Red Grass River

EIGHT

August 1914—January 1915

FOLLOWING HIS ESCAPE FROM BOBBY BAKER HE SENT MOST OF HIS days in the Everglades for months thereafter where none of any race or purpose could close on him without warning. He moved from one to another of his father’s whiskey camps and carried skiffloads of Old Joe Ashley’s hooch to Indian villages in the depths of the Devil’s Garden. He hunted and took hides and feathers and his brothers carried them to sell in Stuart or Pompano or on the New River or Miami docks.

Every few weeks he drove a load of his daddy’s whiskey down to Miami, going to restaurants and pool halls and hotel kitchens and pleasure houses to make the deliveries and collect the money. Now and then his brothers sojourned to Miami with him to have a high time—always less Bill, whose sense of adventure seemed bounded by account ledgers and whose lust knew no object but his wife. As the town had grown, its pleasures had become plentiful and ever more varied, and the Ashleys found the local attitude toward law enforcement far more amenable than that of Palm Beach County. Both the chief of police and the county sheriff were good old boys largely indifferent to victimless and bloodless violations of the criminal statutes—so long as they received their respectful portion of the profits from all such enterprises. Both men had come to be on first-name acquaintance with the Ashley boys.

In Miami the Ashleys would check into a hotel and bathe in porcelain tubs and dress in new suits and sport with the prettiest whores in town and gamble with the sharps and dine on restaurant glassware and sleep on soft beds with fresh linen. These periodic Miami visits both sated their yen for city wickedness and renewed their appreciation of their natural wildland life. They each time asked Old Joe if he would accompany them and he each time fulminated anew against the failings and follies of all cities and loudly lamented the sins of his youth for which God was punishing him by way of sons too ignorant to recognize a city for the shithole it was.

Gordon Blue had by now opened an office in the Biscayne Hotel on Flagler Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, routinely thick with motor vehicle traffic and flanked by a multistoried architectural motley of gables and oriels and turrets and verandahs and balconies, lined with arcades and awninged sidewalks heavily overhung with black electric and telephone lines depending from tall cross-beamed poles smelling of creosote. Crooning pigeons nestled on Blue’s windowsills. From those widows he would watch pelicans gliding in V-formations over the bay where tall-masted ships lay at anchor. Seagulls wheeling and shrilling over the city. Turkey buzzards roosting on the roof ledges, nodding their ugly red-naked heads and chuckling as though at dirty jokes, putting him in mind of judges he had known and done business with.

Blue had not approved of John Ashley’s escape from Bobby Baker’s custody, not after they had promised Sheriff George Baker that John would not try to get away. “Your promise not to try a break was why he left the cuffs off you when you went to court,” he said to John Ashley. They were in his office and it was the first time they’d seen each other since John’s escape. “They catch you again, Johnny, they’ll lock fifty pounds of chain on you and throw away the key.”

John Ashley had to laugh. “They didn’t catch me the first time. I gave myself up, and thats some different. And I did it because they said the trial would be in Palm Beach County. Then those bastards tried to get it moved to Dade. Only a sonofabitch tries to changes a deal after it’s been agreed on, and only a damn fool things he ought keep his word to a sonofabitch. Hell, it aint givin your word that counts, Gordy, it’s who you give it to. If George Baker was fool enough to leave the chains off me while they were tryin to crawfish on our deal, thats his damn fault and nobody else’s.”

“The judge hadn’t decided yet that the trial was going to Miami,” Gordon Blue said. He heard the defensiveness in his own voice. “I think I could have kept that from happening.”

John Ashley narrowed his eyes at Gordon Blue and smiled.

Gordon Blue let the matter drop, partly because it would have been fruitless to argue the point—what was done was done and could not be undone—and partly because he believed John Ashley could be right.

It was Blue who introduced the Ashley boys to Miami’s backroom gambling spots and hotel poker games frequented by some of the highest rollers in town. Rather than the four of them competing directly against each other, the brothers would split up into paired teams and gamble in different locales—Frank and Ed going to one place, John and Bob playing at another. At the end of the night they would pool whatever winnings they’d pulled in and divide them into equal shares. As far as Gordon Blue knew none of them ever held out on the other, a circumstance that flew in the face of his experience with human nature where money was concerned.

