Red Grass River

TEN

February—October 1915

THE DOCTOR WAS A HEAVYSET BEARDED MAN NAMED BOYER. WITH the assistance of a horse-faced nurse called Rachel he worked on John Ashley’s jaw in the narrow confines of an isolation cell of the Palm Beach County Jail. He was able to remove all bullet fragments and was obliged to scrape much less of the shattered jaw than he had thought would be necessary on his initial examination. He set the jawbone, then clamped it with a wire brace, and he put John Ashley on a liquid diet for the next few weeks. He assured him that there would be only a slight perceivable disfigurement to his face once the scars healed. The overall tissue damage had also proved much less severe than it had seemed to Boyer at first sight, though John Ashley’s voice now registered lower than before and his sinuses would evermore trouble him at night and the wound in his hard palate would never heal completely and would occasionally become slightly infected. He had lost but two teeth—a bicuspid and adjoining molar.

He awakened with an eyepatch and a burning sensation under it. The doctor was at a loss to explain how the bullet could have done so much damage to the eye, which was outside the trajectory that took the round through the nosebone and palate to lodge in the jaw. He spoke of major trauma to the sclera and cornea and ciliary processes, of the loss of vitreous humor and of massive damage to the retina. John Ashley stared at him with his bloodshot right eye and saw him in a world gone skewed and narrow and he quite suddenly knew that the darkness under the eyepatch was greater than human vision could perceive and realized the socket was empty and thats what the doctor was trying to tell him. He had a instant’s vision of Bob Baker’s huge yellow teeth in the moment before his thumb set off the red explosion in his skull.

Bob Baker stopped by twice. The first time in the company of Sheriff George, who’d come to notify John Ashley officially that in addition to the charges of murdering Jimmy Gopher and escaping from custody, he now also stood charged for bank robbery and the attempted murder of five police officers. Sheriff George was all business and looked at John Ashley as if he were a stranger. Bob Baker said nothing but stood behind his father and smiled all the while. He looked wellrested. When Sheriff George turned to leave, Bob Baker put a thumb up to his own eye and turned his hand in a sharp corkscrew motion and shut the eye under the thumb and made a face of mock pain. Then he opened both eyes and grinned hard at John Ashley and left. Doctor Boyer watched the whole thing, and when Bob Baker had gone he sighed and shook his head.

A week later John Ashley lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head and thought of blind Loretta May and felt closer to her by virtue of his own half-blindness. He recalled the peach smell of her and the freshness of her yellow hair, the pale smoothness of her skin. He was enjoying the feel of the partial erection pressing snug in his pants when he sensed someone at the cell door. He looked over there and saw a pair of shadowed eyes at the small slotted window and even in the dim light he recognized them. “Hey, Bobby,” he said. “How you keepin?” Come on, he thought—step in here for just a minute. The eyes pinched up in deliberation or amusement and a moment later they were gone.

He had begun to have dreams now such as he’d never had before. He saw things in his sleep and felt that what he saw was somehow real, though at times he knew too—without knowing how he knew—that what he saw had not yet happened. In one such dream he saw a woman he did not recognize, saw her vaguely. She smelled of the swamp, and under that redolence he caught the scents of her skin and hair and sex as keenly as if she were standing beside him. She seemed to loom over him as a wavering pale figure and he felt the heat of her skin and then her face was right in front of his and still he could not see her clearly but for her green eyes and a tiny gold quarter-moon in the iris of one of them.

In another dream he saw Kid Lowe in prison stripes and on a crutch and with a bandaged head, saw him redfaced and shouting and though for some reason he could not hear him he knew somehow that the Kid was cursing because he’d been proved right about the bank holding out on them. And so, when Gordon Blue came to visit and told him that the Stuart bankers were crowing to the newspapers about how they’d managed to withhold some ten thousand dollars from the bandits by simply not emptying all the cash drawers into the money bag, John Ashley was both irritated and a little embarrassed but not really surprised.

He was permitted no visitors but his lawyer, and Gordon Blue apprised him that the state’s attorney had revived his motion to move his trial for the murder of DeSoto Tiger to Dade County. “I’m playing every ace I’ve got to keep it from happening, Johnny, but I have to tell you the odds aren’t good. They mean to have the trial in Miami come hell or high water.”

Gordon Blue told him of Old Joe’s fury on leaning that Bob Ashley had been in on the job after he had expressly forbidden any of his sons but John from acting on it. “I was going over some accounts with your daddy at Twin Oaks when Bob and Kid Lowe showed up and told him what happened. Your daddy was so mad at Bob for being in the holdup he took a strop to him like he was some disobedient child. I couldnt believe Bob would stand for it, but he took off his shirt and leaned against the side of the house like Joe told him to, and Joe let him have it with that strop a good dozen times. I mean, he gave him a hell of a hiding. Some of those welts were thick as your finger. Marked up his whole back all red and purple. Big as he is, Bob might’ve taken that strop away from Joe and beat him with it. It just amazes me that he stood for it.”

John Ashley gave Gordon Blue a puzzled look. “Hell, Gordy, what else he gonna do but stand for it? It’s our daddy, man. You dont hit your daddy, he hits you. It’s who a daddy is—the one to hit you when you done wrong. Bob done wrong and he knew it.”

Two weeks later the judge granted the state’s motion to have the trial moved to Dade County. Within an hour of the judge’s ruling a rock with a note wrapped around it came crashing through the window of the jail office and so tense were the police in the room that pistols cleared holsters before everyone realized what happened. The note said that if John Ashley wasnt released from jail immediately Sheriff George’s house would be burned to the ground and no matter who might be inside it at the time. It was signed “the Ashley Gang.” Sheriff George sent two armed deputies to keep watch on his house and family and deputized several friends to add to the jail guard force.

Barely an hour later a county deputy found a note on the seat of his motorcar. It read: “Tell Sheriff George to let johnnie go or perpare to pay the consequences. We mean bisness. The Ashley gang.”

