Red Grass River

over sideways and lay still.

Kid Lowe and Bob Ashley were facing off warily against the third man who was armed with the jagged rum bottle he’d broken against the wall. He was feinting first at Bob and then at the Kid, making one and then the other jump back as from a striking snake. Now Kid Lowe said, “Fuck this,” and pressed forward and the man slashed at him several quick times and the Kid fended with his hands but kept advancing and he backed the man against the wall and then charged into him with fists flailing. Bob leaped in and grabbed the man in a headlock and wrestled the bottle from him and drove it into his face and the man screamed. Now the Kid had the man by the hair and was biting into his ear and the man screamed again as his ear came away in the Kid’s teeth. Bob and the man fell together in the mud and the kid kicked the man in his gashed face again and again and the man stopped screaming now and Bob was cursing and yelling “You kicking me, goddammit!” and turned loose of the man and rolled away from the Kid’s frenzy.

John Ashley was laughing as he grabbed Kid Lowe by the collar and yanked him back and caught him in a bear hug from behind and said, “All right there, killer, all right, I believe you done made your point on the fella.” Kid Lowe’s breath was heaving, his lean muscles twitching under John Ashley’s grasp.

Now Gordon Blue came forward from the shadows where he’d sought refuge and said, “Jesus Christ Almighty! Are they dead, any of them?”

Bob Ashley made a quick examination of the fallen and verified that all were alive, though none was conscious and the one whose face he and the Kid had mutilated was bleeding badly from a gash in his neck and breathing erratically. “This one aint like to make it,” he said.

“Oh Christ,” Gordon Blue said, and took a look around to see if there might be witnesses. “Let’s get the hell out of here—now.”

The Kids fury had abated and he said, “You can let go me now.” He put his hands to John Ashley’s arms to free himself of his embrace and John Ashley felt their touch slicked with blood.

“Damn, Kid, let’s see them hands.” He pulled the Kid over closer to the street where the light was better. “I need some kinda bandage here,” he said.

Bob Ashley stripped the shirt off the Logan fellow and tore it in two and John Ashley held the Kid’s dripping hands out while Bob bandaged them tightly each in turn. He told the Kid the niggerwrap job would have to do till they got him home and Ma could tend to his wounds proper. Both brothers were grinning as Bob finished tying off the bandages and remarked how damned glad he was that Kid Lowe was on their side because he sure didnt fancy fighting somebody who was half-crazy and half-cannibal besides. Kid Lowe was grinning with them now and saying the ear didn’t taste half bad and maybe he ought to have cut the other one off him to have for breakfast in the morning. They all three laughed.

And now Gordon Blue was tugging at John Ashley’s arm with one hand and at Bob Ashley’s with the other and saying, “Let’s go, let’s go!” and the look on his face made them all three laugh the harder. And then they cleared out of there fast.

Two days later Kid Lowe was living in a small pinewood cabin behind the outside kitchen of the Ashley home. And three weeks after that, Ma Ashley’s good stitches now removed from his hands and his hands almost completely unstiffened, he went with John and Bob Ashley on his first alligator hunt. Although cracker by blood, he’d been raised fatherless and brotherless, without masculine mentor of any sort, and thus had not been taught the usual wildland skills most crackers early acquired. He owned all the natural inclinations, however, and took to poling an Everglades skiff as one long practiced at it. At supper that night the Ashleys listened in high amusement to him tell all about how well he’d learned from John Ashley to bark like a dog to call alligators into open water for easier killing. He could not stop talking of the three gators he’d killed and the two he had skinned mostly by himself after the brothers taught him how to take the hide off the first one. None of the Ashleys minded listening to Kid Lowe’s story three times over as they sipped at cups of old Joe’s best. They knew the little cracker from the city was but happy to be among his own kind.

The next time they saw Gordon Blue he told them there had been but one recent mention in the Miami newspapers of a dead man found in an alley but the alley in question was not the one where they had fought the three men. “If that fella in the alley didnt, ah, make it,” Gordon Blue said, “his friends must’ve taken him away from there.”

