Red Grass River

ONE

December 1911

THE BOY POLED THE SKIFF ALONG THE WINDING SAWGRASS CHANNEL and heard now a faint chanting through the bird cries from the hardwood hammock just ahead. He knew it was the Indian come to meet him and that he was drunk and not alone. He let the pushpole trail alongside the skiff and considered his circumstance as the boat glided slowly through the sawgrass that stood higher than his head. His father always said a drunk Indian could be the easiest delivery in a day’s work or the most troublesome, depending on the Indian. The boy knew this Indian for the troublesome sort. But if he shied from making the delivery just because you never knew what a drunk Indian might do his father would mock him for a nancy forever. He spat into the sawgrass and leaned into the pole and pushed the skiff ahead, feeling the comforting press of the revolver at his back where it was tucked in his waistband under his loose shirt.

His name was John Ashley and he was eighteen years old.

In the west the high enpurpling sky showed streaks of orange and reefs of red clouds flanking the lowering sun. To southeastward rose a high black column of boiler smoke where a dredge was digging a canal. This earlywinter’s day had begun dry and almost cool but had since assumed a hint of unseasonable rain. The air was sweet with the smell of swampwater and vegetation, with the redolence of the approaching hammock’s ripe earth under the canopy of magnolia and gumbo limbo trees. Even if there had been some elevated vantage point as near as fifty yards of him from which an observer might scan the vast encircling vista of sawgrass and scattered hardwood hammocks and pine islands (and the only such vantage points were the tops of the hammock trees where at this hour the birds were coming to clamorous roost), the observer would not have spied either the channel or his movement through it, so high was the grass and so narrow the waterway and so smoothly did he navigate it. Only a circling fish hawk high overhead bore witness to his progress.

The Indians’ chanting ceased as he poled into the shadowed green light under the heavy hardwood overhang and the sawgrass fell away and the canoe carried into the natural moat of copper-colored water that girt the hammock. The roosting birds were quieting now. Their droppings shook leaves on the lower branches, flashed whitely to the ground, poked ripples in the pool. The hammock rang with the croaking of frog colonies. He made toward a rough-sloped mudbank where the root vegetation had been hacked away to shape a landing for canoes.

He smelled the Indians before he caught sight of them in their baggy white shirts and black bowler hats on the higher ground in the darkness of the trees. Two of them. Sitting crosslegged and watching him and passing a jug between them. At the edge of the landing a single long dugout was tethered to a jutting root and now the scent of the otter skins piled within carried to him under the smell of the Indians. The water surface shattered lightly as a school of fingerlings broke away from a rushing bass.

He pulled hard on the pole and the prow bumped up onto the muddy landing and the skiff’s abrupt halt shook the wooden cases nestled toward the bow and there was a clinking of jug on jug. The smaller of the Indians grinned whitely. Mosquitoes raged at the boy’s ears. A gray haze of them quivered about the Indians’ heads without settling on their skins. He spotted a shotgun propped against a tree behind the Indians but saw only knives on their belts.

“We been hearin you from a mile off,” the bigger Indian said. His voice was wetly raw. “Been hearin you comin like a fucken steamboat.”

John Ashley doubted that. This big one—whose name was DeSoto Tiger and who resold to other Indians in the deeper Glades most of the moonshine he bought from the boy’s father—was said by some to be a good man who took after his daddy and his uncle, both of whom were chiefs in local Seminole tribes. But John Ashley knew him for a mean drunk and had for years heard terrible stories about him. He was said to have beaten a wife to death for infidelity and to have cut the dick off the man who put the horns on him. He was said to have drowned a Negro in a creek for trying to steal his traps. The boy’s father had told him that most of those stories were lies DeSoto Tiger had himself concocted to keep other Indians in fear of him. But other white men believed the big Indian was every bit the bad actor his reputation held.

