Red Grass River

TWENTY-TWO

October—December 1923

THEY TRIED HARD TO BELAY THEIR DESIRE UNTIL NIGHTFALL BUT shortly before supper they could stand it no longer and slipped away to the sidehouse so ravenous for each other they did not take time to remove their clothes except for her overalls so she could open herself to him. They tried to mute themselves with kisses but their concupiscent groans and outcries carried around to the porch where Old Joe sat in his rocker and sipped from his cup of shine and grinned. Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey sat in cane chairs facing him with their cups in hand. Ma Ashley and her two youngest daughters, twelve-year-old Jaybird and thirteen-year-old Scout, were setting the table and plying between the house and the kitchen out back and each yelp from the sidehouse tightened the mother’s lips and widened the sisters’ blushing smiles. Ray Lynn seemed undecided whether the caterwauling was funny. Ben Tracey looked becrazed by it. His glance kept going past Joe Ashley to the Scout girl whose breasts were already bloomed and filled her shirtfront snugly. Ray Lynn wanted to tell him to quit his gawping before Old Joe caught him at it but Joe Ashley was absorbed in the lovers’ loud likerish reunion and far enough in his cups to be unlikely to notice.

Earlier that day, after they’d hidden the blue Chevy in the pines well back of the kitchen building, John Ashley had introduced Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey to his family and Laura Upthegrove. He could tell that Old Joe liked Ray right off but was unsure about Ben. Yet he knew that any man who’d taken his side in a prison fight and maybe saved his life would receive the benefit of his daddy’s doubt.

Clarence Middleton was not with them. He was staying with his girl Terrianne in St. Lucie. Bill Ashley had been here earlier to greet John and meet Lynn and Tracey but had then gone home to Salerno to tend his wife Bertha who was down with a fever. Hanford Mobley’s parents, a polite but shy couple, had walked over from their shotgun house a quarter-mile from Twin Oaks to welcome John back. They smiled and nodded on being introduced to Ray and Ben and then took their leave and went home too. Joe Ashley had a half-dozen lookouts posted between the highway and the house with orders to come running the minute they saw anything that looked like it might be a posse. Every man at Twin Oaks went armed with a pistol. Their rifles and shotguns were stood all around the porch.

Now John and Laura came out of the sidehouse and around to the front porch and the men tried to restrain their smiles and then Old Joe laughed and Tracey and Lynn joined in. John Ashley grinned back at them. Laura blushed and put her fists on her hips and glared at them and said “Well? What of it? I aint seem this boy in about a lifetime is all! I’d say we’re entitled, wouldn’t you all?”

“You’d been in a fine fix if a posse’d come tearin in here when you all were in there foolin,” Old Joe said. “You’d been what they call caught with ye pants down.” He gave her a mock leer and waggled his brows. She stuck her tongue out at him and he chortled and slapped his knee. John Ashley hugged her around the neck and looked at her like the man in love he was.

It was a plentiful supper—the table laden with platters of fried ham and catfish filets and cornbread, with bowls of beans and greens and grits, roasted yams and molasses, rice and gravy. Old Joe told about paying off Hicks to effect Hanford Mobley’s and Roy Matthews’ escape from the Broward jail and they all laughed when he recounted how Bob Baker had been so hot about it he’d cussed out the Broward sheriff in his own jail and damn near beat the shit out of Hicks in the hospital. Albert Miller had waited most of the night at Massey’s fishcamp for Hannie and Roy to show up before Hannie finally camp poling out of the mangroves just before sunup and eaten raw by mosquitoes. Roy Matthews wasnt with him.

“Hannie said the Matthews boy done got out the boat back by Coconut Creek,” Old Joe said. “Said he asked where he was goin but Matthews never said a word, just got out in the shallows there and waded ashore and got himself gone. I could see right off he was lyin.” He took a sip of shine to ease the passage of a mouthful of yam. “He was just too shamed to tell the truth of it.”

“What’s that truth of it?” John Ashley said.

“He got the horns put on him is the truth of it.”

“Joseph,” Ma Ashley said, and gain him a reproving stare which he fully ignored.