At one of these poker sessions in the Biscayne Hotel on a late fall Friday evening Gordon Blue introduced John and Bob Ashley to someone he called the nephew of an old friend, a freckled young man named Kid Lowe, just arrived on the train from Chicago. The fellow seemed to the Ashleys aptly named: in both stature and visage—and in his white boater and red bowtie—he looked about fourteen years old, even though he chainsmoked cigarettes and played a good game of poker. Only his eyes were parcel of a grown man—wary and quick and mistrustful. But as soon as he spoke and they heard his accent they knew him for one of their own. He was not shy in telling of himself and over the course of the next few hours they learned he’d been born in Tallahassee to a footloose mother, herself a native of Tally Town, but he’d been reared from infancy by maiden aunts in Leesburg till he was eighteen. Then he went to Chicago to work for an uncle in the stockyards and eventually became a bodyguard for a man named Silver Jack O’Keefe, whose trade consisted of acquiring high-interest loans from private sources and then lending the money to somebody else at higher interest yet.

“Bodyguard?” John Ashley echoed. He gave the diminutive Kid Lowe a pointedly appraising look.

Kid Lowe scowled and said, “It aint the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. I’da figured you all to know that.”

Bob Ashley grinned. “That’s sure enough true about dogs, cousin, is sure enough is.”

At the game’s conclusion John and Bob Ashley accepted Gordon Blue’s invitation to join him and Kid Lowe at a brightly-lighted cafe on Miami Avenue for pork chop sandwiches and beer. There Gordon Blue informed the brothers that Kid Lowe was in difficult circumstances with business associates in Chicago. He did not get specific beyond saying that the matter concerned Silver Jack O’Keefe’s failure to meet a certain financial obligation and that Silver Jack was now said to be at the bottom of Lake Michigan with one end of a rope around his neck and the other tied to a hundred-pound bag of bricks.

“What’s that got to do with young Lowe here?” John Ashley said.

“I paid a visit to the sumbitch responsible for that sack a bricks,” Kid Lowe said. “I mean, hell, it made me look bad, them snatching him out of the restaurant like they did while I was taking a piss. Made me look like a didnt know how to do my job.”

John Ashley nodded and studied the Kid more closely. “That sumbitch in the lake now too?”

“Ask me no questions,” Kid Lowe said, “I’ll tell you no lies.”

John Ashley laughed and said that was fine by him.

Gordon Blue was sure the matter would be cleared up in a week or two, but until then Kid Lowe needed a safe place to lie low. The Ashley boys grinned at the little fugitive and said any friend of Gordon’s was a friend of theirs and they’d be happy to put the boy up for a time, so long as he kept to himself all complaints about mosquitoes or the lack of city amenities he might be used to—such as running water or electricity. Kid Lowe smiled shyly and thanked them and said he’d be proud to get back to country living after three years of the big city life, which he had lately come to lose all fondness for.

They returned to the hotel to meet with Ed and Frank Ashley and then at Gordon Blue’s suggestion they all packed into a taxi and headed for the city limits and Hardieville. One side of Frank Ashley’s face was yet puffed and patched with purple from its impact with the windshield when he ran the Dusenberg squarely into an oak. A drizzling rain had fallen through most of the early evening and the limestone streets shone pale under the rattling taxi’s headlamps and in the cast of the infrequent streetlights. A cat’s-eye amber moon rose out of the Atlantic. The air had cooled and the wind was to seaward and carried on it the scent of wet earth and ripe foliage and was free of the usual stink of dredged bay bottom.

At this late hour of a Friday night the Hardieville sidewalks were raucous with revelers and with drunks doing the hurricane walk. From its brightly blazing doors and windows came the smells of whiskey and cooking grease, sweat and perfume, the sounds of laughter and shouting and badly sung songs, the plinking of ragtime pianos and the blatting of brass bands. They went into the Purple Duck, a supperplace offering three musical floorshows per evening, one of which was in progress before a sparse crowd as they made their way past the dining room—a trio of boaters and peppermint jackets softstepping on a tiny stage and singing “On Moonlight Bay.” A woman in a green satin dress came forth to greet Gordon Blue with a kiss that left its cheerful lipsticked imprint on his cheek. Her smile was warm but her eyes quick and assessing and John Ashley figured her for nobody’s fool. Gordon Blue introduced her as Miss Catherine, the proprietress, and she smiled around at them all and bade them have a swell time.

