Red Grass River

into the driver’s open-mouthed face and yelled, “Go! GO! GO!” The driver was young and freckled and his eyes were big as eggs and for a moment it seemed he would remain immobilized with fright—and then he worked the shift lever with a grinding of gears and the truck lurched into motion.

Behind them came policemen on the run and the lead cop stopped and aimed and fired twice, one round thunking into a bread case, the other ricocheting off the rear fender. Bob Ashley hunkered down on the seat and was glad of the protection of the bread cases back of him. He hollered, “Head for the train station! Go!” His thought was to get to the county road branching off the Dixie Highway at the FEC depot and take that short road to the edge of the Everglades and go it on foot from there. If he could make it to the Devil’s Garden he’d be safe.

He looked back around the bread cases and saw a cop halting an oncoming Dodge and hustling into the car on the passenger side and now the car began to give chase. There sounded another gunshot and he heard the bullet hum past and he jerked back into the truck. The driver was bent low and peering at the road ahead from under the top of the steering wheel, eyes wild and knuckles white. “Oh sweet baby Jesus,” he breathed.

A woman started to run across the street in front of them and then froze like a jacklit doe directly ahead of the truck. The driver stepped hard on the brake and the truck slewed to the right and bounced up over the curb and sideswiped the front of a hardware store in an explosive burst of window glass and veered left again and cases of bread tumbled off the truckbed and broke apart in the street and sent loaves scattering and the truck crashed into the rear of a parked Buick and both the driver and Bob Ashley hit the windshield with their heads and reduced it to shards.

For a moment he was addled and thought he’d been blinded and then realized his vision was but hampered by blood streaming from his forehead. Beside him the driver was slumped unconscious with his head on the door sill and blood running from his pulped nose. He heard an excited babbling and became aware of a crowd gathering at the truck, saw people gaping and pointing—men mostly, some women, some children, some of the faces awed, some horrified, some clenched in outrage. And then a portion of the crowd jumped back as a car braked squealing to a stop beside the steam-hissing truck and the passenger door flew open and a policeman spilled out and loomed over the unconscious driver and pointed a gun at Bob Ashley and said, “Deliver, you son of a bitch! Deliver or —”

Bob Ashley shot him in the face and the cop spun sideways and dropped from view. People screamed and fled in every direction and the other car sped away. He struggled with the door and it sprang open and he fell out onto the sidewalk. He got to his feet and the ground pitched slightly but he recovered his balance and looked about and saw here and there faces peering at him from around doors and from behind ashcans. He swept the pistol over them and they vanished as if he’d done a magic trick.

He thought to drive off in the Buick and went around the front of it to get to the driver’s side. As he stepped into the street he saw the cop sitting alongside the truck. A small dark hole showed under one eye and he held his revolver raised and pointed. The gun cracked and Bob Ashley felt himself roughly shoved backward.

“You son of a bitch,” he said—and shot the cop in the chest and the cop grunted and shot him in the belly and then they fired simultaneously and the cop’s hair jumped and he fell over and lay still and his blood darkly stained the pale limerock paving.

Bob Ashley regarded the unmoving cop for a moment and then his legs quit him and he sat down hard. He looked down at his own bloody stomach and tried to curse but choked on something and he put his hand to his throat and his fingers came away bloodstained. He groaned wetly and looked at the cop and shot him again. Then felt in his stomach a pain beyond any he’d ever known and he could not help but holler with it. He tried to get to his feet but the ground tilted and he fell on his back and saw a pair of gulls winging overhead.

“Bob! You hear me, Bob?”

He opened his eyes to find himself on his side on a bunk. Sheriff Dan Hardie stood before him with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. Bob touched a thick bandage at his throat and then regarded his bloody fingertips. “Hey, Dan,” he said in a voice gargly and foreign to him. “You still puttin it to that high-yella girl over in Little River?” The effort of speech felt such in his chest that he knew he was bad off. His feet were cold. Though the light was dim he could see he was in a jail cell. “Johnny in here?” he asked. “Johnny?” His intended shout came out a croak.

