Red Grass River

In his sleep one cool night of his first October in isolation he saw his brothers out at sea. It was like watching a moving picture show without the accompanying piano music—all action and no sound at all, not even the whirring of the projection machine. He knew somehow that his brothers were on the back leg of a whiskey run, knew they were in the Gulf Stream and bearing westnorthwest. The Della rode low on the gathering swells under an amber crescent moon running through ragged purple clouds. High black thunderheads were closing from the west, sporadically backlit by shimmers of sheet lightning. Ed was at the wheel, smiling and talking, and though he could not hear his words John Ashley knew he was relating some recent sexual adventure with Rita the Breed. Frank clung one-handed to the cabin railing and laughed.

But now the brother both looked out into the night and John Ashley knew they were hearing the sound of powerful marine engines. The boats materialized from the cloud shadows into the brightness of the moon, two sleek craft and each perhaps thirty feet long and running without lights, one bearing on the Della from southwestward and the other coming at her from the north. Ed opened the throttles wide as Frank swooped belowdecks and came back up with a Browning Automatic Rifle. The Della cut smoothly through the water but even though the engines were churning at full speed the bow was hardly raised at all, so heavy was their cargo, and the speedboats were closing fast.

Now automatic fire sparked from both boats and John Ashley saw where the bullets spouted the water aft of the Della’s stern and then the shooters had the range and rounds were gouging into the hull and the after bulkhead and shattering the cabin ports. He saw Frank kneel at the transom and fire a long burst with the BAR—and then he jerked sideways and he fell down clutching at his forehead, the mouth wide and showing all its teeth. Ed looked back at him, yelling something, yanking at the throttle as though he might wrest greater speed from the engines through sheer will. And then he suddenly flung forward against the wheel and John Ashley saw the brilliant red blossoms on his back as Ed slumped to the deck with blood overrunning his scarred mouth.

The Della’s freed wheel wildly and the boat veered to starboard as bullets continued ripping into her and first one engine must have quit and then the other must have died too because the boat ceased its forward progress and rode the swells adrift. The shooting stopped and the speedboat pilots backed off their engines and the boats closed in slowly.

Now the moon was vanished into the roiling black clouds and enormous rays of lightning illuminated the night sea as bright as day and John Ashley in his tossing sleep felt the force of the thunderclaps he could not hear. He saw Frank rise to all fours in the gathered darkness and slashing rain and crawl to Ed. Saw the darkly gaping wound over Frank’s eye running with blood and rainwater. Saw him shake Ed by the shoulder. Frank was yelling now and Ed’s eyes opened. Grappling hooks lofted over the gunwales and caught hold and the hooklines went taut and Frank was searching the deck for the BAR and spied it several feet away and started for it but a booted foot planted on his hand. He looked up half-blinded for the blood in his eyes and John Ashley saw as Frank saw the grinning face of Bo Stokes above the cocked .45 almost touching Frank’s face. Saw too a tall lean man standing unsteadily over Ed in the pitching boat with a pistol in his hand. In a spectral cast of lightning the pitted face of Alton Davis. Ed stirring weakly and Frank’s mouth moving and John Ashley knew Frank was cursing them. Bo Stokes laughing. And then the pistols flashed and his brother fell still.

They found the other Browning belowdecks and passed both rifles to one of the other boats. They made no effort to unload the whiskey, maybe because of the storm or maybe because they had no interest in it from the start. They emptied a gasoline can into the cabin and set a match to it and then hurried back onto their boats and made away just as the brunt of the storm rolled in.

The Della pitched and yawed to every direction and flames leaped from the cabin ports and hatch. The boat spun crazily and traced great sparking loops of fire above the bucking black sea and in the clarity of his dream he saw his brothers lying dead in the driving rain. Then the fire broke through the cabin deck and found the whiskey in the hold and the entire hull burst into flame. A huge wave have the vessel high and turned it on an awkward axis and the boat was poised on its stern for a long shimmering moment before capsizing and tumbling down the wave’s steep slope in scaling sheets of the and the wave broke over the upturned keel in a great raise of smoke and the Della whirled under the sea and was gone.

