Red Grass River

Sheriff George was scared and absolutely serious.

“He opens his mouth again, Bradford,” Sheriff George said, “it’s the same as trying to escape and I want you to blast him, you understand?” The deputy holding the shotgun on John Ashley said, “Yes-sir.” John Ashley heard Bob Baker laugh somewhere out in the darkness.

Sheriff George withdrew from the car and called, “Bobby, you and Freddie lead off. Let’s go.”

Bob Baker and Freddie Baker got into a roadster and led the prisoner vehicle out of the jailyard. Sheriff George and another deputy followed in a chattering coupe. They drove to the railroad station and the train was there and waiting. They put John Ashley aboard the baggage car and left the chains on him and put a double lock on the inside of the doors and kept two shotguns trained on him for the entire trip.

When the following sunrise broke like bright fire out of the distant rim of the Atlantic Ocean, John Ashley was watching it with his single eye from a barred window of the Dade County Jail.

“No,” Old Joe said. “No. There aint gone be no tryin to break him out. It’s just no need for anything risky as that. And hear me good, boy—you write even one more a them notes to George Baker and I’m gonna take a grub hoe to your head. You understand? You aint helpin a damn thing with them fucken notes.”

“We got to do something, Daddy,” Bob Ashley said. “They beatin on him ever day. They whippin him like a damn dog, whippin him all the time. They spittin in his food, pissin in his coffee. They wont empty his slop pail. You heard about it same as us.”

“I heard it from people who dont know the facts of it anymore’n you do.” Old Joe said. “Gordy saw him just yesterday again for about the tenth damn time and you heard him say it aint any of it true. They’re feedin him all right and they aint pissin in his coffe or none of that bullshit. Gordy says he aint got a mark on him but from being shot in the face—and we know it wasnt them who did that, dont we?” He gave Kid Lowe a look and the Kid fixed his gaze on a sparrowhawk in the upper branches of a slash pine.

They were seated at a puncheon table alongside the Twin Oaks house—Old Joe and his four unjailed sons and Kid Lowe and Gordon Blue. The woman were at washing clothes in big steaming tin tubs behind the house. The cicadas were loud in the oaks and a great flock of white herons was wingbeating across the purpling sky and past a low orange sun. Mosquitoes keened at the men’s ears. The ripe smells of encroaching summer were on the air: hot wet earth and spawning bluegills and fresh nests of cottonmouths along the waterway banks.

“They hittin him where it dont show is why Gordy dont see no marks on him,” Bob said. “They dont clean his cell not give him nothing fit to eat but when Gordy goes to visit.”

“How is it you know so much more than everybody else?” Bill Ashley asked. Though he was Old Joe’s chief advisor, it was a rare thing for him to appear at a family council and even rarer for him to speak up at one. When he was in attendance he usually passed the time doodling in a notebook while everyone else did the talking. His brothers sometimes did not see him for weeks at a time. Unlike their own hands and necks, which were burned red-brown by the sun, his had the pallor of indoor life. He wore suspenders and sleeve garters and bow ties and wire-rim spectacles. He never asked any of them to visit his home and none of them had seen his wife but once or twice since the day of his marriage. In some ways he was less familiar to them than Kid Lowe or Gordon Blue.

That distance between him and his youngest brothers had widened even more after John and Bob robbed the Stuart bank. Bill thought they were fools to hold up a bank, which he saw as excessively risky. “There’s too many other ways to make as much money,” he’d said to Old Joe, “without near as much chance of something going wrong like it did in Stuart. As soon’s whiskey’s illegal all over the country you’ll see what I mean.”

Old Joe had shrugged and let the matter drop. A part of him knew Bill was right. He felt like a fool for having given John permission to rob the bank. He felt at fault that John was now one-eyed and in jail. But another part of him could not deny the pleasure of having more than $7,000 of the bank’s money, having it because his boys had been bold enough to take it. He already had in mind a boat he could buy with that money—a sleek fast craft that with a few modifications would be perfect for carrying whiskey. But the news that the bank had cheated them of some ten thousand dollars was enraging. And it infuriated him further to think that Sheriff George might have convinced the bank that all the Baker money was with the cash the bank had saved and none of it gone off in Johnny’s croker sack.

