Red Grass River

SIXTEEN

October 1920—January 1921

THE ELSER PIER WAS AN ORNATE THREE-STORY BUILDING THAT stood at the foot of Flagler Street and extended on pilings into Biscayne Bay. It was as big as a warehouse and from its blazing confines every evening came a rich medley of smells of waft through the streets on the inshore breeze—a redolency of popcorn and roasted peanuts, hot dogs, cotton candy, pastries. This was the place to go in Miami for almost any sort of fun that wasnt illegal. The Pier contained a dancehall and an arcade comprising food stands, a shooting gallery, a tattoo parlor, game booths where fast-talking pitchmen challenged every passing fellow to win for his sweeties a teddybear or gewgaw of colored glass by throwing a baseball at a pyramid of wooden blocks or pitching a penny into a cup or tossing a plastic doughnut at a peg, by shooting an arrow at a fistsized balloon or lobbing a horseshoe at an iron stake in a box of sawdust. There were viewing machines in which one could see short loops of moving pictures by depositing a penny in a slot and turning the crank on the side of the machine—slapstick scenes, quickdraw Western gunfights, exhibitions of horseback highdiving. One viewer showed Hawaiian hula dancers in grass skirts and every night this machine did a brisk trade. Here and there along the arcade aisles were benches and small tables where one might sit with an ice cream cone or a bottle of pop and observe the passing parade. Each time the Ashley gang visited Miami with their women, the Elser Pier was where they took their fun.

The man who ran the shooting gallery would groan at the sight of them headed for his concession. The first time they’d come to Elser Pier each of the men had taken several turns shooting with the pellet rifle and they cleared the pitchman’s shelf of every prize it held. They would have required a sizable sack to bear away their booty except the man looked so dejected they took pity on him and gave back most of it. He’d suggested that thereafter they just give him their fifteen cents and point out the prize they wanted and he’d hand it over and they’d all save some time. The brothers laughed and said that wouldnt be sporting. But on every visit since, they’d made only a single trial apiece with the little rifle, each in turn always shooting a perfect score and laying claim to whatever trophy his ladylove desired off the shelf. Later the girls would give away their prizes to children in the arcade or to women in the dancehall who looked to need cheering up.

The lot of them loved to dance and would still be taking a turn on the floor when the bandleader announced the night’s final number. The dancehall was on the second floor and had tables along the walls and several tall windows to either side overlooking the bay and admitting the seabreeze to swirl the haze of cigarette smoke in the dim yellow light. From these windows the music carried out to the shadowed sidewalks to draw in happy couples and hopeful stags and the always and ever lonely. When the band was between sets you could hear the bayswells slapping at the pilings under the building. Laura loved the Elser Pier dancehall. She told John Ashley it made her feel like she was dancing on a ship at sea.

One warm October night when John and Laura came off the dancefloor to sit at a table and cool off with a glass of lemonade they were approached by a lean man wearing a seersucker suit and a white skimmer. “Pardon me,” the man said. His angular face seemed carved of stained oak. He leaned on the table and said in lower voice, “Might you be John Ashley?”

He spoke with a soft drawl that was neither of Florida nor Georgia. John Ashley wondered if he might be a cop even though his manner bespoke the city and he did not look the type common to the local police department. The Miami chief was partial to hiring beefy young crackers for his force, most of them plowboys whom he enlisted off farms all over Florida and even up in Georgia by way of itinerant agents he’d send out on recruiting missions a few times a year. The plowboys were all tough and afraid of nothing and deeply beholden to the chief for a livelihood other than the backbreaking dullness of life on a farm. They were loyal to him as dogs. And as cultural kin to South Florida crackers they spoke a common language. This lean fellow of quick dark eyes was of another tribe.

John Ashley casually leaned on the table and surreptitiously put his hand to the pistol under his jacket. The day before, he had delivered his father’s monthly contribution to the Miami Police Chief’s “civic fund,” and he did not really think this was a plainclothesman sent to serve warrant. The chief held no quarrel with the Ashleys—nor with any other association of entrepreneurs, however outside the law their enterprise might be—so long as they did not commit robberies or public violence within the city limits and so long as they made regular donation to his fund. The chief would not in any case have sent a lone man to arrest an Ashley and never mind three of the brothers at once. This one could be a detective thinking to solicit for some civic fund of his own. The world was full of fools who knew no better and John Ashley thought this might be one of them.

“Who’s askin?” John Ashley said.

“Somebody who might put you onto somethin I think you’d like to know about. Somethin that might make us some money.”

“Us?” John Ashley said. He exchanged a look with Laura who seemed somewhat amused by the stranger.

On the dancefloor with redhaired Glenda—more than a year older than he and two inches taller, even in flats—Hanford Mobley whispered in her ear that he couldnt wait to give Mister Cooter a kiss when they got back to their room at the hotel. Mister Cooter was their pet name for the small green turtle he’d a week ago persuaded her to have tattooed just below her navel. The tattoo artist had done the job behind a drawn curtain and had smiled the whole time he worked on her smooth belly under the skirt bunched at her waist. Now Hanford Mobley caught sight of the skimmered man talking to John Ashley and he danced Glenda over toward the bandstand in front of which Ed Ashley was whirling with Rita the Breed to the strains of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Some of the couples nearest Ed and Rita would gape on catching sight of her face and she’d whisper to Ed and he’d turn to the gawkers and they’d gawk no more.

