Red Grass River

TWENTY-FOUR

The Liars Club

BOBBY BAKER’S RAID ON THE ASHLEY CAMP MADE HEADLINES THAT stood higher than a whiskey glass. We couldnt hardly believe Old Joe Ashley’d been shot dead. Lots of people didnt believe it till they went to the funeral parlor and saw the body for themselfs. And young Fred Baker shot dead too. He was chock full of piss and vinegar and damn near everybody liked him. It’s hardly any wonder the Ashley and Mobley places got burnt down and all their cars and trucks set afire. Lord, it was wildness for a time—it was like the Old West. Men with guns were everywhere and just aching to shoot somebody, to burn something. Albert Miller tried to get away in the swamp but was too bad hurt to make it very far and a posse run him down quick. And Laura Upthegrove! The woman got shot in the head and lived to tell of it. The “Queen of the Everglades” the newspapers was calling her.

Sheriff Baker told the newspapers he’d by God bring John Ashley in dead or alive and do it any day now. The bullet John Ashley sent him by way of the Nigra had angered Bobby in a way nobody’d seen before. He said he’d be damned if some outlaw could make threat on his life and get away with it. He’d said he’d wear John Ashley’s glass eye for a fob on his pocketwatch and nobody thought he was foolish.

Over the next few months John Ashley was a major topic of conversation in cafes and barbershops and fishcamps and speakeasies from Jacksonville to the Keys. Some believed he’d been shot up so bad in the whiskey camp fight he’d bled to death out in the Devil’s Garden and his bones never would be found. Others said he was healing up out in the Everglades and just waiting for the chance to get even with Bob Baker for the killing of Old Joe. Other thought he’d left the state and was smart enough to stay gone forever.

Reports of John Ashley sightings started making the rounds. Stories of his fate. He’d been seen in a gambling joint in Jacksonville and he’d been winning big. He’s been spotted in a fancy Atlanta nightclub, dressed to the nines and drinking champagne from the shoe of a beautiful blonde. He’d been arrested for armed robbery in Memphis and was in the Brushy Mountain penitentiary under a false name but nobody was sure what it was. He’d lost both legs trying to board a freight train out of New Orleans and was in a wheelchair and pimping for a nigger whore in the French Quarter. He’d had his other eye cut out in a barfight in Pascagoula and was in a home for the blind under the name Bruno Traven. He’d been stabbed to death by a whore in Birmingham and some said the whore was none other than Julie Morrell who Bobby Baker had wanted to marry till John Ashley had his way with her. There was a story he’d been beat to death by a bootlegger in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was another he’d been shot dead by the Knoxville cops during a robbery and been buried nameless in a pauper’s grave. It was all the usual kinda stories about him that get told about most dangerous men who vanish.

And then Laura Upthegrove got out of jail and she disappeared too. Some said she wanted to get away from a place that had so many bad memories for her. They said she’d gone to live with kin up in Georgia someplace. Some said she’d been too full of grief to live without him and had killed herself with poison. But them who believed John Ashley yet lived were sure she’d gone straight to him, wherever he was. And a lot of folk figured if that was true—if John was really alive—then we hadn’t heard the last of him, not yet. Not with his daddy shot dead and the man responsible for it still walking the earth.