Red Grass River

TWELVE

July 1918—December 1919

THEY RAN THROUGH THE PINE SCRUBS TO WHERE ED AND FRANK had left the Dodge and they all four scrambled into the car and sped away jouncing and swaying on an old logging trail. They threw the flour sack masks out into the palmetto scrub a few miles farther on and just before the trail merged into a wider backroad. They drove north from Palatka and made their way to the ferry and were rope-pullied across the coppery St. Johns. They excitedly pointed out to each other a bald eagle wheeling from the sky with a fullgrown cat in its talons to alight at its nest atop a tall live oak overlooking the river. They pitched pennies at turtles sunning themselves on floating driftwood. They told the ferryman their name was Horton and they were headed for their uncle’s funeral in Daytona. But when they reached the crossroad at Molasses Junction they turned the car north for Jacksonville.

His brothers admired his blue glass eye and asked him what it was like being half-blind and made jokes about how he truly could sleep with one eye open now. John Ashley asked about Kid Lowe and they told him the Kid had flat vanished and nobody had heard a word about where he might be. They talked then about their brother Bob and told Tom Maddox about some of the funny things Bob had done when they were boys and when they ran out of stories about him they fell silent for a time. Then Ed asked what it had been like in there. John Ashley shrugged and said it hadn’t been all that intolerable. His voice was distant. His brothers raised their brows at Tom Maddox who shrugged and turned to look out at the passing pines.

The primitive roads of sand limerock sometimes narrowed to hardly more than wagon trails winding through dense brushland and pine forest and they three times had to stop to repair flat tires and spell each other on the air pump before they made the Duval County line. Frank and Ed had brought several jugs of their daddy’s product which helped to ease everyone’s irritation with the delays.

As they puttered through the streets of Jacksonville in search of their sister’s address they passed a police car and raised a hand in greeting and the two cops did likewise and all the while the Ashleys and Tom Maddox too had their other hand on a pistol. They found the house and got out of the car and their sister Daisy came shrilling out the door to greet them, her husband trailing her with a smile and leading their three-year-old boy by the hand. She hugged and kissed her brothers and let them swing her around in their arms and pat her fondly on the rump and she made a special fuss over Johnny, mussing his hair and kissing him all over his face and crying in her happiness to see him. As they trooped into the house Frank told her that Daddy sent his love. She looked at him and laughed and said she knew that wasn’t one bit true. Frank flushed and shrugged and said, “Well, he ought of.”

Her husband Butch had served a short sentence in Raiford for armed robbery back before Daisy knew him but he had since forsworn the criminal life. They’d met at a dance in Stuart four years ago shortly after his release from prison and while he was working with a crew building a cargo dock at Salerno on the Indian River. A few weeks later he asked her to marry him and move to Jacksonville where he had a good job waiting. Old Joe had no objections to the marriage but he was set against his daughter moving away from home. He offered to take Butch into his whiskey operation and told him he’d make more money in a month than he’d make in six months in a shipyard. When Butch politely turned him down Old Joe took umbrage and said he couldnt have Daisy’s hand, not if he was going to take her away. “Ashleys dont desert they home,” he said. To which Daisy said she’d damn well be the one to say who could or couldnt have her hand and whether she would or wouldnt move away. She had always known her own mind and this was not the first time she and her father had been at odds but this was their most serious set-to yet. “Then to hell with ye,” Old Joe Ashley said, and left the room. By that night she and Butch were married and on their way to Jacksonville. That had been four years ago and she had not seen nor heard from her father since. She corresponded regularly with her mother, however, and Ma Ashley had been at her bedside to assist in the delivery when she’d borne Jeb. Ma later told her in a letter that Old Joe couldnt hear enough about his new grandson. She said she was sure he wanted to find a way to tell Daisy he was sorry. Daisy wrote back that all he had to do was say it. So far he had not.

For supper they barbecued huge smoking slabs of pork ribs on the backyard firepit grill and drank cold bottles of beer. Butch enjoyed hearing about the Ashley boys’ exploits and telling them a few from his own outlaw past. Frank asked Tom Maddox which was the toughest jail he’d ever been in and Tom said his own house when he was married and they all had a good laugh over that. One first meeting his Uncle Johnny, the boy Jeb had stared in fascination at his eyes and said, “You got a blue eye and a brown eye—thats funny!” And John Ashley had said, “You think thats funny? Lookee here!” He removed his glass eye and held it out to the boy. The child’s face went to horror and John Ashley hastily explained that it was made of glass and rolled it across the floor so the boy could see it was not real and nothing to be afraid of. He let the boy handle it and told him to wash it off and then showed him how to put it back in the socket. The boy was so taken with the glass eye he said he too was going to get one when he grew up.

Later that evening they went dancing at a riverside pavilion where a band was playing and there were lots of pretty girls and they had a swell time. Tom Maddox took a fancy to a bold red-lipsticked brunette from St. Augustine who was visiting her widowed cousin. She invited him to visit with them in St. Augustine for a few days. He told the Ashleys he was going to do that and would later make his way down to their Twin Oaks house.

