Red Grass River

NINETEEN

July 1921—August 1923

HE WAS LOCKED INTO A SEVEN-BY-NINE CELL IN A SPECIAL BLOCK set apart from the rest of the prison and he did not come out again for one year and eleven months and four days. The door was of iron bars and faced a narrow dimly lighted corridor. If there were any other cells close by he could not see them nor did he raise response when he hallooed loudly from his door. The concrete floor was slightly concave and in its center was a shithole three inches wide and engirt with the umber wastestains of countless convicts over the decades. Once a week a guard flung a pail of water through the door to give the cell a rudimentary rinse. John Ashley quickly learned to anticipate these occasions and would sit naked near the door to receive the brunt of the water and thus wash himself somewhat.

In the rear wall was set a small barred window eight feet above the floor. It was a foot square in dimension and its top was even with the ceiling. It was brightest with daylight in the late afternoons. Through it came birdsong, leaves off a looming water oak, the frost of winter nights. During hard storms of westerly wind the rain spattered into the cell and he positioned himself to receive the drops on his face. He loved the thunder and sporadic flaring of lightning at the window. His narrow bunk was bolted too far from the window to serve as a platform and there was nothing else on which he might stand, and so the only way he could look out was to pull himself up by the bars and hold there by arm strength and with his toes effecting the barest purchase on the wall. In this way would he gaze out on the trunk and branches of the oak that stood almost near enough to touch, on a portion of a highwalled weedgrown yard littered with broken wagon wheels, torn harness, and rusted parts of automobiles and other machines. At various times of the day he would cling to the window until the burning in his biceps became unbearable and he’d drop back to the floor. To straighten his cramped arms was then so painful he’d nearly cry out.

He never saw nor heard anybody in the little yard but often saw birds—mostly jays and crows and mockingbirds—come to feed on insects in the grass. He sometimes spied cats hunting in the yard and once saw a scruffy tortoiseshell catch a mouse and devour it on the spot in less than a minute. One time a sparrow flew into the cell and couldnt make its way out again and it flew wildly until it hit the wall in exhaustion and lit on the floor. He picked it up and felt its tiny heart quivering against his palm and the light in its eyes dimmed as if some wick within were being turned down and it died in his hand. He pulled himself up to the window and dropped the bird outside and felt foolish in his notion that it was now freer than he was.

Since the day of his arrival at Raiford he’d not again seen the warden nor anybody else except the guards who twice a day brought his meals on a tin plate they slid through a narrow slot at the bottom of the door. In the beginning he’d tried to make small talk but neither of the hacks ever made reply nor even looked directly at him and so he quit trying. He was as hungry for conversation as he was for food but would be damned if he’d let them know it. Almost without variance he was fed on fatback, cornbread, molasses and coffee every morning, on blackeyed peas, greens, rice and water every night. Occasionally his plate held a thin watery stew of pork or rabbit. Besides the exercise of holding himself up to the window several times a day, he also did daily pushups and situps and stretching routines of every sort. He took to punching the wall every day, one hundred times with his right fist and then one hundred with his left. He punched the rough stone lightly at first but as the months went by and his knuckles enlarged and gained thicker callus he could hit harder and harder without breaking the skin. He stood on his head for a count of two hundred every morning and again every evening because he’d heard that the habit improved your upright balance and that such regular infusion of blood to the head would make you smarter.

He talked to himself to keep in the practice of speech and hear a human voice if only his own. He described the splendors of the Devil’s Garden, the vast sawgrass horizons and the skies without limit, the veils of heat that rose and shimmered in the heart of summer midday as if the air itself had been crazed by the sun. He held forth on thunder-heads that swelled like encroaching mountains of coal until they overwhelmed the sky and sparked with lightning and detonated with thunderclaps and burst into storms as explosive and incandescent as heaven’s own war. He remarked on the ripe smells of verdure and muck that followed hard rain. He talked of whitetailed deer bounding through the pinewoods in misty dawn silence, of redtail hawks wheeling in graceful hunt over wide savannahs, of the dogbark call of alligators and the ruby glint of their eyes just above the waterline where the lanternlight found them in the dark. He spoke of the cold blue colors and fast deep currents of the Gulf Stream, of the exhilarating sight of porpoises cavorting alongside a boat far out to sea, of the sound of ocean nightwinds and the strange faint melodies they sometimes carried which graybeard sailors said were ancient songs of drowned women whose undying love had transformed them to mermaids. To cockroaches skittering across the floor he confessed that the sea had always scared him.

He was determined not to break under the weight of his isolation nor to dwell on the length of his sentence. But he sometimes found himself thinking he’d missed forever his chance to even the score with Bob Baker and he cursed himself aloud for not havin settled things with him when he had the chance and to hell with his daddy’s order to leave Bobby alone. Such ruminations made him want to howl like a dog forlorn. He’d punch the walls till his knuckles looked like purple grapes.

On clear nights he stood with his back against the door bars and gazed on the small patch of stars framed in the window and among the oak branches. In phases of the lunar cycle he’d see the moon for brief periods of the night and his chest would tighten with the beauty of it. He sometimes saw the moon showing after daybreak like a bruised pearl or a segment therefrom against a soft patch of blue sky.

