Red Grass River

TWENTY-ONE

The Liars Club

THE RUMOR WAS EVERYWHERE THAT OLD JOE ASHLEY’D HAD A hand in Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews slipping out of the Broward jail, and might could be he did or might could be he didnt. Only thing for sure about that rumor was the same as always: nobody had a lick of proof for it.

They say when Bob Baker heard about the escape him and Freddie Baker drove straight down to Fort Lauderdale and he went right into the high sheriff’s office there and asked where that goddamn jailer Hicks was at. The sheriff said he was in the hospital with a skull fracture. Said he wished he’s never accepted the two bank robbers into his jail because he sure as hell didnt need all this bad newspaper publicity. Bob Baker called the sheriff a dumb lazy peckerwood loud enough for everbody in the jailhouse to hear him. He stomped back out to his car and Freddie drove him over to the hospital and Bob Baker told the doctor he had to ask the injured jailer a few important questions. The doctor said all right, but the patient was in a bad way, so go easy on him. But Sheriff Bob wasn’t in no go-easy mood, not with the fella responsible for his prisoners getting away laying right there in front of him. He grabbed Hicks by his hospital gown and shook him like a dog with a rabbit. Called him a lowdown shiteating son of a bitch and said he knew he’d helped the prisoners break out and he would by God prove it and send him to prison for the rest of his miserable life. They say Hicks’s bandage was slipping down over his eyes and he was screaming for somebody to help him. It took the doc and Freddie both to pull Bob Baker offa him. That’s the story we heard Another thing we heard was that a couple of days later Heck Runyon was seen at side door of the county jail one evening and Freddie Baker let him in and they say Heck didnt come out of there again until late at night.

Hicks got fired sure enough. He told the newspaper he was being made a whipping boy. Said it was unfair to be blamed for being attacked from behind. He never really recovered from that whack on the head with a crowbar. It left him part-crippled and strange in the head for all his days after. He couldnt walk in a straight line but had to bear at a slight angle to the direction he really wanted to go, and one eye was always half-closing on him. He got to talking to himself, even when he was walking down the streets and there was people all around. He’d sit on a park bench sometimes and get into mean whispering arguments with himself. He took bad to drink. A coupla years after the jailbreak he killed a fella in a drunken fight or some such and got sent to prison for life. That’s a true fact.

As for Mobley and Matthews, some said Old Joe sent them both out of Florida to lay low for a while. Others say it was only Mobley he sent away—sent him off to wherever John Ashley had hid out a dozen years before when there was a warrant on him for killing the Indian. Wherever it was Hanford Mobley went, he came back about a year later—which was the worst mistake of his life.

Most stories about Roy Matthews said he went off on his own, out to California or up to Tennessee or over to Mexico, depending on which story you wanted to believe. But nobody never saw hide nor hair of him again, not in South Florida. A Palm Beach County deputy who was visiting kin in Cleveland a few months after the jailbreak said he saw him working as a cook in a restaurant on Lake Erie. Said he got up from the table and headed for the kitchen to ask him a few questions but the fella saw him coming and ran out the back way and flat disappeared. Deputy swore it was him. Another story was that Matthews had gone up to Atlanta and took up with a gal who had a jealous boyfriend and the fella caught up to them one night and cut his dick off. Another rumor said he got killed in a bank holdup in Springfield, Missouri—him and some skinny Ozark gal he taken for a partner. Lord, there was some stories about him! Some even said he never left Florida at all, said he’d been hiding out with the Ashleys at Twin Oaks and got drunk one night and picked a fight with Joe Ashley and Old Joe brained him with a hatchet and killed him graveyard dead. Fed him to the gators to get rid of the evidence. It was ever kind of story about Roy Matthews and no telling which was true or if any of them was. The only thing we can say for a absolute fact is nobody we knew ever saw him again.

Clarence Middleton went to trial with his jaw still wired shut. When the judge read the charge against him and asked how he pled, guilty, or not guilty, he said something through his clamped teeth and the judge said “What?” and his lawyer said “That means guilty your honor.” Middleton’s lawyer was a Miami sharpie named Ira Goldman. The story was, Goldman made a deal with the state for Clarence to plead guilty in exchange for a fifteen-year sentence instead of the thirty years the state said it was gonna call for and the judge said he was gonna give him if they was put to the trouble of a trial. The whole thing didn’t take twenty minutes. Two days later Clarence Middleton was on his way to Raiford. That was in October of nineteen and twenty-three.

There’s a lot nobody’s ever been able to figure out for sure about what exactly happened in the next few weeks after that, but there’s no disputing the basic facts. It’s a fact that when Clarence Middleton got to Raiford he was back together with John Ashley. And it’s a fact that Ben Tracey—a convict friend of John’s—finished his sentence and was set loose about a week or so after Clarence got there. Three days later Tracey was seen driving a brand new blue Chevrolet sedan on the streets of Tallahassee, about sixty miles southeast of Marianna, which is right near where the road camp was that Clarence Middleton got sent to after just a couple of weeks at Raiford. Ray Lynn, another prison pal of John Ashley’s, got sent there with Clarence—thats a fact too. Finally, it’s a fact that sometime in the first week of November and barely three weeks after he went to prison, Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn escaped from the Marianna road gang. They did this just one day after John Ashley someway or other broke out of the penitentiary a Raiford.