The next day they motored to the beach after making a brief stop at the home of a fellow Butch knew who brewed the best beer in town and they had bought a dozen quart bottles and put them in two cartons of ice. At the beach they body-surfed in the big breakers and the Ashley boys helped their young nephew to build a sand castle. They all got sandy and sunburned and ate the sandwiches and boiled eggs and potato salad Daisy had packed. The men got half-drunk on beer in the sun and ogled and pointed at all the passing girls whose black wet washing suits clung so closely they could see the jut of their nipples. Daisy said all men were disgusting sex fiends. “I believe you absolutely right,” Butch said, and grabbed her breast. She yelped and pummeled him with both fists and he pulled her down on the blanket and they ended up kissing deeply as Butch fondled her bottom and the brothers whistled and applauded. She broke off the kiss and stuck her tongue out at them any young Jeb laughed with delight. On the drive home into the setting sun they sang in horrid but vastly enjoyable harmony: “By the Sea, By the Sea” and “Abba-Dabba Honeymoon” and “When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabama” and “For Me and My Gal.”

Over cigarettes and late-evening cups of coffee after Jeb had been put to bed the brothers all remarked how wonderful Daisy looked. Frank said life in Jacksonville had sure enough agreed with her. She told them how well Butch was doing at his job at the shipworks and Butch nodded and smiled shyly. She said they all ought to stay in Jacksonville too. “You can get jobs at the works with Butch,” she told them. “You can rent a place until you get enough money together to buy you a house. It’s no need for you all to ever go back to that trouble down there.” Ma Ashley had kept her informed of circumstances.

The brother shifted uncomfortably and exchanged sidelong looks. “Well,” John Ashley said, “the thing is, Daddy needs help with the business.”

“How is that any problem of yours?” she wanted to know.

“Hey, Daze, it’s Daddy,” Ed said, looking about to laugh, about to cry.

She looked about to spit. “You mulletheads, all you. You dont owe that man a solitary thing. He’s used you all your lifes for his work. All you are to him is nigger labor.”

“Quit that talk now,” Butch said. “It’s your brothers you talkin to.”

“It’s all right,” Frank said. “She aint never been one to hide what’s on her mind. We used to it.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why you all got to go back there? You go back you cant even live in the house no more—not with police watching it all the damn time. You’ll be livin out in the Everglades the rest of your lifes. What kinda life is that, livin out in the damn Devil’s Garden?” She slumped deeper into the couch, her arms crossed tightly, her foot tapping in agitation.

John Ashley was sitting on the couch with her and reached out and put his hand under her hair and stroked the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and sighed and rolled her head under his caress.

“We just goin home, baby,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Oh, Johnny,” she sighed. “It aint no kinda home, not no more. It’s just a trouble place is all it is.”

“It’s our home, Daze,” John Ashley said, kneading her neck. “Trouble or not.”

The next morning when they were all three in the car and ready to go, Daisy told them once again that they always had a place to come to, no matter why. Butch said that was for damn sure and shook hands with all of them one more time.

The old man’s smile on greeting John Ashley at the front steps of the Twin Oaks house was the first anyone had seen on him since Bob’s death. He gave John a light punch on the arm and asked how he was keeping. John stood before him with his hands in his pockets and ducked his head at him and said he was doing all right, how about himself, and Old Joe said he was just fine as a froghair split four ways. He asked if they’d seen his grandson. Ma had told him the brothers were going to see their sister and he wanted to know if Jeb looked healthy and if he had a proper portion of wit. They told him all about young Jeb—but when they started talking about Daisy and Butch the old man dismissed the subject with an irritated wave of his hand.

John Ashley then went unaccompanied on the sandy path to Bob’s grave a quarter-mile into the pinewoods behind the house. The trees were thick with squalling crows. In the high-ground clearing that was the family burial ground were two gravemounds—Bob’s, and a smaller one where lay the remains of the youngest Ashley brother who’d twelve years ago died within hours of birth and was never named. Joe Ashley had buried him behind the house in Pompano but when the family moved north to the Twin Oaks property the old man had dug up the tiny coffin and brought the child’s remains with them to be reburied here. Both graves bore simple oak markers at their head. The smaller darkly weathered one stated, “At Peace.” The larger one read: “Bob Ashley. A good son and true brother.” A light breeze soughed in the pine branches and the clearing was spattered with yellow sunlight. He stood gazing on Bob’s grave for a time. And then said, “I’da done the same for you but I guess you know that.” He looked up at the patches of sky showing through the pines and he felt a hot tightness in his throat. After a while he went back down the narrow trail to the house.

They sat to dinner at a long table set up on the front porch—cooter stew, rice, greens, fried tomatoes, hot-peppered swamp cabbage, hush puppies, cornbread and gravy and sweet potato pie. Ma and the girls laid out the table and served the food and went back inside the house. At the table with the Ashleys were Albert Miller and a blond and ropily muscled young man named John Clarence Middleton. Ed and Frank Ashley had met him one day a couple of months before when they were driving through Stuart and spied him fighting three men in an alley. They stopped the car to watch the fight and were much impressed by the smooth cool way Clarence was holding his own against the three. He punched one of them down and fended even better against the others until the first one got up again and this time had a knife in his hand. Ed called “Hey!” and they all looked over at the idling Model T and he brought up his revolver and everybody stood fast. He beckoned the blond fellow and said, “Well come on, bubba, if you coming.” The fellow came on the jog and hopped into the backseat and Ed waved goodbye to the other three as Frank got the car underway.

On the drive out to Twin Oaks John Clarence Middleton introduced himself and thanked them for saving him the trouble of breaking the knifer’s arm and maybe having to cut him with his own blade. He said he did not need any more legal problems. “What you mean more?” Frank asked, grinning at him. Clarence said he’d had to leave Miami in a hurry after a misunderstanding about a stolen motorcar. He was easy-natured and quick to laugh and had a tattoo of the U. S. Marines’ globe-and-anchor insignia on his right forearm. He didnt mind at all when Ed was Frank said they’d call him Clarence because their brother was named John and one John in the bunch was enough. The rest of the family took an immediate liking to him. He volunteered little about his past, yet none of the Ashleys was either so rude or so curious as to inquire into it. But they all admired his variety of skills. He’d learned to box in the marines and he displayed his fistic talent to them at a carnival in Fort Lauderdale where a challenger could pay a dollar to get in the ring with a carnie fighter and win five dollars if he could stay upright for three minutes. In the first two minutes Clarence broke the carnie’s nose and closed one of his eyes and the carnie said fuck it he’d had enough.

