Red Grass River

TWO

February 1912

SHE WAS A BOBHAIRED SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BLONDE WITH FULL breasts and smoothly round hips and a wide sensual mouth. And she was blind. She’d shown up at Miss Lillian’s house in the tenderloin district of West Palm Beach eight months ago in the company of a stranger named Benson who drove a brand new Model T. This Benson raised eyebrows by leaving her to sit in the parlor and be leered at by other patrons who jutted their chins at her and grinned and winked at each other while he took his pleasure with one of the girls upstairs. When he was done with his business he raised brows higher still by getting his hat and slipping out the side door and abandoning her. The girl cried less about it than one might have expected. She told Miss Lillian her name was Loretta May and that Benson had proved himself a son of a bitch in so many ways already that this further proof came as no surprise. But she said she’d rather starve out in the road than return to Atlanta and the only living kin she had, a sister she hated who’d grudgingly taken care of her for all seven years she’d been blind due to a swiftly degenerative disease of the retina. “Only reason I run off with the likes of Benson is I couldn’t stand another day more with Berniece,” she said.

Miss Lillian felt sorry for her and offered to let her stay in a small room off the kitchen in exchange for whatever light housekeeping she might manage in her handicap. The girl said she never was much of one for housekeeping even when she could see what she was doing but she’d never been much of a shrinking violet either and one thing she knew she could do real well even blind was what she’d been doing with Benson in hotels every night since leaving Atlanta. She reasoned that from now on she might as well get paid for it and asked outright and with blushing cheeks if Miss Lillian was of a mind to hire her to work upstairs. Miss Lillian had already favorably appraised the girl’s pretty face and fine figure but she’d never worked with a blind girl before. She was sure some men wouldn’t care at all for a girl who couldn’t see what they were made of. Still, she liked this girl and was impressed with her grit, so she said, “Loretta May, honey, welcome to the house.” And although the madam been right that some of her patrons wouldn’t even consider humping the blind newcomer, others did it at least once just to see what it was like, and some of them liked it so much they wanted her every time thereafter. The girl more than earned her keep.

Among those who favored her was John Ashley. He’d been patronizing Miss Lillian’s since turning sixteen some two yeas before and the madam was fond of him and thought him handsome with his mop of black hair and wide amused mouth, his quick lively eyes that seemed to miss nothing. His visits were irregular but whenever he presented himself early in the week when the house’s business was at its slowest, Miss Lillian would let him have the whole night with Loretta May for the bargain rate of five dollars.

He liked that Loretta May’s skin smelled naturally of peaches and her short yellow hair was always freshly washed. She was the cleanest woman he’d ever put hand to, by far the best natured, the most ardent in the practice of her trade. He mentioned this last to her one time and she’d giggled and told him she was not so enthusiastic with others as with him. He thought she was lying but he could not deny the pleasure he took in the lie. Nor could he deny to himself how much he liked that she could not see him looking on her nakedness. He would often caress one part of her even as he secretly gawped upon another. Because she could not know where his gaze was set or see his face and whatever unguarded yearnings might show there, he felt possessed of a strange and keenly exciting power. But her defenselessness against his eyes also made him feel vaguely ashamed, and the way she sometimes smiled as he caressed her made him suspect she sensed his shame and that her knowledge of it gave her a kind of power too. His times with her were the best he’d had with a woman.

One cool Monday evening he arrived at Miss Lillian’s in the company of his brother Bob, who never tired of chiding him for sporting with the same girl on every visit. “Might’s well get married, you gone do that,” Bob had said to him more than once. He himself insisted on a different whore every time and sometimes would enjoy two of them on a single visit, sometimes in the same bed, sometimes by turn, but in any case he kept strict account of his rotation among girls of the house. The only girl he did not include in the rotation was Loretta May, whom he’d tried once and then no more. “She’s a fine-lookin thing, but it aint no real fun in it if the woman cant see Captain Kidd standin tall,” he said, referring to his member by the name he’d given it when he was twelve years old.