“How you know that?” John Ashley said. He gave his mother a sidelong look and saw her staring tight-lipped at Joe Ashley.

“When they caught the Matthews boy in Jacksonville, that’s who he was with.”

“Glenda?” John Ashley said.

“The very one,” Old Joe said. “They was in what’s called a compromisin position at the time.”

John Ashley and Laura raised their eyebrows at each other. His mother shook her head in exasperation and bent to her supper.

Old Joe gestured for Scout to serve him another portion of ham. “I dont reckon we’re like to see Roy anytime soon,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. Hannie was wrong to blame him. Ye cant fault a fella for trying a gal. It’s natural as the rain for a feller to try. It’s up to the gal to say yay or nay.”

Nobody saw Ben Tracey wink at Scout except her sister and the girls looked at each other and blushed.

“You sayin he took his displeasure out on the wrong party?” John Ashley said.

“All I’m sayin is Hannie’s young yet. Still got things to learn. Specially about women.”

“Joseph! Now thats enough!”

Old Joe narrowed his eyes at Ma Ashley. “Talk a little blue for you, old woman? It’s you said the women ought sit to the table with the men tonight since it’s Johnny’s homecoming and all.” Ma Ashley glared. Old Joe smiled at his daughters and they looked down at their plates to hide their smiles from their momma.

He told John Ashley he had sent Hanford to Texas. He’d offered to sent Clarence too, and Clarence asked his girl to go with him, but Texas sounded like the far end of the earth to Terrianne and she persuaded him to stay with her in St. Lucie. A friend of the Ashleys had driven Hanford Mobley in his truck to St. Marks where another of Old Joe’s bubbas kept a fast sloop and in it carried Mobley to Pensacola. There the boy boarded a steamer to New Orleans and from there voyaged to Galveston.

“You sent him to Aunt July’s?” John Ashley said with a wide grin.

“Said he’d long wanted to make his aunt’s acquaintance,” Old Joe said. He cut a sidelong glance at his wife. “I guess he’ll be outa harm’s way over there.”

“I know whose acquaintance he wanted to make at Aunt July’s,” John Ashley said.

Ray Lynn and Ben Tracy chuckled lewdly. John Ashley had told them all about his Galveston days in his Aunt’s establishment. The daughters had long heard whispers of their notorious Aunt July and they gave each other knowing smiles and giggled. Laura looked askant at John Ashley and said, “Who’s Aunt July?”

Ma Ashley let her fork clank to her plate and her hip jarred the table to she abruptly stood and turned from the room and Old Joe just did manage to catch his jug before it toppled.

After supper the men and Laura Upthegrove repaired to the table outside and the talk turned to business. Old Joe said they were damn near broke. The payoffs to Hicks and Webb had nearly cleaned out the family treasury and there was little money coming in. A few months after Frank and Ed got killed he finally bought another rumboat and Clarence and a young fella named Register made a couple of runs to West End in it before the Coast Guard happened on them one night. Clarence tried to run for it but the Guard shot up the boat offshore and Clarence dove overboard and swam all the way in under a moonless sky without the cutter’s light finding him. But neither Joe nor Clarence had wanted anything more to do with rumboats and that was the end of the Ashley smuggling business.

They’d lost other sources of income as well. When they settled accounts for Frank and Ed they of course put an end to the Bellamy payoffs. They’d expected the Chicago bosses to figure out who’d put the pick to Bellamy and send somebody to see them. But the weeks went by and nobody came. Either Chicago never figured out who did it or they knew who it was but didnt think it worthwhile to come after them in the Everglades Or they knew who it was and didnt give a damn. Old Joe had heard that the Chicago bosses never much liked Bellamy and thats why they had sent him to Miami, which they saw as nothing but a sweaty swamptown. For whatever reason, Chicago let things lay. But they no longer drover loads through Palm Beach County or unloaded any boats off the county’s shores. Hardly anybody else did either. And so hijack pickings had gone slim.

