Red Grass River

The look on Annie Baker’s face reminded John Ashley of the way Bertha looked that night at Bill’s just before she’d run tearfully from the room—and the way Laura looked as she waved goodbye from the dock. He suddenly had a feeling they all three understood something important he did not. In that moment he somehow knew that this woman truly loved Bobby Baker and likely always would. And in some way as inexplicable he knew too—though he knew it only as a feeling, as an understanding beyond language—that Bobby did not know she loved him, that he could not know it, not if she told him so every day for the rest of his life, no matter how she might try to show him that she did. The realization came to him that nothing he might do to Bob Baker could be as bad as having to live in such a circumstance, in such…what? Emptiness. In such emptiness of the heart.

He sensed all this in the span of a heartbeat. And then wished he were with Laura right that minute, wished they were in their bed in Galveston with moonshine or rain either one falling over them through the window.

Well hell, boy, all you got to do is to do it.

He put the shotgun barrel up on his shoulder and smiled at Annie Baker. The woman’s eyes were intent upon him and now they suddenly filled and she showed a small uncertain smile.

“Let’s go, Hannie,” He said. “I cant wait to get shut of this place and get down to Key West.”

Hanford Mobley looked at him like he’d spoken in a foreign tongue. “Say what? How come? We can lay for him right here and—”

John Ashley was still looking at Annie Baker and now his grin widened. “And from Key West a boat to Mexico, where the arm of the law dont reach too good.” He glanced at Hanford and said, “Let’s go,” and started from the room.

Hanford came rushing after him. “Goddamn, John, what’s going on? The son of a bitch killed Granddaddy. It aint right we—”

“He didnt do any such a thing,” John Ashley said tiredly as he crossed the parlor to the front door where he stood and looked back at Hanford. “Daddy always done exactly what he wanted and he died the same way.”

Hanford Mobley snatched up the gasoline can and said, “Well we damn sure ought to burn down his fucken house! He burned down my momma and daddy’s house and I aim to pay him in kind.”

John Ashley grabbed the can from him. “We aint burnin nothin. It aint just Bobby’s house, Hannie, it’s them’s.” He gestured at Annie Baker and her daughters, standing on the other side of the room and watching them. “Hell, it’s more them’s than Bobby’s. What we got against them?” He put a hand on Hanford’s shoulder. “Listen. Let’s just go, all right?”

Hanford Mobley shook his head and cursed under his breath and followed his uncle into the tempestuous night.

And Annie Baker hurried to the door and shut it hard against the buffeting storm.

A year earlier, following Clarence Middleton’s and Ray Lynn’s getaway from a road gang the day after John Ashley escaped from Raiford, Sheriff Bob Baker had requested and received from the state penitentiary the prison records of all three men and of all convicts who’d been known to associate with them. Each convict’s folder included a photograph. After studying the material, Bob Baker had put it all in his Ashley Gang file. He had since made it policy for his officers to check any strangers arrested in Palm Beach County against the photos and descriptions in the Raiford records. And so, when Deputy Grover Pass received a telephone call from the station in Stuart information him that the local hospital had reported a battered patient armed with a pistol when he was admitted, he took the Ashley Gang file and drove up to Stuart in a furious thunderstorm and went to the hospital ward to have a look at this patient who said his name was Walter Jones.

Deputy Pass had a good eye for features, and despite the man’s battered aspect, he recognized him as the same man in one of the prison photographs in the file. The file report said the man’s name was Ben Tracey and that he had been in the same cell block and work gang as John Ashley and Ray Lynn. He had served out his sentence only a short time before their escapes.

The battered man had watched Deputy Pass carefully as he looked back and forth from his face to each photograph in turn. When he looked twice at the same photo and then grinned, the man had said, “Shut,” through his mutilated mouth and broken nose. Deputy Pass cuffed Ben Tracey’s wrist to the bed and went to the desk to call Sheriff Baker. Several of the other ward patients had been looking on and fell to murmured speculation among themselves. In a neighboring bed a man with two broken legs grinned at Ben Tracey and said, “Sometimes it aint no end of trouble, is it?” Ben Tracey glared at him and said, “Uck you.”

