Red Grass River (31 page)

The warden chuckled and paused to light a cigarette. It was the first tobacco smoke John Ashley had smelled since arriving at Raiford
and the aroma was so heady he felt mildly faint. Sweet Jesus, boy, he thought—the things you done without.

“There’s no escaping from the Rockpile Gang, take my word,” the warden said. “You’ll see the for yourself. But if you’re fool to try it anyway, you’ll get shot dead. I promise. I surely hope you believe me, John.”

John Ashley said he did.

And now the warden cleared his throat loudly and glanced out the window and then looked at the assistant warden and then at John Ashley and cleared his throat again. “There’s somethin more,” he said. He told John Ashley that his brothers had been reported drowned while fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. The accident had occurred in October of the previous year but prison policy prohibited giving information of any sort to inmates in isolation. He regretted that he had been denied this knowledge for so long but it simply couldnt be helped. John Ashley looked at him but said nothing. The warden studied his face for a moment and then nodded as though he’d been told something satisfactory.

The Rockpile Gang was quartered in a windowless cell block secured tight as a tomb. He shared a cell with a convict named Ray Lynn, a weathered sandy-haired Florida native from Crawfordville who was serving six years for armed robbery. The Rockpile Gang’s membership, Ray Lynn informed him, varied from six or seven men to nearly two dozen, depending on the warden and the assistant warden’s whims. “You never know what either a them fuckheads will do next. Puttin a fella in isolation right off, thats the warden’s way of dealin with dangerous convicts. Likes to try to bust they spirit first thing. But I gotta say, you was in there a lot longer than anybody else I know of.” The rockpile was for convicts the warden considered particularly high risk for escape, Ray Lynn said. “Or for fellas the underwarden just flat fuck dont like.”

The rockpile stood in a remote sideyard—a huge sprawling heap of limerock boulders brought in on a half-dozen trucks once a week. The gang was shuffled out to it on a common legchain. Only at the rockpile itself and in their cells were they ever off that chain. They broke the boulders apart with sledgehammers until no piece remained bigger than a fist. Then shoveled the broken rock into trailers to be hauled away to various construction projects. They broke and shoveled stone from sunup to sundown six-and-half days a week and always under the eyes of wall guards armed with shotguns.

Ray Lynn had been on the Rockpile Gang for nine months—longer
than anybody else except Ben Tracey who’d been on it for nearly eighteen months. On John Ashley’s first day on the rockpile, Lynn introduced him to Tracy whose grin was absent a front tooth and whose aspect suggested that nothing this world might show him would be cause for surprise. He was doing five years for second degree murder and two for attempted murder, but he’d cut almost a third off his sentence for good behavior and was due for release in another two months. He’d killed a man he caught coupling with his sister in a barn back home in Tallahassee. “He might of got her to claim it was rape and he’d been free as a bird,” Ray Lynn said in low voice later that evening in their cell. “Probly wouldnt of even gone to trial. but after beatin the sumbitch dead with a shovel, he started in on
her
too.” He paused to glance at Tracey in his cell across the way. “All told, I’d say he got him a pretty light sentence.” His voice was barely at a whisper. “Especially since the way some tell it, he’d been shagging little sister his ownself, you see, and he had just a awful shit fit when he seen her doing it with somebody else.”

John Ashley looked over at Tracey. Ray Lynn read his aspect and said, “I dont know if it’s true about the sister. It’s some say he’s a bug with all women. I dont know. I just know he’s a damn good one to have on your side when things get hairy.”

