Red Grass River

John Ashley laughed and started shedding clothes as he went to her. The cat saw him coming and sprang to the beside table and almost upset the unlit oil lamp there and then leaped to the window sill and glared at John Ashley.

“I see dont nobody bother you all,” Wisteria said to Laura as she closed the door on them. The girl’s giggles faded down the hallway.

She stood with her back against the door and watched them come together. So avid was John Ashley that he climaxed almost immediately on joining with Loretta May. She held him close for a moment and then rolled him onto his side and sat up and said, “Hey boy.”

“What?” John Ashley said, looking up at her.

“Where’s your manners?” Her smiling sightless face turned toward Laura at the door.

He sat up grinning at Laura and said, “Hey girl, how much longer you gonna be about makin your way on over to—”

But she was already half out of the clothes and hurtling to the bed and tumbling into it and laughing and embracing them both and tasting the salt of her own happy tears.

On a cold afternoon in late December Bob and Fred Baker met with Heck Runyon at Springer’s Restaurant in Salerno. They sat at a back table and drank coffee and Heck informed them he’d two days earlier busted up another of the Ashley camp. A small camp in a gumbo limbo hammock in the swamps west of Hobe. Bob Baker asked if any of the Ashley Gang had been there and Heck said no, only a nigger and his kid.

“Oh Jesus,” Fred Baker said. “Did you—? How old was this kid?”

Heck Runyon shrugged. A man at another table casually glanced over and met his eye and instantly looked away.

“Shit,” Fred Baker whispered.

Heck Runyon picked his teeth and stared at Fred Baker through half-closed eyes. Bob Baker reflected that he’d never seen Heck Runyon’s eyes fully open nor ever to blink. It was as though he thought that to open his eyes too much would be to let others see into them and thereby know his secrets, that to blink would be to let down his guard. It was the look of a man at once mistrustful of the world’s motives and bored with all possibilities of them. Now he turned to Bob Baker and leaned forward on his crossed arms and showed a smile the lacked everything most people associated with a smile. “You said get rid them camps.”

“Yeah, but he didnt tell you—” Fred Baker started to say but Bob Baker made an abrupt hand gesture and said, “Never mind, Freddie.”

“Aint but one camp left,” Heck Runyon said.

“One?” Bob Baker said. “How you know?”

“I know.”

“Who said so?” Fred Baker said sardonically. “That Miccosukee you run with—Roebuck?” Roebuck was a ropy renegade Indian, a known thief and reputed murdered who’d all his life moved like a shadow through the breadth and reach of the Devil’s Garden. He’d been said to hijack the loads of plume hunters along the Shark River Slough and as far south as the Ten Thousand Islands, to have robbed gator skinners playing their trade on Lake Okeechobee’s most desolate shores. He’d never been known to keep company with another human being until Heck Runyon took him as partner in manhunting for Bob Baker.

“Would Roebuck know?” Bob Baker said.

Heck Runyon turned his half-closed eyes on him and gave a slow nod and Bob Baker thumped his fist on the table. “That’s where they’re hidin—got to be. The men watchin the house aint seen a hair of any the men but Bill. The gang’s off hid someplace and like as not it’s that damn camp!”

He put his hand under the table and felt of the rifle cartridge in his pocket. “The National Guard outfit in West Palm’s promised to lend us a couple of automatic rifles and all the ammunition we want. We got the men and the firepower. All we have to do is find that camp and we got their ass!”

Heck Runyon showed his teeth. “Done been found,” he said.

John Ashley had been for killing him right after the Pompano job but Old Joe had argued against such haste. It was too risky yet, Joe Ashley said. Every cop in the county had an eye out for the Ashley Gang. Besides, Bob Baker wasnt showing his face in public without a half dozen of his best cops around him.

