Red Grass River

FIVE

April 1912—June 1914

THE GALVESTON SUMMERS WERE HOT AND WET AND LITTLE DIFFERent from those he’d known in Florida. The fitful breezes off the Gulf moistly warm as dogbreath. Hordes of mosquitoes. Regular evening rainstorms that flared whitely at the windows and rattled the glassware with their thunder and sometimes became downpours that lasted for days. All such was familiar to him. But winter’s occasional blue northers were an alien brutality that made his teeth ache and burned his face raw and made him think his feet would never again be warm.

He’d arrived on a boat from New Orleans, where he’d steamed to out of Tampa. His father had sent word ahead to his sister July of John’s troubles with the Florida laws and asked her to take him in for a time. When he showed up one early afternoon at the front door of her pink two-story clapboard on Post Office Street in a part of town long known as Fat Alley, Aunt July welcomed him warmly. She was a lean darkhaired woman who looked younger than her forty-four years except in the eyes which looked to him to have seen everything. While they took lunch on the back porch off the kitchen she said she had friends who could get him work on the Galveston docks if he was interested. John Ashley said he had given the matter of a job some thought on the voyage from Florida and believed he was well-suited to work for her as what was commonly called a bouncer.

“Houseman, we call them,” Aunt July had said, looking surprised, “or mostly just the man.” Her gaze turned appraising. “Well, you’re certainly of size for the job,” she said, “but you are awfully young. Besides, the house already has a man.” She turned toward the kitchen and called out, “Hauptmann!”

A beefy balding man in a collarless striped shirt and suspenders came to the screen door and looked out at them without expression as he noisily ate an apple.

She looked at John Ashley and arched her brow. John Ashley smiled at her and then turned to the man at the door and said, “Hey, Hauptmann, why dont you just get your hat and go? Or if you ruther, you can step out here and we’ll settle who’s man of the house.”

Hauptmann’s forehead furrowed and he stopped chewing. Then he snorted and said, “There aint but one man of the house here, sonny, and you lookin at him.”

John Ashley stood up and took off his coat and draped it over the porch railing and said, “Come show me.”

Aunt July looked from one to the other and said, “Now boys, I wont stand for you either one getting bad hurt. No knives, you hear me?”

They stepped down to the weedy courtyard shaded by white-blossomed oleander trees and stripped of their shirts. Girls flocked to the rear windows of both floors to witness the job competition. Hauptmann was the bigger man but he’d grown soft and slow with whorehouse life and in minutes his nose was broken and one of his ears was a ruination and one eye was swelling and closing fast and he told John Ashley he’d had enough. Ten minutes later Aunt July had paid him his wages and he was gone. And John Ashley sat in the kitchen and smiled and had his skinned knuckles tended by a pair of girls as Aunt July explained his duties to him.

He rarely had to use force to put anyone off the premises and even then most of the rowdies were too drunk to put up much of a fight and he easily enough muscled them to the side door and pitched them into the alley and their hats after them. When he did have to get tougher a hard hook to the belly or a punch to the neck was usually sufficient to quell all dispute. He had expected a rougher patronage but Aunt July’s regulars were mostly a tame bunch and he now and then found himself wishing some old boy who could scrap would start trouble simply to relieve the boredom. To exercise himself to a sweat he’d several times a week set loose all the chickens in the little coop in the courtyard and then chase them down again to the delight of the spectating girls.

The girls were the job’s grand compensation. Eight inmates as they called themselves resided in the house and only a couple were older than he and none were less than pretty and nearly all freely available to him when the business hours were done. Besides deferring to his status as the man of the house and as their employer’s favored nephew the girls were anyway attracted to him for his youth and good looks and pleasant Deep South manners—and for the mystery of his past which included the rumor that he’d killed a man. They admired and took comfort in his adeptness at dealing with trouble. He made joyful daily claim on this sexual perquisite during the whole of his first year in Galveston. Only two of the girls would not permit him in their beds—Laraine who was married and truly loved her husband and would not cheat on him by having congress with any other man but a paying customer, and Cindy Jean who said he so much reminded her of her brother Royal back home in Fort Worth that it would feel like the awfulest sin. He took the other six in turn, a different one every night, and so each week had one of them twice—once on Sunday and again the following Saturday.