Ray Lynn was on the Rockpile Gang because he had tried to escape from a turpentine camp. “Hell, I didnt have no idea of tryin to light out when they sent me there,” he told John Ashley. “I just wanted to do the two years I had left on my three-year sentence and get out. But goddamn, you even
been
in a turpentine camp?” John Ashley said he had not, but that all he’d ever heard about them was bad. “Closest thing to living hell is all it is,” Ray Lynn said. “I thought I was though but I couldnt take that fucken place. It’s only niggers can work turpentine and not die of it and even some a them dont fare too good. You dont even
want
to hear about them turpentine camps. After three months of it I didnt give a shit if they killed me tryin to escape. I figured being dead all at once would be better than stayin there and dyin little by little. So I made my break. I was two days and nights in the swamp before the dogs caught me and run me up a tree. When the posse showed up they were so mad at having to slog through the swamp after me the captain shot me in the leg as I was startin to climb down. I hit the ground so hard it knocked the breath out of me all the way to next week. When they realized they were gonna have to carry me back through the swamp on account of I couldnt walk on the leg they’d shot they kindly got hotter about the whole thing and
sict the dogs on me for a while and then give me a good kickin besides. I mean to tell you I looked like hammered shit by the time they brung me back. They stuck me in solitary till my leg healed up some and then put me in the hole for fifteen days and then doubled my sentence and put me on the Rockpile Gang. And thats how come I still got moren four years to go instead of the three I had when I first got here.”

John Ashley came to learn that at age sixteen Ray Lynn had impregnated his sweetheart, a girl a year his junior, and willingly married her. But their families had been feuding for generations—and both families cut all ties with them. Ray Lynn could not say what the feud was about and doubted that anyone in either family knew either, not anymore, and yet the feud persisted. He worked at a lot of menial jobs to try to support wife and child but it had been rough times. Their second winter together was particularly hard and the baby contracted pneumonia and died. His wife withdrew into her grief and he could not bring her out of it. He took to drinking and keeping bad company. One day he helped a couple of buds rob a lumberyard office in Tallahassee. His share of the take was fourteen dollars. He took it home and gave it to his wife. She suspected he had stolen it and wept. He was trying to placate her when the police arrived and arrested him. One of the others had been caught and ratted out the rest. He served six months in the Leon County jail and when he went home his wife had moved away and no one knew where and he had not seen her since.

At noon every day the captain on the wall would blow his whistle and the gang would lay down their hammers and shovels and line up to receive the common leg shackle before being taken to the mess hall for dinner. On his fifth day on the rockpile and just after the captain sounded his noon whistle, John Ashley was lined up in front of a gang member named Pankin who suddenly yelled, “You aint so fucken tough!” and stabbed him in the short ribs with a shank fashioned from a spoon. John Ashley seized Pankin in a headlock and pulled him down to his knees and began beating him on the head with a melon-sized chunk of limerock. Pankin’s backup man was set to stab Ashley in the neck but Ben Tracey tripped him down and started kicking him and Ray Lynn ran up and joined in. The guards came running with their clubs to break up the fight. Pankin was unconscious for two days and woke up dimmer of wit than he’d already been. But the guards reported the incident truthfully, and the warden sent Pankin and his confederate to the hole for thirty days and then assigned them to a turpentine camp. Ben Tracey—who’d risked losing his accumulated
good time when he jumped into the fray—stood exonerated, as did Ray Lynn. John Ashley was hospitalized for ten days and then returned to the rockpile. He told Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey they had a friend for life.

The last Sunday of July was a visiting day and that afternoon he was permitted his first visitor since arriving at Raiford. His father sat across from him at a table extending the width of the room and partitioned with chickenwire. Guards stood against the walls on either side of the partition. John Ashley smiled to see that the old man’s movements were still quick and his eyes yet alert and full of fire.

“They aint overfed you, thats certain sure,” Old Joe said, assessing the leanness of him, the edged planes of his face.

“Shoulda seen when I first come out that solitary,” John Ashley said. “Looked about like a broomstick. Looked like I never in my life seen the sun. I’d get fattened up quick enough I reckon if I could get some of Ma’s cookin in me.”

“She sent a basket but they say you caint have it. She and your sisters wanted to come but I said no. I wont have them in such place as this.”

Now Joe Ashley leaned close to the screen and told John it wouldnt be long before he got a chance to slip away. Ira Goldman had found out that if you wanted to make a deal with Raiford you didnt talk to the warden, you went to see his assistant, a man named Webb. Ira was close to working something out with him.

“This underwarden sumbitch wont guarantee nothin except the chance for you to slip out,” Old Joe said. “Told Ira it’d be just him and one guard and one driver in on it.” He looked around to be certain nobody had closed to earshot distance, then leaned to the screen again. “He’s asked for the moon, this Webb. We aint settled on a sum but I do believe he’s lookin for me to retire him for life. I guess I caint rightly blame him. He aint gone have a shadow of a job after you fly this coop, thats sure.”