Gordon Blue led the way through a curtained doorway in the rear of the room and down a narrow hall to yet another door. He grinned at his friends and delivered three sharp raps and then two lesser ones. A small peephole opened in the door for a moment and then closed and there was the sound of a latch working and the door opened and a short broad man in a red bowtie and black vest nodded at Gordon Blue and permitted them to pass into a room hazy with dim yellow light and cigarette smoke and loud with ragtime music and laughter and talk. There were crowded tables all about and a small dance floor at one end of the room and beside it a bandstand and on it a Negro pianist playing his rag tunes in a sweat. A brass-railed bar ran the length of the room and the backbar was resplendent with a tiered array of every variety of bottled spirits. Whores everywhere—in shimmies and in filmy Arabian pantalettes and vests and in white cotton bloomers and beribboned lace bodices cut low on their milky breasts—whores plying the tables and bantering with the patrons at the bar and here and there twining arms with a grinning man and the pair making for the stairway leading to the rooms above.

They wended their way to the bar and each man called for bourbon. As the bartender set them up John Ashley scanned the crowd and marveled happily at the great allure of vice. He turned to Gordon Blue and said, “I’ve heard tell it aint no fruit so sweet as that which is forbidden, and ever time I come in a place like this I do believe I heard tell correctly.”

Gordon Blue grinned and said, “Spoken like a true philosopher, Johnny.”

John Ashley smiled. “I do hope and pray the damn Saloon League gets the federals to outlaw spirits. Hellfire, Gordy, we’ll all be rich in no time.”

Gordon Blue raised his glass high and said, “To the Saloon League! May its high moral principles enrich us all!”

Four hours later they’d each of them made a trip upstairs with a girl and Frank and Ed told their brothers they would see them back at the hotel and then departed for The Pair-’O-Dice down the street to see what it was like. John and Bob Ashley, Kid Lowe and Gordon Blue then posted themselves at the bar of The Purple Duck’s backroom and were shortly joined by Miss Catherine who clearly had a special fondness for Gordon Blue. Each man bought a round in his turn and they talked and told jokes and finally agreed to call it a night.

The crowd had grown larger now and the air was thick and warm with body heat and gauzed with cigarette smoke and the front door seemed very far away at the other end of the room. Gordon Blue asked Miss Catherine if they might use her special side door and she led them to her office and shut the door behind them and pulled back a heavy set of curtains against the wall to reveal her private door. It opened into a dark alley thick with mud on which a walkway of planks had been laid end to end from Miss Catherine’s door to the street some forty yards distant to their right. Immediately to their left was a cul-de-sac. A light drizzle yet fell in a mist and the alley reeked of rot and human waste and the only light in the alleyway was the dim glow from the streetlamps.

While Gordon Blue said his private goodnights to Miss Catherine, John Ashley stepped out onto the plank walkway and the others followed behind. Now Gordon Blue came out and Miss Catherine waved from the brightly lighted doorway and said, “You boys take care now, you hear?” and closed the door behind them.

They began to file along the boards, one behind the other, just as a trio of men in derbies came round the corner at the far end of the alley and started toward them on the planks, stark black silhouettes against the yellow backlight of the street, their shadows stretching before them like shades loosed of the graveyard.

“This might could get interestin,” Bob Ashley said.

Near the midpoint of the walkway, John Ashley and the other point man halted with three feet between them and regarded each other. John Ashley felt himself clearly illumined in the glow of the streetlights, but the other man remained indistinct, a backlighted silhouette. One of the other men raised a bottle to his mouth and it gleamed brightly against the light and John Ashley caught the redolence of rum.

“Well now, I guess you lads will be getting a bit of mud on your shoes now, wont ye?” the front man said, and John Ashley felt rather than saw the man’s grin.

“We was on this walk before you boys,” John Ashley said. “Anybody gone get their shoes muddy it’s you.”

“You were on these boards first?” the point man said sardonically. He laughed. “Well, hell I guess that fucken well settles everything, now dont it?”

“What the hell you doin arguin with these sonsofbitches?” said one of the other derbied men as he stepped off the plank and came around from behind the point man, his shoes sucking through the mud. The point man grabbed him by the arm and said, “Goddammit, Logan, I know how to deal with these hicks.”

