Red Grass River

mess of some of the finest polished-mahogany bars in town. They say she could of used her face for a hatchet. Most waterholes had a sign over the backbar saying “Every Nation Welcome But Carry.”

Of course, the county law against booze didnt stop Miamians from drinking anymore than a law against breathing would make anybody but a fool go blue in the face. What the law did was help boost Old Joe’s moonshine profits by removing all his legal competition. After John Ashley escaped from Bobby Baker’s custody right there in the yard of the Palm Beach County Jail he became his daddy’s main whiskey runner to Miami. The time was fast approaching when Old Joe would have some mean competition for the whiskey market in Miami—some of the toughest coming from Chicago, if what we heard was right—but for a fact Old Joe was selling more whiskey to the Indians than he ever had, and nobody could cut into his business with them because nobody else knew the Devil’s Garden as well as him and his boys did.

No question about it, the Ashleys were making money hand over fist. You’d see Old Joe and his boys driving along the Dixie Highway in Palm Beach County and each one in his own brandnew car. John Ashley had him a spanking new Oakland for a while but we heard he lost it in a poker game in Miami. In Daytona Frank and Ed bought theirselves one of the first Dusenbergs sold in Florida. We heard they took it out on the beach and run it up to over ninety miles an hour but nobody really believed that story. Mind you, this was at a time when forty miles an hour was just flying. People used to say that at ten miles an hour in a Model T the fenders rattled, at twenty the headlamps rattled, at thirty the windshield rattled, and any faster than that your bones rattled. Frank and Ed brung the Dusenberg down to West Palm Beach but the roads around here wasn’t yet ready for any such car and next thing we heard Frank had run it through palmetto pasture and into a live oak and nearly kilt himself. After that the car didnt run no more, so they took the seats out of it and put wire in the windows and used it for a dog pen.

EIGHT

August 1914—January 1915

FOLLOWING HIS ESCAPE FROM BOBBY BAKER HE SENT MOST OF HIS days in the Everglades for months thereafter where none of any race or purpose could close on him without warning. He moved from one to another of his father’s whiskey camps and carried skiffloads of Old Joe Ashley’s hooch to Indian villages in the depths of the Devil’s Garden. He hunted and took hides and feathers and his brothers carried them to sell in Stuart or Pompano or on the New River or Miami docks.

Every few weeks he drove a load of his daddy’s whiskey down to Miami, going to restaurants and pool halls and hotel kitchens and pleasure houses to make the deliveries and collect the money. Now and then his brothers sojourned to Miami with him to have a high time—always less Bill, whose sense of adventure seemed bounded by account ledgers and whose lust knew no object but his wife. As the town had grown, its pleasures had become plentiful and ever more varied, and the Ashleys found the local attitude toward law enforcement far more amenable than that of Palm Beach County. Both the chief of police and the county sheriff were good old boys largely indifferent to victimless and bloodless violations of the criminal statutes—so long as they received their respectful portion of the profits from all such enterprises. Both men had come to be on first-name acquaintance with the Ashley boys.

In Miami the Ashleys would check into a hotel and bathe in porcelain tubs and dress in new suits and sport with the prettiest whores in town and gamble with the sharps and dine on restaurant glassware and sleep on soft beds with fresh linen. These periodic Miami visits both sated their yen for city wickedness and renewed their appreciation of their natural wildland life. They each time asked Old Joe if he would accompany them and he each time fulminated anew against the failings and follies of all cities and loudly lamented the sins of his youth for which God was punishing him by way of sons too ignorant to recognize a city for the shithole it was.

