Red Grass River

back down the narrow trail to the house.

They sat to dinner at a long table set up on the front porch—cooter stew, rice, greens, fried tomatoes, hot- peppered swamp cabbage, hush puppies, cornbread and gravy and sweet potato pie. Ma and the girls laid out the table and served the food and went back inside the house. At the table with the Ashleys were Albert Miller and a blond and ropily muscled young man named John Clarence Middleton. Ed and Frank Ashley had met him one day a couple of months before when they were driving through Stuart and spied him fighting three men in an alley. They stopped the car to watch the fight and were much impressed by the smooth cool way Clarence was holding his own against the three. He punched one of them down and fended even better against the others until the first one got up again and this time had a knife in his hand. Ed called “Hey!” and they all looked over at the idling Model T and he brought up his revolver and everybody stood fast. He beckoned the blond fellow and said, “Well come on, bubba, if you coming.” The fellow came on the jog and hopped into the backseat and Ed waved goodbye to the other three as Frank got the car underway.

On the drive out to Twin Oaks John Clarence Middleton introduced himself and thanked them for saving him the trouble of breaking the knifer’s arm and maybe having to cut him with his own blade. He said he did not need any more legal problems. “What you mean more?” Frank asked, grinning at him. Clarence said he’d had to leave Miami in a hurry after a misunderstanding about a stolen motorcar. He was easy-natured and quick to laugh and had a tattoo of the U. S. Marines’ globe-and-anchor insignia on his right forearm. He didnt mind at all when Ed was Frank said they’d call him Clarence because their brother was named John and one John in the bunch was enough. The rest of the family took an immediate liking to him. He volunteered little about his past, yet none of the Ashleys was either so rude or so curious as to inquire into it. But they all admired his variety of skills. He’d learned to box in the marines and he displayed his fistic talent to them at a carnival in Fort Lauderdale where a challenger could pay a dollar to get in the ring with a carnie fighter and win five dollars if he could stay upright for three minutes. In the first two minutes Clarence broke the carnie’s nose and closed one of his eyes and the carnie said fuck it he’d had enough.

He was an able woodsman, Clarence, and a good skinner, and impressively familiar with a variety of firearms. Through a military connection in Miami he had recently acquired four cases of Springfield rifles for about one-third their value and had let Joe have a case in gratitude for taking him in and had sold the rest to some Cuban insurrectionists who’d come across the strait to buy weapons. Clarence himself carried a new army .45 automatic. He’d let the Ashleys fire it one day and they were all taken with the piece’s smooth action and striking power and Clarence promised to get one for everybody in the gang.

Having dinner with them too was Hanford Mobley, now fifteen and apprenticing at the whiskey trade with Old Joe and beaming proudly in the company of the uncles he revered. “That boy aint feared of a damn thing,” Joe had told his sons before they sat to eat. “Got balls like coconuts. And a good head. Learns quick. Aint got to be told somethin but once. I always did say he was gonna be a good one and he is.”

As they ate he told John Ashley all about Bob Baker’s continuing was against their whiskey camps. His most recent raid had been two months ago when he and his boys swooped in on Joe’s camp in the palm hammocks a few miles north of the railroad tracks running from Lake Okeechobee to Fort Pierce. They’d reduced it to crushed metal and busted glass and charred wood and made off with more than twenty cases of bush lighting. Joe now had but four camps in operation, fewer than half the number of stills he’d been running two years earlier. So deeply had the raids cut into his profits he could no longer pay off all the lawmen on his bribery list and so had lost much of the protection he’d enjoyed for a time.

“That damn Bobby’s cost me a ton of money and trouble,” Old Joe said. “I strained my brain a hundred times tryin to figure how in the hell he was findin out who my lookouts were. I knowed the lookouts was how he’d been doin it. He’d been catchin them some kinda way and gettin them to tell where the camps are at. I’ll wager he got some interestin ways to get a fella to speak up. Anyhow, he wont be—”

“I’m meanin to pay Bobby a visit real soon,” John Ashley interrupted. “It’s a few matters we got to settle between us.”

“No!” Joe Ashley said. “Now you listen good, Johnny: you aint payin Bobby Baker no kinda visit. If we do harm to Bobby Baker right now it wouldnt do nothin but bring police from everywhere down on us like a bad rain. It’s too much at stake to fuck er up by putting away Bobby Baker over somethin personal.”

