Red Grass River (48 page)

“Well now you caught em, let’s see you whip their ass,” John Ashley said. “They just sittin there waitin on you.”

The driver of the Dodge was a young man named Ted Miller and the friend with him was S.O. Davis, whom some called So-So despite his hatred of the nickname. They had been to a dance in Fort Pierce earlier that Saturday evening but were disappointed by the paucity of pretty girls and so decided to drive around and sip from their shine jug and see what adventures the night might bring. After an hour of aimless driving and talking about girls, they headed for home in Sebastian. They were almost to Davis’s house when So-So said maybe they ought pay Angie Cambone a visit. Angie Cambone lived in a shack across the river and was reputed to do the trick for a dollar. Neither of them had ever even seen her but they’d heard of her since early adolescence—and long heard the old joke that she was so ugly she had a sneak up on a glass to get drink of water. Miller gave Davis a thin look and said a man had to be hornier than a billygoat to go to Angie Cambone. Davis said he didnt know about Miller but he himself was about as horny as a damn
herd
of billygoat. They looked at each other and laughed and Miller admitted that
he
was so horny he didnt care if Angie did look like her momma’d sat on her face at birth, he was going to need a wheelbarrow to get his hard-on from the car to Angie’s door. He goosed the Dodge down the dirt road and made a tight turn onto the Dixie Highway and neither of them even took notice of the Ford that had to brake sharply to avoid hitting them.

They were arguing about which of them would go first with Angie when they saw the red light ahead. “What the hell’s this?” Miller said. He slowed the Dodge and as they drew closer they saw it was a red lantern hooked to a chain hung across the entrance to the bridge.

Davis groaned. “Of all the damn times to close the bridge.”

Miller braked the car a few feet from the chain. The headlamps
cast their yellow beams onto the empty bridge planks beyond. “Shoot, I dont see nothin wrong with it, do you?” Miller said. “How come they closed it I wonder.”

Headlights fell over them from the rear and only now did they become aware of the car closing up behind them. “I want you to look here at this sumbuck who’s gonna have to back around before we can,” Miller said.

Davis looked back at the car coming to a stop directly behind them and said, “Might could be some ole boy even hornier’n us on his way to see Angie. Boy, is
he
gonna be chafed to find out he cant get across.”

The driver’s door of the car behind them swung open and a small vaguely silhouetted man stepped out.

Flashlight beams suddenly blazed from the shrubbery on both sides of the road and lit up the interior of the car behind them and Miller and Davis saw three men yet in the car and the small man outside—he looked hardly more than a boy—was wide-eyed and starkly illuminated and immobile as a jacklit deer.

“STAND FAST YOU SONOFABITCH OR WE’LL BLOW YOUR DAMN HEAD OFF!”

“Oh Jesus,
what?
” Davis said.

“PUT YOUR HANDS UP NOW!
NOW!
—OR WE’LL BLAST YOU TO HELL!”

The man outside the car raised his hands up high, his eyes still fixed hugely into the bright flashlight beam.

“OUT OF THE CAR—ALL YOU—
OUT—NOW!
HANDS OUT WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM.
MOVE
, GODDAMNIT!”

“It’s a damn
holdup
,” Miller said, his voice high and tight. He quickly stripped off his watch and put it under the car seat, then dug into his pocket for the few dollars he had and tucked them under the seat too. Davis immediately did likewise, saying, “Oh sweet Jesus, oh lord.”

Behind them the other three men in the car all got out on the driver’s side and put their hands up. Men emerged from the dark foliage on both sides of the road and two of them held a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other and the rest were armed with rifles and they formed a loose semicircle around the surrendered men who stood squinting into the blinding glare of the flashlights.

“STAND FAST!”

Two of the armed men hastened into the blaze of light and quickly relieved the surrendered men of their pistols and then backed out of
the lights again. And now another moved in with a fistful of handcuffs and began to manacle the prisoners’ hands behind them.

Miller opened his door and stepped out into the glare of headlights and raised his hands. One of the armed men came toward him and in the peripheral cast of the Ford’s headlights he saw that it was the St. Lucie high sheriff.

“Is your name Miller?” Merritt said. “Dont I know your daddy?”

Miller nodded jerkily. “Yessir, it’s—you do—I mean, thats my name, and Daddy fixed your boat—your outboard—a coupla months ago.”

The sheriff smiled. “Why your hands up, boy? Is it somethin I ought arrest you for?”

Miller dropped his hands. “No sir, no. I—we—didnt know what’s happenin. We thought we was bein held up.”

The sheriff laughed. “We just nabbed the goddamn Ashley Gang is what we done.” He pulled a .45 automatic out of his waistband and looked on it as though it were a special gift. “this here’s John Ashley’s gun.” He looked back at the men holding their hands up and laughed again. “That’s him on the right. See how the light shines on that glass eye?”

With his good eye narrowed against the flashlight beam John Ashley appeared to be holding a wink. He looked to Miller to be irritated but not at all afraid. So did the others.

“My car’s at the other end of the bridge,” Merritt said. “How bout a ride over?”

