Red Grass River (39 page)

Clarence Middleton would not be joining them, they knew that. Old Joe’s lookouts had surely warned him of the police around the house and informed him that the gang had fled to the Crossbone. Clarence would have rightly decided there was no reason to risk capture by trying to slip out to the camp and would have returned to his girlfriend’s place in St. Lucie.

During their first weeks at the Crossbone camp John and Laura taught Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey to navigate the channels of the sawgrass country to the south—and taught them more besides. John Ashley showed them how to cut open a cabbage palm and extras the succulent heart of it, a treat known to the local crackers as swamp cabbage and which could be eaten raw or prepared in a variety of ways. He showed them how to dig a scratch well in the hammock ground with a stick or just their hands. He and Laura smiled at the look on their faces the first time they dug a little well and the water came up sludgy and dark brown and they said they werent about to drink
that
. John Ashley told them to keep scooping and they did and then after a minute more the water began to clarify and then it was coming forth clear as glass and delighted them with its sweet freshness.

Joe Ashley continued to make whiskey and run it to the Indians. Ben Tracey, who’d always wanted to know the moonshine trade, was his eager apprentice. Joe showed him how to make his way to the cypress hammocks a full day’s distance to the southwest where the Indian middlemen awaited the loads. Ray Lynn spent most his time with Albert Miller fishing for bass and bream, gigging frogs, netting turtles, snaring possums for the cookpot. They dared not shoot in case some trapper or posseman be sufficiently keen-eared to accurately fix the bearing of the gunshot even in the acoustical queerness of that vast
and aqueous grssland where a report might carry for miles but seemed to whoever heard it to come from all points of the compass at once.

Laura Upthegrove and John Ashley would vanish for hours at a time. Ray Lynn asked of Albert Miller where they went and Albert smiled and winked. “Johnny and Laura are the king and queen of the Everglades,” he said. “Them two know places in the Devil’s Garden the rest of us aint even guessed is out here.”

Now the dry season was on them and the mosquitoes were scent. The night turned cool and clear and the stars did brighten. The dark sky seemed powdered with stellar swirls pale as talc. The moon in its fullness that month hung like a peeled blood orange. Frogs rang in the creeks and sloughs, owls hooted in the high pine, Sometimes came the deep rumbling growls and guttural barks of gators and now and then the high shriek of a panther near of far. John and Laura shared a tent but used it only to make love in private, after which they would come outside to sleep under the riotous stars on beds fashioned of Spanish moss.

Ray Lynn would like awake in the early nights and listen to the lovers in their passion and remember a time before he’d seen his first jail, a time when he was loved by a honey-haired girl with freckles like brown sugar on her breasts and a small chip in her front tooth. A girl he’d never seen again after going to jail for his first armed robbery and thereafter living the life of the itinerant holdup man from Pensacola to Key West. Thinking of her now he would ache with a loneliness he dared not admit for fear of weeping like a child.

January 1924

C
HILL WINTER DAWN
. T
HE EASTERN SKY SHOWING GRAY AT THE
horizon. Pale mist rising in clouds off the wetland all about and dark trees ghostly in the fog. The air smelling of ripe muck. The world soundless.

Thomas High Hawk eased off his flatboard perch on the pine branch with his rifle slung around his chest and shinned down the trunk and lit softly on a carpet of pine needles. He was tired and his eyes burned. Last night’s fog had cut his vision’s range to a few feet but he had not heard anything unusual and the night had passed without hint of encroaching trouble. Nobody would have been out searching for their camp in such for anyhow.

He yawned and stretched, hoping that either the black man or cousin Charlie had a pot of coffee on the fire. Shirttail Charlie was his elder but he was lazy as a child and he often chose to sleep until Thomas shook him awake for his shift. He tightened his rifle slight and buttoned his jacket to the neck and headed into the fog, keeping his eyes to the ground in watch for mudholes and snakes.

