waycamp where they’d long before cached a skiff and ammunition and a few supplies. By sunrise the next day he was headed for the Devil’s Garden.
Three days later he was forty miles away at Laura’s house deep in the sawgrass country and the Thousand Hammocks where nothing did abide but the ever untamed.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Liars Club
BOBBY BAKER’S RAID ON THE ASHLEY CAMP MADE HEADLINES THAT stood higher than a whiskey glass. We couldnt hardly believe Old Joe Ashley’d been shot dead. Lots of people didnt believe it till they went to the funeral parlor and saw the body for themselfs. And young Fred Baker shot dead too. He was chock full of piss and vinegar and damn near everybody liked him. It’s hardly any wonder the Ashley and Mobley places got burnt down and all their cars and trucks set afire. Lord, it was wildness for a time—it was like the Old West. Men with guns were everywhere and just aching to shoot somebody, to burn something. Albert Miller tried to get away in the swamp but was too bad hurt to make it very far and a posse run him down quick. And Laura Upthegrove! The woman got shot in the
Sheriff Baker told the newspapers he’d by God bring John Ashley in dead or alive and do it any day now. The bullet John Ashley sent him by way of the Nigra had angered Bobby in a way nobody’d seen before. He said he’d be damned if some outlaw could make threat on his life and get away with it. He’d said he’d wear John Ashley’s glass eye for a fob on his pocketwatch and nobody thought he was foolish.
Over the next few months John Ashley was a major topic of conversation in cafes and barbershops and fishcamps and speakeasies from Jacksonville to the Keys. Some believed he’d been shot up so bad in the whiskey camp fight he’d bled to death out in the Devil’s Garden and his bones never would be found. Others said he was healing up out in the Everglades and just waiting for the chance to get even with Bob Baker for the killing of Old Joe. Other thought he’d left the state and was smart enough to stay gone forever.
Reports of John Ashley sightings started making the rounds. Stories of his fate. He’d been seen in a gambling joint in Jacksonville and he’d been winning big. He’s been spotted in a fancy Atlanta nightclub, dressed to the nines and drinking champagne from the shoe of a beautiful blonde. He’d been arrested for armed robbery in Memphis and was in the Brushy Mountain penitentiary under a false name but nobody was sure what it was. He’d lost both legs trying to board a freight train out of New Orleans and was in a wheelchair and pimping for a nigger whore in the French Quarter. He’d had his other eye cut out in a barfight in Pascagoula and was in a home for the blind under the name Bruno Traven. He’d been stabbed to death by a whore in Birmingham and some said the whore was none other than Julie Morrell who Bobby Baker had wanted to marry till John Ashley had his way with her. There was a story he’d been beat to death by a bootlegger in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was another he’d been shot dead by the Knoxville cops during a robbery and been buried nameless in a pauper’s grave. It was all the usual kinda stories about him that get told about most dangerous men who vanish.
And then Laura Upthegrove got out of jail and she disappeared too. Some said she wanted to get away from a place that had so many bad memories for her. They said she’d gone to live with kin up in Georgia someplace. Some said she’d been too full of grief to live without him and had killed herself with poison. But them who believed John Ashley yet lived were sure she’d gone straight to him, wherever he was. And a lot of folk figured if that was true—if John was really alive—then we hadn’t heard the last of him, not yet. Not with his daddy shot dead and the man responsible for it still walking the earth.
TWENTY-FIVE
February—October 1924
HE FISHED AND HUNTED AND HE TOOK HIDES OF ALL SORTS SIMPLY to keep his hand in. He fashioned a small still to provide himself with sipping whiskey. Laura’s daddy had long ago inserted wooden-peg footholds into a high thick-boled pine for easy climbing, and twice a day John Ashley ascended to the top of the tree and peered with binoculars through its branches out to the vast viridity of the sawgrass country under the endless Everglades sky of everchanging blues. He never saw another soul except for Henry Quickshoes, an Indian devoted to Bill Ashley these last two years. Bill had one day come upon him carrying his eight-year-old son along the shoulder of the highway and he had stopped the car on seeing that the boy’s foot was wrapped in a white shirt sopped with blood. They got in the car and as Bill sped them to the hospital in Stuart he learned that the boy had been setting otter traps along Gomez Creek and somehow one of them snapped shut on his foot. The man came running and pried the trap off the boy’s crushed foot but bones were jutting out top and bottom and the wound was streaming blood. When the clerk at the admissions desk showed reluctance at checking in an Indian who anyway didnt have the money to pay, Bill Ashley leaned across the counter into his face and in a razorous whisper threatened to break his neck in three places if the boy didnt get into surgery immediately. The boy’s foot was saved, though he’d walk with a limp evermore, and Bill Ashley settled the bills with surgeon and hospital. Since then Henry Quickshoes was ever ready to do for Bill Ashley and service he asked. He was now poling out to John Ashley’s hideaway ever ten days or so, bearing supplies and news from Bill.
In this way was John Ashley informed that their mother had rejoiced on learning he was alive and well. And that Laura had been convicted of illegal production and possession of distilled spirits and sentenced to 120 days in the county lockup. She was serving her time with little discomfort. Bertha visited her several times a week with rations of food, magazines, cigarettes. In a note brought by Henry Quickshoes, Bertha said that when she whispered to Laura that John was all right and would await her at the Everglades house, she had wept and laughed at the same time and given herself such a bad case of hiccups it took her the rest of the day to get rid of them.
Bill reported that Clarence Middleton and Terrianne had abandoned St. Lucie for Vero where a friend of Clarence’s from Miami had started a charter boat business. Clarence had taken the name Calvin Walker and was growing a beard and working as mate on the boat.
Ben Tracy was in the Dade County Jail under the name Harry Brown serving ninety days for battery and indecent commission. “What’s ‘indecent commission’ anyhow?” Henry Quickshoes asked John Ashley. “Bill says he dont know.” John Ashley said he didnt know either but it sounded like something fun. Whatever the specific transgression was, Ben committed it with a woman on the Elser Pier dancefloor after cutting in on her partner. When the woman let a shriek in response to Ben’s indecent commission, the partner came rushing to her defense and thats when Ben committed the battery.
Ray Lynn was said to be crewing on a rum schooner plying the Caribbean out of Key West.
He tried not to think about things. In the first few nights in the Everglades house he had terrible dreams. He’d several times seen his father lying in his own blood and staring up at him with a look of accusation. And he’d several times dreamt of Old Joe wandering pale and ghostly in a distant twilit mist of the Devil’s Garden. His father would turn and look at him as if waiting to hear what he had to say. His neck would ran blood. John Ashley wanted to tell him he would avenge him, that he’d even the score with Bob Baker—but each time he opened his mouth he could make no sound. And then he’d suddenly be seated at Bill’s table and Bertha would be telling him yet again how much he sounded just like Bobby Baker and how she pitied Bobby’s wife and how awful damn lucky John was to have somebody who loved him as much as Laura, how only a damn fool would risk losing that for some dumb-ass notion of getting even.
Then he got the still set up and working and he found that if he drank enough every night he would dream not at all—or if he did dream, he would not remember it clearly, which was just as good. And so he spent his days