Logan shook off the man’s grip and turned to John Ashley and brought a snapblade knife out of his pocket so fast and smoothly it was as if the weapon had been in his hand all along. The small snick of the blade snapping open seemed to John Ashley to make the air go thinner.

“Fucken hillbillies,” Logan said and took a step toward John Ashley just as Kid Lowe came slogging up alongside the planks and delivered a grunting kick to the knifer’s balls that raised the man to his toes. John Ashley heard the hiss of Logan’s sharp suck of air and even as the man started to sag Bob Ashley stepped forward and struck him with a huge roundhouse that sent him sprawling back into the mud and Kid Lowe set to kicking the man in the head.

The point man caught John Ashley by the throat with both hands and they staggered off the planks and into the mud and John Ashley could not breathe. He grabbed the man’s arms tight at the elbows and planted his feet and swung him around hard into the wall and the man’s breath blew out of him. John Ashley broke free and grabbed him by the neck with one hand and by the hair with the other and rammed the back of the man’s head into the wall a hard half-dozen times and then let him fall to a sitting position and drove his knee into his face and felt the man’s front teeth give way as the man’s head snapped back to strike the wall yet again with a hollow thunk. The man fell over sideways and lay still.

Kid Lowe and Bob Ashley were facing off warily against the third man who was armed with the jagged rum bottle he’d broken against the wall. He was feinting first at Bob and then at the Kid, making one and then the other jump back as from a striking snake. Now Kid Lowe said, “Fuck this,” and pressed forward and the man slashed at him several quick times and the Kid fended with his hands but kept advancing and he backed the man against the wall and then charged into him with fists flailing. Bob leaped in and grabbed the man in a headlock and wrestled the bottle from him and drove it into his face and the man screamed. Now the Kid had the man by the hair and was biting into his ear and the man screamed again as his ear came away in the Kid’s teeth. Bob and the man fell together in the mud and the kid kicked the man in his gashed face again and again and the man stopped screaming now and Bob was cursing and yelling “You kicking me, goddammit!” and turned loose of the man and rolled away from the Kid’s frenzy.

John Ashley was laughing as he grabbed Kid Lowe by the collar and yanked him back and caught him in a bear hug from behind and said, “All right there, killer, all right, I believe you done made your point on the fella.” Kid Lowe’s breath was heaving, his lean muscles twitching under John Ashley’s grasp.

Now Gordon Blue came forward from the shadows where he’d sought refuge and said, “Jesus Christ Almighty! Are they dead, any of them?”

Bob Ashley made a quick examination of the fallen and verified that all were alive, though none was conscious and the one whose face he and the Kid had mutilated was bleeding badly from a gash in his neck and breathing erratically. “This one aint like to make it,” he said.

“Oh Christ,” Gordon Blue said, and took a look around to see if there might be witnesses. “Let’s get the hell out of here—now.”

The Kids fury had abated and he said, “You can let go me now.” He put his hands to John Ashley’s arms to free himself of his embrace and John Ashley felt their touch slicked with blood.

“Damn, Kid, let’s see them hands.” He pulled the Kid over closer to the street where the light was better. “I need some kinda bandage here,” he said.

Bob Ashley stripped the shirt off the Logan fellow and tore it in two and John Ashley held the Kid’s dripping hands out while Bob bandaged them tightly each in turn. He told the Kid the niggerwrap job would have to do till they got him home and Ma could tend to his wounds proper. Both brothers were grinning as Bob finished tying off the bandages and remarked how damned glad he was that Kid Lowe was on their side because he sure didnt fancy fighting somebody who was half-crazy and half-cannibal besides. Kid Lowe was grinning with them now and saying the ear didn’t taste half bad and maybe he ought to have cut the other one off him to have for breakfast in the morning. They all three laughed.

And now Gordon Blue was tugging at John Ashley’s arm with one hand and at Bob Ashley’s with the other and saying, “Let’s go, let’s go!” and the look on his face made them all three laugh the harder. And then they cleared out of there fast.

