Red Grass River

paused to glance at Tracey in his cell across the way. “All told, I’d say he got him a pretty light sentence.” His voice was barely at a whisper. “Especially since the way some tell it, he’d been shagging little sister his ownself, you see, and he had just a awful shit fit when he seen her doing it with somebody else.”

John Ashley looked over at Tracey. Ray Lynn read his aspect and said, “I dont know if it’s true about the sister. It’s some say he’s a bug with all women. I dont know. I just know he’s a damn good one to have on your side when things get hairy.”

Ray Lynn was on the Rockpile Gang because he had tried to escape from a turpentine camp. “Hell, I didnt have no idea of tryin to light out when they sent me there,” he told John Ashley. “I just wanted to do the two years I had left on my three-year sentence and get out. But goddamn, you even been in a turpentine camp?” John Ashley said he had not, but that all he’d ever heard about them was bad. “Closest thing to living hell is all it is,” Ray Lynn said. “I thought I was though but I couldnt take that fucken place. It’s only niggers can work turpentine and not die of it and even some a them dont fare too good. You dont even want to hear about them turpentine camps. After three months of it I didnt give a shit if they killed me tryin to escape. I figured being dead all at once would be better than stayin there and dyin little by little. So I made my break. I was two days and nights in the swamp before the dogs caught me and run me up a tree. When the posse showed up they were so mad at having to slog through the swamp after me the captain shot me in the leg as I was startin to climb down. I hit the ground so hard it knocked the breath out of me all the way to next week. When they realized they were gonna have to carry me back through the swamp on account of I couldnt walk on the leg they’d shot they kindly got hotter about the whole thing and sict the dogs on me for a while and then give me a good kickin besides. I mean to tell you I looked like hammered shit by the time they brung me back. They stuck me in solitary till my leg healed up some and then put me in the hole for fifteen days and then doubled my sentence and put me on the Rockpile Gang. And thats how come I still got moren four years to go instead of the three I had when I first got here.”

John Ashley came to learn that at age sixteen Ray Lynn had impregnated his sweetheart, a girl a year his junior, and willingly married her. But their families had been feuding for generations—and both families cut all ties with them. Ray Lynn could not say what the feud was about and doubted that anyone in either family knew either, not anymore, and yet the feud persisted. He worked at a lot of menial jobs to try to support wife and child but it had been rough times. Their second winter together was particularly hard and the baby contracted pneumonia and died. His wife withdrew into her grief and he could not bring her out of it. He took to drinking and keeping bad company. One day he helped a couple of buds rob a lumberyard office in Tallahassee. His share of the take was fourteen dollars. He took it home and gave it to his wife. She suspected he had stolen it and wept. He was trying to placate her when the police arrived and arrested him. One of the others had been caught and ratted out the rest. He served six months in the Leon County jail and when he went home his wife had moved away and no one knew where and he had not seen her since.

At noon every day the captain on the wall would blow his whistle and the gang would lay down their hammers and shovels and line up to receive the common leg shackle before being taken to the mess hall for dinner. On his fifth day on the rockpile and just after the captain sounded his noon whistle, John Ashley was lined up in front of a gang member named Pankin who suddenly yelled, “You aint so fucken tough!” and stabbed him in the short ribs with a shank fashioned from a spoon. John Ashley seized Pankin in a headlock and pulled him down to his knees and began beating him on the head with a melon-sized chunk of limerock. Pankin’s backup man was set to stab Ashley in the neck but Ben Tracey tripped him down and started kicking him and Ray Lynn ran up and joined in. The guards came running with their clubs to break up the fight. Pankin was unconscious for two days and woke up dimmer of wit than he’d already been. But the guards reported the incident truthfully, and the warden sent Pankin and his confederate to the hole for thirty days and then assigned them to a turpentine camp. Ben Tracey—who’d risked losing his accumulated good time when he jumped into the fray—stood exonerated, as did Ray Lynn. John Ashley was hospitalized for ten days and then returned to the rockpile. He told Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey they had a friend for life.

The last Sunday of July was a visiting day and that afternoon he was permitted his first visitor since arriving at Raiford. His father sat across from him at a table extending the width of the room and partitioned with chickenwire. Guards stood against the walls on either side of the partition. John Ashley smiled to see that the old man’s movements were still quick and his eyes yet alert and full of fire.

