Red Grass River (44 page)

Aunt July asked about John’s plans and he told of his intention to go into business through he hadnt yet decided what sort. If he caught any of the looks of doubt that exchanged around the table he did not give sign of it. Aunt July then expounded on her growing boredom with whoring business and recited a litany of complaints—the greedy policemen, the extortionist politicians, the ever-higher taxes, and the ever-lower quality of whores come looking for a house to work. “Present company excepted,” she said to Ella, who smiled and blushed and said, “Oh, I know.”

They stayed at Aunt July’s for more than a week before they found a rental house they liked just a block from the beach. She had insisted they should save their money and continue living under her roof, but they as vigorously insisted they would not impose upon her hospitality any more than they already had. They signed a lease on the house, paid the first month’s rent and moved in.

Nearly every morning they packed a picnic basket and went to the beach to swim in the Gulf, nap on the sand under an umbrella, fish for snapper from the jetties. The rainy season was on them and every afternoon raised huge indigo thunderheads off the Gulf that blackened the entire sky and then the storm came crashing down. They’d sit on their little porch with cold beer in hand and watched the play of pale lightning over the sea while thunder crackled and rain hammered the roof and poured off the gutters and the wind blew cool and fresh. Sometimes they’d lie in bed under a partly open window and let the rain spatter them as they made love.

Bertha sent letters with news. Ma Ashley and the girls had recently moved into the new house she had contracted to have built at Twin Oaks. It was a little smaller than the old house but spacious enough for the three of them. It had a little sidehouse for guests and Clarence Middleton was now living there. Terrianne had left him, just up and run off—some said to Miami, but no telling if that was true. If Clarence knew where she’d gone he wasnt saying. He’d gone to see Ma Ashley and asked if he could pitch a tent at Twin Oaks till he decided what to do. She said she’d be proud to have him there but she insisted he make himself at home in the sidehouse.

A good bit of the news in the paper lately, Bertha informed them, was about Bobby Baker. He’d finally called off the search for Johnny and publicly proclaimed that John Ashley was either dead in the Everglades or run off to somewhere else for good. He’d also announced he was running for reelection. The newspapers were backing him all the way and praising him as the lawman who busted up the Ashley Gang. They were calling him the best sheriff in South Florida, maybe the best in the state. For the first time in ages he was showing his family in public. At recent official ceremonies his wife had been at his side, and every Saturday afternoon he was spotted with her and his daughters at some restaurant or moviehouse somewhere in the county. “The man seems pretty well satisfied with himself,” Bertha wrote.

They took long walks around town and admired the ornate architecture. He took her to the theater to see her first play ever and she
was enrapt and insisted they thereafter go at least twice a week and they did. On Sunday afternoons they went to a park frequented chiefly by Germans and from a vendor they bought grilled sausages on bread with mustard and ate them while they listened to the polka bands. Galveston had changed but little in the ten years John Ashley had been gone. The main difference was in the greater volume of auto traffic. Cars were now everywhere. Laura noted that the weather was much like back home but she admitted she sometimes missed having the wildness of the Everglades hard by. “Back home you could always run into the Glades if there was need to get hid,” she said. On a little island like this there was nowhere to hide. John laughed at her comparison and said she had a naturalborn criminal mind. She punched his arm and said she certainly was not a naturalborn criminal, she’d had to learn every bit about being an outlaw from him.

For all their larking and carefree living, she sensed that he was restless. Not that he didnt laugh or smile very often, because he did. Not that he lacked his usual robust appetite, because he didnt. Not that his enthusiasm for lovemaking had fallen off, because it certainly had not. But more and more often now—sometimes for long minutes at a time, while they were having supper, while they were waiting for the curtain to rise at the theater, while they were lying in bed and smoking after making love—his gaze would turn inward and fix on some private vision that gave him no rest. And each time he returned from that far place in his mind his eyes would be quick and uneasy, his movements nervous. She somehow knew it was Bob Baker on his mind, but sensed also that he could not explain these thoughts to her. She suspected he could not explain them very well even to himself. She wanted to say to him that he could tell her anything, that maybe she would understand and maybe she wouldnt but she would by God
try
. She wanted to tell him she was
there
. But she knew he already knew that.