He was an able woodsman, Clarence, and a good skinner, and impressively familiar with a variety of firearms. Through a military connection in Miami he had recently acquired four cases of Springfield rifles for about one-third their value and had let Joe have a case in gratitude for taking him in and had sold the rest to some Cuban insurrectionists who’d come across the strait to buy weapons. Clarence himself carried a new army .45 automatic. He’d let the Ashleys fire it one day and they were all taken with the piece’s smooth action and striking power and Clarence promised to get one for everybody in the gang.

Having dinner with them too was Hanford Mobley, now fifteen and apprenticing at the whiskey trade with Old Joe and beaming proudly in the company of the uncles he revered. “That boy aint feared of a damn thing,” Joe had told his sons before they sat to eat. “Got balls like coconuts. And a good head. Learns quick. Aint got to be told somethin but once. I always did say he was gonna be a good one and he is.”

As they ate he told John Ashley all about Bob Baker’s continuing was against their whiskey camps. His most recent raid had been two months ago when he and his boys swooped in on Joe’s camp in the palm hammocks a few miles north of the railroad tracks running from Lake Okeechobee to Fort Pierce. They’d reduced it to crushed metal and busted glass and charred wood and made off with more than twenty cases of bush lighting. Joe now had but four camps in operation, fewer than half the number of stills he’d been running two years earlier. So deeply had the raids cut into his profits he could no longer pay off all the lawmen on his bribery list and so had lost much of the protection he’d enjoyed for a time.

“That damn Bobby’s cost me a ton of money and trouble,” Old Joe said. “I strained my brain a hundred times tryin to figure how in the hell he was findin out who my lookouts were. I knowed the lookouts was how he’d been doin it. He’d been catchin them some kinda way and gettin them to tell where the camps are at. I’ll wager he got some interestin ways to get a fella to speak up. Anyhow, he wont be—”

“I’m meanin to pay Bobby a visit real soon,” John Ashley interrupted. “It’s a few matters we got to settle between us.”

“No!” Joe Ashley said. “Now you listen good, Johnny: you aint payin Bobby Baker no kinda visit. If we do harm to Bobby Baker right now it wouldnt do nothin but bring police from everywhere down on us like a bad rain. It’s too much at stake to fuck er up by putting away Bobby Baker over somethin personal.”

“Hell, Daddy, it aint just personal—he’s tearin up our camps!”

Joe Ashley paused to light his pipe and pour himself a cup of his own whiskey. He eyed John Ashley closely as he sipped, then he said: “Dont bullshit me, boy. It aint the camps got you bothered about Bobby Baker. You two aint never unlocked horns since the business with that little Morrell girl. I dont know what else it is between you, but seems to me you done got the better of him a lot more than he ever did of you. I dont see what-all you got to settle with him. Maybe you wanna tell me.”

“It’s between him and me,” John Ashley said, and shifted his eyes from Old Joe’s intent stare. The others at the table were looking on with interest.

Joe Ashley sighed. “Well, whatever it is, you cant be doin nothin about it right now. I mean it, you hear? We cant have every cop on the coast coming down on us and thats exactly what’ll happen you do any harm to either George or Bobby Baker right now. Bobby’s time’ll come, boy, dont think it wont. Could be you’ll be the one to see to it. But the time aint now. You listenin to me, boy?”

John Ashley stared at the bowl of cooter stew congealing before him for a long moment before he nodded.

Old Joe banged his palm on the table and grinned through a cloud of violet smoke and said, “Old Bobby’s anyhow gonna play hell findin any more my camps to tear up from now on, because this fella here”—he nodded at Hanford Mobley, who grinned proudly—“just this mornin told me somethin thats gonna put an end to it. I tell ye, boys, it’s a damn fine day when you get a son back from prison and you find out who’s been playing the rat on you, all in the same twenty-four hours.”

What Hanford Mobley told Joe Ashley was how Bob Baker had been learning who the lookouts were. The night before, Hanford had been out netting mullet in the Indian River till around midnight. After getting back to the Stuart docks he sold some of his catch to the night dockmaster and left the rest in a tin tub of saltwater outside the door of the dock baitshop and wrote in chalk on the slateboard fixed on the wall, “U owe me—Mobley.” He then headed for the train station where he’d parked the car in the shade of a huge live oak that afternoon. As he turned the corner two blocks from the depot he saw Bob Baker entering Molly’s Cafe, an all-night eatery, on the opposite corner of the street. Curious, Hanford Mobley crossed the street and walked up to the cafe’s front window and peeked inside. And saw Bob Baker taking a seat at a table in the corner. And sitting at the table with him was Claude Calder.

“I never figured Claude for the balls to do it,” Old Joe said, “but when Hannie told me what he’d seen, well, it all fell in place. Claude knowed where the Hungryland camp was and he told Bobby—and he told him Seth and Scratchley were the lookouts for it. Bobby had to get them out the way before he could sneak up on the camp. I figure Claude’s heard us mention a bunch of the lookouts by name sometime or other and he’s told those names to Bobby Baker is what he’s done. All Bobby’s had to do is track down the lookouts or lay for them somewhere or wait for them to come home sometime and then make em tell where the camps was at.”

