looked up at him and John Ashley leaned close against the counter and exposed enough of the revolver in his bib for the teller to see what it was.
Even as the teller’s eyes widened and his mouth came open John Ashley smiled and said softly, “Everything’s just fine, bubba, you do like I say. Act natural and don’t holler. Make me any trouble I’ll shoot you graveyard dead. Now gimme it.”
The teller did it. He handed over a banded pad of twenty-dollar bills with “$400” imprinted on the band and then several handfuls of loose paper currency of various denominations. John Ashley casually put it all into his overall pockets with the insouciance of a man reaping his just desserts. The teller handed him yet another small stack of bills and said in a quavering whisper, “That’s all I have in my cash drawers, sir, really it is.”
John Ashley grinned under his bandaged nose and said, “Well, then, bubba, thats all I’ll take.” The teller looked dazed and for a moment John Ashley thought the man might faint. “Sit down at that desk back of you and just stay there and don’t say nothin to nobody for five minutes, you hear?” He said all this in a low conversational tone and with a broad smile and anyone looking their way would have seen a friendly farmer with an injured nose chatting with a teller who looked but a little more out of sorts than usual.
As the teller turned and went to the desk John Ashley left the bank, whistling lowly and waving so long at the guard and feeling his heart banging against his ribs as if trying to make its own wild escape ahead of him. He steeled himself to walk at a normal pace as he made his way along the serpentine route he’d laid out through the alleys. At every step of the way he expected to hear police whistles suddenly shrilling behind him and shouted commands to stand fast and put up his hands.
And then he was back in the shed and the gauze was off his face and he quickly changed into his white suit and stuffed the overalls and the hat in the paper sack and hid it behind a nail barrel in the corner. He put the money in his coat pockets and then went into the house and up to his room. In response to the look of curiosity he received from the cleaning women on the stairs he said, “Forgot my pipe.”
He counted the money out on the bed—one thousand two hundred and seventy-two dollars, most of it in twenties and tens and no bill larger than a fifty, of which there five. He counted all of it again and laughed out loud. He felt better than he had in weeks—even as his heart yet pounded and he tasted now the brassy flavor of the apprehension he’d been holding in tight check all morning. He wanted to howl his elation. He divided the money into four even piles and rolled them tightly and stuffed them into a spare pair of boots and then went for a long walk on the seawall. He could not stop grinning.
By the time the house sat down to dinner that afternoon the news of the robbery was all over town. The talk at the table was all about it and the bold broken-nosed farmer who’d done it and got away. The most popular sentiment among the girls was the hope that the hayseed would come to the house to spend some of his loot.
“I’ll show him how to do a damn
John Ashley laughed with them. The girls had several times remarked on his high spirit all afternoon and some now wondered aloud as to its cause. He told them he just felt good being in their company, that was all, and they grinned and blew kisses at him. It was all he could do to keep from bragging to them that he’d committed the crime. But he knew too well the whores’ love of gossip and knew that if he confided in even one of them about the holdup they would all soon know the story and so would others outside the house. He felt cheated that he could not crow about it to anybody.
Two months later his euphoria from the robbery had ebbed and he found himself standing across the street from a Broadway Avenue bank and considering the possibilities. He decided that yes, he could take this one too. He thought about it for the next few days and was almost decided on doing it when a telegram arrived from his father: “Get home. Gordy says all will be well.” Gordy was Gordon Blue, attorney-at-law with offices in Palm Beach and Chicago and an occasional partner of Joe Ashley dating back to their days in Lee County.
The girls were sorry to see him go. The night before his departure Aunt July threw a party and hired a dance band to play in the crowded parlor and each girl in turn took him aside and kissed him goodbye and petted him and whispered endearments. He three times went upstairs with a different girl each time including Cindy Jean who said she didnt care anymore how much he looked like her brother.
When he boarded the steamer next morning he was redeyed with hangover and exhausted to the marrow and his flayed peeter pained him in his pants. Yet he grinned wide as he stood at the rail in the cold wind and returned the goodbye waves of the girls on the dock. Then the ship cleared the channel and entered the silver-green Gulf and he watched Galveston recede in the wake and he told himself that if he should ever have to live someplace other than Florida he would come back to this old island. Under a sunwashed sky laced with white clouds a school of dolphin rolled up beside the ship like old friends attending him home.
SIX
July 1914
ON A CLEAR HOT SUMMER SUNDAY JUST DAYS AFTER JOHN ASHLEY debarked at Tampa and was driven home to Twin Oaks by his brother Bob, the family celebrated his return with a great feast and invited every friendly acquaintance in the county. In the shade of the wide live oaks whole pigs crackled and dripped from their spits above open fires tended by Old Joe’s Negro help. Huge racks of beef ribs sizzled on thick iron grills over firepits. Puncheon tables held heaping platters of smoked mullet, roast backstrips of venison, fried catfish, skin-crisped sweet potatoes. There were huge steaming kettles of clams, of oysters, of corn on the cob, of seasoned swamp cabbage which is the heart of palm. There were pots of grits and of greens of several kinds, bowls of hush puppies, baskets of boiled turtle eggs. There was cornbread, flour biscuits, Seminole bread made of coontie starch. There were jars of molasses, jellies of guava and strawberry and seagrape. There were barrels of mangoes and limes. Several tables held kegs of beer and Old Joe had brought in a wagonload of his best jugged whiskey.
The huge party ate and drank, talked and laughed and told tales of every sort. It danced to the music of a string band out of Stuart and Old Joe took a turn with them on his fiddle and Bill Ashley plunked his banjo for several sets. Children ran about in shrieking play or danced at the periphery of the packed-dirt clearing where the adults reeled and waltzed and square-danced and dogs ran yapping through the crowd. A dozen smoking smudge pots stood at intervals between the house and the surrounding swamp to keep down the mosquitoes.
John Ashley sat at one end of the family table and Old Joe at the other. Bob Ashley sat by John and told him about Bob Baker’s recent marriage. “She’s a Georgia girl,” he said. “They say she’s real nice. I saw her in West Palm one time. Goodlookin thing—way too goodlookin for the likes of him. I figure she musta took pity on him is why she married him. Maybe she figured a one-legged man wouldnt never get nobody to marry him and she just felt good and sorry for him.”
“Maybe she was just good and drunk,” John Ashley said.
“Maybe she’s just good and
With them sat their twelve-year-old nephew Hanford Mobley who idolized both these uncles who treated him like the young man he believed he already was. Earlier that day they had let him go with them into the pineywoods to watch them have a shooting contest. They had fired twelve shots each at pine cones they lined up on a fallen trunk and John had won by a score of twelve cones to eleven and laughingly claimed that all the pussy he’d had these past two years had made his shooting eye even sharper than it always was. John then let Hanford Mobley have a turn with his pistol and the brothers stood astonished to discover that their slight small-boned nephew who had to use both hands to aim the big. .44 was a natural-born deadeye. The boy hit all twelve cones he shot at and didnt stop beaming the rest of the day. When they told old Joe about it he said of his grandson, “Hell yeah that sprout can shoot. Been thataway since he was eight or so. He’s a good one, that little fella. Aint afraid a the devil hisself neither. You ought see how he can use a knife.”
Now John Ashley grinned at his brother’s insistence on hearing more about his lickerish life at their aunt’s house in Galveston. “Hell, brother,” he said, “I done told you all there is to tell.” He ran a hand over the unfamiliar feel of the exposed back of his neck, which showed as pale as the narrow strip of shaved skin above each ear. The