The whiskey camps had continued to bring in steady money until the gang hit the Stuart bank the month before. “Bobby musta took that robbery even more personal than I thought he would,” Joe Ashley said. Since the robbery two of his whiskey camps had been found out and destroyed, one of them just then days ago. Another camp had been leveled by a bad storm just a few days before that. “We down to two camps,” Joe said. “A little one we set up just last year we call Gumbo, about a mile-and-a-half southwest of Hobe, that one and the Crossbone.” The Crossbone camp was so-called because it was set never Crossbone Creek which ran into the south fork of the St. Lucie River. Though it was within three miles of Twin Oaks it had never been found out by searchers. It was their oldest camp and had long been their most productive.

“It’s got right damn serious now,” Old Joe said. “The sumbitches who busted up them camps didnt just scare way my help like Bobby done when you was in the jug the first time. No sir, they did in both my niggers at the little Loxahatchee camp. Sam and Rollo, remember them? Good boys the both. Killed stone dead. You could see they’d shot the Rollo boy from close up after he’d already been shot in the knee and couldnt run nowhere. When I found them they were half eat up by varmints and were startin to turn, so I buried them right there in the muck and weighted down the graves with big chunks of limestone. When I told Sambo’s wife what happened to him and her boy she cried like she was gone die of sorrow.”

The more recent attack was on the camp in the Hungryland Slough. “They killed another my niggermen and a good cracker boy name of Lee wasnt but fourteen-year-old and didnt have no livin kin. Jaybird seen him shiverin in the streets in Stuart one day last winter with no shoes nor even a long-sleeve shirt. She talked your ma into bringin him home with them and asked me would I do something for him, so I give him a roof and put him to work. It was another nigger workin that camp too, Mage Livermore, you know him. He got shot in the leg. Told me the men who did it was a breed and a fullblood Indian. Said the breed told him he was lettin him live so he could give me a message. Know what the message was? ‘Your time has come.’”

John Ashley said it sounded like that breed called Heck Somebody who’d lived on the Baker place off and on and had been a county deputy for a time. “I never did meet him myself but everybody always said he’s spose to be so damn scary. The one they say Bobby uses when he dont want to dirty his own hands..”

“It’s him for sure,” Old Joe said. “I’d dearly like to make his acquaintance. He’s cost me money and some damn good men.”

“It’s Bobby put him up to it,” John Ashley said. “Listen Daddy, I been keepin off Bobby a long time cause you said to, but I got things to settle with that son of a bitch and I aim to settle them.”

“Then goddamn do it, boy! I aint sayin keep off him, not no more. He sure aint keeping off us, is he? I swear I truly have had my fill of Bakers, by Jesus.”

“All right then,” John Ashley said. “Just wanted you to know where I stand on it.”

“I know where you stand. I’m standin there too.”

“All right then.”

But before they did anything else, they needed to come up with some operating capital, on that they were agreed. Old Joe had been tipped that the bank in Pompano had lately grown fat with farm money. According to his source there stood at least twenty-five thousand in that bank every working day of the week, sometimes more. “We’ll check is it true,” Old Joe said, “and if it is, I’d say thats the place to start.”

John Ashley nodded, and Laura said, “I’m drivin.”

“No,” John Ashley told her. “You’re good, honeybunch, but you aint doin this one. You been lucky nobody recognized you with Hannie on them other jobs and they still aint got a thing on you. But they gone know me so easy it aint even worth wearin a disguise. If you with me they’ll know you too for certain sure.”

She argued about it for a while but he would not change his mind nor would Old Joe take her side. She finally heaved a huge sigh of frustration and sat back with her arms crossed and her face burning with anger and disappointment.

John Ashley said he only wished it was a Palm Beach County bank. “I want that goddamn Bobby to know the onlybody’s time has come is his.”

“Well then, leave him some kind a message when you do the Pompano, why dont you? A message he’ll for certain sure understand.”

Over the next weeks they moved cautiously and in pairs whenever they ventured from Twin Oaks into the towns. They drove most of the way to Pompano by backroad and scouted the bank. For a handsome recompense George Doster the Stuart banker made professional inquiries and reported to them that the Pompano bank’s cash and securities holding had indeed grown impressive in recent months due chiefly to the boom in local agricultural enterprise. Old Joe had apprised Bill Ashley of their intentions and Bill nodded more in resignation than accord. As they crafted their plan John Ashley decided on his message for Bob Baker. When he told his father what it was, Old Joe smiled and said, “I’d say it’s clear enough.”

