Red Grass River (4 page)

The deputies heard them too late. They turned and saw the brothers emerging from the brush not fifteen feet behind them, saw Bob Ashley holding the carbine at his hip like a long-barreled pistol and John Ashley pointing the .44 Colt as he came.

“Oh shit,” the one called Sammy Barfield said, and he quick put up his hands.

The other kept his hands at his sides as Bob Ashley hastened to
Sammy and snatched his service revolver from its holster and lowered the carbine and pointed the pistol squarely at Sammy’s chest. Sammy’s arms were up as high as they could go and he said, “Oh shit, Bob, dont shoot me.”

“You’re under arrest, Johnny,” the other deputy said.

John Ashley was smiling widely as he came up to this deputy and said “Hello to you too, Bobby. How’s daddy’s little deputy?” Bob Baker’s father George was the high sheriff of Palm Beach County and had been since the county’s inception three years earlier.

John Ashley relieved him of his revolver and gave the piece cursory examination and stuck it in his waistband. Then said: “Under arrest, you say?” He laughed. “Hell, Bobby, do I
look
under arrest?”

“For murder, John.”

“That right? Who’m I sposed to killed?”

“DeSoto Tiger.”

“
Who?
”

“Quit the bullshit. We know you shot that Indian. We got a witness.’

John Ashley grinned hugely. “Well if I did, I guess it wouldn’t mean nothin to shoot the both you too. I mean, they can only hang me once, aint that right?”

“Even you aint that damn dumb,” Bobby Baker said.

John Ashley laughed. He spun the .44 on his finger like a storybook cowboy and then affected to aim very carefully between the deputy’s eyes from a distance of four feet.

“You dont scare me a goddamn bit and you never have. You shoot me, every police officer for three counties around will come huntin you.”

John Ashley moved the gunsights down to Bobby Baker’s heart and stroked his chin in affected contemplation for a moment, then shook his head and raised the sights to Bobby’s forehead once again. “Bang!” he said and lowered the pistol and grinned. “You that important now, hey Bobby? All them police would be lookin to even the score for you?”

“I aint no Indian, Johnny?”

Bob Ashley said “You sure aint, bubba. You got to be near deaf not to heard us comin up behind you.”

“You’re under arrest too,” Bobby Baker said to him. “As an accomplice.”

Bob Ashley hooted and shook his head. “I guess we
best
shoot
these boys, Johnny, before this hardcase decides to tote the whole damn family off to jail.”

“Oh lord, boys,” the deputy called Sammy said, “dont shoot us, boys.”

“Shut up, Sammy,” Bobby Baker said. “They aint about to shoot anybody.”

“Maybe yes and maybe no,” John Ashley said. He gestured at Bob Baker’s leg and said, “Take that thing off and hand it here.”

Two years earlier Bob Baker had tracked down a Negro fugitive wanted for the murder of his wife and brother and in the ensuing confrontation he had shot the Negro dead at the same moment that the man blew off most of his lower leg with a twelve-gauge buckshot load. The doctors amputated just below the knee and he had since worn a wooden prosthetic. He had become so proficient with it that his walk showed only a hint of awkwardness. None who knew him considered him handicapped. It was a point of pride with him never to mention the leg and his friends knew better than to refer to it in his presence.

“Well dont just stand there gawkin,” John Ashley said. “Take it off and hand it over.” Bob Ashley guffawed.

Bob Baker stood fast and glared at him. John Ashley cocked the .44 and aimed it at Bob Baker’s good foot. “You tirin my patience, peckerwood,” he said. “You dont take that thing off right now, I’m gonna shoot you in the other foot is what I’m gonna do.” The early dawnlight had not yet dispersed the ground darkness and everyone’s feet were but vague entities.

“You aint gonna shoot any part of me, John, and you damn well know it.”

John Ashley fired. The round tore a chunk off the heel of Bob Baker’s boot and the deputy yipped and flinched sidewise and the loud crack of the gunshot was swallowed almost instantly by the breadth of the surrounding country.

