“Oh yeah,” Bob Baker said. “I heard of him.” He slid his thumb up to the corner of the bloody eye and John Ashley locked his jaws against the pain and the surge of bile in his throat. Bob Baker’s teeth loomed large.
Came a whisper: “You ever even wondered what it’s like not being whole?”
“Like somebody we know, you mean?” His head now felt to be swelling with pain, the very skullbone itself.
“I reckon I owe you, Johnny.”
John Ashley tried to smile. “Ah hell, Bobby, forget it. I aint never been one to call a man’s marker if he’s down on his luck.”
Bob Baker’s thumb went into the socket and John Ashley screamed and saw behind the eye a radiant skyrocket burst of red light and then darkness.
TEN
February—October 1915
THE DOCTOR WAS A HEAVYSET BEARDED MAN NAMED BOYER. WITH the assistance of a horse-faced nurse called Rachel he worked on John Ashley’s jaw in the narrow confines of an isolation cell of the Palm Beach County Jail. He was able to remove all bullet fragments and was obliged to scrape much less of the shattered jaw than he had thought would be necessary on his initial examination. He set the jawbone, then clamped it with a wire brace, and he put John Ashley on a liquid diet for the next few weeks. He assured him that there would be only a slight perceivable disfigurement to his face once the scars healed. The overall tissue damage had also proved much less severe than it had seemed to Boyer at first sight, though John Ashley’s voice now registered lower than before and his sinuses would evermore trouble him at night and the wound in his hard palate would never heal completely and would occasionally become slightly infected. He had lost but two teeth—a bicuspid and adjoining molar.
He awakened with an eyepatch and a burning sensation under it. The doctor was at a loss to explain how the bullet could have done so much damage to the eye, which was outside the trajectory that took the round through the nosebone and palate to lodge in the jaw. He spoke of major trauma to the sclera and cornea and ciliary processes, of the loss of vitreous humor and of massive damage to the retina. John Ashley stared at him with his bloodshot right eye and saw him in a world gone skewed and narrow and he quite suddenly knew that the darkness under the eyepatch was greater than human vision could perceive and realized the socket was empty and thats what the doctor was trying to tell him. He had a instant’s vision of Bob Baker’s huge yellow teeth in the moment before his thumb set off the red explosion in his skull.
Bob Baker stopped by twice. The first time in the company of Sheriff George, who’d come to notify John Ashley officially that in addition to the charges of murdering Jimmy Gopher and escaping from custody, he now also stood charged for bank robbery and the attempted murder of five police officers. Sheriff George was all business and looked at John Ashley as if he were a stranger. Bob Baker said nothing but stood behind his father and smiled all the while. He looked wellrested. When Sheriff George turned to leave, Bob Baker put a thumb up to his own eye and turned his hand in a sharp corkscrew motion and shut the eye under the thumb and made a face of mock pain. Then he opened both eyes and grinned hard at John Ashley and left. Doctor Boyer watched the whole thing, and when Bob Baker had gone he sighed and shook his head.
A week later John Ashley lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head and thought of blind Loretta May and felt closer to her by virtue of his own half-blindness. He recalled the peach smell of her and the freshness of her yellow hair, the pale smoothness of her skin. He was enjoying the feel of the partial erection pressing snug in his pants when he sensed someone at the cell door. He looked over there and saw a pair of shadowed eyes at the small slotted window and even in the dim light he recognized them. “Hey, Bobby,” he said. “How you keepin?” Come on, he thought—step in here for just a minute. The eyes pinched up in deliberation or amusement and a moment later they were gone.
He had begun to have dreams now such as he’d never had before. He saw things in his sleep and felt that what he saw was somehow real, though at times he knew too—without knowing how he knew—that what he saw had not yet happened. In one such dream he saw a woman he did not recognize, saw her vaguely. She smelled of the swamp, and under that redolence he caught the scents of her skin and hair and sex as keenly as if she were standing beside him. She seemed to loom over him as a wavering pale figure and he felt the heat of her skin and then her face was right in front of his and still he could not see her clearly but for her green eyes and a tiny gold quarter-moon in the iris of one of them.
In another dream he saw Kid Lowe in prison stripes and on a crutch and with a bandaged head, saw him redfaced and shouting and though for some reason he could not hear him he knew somehow that the Kid was cursing because he’d been proved right about the bank holding out on them. And so, when Gordon Blue came to visit and told him that the Stuart bankers were crowing to the newspapers about how they’d managed to withhold some ten thousand dollars from the bandits by simply not emptying all the cash drawers into the money bag, John Ashley was both irritated and a little embarrassed but not really surprised.
He was permitted no visitors but his lawyer, and Gordon Blue apprised him that the state’s attorney had revived his motion to move his trial for the murder of DeSoto Tiger to Dade County. “I’m playing every ace I’ve got to keep it from happening, Johnny, but I have to tell you the odds aren’t good. They mean to have the trial in Miami come hell or high water.”
Gordon Blue told him of Old Joe’s fury on leaning that Bob Ashley had been in on the job after he had expressly forbidden any of his sons but John from acting on it. “I was going over some accounts with your daddy at Twin Oaks when Bob and Kid Lowe showed up and told him what happened. Your daddy was so mad at Bob for being in the holdup he took a strop to him like he was some disobedient
John Ashley gave Gordon Blue a puzzled look. “Hell, Gordy, what else he gonna do
Two weeks later the judge granted the state’s motion to have the trial moved to Dade County. Within an hour of the judge’s ruling a rock with a note wrapped around it came crashing through the window of the jail office and so tense were the police in the room that pistols cleared holsters before everyone realized what happened. The note said that if John Ashley wasnt released from jail immediately Sheriff George’s house would be burned to the ground and no matter who might be inside it at the time. It was signed “the Ashley Gang.” Sheriff George sent two armed deputies to keep watch on his house and family and deputized several friends to add to the jail guard force.
Barely an hour later a county deputy found a note on the seat of his motorcar. It read: “Tell Sheriff George to let johnnie go or perpare to pay the consequences. We mean bisness. The Ashley gang.”
Sheriff George affected to shrug it off, but his men could see the anger working in his jaw, the sudden distance in his eyes. He made secret plans with his son Bob and two evenings later and without advance notice to anyone he showed up at the jail a little past midnight and ordered John Ashley brought out of his cell. They manacled his hands behind him and put leg irons on him. They flanked him with guards carrying shotguns and hustled him out into a touring car with tarp covers tied over both sides of the rear of the car and put him in the backseat with two guards. Another guard got in the front with the driver and held a shotgun over the seat with the muzzle within inches of John Ashley’s chest. John Ashley laughed and said, “Goddamn if you boys aint makin me feel like Jesse James.”
Sheriff George appeared at the car window and put a finger in John Ashley’s face. “One more word out of you, just one more—and Deputy Bradford’s gonna blow a hole in you big enough to throw a dog through. Go ahead, say something. See if I dont mean it. I had all the trouble from you I aim to stand.” John Ashley could see that