As John rapped on the door with the horseshoe knocker that hung there, Bob said it was feeling like a two-time night to him. They were admitted to the plush red-satined parlor by a husky and jovial moonfaced man named Easton whose duty it was to defend the house tranquillity against troublesome patrons. Miss Lillian greeted the brothers affectionately and they nodded hello to Sherman the Negro piano player and to a derbied man they knew who worked at the train depot. The only others in the parlor were a pair of strangers in suits and ties—one burly, one lean—who sat on a sofa with a couple of girls and looked with urban disdain at the brothers in their faded denim and worn brogans. In their eagerness to get upstairs the Ashleys paid them no heed. A minute later Bob was ensconced in a room with a greeneyed girl named Sheryl Ann and John Ashley was rapping lightly on Loretta May’s door and hearing her call, “Get on in here, you bad old gatorskinner, you.”

As always she first bathed him in the large clawfoot tub Miss Lillian had placed in her room so that she would not have to use the common bath room the other girls shared—and so popular was she with the others that none but redhaired Quentin, who was quarrelsome by nature, had carped about her special privilege. After the bath she dried him and then dusted him with rose powder despite his usual happy protests. And then, because the moon was nearly full and its blue-silver blaze suffused the room, he extinguished the lantern and described to her the moonlight’s play in her bright hair and on her pale flesh stretched on the bed under the tall open window. She drew him to her and they entwined limbs and tongues and he entered her. They rocked together smoothly and when she emitted a small gasp deep in her throat that signaled her readiness he groaned in satisfaction and permitted himself to climax. He did not know if she truly came at such times or if she was simply putting on an act. He asked her one time, saying that he didn’t need any such pretense to enjoy himself, and she’d smiled and said, “Well, if you dont know, I aint gonna tell you.”

Then lay in the moonlight and smoked cigarettes and she put her fingers to his cheek and then his neck and said it felt like his cuts were almost completely healed. “Feels like there wont be hardly no scar at all,” she said. The first time he’d come to her she’d felt the freshly scabbed wounds he’d received in the fight with the Indian and when she asked where he got them he’d told her an alligator bit him. She laughed and said he was lying, that a gator bite would have done him a lot more damage, even she knew that. He said it was an old gator with only two teeth left in its head and thats why he only had the two scabs. She’d laughed even louder and kissed him hard on the mouth.

He’d only just fallen asleep with his face in her hair when he was awakened by a heavy crash from downstairs followed by shouts and curses and in the tumult he heard his brother’s angry voice. He sat up and Loretta May grabbed his arm and said, “What?” He shook her off and scrambled from the bed and put on his pants and snatched up the pistol he’d sneaked in under his shirt. Miss Lillian expressly forbade guns in her house and he knew she would give him hell for it. He hurried shirtless and barefoot down the hallway and every head that appeared in other doorways as quickly withdrew at the sight of the pistol.

Down in the parlor Bob—wearing but his trousers—was trading kicks with the leaner of the suited men even as he tried to shake off the burly suit who held him fast in a bear hug from behind so that his arms were pinned at his sides. The three of them reeled in an awkward cursing dance, banging into walls and furniture and upsetting chairs and tea tables and breaking various things of glass. Easton the bouncer lay on the floor as though listening for activity in the crawlspace below and Sherman stood bigeyed before his piano with his palms out as if he would deflect the fight from it. A trio of swearing girls in states of undress were delivering kicks of their own at the suited men and shrilling and jumping aside each time the fight lurched their way. The stairway behind John Ashley was bunched with clamoring spectating whores and from the foot of the stairway his cry of “Hey!” was lost in the uproar.

All he could think to do was shoot. Without aiming he fired at the wall over the combatants’ heads and hit a framed photograph of former president Theodore Roosevelt whom Miss Lillian worshipped and the gunshot shook the air and rained shards of glass on them. The room fell silent but for the ragged gasping of the principals who were seized in a tableau of contention—clothes awry, hair amuss, faces florid and wild and turned toward John Ashley as he pointed the pistol from one to the other of the two suits and said, “Hands up both you boys.” As the suits put up their hands Bob Ashley drove a knee into the crotch of the burly one who’d held him and the girls cheered to see the man go bug-eyed and fall gagging to all fours. They cheered again when Bob struck the other suit a terrific roundhouse that spun the man three-quarters around and dropped him to his knees with blood running through the fingers of the hand he clasped to his broken mouth.

And then a handful of police came through the front door and the donnybrook was done.

The sergeant in charge was named Abel Watkins and when he saw that the Ashleys were on the scene he wasn’t surprised. He’d known them for hellions since their boyhood. The brothers’ clothes were retrieved from upstairs and while they got dressed and some of the girls helped Easton up onto a sofa and tended to him, Bob Ashley gave Sergeant Watkins an account of events.

