Red Grass River

TWENTY-FIVE

February—October 1924

HE FISHED AND HUNTED AND HE TOOK HIDES OF ALL SORTS SIMPLY to keep his hand in. He fashioned a small still to provide himself with sipping whiskey. Laura’s daddy had long ago inserted wooden-peg footholds into a high thick-boled pine for easy climbing, and twice a day John Ashley ascended to the top of the tree and peered with binoculars through its branches out to the vast viridity of the sawgrass country under the endless Everglades sky of everchanging blues. He never saw another soul except for Henry Quickshoes, an Indian devoted to Bill Ashley these last two years. Bill had one day come upon him carrying his eight-year-old son along the shoulder of the highway and he had stopped the car on seeing that the boy’s foot was wrapped in a white shirt sopped with blood. They got in the car and as Bill sped them to the hospital in Stuart he learned that the boy had been setting otter traps along Gomez Creek and somehow one of them snapped shut on his foot. The man came running and pried the trap off the boy’s crushed foot but bones were jutting out top and bottom and the wound was streaming blood. When the clerk at the admissions desk showed reluctance at checking in an Indian who anyway didnt have the money to pay, Bill Ashley leaned across the counter into his face and in a razorous whisper threatened to break his neck in three places if the boy didnt get into surgery immediately. The boy’s foot was saved, though he’d walk with a limp evermore, and Bill Ashley settled the bills with surgeon and hospital. Since then Henry Quickshoes was ever ready to do for Bill Ashley and service he asked. He was now poling out to John Ashley’s hideaway ever ten days or so, bearing supplies and news from Bill.

In this way was John Ashley informed that their mother had rejoiced on learning he was alive and well. And that Laura had been convicted of illegal production and possession of distilled spirits and sentenced to 120 days in the county lockup. She was serving her time with little discomfort. Bertha visited her several times a week with rations of food, magazines, cigarettes. In a note brought by Henry Quickshoes, Bertha said that when she whispered to Laura that John was all right and would await her at the Everglades house, she had wept and laughed at the same time and given herself such a bad case of hiccups it took her the rest of the day to get rid of them.

Bill reported that Clarence Middleton and Terrianne had abandoned St. Lucie for Vero where a friend of Clarence’s from Miami had started a charter boat business. Clarence had taken the name Calvin Walker and was growing a beard and working as mate on the boat.

Ben Tracy was in the Dade County Jail under the name Harry Brown serving ninety days for battery and indecent commission. “What’s ‘indecent commission’ anyhow?” Henry Quickshoes asked John Ashley. “Bill says he dont know.” John Ashley said he didnt know either but it sounded like something fun. Whatever the specific transgression was, Ben committed it with a woman on the Elser Pier dancefloor after cutting in on her partner. When the woman let a shriek in response to Ben’s indecent commission, the partner came rushing to her defense and thats when Ben committed the battery.

Ray Lynn was said to be crewing on a rum schooner plying the Caribbean out of Key West.

He tried not to think about things. In the first few nights in the Everglades house he had terrible dreams. He’d several times seen his father lying in his own blood and staring up at him with a look of accusation. And he’d several times dreamt of Old Joe wandering pale and ghostly in a distant twilit mist of the Devil’s Garden. His father would turn and look at him as if waiting to hear what he had to say. His neck would ran blood. John Ashley wanted to tell him he would avenge him, that he’d even the score with Bob Baker—but each time he opened his mouth he could make no sound. And then he’d suddenly be seated at Bill’s table and Bertha would be telling him yet again how much he sounded just like Bobby Baker and how she pitied Bobby’s wife and how awful damn lucky John was to have somebody who loved him as much as Laura, how only a damn fool would risk losing that for some dumb-ass notion of getting even.