“Claude ratted our lookouts for no reason but Daddy give him a whuppin for runnin out on Bob in Miami,” Frank said to John Ashley. “A whuppin he damn well had comin.”

“I shoulda kilt the sonofabitch the minute he come back here.” Old Joe said. “I meant to.”

“We shouldnt of pulled you off his sorry ass, Daddy,” Ed said.

“Well hell,” Hanford Mobley said. “Let’s set the business straight right now. I know for a fact he’s over to the Yella Creek dock right this minute sandin a skiff bottom.”

Old Joe looked at Hanford Mobley and grinned. “I want you all to just listen to this one here. Fifteen year old. Aint he a bull gator though!”

“Let me set it right, Gramps,” Hanford Mobley said. Old Joe looked around the table at the other grinning men, then smiled and nodded at his grandson.

Hanford Mobley beamed. “Yall excuse me,” he said and stood up and pushed his chair in under the table and adjusted the pistol under his shirt. Then skipped down the porch steps and jogged out to the sidetrail leading though the pinewoods and down to Yellow Creek, about a quarter-mile away.

The men passed the bowls and platters around the table for third helpings and they poured more ice water and Old Joe served himself another drink and told John about a boat he had his eye on, a forty-foot trawler for sale in the Stuart boatyard.

“She’ll make a fine rummer we fix er up right,” he said. “But she’ll cost a pretty penny and the work she needs wont come cheap neither.” He took a slow sip of whiskey and eyed John Ashley intently. “Frank and Ed, they always was the best of us with boats, so they gonna be my main whiskey runners,” he said. “I dont want them goin in no banks, you hear? I dont want no warrants on them.”

“Banks?” John Ashley said as though he’d never heard the word before. “What-all banks you talkin about, Daddy?” But he could not keep the smile off his face.

“Whatever ones you and Clarence and young Hannie was whisperin about when you all was over there fishin in the creek. Hell, boy, I aint gonna object. We need money to get the boat and fix er up right if we ever gonna start running booze from the islands. All I’m sayin is Frank and Ed wont be havin nothin to do with it. I want them able to come and go and take care of business without havin to look over their shoulder for the law all the time.”

“How could you tell what we was talkin about from way over here?”

“Boy,” Joe Ashley said with mock tiredness, “I known the lot of you since you was whelped. I can look at any a you from a quartermile off and know exactly what the hell you got on your mind, so dont play the innocent with me.” His grin was as wide as his son’s.

A pistolshot sounded from the area of Yellow Creek and the crows fell mute in the pines. All heads at the table turned in that direction as a second sharp report carried to them. And then only silence.

And then Joe Ashley said, “Damn pretty day, aint she?”

A month later deputy sheriff Bob Baker drove out to the Ashley homestead. He let the motor idle as he got out of the car and was met at the porch steps by Ed and Frank Ashley and Hanford Mobley, each of them with a .45 automatic snugged out of sight at the small of his back, the pistols only recently presented to them all by Clarence Middleton.

A lookout had come running to tell them Bob Baker was coming and that he was alone. John Ashley had gone upstairs to his father’s bedroom where Old Joe lay abed with one of his chronic attacks of ague. John positioned himself with his automatic in hand to peek out from behind a curtain and Old Joe, brighteyed with his fever, had slipped his pistol out from under his pillow and sat up so he could peek out too.

In the three years since John Ashley had last seen him, Bob Baker seemed to have grown even larger, wider of shoulder, deeper of chest. Even his hands looked bigger, of a size unreal. He put his booted wooden foot up on the bottom step and hooked a thumb in his gunbelt and rested the heel of his other hand on the butt of his pistol. He told Ed and Frank Ashley that lawmen all up and down the Florida east coast were on the alert for sightings or reports of John Ashley as an escaped convict who was armed and dangerous and they had orders to shoot to kill if he attempted to resist arrest. He advised them to tell John to keep to the Devil’s Garden if he knew what was good for him.

“My boys’ll throw down on him the minute they see his face in public,” Bob Baker said. “He even looks like he’ll make a fight of it, they got orders to shoot him where he stands. And those’re Daddy’s orders, not just mine.”

“Well now, Bobby,” Ed said, rolling a toothpick in his twisted mouth, “we’ll be sure and tell what you said if ever we see him, though we aint seen hair of him since he got sent to Raiford, no thanks to you and your daddy.”

Bob Baker glanced up at the second-floor windows and then spat off to the side. A horsefly bigger than a bumblebee lit on his arm—purpleheaded ugly and amber-winged, with a bite like a cigarette burn that could raise a welt the size of a clamshell. Bob Baker smacked it hard with the flat of his hand and the horsefly dropped to the ground and lay still for a moment and then fluttered its wings tentatively and then flew off so fast none of them saw the direction it went.

“Them sumbitches are some hard to kill, aint they?” Ed said. “Damn near everything out here is.”

Bob Baker spat and looked at him.

“If we ever do see Johnny sometime,” Frank said, “you bet we’ll tell him what you said.”

Bob Baker now inquired after Claude Calder. No one had seen him in well nigh a month or so, he said, and some people couldnt help wondering what might’ve become of him. “Everbody knows he been living out here with you all.”

Hanford Mobley chuckled and Bob Baker fixed his gaze on him. “Is it somethin funny, boy?”

Hanford Mobley smiled and said, “I just remembered me a joke I heard is all.”

“That a fact? I like a good joke my ownself. Tell me it.”