After having his sport with Sheryl Ann, he had come downstairs to see what other girls might be available for his second go-round and found three of them sitting with the two men in suits. “You city boys sure take your time about pickin your pleasure,” Bob said, and beckoned Jenny the Horse to him. But the burly one of the suits caught Jenny by the wrist and said in a Yankee accent, “Hold on there, sugar. I haven’t decided who I want and it might be you.” Bob said that if the suit was going to pick Jenny, then pick her, and if not, he was taking her upstairs himself. The suit responded that he’d take all the damn time he wanted to make his choice and no white trash son of a bitch was going to tell him different. Bob’s response to that had been to kick the man in the face with the heel of his bare foot and send him over backward together with the sofa. Easton came on the run from the kitchen and grabbed Bob by the arm and Bob punched him backwards toward the other suit who bonked him on the crown with a half-full bottle and took him out of the fight. Then the first suit was up again and grabbed Bob tightly from behind and the other one commenced kicking him and hitting at him with the bottle. “Sonofabitches mighta put a hurt on me if Johnny didnt get their attention like he did,” Bob told Watkins. He was sporting a swollen purple eye and Sheryl Ann pressed a wet cloth to his scalp to stem the blood running from his hair.

The city men looked even worse. The burly one had a broken cheekbone and half of his face was grotesquely engorged. His gait was that of an old man, so bruised were his testicles. The lean one showed an upper lip like a large wedge of peeled plum and the fresh lack of a top front tooth. As Bob gave Sergeant Watkins his account of the fight, John Ashley heard the lean suit mutter to the other, “I told you we oughta come packing. But nooo, you said, whatta we need to pack for, you said. The fuck can happen in a damn cracker whorehouse, you said.”

They told Sergeant Watkins they were from Chicago and en route to Miami for a fishing vacation. The burly one gave his name as Johnson, the lean one said he was Bode. They insisted that Bob had started the fight for no reason except jealousy over one of the girls who’d been keeping them company. But the three girls said that wasn’t so, that the Johnson one started it by calling Bob trash.

“Christ,” the Bode one said. “thats no reason to kick a man in the face.”

Sergeant Watkins glowered and said, “You sure’s hell from up north, aint you?”

He charged the Chicagoans with felonious battery and disorderly conduct but was willing to close the case on payment from each of a twenty-five-dollar fine if they also paid Miss Lillian one hundred cash dollars apiece to cover the damages to her parlor.

“Money wont patch up the insult to Teddy’s eye,” Miss Lillian said, looking at the skewed photograph dangling on the wall and at the bullet hole in Roosevelt’s spectacles. “But thats somebody else’s doing anyhow”—and here she gave John Ashley a tight-lipped look.

The suits muttered about it but they paid up. Everyone gaped at the roll of bills the Johnson one produced from his coat to peel off the requisite 250 dollars. Watkins then ordered the two men escorted to the depot to await the Miami train.

Sergeant Watkins concluded that Bob had acted in self-defense and so filed no charge against him. But he had to charge John Ashley. “It’s too many people heard that gunshot, Johnny,” he said. “The captain’s gonna hear about it in the mornin and ask me where’s the report. I dont charge you on it he’ll sure-God skin me good.” The captain was new to West Palm Beach, a hardliner from Jacksonville with a reputation for doing things by the book.

John Ashley said he understood. He agreed to a charge of reckless discharge of a firearm in the city limit and gave Watkins a bond of $25 which, rather than go to court, he would be able to forfeit as a fine. Watkins gave him back his pistol and the matter was closed. At the front door the sergeant exchanged winks with Miss Lillian and she waggled her fingers after him and said “Come back soon, Abel—but not in that uniform, you hear?”

Ten minutes later the Ashley brothers were having a drink and laughing along with a clutch of fawning girls who persisted in their excited babble about the fight when Miss Lillian’s Negro cook Jewel came into the parlor and quietly informed John Ashley that there was someone at the kitchen door who wanted to talk to him. He asked who but she couldn’t say—the man was holding back in the shadows like he didnt want to be recognized. John Ashley thanked her and stepped into the hallway to check the revolver and ensure it carried five ready cartridges, and then he went to the kitchen but saw no one at the door. He held the gun low against his leg and slipped out the screen door and stood fast in the shadow of the overhang and studied the moonlit sideyard.

A voice in the dark said, “Over here, Johnny.”