Then he got the still set up and working and he found that if he drank enough every night he would dream not at all—or if he did dream, he would not remember it clearly, which was just as good. And so he spent his days trapping and hunting and thinking of nothing but the beauty of the surrounding sawgrass world. At night he gave himself to drinking and dwelling on Laura and sometimes taking himself in hand in his yearning for her and then falling into a fitful sleep. One night he had a vague dream of fire and heard a woman’s single scream that carried in it as much of loneliness as of terror and he started awake half-drunk with his heart lunging hard but he could recall no details of the nightmare. When he went back to sleep he began to dream of his father and so woke again and took several more deep swallows of shine and once more fell asleep and dreamt no more that night.

She was released in the early days of June. Bill and Bertha Ashley met her at the jailyard gate. They drove her to a West Palm Beach restaurant and bought her a huge steak for dinner. During the meal Bill passed her an envelope holding five thousand dollars. Bertha had brought a change of clothes for her and she went into the women’s restroom and put on her overalls and laced on her boots and slipped the money into her bib pocket and buttoned the flap. Then came out and said she was ready to go.

A pair of cops had followed them in a county car and sat waiting outside. Bill wasnt surprised. “Bobby’s bound to figure you’ll head for Johnny if he’s anywhere around,” he said. “He knows damn well he aint gonna be able to follow you once you get in the Devil’s Garden but he’s gotta try, dont he?”

He drove her to a friend’s fishcamp out on the canal road on the rim of the sawgrass country. Waiting there for her was a skiff loaded with supplies. She hugged Bill and Bertha and kissed them goodbye and then got in the skiff and started poling north along a sawgrass channel. Even if Bob Baker had assigned someone to follow here, once she got into the Loxahatchee Slough she’d be able to lose anybody on her trail. Not until two days later when she was absolutely sure she was not being followed did she turn westward, and not until a day after that did she turn again and bear for the south of Lake Okeechobee and home.

Henry Quickshoes had brought to him the news of her release and every day thereafter he spent most of the daylight hours in his high pine lookout. And then one cloudless midmorning of pale sunshine there she was, poling around a distant palm island. His heart jumped at the sight of her. He skimmed down the tree and raced around to the far side of the hammock to the boat landing hidden in the brush and the wide overhang of the oaks. Here in the deep shadows the grass and thorny weeds were shin-high and the air humid and the smells rank and ripe. He paced and twirled and smoked one cigarette after another and finally heard the soft plash of her pole in the water and he hid behind a thick myrtlebush. He soon heard the dugout’s prow slide up onto the sloped bank and heard her feet hit the ground and heard her grunt as she pulled the boat the rest of the way up onto dry ground. The sound of her laboring breath made him hard for her.

He gingerly pushed aside the myrtle branches and saw her sling her rucksack onto her shoulder and start for the path toward the house. Then she stopped and lifted her face to the air and sniffed at it and he knew she’d smelled him or the cigarettes he’d been smoking. She was a wilderness child, no question. She smiled and eased the rucksack to the ground and looked around and then fixed on a wide-trunked oak. She went into a crouch and began to sneak up on it as quiet as a thought. John Ashley slipped out from behind the bush and moved after her in a quick silent scuttle. She darted up to the oak and looked behind it and her face fell to see he was not there—and then she let a shriek as he grabbed her from behind and they tumbled and rolled in the grass and thorny weeds, both of them laughing now and hugging each other tightly and kissing and kissing, faces, necks, eyes mouths. Then their clothes lofted in ever direction and caught on bushes and tree limbs and her shirt sailed beyond the bank and into the water. They coupled as if they would break each other’s bones, bucking and tossing and howling until they came—and then kept right on at it and he lapped at her breasts and she clasped him tight with her legs and they rolled over and now she was on top and gripping his shoulders and they humped hard and fast and cried out and came again and she flexed into a single quivering muscle in her orgasm, her sex locked tight around him, and she stayed that way for a long moment and then let a deep sigh an relaxed and folded down beside him and he rolled with her to keep from slipping out. They lay gasping and looking at each other and he grinned at the small gold quarter-moon in one of her eyes. “Hey, girl,” he said, “how you keepin?” And kissed her golden eye eye and then the other. Then her mouth. Her breasts. Her belly. And then he was at her vulva and she arched herself against his tongue and made sweet moan.