It was dawn when the sheriff arrived at the hospital. After visiting with the commissioner whose daughter had been injured in the car crash and then stopping by the newspaper office in West Palm Beach to have a talk with the night editor, he had called the station to check in and the desk clerk had relayed Grover Pass’s message to call him at the Stuart hospital. When Grover told him he had arrested a patient who might be in the Ashley Gang, Bob Baker ordered the suspect moved to a private room and a pair of deputies placed on guard at his door. He then had Elmer Padgett drive him directly to Stuart. The wind had fallen off and the thunder and lightning had ceased their action, but the rain yet fell.

The interrogation did not take long. When Bob Baker asked Ben Tracey where John Ashley might be found, Ben said, “Uck you wid a arden hose.” Bob Baker said he had him for bank robbery but would drop all charges against him in exchange for information on John Ashley and his gang. “Aint no rat,” Ben Tracey said. Bob Baker stood over him and gently laid a hand on his bandaged chest and repeated his question. Tracey cursed him once more and Bob Baker leaned hard on his chest.

Tracey’s quavering scream brought nurses on the run but the two cops outside the closed door would not permit them to enter the room. One of the nurses ran off to find a doctor but she was ten minutes in returning with one in tow and by then Ben Tracey had come to see the wisdom in accepting Bob Baker’s deal and had hastily confided all he knew about John Ashley’s immediate intentions. The sheriff was already on his way out of the hospital when the doctor arrived.

Bob Baker told Elmer Padgett to round up his brought Joel and deputies L. B. Thomas and Henry Stubbs and get up to Fort Pierce as quick as they could and call on St. Lucie County Sheriff J. R. Merritt. “I’m puttin you boys in his charge. Tell him exactly what this Tracey shitbird told us,” Bob Baker said. “If he aint lyin and the Ashley bunch stopped to see their bubba in Vero tonight, J.R. can maybe catch up to them there, or maybe further along the road. They got no reason to think we know their plan, so they got no call to be in a hurry. I’m gonna go check on Annie and the back at the house. Keep me posted.”

He took the car they’d come in and Elmer took the guard deputies’ car and followed him out to the Dixie Highway. There Bob Baker turned south for West Palm Beach and Elmer wheeled north to the county sheriff’s station in Stuart where he would telephone his brother and the other two and tell them to get up to Stuart right now and he would explain things to them on the way to Fort Pierce.

Bob Baker did not telephone his wife before heading home. It had occurred to him that on finding he was not at home John Ashley might have decided to wait at the house in ambush for him. If so, he did not want to tip him off that he was coming.

The morning was darkly gray with lingering storm clouds. He turned onto the muddy road to his house and slowed to hardly more than walking speed. He studied the wooden sides of the road carefully in search of a waiting car but did not see one. He stopped at the bend in the road and regarded the house, some forty yards distant. There was a light in the parlor window but nothing looked out of the ordinary. He jacked a round in the chamber of his pump action and got out and headed for the porch. Before he got halfway there the door swung open and he raised the shotgun and had his finger on the trigger before he saw it was Annie silhouetted in the light from inside.

He looked in on the sleeping girls from their door and then softly shut it again. he made Annie sit on the couch in the parlor and tell him everything, and she did—all of it, including John Ashley’s remark about going to Key West to catch a boat to Mexico. She told him everything except about the smile John Ashley had given her. A smile that had given her ease, though she could not have explained why.

Bob Baker looked off to the hallway leading to his daughters’ room and looked at the muddy tracks across the carpet from one hallway to the other. She felt the heat of his raging eyes and said, “They didnt scare the girls, Robert. The girls were scared of the storm more than anything.”

“They brought gasoline in the house?” Bob Baker said. “And they didnt use it?”

“The little one, Hannie, he wanted to, but John wouldnt let him.”

“John?” His look was as accusatory as his tone. “Hannie?