All thats a fact. The rest is just stories. A lot of guessing and supposing and probly. What probly happened is Old Joe spread some money around to the right people at Raiford. That’s what probly happened.

As time went by, the most popular story we heard about how Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn escaped was they somehow picked the lock to their legchains just before the gang was lined up at the end of the workday to get put in the truck back to camp and next thing anybody knew, the two of them was gone into the pineywoods. The main highway wasnt but a few miles off and there wasnt no time to go get the dogs from back at the camp, so a couple of the guards with rifles took off after them. Said they damn near caught up to them. Said they saw them getting into a blue Chevy sedan and heading off down the road in the twilight and could hear them laughing. Said they fired at them but if they even hit the car they didnt do enough damage to stop it. That was the story we heard. Most times, whoever was telling it would wink when he said Clarence and Ray “picked” the lock to their chain, a wink meaning that like as not the “pick” used on the lock was a guard’s key. There was lots of winks went with that story. Besides using their key, the guards might of been paid to run slow when they went after them, or to be sure to miss when they shot at them. In them days money could buy you a whole lot of cooperation from prison guards, who the state never did pay any bettern coolies. Everbody knew that. Old Joe had found out it was true the first time John went to prison.

It was money that got John Ashley out of Raiford too—leastways the way we heard it. One afternoon he told a rockpile guard he was feeling sick and so the guard took him over to the infirmary. The guard was spose to stay with his prisoner ever minute, even while the doc looked him over. But so happened the doctor wasnt in his office when they got there and the clerk didnt know where he was at. The guard told John Ashley to sit tight in the doctor’s office where there wasnt even a window, and he told the clerk in the outer office to give a holler if the prisoner so much as stuck his head out the door. Then he went off to look for the doc. When they got back fifteen minutes later the clerk wasnt there and neither was John Ashley. The clerk told the investigators he’d forgot John Ashley was in the office and so he’d gone over to the guards’ mess for a cup of coffee. The warden ordered an immediate lockdown and every foot of the prison got searched but they couldnt find him nowhere. They figured the only way he coulda got out of the walls was on one of the rockpile trucks that delivered boulders that afternoon. When the cops went out to the quarry company to talk to the drivers they couldnt round up but five of the six. They never found the other one, not then nor ever after, and so they were sure he’d been the one to help John Ashley to escape. It’s as good an explanation as any, but that dont mean it’s the true one. The only true thing anybody can say about that escape is that it was awful damn easy. The kind of easy you get only by paying for it.

Of course nobody could prove nothing, not even after they investigated everybody in the prison who might of had anything to do with John’s deliverance or with Ray Lynn and Clarence Middleton escaping from the road gang. Nobody knew a damn thing—not the warden nor his assistant nor the doctor nor the guards not the truck drivers. No-damn-body. The only thing to come of the investigation was three men got fired—the assistant warden, for poor judgment in assigning two dangerous felons to a road camp, and the guard and the medical clerk who both left John Ashley alone in the doctor’s office. They say that less than a month later the assistant warden was hired as the jail supervisor by some county up in the panhandle and the fired guard and clerk were hired along with him.

You’d of thought that when he heard about three of the Ashley Gang breaking out from prison within a day of each other and just six weeks or so after Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews escaped from the Broward jail, Bob Baker would of let a holler you could hear to Pensacola. But he didn’t. They say when he got the news about John getting away from Raiford for the second time in his life he was sitting at his office desk and trimming a cigar. It was Slim Jackson who told him the news and he said later that Bob Baker just looked at him with no expression at all and then went right on trimming the cigar. Slim sat down and waited to hear what Bob might have to say about it but he never said a word. Just trimmed at the cigar till the leaf came apart in his hands and he dropped the mess on the floor and brushed his hands and took his pipe out of his shirt pocket and started cleaning that. Slim sat there about ten minutes and then got up and left. They say Bobby just sat there and fiddled with his pipe and smoked it some and didnt say a word till some reporters came to ask what he thought of the escapes. He said he expected all three fugitives to be recaptured before long and he hoped the next time they were locked up in stronger jails and looked after by more honest guards. They say the reporters laughed but Bob Baker didnt smile when he said it.