Davis hurried around to the backseat of the Dodge so the sheriff could sit up front and then Miller drove over the river. His headlights camp up on a St. Lucie County police car blocking the end of the bridge. Leaning on a front fender was a St. Lucie deputy.

Merritt asked where they were headed and Miller said they’d just been taking a ride and would go on back home now. Merritt and the other office got in the police car, Merritt behind the wheel, and the sheriff backed out of the way so Miller could pass him by and turn his car around, and then Merritt led the way back across the bridge. Miller and Davis kept looking at each other and grinning. “The Ashley Gang!” Davis said. “
Hot damn!
”

The bandits’ car yet stood in the road and Merritt called for one of the deputies to move it out of the way. He parked his car on the grassy shoulder opposite the side of the road where the bandits were bunched with their hands cuffed behind them. A line of four deputies held them at gunpoint in full glare of the flashlights. As the Ford was
backed off the road, Merritt waved Miller on by and Davis said, “Go, man!” and Miller gunned the Dodge and they went.

They sped back toward Sebastian in high excitement, both of them jabbering at once and eager to tell everyone about their witness to the capture of the Ashley Gang. So enrapt were they with their adventure that neither paid the least notice to the green runabout that hurtled past them in the opposite direction.

The instant the flashlights hit them from both sides of the car they knew they had no chance to make a fight of it. They were in a car and in bright light and could not see the men who had them under the gun. Ever the BAR on the floor was of no help under such conditions. Clarence cursed and Ray Lynn sighed and John Ashley’s first thought was that it was going to be godawful hard to break out of prison this time without Daddy’s help. But he had Laura out there. He’d find a way.

As he got out of the car and put up his hands and squinted his eye against the glaring lights he decided the first thing he would ask of her was to find Ben Tracey and kill him. The bastard ratted. That was how this trap got set.

And now they stood cuffed and under gunpoint in the blaze of the flashlights and the Dodge was heading off back toward Sebastian and the leader of this bunch came across the road and said, “Mister Ashley, I’m pleased to meet you. My name’s Merritt.”

John Ashley knew him by reputation. “Pleasure’s mine, Sheriff,” John Ashley said. “This was a nice piece of work.”

Beside him Hanford Mobley snorted and spat.

Merritt grinned. “Thank you, I believe it was. Now what I’d like for you to do is to step on over to my car and—” They heard the high raspy flutter of a Model T motor working hard and both of them looked up the road and saw a pair of headlamps closing in.

The runabout slowed and its brakes screeched and the car halted and then lurched against the sudden application of its hand break. Bob Baker stepped down from the car without cutting off the motor. He held a Winchester carbine in one hand.

J. R. Merritt said, “Well
hey
now, Bob, I’m damn glad you made it. Your boys here were—”

Bob Baker stepped past him without a glance, his eyes on John Ashley. He looked like a man in a bad waking dream. He stood before John Ashley and held a hand up in front of him and said, “Remember this?”

John Ashley saw that he was holding a rifle cartridge. He grinned. “Got my message, hey? But damn, Bobby, I sent that thing—when?—a year ago? I like to died of old age waitin for you to come out to the Glades for the other one.”

Without taking his eyes off him Bob Baker slipped the round into the Winchester and levered it home and held the carbine pointed at him from the hip.

The deputies backed away from John Ashley and glanced at J. R. Merritt, who looked on and said nothing. In the sideglow of headlamps and flashlights Bob Baker’s face looked as hard and bloodless as barked pine. His eyes seemed fixed on something more than John Ashley, something no man else could see but which John Ashley believed he could smell. A faint odor of rage undercut by fear. It was the smell of one more victory over this man who could never beat him.

He grinned. “You gonna shoot me, Bobby? In front of all these witnesses and with my hands locked behind my back? I dont reckon. But tell you what: you just wait for me. I’ll break out soon enough and come see you. You know I will. Maybe by then you’ll find you a pair of balls. Your wife told me she’ll be glad of it when you do.” He laughed in Bob Baker’s face.

And got the surprise of his life when Bob Baker shot him in the heart.

As John Ashley went sprawling back Hanford Mobley screamed and kicked at Baker and Deputy Wiggins shot him in the throat and blood jumped off Hanford’s neck as Clarence and Ray Lynn stood agape and then the darkness detonated into speaking blasts of gunfire and every prisoner went down in the fusillade and the shooters stepped up to the fallen men and shot them repeatedly and then ceased.

They stood for a time in deep silence and the rising haze of gunsmoke. Then Bob Baker went to John Ashley and squatted beside him and none saw what he did but every man of them knew. Then he stood and his hand went to his pocket and he looked around at them all and they looked back at him mutely.

He went to his car and got in and turned it around and drove away into the darkness.

And behind him seven policemen drew together and even though no living soul could overhear they conversed in whispers.