At the dinner table one afternoon Aunt July mock-admonished him for his unflagging concupiscence. “It’s a scientific fact that a man can go crazy doing it as much as you do,” she said. “It’s all that constant friction. Sends way too much heat up your tallywhacker just like a fuse and on up your spinebone and when it reaches your brain, why, it just cooks it like an egg. Too much hokey-pokey has been known to turn a man into a drooling fool fit for nothing but a freak tent.”

To which John Ashley raised his face to the dining room ceiling and bayed like a moonstruck hound and his aunt couldn’t help but join in the girls’ laughter.

Wiser heads might have warned him that ever-ready pleasures cannot long endure, that sexual indulgence requires respite and even occasional lack in order that its enjoyment not jade. He was young and did not know these things and would anyway not have believed them had he been told and so was obliged to discover their truth for himself. By the end of his first year in Galveston he was beyond surfeit with pleasures of the flesh. He took to waking in the forenoon before the girls arose and slipping out of the house and staying away until early evening and the hour of his employ. At supper the girls began to look at him askance but they held their tongues. Not until he’d kept his distance from them for more than two weeks did a roanhaired inmate named Sally make bold to inquire: “Dont you like us no more, Johnny?”

He heard the injury in her voice and saw in her face and in the faces of the others that a man’s failure of desire for them was the harshest of rebuffs. He felt mean for making them feel unwanted.

“Hey now, girls,” he said, turning up his palms, “I just need a little rest from you all or like Aunt July says I’ll sure enough go loony from way too much of a good thing.”

They smiled with ready acceptance of this explanation and winked at each other with relief and fell to their suppers with a happy clatter of dishware.

He did resume his visits with the girls but now dallied only twice or thrice a week—often enough to avoid giving further offense but not so often as to glut himself again. He spent the larger portion of his days walking the city and at last acquainting himself with it. He bought a white suit and wore it everywhere against a light blue shirt and black tie and all under a widebrimmed white Panama. He went to the bayside docks and watched the loading and unloading of cargoes of every sort and heard seamen speaking in the tongues of nations whose names he did not know. He daily joined the crowd that gathered every afternoon to see what the fishing boats brought in and one day marveled with them all at a fourteen-foot tiger shark with a girth twice his own as the beast was hung up by its tail and the captain dissected its belly and among the contents to issue onto the dock were a rum bottle and a horseshoe and most of a woman’s bare arm as yet hardly digested and whose finger bore a gold wedding band. The sight reminded him of a time he’d cut open the stomach of a bull gator he’d shot at the south rim of Lake Okeechobee and therein found a boot containing a pale hairy foot.

He ambled along the Strand and admired its ornate Victorian architecture and several times attended matinee theater performances and once and only once a matinee at the opera house. He liked walking in the drizzling rain after dark in the misty glow of the streetlamps. He took long noonday strolls along the seawall so recently completed after the hurricane of 1900 that killed 6,000. In the saloons they yet told stories of workgangs impressed at gunpoint and given whiskey rations through the day and night that they might stay halfdrunk and abide the labor of heaving corpses into the towering bonefires on the beach. The fires blazed for weeks and hung the island with a dread and hazy stench. Now the city streets rattled and honked with more than 200 motorcars and pedestrians scurried aside with hardly a glance at them and only the most nervous horses still stamped and kicked at their passing. The speed limit in town was ten miles per hour but there were daring motorists who raced each other on the beach all the way to San Luis at the west end of the island. In the parks he watched baseball games and boxing matches and bicyclists and schoolchildren at their gymnastics. He put on a bathing suit in a beach bathhouse and went for long swims in the mirrorsmooth morning sea. And yet, in this his second year of exile in a modern city whose pleasures he could not refute, he could not deny either his increasing yearning for home.