Hanford Mobley tapped Ed’s shoulder and gestured toward the table. Ed looked over there and nodded and then deftly maneuvered Rita through the other dancers until they were near enough to Frank and Jenny for him to catch Frank’s eye and direct it to the stranger with John. Then all three couples danced their way toward the table.

The man made bold to sit without invitation. He removed his hat to expose freshly barbered brown hair neatly combed straight back and brightly oiled. He smelled of bay rum. His upper lip was lighter than the rest of his face and John Ashley suspected he had recently shaved a mustache. A short broad scratch was crusted darkly on his left cheekbone. “Us is me and you all,” he said. He put his hand out to John Ashley across the table. “Name’s Matthews. Roy Matthews.”

John Ashley regarded the hand for a moment. The fellow might be city mannered but the calluses and knucklescars on his hands informed that he had known both hard work and skirmish. Any Miami policeman was likely to have such hands but something of this Matthews’ aspect and in the cast of his eyes now decided John Ashley that the man was no cop. He shook the proffered hand and leaned back and said, “If you tryin to interest me in the real estate around here, bubba, save it for the suckers.”

“What if I was tryin to innerest you in somebody who’s runnin whiskey through Palm Beach County?”

John looked at Laura who raised her brow. And now Frank spun Jenny so close to their table her skirt brushed John Ashley’s arm. Then Hanford Mobley whirled Glenda past the table and John Ashley grinned at his narrow-eyed nephew.

Roy Matthews glanced up at them too. Then said to John Ashley: “Besides you all I mean.”

John Ashley’s smile eased off his face. “What you mean?”

“There’s somethin I wasnt first.”

The number ended and Frank and Ed Ashley came to the table with their arms around their girls to listen in and look more closely on the stranger. Hanford Mobley moved up behind John and Laura, Glenda beside him and holding to his arm with both hands. When Roy Matthew’s gaze fixed on her for a moment, she flushed and averted her eyes.

“I asked you what you mean,” John Ashley said.

“I want in,” Roy Matthews said. “Whatever you do with this, I want in on it.”

“On what, dammit?”

The band surged into “Second-Hand Rose” and the floor once again began to spin with dancing couples.

“Tell me I’m in.”

“You might could be in your grave you dont tell me what I’m askin.”

Roy Matthews sighed deeply and regarded John Ashley with a bored look. “I aint been scared in so long I dont even remember what it feels like. I’m gettin up and leavin if you dont say I’m in.” Hanford Mobley said, “You aint doin a damn thing but what we—”

John Ashley cut him short with an impatient wave of his hand. Hanford reddened but held silent. John stared at Roy Matthews as if trying to hear the man’s thoughts. Then smiled. “Bedamn if you dont believe you some kinda hardcase, dont you? What’d you say you name was—Ray?”

“Roy.”

“All right, Roy, you’re in. There. Now tell me what I just let you in on.”

Roy Matthews smiled tightly and leaned over the table and said in low voice, “This bunch from Chicago, they’re bossing a big clan of moonshiners in Georgia and they’re runnin the stuff from there camps down to Miami.”

John Ashley stared at him. “That’s right,” Roy Matthews said. “Right down the Dixie Highway. Right through Palm Beach. And I dont mean a few cases at a time. I mean they’re runnin truckloads. Sometimes one truck and sometimes two or more at a time. Might be only a coupla hundred cases come down one time and then five or six hundred the next. Depends on how many trucks and how big they are.”

“God damn,” Frank said. John Ashley glared at him and Frank said, “Well I dont like it, Johnny, and I dont give a shit who knows it.”

“I didnt quess you would care for it,” Roy Matthews said. “Nary you.”

“Daddy aint gonna be real happy about it for damn sure,” Ed said.

“It aint all,” Roy Matthews said. “They bringin in stuff from the islands too. But there’s so much Coast Guard off Miami and Lauderdale it’s too big a risk anymore to beach the booze there. A coupla weeks ago they started puttin some of it off in Palm Beach and drivin it down the rest of the way.”

The Ashley Gang men exchanged narrow looks.

“Might innerest you to know,” Roy Matthews said, “some New York fellas tried gettin in on the Miami trade too but the Chicago boys pretty quick discouraged them. Chicago wants Miami for theirself, I mean to tell you.”

“Discouraged them New York fellas how?” Ed Ashley asked.

“How?” Roy Matthews said. “Told them they wanted to talk about bein partners. Took a couple of them for a boat ride on the Gulf Stream. About a mile out they got the jump on them an tied them hand and foot and hung a concrete block around their neck and gave them a little push over the side. All but their ears. Sent their ears back to their bosses in New York by way of the U.S. mail.” He took his time about lighting a cigarette. “They know all about you fellas. Know all about your daddy bein the big-dog moonshiner round here. They probly gonna want to see him pretty soon, talk some business. They probly wanna talk to him about bein partners.”

John Ashley’s eyes were gone thin. “Tell me somethin, Roy. How you know so much about it?”

Matthews blew a blue plume of smoke at the overhead lights. “I was workin for them Chicago boys until recent. A friend of mine in Memphis knew a fella who knew a fella who got us hired on as load runners to Miami. Job like that, you hear things now and then, here and there. You know how it is.”

