Red Grass River

so close to the wire his nose almost touched it. “The thing is, we just got word a big construction company’s about to put more’n forty grand in the bank at Stuart. They got a contract to rebuild most of the city docks and the money’s for payrolls and operation capital and such. It’s too fat to pass up. That job’ll give us all we need to pay off this Webb. It’s worth takin a chance with Bobby.”

John Ashley asked how he knew the information about the Stuart bank was accurate.

“Your old but told us. George Doster. Remember him from the bank in Avon? That good family man talked you into leavin some of the money when you robbed him for the second time? He’s the assistant manager at the Stuart Bank now. But he’s a unhappy fella, George is. Thinks he aint gettin paid near enough for as hard as he works and all the responsibility he got. Been feelin real sorry for hisself. That’s why he come to us with a deal. Said he’d tell us just exactly when a big bunch of money would be put in the bank. Said he’d tell us on one condition.”

“You had to promise that good family man a cut,” John Ashley said.

“Ten percent he wanted,” Old Joe said. “I told him five and he better take it, and he did.”

They grinned. And then as if they’d both had the same thought at the same time, their grins faded and they stared at each other without expression and Old Joe sat back. John felt his chest tighten as he said, “You aint had much to say about Frank and Ed.”

Old Joe looked off for a moment. Then told him flatly his brothers had drowned nearly two years ago on a whiskey run when they got caught in a had storm out on the Gulf Stream. “I’m sorry to tell you this way, boy, and I’m sorry to tell you so long after the fact of it. Your Ma was near distracted by it. Didnt hardly say a word for the better part of three months. Just sat out on the porch in her rocker and looked out at nothin. It were hard on her when Bob got killed, but that was somethin she’d pretty much been expectin from the time he was a boy and she saw how nobody could tell him nothin and how reckless he was. Boys like Bob dont never get to be old men and she knew it. But Frank and Ed, well, they was rough boys but they was good to mind me and her, they wasnt reckless. And it bein the both of them at once, well…it went hard on her.”

He told John that just nine days before he died Frank had asked Jenny to marry him and she’d said yes. When she got the bad news she shut herself up in her parents’ home for nearly two months in her grief and when she emerged she was wasted and pale and carried herself like an old woman. She had taken a train for Charleston where her family had kin and she had not returned nor was expected to. As for Rita the Breed, she’d simply vanished. One story held that she’d taken up with some mean Indian who lived on the far side of Okeechobee and they hadnt been together three weeks before they had a bad fight and he killed her. Another rumor said she’d gone to Apalachicola and was working in a whorehouse. Nobody knew.

Joe Ashley kept his eyes away from his son’s as he said these things, and John knew it had been harder on the old man than on anyone else, even Ma. Now Old Joe swallowed hard and snorted and narrowed his eyes as he looked at John. “This warden here, he told Ira you couldnt be told about Frank and Ed cause you was in isolation. Prison policy, he said. Sorry bastard. I’d like to show him what I think of his fucken policy. Anyhow, I’m truly sorry, boy that—”

“Listen, Daddy,” John Ashley said, “it’s somethin I got to say.” He said it so softly that Old Joe knew what would fellow was bad. He knew his boys, knew their tones. He put his ear close to the screen.

John Ashley recounted for his father his dream of Frank and Ed, a dream he’d had but once and yet recalled as vividly as if he’d awakened from it a minute ago. When he was done with the telling his chest was tight, his voice strained. Old Joe eased back from the screen and stared at him. His face looked carved of limerock.

“It wasnt but a dream,” John Ashley said, “but—”

Old Joe shushed him with a raised hand. “Dont say nother word.” He told him to keep out of trouble and stay ready. Then took his leave.