He made out the figure of a man standing in the moon-dappled shadows of an umbrella tree beside the pump shed and then saw that the man wore a uniform and then recognized Buford Moore, a Palm Beach County deputy sheriff whose family were longtime acquaintances with the Ashleys. John Ashley’s father had once carried Buford’s daddy on his back for more than five miles after coming on him in the Glades where he’d broken his knee on a limerock outcropping and had been struggling along on a makeshift crutch for almost a day.

Buford Moore looked around nervously as John Ashley came up and said, “Hey, Buford, what you doin out here in the dark?”

“Get out of the light, Johnny,” Buford whispered. “It won’t do to have nobody see us talkin.”

John Ashley stepped into the shadow of the umbrella tree and slipped the pistol into the waistband at the small of his back. “Damn, bubba, what’s all the mystery about?”

“Listen, Johnny,” said Buford Moore, “I got somethin to tell you.” He asked if he remembered the dead Indian that was dredged out of the Lauderdale canal about six weeks ago. “His face was pretty bad but his daddy knew him right off. He anyway had a panther head tattoo on his shoulder made it certain who he was. Name’s DeSoto Tiger. His daddy and uncle both some kind of high-muckety chiefs. Made a lot of noise about wantin justice for his nephew and yackety-yack-yack. Remember?”

John Ashley said he had a vague recollection of all that. He took out his fixings and began to roll a cigarette.

Well, Moore told him, just last week a couple of sheriff’s deputies arrested an Indian breed trying to break into Willis’ Grocery over near Delray. It was about the fifth or sixth time they’d caught this son of a bitch thieving and this time Sheriff George meant to put him away for a good while. But the breed said he knew something the sheriff might like to know and he’d tell it to him if he let him go. The sheriff asked what and the breed said he knew who killed DeSoto Tiger. Sheriff George said who and the breed told him. The sheriff asked how did he know and the breed said because he saw him do it. Sheriff George said the breed’s say-so wasn’t hardly good enough and asked could he prove it and the breed says it shouldn’t be too hard since the fella stole about a thousand dollars’ worth of DeSoto Tiger’s otter furs and all the sheriff’s got to do is find out if this same fella’s sold about that much worth of otter furs to anybody lately.

John Ashley ran his tongue along the edge of the paper and sealed the cigarette and asked Deputy Moore if he had a match. The deputy dug one out and struck it and held it cupped to him. John Ashley took a deep drag and said, “And so?”

And so, deputy Moore said, Sheriff George had sent people out to check with all the fur buyers along the coast. They checked all the way down to Miami and bedamn if the Girtman Brothers hadn’t paid twelve hundred cash money for a load of otter skins brung to them by the very same fella the breed had told Sheriff George about. Sheriff George had got up a murder warrant last night and was sending it all over.

“Well now, Buford,” John Ashley said, “let’s be real clear about this. Exactly who’s the warrant for?”

“Well, John,” Buford Moore said, “exactly, the warrant’s for you.”

John Ashley nodded and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said. “Figured it might be. Where’s that breed now? All safe and sound in a jail cell?”

“Nuh-uh. Sheriff George did like he promised and let him go this afternoon. You know Sheriff George—trusts everybody to keep his word till they give him reason not to. But he made the breed promise to report to him once a week and told him if he broke his word he’d see to it he got sent to a turpentine camp for the rest of his days. That might could be enough reason to make the breed hold to his promise.”

John Ashley spat. “Goddamn breed.”

“I thought you oughta know,” Buford Moore said. “I been scoutin for you all day. I finally come here and seen the police wagon out front and I figured they’d maybe already got the word somehow, but when they come out you wasnt with them.” The deputy licked his lips. “Listen Johnny, I got to give the city cops this warrant”—he tapped a long folded paper in his shirt pocket. “Sheriff George’ll have my hide if they dont get it tonight. I been carrying it since this mornin. You understand, dont you?”

John Ashley said he surely did and he thanked Buford Moore for the information. The deputy took a nervous look around and said, “Listen Johnny, the last time you and me saw each other was over a week ago, all right?”

“Sure enough, Buford,” John Ashley said. The deputy smiled and shifted his weight awkwardly and said, “All right, well, you take care, hear?” He raised his hand in farewell and hastened away around the corner of the house.

John Ashley went back into Miss Lillian’s parlor and took his brother aside and whispered to him what Buford Moore had said. He then went upstairs and told Loretta May something had come up and he had to go take care of it. He kissed her goodbye and said he’d see her soon. As he went out the door she stared after him with her sightless eyes.