“Damn if I aint just this second forgot it,” Hanford Mobley said.

Frank and Ed snorted and smiled. At the window upstairs Old Joe grinned and nudged John Ashley and whispered, “Aint he a damn pistol!”

Bob Baker’s eyes narrowed. “You way too runty and wet behind the ears to think you so tough, sweetpea. You sass me again I’ll come up on that porch and slap you sillier than you already look.”

Hanford Mobley lost his smile and pushed off the porch post he’d been leaning on and stood with legs apart and a hand behind his back.

“Whatever you got there, boy,” Bob Baker said, “dont show it to me unless you want it way up your ass.”

“Oh hell now, Bobby, he’s just funnin,” Frank said as he gave Hanford Mobley a sharp look and came halfway down the porch steps to stand between them. “Truth is, Claude went off to Atlanta nearbouts a month ago. Said his sister was real poorly and he wanted to see her one more time fore she passed on. Hell, we didnt even know old Claude had him a sister. We anyhow aint heard a word from him since—have we Ed?”

Ed allowed they surely had not.

“Wish we could be more help to you, Bobby,” Frank said, “but thats all we know about ole Claude.”

“Could be ole Claude was lyin about havin a sister,” Ed said. “Hell, he mighta been lyin about goin to Atlanta. That Claude, he was bad to tell lies. Aint that right, Frank?”

Frank Ashley allowed he surely was.

Bob Baker spat again and worked the spit into the dirt with the toe of his boot. Then scowled and said, “You tell John we aint foolin. Your daddy too. Tell em I’m gonna find ever one of his stills sooner or later and tear em all down and I dont need Claude Calder to do it.”

He looked up at the curtained window and then at Frank and Ed Ashley and Hanford Mobley. “You tell em I said so. Tell em both.”

As Bob Baker got back in the car and wheeled it around and headed back for the narrow pineywoods trail to the Dixie Highway, Old Joe turned to John Ashley and said, “It’ll be ass-deep snow in hell before he finds another one of my stills. But goddamn I hate that son of a bitch standin on my property and talkin about tearin em up.”

He looked out the window again as Bob Baker’s car vanished into the trees. “I surely hope I dont never regret not putting a bullet in that fucker’s brainpan just now.” He held up his thumb and forefinger a quarter-inch apart. “I mean, I was this close.”

John Ashley was still staring at the trailhead where Bob Baker had driven out of sight. “Tell me about it,” he said. And let a long breath. And reset the .45’s safety with his thumb.

As he’d walked back to his car he’d felt the sweat rolling coldly down his sides. He’d half expected to get a blast of buckshot in the back from the upstairs window. He knew John Ashley was up there, he could feel he was. The old man too most likely.

And after those pictures…

The eye was fair desserts for Johnny backjumping him and smacking his head on a wall and near busting out his brains, damn if it wasnt. For breaking his worthless Ashley word and escaping and making him look so bad. For stealing his gun. For…lots of things. A damn eye was letting him off light.

But those pictures…

He figured John wouldnt have shown them to his daddy or anybody else. He’d want to keep them secret. Who wouldnt? Jesus. He could not have said then or now what had possessed him to do such a thing. The mean shame of it had been welling under his ribs like a poison gas ever since he awoke one night with the thought that John Ashley wouldnt have done anything like that and probably saw it as cowardly. The notion that John Ashley saw him as a coward was enraging and added weight to his shame.

His car jounced over the uneven trail and out of sight of the house. He blew a long breath.

All right then, he thought, you gave him a chance to do something about it and not a one of them can say you didnt. And if he did show the pictures to any of the rest of them, well, they’d just had their chance to do something about it too, didnt they? He figured that counted for plenty, going there and giving them the chance to do something about it. Took some balls—damn if it didnt. His shirt sopped now with sweat.

He wouldnt go back there again, nor go hunting after him. He’d given warning and that was enough. As for the Calder boy, hell, he’d been found out sure and done for. They’d somehow come to know he was fingering the lookouts and they’d done him in and fed him to the gars in one of the hundred creeks back in the pine swamps. No surprise to it. It’s what every snitch had coming to him sooner or later and one way or another.

He figured he’d been clear enough: keep out of the county towns, keep to the Glades from here on, keep to your whiskey camps you got left. Keep to your ground and we’re quits. It was a damn fair deal and just show him somebody who could say it wasnt.

His hands tremored on the steering wheel and he cursed the rugged car trail that shook the car so.

After they’d made love Loretta May brought him up to date on the happenings around the place in the nearly four years he’d been gone. She told him Miss Lillian had steadily gotten bitchier as she got older but had been nice enough to give Jenny the Horse a big wedding and reception right there in the house when Jenny married a hardware dealer who had been visiting her every Tuesday night for almost a year. Jenny and her husband had gone to live in Delray and she every now and then wrote a letter addressed to all the girls to let them know how married life was going and to break the news when she was pregnant the first time and to announce when her first kid was born. Quentin the redhead had run off one night with some trick and never even said goodbye to any of them but nobody really cared since nobody had ever liked the bitch anyway. Sheryl Ann had gotten married too but it only lasted about five months before she’d come right back to Miss Lillian’s.

She said she’d cried when she first heard about his eye. She asked if he’d really got a glass one and when he said yes she sat up in bed and asked if she could touch it. He took the eye out and place it in her hand and watched as she felt of its slight heft and rolled it between her fingers. She dropped it from one palm to the other and back again and giggled. What shade of blue was it, she wanted to know. “Real light,” he told her. “Like the sky was today when it’s sunny and cool and there’s no clouds at all.”