After a time they gathered up their clothes and her rucksack and they saw and felt now the scratches they’d gotten in the thorny grass and they joked about looking like they’d been in a catfight. Up in the house they applied moonshine to the cuts on their elbows and knees and legs and she giggled when she saw that he had a scratch on his pecked and he made fun of the cuts on her ass and they ministered to them with the moonshine and then kissed each other’s wounds to make them all better.

Some time later they lay in bed and smoked cigarettes under the open window with no night but that of the pale moon upon their nakedness. He’d told her all that he’d been thinking. That there wasnt any need to go after Bobby Baker. That revenge was a silly notion anymore. Maybe if Bobby’s daddy was still alive he could even things up by killing him, but George Baker was long dead. Besides, he’d killed Fred Baker who was Bobby’s best kin, so that made it all even, didnt it? In a way?

He told her what Bertha had said about him and Bobby Baker seeming alike and how much that chafed him. He wasnt nothing like that son of a bitch. She’d made sense about some other things, though, Berty had. She could be pretty smart. She was damn sure right about him being awful lucky to be loved like he was.

He asked if he was making any sense. Did she think he was right?

She held his face between her hands and kissed him deeply. Yes, she told him, he was making all the sense in the world.

“Well all right then, it’s all settled,” he said, grinning big and slapping her hip. “Galveston, here we come.”

He sat up and lit another cigarette and cleared his throat and said. “Listen honeybunch, there’s just one thing. I dont know what you’ll think of this, but here me out, okay? I been thinking that, well, Loretta May, you know, she aint got nobody. Now, you know she loves you to death, you know that, and it’s always seemed to me you care a whole lot for her too, and so I was thinking, well, why dont we just take her with—”

Laura howled and buried her face in his lap. He sat stunned, so suddenly had she burst into tears and so wrenching were her sobs.

And then he knew. And said, “Damn.”

She tried to talk but could not, she was crying so hard. He stroked her hair and made soothing sounds and let her cry it out. And he thought of the bobbed blonde hair and the skin that always smelled of peaches and the sightless eyes that could see so much.

“I thought you know,” she said in choking sobs. “I thought you just…you didnt want to say nothin because…because it’s just so terrible and said.”

She’d been in jail a month when she heard about it. Miss Lillian’s maid Wisteria had come to visit her several times by then to give her messages from Loretta May in a blushing whisper through the bars. “Loretta had her say just the boldest things to me. They’d make me blush too and me and Wisteria would both of us bust out laughin and the matron would look over at us like we’d lost out minds,” Laura said. She heard about the fire from the matron the morning after it happened and only then did she realize the bells that had awakened her with their wild clanging the night before were of fire engines going to Miss Lillian’s. But it wasnt till the tearful Wisteria came to see her later that morning that she found out about Loretta May. “I’d cussed them bells up and down for wakin me up,” Laura said. She sobbed into her hands and he stroked her shoulder. “I was cussin them damn fire bells…and all the while poor Loretta was…oh God, Johnny!”

The place was so old, the wood so dry, it had burned down in less than twenty minutes. Everybody got out but one. According to Wisteria, the man who’d been with Loretta May in her room told the firemen the whole thing started when Miss Loretta’s one-eyed cat sprang up on the bedside table and knocked over the oil lamp. He said the fire just jumped up the wall. Said it shot across the floor like some circus trick. He said he’d had to run through fire to get out the door.

“He ran out of there in his underpants—just run out and left her there in her darkness and all that fire,” Laura said. He voice was different now. Hard. “If God gave me just one wish, Johnny, just one, I’d ask Him to please let me find that man.”

She looked at him and saw his face streaked with tears. She sat up and held him to her.