John Ashley had known him only to nod to until almost a year ago when he and his daddy had come on him one day at Blue’s store on Lake Towhee and the Indian asked the boy if he wanted to go for alligator hides in the Okaloosa sloughs with him on shares. He said he wanted a white partner so he could get a better price for the hides on the New River trading dock and he’d heard the boy was a good enough skinner to go shares with. John Ashley had turned to his father who affected to study the clouds in the distance. He did not really want to work shares with the Indian but he wanted to show his father he was not afraid of DeSoto Tiger. He told the Indian he’d do it if he would agree to take no whiskey on the hunt. His daddy had smiled without looking their way and DeSoto Tiger laughed and said that was fine, he anyway never drank when he was working.

They’d gone south with a string of four empty dugouts and over the next fortnight killed gators through the nights and skinned the carcasses through the mornings and slept through the afternoons and did not talk much the whole time. They piled three of the dugouts high with hides and another with the tailmeat, which they could readily sell in the Negro parts of town. En route to the trading docks they came upon a whiskey peddler and the Indian bought a quart bottle. John Ashley gave him a look and the Indian said, “Hell, boy, the work’s done.”

When they arrived at the New River trading post DeSoto Tiger was drunk. Their boat no sooner bumped up to the dock than the Indian spied a tribesman named Henry Little Bear who he believed had been trying to steal his sweetheart’s affections. A loud row ensued and knives came into play and it required several dockhands to subdue the big Indian and hold him until the police arrived and took him away to jail. Henry Little Bear was sopping with blood as he was borne to the nearest doctor with his belly gashed and most of his nose missing and half his face flensed to the skull. Like the other witnesses John Ashley had been impressed by DeSoto Tiger’s spectacular proficiency with a knife. For the next few days the talk on the docks was of little else but the Indian fight. The boy sold the hides and put aside the Indian’s half of the proceeds.

Because Henry Little Bear didnt die but had only been mutilated—and because DeSoto Tiger’s father and uncle were chiefs in the regional Seminole confederation and often proved of assistance to the white authorities in their Indian dealings—and because the law didnt much care what Indians did to each other anyway as long as they didnt disturb decent white folk by it, DeSoto Tiger was obliged to serve but ten days in the county lockup. When the Indian got out of jail John Ashley retrieved his share of the gatorhide money and met him at Blue’s store and turned it over to him. DeSoto Tiger stared at the money and then at the boy, his eyes hard with accusation. John Ashley took insult and told him he could check the price he’d got with Mister Williams, the hide buyer. The Indian said he knew better than to ask any white man for the truth. He spat on the ground between them and stuffed the money in his pocket and stalked away.

They did not see each other again until three months ago when the boy’s father sent him to make delivery to this hammock in the sawgrass country southeast of Lake Okeechobee, one of several waycamps DeSoto Tiger was reputed to have in the region. Although John Ashley had told none but his brother Bob of the Indian’s accusation that he’d cheated him, his father seemed aware that his brief partnership with DeSoto Tiger had not concluded well, and yet sent him to deliver to the Indian anyway, maybe for that reason. His father wasn’t one to explain his actions but he’d always told John Ashley and his brothers that the only way to deal with bulls of any sort was to take them by the horns. The boy had been apprehensive on that first delivery but the big Indian had affected remoteness and made no mention of the last time they’d seen each other and their transaction was brief and without incident. Thus had they carried on in every meeting since and the boy was content to have it that way.

This was the first time the Indian had shown up drunk. John Ashley saw that the jug the Indians were hefting was not one of his father’s. He stepped out of the skiff and nodded at the jug in DeSoto Tiger’s crooked finger and said, “Hope you boys aint switchin to another supplier. We’d hate to lose you all’s business.”

DeSoto Tiger stared at the jug as if he’d only just noticed it. The other Indian laughed and said hell no, they weren’t switching, they’d found the jug just laying there in the scrub. The Indians looked at each other and laughed. Shit, John Ashley thought, one drunk Indian’s bad enough and here I got two.