John Ashley still slipped into West Palm Beach every now and then to visit Miss Lillian’s and be with blind Loretta May. They were easy with each other now as they were with no one else, and had for a while even played a game whereby they would make bets as to what part of her he was looking at while they caressed each other’s nakedness. At first they bet a dollar each time but after she lost the first five times she suggested they raise the bet to five dollars, saying maybe she could do better if there was more at stake. He said all right, but he hated taking advantage. She said he shouldn’t feel guilty about it because after all it was her who wanted to raise the ante. She won the next five times in a row before he realized she’d conned him thoroughly, that she knew exactly where his eyes were on her at all times, and how she knew this did not trouble him as much as the fact that she used the knowledge to hornswoggle him. One more time, he said. On the next bet she said that he was looking at her left breast, which he was, but he told her she was wrong, he was looking at her belly, and she laughed with such delight that he knew she knew he was lying and he had to laugh too. He tried to summon a proper degree of indignation. “I dont know how you know what I’m lookin at, but knowin it and pretendin you dont know just cause you’re blind, thats the same as cheatin.” At which she could only laugh. “And it aint cheatin to make bets with a blind person about what you lookin at?”

After their lovemaking one night she asked if he had many dreams. Did she mean dreams like things he wanted to do real bad before he died, he asked, or dreams like things you see in your sleep at night. “Night dreams,” she said. He said it was funny she should ask that because, truth be told, he knew he’d been dreaming a lot lately but he could never remember the dreams when he woke up.

“Funny thing is,” he said, “while I’m havin the dreams it’s like I know they’re showin me things that’re real, or…true somehow. I mean, when I wake up thats the feelin I have, that I just dreamt about somethin true, only I cant remember what it was.”

“You will,” she said. “The time’ll come you will.”

He looked at her for a long moment, unsure whether to ask her what she meant. And now, as he stared at her smiling face, she said, “You’re looking at my mouth—thats another five dollars you owe me.”

He gave a mock roar and fell on her, saying, “You bat-blind little witch!”

And laughing, wrestling happily, they made love once again.

Gordon Blue’s estimation of how long it would take to resolve Kid Lowe’s Chicago troubles proved overly optimistic and two months later the Kid was still residing with the Ashleys, though he didn’t at all mind and neither did the family. He was proud that the largest of the three turkeys Ma and the girls roasted for Christmas dinner was one he’d shot. In addition to taking him hunting and trapping with his brothers, John Ashley now allowed him to come with him on whiskey drops to the Indians and Kid Lowe marveled at the alien wonders of these primitive villages in the heart of the Devil’s Garden.

The Kid liked Twin Oaks but he loved the whiskey camps. He loved their wildness. He loved the stygian nights when the orange pinefires under the great copper kettles were the only light save that of the moon and stars to hold at bay an encompassing darkness greater than imagination could conjure. The fires raised trembling shadows against the closely standing hardwoods hung with moss and twisted vines that held to the earth like umbilicals. The blackness beyond the fireglow stirred and rustled and splashed and sometimes sounded of fluttering wing. From the greater darkness came deep quivering grunts of alligators whose forebears had themselves looked upon dinosaurs. Came skin-tightening shrieks of panthers at mate, sporadic outcries of prey falling to predator. The night swamp was ever clamorous with blood. The air pungent with the redolence of muck and water seasoned richly with matter living and dead.

On nights as these they sat about the kettle fire into the late hours and smoked pipe and cigarette and sipped whiskey and told stories both real and invented to entertain each other. They never tired of hearing of the night John Ashley took a drive to Twin Oaks after several weeks of hiding out at whiskey camp and Ma Ashley stepped out on the porch and fired a doubleblast of her shotgun in the air to warn him of the policemen lurking in the surrounding brush.

“Old Johnny just hustled on up to the turnaround and stomped on the brake and kicked her into reverse and turned that Lizzie around on a damn silver dollar and right back out we went,” Ed Ashley said, who had been in the car with John that night. “Cut off the headlamps so they couldnt see us but then naturally we couldnt see a damn