Excepting the mermaids and their sea-songs he did not speak of women, not even to the cockroaches. He tried hard to keep women from his waking mind. But from the start of his isolation he dreamt almost nightly of Loretta May who was blind but could see across time and distance and into the heart of things, she whose nipples were sometimes the color of caramel and sometimes of brown sugar, depending on her state of excitement, whose skin smelled of peaches and her hair of daybreak dew. And he dreamt of course of Laura who smelled always of the swamp and whose joy in sex was as abandoned as a cat’s. He dreamt of dancing with her at Elser Pier to plinking ragtime and blatant jazz bands. In his sleep he sometimes revisited the three occasions on which they had all frolicked together in Loretta’s bed and he sometimes ejaculated as he dreamt and he sometimes woke with a throbbing erection that flexed like a snake in his hand as he came. He dreamt also of seeing them together without him, kissing and caressing each other’s bare flesh, and he knew the dream was true but he did not mind that they took comfort from each other that way. He could not have explained how he knew they were doing it as much for love of him as for any other reason. But so rousing were these visions that by the end of his fourth month in isolation he was masturbating several times a day. He continued this excess for weeks. The deepest reach of his rectum developed a chronic ache. Not until his raw and discolored cock became infected and too painful to touch was he able to free himself of the mania. Once his penis was hale again he refrained from choking the chicken—as he and his brothers had called it since boyhood—but a few quick times a week. Over the next months the practice palled to the point that he abandoned it altogether. He thereafter spent himself only as he dreamed of Laura and Loretta May.

In his sleep one cool night of his first October in isolation he saw his brothers out at sea. It was like watching a moving picture show without the accompanying piano music—all action and no sound at all, not even the whirring of the projection machine. He knew somehow that his brothers were on the back leg of a whiskey run, knew they were in the Gulf Stream and bearing westnorthwest. The Della rode low on the gathering swells under an amber crescent moon running through ragged purple clouds. High black thunderheads were closing from the west, sporadically backlit by shimmers of sheet lightning. Ed was at the wheel, smiling and talking, and though he could not hear his words John Ashley knew he was relating some recent sexual adventure with Rita the Breed. Frank clung one-handed to the cabin railing and laughed.

But now the brother both looked out into the night and John Ashley knew they were hearing the sound of powerful marine engines. The boats materialized from the cloud shadows into the brightness of the moon, two sleek craft and each perhaps thirty feet long and running without lights, one bearing on the Della from southwestward and the other coming at her from the north. Ed opened the throttles wide as Frank swooped belowdecks and came back up with a Browning Automatic Rifle. The Della cut smoothly through the water but even though the engines were churning at full speed the bow was hardly raised at all, so heavy was their cargo, and the speedboats were closing fast.

Now automatic fire sparked from both boats and John Ashley saw where the bullets spouted the water aft of the Della’s stern and then the shooters had the range and rounds were gouging into the hull and the after bulkhead and shattering the cabin ports. He saw Frank kneel at the transom and fire a long burst with the BAR—and then he jerked sideways and he fell down clutching at his forehead, the mouth wide and showing all its teeth. Ed looked back at him, yelling something, yanking at the throttle as though he might wrest greater speed from the engines through sheer will. And then he suddenly flung forward against the wheel and John Ashley saw the brilliant red blossoms on his back as Ed slumped to the deck with blood overrunning his scarred mouth.

The Della’s freed wheel wildly and the boat veered to starboard as bullets continued ripping into her and first one engine must have quit and then the other must have died too because the boat ceased its forward progress and rode the swells adrift. The shooting stopped and the speedboat pilots backed off their engines and the boats closed in slowly.

Now the moon was vanished into the roiling black clouds and enormous rays of lightning illuminated the night sea as bright as day and John Ashley in his tossing sleep felt the force of the thunderclaps he could not hear. He saw Frank rise to all fours in the gathered darkness and slashing rain and crawl to Ed. Saw the darkly gaping wound over Frank’s eye running with blood and rainwater. Saw him shake Ed by the shoulder. Frank was yelling now and Ed’s eyes opened. Grappling hooks lofted over the gunwales and caught hold and the hooklines went taut and Frank was searching the deck for the BAR and spied it several feet away and started for it but a booted foot planted on his hand. He looked up half-blinded for the blood in his eyes and John Ashley saw as Frank saw the grinning face of Bo Stokes above the cocked .45 almost touching Frank’s face. Saw too a tall lean man standing unsteadily over Ed in the pitching boat with a pistol in his hand. In a spectral cast of lightning the pitted face of Alton Davis. Ed stirring weakly and Frank’s mouth moving and John Ashley knew Frank was cursing them. Bo Stokes laughing. And then the pistols flashed and his brother fell still.

They found the other Browning belowdecks and passed both rifles to one of the other boats. They made no effort to unload the whiskey, maybe because of the storm or maybe because they had no interest in it from the start. They emptied a gasoline can into the cabin and set a match to it and then hurried back onto their boats and made away just as the brunt of the storm rolled in.

The Della pitched and yawed to every direction and flames leaped from the cabin ports and hatch. The boat spun crazily and traced great sparking loops of fire above the bucking black sea and in the clarity of his dream he saw his brothers lying dead in the driving rain. Then the fire broke through the cabin deck and found the whiskey in the hold and the entire hull burst into flame. A huge wave have the vessel high and turned it on an awkward axis and the boat was poised on its stern for a long shimmering moment before capsizing and tumbling down the wave’s steep slope in scaling sheets of the and the wave broke over the upturned keel in a great raise of smoke and the Della whirled under the sea and was gone.

