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
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. “
Sergeant Watkins glowered and said, “You sure’s
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
