trapping and hunting and thinking of nothing but the beauty of the surrounding sawgrass world. At night he gave himself to drinking and dwelling on Laura and sometimes taking himself in hand in his yearning for her and then falling into a fitful sleep. One night he had a vague dream of fire and heard a woman’s single scream that carried in it as much of loneliness as of terror and he started awake half-drunk with his heart lunging hard but he could recall no details of the nightmare. When he went back to sleep he began to dream of his father and so woke again and took several more deep swallows of shine and once more fell asleep and dreamt no more that night.
She was released in the early days of June. Bill and Bertha Ashley met her at the jailyard gate. They drove her to a West Palm Beach restaurant and bought her a huge steak for dinner. During the meal Bill passed her an envelope holding five thousand dollars. Bertha had brought a change of clothes for her and she went into the women’s restroom and put on her overalls and laced on her boots and slipped the money into her bib pocket and buttoned the flap. Then came out and said she was ready to go.
A pair of cops had followed them in a county car and sat waiting outside. Bill wasnt surprised. “Bobby’s bound to figure you’ll head for Johnny if he’s anywhere around,” he said. “He knows damn well he aint gonna be able to follow you once you get in the Devil’s Garden but he’s gotta try, dont he?”
He drove her to a friend’s fishcamp out on the canal road on the rim of the sawgrass country. Waiting there for her was a skiff loaded with supplies. She hugged Bill and Bertha and kissed them goodbye and then got in the skiff and started poling north along a sawgrass channel. Even if Bob Baker had assigned someone to follow here, once she got into the Loxahatchee Slough she’d be able to lose anybody on her trail. Not until two days later when she was absolutely sure she was not being followed did she turn westward, and not until a day after that did she turn again and bear for the south of Lake Okeechobee and home.
Henry Quickshoes had brought to him the news of her release and every day thereafter he spent most of the daylight hours in his high pine lookout. And then one cloudless midmorning of pale sunshine there she was, poling around a distant palm island. His heart jumped at the sight of her. He skimmed down the tree and raced around to the far side of the hammock to the boat landing hidden in the brush and the wide overhang of the oaks. Here in the deep shadows the grass and thorny weeds were shin-high and the air humid and the smells rank and ripe. He paced and twirled and smoked one cigarette after another and finally heard the soft plash of her pole in the water and he hid behind a thick myrtlebush. He soon heard the dugout’s prow slide up onto the sloped bank and heard her feet hit the ground and heard her grunt as she pulled the boat the rest of the way up onto dry ground. The sound of her laboring breath made him hard for her.
He gingerly pushed aside the myrtle branches and saw her sling her rucksack onto her shoulder and start for the path toward the house. Then she stopped and lifted her face to the air and sniffed at it and he knew she’d smelled him or the cigarettes he’d been smoking. She was a wilderness child, no question. She smiled and eased the rucksack to the ground and looked around and then fixed on a wide-trunked oak. She went into a crouch and began to sneak up on it as quiet as a thought. John Ashley slipped out from behind the bush and moved after her in a quick silent scuttle. She darted up to the oak and looked behind it and her face fell to see he was not there—and then she let a shriek as he grabbed her from behind and they tumbled and rolled in the grass and thorny weeds, both of them laughing now and hugging each other tightly and kissing and kissing, faces, necks, eyes mouths. Then their clothes lofted in ever direction and caught on bushes and tree limbs and her shirt sailed beyond the bank and into the water. They coupled as if they would break each other’s bones, bucking and tossing and howling until they came—and then kept right on at it and he lapped at her breasts and she clasped him tight with her legs and they rolled over and now she was on top and gripping his shoulders and they humped hard and fast and cried out and came again and she flexed into a single quivering muscle in her orgasm, her sex locked tight around him, and she stayed that way for a long moment and then let a deep sigh an relaxed and folded down beside him and he rolled with her to keep from slipping out. They lay gasping and looking at each other and he grinned at the small gold quarter-moon in one of her eyes. “Hey, girl,” he said, “how you keepin?” And kissed her golden eye eye and then the other. Then her mouth. Her breasts. Her belly. And then he was at her vulva and she arched herself against his tongue and made sweet moan.