“The firemen thought everybody’d got out. Wisteria was right there and she said the girls was all screaming when they come running out the house and they all stood out in the street and watched the fire. Wisteria said didnt none of them heard nobody screamin inside and so they thought everybody was out. She went all through the crowd lookin for Loretta May but couldnt find her and then Miss Lillian come up to her and asked where’s Loretta May and thats when they both realized she must still been inside and they screamed to the firemen to do something but it was way too late. They couldnt nobody get near the house by then the fire was so bad. She said that ole place burnt up like it was made of newspaper. But she said she never did hear her scream, Johnny, she swears she didnt. And if Loretta didnt scream she musta been unconscious, aint that right? And if she was unconscious she wouldnt of felt nothin, would she?”

John Ashley shook his head.

They sat silent for a long minute.

“She sure did love us, didnt she, Johnny?”

He nodded and dug at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“Oh God damn it, Johnny!” She waited into her hands.

They held each other close all through the night and wept together for her whom they both loved, she who had loved them both. They whispered of her and after a time could not help but smile at some of their shared memories. And after a while longer they were chuckling at recollections of the wonderful times they’d all three had together. And in the red light of the rising sun they made love once again and kissed each other goodbye for their lost Loretta May.

They poled up the sawgrass channels and adjoining creeks to Lake Okeechobee and then up along its coast to Pahokee and were met there by Henry Quickshoes. He drove them over the rugged backroads all the way up to Fort Pierce. John had wanted to see his mother one more time but the house where she was staying in West Palm Beach was still too closely watched by Bob Baker’s men. She sent word through Bill for him not to try to see her, to just get clear of the region and be safe. Bill had arranged for a new Model T to be waiting for them at a filling station owned by a family friend. they tanked Billy Quickshoes and said so long and then drove up to Vero to visit with Clarence Middleton and Terrianne at their rented cottage overlooking the Indian River Lagoon.

Clarence was overjoyed to see them but Terrianne was terse and little more than polite. She was lean and honeyhaired and had pouty lips and quick dark eyes and she had always thought Clarence’s troubles with the law would be over if only he would break away from the Ashley bunch—though she’d never said so to anyone but Clarence and said so only once. It was the only time he’d ever been openly angry with her. Her argument that they would be so much safer and in better position to start a family had carried little weight against his loyalty to the Ashleys, and she’d not mentioned the matter again. When they first heard the news of the Crossbones camp raid, both Joe and John Ashley were supposed to have been killed, and Clarence went into a deep gloom. She tried to comfort him—but in truth she’d felt that they were at last free from the dangers attached to that criminal bunch. Then Bill Ashley sent word that John was alive and safely hid-out in the Devil’s Garden and Clarence showed his first smiled in nearly two weeks and Terrianne cursed under her breath. Now here John Ashley was, right in her house, laughing and carrying on as though he had not a care in the world—and every cop in South Florida ready to shoot him dead and anybody they found with him.

They had a fish-fry that evening and were joined by Clarence’s charter boat friend Wayne Lillis and his wife Marie. Near midnight they were all a little drunk and Terrianne grew more sullen and Clarence upbraided her for it and she stalked away into the house. Clarence said for them to ignore her, she’d been out of sorts lately. But he seemed distracted and Wayne and Marie took their leave shortly after.

John and Laura had a nightcap with Clarence and told him he and Terrianne were always welcome to come visit or even to live with them after they got settled in Texas. Clarence said he couldnt speak for Terrianne but he just might take them up on the offer. Then again he might see about going to work for his brother Jack in Jacksonville Beach. John and Laura looked at each other. Neither had known Clarence had a brother.

“Jack’s never much cared for me livin on the wrong side of the law,” Clarence said. He’d recently trimmed his beard to a close goatee and was now in the habit of stroking it when he mulled. “Owns a damn nightclub but he aint crooked, if you can believe that. He’s long been after me to quit the criminal life and go to work with him. I got so tired of hearin it I pretty much kept my distance from him these last few years. Now I just dont know. He’s all the kin I got. Maybe I’ll go see him.”

Laura put an arm around his shoulder and kissed his cheek and said not to be too hard on Terrianne. “Dont matter what she thinks of me and Johnny,” she said. “Whatever you do decide to do, I think you’d be wise to take her with you,” She hugged him tight and then he showed her and John to the spare room where a bed had been made up.