“Goddamn me if I aint a piss-poor shot,” John Ashley said. Bob Ashley laughed so hard he had a coughing fit.

John Ashley cocked the piece and this time held it with both hands and aimed at Bob Baker’s foot again and the deputy said, “
Hold
it!
Hold
it, you crazy son of a bitch!” He sat on the ground and tugged up his pants leg and unbuckled the straps holding the prosthetic in place. He handed it up to John Ashley. “You aint right in the head, you know that? You never been.”

John Ashley was enjoying himself immensely. He hefted the pros
thetic leg with its boot still attached and said, “Do much dancin with this thing, Bobby? I guess you lost your taste for dancin since before you got crippled, huh? You know, I dont recall seein you at one single dance after that one you took what’s-her-name to. Judy? Junie?
Julie
—thats it. Say, whatever become of her, anyhow?”

Bob Ashley whooped and had another spasm of coughing laughter. Bob Baker sat in place and said nothing but glared at John Ashley who could almost smell the anger rising off him like a malefic vapor. He smiled at how easy it was to rile him with just mention of a girl from their past. “Ah well, enough of relivin the good old days, eh Bobby? You, Sammy, help this poor crippled man to his feet—his foot, I mean.”

Deputy Barfield pulled Bob Baker up onto his good leg and Bobby braced himself on Sammy’s shoulder. Still chuckling, Bob Ashley went to the deputies’ car and punctured all four tires with his buck knife, then opened one of the hood panels and reached in and yanked several wires off the engine and flung them far into the brush.

“Now you boys get goin,” John Ashley ordered. “And tell your daddy, Bobby, the next time he sends someone after me he best send a whole man.”

The two lawmen started off for the highway with their arms around each other’s shoulders, their three-legged gait awkward and shambling and the Ashley brothers’ laughter in their ears. The brothers watched them at their slow progress until they were distant figures nearly a half-mile away against the redly rising sun. Then John Ashley went to the disabled Model T and tossed the wooden leg onto the backseat and he and Bob went on to their camp.

An hour later the brothers had the hides on the wagon and had retrieved and hitched the mule and were on the corduroy track for home.

March 1912

F
OLLOWING HIS RELEASE FROM THE
P
ALM
B
EACH
C
OUNTY
J
AIL
he’d made directly for the deeper reaches of the Everglades, avoiding all the various waycamps he and DeSoto Tiger had ever used, bypassing widely all Indian villages and the possibility of informers who would point out his direction to some who might come inquiring. For five days he poled his dugout through the maze of waterways winding through sawgrass and around hardwood hammocks and palm islands and pine stands and along sloughs wide and narrow until he arrived in a region unfamiliar even to him, who had lived in the Everglades all his life and hunted and trapped and ranged over a considerable portion of it. For five nights he slept in the dugout or on the raised ground of hammocks, face and hands coated heavy with muck against the mosquitoes. Quick rain showers came and went, drumming on the hard crown of his bowler. And when he was at last so deep in the wilderness he could not except in the vaguest sense have said where he was, he beached the dugout in the high dark shade of a cypress-and-palm hammock and there made a camp of sorts and settled in to let time pass and to ponder the possibilities of his future.

He’d heard that John Ashley had been warned about the murder warrant and had left the state to avoid prosecution, but the put little stock in the rumor. No telling where the man might be. He could be hid out somewhere in the Glades just as he himself was and who’d know it but them who’d never tell. Besides, there were other Ashleys
who might come looking for him and any of them capable of settling accounts for brother John. Lay low was the thing to do. Way out here where none but the wildest ever ventured.

He subsisted on fish and turtles, on eggs pilfered from bird nests. He built small cookfires of lighterwood only in the brightest hours of the day the better to hide against the sunlight and clouds whatever smoke might ascend through the thick cover of the cypress branches. He napped often but never deeply and always with an ear cocked for anomalous sound. At various times every day he climbed high in a tree and scanned the horizon for signs of encroaching others but saw none.