Lots of folk was feeling sympathy for him. They saw him as a good man and a good sheriff and had come to respect him plenty. His cousin Freddie was probly the only lawman in all Palm Beach County who was more popular. The Ashley had always had friends and admirers who appreciated their independent spirit but, little by little, more folk were leanin to the Bakers’ side of the matter. They could see how things was changing. The Ashleys was the sort whose day was done. The frontier life their kind had always lived was slipping away. More and more of the Everglades was giving way to what they call development—to more canals and landfills and roads, to a whole new world. Whole regions of the Glades was little by little getting drained and burned clear and built on. You could see it happening from year to year. Some said a goodly portion of the Devil’s Garden would one day mostly be the Devil’s parking Lot. You could say that Twin Oaks was a good example of the old ways and Miami was a good example of the new ones, and at the time we’re talking about they was passing each other by in opposite directions. The old ways of the crackers was folks living apart and independent and making do on their own, setting troubles between themselfs. The new ways being forced on them and everbody else was people living close together and lots of them strangers and all of them having to depend on courtroom law. It was a world getting a whole lot unfriendier to such as the Ashleys—and a whole lot more needful of such as Bob Baker.

They say Bob Baker seemed different for a time after he heard about John Ashley’s escape. They say you could see it in his eyes, that even when he looked at you he seemed to be lookin at something somewhere else, something cold and mean and not all that far away. You never say him with his wife and daughters anymore. Some said he didnt bring them out in public because he was certain the Ashley Gang was gonna try to kill him and he didn’t want to put his family at risk. You never saw him now without some of his special gang of deputies around him. It was like he was waiting for something but wasnt quite sure what it was. Lots of folk had the same feeling. They said it was like a bad storm building just over the horizon but there wasnt any sign of it yet that you could point to. Like it was building without sound nor smell nor quiver but everbody seemed to know it was out there and headed this way.

One sunny morning in late November not even a month after he broke out of Raiford John Ashley and his gang robbed the bank at Pompano. Him and Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn. The charged into the bank like Wild West outlaws whooping and waving their guns. Witnesses said Middleton and Lynn had a .45 in each hand and John Ashley carried an automatic rifle. They scared hell out of everbody. They none of them wore masks. They got nearly thirty thousand dollars in cash and securities and when they were ready to go Ray Lynn signaled from the door and here came a damn taxi driven by Ben Tracey, judging by the descriptions give of him by witnesses. He was blaring the klaxon and weaving down the street and scattering people ever which way. The gang tumbled into the taxi and they took off laughing. The people who saw it say it all happened so fast and loud it didnt hardly seem real.

Ten minutes later the Broward County Sheriff led a posse of police cars north on the Dixie Highway, hopin to pick up the trail of the robbers and they did. About a mile south of the Palm Beach County line they saw the taxi abandoned by the side of the road. They pulled over and examined the area and saw tires tracks leading off down a dirt and limerock road heading west into the pinewoods. They followed it and about a quarter-mile farther along they found a Nigra man tied to a pine tree. Turned out it was his taxi the gang had stolen for the bank robbery. The Nigra said they came tearing back down the pineywoods road in a truck they’d left parked alongside the highway and waved at him as they went by. One of them hollered to him that somebody would be right along and set him loose. The sheriff told the Nigra to get in the car with him and the posse moved on for another mile or so before it came to where the road ran out at the edge of a cypress swamp and they found the truck—which had also been stole of course—bogged in muck to the wheel wells. There wasnt nothing in front of them but the Everglades. Nothin but the Devil’s Garden. The Ashley gang must of had dugouts waiting for them.

On the drive back out of the swamp the Nigra told the sheriff that John Ashley told him to deliver a message to Sheriff Bob Baker of Palm Beach County. The sheriff said the Nigra looked scared to say what it was and scared of what might happen to him if he didnt. Everbody knew the Broward sheriff couldnt stand Bob Baker, especially not after Bobby’s called him a dump peckerwood right in his own office in front of his own men. But when he heard the message John Ashley was sending Bobby he personally drove the Nigra up to West Palm Beach to deliver it. He said he wanted to see Bob Baker’s face when he got it.

A half-dozen witnesses saw the Broward sheriff stand in front of Bobby’s desk and say to him, “Fella here’s got somethin for you from John Ashley.” The Nigra was scared shitless, naturally, being in a room fulla nothin but cops, but the Broward sheriff told him, “Go on, boy, give it to him.”

Sheriff Bob put his hand out and the Nigra put a rifle cartridge in his palm. A Winchester .30-30 round.

“Mistah Ashley say give you that,” the Nigra said. Bobby had a .30-30 of his own and always kept it in his car, but they say he looked at that round like it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen.

The Broward sheriff told the Nigra to go on and say the message that went with it, told him dont be afraid, he would only be repeating what Ashley had told him to say and the Palm Beach Sheriff wouldnt hold it against him personal. They say the Broward sheriff was just grinning and grinning.

And so the Nigra told Bob Baker that John Ashley said to come and get him if he was man enough. Told him he’d be waiting in the Devil’s Garden with another bullet just like that one with his name on it. Said he wanted to deliver it to Bob Baker personal. Deliver it right in his heart.