Red Grass River

ELEVEN

The Liars Club

THERE WASNT ANYBODY TO GET EVEN WITH, THAT WAS OLD JOE’S problem. The man who killed Bob Ashley was killed by Bob himself in return and thats all she wrote. There wasnt nobody else at fault. Nobody ordered the cop who shot Bob to do it. Old Joe didnt have nobody to blame for Bob’s killing, not even Dade Sheriff Dan Hardie. Truth be told, he was in Dan Hardie’s debt for saving John from a lynch mob. Some said the old man snuck a whole carload of his best stuff out to Hardie for a present and the sheriff was appreciative. Anyhow, they say Old Joe went around for months looking like a man searching for something he couldnt even put a name on.

It didnt help Old Joe’s spirits any that John Ashley was in jail down in Miami all this while. He was allowed one visitor at a time but they had to sit on the other side of a wide table from him and there was no touching allowed and there was always two guards standing right there and listening to everything was said. But Sheriff Hardie did allow Old Joe to bring John in some special dishes and treats Ma Ashley baked for him.

They dropped the attempted murder charges since there was no way they could prove he fired any of the shots at the cops who’d chased the Stuart bank robbers. But he stayed in the Dade County Jail under heavy guard for another year and a half before they finally let him out from under the murder of DeSoto Tiger. He mostly passed the time playing cards and exercising to keep from going soft. They say he got so he could do all kinds of card tricks and wouldnt none of the other jailbirds play him for money because he could deal himself any card he wanted and nobody could catch him at it. When he wasnt playing cards he was doing pushups and situps and such. He’d put his back to the cell door and take hold of the bars over his shoulders and then lift his legs straight out in front of him. He could do that a hundred times in a row. They say after a few months his belly looked like it was wrapped with rope and there wasnt a white man in that jailhouse could beat him at arm rassling.

The state said finally it was dropping the Indian murder case against him. Nolle Prosqui they called it—a high-sounding way of saying, “We cant prove it so we quit.” Some said it was because they never could find their chief witness Jimmy Gopher anywhere—but they hadnt found him the summer before either and that didnt stop them from going ahead with the trial. Truth is, there was talk that Old Joe had passed a hefty sum of money to the judge and prosecutor by way of Gordon Blue and that the reason it took so long to bring the case to trial was all the negotiating over the deal. Supposedly the state’s attorney and the judge each wanted ten thousand dollars. Back then that wasnt nothing less than a small fortune and Old Joe thought they were out of their mind to ask so much. He figured five grand each ought be way more than enough. But the prosecutor and the judge said they wouldnt even think about it for less than eight and they finally told Joe take it or leave it and he couldnt do a thing but take it. Then they argued about exactly what that sixteen thousand dollars would buy. Old Joe didnt see what there was to argue about. He naturally thought all the charges ought be dropped. Supposedly the prosecutor was willing but the judge wouldnt hear of it. The way the story goes, the judge was willing to see the murder charge dropped but Johnny would have to stand trial for the bank job—and plead guilty. If John pled not guilty and made the prosecution work for his conviction, the judge swore he’d give him thirty years, but if he pled guilty he’d only give him ten. Joe didnt like that deal for shit. Him and the prosecutor argued about it for a time before they finally agreed to a five-year sentence.

So John Ashley went to trial for the bank robbery and pled guilty—and the judge gave him seventeen years. Old Joe sat there like he’d been pole-axed. He musta felt like the fella who paid for a pearl and got him a pebble. The prosecutor looked at him and shrugged like he didnt know what was going on either and then quick skeedaddled. They say the judge was smiling as he left the bench, that the seventeen years was his way of letting Joe know he shoulda paid the ten thousand. The courtroom was about empty when Joe finally got up and walked out with Frank and Ed. The story goes that when he got outside he looked up at the sky and hollered, “The law aint nothing but a untrustworthy double-crossing son of a bitch!” Like it might of just come as news to him.

They transported John Ashley to the state penitentiary at Raiford in November of nineteen and sixteen. He was still there when the country went to war against the Hun. None of the Ashley boys went off the to the army—Old Joe’s view was that the family had enough enemies right here in Florida without having to go fight a new bunch a them on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Besides, he needed his boys to help him run his business. In 1917 the feds passed a wartime prohibition law that made it illegal to use grain for making whiskey, and a short time later they extended the law to include beer and wine. Naturally, the moonshine business just boomed.

