Red Grass River

FIFTEEN

The Liars Club

LORDY, THE STORIES WE HEARD ABOUT JOHN AND LAURA! THE kinda stories no one could know were true or not except for the two of them their ownselfs. Stories about the sort of things they’d do in the house Laura was give by her daddy. They say it was way down in the Devil’s Garden, that house, down in the Thousand Hammocks where there’s nothin for miles around but sawgrass and snakes and gators, hooty owls and skeeters and frogs ranging on your ears all the night long. Nights out there just black as blindness. It wasnt any way at all to get within a mile of that house but by the twisty sawgrass channels out there where the grass was just shy of sufficient height to hide you. By the time you’d get close enough to see just a tiny bit of the house through the highground pines, a lookout up in the trees would of had you in his gunsight for a half-an-hour. They say there was getaway sawgrass channels all around that hammock that nobody but Laura knew about and the only one she ever told about them was John Ashley. It was probly the best hideout house John Ashley ever had. Them wild-ass lovebirds didnt live out there all the time, only when they wanted to be alone for a few days and nights way off where there wasnt no law of man nor God to keep em from doin whatever they felt like as loud as they felt like. Ever now and then some hunter or frogger would claim to’ve been out in that part of the glades of an early evening and from a mile away heard em howling like a couple of painters. We heard that when they first moved into the sidehouse on the Twin Oaks property Old Joe couldnt stand the ruckus they made when they went at it late at night. He said if they were going to carry on so awful loud they could damn well do it someplace where they wouldn’t keep everybody awake by it. The Ashleys liked Laura real well and everybody in the family was glad John had found him a true love and all, but we heard the whole family was bad to joke about the caterwauling John and Laura’d make out in the sidehouse.

And so the lovebirds started going out to her house every now and again. Out there they could make all the noise they wanted and nobody around to make fun of them for it nor tell them to quit.

In the spring of nineteen and twenty Sheriff George Baker whose health hadnt been gettin nothin but worse woke up sicker than usual one morning and stayed home in bed and only got worse and by that night he was dead. Bob Baker was appointed to finish out his daddy’s term and then in November he ran for election to the job. He had a photographer take his picture throwin his hat in a ring like he was Teddy Roosevelt. Dont none of us recall who it was ran against him that November. It didnt matter. Bobby was about popular as religion by then and there wasnt a chance in hell he wouldnt be elected—and he was. In his victory speech he said his number one aim was to rid Palm Beach County of what he called the criminal element. Actually he’d been claiming credit all during the campaign for having cut crime a goodly bit already. There hadnt been a bank robbery in the county in nearly a year and he promised the voters there’d not be another one, not while he was sheriff. He didnt mention the Ashley Gang by name but everbody knew that was who pulled the last bank job. It pretty soon became clear, though, that as long as the Ashleys didnt show their face to Bob Baker or any of his officers nor harm any of the good citizens of the county, Sheriff Bob wasnt gonna go out hunting for them. In a way it was like he was letting bygones be bygones as long as the Ashleys didnt do any new crimes, not in Palm Beach County—not in public anyway. Oh he knew they were runnin booze, everbody knew it, but hardly anybody around here saw moonshiners and rumrunners as criminals anyhow, except for some of the good Christian people who’d favored the damn Prohibition laws in the first place.

If the Ashleys had done their booze business out in the open like some bootleggers were doin in some places, Sheriff Bob wouldnt of had no choice but to come down hard on them. But they was careful and quiet about the way they made deliveries to their Palm Beach County customers and Bobby knew better than to work too hard at stopping them. Just about all the hotels and restaurants had speakeasies and they couldnt have done much business without em. And the fish camps liked to keep spirits on hand for their customers who liked a cold beer or a drop of something stronger after a day of fishing. If Bob Baker had put a stop to the Ashley bootlegging in Palm Beach County he’d of hurt a lot more businesses than just Old Joe’s. And if you do something that harms a man’s business, he aint about to vote for you come next election—not him nor his family nor his friends.

John Ashleys was another matter. There was a warrant on him and arresting him wouldnt of put Joe Ashley out of business. But John Ashley was mostly keeping to the Devil’s Garden or down to Miami, where Bob Baker couldnt touch him. As far as anyone knows, the only times he showed hisself publicly in Palm Beach County anymore were now and then when he’d bring a load of hides to a buyer. He never caused trouble on those visits and never of hides to a buyer. He never caused trouble on those visits and never stayed long, and he seemed to know exactly when neither Bob Baker nor any of his main deputies would be around. Sheriff Bob have to of known about those appearances but he didnt seem to care all that much. All in all, over the next few years it was like there was an unspoken truce between Bobby and John.