“How come you tellin us?” John Ashley said.

Roy Matthews took a deep drag and exhaled a series of small perfect smoke rings to sail slowly between John and Laura and bear directly for Glenda’s nipples jutting against the clinging bodice of her satin dress. Hanford Mobley abruptly batted the rings to haze before they lit on her. Glenda had started to smile and then blushed brightly and seemed not to know where to direct her eyes. Hanford Mobley glared furiously at Roy Matthews who affected not to notice.

“The fella who runs things for Chicago in this town,” Roy Matthews said, “is a sumbitch named Bellamy—excuse my language, ladies.” He smiled with boyish rue at the women, who all showed smiles in return. Frank looked at Ed and rolled his eyes.

“Anyhow,” Roy Matthews said, “him and my friend Cormac never did like each other for spit. He shorted us on our cut the last two deliveries we made and we knew it. So last week we went over to the Taft Hotel to see him about it. Now it so happens I dont like this Bellamy even more than Cormac dont like him, so Cormac figured it’d be better if just him went up to see him and I wait downstairs. That was all right by me. So I’m waiting around in the lobby and old Cormac hadnt been up there five minutes before there’s gunshots. I look over and the desk clerk’s gone, the bellboy, everdamnbody’s gone. It’s just me in that lobby. Then I hear them comin down the stairs and I can tell it’s more than one and I’m already headed for the back door when they come off the landing and I see they got guns in their hands and brother I hit that door on the fly. I hear bam and a chunk of wood tears off the doorjamb yay close to my head and thats how I got this scratch here. I run down so many alleys and crawled under so many cars and clumb over so many fences that by the time I was sure I’d lost them I was damn well lost myself. I looked like somethin the cat drug in, I mean to tell you.”

“They were shootin in a goddamn hotel?” Frank Ashley said. “Didnt it bring a bunch of cops down no them?”

“Well now I wasnt around to find out. But the Taft’s been their headquarters since before I started runnin hooch for Bellamy and ever cop I ever saw in there was gettin his palm greened or was havin hisself a drink or was there for a free one with one of the third-floor girls. I’d say if the shootin brung any cops it was only from upstairs to tell them hold the noise down.”

Ed Ashley said, “Hell, you could fire a machinegun in this town and nobody’s hear it a block away or pay it any mind if they did, it’s always so damn much noise in the street.”

“Why they wanna shoot you and your partner anyway?” Frank Ashley said.

“Why?” Roy Matthews said. “Well I’d guess old Cormac probly irritated the man some, dont you reckon? Irritated or scared him, one. Maybe he told him pay up what he owed us or else, and Bellamy figured or else meant he best shoot Cormac while he had the chance—then me too for bein the partner. Hell man, I dont know why and I dont give a damn. Coupla sumbitches—scuse me ladies—coupla fellas come at you with guns in they hand you dont stand there and ask how come they upset. Why dont matter a damn. What’s all that counts—and they tried to shoot me is the what of it.”

John Ashley smiled. “So you’re gonna get even by tellin us where they’re landin the stuff and we take it from them.”

“And, I get a cut,” Roy Matthews said.

“Hell, boy, what makes you think we need your help to find where they landin their booze?” Ed Ashley said.

“I guess you dont,” Roy Matthews said. “I’m just hopin you’ll do the sportin thing and let me in on it since I’m the one who told you.”

Hanford Mobley snorted and said sardonically, “The sportin thing.”

“We’re of heard about it soon enough,” Frank Ashley said. “Dont nothin happen in Palm Beach County we dont hear about it soon enough.”

Roy Matthews nodded. “I reckon. Still, I’m the one brung it to you first.”

Hanford Mobley said maybe they ought to go over to the Taft Hotel and see this Bellamy fellow and ask him if Matthews was telling the truth. “If this one’s tellin us true.” Hanford said, gesturing at Roy Matthews, “we can take care of Bellamy right then and there. And if this one’s lyin, well, we can take care of that too.”

John Ashley chuckled. “Hey now, Hannie, we dont want to go startin no war.” He looked at Roy Matthews. “He’s sore-assed about them smoke rings is what it is. Tell him you didnt mean nothing by it.”

Roy Matthews glanced at Hanford Mobley and then turned back at John Ashley with a look that wondered if he was kidding.

“Be best if you tell him,” John Ashley said. “He dont fool that way with other people and dont care to have them fool that way with him.”

Roy Matthews shrugged and turned to Hanford Mobley and said, “Sorry boy. I didnt mean ary thing.” He put his hand out to him.

Hanford Mobley stared at him. Glenda nudged him and stage-whispered, “Han-nie! Dont be mean. Do it.” Hanford exhaled loudly and took Roy Matthews’ hand.

“All right then,” John Ashley, “let’s get on over to the hotel where we can talk some more about this over a jug.”

As they all headed out of the dancehall and toward the stairway the band was playing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” Frank and Ed Ashley were groping at their girls who squealed and pulled away in feigned protest at their liberties. John Ashley was pointing out to Laura a particularly graceful pair of dancers and Hanford Mobley was admiring them too. None among them saw Glenda glance back at Roy Matthews over her shoulder nor see the wink he gave her nor the quick wide smile she showed him in return.