A small stand of cabbage palms loomed darkly out of the mist and he held to the vague trail skirting around the trees. A dark figure emerged behind him and silently closed the short distance between them. An arm clamped around Thomas High Hawk’s mouth and cut off his cry before it began and Thomas felt an instant’s sickening pain
at his backribs and then the blade was in his heart and he was dead even before Roebuck yanked away the knife and let him fall.

The sky showed now a long thin streak of pink at some distant point out over the Atlantic. The fog on the high ground was thinning fast but was yet dense as smoke under the trees and rose like steam clouds from the sloughs and flagponds and all along the length of Crossbone Creek as though the oaks were burning at their roots and all bodies of water in this swampland were on fire under their surface. A crow lit on a high branch of a scorched bony pine and his rasping squall was the day’s first sound. The camp was absent two of its residents this dawn—Ben Tracey and Ray Lynn having departed a week ago, each armed with a Winchester 95 and a .45 automatic, and each trailing a dugout loaded with bush lightning for delivery to Indian buyers at the south end of Lake Okeechobee. They were not due back for a day or so.

The campfire had been revived by Jefferson James who sat beside it and now set a pot of coffee to boil on the firerocks. Rolled in his blanket near the fire Shirttail Charlie still slept. Joe Ashley emerged from his tent, his trousers unbuttoned and held by galluses over his undershirt. He unleashed his stream against an oak trunk and then buttoned up and stalked over to Shirttail Charlie and nudged him with his boot. The Indian grumbled and tried to squirm away and Joe Ashley cursed lowly and kicked him lightly on the leg.

“Aw right,” Shirttail Charlie said, “I’m up, I’m up.” He sat up and peered around at the misty morn. “Where’s Thomas?”

“Aint come in yet,” Old Joe said, squatting to pour a cup of coffee. “If he went to asleep out there I’ll feed his ass to Jefferson’s damn dog.”

The dog was at that moment standing at the perimeter of the camp and peering intently into the thinning fog in the prairie beyond, its ears forward and its nape roaching. And then it bolted with a loud growl and fangs bared and the three men at the campfire all came fast to their feet as the dog sped toward a cluster of palmettos forty yards distant in the gray haze, its snarl rising as it closed on the brush. Then a shotgun blasted with an orange flare and knocked the dog in the air sideways in a burst of hide and blood.

A crackling salvo erupted from the prairie brush and Jefferson James grunted, staggered like a drunk and dropped. Joe Ashley ran at a crouch for his tent and his rifle that lay within as bullets kicked up dirt all around him. The coffeepot jumped away from the fire with a loud whang and round thucked through the sides of the tents. He
lunged into his tent and snatched up his .44-40 and the canvas walls popped and shook with bullets and he was hit hard on the hipbone and dropped to his belly. He looked at his hip and saw blood and cursed. He levered a round and crawled forward to the doorflap. He fired several rounds into the expense of prairie even though he had yet to see any of the attackers. A bullet hummed over his head. From his left came the hollow staccato popping of an automatic rifle and he looked over and saw Laura firing the Browning from behind an oak and giving John Ashley coverfire as John with a pistol in his hand ran out to the fallen Jefferson and knelt beside him and rolled him onto his back. A bullet snatched at John’s sleeve and a chunk of limerock flew up beside him in a ricochet whine. At the forward edge of the camp Albert Miller lay behind a stump and levered and fired his Marlin. Now John Ashley turned and ran back for the trees as Laura stepped out in the open and fired the BAR from the hip as if she’d been born to it. Bullets chunked into the oak trunks around her. Then John was in the trees again and she side-hopped back behind cover. Shirttail Charlie was nowhere in sight.

Joe Ashley thought to follow John to the shelter of the trees but as he rose to one knee he was hit in the shoulder and he sat down hard. For a moment he was stunned and then tired his arm and found he could move it, but only awkwardly, and the pain was intense. He struggled to lever a round and felt bone grinding in his shoulder and even in the surrounding din of gunfire heard himself cry out. He crawled back to the tent flap and saw a man duck down in the myrtlebrush forty yards away. He fired into the brush and the man ran out from it and took cover behind a thick pine stump jutting from a clump of palmetto. Another man came running with a rifle in his hands and threw himself behind a low limestone outcrop not thirty yards away.