He woke in a soaking sweat, gasping for air as though he’d been drowning. Woke to the sounds of rain and weeping. And found that it was in fact raining. And that the weeping was his own.

In the late spring of 1923 he was removed from isolation and taken to a shower room where his first full soapy wash in two years gradually unloosed from his hide scales of dirt and clogs of casefied bodily exudates that ran off him as a rank gray gruel. His flesh was rashed and splotched and scabbed, coated with sores both old and fresh. Then to the prison barber who grinned at the sight of his wild shag and beard and cheerfully set to work upon him. His hair was cropped to a buzz and lice burrowed in the thick locks tumbled to his sheeted lap. His beard was scissored and then shaved with such dexterity he showed but two bloodspots when the job was done. The barber finished up by rubbing kerosene into his scalp. He was then led to the supply room and issued a fresh set of convict stripes and told to put them on. Then to the warden’s office where he learned he was being assigned to the Rockpile Gang.

“You wont be in general population,” the warden said, “but it’s better than that damned isolation cell, isnt it? Two years in isolation’s enough to make some men loony but you look to be all right in the head. Of course now, we cant always judge by looks, can we?” The assistant warden stood against the wall with his arms folded and looked to John Ashley like he was trying not to yawn.

The warden chuckled and paused to light a cigarette. It was the first tobacco smoke John Ashley had smelled since arriving at Raiford and the aroma was so heady he felt mildly faint. Sweet Jesus, boy, he thought—the things you done without.

“There’s no escaping from the Rockpile Gang, take my word,” the warden said. “You’ll see the for yourself. But if you’re fool to try it anyway, you’ll get shot dead. I promise. I surely hope you believe me, John.”

John Ashley said he did.

And now the warden cleared his throat loudly and glanced out the window and then looked at the assistant warden and then at John Ashley and cleared his throat again. “There’s somethin more,” he said. He told John Ashley that his brothers had been reported drowned while fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. The accident had occurred in October of the previous year but prison policy prohibited giving information of any sort to inmates in isolation. He regretted that he had been denied this knowledge for so long but it simply couldnt be helped. John Ashley looked at him but said nothing. The warden studied his face for a moment and then nodded as though he’d been told something satisfactory.

The Rockpile Gang was quartered in a windowless cell block secured tight as a tomb. He shared a cell with a convict named Ray Lynn, a weathered sandy-haired Florida native from Crawfordville who was serving six years for armed robbery. The Rockpile Gang’s membership, Ray Lynn informed him, varied from six or seven men to nearly two dozen, depending on the warden and the assistant warden’s whims. “You never know what either a them fuckheads will do next. Puttin a fella in isolation right off, thats the warden’s way of dealin with dangerous convicts. Likes to try to bust they spirit first thing. But I gotta say, you was in there a lot longer than anybody else I know of.” The rockpile was for convicts the warden considered particularly high risk for escape, Ray Lynn said. “Or for fellas the underwarden just flat fuck dont like.”

The rockpile stood in a remote sideyard—a huge sprawling heap of limerock boulders brought in on a half-dozen trucks once a week. The gang was shuffled out to it on a common legchain. Only at the rockpile itself and in their cells were they ever off that chain. They broke the boulders apart with sledgehammers until no piece remained bigger than a fist. Then shoveled the broken rock into trailers to be hauled away to various construction projects. They broke and shoveled stone from sunup to sundown six-and-half days a week and always under the eyes of wall guards armed with shotguns.

Ray Lynn had been on the Rockpile Gang for nine months—longer than anybody else except Ben Tracey who’d been on it for nearly eighteen months. On John Ashley’s first day on the rockpile, Lynn introduced him to Tracy whose grin was absent a front tooth and whose aspect suggested that nothing this world might show him would be cause for surprise. He was doing five years for second degree murder and two for attempted murder, but he’d cut almost a third off his sentence for good behavior and was due for release in another two months. He’d killed a man he caught coupling with his sister in a barn back home in Tallahassee. “He might of got her to claim it was rape and he’d been free as a bird,” Ray Lynn said in low voice later that evening in their cell. “Probly wouldnt of even gone to trial. but after beatin the sumbitch dead with a shovel, he started in on her too.” He paused to glance at Tracey in his cell across the way. “All told, I’d say he got him a pretty light sentence.” His voice was barely at a whisper. “Especially since the way some tell it, he’d been shagging little sister his ownself, you see, and he had just a awful shit fit when he seen her doing it with somebody else.”

John Ashley looked over at Tracey. Ray Lynn read his aspect and said, “I dont know if it’s true about the sister. It’s some say he’s a bug with all women. I dont know. I just know he’s a damn good one to have on your side when things get hairy.”

Ray Lynn was on the Rockpile Gang because he had tried to escape from a turpentine camp. “Hell, I didnt have no idea of tryin to light out when they sent me there,” he told John Ashley. “I just wanted to do the two years I had left on my three-year sentence and get out. But goddamn, you even been in a turpentine camp?” John Ashley said he had not, but that all he’d ever heard about them was bad. “Closest thing to living hell is all it is,” Ray Lynn said. “I thought I was though but I couldnt take that fucken place. It’s only niggers can work turpentine and not die of it and even some a them dont fare too good. You dont even want to hear about them turpentine camps. After three months of it I didnt give a shit if they killed me tryin to escape. I figured being dead all at once would be better than stayin there and dyin little by little. So I made my break. I was two days and nights in the swamp before the dogs caught me and run me up a tree. When the posse showed up they were so mad at having to slog through the swamp after me the captain shot me in the leg as I was startin to climb down. I hit the ground so hard it knocked the breath out of me all the way to next week. When they realized they were gonna have to carry me back through the swamp on account of I couldnt walk on the leg they’d shot they kindly got hotter about the whole thing and sict the dogs on me for a while and then give me a good kickin besides. I mean to tell you I looked like hammered shit by the time they brung me back. They stuck me in solitary till my leg healed up some and then put me in the hole for fifteen days and then doubled my sentence and put me on the Rockpile Gang. And thats how come I still got moren four years to go instead of the three I had when I first got here.”