A week went by and then another and with the passing of each day he grew more confident that his hideout was a good one. He constructed a solid lean-to of saplings and palm fans against the occasional rain shower and the nightly dew. He built a bed of palm fronds. On the far side of the hammock he discovered a wide shallow creek just beyond the reach of the tree overhang, its current clear and smooth and thronged with turtles and bream and bass as long as his forearm. His immediate thought was of a trotline, a line with baited hooks affixed to it at intervals and let to hang into the water from one bank to the other overnight and retrieved the next day with its catches. In the dugout he had a sufficient length of line and plenty of hooks, and about ten yards onto the grassy bank on the other side of the creek stood a small cypress to which he could attach the other end of the line. But the range from the edge of the hammock and across the creek to the dwarf cypress was perhaps forty feet and all of it out in the open and his wariness would not easily abate. He was loathe to expose himself for even so short a distance and for as brief a time as it would take to tie the line.

Another week passed and each day found him squatting in the shadows of the hammock bank and considering the creek. The trotline he’d fashioned days before and then lain aside was unnecessary to feed himself—he every day on his handline caught more fish than he could eat. But he was angry at himself for being too fearful to string the trotline. He had been fearful his entire life and knew it. And knew too that others knew it. Neither white man nor Indian had ever shown him a measure of respect and he could not fault them for that. Why should anyone respect him, who could not respect himself for his cowardice?

He determined to do it. He would wait for dark and then cross the creek and attach the line. The resolution was heady. Yes, he would do it and be done with being afraid. And now asked himself why he
should wait until dark. Who but he and the beasts inhabited this portion of wildland for miles around? Now—now in the clarity of full daylight—was the time to prove to himself he could do it. He retrieved the ready trotline and baited the hooks with chunks off the several largemouth he’d caught earlier that morning and he fastened one end of the line to a ground root and fed out the line behind him as he walked backward out of the cover of the trees. He eased into the creekwater and it rose to his chest as he sidestepped his way across, playing out the trotline as he went. As he clambered up the other bank he almost laughed out loud in his exultation at being unafraid. And now he reached the little cypress and checked the lay of the line behind him and then tied this end to the cypress and the job was complete.

He went to the creek bank and admired the hang of the line in the water and already a fat turtle took the bait on one of the hooks and was caught. He looked all around and smiled at the infinite depth of dizzying blue sky carrying a few thin clouds above a scattering of hammocks in a vista of sawgrass to the horizons. And never heard the carbine crack from the cluster of cabbage palms some one hundred and fifty yards distant that sent up a fluttering flock of roseate spoonbills from its feed in the grass shallows and sped before it a .30 caliber bullet to enter his skull in front of his right ear and spin him about completely before he pitched into the creek with a huge splash. He bobbed to the surface facedown and floated there as the water again stilled and the blood issuing from his head drifted away on the slow current in wispy red rivulets as vague and elusive as dreams of courage.

The Liars Club

O
LD
J
OE
A
SHLEY’S DADDY COME TO
F
LORIDA AS A YOUNG MAN
after the War Between the States. Him and his wife. They come from Tennessee by way of more than a dozen years in Georgia and then settled in Lee County, on the Gulf side nearabouts Fort Myers. The story has it he was killed in a timber camp one winter by a rattlesnake bit him in the chin when he woke up from a dinnertime nap under a tree. They say he died with his face all swole up just ugly as sin. Old Joe used to tell folk the only three things his daddy left to him was a scarred-up fiddle, the know-how for making good moonshine, and a damn good reason never to sleep on the ground unless he absolutely had to.