They say Joe was paying protection money by the wheelbarrowful to the high sheriffs of three of four counties and to deputies and police chiefs and cops all up and down the East Coast and all around Lake Okeechobee. Supposedly he even had him a judge or two on the payroll. The more successful he got the more it was costing him to stay in business. Probably the only ones not on the Ashley payroll were the Bakers, but it wasnt no secret Joe Ashley had some of Sheriff George’s deputies in his pocket and for sure Sheriff George knew it. By now George Baker’s health was staring to go bad and he was giving Bob more and more authority to run the department in his place. Bobby knew a lot of the deputies were friends to the Ashleys or on Joe’s payroll and he didn’t trust many of the cops on the force except for about seven or eight he knew real well—the main ones being the Padgett brothers and Henry Stubbs and Grover Pass and Slim Jackson, a coupla others. His cousin Freddie was his closest bubba and sort of his personal lieutenant. He was a good old boy and easily the most popular policeman in Palm Beach County.

The rest of the department got to calling Bobby and his bunch the Baker Gang, and some say the most valuable man in the bunch was Heck Runyon. Even after Sheriff George was forced to fire him for killing a prisoner, he kept using him as what he called a special public agent. He said he needed him because there wasnt anybody on the county force as good at tracking a man in the Devil’s Garden, and there wasnt. But there were rumors he used him to fight crime in other ways too, ways maybe not all that legal but ways Heck Runyon was awful good at. Hardly anybody was too bothered by these rumors because Heck wasnt really a policeman anymore and because when you got right down to it nobody really cared how Sheriff George and Bob Baker got rid of criminals, just so they did.

John Ashley hadnt been in Raiford but about six months when Bob Baker and his gang raided one of Old Joe’s whiskey camps set in a clearing in the Hungryland Slough about twelve miles into the Devil’s Garden west of Juno Beach. Old Joe himself was there and got caught redhanded along with two nigger helpers and a big old cracker boy named Albert Miller. They later on admitted they got took by such surprise they didnt even try to fight nor make a run for it. Bobby and his boys used axes to ruin the boiling kettles and bust up all the other whiskey equipment at the camp. They confiscated two of Joe’s trucks and every weapon they found and all the cash money Joe had with him at the time which was said to be several thousand dollars. Bob Baker had wanted the judge to give them jail time but the judge—who some said was a friend of Joe’s—made Bobby give back Joe’s money and his trucks and then made Joe pay a fifty-dollar fine for himself and the same for Albert Miller and let them go.

Bob Baker was hopping mad but Old Joe was plenty put out himself. He even went to George Baker’s office to complain about Bobby busting up his camp but Sheriff George told him he’d authorized Bobby to deal with moonshiners any way he saw fit and Joe would have to settle the problem with him. Old Joe told Sheriff George he could unauthorize Bobby just as easy as he’d authorized him and the sheriff said he didnt need anybody telling him how to do his job. They say you could hear the two of them a half a block away, they was hollering at each other so loud. When Joe Ashley came out of the office he looked ready to spit bullets and people just jumped out of his way.

That raid was the talk of the county for a month after. It was hard to believe anybody could find any of Joe’s whiskey camps in the first place, never mind be able to sneak up on them if they even knew where they were at. Old Joe had about eight or nine camps by then—four or five round about Palm Beach County, the others strung out from south of Lake Okeechobee to just west of Miami—and it was common knowledge he had eyes working for him everywhere in the Devil’s Garden, a whole grapevine of lookouts to send warning if the law ever started closing in on any the camps. The lookouts were said to be posted a good ways from the camps so that even if you caught one you still might never find the camp he was watching out for.

Bob Baker said he’d been able to find the Hungryland Slough camp because Heck Runyon knew his way in Devil’s Garden as well as anybody. Maybe so—but not real likely. There was hardly a fullblood Indian who could find John Ashley’s whiskey camps, never mind some halfbreed who’d lived way off in DeSoto County for seven years of his young life. More likely, at least one of the lookouts ratted. The talk was that Bobby had somehow found out who Joe’s lookouts were for the Hungryland still and he’d run them down and made them tell where the camp was. Then ruther than put them in jail, he let Heck Runyon deal with them.

