Red Grass River

“Now you got to tie me up good,” Hicks said as he rummaged in the debris. “Make it look right.” He came up with some thick strips of canvas. “This here’ll work good as rope. Then you put a gag on me and get youselfs out that skylight and thats all she wrote. You just a coupla jailbirds got the jump on me and made away.”

“Maybe that rope there be better for tying you,” Roy Matthews said.

“What rope’s that?” Hicks said, turning to look where Matthews pointed. Matthews swung the crowbar against the back of his head with a soft crack and Hicks fell as if his bones had gone to milk.

“God damn, man!” Hanford Mobley said. “What you do that for?” He stepped over Hicks so he could watch Matthews ever as he squatted to check the fallen man.

“Make it look right, didnt he say?” Roy Matthews said. “Well, this’ll look right and didnt take near as long. What the hell, he aint but a fucken jail hack.”

“He’s a friend of Grandaddy’s, who he is,” Mobley said. He probed for a pulse under Hicks’ jaw and could not find it and was sure Hicks was dead and then he felt it. Mobley stood up. “He’s alive, no thanks to you.”

They both looked up at the skylight and then around the room. “Dont look like any these busted crates any good for standin on,” Roy Matthew said.

“Give me that iron and make a stirrup with you hands,” Hanford Mobley said.

Roy Matthews looked at him.

“I’m lighter than you,” Mobley said. “You boost me up and I’ll bust the lock. Then we’ll make a rope of them pieces of canvas and I’ll brace myself and haul you up.”

“Real good plan, sonny,” Roy Matthews said. “What’s to keep you from going on without me once you make the roof?”

“You damn fool. You think I couldnt of got out of here before now? I been waitin on you. Not cause I give a shit about you—cause I dont. It’s only cause Grandaddy wanted me to. Now we gone stand here arguin all fucken night or we gone get out of here?”

Matthews gave him the little prizing bar and interlaced the fingers of his hands to form a stirrup and Hanford Mobley stepped into it and Matthews heaved him up and braced Mobley’s foot at belly level. Mobley caught hold of the frame around the skylight with one hand to steady himself and worked the bar into the padlock yoke. On his third hard pull the yoke broke open. He took the lock out of the eye-ring and tossed it aside and pushed the skylight window up and it fell open onto the roof with a loud bang and it was a wonder the glass did not shatter.

“Shitfire!” Roy Matthews grunted under Hanford Mobley’s weight on his hands. “Think you might can be a little noisier about it?”

Hanford Mobley laid the crowbar on the roof and called down, “Higher! Boost me higher.”

“God damn,” Roy Matthews said. He grit his teeth and raised Mobley’s foot up almost to his chin, elevating him high enough so he could pull himself up onto the graveled roof by arm strength. Mobley took a moment to catch his breath and then slipped the crowbar into his belt and lay on his belly to look down at Roy Matthews who was quickly trying together some of the strips of canvas. Matthews then tied a loop in one end of the line and slipped it under his arms like a sling and tossed up the other end of the line to Mobley who took up the slack and wound it around his back for support and then sat at the edge of the skylight with his legs drawn up and his heels braced against the frame of it. He leaned forward into the opening and reached as far down on the line as he could and got a tight two-hand grip and then slowly straightened and leaned back and pushed himself away from the window frame with his legs and thus raised Roy Matthews up high enough so he could grab onto the skylight frame and work himself up on the roof.

They scurried to the corner of the building and shinned down the drainpipe there. They paused to listen for sounds of alarm but heard none and then raced across the moonbright stretch of grass to the woods beyond and plunged into the pines. They made their way to Turtle Creek and followed it eastward through the swamp where little light of the waning gibbous moon did penetrate. They came at last to the lagoon which formed a portion of the intracoastal waterway and they began searching for the skiff. The clouds of mosquitoes were so thick they could be clutched by the fistful and squeezed to bloody paste in the palm. They flailed at the maddening whine at their ears as they tramped through the brush and stumbled on mangrove roots along the lagoon bank and finally both of them dug dripping scoops of malodorous muck and coated their faces and arms with it against the rage of mosquitoes.

They found the skiff lashed to a mangrove in a small cleared portion of bank about twenty yards north of the creek. In it was a jug of water and a croker sack containing a dozen oranges, some smoked mullet and cornbread, a box of matches and a sheathed skinning knife. They gobbled down the food and Hanford Mobley put the knife on his belt. Then Roy Matthews set himself in the fore of the boat and Mobley pushed them off and took up the pole and stood near the stern and began poling north for Skeet Massey’s fishcamp at Pompano.

Roy Matthews turned once and grinned palely in the moonlight and said, “We done er,” and Hanford Mobley said, “Yeah we did.”

They spoke no more as the skiff glided through the water with a barely visible green-yellow glow in its wake. The mosquitoes were not so severe out here on the water where there was at least a small breeze to help keep them at bay. From the dark pine came a deep hollow hooting of an owl. An enormous school of mullet broke the surface ahead of them in a great phosphorescent shimmer like a shattering of burning glass and both of them sucked their breath at the sight.

The moon rode high and made slow progress across the black heaven and its spangled of stars. After a time the mangroves drew in on them from both sides and shadows dappled the skiff and again mosquitoes closed on them in a densely humming mass.

Hanford Mobley put down the pole and slipped the skinning knife from its sheath. The blade was eight inches long and felt razorous to his thumb. He had intended to use the crowbar but a knife was so much better. An engine of keener intimacy. Used properly a knife allowed for at least a moment’s mutual reflection between the principals and thus a truer sense of reckoning. He stepped forward lightly as a cat.

Roy Matthews noted the slowing of the boat and started to turn around as Mobley’s shadow fell over him and he felt a sudden horrid pain at his neck and knew in the instant that his throat had been slashed to the neckbone.

His hands went to his wound in a desperate pawing and he tried to get up but Hanford Mobley kicked him in the chest and he sprawled in the rocking bow and felt the blood coursing hotly down his chest and sopping his shirt and his horror was such that he would have screamed but for windpipe and voice box having been severed as well. The sound from his mouth was the deep gurgle of a drain abruptly unplugged and blood rushed into his lungs and he choked and saw the dimming moon above the through his last loud try for breath he heard Hanford Mobley asking if she’d been worth it.

TWENTY-ONE

The Liars Club

THE RUMOR WAS EVERYWHERE THAT OLD JOE ASHLEY’D HAD A hand in Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews slipping out of the Broward jail, and might could be he did or might could be he didnt. Only thing for sure about that rumor was the same as always: nobody had a lick of proof for it.

They say when Bob Baker heard about the escape him and Freddie Baker drove straight down to Fort Lauderdale and he went right into the high sheriff’s office there and asked where that goddamn jailer Hicks was at. The sheriff said he was in the hospital with a skull fracture. Said he wished he’s never accepted the two bank robbers into his jail because he sure as hell didnt need all this bad newspaper publicity. Bob Baker called the sheriff a dumb lazy peckerwood loud enough for everbody in the jailhouse to hear him. He stomped back out to his car and Freddie drove him over to the hospital and Bob Baker told the doctor he had to ask the injured jailer a few important questions. The doctor said all right, but the patient was in a bad way, so go easy on him. But Sheriff Bob wasn’t in no go-easy mood, not with the fella responsible for his prisoners getting away laying right there in front of him. He grabbed Hicks by his hospital gown and shook him like a dog with a rabbit. Called him a lowdown shiteating son of a bitch and said he knew he’d helped the prisoners break out and he would by God prove it and send him to