Two days later Kid Lowe was living in a small pinewood cabin behind the outside kitchen of the Ashley home. And three weeks after that, Ma Ashley’s good stitches now removed from his hands and his hands almost completely unstiffened, he went with John and Bob Ashley on his first alligator hunt. Although cracker by blood, he’d been raised fatherless and brotherless, without masculine mentor of any sort, and thus had not been taught the usual wildland skills most crackers early acquired. He owned all the natural inclinations, however, and took to poling an Everglades skiff as one long practiced at it. At supper that night the Ashleys listened in high amusement to him tell all about how well he’d learned from John Ashley to bark like a dog to call alligators into open water for easier killing. He could not stop talking of the three gators he’d killed and the two he had skinned mostly by himself after the brothers taught him how to take the hide off the first one. None of the Ashleys minded listening to Kid Lowe’s story three times over as they sipped at cups of old Joe’s best. They knew the little cracker from the city was but happy to be among his own kind.

The next time they saw Gordon Blue he told them there had been but one recent mention in the Miami newspapers of a dead man found in an alley but the alley in question was not the one where they had fought the three men. “If that fella in the alley didnt, ah, make it,” Gordon Blue said, “his friends must’ve taken him away from there.”

John Ashley still slipped into West Palm Beach every now and then to visit Miss Lillian’s and be with blind Loretta May. They were easy with each other now as they were with no one else, and had for a while even played a game whereby they would make bets as to what part of her he was looking at while they caressed each other’s nakedness. At first they bet a dollar each time but after she lost the first five times she suggested they raise the bet to five dollars, saying maybe she could do better if there was more at stake. He said all right, but he hated taking advantage. She said he shouldn’t feel guilty about it because after all it was her who wanted to raise the ante. She won the next five times in a row before he realized she’d conned him thoroughly, that she knew exactly where his eyes were on her at all times, and how she knew this did not trouble him as much as the fact that she used the knowledge to hornswoggle him. One more time, he said. On the next bet she said that he was looking at her left breast, which he was, but he told her she was wrong, he was looking at her belly, and she laughed with such delight that he knew she knew he was lying and he had to laugh too. He tried to summon a proper degree of indignation. “I dont know how you know what I’m lookin at, but knowin it and pretendin you dont know just cause you’re blind, thats the same as cheatin.” At which she could only laugh. “And it aint cheatin to make bets with a blind person about what you lookin at?”

After their lovemaking one night she asked if he had many dreams. Did she mean dreams like things he wanted to do real bad before he died, he asked, or dreams like things you see in your sleep at night. “Night dreams,” she said. He said it was funny she should ask that because, truth be told, he knew he’d been dreaming a lot lately but he could never remember the dreams when he woke up.

“Funny thing is,” he said, “while I’m havin the dreams it’s like I know they’re showin me things that’re real, or…true somehow. I mean, when I wake up thats the feelin I have, that I just dreamt about somethin true, only I cant remember what it was.”

“You will,” she said. “The time’ll come you will.”

He looked at her for a long moment, unsure whether to ask her what she meant. And now, as he stared at her smiling face, she said, “You’re looking at my mouth—thats another five dollars you owe me.”

He gave a mock roar and fell on her, saying, “You bat-blind little witch!”

And laughing, wrestling happily, they made love once again.

Gordon Blue’s estimation of how long it would take to resolve Kid Lowe’s Chicago troubles proved overly optimistic and two months later the Kid was still residing with the Ashleys, though he didn’t at all mind and neither did the family. He was proud that the largest of the three turkeys Ma and the girls roasted for Christmas dinner was one he’d shot. In addition to taking him hunting and trapping with his brothers, John Ashley now allowed him to come with him on whiskey drops to the Indians and Kid Lowe marveled at the alien wonders of these primitive villages in the heart of the Devil’s Garden.

The Kid liked Twin Oaks but he loved the whiskey camps. He loved their wildness. He loved the stygian nights when the orange pinefires under the great copper kettles were the only light save that of the moon and stars to hold at bay an encompassing darkness greater than imagination could conjure. The fires raised trembling shadows against the closely standing hardwoods hung with moss and twisted vines that held to the earth like umbilicals. The blackness beyond the fireglow stirred and rustled and splashed and sometimes sounded of fluttering wing. From the greater darkness came deep quivering grunts of alligators whose forebears had themselves looked upon dinosaurs. Came skin-tightening shrieks of panthers at mate, sporadic outcries of prey falling to predator. The night swamp was ever clamorous with blood. The air pungent with the redolence of muck and water seasoned richly with matter living and dead.

