Red Grass River (8 page)

Bob Baker snarled a muffled curse under John Ashley’s arm and
became a bucking writhing frenzy trying with both hands to break free. But John Ashley held the arm clamped round his head as hard as he could and they reeled and staggered and splashed about like mad dancers in the muddy rain. And now Bob Baker was clawing at John Ashley’s binding arm with one hand and trying to unholster his pistol with the other and John Ashley got the leverage and purchase he was struggling for and lunged toward the jail wall and rammed the crown of Bob Baker’s head against it. Bobby went slack and sagged full weight in the vise of his arm and John Ashley feared he might have killed him. So tightly was his arm locked that he had to force it open with his other hand before he could let Bob Baker fall.

He stood gasping, massaging his aching arm, watching the jailhouse door in expectation of Norman’s appearance, but the door remained shut. The wind had died of a sudden and the rain was falling straight down and spattering high and loud. He saw now that Bobby’s face was in the mud and if he was not already dead he was going to drown. He knelt and pushed him onto his side and Bob Baker sucked a huge muddy mouthful of air. He was yet unconscious and blood ran from his hair and rubied the mud under his head. The hold-down strap of his holster was unfastened and John Ashley for the second time in their lives relieved him of his gun, once again a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. He checked the loads and then stuck the pistol in his waistband.

“Johnny!”

He looked to the yard gate and saw his brothers Bob and Ed coming on the run, each time pistol in hand, and behind them, in the driving rain, a shimmying Model T emitted vague smoke from its exhaust pipe and Frank was behind the wheel and was looking out for anyone coming from either direction in the road.

Bob kicked and kicked at the gate lock and John Ashley was about to yell out for him to hold on, he’d get the gate key out of Bobby’s pocket, but Ed was already backing up a dozen feet and now running at the fence and throwing his full weight against it and a fifteen-foot portion of chickenwire ripped off its support posts and scooped down into the mud as Ed sprawled on the fallen fence and regained his feet and here came Bob behind him laughing raucously and yelling, “Whooo! Some damn jail, aint it? Fucken
Chickenwire
!”

They clapped him on the shoulder and grinned hugely and he felt himself grinning back. “We’d been here waitin to jump the sonofabitch,” Ed said, “but Frankie run off the road about a quarter-mile back and it took a while to get the machine out the damn ditch.”

“He
dead
?” Bob asked, nudging Bobby Baker with his toe. Bob Baker groaned but his eyes were still closed.

“You all get back to the car,” John Ashley said. “Best he dont see you here. Go on now.”

“Hell, I aint scared of this mullethead,” Bob said. “Let him see me all he wants.”

“It’s got nothin to do with bein scared of him, Bob,” John Ashley said. “Right now he aint got a thing on any you, only me. Let’s keep it that way. Get on to the car and I be right there. I want a word with this sumbitch.”

“He’s right,” Ed said, tugging on Bob’s sleeve. “C’mon, let’s get.” Bob spat and hustled his balls and looked from one to the other of them and said, “Well all right, hell,” and went off with Ed through the rain and over the downed portion of fence and got in the car with Frank.

John Ashley knelt and turned Bobby Baker on his back and shook him by the shoulder and patted his face and tugged repeatedly on his ears and in a moment Bobby coughed wetly and choked and rolled toward John Ashley who jumped up and away to avoid the gush of vomit he heaved up.

Bobby gasped and opened his eyes and saw John Ashley grinning down at him. He started to sit up but John Ashley put his foot against his shoulder and pushed him onto his back again. “Just you stay there.”

“Son…bitch,” Bobby muttered. He managed to get up on all fours before John Ashley kicked him in the ribs and the air whooshed out of him and he fell on his side with eyes wide and blood running from his hair and down the side of his face and his mouth working for breath. John Ashley squatted and grabbed a fistful of his hair and turned his face up into the rain.

“So I’m gonna hang, hey?” John Ashley said. “Gonna shit my pants? I told you not to get so ahead of yourself, didnt I?” He yanked Bob Baker over onto his stomach and pushed his face into the mud for several seconds and then yanked his head up again by the hair. Bob Baker snorted and spat mud and tried weakly to wrest free and John Ashley punched him in the back of the neck. “I wouldn’t try and make a fight of it just now, I was you,” he said.