They took Roy Matthews out to Twin Oaks and introduced him to Old Joe and let him tell their father what he’d told them. Lambent sunlight filtered through the tall oaks flanking the house and made pale yellow mottles on the pine-needled ground. A family of scrub jays clamored in the high branches. Old Joe listened to Roy Matthews and then spat off the porch and went through the ritual of loading and lighting his pipe before saying he wasnt surprised the Yankee gangsters were brining their booze through Palm Beach. “Hell, they bound to been doin it for a while and we just now findin out about it because we aint been payin no kinda attention worth a damn.”

Bill Ashley sat beside his father on the porch. He took off his spectacles and held them up against the light to check for cleanliness. “I told you this problem was like to come up,” he said.

Old Joe turned a thin look on him. There were times when Bill’s know-it-all manner could wear on him as much as it did on his brothers. “Yes, you did tell me that, boy. And I told you we’d do somethin about it when it happened.”

Bill fit the glasses back on his face and looked at his father for a moment without expression and then stared off at the swamp pines.

“It aint right, Gramps,” Hanford Mobley said. “Them bringin they whiskey right smack through our territory without so much as a by-your-leave.”

Old Joe grinned wide at Hanford Mobley and turned to his sons and said, “Listen at him. Damn pit bull, ready to tear ass.”

Now he fixed his attention on Clarence Middleton who was sitting on the ground beside the porch steps with his back against the lattice-work fronting the crawlspace, legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded on his stomach, eyes closed. He’d just returned from another night with his girlfriend Terrianne in St. Lucie and his face was sagged with fatigue and lack of sleep. Every few minutes he’d wince and hustle his balls to ease the ache of their strained condition. Over the past two months he seen the girl every night that he wasnt out on a rum run, and his exhaustion was beginning to tell.

“You, Clarence,” Old Joe said, and Clarence Middleton opened one watery red eye to look up at him. “You best ease up on all that hunchin or we gone have to wrung you out that girl’s bedsheets one these mornings. You listening to me, boy?”

Clarence sighed heavily and shut his eyes.

Old Joe smiled at him and then turned to Roy Matthews. “Tell me, young fella, you know boats?”

“Grew up in Myrtle Beach and learned to sail when I was but ten year old,” Roy Matthews said. “Know motors too. Aint ary kinda boat I cant handle nor motor vehicle I cant drive.”

“Real high-powered package, aint he?” Hanford Mobley said with heavy sarcasm. Old Joe gave him a smiling glance. Roy Matthews ignored him.

“Myrtle Beach, hey?” Old Joe said to Roy Matthews. “That aint where you spent your first years though was it? You didnt learn to talk in no part of South Caroline. Say you was borned in Tennessee?”

“I didnt say,” Roy Matthews said.

“You surely did, boy,” Old Joe said. “Said so with the first word come out your mouth. East part I say.”

Roy Matthews grinned. “You say about right. Borned and spent my first years just outside Rogersville.”

“Reckoned it was thereabouts,” Old Joe said. He leaned back and scratched his chin, then swept his hard gaze over them all and said: “Anybody brining whiskey through our territory has got to pay us a tax.”

The others looked at each other. Then Frank Ashley whooped. “A tax! Damn, daddy! Who you think we are, the government?”

“Well boy, if we aint the government of ourselfs, who is?” Old Joe said.

Ed Ashley laughed. “Bobby Baker’s have an answer to that.”

“Piss on Bobby Baker,” John Ashley said. “Him and the mangy-ass dog he rode in on.”

The Ashley boys and Hanford Mobley all laughed and grinned at each other. Clarence Middleton chuckled with his eyes closed. And even Bill Ashley’s eyes were bright with excitement behind his spectacles.

They posted lookouts along the Dixie Highway about ten miles apart and ranging from Fort Pierce in St. Lucie County all the way down to just about Palm Beach County’s southern line. Each lookout was kin or a trustworthy hired man of Joe Ashley’s and each was positioned near a telephone. Some were set up on secondary roads that connected with the main highway at points between Stuart and Delray. Three or four of the gang at a time were now living in a pinelands camp just outside of Boynton Beach near the south county line and a scant quarter mile from highway. Their Boynton lookout could get word to the camp in twenty minutes of any suspected whiskey carrier reporter by telephone to be coming their way, and in minutes the gang could be on its way to intercept the load.

Their first stop was a truck just south of Jupiter. They got report of the truck and its description from their Fort Pierce lookout and then drove north to a desolate spot flanking Hobe Sound and parked the car on the highway’s narrow shoulder alongside the palmetto thickets. John Ashley and Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews got out and hid in the bush. Clarence Middleton raised one of the Ford’s hood flaps and stood smoking a cigarette and leaning on a fender. The midmorning was bright and clear and passing traffic was sparse. One motorist stopped and asked if he needed help and Clarence thanked him and said help was on the way and the motorist waved and went on.

When the truck came into view Clarence stepped out on the road and raised his hand. The truck slowed and started to go around him but he sidestepped in front of it again and the driver braked hard and the truck halted on the wrong side of the road. The man sitting on the passenger side was wearing a Chicago White Sox baseball cap and he stuck his head out and began to curse Clarence for a fool. Then John Ashley and Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews came out of the trees with shotguns ready and the man shut up.

