his adeptness at dealing with trouble. He made joyful daily claim on this sexual perquisite during the whole of his first year in Galveston. Only two of the girls would not permit him in their beds—Laraine who was married and truly loved her husband and would not cheat on him by having congress with any other man but a paying customer, and Cindy Jean who said he so much reminded her of her brother Royal back home in Fort Worth that it would feel like the awfulest sin. He took the other six in turn, a different one every night, and so each week had one of them twice—once on Sunday and again the following Saturday.
At the dinner table one afternoon Aunt July mock-admonished him for his unflagging concupiscence. “It’s a scientific fact that a man can go crazy doing it as much as you do,” she said. “It’s all that constant friction. Sends way too much heat up your tallywhacker just like a fuse and on up your spinebone and when it reaches your brain, why, it just cooks it like an egg. Too much hokey-pokey has been known to turn a man into a drooling fool fit for nothing but a freak tent.”
To which John Ashley raised his face to the dining room ceiling and bayed like a moonstruck hound and his aunt couldn’t help but join in the girls’ laughter.
Wiser heads might have warned him that ever-ready pleasures cannot long endure, that sexual indulgence requires respite and even occasional lack in order that its enjoyment not jade. He was young and did not know these things and would anyway not have believed them had he been told and so was obliged to discover their truth for himself. By the end of his first year in Galveston he was beyond surfeit with pleasures of the flesh. He took to waking in the forenoon before the girls arose and slipping out of the house and staying away until early evening and the hour of his employ. At supper the girls began to look at him askance but they held their tongues. Not until he’d kept his distance from them for more than two weeks did a roanhaired inmate named Sally make bold to inquire: “Dont you like us no more, Johnny?”
He heard the injury in her voice and saw in her face and in the faces of the others that a man’s failure of desire for them was the harshest of rebuffs. He felt mean for making them feel unwanted.
“
They smiled with ready acceptance of this explanation and winked at each other with relief and fell to their suppers with a happy clatter of dishware.
He did resume his visits with the girls but now dallied only twice or thrice a week—often enough to avoid giving further offense but not so often as to glut himself again. He spent the larger portion of his days walking the city and at last acquainting himself with it. He bought a white suit and wore it everywhere against a light blue shirt and black tie and all under a widebrimmed white Panama. He went to the bayside docks and watched the loading and unloading of cargoes of every sort and heard seamen speaking in the tongues of nations whose names he did not know. He daily joined the crowd that gathered every afternoon to see what the fishing boats brought in and one day marveled with them all at a fourteen-foot tiger shark with a girth twice his own as the beast was hung up by its tail and the captain dissected its belly and among the contents to issue onto the dock were a rum bottle and a horseshoe and most of a woman’s bare arm as yet hardly digested and whose finger bore a gold wedding band. The sight reminded him of a time he’d cut open the stomach of a bull gator he’d shot at the south rim of Lake Okeechobee and therein found a boot containing a pale hairy foot.
He ambled along the Strand and admired its ornate Victorian architecture and several times attended matinee theater performances and once and only once a matinee at the opera house. He liked walking in the drizzling rain after dark in the misty glow of the streetlamps. He took long noonday strolls along the seawall so recently completed after the hurricane of 1900 that killed 6,000. In the saloons they yet told stories of workgangs impressed at gunpoint and given whiskey rations through the day and night that they might stay halfdrunk and abide the labor of heaving corpses into the towering bonefires on the beach. The fires blazed for weeks and hung the island with a dread and hazy stench. Now the city streets rattled and honked with more than 200 motorcars and pedestrians scurried aside with hardly a glance at them and only the most nervous horses still stamped and kicked at their passing. The speed limit in town was ten miles per hour but there were daring motorists who raced each other on the beach all the way to San Luis at the west end of the island. In the parks he watched baseball games and boxing matches and bicyclists and schoolchildren at their gymnastics. He put on a bathing suit in a beach bathhouse and went for long swims in the mirrorsmooth morning sea. And yet, in this his second year of exile in a modern city whose pleasures he could not refute, he could not deny either his increasing yearning for home.