They hit the bank and made away clean. And that night celebrated at Twin Oaks with bottles of bonded bourbon and judge of Old Joe’s shine while the lookouts kept watch in the woods for encroaching agents of the law. Old Joe got down his fiddle and despite his opposition to bank robbery Bill Ashley had come to the party with his wife Bertha and his banjo, and the music swirled through the house.

They danced and drank and told funny stories and it was a fine party until Ben Tracey got overly bold in his manner of holding Scout to him as they danced and then laughingly refused to release her when she tried to wrest herself free. Laura saw what was happening and slipped out of John Ashley’s arms and kicked Ben in the leg and told him to let her go, goddammit. Tracey turned on her with a glare and John Ashley stepped up and said, “Do it, Ben. Raise you hand to her. See what happens.”

Scout got between them and said it was all right, Ben hadnt done anything, for Pete’s sake, she’d just been funning with him. Old Joe who was drunk asked what the hell was going on and why’d everybody quit dancing damn it. Ray Lynn pulled Ben aside and whispered in his ear and Ben nodded and looked hangdog and then told Laura he was sorry, he’d just been playing with the girl and hadnt meant any disrespect.

Ma Ashley entered the room as Ben made his apology and she gave Scout a hard stare and the girl shrugged as if to say she didnt know what was going on. Laura saw the girl’s impish look and shook a finger at her and then told Ben she was sorry she’d kicked him. Ben Tracey showed a small smile and made a dismissive gesture. John Ashley punched his shoulder lightly and told him to get himself another drink. The party then resumed but it had lost its momentum, and a few minutes later Bill put his banjo and he and Bertha took their leave and the celebration broke up shortly after.

In a still dark hour of that night, a lookout came to Old Joe’s window and woke him with the whispered information that a pair of sheriff’s cars had stopped out on the highway and let out a half-dozen men with rifles who were right now working their way through the woods toward the house.

By the time the sheriff’s men, muck-caked and mosquito-ravaged, had positioned themselves in the surrounding brush and trees where they could keep the house under surveillance, the Ashley Gang was into the deeper swamp and making for the Crossbone camp.

He kept the rifle bullet in his pocket and throughout the day would take it out and finger it and roll it in his palm and then put it back. For more than a month now his anger had gripped hard inside his chest—squeezing heart and lungs so tightly he could feel his pulse behind his eyes and sometimes had to open his mouth to breathe. On the evening he’d arrived home after receiving John Ashley’s message his wife had looked at him and paled and said not a word. His daughters too had gone wide-eyed at the sight of his face and it seemed they all three might cry and their mother had pulled them to her skirts and taken them to another room. But even behind the door mother and children could sense his fury quivering in the walls, could smell his hate drifting through the house like a caustic vapor.

The next day she read in the newspaper all about the Negro and the rifle bullet, read of John Ashley’s arrogant challenge to her husband, of her husband’s aplomb in the face of it. Read of his sneering dismissal of the Ashley Gang as worthless swamprats who belonged in a zoo cage or on a taxidermist’s table more than in a jail cell. She read of his vow to bring them down. When she read of his promise to wear John Ashley’s glass eye for a watch fob she little knew this man she was wed to, the father of her children. He seemed unaware of the fear he was inspiring under his own roof.

After days of his oblivious and leaden silence she went to his den one evening and knocked lightly on the door and when she received no response knocked again and then entered. He sat at his desk and stared at her. “I just want you to know,” she said softly, “that I’m here.” He seemed not to recognize her nor care that he did not. He was rolling a bullet under his finger on the desktop. She retreated.

During the month that followed he came and went at all hours. Sometimes he slept at the jail. Sometimes he came home in the middle of the day and went to sleep and all the while there would be cops lolling in the parlor talking in whispers and laughing lowly. Cops in the front yard. His wife and daughters kept to other parts of the house. Christmas passed like a day of mourning. He would awaken and go back out after dark and not return until sometime the following day. He ate but little. And if at time there was whiskey on his breath he never seemed drunk, not to anyone.