On nights as these they sat about the kettle fire into the late hours and smoked pipe and cigarette and sipped whiskey and told stories both real and invented to entertain each other. They never tired of hearing of the night John Ashley took a drive to Twin Oaks after several weeks of hiding out at whiskey camp and Ma Ashley stepped out on the porch and fired a doubleblast of her shotgun in the air to warn him of the policemen lurking in the surrounding brush.

“Old Johnny just hustled on up to the turnaround and stomped on the brake and kicked her into reverse and turned that Lizzie around on a damn silver dollar and right back out we went,” Ed Ashley said, who had been in the car with John that night. “Cut off the headlamps so they couldnt see us but then naturally we couldnt see a damn thing neither. Lord knows how many times we run into the palmettos on either side of that little-bitty trail getting back to the main road in the dark. We was bouncing all over hell and I about got throwed right out the damn car more’n once, I mean to tell you.”

It was early in the new year and their breath showed vaguely gray on the dark chill air. They were at the whiskey camp in the Hungryland Slough and about fifteen miles west of Juno Beach—John and Ed Ashley, Kid Lowe and Claude Calder, a rough and rangy bucktoothed youth, a longtime friend of the Ashleys and Old Joe Ashley’s main deliveryman to most clients north of Fort Pierce. On this night Bob and Frank Ashley were helping their father out at the Sand Cut camp on Lake Okeechobee.

John Ashley spat into the fire and laughed with the others at the memory of that wild night ride. “Bet when Ma let go with that shotgun,” he said, “then police in the bushes pissed their pants.”

“They say Sheriff George about had a fit when he heard about it,” Claude Calder said.

“He surely did,” Ed Ashley said. “Came out to the house next day and told Ma she could get in trouble for aidin and abettin a fugitive from the law. Ma just looked at him like he was simple and said she didnt know nothin about no abettin nor any such gamblin talk, she’d just been shooting at some old hooty owl been tryin to get at a new litter of pups under the front porch.”

“Them damn Bakers,” Claude said. “You all heard Sheriff George done made Bobby his chief deputy?”

“I know it,” Ed Ashley said. “That sumbuck Bobby’s gonna be the sheriff before you know it, just watch and see.” Even in the vague and shifting light of the fire, the cordlike scar across his mouth was visible and made him look about to laugh or about to cry, you couldnt be sure which. An Okeechobee catfisher had cut him with a filleting knife in a fight over a Hardieville whore named Della. Ed Ashley had then beaten the man senseless with a spitoon and had just snatched up the man’s dropped knife and was set to shove it into his heart when he was pried away by the bouncer and a sheriff’s deputy. He spent the night in jail and his father bailed him out the next day. He waited a couple of weeks until his wound was partially healed before he went back to Miami to see Della again but by then she had departed for places unknown. Another of the girls tried to console him by pointing out that he likely wouldnt have won her over anyway, not now, not with that awful scar, since Della always had been one to prize handsomeness. Ed Ashley had not spoken of her since, not even to Frank, but not a day passed that he did not think of her.

“Maybe Bobby’ll become sheriff before Sheriff George knows it,” Claude Calder said, and everybody laughed.

“I seen him up to Stuart just the other day,” Ed Ashley said as he worked open a fresh jar of whiskey. He took a tentative taste and worked his tongue around it and considered and then nodded his approval. “You know, I do believe daddy’s still gettin some better at his business, I truly do.”

“You seen who? Bobby?” John Ashley said. “What was he up to? Still running his mouth about what a sumbitch I am to of run off and what a good man he is for not shooting me?”

“Like usual, yeah,” Ed said. “Told me to tell you again, when you ready to meet him face-to-face just the two of you, you let him know.”

“Face-to-face, my ass,” John Ashley said. He spat. “You know as well as I do, he’ll say he’s gonna meet me just us two and then have a dozen damn deputies hid all around to jump me soon’s I show up. Man’s a born liar. If he said the ocean’s made of salt water I’d expect it to taste like sugar. I tell you, I’m of a mind to slip up to his house one a these nights and call him out, just us two, and see what happens.”

“I told him I’d take him on anytime,” Ed said, “but he gimme a shit-eatin grin and said it’s been between him and you. Before I could say another word he went on in the bank to add to his pile of money.”