He often went fishing from the beach in the afternoons and sometimes thought of Bobby Baker who’d shown him the best places in the Indian River for trout and how to read the weather—taught him that when you saw sand sharks jumping between dawn and sunrise you could look for sporadic southwest winds in about five or six hours, that when the whip rays jumped in the morning you knew a northwester would soon hit and rough up and silt the water, but when the morning cobwebs were thicker than usual you could bet on good weather for fishing out on the salt.

John Ashley felt almost friendly toward Bobby Baker in his recollections. He had always considered him a good old boy who seemed to have no lack of grit—as he’d proved on such occasions as the first-fight with his brother Bob and the attempt to arrest them that night at the waycamp, the night he’d sent him home on one leg.

But as he cast into the gentle surf one afternoon it occurred to him that Bobby Baker wasn’t likely to forget the humiliations of Julie Morrell and being stripped of his gun and leg. It struck him and Bobby might evermore seek to get even for those public humblings. The notion that Bobby might even be pleased to see him dead came quite suddenly and made him at once melancholic and angry.

These feelings confused him and would not dismiss. They persisted for the next several weeks and because he could not say why he felt as he did he became even more nervous and irritable. He twice in one week badly battered troublesome patrons he could easily have handled without letting blood. Aunt July gave him a reprimanding look in the first instance and a severe rebuke after the second, reminding him that she needed no additional difficulties with the police or from some young muckraker’s righteous journalistic denunciations of the whoring trade. He had thought that the fights might soothe his gloomy agitations but they did not. He ached for an action he could not name.

One morning just a few days after Aunt July’s scolding he was walking by a bank a block removed from the Strand and chanced to look into the lobby just as a customer was receiving money at a teller’s window. He paused and watched the man tally the bills and then smile and say something to the teller who seemed a sulky young man and who showed not a hint of smile in return but simply nodded. The customer folded the money and put it in his coat and came out and gave John Ashley a polite smile in passing. John Ashley glanced at the bulge in the man’s coat pocket and then watched him cross the street and go into a restaurant. Then he looked back into the bank for a long moment, at the polished wood floor gleaming against the yellow sunlight slanting through the windows. He made his way back to the house by a slow roundabout route, noting carefully the lay of every street and alley as he went, stopping in at a pharmacy to buy a small package of gauze and a roll of adhesive tape. By the time he was back at the house his melancholy had lifted, his nervousness dissipated like blown smoke.

Early the next morning after the house had turned out its last patron of the night and everyone had gone to bed and only the domestics were moving about at their housekeeping and cooking duties, he cleaned his pistol at the small table by his bedside window and then loaded it. He dressed in his white suit and from his suitcase withdrew a floppy-brimmed black felt hat and pair of overalls no one in the house had ever seen and he put them in a large paper sack together with the pistol and the gauze and the roll of tape. He descended the stairs quietly and slipped out the back door and went to the tool shed at the rear of the property. The day was cold enough to show his breath. In the shed he emptied the sack and changed from his white suit into the overalls and tucked his long hair up into the hat. He had let his hair grow nearly to his shoulders because several of the girls had dared him to do so and then all of them had said they preferred it like that. He neatly folded his white suit and put it in the bag and cached it in a corner. He slipped the pistol into the bib pocket of the overalls and then carefully set a wide strip of gauze over his nose and cheekbones and taped it in place.

Five minutes after the bank opened for business he walked in and stood at the central counter and on a withdrawal slip wrote “Give me all your paper money.” The guard was a uniformed big-bellied fellow engaged in conversation with a young female clerk at her desk in a corner and the only other customer of the moment was in discussion with the bank manager at his desk at the far end of the room. There was but one other teller on duty and he was busy with a ledger.

John Ashley went to the sulky teller’s window and pushed the slip of paper at him. The teller read it and looked up at him and John Ashley leaned close against the counter and exposed enough of the revolver in his bib for the teller to see what it was.

Even as the teller’s eyes widened and his mouth came open John Ashley smiled and said softly, “Everything’s just fine, bubba, you do like I say. Act natural and don’t holler. Make me any trouble I’ll shoot you graveyard dead. Now gimme it.”