When the sun broke over mangroves across the narrows in the morning they were already on their way to Jacksonville.

Daisy and her husband Butch were doing well—he had been a foreman at the shipyard for nearly three years now—and John’s nephew Jeb was grown to a husky nine-year-old who loved to fish and to shoot his daddy’s shotgun. There had been two new additions to the family since John’s last visit—your-year-old redhaired Janie, pretty and shy, and two-year-old Eddie Frank, who loved to gnaw things with his new teeth. They barbecued ribs on the backyard pit that evening under a blazing bone-white moon and drank beer and later on danced to the radio in the living room.

Daisy was glad to hear they were leaving South Florida for good, although she wished they would settle in Jacksonville rather than move all the way out to Texas. “I dont like to say I tole you so, Johnny, but way back when you were last here I tole you there wouldnt be nothin but trouble if you went back to Twin Oaks. Last time it was three others with you and now all of em dead. My heart just broke when I heard about Frank and Eddie three years ago and I dont know if it was an accident like they say or not but I still cry most ever time I think about them. But I aint grieved about Daddy for a minute and I never will. The only think I’m sorry about him dead is Momma—though why she ever loved that son of a bitch is a mystery I will never understand.” She and Old Joe had never made their peace. Ma Ashley had told her that Joe always regretted not being able to see young Jeb, but her mother could not deny that he’d had no interest whatever in the next two of his grandchildren by her.

Butch asked what John intended to do for a living in Texas and John said he didnt know yet but he was thinking of going into some kind of business for himself. Maybe a gun shop or a fishcamp. He didnt see the look Daisy gave him, as though she thought he had to be joking. She then turned to Laura who just smiled slightly and shrugged.

They all went to the beach next day and got sunburned and halfdrunk on beer. The following night they went to a moviehouse in town and laughed all through a swell Chaplain double-feature and when they came out of the theater they all tried to outdo each other at walking like the Little Tramp and they agreed that Laura could do it the best. The next day Daisy left the kids in a neighbor’s care and the four of them went canoeing on the St. Johns. Butch took his throw net and they caught a mess of mullet and filleted them and baked them in palm fronds in a firepit in the sand. Afterward while Daisy and Butch napped John and Laura went into the pines and found a soft bed of needles and there made love with hordes of dragonflies bobbing in the still air.

The next morning they said goodbye. John shook young Jeb’s hand as manfully as he did Butch’s and he picked Janie up and swung her around and Laura cuddled Eddie Frank one more time and there were hugs and kisses all around. Butch reminded John that he and Laura and any of their friends always had a place to stay when they needed it, and John thanked him but said he didnt think he’d be back this way again. Then they got into the Model T and set off for Pensacola.

They took their time about getting there and after their arrival they passed a few days playing in the gentle Gulf waves on beaches with sand as find and white as talcum powder. They sold the car and bought passage to New Orleans and there they stayed a week. They every night dined on Cajun or Creole cooking and they walked all about the exotic French Quarter and drank pitchers of beer as they tapped their feet to the music of Dixieland bands. They rode a sidewheeler up the Mississippi to Baton Rouge and back. Just before they departed New Orleans John sent a telegram to Aunt July notifying her of their arrival date.

Their ship docked in Galveston on a sweltering later afternoon of heavy humidity. Hanford Mobley was there to greet them. He looked fit and was sportily dressed in blue-striped seersucker and a white boated with a black band. When he grinned he showed a new gold canine. He was accompanied by a pretty and sweet-natured brunette named Ella whom he introduced as his fiancée. John whooped his congratulations and hugged Ella tight and patted her behind and kissed her on her forehead, then grabbed Hanford in a bear hug and swung him around. Debarking passengers passing by smiled at the happy sight of them. Hanford kissed Laura’s hand in greeting and she blushed and said, “Declare, somebody’s sure picked up some fancy manners in Texas.” The girl Ella smiled and took Hanford’s arm and he beamed upon her. They all got into a cab and repaired to Aunt July’s.