Old Joe moved his family to this side of the state in ought-four, some seven years before John killed that Indian and all his bad troubles began. Besides Joe and Ma Ashley, there were five boys and two girls—and two more daughters would be born some years later. It was no more than a fair-sized family, as cracker families go. They come across in a pair of wagons pulled by mules wearing muck shoes, come all the way through what was still awful wild country along the Caloosahatchee River and over to Lake Okeechobee and on down through the sawgrass glades to Pompano on the coast. In them days only a Indian or a hardshell cracker could make a trip like that across the Devil’s Garden.

Those who first saw them come out on this side of the glades with
Old Joe driving the mules along with his whip popping like gunshots said both the family’s wagons was near covered with the hides of all the diamondbacks they’d killed along the way and not a hide under six feet. Old Joe always wore a rattlesnake hatband and a rattlesnake belt. Carried a rattle in his pocket about the size of a kazoo and liked to come up quiet behind an ole boy and shake it hard and laugh like hell to see the fella jump five feet in the air and whirl around all bigeyed. Some called him Rattler Joe and said he never did seem to mind the name a bit.

He told folks he’d made the move because he was tired of trading in hides and furs for a living and wanted some of the steady wages Henry Flagler was paying his railroad workers. Maybe so. But there was a bunch of stories that followed right behind him when he come over from the west side and one of them was that he’d started cutting in on the wrong people’s whiskey business in Lee County. When he didnt take their warnings to quit they busted up his operation and whipped his nigger helper near to death and threatened to burn down his house with everybody in it if he didnt clear out. According to this story Joe and the family was in the wagons and on their way east by the next sunup. That story’d been whispered around for a couple of years when some fella named Witliff in Pompano made the mistake of telling it out loud to a bunch of old boys that included a friend of Joe’s who took it back to him. Joe went to Witliff’s house and called him out and beat him senseless right there in his yard and in front of his family. Told him if he ever told tales about him again he’d cut out his tongue.

Another story said he’d left Lee County after clubbing a young fella near to death with a grub hoe handle for getting improper with one of his daughters. They say he gave that boy a stutter and a useless left arm and a droop-eye the rest of his life. Trouble was, one of the boy’s best uncles was a rich Fort Myers cattleman who was related by marriage to the high sheriff and was friends with all the local judges. Joe didnt much care for the odds, so he packed up the family and headed out on the Caloosahatchee trace. Story has it that the cattleman sent a couple of roughs after him but they never come back. Could be they simply made off with the money they was paid to deal with Joe. Or could be they had the bad luck to catch up to him.

Joe Ashley paid bottom dollar for an abandoned half-burned-down house in the deep pineywoods just west of Pompano and pretty soon him and his boys fixed it up good. They were a tight family that mostly kept to itself but they were friendly enough whenever they came into
town or met with a neighbor out on the Old Dixie Highway, which at that time wasnt much more than a bunch of ruts packed with rock in some stretches and with shell in others and hardly wide enough for a pair of wagons to pass each other by. Most who got to know the Ashleys liked them fairly well. But there were some who were quick to believe every mean story ever told about them and thought the whole family was a bunch of naturalborn outlaws. Such folk were just too flat afraid of them not to hate them. The Ashleys always would have admirers, bunches of them, but they’d always have bad enemies too. Everybody who knew them was pretty much one or the other.

For a time after they first got to Pompano, Joe and two of his boys—Frank and Ed—worked as woodchoppers for Flager’s railroad. The eldest boy Bill worked as a chopper a few months too but pretty soon gave up axing to go work in a general store. Not long after the Ashleys moved to Pompano he took Bertha Rodgers to wife. He was the brainy one, Bill, the most serious, though they say he could play the banjo like he’d been born to it and he’d sometimes take a turn with a string band at a local dance. You’d see him around town more often than his brothers, reading magazines or the newspaper in the cafes, coming and going from banks and lawyer offices, taking care of Old Joe’s business matters. He never did get in such bad trouble as his daddy and his little brothers did, but some say it’s only because he did all his crimes with a pen instead of a gun.