The teller did it. He handed over a banded pad of twenty-dollar bills with “$400” imprinted on the band and then several handfuls of loose paper currency of various denominations. John Ashley casually put it all into his overall pockets with the insouciance of a man reaping his just desserts. The teller handed him yet another small stack of bills and said in a quavering whisper, “That’s all I have in my cash drawers, sir, really it is.”

John Ashley grinned under his bandaged nose and said, “Well, then, bubba, thats all I’ll take.” The teller looked dazed and for a moment John Ashley thought the man might faint. “Sit down at that desk back of you and just stay there and don’t say nothin to nobody for five minutes, you hear?” He said all this in a low conversational tone and with a broad smile and anyone looking their way would have seen a friendly farmer with an injured nose chatting with a teller who looked but a little more out of sorts than usual.

As the teller turned and went to the desk John Ashley left the bank, whistling lowly and waving so long at the guard and feeling his heart banging against his ribs as if trying to make its own wild escape ahead of him. He steeled himself to walk at a normal pace as he made his way along the serpentine route he’d laid out through the alleys. At every step of the way he expected to hear police whistles suddenly shrilling behind him and shouted commands to stand fast and put up his hands.

And then he was back in the shed and the gauze was off his face and he quickly changed into his white suit and stuffed the overalls and the hat in the paper sack and hid it behind a nail barrel in the corner. He put the money in his coat pockets and then went into the house and up to his room. In response to the look of curiosity he received from the cleaning women on the stairs he said, “Forgot my pipe.”

He counted the money out on the bed—one thousand two hundred and seventy-two dollars, most of it in twenties and tens and no bill larger than a fifty, of which there five. He counted all of it again and laughed out loud. He felt better than he had in weeks—even as his heart yet pounded and he tasted now the brassy flavor of the apprehension he’d been holding in tight check all morning. He wanted to howl his elation. He divided the money into four even piles and rolled them tightly and stuffed them into a spare pair of boots and then went for a long walk on the seawall. He could not stop grinning.

By the time the house sat down to dinner that afternoon the news of the robbery was all over town. The talk at the table was all about it and the bold broken-nosed farmer who’d done it and got away. The most popular sentiment among the girls was the hope that the hayseed would come to the house to spend some of his loot.

“I’ll show him how to do a damn stick-up like he aint never done,” Cindy Jean said, and all the girls laughed.

John Ashley laughed with them. The girls had several times remarked on his high spirit all afternoon and some now wondered aloud as to its cause. He told them he just felt good being in their company, that was all, and they grinned and blew kisses at him. It was all he could do to keep from bragging to them that he’d committed the crime. But he knew too well the whores’ love of gossip and knew that if he confided in even one of them about the holdup they would all soon know the story and so would others outside the house. He felt cheated that he could not crow about it to anybody.

Two months later his euphoria from the robbery had ebbed and he found himself standing across the street from a Broadway Avenue bank and considering the possibilities. He decided that yes, he could take this one too. He thought about it for the next few days and was almost decided on doing it when a telegram arrived from his father: “Get home. Gordy says all will be well.” Gordy was Gordon Blue, attorney-at-law with offices in Palm Beach and Chicago and an occasional partner of Joe Ashley dating back to their days in Lee County.

The girls were sorry to see him go. The night before his departure Aunt July threw a party and hired a dance band to play in the crowded parlor and each girl in turn took him aside and kissed him goodbye and petted him and whispered endearments. He three times went upstairs with a different girl each time including Cindy Jean who said she didnt care anymore how much he looked like her brother.

When he boarded the steamer next morning he was redeyed with hangover and exhausted to the marrow and his flayed peeter pained him in his pants. Yet he grinned wide as he stood at the rail in the cold wind and returned the goodbye waves of the girls on the dock. Then the ship cleared the channel and entered the silver-green Gulf and he watched Galveston recede in the wake and he told himself that if he should ever have to live someplace other than Florida he would come back to this old island. Under a sunwashed sky laced with white clouds a school of dolphin rolled up beside the ship like old friends attending him home.