Now Bob Ashley gaped at Bill, at once surprised at hearing him speak up and angry at what he’d said. “Hey bubba,” Bob Ashley said, “When I want shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head.”

“Ah hell, Bob,” Frank Ashley said.

“Real bright,” Bill Ashley said, looking at Bob with disdain. “You’re a natural-born fool, you know that?”

“Go to hell, Billy,” Bob Ashley said. “This aint never gonna be none your business—not while you sittin on your ass all day and markin in books while some of us are out there doin things.”

“That’s enough, the both you,” Old Joe said. “Now I told you all how it’s gonna be. We’re gonna wait and see can Gordy get the murder charge dropped. If he can do that, then the bank robbery trial’ll come back to Palm Beach and like as not we’ll get us a good jury for it.”

“He been in there more’n three months already,” Bob said. “He’s gonna serve life in prison before he ever gets to trial.”

“Have a little patience, Bob—these things take time,” Gordon Blue said. “You know how slow the law works.”

“Dont you be tellin me too what I got to do!” Bob Ashley said.

Gordon Blue sighed and looked away.

“Daddy, look we just got to—” Bob Ashley began, but Old Joe held up a hand to cut him short.

“No, I said. That’s the end of it.”

A week later Bob Ashley, Kid Lowe and Claude Calder sat at a corner table in the dim recesses of the Flamingo Restaurant across the road from the Fort Lauderdale depot and just two blocks removed from one of their favorite brothels, at which establishment they had passed the earlier part of the evening. They surreptitiously poured whiskey into their cups long since emptied of coffee and once more went over the details of the operation. They had been three days in Miami, ensconced in a rundown hotel a block from the Dade County Jail. They had watched carefully, made notes, followed people to and from the jail, established routines, set up an escape route to the Dixie Highway and an alternate route westward from Miami and into the Everglades. They had also been drinking steadily the while, a factor none among them considered important.

“Your daddy’d skin you alive he knew what you’re up to,” Claude Calder said. He fingered his mutilated right ear, a nervous habit he’d developed of late.

“Hell, bubba,” Bob Ashley said, “tomorrow night Johnny’ll be a free man and Daddy wont be doin nothing but pattin me on the back for it, you’ll see.”

“He damn sure will,” Kid Lowe said. “Old Joe’s a smart fella and smart fellas dont care about nothin but results. I’m proud to be in on this with you, Bob.”

“Well I’m proud to have you in on it, Kid.”

They raised their cups in a toast to their success. A whistle shrilled and a locomotive heaved a huge gasp and a train began its huffing, clanking departure and the smells of smoke and hot cinders carried into the restaurant.

They left for Miami before sunup, clattering along in a Model T touring car with the top down, the headlamps casting weak yellow light over the sandy road ahead. They’d stayed up late the night before, repeatedly toasting themselves for the boldness of their plan, and every man of them had walked at a list when they at last headed for the hotel and to bed. They’d directed the night manager to awaken them at five o’clock sharp and so had the man tried to do, but his pounding on the doors had failed to rouse them and he’d had to go in the rooms and shake each of them in turn to grumbling consciousness. Now they were all of them red-eyed and surly and their spirits did not lift until Bob Ashley reached under the front seat and withdrew a sealed bottle of true Kentucky bourbon.

“Was savin this for after we got Johnny in the car,” he said, “but bedamn if I aint in bad need of a little bite of it right now.” He unsealed the bottle and turned it up and bubbled it with a huge swal-low. He blew a hard breath and said in a strictured voice, “Whoo! That oughta chase some of them snakes out of my head.”

They passed the bottle around and they all quickly came to feel much better. By the time they went through the hamlet of Lemon City just a couple of miles north of Miami the bottle was empty. Kid Lowe threw it arcing from the car and it shattered against the trunk of an oak where several small Negro children were playing and the kids scattered like spooked grackles. The men’s hard laughter trailed out of the car.

They stopped at a Little River gasoline station and alighted and removed the from seat to expose the fuel