Red Grass River (46 page)

Bob Baker was eating his supper when the telephone rang. Annie got up to answer it in the parlor. He heard her soft muted voice and then she was back to tell him it was Deputy Elmer Padgett on the line. Elmer apologized for interrupting his supper but just a few minutes ago there had been a head-on collision on the Dixie Highway about four miles north of town. Two carloads of kids. Three dead, four injured—two of them in awful bad condition. Both cars reeking of hooch.

“Slim called it in from Riviera,” Elmer Padgett said. “He’s back at the scene waitin for an ambulance. He thought you’d want to know one of the criticals is Commissioner Jensen’s daughter. Slim says she was in the backseat of one of the cars and, ah, her skirt was up around her waist and she wasnt wearin no underpants is what he said. The boy back there with her, his pants was wrapped around his ankles. He’s dead with a broke neck. Slim says it sure enough looks like they was goin at it when the cars hit.” Elmer chortled. “Hell, man, I can think of worse ways to go.”

“Quit,” Sheriff Bob said. “It aint funny.”

“No sir, I’m sorry.”

Bob Baker sighed. Damn cars. Kids could go off to who knew where and do every kind of wickedness in them. The automobile was the ruination of morality in the young, no question about it. And now Commissioner Jensen’s daughter—a situation as much political as tragic. Elmer had been right to call him about it. He’d have to do it all himself, write up the accident report and go to the commissioner’s house to break the news to him in person and then visit the newspaper office and make sure that the business about drinking and nakedness and who knew what else did not get into print. It looked to be a long night ahead—and a nasty one, judging by the sound of the wind in the trees and the flicker of sheet lightning at the window.

Elmer said he was calling from headquarters and could stop by for him unless he wanted to take his own car. Sheriff Bob said to come get him, then hung up and went to the den to put on his boots and gun and get a rain slicker. Annie took his half-finished supper off the table and covered it and set it in the over. She asked him to call home before he started back so she could warm it up by the time he arrived.

“Probably be awful late before I get this wrapped up,” he said. “You’re like to be sleepin.”

“I dont mind,” she said.

Then Elmer arrived and Bob Baker went out and got in the car and they left.

Two hours later the telephone shrilled again. It was Deputy Grover Pass calling from the hospital in Stuart. She had to press the receiver to her ear tightly to hear him clearly above the rain drumming on the roof. he asked Annie Baker to please tell Sheriff Bob to call him there as soon as she saw him or heard from him. It was awful important. Of course, she said in her soft pleasant accent, of course she would.

It’s
all
so awful important, she thought, as she hung the receiver back in its cradle.

By the time they arrived at West Palm Beach the wind was whipping the trees and lightning was branching brightly and thunderclaps shook the air. Hanford Mobley turned off onto the dirt lane leading through the pinewoods to Bob Baker’s house and switched off the Ford’s headlamps. Clarence Middleton kept watch through the rear window but there was no one behind them. As they approached a bend in the road they suddenly made out a faint light through the trees and Hanford stopped the car. Through a series of back-and-forth wheelings he turned the vehicle around on the narrow road to face back toward the highway and then carefully backed off the road and into the deeper shadows of the pines. They checked their weapons once again and then John Ashley and Hanford Mobley, each armed with a pump-action shotgun and a .45, got out of the car into the blowing rain. Hanford took the one-gallon can of gasoline Clarence handed him and they started walking toward the house, keeping to she shadows of the roadside trees. Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn remained in the car to keep watch for anyone who might come down the road.

The rain was hard and cold and rattled through the hardwood leaves and pocked the muddy road. In seconds their clothes were stuck to their skins. They saw Bob Baker’s green Ford runabout parked in front of the house. A large front window of the house showed bright yellow. They came across the yard at an angle to avoid its misty cast of light. The room at the front corner was unlighted and they edged past it and moved along the front of the house and past the stonework of the chimney and stopped at the lighted window. They peeked in through slightly-parted curtains and saw a parlor with plush furniture. One of Bob Baker’s cob pipes was propped in an ashtray on a table
beside an armchair. They went up onto the porch, stepping lightly, and moved to the front door. John Ashley tried the knob and it turned.

