she did not understand what he said and he had to repeat it before she nodded and laid the pistol on the seat.
As she backed the car around in the yard John Ashley saw the children come out of the house and go to their daddy and each one hug tightly to one of his legs while he stroked their heads and told them it was all right, there was nothing to cry about, not anymore.
Then they were rattling down the road and past the pines and then came to the crossroads and turned toward Indiantown and sent up a flutter of chickens that had wandered out from a nearby yard. As they went through the hamlet they once again drew stares. And then they were down the road and around the bend and Indiantown fell away behind them.
“Eye,” he said, and held out his hand. She gave him the glass eye and he fitted it in place and then put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes and thought of nothing at all.
After they’d driven in silence for a time she pulled over one the shoulder and stopped the car. He sat up and saw but the road ahead and behind and boundless blue sky and nothing else to see in the world but open prairie and distant hammocks and the bluegreen horizon shimmering hazily in the rising heat like a world badly imagined.
She slid across the seat and up against him and hugged his neck and kissed his battered face. He flinched and her face drew with concern and she kissed him more softly. He said he was sorry he didnt get her children back. She said she wasnt. She said that while he was fighting for her she’d come to understand that what she’d been missing wasnt the children at all but something she hadnt even known existed. What it was she’d been missing in her life was him.
She straddled him on the seat and kissed him again and then stroked his hair and looked down into his one- eyed face. Her eyes bespoke a tenderness beyond any he’d ever known. He saw then for the first time that her eyes were green. And that one of them held a tiny gold quarter-moon.
FIFTEEN
The Liars Club
LORDY, THE STORIES WE HEARD ABOUT JOHN AND LAURA! THE kinda stories no one could know were true or not except for the two of them their ownselfs. Stories about the sort of things they’d do in the house Laura was give by her daddy. They say it was way down in the Devil’s Garden, that house, down in the Thousand Hammocks where there’s nothin for miles around but sawgrass and snakes and gators, hooty owls and skeeters and frogs ranging on your ears all the night long. Nights out there just black as blindness. It wasnt any way at all to get within a mile of that house but by the twisty sawgrass channels out there where the grass was just shy of sufficient height to hide you. By the time you’d get close enough to see just a tiny bit of the house through the highground pines, a lookout up in the trees would of had you in his gunsight for a half-an-hour. They say there was getaway sawgrass channels all around that hammock that nobody but Laura knew about and the only one she ever told about them was John Ashley. It was probly the best hideout house John Ashley ever had. Them wild-ass lovebirds didnt live out there all the time, only when they wanted to be alone for a few days and nights way off where there wasnt no law of man nor God to keep em from doin whatever they felt like as loud as they felt like. Ever now and then some hunter or frogger would claim to’ve been out in that part of the glades of an early evening and from a mile away heard em howling like a couple of painters. We heard that when they first moved into the sidehouse on the Twin Oaks property Old Joe couldnt stand the ruckus they made when they went at it late at night. He said if they were going to carry on so awful loud they could damn well do it someplace where they wouldn’t keep everybody awake by it. The Ashleys liked Laura real well and everybody in the family was glad John had found him a true love and all, but we heard the whole family was bad to joke about the caterwauling John and Laura’d make out in the sidehouse.
And so the lovebirds started going out to her house every now and again. Out there they could make all the noise they wanted and nobody around to make fun of them for it nor tell them to quit.
In the spring of nineteen and twenty Sheriff George Baker whose health hadnt been gettin nothin but worse woke up sicker than usual one morning and stayed home in bed and only got worse and by that night he was dead. Bob Baker was appointed to finish out his daddy’s term and then in November he ran for election to the job. He had a photographer take his picture throwin his hat in a ring like he was Teddy Roosevelt. Dont none of us recall who it was ran against him that November. It didnt matter. Bobby was about popular as religion by then and there wasnt a chance in hell he wouldnt be elected—and he was. In his victory speech he said his number one aim was to rid Palm Beach County of what he called the criminal element. Actually he’d been claiming credit all during the campaign for having cut crime a goodly bit already. There hadnt been a bank robbery in the county in nearly a year and he promised the voters there’d not be another one, not while he was sheriff. He didnt mention the Ashley Gang by name but everbody knew that was who pulled the last bank job. It pretty soon became clear, though, that as long as the Ashleys didnt show their face to Bob Baker or any of his officers nor harm any of the good citizens of the county, Sheriff Bob wasnt gonna go out hunting for them. In a way it was like he was letting bygones be bygones as long as the Ashleys didnt do any new crimes, not in Palm Beach County—not in public anyway. Oh he knew they were runnin booze, everbody knew it, but hardly anybody around here saw moonshiners and rumrunners as criminals anyhow, except for some of the good Christian people who’d favored the damn Prohibition laws in the first place.
If the Ashleys had done their booze business out in the open like some bootleggers were doin in some places, Sheriff Bob wouldnt of had no choice but to come down hard on them. But they was careful and quiet about the way they made deliveries to their Palm Beach County customers and Bobby knew better than to work too hard at stopping them. Just about all the hotels and restaurants had speakeasies and they couldnt have done much business without em. And the fish camps liked to keep spirits on hand for their customers who liked a cold beer or a drop of something stronger after a day of fishing. If Bob Baker had put a stop to the Ashley bootlegging in Palm Beach County he’d of hurt a lot more businesses than just Old Joe’s. And if you do something that harms a man’s business, he aint about to vote for you come next election—not him nor his family nor his friends.
John Ashleys was another matter. There was a warrant on him and arresting him wouldnt of put Joe Ashley out of business. But John Ashley was mostly keeping to the Devil’s Garden or down to Miami, where Bob Baker couldnt touch him. As far as anyone knows, the only times he showed hisself publicly in Palm Beach County anymore were now and then when he’d bring a load of hides to a buyer. He never caused trouble on those visits and never of hides to a buyer. He never caused trouble on those visits and never stayed long, and he seemed to know exactly when neither Bob Baker nor any of his main deputies would be around. Sheriff Bob have to of known about those appearances but he didnt seem to care all that much. All in all, over the next few years it was like there was an unspoken truce between Bobby and John.
Which aint to say the Ashleys didn’t have their troubles in that time—especially once national Prohibition came along. Supposedly a gang of Yankee bootleggers tried to run hooch through Palm Beach County and the Ashleys took exception to the intrusion on their territory. None of us knew—then or now—what the real truth of all those stories was, but we heard a lot of things. We heard the Ashleys was hijacking ever booze shipment the Yankee rumboats were landing on the local beaches. There were rumors of gunfights out on boondock stretches of the Dixie Highway where they was stopping every Yankee rum truck to come down the road. There was stories of men gettin shot dead. Mind you, we only
Miami really started booming during the Great War and just kept at it after the Armistice. When Deering finished building his Vizcaya estate in 1915 the town lost a lot of jobs—then the war come along and everthing got all better in a hurry. Thousands of servicemen got stationed in Miami and at the end of the war some of them stayed. All the military branches—army and navy and marine corps—set up flying centers of one kind or another in