“Hell, boy, we dont drink nothin but your daddy’s wyome,” the smaller Indian said, using the Indian word for whiskey. “Everbody knows Old Joe’s stuff is the goodest.” This one’s name was Jimmy Gopher and he was a halfbreed as much scorned by Indians as by whites. John Ashley knew him for a mediocre trapper and truckling friend to DeSoto Tiger. “We don’t buy no shine cept your daddy’s,” Jimmy Gopher said. He stood up and came to the skiff and peered at the two cases inside and grinned.

John Ashley hefted each case in turn and set it on the ground and looked at DeSoto Tiger who still sat crosslegged. The Indian looked back at him for a long moment and then withdrew a clump of bills from inside his shirt and handed it up to Jimmy Gopher who passed it to the boy. The money was damp and pungent with the smell of Indian. John Ashley counted it carefully and then folded it neatly and put it in his pocket. “Well,” he said, turning to the skiff, “see you next month.”

“Have a drink fore you go,” DeSoto Tiger said, and got to his feet as lightly as rising smoke. He stood a head taller than the boy who was himself nearly six feet. He wore his bowler tilted forward so the narrow brim shadowed his eyes.

“Sorry,” John Ashley said, “but I got to get.”

“Heard you sold a bunch a egret feathers to Burris’ Store in Palm Beach,” the big Indian said. “For good money.”

John Ashley looked at him, then at Jimmy Gopher and then back at DeSoto Tiger. “I sell plumes sometimes,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”

“Heard you took them birds over by Pahokee Slough,” DeSoto Tiger said. His face held no hint of fellowship. “Everybody know Pahokee Slough’s my bird ground. That’s what everbody knows.”

Only now did John Ashley perceive that the Indian was drunker than he’d thought. He wished his brother Bob was with him. Bob always offered to come along on the deliveries to the Indians and John Ashley always said no, he could make the drops himself. And his daddy always looked at him from the head of the supper table and smiled.

“Aint nobody got a deed to no rookery,” he said, showing a grin and instantly chiding himself for it. You aint scared of this sonofabitch, he told himself, dont even wonder if you are.

The big Indian took a step toward him. “I wonder did you go shares with anybody in them feathers,” he said, “and I wonder how much did you cheat him on them.”

Jimmy Gopher leaned on a tree, grinning, watching with bright eyes. He’d opened one of the shine jugs and was sipping from it off his elbow.

DeSoto Tiger drew his knife from its belt sheath and affected to strop it on his shirtsleeve as he smiled thinly at John Ashley. The boy had a fleeting vision of Henry Little Bear weighted with his own bloody clothes as he was carried off the New River dock. He put his hand behind him and under his shirt and around the pistol grips.

The Indian grinned and stepped nearer to the boy. “What you got there, whitedove? A bible? A weapon?” He took another step toward him and John Ashley pulled out the pistol, a single-action Colt .44, and cocked it and pointed it outstretched at DeSoto Tiger’s chest. “Quit right there,” he said.

He’d never before pointed a loaded firearm at anyone but he had several times seen it done. He’d seen his first mankilling at age seven when Porter Longtree shot Morris Jones through the eye on the front steps of Kennison’s Store. There had long been bad blood between the two men and the general opinion of the killing was fairly summed up by John Ashley’s daddy when he said it couldnt have ended any other way and whichever of them got killed for sure had it coming. John Ashley had since witnessed other acts of bloodletting and seen other men killed and could not have named an acquaintance who had not. And now, pointing the .44 at DeSoto Tiger, he was pleased to feel no tremor in his gunhand even as he felt his pulse thumping in his dry throat.

DeSoto Tiger raised his hands and said, “Whoa now, boy.” He laughed and said, “Dont you know when you being wolfed?” He lowered his hands and shook his head, still grinning. He looked at Jimmy Gopher whose smile had gone weak. “Boy thought we was serious.”

Jimmy Gopher’s laugh was hollow. His eyes had gone skittish.

John Ashley lowered the gun, still unsure of the moment.

“We had you goin, huh?” the big Indian said. “Should see your face. Hell, I bet you’d jump five feet if I did this.” The Indian feinted with the knife and the boy jumped back and lost his footing on the slick landing and staggered into the water up to his knees and regained his balance and again pointed the gun at DeSoto Tiger.