“Pretty,” she said. She placed it between her breasts and rolled it from one to the other and her caramel nipples puckered enticingly and he gently plucked at one and she smiled. She reached out and found his face and the empty socket and gently fingered its ridge. “Oh baby,” she breathed, her face soft with pity. He leaned forward and lightly kissed each of her cheeks and then held her face between his hands and kissed her mouth.

He put his eye back in the socket and she put her fingers to it again and smiled. “I bet you seen some real interestin things with that one.”

He said he didnt know what she meant.

“Yes, you do,” she said. She lay back and pulled him down beside her and held him close and hid her face against his throat. “You said before you couldnt hardly ever remember what you dreamed but it was like you was seein true things while you were dreamin them. Now you rememberin a lot of what you dream, aint you?”

He tried to pull back to look at her but she held him fast and burrowed her face under his chin.

“It’s some eyes cant see any of the awake world but can see a whole lot in the sleepin world,” she said barely above a whisper.

“I think you turned crazier’n a coot while I was gone,” he said. But he suddenly felt uneasy and couldnt have said why.

“I saw you sometimes while you were away,” she said, her voice so low now he had to strain to make out her words. “Not every night and most times not real clear and sometimes I’d wake up before I could see exactly what you were doin. But I saw you.”

They lay in silence for a time and then he said, “What’d you see?”

She told him. Told of seeing him standing at a steaming tub and stirring clothes in it with a wooden pole and that she could smell the strong lye soap he was smelling. Told of seeing his bare shoulder real close up and a sharp instrument dipped in dark ink and its nib pecking into his shoulder and the image of a skull taking shape there. As she spoke she slid her hand up his arm to his shoulder and her fingers found the black skull with the paleskin eyes and nosehole and teeth.

“How’d you…see that,” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “The laundry at Raiford…the tattoo?”

She murmured into his neck but he could not make out the words. And then she told of seeing him in a cramped dark place. And though it was dark she knew he was naked and knew too that it was so cold and damp in that place it made his bones ache. “I saw you and could feel how much it hurt to be so cramped like that. I could feel how thirsty you were and how…lonely I swear I could smell how awful bad it stunk in there. Tell me, Johnny…where were you at?”

In the hole, he told her. He’d been put in there for three days and nights the first time for backsassing a guard. That had been in winter and he’d been colder than he’d ever been in his life. The next time was in late summer and he was put in there after a fight with a convict who’d tried to get ahead of him in the chow line. He’d stabbed the con in the face with a fork and the guards had both of them headlocked and manacled before the fight really got started and they’d each been given a week in the hole. In this season the hole had been an oven and it baked the human waste sliming the floor and walls, the foetor nearly palpable and the steamed air a labor to breathe. The cockroaches so many they felt like a crawling blanket. Rats squirmed into the cell as he slept and bit him awake into a panicked hollering and always escaped his wild blind grabs for them in his rage to kill them with his hands. He’d been too weak to stand when his time was up and they’d had to drag him out by the heels, rife with festering sores and sightless against the sudden light of day and nearly rank as a dead man.

She’d seen him too in bright sunshine once when he was dancing back and back and flinging his arms out to the side each time he leaped rearward and another man in striped pants like his own was lunging at him and both of them barechested and then there were bright red stripes across John Ashley’s chest and stomach. As she spoke her hand went to his chest and belly and her fingers trailed softly along the scars there. She’d seen then that the other man had a knife and they were fighting near piles of brush. John Ashley tripped the man down and ran to a stack of tools and grabbed a shovel and she saw other convicts gathered around and watching. She could see them cheering though she could not hear them and she saw too a man in a uniform and holding a shotgun and he too was watching and grinning as the man with the knife came running after John Ashley. She saw John strike him in the head with the shovel and the man fell and John straddled him and with both hands gripping the shovel handle he drove its blade into the man’s throat as if he were plunging into the earth with a postdigger. She saw the man’s head come loose of its moorings and his face of a sudden looked sleepy and the gaping neck heaved a bright gout of blood four feet in the air and it splattered back on the face of the killed and on the shoes of his killer like a quick fall of red rain.

“Burchard,” John Ashley said lowly. “I didnt have no idea why he come at me. Somebody said later he’d thought I was the fella his wife run away with in Tallahassee. He was always looking hard at me but he never said word one to me, not even when he just all of a sudden was standin in front of me and started cuttin at me, the son of a bitch.”

He stroked her hair and put his face to it and breathed deeply of its sweetness. “I didnt get in no trouble over it. The walking boss, Sobel, he was a old boy from Alva where my family used to live, and me and him got along pretty good and he didnt care for Burchard at all and was glad to see him get it. He told the warden the truth—that Burchard had went crazy and attacked me with a knife he wasnt supposed to have and I didnt do nothin but defend myself. The warden never questioned it, neither, even though all the cons on brush detail that day saw what happened and some were saying I didnt have to kill him. Hell, sometimes I wish I hadnt. Took me a while to quit thinkin about…about what he looked like after. A time like that, you just wanna stop the other fella, just make sure he cant cut you no more. I admit I was blackassed about gettin cut. Anyway, the bosses dont like a fella they dont care much what happens to him or who does it.”

They lay quietly for a while. Then she said: “This other time, I seen you sitting on your bed in a little-bitty room and you, well, you were cryin. You had some papers in your hand and you were cryin. I couldnt see but the back of them. Whatever they were, they made you so awful sad I couldnt stand it. I didnt have that dream but two minutes before I woke up and I was cryin too. I cried all that day and didnt even know why. What was it, Johnny, made you feel so bad?”

