunter used to come see me ever now and then. Oh but he was bad about not payin, that one. I bet he owes me fifty thousand dollars for services unpaid.”

“Well, from the looks of things I’d say he’s bout to run that bill up some more,” Laura said. “You oughta see—looks like he got a damn banana down his pocket.”

Loretta laughed, and behind Laura, Wisteria giggled.

The cat sprang onto the bed and nuzzled her leg and John Ashley said, “Who’s the one-eye?”

“Name’s Johnny,” Loretta May said with a smile, “just like all the one-eyed evil tomcats I know. But how you all
get
here anyway? I heard the bunch of you was hid out in the Devil’s Garden and ever cop in the county’s on the lookout for you.”

“Hell girl, show me the cop who can make his way round the Glades good as us,” John Ashley said.

“Well it sure took you long enough to make your way round to me,” she said. “I only got one question other.”

“What’s that?” John Ashley said. His tongue felt thick with his desire for her.

“How much longer you gonna be about makin your way on over to this bed?”

John Ashley laughed and started shedding clothes as he went to her. The cat saw him coming and sprang to the beside table and almost upset the unlit oil lamp there and then leaped to the window sill and glared at John Ashley.

“I see dont
nobody
bother you all,” Wisteria said to Laura as she closed the door on them. The girl’s giggles faded down the hallway.

She stood with her back against the door and watched them come together. So avid was John Ashley that he climaxed almost immediately on joining with Loretta May. She held him close for a moment and then rolled him onto his side and sat up and said, “Hey boy.”

“What?” John Ashley said, looking up at her.

“Where’s your manners?” Her smiling sightless face turned toward Laura at the door.

He sat up grinning at Laura and said, “Hey girl, how much longer you gonna be about makin your way on over to—”

But she was already half out of the clothes and hurtling to the bed and tumbling into it and laughing and embracing them both and tasting the salt of her own happy tears.

On a cold afternoon in late December Bob and Fred Baker met with Heck Runyon at Springer’s Restaurant in Salerno. They sat at a back table and drank coffee and Heck informed them he’d two days earlier busted up another of the Ashley camp. A small camp in a gumbo limbo hammock in the swamps west of Hobe. Bob Baker asked if any of the Ashley Gang had been there and Heck said no, only a nigger and his kid.

“Oh Jesus,” Fred Baker said. “Did you—? How old was
this
kid?”

Heck Runyon shrugged. A man at another table casually glanced over and met his eye and instantly looked away.

“Shit,” Fred Baker whispered.

Heck Runyon picked his teeth and stared at Fred Baker through half-closed eyes. Bob Baker reflected that he’d never seen Heck Runyon’s eyes fully open nor ever to blink. It was as though he thought that to open his eyes too much would be to let others see into them and thereby know his secrets, that to blink would be to let down his guard. It was the look of a man at once mistrustful of the world’s motives and bored with all possibilities of them. Now he turned to Bob Baker and leaned forward on his crossed arms and showed a smile
the lacked everything most people associated with a smile. “
You
said get rid them camps.”

“Yeah, but he didnt tell you—” Fred Baker started to say but Bob Baker made an abrupt hand gesture and said, “Never mind, Freddie.”

“Aint but one camp left,” Heck Runyon said.

“One?” Bob Baker said. “How you know?”

“I know.”

“Who said so?” Fred Baker said sardonically. “That Miccosukee you run with—Roebuck?” Roebuck was a ropy renegade Indian, a known thief and reputed murdered who’d all his life moved like a shadow through the breadth and reach of the Devil’s Garden. He’d been said to hijack the loads of plume hunters along the Shark River Slough and as far south as the Ten Thousand Islands, to have robbed gator skinners playing their trade on Lake Okeechobee’s most desolate shores. He’d never been known to keep company with another human being until Heck Runyon took him as partner in manhunting for Bob Baker.

“Would Roebuck know?” Bob Baker said.