They’d been in Galveston about two months when he started having nightmares so bad he’d suddenly should in his sleep and bolt upright and she’d wake to find him sitting wide-eyed and dripping sweat and gasping as though he’d been running far and hard. She’d hold him close and croon soothingly and tell him it was all right, it was just a bad dream and his quivering would slowly subside and his breathing ease to normal. The first few times it happened she asked what he’d dreamt but he’d only mumbled that he wasnt sure, he couldnt remember. At first the nightmares came but once or twice a week but in another month they were a nightly visitation. One late-summer night
she heard him cry out the name of Bobby Baker just before he came awake. When she told him what she’d heard he sighed and held her close and told of his father coming to him every night now for months, half-rotted and dirt-smeared as though he’d dug out from the grave, his voice a horrible rasp for the black bullet hole in his neck and asking why he hadnt settled things, asking how he could live with himself while Bobby Baker yet breathed and walked on the earth and bragged of how he’d killed Joe Ashley and set John Ashley running like a kicked dog.

She stroked his head and kissed him and whispered fiercely that he was just feeling guilty for something that wasnt his fault, that they were free now of all that meanness back there, that they didnt have to do anything anymore except live their life. But her heart was careering as she spoke because she could sense that he’d already made up his mind what to do.

A week later she woke in the middle of the night to find him gone. Her breath seized in her throat. She ran out wearing but a shirt and saw only the empty street. She hurried for the beach lit pale under the bright half-moon, toward the dark sea spangled silver, and there she found him, sitting in the sand and staring at the Gulf. She wanted to slap him for scaring her so, but could only hug him tight and cry and ask why he couldnt let the damn thing go, why couldnt he.

“If I knew that,” he said, “I’d know everything.”

Back at the house they had a terrible row about his refusal to let her accompany him. “I wont be gone but long enough to settle things and I’ll be right back,” he told her. “If I have to run for it I’ll be able to move faster if you aint with me. Now thats the end of it, girl.”

“It aint the end of a damn thing! I can move fast as you, fast as anybody.”

“Hannie and Clarence is all the help I need for this. Probly get Ray Lynn on it if I can find him, and maybe even Ben Tracey if he aint in jail. They’d be good backup, but I can do it with just Hannie if I have to.”

“I can shoot better than them and almost good as you! It’s not a thing any them can do I cant and you
know
it!” She was almost in tears and hated herself for it.

John Ashley looked at her a long moment and then grinned and said, “Can you piss out a window in the rain without getting your as wet?”

She gaped at him. “
What?
Oh, God
damn
you!” She flew at him with fists swinging and he fended her wild flailings until she tired and
fell weeping into his arms. And then they were both laughing and by and by were naked and in bed and she had the hiccups and they laughed about that even as they undulated in each other’s embrace.

When Hanford Mobley answered his knock on the cottage door the next day, John Ashley said, “It’s somethin I didnt take care of in Florida that I shoulda. “I might could use a hand.”

Hanford Mobley grinned and said, “Well hell, uncle, I just been waitin for the word.”

Three days later they stood on a steamer deck in a gray morning of October chill, both of them armed with a pair of army .45’s in holsters under each arm, and waved to Laura and Ella standing on the deck and looking like bereaved women beyond their years.

October 1924

T
HEY DISEMBARKED IN
K
EY
W
EST AND MADE INQUIRIES AND
found Ray Lynn in a place on Duval Street that called itself Kate’s Cafe but otherwise didnt even try to disguise its true function as barroom. In this free-spirited town of piratical heritage Prohibition seemed but vague rumor. Booze was sold and consumed openly and even the cops now and then stopped in for a short one.

“Well I’ll be a sad son of a bitch,” Ray Lynn said on spying John Ashley come through the door. They pounded each other on the shoulders and neither one could stop grinning. “Men, I thought you were dead!” Ray Lynn said.