On the way there Hanford Mobley asked about the police raid on the Crossbones camp. John Ashley said they could talk about it another time but assured Hanford that his parents were well and living comfortably in a new cottage Bill Ashley had bought for them just down the road from his own house in Salerno. As the cab turned onto Aunt July’s street John Ashley asked Hanford with happened with Roy Matthews. Hanford smiled and said, “Roy who?” and laughed and said no more.

They had not seen each other in ten years, John Ashley and his aunt. She’d gone to corpulence but seemed at ease with her fleshiness and less given to general fret. She was thrilled to see him and remarked that he was even handsomer then he’d been a decade ago. When he introduced Laura, Aunt July said, “So this is the girl who won the heart that couldnt be won,” and hugged her to her copious bosom. She could not stop smiling at John Ashley and made him sit beside her on the parlor sofa so she could pet him as they talked. Laura took immediate liking to her as had to Ella, and the three women were as easy with each other as longtime friends.

When Aunt July questioned him about her brother’s death John Ashley recounted how Old Joe had been killed. Aunt July began to cry and Laura hastened to her side and put her arm around her and told of the dignified funeral Ma and Bill Ashley had arranged for him. “They told me there was just a whole hill of pretty flowers on his grave,” Laura said. Aunt July apologized for her tears, saying she had sworn she would not cry about it anymore, not in front of them, and now she meant it, by God. She dried her eyes with a lace hanky and called for one of the maids to turn on the radio to a music program.

That evening the five of them went to supper at a bayside restaurant and caught each other up on things still further. Aunt July said that none of the girls who’d worked in the house at the time John had lived there were with her any longer—a revelation prompting Laura to give John Ashley a smiling sidelong look. Some of the girls had married, some had gone to bigger towns in chase of bigger money. Some had gotten mixed up with criminals and were likely now in jail. Some had simply disappeared and none knew whereto or why. Roan-haired Sally who’d been one of John’s favorites had developed a cancer in her breast and died within six months of its discovery.

“Nineteen years old,” Aunt July said sadly. “So many old people doing nothing but meanness in the world and such a sweet pretty thing has to die so young. If there’s a God in heaven He sure aint much of a one for fairness.”

John Ashley said he was surprised to hear such a commonplace sentiment from someone so experienced with the world as his aunt. “Well,” she said, “I expect it’s exactly because of people’s experience with the world that such notions get to be so common.”

Cindy Jean, whose sweetness on the eve of his departure from Galveston John Ashley well recalled, had married a wildcatter and gone with him to Texas where he struck oil six months later. “She wrote me a letter,” Aunt July said. “She said, ‘Maylon struck oil so I guess I for damn sure struck gold.’” She laughed along with the others and said, “I just love a story about hard work paying off, dont you all?”

They all laughed too at Hanford’s account of wanting to be the man of the house just as his Uncle John had been when he’d lived in Galveston. On his arrival at Aunt July’s Hanford had followed John Ashley’s example and challenged the resident houseman to a fistfight for rights to the job. But Hanford lacked both the size and the fistic talent of his uncle, and the houseman, a big quick man named Mack, had in short order beaten him insensible. Hanford claimed to hold no hard feelings. In truth Mack was a pleasant man who was always ready with a joke and the two had become friends. Hanford had since been earning his keep as Aunt July’s general handyman, tending to small repairs around the house and keeping up the yard and garden. This position did not, however, carry the houseman’s perquisites, and whatever pleasures Hanford desired from the girls in residence he’d been required to pay for like everybody but Mack, albeit he got a discount price of a dollar and a half.