They bid Miss Lillian and the girls goodbye and exited by the back door and made away into the shadows of the pine forest.

They jogged over a vague trail through the pineywoods, navigating the darkness with the sureness of bats. After a time they came out from the trees onto a grass prairie illuminated pale blue under a bone-pale gibbous moon and in another quarter mile came to the Loxahatchee Canal. From the thick palmettos along the bank they withdrew a canoe they’d hidden there and slipped it into the moon-silvered water and began paddling north at a strong steady pace. Before they’d gone half a mile the palmettos fell away and ghostly bluegreen vistas of moonlit sawgrass opened to all points of the compass.

As they bent to their paddles Bob cursed once again Jimmy Gopher for a loose-lipped son of a bitch and swore he was going to track down that red nigger and put a slug in his brainpan. At his knees lay the .30 caliber Winchester carbine with which he intended to do it. John Ashley told him to do no such thing, that they had enough trouble as it was. “We’ll let Daddy say what to do.”

“I already know what Daddy’s gonna say,” Bob said, “and so do you. He aint never been abidin of them who tells tales to police.”

“Well, we’ll just let him say what to do,” John Ashley said. He looked at his brother over his shoulder. “Dont be goin off half-cocked like you prone.”

Bob Ashley snorted and spat in the passing water. A moment later his conversation turned to the fine time he’d had with Sheryl Ann and he told his brother of a new technique she’d taught him. “That gal’s always got some new trick to show,” he said. “Wonder where-all she gets them?”

“Where you think?” John Ashley said and turned to his brother with a white grin. “It’s some men just natural-born good teachers.”

Bob Ashley splashed him with his paddle and said, “You lying sack!”

As they stroked their way upstream and Bob talked on about Sheryl Ann, John Ashley tried to anticipate what their father might say about all this, but his thoughts kept drifting to Loretta May, to images of being spooned against her fine ass with his face in her sweet-smelling hair.

Bob at last fell silent and the only sounds were of their paddles cutting through the water and of animals rustling into the shorebrush at the canoe’s approach. At one point as they passed through the closing blackness of a hardwood overhand a huge bull gator let a resonant grunt so close to the boat that both brothers flinched and yanked their paddles from the water and then giggled at their start.

“We ought take the hide,” Bob Ashley whispered, straining his eyes into the passing darkness to try to make out the gator. “I bet that grandaddy sumbuck goes sixteen feet if he goes a inch.”

“Aint got the time and you know it,” John Ashley said, resuming his stroking. “From the sound of him we’re lucky he didnt want our hides, you ask me.” They chuckled softly as they emerged from the hollow and into the brightness of the moon and the clustered stars.

They paddled in silence for a time and then Bob said softly: “Hey? You ever think about the future?”

“What?” John Ashley said, stroking easily.

“The future,” Bob said. “You ever think about what you want in the days to come.”

John Ashley let off paddling and looked at him over his shoulder. “In the days to come?” He could not see Bob’s eyes under the shadow of his hat brim.

Bob spat into the passing water. “Yeah,” he said. He looked about at the measureless compass of starry sky and the dark surrounding wilderness and said, “You know what I want?” He swept his arm before him and said, “This.”

John Ashley looked around as though Bob might have indicated something he had not seen before. Then turned back to his brother and said, “This place? Hell boy, you got it.”

Bob laughed softly. “I know. Jesus Johnny, look at it! Smell of it! Of all the damn places in the world we might of got born in, we’re some lucky sumbucks to get borned here.”

John Ashley regarded the immense expanse of shadowed sawgrass and the near and distant hammocks silhouetted under the moon and he thought of the shallow bankless river that flowed through it all and was the lifeblood of his great wilderness. He breathed deeply of the night air pungent with the smells of ripe vegetations and raw earth and water richly seasoned with matter living and dead. We are, he thought. We are.

Bob spread his arms as if he would embrace all the starry night and all the world both visible and enshadowed. “Just look at it, man! Aint it beautiful?” He laughed with a low vehemence, like one near to madness with a secret joy. And John Ashley laughed with him.