John Ashley came to learn that at age sixteen Ray Lynn had impregnated his sweetheart, a girl a year his junior, and willingly married her. But their families had been feuding for generations—and both families cut all ties with them. Ray Lynn could not say what the feud was about and doubted that anyone in either family knew either, not anymore, and yet the feud persisted. He worked at a lot of menial jobs to try to support wife and child but it had been rough times. Their second winter together was particularly hard and the baby contracted pneumonia and died. His wife withdrew into her grief and he could not bring her out of it. He took to drinking and keeping bad company. One day he helped a couple of buds rob a lumberyard office in Tallahassee. His share of the take was fourteen dollars. He took it home and gave it to his wife. She suspected he had stolen it and wept. He was trying to placate her when the police arrived and arrested him. One of the others had been caught and ratted out the rest. He served six months in the Leon County jail and when he went home his wife had moved away and no one knew where and he had not seen her since.

At noon every day the captain on the wall would blow his whistle and the gang would lay down their hammers and shovels and line up to receive the common leg shackle before being taken to the mess hall for dinner. On his fifth day on the rockpile and just after the captain sounded his noon whistle, John Ashley was lined up in front of a gang member named Pankin who suddenly yelled, “You aint so fucken tough!” and stabbed him in the short ribs with a shank fashioned from a spoon. John Ashley seized Pankin in a headlock and pulled him down to his knees and began beating him on the head with a melon-sized chunk of limerock. Pankin’s backup man was set to stab Ashley in the neck but Ben Tracey tripped him down and started kicking him and Ray Lynn ran up and joined in. The guards came running with their clubs to break up the fight. Pankin was unconscious for two days and woke up dimmer of wit than he’d already been. But the guards reported the incident truthfully, and the warden sent Pankin and his confederate to the hole for thirty days and then assigned them to a turpentine camp. Ben Tracey—who’d risked losing his accumulated good time when he jumped into the fray—stood exonerated, as did Ray Lynn. John Ashley was hospitalized for ten days and then returned to the rockpile. He told Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey they had a friend for life.

The last Sunday of July was a visiting day and that afternoon he was permitted his first visitor since arriving at Raiford. His father sat across from him at a table extending the width of the room and partitioned with chickenwire. Guards stood against the walls on either side of the partition. John Ashley smiled to see that the old man’s movements were still quick and his eyes yet alert and full of fire.

“They aint overfed you, thats certain sure,” Old Joe said, assessing the leanness of him, the edged planes of his face.

“Shoulda seen when I first come out that solitary,” John Ashley said. “Looked about like a broomstick. Looked like I never in my life seen the sun. I’d get fattened up quick enough I reckon if I could get some of Ma’s cookin in me.”

“She sent a basket but they say you caint have it. She and your sisters wanted to come but I said no. I wont have them in such place as this.”

Now Joe Ashley leaned close to the screen and told John it wouldnt be long before he got a chance to slip away. Ira Goldman had found out that if you wanted to make a deal with Raiford you didnt talk to the warden, you went to see his assistant, a man named Webb. Ira was close to working something out with him.

“This underwarden sumbitch wont guarantee nothin except the chance for you to slip out,” Old Joe said. “Told Ira it’d be just him and one guard and one driver in on it.” He looked around to be certain nobody had closed to earshot distance, then leaned to the screen again. “He’s asked for the moon, this Webb. We aint settled on a sum but I do believe he’s lookin for me to retire him for life. I guess I caint rightly blame him. He aint gone have a shadow of a job after you fly this coop, thats sure.”

John Ashley said the plan would cost even more than Old Joe thought it would. “I want a fella here to get put on a road gang,” he said. He told his father about Ben Tracey’s and Ray Lynn’s help in the rockpile fight. Ben was due for release soon but they’d have to deliver Ray Lynn. “Cant do that unless he’s outside these walls,” he said.

“He took your side in a fight, hell yes we’ll deliver him,” Old Joe said.

The problem was the money. Old Joe’s profits had fallen off badly in the time John Ashley had been locked away. Bellamy had found some better beaches for landing his smuggled whiskey—down in the upper keys and in Florida Bay—and had cut down on the amount of stuff he brought though Palm Beach County by boat and truck both. “We aint been makin near as much as we used to on our deal with him,” Old Joe said.

He was still operating the whiskey camps—five of them, all told, in the pinelands and the Devil’s Garden both—and had more customers than ever. But the money from moonshine and Bellamy’s payoffs was hardly sufficient anymore to cover much else beyond operating and living expenses. The cost of distillation equipment and ingredients had gone high as the sky since Prohibition and the cops on their payroll were greedier than ever—and there were always more and more of them to pay off.

