“It’s got nothin to do with bein scared of him, Bob,” John Ashley said. “Right now he aint got a thing on any you, only me. Let’s keep it that way. Get on to the car and I be right there. I want a word with this sumbitch.”
“He’s right,” Ed said, tugging on Bob’s sleeve. “C’mon, let’s get.” Bob spat and hustled his balls and looked from one to the other of them and said, “Well all right, hell,” and went off with Ed through the rain and over the downed portion of fence and got in the car with Frank.
John Ashley knelt and turned Bobby Baker on his back and shook him by the shoulder and patted his face and tugged repeatedly on his ears and in a moment Bobby coughed wetly and choked and rolled toward John Ashley who jumped up and away to avoid the gush of vomit he heaved up.
Bobby gasped and opened his eyes and saw John Ashley grinning down at him. He started to sit up but John Ashley put his foot against his shoulder and pushed him onto his back again. “Just you stay there.”
“Son…bitch,” Bobby muttered. He managed to get up on all fours before John Ashley kicked him in the ribs and the air whooshed out of him and he fell on his side with eyes wide and blood running from his hair and down the side of his face and his mouth working for breath. John Ashley squatted and grabbed a fistful of his hair and turned his face up into the rain.
“So I’m gonna hang, hey?” John Ashley said. “Gonna shit my pants? I told you not to get so ahead of yourself, didnt I?” He yanked Bob Baker over onto his stomach and pushed his face into the mud for several seconds and then yanked his head up again by the hair. Bob Baker snorted and spat mud and tried weakly to wrest free and John Ashley punched him in the back of the neck. “I wouldn’t try and make a fight of it just now, I was you,” he said.
A piercing whistle he recognized as Bob’s cut through the rain and he looked at the idling Ford. The rain was falling harder now and he could see his brothers as only vague forms within the car and he knew Bobby would not recognize them if he should look their way. Bob Baker cursed lowly and tried to pull John’s hand off his hair and roll over. John Ashley released him and got to his feet and thought to kick him again but the sight of his bloody head and the sound of his gasping decided him against it. The man was beat, so let him lay. He turned and ran for the fence and clambered over the skewed chickenwire and loped to the car and the open door waiting for him.
And Bob Baker, bleeding and breathless in the mud, heard him laughing and laughing as he made away.
He confided the details of the escape to no one but his father, and in addition to the warrants on John Ashley for murder and escape from custody, Sheriff George Baker had also wanted one for assault on a police officer. But Bob Baker did not want the assault known publicly and his father had deferred to his wish that they keep it to themselves. In his official report Bob Baker asserted that John Ashley had broken his word not to escape and bolted away into the rainy darkness when they got back to the jailyard from the courthouse. He said he could have shot him down but he was not one to shoot an unarmed man, not even a fleeing prisoner, not if he had not yet been convicted of a crime. Because he did not remove his hat in public during the entire time he wore a bandage on his crown, no one but his father and his wife Annie—who’d been the one to tend his wound—ever saw evidence of the beating he’d taken.
As she ministered to his bloody scalp Annie had asked what happened but he’d only looked at her and she’d questioned him no further. She’d come to know him for a moody man best left alone when withdrawn into himself.
That night he made love to her despite the pain of his throbbing head—made love with a passion near to ferocity and the woman in his mind was not his wife but a girl long gone. Two months later Annie happily informed him that she was carrying a child. He was delighted and said they would name it after his father. Annie made a mock face of distaste but said all right, but if it was a girl she wanted to name it after her favorite aunt. Bob Baker said fine, whatever the name it was fine with him. Annie’s smile at him then had been wide and warm and full of love. “Good,” she said. “I just love the name Julie.”
Seven months later she gave birth to the girl. Bob Baker smiled on his wife in the hospital room and gingerly cuddled the infant in his arms and cooed to her and called her his pretty little bird and evermore called her by that nickname rather than her Christian name. If his wife or the girl herself were ever curious about that, they neither one ever said.
Although John Ashley remained in the region, the Palm Beach sheriff was hard-pressed to arrest him. When Dade County went dry the year before, Joe Ashley’s moonshine business boomed, and now John Ashley was making regular runs to Miami to deliver his daddy’s hooch. Sheriff George knew that. But he was not on friendly terms with the Dade County sheriff and the Ashley family was. And he’d heard enough tales about the corruption in the Miami Police Department to know it would be useless to ask for its help.
There were steady reports of John Ashley sightings in the local region too—mostly in its portion of the Everglades. He was seen at Indian villages and at fishing and hunting camps from the north shore of Lake Okeechobee to the south end of the Loxahatchee Slough. But Sheriff George knew there was as much chance of catching John Ashley in the Devil’s Garden as there was of catching a hawk on the wing. He figured his best chance for an arrest would at the Ashley homestead, and so he posted a continuous surveillance on the Twin Oaks house. His deputies made their way to the Ashley property on foot through the piney swamp and took up positions among the trees from which they had a good view of the front of the house some forty yards distant. They reported seeing all the other Ashleys come and go at irregular intervals but never spied John among them.
One late evening a pair of motorcar headlamps came waggling along the trail leading from the highway to the Twin Oaks property and the two mosquito-plagued policeman watching from their post in the pines nudged each other excitedly and jacked rounds into their rifles. Then the front door of the house swung open and laid out a shaft of yellow lamplight bearing the elongated shadow of Ma Ashley as she came out to the top of the porch steps. She raised a shotgun and discharged both flaring barrels into the sky as if bent on felling the bright crescent moon. The carlights halted and swung about through the trees as the car wheeled tightly in reverse and then the lights extinguished and the two cops stood in the darkness and listened to the motor fade into the distance. And they heard too Ma Ashley’s laughter as she went back into the house with her shadow following behind and the length of jaundiced lamplight scooted after her just ahead of the shutting door.
SEVEN
The Liars Club
MIAMI WASNT BUT ABOUT FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN THE Ashleys started running whiskey down there. The damn town was a flat crazy place right from the start and never did lack for grifters and gamblers and highrollers and bad actors of all sorts. It wasnt many crackers liked Miami and its ways but the Ashley boys was among them that did.
Since the turn of the century somebody or other had been dredging canals between Lake Okeechobee and the Atlantic with the idea of draining the Everglades and creating a lot more acreage to sell. Before you could say “Sign right here on the dotted line,” Miami was full of sharpies making money off that scheme. The first dredge boilers were just getting fired up when the sharpies started advertising virgin farmland for sale in the northern newspapers and a bunch of fool Yankees started buying it through the mail, sight unseen. Hell, they couldnt of seen it if they wanted to—most of what was being sold was still under water, and a lot of it would stay that way. The dumbshits were paying for it by the acre but really buying it by the quart. The sort of conniving was routine stuff up through the boom of the 1920s when it got worse than ever—and then a hellacious hurricane blew away a lot of the enthusiasm for Miami and South Florida for a while.
When they started digging the Miami Canal the engineers built a dam to hold the water back until the job was done. Once the canal was dug out to the Glades, they dynamited the dam to let the water run out and, Lord amighty, did it ever! Water come pouring out of the Glades like some terrible punishment from the Bible. It rushed on down the canal to the Miami River and overran the banks in some places and knocked down sheds and shacks and boat stands and it grabbed up dogs and pigs and anybody who didnt get out the way quick enough and just carried everything it picked up right on down to the bay and dumped it in there and turned that pure blue baywater the ugliest shit-brown you ever saw. The water kept pouring down that canal for
