Red Grass River

Miami and us kids loved to watch them military planes making their practice flights ever day. We were all just crazy for aeroplanes. Some of us are old enough to remember the first aeroplane flight in Miami back in nineteen and eleven. The mayor wanted to do something special to celebrate the town’s fifteenth birthday so he passed the hat and scraped up a whopping $7,500 to pay the Wright brothers and they sent down an aeroplane on the train and a pilot named Gill to fly it.

It was one of them old bi-wing jobs that looked like a giant dragonfly. They hauled it out to the country club golf course and when Gill took off you didnt hear nothing but his motor and a coupla thousand people going “Ooooh!” and it was one or two ladies fainted from the excitement. The plane went up over the pines and a bunch of the girls from the Hardieville houses had come out to watch and they waved their white hankies at the pilot as he flew over them and he wagged his wings from side to side and you could see his big white grin under his goggles. But the plane scared the daylights out of a herd of cattle in a neighboring pasture and them cows went right through the fence and come stampeding across the golf course just as the plane circled around low and started coming back our way. All the horses and mules started rearing and bucking in the traces and the drivers were yelling “Ho! Ho now!” and trying to rein them in as hard as they could, but here come the cattle stampeding at us and here come the plane not more’n fifty feet overhead with its motor loud as bejesus and them horses and mules were flat terrified and there was no holding em back. They lit out with their teeth showing and their eyes big as baseballs and the drivers and passengers went ass over teakettle off the wagons and out of the buggies. People were shrieking and scattering out of the way of the cattle and the runaway vehicles and some folk went tumbling into the sand traps and some fell in the ponds. All you heard was the rapping of that aeroplane motor and the cattle bawling and horses and mules galloping and whinnying and women screaming and men cussing and kids laughing and…well Lord, aint none of us who was old enough to be there have yet forgot that fifteenth birthday celebration and the first aeroplane to fly over Miami. We found out later that one fella drowned in the water trap in front of the sixteenth green and wasnt found till the next day when a golfer’s fairway shot bounced in front of the hazard and ended up between the dead man’s shoulder blades, which was about all of that was showing above the water. Some say the golfer waded on in and played the lie off the fella’s back before reporting the body, but likely as not thats just a mean story. Anyway, not six years later we were watching the navy’s flying boats—flying boats, mind you—takin off and landing from the bay at Dinner Key and asking each other what they’d think of next. But by the end of the war we’d seen so many planes we didnt even look up anymore when one flew over. A body can get used to anything, no matter how mysterious or strange, and it pretty soon becomes a commonplace, even if its mystery aint any better understood than it ever was.

Lots of mysterious things happened around that time. There was a story in the newspapers about a baby born in Fort Lauderdale that no sooner came out of his momma’s womb that he said just clear as a bell, “It will rain for forty days and forty nights.” And bedamn if it didnt start coming down that very evening and rain from Lauderdale to the keys all through the next day and all the day after that. Newspaper reporters went to the baby’s home and asked his momma and daddy to ask the infant what was going on but apparently the child had spoke his piece and wasnt about to say another word about rain or anything else. You can imagine how people carried on when the rain kept falling and falling day after day. Some good Christian folk sold everything they owned and got ready for the second coming of Noah’s Flood. Most the houses in town put a boat ready in the yard and loaded it with provisions. In the worst flooded neighborhoods alligators swam across the yards and ate ever dog around. Ever day there was news of somebody got bit by a water moccasin. The churches did steady business in sinners stopping in to make theirselfs right with the Lord. Others went the other way and took to the bottle. They say half the men in Miami didnt see a sober hour during that steady fall of rain. There were drunken public fistfights ever day and the cops mostly didnt did anything about them except make bets on who’d win. We heard that some men drowned in the streets when they feel down and were too drunk to even lift their heads up out the water. It rained ever single day for three either weeks before it finally quit and the sun come out again and started to dry out all the craziness. Some said the rain was God’s way of punishing Miami for its wicked ways but others said that was just superstitious nonsense and that the real reason for the rain was them enormous Krupp guns the Germans was using to shell Paris from seventy-five miles away. They said the blasts of them huge guns was upsetting the atmosphere and causing all kinds of strangeness in the weather all over the world.

