Red Grass River (41 page)

Then came another report—a Winchester. And then nothing more.

Bob Baker looked at Henry Stubbs who shrugged and spat.

Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey were poling along the sawgrass channel back to the Crossbone camp that early morning when they heard the sudden distant sounds of the gun battle. They sat in the dugouts and listened for a time and agreed that nothing good could be going on where so many guns were shooting. They turned around and headed back for Lake Okeechobee. The next day they hove up at an inlet of Pelican Bay, about four miles south of Pahokee. The bank was high and dry under tall willows and there they set up camp and stayed put for two days to let things settle. Then they cached their dugouts and rifles in the brush and pulled their shirts out of their pants to hide their pistols and walked up to Pahokee. They had a couple of beers at a fishcamp and two hours later cadged a ride on a catfisherman’s truck bound for West Palm Beach.

In West Palm they heard all about the raid on the Ashley whiskey camp—and learned that Joe Ashley was dead. And that Albert Miller and Laura Upthegrove were under arrest and heavily guarded. And that Bill Ashley had driven down from Salerno and surrendered himself in exchange for the sheriff posting of men at his house. Bill didnt want vigilantes showing up and terrifying his family and maybe torching his house too.

They learned that the Ashley home had been burned to the ground, and the Mobley house as well. That even Ma Ashley and her daughters and Hanford Mobley’s parents had been jailed for a couple of days before being released to tend to Old Joe’s funeral. Bill had been allowed to go with them. They’d buried Joe Ashley in the family graveyard next to the charred ruins of Twin Oaks. The only one present who wasnt a member of the family was the preacher, who later said everything about the Ashley place smelled of charcoal, Joe’s grave most of all. He said Ma Ashley and her daughters keened like Indian women. After the funeral Sheriff Baker dropped all charges against Bill Ashley, his mother and sister and the parents of Hanford Mobley. Bill had gone home to his wife. Ma Ashley and the girls were staying at the West Palm home of family friends with a larger house than Bill’s.

They heard that Bob Baker was charging Laura Upthegrove with murder for helping John Ashley kill Deputy Fred Baker. John Ashley
was still at large in the Everglades but Sheriff Bob told the newspapers he was confident the outlaw would be captured or killed any day now.

The bad tidings weighed hard on Tracey and Lynn. They repaired to a cafe and sat in a dim booth and toyed with the Blue Plate Special of pork chops and sweet potatoes. They drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. They told each other there wasnt a damn thing they could do now except watch out for their own asses. They still had the money from the hooch sale to the Indians—and with Joe Ashley dead and John Ashley likely to join him real soon, the money belonged to whoever had it in hand. They agreed the smart thing to do was lay low. An hour later they were on the bus to Miami.

Over the next two days he rested during daylight hours and listened to the possemen hunting for him in the swamp but they had no dogs with them and they sounded scattered and lost more than like hunters on a hot trail. He’d tended well to his wounds. A think muckpack on his crown had finally stopped the bleeding and he’d bound his lacerated forearm with a sleeve ripped from his shirt. At night he moved fast and sure through the pineywoods and on the second night came at last to the highway and saw no traffic and he crossed and stayed to the deeper trees as he made his way to the Salerno town limits. The hour was late and the moon high and there was no one about the central streets but a stray drunk. Now came a lone police car moving without haste. John Ashley kept to the shadows of the eaves with his rifle cocked and watched the car pass and waited till it was gone from sight before he moved on. In the moonlit road his shadow stood so short under him it seemed itself to be trying to hide. Now he was on the dirt road east of town. As he went by a dark house set well back from the road a dog started barking at his passing and other dogs on the road ahead began to take up the alert. He stopped and faced the dark house and whistled as his daddy had long ago taught him and no human ear could hear the sound he made but the dog abruptly fell silent and then the other ahead did too.

A quarter-mile farther along he came to a side road and turned onto it and felt better for being now in the deep shadows of an oak hollow. Another two hundreds yards brought him to the narrow turn-in to his brother’s house. He’d been on the alert for police all the while and now advanced slowly and looked and listened more keenly yet. The trail to his brother’s house went through a dense wood of oak and pine and he could see the house just ahead and no cars in sight but Bill’s Oldsmobile tourer in the dappled light of the moon. He
stopped in the darkest shadows of the trees and listened hard and heard nothing but the sudden rush of an owl leaving its perch somewhere overhead and the splatter of a school of mullet jumping in the canal behind the house. No sounds other.