A piercing whistle he recognized as Bob’s cut through the rain and he looked at the idling Ford. The rain was falling harder now and he could see his brothers as only vague forms within the car and he knew Bobby would not recognize them if he should look their way. Bob
Baker cursed lowly and tried to pull John’s hand off his hair and roll over. John Ashley released him and got to his feet and thought to kick him again but the sight of his bloody head and the sound of his gasping decided him against it. The man was beat, so let him lay. He turned and ran for the fence and clambered over the skewed chickenwire and loped to the car and the open door waiting for him.

And Bob Baker, bleeding and breathless in the mud, heard him laughing and laughing as he made away.

He confided the details of the escape to no one but his father, and in addition to the warrants on John Ashley for murder and escape from custody, Sheriff George Baker had also wanted one for assault on a police officer. But Bob Baker did not want the assault known publicly and his father had deferred to his wish that they keep it to themselves. In his official report Bob Baker asserted that John Ashley had broken his word not to escape and bolted away into the rainy darkness when they got back to the jailyard from the courthouse. He said he could have shot him down but he was not one to shoot an unarmed man, not even a fleeing prisoner, not if he had not yet been convicted of a crime. Because he did not remove his hat in public during the entire time he wore a bandage on his crown, no one but his father and his wife Annie—who’d been the one to tend his wound—ever saw evidence of the beating he’d taken.

As she ministered to his bloody scalp Annie had asked what happened but he’d only looked at her and she’d questioned him no further. She’d come to know him for a moody man best left alone when withdrawn into himself.

That night he made love to her despite the pain of his throbbing head—made love with a passion near to ferocity and the woman in his mind was not his wife but a girl long gone. Two months later Annie happily informed him that she was carrying a child. He was delighted and said they would name it after his father. Annie made a mock face of distaste but said all right, but if it was a girl she wanted to name it after her favorite aunt. Bob Baker said fine, whatever the name it was fine with him. Annie’s smile at him then had been wide and warm and full of love. “Good,” she said. “I just love the name Julie.”

Seven months later she gave birth to the girl. Bob Baker smiled on his wife in the hospital room and gingerly cuddled the infant in his arms and cooed to her and called her his pretty little bird and evermore called her by that nickname rather than her Christian name. If his
wife or the girl herself were ever curious about that, they neither one ever said.

Although John Ashley remained in the region, the Palm Beach sheriff was hard-pressed to arrest him. When Dade County went dry the year before, Joe Ashley’s moonshine business boomed, and now John Ashley was making regular runs to Miami to deliver his daddy’s hooch. Sheriff George knew that. But he was not on friendly terms with the Dade County sheriff and the Ashley family was. And he’d heard enough tales about the corruption in the Miami Police Department to know it would be useless to ask for its help.

There were steady reports of John Ashley sightings in the local region too—mostly in its portion of the Everglades. He was seen at Indian villages and at fishing and hunting camps from the north shore of Lake Okeechobee to the south end of the Loxahatchee Slough. But Sheriff George knew there was as much chance of catching John Ashley in the Devil’s Garden as there was of catching a hawk on the wing. He figured his best chance for an arrest would at the Ashley homestead, and so he posted a continuous surveillance on the Twin Oaks house. His deputies made their way to the Ashley property on foot through the piney swamp and took up positions among the trees from which they had a good view of the front of the house some forty yards distant. They reported seeing all the other Ashleys come and go at irregular intervals but never spied John among them.

One late evening a pair of motorcar headlamps came waggling along the trail leading from the highway to the Twin Oaks property and the two mosquito-plagued policeman watching from their post in the pines nudged each other excitedly and jacked rounds into their rifles. Then the front door of the house swung open and laid out a shaft of yellow lamplight bearing the elongated shadow of Ma Ashley as she came out to the top of the porch steps. She raised a shotgun and discharged both flaring barrels into the sky as if bent on felling the bright crescent moon. The carlights halted and swung about through the trees as the car wheeled tightly in reverse and then the lights extinguished and the two cops stood in the darkness and listened to the motor fade into the distance. And they heard too Ma Ashley’s laughter as she went back into the house with her shadow following behind and the length of jaundiced lamplight scooted after her just ahead of the shutting door.