Mind you now, there aint never been a bit of proof put out in public that Bobby Baker was responsible for the death or disappearance of any of Joe Ashley’s lookouts—but there was talk about it. Friends of the Ashleys said the talk was true and Bobby Baker was using Heck Runyon as his private executioner. Friends of the Bakers said it was a wicked lie of the sort nobody but the Ashleys was low enough to tell. Most of us didnt know what to believe—and still dont. It aint no denying that in them days bodies were always being found along the edge of the Devil’s Garden and ever time one was found with its skull stove-in or showing a bullet hole, there were some who said it was one of Old Joe’s lookouts. It was hard to say for sure because after just a coupla weeks in the swamp a body’s nothing but rot on the bone and cant hardly be recognized by its own mother.

Most of the lookouts who vanished never turned up anywhere at all. But it’s a true fact that a week or so after the Hungryland raid a nekkid dead man come floating up to the Jupiter docks with his throat cut. The men who first spotted him thought it was a fat nigger but it turned out to be a white man all swole up and rotted black. His name was Seth Thomason and he owned a house in Jupiter and he had a wife and baby girl. Nobody ever found out who done him in but the word quick got around that he’d been one of Joe’s lookouts for the camp Bobby Baker had busted up. There’d been another lookout for that camp too—a swamp rat named Dog Scratchley who lived in a shack somewhere in the Loxahatchee Slough—and he just flat vanished is what he did. His shack was found burnt to the ground but there wasnt a sign of him nowhere and never has been. Most of us couldnt but wonder what-all was going on. Joe Ashley was said to be wondering too—wondering how Bobby Baker had found out that Scratchley and Seth Thomason were his Hungryland lookouts.

That Hungryland raid was just the first of more to come. Sometimes Bob Baker hit a couple of camps within just a few weeks of each other but more often months would go by between raids. Every time there was a raid, though, it turned out that the lookouts for the camp to get raided had disappeared a day or two before Bobby came popping out of the sawgrass or the pine trees to tear up the still.

Bob Baker never did catch anybody except now and then a few more of Joe’s niggers. But he ever time busted up or burned all the equipment and stuff Joe and his boys were forced to leave behind in camp—boilers and kettles and barrels and tubing and jugs and sugar and mash and whatnot. He even burned up the vehicles the Ashleys had to abandon. He was tearing down Joe’s whiskey camps faster than Joe could afford to rebuild them. We heard Old Joe was going crazy trying to figure out how Bobby was finding out who his lookouts were. It was a war going on is what it was, and Bobby was starting to win because he was making it so damn expensive for Old Joe to keep at it.

While all this was going on, John Ashley was doing his time at Raiford. He was kept in the main prison for a little over a year and while he was in there he worked in the laundry and got himself fitted with a glass eye. His natural eye color was brown, but for some reason the only color glass eye they could get for him in prison was blue. Some say they could of got him the right color but they just wanted to devil him some more by giving him different color eyes. The joke was on them though because John Ashley liked having one eye blue and one brown. He always did say the state had done him a favor and made him even more interesting to women.

Then he got transferred to a road camp not too fat from Palatka there on the St. Johns River. And not three months later he escaped. The story has it that he was out with his road gang fixing up the ferry road north of Palatka one afternoon and two men wearing flour-sack masks stepped out of the bushes with shotguns and got the drop on the guards and manacled them to a magnolia tree. There’s always been stories about somebody at Raiford being paid off to assign John Ashley to a road gang but it’s just one more thing you hear that there aint never been no proof of one way or the other. Most stories say it was Frank and Ed who broke him out but there’s never been no proof of that neither. For certain sure the Ashley was behind the break—had to be. And they had to of planned the break real careful for it to work so smooth as it did. They freed all twelve cons on the chain but took only one with them, a fella named Tom Maddox who was a bank robber out of North Florida and had got to be good friends with John Ashley in the road camp but who nobody never heard nothing about ever again.

Right after word of John Ashley’s escape reached Palm Beach County, Bobby and Freddie Baker were seen sitting at a corner table in the Oleander Grocery in West Palm Beach drinking out of paper bags and talking low and glaring like they’d like to shoot the whole damn world.