Red Grass River

was swole up all red and ugly and he lost him a eyetooth. By the time he come around she was long gone. The boys naturally give him a pretty good ribbin about getting the shit beat out of him by a woman. Harv got all blackassed about it and cussed a blue streak and stomped on out. Aint seed him since. Dont know where-all he’s been doin his drinkin lately.”

They had all three been furtively eyeing the woman at the bar as Toomey told his story. Now she shifted her weight on the stool and John Ashley felt his cock stir and he sucked a breath between his teeth.

“Just last week she brung Dolan another boatful of hides and then come in here again,” Toomey whispered. “She’d just recent got that shiner under her eye and it was lots worse-lookin than now, I’ll tell ye. That eye was swole near shut. Some of the boys thought maybe Harvey give it to her but I misdoubt it. Harvey aint so dumb he dont know he’d only make hisself look worse if he was to beat up on her. All he can do is hope that after a time nobody’ll remember much about what she done to him. But like they say, hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first. Wont nobody who saw it ever forget the way she laid him out nor ever quit tellin about it. Anyhow, this last time, she had herself a pitcher and a coupla shots of your daddy’s good stuff and then left. Never said a word except to order the spirits. And didnt nobody get bold with her neither. Hell, nobody come within four feet of her, not after how she done poor Harvey.”

Toomey gave her a sidelong look and he leaned farther over the table as he said, “I tell you, boys, that aint no woman to get gay with. It’s things about her just aint natural.”

“It’s something about her,” John Ashley said.

“You right about that,” Toomey said. “And it sets on that stool real nice.”

Hanford Mobley chuckled and John Ashley said, “That aint what I mean.”

Toomey and Mobley grinned at him. He said, “Well, it is—but it aint all I mean.” He could not have said what he meant.

Now the woman drained the last of her beer and slid off the stool and took up the shotgun and headed for the door.

“She gonna make he getaway, uncle,” Hanford Mobley said, nudging John Ashley with an elbow.

John Ashley got up and went to the door and watched the woman cross the street to a battered Model T he guessed to be ten years old. It angled awkwardly on a bent frame and its top was in tatters. She laid the shotgun on the seat and adjusted the levers under the steering wheel and took the crank around to the front of the car and fitted it and gave it a hard turn as forcefully as most men might and the motor coughed several times but didnt ignite. She glared at the car and tried again and this time the engine did not even cough. She reset the spark lever and tried again. After she’d cranked the motor a half-dozen futile times John Ashley went across the street and gave her his best smile and asked if he might be of assistance.

She studied him narrowly. She was breathing hard and her shirt was darkly damp and sweat beaded under her chin and nose. Her mouth was set hard and her eyes were shadowed by her hatbrim though he could see they were brightly wet. She looked like she might be resisting an urge to cry. Standing this near to her he was surprised to see she was almost as tall as he was. Now she held the crank out to him.

He used the marking stick to make sure there was gasoline in the tank and then checked to see that gas was getting to the carburetor. Whistling the while to convey an air of casually assured proficiency he made certain all ignition wiring was properly affixed and then went to the steering wheel and adjusted the spark level and throttle and then set himself in front of the car and readied the crank and gave it a turn.

The engine emitted a hollow rasp on each of the first four tries. Passersby averted their eyes when he turned his glare on them. He reset the spark advance. The woman looked on without expression, her arms crossed over her breasts. The motor hacked on the fifth and sixth and seventh attempts but still would not start. When it coughed not at all on the eighth try, he blew a hard breath and muttered “Son of a bitch! ”

He was huffing hard and dripping sweat. The woman sat down on the edge of the sidewalk with her elbows braced on her knees and her chin in her hands. He rolled up his sleeves and gripped the crank as though he meant to strangle it. He turned to the woman and smiled and winked and she reacted not at all. He gave the crank a mighty turn but his sweaty grip slipped and he fell to his knees as the crank recoiled and clipped him on the chin and snapped his teeth together with a clack. He saw an instant’s darkness lit with sparks and swayed and nearly fell over but managed to keep his balance. He heard laughter from Toomey’s across the way and turned to glare over there but the door stood empty. He got to his feet and tasted blood and felt of his mouth and found that he’d bitten his lower lip.

The woman was laughing into her hands and he felt a rush of anger—and then pictured what he must have looked like when the crank hit him and he chuckled and shrugged and sat down beside her on the plank walkway. He mopped at his lip with his shirttail and said, “Bedamn if that car aint got it in for me.”

She laughed harder and covered her face with her hands and rocked to and fro and stomped a foot on the ground and people passing on the sidewalk glanced at them and gave them wider berth. He felt himself grinning. He looked across to Toomey’s and saw a pair of heads at the door pull back from sight.

And then she was crying. He gaped and wondered what he’d done to upset her so suddenly. He stammered, “What’s—what’re you—” He put a hand to her shoulder and said, “Hey now, darlin, what’s all this? What’s the matter?”

She dropped her hands and turned to him, her face bright with tears, he eyes bloodshot. “All I want is to get em back,” she said. “It’s all I want to do. But nothin ever works out right, not a goddamn thing! Now the goddamn car’s no good and I cant get out there to get em back.”

“Get what back?” he asked. “What all you talkin about?”

“My kids, goddamn it—my kids. They all I got and I want them back and I dont know how I’m gonna get out there to get them without no goddamn car!”

“Kids?” he said, as though he’d never heard the word.

“It’s all I want from him,” she said. “But noooo, he cant let me have em. Says they ruther be with him, the liar.”

“Who wont let you have em?”

“My son of a bitch husband, who you think? Lord Jesus, I wish he’d drop dead this minute. I wish he’d dropped dead a long time ago. I wish his momma’d sat on him when he was just a baby. Goddamn it, I wish I had a car!”

“Hey, darlin,” he said, “I got a car. And thats the same as you got one.”

She wiped at her nose with her sleeve and looked at him.

“I’d be proud to take you to get them children.”

Once again her eyes went thin. “Oh yeah? And just why you want to do that? You dont even know me.”

“Well I know you’re a nice person. And I know you need a car to go get your kids. And I know I can help you with that. What else I got to know? Let’s just say I got a hankerin to help. Course now, if you don’t want my help….”

His hankering went well beyond wanting to help out, of course, but he knew that the best way to approach these nervous half-crazy ones was slowly and roundabout.

Her name was Laura Upthegrove. Her husband was E. A. Tillman but she had never taken his last name for her own. She called him Eat.

She sat leaning against the passenger door as John Ashley drove his Model T roadster over the narrow and dusty rockfill road flanking the St. Lucie canal that ran through scrub pine and palmetto prairie in a long easy curve of about twenty miles southwestward from the lower fork of the St. Lucie River to Indiantown and then went on another dozen miles or so to Lake Okeechobee. The sky was palely blue and fathomless, the sun as light yellow as a baby chick. The wind was from the south, soft and redolent of rips sawgrass and spawning bream. Osprey nests showed in the high pines and the parents raptors wheeled in hunt far out over the savannah.

She’d wanted to bring her shotgun but John Ashley wanted no part of spousal murder and had told her there’d be no need of it. He’d given it to a passing boy to take across the street to Toomey for safekeeping.

“Eat’s not only his initials, it’s what he likes to do best,” she said. “And it’s about what he’s done to ever old boy who ever messed with him—just eat him up.”

She looked at him carefully when she said this last, and he grinned and said, “Well I aint fixin to mess with him. I’m just takin a friend to get her children is all.”

Snakebirds stood on the canalbanks with their pointed beaks up-thrust and their wet black wings spread to