Red Grass River (42 page)

She was crying as she rushed from the table into the bedroom and shut the door behind her.

“The brother sat in silence for a moment without meeting each other’s eyes. Then Bill looked at him and showed a small crooked smile and said: “Now look what you done. She’ll be at least a week blamin me for any pain any man’s ever caused a woman.”

John Ashley chuckled softly. “Sometimes just havin a dick means we’re guilty, dont it?”

They fell quiet again. After a time John Ashley said, “You say she’ll do about three months in the lockup?”

“Three, four, wont be much. He aint got much on her.”

“They mistreatin her?”

“Hell no. I know that for a fact. I talked to her before I got let go. She’s lookin fine, I swear. Luckiern hell that bullet only scraped her skull. And the leg would wasnt much. She was already gimpin around in the cell a coupla days after. Bobby told them to treat her right, she heard him say it herself.”

John Ashley looked at him. “Why would he do that? I thought he wanted to hang her?”

Bill Ashley shrugged. “He wanted
somebody
hung for Freddie. Anyway just cause he wanted to hang her dont mean he cant be a gentleman to her. Hell,
I
dont know. I quit tryin to figure why people do any the things they do. It only tired my mind to try.”

He stayed with Bill and Bertha two days more and then was sufficiently rested to slip out in the late darkness of the following night. He made his way through town and into the pineland swamps and on to a creekside waycamp where they’d long before cached a skiff and ammunition and a few supplies. By sunrise the next day he was headed for the Devil’s Garden.

Three days later he was forty miles away at Laura’s house deep in the sawgrass country and the Thousand Hammocks where nothing did abide but the ever untamed.

The Liars Club

B
OBBY
B
AKER’S RAID ON THE
A
SHLEY CAMP MADE HEADLINES THAT
stood higher than a whiskey glass. We couldnt hardly believe Old Joe Ashley’d been shot dead. Lots of people didnt believe it till they went to the funeral parlor and saw the body for themselfs. And young Fred Baker shot dead too. He was chock full of piss and vinegar and damn near everybody liked him. It’s hardly any wonder the Ashley and Mobley places got burnt down and all their cars and trucks set afire. Lord, it was wildness for a time—it was like the Old West. Men with guns were everywhere and just aching to shoot somebody, to burn something. Albert Miller tried to get away in the swamp but was too bad hurt to make it very far and a posse run him down quick. And Laura Upthegrove! The woman got shot in the
head
and lived to tell of it. The “Queen of the Everglades” the newspapers was calling her.

Sheriff Baker told the newspapers he’d by God bring John Ashley in dead or alive and do it any day now. The bullet John Ashley sent him by way of the Nigra had angered Bobby in a way nobody’d seen before. He said he’d be damned if some outlaw could make threat on his life and get away with it. He’d said he’d wear John Ashley’s glass eye for a fob on his pocketwatch and nobody thought he was foolish.

Over the next few months John Ashley was a major topic of conversation in cafes and barbershops and fishcamps and speakeasies from Jacksonville to the Keys. Some believed he’d been shot up so bad in
the whiskey camp fight he’d bled to death out in the Devil’s Garden and his bones never would be found. Others said he was healing up out in the Everglades and just waiting for the chance to get even with Bob Baker for the killing of Old Joe. Other thought he’d left the state and was smart enough to stay gone forever.

Reports of John Ashley sightings started making the rounds. Stories of his fate. He’d been seen in a gambling joint in Jacksonville and he’d been winning big. He’s been spotted in a fancy Atlanta nightclub, dressed to the nines and drinking champagne from the shoe of a beautiful blonde. He’d been arrested for armed robbery in Memphis and was in the Brushy Mountain penitentiary under a false name but nobody was sure what it was. He’d lost both legs trying to board a freight train out of New Orleans and was in a wheelchair and pimping for a nigger whore in the French Quarter. He’d had his other eye cut out in a barfight in Pascagoula and was in a home for the blind under the name Bruno Traven. He’d been stabbed to death by a whore in Birmingham and some said the whore was none other than Julie Morrell who Bobby Baker had wanted to marry till John Ashley had his way with her. There was a story he’d been beat to death by a bootlegger in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was another he’d been shot dead by the Knoxville cops during a robbery and been buried nameless in a pauper’s grave. It was all the usual kinda stories about him that get told about most dangerous men who vanish.