He often went fishing from the beach in the afternoons and sometimes thought of Bobby Baker who’d shown him the best places in the Indian River for trout and how to read the weather—taught him that when you saw sand sharks jumping between dawn and sunrise you could look for sporadic southwest winds in about five or six hours, that when the whip rays jumped in the morning you knew a northwester would soon hit and rough up and silt the water, but when the morning cobwebs were thicker than usual you could bet on good weather for fishing out on the salt.
John Ashley felt almost friendly toward Bobby Baker in his recollections. He had always considered him a good old boy who seemed to have no lack of grit—as he’d proved on such occasions as the first-fight with his brother Bob and the attempt to arrest them that night at the waycamp, the night he’d sent him home on one leg.
But as he cast into the gentle surf one afternoon it occurred to him that Bobby Baker wasn’t likely to forget the humiliations of Julie Morrell and being stripped of his gun and leg. It struck him and Bobby might evermore seek to get even for those public humblings. The notion that Bobby might even be pleased to see him dead came quite suddenly and made him at once melancholic and angry.
These feelings confused him and would not dismiss. They persisted for the next several weeks and because he could not say why he felt as he did he became even more nervous and irritable. He twice in one week badly battered troublesome patrons he could easily have handled without letting blood. Aunt July gave him a reprimanding look in the first instance and a severe rebuke after the second, reminding him that she needed no additional difficulties with the police or from some young muckraker’s righteous journalistic denunciations of the whoring trade. He had thought that the fights might soothe his gloomy agitations but they did not. He ached for an action he could not name.
One morning just a few days after Aunt July’s scolding he was walking by a bank a block removed from the Strand and chanced to look into the lobby just as a customer was receiving money at a teller’s window. He paused and watched the man tally the bills and then smile and say something to the teller who seemed a sulky young man and who showed not a hint of smile in return but simply nodded. The customer folded the money and put it in his coat and came out and gave John Ashley a polite smile in passing. John Ashley glanced at the bulge in the man’s coat pocket and then watched him cross the street and go into a restaurant. Then he looked back into the bank for a long moment, at the polished wood floor gleaming against the yellow sunlight slanting through the windows. He made his way back to the house by a slow roundabout route, noting carefully the lay of every street and alley as he went, stopping in at a pharmacy to buy a small package of gauze and a roll of adhesive tape. By the time he was back at the house his melancholy had lifted, his nervousness dissipated like blown smoke.
Early the next morning after the house had turned out its last patron of the night and everyone had gone to bed and only the domestics were moving about at their housekeeping and cooking duties, he cleaned his pistol at the small table by his bedside window and then loaded it. He dressed in his white suit and from his suitcase withdrew a floppy-brimmed black felt hat and pair of overalls no one in the house had ever seen and he put them in a large paper sack together with the pistol and the gauze and the roll of tape. He descended the stairs quietly and slipped out the back door and went to the tool shed at the rear of the property. The day was cold enough to show his breath. In the shed he emptied the sack and changed from his white suit into the overalls and tucked his long hair up into the hat. He had let his hair grow nearly to his shoulders because several of the girls had dared him to do so and then all of them had said they preferred it like that. He neatly folded his white suit and put it in the bag and cached it in a corner. He slipped the pistol into the bib pocket of the overalls and then carefully set a wide strip of gauze over his nose and cheekbones and taped it in place.
Five minutes after the bank opened for business he walked in and stood at the central counter and on a withdrawal slip wrote “Give me all your paper money.” The guard was a uniformed big-bellied fellow engaged in conversation with a young female clerk at her desk in a corner and the only other customer of the moment was in discussion with the bank manager at his desk at the far end of the room. There was but one other teller on duty and he was busy with a ledger.
John Ashley went to the sulky teller’s window and pushed the slip of paper at him. The teller read it and