He slipped into a foyer and Hanford Mobley stepped lightly after him and gingerly set down the can of gasoline. A gust of wind came in behind them and fluttered the pages of a wall calendar. Hanford eased the door to and they stood motionless and listened for voice or footfall but heard only the falling rain and the water running off their sopping clothes onto the wooden floor. With his shotgun at port arms John Ashley moved ahead into the parlor and again stopped. The room was well-lighted by table lamps at opposite walls. He looked down at the carpet muting the water dripping off their sopping clothes. He’d known no one who lived in houses with carpeting except whores. The rain was falling even harder now and the crashes of thunder came more loudly and more closely together and quivered the floor under his feet.

The parlor gave onto a dining room just ahead and it too was bright with lamplight. A hallway led off to their right between the parlor and dining room, and to their left, across the parlor, was another open hallway. The house was spacious and warm and seemed to John Ashley a comfortable place to live. He knew bob Baker had lived here since before his daddy died and he became the sheriff. John Ashley suddenly felt strange in some way he couldn’t define—and then his uncertainty became anger. Just do it, he told himself. Find the bastard and do it.

He went forward and paused before the hallway to the right and craned his neck to see into it. There was a closed door on either side of the hall but no light showed under either door. He peered into the dining room and saw another door, this one ajar, to the left, and from beyond it now heard the muted sound of voices. He looked back at Hanford Mobley and gestured and Hanford looking into the dining room and saw the door and now heard the murmuring voices and nodded and tightened his grip on the shotgun.

They moved silently to the dining room door and paused there and John Ashley listened hard for Bob Baker’s voice but heard only those of children and that of a woman: “All right now, we need to beat four eggs.” He looked at Hanford Mobley behind him and gestured for him to back out into the parlor and he followed after.

“I dont think he’s in there,” John whispered at Hanford’s ear. “Could be he’s sleepin.” He nodded toward the near hallway and led the way into it. Standing to the side so he would not be framed by the doorway, he eased open the door on the left and listened for sound
in the darkness within and heard none. He crouched and peered into the room and after a moment made out in the dimness that it was the children’s bedroom and the two beds were empty. He pulled the door to and moved across the hall and opened the other door in the same way, again crouching before peeking inside. Another bedroom, the window curtains open. In a quivering blue flash of lightning he saw a large neatly made bed and that no one was in the room.

They crossed back through the parlor to the other hallway and the door to their right opened into a bathroom and John Ashley and Hanford Mobley looked at each other with raised brows at this luxury Bob Baker had added to the house. The other door opened into Bobby’s den. John Ashley waited for lightning to illuminate the room and reveal that no one was inside, the went to the lamp on the desk and lifted the glass and lit the wick with a match. A rack of guns on one wall held shotguns both pump and breech-break, carbines both bolt and lever. On another wall was a row of animal heads—a ten-point and a twelve-point buck, and two wild boars, their little red eyes looking almost alive, their tusks shining whitely in the lamplight against their black bristly hides. One of them wore a St. Louis Browns baseball cap at jaunty sideward tilt and had a cigarette in its mouth. Several fishing rods stood clustered in a corner, and on a table beside them was a litter of tackle and reels and lures. Over the roll-shaded window was mounted a largemouth that looked to scale at least fifteen pounds.

“I bet he really likes it in here—in this whole damn house,” Hanford Mobley whispered. “It’s gonna be a pure-dee pleasure to burn it down.”

The window shade went blue-white with lightning, and the almost simultaneous blast of thunder rattled the window. John Ashley opened the righthand desk drawer and saw within a gunbelt with a holstered .38 revolver, and a bottle of dark rum. He let the gun alone but took out the rum and uncapped the bottle and took a drink and passed the rum to Hanford Mobley whose deep swallow bubbled the bottle. Now John Ashley opened the shallow middle drawer. It held a few pencils and pens and gum erasers and blank sheets of paper. And a bullet. He recognized it at once and grinned and took it out and set in on its base on the desktop.

“He’s not home,” Annie Baker said.