He shrugged. “I dont recall nothin about it.”

He could feel that she knew he was lying. The papers had been photographs. Four of them. They had come for him in an envelope with no return address and bearing a Tampa postmark. In the first picture Bob was sitting up and naked and his open eyes were dead as glass and his mouth shaped into a grotesque smile and he held his own shriveled dick in his hand. In the next he was still showing the horrid smile but this time holding a pistol to his head, his hand supported by the large hand of someone standing beside him but out of the picture. In the next, his head was turned sideways toward the same large man standing very close to him and holding Bob by the hair with one hand and a penis to his mouth with the other so that the skinned-back glans was between his lips. In the last photograph Bob was lying on his back and someone visible only from the waist down was standing beside him on the table with one booted foot on his chest in the manner of a hunter posing with his trophy. On the front ankle of the boot was embossed a white star.

He had looked and looked at the pictures and sobbed in his fury and his helplessness. He did not want to risk that anyone else might ever see them and so had studied them very hard for a while longer and then burned them to ash.

How could he have told his father? Told anyone? The day Bob Baker had stood at the foot of the porch steps while he watched from the window above with a .45 cocked in his hand and his daddy sitting in bed beside him, it had been all he could do not to shoot the bastard then and there. He dreamed of those pictures more often than he did not and would waken enraged in the dark of night, his jaws clenched and aching.

“What’re you thinkin?” Loretta May said. “You’re wantin to hurt something. Not me, is it, baby? I didnt say nothin wrong, did I?”

He heard uncertainty in her voice and blew a deep breath and kissed her shoulder and stroked her hip and said, “How’d you see all that?” His breath was tight in his chest. “You some kinda geechie woman?” He hoped she wouldnt say she was a witch because he did not believe in witches but had no trouble believing in her.

“I dont reckon,” she said, still nuzzling his neck. “I just see things in my sleep sometimes.” She pulled back and held her face toward him. “You had any more of them dreams you told me about? Them that seem like they’re trying to tell you somethin but you wake up and cant remember?”

“Yeah,” he said, “sometimes. I can recollect some of them fairly clear ever once in a while.” The dreams always disquieted him, and even now, simply thinking about them, he felt his pulse quicken.

“I told you the time would come when you’d start to remember them.” She said, smiling. “I dont reckon you’ll ever see as much as I do because you only blind in one eye. Tell me one you remember.”

He thought for a moment and then said, “i recent had one about a funeral. It was in St. Augustine. I could see the old fort out yonder of the graveyard and see the ocean behind it. But it was strange because it was like the graveyard was on top of a high hill. There wasnt anybody there but me and a woman with real red lipstick and it was like she didnt even know I was there. I could see the casket down in the grave but it didnt have no top to it and you could see the man lying in there. I knew him. A fella name of Tom Maddox. He’d been with me in prison and he come with us when Frank and Ed busted me free of the road gang. He went to Daisy’s with us and met a girl in Jacksonville with red lipstick and said he was gonna stay with her a few days and catch up with us at Twin Oaks but he never did show up. I looked down at him in that grave and I knew it was real, even though it aint real that people get buried in coffins with no tops and there aint no big hill like that in St. Augustine. But I knew it was true he musta gone to Augustine with that girl and died there for some reason and was buried and thats why we never saw him no more.”

“You could go and find out if he’s really buried there.”

Dont have to. I know he is.”

“What do you reckon happened to him?”

“I dont know. Somethin.”

“Do you care to find out?”

“No. It was his own business.”

They lay in silence for few minutes and then she said, “Tell me another one. A nicer one.”

“Well, it’s one I had it a few times now,” he said. “It’s a woman in it but not one I ever knowed. I dont see her, not really. More like I…sense her, like she’s right there but I cant really see her too clear. I swear I can almost smell her. She got this thing in her eye…like a little gold piece of the moon, it looks like.” He glanced at Loretta May and saw her smiling and he flushed and looked away. “Ah hell,” he said.

Loretta May laughed. “It’s always a woman in what men dream. Either that or somebody dead or somebody chasin after them. Men’s dreams either give em a hard cock or a cold sweat.”

He leaned over and kissed her breast and tongued the nipple and felt it go rigid, then did the same with the other, then looked up and saw that she was smiling happily. Her hand sought him out and closed around his hardness and she made a face of mock astonishment and said, “Oooh. Sometimes they aint even got to be dreamin, do they?”

He laughed with her and mounted her in a smooth practiced motion and began rocking and rocking into her as she grinned up at him clutching tight to his shoulders.

They entered the Avon bank with .45’s in hand just before closing on a Friday afternoon and relieved the guard of his revolver before he fully comprehended what was happening. They did not wear masks. The customers’ mouths hung open but the gang assured them nobody would be hurt if they all just stayed put and did as they were told. John Ashley went to the head teller’s window and asked his name.

“George Doster, sir,” the teller said.

“I’m John Ashley, George. Open the cage.”

The teller did so, and while Clarence Middleton and Hanford Mobley kept the patrons under watch, John Ashley went around behind the tellers’ windows and himself emptied all the cash drawers into a gunnysack. He then went into the vault and filled another sack with all the paper cash he found in there. The bags now held about eight thousand dollars. Then he came out and asked the manager, a balding man named Weatherington, if there was any more money in the bank and the manager said there wasn’t.

John Ashley grinned at him. “I heard that song before, bubba. Cost me ten thousand dollars to believe it.” He turned to the head teller and said, “George, is he tellin me true? Is it any more money in this bank?”

