unthinking defensive reflex drew his pistol from under his shirt and from a distance of less than three feel shot the man though the throat. The man staggered backward with his hands patting at the blood jetting from his neck and spattering those nearest him. He reeled and crumpled to the floor and made rude guttering sounds and the blood was fast pooling round his head.
Now the bartender had the Kid in a headlock and was gripping his gun hand and several others fell to him in the midst of much angry shouting. The gun was wrested from him and the Kid went down flailing. They were cursing him and kicking him and it seemed to him a long time before they stopped. He was hauled to his feet and held by a man on either side of him and he could barely focus on the man before him who told him he was under arrest.
His arm was broken, his nose and ribs and one of his feet. Because he did not know his standing with the organization in Chicago he did not contact anyone there for legal help. He was sure that if he called on Joe Ashley the old man would come to Macon solely to kill him. And so when he went to trial still relying on a crutch and with his arm yet in a cast, he was represented by a court-appointed lawyer named Soames who smelled always of peppermint and had trouble remembering his client’s name. The trial began at nine o’clock in the morning and an hour later he stood convicted of murder in the first degree and the afternoon was sentenced to life imprisonment in the state penitentiary.
Within the year he would escape from the Okeefenokee penal camp where he’d been confined. But he would get lost as he made his breathless way through the sunless depths of the swamp and unwittingly bore ever deeper into that wilderness where even the dogs could not follow. No one in the world would ever know that he plunged into a quicksand bog and drowned and his bones would remain in that muck to the end of time.
There had been no one in the garage but a mechanic at the far end of the room who was busy replacing a tire on a wheel and when he saw Claude Calder enter he called out that he would be with him in a minute. Claude said for him to take his time, he was in no hurry, and headed straight for a Ford touring car exactly like their own. He had just cranked up the motor when he heard the gunshot from somewhere out in front of the building and he was confused, thinking that Bob and the Kid and John Ashley were already making their break from the jail and he wondered how they’d managed to move so fast.
He got behind the wheel and saw the mechanic hurrying toward him saying, “Say there, mister, what you think—” when the shotgun blasted across the street. Both of them glanced in that direction and then Claude kicked the car into gear and worked the throttle and the car clattered forward. The mechanic came running as if he would jump into the car with him and Claude brought his gun into view and the mechanic veered and took cover behind a car.
He heard more pistolshots as he braked at the garage door and he expected to see Kid Lowe and the Ashleys shooting it out with police in front of the jail, but the jailhouse door stood deserted. Gunfire sounded to his right and he hunkered in the car seat as he looked down the street and saw policemen running around the corner. He drove after them as more gunfire sounded.
He made the turn and slowed the car almost to a stop at the sight of a dozen armed cops on the next block where a truck was crumpled and steaming against the smashed back end of a car. Shattered bread boxes littered the limerock pavement. A policeman and another man lay in the street and even at this distance Claude Calder could see that the street under them was stained with blood and that likely both of them were dead. And now he recognized Bob Ashley as one of the two bodies and he pondered the situation for one long moment and then wheeled the car around and headed for home.
He was slow about making his way back. He made frequent stops to take a glass of beer in the backrooms of filling stations and cafes, to shoot a game of pool in one roadhouse or another. When he was in sight of the beach he sometimes parked the car and stripped to his underwear and dove into the breakers to cool off. He knew he would have to go to the Ashleys and tell them what happened but he did not like the idea of having to face Old Joe. Two days after the break attempt he arrived at the oystershell road leading to Twin Oaks. He was hoping John Ashley would not be home, that the old man might be out at one of his whiskey camps.
The trail wound for several miles through palmetto thickets and heavy pine stands and he knew the Ashley lookouts had seen him from the moment he’d turned off the Dixie Highway and had already sent word to the house of who was coming. Now the Ford reverberated over a hundred-yard stretch of jarring corduroy road that carried him through a wide muddy slough flanked by shadowy stands of oak and gumbo limbo hung with vines as thickly as a jungle. The car’s clangor raised a horde of storks from the shallows and up into the trees. And then he was off the logs and on a narrow sandy trail and the bushes scraped along both sides of the car. He negotiated a final sharp turn and the trees suddenly fell away and he came into a wide sunlit clearing and the house stood just ahead. The air was full of dragonflies hovering on blurred wings.
