Red Grass River

made you feel so bad?”

He shrugged. “I dont recall nothin about it.”

He could feel that she knew he was lying. The papers had been photographs. Four of them. They had come for him in an envelope with no return address and bearing a Tampa postmark. In the first picture Bob was sitting up and naked and his open eyes were dead as glass and his mouth shaped into a grotesque smile and he held his own shriveled dick in his hand. In the next he was still showing the horrid smile but this time holding a pistol to his head, his hand supported by the large hand of someone standing beside him but out of the picture. In the next, his head was turned sideways toward the same large man standing very close to him and holding Bob by the hair with one hand and a penis to his mouth with the other so that the skinned-back glans was between his lips. In the last photograph Bob was lying on his back and someone visible only from the waist down was standing beside him on the table with one booted foot on his chest in the manner of a hunter posing with his trophy. On the front ankle of the boot was embossed a white star.

He had looked and looked at the pictures and sobbed in his fury and his helplessness. He did not want to risk that anyone else might ever see them and so had studied them very hard for a while longer and then burned them to ash.

How could he have told his father? Told anyone? The day Bob Baker had stood at the foot of the porch steps while he watched from the window above with a .45 cocked in his hand and his daddy sitting in bed beside him, it had been all he could do not to shoot the bastard then and there. He dreamed of those pictures more often than he did not and would waken enraged in the dark of night, his jaws clenched and aching.

“What’re you thinkin?” Loretta May said. “You’re wantin to hurt something. Not me, is it, baby? I didnt say nothin wrong, did I?”

He heard uncertainty in her voice and blew a deep breath and kissed her shoulder and stroked her hip and said, “How’d you see all that?” His breath was tight in his chest. “You some kinda geechie woman?” He hoped she wouldnt say she was a witch because he did not believe in witches but had no trouble believing in her.

“I dont reckon,” she said, still nuzzling his neck. “I just see things in my sleep sometimes.” She pulled back and held her face toward him. “You had any more of them dreams you told me about? Them that seem like they’re trying to tell you somethin but you wake up and cant remember?”

“Yeah,” he said, “sometimes. I can recollect some of them fairly clear ever once in a while.” The dreams always disquieted him, and even now, simply thinking about them, he felt his pulse quicken.

“I told you the time would come when you’d start to remember them.” She said, smiling. “I dont reckon you’ll ever see as much as I do because you only blind in one eye. Tell me one you remember.”

He thought for a moment and then said, “i recent had one about a funeral. It was in St. Augustine. I could see the old fort out yonder of the graveyard and see the ocean behind it. But it was strange because it was like the graveyard was on top of a high hill. There wasnt anybody there but me and a woman with real red lipstick and it was like she didnt even know I was there. I could see the casket down in the grave but it didnt have no top to it and you could see the man lying in there. I knew him. A fella name of Tom Maddox. He’d been with me in prison and he come with us when Frank and Ed busted me free of the road gang. He went to Daisy’s with us and met a girl in Jacksonville with red lipstick and said he was gonna stay with her a few days and catch up with us at Twin Oaks but he never did show up. I looked down at him in that grave and I knew it was real, even though it aint real that people get buried in coffins with no tops and there aint no big hill like that in St. Augustine. But I knew it was true he musta gone to Augustine with that girl and died there for some reason and was buried and thats why we never saw him no more.”

“You could go and find out if he’s really buried there.”

Dont have to. I know he is.”

“What do you reckon happened to him?”

“I dont know. Somethin.”

“Do you care to find out?”

“No. It was his own business.”

They lay in silence for few minutes and then she said, “Tell me another one. A nicer one.”

“Well, it’s one I had it a few times now,” he said. “It’s a woman in it but not one I ever knowed. I dont see her, not really. More like I…sense her, like she’s right there but I cant really see her too clear. I swear I can almost smell her. She got this thing in her eye…like a little gold piece of the moon, it looks like.” He glanced at Loretta May and saw her smiling and he flushed and looked away. “Ah hell,” he said.

Loretta May laughed. “It’s always a woman in what men dream. Either that or somebody dead or somebody chasin after them. Men’s dreams either give em a hard cock or a cold sweat.”

He leaned over and kissed her breast and tongued the nipple and felt it go rigid, then did the same with the other, then looked up and saw that she was smiling happily. Her hand sought him out and closed around his hardness and she made a face of mock astonishment and said, “Oooh. Sometimes they aint even got to be dreamin, do they?”

He laughed with her and mounted her in a smooth practiced motion and began rocking and rocking into her as she grinned up at him clutching tight to his shoulders.

They entered the Avon bank with .45’s in hand just before closing on a Friday afternoon and relieved the guard of his revolver before he fully comprehended what was happening. They did not wear masks. The customers’ mouths hung open but the gang assured them nobody would be hurt if they all just stayed put and did as they were told. John Ashley went to the head teller’s window and asked his name.

“George Doster, sir,” the teller said.

“I’m John Ashley, George. Open the cage.”

The teller did so, and while Clarence Middleton and Hanford Mobley kept the patrons under watch, John Ashley went around behind the tellers’ windows and himself emptied all the cash drawers into a gunnysack. He then went into the vault and filled another sack with all the paper cash he found in there. The bags now held about eight thousand dollars. Then he came out and asked the manager, a balding man named Weatherington, if there was any more money in the bank and the manager said there wasn’t.

John Ashley grinned at him. “I heard that song before, bubba. Cost me ten thousand dollars to believe it.” He turned to the head teller and said, “George, is he tellin me true? Is it any more money in this bank?”

“I…I dont know, sir.”

“Listen, George,” John Ashley said. “If I read in the newspapers that you boys cheated me, I’m gone be mad, you hear? I’m gone be real mad. I’m gone come back and see all of you one by one and aint none of you gone be happy to see me. So now—one last time—any more money in this bank?”

George Doster licked his lips and glanced sidelong at the bank manager who kept his eyes on the floor. “Mister Ashley, sir,” he said, “I think there might be some money in Mister Weatherington’s top desk drawer.”

John Ashley went to the manager’s desk and in the top drawer found an envelope from the Tarpon Construction Company containing nearly twenty-five hundred dollars. He stepped up to the bank manager and hit him across the bridge of the nose with the pistol barrel and his nosebone cracked like a nutshell. The manager let a yelp and sagged to his knees with blood spurting bright from his nose onto his white shirtfront and spattering the floor.

“Damn, but I hate a liar.” John Ashley said. He gestured for Middleton and Hanford Mobley to go out ahead of him and then he pushed at the door and said, “Listen, Weatherington, I dont want to hear that George lost his job for tellin me the truth. You understand?”

The bank manager had both bands to his nose and blood ran through his fingers and into his shirtsleeves and his eyes were red and flooded with tears. He nodded vigorously and blood shook from his hands ion thick drops.

Three months later they ranged back to the central highlands once again and this time hit the bank in Sebring, announcing themselves loudly as the Ashley Gang. They were in and out in less than ten minutes and took seven thousand dollars. Four months after that they drove down the coast and robbed the Boynton Beach bank of sixty-five hundred. People came out on the sidewalks to watch them make their getaway and some of them waved