John Ashley said the plan would cost even more than Old Joe thought it would. “I want a fella here to get put on a road gang,” he said. He told his father about Ben Tracey’s and Ray Lynn’s help in the rockpile fight. Ben was due for release soon but they’d have to deliver Ray Lynn. “Cant do that unless he’s outside these walls,” he said.

“He took your side in a fight, hell yes we’ll deliver him,” Old Joe said.

The problem was the money. Old Joe’s profits had fallen off badly in the time John Ashley had been locked away. Bellamy had found some better beaches for landing his smuggled whiskey—down in the upper keys and in Florida Bay—and had cut down on the amount of stuff he brought though Palm Beach County by boat and truck both. “We aint been makin near as much as we used to on our deal with him,” Old Joe said.

He was still operating the whiskey camps—five of them, all told, in the pinelands and the Devil’s Garden both—and had more customers than ever. But the money from moonshine and Bellamy’s payoffs was hardly sufficient anymore to cover much else beyond operating and living expenses. The cost of distillation equipment and ingredients had gone high as the sky since Prohibition and the cops on their payroll were greedier than ever—and there were always more and more of them to pay off.

The fatten their treasury, Joe told him in a whisper, the gang had hit a couple of banks. It had been Hanford Mobley’s idea. Bill Ashley had argued against it for all the same old reasons but nobody wanted to hear it. Even Laura was in favor of the bank jobs, Old Joe said, keeping a sidewise watch on the guards. “Insisted she’d do the driving. The boys all know damn well she can outdrive any a them and shoot just as good too, so nobody argued the point. You got you a good one in her, boy. She got a right amount of sand, that girl.”

John Ashley grinned and said, “Naturalborn outlaw aint she? Just like Ma.” He did not mention that two months ago he had dreamt of seeing Laura with an army .45 on her hip and driving hatless down a sandy pinewoods road with her hair tossing in the wind. She was laughing along with the boys around her—Hanford and Clarence and Roy—and all of them with money in their fists. He’d awakened smiling.

The gang had robbed the bank in Arcadia of ten thousand dollars, Joe told him. Back in April. Hanford, Clarence and Roy did the job in under five minutes and Laura scooted the getaway car out of there like a scalded dog. And then three weeks ago they hit the bank in Wauchula. They’d heard that the money for a big cattle deal was on deposit there but it turned out they’d been misinformed—there was only seven grand in the vault. It was worth it anyway, Old Joe said, just to even the score a little with that dickhead Sheriff Poucher who’d put the arm on John at Goren’s fishcamp. “Would of been better if we could of let him know we did it,” Old Joe said, “but I didnt want to draw no more heat from the cops than we already got.” They’d not
only hit banks far from home, but on both jobs had worn bandannas over their faces as well, and none of them had been recognized.

“We figured not to do any robbing in Palm Beach,” Joe said. “Bobby Baker’s let us alone since you been gone and we didnt see no need to agitate him and get him troublin our whiskey business.” He looked around and leaned so close to the wire his nose almost touched it. “The thing is, we just got word a big construction company’s about to put more’n forty grand in the bank at Stuart. They got a contract to rebuild most of the city docks and the money’s for payrolls and operation capital and such. It’s too fat to pass up. That job’ll give us all we need to pay off this Webb. It’s worth takin a chance with Bobby.”

John Ashley asked how he knew the information about the Stuart bank was accurate.

“Your old but told us. George Doster. Remember him from the bank in Avon? That good family man talked you into leavin some of the money when you robbed him for the second time? He’s the assistant manager at the Stuart Bank now. But he’s a unhappy fella, George is. Thinks he aint gettin paid near enough for as hard as he works and all the responsibility he got. Been feelin real sorry for hisself. That’s why he come to us with a deal. Said he’d tell us just exactly when a big bunch of money would be put in the bank. Said he’d tell us on one condition.”

“You had to promise that good family man a cut,” John Ashley said.

“Ten percent he wanted,” Old Joe said. “I told him five and he better take it, and he did.”