“Guess who’s heeere!” Laura trilled from the doorway, John Ashley smiling beside her and Wisteria’s black face behind them showing a wide white grin. It was two weeks before Christmas and a wreath of fresh pine twigs hung on the open door.

“Well now, let me see…” Loretta May said. She was sitting in the middle of the bed and the room was bathed in bright morning sunshine. A marmalade cat sat tonguing itself on the bedside table and now looked up and John Ashley saw that it was one-eyed. Loretta’s crossed legs were exposed under her parted robe as was most of one breast. He could smell her yellow hair freshly washed. Looking on her smiling face he realized how little she had changed in the eleven years or so he’d known her. She looked hardly older than the seventeen she’d been the first time he’d come to her bed and he believed he’d never seen anything so beautiful as she looked at this moment.

She drummed her fingers on her bare knee and held her chin in affected thought and said. “Who could it be?”

“Oh you,” Laura said. “You know! I bet you even knowed he was loose before I did, didnt you? I bet you…you know…seen us? In the sidehouse? In the tent?”

“Do you know this girl’s blushin?” John Ashley said.

Loretta May smiled wide. “Sounds like she’s braggin too. And you know what, mister? You sound a whole lot like a bad old gator hunter used to come see me ever now and then. Oh but he was bad about not payin, that one. I bet he owes me fifty thousand dollars for services unpaid.”

“Well, from the looks of things I’d say he’s bout to run that bill up some more,” Laura said. “You oughta see—looks like he got a damn banana down his pocket.”

Loretta laughed, and behind Laura, Wisteria giggled.

The cat sprang onto the bed and nuzzled her leg and John Ashley said, “Who’s the one-eye?”

“Name’s Johnny,” Loretta May said with a smile, “just like all the one-eyed evil tomcats I know. But how you all get here anyway? I heard the bunch of you was hid out in the Devil’s Garden and ever cop in the county’s on the lookout for you.”

“Hell girl, show me the cop who can make his way round the Glades good as us,” John Ashley said.

“Well it sure took you long enough to make your way round to me,” she said. “I only got one question other.”

“What’s that?” John Ashley said. His tongue felt thick with his desire for her.

“How much longer you gonna be about makin your way on over to this bed?”

John Ashley laughed and started shedding clothes as he went to her. The cat saw him coming and sprang to the beside table and almost upset the unlit oil lamp there and then leaped to the window sill and glared at John Ashley.

“I see dont nobody bother you all,” Wisteria said to Laura as she closed the door on them. The girl’s giggles faded down the hallway.

She stood with her back against the door and watched them come together. So avid was John Ashley that he climaxed almost immediately on joining with Loretta May. She held him close for a moment and then rolled him onto his side and sat up and said, “Hey boy.”

“What?” John Ashley said, looking up at her.

“Where’s your manners?” Her smiling sightless face turned toward Laura at the door.

He sat up grinning at Laura and said, “Hey girl, how much longer you gonna be about makin your way on over to—”

But she was already half out of the clothes and hurtling to the bed and tumbling into it and laughing and embracing them both and tasting the salt of her own happy tears.

On a cold afternoon in late December Bob and Fred Baker met with Heck Runyon at Springer’s Restaurant in Salerno. They sat at a back table and drank coffee and Heck informed them he’d two days earlier busted up another of the Ashley camp. A small camp in a gumbo limbo hammock in the swamps west of Hobe. Bob Baker asked if any of the Ashley Gang had been there and Heck said no, only a nigger and his kid.

“Oh Jesus,” Fred Baker said. “Did you—? How old was this kid?”

Heck Runyon shrugged. A man at another table casually glanced over and met his eye and instantly looked away.

“Shit,” Fred Baker whispered.