“If I was, I’d still look a sight better than you,” John Ashley said. Ray Lynn’s eyes were ringed with purple bruises and one ear was swollen and discolored and he bore a large scab on his chin.

“Hell, You oughta see she other guy,” he said. “Big old honker was in the lockup with me last week. Said he’d have my supper rations or know the reason why.”

John introduced Ray and Hanford and the three of them took a jug to a back table to talk. Ray Lynn said he been working on a rum schooner named
The Pearl
until two weeks ago when he drew ten days in the Key West jail for beating up a navy sailor for some reason he couldnt afterward recall.
The Pearl
had sailed without him and eight days later was sunk by a Coast Guard gunboat two miles off the Dry Tortugas and all hands all hands lost. “I tell you, boys,” he said
with a wild grin, “it aint nothin in the world worth more than good luck.”

“Could be you’re luck’s still runnin good,” John Ashley said. He told him in low voice that he was going to kill Bob Baker and he wanted some backup in case there was need of it. If Ray threw in he could forget about turning over the money from the moonshine sale to the Indians.

Ray Lynn smiled sadly and said, “Truth to tell, that money was the first thing come to my mind when I seen you at the door. I didn’t reckon you’d let me ride on it. Ben spent some of it too, you know.”

John Ashley said he intended to discuss the matter with Ben. He said if Ray wanted to come to Galveston and be business partners with him and Laura after the job here was done, he was welcome.

Ray Lynn said it was the best offer he’d had in a good while. He’d never been to Texas but at least they didnt have any warrants on him there. He was in.

John inquired after Ben Tracy and Lynn said he was but a month out of the Dade County Jail and tending bar in the backroom speak of the Blue Heaven Dance Club in the old Hardieville section of Miami. “I saw him up there a coupla days before I come back here and got that ten-day jolt,” Ray Lynn said. “I offered to get him a spot on
The Pearl
but he’d just met a Cuban gal was workin at the Blue Heaven and he wanted to stick around and see could he get anywhere with her. She espicks like thees, but he dont care—he says he likes here accent. She warned him she’s got a big ole jealous boyfriend works a dredge out in the Glades and comes to see her once a week, but you know Ben. He taken a shine to a gal he loses every bit of what little common sense he got. But you see what I mean about luck? If he’d taken me up on the
Pearl
job he’d been on her when she went down last week.”

The next day dawned hot and muggy and the three of them took the train on Flager’s overseas railroad to Miami. They marveled at the feeling of flying over the water. Nothing to see on either side of the coach but sparkling green sea under an infinite blue sky bright with sunlight. The air rushing through the window smelled of salt and seaweed. Great squalling flocks of gulls fed on baitfish running in the shallows. A flock of pelicans in low V formation glided over the water with hardly a wingbeat. Billowing cumulus clouds shone white in the distance and a speck of a ship rode the horizon under a thin black plume of smoke.

By the time the track made the mainland just north of Key Largo
the wind had roused and was swaying the trees. The clouds had gone dark and swelled to thunderheads and swiftly closed landward and now rain came sweeping over them in great blown sheets and clattered against the coach windows like flung gravel. It fell for ten minutes and then abruptly abated to a sprinkle.

From the depot they took a taxi through congested streets and a continuing gray drizzle to the Ford dealership and there had a long wait before anyone could attend them. The receptionist smiled wearily and told them they were in luck—a new shipment of autos had just that morning arrived by flatcar from Detroit. The Boom was bringing in so much business they could hardly keep up.

It was that way all over town. Miami had seen booms before but nothing like this. Half the men in town dealt in real estate. They wore white boaters and seersucker suits, rolled toothpicks in their mouths and extolled the wonders of South Florida like evangelists describing Eden. South Florida real estate was being hawked in newspapers and magazines all over the country and every day’s mail brought fresh money from people avid to buy their portion of earthly paradise. The sharpies were pulling in profits like croupiers. Contract binders on property lots changed hands a dozen times a month and each time sold at higher price. Once again they were selling swampwater lots to the fools—and every wised-up sap was a newborn con foisting his folly onto the next sucker in line. The town abounded with hustlers of every stripe. The streets were an incessant cacaphony of klaxons and traffic-cop whistles and corner newshawks. Cargo ships crammed the bay. A skyscraper courthouse was going up next to the Florida East Coast depot where hundreds of newcomers stepped down daily. The population had tripled in the last five years and stood close to 100,000. The city was a clamor of construction projects. The air smelled of dredged muck and limerock dust and ready money.