Which aint to say the Ashleys didn’t have their troubles in that time—especially once national Prohibition came along. Supposedly a gang of Yankee bootleggers tried to run hooch through Palm Beach County and the Ashleys took exception to the intrusion on their territory. None of us knew—then or now—what the real truth of all those stories was, but we heard a lot of things. We heard the Ashleys was hijacking ever booze shipment the Yankee rumboats were landing on the local beaches. There were rumors of gunfights out on boondock stretches of the Dixie Highway where they was stopping every Yankee rum truck to come down the road. There was stories of men gettin shot dead. Mind you, we only heard most of this—the local newspapers hardly ever mentioned any of it. There was talk that Sheriff Bob had told them not to print any stories to worry the public with secondhand reports of things that were not threat to the civic order, of things going on in the dead of night way out in the lonesome reaches of the Dixie Highway or on stretches of beach where not a soul lived for miles around. More than one person made bold to whisper that Bob Baker didnt want anything to put an end to that whiskey war because he was hoping every one of the Ashleys would get killed in it.

Miami really started booming during the Great War and just kept at it after the Armistice. When Deering finished building his Vizcaya estate in 1915 the town lost a lot of jobs—then the war come along and everthing got all better in a hurry. Thousands of servicemen got stationed in Miami and at the end of the war some of them stayed. All the military branches—army and navy and marine corps—set up flying centers of one kind or another in Miami and us kids loved to watch them military planes making their practice flights ever day. We were all just crazy for aeroplanes. Some of us are old enough to remember the first aeroplane flight in Miami back in nineteen and eleven. The mayor wanted to do something special to celebrate the town’s fifteenth birthday so he passed the hat and scraped up a whopping $7,500 to pay the Wright brothers and they sent down an aeroplane on the train and a pilot named Gill to fly it.

It was one of them old bi-wing jobs that looked like a giant dragonfly. They hauled it out to the country club golf course and when Gill took off you didnt hear nothing but his motor and a coupla thousand people going “Ooooh!” and it was one or two ladies fainted from the excitement. The plane went up over the pines and a bunch of the girls from the Hardieville houses had come out to watch and they waved their white hankies at the pilot as he flew over them and he wagged his wings from side to side and you could see his big white grin under his goggles. But the plane scared the daylights out of a herd of cattle in a neighboring pasture and them cows went right through the fence and come stampeding across the golf course just as the plane circled around low and started coming back our way. All the horses and mules started rearing and bucking in the traces and the drivers were yelling “Ho! Ho now!” and trying to rein them in as hard as they could, but here come the cattle stampeding at us and here come the plane not more’n fifty feet overhead with its motor loud as bejesus and them horses and mules were flat terrified and there was no holding em back. They lit out with their teeth showing and their eyes big as baseballs and the drivers and passengers went ass over teakettle off the wagons and out of the buggies. People were shrieking and scattering out of the way of the cattle and the runaway vehicles and some folk went tumbling into the sand traps and some fell in the ponds. All you heard was the rapping of that aeroplane motor and the cattle bawling and horses and mules galloping and whinnying and women screaming and men cussing and kids laughing and…well Lord, aint none of us who was old enough to be there have yet forgot that fifteenth birthday celebration and the first aeroplane to fly over Miami. We found out later that one fella drowned in the water trap in front of the sixteenth green and wasnt found till the next day when a golfer’s fairway shot bounced in front of the hazard and ended up between the dead man’s shoulder blades, which was about all of that was showing above the water. Some say the golfer waded on in and played the lie off the fella’s back before reporting the body, but likely as not thats just a mean story. Anyway, not six years later we were watching the navy’s flying boats—flying boats, mind you—takin off and landing from the bay at Dinner Key and asking each other what they’d think of next. But by the end of the war we’d seen so many planes we didnt even look up anymore when one flew over. A body can get used to anything, no matter how mysterious or strange, and it pretty soon becomes a commonplace, even if its mystery aint any better understood than it ever was.

Lots of mysterious things happened around that time. There was a story in the newspapers about a baby born in Fort Lauderdale that no sooner came out of his momma’s womb that he said just clear as a bell, “It will rain for forty days and forty nights.” And bedamn if it didnt start coming down that very evening and rain from Lauderdale to the keys all through the next day and all the day after that. Newspaper reporters went to the baby’s home and asked his momma and daddy to ask the infant what was going on but apparently the child had spoke his piece and wasnt about to say another word about rain or anything else. You can imagine how people carried on when the rain kept falling and falling day after day. Some good Christian folk sold everything they owned and got ready for the second coming of Noah’s Flood. Most the houses in town put a boat ready in the yard and loaded it with provisions. In the worst flooded neighborhoods alligators swam across the yards and ate ever dog around. Ever day there was news of somebody got bit by a water moccasin. The churches did steady business in sinners stopping in to make theirselfs right with the Lord. Others went the other way and took to the bottle. They say half the men in Miami didnt see a sober hour during that steady fall of rain. There were drunken public fistfights ever day and the cops mostly didnt did anything about them except make bets on who’d win. We heard that some men drowned in the streets when they feel down and were too drunk to even lift their heads up out the water. It rained ever single day for three either weeks before it finally quit and the sun come out again and started to dry out all the craziness. Some said the rain was God’s way of punishing Miami for its wicked ways but others said that was just superstitious nonsense and that the real reason for the rain was them enormous Krupp guns the Germans was using to shell Paris from seventy-five miles away. They said the blasts of them huge guns was upsetting the atmosphere and causing all kinds of strangeness in the weather all over the world.