“Easy now,” DeSoto Tiger said, laughing and raising a placatory palm. “See how we got you goin? Hell, boy, we just funnin. You dont want to shoot somebody’s just funnin.” He stepped forward and put his hand out to John Ashley and said. “Come on out the water.”

He gave his free hand to the Indian and DeSoto Tiger’s fingers locked around his wrist. Jimmy Gopher called “Hey Johnny” and as he turned to look at him the big one yanked him off-balance and he knew the knife was coming and he lunged sideways and felt the blade nick his neck. The big Indian’s hold was iron and the blade was on its backswing and all in the same instant the boy turned his head aside and shoved the pistol against the Indian and the knife cut through his cheek as he pulled the trigger. DeSoto Tiger grunted and fell away.

The pistol blast raised a great wingbeating cloud of shrilling white egrets off the trees. John Ashley swung the pistol toward the tree where he’d seen the shotgun and saw that the gun was still there and he caught a flash of Jimmy Gopher’s white shirt as the Indian vanished into the deeper hardwoods.

DeSoto Tiger was sitting in water to his chest with his hands clasped to his stomach, staring down at the blood rising darkly to the surface.

John Ashley slogged up onto the bank and retrieved the Indians’ shotgun and took it to his skiff and laid it inside. Then heard an agitation of water behind him and turned to see DeSoto Tiger looming huge and brightly bloodstained at his belly, his face contorted with malice as he came with one hand clawing for him and the other brandishing the knife. John Ashley shot him in the chest and the Indian stopped short and took a step back and then started for him again and the boy fired into his face and the Indian’s head jerked and his bowler tumbled from his head and he did a wobbly sidestep and fell on the sloping bank and slid in the mud to the edge of the water and under the dark hole in his forehead his open eyes held no light at all.

John Ashley felt of the cuts on his neck and cheek and neither was severe. He packed mud in the wounds to stanch the bleeding. A riot of sensations churned in his chest. He looked on the dead man and felt a confusing tangle of regret and exultation. Then said aloud: “Try to cut my head off. You damn well had it comin.”

It took a while for his pounding heart to slow, his breathing to ease.

He set the two cases of whiskey back in the skiff—and then paused to consider. He went to the Indians’ dugout and in the last light of day saw that the pelts were prime quality. They could not belong to a dead man nor to any who abandoned them. He brought the bow of the Indian dugout around and tied it to a stern ring on his skiff with a short length of line. He thought of going through DeSoto Tiger’s pockets but could not bring himself to touch the body.

Then he was poling hard in the sawgrass channel and making away into a moonless night black as ink but for a blazing spangle of stars.

Later that night the stars dimmed and then disappeared altogether behind a massing of clouds in which lightning at first shimmered soundlessly and then began to be trailed closely by low rumblings. The wind roused, gained force and began pushing hard against the sawgrass. The hammock palms tossed and clattered. The susurrous hardwoods swayed. An incandescent flash of lightning made a ghostly blue noon of the night and illuminated the shadowed corpse of DeSoto Tiger sprawled on the bank of the hammock with face up to the first sprinkles of rain, eyesockets freshly hollowed by a possum and teeming with ants at their ancient industry.

Now lightning jagged across the sky and thunder blasted close behind and the rain came crashing down, shaking the sawgrass, pocking the water. Lightning branched blue-white across the black sky. The sawgrass quivered under the explosive thunder as the storm rolled hard into the Everglades. Rain fell in a steady torrent and the water rose on the bank and after a time the dead man bobbed off the ground and was borne slowly from the hammock and out into the sawgrass channel. The body carried on the winding current all through the night and all the next day and then for two days more until it debouched onto the Okeechobee Slough and in another two days arrived at a canal being dredged to Fort Lauderdale. The corpse bloated now, blackened and malodorous, faceless for having been fed upon by birds, its ears and fingers gone to garfish.

Near noon of that day it was scooped up with a load of muck and the dredge operator saw the legs overhanging the crane bucket and he deposited the load on the bank and called to his fellows to come see what he found.