The fatten their treasury, Joe told him in a whisper, the gang had hit a couple of banks. It had been Hanford Mobley’s idea. Bill Ashley had argued against it for all the same old reasons but nobody wanted to hear it. Even Laura was in favor of the bank jobs, Old Joe said, keeping a sidewise watch on the guards. “Insisted she’d do the driving. The boys all know damn well she can outdrive any a them and shoot just as good too, so nobody argued the point. You got you a good one in her, boy. She got a right amount of sand, that girl.”

John Ashley grinned and said, “Naturalborn outlaw aint she? Just like Ma.” He did not mention that two months ago he had dreamt of seeing Laura with an army .45 on her hip and driving hatless down a sandy pinewoods road with her hair tossing in the wind. She was laughing along with the boys around her—Hanford and Clarence and Roy—and all of them with money in their fists. He’d awakened smiling.

The gang had robbed the bank in Arcadia of ten thousand dollars, Joe told him. Back in April. Hanford, Clarence and Roy did the job in under five minutes and Laura scooted the getaway car out of there like a scalded dog. And then three weeks ago they hit the bank in Wauchula. They’d heard that the money for a big cattle deal was on deposit there but it turned out they’d been misinformed—there was only seven grand in the vault. It was worth it anyway, Old Joe said, just to even the score a little with that dickhead Sheriff Poucher who’d put the arm on John at Goren’s fishcamp. “Would of been better if we could of let him know we did it,” Old Joe said, “but I didnt want to draw no more heat from the cops than we already got.” They’d not only hit banks far from home, but on both jobs had worn bandannas over their faces as well, and none of them had been recognized.

“We figured not to do any robbing in Palm Beach,” Joe said. “Bobby Baker’s let us alone since you been gone and we didnt see no need to agitate him and get him troublin our whiskey business.” He looked around and leaned so close to the wire his nose almost touched it. “The thing is, we just got word a big construction company’s about to put more’n forty grand in the bank at Stuart. They got a contract to rebuild most of the city docks and the money’s for payrolls and operation capital and such. It’s too fat to pass up. That job’ll give us all we need to pay off this Webb. It’s worth takin a chance with Bobby.”

John Ashley asked how he knew the information about the Stuart bank was accurate.

“Your old but told us. George Doster. Remember him from the bank in Avon? That good family man talked you into leavin some of the money when you robbed him for the second time? He’s the assistant manager at the Stuart Bank now. But he’s a unhappy fella, George is. Thinks he aint gettin paid near enough for as hard as he works and all the responsibility he got. Been feelin real sorry for hisself. That’s why he come to us with a deal. Said he’d tell us just exactly when a big bunch of money would be put in the bank. Said he’d tell us on one condition.”

“You had to promise that good family man a cut,” John Ashley said.

“Ten percent he wanted,” Old Joe said. “I told him five and he better take it, and he did.”

They grinned. And then as if they’d both had the same thought at the same time, their grins faded and they stared at each other without expression and Old Joe sat back. John felt his chest tighten as he said, “You aint had much to say about Frank and Ed.”

Old Joe looked off for a moment. Then told him flatly his brothers had drowned nearly two years ago on a whiskey run when they got caught in a had storm out on the Gulf Stream. “I’m sorry to tell you this way, boy, and I’m sorry to tell you so long after the fact of it. Your Ma was near distracted by it. Didnt hardly say a word for the better part of three months. Just sat out on the porch in her rocker and looked out at nothin. It were hard on her when Bob got killed, but that was somethin she’d pretty much been expectin from the time he was a boy and she saw how nobody could tell him nothin and how reckless he was. Boys like Bob dont never get to be old men and she knew it. But Frank and Ed, well, they was rough boys but they was good to mind me and her, they wasnt reckless. And it bein the both of them at once, well…it went hard on her.”

He told John that just nine days before he died Frank had asked Jenny to marry him and she’d said yes. When she got the bad news she shut herself up in her parents’ home for nearly two months in her grief and when she emerged she was wasted and pale and carried herself like an old woman. She had taken a train for Charleston where her family had kin and she had not returned nor was expected to. As for Rita the Breed, she’d simply vanished. One story held that she’d taken up with some mean Indian who lived on the far side of Okeechobee and they hadnt been together three weeks before they had a bad fight and he killed her. Another rumor said she’d gone to Apalachicola and was working in a whorehouse. Nobody knew.

Joe Ashley kept his eyes away from his son’s as he said these things, and John knew it had been harder on the old man than on anyone else, even Ma. Now Old Joe swallowed hard and snorted and narrowed his eyes as he looked at John. “This warden here, he told Ira you couldnt be told about Frank and Ed cause you was in isolation. Prison policy, he said. Sorry bastard. I’d like to show him what I think of his fucken policy. Anyhow, I’m truly sorry, boy that—”

“Listen, Daddy,” John Ashley said, “it’s somethin I got to say.” He said it so softly that Old Joe knew what would fellow was bad. He knew his boys, knew their tones. He put his ear close to the screen.

John Ashley recounted for his father his dream of Frank and Ed, a dream he’d had but once and yet recalled as vividly as if he’d awakened from it a minute ago. When he was done with the telling his chest was tight, his voice strained. Old Joe eased back from the screen and stared at him. His face looked carved of limerock.

“It wasnt but a dream,” John Ashley said, “but—”

Old Joe shushed him with a raised hand. “Dont say nother word.” He told him to keep out of trouble and stay ready. Then took his leave.