Ella had been the only one not to charge him. “I cant even say what, but it’s something about this boy,” she said. He sat next to her and she patted his arm. She said she had fallen in love with him the minute they met but it had taken him a while longer to reciprocate. “I guess because of havin so many pretty girls under the same roof,” she said. “I guess being a man he had to try everything in the candy store before he could settle for just one kinda treat.” Aunt July and Laura smiled knowingly at John Ashley but he affected to be engrossed in the condition of his fingernails. Once Hanford realized the prize the had in Ella they started spending most of their free time together, going to the beach and sailing on Hanford’s dinghy and watching movies in the coolness of the local moviehouse. Three months later he proposed marriage on the condition that she give up the whoring life and she said it was the easiest deal she ever made. They’d since been living together in the small gardner’s cottage behind the main house. They planned to wed on Thanksgiving Day.

Laura said that was just the sweetest story. She shook a finger at Hanford Mobley across the table and said, “You best treat her right, you hear?” Hanford grinned and said, “Yes, mam, I aim to.”

Aunt July asked about John’s plans and he told of his intention to go into business through he hadnt yet decided what sort. If he caught any of the looks of doubt that exchanged around the table he did not give sign of it. Aunt July then expounded on her growing boredom with whoring business and recited a litany of complaints—the greedy policemen, the extortionist politicians, the ever-higher taxes, and the ever-lower quality of whores come looking for a house to work. “Present company excepted,” she said to Ella, who smiled and blushed and said, “Oh, I know.”

They stayed at Aunt July’s for more than a week before they found a rental house they liked just a block from the beach. She had insisted they should save their money and continue living under her roof, but they as vigorously insisted they would not impose upon her hospitality any more than they already had. They signed a lease on the house, paid the first month’s rent and moved in.

Nearly every morning they packed a picnic basket and went to the beach to swim in the Gulf, nap on the sand under an umbrella, fish for snapper from the jetties. The rainy season was on them and every afternoon raised huge indigo thunderheads off the Gulf that blackened the entire sky and then the storm came crashing down. They’d sit on their little porch with cold beer in hand and watched the play of pale lightning over the sea while thunder crackled and rain hammered the roof and poured off the gutters and the wind blew cool and fresh. Sometimes they’d lie in bed under a partly open window and let the rain spatter them as they made love.

Bertha sent letters with news. Ma Ashley and the girls had recently moved into the new house she had contracted to have built at Twin Oaks. It was a little smaller than the old house but spacious enough for the three of them. It had a little sidehouse for guests and Clarence Middleton was now living there. Terrianne had left him, just up and run off—some said to Miami, but no telling if that was true. If Clarence knew where she’d gone he wasnt saying. He’d gone to see Ma Ashley and asked if he could pitch a tent at Twin Oaks till he decided what to do. She said she’d be proud to have him there but she insisted he make himself at home in the sidehouse.

A good bit of the news in the paper lately, Bertha informed them, was about Bobby Baker. He’d finally called off the search for Johnny and publicly proclaimed that John Ashley was either dead in the Everglades or run off to somewhere else for good. He’d also announced he was running for reelection. The newspapers were backing him all the way and praising him as the lawman who busted up the Ashley Gang. They were calling him the best sheriff in South Florida, maybe the best in the state. For the first time in ages he was showing his family in public. At recent official ceremonies his wife had been at his side, and every Saturday afternoon he was spotted with her and his daughters at some restaurant or moviehouse somewhere in the county. “The man seems pretty well satisfied with himself,” Bertha wrote.

They took long walks around town and admired the ornate architecture. He took her to the theater to see her first play ever and she was enrapt and insisted they thereafter go at least twice a week and they did. On Sunday afternoons they went to a park frequented chiefly by Germans and from a vendor they bought grilled sausages on bread with mustard and ate them while they listened to the polka bands. Galveston had changed but little in the ten years John Ashley had been gone. The main difference was in the greater volume of auto traffic. Cars were now everywhere. Laura noted that the weather was much like back home but she admitted she sometimes missed having the wildness of the Everglades hard by. “Back home you could always run into the Glades if there was need to get hid,” she said. On a little island like this there was nowhere to hide. John laughed at her comparison and said she had a naturalborn criminal mind. She punched his arm and said she certainly was not a naturalborn criminal, she’d had to learn every bit about being an outlaw from him.