Gordon Blue had by now opened an office in the Biscayne Hotel on Flagler Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, routinely thick with motor vehicle traffic and flanked by a multistoried architectural motley of gables and oriels and turrets and verandahs and balconies, lined with arcades and awninged sidewalks heavily overhung with black electric and telephone lines depending from tall cross-beamed poles smelling of creosote. Crooning pigeons nestled on Blue’s windowsills. From those widows he would watch pelicans gliding in V-formations over the bay where tall-masted ships lay at anchor. Seagulls wheeling and shrilling over the city. Turkey buzzards roosting on the roof ledges, nodding their ugly red-naked heads and chuckling as though at dirty jokes, putting him in mind of judges he had known and done business with.

Blue had not approved of John Ashley’s escape from Bobby Baker’s custody, not after they had promised Sheriff George Baker that John would not try to get away. “Your promise not to try a break was why he left the cuffs off you when you went to court,” he said to John Ashley. They were in his office and it was the first time they’d seen each other since John’s escape. “They catch you again, Johnny, they’ll lock fifty pounds of chain on you and throw away the key.”

John Ashley had to laugh. “They didn’t catch me the first time. I gave myself up, and thats some different. And I did it because they said the trial would be in Palm Beach County. Then those bastards tried to get it moved to Dade. Only a sonofabitch tries to changes a deal after it’s been agreed on, and only a damn fool things he ought keep his word to a sonofabitch. Hell, it aint givin your word that counts, Gordy, it’s who you give it to. If George Baker was fool enough to leave the chains off me while they were tryin to crawfish on our deal, thats his damn fault and nobody else’s.”

“The judge hadn’t decided yet that the trial was going to Miami,” Gordon Blue said. He heard the defensiveness in his own voice. “I think I could have kept that from happening.”

John Ashley narrowed his eyes at Gordon Blue and smiled.

Gordon Blue let the matter drop, partly because it would have been fruitless to argue the point—what was done was done and could not be undone—and partly because he believed John Ashley could be right.

It was Blue who introduced the Ashley boys to Miami’s backroom gambling spots and hotel poker games frequented by some of the highest rollers in town. Rather than the four of them competing directly against each other, the brothers would split up into paired teams and gamble in different locales—Frank and Ed going to one place, John and Bob playing at another. At the end of the night they would pool whatever winnings they’d pulled in and divide them into equal shares. As far as Gordon Blue knew none of them ever held out on the other, a circumstance that flew in the face of his experience with human nature where money was concerned.

At one of these poker sessions in the Biscayne Hotel on a late fall Friday evening Gordon Blue introduced John and Bob Ashley to someone he called the nephew of an old friend, a freckled young man named Kid Lowe, just arrived on the train from Chicago. The fellow seemed to the Ashleys aptly named: in both stature and visage—and in his white boater and red bowtie—he looked about fourteen years old, even though he chainsmoked cigarettes and played a good game of poker. Only his eyes were parcel of a grown man—wary and quick and mistrustful. But as soon as he spoke and they heard his accent they knew him for one of their own. He was not shy in telling of himself and over the course of the next few hours they learned he’d been born in Tallahassee to a footloose mother, herself a native of Tally Town, but he’d been reared from infancy by maiden aunts in Leesburg till he was eighteen. Then he went to Chicago to work for an uncle in the stockyards and eventually became a bodyguard for a man named Silver Jack O’Keefe, whose trade consisted of acquiring high-interest loans from private sources and then lending the money to somebody else at higher interest yet.

“Bodyguard?” John Ashley echoed. He gave the diminutive Kid Lowe a pointedly appraising look.

Kid Lowe scowled and said, “It aint the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. I’da figured you all to know that.”

Bob Ashley grinned. “That’s sure enough true about dogs, cousin, is sure enough is.”

At the game’s conclusion John and Bob Ashley accepted Gordon Blue’s invitation to join him and Kid Lowe at a brightly-lighted cafe on Miami Avenue for pork chop sandwiches and beer. There Gordon Blue informed the brothers that Kid Lowe was in difficult circumstances with business associates in Chicago. He did not get specific beyond saying that the matter concerned Silver Jack O’Keefe’s failure to meet a certain financial obligation and that