All five of the Ashley brothers were close, but Frank and Ed were said to be fraternal twins and so naturally they was extra tight. And John and Bob were special-close because they were the youngest and grew up together hunting and trapping in the Everglades from the time they were big enough to shoot a rifle. John wasnt but eleven at the time the family moved to Pompano and Bob about a year older, and while Frank and Ed were cutting railroad ties with their daddy the two pups were bringing home meat for the table and gator and rattler hides to sell at the trading posts. Trapping and hunting was what they liked best but they could do lots of other things real well. Old Joe always could do damn near anything with his hands and he taught his boys the same. John was fourteen when a doctor down in Miami hired him and Bob to roof his house and over the next thirty years that roof never lost a shingle, not even in a hurricane. They worked in a Pompano packinghouse for a time and were said to handle a butchering knife as good as anybody in the place. But they didnt much like working for wages and went back to trapping for their daily bread. They got to know their way all over the Glades even better than their
daddy—and Old Joe was as much at home in the Devil’s Garden as a cottonmouth. John and Bob were the wildest of the Ashleys, everbody pretty much agreed on that, though John wasnt nearly the hot-head Bob was. They say John was generally one to think a thing through before acting on it, leastways if he had the chance. Bob, he was always quick as a struck match to flare and burn. Which is exactly why he died the way he did.

They were the best shooters in the family too, John and Bob—not counting their daddy. They said Bob could shoot the whiskers off a rabbit at over a hundred yards with his old lever-action Winchester, but John was even more of a deadeye. At a traveling show in West Palm one time there was a .22 rifle shooting gallery with a line of little tin ducks steady moving across the far end of the tent on a conveyor belt in front of a backboard. The five brothers had a contest and by the time John and Bob were the last two left they were shooting at the ducks from forty feet outside the tent. They’d drawn a crowd by then and Old Joe was looking on too. When John finally won from some fifty feet out, the onlookers gave him a big hand and he bowed like an actor on a stage. He wasnt but fifteen at the time and loved to show off. Then Old Joe took the little .22 from him and backed up another ten feet and bang-bang-bang he knocked down a line of twelve ducks without a miss. Then he gives the rifle back to John and the boy didnt hit but nine of his twelve. The crowd gave Joe a bigger hand than they had John. When it came to showing off, Old Joe never was one to be outdone by his boys.

They’d been in Pompano about six years when word got around that Joe had set up a still somewhere in the pines and gone in the whiskey business. Gone
back
in the whiskey business is what most said. And because Bill had such a good head for account books and such, Ole Joe made him his business manager. The Ashleys didnt have any local rivals in the trade except for a couple of swamp-rat shiners named Runyon and Aho who’d been around for years and years although hardly anybody ever saw them because they never come into town but once in a blue moon. They had a cabin somewhere in the Devil’s Garden and shared an Indian woman who lived with them. She never come to town. After Joe started making and selling whiskey on this side of the state neither Runyon nor Aho ever come to town again and nobody ever saw them anywhere else either. And somewhere along the way Joe took over their stills as abandoned property. There were some mean stories told about what might of happened to the swamp rats, but the plain and simple of it was that nobody knew if
the Ashleys had anything to do with their disappearances and nobody cared a thinker’s damn anyhow. The only thing for sure was that Old Joe’s product was way better than what the swamp rats had been peddling. Everybody who ever tasted the stuff will tell you that Joe Ashley’s shine was the finest ever made in the south of Florida. He soon had a steady line of customers from Stuart to Lauderdale and was using his boys to deliver the loads. And it wasnt much of a secret that he was selling to the Indians.

There’s something more to tell about Runyon and Aho. It was a common story that one or the other of them sired a child by the Indian woman who lived with them, a boy they named Hector. When the kid grew up he used the name Runyon but that dont mean Runyon was his daddy. Some say he just ruther have that name than Aho, and who could blame him. You’d see him roundabout the Indian River towns a lot more than either of the two men because he was the one they sent in to get whatever supplies they needed. Like most breeds he looked more Indian than white. He was brownskinned and his hair was as black as ink and he wore it long from the time he was a child. But he had blue eyes and the inside of his forearms was pale as any white man’s.