Heck Runyon turned his half-closed eyes on him and gave a slow nod and Bob Baker thumped his fist on the table. “That’s where they’re hidin—got to be. The men watchin the house aint seen a hair of any the men but Bill. The gang’s off hid someplace and like as not it’s that damn camp!”

He put his hand under the table and felt of the rifle cartridge in his pocket. “The National Guard outfit in West Palm’s promised to lend us a couple of automatic rifles and all the ammunition we want. We got the men and the firepower. All we have to do is find that camp and we
got
their ass!”

Heck Runyon showed his teeth. “Done been found,” he said.

John Ashley had been for killing him right after the Pompano job but Old Joe had argued against such haste. It was too risky yet, Joe Ashley said. Every cop in the county had an eye out for the Ashley Gang. Besides, Bob Baker wasnt showing his face in public without a half dozen of his best cops around him.

“You
might
can get up close and put him down,” Old Joe said, “but you’ll play hell getting away with it. And even if you somehow
was
able to get away, everybody’ll know it was you and the cops wont never rest till they run you down. They dont hunt nobody like they hunt somebody who kills one their own. Course now, you could do for him at a distance with a rifle—but then he’d never know it was
you done it and where’s the pleasure in that? Best to let it lay awhile. He’ll get tired of huntin somebody he cant find and then he’ll let his guard down. You’ll see. He’ll get shut of them bodyguards after a time.
Then
you slip up on him. When he’s alone. You want
him
to know it’s you but nobody else to know. Now witness, no murder warrant.”

“Listen to him, Johnny,” Laura said.

He looked from one to the other of them and spat to the said and flung up his hands in capitulation. “What the hell, I waited
this
long.”

The Crossbone camp was set on a high dry range of ground marked by a heavy stand of live oaks ragged with Spanish moss. Crossbone Creek flowed in from the northwestern savannah and ran behind the oaks and into the heavy brush to the east and then made its secret way to the South Fork of the St. Lucie River a half-mile farther on. Only the Ashleys and their most trusted confederates knew of the boat route from Twin Oaks to Crossbone Creek, a route that followed a network of narrow waterways through a region called the Pits—a portion of swamp marked by cattailed sloughs and ponds, by cutgrass and tupelo and maidencane, a muckland where footing was more hope than substance and a man so luckless as to find himself there without a skiff might suddenly sink in mud to his ass or be swallowed entire by a quicksand bog in less time than it takes to tell and no mortal trace of him left behind. The route took them to the creekhead—where they kept mules and tack and muckshoes and wagons for carrying out cases of moonshine—and from there it was an easy skiff ride down to the camp.

Southeast of the camp lay a wide range of marl prairie too soft to bear the weight of a motor vehicle and marked by scatterings of saw palmetto and clusters of cabbage palms and myrtlebrush. The camp’s high ground afforded a clear view across this prairie to the pinewoods a half-mile away. In those woods were a scattering of rugged trails on which motorcars might drive from the highway far to the east if they came slowly and carefully. Eastward to the South fork lay impenetrable thickets of peppertree and buttonbush and black willows. To the west and southwest the grassy savannah ran flat and swift to the immensity of the sawgrass country.

Two of Old Joe’s best Indian lookouts, Shirttail Charlie and Thomas High Hawk, alternated eight-hour watch shifts on a perch twenty-five feet aboveground in a pine strand a hundred yards south of the camp. While one kept watch the other took a meal in the camp
and slept. A grayhaired Negro named Uncle Arthur James and his grown son Jefferson had operated this camp for Joe Ashley for years, maintaining the fire under the great copper kettle at just the right intensity and keeping the distillation box full of water, replacing the buckets under the tap as they filled, jugging the shine and packing the jugs into cases. Now and then father or son would pole a dugout to Salerno for supplier. On the gang’s arrival at the camp the month before, Old Joe had dispatched Uncle Arthur to Twin Oaks to tend the property in his absence and make sure the Ashley women had whatever they needed by way of supplies for other necessities. Jefferson remained at the camp—and his dog, Paint, a one-eared mongrel raised from pup-hood in the swamp and considered magically charmed to have lived so long without falling prey to gator or snake or hunting cat.