“I’ll tell you what,” Hanford Mobley said, staring out the dealership window at the heavy traffic on the rain-sheened streets. “I bet they’s deals being made in this damn town like you wouldnt believe.”

John Ashley nodded and said, “Likely so—just like always.”

A harried salesman finally took them in their turn and twenty minutes later they drove away in a new sedan.

They bought two pump-action shotguns at a gun store and then went to a Miami Avenue jewelry store they’d heard about in Key West. John Ashley told the manager they’d been sent by General Lee and the man smiled at the code phrase and led them into a backroom. A few minutes later they emerged and Ray Lynn now had a .45 auto
matic under his shirt and John Ashley carried under his arm a paper package containing a brand new Browning Automatic Rifle and three full magazines.

They drove over to the Blue Heaven Dance Club. It was late afternoon and the place had just opened its doors for the evening and the parking lot held but three cars. The sun had come out again but was down almost to the trees. The long low clouds in the west looked on fire at their core. Roosting birds clamored in the high branches. The ground yet steamed from the rain. They entered the coolness of a large dim room about half of which was given over to a polished dance floor fronted by a bandstand. Tables with white cloths and already set for dinner were arrayed along the walls. They were approached by a man in a tuxedo who introduced himself as the manager and asked if they wanted a table. John Ashley said he wanted to see Ben Tracey.

In that moment—as if the action had been cued by mention of Ben’s name—the door at the rear of the room banged open and Ben Tracey came backpedaling through it and ran into a table and upset it with a crash of dishware and fell hard on his ass and slid on the slick floor. Hi mouth was bloody. A huge man in overalls and a sleeveless shirt came stalking through the door after him and a young woman right behind him and yelling in Spanish. As Tracey scrabbled to his feet the man grabbed him by the collar with one big fist and drove the other hard into his stomach and the breath blew out of Tracey and he sagged in the man’s grip. The woman jumped on the big man’s back and clawed his face and the man cursed and bucked her off onto the floor. He still held Ben Tracey breathless in his grasp as he wiped at his scratched face and the woman scrambled to her feet and came at him once more. He hooked her in the jaw and set her tumbling unconscious on the floor, her skirt riding up high and exposing much of her fetching legs.

Hanford Mobley laughed and cried out, “
Whoooo!
”

John Ashley pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the back of the big man’s head and cocked the piece and said, “That’ll do, bubba.”

The big man went still and let Ben Tracy fall, Tracey braced himself on all fours and vomited loudly. The man in the tuxedo muttered, “Oh, for pity’s sake.” Ray Lynn went to Ben and helped him to his feet and led him away toward the front door. Ben was still struggling for breath.

The big man slowly turned and John Ashley had to look up to meet his eyes. “You best get that thing out my face before I make you eat it,” the big man said.

John Ashley brought his knee up hard into the man’s balls and the man grunted and lunged forward at the waist with his eyes wide and John Ashley held his thumb tight over the hammer and hit the man across the nose with the pistol barrel. The man’s legs gave way and he dropped to the knees with a great moan and both bands clapped to his nose and blood running through his fingers. John Ashley kicked him in the chest and he fell over on his side and curled up protectively, still clutching his face.

Hanford Mobley went to the woman and knelt beside her and checked her pulse at her neck. He looked at John Ashley and said, “She’s all right.” He looked on her legs for a moment and then lifted the hem of her skirt to peek at her white panties and the little black hairs curling out from the underwear’s edges at her pubic mound. He looked up at John Ashley and grinned.