He saw Frank and Ed Ashley sitting on the front porch smoking and drinking and watching him come. He parked directly in front of the house and cut off the engine and got out of the car.
“Hey, boy,” he said, and was just starting up the steps when the front door flew open and Old Joe burst out like and unleashed hunting hawk and swooped down the steps and onto him and struck him on the head with a grub hoe handle and Claude Calder never had a chance to say a word before Old Joe hit him again and again, grunting hard with every blow he delivered. Claude fell and got up and fell again and was trying to fend with his hands and he felt bones break under the slashing hoe handle and now there was blood in his eyes and Old Joe kicked him in the face and he felt his front teeth stave. And now he could not get up and the blows continued to fall but he felt little pain and only later would he find out that Frank and Ed had at last came down the steps and pulled Old Joe off before he killed him.
He was put up in a backroom of the Twin Oaks house while he healed. But he was permanently purblind in his left eye and would never again have full use of his left hand nor replace the two front teeth he’d lost. His bullet-maimed ear now seemed insignificant to him. Nor would his spirit ever fully recover. Evermore he would jump at sudden sounds and sometimes be the object of ridicule for it. He would for the rest of his brief life have bad dreams that woke him in the night in a soaking sweat.
Even after Claude was up and about, Frank and Ed had insisted that he stay on the place and they gave him simple tasks to let him feel he was earning his keep. Old Joe did not speak to him directly until nearly two months after the beating. One afternoon he came out to the Yellow Creek dock west of the house where Claude was cleaning a string of catfish. He expressed admiration for Claude’s catch and sat on the edge of the dock and offered him a drink from his personal jug. He told Claude that he would always have a place to live, that even if he married and started a family he could live on the Twin Oaks property. Claude knew Old Joe was apologizing the only way he knew how, knew the old man might even actually be sorry for what he’d done to him. When Joe got up to go, he handed Claude the jug and said, “Here, son, you keep this.” He accepted the jug with a smile and said thanks and watched Joe Ashley head off. And the thought of someday getting even with the old bastard was so sweet he could almost taste it. And then he thought of what would happen if Old Joe ever thought him faithless turned the taste to brass.
Scratchley ventured out of the Devil’s Garden but once every three or four months, poling his dugout through the sawgrass channels and along the creeks leading in serpentine fashion to the canal connecting to Jupiter, there to get a new supply of matches and lamp oil and other such luxuries as he could not wrest from the Everglades itself like he did all the essentials of life. The money for these items he regularly received from Joe Ashley. To earn it he was required only to keep close watch in the swamp for any signs of encroaching strangers or known lawmen and, if he ever saw any—which he rarely did—to report the sighting at once to Joe’s whiskey camp in the Hungryland Slough. The camp lay a few miles west of his weathered pinewood cabin in the Loxahatchee and he would go there once a month in any case to receive his stipend from Joe and take a cup of whiskey with him before poling back home. He was one of dozens—white, black and Indian—who served Joe Ashley in this employ all over South Florida.
On this late sun-bright Friday afternoon he had poled back up the canal from Jupiter with a fresh cargo of wheat flour and sugar, matches and lamp oil, a case of soda pop and sacks of rock candy, which was his weakness, and had just turned off into the creek leading to the Loxahatchee sawgrass channels when he saw another dugout laying to in the shadows of a live oak overhanging the creek ahead. Its three occupants were watching him and he knew there was no reason at all they would be there except they were waiting for him. To try to back up and outdistance them on the canal was out of the question. Two of the men had poles and they would overtake him easily. And so he slowly pushed ahead and closed the distance to them.
He saw now that the man in the middle—the one without a pole—was deputy sheriff Bob Baker. The forward