Sheriff George affected to shrug it off, but his men could see the anger working in his jaw, the sudden distance in his eyes. He made secret plans with his son Bob and two evenings later and without advance notice to anyone he showed up at the jail a little past midnight and ordered John Ashley brought out of his cell. They manacled his hands behind him and put leg irons on him. They flanked him with guards carrying shotguns and hustled him out into a touring car with tarp covers tied over both sides of the rear of the car and put him in the backseat with two guards. Another guard got in the front with the driver and held a shotgun over the seat with the muzzle within inches of John Ashley’s chest. John Ashley laughed and said, “Goddamn if you boys aint makin me feel like Jesse James.”

Sheriff George appeared at the car window and put a finger in John Ashley’s face. “One more word out of you, just one more—and Deputy Bradford’s gonna blow a hole in you big enough to throw a dog through. Go ahead, say something. See if I dont mean it. I had all the trouble from you I aim to stand.” John Ashley could see that Sheriff George was scared and absolutely serious.

“He opens his mouth again, Bradford,” Sheriff George said, “it’s the same as trying to escape and I want you to blast him, you understand?” The deputy holding the shotgun on John Ashley said, “Yes-sir.” John Ashley heard Bob Baker laugh somewhere out in the darkness.

Sheriff George withdrew from the car and called, “Bobby, you and Freddie lead off. Let’s go.”

Bob Baker and Freddie Baker got into a roadster and led the prisoner vehicle out of the jailyard. Sheriff George and another deputy followed in a chattering coupé. They drove to the railroad station and the train was there and waiting. They put John Ashley aboard the baggage car and left the chains on him and put a double lock on the inside of the doors and kept two shotguns trained on him for the entire trip.

When the following sunrise broke like bright fire out of the distant rim of the Atlantic Ocean, John Ashley was watching it with his single eye from a barred window of the Dade County Jail.

“No,” Old Joe said. “No. There aint gone be no tryin to break him out. It’s just no need for anything risky as that. And hear me good, boy—you write even one more a them notes to George Baker and I’m gonna take a grub hoe to your head. You understand? You aint helpin a damn thing with them fucken notes.”

“We got to do something, Daddy,” Bob Ashley said. “They beatin on him ever day. They whippin him like a damn dog, whippin him all the time. They spittin in his food, pissin in his coffee. They wont empty his slop pail. You heard about it same as us.”

“I heard it from people who dont know the facts of it anymore’n you do.” Old Joe said. “Gordy saw him just yesterday again for about the tenth damn time and you heard him say it aint any of it true. They’re feedin him all right and they aint pissin in his coffe or none of that bullshit. Gordy says he aint got a mark on him but from being shot in the face—and we know it wasnt them who did that, dont we?” He gave Kid Lowe a look and the Kid fixed his gaze on a sparrowhawk in the upper branches of a slash pine.

They were seated at a puncheon table alongside the Twin Oaks house—Old Joe and his four unjailed sons and Kid Lowe and Gordon Blue. The woman were at washing clothes in big steaming tin tubs behind the house. The cicadas were loud in the oaks and a great flock of white herons was wingbeating across the purpling sky and past a low orange sun. Mosquitoes keened at the men’s ears. The ripe smells of encroaching summer were on the air: hot wet earth and spawning bluegills and fresh nests of cottonmouths along the waterway banks.

“They hittin him where it dont show is why Gordy dont see no marks on him,” Bob said. “They dont clean his cell not give him nothing fit to eat but when Gordy goes to visit.”

“How is it you know so much more than everybody else?” Bill Ashley asked. Though he was Old Joe’s chief advisor, it was a rare thing for him to appear at a family council and even rarer for him to speak up at one. When he was in attendance he usually passed the time doodling in a notebook while everyone else did the talking. His brothers sometimes did not see him for weeks at a time. Unlike their own hands and necks, which were burned red-brown by the sun, his had the pallor of indoor life. He wore suspenders and sleeve garters and bow ties and wire-rim spectacles. He never asked any of them to visit his home and none of them had seen his wife but once or twice since the day of his marriage. In some ways he was less familiar to them than Kid Lowe or Gordon Blue.

That distance between him and his youngest brothers had widened even more after John and Bob robbed the Stuart bank. Bill thought they were fools to hold up a bank, which he saw as excessively risky. “There’s too many other ways to make as much money,” he’d said to Old Joe, “without near as much chance of something going wrong like it did in Stuart. As soon’s whiskey’s illegal all over the country you’ll see what I mean.”

Old Joe had shrugged and let the matter drop. A part of him knew Bill was right. He felt like a fool for having given John permission to rob the bank. He felt at fault that John was now one-eyed and in jail. But another part of him could not deny the pleasure of having more than $7,000 of the bank’s money, having it because his boys had been bold enough to take it. He already had in mind a boat he could buy with that money—a sleek fast craft that with a few modifications would be perfect for carrying whiskey. But the news that the bank had cheated them of some ten thousand dollars was enraging. And it infuriated him further to think that Sheriff George might have convinced the bank that all the Baker money was with the cash the bank had saved and none of it gone off in Johnny’s croker sack.

Now Bob Ashley gaped at Bill, at once surprised at hearing him speak up and angry at what he’d said. “Hey bubba,” Bob Ashley said, “When I want shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head.”

“Ah hell, Bob,” Frank Ashley said.

“Real bright,” Bill Ashley said, looking at Bob with disdain. “You’re a natural-born fool, you know that?”

“Go to hell, Billy,” Bob Ashley said. “This aint never gonna be none your business—not while you sittin on your ass all day and markin in books while some of us are out there doin things.”

“That’s enough, the both you,” Old Joe said. “Now I told you all how it’s gonna be. We’re gonna wait and see can Gordy get the murder charge dropped. If he can do that, then the bank robbery trial’ll come back to Palm Beach and like as not we’ll get us a good jury for it.”

“He been in there more’n three months already,” Bob said. “He’s gonna serve life in prison before he ever gets to trial.”

“Have a little patience, Bob—these things take time,” Gordon Blue said. “You know how slow the law works.”

“Dont you be tellin me too what I got to do!” Bob Ashley said.

Gordon Blue sighed and looked away.