“I bet it is a pile, too,” Claude Calder said. “Only I hear it’s Sheriff George raking in the money, not Bobby. They say Bobby just runs it to the bank for him. But I bet anything he gets a cut.”

“It’s always been talk Sheriff George takes money, but I never heard anybody but a known liar say Bobby does,” John Ashley said. “But he’ll for damn sure do whatever his daddy tells him, and if Daddy says pick up money from someplace or take money to the bank, thats what he’s gonna do.”

“I heard from Miss Lillian that Sheriff George takes a cut from every gambling joint and whorehouse in the county—nigger and white both,” Ed Ashley said. “She said he’d jacked up his cut to twenty percent and she cant hardly make a profit anymore unless she raises her own prices. Said she called him a thief and he laughed at her and said it aint thievin to steal from criminals.”

“He got some interestin notions of justice, Sheriff George,” John Ashley said. Nobody spoke for a moment and then he said, “They really keep their money in the Stuart bank? Maybe Bobby was just seeing to some kind of police business.”

“Hell, John,” Ed said, “he had a damn bag right there in his hand and if it wasn’t fulla money I’ll kiss your ass.”

“How you know it was money in it?”

“Cause I seen him take it to the teller and hand it over to him and stand there while the fella went off with it to someplace in back and in a minute the fella comes back and hands him a piece of paper and Bobby sticks it in his shirt, thats how come I know it. I was waitin for him to come out. I said, ‘Let’s you and me step around back in alley and you take off that badge and we’ll see whose ass is the blackest.’ He just give that smile some more and said to tell you he’s waitin on you, and off he went, the chickenshit son of a bitch.”

For a minute none of them said anything, each man drifting on his own thoughts. Then Kid Lowe said: “You know, somebody ought rob that bank and all them Bakers’ money in it.”

Ed Ashley grinned his wretched grin and glanced at John, who smiled and cut his gaze to the fire. Bob had told the other Ashley brothers about John’s Galveston bank job and John had then sworn them all to keep it secret from their father. Still, all of the brothers had a feeling their father somehow knew about it. “Hell, boy,” Ed said, turning back to the Kid, “what-all you know about robbin a damn bank?”

Kid Lowe turned to him with a glower, then looked around at the others, then behind him, then spat into the fire. “I guess it’s all right to tell you boys something.” He looked around again as if checking the surrounding shadows for signs of spies. “The thing is,” he said in lowered voice, “I’m a bank robber is what I am.” He smiled with shy pride. “Dont guess any you all’s gonna turn me in, are you?”

The others exchanged looks. Claude Calder chuckled. Ed Ashley snorted and said, “Shiiit! You never.”

“Hell I aint,” the Kid said. “It’s how come I’m here. I robbed four banks all told in Chicago and was doing all right, if I say so myself, till I robbed this one bank on State Street. There was a dumbshit guard just couldnt do like I told him to put his hands behind his head and so he got himself shot.” He paused to spit and take a sip of whiskey.

“You shot a bank guard?” Ed Ashley said. “You kill him?”

“Oh hell no,” the Kid said. “Wasnt aimin to. All I did was wound him in the gut a little bit. He didnt die till long after, about two weeks later. Caught the pneumonia in the hospital and died.”

“Well hell,” John Ashley said, “he caught the pneumonia because he was bad wounded, thats what happened.”

Kid Lowe flung his arms wide in exasperation. “That’s just exactly what the damn cops in Chicago told everybody including the newspapers.” The bitter memory gave his voice an edge. “Sorry sonofabitches. How do they know the fella didnt catch pneumonia for some other reason? How do you know he didnt? Maybe somebody with pneumonia sneezed on him. Maybe he wasnt warm enough in that damn hospital and he caught a cold and it got worser till it became pneumonia. That could of happened. They dont know thats not what happened. But noooo, they right away say he got pneumonia because he was wounded. And because I’m the one wounded him I’m the one to blame he’s dead. Makes me so goddamn mad I wish the sumbitch was alive so I could shoot him again.”

“So you down here hiding from the Chicago police?” Ed Ashley said.

Kid Lowe shrugged, spat, took another sip of whiskey, looked around at nothing in particular.

“How much did you get from these here bank robberies?” Claude Calder said. “You must got yourself a rich stash someplace, eh?”