John Ashley directed the driver to park the truck on the shoulder and turn off the motor. The two men then got out of the truck as ordered and John Ashley told them to keep their hands down at their sides while Hanford Mobley quickly searched them and found a revolver on each one. On the floor of the truck cab he found a shotgun and he took it and the pistols to the Ford and laid the weapons on the rear seat. He put up their own shotguns too and they went to their .45’s.

“Car comin!” Clarence Middleton called. John Ashley and Hanford Mobley hid their Colts against their legs and John walked up to the driver and put an arm over his shoulder in the manner of an old friend. A roadster made its way toward them. Hanford Mobley affected to engage the baseball-capped man in conversation as Clarence leaned over the sedan’s exposed motor like a man at repairs and Roy Matthews knelt in the grass and slowly retied his shoes. Now the roadster came abreast and at the wheel was a young man wearing a duster and goggles and a car cap and beside him a pretty girl in a summer dress who brushed her wild blonde hair from her face and smiled at them one and all as the car sped past in a pale could of dust. They all looked after the roadster a for a moment, and then Clarence Middleton said, “Kiss my ass if that aint one lucky sumbitch!”

The highway again lay deserted in both directions but for the turkey buzzards that lit from the pines to the shoulder some fifty yards up the road to feed on the crushed and moldering carcass of a possum whose stench came faintly to the men where they stood,.

John Ashley and Hanford Mobley again brandished their guns and the man in the Sox cap said, “What is this, a robbery? You want our money?” He was a tall lean man with prematurely gray hair cropped close as a convict’s. A short but vivid purple scar curved from the corner of him mouth to just under his chin.

John Ashley laughed at him. He went to the truck and loosened the rope holding a trap cover across the back of the enclosed bed and he lifted a corner of the tarp and looked in and gave a low chuckle. He asked the driver how many cases it was. The driver glanced at the man in the Sox cap and John Ashley looked at him too and the man hesitated and then said fifty. Hanford Mobley and Clarence Middleton grinned.

Now the main in the Sox cap spotted Roy Matthews and looked at him hard and said, “Well hell now, look who’s here. I heard you and your Scotchman buddy had a fatal accident down in Miami.”

“I’d say you heard half-wrong, White,” Roy Matthews said. He was smiling broadly.

“So now you’re in with these jackers? Bellamy’ll have your ass for breakfast.”

“Bellamy best pray he dont never see me again.”

The man called White gave a derisive snort. “Bold talk.” He looked around at the others. “Must be all these hillbilly guns makes you so bold.”

“Who you callin hillbilly, you son of a bitch?” Hanford Mobley said.

“Hell, it aint hardly a hill in Florida,” Clarence Middleton said. “Everbody knows that except dumbass Yankees.”

White smiled and said, “Sorry, friend. I guess Roy’s just feeling brave because he’s in your company. I think I know who you gents are, but I’d rather not guess.” When he smiled the scar on his chin went thinner and lightened almost to blue.

“Name’s Ashley,” John told him. “Palm Beach is our grounds. You ask anybody. Any whiskey you bring through this county anymore is gonna cost you a tax of ten dollars a case. It’ll cost you five hundred dollars to take these here fifty cases on through.”

“A tax?” White said. He looked around as if suddenly unsure of where he was or if he ought to laugh. “Listen,” he said, “if I had the fucken money on me I wouldnt pay it, not to you guys. This here’s a public road, brother. We got as much right to use it as anybody.” He smiled at the folly of his own argument.

“I aint your brother,” John Ashley said. “And considerin how much you stand to make on this load in Miami, I’d say five hundred is a fair cut to us for lettin you take it by. It’s anyway cheaper than losin your whole entire load like you gonna do.”

White heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Do you know whose booze you’re stealing?”

“Sure do,” John Ashley said. “A fella’s who wouldnt pay us the tax on it.”

White showed a wry smile. “Say your name’s Ashley?”

“That’s right.”

“Which one are you?” White said.

“John. You heard of us, huh? What’s your name?”

“James White,” the man said. “Some people as soon as you’re introduced to them as James think it’s all right to call you Jim, but I let them know pretty quick I dont care much of that name. Care even less for Jimmy.”

“Where you from, Jimmy?”

James White laughed. “Chicago.”

John Ashley said, “Ah.”

“You heard of it, huh?” James White said. “Listen, you gonna take the truck too?”

John Ashley spat to the side and grinned. “Well you dont reckon I’m gonna bust a sweat hauling all that booze out of your truck just to heave it up on mine?” He gestured at Hanford Mobley and the boy hastened to the truck cab and set the levers and got out the crank and went around to the front of the vehicle and cranked the motor and it fired up on the first try. He got in the driver’s seat and tooted the Klaxon in sheer exuberance, then put the truck in gear and it lurched into motion and he wheeled out onto the road. They all watched it move away down the highway until it clattered around a bend and was gone.

James White let another long sigh. “How far to the nearest depot?”

“Olympia station, back the way you came,” John Ashley said. “Aint but a few miles.”

White tugged his White Sox cap low on his eyes and put his hands in his pockets. “You know, John: there’s people in Miami gonna be real unhappy about his. I’m responsible for the transfer of our Georgia stuff. I’ve got other drivers working for me. I got a half-dozen trucks to keep track of. You’re making me look bad at my work is what you’re doing.”