The Liars Club

M
IAMI WASNT BUT ABOUT FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN THE
Ashleys started running whiskey down there. The damn town was a flat crazy place right from the start and never did lack for grifters and gamblers and highrollers and bad actors of all sorts. It wasnt many crackers liked Miami and its ways but the Ashley boys was among them that did.

Since the turn of the century somebody or other had been dredging canals between Lake Okeechobee and the Atlantic with the idea of draining the Everglades and creating a lot more acreage to sell. Before you could say “Sign right here on the dotted line,” Miami was full of sharpies making money off that scheme. The first dredge boilers were just getting fired up when the sharpies started advertising virgin farmland for sale in the northern newspapers and a bunch of fool Yankees started buying it through the mail, sight unseen. Hell, they couldnt of seen it if they wanted to—most of what was being sold was still under water, and a lot of it would stay that way. The dumbshits were paying for it by the acre but really buying it by the quart. The sort of conniving was routine stuff up through the boom of the 1920s when it got worse than ever—and then a hellacious hurricane blew away a lot of the enthusiasm for Miami and South Florida for a while.

When they started digging the Miami Canal the engineers built a dam to hold the water back until the job was done. Once the canal was dug out to the Glades, they dynamited the dam to let the water
run out and, Lord amighty, did it ever! Water come pouring out of the Glades like some terrible punishment from the Bible. It rushed on down the canal to the Miami River and overran the banks in some places and knocked down sheds and shacks and boat stands and it grabbed up dogs and pigs and anybody who didnt get out the way quick enough and just carried everything it picked up right on down to the bay and dumped it in there and turned that pure blue baywater the ugliest shit-brown you ever saw. The water kept pouring down that canal for
weeks
. Made a godawful mess. Then come the dry season and way out where the swamp had been drained the muck got drier than it was ever meant to be and just any old spark would set it afire. The grass for miles around would catch fire too and the trees would get burnt to black skeletons and the muck would just go on burning and burning and at night you could see the sky glowing orange way out in the Devil’s Garden. The smoke would drift in on the wind and turn and high noon sun red as blood and sometimes got so thick you couldnt hardly tell high noon from dawn or dusk. For weeks at a time everybody in town went around with their eyes watering and their throats sore and scratchy from breathing that muck smoke. To make things worse the fires would drive all kinds of critters out of the swamp and there was times when Miami was just overrun with animals getting away from the flames—possums and coons, rats big as cats. You’d see a dozen rattlesnakes a day right in the damn streets. If a little baby in a stroller so much as gave his rattle a shake people would jump a foot in the air and look all wild-about for snakes at their feet. Alligators would come downriver in bunches like timber logs. But hell, the gators was even worse in the wet season, the cottonmouths too. That’s when the streets, would flood with the rain running off the burnt-up Glades like water off a bare table.

As for them who bought land that actually
did
get drained, well, they set to farming on it and at first they was all excited to see how high the sugarcane grew in the dried-out muck, how the cabbages was big as a man’s head and the tomatoes twice the size of a fist. Them farmers figured they’d sure enough done the right thing and it was worth getting a little burnt up in winter and regular flooded in the summertime. Then just as quick as all that growth come out the ground, it shriveled up and died. Turned out the drained muck didnt have the minerals necessary to sustain the crops. Couldnt none of them farmers get anybody to take their land off their hands for as low as ten cents on every dollar they’d paid for it. A lot of them said the hell with it and packed up and left it to whoever was fool enough to claim it.

They’d started clearing the mangroves out of Miami Beach around that time and the rank smell of all that dug-up seabottom was on every ocean breeze carrying into the city. Beginning in 1913 you could drive into the heart of that stink in Miami Beach by way of the Collins Bridge, back then the longest wooden bridge in the world. Most folk today who tell about Old Miami never bother to mention the smell that used to hang over the town. Well, take it for a fact, the stink of Miami was dawn near constant and something to reckon with till you got used to it.