“Daddy, look we just got to—” Bob Ashley began, but Old Joe held up a hand to cut him short.

“No, I said. That’s the end of it.”

A week later Bob Ashley, Kid Lowe and Claude Calder sat at a corner table in the dim recesses of the Flamingo Restaurant across the road from the Fort Lauderdale depot and just two blocks removed from one of their favorite brothels, at which establishment they had passed the earlier part of the evening. They surreptitiously poured whiskey into their cups long since emptied of coffee and once more went over the details of the operation. They had been three days in Miami, ensconced in a rundown hotel a block from the Dade County Jail. They had watched carefully, made notes, followed people to and from the jail, established routines, set up an escape route to the Dixie Highway and an alternate route westward from Miami and into the Everglades. They had also been drinking steadily the while, a factor none among them considered important.

“Your daddy’d skin you alive he knew what you’re up to,” Claude Calder said. He fingered his mutilated right ear, a nervous habit he’d developed of late.

“Hell, bubba,” Bob Ashley said, “tomorrow night Johnny’ll be a free man and Daddy wont be doin nothing but pattin me on the back for it, you’ll see.”

“He damn sure will,” Kid Lowe said. “Old Joe’s a smart fella and smart fellas dont care about nothin but results. I’m proud to be in on this with you, Bob.”

“Well I’m proud to have you in on it, Kid.”

They raised their cups in a toast to their success. A whistle shrilled and a locomotive heaved a huge gasp and a train began its huffing, clanking departure and the smells of smoke and hot cinders carried into the restaurant.

They left for Miami before sunup, clattering along in a Model T touring car with the top down, the headlamps casting weak yellow light over the sandy road ahead. They’d stayed up late the night before, repeatedly toasting themselves for the boldness of their plan, and every man of them had walked at a list when they at last headed for the hotel and to bed. They’d directed the night manager to awaken them at five o’clock sharp and so had the man tried to do, but his pounding on the doors had failed to rouse them and he’d had to go in the rooms and shake each of them in turn to grumbling consciousness. Now they were all of them red-eyed and surly and their spirits did not lift until Bob Ashley reached under the front seat and withdrew a sealed bottle of true Kentucky bourbon.

“Was savin this for after we got Johnny in the car,” he said, “but bedamn if I aint in bad need of a little bite of it right now.” He unsealed the bottle and turned it up and bubbled it with a huge swal-low. He blew a hard breath and said in a strictured voice, “Whoo! That oughta chase some of them snakes out of my head.”

They passed the bottle around and they all quickly came to feel much better. By the time they went through the hamlet of Lemon City just a couple of miles north of Miami the bottle was empty. Kid Lowe threw it arcing from the car and it shattered against the trunk of an oak where several small Negro children were playing and the kids scattered like spooked grackles. The men’s hard laughter trailed out of the car.

They stopped at a Little River gasoline station and alighted and removed the from seat to expose the fuel tank. Bob unscrewed the cap and poked the sounding stick into the tank and determined that it was more than half-full but went ahead and filled it anyway.

A pair of greasy dogs suddenly came together in a snarling snap-ping tangle alongside the garage and as quickly broke apart and one of them slunk away as the other stood growling after it. The day was brightly blue but uncommonly cool and dry for June in South Florida: a thermometer on the front wall registered but seventy-seven degrees. A sweetly briny breeze came off the ocean and rustled the palms. Despite the fair weather the three were avidly thirsty from the previous night’s drinking and the morning’s bourbon and they bought two bottles of cold beer each from the station proprietor’s secret cache in the rear room and the beer did appease their dry tongues. Then they drove on into Miami.

They passed the Florida East Coast Railroad depot and all of them glanced down the adjoining road that led west to a fish camp at the edge of the Everglades and was their alternate escape route. They drove slowly down the boulevard and admired the beautiful schooners anchored offshore and the yachts moored in the bay and tied up at the docks. They pointed out to each other every pretty woman they saw strolling on the sidewalks and even some who were not so pretty.

They marveled aloud at the rate the town was growing and only Bob lamented this steady rise in population, predicting that the day would come when there’d be so damn many people in Miami they’d probably have to drain the Everglades all the way up to the river rapids. The more people came the more they’d have to drain just to make room for them—and then what would happen to all the good hunting, he wanted to know. Kid Lowe and Claude Calder snorted at this.

Kid Lowe said he sounded like some old fart who wanted everything to stay exactly the same forever. “This is progress, brother,” Kid Lowe said. “It’s what makes the world go round. Get in its way and it’ll run right over your young ass.”

“If this is progress, you all can have it,” Bob Ashley said.

A couple of blocks above Flagler Street Claude turned off the bay boulevard and navigated the inner streets and they came now to the hotel where they’d stayed and went past it and then slowly past the Dade County Jail. Since John Ashley’s incarceration within, the jail’s outer doors were secured at sundown with double lengths of heavy-link chain and heavy padlocks, but during the day the chains were let off. A pair of policemen stood guard at the front door.

They went another block and parked at the curb on the other side of the street and from there had a clear view of the jail. A garage stood directly opposite the jailhouse and cars came and went through its wide front doors. To this side of the jail building and adjoining it was the small residence of the chief jailer Wilber Hendrickson. Bob Ashley checked his pocket watch. “Plenty of time,” he said. “It aint but twenty after twelve.” They had studied Hendrickson’s routine and knew he came home for dinner every day at one o’clock.

The time passed slowly. No one talked. They checked their weapons and then checked them again. They affected to read the newspapers and magazines they’d brought along. None would have admitted it to the others but all were now feeling the pain of the morning’s alcohol and every man of them was dry of mouth from hangover and apprehension. Few people passed by on this street and those who did paid them no mind. At five minutes to one the jail’s front doors swung inward and out stepped Wilbur Hendrickson, a tall sandyhaired policeman with a heavy paunch. Hendrickson chatted with the cops at the door a moment before coming down the steps and turning toward the house next door.

“Let’s do it,” Bob Ashley said. He and Kid Lowe got out of the car.