“He cant hear you, he aint in this block,” Sheriff Hardie said. “Listen, Bob, I got to tell you straight. It dont look like you’re goin to make it.”

“Dont feel like it a whole lot, neither,” Bob said, his face clenched against the pain in his belly. He saw now that there were two other men in the room and both of them in black suits and with serious faces pale as frog bellies and he knew at once who they were. “I’ll wager you boys done got me measured for the coffin already,” he said and coughed a gush of bright blood onto the bunksheet.

“Come on, boy—come clean of it,” Hardie said. “Tell us who the others were. We know it was at least two more. Was it your brothers?”

“No,” Bob Ashley managed to say through his teeth. “They never. Wasnt nobody but me in this.”

“Bullshit!” the sheriff said. “Look, Bob, I been a friend to you and yours and you know it. I aint never braced any you. I always let you boys do your business and have your fun. But now—well hell, you’re going over the river, son. Make a clean break of it and tell me: who was in it with you?”

Bob Ashley looked up at him and sighed wetly. With effort, he raised his hand and beckoned Sheriff Hardie closer. The sheriff squatted beside the bunk and leaned forward with his ear close to Bob Ashley’s mouth.

Bob Ashley whispered, “Fuck you, Danny.” And then a long exhalation issued from his throat and was gone into the world’s vast mingle of last breaths.

Even before Sheriff Hardie had began his interrogation of Bob Ashley, word had come to him that a mob was forming in front of the jail and demanding that John and Bob Ashley be delivered to it.

“It’s a hundred of em if it’s one, Sheriff,” a deputy had told him. “They got guns, hatchets, clubs, ropes, ever-damn-thing. It’s lots of Wilbur’s friends out there and lots of old boys who knew J.R. too.”

J. R. Riblett was the patrolman Bob Ashley had killed in the street. The deputy reporting to Hardie was barely nineteen years old and not yet four months on the force. He tried mightily not to let the sheriff see that he was afraid but Hardie heard the fear in his voice and smelled it on him. He put a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and the gesture seemed to calm the boy. The sheriff then ordered that every man on the county force be called in to defend against and assault on the jailhouse—and now a force of some twenty deputies was standing between the jail doors and a mob of hundreds.

The mob’s chanting cries for Ashley blood carried into the jail and down the corridors and into the cell where Bob Ashley lay dying—and carried deeper still to the corridor where two sweating deputies with shotguns stood outside John Ashley’s cell. “Give us Ashley! Give us ASHLEY! Give us ASHLEY!”

The guards had told John about Bob’s attempt to free him and of his failed try at a getaway. Since then they’d been receiving second-hand reports of Bob Ashley’s condition and passing it on to John. The latest word was that Bob had choked to death on his own blood. John Ashley showed no expression when they told him. He lay on his bunk and listened to the mob’s call for vengeance and it seemed to him but an echo of his own heart’s cry.

When the sheriff appeared at the jail doors and the undertaker and his assistant behind him, the mob became frenzied as a zoo at feeding time. The officers on guard looked terrified to a man. Sheriff Hardie knew that if the mob should rush them, his men would start shooting or start running, one or the other, and of his untried officers it was hard to say which of them would do which.

The sheriff raised his hands to try to quiet the mob so he might address it but their cries for Ashley only grew louder. He turned and beckoned into the jail and two deputies came out bearing a sheet-draped body on a stretcher. The mob’s chanting slowly gave way to a snaking murmur. And then one of the men at the front of the crowd cried, “It’s a trick! They sneaking one out under the sheet like he’s dead but he aint!”

“Let’s see!” hollered another. In an instant the chant went up: “Let’s see! Let’s see! LET’S SEE!”

Hardie went to the stretcher and yanked the sheet away to expose the bloody corps of Bob Ashley and the mob abruptly fell mute.

“Take a good look!” the sheriff shouted. “This here’s Bob Ashley and he’s as dead as he’s ever gonna get! Now what you hardcases wanna do? String him up anyway? Wanna beat on him a while? Set him afire maybe? Wanna shoot him some? You all wanna bring your womenfolk up here to see him? Want your kids to have a good look?”