Laura was kneeling against a wide oak trunk and shooting now an Enfield rifle—working the bolt smoothly and firing steadily and now stripping a fresh clipload into the magazine and flinging away the empty clip and slapping the bolt home and firing again. One let of her overalls was stained bright red. John Ashley had the Browning braced in the crotch of a large oak and was pouring fire into the open country and yelling, “Come
on
, Daddy! Come on, Al!”

Albert Miller jumped up and ran for the trees and he was almost to them when he was hit and went down. He was hit again as he got to his feet but he gimped ahead and now Laura had him and pulled him behind the cover of the tree. His shirtsleeve and pants leg were
soaked with blood. A round had ripped through his hamstring muscle without hitting bone but his humerus was broken. Laura eased him to the ground and examined the wounds and said neither one would bleed him dead. She found a stick to serve for a splint and then tore the other sleeve off Miller’s shirt and began to bind his arm. Albert bit his lip bloody against crying out.

John Ashley ducked down to replace the emptied magazine in the Browning. He said they were cut off from the west side of the camp where the dugouts were banked at the creek and they couldnt get away by water. The only way out was on foot through the Pits. “Like that goddamn Charlie—you see him? Took off in there like a spooked deer.”

He was talking fast and kept glancing up over the crotch of the tree. He said they could make their way north through the Pits till they hit higher ground and then head east to the pineywoods and on to Twin Oaks where they had their vehicles hidden in the woods. He told Albert to go first. He and Laura would hold off the posse for a time so he could get a good head start and then they would follow after him.

“Watch yourself good when you get near the house,” John Ashley said. “Cops bound to be watchin the place, so lay low. Get close enough to see what’s goin on but stay put till you know for sure how things stand.”

He peered up over the tree crotch and fired a long burst, then dropped down again and said, “All right, boy, go on. We be along directly.” Dazed and bloody Albert Miller staggered away into the Pits.

Now John Ashley stood once more and called out, “Daddy, come on get up here!”

As Old Joe bolted from the tent the BAR quit firing and he knew it had jammed. A fierce clatter of gunfire rolled out from the prairie brush and he could hear that their attackers too had at least one automatic rifle and before he’d taken five strides he was hit in the foot and he fell. He turned and scrabbled back for the tent on all fours, his foot a number ruin but the pain in his shoulder making him yell. And now he was hit in the side and he screamed but kept on crawling and was hit in the ass and as he tumbled into the tent he was hit somewhere under his arm.

He lay facedown and gasped his pain into the dirt. He put a hand to his searing side and felt of a gaping pulsing wound and the hand came away coated bright and hotly red. He heard John yell, “Got one! I got the bastard!” and heard Laura yell something too but did not
make it out. He sat up and looked out and saw a man lying on his side next to a palmetto clump and hugging himself as though he were napping in the cold.

It now occurred to him that if he went out through the back of the tent he would have at least a little cover as he made for the trees. He unsheathed his skinning knife and crawled through his pain and raised up on his knees and the rear canvas wall parted neatly before the slash of his blade. And then a bullet passed through his neck and Joseph Ashley felt nothing as he fell forward through the slashed tent but clearly recalled sitting on the bank of the Caloosahatchee at age seven while his daddy showed him the proper way to rig his line if he wanted to catch fish of a size to impress his mother.

John Ashley had thrown aside the jammed BAR and taken up his Winchester carbine. He saw his father hit several times as he scrabbled back into the tent and then saw a man peek out from behind a palmetto clump not twenty yards from the edge of the camp. He fired twice and the man cried out and fell clear of his cover and drew up on his side in pain, hugging his belly. John Ashley shot him again and saw his hair jump with the impact of the round. He hollered in exultation and Laura yelled, “Good, baby,
good
!” Then a man with a rifle peered over an outcrop and fired once and John Ashley saw his father spill out of the back of the tent with blood jetting from his neck and knew he was killed. The shooter ducked out of sight as John Ashley howled and fired three fast rounds at the outcrop and each glanced off the rock with a high whine.