“Be ready, Claude,” Bob Ashley said. He started across the street toward the jailer’s house and Kid Lowe followed directly behind. They carried their pistols in their waistbands under their untucked shirts. Hendrickson was going through the fence gate and a smiling matronly woman waited for him at the top of the porch steps.

Bob Ashley believed that the more complex a plan, the more that could go wrong with it, and thus the best plan was the simplest. His plan was to get the cell keys from Hendrickson, get the drop on the jail guards and get into the building, get John out of his cell, and get away quick to the safety of the Everglades. Clean and simple. Should complexities arise he would deal with them when they did.

Claude Calder’s job was to get the car in position and wait with the motor running, ready to pull up fast in front of the jail when he saw them bring Johnny out. He now went around to the front of the Ford to crank up the engine. The motor was a good one and usually started on the first good spin of the crank. Not this time. Nor did it fire up on the second spin, nor on the third. Claude Calder’s face was suddenly dripping sweat, his shirt sopped. Kid Lowe and Bob Ashley were almost to the house and seemed not to hear the trouble he was having cops at the jailhouse door. He hurried to the driver’s side and reset the spark lever and then tried the crank again. No luck. Once more he adjusted the spark and this time reset the throttle too and then again spun the crank. Nothing. He felt like shooting the car for a traitor.

Bob and the Kid passed through the fence gate in front of the little house and went up the walk and up onto the porch which was shaded by a lush umbrella tree and Claude Calder could no longer see them. A car came out of the garage across the street from the jail and drove off in the other direction and it occurred to him that the place was full of cars for the taking. He restrained himself from running as he headed for the garage, affecting an air of casual passerby, lips pursed as if whistling, thumbs hooked in his belt loops. As he drew even with the jailer’s house he looked across the street and saw Bob at the screen door and holding his .38 behind him. The Kid stood off to the side and held his own revolver low against his leg. Just then the Kid looked over and spied Claude Calder and he stepped into the sunlight at the edge of the porch and his aspect was perplexed. Claude was now at the garage entry and wanted to somehow let the Kid know what he was up to but the cops at the jail door were idly looking his way and there was nothing to do but go into the garage.

Kid Lowe said, “Hey Bob, you better—” but then a raspy voice said, “Who’s there? Can I help you?” He turned and saw the large figure of the jailer filling the space behind the door, a bib napkin tucked into his collar.

“I’m Bob Ashley, you son of a bitch,” Bob said, and brought the .38 around to brandish it in Hendrickson’s face. “I’ll have those jail keys and I mean right now. Your pistol too. Hand it over easy.”

Hendrickson looked down at the ring of keys attached to his belt as if he was surprised to find them there. His gun was holstered on his other hip. Bob Ashley cocked the revolver and said, “Now, Goddamn you. Keys and gun.”

Hendrickson’s eyes widened as if he’d only just now realized what was happening. “All right, son—you bet—all right,” he said, fumbled at the key ring.

A woman’s voice called from the shadows within: “Will? Will, who is it?”

“Tell her get out here,” Bob Ashley said. He leaned to the side to peer past the jailer into the dim living room.

“No!” Hendrickson said. “You leave her be!” And went for the gun on his hip.

Bob Ashley cursed and fired through the screen and the pistolblast was huge and all in an instant the round passed through Hendrickson’s heart and broke through his shoulderblade and burst out his back and struck the wall behind him in a dark spray of blood. Hendrickson fell as if his legs had gone to water. The woman screamed. Bob Ashley yanked the door off its latch and was squatting to remove the keys from the dead man’s belt when she came rushing from the hallway with a double-barreled shotgun. He dove out to the porch and went tumbling down the steps as she discharged both loads like a thunder-clap and the screen door came apart and portions of the door-jamb sprayed over him into the yard.

Then he was up and running out the fence gate with his pistol still in hand and he caught a glimpse of policemen coming quick from the jail. He ran down the sidewalk ahead of the woman’s screams and the shouting of the cops and saw the Model T still at the curb and Claude Calder nowhere in sight—only a spotted dog trotting away and glancing back at him fearfully. Came a gunshot and the dog bolted and Bob Ashley felt his innards constrict and his pounding heart surged higher into his throat. He ran past the car and around the corner and wondered whatever became of Kid Lowe.

He was on a glaring white street of boarding houses and small store. People stool outside their doors and pointed him out to each other as he ran past and some of them up ahead ducked back indoors on seeing the gun in his hand and some simply crouched as though they might dodge any bullet he sent their way. Some behind him now yelling “Over there! Yonder he goes!” and he knew they were advising pursuers. His chest felt stretched to bursting and every breath seared and he saw at the corner ahead an idling bread truck parked before a grocery store and the driver just then getting into the cab.

He ran to the truck and opened the passenger-side door and clambered onto the seat and thrust the pistol into the driver’s open-mouthed face and yelled, “Go! GO! GO!” The driver was young and freckled and his eyes were big as eggs and for a moment it seemed he would remain immobilized with fright—and then he worked the shift lever with a grinding of gears and the truck lurched into motion.

Behind them came policemen on the run and the lead cop stopped and aimed and fired twice, one round thunking into a bread case, the other ricocheting off the rear fender. Bob Ashley hunkered down on the seat and was glad of the protection of the bread cases back of him. He hollered, “Head for the train station! Go!” His thought was to get to the county road branching off the Dixie Highway at the FEC depot and take that short road to the edge of the Everglades and go it on foot from there. If he could make it to the Devil’s Garden he’d be safe.

He looked back around the bread cases and saw a cop halting an oncoming Dodge and hustling into the car on the passenger side and now the car began to give chase. There sounded another gunshot and he heard the bullet hum past and he jerked back into the truck. The driver was bent low and peering at the road ahead from under the top of the steering wheel, eyes wild and knuckles white. “Oh sweet baby Jesus,” he breathed.

A woman started to run across the street in front of them and then froze like a jacklit doe directly ahead of the truck. The driver stepped hard on the brake and the truck slewed to the right and bounced up over the curb and sideswiped the front of a hardware store in an explosive burst of window glass and veered left again and cases of bread tumbled off the truckbed and broke apart in the street and sent loaves scattering and the truck crashed into the rear of a parked Buick and both the driver and Bob Ashley hit the windshield with their heads and reduced it to shards.