Heck Runyon picked his teeth and stared at Fred Baker through half-closed eyes. Bob Baker reflected that he’d never seen Heck Runyon’s eyes fully open nor ever to blink. It was as though he thought that to open his eyes too much would be to let others see into them and thereby know his secrets, that to blink would be to let down his guard. It was the look of a man at once mistrustful of the world’s motives and bored with all possibilities of them. Now he turned to Bob Baker and leaned forward on his crossed arms and showed a smile the lacked everything most people associated with a smile. “You said get rid them camps.”

“Yeah, but he didnt tell you—” Fred Baker started to say but Bob Baker made an abrupt hand gesture and said, “Never mind, Freddie.”

“Aint but one camp left,” Heck Runyon said.

“One?” Bob Baker said. “How you know?”

“I know.”

“Who said so?” Fred Baker said sardonically. “That Miccosukee you run with—Roebuck?” Roebuck was a ropy renegade Indian, a known thief and reputed murdered who’d all his life moved like a shadow through the breadth and reach of the Devil’s Garden. He’d been said to hijack the loads of plume hunters along the Shark River Slough and as far south as the Ten Thousand Islands, to have robbed gator skinners playing their trade on Lake Okeechobee’s most desolate shores. He’d never been known to keep company with another human being until Heck Runyon took him as partner in manhunting for Bob Baker.

“Would Roebuck know?” Bob Baker said.

Heck Runyon turned his half-closed eyes on him and gave a slow nod and Bob Baker thumped his fist on the table. “That’s where they’re hidin—got to be. The men watchin the house aint seen a hair of any the men but Bill. The gang’s off hid someplace and like as not it’s that damn camp!”

He put his hand under the table and felt of the rifle cartridge in his pocket. “The National Guard outfit in West Palm’s promised to lend us a couple of automatic rifles and all the ammunition we want. We got the men and the firepower. All we have to do is find that camp and we got their ass!”

Heck Runyon showed his teeth. “Done been found,” he said.

John Ashley had been for killing him right after the Pompano job but Old Joe had argued against such haste. It was too risky yet, Joe Ashley said. Every cop in the county had an eye out for the Ashley Gang. Besides, Bob Baker wasnt showing his face in public without a half dozen of his best cops around him.

“You might can get up close and put him down,” Old Joe said, “but you’ll play hell getting away with it. And even if you somehow was able to get away, everybody’ll know it was you and the cops wont never rest till they run you down. They dont hunt nobody like they hunt somebody who kills one their own. Course now, you could do for him at a distance with a rifle—but then he’d never know it was you done it and where’s the pleasure in that? Best to let it lay awhile. He’ll get tired of huntin somebody he cant find and then he’ll let his guard down. You’ll see. He’ll get shut of them bodyguards after a time. Then you slip up on him. When he’s alone. You want him to know it’s you but nobody else to know. Now witness, no murder warrant.”

“Listen to him, Johnny,” Laura said.

He looked from one to the other of them and spat to the said and flung up his hands in capitulation. “What the hell, I waited this long.”

The Crossbone camp was set on a high dry range of ground marked by a heavy stand of live oaks ragged with Spanish moss. Crossbone Creek flowed in from the northwestern savannah and ran behind the oaks and into the heavy brush to the east and then made its secret way to the South Fork of the St. Lucie River a half-mile farther on. Only the Ashleys and their most trusted confederates knew of the boat route from Twin Oaks to Crossbone Creek, a route that followed a network of narrow waterways through a region called the Pits—a portion of swamp marked by cattailed sloughs and ponds, by cutgrass and tupelo and maidencane, a muckland where footing was more hope than substance and a man so luckless as to find himself there without a skiff might suddenly sink in mud to his ass or be swallowed entire by a quicksand bog in less time than it takes to tell and no mortal trace of him left behind. The route took them to the creekhead—where they kept mules and tack and muckshoes and wagons for carrying out cases of moonshine—and from there it was an easy skiff ride down to the camp.

Southeast of the camp lay a wide range of marl prairie too soft to bear the weight of a motor vehicle and marked by scatterings of saw palmetto and clusters of cabbage palms and myrtlebrush. The camp’s high ground afforded a clear view across this prairie to the pinewoods a half-mile away. In those woods were a scattering of rugged trails on which motorcars might drive from the highway far to the east if they came slowly and carefully. Eastward to the South fork lay impenetrable thickets of peppertree and buttonbush and black willows. To the west and southwest the grassy savannah ran flat and swift to the immensity of the sawgrass country.