“Oh man—you’re bad as that damn Tracey,” John Ashley said. “Let’s go.” He turned and headed for the door.

Hanford Mobley hastened outside after him and got behind the wheel of the car and John cranked up the motor. In the backseat Ray Lynn said to Ben Tracey, “Didnt I
tell
you not to fuck around with a woman with a dredge operator for a boyfriend? Didnt I? She’s a looker. I’ll admit it—but those fucken dredgers are some mean-ass mothersons.”

Ben Tracey wiped with his shirttail at the vomit and blood on his mouth. “That wasnt him,” he said. Hanford wheeled the Ford out of the lot and headed for the boulevard.

“That wasnt the dredger fella the gal warned you about?” Ray Lynn said.

“Nuh-uh,” Ben said. “He’s with a crew over to Ford Myers right now and wont be back for a coupla weeks yet.” He nodded at John Ashley and said, “Good seein you, Johnny,” the gestured at Hanford Mobley and said, “Who’s the youngster?”

“My nephew Hannie,” John Ashley said. “So who the hell was
that
peckerwood thumpin on you?”

Ben Tracey shrugged. “Big honker come tearing in through the kitchen door just as I had her up against the bar and was kissing on her and copping me some tit. Hollerin he was gonna break my neck for snakin his girl. You know what? I believe the bitch got her a few more boyfriends than she let on.”

John Ashley laughed. “You think so, hey? You really dont know who the fella was?”

“Beats the shit out of me,” Ben Tracey said.

“He damn near did,” Ray Lynn said, “if that gal you called a bitch hadnt lent you a hand. Her and Johnny here.”

Ben Tracey laughed along with them.

The deskman of the McAllister Hotel told them he was sorry but the hotel was completely booked. John Ashley slid a fifty-dollar bill across the counter and asked him to check his book again and the clerk found that, oh yes, there
were
two rooms available after all. They checked in and got cleaned up and then went downstairs and treated themselves to a steak dinner in the hotel restaurant. John Ashley said the town wasnt as much fun anymore. “It’s bigger and faster and louder,” he said, “but just
look
at em.” He swept him fork through the air in a gesture that took in the crowded restaurant and the thronged sidewalk just beyond the large plate glass windows. “They strainin so hard to have a good time they aint havin no fun at all, you can see it in their face.”

They repaired to the Elser Pier dancehall but it now had a bouncer at the door and he recognized Ben Tracey for trouble he’d caused in the past and would not permit him to enter. Hard words ensure but Ray Lynn pulled Ben away before a fight broke out. “Who’s that son of a bitch think he’s callin a troublemaker?” Ben said. They went out to the sidewalk and stood there smoking cigarettes and Ray Lynn suggested they go to Old Hardieville and get laid. Ben seconded the idea. Hanford looked at John and shrugged and said, “Why the hell not? I’m engaged but I ain’t gelded.”

So they went to The Palmetto House Inn, and even though the others made fun of him and said Laura had him damn well pussy-whipped, John Ashley just grinned and remained in the parlor to smoke and talk with some of the girls while his friends had their lark upstairs.

Quite early the next morning they drove north out of town on the Dixie Highway. They pulled in at a Fort Lauderdale roadhouse for a breakfast of eggs and pork chops and grits. Their plan thus far was vague. They would first of all have to find out when Bob Baker would be home. That much John Ashley had decided: he would kill him at home and then burn down his house as Bobby had burned his. He had not dreamt again of his daddy since deciding on his course of action.

Late in the forenoon they came to West Palm Beach and all pulled their hats low and tried to keep their faces averted from the street and any who might recognize them. John Ashley pointed down a dirt road
branching off the highway into a woodland and said, “That’s the way to Bobby’s house. Bout five miles yonderway.”

Hanford Mobley slowed the car. “You wanna go on over there and see if he’s home? He might be sitting in his easy chair this minute and reading the newspaper and smokin his pipe and feelin on top of the damn world. We can hide the car in the trees a ways from the house and sneak up on him. If he’s there you can settle the thing right goddamn now.”