He was bad-dog mean, that boy, everybody said so. Sometimes he’d come into a town for no reason but to pick a fight with another boy and then just tear him up. He’d as soon gouge out your eye in a fight as not, as soon bite off your ear, your damn nose. The only boy who wasnt afraid of him was Bobby Baker, who was a few years older and some bigger, and for some reason they got along. Far as anybody knows, Bobby was the closest thing to a friend Heck Runyon ever had.

When he was about fourteen he was accused of stealing a farmer’s horse off a farm and the man wanted him throwed in jail. Sheriff George went out in the Glades to look for him and came back saying he couldnt find hide nor hair of him anywhere. But there was some who said he’d found him all right—and then helped him to get away to DeSoto County where he got work as a cowhunter, which is what they called a cowboy in Florida in them days. That all happened around ought-eight, a couple of years before Joe Ashley started up his whiskey business and Runyon and Aho vanished.

It wasnt till seven years later that Heck Runyon showed up again on this side of the state. At the time he come back he was still wanted for stealing the horse but the farmer dropped the charge a few days after Heck went to live in a hut out behind the Baker place. Some said
Sheriff George made a deal with the farmer. A story went around that Heck had been working the last couple of years as a regulator for a rich DeSoto County rancher. A regulator was somebody paid to stop rustlers, and they say Heck Runyon stopped a bunch of them as stopped as they could get by shooting them graveyard dead. Then he got in a saloon fight with a cowhunter and cut the fella up pretty bad. Ruther than stick around and see what the law might say about it, he’d come back to his old stomping grounds. He’d been back about six months when Sheriff George made him a Palm Beach County deputy.

Not too long later he killed a prisoner. He was bringing the man back to the county jail in West Palm Beach after the fella was convicted in a trial in Stuart and they were sitting in the coach while the train made a whistle stop in Jupiter. Witnesses said the prisoner called him a mongrel dog and spit in his face and Heck Runyon clubbed him to death with his revolver right then and there. Women and children saw it and was screaming and running off the train. They say it was a bloody mess. There was talk that Heck Runyon ought be charged with murder since the prisoner had his hands cuffed at the time. The newspaper said he ought for sure at least be fired, that the county didnt need any deputies who thought they were judge, jury and executioner. Sheriff George argued that Deputy Runyon had been strongly provoked and had just cause, but he was enough of a politician to know when to give in to popular opinion and so he fired him.

Heck Runyon hardly ever showed himself in town after that but it was said he was still living out on the Baker property and that Sheriff George was still using him to track down fugitives who made off into the Devil’s Garden.

The bad blood between John Ashley and Bobby Baker started over a girl, which aint such an uncommon story. Leastways thats how most tell it. John Ashley was fifteen at the time and Bobby about nineteen. They’d knowed each other since the Ashleys moved to Pompano. They werent never exactly friends, but during those first few years they’d been friendly enough. They say Bobby Baker was the one showed John Ashley all the best fishing spots in the Indian River and John taught Bobby plenty about tracking game in the Glades. Their daddies got along all right too—at least in the years before John’s trouble over the Indian. Old Joe and Sheriff George would take a cup of coffee together in Lucy’s Cafe in West Palm sometimes or buy each other a drink at Blue’s store at Lake Towhee and talk about mules and dogs and fishing. Like with their boys, nobody’d go so far as to say they were
friends, but Old Joe made it plain he appreciated that the high sheriff was one to live and let live when it came to whiskeymaking. The way. Sheriff George saw it, if the federal government wanted to tax the whiskey a man made, it could damn well send its own men to collect it. Sheriff George was anyway known to take a drink ever now and then and was said to be pretty fond of Joe Ashley’s product his ownself.