Two of Old Joe’s best Indian lookouts, Shirttail Charlie and Thomas High Hawk, alternated eight-hour watch shifts on a perch twenty-five feet aboveground in a pine strand a hundred yards south of the camp. While one kept watch the other took a meal in the camp and slept. A grayhaired Negro named Uncle Arthur James and his grown son Jefferson had operated this camp for Joe Ashley for years, maintaining the fire under the great copper kettle at just the right intensity and keeping the distillation box full of water, replacing the buckets under the tap as they filled, jugging the shine and packing the jugs into cases. Now and then father or son would pole a dugout to Salerno for supplier. On the gang’s arrival at the camp the month before, Old Joe had dispatched Uncle Arthur to Twin Oaks to tend the property in his absence and make sure the Ashley women had whatever they needed by way of supplies for other necessities. Jefferson remained at the camp—and his dog, Paint, a one-eared mongrel raised from pup-hood in the swamp and considered magically charmed to have lived so long without falling prey to gator or snake or hunting cat.

Clarence Middleton would not be joining them, they knew that. Old Joe’s lookouts had surely warned him of the police around the house and informed him that the gang had fled to the Crossbone. Clarence would have rightly decided there was no reason to risk capture by trying to slip out to the camp and would have returned to his girlfriend’s place in St. Lucie.

During their first weeks at the Crossbone camp John and Laura taught Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey to navigate the channels of the sawgrass country to the south—and taught them more besides. John Ashley showed them how to cut open a cabbage palm and extras the succulent heart of it, a treat known to the local crackers as swamp cabbage and which could be eaten raw or prepared in a variety of ways. He showed them how to dig a scratch well in the hammock ground with a stick or just their hands. He and Laura smiled at the look on their faces the first time they dug a little well and the water came up sludgy and dark brown and they said they werent about to drink that. John Ashley told them to keep scooping and they did and then after a minute more the water began to clarify and then it was coming forth clear as glass and delighted them with its sweet freshness.

Joe Ashley continued to make whiskey and run it to the Indians. Ben Tracey, who’d always wanted to know the moonshine trade, was his eager apprentice. Joe showed him how to make his way to the cypress hammocks a full day’s distance to the southwest where the Indian middlemen awaited the loads. Ray Lynn spent most his time with Albert Miller fishing for bass and bream, gigging frogs, netting turtles, snaring possums for the cookpot. They dared not shoot in case some trapper or posseman be sufficiently keen-eared to accurately fix the bearing of the gunshot even in the acoustical queerness of that vast and aqueous grssland where a report might carry for miles but seemed to whoever heard it to come from all points of the compass at once.

Laura Upthegrove and John Ashley would vanish for hours at a time. Ray Lynn asked of Albert Miller where they went and Albert smiled and winked. “Johnny and Laura are the king and queen of the Everglades,” he said. “Them two know places in the Devil’s Garden the rest of us aint even guessed is out here.”

Now the dry season was on them and the mosquitoes were scent. The night turned cool and clear and the stars did brighten. The dark sky seemed powdered with stellar swirls pale as talc. The moon in its fullness that month hung like a peeled blood orange. Frogs rang in the creeks and sloughs, owls hooted in the high pine, Sometimes came the deep rumbling growls and guttural barks of gators and now and then the high shriek of a panther near of far. John and Laura shared a tent but used it only to make love in private, after which they would come outside to sleep under the riotous stars on beds fashioned of Spanish moss.

Ray Lynn would like awake in the early nights and listen to the lovers in their passion and remember a time before he’d seen his first jail, a time when he was loved by a honey-haired girl with freckles like brown sugar on her breasts and a small chip in her front tooth. A girl he’d never seen again after going to jail for his first armed robbery and thereafter living the life of the itinerant holdup man from Pensacola to Key West. Thinking of her now he would ache with a loneliness he dared not admit for fear of weeping like a child.