Red Grass River

John Ashley nodded, and Laura said, “I’m drivin.”

“No,” John Ashley told her. “You’re good, honeybunch, but you aint doin this one. You been lucky nobody recognized you with Hannie on them other jobs and they still aint got a thing on you. But they gone know me so easy it aint even worth wearin a disguise. If you with me they’ll know you too for certain sure.”

She argued about it for a while but he would not change his mind nor would Old Joe take her side. She finally heaved a huge sigh of frustration and sat back with her arms crossed and her face burning with anger and disappointment.

John Ashley said he only wished it was a Palm Beach County bank. “I want that goddamn Bobby to know the onlybody’s time has come is his.”

“Well then, leave him some kind a message when you do the Pompano, why dont you? A message he’ll for certain sure understand.”

Over the next weeks they moved cautiously and in pairs whenever they ventured from Twin Oaks into the towns. They drove most of the way to Pompano by backroad and scouted the bank. For a handsome recompense George Doster the Stuart banker made professional inquiries and reported to them that the Pompano bank’s cash and securities holding had indeed grown impressive in recent months due chiefly to the boom in local agricultural enterprise. Old Joe had apprised Bill Ashley of their intentions and Bill nodded more in resignation than accord. As they crafted their plan John Ashley decided on his message for Bob Baker. When he told his father what it was, Old Joe smiled and said, “I’d say it’s clear enough.”

They hit the bank and made away clean. And that night celebrated at Twin Oaks with bottles of bonded bourbon and judge of Old Joe’s shine while the lookouts kept watch in the woods for encroaching agents of the law. Old Joe got down his fiddle and despite his opposition to bank robbery Bill Ashley had come to the party with his wife Bertha and his banjo, and the music swirled through the house.

They danced and drank and told funny stories and it was a fine party until Ben Tracey got overly bold in his manner of holding Scout to him as they danced and then laughingly refused to release her when she tried to wrest herself free. Laura saw what was happening and slipped out of John Ashley’s arms and kicked Ben in the leg and told him to let her go, goddammit. Tracey turned on her with a glare and John Ashley stepped up and said, “Do it, Ben. Raise you hand to her. See what happens.”

Scout got between them and said it was all right, Ben hadnt done anything, for Pete’s sake, she’d just been funning with him. Old Joe who was drunk asked what the hell was going on and why’d everybody quit dancing damn it. Ray Lynn pulled Ben aside and whispered in his ear and Ben nodded and looked hangdog and then told Laura he was sorry, he’d just been playing with the girl and hadnt meant any disrespect.

Ma Ashley entered the room as Ben made his apology and she gave Scout a hard stare and the girl shrugged as if to say she didnt know what was going on. Laura saw the girl’s impish look and shook a finger at her and then told Ben she was sorry she’d kicked him. Ben Tracey showed a small smile and made a dismissive gesture. John Ashley punched his shoulder lightly and told him to get himself another drink. The party then resumed but it had lost its momentum, and a few minutes later Bill put his banjo and he and Bertha took their leave and the celebration broke up shortly after.

In a still dark hour of that night, a lookout came to Old Joe’s window and woke him with the whispered information that a pair of sheriff’s cars had stopped out on the highway and let out a half-dozen men with rifles who were right now working their way through the woods toward the house.

By the time the sheriff’s men, muck-caked and mosquito-ravaged, had positioned themselves in the surrounding brush and trees where they could keep the house under surveillance, the Ashley Gang was into the deeper swamp and making for the Crossbone camp.

He kept the rifle bullet in his pocket and throughout the day would take it out and finger it and roll it in his palm and then put it back. For more than a month now his anger had gripped hard inside his chest—squeezing heart and lungs so tightly he could feel his pulse behind his eyes and sometimes had to open his mouth to breathe. On the evening he’d arrived home after receiving John Ashley’s message his wife had looked at him and paled and said not a word. His daughters too had gone wide-eyed at the sight of his face and it seemed they all three might cry and their mother had pulled them to her skirts and taken them to another room. But even behind the door mother and children could sense his fury quivering in the walls, could smell his hate drifting through the house like a caustic vapor.

The next day she read in the newspaper all about the Negro and the rifle bullet, read of John Ashley’s arrogant challenge to her husband, of her husband’s aplomb in the face of it. Read of his sneering dismissal of the Ashley Gang as worthless swamprats who belonged in a zoo cage or on a taxidermist’s table more than in a jail cell. She read of his vow to bring them down. When she read of his promise to wear John Ashley’s glass eye for a watch fob she little knew this man she was wed to, the father of her children. He seemed unaware of the fear he was inspiring under his own roof.

After days of his oblivious and leaden silence she went to his den one evening and knocked lightly on the door and when she received no response knocked again and then entered. He sat at his desk and stared at her. “I just want you to know,” she said softly, “that I’m here.” He seemed not to recognize her nor care that he did not. He was rolling a bullet under his finger on the desktop. She retreated.

During the month that followed he came and went at all hours. Sometimes he slept at the jail. Sometimes he came home in the middle of the day and went to sleep and all the while there would be cops lolling in the parlor talking in whispers and laughing lowly. Cops in the front yard. His wife and daughters kept to other parts of the house. Christmas passed like a day of mourning. He would awaken and go back out after dark and not return until sometime the following day. He ate but little. And if at time there was whiskey on his breath he never seemed drunk, not to anyone.

“Guess who’s heeere!” Laura trilled from the doorway, John Ashley smiling beside her and Wisteria’s black face behind them showing a wide white grin. It was two weeks before Christmas and a wreath of fresh pine twigs hung on the open door.

“Well now, let me see…” Loretta May said. She was sitting in the middle of the bed and the room was bathed in bright morning sunshine. A marmalade cat sat tonguing itself on the bedside table and now looked up and John Ashley saw that it was one-eyed. Loretta’s crossed legs were exposed under her parted robe as was most of one breast. He could smell her yellow hair freshly washed. Looking on her smiling face he realized how little she had changed in the eleven years or so he’d known her. She looked hardly older than the seventeen she’d been the first time he’d come to her bed and he believed he’d never seen anything so beautiful as she looked at this moment.

She drummed her fingers on her bare knee and held her chin in affected thought and said. “Who could it be?”

“Oh you,” Laura said. “You know! I bet you even knowed he was loose before I did, didnt you? I bet you…you know…seen us? In the sidehouse? In the tent?”

“Do you know this girl’s blushin?” John Ashley said.

Loretta May smiled wide. “Sounds like she’s braggin too. And you know what, mister? You sound a whole lot like a bad old gator hunter used to come see me ever now and then. Oh but he was bad about not payin, that one. I bet he owes me fifty thousand dollars for services unpaid.”

“Well, from the looks of things I’d say he’s bout to run that bill up some more,” Laura said. “You oughta see —looks like he got a damn banana down his pocket.”

Loretta laughed, and behind Laura, Wisteria giggled.

The cat sprang onto the bed and nuzzled her leg and John Ashley said, “Who’s the one-eye?”

“Name’s Johnny,” Loretta May said with a smile, “just like all the one-eyed evil tomcats I know. But how you all get here anyway? I heard the bunch of you was hid out in the Devil’s Garden and ever cop in the county’s on the lookout for you.”

“Hell girl, show me the cop who can make his way round the Glades good as us,” John Ashley said.

“Well it sure took you long enough to make your way round to me,” she said. “I only got one question other.”

“What’s that?” John Ashley said. His tongue felt thick with his desire for her.

“How much longer you gonna be about makin your way on over to this bed?”