Then there was the Spanish Lady. That’s what everbody called the influenza that went around so bad during the war. For a time it seemed all South Florida was sick, the whole damn world. People pretty much stopped visiting with their neighbors for fear of sickness in their house. Some of the grownups called catching the flu being kissed by the Spanish Lady. It was a kiss to make you out-of-your-head sick is what it was. For some it was the kiss of death. Everbody knew somebody who was took by the influenza. It was lots of people in mourning dress at that time. For reasons nobody ever figured out, the only ones in Miami who seemed immune to it was the Hardieville girls. Some said it was because God had meaner ends in mind for them sinful women and wasnt about to let them die of anything so easy as the flu.

Anyhow, the war brought more servicemen to Miami than you could shake a picture postcard at and the doughboys brought money and things were mostly good most of the time during the war and got even better afterward. Business was fine all over town—it was money money everwhere. Some restaurants were open for business round the clock. Clothing stores couldnt resupply their stock fast enough, there was so much demand for the latest fashions. Every man wanted a silk shirt and a white boater. Pink and yellow were the favorite colors for shirts during the war but after Armistice candy-striped became most popular. Wages went way up—but so did prices. A carpenter who used to make two dollars a day now got paid a dollar an hour but his twelve dollars for a day’s work was about what one of those new silk shirts cost.

Of course what them doughboys wanted more’n anything else during the war was whores and booze and gambling games—and of course the town was quick to provide all they wanted and no matter it was all illegal. The Hardieville houses never closed. Some of the houses had gambling and some didnt but damn near ever hotel in town had at least one room reserved for dicing and cards at any hour. The politicians and cops were gettin rich on the payoffs. With all them cathouses and gambling rooms doin round-the-clock business the call for booze was constant and the Ashleys had all they could do to satisfy it. When Prohibition came in after the war the market for hooch in Miami was so great it’s no wonder the gangsters from up north wanted in on the action.

After the war the Ashley boys started going to Miami more often than ever. The town was building up a boom that wouldnt do nothing but get bigger and bigger till it’d finally get blowed away by the hurricane of nineteen and twenty-six—but by then the Ashley boys were history, all but one. Once Prohibition become the law there wasnt any kind of fun a man couldnt find in Miami. The Ashleys still went there to gamble sometimes and to sport with the fancy ladies like they always had, but by now they all of them had a steady girl and they liked to go down to Miami in a bunch and have a big time together.

Frank had took up with a gal from Stuart named Jenny, a real pretty thing with black hair to her waist. Ever chance he got he’d take her for drives in his roadster. Now and then people saw them having a picnic in the harbor park. Ed’s girl and named Rita somebody. She was a reclusive thing and nobody’d ever seen much of her till she became Ed Ashley’s girl. She was half-Indian and a few years older than Ed and lived somewhere midway of the St. Lucie canal near an Indian camp. They say she had tits like grapefruits and an ass like a perfect turned-over heart —a body to make a man just howl with want. But her face was another story. They say one side of it was real pretty but the other side of it was a scary thing to behold. The story is, she got that face when she was about fourteen from a bad Indian named Tommy Fox Shadow who later got killed in a fight with a game warden who caught him taking egret plumes. One night in a drunken argument the Indian hit her across the face with a flaming chunk of pinewood off the campfire and knocked out a coupla upper teeth on that side and embers got stuck in her cheek and just burned her to the bone. After that nobody ever saw her to smile nor heard her to say a word. But if her face wasnt much to look at, well hell, neither was Ed’s, what with that scarred mouth and all. It was lots of jokes on the quiet about how the two of them must of had to put a bag over each other’s head just to do the deed.

Hanford Mobley was said to of fallen for some redhead in Miami, and Clarence Middleton had a girl in St. Lucie he has sweet on. Clarence would go off by himself to see her and hardly ever went to Miami with the others. Roy Matthews now, he never did have a steady girl as far as anybody knows. From the time he joined the gang he pretty much took his pleasure where he found it and they say he found it everwhere. For reasons no man’s ever understood, women just cant seem to resist a naturalborn sonofabitch and they say Roy Matthews could have his pick of them like oranges off a tree.

The way we heard it, the boys were taking their girls to Miami nearly ever weekend. They say Old Joe had