And then Laura Upthegrove got out of jail and she disappeared too. Some said she wanted to get away from a place that had so many bad memories for her. They said she’d gone to live with kin up in Georgia someplace. Some said she’d been too full of grief to live without him and had killed herself with poison. But them who believed John Ashley yet lived were sure she’d gone straight to him, wherever he was. And a lot of folk figured if that was true—if John was really alive—then we hadn’t heard the last of him, not yet. Not with his daddy shot dead and the man responsible for it still walking the earth.

February—October 1924

H
E FISHED AND HUNTED AND HE TOOK HIDES OF ALL SORTS SIMPLY
to keep his hand in. He fashioned a small still to provide himself with sipping whiskey. Laura’s daddy had long ago inserted wooden-peg footholds into a high thick-boled pine for easy climbing, and twice a day John Ashley ascended to the top of the tree and peered with binoculars through its branches out to the vast viridity of the sawgrass country under the endless Everglades sky of everchanging blues. He never saw another soul except for Henry Quickshoes, an Indian devoted to Bill Ashley these last two years. Bill had one day come upon him carrying his eight-year-old son along the shoulder of the highway and he had stopped the car on seeing that the boy’s foot was wrapped in a white shirt sopped with blood. They got in the car and as Bill sped them to the hospital in Stuart he learned that the boy had been setting otter traps along Gomez Creek and somehow one of them snapped shut on his foot. The man came running and pried the trap off the boy’s crushed foot but bones were jutting out top and bottom and the wound was streaming blood. When the clerk at the admissions desk showed reluctance at checking in an Indian who anyway didnt have the money to pay, Bill Ashley leaned across the counter into his face and in a razorous whisper threatened to break his neck in three places if the boy didnt get into surgery immediately. The boy’s foot was saved, though he’d walk with a limp evermore, and Bill Ashley settled the bills with surgeon and hospital. Since then Henry
Quickshoes was ever ready to do for Bill Ashley and service he asked. He was now poling out to John Ashley’s hideaway ever ten days or so, bearing supplies and news from Bill.

In this way was John Ashley informed that their mother had rejoiced on learning he was alive and well. And that Laura had been convicted of illegal production and possession of distilled spirits and sentenced to 120 days in the county lockup. She was serving her time with little discomfort. Bertha visited her several times a week with rations of food, magazines, cigarettes. In a note brought by Henry Quickshoes, Bertha said that when she whispered to Laura that John was all right and would await her at the Everglades house, she had wept and laughed at the same time and given herself such a bad case of hiccups it took her the rest of the day to get rid of them.

Bill reported that Clarence Middleton and Terrianne had abandoned St. Lucie for Vero where a friend of Clarence’s from Miami had started a charter boat business. Clarence had taken the name Calvin Walker and was growing a beard and working as mate on the boat.

Ben Tracy was in the Dade County Jail under the name Harry Brown serving ninety days for battery and indecent commission. “What’s ‘indecent commission’ anyhow?” Henry Quickshoes asked John Ashley. “Bill says he dont know.” John Ashley said he didnt know either but it sounded like something fun. Whatever the specific transgression was, Ben committed it with a woman on the Elser Pier dancefloor after cutting in on her partner. When the woman let a shriek in response to Ben’s indecent commission, the partner came rushing to her defense and thats when Ben committed the battery.

Ray Lynn was said to be crewing on a rum schooner plying the Caribbean out of Key West.

He tried not to think about things. In the first few nights in the Everglades house he had terrible dreams. He’d several times seen his father lying in his own blood and staring up at him with a look of accusation. And he’d several times dreamt of Old Joe wandering pale and ghostly in a distant twilit mist of the Devil’s Garden. His father would turn and look at him as if waiting to hear what he had to say. His neck would ran blood. John Ashley wanted to tell him he would avenge him, that he’d even the score with Bob Baker—but each time he opened his mouth he could make no sound. And then he’d suddenly be seated at Bill’s table and Bertha would be telling him yet again how much he sounded just like Bobby Baker and how she pitied Bobby’s wife and how awful damn lucky John was to have somebody who
loved him as much as Laura, how only a damn fool would risk losing that for some dumb-ass notion of getting even.