“Hell, Daddy, it aint just personal—he’s tearin up our camps!”

Joe Ashley paused to light his pipe and pour himself a cup of his own whiskey. He eyed John Ashley closely as he sipped, then he said: “Dont bullshit me, boy. It aint the camps got you bothered about Bobby Baker. You two aint never unlocked horns since the business with that little Morrell girl. I dont know what else it is between you, but seems to me you done got the better of him a lot more than he ever did of you. I dont see what-all you got to settle with him. Maybe you wanna tell me.”

“It’s between him and me,” John Ashley said, and shifted his eyes from Old Joe’s intent stare. The others at the table were looking on with interest.

Joe Ashley sighed. “Well, whatever it is, you cant be doin nothin about it right now. I mean it, you hear? We cant have every cop on the coast coming down on us and thats exactly what’ll happen you do any harm to either George or Bobby Baker right now. Bobby’s time’ll come, boy, dont think it wont. Could be you’ll be the one to see to it. But the time aint now. You listenin to me, boy?”

John Ashley stared at the bowl of cooter stew congealing before him for a long moment before he nodded.

Old Joe banged his palm on the table and grinned through a cloud of violet smoke and said, “Old Bobby’s anyhow gonna play hell findin any more my camps to tear up from now on, because this fella here”—he nodded at Hanford Mobley, who grinned proudly—“just this mornin told me somethin thats gonna put an end to it. I tell ye, boys, it’s a damn fine day when you get a son back from prison and you find out who’s been playing the rat on you, all in the same twenty-four hours.”

What Hanford Mobley told Joe Ashley was how Bob Baker had been learning who the lookouts were. The night before, Hanford had been out netting mullet in the Indian River till around midnight. After getting back to the Stuart docks he sold some of his catch to the night dockmaster and left the rest in a tin tub of saltwater outside the door of the dock baitshop and wrote in chalk on the slateboard fixed on the wall, “U owe me—Mobley.” He then headed for the train station where he’d parked the car in the shade of a huge live oak that afternoon. As he turned the corner two blocks from the depot he saw Bob Baker entering Molly’s Cafe, an all-night eatery, on the opposite corner of the street. Curious, Hanford Mobley crossed the street and walked up to the cafe’s front window and peeked inside. And saw Bob Baker taking a seat at a table in the corner. And sitting at the table with him was Claude Calder.

“I never figured Claude for the balls to do it,” Old Joe said, “but when Hannie told me what he’d seen, well, it all fell in place. Claude knowed where the Hungryland camp was and he told Bobby—and he told him Seth and Scratchley were the lookouts for it. Bobby had to get them out the way before he could sneak up on the camp. I figure Claude’s heard us mention a bunch of the lookouts by name sometime or other and he’s told those names to Bobby Baker is what he’s done. All Bobby’s had to do is track down the lookouts or lay for them somewhere or wait for them to come home sometime and then make em tell where the camps was at.”

“Claude ratted our lookouts for no reason but Daddy give him a whuppin for runnin out on Bob in Miami,” Frank said to John Ashley. “A whuppin he damn well had comin.”

“I shoulda kilt the sonofabitch the minute he come back here.” Old Joe said. “I meant to.”

“We shouldnt of pulled you off his sorry ass, Daddy,” Ed said.

“Well hell,” Hanford Mobley said. “Let’s set the business straight right now. I know for a fact he’s over to the Yella Creek dock right this minute sandin a skiff bottom.”

Old Joe looked at Hanford Mobley and grinned. “I want you all to just listen to this one here. Fifteen year old. Aint he a bull gator though!”

“Let me set it right, Gramps,” Hanford Mobley said. Old Joe looked around the table at the other grinning men, then smiled and nodded at his grandson.

Hanford Mobley beamed. “Yall excuse me,” he said and stood up and pushed his chair in under the table and adjusted the pistol under his shirt. Then skipped down the porch steps and jogged out to the sidetrail leading though the pinewoods and down to Yellow Creek, about a quarter-mile away.

The men passed the bowls and platters around the table for third helpings and they poured more ice water