Then there was the Spanish Lady. That’s what everbody called the influenza that went around so bad during the war. For a time it seemed all South Florida was sick, the whole damn world. People pretty much stopped visiting with their neighbors for fear of sickness in their house. Some of the grownups called catching the flu being kissed by the Spanish Lady. It was a kiss to make you out-of-your-head sick is what it was. For some it was the kiss of death. Everbody knew somebody who was took by the influenza. It was lots of people in mourning dress at that time. For reasons nobody ever figured out, the only ones in Miami who seemed immune to it was the Hardieville girls. Some said it was because God had meaner ends in mind for them sinful women and wasnt about to let them die of anything so easy as the flu.

Anyhow, the war brought more servicemen to Miami than you could shake a picture postcard at and the doughboys brought money and things were mostly good most of the time during the war and got even better afterward. Business was fine all over town—it was money money everwhere. Some restaurants were open for business round the clock. Clothing stores couldnt resupply their stock fast enough, there was so much demand for the latest fashions. Every man wanted a silk shirt and a white boater. Pink and yellow were the favorite colors for shirts during the war but after Armistice candy-striped became most popular. Wages went way up—but so did prices. A carpenter who used to make two dollars a day now got paid a dollar an hour but his twelve dollars for a day’s work was about what one of those new silk shirts cost.

Of course what them doughboys wanted more’n anything else during the war was whores and booze and gambling games—and of course the town was quick to provide all they wanted and no matter it was all illegal. The Hardieville houses never closed. Some of the houses had gambling and some didnt but damn near ever hotel in town had at least one room reserved for dicing and cards at any hour. The politicians and cops were gettin rich on the payoffs. With all them cathouses and gambling rooms doin round-the-clock business the call for booze was constant and the Ashleys had all they could do to satisfy it. When Prohibition came in after the war the market for hooch in Miami was so great it’s no wonder the gangsters from up north wanted in on the action.

After the war the Ashley boys started going to Miami more often than ever. The town was building up a boom that wouldnt do nothing but get bigger and bigger till it’d finally get blowed away by the hurricane of nineteen and twenty-six—but by then the Ashley boys were history, all but one. Once Prohibition become the law there wasnt any kind of fun a man couldnt find in Miami. The Ashleys still went there to gamble sometimes and to sport with the fancy ladies like they always had, but by now they all of them had a steady girl and they liked to go down to Miami in a bunch and have a big time together.

Frank had took up with a gal from Stuart named Jenny, a real pretty thing with black hair to her waist. Ever chance he got he’d take her for drives in his roadster. Now and then people saw them having a picnic in the harbor park. Ed’s girl and named Rita somebody. She was a reclusive thing and nobody’d ever seen much of her till she became Ed Ashley’s girl. She was half-Indian and a few years older than Ed and lived somewhere midway of the St. Lucie canal near an Indian camp. They say she had tits like grapefruits and an ass like a perfect turned-over heart—a body to make a man just howl with want. But her face was another story. They say one side of it was real pretty but the other side of it was a scary thing to behold. The story is, she got that face when she was about fourteen from a bad Indian named Tommy Fox Shadow who later got killed in a fight with a game warden who caught him taking egret plumes. One night in a drunken argument the Indian hit her across the face with a flaming chunk of pinewood off the campfire and knocked out a coupla upper teeth on that side and embers got stuck in her cheek and just burned her to the bone. After that nobody ever saw her to smile nor heard her to say a word. But if her face wasnt much to look at, well hell, neither was Ed’s, what with that scarred mouth and all. It was lots of jokes on the quiet about how the two of them must of had to put a bag over each other’s head just to do the deed.

Hanford Mobley was said to of fallen for some redhead in Miami, and Clarence Middleton had a girl in St. Lucie he has sweet on. Clarence would go off by himself to see her and hardly ever went to Miami with the others. Roy Matthews now, he never did have a steady girl as far as anybody knows. From the time he joined the gang he pretty much took his pleasure where he found it and they say he found it everwhere. For reasons no man’s ever understood, women just cant seem to resist a naturalborn sonofabitch and they say Roy Matthews could have his pick of them like oranges off a tree.

The way we heard it, the boys were taking their girls to Miami nearly ever weekend. They say Old Joe had foaming fits about them spending so much time in the city. He believed all cities were naught but sin pits and he was fearful his boys might get too fond of Miami’s ways. The fact is, the Ashley boys liked Miami plenty well. They liked wearing snazzy city suits and going dancing in the Elser Pier hall. They liked eating in fancy restaurants and going to the moviehouses and singing along to the music at the park bandstand. They for damn sure must of liked them big hotel beds for fooling on. As for their women, well, they loved the city. They didnt have to work while they were there. Didnt have to cook nor wash laundry nor chop wood nor nothing. They could take bubblebaths, they could wear perfume and pretty theirselfs up. Those visits to Miami were to only times Laura Upthegrove was ever known to put on lipstick and a dress.