“They aint overfed you, thats certain sure,” Old Joe said, assessing the leanness of him, the edged planes of his face.

“Shoulda seen when I first come out that solitary,” John Ashley said. “Looked about like a broomstick. Looked like I never in my life seen the sun. I’d get fattened up quick enough I reckon if I could get some of Ma’s cookin in me.”

“She sent a basket but they say you caint have it. She and your sisters wanted to come but I said no. I wont have them in such place as this.”

Now Joe Ashley leaned close to the screen and told John it wouldnt be long before he got a chance to slip away. Ira Goldman had found out that if you wanted to make a deal with Raiford you didnt talk to the warden, you went to see his assistant, a man named Webb. Ira was close to working something out with him.

“This underwarden sumbitch wont guarantee nothin except the chance for you to slip out,” Old Joe said. “Told Ira it’d be just him and one guard and one driver in on it.” He looked around to be certain nobody had closed to earshot distance, then leaned to the screen again. “He’s asked for the moon, this Webb. We aint settled on a sum but I do believe he’s lookin for me to retire him for life. I guess I caint rightly blame him. He aint gone have a shadow of a job after you fly this coop, thats sure.”

John Ashley said the plan would cost even more than Old Joe thought it would. “I want a fella here to get put on a road gang,” he said. He told his father about Ben Tracey’s and Ray Lynn’s help in the rockpile fight. Ben was due for release soon but they’d have to deliver Ray Lynn. “Cant do that unless he’s outside these walls,” he said.

“He took your side in a fight, hell yes we’ll deliver him,” Old Joe said.

The problem was the money. Old Joe’s profits had fallen off badly in the time John Ashley had been locked away. Bellamy had found some better beaches for landing his smuggled whiskey—down in the upper keys and in Florida Bay—and had cut down on the amount of stuff he brought though Palm Beach County by boat and truck both. “We aint been makin near as much as we used to on our deal with him,” Old Joe said.

He was still operating the whiskey camps—five of them, all told, in the pinelands and the Devil’s Garden both—and had more customers than ever. But the money from moonshine and Bellamy’s payoffs was hardly sufficient anymore to cover much else beyond operating and living expenses. The cost of distillation equipment and ingredients had gone high as the sky since Prohibition and the cops on their payroll were greedier than ever—and there were always more and more of them to pay off.

The fatten their treasury, Joe told him in a whisper, the gang had hit a couple of banks. It had been Hanford Mobley’s idea. Bill Ashley had argued against it for all the same old reasons but nobody wanted to hear it. Even Laura was in favor of the bank jobs, Old Joe said, keeping a sidewise watch on the guards. “Insisted she’d do the driving. The boys all know damn well she can outdrive any a them and shoot just as good too, so nobody argued the point. You got you a good one in her, boy. She got a right amount of sand, that girl.”

John Ashley grinned and said, “Naturalborn outlaw aint she? Just like Ma.” He did not mention that two months ago he had dreamt of seeing Laura with an army .45 on her hip and driving hatless down a sandy pinewoods road with her hair tossing in the wind. She was laughing along with the boys around her—Hanford and Clarence and Roy—and all of them with money in their fists. He’d awakened smiling.

The gang had robbed the bank in Arcadia of ten thousand dollars, Joe told him. Back in April. Hanford, Clarence and Roy did the job in under five minutes and Laura scooted the getaway car out of there like a scalded dog. And then three weeks ago they hit the bank in Wauchula. They’d heard that the money for a big cattle deal was on deposit there but it turned out they’d been misinformed—there was only seven grand in the vault. It was worth it anyway, Old Joe said, just to even the score a little with that dickhead Sheriff Poucher who’d put the arm on John at Goren’s fishcamp. “Would of been better if we could of let him know we did it,” Old Joe said, “but I didnt want to draw no more heat from the cops than we already got.” They’d not only hit banks far from home, but on both jobs had worn bandannas over their faces as well, and none of them had been recognized.

“We figured not to do any robbing in Palm Beach,” Joe said. “Bobby Baker’s let us alone since you been gone and we didnt see no need to agitate him and get him troublin our whiskey business.” He looked around and leaned