Ben Tracey had no visitor that day. The story around the yard was that the only visitor he’d ever had was his sister who came but once. During his fourth month a Raiford she showed up to let him see for himself the ruin he’d made of her face with the shovel. Even the most hardened cons who’d looked on her were moved to pity. She made Ben Tracey look at her face and cursed him to hell and then broke into tears and fled the room. Back in the block Tracey joked that if he’d had to look at her a minute longer he would’ve horked his dinner. None of the cons who’d seen his sorrowed sister laughed. Most of them hated Ben Tracey. But they feared him even more and so held their opinion mute.

Ray Lynn received no visitor that day nor any other.

A hot August night in Miami. The air unmoving, congealed with humidity. A cat’s-eye moon in a hazy sky holding but distant promise of rain and few stars to be seen. The Hardieville streets poorly lighted and sparsely trafficked this midweek eve.

Two men emerge from the front door of The High Tider—formerly The Purple Duck owned and operated by Miss Catherine Mays who’d departed for California shortly after her fiancé Gordon Blue had been found dead in the Miami River. The men stroll down the street and turn at the end of the block and approach a parked roadster. One chuckles at something the other says. As they pass under a streetlamp their faces are for the moment clearly exposed, the pockmarked aspect of Alton Davis and the chin-scarred visage of James White. Davis cranks the motor to life and settles himself behind the wheel. White lights a cigarette. Davis stares at a pair of young couples going down the street a block away with their arms about each other and one of the boys fondling his girl’s ass. Now two men step from the shadows and into the hazy light of the streetlamp and stand directly before the car and each of them aims a pair of .45 automatics at the two men through the windshield. James White’s mouth sags open and the cigarette drops burning from his lips as he looks on Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews grinning behind the guns and he wonders what it feels like to be shot and he wants to turn to Davis but cannot and only manages to say, “Alton, shit…” and Davis turns to him and does an almost comic double-take back to the men holding guns on them and he makes a low grave sound as he grabs for his shoulder-holstered revolver knowing he will never touch it and he doesn’t for in that instant Mobley and Matthews start squeezing off rounds as fast as they can work the triggers.

The windshield flies apart and Davis and White jerk and twitch and lurch like dire epileptics and blood jumps from their heads and faces and several bullets glance off the roadster and ricochet off the building across the street and one stray round makes a starburst hole in a shop window and almost as abruptly as it began the rapidfire gunblasting ceases, all thirty-two rounds of the four Colts spent. In the jaundiced haze of gunsmoke under the streetlamp Roy Matthews steps around to the passenger side and spits in James White’s ruined face uptilted against the car door. Then the shooters are gone in the darkness.

Only now do heads cautiously appear at some of the doorways to peek out at the death car. Blood runs in a thin line from under the driver’s door and pools darkly in the street as though the automobile itself has suffered mortal wound. Only now do the girls on the street who watched the whole thing in open-mouthed shock begin a hysterical wailing. And not until this moment does one of the young men with them realize he has pissed in his pants.

In a late hour of the same night…

Bo Stokes comes out of a restaurant at the north end of Biscayne Boulevard where he has dined on a superbly broiled red snapper and his thoughts now are of a particular woman he is to meet at the McAllister Hotel. She is lean and lovely with firm breasts and a pubic bush soft as a Persian kitten. He feels himself heavy in his loins as he walks along this northern portion of boulevard lit only by the narrow moon and the lights from the train depot across the street. He glances skyward to check for possibility of rain and sees none.

A car draws up to the curb alongside and a voice calls, “Hey, Bo, wait up! Look here who wants to meet you, man.”

He stoops slightly to look into the coupé and sees a man behind the wheel and a woman sitting by the passenger window and both silhouetted against the light from the depot. “Who’s that?” he says.

“It’s me, man,” the driver says. “Look here who wants to meet you.” A bare female arm extends from the interior darkness and the fingers flutter in greeting and then quickly withdraw as the woman giggles.

Bo Stokes laughs and steps up to the car and leans one arm against the car roof and peers into the gloomy interior and still cannot make out the driver’s face nor the woman’s. “Who the hell is it?” he says.

“Me, man,” the driver says. “This here’s Wanda. She been wanting to meet you. She’s seen you around, you know, at the Taft. She knows Nelson. Been telling him she wants to meet you.”

“She has, huh?” Bo Stokes says. He grins at the woman’s silhouette, “You told Nels you wanna meet me, huh?”

The woman nods and giggles. “Wanda, meet Bo,” the driver says. “Bo, meet Wanda.” She slides over closer to the driver and pats the seat beside her.

“Well now darlin,” Bo Stokes says. He opens the car door and crowds his bulk onto the seat and slides an arm around the woman’s shoulders and his hand closes on her thigh and the woman puts her hand to the back of his neck and he glances at the driver and even in the dim light sees now that he does not know him and he starts to draw back but the woman locks both arms hard around his neck and pulls him against her and the driver grabs him by the coat lapel and holds him fast and presses a pistol up under his chin and before Bo Stokes can gain the leverage to break free, before he can even believe this is happening to him—he who fought Jack Dempsey almost even for two rounds and scored several good shots before the Mauler caught him with a right hook that brought the stellar sky down on his head—he sees an explosion of stars to surpass all imagination and where the bullet goes through the car roof it leaves a dark viscid smear.