But Lord, that crazy place was growing fast! Wasnt ten thousand people there in 1910 and by 1920 it had more than thirty thousand souls. In 1913 a fella named Deering started building himself a humongous old-fashioned Italian-style mansion he called Vizcaya. Build right on the edge of the bay in the Brickell Hammock between Miami and Coconut Grove. Spent millions of it—back when a million dollars was a sum you couldnt imagine. Up till the time Deering build his dream house, the town pretty much depended on a small but regular tourist business in the winter and on Mister Flagler’s railroad. But Deering imported hundreds of European craftsmen to do all the fancy masonry and scrollwork and tile-setting and so forth, and he hired about half the men in town to do everything else. In the two years it took to build the place, Miami grew to almost twice the size it’d been and you couldnt hardly go anyplace in town without hearing all kinds of funny foreigner languages being spoke.

In those days Biscayne Bay came right up to the Boulevard and was so clear you could see the stingrays gliding through the grass on the bottom twenty feet down. At the north end of town the bay formed a pretty little cove that tailed in at the Florida East Coast Railroad depot—and down at the south end Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel was set at the mouth of the Miami River. In between was the rest of the town. The center of business was along Flagler Street between the railroad tracks and the Boulevard. The rowdiest area of all—which included the red-light district—was over along 11th Street and a tad west of Miami Avenue, just outside the city limits. That area was called Hardieville in honor of Sheriff Dan Hardie who’d run the whores out of town. There was a story that Ed Ashley had got in a bad fight in a Hardieville cathouse over some girl the very first time he was in there and thats how he got the scar acrost his mouth that for the rest of his life left him looking like he was about to smile or cry and you never knew which one.

The city streets were paved with pulverized limestone back then and the glare of them under the sun would about knock you blind.
When it rained, the limestone went muddy and got tracked into every house and office. In dry weather the lime dust rose in a thin pale haze and blew in through the windows and doors and got on everything. It wasnt until after the War that the city commission decided to improve on those streets and got the bright idea to pave them over with eight-by-four-inch wooden blocks. They were cut from cypress and boiled in creosote and would last till Judgment Day. The workmen laid a layer of white sand over the limestone base and then snugged the blocks in place—and bedamn if the ride over them blocked streets wasnt the smoothest you’d ever know. Then came a frog-strangle of a rainstorm and huge puddles formed in the street and water seeped into the wooden blocks and they started to swell up. Little mounds began forming all over the streets and the rain kept falling and next thing you know—
pop! pop! pop!
—those blocks started flying up off the streets with a sound like gunshots, just whizzing in every direction and ricocheting off the storefronts and busting windows and scaring the bejesus out of the dogs and the draft animals and anybody standing out there at the time. It kept on like that even after the rain stopped, and halfway into the night you’d still hear an occasional pop out in the street and hear a block crack off a wall or pang against an ashcan. The city commissioners didnt want to give up the smoothness of those wooden-block streets, but they didnt want the blocks flying through the air every time there came a downpour neither. They thunk it over for a while and then decided to put the wooden blocks back in the street, only this time with plenty of play between them to allow for swelling the next time it rained. Everybody thought that was a real smart idea. But now the blocks were so loose they clattered when motorcars and wagons rolled over them. When traffic was heavy the clattering was so loud people on the sidewalks had to shout at each other to make theirselves heard. Even those of us who wasnt but squirts back then can recall the godawful racket of them loose wooden blocks. The first rain to come along after the blocks had been reset swelled them up just enough to fit together real nice and for the next day or two they didnt clatter hardly at all and they gave a real smooth ride and everybody smiled and said the commissioners had done a heck of a smart job of it. A few days later it rained again, only harder, and the blocks swelled up a little snugger against each other. But this time the rain kept falling all through the day and the blocks kept swelling and swelling and suddenly
pop! pop! pop!
they started shooting out all over the place just like before.