For a moment he was addled and thought he’d been blinded and then realized his vision was but hampered by blood streaming from his forehead. Beside him the driver was slumped unconscious with his head on the door sill and blood running from his pulped nose. He heard an excited babbling and became aware of a crowd gathering at the truck, saw people gaping and pointing—men mostly, some women, some children, some of the faces awed, some horrified, some clenched in outrage. And then a portion of the crowd jumped back as a car braked squealing to a stop beside the steam-hissing truck and the passenger door flew open and a policeman spilled out and loomed over the unconscious driver and pointed a gun at Bob Ashley and said, “Deliver, you son of a bitch! Deliver or—”

Bob Ashley shot him in the face and the cop spun sideways and dropped from view. People screamed and fled in every direction and the other car sped away. He struggled with the door and it sprang open and he fell out onto the sidewalk. He got to his feet and the ground pitched slightly but he recovered his balance and looked about and saw here and there faces peering at him from around doors and from behind ashcans. He swept the pistol over them and they vanished as if he’d done a magic trick.

He thought to drive off in the Buick and went around the front of it to get to the driver’s side. As he stepped into the street he saw the cop sitting alongside the truck. A small dark hole showed under one eye and he held his revolver raised and pointed. The gun cracked and Bob Ashley felt himself roughly shoved backward.

“You son of a bitch,” he said—and shot the cop in the chest and the cop grunted and shot him in the belly and then they fired simultaneously and the cop’s hair jumped and he fell over and lay still and his blood darkly stained the pale limerock paving.

Bob Ashley regarded the unmoving cop for a moment and then his legs quit him and he sat down hard. He looked down at his own bloody stomach and tried to curse but choked on something and he put his hand to his throat and his fingers came away bloodstained. He groaned wetly and looked at the cop and shot him again. Then felt in his stomach a pain beyond any he’d ever known and he could not help but holler with it. He tried to get to his feet but the ground tilted and he fell on his back and saw a pair of gulls winging overhead.

“Bob! You hear me, Bob?”

He opened his eyes to find himself on his side on a bunk. Sheriff Dan Hardie stood before him with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. Bob touched a thick bandage at his throat and then regarded his bloody fingertips. “Hey, Dan,” he said in a voice gargly and foreign to him. “You still puttin it to that high-yella girl over in Little River?” The effort of speech felt such in his chest that he knew he was bad off. His feet were cold. Though the light was dim he could see he was in a jail cell. “Johnny in here?” he asked. “Johnny?” His intended shout came out a croak.

“He cant hear you, he aint in this block,” Sheriff Hardie said. “Listen, Bob, I got to tell you straight. It dont look like you’re goin to make it.”

“Dont feel like it a whole lot, neither,” Bob said, his face clenched against the pain in his belly. He saw now that there were two other men in the room and both of them in black suits and with serious faces pale as frog bellies and he knew at once who they were. “I’ll wager you boys done got me measured for the coffin already,” he said and coughed a gush of bright blood onto the bunksheet.

“Come on, boy—come clean of it,” Hardie said. “Tell us who the others were. We know it was at least two more. Was it your brothers?”

“No,” Bob Ashley managed to say through his teeth. “They never. Wasnt nobody but me in this.”

“Bullshit!” the sheriff said. “Look, Bob, I been a friend to you and yours and you know it. I aint never braced any you. I always let you boys do your business and have your fun. But now—well hell, you’re going over the river, son. Make a clean break of it and tell me: who was in it with you?”

Bob Ashley looked up at him and sighed wetly. With effort, he raised his hand and beckoned Sheriff Hardie closer. The sheriff squatted beside the bunk and leaned forward with his ear close to Bob Ashley’s mouth.

Bob Ashley whispered, “Fuck you, Danny.” And then a long exhalation issued from his throat and was gone into the world’s vast mingle of last breaths.

Even before Sheriff Hardie had began his interrogation of Bob Ashley, word had come to him that a mob was forming in front of the jail and demanding that John and Bob Ashley be delivered to it.

“It’s a hundred of em if it’s one, Sheriff,” a deputy had told him. “They got guns, hatchets, clubs, ropes, ever-damn-thing. It’s lots of Wilbur’s friends out there and lots of old boys who knew J.R. too.”

J. R. Riblett was the patrolman Bob Ashley had killed in the street. The deputy reporting to Hardie was barely nineteen years old and not yet four months on the force. He tried mightily not to let the sheriff see that he was afraid but Hardie heard the fear in his voice and smelled it on him. He put a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and the gesture seemed to calm the boy. The sheriff then ordered that every man on the county force be called in to defend against and assault on the jailhouse—and now a force of some twenty deputies was standing between the jail doors and a mob of hundreds.

The mob’s chanting cries for Ashley blood carried into the jail and down the corridors and into the cell where Bob Ashley lay dying—and carried deeper still to the corridor where two sweating deputies with shotguns stood outside John Ashley’s cell. “Give us Ashley! Give us ASHLEY! Give us ASHLEY!”

The guards had told John about Bob’s attempt to free him and of his failed try at a getaway. Since then they’d been receiving second-hand reports of Bob Ashley’s condition and passing it on to John. The latest word was that Bob had choked to death on his own blood. John Ashley showed no expression when they told him. He lay on his bunk and listened to the mob’s call for vengeance and it seemed to him but an echo of his own heart’s cry.

When the sheriff appeared at the jail doors and the undertaker and his assistant behind him, the mob became frenzied as a zoo at feeding time. The officers on guard looked terrified to a man. Sheriff Hardie knew that if the mob should rush them, his men would start shooting or start running, one or the other, and of his untried officers it was hard to say which of them would do which.

The sheriff raised his hands to try to quiet the mob so he might address it but their cries for Ashley only grew louder. He turned and beckoned into the jail and two deputies came out bearing a sheet-draped body on a stretcher. The mob’s chanting slowly gave way to a snaking murmur. And then one of the men at the front of the crowd cried, “It’s a trick! They sneaking one out under the sheet like he’s dead but he aint!”