“Damn if that aint a sad story, Jimmy,” John Ashley said. “But the plain and simple of it is, we cant have somebody else making money by running whiskey through our territory without us gettin a share of it. I know you can understand that.”

“Oh hell yeah, John, I understand it just fine. But I dont think my bosses are gonna be near so understanding.”

“You explain it to them real good and maybe they will be,” John Ashley said. “They’re businessmen. They know taxes is part of doin business. They dont wanna pay the tax they can either take their hooch around Palm Beach County or they can lose it to us.” He headed for the Ford. Clarence Middleton was already behind the wheel and Roy Matthews in the backseat.

James White morosely shook his head. “You’re fucking with the wrong people, John.”

“Tell Bellamy I said his momma sucks nigger dicks,” Roy Matthews called back to him.

“You always been a silvertongue, Roy,” James White said.

Then Clarence Middleton was accelerating the Ford down the road and all three of them were laughing and James White and his driver stood in the raised dust and watched them go.

The next one came through at night and didnt even slow down nor try to go swerve around Clarence Middleton who stood stark in its headlights and was obliged to dive off the road and into the palmettos to avoid being run over. As the truck roared past them John Ashley and Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews opened fire on its wheels and the flaming rifleshots blew out three of its tires. The truck veered and then straightened out and tried to go on with its useless tires flapping and its rims cutting rasping grooves in the whiterock road but the engine was laboring hard and now it began stuttering under the heavy drag and the truck slowed steadily and finally stalled. And here came John Ashley and Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews on the run through the dust with Clarence Middleton behind them and cursing the bastards who’d tried to run him down but by the time they got to the vehicle the driver and shotgun rider had fled into the woods.

They repaired the flattened tires and took turns on the air pump and when all the tires were inflated Clarence got in the truck and drove the load of booze to Twin Oaks with John Ashley and Hanford Mobley following close in the Ford touring car.

Some weeks later, on a cool January evening, John Ashley and Hanford Mobley lay hidden among the sea oats on the crest of a Jupiter Island sand dune and watched a whiskey sloop bobbing easily on the swells fifty yards offshore as it unloaded its cargo. Although the bigger rumships that could carry several thousand cases were now careful to conduct their load transfers outside the three mile limit of the Coast Guard’s legal authority, the captain of this sloop obviously had no fear of doing business so close to shore. A trio of large motorboats operating without running lights was nestled against the sloop’s hull and taking on the booze. The Ashley gang had pulled a half-dozen road hijackings by now but this was their first beach job.

They could see that the booze was in sacks instead of wooden crates. The smugglers were always learning new tricks for their trade and this was a recent one in the way they packed whiskey for transport. The bottles were now commonly packed in burlap sacks jacketed with straw—three to six bottles to the sack—and the sack tied tightly to hold the bottles snugly together. Because of the resemblance, these booze sacks were called hams. They made for easier handling and more compact loading. Twice as much liquor could be put in a cargo hold when it was packed in hams rather than crates, and pairs of hams tied together with lengths of cord could be hung around a man’s neck for portage from beach to trucks. Frank and Ed Ashley themselves now insisted that the whiskeyloads they took aboard the Della in the Bahamas be packed as hams.

The Ashleys had also adopted another common rummer’s trick, one intended to avoid capture with a load of booze. They securely glued a light ball of cork about as big as a baseball to a fist-sized bag of salt, then tied one end of a six-fathom length of fishing line to the cork and the other end to a ham, then hung the coiled line over the neck of the ham. They did this with about dozen hams in every load. If it should ever look to them like they were going to be intercepted by the Coast Guard, they would jettison the load before they hove to—and then later, after the salt dissolved and released the cork markers to bob to the surface, they could come back and use divers to retrieve the cargo.

They knew the tactic was not assured of success. They had heard stories of rummers who dumped their loads in water too deep for the markers to reach the surface. And of instances when somebody else came along and spied the markers and stole the whiskey before the rummers could come back for it. Smuggling was a lucrative enterprise precisely because it was fraught with risk. To the outsiders now landing their booze in Palm Beach County, the Ashley Gang was about to present itself as one of the more severe risks in the business.

A dozen yards fore of the sloop a school of silvery fish broke the water in a sparkling phosphorescent rush ahead of a pursuing pack of dark dorsal fins. A half-moon pale as a skull hung high in the east. The sky was cloudless and swarming with stars. A cool saltwind came softly off the ocean. John Ashley felt the beauty of this world as a tight clutching in his chest. A comet cut across the night in a fine bright-yellow streak and vanished in the measureless void and he wondered if it now existed anywhere at all.

Between the island and the mainland was the Jupiter Narrows, a labyrinthine tangle of mangrove channels pungent with marine decay. At this location the channels were shallow enough to ford and on the mainland side of the Narrows an oystershell trail had been hacked through the mangroves and laid to a clearing in the hardwoods and pines farther inland. The clearing stood within a hundred yards of the Dixie Highway but was fully hidden from its view. A pair of trucks was waiting there to receive the whiskey. In each of the cabs sat a driver and a guard, smoking and quietly talking, unaware of being watched from the trees by Roy Matthews and Clarence Middleton, both of whom held shotguns charged with buckshot.