He went around to the back of the house and to the bedroom window and saw that it was open. He stood there and listened hard and after a time could make out Bill’s steady heavy breathing and Bertha’s light sporadic snores. He tapped lightly on the open shutter and Bill’s breath already and then held bated. Bertha snored once more and then she too fell silent. And then Bill said, evenly and very clearly: “I got a gun here. I’ll blow your damn brains out without even thinking about it.”

“Easy now, big brother,” John Ashley whispered. “It aint but a wanderer lookin for shelter.”

They raised no lights until they’d let him into the indoor kitchen and closed all the shutters. Then Bertha fired a lamp and at the sight of him she gasped.

“Sweet Jesus!” Bill said.

John Ashley tried to grin. “Probably dont smell a whole lot bettern I look neither, huh?”

They made him strip naked and Bill gave him a towel to wrap around his waist and Bertha stuffed his foul ragged clothes in an old croker sack and went out and disposed of them. When she came back she was lugging two full pails of water. She made John Ashley hold his head over the tin sink and she poured a bucket on his hair to wash out the dried muck. As the muck softened and fell away his scalp began to bleed again. While Bill set up a tin washtub in the middle of the kitchen floor and put in handfuls of soap shavings and then went out several times more for water, Bertha got a needle and thread and made John Ashley sit at the table and she stitched his scalp closed and then washed and sewed his forearm as well and applied a clean bandage to it. As he submitted to being tended to, John Ashley felt a tiredness greater than any he’d known before. He barely felt Bertha’s needle. There was little talk among them until the tub was full of foamy water and Bill told him to get in it. Bertha excused herself to give John privacy while he bathed. Bill had brought in a quart bottle of beer he’d pulled up from the well and now poured two glasses and handed one to his brother, then lit two cigarettes and passed one of these to him also. They looked at each other a long moment. In a tight voice Bill Ashley said: “I thought they’d killed you too for sure.”

He told John that Ma and their sisters were living with the Pat
tersons in West Palm Beach for now but it would be too risky for him to try to sneak over there to see them. Their mother had cursed Bob Baker publicly as the murderer of her husband and destroyer of her home and told the newspapers she hoped Bob Baker got paralyzed and had to be fed from a spoon for the rest of his life. She had sworn to build a new house on the ashes of Twin Oaks. “She can afford to do it, too,” Bill said. “Daddy buried money all over the place and she knows where a good bit of it is.”

What about their daddy’s grave, John Ashley wanted to know. Could he go to it? He wanted to say goodbye to him.

Bill told him to forget it. Bob Baker still had the posse on duty and had deputized what seemed like half the men in the county. Cops were everywhere. Thinking John might try to visit his daddy’s grave, Bobby was keeping it under close watch by deputies armed to the teeth.

He told John of the rumor that Ray Lynn and Ben Tracy were in Miami, but nobody knew it to be true for sure. Clarence Middleton hadnt shown a hair of himself since the news of the raid and was likely still in St. Lucie. Bertha had written a note to Hanford Mobley telling him what happened and to stay put right where he was. She’d mailed it by way of a friend in Pensacola who relayed the letter to Galveston—just in case the cops were checking the mail going out through the local post offices. As for Laura, Bill said, Bobby’d given up trying to stick even an attempted murder charge on her and wouldnt be able to convict her for anything more than a misdemeanor or two and she wasnt likely to serve more than a few months at the most.

John Ashley stared at him and the stub of his cigarette fell from his mouth into the tub water now thickly purpled with dirt and old blood. He put his head in his hands and sobbed so loudly Bertha came running with face afright.