“You might can get up close and put him down,” Old Joe said, “but you’ll play hell getting away with it. And even if you somehow was able to get away, everybody’ll know it was you and the cops wont never rest till they run you down. They dont hunt nobody like they hunt somebody who kills one their own. Course now, you could do for him at a distance with a rifle—but then he’d never know it was you done it and where’s the pleasure in that? Best to let it lay awhile. He’ll get tired of huntin somebody he cant find and then he’ll let his guard down. You’ll see. He’ll get shut of them bodyguards after a time. Then you slip up on him. When he’s alone. You want him to know it’s you but nobody else to know. Now witness, no murder warrant.”

“Listen to him, Johnny,” Laura said.

He looked from one to the other of them and spat to the said and flung up his hands in capitulation. “What the hell, I waited this long.”

The Crossbone camp was set on a high dry range of ground marked by a heavy stand of live oaks ragged with Spanish moss. Crossbone Creek flowed in from the northwestern savannah and ran behind the oaks and into the heavy brush to the east and then made its secret way to the South Fork of the St. Lucie River a half-mile farther on. Only the Ashleys and their most trusted confederates knew of the boat route from Twin Oaks to Crossbone Creek, a route that followed a network of narrow waterways through a region called the Pits—a portion of swamp marked by cattailed sloughs and ponds, by cutgrass and tupelo and maidencane, a muckland where footing was more hope than substance and a man so luckless as to find himself there without a skiff might suddenly sink in mud to his ass or be swallowed entire by a quicksand bog in less time than it takes to tell and no mortal trace of him left behind. The route took them to the creekhead—where they kept mules and tack and muckshoes and wagons for carrying out cases of moonshine—and from there it was an easy skiff ride down to the camp.

Southeast of the camp lay a wide range of marl prairie too soft to bear the weight of a motor vehicle and marked by scatterings of saw palmetto and clusters of cabbage palms and myrtlebrush. The camp’s high ground afforded a clear view across this prairie to the pinewoods a half-mile away. In those woods were a scattering of rugged trails on which motorcars might drive from the highway far to the east if they came slowly and carefully. Eastward to the South fork lay impenetrable thickets of peppertree and buttonbush and black willows. To the west and southwest the grassy savannah ran flat and swift to the immensity of the sawgrass country.

Two of Old Joe’s best Indian lookouts, Shirttail Charlie and Thomas High Hawk, alternated eight-hour watch shifts on a perch twenty-five feet aboveground in a pine strand a hundred yards south of the camp. While one kept watch the other took a meal in the camp and slept. A grayhaired Negro named Uncle Arthur James and his grown son Jefferson had operated this camp for Joe Ashley for years, maintaining the fire under the great copper kettle at just the right intensity and keeping the distillation box full of water, replacing the buckets under the tap as they filled, jugging the shine and packing the jugs into cases. Now and then father or son would pole a dugout to Salerno for supplier. On the gang’s arrival at the camp the month before, Old Joe had dispatched Uncle Arthur to Twin Oaks to tend the property in his absence and make sure the Ashley women had whatever they needed by way of supplies for other necessities. Jefferson remained at the camp—and his dog, Paint, a one-eared mongrel raised from pup- hood in the swamp and considered magically charmed to have lived so long without falling prey to gator or snake or hunting cat.

Clarence Middleton would not be joining them, they knew that. Old Joe’s lookouts had surely warned him of the police around the house and informed him that the gang had fled to the Crossbone. Clarence would have rightly decided there was no reason to risk capture by trying to slip out to the camp and would have returned to his girlfriend’s place in St. Lucie.

During their first weeks at the Crossbone camp John and Laura taught Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey to navigate the channels of the sawgrass country to the south—and taught them more besides. John Ashley showed them how to cut open a cabbage palm and extras the succulent heart of it, a treat known to the local crackers as swamp cabbage and which could be eaten raw or prepared in a variety of ways. He showed them how to dig a scratch well in the hammock ground with a stick or just their hands. He and Laura smiled at the look on their faces the first time they dug a little well and the water came up sludgy and dark brown and they said they werent about to drink that. John Ashley told them to keep scooping and they did and then after a minute more