Ben Tracey had no visitor that day. The story around the yard was that the only visitor he’d ever had was his sister who came but once. During his fourth month a Raiford she showed up to let him see for himself the ruin he’d made of her face with the shovel. Even the most hardened cons who’d looked on her were moved to pity. She made Ben Tracey look at her face and cursed him to hell and then broke into tears and fled the room. Back in the block Tracey joked that if he’d had to look at her a minute longer he would’ve horked his dinner. None of the cons who’d seen his sorrowed sister laughed. Most of them hated Ben Tracey. But they feared him even more and so held their opinion mute.

Ray Lynn received no visitor that day nor any other.

A hot August night in Miami. The air unmoving, congealed with humidity. A cat’s-eye moon in a hazy sky holding but distant promise of rain and few stars to be seen. The Hardieville streets poorly lighted and sparsely trafficked this midweek eve.

Two men emerge from the front door of The High Tider—formerly The Purple Duck owned and operated by Miss Catherine Mays who’d departed for California shortly after her fiance Gordon Blue had been found dead in the Miami River. The men stroll down the street and turn at the end of the block and approach a parked roadster. One chuckles at something the other says. As they pass under a streetlamp their faces are for the moment clearly exposed, the pockmarked aspect of Alton Davis and the chin-scarred visage of James White. Davis cranks the motor to life and settles himself behind the wheel. White lights a cigarette. Davis stares at a pair of young couples going down the street a block away with their arms about each other and one of the boys fondling his girl’s ass. Now two men step from the shadows and into the hazy light of the streetlamp and stand directly before the car and each of them aims a pair of .45 automatics at the two men through the windshield. James White’s mouth sags open and the cigarette drops burning from his lips as he looks on Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews grinning behind the guns and he wonders what it feels like to be shot and he wants to turn to Davis but cannot and only manages to say, “Alton, shit…” and Davis turns to him and does an almost comic double-take back to the men holding guns on them and he makes a low grave sound as he grabs for his shoulder-holstered revolver knowing he will never touch it and he doesn’t for in that instant Mobley and Matthews start squeezing off rounds as fast as they can work the triggers.

The windshield flies apart and Davis and White jerk and twitch and lurch like dire epileptics and blood jumps from their heads and faces and several bullets glance off the roadster and ricochet off the building across the street and one stray round makes a starburst hole in a shop window and almost as abruptly as it began the rapidfire gunblasting ceases, all thirty-two rounds of the four Colts spent. In the jaundiced haze of gunsmoke under the streetlamp Roy Matthews steps around to the passenger side and spits in James White’s ruined face uptilted against the car door. Then the shooters are gone in the darkness.

Only now do heads cautiously appear at some of the doorways to peek out at the death car. Blood runs in a thin line from under the driver’s door and pools darkly in the street as though the automobile itself has suffered mortal wound. Only now do the girls on the street who watched the whole thing in open-mouthed shock begin a hysterical wailing. And not until this moment does one of the young men with them realize he has pissed in his pants.

In a late hour of the same night…

Bo Stokes comes out of a restaurant at the north end of Biscayne Boulevard where he has dined on a superbly broiled red snapper and his thoughts now are of a particular woman he is to meet at the McAllister Hotel. She is lean and lovely with firm breasts and a pubic bush soft as a Persian kitten. He feels himself heavy in his loins as he walks along this northern portion of boulevard lit only by the narrow moon and the lights from the train depot across the street. He glances skyward to check for possibility of rain and sees none.

A car draws up to the curb alongside and a voice calls, “Hey, Bo, wait up! Look here who wants to meet you, man.”

He stoops slightly to look into the coupe and sees a man behind the wheel and a woman sitting by the passenger window and both silhouetted against the light from the depot. “Who’s that?” he says.

“It’s me, man,” the driver says. “Look here who wants to meet you.” A bare female arm extends from the interior darkness and the fingers flutter in greeting and then quickly withdraw as the woman giggles.

Bo Stokes laughs and steps up to the car and leans one arm against the car roof and peers into the gloomy interior and still cannot make out the driver’s face nor the woman’s. “Who the hell is it?” he says.

“Me, man,” the driver says. “This here’s Wanda. She been wanting to meet you. She’s seen you