He slept all the next day and despite his exhaustion he came awake on the instant that afternoon when he heard a car pull up in front of the house. He peeked from behind the curtain and saw two cops in the car, the driver talking to Bill Ashley who was wearing a straw hat and had gardening tools in his hand. Bertha knelt at her nearby flower bed and trimmed weeds. Bill was talking amiably and one of the cops smiled and shook a finger at him. Then both cops grinned and waved so long and the car wheeled around and left. John Ashley once more checked the .45 under the pillow to ensure a round in the chamber. He lay back and thought to himself,
She’s alive, oh yes she is
, and smiled so wide it hurt mouth and he happily drifted back to sleep.

That evening Bertha served a supper of fried chicken and cornbread, rice and greens, and John Ashley had second helpings of everything and then two huge wedges of pineapple pie for dessert. Over coffee and cigarettes Bill told him the best thing to do was go away to Texas. He would make all the arrangements for him.

“The law’s on you for killing a policeman now,” he said. “They figured they got a score to settle and they wont never let it lay and you know it. You stay round here and sooner or later they’ll catch up to you and if they dont shoot you dead on the spot they’ll sure’s hell see you hang.”

“Well goddamn, Billy, I figure
we
got a few scores to settle our ownselfs, dont you?” John Ashley said. “What about Daddy? Dont you figure thats a score needs settling? Hell, men, it’s
lots
of damn scores I still got to settle with that fucken Bobby, scores nobody even knows about but me and him. Scuse my language, Berty.”

Bill Ashley heaved an enormous sigh. “All this”—he gestured vaguely—“this
shit
about settlin scores. It’s too damn many people with too damn many scores to settle in this world, Johnny. If we dont start lettin go of some of these damn
scores
, thats all we’ll be doin the rest of our days, tryin to settle em. That aint no goddamn way to live. It’s just a way to not live long.”

John Ashley set down his cut and stared hard at him. “What the hell you talkin about? The son of a bitch killed my daddy.”

“
Our
daddy.”

“Well you damn sure dont act like he’s any daddy of yours. I seen you out there talking to them cops today, jokin with them like they was just a coupla old boys.”

“They
are
a coupla old boys. Christ, Johnny,
they
didnt shoot Daddy. They didnt have a thing in the world to do with it.”

“It was cops killed him and they’re
cops
, aint they? Anybody who can smile at cops thataway aint no son of—”

“Goddammit, dont talk to me like that! He was as much my daddy as—”

“Billy, you stop now!” Bertha said. “The both you—stop!”

Bill Ashley glared at John and looked at Bertha and then made a half-growl in this throat and looked off to the window.

Bertha turned to John Ashley who lit a cigarette and angrily exhaled. She said softly, “Can I say somethin? I promise I’ll only say it once and then I’ll keep my trap shut and go back to mindin my own business.”

He looked at her. “You can always say anything you want, Berty, you know that.”

“Just last night you thought Laura was dead, didnt you? You’d thought it for days. You felt like there wasnt a reason in the world to go on living except to get even with Bobby Baker for her and your daddy. Then you found out she was alive and it made you so happy you cried—yes, you did, John Ashley, I saw it and you know I did, and there’s nothin in the world wrong with that. Knowin she was alive made the world a whole lot better in a hurry, didnt it? But
now
just listen to you. Here you are all over again talkin about gettin even with Bob Baker for your daddy and you know it wasn’t even him that killed him, you said so yourself—no, wait, let me finish…You figure Bobby’s responsible no matter who did the shootin, but what difference does it make anymore, Johnny? I swear, you and that damned Bobby Baker sound exactly the same. He’s sayin in the newspaper he wants to even things with
you
for killing his cousin Freddie. How two men who already suffered and caused as much pain as you two can talk about nothing but causin
more
pain is something I’ll never understand. How I pity that man’s poor wife and children. But
you
! Even if you cant think of yourself or of your own brother here, cant you at least think of what you’d be doin to Laura? That girl loves you
so much
. Why in the world do you want to take a chance on getting killed or goin back to prison and makin the rest of her life so miserable? Why do that when you and her can just go away somewhere and be happy together? Why cant you just
quit
all this awful business? I’m sorry to sound like Little Miss Know-it-all, because I surely aint any such a thing, but if I was you I’d just want to get away from all this meanness and sadness and trouble and so someplace where I could live a peaceable life and wake up happy ever day because I’m with somebody I love and who loves me back and I’d try and remember how damn lucky that makes me.”