Laura Upthegrove pulls the door shut as Clarence Middleton wheels the car into the street and if anybody along the boulevard heard the pistol report there is no sign of it.

“This dress is just ruint,” Laura says as Clarence makes a right turn at the corner and heads around the block. She holds the heavy press of the dead man to her like a lover so that any who sees them might take them for such. She feels the blood seeping warmly over her breasts and down her belly, smells it ripe through the scent of cordite. “Good thing I never did like it worth a damn.”

Clarence drives back onto the boulevard and heads north. In another hour he will be dropping Bo Stokes’ mortal remains in a canal miles off the main highway and fourteen feet deep and swarming with gators.

Near midnight of yet the same evening…

Nelson Bellamy is lying supine and fondling the heavy breasts of the naked woman mounted on him and rolling her hips with expert technique. The bedside lamp is lit but the woman has draped Bellamy’s undershirt over it to effect a more subdued cast of light. So engrossed are the lovers in what they are doing—and so loud is the music booming through the open window from the dance pavilion next door—that neither hears the small clack of the doorlock Joe Ashley has opened with a ring of keys appropriated from a downstairs maid. He is masked with a bandanna and holds a shotgun with cut-down barrels and the stock reduced to a pistolgrip.

They had pulled up their masks and entered the Taft Hotel—he and Albert Miller—through the kitchen. Albert Miller put a pistol to a cook’s head and asked which room was Nelson Bellamy’s and the man said 302 without hesitation and they could see he was too frightened to be lying. Just then a maid came in from the adjoining linen room and at the sight of the key ring on her waist Old Joe smiled and said the Good Lord was making it all too easy. Albert Miller remained downstairs to hold the cooks in place as well as any other who might come to the kitchen in the interim. On the third floor landing Old Joe came on a pair of guards playing rummy, men so long without challenge they’d grown lax and dull and they sat with their cards in their hands and one asked in raised voice to be heard over the music who he was. Joe Ashley brought the cutoff up from behind his leg and cocked both hammers and the guards went still and mute. He disarmed each of them in his turn and ordered one to lie on the floor and the other to use cords off the window curtains to bind his partner’s hands tightly behind him and tie his feet together. Joe then clubbed the untied man in the back of the head with the muzzle of the sawed-off and the man fell to his knees and clutched his head and swore vehemently and said, “What the fuck you do that for?” He started to get up and turn around and Joe hit him again, harder, squarely atop his crown. The man fell on his side and gripped the top of his head with both hands and rocked on the floor and wept with the pain and swore heatedly. Old Joe gaped and said, “Son of a bitch.” And once more hit the man in the head with the shotgun—this time behind the ear—and this time the man fell still. Blood ran in a thin rivulet from his hair and stained the carpet under his head. “Shit man, you killed him,” the tied man said. Old Joe told him to shut up. He knelt beside the bleeding man and checked his pulse at his throat and felt that he was still alive. He took the cords off another window curtain and tied the unconscious man tightly hand and foot. Then checked the first man’s bonds and found that they been left just loose enough that the men might with effort work himself free, and so he tightened them. He dragged the unconscious man around and using their belts tied the two men together back to back, each man’s hands belted to the other’s feet. He pulled off their shoes and socks and balled the socks and stuffed a pair into each man’s mouth. He studied his handiwork and picked up his shotgun and saw the conscious one watching him:

“You try callin out or you make a fuss any other way before I come back though, I promise you’ll die.”

Now he gently pushes the door open and the hallway light falls across the bed within. The girl ceases her pelvic gyration to look over her shoulder and she sees a masked man with a wild tangle of white hair coming toward her with darkcircled eyes glowing like coalfires in a nightwind. He motions her away and she scrabbles off the bed and against the wall where she huddles with her arms crossed over her breasts. Bellamy rises on his elbows, his cock yet upright and gleaming, and sees a shotgun muzzle two inches from his face and at the far end of the shortened barrel and the extended left arm holding it the maniacally grinning face of Joe Ashley, his bandanna mask pulled down around his neck so the man might see clearly the agent of his death. Bellamy’s erection folds.

“I dont never care to come to this snakepit town,” Old Joe says, “but this trip’s damn well worth it.”

“Hold on,” Bellamy says in halting voice. “Let’s talk this out.”

Joe Ashley shoves the gun muzzle against Bellamy’s cheek and forces his head back into the pillow. Bellamy shuts his eyes and says tightly, “Listen, listen to me, we can work this out. We’re businessmen, you and me. We can work it out.”

Holding the gun to Bellamy’s underchin Joe Ashley withdraws an ice pick from his belt and all in one fast action shoves it to the hilt in Bellamy’s heart and slips it out and steps back as Bellamy convulses but once and then lies still with eyes wide but done with seeing in this world. Joe Ashley pulls his mask up again and heads for the door. The girl whimpers into her fist at her mouth and her eyes are shut tight as if she would subvert the memory of this horror by not paying visual witness.

He exits the way he came—past the belt-bound and sock-gagged guards who have not make effort to free themselves and down to the kitchen where the cocks are seated now and drinking coffee and Albert Miller is flirting with the maid. Albert pulls his bandanna down just long enough to give her a quick kiss on the lips and then follows Old Joe into the night.