After a time they gathered up their clothes and her rucksack and they saw and felt now the scratches they’d gotten in the thorny grass and they joked about looking like they’d been in a catfight. Up in the house they applied moonshine to the cuts on their elbows and knees and legs and she giggled when she saw that he had a scratch on his pecked and he made fun of the cuts on her ass and they ministered to them with the moonshine and then kissed each other’s wounds to make them all better.
Some time later they lay in bed and smoked cigarettes under the open window with no night but that of the pale moon upon their nakedness. He’d told her all that he’d been thinking. That there wasnt any need to go after Bobby Baker. That revenge was a silly notion anymore. Maybe if Bobby’s daddy was still alive he could even things up by killing him, but George Baker was long dead. Besides, he’d killed Fred Baker who was Bobby’s best kin, so that made it all even, didnt it? In a way?
He told her what Bertha had said about him and Bobby Baker seeming alike and how much that chafed him. He wasnt
He asked if he was making any sense. Did she think he was right?
She held his face between her hands and kissed him deeply. Yes, she told him, he was making all the sense in the world.
“Well all right then, it’s all settled,” he said, grinning big and slapping her hip. “Galveston, here we come.”
He sat up and lit another cigarette and cleared his throat and said. “Listen honeybunch, there’s just one thing. I dont know what you’ll think of this, but here me out, okay? I been thinking that, well, Loretta May, you know, she aint got nobody. Now, you know she loves you to death, you know that, and it’s always seemed to me you care a whole lot for her too, and so I was thinking, well, why dont we just take her with—”
Laura howled and buried her face in his lap. He sat stunned, so suddenly had she burst into tears and so wrenching were her sobs.
And then he knew. And said, “Damn.”
She tried to talk but could not, she was crying so hard. He stroked her hair and made soothing sounds and let her cry it out. And he thought of the bobbed blonde hair and the skin that always smelled of peaches and the sightless eyes that could see so much.
“I thought you know,” she said in choking sobs. “I thought you just…you didnt want to say nothin because… because it’s just so terrible and said.”
She’d been in jail a month when she heard about it. Miss Lillian’s maid Wisteria had come to visit her several times by then to give her messages from Loretta May in a blushing whisper through the bars. “Loretta had her say just the boldest things to me. They’d make me blush too and me and Wisteria would both of us bust out laughin and the matron would look over at us like we’d lost out minds,” Laura said. She heard about the fire from the matron the morning after it happened and only then did she realize the bells that had awakened her with their wild clanging the night before were of fire engines going to Miss Lillian’s. But it wasnt till the tearful Wisteria came to see her later that morning that she found out about Loretta May. “I’d cussed them bells up and down for wakin me up,” Laura said. She sobbed into her hands and he stroked her shoulder. “I was cussin them damn fire bells…and all the while poor Loretta was…oh
The place was so old, the wood so dry, it had burned down in less than twenty minutes. Everybody got out but one. According to Wisteria, the man who’d been with Loretta May in her room told the firemen the whole thing started when Miss Loretta’s one-eyed cat sprang up on the bedside table and knocked over the oil lamp. He said the fire just jumped up the wall. Said it shot across the floor like some circus trick. He said he’d had to run through fire to get out the door.
“He ran out of there in his underpants—just run out and left her there in her darkness and all that fire,” Laura said. He voice was different now. Hard. “If God gave me just one wish, Johnny, just one, I’d ask Him to please let me find that man.”
She looked at him and saw his face streaked with tears. She sat up and held him to her.
“The firemen thought everybody’d got out. Wisteria was right there and she said the girls was all screaming when they come running out the house and they all stood out in the street and watched the fire. Wisteria said didnt none of them heard nobody screamin inside and so they thought everybody was out. She went all through the crowd