Then he got the still set up and working and he found that if he drank enough every night he would dream not at all—or if he did dream, he would not remember it clearly, which was just as good. And so he spent his days trapping and hunting and thinking of nothing but the beauty of the surrounding sawgrass world. At night he gave himself to drinking and dwelling on Laura and sometimes taking himself in hand in his yearning for her and then falling into a fitful sleep. One night he had a vague dream of fire and heard a woman’s single scream that carried in it as much of loneliness as of terror and he started awake half-drunk with his heart lunging hard but he could recall no details of the nightmare. When he went back to sleep he began to dream of his father and so woke again and took several more deep swallows of shine and once more fell asleep and dreamt no more that night.

She was released in the early days of June. Bill and Bertha Ashley met her at the jailyard gate. They drove her to a West Palm Beach restaurant and bought her a huge steak for dinner. During the meal Bill passed her an envelope holding five thousand dollars. Bertha had brought a change of clothes for her and she went into the women’s restroom and put on her overalls and laced on her boots and slipped the money into her bib pocket and buttoned the flap. Then came out and said she was ready to go.

A pair of cops had followed them in a county car and sat waiting outside. Bill wasnt surprised. “Bobby’s bound to figure you’ll head for Johnny if he’s anywhere around,” he said. “He knows damn well he aint gonna be able to follow you once you get in the Devil’s Garden but he’s gotta try, dont he?”

He drove her to a friend’s fishcamp out on the canal road on the rim of the sawgrass country. Waiting there for her was a skiff loaded with supplies. She hugged Bill and Bertha and kissed them goodbye and then got in the skiff and started poling north along a sawgrass channel. Even if Bob Baker had assigned someone to follow here, once she got into the Loxahatchee Slough she’d be able to lose anybody on her trail. Not until two days later when she was absolutely sure she was not being followed did she turn westward, and not until a day after that did she turn again and bear for the south of Lake Okeechobee and home.

Henry Quickshoes had brought to him the news of her release and every day thereafter he spent most of the daylight hours in his high pine lookout. And then one cloudless midmorning of pale sunshine there she was, poling around a distant palm island. His heart jumped at the sight of her. He skimmed down the tree and raced around to the far side of the hammock to the boat landing hidden in the brush and the wide overhang of the oaks. Here in the deep shadows the grass and thorny weeds were shin-high and the air humid and the smells rank and ripe. He paced and twirled and smoked one cigarette after another and finally heard the soft plash of her pole in the water and he hid behind a thick myrtlebush. He soon heard the dugout’s prow slide up onto the sloped bank and heard her feet hit the ground and heard her grunt as she pulled the boat the rest of the way up onto dry ground. The sound of her laboring breath made him hard for her.

He gingerly pushed aside the myrtle branches and saw her sling her rucksack onto her shoulder and start for the path toward the house. Then she stopped and lifted her face to the air and sniffed at it and he knew she’d smelled him or the cigarettes he’d been smoking. She was a wilderness child, no question. She smiled and eased the rucksack to the ground and looked around and then fixed on a wide-trunked oak. She went into a crouch and began to sneak up on it as quiet as a thought. John Ashley slipped out from behind the bush and moved after her in a quick silent scuttle. She darted up to the oak and looked behind it and her face fell to see he was not there—and then she let a shriek as he grabbed her from behind and they tumbled and rolled in the grass and thorny weeds, both of them laughing now and hugging each other tightly and kissing and kissing, faces, necks, eyes mouths. Then their clothes lofted in ever direction and caught on bushes and tree limbs and her shirt sailed beyond the bank and into the water. They coupled as if they would break each other’s bones, bucking and tossing and howling until they came—and then kept right on at it and he lapped at her breasts and she clasped him tight with her legs and they rolled over and now she was on top and gripping his shoulders and they humped hard and fast and cried out and came again and she flexed into a single quivering muscle in her orgasm, her sex locked tight around him, and she stayed that way for a long moment and then let a deep sigh an relaxed and folded down beside him and he rolled with her to keep from slipping out. They lay gasping and looking at each other and he grinned at the small gold quarter-moon in one of her eyes. “Hey, girl,” he said, “how you keepin?” And kissed her golden eye eye and then the other. Then her mouth. Her breasts. Her belly.
And then he was at her vulva and she arched herself against his tongue and made sweet moan.