“Let’s see!” hollered another. In an instant the chant went up: “Let’s see! Let’s see! LET’S SEE!”

Hardie went to the stretcher and yanked the sheet away to expose the bloody corps of Bob Ashley and the mob abruptly fell mute.

“Take a good look!” the sheriff shouted. “This here’s Bob Ashley and he’s as dead as he’s ever gonna get! Now what you hardcases wanna do? String him up anyway? Wanna beat on him a while? Set him afire maybe? Wanna shoot him some? You all wanna bring your womenfolk up here to see him? Want your kids to have a good look?”

There were mutterings in the crowd but nobody spoke up. Dan Hardie pointed at the jail doors and shouted, “John Ashley’s still in there, but he didnt have a thing to do with any the killing today. That man will stand trial for murdering a damn Indian and if he’s convicted he’ll be hanged. But he aint gonna be hanged today, not by you all or anybody else. Anybody goes in that jail without my say-so is gonna be one sorry son of a bitch and thats a goddamned promise.”

He stood with his hands on hips and swept his gaze over them and every man’s eyes jumped away from his.

And now in softer tone he said, “You all move aside now and let Doctor Combs get this body out of here. I dont want it stinking up my jail.”

And move aside they did.

An hour later Bob Ashley’s body lay alongside those of Wilber Hendrickson and J. R. Riblett in W. H. Combs’ funeral parlor. By then more than a thousand people had gathered outside the parlor and were insisting on seeing the desperado’s remains. Combs became fearful and telephoned the sheriff who advised him to let them look.

So the undertaker placed Bob Ashley’s body in a room by itself and then permitted the public to come in and view it—men and women both, but no children under twelve. He posted a man next to the body to keep people beyond reach of it and prevent them from taking locks of hair or other mementos. The line of gawkers snaked through the front door and into the viewing room and out the side door to the alley through the rest of the afternoon. At nightfall Undertaker Combs pled exhaustion and promised he would show the body again in the morning.

At sunrise, the line of people waiting to go inside was already a block long. Word had spread that Bob Ashley’s corpse was on display to any who cared to see him, and thrillseekers had come from as far off as Palm Beach. Combs was coming up the street toward the parlor when he was approached by two strangers in suits, one of them carrying a camera and rolling a toothpick in his mouth. The other, who looked too big for his clothes, said, “Mister Combs, sir, I’d like a word with you.”

He guided Combs into the alley out of sight and earshot of the waiting line—and though his touch was gentle on Combs’ arm the undertaker could feel the ready strength in his hand. The man said his name was Hal Croves and he would pay Combs thirty dollars for ten minutes in the room with Bob Ashley’s body and no one else in attendance but the photographer.

“Oh, I’m afraid not, Mister Croves,” the undertaker said. “We have a strict policy, you see—to protect the deceased from souvenir takers and such.”

The big man laughed but his eyes roused in Combs a sudden unease. “We,” the big man said. “There aint no we. It’s just you. It’s your policy.” The man’s teeth showed large and yellow and Combs felt the grip on his elbow tighten slightly. “Fifty dollars,” the man said.

“Fif—!” Combs said. He glanced about for eavesdroppers, “Well…I suppose if you were to promise not to actually touch the deceased, and if…”—he took another quick look about—“if you could make it, say, sixty?”

The man laughed again. “Sixty it is,” he said.

Combs let them in by the alley door and showed them to the room where Bob Ashley lay. “I’ll just wait out here,” he said. He consulted a pocketwatch. “Ten minutes.”

“Be just fine,” the big man said. Combs went out in the hall and the big man closed the door and Combs heard the latch slide home. He went to the front door and opened it and announced to the crowd that he was running a little late but they would be permitted inside in just another five minutes. He turned up his palms at the chorus of complaints as if the entire matter were one of those things that couldnt be helped.

When the two men came out again, Combs was waiting in the hall with his hands clasped before him like a penitent. He raised his brow at them. The man named Croves paid him thirty dollars and showed his big yellow teeth and Combs stood there gaping, looking from the money in his hand to the retreating backs of the two men. The big man’s laughter echoed in the high-ceilinged hall as he headed for the alley door.

At eleven o’clock that morning Edward Rogers, Bill Ashley’s father-in-law, arrived haggard and disheveled on the train from Hobe Sound and went directly to the Combs Funeral Parlor and made arrangements to ship Bob Ashley’s body the following day. He said no more than necessary and refused all reporters’ requests for interviews.

There were rumors in the street all day that Old Joe Ashley and his other sons had been in town in disguise, though nobody had any proof of it and nobody could offer a reasonable explanation for their presence other than the possibility that they intended to try to break John Ashley out of jail themselves.

The moment Bob Ashley shot the jailer, Kid Lowe knew the plan was gone to hell. And because he knew Claude Calder had abandoned the car, he figured his best chance for escape was by the alleyway in back of the house. He vaulted the railing at the end of the porch and jogged around to the backyard, holding his pistol low and close against his leg. He nearly jumped at the sound of the shotgun blast from the front of the house and he knew Bob had been at the wrong end of it and was certain he’d been killed.

In the backyard a pair of Negro yardmen stood like statues with their tools in their hands and stared at him in stark fear. He pointed the pistol at them and said, “You aint seen nobody, you hear me?” The two men nodded jerkily and dropped their gaze and Kid Lowe hurried away down the alley.

He walked fast, restraining himself from running even when he heard a gunshot from somewhere near the jail. He reckoned Bob might yet be alive and was making a fight of it—or Claude Calder was. At the end of the alley he paused and heard now more gunshots but from greater distance. He slipped the pistol into his belt under his shirt and walked out onto the sidewalk and saw people hurrying toward the intersecting street that led back to the jail. He went in the other direction.

Two blocks away he stole a new Dodge sedan and made his way to the Dixie Highway and there turned north. At dusk he was just south of Stuart but did not even slow down at the branching oystershell road that led into the dark pinewoods and beyond to the Ashley Twin Oaks house at the edge of the swamps. The last man he wanted to meet with anytime soon was Old Joe Ashley.