Every couple of weeks or so Laura presented herself at the kitchen door of Miss Lillian’s to be admitted by Wisteria, the daytime head-maid who adored Miss Loretta and delighted in the special charge of conveying Miss Laura to and from her room. A few weeks earlier Wisteria had told Loretta May of seeing a scruffy one-eyed marmalade kitten wandering about in the alley behind the house and being reminded of Mister John by it. Loretta had insisted that she go find the kitten and bring it to her and the maid had done so. Loretta named the cat Johnny and it had lived in her room ever since.

Laura always arrived shortly after sunrise, at which hour Miss Lillian and the girls were just retired until the midafternoon and no one was about in the house but the Negro help. If any of the domestics were curious about her visits they kept their curiosity to themselves. She would usually stay but an hour or two, sometimes longer. Sometimes they fell asleep in each other’s arms and in those instances the good Wisteria would do as Miss Loretta had instructed and tap on her door at one o’clock to rouse so she could be one her way before the rest of the house came awake.

They never questioned their actions together, these two. They held each other close and kissed and caressed and their mutual affections now and then were of such intimacy to render them both breathless. Sometimes they spoke of John hardly at all but he was ever on their minds. As they held each other close Loretta May would tell Laura in low voice what she had seen of him in recent dreams, what she had heard him say. She told of his lonely isolation and the things he called to mind to keep a steadfast spirit. Laura smiled at her renditions of his visions of their swampland world and of the sea—thought she was fearful of the ocean even more than he was and would not venture on it. When Loretta spoke of the near-madness of his desire for them and the physical torment it caused him they both wept and Laura said she wished they could fuck him for real in his dreams and then cried the harder because they could not. When Loretta May announced one morning that John had been released from isolation, albeit he was now swinging a sledgehammer all day, Laura pulled her from the bed and danced her around the room as she sang, “Johnny’s in the sun again, Johnny’s in the sun again.” But another day when Loretta related the dream of seeing him stabbed, Laura was beside herself and demanded more details and grabbed the blind woman by the shoulders and shook her hard before collapsing in tears on her lap.

“He’ll be all right, honey,” Loretta May had crooned to her, stroking her hair. “It’s all I know for sure but it’s enough. He’ll be all right.”

“I made up my mind,” she said. “I’m moving to Jacksonville. Going next week.”

“That so?” Roy Matthews said. They lay naked under the bedsheet, the glowing tips of their cigarettes alternately brightening and dimming, a steady baybreeze belling the gauzy curtains of her bedroom window against which was framed a bone-white gibbous moon.

“My best girlfriend Rose Sharon says I can easy get me a job at the insurance company where she works because I know how to use a typewriting machine so well.”

“I thought you liked Miami. I thought you said it’s lot more lively than Jacksonville.”

“Yeah, well, it’s gettin a little too lively, you ask me. Hardly a week goes by there’s not a shooting or some other kind of murder going on. There’s no being safe here anymore, not for any respectable girl, anyhow. You can’t even walk down the street anymore without total strangers giving you the wolf whistle or saying something so awful nasty you just cant believe your ears.”

“That’s what I hear,” Roy Matthews said, snuffing their cigarettes in a bedside ashtray. “Damn town’s just chock fulla criminals and bad actors and no-counts of all kinds. It’s no place for a right citizen like me or you to live.”

“Ho ho, look who’s talkin,” she said.

He kissed her shoulder and said, “You gonna give me a number so I can call you I’m ever up there?”

“Oh you with all your girls. You wouldnt call me.”

“Sure I would. I’m gonna miss you plenty, sweetheart.”

“Oh, you.”

They lay facing each other and he slid his hand under the sheet and held her breast. “Does he know you’re goin?”

“Well of course he does. He’s not real happy about it, naturally. I told you he wants to marry me.”

Roy Matthews chuckled and lightly tweaked her nipple and she slapped at his hand through the sheet. “If he wants to marry you why you goin to Jacksonville?”

“Cause he says he doesnt wanna live nowhere except down here in South Florida is why. You know he built a house up there where the Ashleys live?”

“Sure. For his momma and daddy. Cleared and filled some ground a quarter-mile from Twin Oaks and built the place and laid down a trail and everthing. He lives there too. So what?” His feigned puzzlement was belied by his grin.

“Dont you shine me, mister,” she said. “When I first met him all he talked about was how much he wanted to travel around and see the country. That’s exactly what I always wanted to do—travel around, see things, do things, you know, while I’m still young, damn it. For more than two years he’s told me it’s what he wanted to do too. Now he tells me he wants to stay where his roots are. His roots!” She snorted with disgust. “I told him, ‘You know what I want and you know where I’ll be. You got Rose Sharon’s address and I guess you know how to write. I guess you know how to get to Jacksonville from here if you want to come see me.’ That’s exactly how I told him.”

Roy Matthews laughed and said, “Good for you, girl. Hell, you dont need that peckerwood no way. I’ll go up and see you now and then and help you keep your mind offa him.” He squeezed her breasts and nuzzled her neck.

“Oh you.” She pushed his hands out from under the sheet and drew it around her breasts and made a face at him. “You’re such a liar. You and all your girls.”

He grinned and tried to insinuate his hand under the sheet again but she rolled onto her back with the sheet held to her chest under her crossed arms and affected to glare at the ceiling. “And I used to think you were a nice fella. Jeepers!”

“I am a nice fella,” he said, kissing her bare shoulder. He pulled the sheet off her breasts and she said, “Oooo, chilly,” and put her hands over them. He pushed one hand aside and ran his tongue over the erect nipple and prickled aureole and she made a low purr and rolled into his embrace with a smile.