They whirled around with shotguns up and Annie Baker gasped and lunged back from the door with her hands up to her mouth.

“
Dont move
,” John Ashley said. “Not a muscle.” He hollered,
“
Bobby!
I’ll blow her damn head off, you dont show yourself with your hands up.”

“He isnt home, I told—”

There was a brilliant white flash at the window and an enormous ripping sound and an explosive blast of thunder that shook the house. And then a wailing of children and a loud call of “Momma!”

Annie Baker looked down the hallway and called, “It’s all right, girls, I’m—” and then squatted with open arms to receive her two daughters rushing to her. “I
told
you to stay put,” she said, but her rebuke was without temper. The girls held tight to her, crying with their faces against her breasts.

“We tole
you
dont move, goddammit!” Hanford Mobley said. He was aiming his shotgun at her as though at some distant target.

The woman stood and held her whimpering daughters to her skirt. “You’re scaring the children,” she said. “Arent you ashamed, the both of you?”

“God damn it, woman, I’m—”

“Please dont use profanity in front of my daughters.”

“Shit, lady, you dont—”

“Hush up, Hannie,” John Ashley said. “Take that gun off her.” He held his own shotgun with the muzzle toward the floor. He had seen occasional photographs of Bobby’s wife in the newspapers over the years and now reflected that the pictures had not done her justice. “Miz Baker? You tellin me true he aint home?”

“It’s the truth. See for yourselves if you like and then please go away.”

“I know thats his car out there.”

“He was called away to a highway accident,” she said. “A deputy came for him.” The rain clattered hard on the roof and lightning flickered and flared almost without pause and one thunderclap followed on another.

“Well hell, we’ll just wait for him,” Hanford Mobley said. “We’ll lay for him right here and give him a big surprise when he gets back.”

The look on Annie Baker’s face reminded John Ashley of the way Bertha looked that night at Bill’s just before she’d run tearfully from the room—and the way Laura looked as she waved goodbye from the dock. He suddenly had a feeling they all three understood something important he did not. In that moment he somehow knew that this woman truly loved Bobby Baker and likely always would. And in some way as inexplicable he knew too—though he knew it only as a feeling, as an understanding beyond language—that Bobby did not know she
loved him, that he
could
not know it, not if she told him so every day for the rest of his life, no matter how she might try to show him that she did. The realization came to him that nothing he might do to Bob Baker could be as bad as having to live in such a circumstance, in such…what? Emptiness. In such emptiness of the heart.

He sensed all this in the span of a heartbeat. And then wished he were with Laura right that minute, wished they were in their bed in Galveston with moonshine or rain either one falling over them through the window.

Well hell, boy, all you got to do is to do it
.

He put the shotgun barrel up on his shoulder and smiled at Annie Baker. The woman’s eyes were intent upon him and now they suddenly filled and she showed a small uncertain smile.

“Let’s go, Hannie,” He said. “I cant wait to get shut of this place and get down to Key West.”

Hanford Mobley looked at him like he’d spoken in a foreign tongue. “Say
what
? How come? We can lay for him right here and—”

John Ashley was still looking at Annie Baker and now his grin widened. “And from Key West a boat to Mexico, where the arm of the law dont reach too good.” He glanced at Hanford and said, “Let’s go,” and started from the room.

Hanford came rushing after him. “Goddamn, John, what’s going on? The son of a bitch killed Granddaddy. It aint right we—”

“He didnt do any such a thing,” John Ashley said tiredly as he crossed the parlor to the front door where he stood and looked back at Hanford. “Daddy always done exactly what he wanted and he died the same way.”

Hanford Mobley snatched up the gasoline can and said, “Well we damn sure ought to burn down his fucken house! He burned down my momma and daddy’s house and I aim to pay him in kind.”

John Ashley grabbed the can from him. “We aint burnin nothin. It aint just Bobby’s house, Hannie, it’s them’s.” He gestured at Annie Baker and her daughters, standing on the other side of the room and watching them. “Hell, it’s more them’s than Bobby’s. What we got against
them
?” He put a hand on Hanford’s shoulder. “Listen. Let’s just go, all right?”