For all their larking and carefree living, she sensed that he was restless. Not that he didnt laugh or smile very often, because he did. Not that he lacked his usual robust appetite, because he didnt. Not that his enthusiasm for lovemaking had fallen off, because it certainly had not. But more and more often now—sometimes for long minutes at a time, while they were having supper, while they were waiting for the curtain to rise at the theater, while they were lying in bed and smoking after making love—his gaze would turn inward and fix on some private vision that gave him no rest. And each time he returned from that far place in his mind his eyes would be quick and uneasy, his movements nervous. She somehow knew it was Bob Baker on his mind, but sensed also that he could not explain these thoughts to her. She suspected he could not explain them very well even to himself. She wanted to say to him that he could tell her anything, that maybe she would understand and maybe she wouldnt but she would by God try. She wanted to tell him she was there. But she knew he already knew that.

They’d been in Galveston about two months when he started having nightmares so bad he’d suddenly should in his sleep and bolt upright and she’d wake to find him sitting wide-eyed and dripping sweat and gasping as though he’d been running far and hard. She’d hold him close and croon soothingly and tell him it was all right, it was just a bad dream and his quivering would slowly subside and his breathing ease to normal. The first few times it happened she asked what he’d dreamt but he’d only mumbled that he wasnt sure, he couldnt remember. At first the nightmares came but once or twice a week but in another month they were a nightly visitation. One late-summer night she heard him cry out the name of Bobby Baker just before he came awake. When she told him what she’d heard he sighed and held her close and told of his father coming to him every night now for months, half-rotted and dirt-smeared as though he’d dug out from the grave, his voice a horrible rasp for the black bullet hole in his neck and asking why he hadnt settled things, asking how he could live with himself while Bobby Baker yet breathed and walked on the earth and bragged of how he’d killed Joe Ashley and set John Ashley running like a kicked dog.

She stroked his head and kissed him and whispered fiercely that he was just feeling guilty for something that wasnt his fault, that they were free now of all that meanness back there, that they didnt have to do anything anymore except live their life. But her heart was careering as she spoke because she could sense that he’d already made up his mind what to do.

A week later she woke in the middle of the night to find him gone. Her breath seized in her throat. She ran out wearing but a shirt and saw only the empty street. She hurried for the beach lit pale under the bright half-moon, toward the dark sea spangled silver, and there she found him, sitting in the sand and staring at the Gulf. She wanted to slap him for scaring her so, but could only hug him tight and cry and ask why he couldnt let the damn thing go, why couldnt he.

“If I knew that,” he said, “I’d know everything.”

Back at the house they had a terrible row about his refusal to let her accompany him. “I wont be gone but long enough to settle things and I’ll be right back,” he told her. “If I have to run for it I’ll be able to move faster if you aint with me. Now thats the end of it, girl.”

“It aint the end of a damn thing! I can move fast as you, fast as anybody.”

“Hannie and Clarence is all the help I need for this. Probly get Ray Lynn on it if I can find him, and maybe even Ben Tracey if he aint in jail. They’d be good backup, but I can do it with just Hannie if I have to.”

“I can shoot better than them and almost good as you! It’s not a thing any them can do I cant and you know it!” She was almost in tears and hated herself for it.

John Ashley looked at her a long moment and then grinned and said, “Can you piss out a window in the rain without getting your as wet?”

She gaped at him. “What? Oh, God damn you!” She flew at him with fists swinging and he fended her wild flailings until she tired and fell weeping into his arms. And then they were both laughing and by and by were naked and in bed and she had the hiccups and they laughed about that even as they undulated in each other’s embrace.

When Hanford Mobley answered his knock on the cottage door the next day, John Ashley said, “It’s somethin I didnt take care of in Florida that I shoulda. “I might could use a hand.”

Hanford Mobley grinned and said, “Well hell, uncle, I just been waitin for the word.”

Three days later they stood on a steamer deck in a gray morning of October chill, both of them armed with a pair of army .45’s in holsters under each arm, and waved to Laura and Ella standing on the deck and looking like bereaved women beyond their years.