Now the transfer was complete and the motorboats swung away from the sloop and came churning for the beach, their motors rapping on the night air. Behind them the sloop weighed anchor and hoisted sail and made away on the wind like a pale phantom. The motorboats rose and dipped over the swells and came through the cut in the bar where the waves broke. The pilots throttled back their engines and the boats glided up onto the beach in front of a line of dunes some thirty yards from the where John Ashley and Hanford Mobley lay watching.

A shore party of ten men scrambled from the shadows and began unloading the booze. Soon all the hams were on the beach and the motorboats were heading for open water again and bursting through the combers in sprays of spume and then one after another veering to the south and a minute later not even their foamy wakes were in evidence.

The men of the shore party now hung hams around their necks and began trudging over the dunes and through the sea oats and down to the meager mangrove path leading to the Narrows. One man was left on the beach to watch over the rest of the whiskey. The shore party filed into the shallow lagoon and made their way across under the blazing moon.

The Ashley Gang waited and watched—John Ashley and Hanford Mobley from the dunes, Clarence Middleton and Roy Matthews from the trees at the edge of the clearing—watched as the shore party went back and forth over the Narrows, carrying whiskey to the trucks. When the last of the hams was retrieved from the beach, John Ashley and Hanford Mobley followed the shore party at a distance through the mangroves and across the Narrows and into the trees. They hung back in the shadows while the last sacks of whiskey were put aboard the trucks under the supervision of one of the drivers, a man wearing a longbilled fishing cap. Illuminated by a pair of kerosene lanterns hung on a pine branch, the clearing was cast in a ghostly yellow light. The shore party spoke little as it went about its work. Then the fishing-capped man pulled down in turn the rear tarpaulin flap on each truck and tied it snugly in place and the trucks were ready to go.

John Ashley and Hanford Mobley stepped out of the shadows and took positions a dozen feet apart and aimed their cocked shotguns at the guards and drivers. John Ashley said, “You even think about them pistols on your hips, boys, and your brains’ll be all over the bushes.” The drivers and guards put their hands up and stood still but for breathing.”

Some in the shore party glanced around as if thinking to bold. But now Clarence Middleton and Roy Matthews appeared from the darkness of the trees with their shotguns ready and Clarence Middleton said, “Stand fast, cousins.”

John Ashley ordered them all to clasp their hands on top of their heads and then told everybody in the shore party except the drivers and guards to bunch up in the middle of the clearing. Hanford Mobley hastened for the pump shotguns the truck guards had left propped against a pine tree. He pitched one to Clarence Middleton and one to Roy Matthews and now they both brandished a shotgun in each hand like a pair of huge pistols. Mobley then went to the drivers and relieved them of the revolvers in their hip holsters—a .38 and a .44 caliber. He tucked the .38 in his waistband and lobbed the bigger piece to John Ashley, who kept it in hand.

“Hey, Johnny,” Hanford Mobley said, “lookit here who’s ridin with these boys.”

One of the truck guards had been trying to keep his face averted from the light and shielded by his upraised arms. He was short and thickshouldered and when he looked directly at Mobley and grinned his mouth looked almost toothless for the blackness of his teeth. It was Phil Dolan who operated the trading post on the Salerno docks. “How do, Hannie,” he said. “How you keepin?”

“Well damn, Phil,” John Ashley said, coming up to him, “what you doin ridin shotgun for this bunch?”

Dolan showed an abashed smile. “Aw hell, it’s just for the money is all. I aint been doing a lot of business lately. The trappers’re havin to go way out farther in the Glades than they used to get a full load of hides. You know thats true, John. Nowadays by the time they get theirselfs a load they usually closer to the Okeechobee or the Indiantown trade posts. They aint about to tow them hides all the way back to me if they can sell them just as good over there. I mean, my business gone all to hell recent, I aint lyin.”

He’d been talking rapidly and now paused to lick his lips. The look he gave John Ashley beseeched understanding. “A while back these fellers come to my place and said they was from Miami and they’d pay me two hundred dollars for ever back road I could show them through Palm Beach County and another hundred for just ridin with the trucks when they come through. Said they’d pay me another two hundred for ever good spot I could show them for unloading stuff on the beach. Well hell, John, I couldnt rightly turn down no offer like that, now could I?”

“Dont look like you could, Phil,” John Ashley said. He was surprised to be bothered as much as he was by the fact of a local cracker in the employ of the Yankee bootleggers. He nodded at the man with the fishing cap and said, “This the party chief?”

Phil Dolan glanced at the fishing-capped man and nodded.

“I can talk for myself,” the party chief said.

John Ashley told him to shut up. Then asked Dolan: “Who were these fellas sweet-talked you so easy, Phil?”

“They had Yankee accents, the both them. Wore suits. They never said their names and I never asked. I heard one say they worked for a fella called Ben Mead, I think he said. But—”

“Bellamy,” Roy Matthews said.

Phil Dolan glanced at him and shrugged. “Could be, I guess. Anyway, it wasnt sweet-talk like you say, Johnny. It was just the money, is all. You should see the money they had. Big roll of hundred-dollar bills like you wouldnt believe. Said they’d pay me in advance and then did it. Hell Johnny, how was I gonna turn down somethin like that? Would you have, you was me?”