Now Laura screamed. He whirled and saw her sitting with a hand to her head and blood rolling in thick rivulets from her hair. Her eyes were on him and now fluttered and closed and she fell back. He ran to her and shook her and shouted for her not to die goddammit. Blood ran into her ears and down her neck. Possemen were hollering one to the other and drawing closer and they sounded like a dozen or more. They continued to shoot as they came and bullets cracked through the branches and whacked against the tree boles and cut pale scars in the bark. He thought for a moment to run out to meet them and be done with it. And then heard Bobby Baker curse in a high wail, in a timbre of sorrow he’d never before heard in his voice, and he knew if he charged out there they would kill him before he got Bobby or even saw him. The only way to get Bob Baker was first to get clear of this killing ground. He loaded his pockets with ammunition and picked up his carbine. He put his fingers to his lips and then to Laura’s and then was up and running for the deeper swamp.

Albert Miller slogged through the treacherous muck and struggled through the bracken and thorny brush and several times that long. afternoon fell under the weight of his pain. His right boot was heavy with blood off his leg wound. His arm was a throbbing agony. He took his bearing from the sun, but even though Twin Oaks was a little less than three miles away as the crow flies, there was no route to it that did not cover at least twice that distance and all of it terrain so difficult he would do well to cover a mile in half a day. When he first heard the high excited yelping of the tracking dogs he guessed he’d been on the move about two hours. They were coming his way, but slowly, the swamp much rougher still on them than on a man. As the afternoon passed the hounds seemed to move off on a more easterly track into the deeper heart of the swamp and Albert guessed they were on someone else’s trail, maybe John’s and Laura’s, or one of the other’s if they’d split up. He almost walked into a quicksand bog but he threw himself back from it almost in the same motion of stepping forth and the action sent a streak of white pain through his wounds and he yelped despite himself. Some time later his heart lunged to his throat when a snorting redeyed boar all black and stinking and hung with ticks the size of grapes on his bristly hide crashed out of the button-brush and came for him with its yellow tusks forward and then veered away within a yard of him and vanished into the scrub. Why the brute didnt knock him down and gore out his guts would remain to Albert one of the mysteries of his life. He drank from a slough and was so tired and in such pain that he didn’t care if it poisoned him. By late that afternoon he did not know where he was. He stripped moss from a dwarf cypress that evening well before dark and made a bed beside a small creek under a low overhang of elephant ears. He slept but fitfully for his pain and the onslaught of mosquitoes that throve even in winter in this soggy mire. He could feel small parasitic forms already feeding on his wounds. The next day he staggered through country so mean it reduced his clothes to rags before midmorning and when he came at last to the outskirts of the pinelands and its more solid ground he sat down to rest in the shade. The next thing he knew he was awakened by a kick and opened his eyes to a ring of grinning possemen all aiming cocked firearms at his head and recognized among them the Padgett brothers and Grover Pass. He tried to speak but his mouth was too dry to shape words. He wanted to tell them he surrendered, that he never was cut out for this outlaw life, that prison would by God come a blessed relief.

She regained consciousness to find herself sitting against a tree. Her skull felt cloven. She put her hand to her head and felt a makeshift bandage in place there, felt a shirt sleeve dangling alongside her right ear. Her fingers came away bloody. Her thigh bandaged too if only cursorily. Cops everywhere, probing every part of the camp. And now she saw, not ten feet to her right, the bloody and unmistakably dead forms of Joe Ashley and Fred Baker laid side by side. Their mouths and eyes were closed but ants were already filing into their noses and ears in attendance to timeless instinctual duty. Her breath caught and she looked everywhere but saw no other bodies, no sign of John—then heard the bark and bay of dogs across the open ground and knew he had made away.