Two hours later the trees drew in close on both banks of the canal. Against the moonbright sky they spotted the high black silhouette of a lightning-charred oak that served as their landmark. They put in against the bank and pulled the canoe out of the water and Bob Ashley removed the carbine and they hid the boat in the brush. They pressed ahead on foot and followed narrow winding trails through hardwood forest and underbrush. As they went they listened intently for anything that sounded out of place but heard only the calls of owls and night-hawks, the scuttling of creatures in the brush, the rantings of frogs, the keening mosquitoes at their ears. Their plan was to gather the gator hides they’d left to dry at their waycamp by the north bend of the Loxahatchee River and then make for home and tell their father the news about the Indian.

The eastern sky was showing a pale band of pink light as they drew close to their camp. When they werent slogging through mud they had to step carefully over vinecovered ground. Up ahead the trees abruptly fell away. They paused at the edge of the woods to listen hard and survey the open ground to the east where it came up against a dense palmetto thicket and the pinewoods beyond. Their waycamp lay in a natural clearing a hundred yards into those pines. In addition to the gator hides, they had a wagon in there and a tethered mule. On the far side of the camp was a corduroy track of pine timbers they’d laid over the mucky ground for a distance of a quarter-mile to where the ground was higher and the track became a solid limestone trail. From there the going in the wagon was easier the rest of the way to their father’s whiskey camp at the edge of the deeper swamp and but a few miles from Twin Oaks.

But now they heard the chugging of a motorcar and made out dim headlamps coming along the open ground. The lights progressed on a narrow raised-rock road a timber company had once used to take out pine logs. After clearing the trees for twenty yards on both sides of the road the company went broke and abandoned the site and the Ashleys had since used the road for their own purposes. It originated at the Dixie Highway about a mile to the east and terminated at the palmetto thicket.

“Who you reckon?” Bob asked, looking off at the coming lights.

“Nobody we call friend, I’ll wager,” John Ashley said.

They made for a better vantage point closer to the road as the motorcar came on. They were hiding in the high shrubs near the end of the road when a Model T sedan came clattering into view in the dawn gloam and halted. The motor shut off and the headlamps extinguished and two uniformed county deputies got out of the car and stood staring at the seemingly impenetrable palmetto thicket before them. One of the men said something the brothers couldn’t hear clearly and the other said, “Maybe so but Daddy said check it and thats what we going to do.”

“Bobby Baker,” Bob whispered. “And Sammy Barfield with him. How you reckon they know about this camp?”

“No tellin who’s seen us comin and goin on that road,” John Ashley said. “It’s too open. I told Daddy we ought of quit this camp.”

The deputies now found the narrow path the Ashleys had cut through the palmettos and they trudged into the thicket in the direction of the camp. The Ashleys set out after them, following at a short distance and moving easily as shadows. Halfway to the camp the path abruptly opened into a small clearing where the Ashleys had felled most of the pines they’d used to make the corduroy track—and now John Ashley raised his fist in signal to Bob and they quickly closed in on the lawmen.

The deputies heard them too late. They turned and saw the brothers emerging from the brush not fifteen feet behind them, saw Bob Ashley holding the carbine at his hip like a long-barreled pistol and John Ashley pointing the .44 Colt as he came.

“Oh shit,” the one called Sammy Barfield said, and he quick put up his hands.

The other kept his hands at his sides as Bob Ashley hastened to Sammy and snatched his service revolver from its holster and lowered the carbine and pointed the pistol squarely at Sammy’s chest. Sammy’s arms were up as high as they could go and he said, “Oh shit, Bob, dont shoot me.”

“You’re under arrest, Johnny,” the other deputy said.

John Ashley was smiling widely as he came up to this deputy and said “Hello to you too, Bobby. How’s daddy’s little deputy?” Bob Baker’s father George was the high sheriff of Palm Beach County and had been since the county’s inception three years earlier.

John Ashley relieved him of his revolver and gave the piece cursory examination and stuck it in his waistband. Then said: “Under arrest, you say?” He laughed. “Hell, Bobby, do I look under arrest?”

“For murder, John.”

“That right? Who’m I sposed to killed?”

“DeSoto Tiger.”

“Who?”

“Quit the bullshit. We know you shot that Indian. We got a witness.’

John Ashley grinned hugely. “Well if I did, I guess it wouldn’t mean nothin to shoot the both you too. I mean, they can only hang me once, aint that right?”

“Even you aint that damn dumb,” Bobby Baker said.

John Ashley laughed. He spun the .44 on his finger like a storybook cowboy and then affected to aim very carefully between the deputy’s eyes from a distance of four feet.