“I aint you, Phil,” John Ashley said. His impassive air unnerved Phil Dolan the more.

“Oh hell, John,” he said, “it’s just the money, man. It dont mean nothin.”

The party chief hawked and spat. He was stocky and wore several days’ growth of whiskers. The look he held on Phil Dolan was hard with disdain. The other driver and guard looked as fearful as Dolan.

“How about that shotgun you was carryin, Phil,” Hanford Mobley said. He’d perceived John Ashley’s intention to make Phil Dolan sweat a little for going on the Bellamy payroll and he thought to get in on the fun. “Aint that for shootin anybody tries to hijack this load?” He was smiling at Dolan’s fear. The men of the shore party stood still as a painting.

“Jesus, I wouldnt shoot none of you, Hannie,” Phil Dolan said, his face gone even paler now. He knew John Ashley for a reasonable man but Hanford Mobley was of a more volatile nature. He turned back to John Ashley and said, “It’s just for show, that shotgun, it’s just…ah hell. Johnny, you wouldnt shoot me?” His attempt at a smile was pitiful. “We know each other, man. We done business for years, you and me.”

“Quit your whining, you pussy son of a bitch,” the party chief said.

John Ashley turned to tell him that if he said another word without permission he’d break his jaw—and in that instant Phil Dolan broke for the trees and Roy Matthews shouted, “Watch it, Johnny!”

All in one motion John Ashley whirled and raised the revolver and fired. The pistol blasted an orange streak and bucked hard in his hand and a chunk of Phil Dolan’s skull jumped off his head and Dolan lunged forward with his arms out to his sides like he was flinging himself into the surf. He lit on his face and lay still.

A pair of shotguns boomed almost simultaneously and John Ashley spun in a crouch with the revolver ready and saw Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews jacking fresh shells and both of them looking to the edge of the woods where the party chief lay in an awkward tangle a few feet shy of the trees which was as far as he’d gotten before the buckshot took him down. In the hazy lantern light his left forearm was ripped open to the bones and his back looked scooped of a spadeful of flesh and rib to expose to the indifferent stars his mutilated organs. The air smelled of gunsmoke.

Everyone held mute. John Ashley slowly lowered his gun and turned and walked over to Phil Dolan and stared down at the lanternlit spill of blood and brainmatter around his broken skull. You dumb cracker, he thought—it wasnt no need. He wasnt sure if his thoughts were directed at Phil Dolan or himself or both. He stood perplexed by his own angry sorrow.

He saw Clarence Middleton looking serious and Hanford Mobley grinning widely at nobody in particular. Roy Matthews was squatting beside the shotgunned man and now looked over at John Ashley and shook his head. The men of the shore party had all put their hands up high. They looked terrified. “Put your hands down,” John Ashley said to the shore party, and some did, and some put them back on top of their heads, and some seemed reluctant to bring them down at all.

“I said put them down, goddammit!” John Ashley shouted. “Not on your head, just down” He looked ready to shoot them all. Some of them were petty criminals but most were simply unemployed laborers who’d thought themselves lucky to be recruited for the shore party. Excepting two veterans of the Great War and a man who’d seen one bum stab another to death in a St. Louis alleyfight, none among them had ever before witnessed a killing.

John Ashley sighed heavily and put the revolver in his waistband and rested the shotgun barrel against his shoulder and rubbed his face hard. He regarded the frightened men before him, then walked up and looked closely into every man’s face in turn. Then he directed Clarence Middleton to give each man five dollars. As Clarence dispensed the money, John Ashley told them they had until sunup to get out of Palm Beach County. They could not go back to Dade. They could not go south at all. They could go only north to at least Jacksonville or north-westward to at least Pensacola. “Be best if you get all the way out the state,” John Ashley said. “Now I know what all you look like and I never forget a face. I ever see any of you anywhere in Florida outside of Jacksonville or Pensacola, I wont even ask you what you’re doin. I’ll just shoot you where you stand. Do you all believe me?”

They nodded, all of them quickeyed and tightfaced. John Ashley told them to get on the trucks, he was taking them to the train station. The men loosened the tarp covers and clambered aboard and positioned themselves carefully so as not to upset the hams. When every man of them was on the trucks, John Ashley and Hanford Mobley drew down the tarps and tied them tightly in place. Then John took Roy Matthews and Clarence Middleton aside and told them to dispose of the bodies where they wouldn’t be found.

An hour later John Ashley and Hanford Mobley were watching the Midnight Flyer pulling out of the West Palm Beach station with its whistle shrieking and its smokestack huffing high black plumes and tossing sparks as the train headed for Jacksonville and points north with all ten men of the shore party aboard. At the same moment, Clarence Middleton and Roy Matthews, with a pair of dead men stretched at their feet, were on an eighteen-foot launch cutting through the ocean and heading for the Gulf Stream under the high half-moon. When they reached the Stream they would cut back the motor and the boat would rise and fall on the silvery swells as they tied concrete blocks to the dead men’s feet and cut their bellies open with a buck knife and felt the boat bottom go slick under their shoes. They would roll the bodies over the side to plunge into the dark fastrunning depths with blood billowing and intestines uncoiling and sharks closing fast to rid the world of all mortal evidence that these men did ever exist.