One fella was running across the street in the rain to get to the
barber shop when a block exploded off the street and hit him between the legs and he let out a yelp they probably heard up in Fort Lauderdale. The way the story went, he wasnt much good to his wife in bed after that and she was a high-spirited gal who liked her fun, so she left him a few months later for a Hardieville piano player she’d met in the lobby of a movie house. The abandoned husband was so full of grief he tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a train as it rolled out of the depot but all he managed to do was get both legs cut off a little below the hips. After that he had to push himself along on one of them little platforms on rollers. He begged money on the streets with a tin cup all day and got drunkern hell every night. But he was a mean drunk and one night he got into it with a fella in a Hardieville bar and bit into his shin just as tight as a bulldog and wouldnt let loose for love nor money. The fella was screaming and smacking him with a beer mug and the barkeep came around and started hitting the cripple over the head with a billy like he was driving nails and between them they beat that poor legless fella to death, sure enough. But even then he didnt let go his bite. They finally had to break his teeth with a hammer to get him loose of that shinbone. The cops figured a man being bit had every right to hit whoever was biting him but they knew the bartender for a bully and thought he’d beat on the fella as much for fun as anything else and they charged him with manslaughter. He went to trial and was acquitted real quick because all the jurors were businessmen and understood how it’d be real bad for business if a man let some fella bite on one of his customers without doing something about it. The legless man was buried in a box not four feet long—looked more like a fat child’s coffin than a man’s The whole thing was a terrible true story but a hard one for most folk back then to tell or listen to without grinning by the time they got to the end of it. Oh, that Hardieville was a rough place. Whole damn town was, truth be told.

Across the street from the Royal Palm Hotel was a park with a bandshell, and across from the park was the Biscayne Yacht Club, where the rich people kept their boats. The club had a cannon they fired every day at eight in the morning when they raised the Stars and Stripes and again at sunset when the flag came down. They say that many a visitor to the city who didnt know about that cannon and happened to be near the yacht club at eight
A.M
. or sundown when the fuse was touched off soiled himself. Anybody who ever heard it can tell you how the blasts rattled windows all down the Boulevard and sometimes shook coconuts off the trees.

Most visitors to Miami were still coming by train or boat but more and more were now driving down on the Dixie Highway which was already a pretty fair whiterock road by then. And starting in 1913 when Dade County went dry—like most Florida counties already were—the Ashleys had good reason to ride that road to Miami fairly often. This was just a few years after that loony bitch Carry Nation showed up in town with her damn hatchet and made a mess of some of the finest polished-mahogany bars in town. They say she could of used her
face
for a hatchet. Most waterholes had a sign over the backbar saying “Every Nation Welcome But Carry.”

Of course, the county law against booze didnt stop Miamians from drinking anymore than a law against breathing would make anybody but a fool go blue in the face. What the law
did
was help boost Old Joe’s moonshine profits by removing all his legal competition. After John Ashley escaped from Bobby Baker’s custody right there in the yard of the Palm Beach County Jail he became his daddy’s main whiskey runner to Miami. The time was fast approaching when Old Joe would have some mean competition for the whiskey market in Miami—some of the toughest coming from Chicago, if what we heard was right—but for a fact Old Joe was selling more whiskey to the Indians than he ever had, and nobody could cut into his business with them because nobody else knew the Devil’s Garden as well as him and his boys did.

No question about it, the Ashleys were making money hand over fist. You’d see Old Joe and his boys driving along the Dixie Highway in Palm Beach County and each one in his own brandnew car. John Ashley had him a spanking new Oakland for a while but we heard he lost it in a poker game in Miami. In Daytona Frank and Ed bought theirselves one of the first Dusenbergs sold in Florida. We heard they took it out on the beach and run it up to over ninety miles an hour but nobody really believed that story. Mind you, this was at a time when
forty
miles an hour was just
flying
. People used to say that at ten miles an hour in a Model T the fenders rattled, at twenty the headlamps rattled, at thirty the windshield rattled, and any faster than that your bones rattled. Frank and Ed brung the Dusenberg down to West Palm Beach but the roads around here wasn’t yet ready for any such car and next thing we heard Frank had run it through palmetto pasture and into a live oak and nearly kilt himself. After that the car didnt run no more, so they took the seats out of it and put wire in the windows and used it for a dog pen.