“You dont scare me a goddamn bit and you never have. You shoot me, every police officer for three counties around will come huntin you.”

John Ashley moved the gunsights down to Bobby Baker’s heart and stroked his chin in affected contemplation for a moment, then shook his head and raised the sights to Bobby’s forehead once again. “Bang!” he said and lowered the pistol and grinned. “You that important now, hey Bobby? All them police would be lookin to even the score for you?”

“I aint no Indian, Johnny?”

Bob Ashley said “You sure aint, bubba. You got to be near deaf not to heard us comin up behind you.”

“You’re under arrest too,” Bobby Baker said to him. “As an accomplice.”

Bob Ashley hooted and shook his head. “I guess we best shoot these boys, Johnny, before this hardcase decides to tote the whole damn family off to jail.”

“Oh lord, boys,” the deputy called Sammy said, “dont shoot us, boys.”

“Shut up, Sammy,” Bobby Baker said. “They aint about to shoot anybody.”

“Maybe yes and maybe no,” John Ashley said. He gestured at Bob Baker’s leg and said, “Take that thing off and hand it here.”

Two years earlier Bob Baker had tracked down a Negro fugitive wanted for the murder of his wife and brother and in the ensuing confrontation he had shot the Negro dead at the same moment that the man blew off most of his lower leg with a twelve-gauge buckshot load. The doctors amputated just below the knee and he had since worn a wooden prosthetic. He had become so proficient with it that his walk showed only a hint of awkwardness. None who knew him considered him handicapped. It was a point of pride with him never to mention the leg and his friends knew better than to refer to it in his presence.

“Well dont just stand there gawkin,” John Ashley said. “Take it off and hand it over.” Bob Ashley guffawed.

Bob Baker stood fast and glared at him. John Ashley cocked the .44 and aimed it at Bob Baker’s good foot. “You tirin my patience, peckerwood,” he said. “You dont take that thing off right now, I’m gonna shoot you in the other foot is what I’m gonna do.” The early dawnlight had not yet dispersed the ground darkness and everyone’s feet were but vague entities.

“You aint gonna shoot any part of me, John, and you damn well know it.”

John Ashley fired. The round tore a chunk off the heel of Bob Baker’s boot and the deputy yipped and flinched sidewise and the loud crack of the gunshot was swallowed almost instantly by the breadth of the surrounding country.

“Goddamn me if I aint a piss-poor shot,” John Ashley said. Bob Ashley laughed so hard he had a coughing fit.

John Ashley cocked the piece and this time held it with both hands and aimed at Bob Baker’s foot again and the deputy said, “Hold it! Hold it, you crazy son of a bitch!” He sat on the ground and tugged up his pants leg and unbuckled the straps holding the prosthetic in place. He handed it up to John Ashley. “You aint right in the head, you know that? You never been.”

John Ashley was enjoying himself immensely. He hefted the prosthetic leg with its boot still attached and said, “Do much dancin with this thing, Bobby? I guess you lost your taste for dancin since before you got crippled, huh? You know, I dont recall seein you at one single dance after that one you took what’s-her-name to. Judy? Junie? Julie—thats it. Say, whatever become of her, anyhow?”

Bob Ashley whooped and had another spasm of coughing laughter. Bob Baker sat in place and said nothing but glared at John Ashley who could almost smell the anger rising off him like a malefic vapor. He smiled at how easy it was to rile him with just mention of a girl from their past. “Ah well, enough of relivin the good old days, eh Bobby? You, Sammy, help this poor crippled man to his feet—his foot, I mean.”

Deputy Barfield pulled Bob Baker up onto his good leg and Bobby braced himself on Sammy’s shoulder. Still chuckling, Bob Ashley went to the deputies’ car and punctured all four tires with his buck knife, then opened one of the hood panels and reached in and yanked several wires off the engine and flung them far into the brush.

“Now you boys get goin,” John Ashley ordered. “And tell your daddy, Bobby, the next time he sends someone after me he best send a whole man.”

The two lawmen started off for the highway with their arms around each other’s shoulders, their three-legged gait awkward and shambling and the Ashley brothers’ laughter in their ears. The brothers watched them at their slow progress until they were distant figures nearly a half-mile away against the redly rising sun. Then John Ashley went to the disabled Model T and tossed the wooden leg onto the backseat and he and Bob went on to their camp.

An hour later the brothers had the hides on the wagon and had retrieved and hitched the mule and were on the corduroy track for home.