He drove and drove and stopped only to take on fuel and buy sandwiches and soda pop beer where he could find it. Just before sunrise he parked within the sound of breakers and slept in the car for a couple of hours and then drove on. He had decided on returning to Chicago to see if he might make his peace with Silver Jack O’Keefe’s former competitors. If they should prove unforgiving he would push on to Detroit and try his luck there.

A few days later and just south of Macon, Georgia, the Dodge began to sputter and ten minutes later it quit altogether and coasted to a halt on the red clay road. In the absence of the motor’s clatter the countryside silence seemed huge. The Kid sat on the front fender and smoked cigarettes and drank his last warm bottle of beer and regarded a pair of redtails wheeling on the hunt over a distant pasture.

Some time later a farmer happened along in his two-mule wagon and they hitched the Dodge to the wagon’s rear axle with rope and the farmer towed it to a smitty shop at the edge of town. He absolutely would not accept the Kid’s offer of a dollar for his help. The smith said the trouble was likely in the fuel line and he could fix it in about a half-hour but wouldnt be able to get to it for an hour yet. He directed the Kid to a barbershop down the block where a man might get a haircut in the chair by the front window or a shot of spirits in the backroom.

It was a dim place but cool and comfortable and the Kid sat on a stool at the makeshift plank bar and threw down two quick shooters before taking a third more slowly with a beer back. His very bones seemed to sigh with pleasure. An hour later he was glass-eyed drunk and ruminating bitterly about the way things had gone in Miami. A beefy fellow came in and straddled the adjacent stool and looked over at him and wrinkled his nose and said, “Whoo! Been a while since you was last near a tub of water, aint it, shorty?”

Kid Lowe squinted blearily at him and wondered if he’d been insulted and seeing no smile on the man’s face decided that he had. In a single smooth motion remarkable in one so drunk he slid off his stool and punched the man squarely in the mouth and man and stood went over onto the floor and the half-dozen other patrons cheered and applauded with delight at this entertaining turn.

The man sat on the floor and gaped up at the Kid less in pain than in astonishment. He put his hand to his bleeding mouth and one of his front teeth came away in his fingers. Someone among the spectators said loudly, “Hey, Turner, you forgot to duck!” and there was a chorus of laughter.

“You half-pint son of a bitch!” The man scrambled to his feet and started for the Kid who in a sudden drunken panic perceived his antagonist as fearsomely and unstoppably huge and in an unthinking defensive reflex drew his pistol from under his shirt and from a distance of less than three feel shot the man though the throat. The man staggered backward with his hands patting at the blood jetting from his neck and spattering those nearest him. He reeled and crumpled to the floor and made rude guttering sounds and the blood was fast pooling round his head.

Now the bartender had the Kid in a headlock and was gripping his gun hand and several others fell to him in the midst of much angry shouting. The gun was wrested from him and the Kid went down flailing. They were cursing him and kicking him and it seemed to him a long time before they stopped. He was hauled to his feet and held by a man on either side of him and he could barely focus on the man before him who told him he was under arrest.

His arm was broken, his nose and ribs and one of his feet. Because he did not know his standing with the organization in Chicago he did not contact anyone there for legal help. He was sure that if he called on Joe Ashley the old man would come to Macon solely to kill him. And so when he went to trial still relying on a crutch and with his arm yet in a cast, he was represented by a court-appointed lawyer named Soames who smelled always of peppermint and had trouble remembering his client’s name. The trial began at nine o’clock in the morning and an hour later he stood convicted of murder in the first degree and the afternoon was sentenced to life imprisonment in the state penitentiary.

Within the year he would escape from the Okeefenokee penal camp where he’d been confined. But he would get lost as he made his breathless way through the sunless depths of the swamp and unwittingly bore ever deeper into that wilderness where even the dogs could not follow. No one in the world would ever know that he plunged into a quicksand bog and drowned and his bones would remain in that muck to the end of time.

There had been no one in the garage but a mechanic at the far end of the room who was busy replacing a tire on a wheel and when he saw Claude Calder enter he called out that he would be with him in a minute. Claude said for him to take his time, he was in no hurry, and headed straight for a Ford touring car exactly like their own. He had just cranked up the motor when he heard the gunshot from somewhere out in front of the building and he was confused, thinking that Bob and the Kid and John Ashley were already making their break from the jail and he wondered how they’d managed to move so fast.

He got behind the wheel and saw the mechanic hurrying toward him saying, “Say there, mister, what you think—” when the shotgun blasted across the street. Both of them glanced in that direction and then Claude kicked the car into gear and worked the throttle and the car clattered forward. The mechanic came running as if he would jump into the car with him and Claude brought his gun into view and the mechanic veered and took cover behind a car.

He heard more pistolshots as he braked at the garage door and he expected to see Kid Lowe and the Ashleys shooting it out with police in front of the jail, but the jailhouse door stood deserted. Gunfire sounded to his right and he hunkered in the car seat as he looked down the street and saw policemen running around the corner. He drove after them as more gunfire sounded.

He made the turn and slowed the car almost to a stop at the sight of a dozen armed cops on the next block where a truck was crumpled and steaming against the smashed back end of a car. Shattered bread boxes littered the limerock pavement. A policeman and another man lay in the street and even at this distance Claude Calder could see that the street under them was stained with blood and that likely both of them were dead. And now he recognized Bob Ashley as one of the two bodies and he pondered the situation for one long moment and then wheeled the car around and headed for home.

He was slow about making his way back. He made frequent stops to take a glass of beer in the backrooms of filling stations and cafes, to shoot a game of pool in one roadhouse or another. When he was in sight of the beach he sometimes parked the car and stripped to his underwear and dove into the breakers to cool off. He knew he would have to go to the Ashleys and tell them what happened but he did not like the idea of having to face Old Joe. Two days after the break attempt he arrived at the oystershell road leading to Twin Oaks. He was hoping John Ashley would not be home, that the old man might be out at one of his whiskey camps.