After a time they gathered up their clothes and her rucksack and they saw and felt now the scratches they’d gotten in the thorny grass and they joked about looking like they’d been in a catfight. Up in the house they applied moonshine to the cuts on their elbows and knees and legs and she giggled when she saw that he had a scratch on his pecked and he made fun of the cuts on her ass and they ministered to them with the moonshine and then kissed each other’s wounds to make them all better.

Some time later they lay in bed and smoked cigarettes under the open window with no night but that of the pale moon upon their nakedness. He’d told her all that he’d been thinking. That there wasnt any need to go after Bobby Baker. That revenge was a silly notion anymore. Maybe if Bobby’s daddy was still alive he could even things up by killing him, but George Baker was long dead. Besides, he’d killed Fred Baker who was Bobby’s best kin, so that made it all even, didnt it? In a way?

He told her what Bertha had said about him and Bobby Baker seeming alike and how much that chafed him. He wasnt
nothing
like that son of a bitch. She’d made sense about some other things, though, Berty had. She could be pretty smart. She was damn sure right about him being awful lucky to be loved like he was.

He asked if he was making any sense. Did she think he was right?

She held his face between her hands and kissed him deeply. Yes, she told him, he was making all the sense in the world.

“Well all right then, it’s all settled,” he said, grinning big and slapping her hip. “Galveston, here we come.”

He sat up and lit another cigarette and cleared his throat and said. “Listen honeybunch, there’s just one thing. I dont know what you’ll think of this, but here me out, okay? I been thinking that, well, Loretta May, you know, she aint got nobody. Now, you know she loves you to death, you know that, and it’s always seemed to me you care a whole lot for her too, and so I was thinking, well, why dont we just take her with—”

Laura howled and buried her face in his lap. He sat stunned, so suddenly had she burst into tears and so wrenching were her sobs.

And then he knew. And said, “Damn.”

She tried to talk but could not, she was crying so hard. He stroked her hair and made soothing sounds and let her cry it out. And he
thought of the bobbed blonde hair and the skin that always smelled of peaches and the sightless eyes that could see so much.

“I thought you know,” she said in choking sobs. “I thought you just…you didnt want to say nothin because…because it’s just so terrible and said.”

She’d been in jail a month when she heard about it. Miss Lillian’s maid Wisteria had come to visit her several times by then to give her messages from Loretta May in a blushing whisper through the bars. “Loretta had her say just the boldest things to me. They’d make me blush too and me and Wisteria would both of us bust out laughin and the matron would look over at us like we’d lost out minds,” Laura said. She heard about the fire from the matron the morning after it happened and only then did she realize the bells that had awakened her with their wild clanging the night before were of fire engines going to Miss Lillian’s. But it wasnt till the tearful Wisteria came to see her later that morning that she found out about Loretta May. “I’d cussed them bells up and down for wakin me up,” Laura said. She sobbed into her hands and he stroked her shoulder. “I was cussin them damn fire bells…and all the while poor Loretta was…oh
God
, Johnny!”

The place was so old, the wood so dry, it had burned down in less than twenty minutes. Everybody got out but one. According to Wisteria, the man who’d been with Loretta May in her room told the firemen the whole thing started when Miss Loretta’s one-eyed cat sprang up on the bedside table and knocked over the oil lamp. He said the fire just jumped up the wall. Said it shot across the floor like some circus trick. He said he’d had to run through fire to get out the door.

“He ran out of there in his underpants—just run out and left her there in her darkness and all that fire,” Laura said. He voice was different now. Hard. “If God gave me just one wish, Johnny, just one, I’d ask Him to please let me find that man.”

She looked at him and saw his face streaked with tears. She sat up and held him to her.

“The firemen thought everybody’d got out. Wisteria was right there and she said the girls was all screaming when they come running out the house and they all stood out in the street and watched the fire. Wisteria said didnt none of them heard nobody screamin inside and so they thought everybody was out. She went all through the crowd lookin for Loretta May but couldnt find her and then Miss Lillian come up to her and asked where’s Loretta May and thats when they both realized she must still been inside and they screamed to the firemen to do something but it was way too late. They couldnt nobody
get near the house by then the fire was so bad. She said that ole place burnt up like it was made of newspaper. But she said she never did hear her scream, Johnny, she
swears
she didnt. And if Loretta didnt scream she musta been unconscious, aint that right? And if she was unconscious she wouldnt of felt nothin, would she?”