“I…I dont know, sir.”

“Listen, George,” John Ashley said. “If I read in the newspapers that you boys cheated me, I’m gone be mad, you hear? I’m gone be real mad. I’m gone come back and see all of you one by one and aint none of you gone be happy to see me. So now—one last time—any more money in this bank?”

George Doster licked his lips and glanced sidelong at the bank manager who kept his eyes on the floor. “Mister Ashley, sir,” he said, “I think there might be some money in Mister Weatherington’s top desk drawer.”

John Ashley went to the manager’s desk and in the top drawer found an envelope from the Tarpon Construction Company containing nearly twenty-five hundred dollars. He stepped up to the bank manager and hit him across the bridge of the nose with the pistol barrel and his nosebone cracked like a nutshell. The manager let a yelp and sagged to his knees with blood spurting bright from his nose onto his white shirtfront and spattering the floor.

“Damn, but I hate a liar.” John Ashley said. He gestured for Middleton and Hanford Mobley to go out ahead of him and then he pushed at the door and said, “Listen, Weatherington, I dont want to hear that George lost his job for tellin me the truth. You understand?”

The bank manager had both bands to his nose and blood ran through his fingers and into his shirtsleeves and his eyes were red and flooded with tears. He nodded vigorously and blood shook from his hands ion thick drops.

Three months later they ranged back to the central highlands once again and this time hit the bank in Sebring, announcing themselves loudly as the Ashley Gang. They were in and out in less than ten minutes and took seven thousand dollars. Four months after that they drove down the coast and robbed the Boynton Beach bank of sixty-five hundred. People came out on the sidewalks to watch them make their getaway and some of them waved to the bandits as they went by. Hanford Mobley tooted the horn and waved back.

They let pass another three months and then again picked a job west of Lake Okeechobee and well away from their own territory, this time robbing a bank in Fort Meade of a little more than five thousand. Their reputation had spread and some of the patrons seemed thrilled to be part of an Ashley Gang holdup. “I do believe that teller was about to ask you for your autograph,” Clarence Middleton said to John Ashley as Hanford Mobley steered with one hand and worked the levers with the other and his foot danced on the Model T’s left pedal. They made away into the pinelands on the Frostproof Road. “You all see that pretty thing was standin near the door?” Hanford Mobley said happily. He was sixteen years old this day and feeling very much a man. “I thought she was gonna kiss me on my way out. I shoulda slowed down for a minute and give her the chance, what I shoulda done.”

Newspaper accounts of the robberies used such phrases as “bad actors” and “desperadoes” in describing the Ashley Gang. They referred to the “menacing Wild West deportment of these fearless outlaws.”

When they walked into the Avon bank for the second time they did not even take out their guns. The customers nudged each other and whispered, “It’s them! It’s them!” as Hanford Mobley and Clarence Middleton stood by the door with their hands in their pockets and smiled pleasantly at everyone. John Ashley walked past Weatherington at his desk and nodded at him and the manager nodded jerkily in response and dropped his eyes back to the open ledger in front of him. George Doster had seen them come in and had already put all the paper money into two bags by the time John Ashley arrived at his window.

“Hey George,” John Ashley said.

“Good afternoon, Mister Ashley, sir.” The other teller had seen what was happening and now hastily filled a bag with the contents of his cash drawer and handed it to George Doster. Doster pushed the three bags of money across the counter to John Ashley.

“How much, George?”

“About four thousand five hundred, Mister Ashley. We dont keep as much on hand as we used to before your visit last time.”

“You aint lying now are you, George?”

“Nossir, I wouldnt lie to you, Mister Ashley.”

“How about the vault, George?”

“There’s only about fifteen hundred back there, sir, and, well, I was hoping you might let us keep that so we could at least stay open for business through the rest of the day. If we have to close up for lack of money I dont get paid for the lost time, sir, and, well…I’ve got a family, Mister Ashley. Surely you understand.”

“Got kids, George?”

“A boy and a girl, sir. And one on the way.”

“Oh hell, George, keep the damn fifteen hundred.” John Ashley picked up the bags of money and headed for the door. As he passed Weatherington’s desk he said to the manager, “You ought give that Doster fella a promotion, saving you money like he just did. Got a good head on his shoulders.”

Shortly before Christmas John Ashley walked by himself into the bank at Delray with no intention but to exchange a sack of one hundred silver dollars for a hundred in paper money. The silver had come to him in payment for a load of Old Joe’s bush whiskey from a longtime customer who owned a grocery store at the edge of town. The bank manger glanced out the front window and recognized John Ashley coming across the street and he ordered the head teller to empty the cash drawers into a sack and do it quick.

Now John Ashley came inside but before he could say a word the manager handed him the bag and said, “That’s most of the paper money, Mister Ashley, a little more than four thousand dollars. I swear I’m not lying. There’s about five hundred left in the vault and I wish you’ll leave us with that, Mister Ashley—like you let that other bank keep some. To stay open for business.”

The man was near breathless and his face shone with sweat despite the cool dryness of the winter morning. John Ashley stroked his chin and peeked into the bag and saw the money in there and he smiled at the manager whose left eye was twitching.

“Well now, sir,” John Ashley said, “thank you kindly.” He walked out with the bag of silver dollars in one hand and the sack of paper currency in the other and went across the street to his car. Albert Miller cranked up the engine while a Delray policeman stood on the corner not twenty feet away with his hands behind him and stared up at the sky as though utterly entranced by the blueness of it. Now Albert got behind the wheel and they chugged on out of town. As the car passed by, people heard them guffawing.