The trail wound for several miles through palmetto thickets and heavy pine stands and he knew the Ashley lookouts had seen him from the moment he’d turned off the Dixie Highway and had already sent word to the house of who was coming. Now the Ford reverberated over a hundred-yard stretch of jarring corduroy road that carried him through a wide muddy slough flanked by shadowy stands of oak and gumbo limbo hung with vines as thickly as a jungle. The car’s clangor raised a horde of storks from the shallows and up into the trees. And then he was off the logs and on a narrow sandy trail and the bushes scraped along both sides of the car. He negotiated a final sharp turn and the trees suddenly fell away and he came into a wide sunlit clearing and the house stood just ahead. The air was full of dragonflies hovering on blurred wings.

He saw Frank and Ed Ashley sitting on the front porch smoking and drinking and watching him come. He parked directly in front of the house and cut off the engine and got out of the car.

“Hey, boy,” he said, and was just starting up the steps when the front door flew open and Old Joe burst out like and unleashed hunting hawk and swooped down the steps and onto him and struck him on the head with a grub hoe handle and Claude Calder never had a chance to say a word before Old Joe hit him again and again, grunting hard with every blow he delivered. Claude fell and got up and fell again and was trying to fend with his hands and he felt bones break under the slashing hoe handle and now there was blood in his eyes and Old Joe kicked him in the face and he felt his front teeth stave. And now he could not get up and the blows continued to fall but he felt little pain and only later would he find out that Frank and Ed had at last came down the steps and pulled Old Joe off before he killed him.

He was put up in a backroom of the Twin Oaks house while he healed. But he was permanently purblind in his left eye and would never again have full use of his left hand nor replace the two front teeth he’d lost. His bullet-maimed ear now seemed insignificant to him. Nor would his spirit ever fully recover. Evermore he would jump at sudden sounds and sometimes be the object of ridicule for it. He would for the rest of his brief life have bad dreams that woke him in the night in a soaking sweat.

Even after Claude was up and about, Frank and Ed had insisted that he stay on the place and they gave him simple tasks to let him feel he was earning his keep. Old Joe did not speak to him directly until nearly two months after the beating. One afternoon he came out to the Yellow Creek dock west of the house where Claude was cleaning a string of catfish. He expressed admiration for Claude’s catch and sat on the edge of the dock and offered him a drink from his personal jug. He told Claude that he would always have a place to live, that even if he married and started a family he could live on the Twin Oaks property. Claude knew Old Joe was apologizing the only way he knew how, knew the old man might even actually be sorry for what he’d done to him. When Joe got up to go, he handed Claude the jug and said, “Here, son, you keep this.” He accepted the jug with a smile and said thanks and watched Joe Ashley head off. And the thought of someday getting even with the old bastard was so sweet he could almost taste it. And then he thought of what would happen if Old Joe ever thought him faithless turned the taste to brass.

Scratchley ventured out of the Devil’s Garden but once every three or four months, poling his dugout through the sawgrass channels and along the creeks leading in serpentine fashion to the canal connecting to Jupiter, there to get a new supply of matches and lamp oil and other such luxuries as he could not wrest from the Everglades itself like he did all the essentials of life. The money for these items he regularly received from Joe Ashley. To earn it he was required only to keep close watch in the swamp for any signs of encroaching strangers or known lawmen and, if he ever saw any—which he rarely did—to report the sighting at once to Joe’s whiskey camp in the Hungryland Slough. The camp lay a few miles west of his weathered pinewood cabin in the Loxahatchee and he would go there once a month in any case to receive his stipend from Joe and take a cup of whiskey with him before poling back home. He was one of dozens—white, black and Indian—who served Joe Ashley in this employ all over South Florida.

On this late sun-bright Friday afternoon he had poled back up the canal from Jupiter with a fresh cargo of wheat flour and sugar, matches and lamp oil, a case of soda pop and sacks of rock candy, which was his weakness, and had just turned off into the creek leading to the Loxahatchee sawgrass channels when he saw another dugout laying to in the shadows of a live oak overhanging the creek ahead. Its three occupants were watching him and he knew there was no reason at all they would be there except they were waiting for him. To try to back up and outdistance them on the canal was out of the question. Two of the men had poles and they would overtake him easily. And so he slowly pushed ahead and closed the distance to them.

He saw now that the man in the middle—the one without a pole—was deputy sheriff Bob Baker. The forward man was one he’d sometimes seen roaming deep in the sawgrass country to the southwest, a halfbreed who seemed to know his way in the Devil’s Garden. The fellow sitting behind Deputy Bob he’d seen before too, but could not recall exactly where nor if he knew his name.

He knew what they wanted and was already resolved to go to jail rather than give them the information. As his dugout drew near theirs he said, “Might’s well just go on and take me in, Bobby, because I dont know a thing.”

Bob Baker smiled. “Another fella was tellin me just yesterday he didnt know a thing neither and he didnt sound truthful to me anymoren you do. So I figured I’d test him. And do you know that not ten minutes later he was just jabberin like a parrot? I reckon I could make you do the same, Scratch, but truth is, I dont really need your information anymoren I needed his.”

Scratchley hove up within ten feet of the deputies’ boat. “Well then, what-all you want?”

“I want you to know you been makin a big mistake workin for the Ashleys,” Bob Baker said. “You and all them others. And now you know it.”

The breed stood up and it was as if the twin-barreled shotgun had materialized from the very air, so suddenly was it in his hands. He took aim and one of the muzzles flashed bright yellow and the buck-shot load blasted through the forward hull of Scratchley’s dugout and the great blue herons feeding along the banks broke for the sky in a terrified frenzy of wingflaps.

The impact jarred the boat under Scratchley’s feet and he almost lost his balance and the dugout prow was already sunk as the breed raised the barrels and Scratchley saw the man’s blue eyes behind the dark muzzles settling on him and the last thing he ever saw was the grin or grimace of the man behind Bob Baker who lacked both front teeth. Then the shotgun boomed again and he felt himself moving blackly through the air and then there was nothing.

Just after sundown they dumped his bloodymeat remains in a gator hole some five miles deeper in the Devil’s Garden.