The Liars Club

T
HE FIRST ANYBODY HEARD ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED WAS WHEN A
coupla Sebastian boys named Miller and Davis come tearing into town in their car late one Saturday night hollering that the cops had captured the Ashley Gang out at Sebastian Bridge. Folk was standing out in the street jabbering about the news when here come the High Sheriff J.R. Merritt to tell them his deputies had killed John Ashley and three of the gang when they tried to resist arrest. Some people cussed at the news and some cheered and said it was about time somebody killed that whole bunch of lowdown outlaws. Sheriff Merritt picked out six men to serve as a coroner’s jury and the got in cars and all went out to the bridge. The way we heard the story, when the jury got there the dead men were all neatly laid out next to the road. The jury had their official look at them and then the bodies were stacked in a car and driven to the Fee Hardware and Mortuary in Fort Pierce. It was the middle of the night when they got there but the news had traveled ahead by telephone and they say it was a good-sized crowd waiting on them. The cops laid the bodies on the sidewalk so everybody could have a good look. the undertaker, W.I. Fee, showed up early that Sunday morning and had the bodies taken inside and by that afternoon he’d embalmed all four.

The news just flew up the coast. That afternoon Jack Middleton came into Fort Pierce on the train from Jacksonville and claimed the body of his brother Clarence. Ma and Bill Ashley came
with the elder Mobleys to take home the bodies of John And Hanford. When they were told Ray Lynn had no known kin and would go in a pauper’s grave Ma Ashley said no he would not, he could be buried in the graveyard at Twin Oaks. Some who were there and saw her said she looked to be a hundred years old.

The bodies were in the ground by the time of the inquest three days later. The day before the inquest J.R. Merritt was elected to remain sheriff of St. Lucie County for another two years—despite the rumor going around that the Miller and Davis boys had seen John Ashley and his men under arrest and handcuffed at the Sebastian Bridge and it might be the police had executed them in cold blood. The lawmen who’d been at the scene refused to talk to reporters about the rumor and they hired lawyers to represent them at the inquest. They say when Ma Ashley heard the rumor she cussed the cops for murderers with badges and hired a lawyer named Alto L. Adams to attend the inquest and make sure some important questions got asked.

The presiding judge was Angus Sumner and the first witness was undertaker W.I. Fee. One of the first questions Adams asked him was if he had seen any marks on the dead men’s wrists, especially marks that might of been made by handcuffs. Fee said he hadnt seen any such a thing. They say the undertaker was sweating bullets and kept licking his lips and looking over at the seven cops who never took their eyes off him the whole time he was testifying. They say the judge dint seem too pleased with Adam’s line of questioning but the jury looked mighty interested.

Then the Miller and Davis boys took their turns on the stand and both of them testified under oath that they’d seen the four bandits under arrest and with their hands cuffed. No amount of badgering by either of the two lawyers for the cops could make either one change a word of their story. The coroner’s jurymen looked to be hanging on every word of the boys’ testimony. None of them had seen any marks on the men’s wrists when they went to the bridge, but like one of them said later, it had been dark and none of them had had reason to look very closely at the men’s wrists anyway. When Adams made a motion to have the bodies exhumed so they could be examined for handcuff marks, several of the jurymen nodded like they thought that was a fine idea.

The judge didnt think so. He said the question of whether the jurymen had seen marks on the dead men’s wrists when they went to the bridge to view the bodies now made them material witnesses and so they couldnt serve as impartial jurors. He disbanded the jury and
said he would impanel a new one and hold another inquest in three] days.

And thats exactly what he did. The new inquest took place on the following Saturday and this time the cops took the stand, all seven of them in their turn, and every one of them said he had shot in self-defense when the prisoners—who were not handcuffed and probably acting on a secret signal from John Ashley—all made a try for their guns at the same time. After all the testimony had been given, the coroner’s jury reached a unanimous decision of justifiable homicide.

Some folk couldnt believe it. Some still dont. The suspicions about what happened on the Sebastian River Bridge that night of November first, nineteen and twenty-four, will probably never go away. Hell, our own Liars Club been arguing about it all our lives, and some of us side with the cops’ version and some with the Ashley’s’. Ever few years one local newspaper or another will bring up the story of the Ashley Gang but they dont say anything we aint heard a hundred times before.

One more thing. Before John Ashley’s body was in the ground a week there were stories going around that when his body got to the undertaker’s it was missing its glass eye. Everybody knew somebody who claimed to know somebody who’d seen the body laying in front of the undertaker’s and seen that the eye was missing, but nobody ever said they’d seen so with their own two eyes. The undertaker said the eye was in place when he did the embalming, but some say he was too scared to tell the truth, which is that one of the cops took it and gave it to Bobby Baker, who’d always said he meant to have it. But Bobby always denied that anybody’d given him the eye and said the only way he ever wanted to have it was if he could of taken off John Ashley himself. The Ashley family—what was left of it, Ma and Bill and the sisters—they all said the eye was buried with John, but how would they know unless they opened his eye to check and nobody saw them do it when they came for the body at the undertaker’s. Maybe they checked for it before they buried him and it really was there. Or maybe, like some say, they were just trying to save face by not admitting that somebody got the best of John Ashley at the end by making off with his eye.

It’s just one more thing the Liars Club been arguin about for years and years.