He woke in a soaking sweat, gasping for air as though he’d been drowning. Woke to the sounds of rain and weeping. And found that it was in fact raining. And that the weeping was his own.

In the late spring of 1923 he was removed from isolation and taken to a shower room where his first full soapy wash in two years gradually unloosed from his hide scales of dirt and clogs of casefied bodily exudates that ran off him as a rank gray gruel. His flesh was rashed and splotched and scabbed, coated with sores both old and fresh. Then to the prison barber who grinned at the sight of his wild shag and beard and cheerfully set to work upon him. His hair was cropped to a buzz and lice burrowed in the thick locks tumbled to his sheeted lap. His beard was scissored and then shaved with such dexterity he showed but two bloodspots when the job was done. The barber finished up by rubbing kerosene into his scalp. He was then led to the supply room and issued a fresh set of convict stripes and told to put them on. Then to the warden’s office where he learned he was being assigned to the Rockpile Gang.

“You wont be in general population,” the warden said, “but it’s better than that damned isolation cell, isnt it? Two years in isolation’s enough to make some men loony but you look to be all right in the head. Of course now, we cant always judge by looks, can we?” The assistant warden stood against the wall with his arms folded and looked to John Ashley like he was trying not to yawn.

The warden chuckled and paused to light a cigarette. It was the first tobacco smoke John Ashley had smelled since arriving at Raiford and the aroma was so heady he felt mildly faint. Sweet Jesus, boy, he thought—the things you done without.

“There’s no escaping from the Rockpile Gang, take my word,” the warden said. “You’ll see the for yourself. But if you’re fool to try it anyway, you’ll get shot dead. I promise. I surely hope you believe me, John.”

John Ashley said he did.

And now the warden cleared his throat loudly and glanced out the window and then looked at the assistant warden and then at John Ashley and cleared his throat again. “There’s somethin more,” he said. He told John Ashley that his brothers had been reported drowned while fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. The accident had occurred in October of the previous year but prison policy prohibited giving information of any sort to inmates in isolation. He regretted that he had been denied this knowledge for so long but it simply couldnt be helped. John Ashley looked at him but said nothing. The warden studied his face for a moment and then nodded as though he’d been told something satisfactory.

The Rockpile Gang was quartered in a windowless cell block secured tight as a tomb. He shared a cell with a convict named Ray Lynn, a weathered sandy-haired Florida native from Crawfordville who was serving six years for armed robbery. The Rockpile Gang’s membership, Ray Lynn informed him, varied from six or seven men to nearly two dozen, depending on the warden and the assistant warden’s whims. “You never know what either a them fuckheads will do next. Puttin a fella in isolation right off, thats the warden’s way of dealin with dangerous convicts. Likes to try to bust they spirit first thing. But I gotta say, you was in there a lot longer than anybody else I know of.” The rockpile was for convicts the warden considered particularly high risk for escape, Ray Lynn said. “Or for fellas the underwarden just flat fuck dont like.”

The rockpile stood in a remote sideyard—a huge sprawling heap of limerock boulders brought in on a half- dozen trucks once a week. The gang was shuffled out to it on a common legchain. Only at the rockpile itself and in their cells were they ever off that chain. They broke the boulders apart with sledgehammers until no piece remained bigger than a fist. Then shoveled the broken rock into trailers to be hauled away to various construction projects. They broke and shoveled stone from sunup to sundown six-and-half days a week and always under the eyes of wall guards armed with shotguns.

Ray Lynn had been on the Rockpile Gang for nine months—longer than anybody else except Ben Tracey who’d been on it for nearly eighteen months. On John Ashley’s first day on the rockpile, Lynn introduced him to Tracy whose grin was absent a front tooth and whose aspect suggested that nothing this world might show him would be cause for surprise. He was doing five years for second degree murder and two for attempted murder, but he’d cut almost a third off his sentence for good behavior and was due for release in another two months. He’d killed a man he caught coupling with his sister in a barn back home in Tallahassee. “He might of got her to claim it was rape and he’d been free as a bird,” Ray Lynn said in low voice later that evening in their cell. “Probly wouldnt of even gone to trial. but after beatin the sumbitch dead with a shovel, he started in on her too.” He