“Dont I wish,” Kid Lowe said. “Most the jobs didnt get me even two thousand dollars. And the way I was living—you know, girls, the racehorses, nice clothes—well, the money went pretty damn quick, you bet.”

He took a drink of whiskey and looked sharply at Ed Ashley. “So dont be asking me what I know about robbing banks. I’m the only damn one here knows anything about it because I’m the only damn one here ever done it.”

Ed Ashley met his stare for a moment, then turned to John and raised his eyebrows. John was grinning at the Kid and the Kid looked at him sharply and John Ashley said, “Well boy, that aint exactly right.”

They hadn’t been at all sure what Old Joe would think of the idea. While John Ashley explained it to him a few evenings later, all of them sitting around the firepit back of the Twin Oaks house, Old Joe gave no sign of his inclination as he listened without expression, puffing his pipe and sipping his whiskey and occasionally spitting into the fire. And when John had explained everything in detail and sat back to hear what his father thought of it, he who might dismiss the whole thing with a shake of his head, Old Joe did not answer right away but refired his pipe and refilled his cup and sat smoking and drinking and staring into the fire.

Nobody spoke for five minutes. And then, his eyes still on the flames, Joe Ashley said: “I don’t understand it. All this trouble because of some worthless Injun. That goddamn George Baker’s been a real mullethead recent and thats a fact. I hear tell he’s drinkin moren usual. He looks it. Startin to get that yellow look around the eyes. But whatever’s botherin him aint no good excuse for takin hisself so damn serious as he’s been. I heard tell he said if he ran you down he’d take you in any way he had to. Heard tell those were his exact words: any way he had to. When I saw him up to Blue’s store last month I went over and asked was it true he said that. He said it was. I said the day he did serious harm to any of you boys was the day I’d lay him in his grave. He knew I meant it. Bobby was there and started to run his mouth at me but George told him shut up.” He looked skyward and regarded the stars. “You know Freddie Baker, Bobby’s cousin? He’s a deputy too.”

John Ashley nodded. “More like brothers than cousins, some say. Spose to be a good old boy and a rough one, but he aint never looked all that rough to me.”

“I heard tell,” Old Joe said, “Freddie was in the Doghouse Bar the other night saying his Uncle George is gonna run the Ashleys out of Palm Beach County or know the reason why. Saying it like it’s somethin good as done.”

“I heard that talk,” John Ashley said. “We all have. We waitin to see them try.”

“Them damn Bakers are kindly startin to irritate me,” Old Joe said. He spat hard into the fire.

They all sat silent and the minutes passed. Then Old Joe said: “You sure they keep they money in that bank?”

“Yessir.”

Joe Ashley sighed and stared into the fire. “Cant imagine why anybody’d trust his money to a damn bank.”

John Ashley laughed. “Me either. Somebody’s like to steal it.”

Old Joe nodded in the manner of one being told something he already knew. “Bill says the fedral govment’s sooner or later gonna pass the law against alcohol,” he said. “Probly not for a coupla three four years yet, he dont think, but he says a smart man would start getting ready right now. Says the demand’s gonna be way more than we can ever fill with just our own operation. Says if we get us a good fast boat and rig it proper we can bring in ever kind of labeled hooch when the time comes. Bring it from the Bahamas. Course now, a good boat costs plenty, and riggin it up for our purpose gonna cost more.” He paused and spat. Then said: “I guess what I wanna know is, is it a lot of money in that bank?”

John Ashley shrugged. “Dont know, Daddy.” He smiled. “But if it aint, there’s plenty more banks.”

Old Joe returned his smile for a moment, then his aspect went serious. “They already got so many warrants on you I guess it dont matter much if they add any more, even for a damn bank. But I dont want you takin no chances you aint got to. You see any police around before you go in, you forget the job. Wait and do it another time. You hear?”

“I hear you, Daddy.” His heart jumped with excitement.

Old Joe turned to Frank and Ed and Bob. “But you boys, you aint none of you under warrant for a damn thing and I dont want you to be.”

Bob Ashley cut his eyes to John whose look told him to keep quiet. Frank and Ed dug at the dirt with sticks, ready as always to do without objection whatever their daddy said.

“Damn Bakers,” Old Joe said and spat hard into the fire. “They kindly irritatin hell outa me.”