Red Grass River (32 page)

They grinned. And then as if they’d both had the same thought at the same time, their grins faded and they stared at each other without expression and Old Joe sat back. John felt his chest tighten as he said, “You aint had much to say about Frank and Ed.”

Old Joe looked off for a moment. Then told him flatly his brothers had drowned nearly two years ago on a whiskey run when they got caught in a had storm out on the Gulf Stream. “I’m sorry to tell you this way, boy, and I’m sorry to tell you so long after the fact of it. Your Ma was near distracted by it. Didnt hardly say a word for the better part of three months. Just sat out on the porch in her rocker and looked out at nothin. It were hard on her when Bob got killed, but that was somethin she’d pretty much been expectin from the time he was a boy and she saw how nobody could tell him nothin and how reckless he was. Boys like Bob dont never get to be old men and she knew it. But Frank and Ed, well, they was rough boys but they was
good to mind me and her, they wasnt reckless. And it bein the both of them at once, well…it went hard on her.”

He told John that just nine days before he died Frank had asked Jenny to marry him and she’d said yes. When she got the bad news she shut herself up in her parents’ home for nearly two months in her grief and when she emerged she was wasted and pale and carried herself like an old woman. She had taken a train for Charleston where her family had kin and she had not returned nor was expected to. As for Rita the Breed, she’d simply vanished. One story held that she’d taken up with some mean Indian who lived on the far side of Okeechobee and they hadnt been together three weeks before they had a bad fight and he killed her. Another rumor said she’d gone to Apalachicola and was working in a whorehouse. Nobody knew.

Joe Ashley kept his eyes away from his son’s as he said these things, and John knew it had been harder on the old man than on anyone else, even Ma. Now Old Joe swallowed hard and snorted and narrowed his eyes as he looked at John. “This warden here, he told Ira you couldnt be told about Frank and Ed cause you was in isolation. Prison policy, he said. Sorry bastard. I’d like to show him what I think of his fucken
policy
. Anyhow, I’m truly sorry, boy that—”

“Listen, Daddy,” John Ashley said, “it’s somethin I got to say.” He said it so softly that Old Joe knew what would fellow was bad. He knew his boys, knew their tones. He put his ear close to the screen.

John Ashley recounted for his father his dream of Frank and Ed, a dream he’d had but once and yet recalled as vividly as if he’d awakened from it a minute ago. When he was done with the telling his chest was tight, his voice strained. Old Joe eased back from the screen and stared at him. His face looked carved of limerock.

“It wasnt but a dream,” John Ashley said, “but—”

Old Joe shushed him with a raised hand. “Dont say nother word.” He told him to keep out of trouble and stay ready. Then took his leave.

Ben Tracey had no visitor that day. The story around the yard was that the only visitor he’d ever had was his sister who came but once. During his fourth month a Raiford she showed up to let him see for himself the ruin he’d made of her face with the shovel. Even the most hardened cons who’d looked on her were moved to pity. She made Ben Tracey look at her face and cursed him to hell and then broke into tears and fled the room. Back in the block Tracey joked that if he’d had to look at her a minute longer he would’ve horked his dinner. None of the cons who’d seen his sorrowed sister laughed. Most of
them hated Ben Tracey. But they feared him even more and so held their opinion mute.

Ray Lynn received no visitor that day nor any other.

A hot August night in Miami. The air unmoving, congealed with humidity. A cat’s-eye moon in a hazy sky holding but distant promise of rain and few stars to be seen. The Hardieville streets poorly lighted and sparsely trafficked this midweek eve
.

Two men emerge from the front door of The High Tider—formerly The Purple Duck owned and operated by Miss Catherine Mays who’d departed for California shortly after her fiancé Gordon Blue had been found dead in the Miami River. The men stroll down the street and turn at the end of the block and approach a parked roadster. One chuckles at something the other says. As they pass under a streetlamp their faces are for the moment clearly exposed, the pockmarked aspect of Alton Davis and the chin-scarred visage of James White. Davis cranks the motor to life and settles himself behind the wheel. White lights a cigarette. Davis stares at a pair of young couples going down the street a block away with their arms about each other and one of the boys fondling his girl’s ass. Now two men step from the shadows and into the hazy light of the streetlamp and stand directly before the car and each of them aims a pair of .45 automatics at the two men through the windshield. James White’s mouth sags open and the cigarette drops burning from his lips as he looks on Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews grinning behind the guns and he wonders what it feels like to be shot and he wants to turn to Davis but cannot and only manages to say, “Alton, shit…” and Davis turns to him and does an almost comic double-take back to the men holding guns on them and he makes a low grave sound as he grabs for his shoulder-holstered revolver knowing he will never touch it and he doesn’t for in that instant Mobley and Matthews start squeezing off rounds as fast as they can work the triggers
.

The windshield flies apart and Davis and White jerk and twitch and lurch like dire epileptics and blood jumps from their heads and faces and several bullets glance off the roadster and ricochet off the building across the street and one stray round makes a starburst hole in a shop window and almost as abruptly as it began the rapidfire gunblasting ceases, all thirty-two rounds of the four Colts spent. In the jaundiced haze of gunsmoke under the streetlamp Roy Matthews steps around to the passenger side and spits in James White’s ruined face uptilted against the car door. Then the shooters are gone in the darkness
.

Only now do heads cautiously appear at some of the doorways to peek out at the death car. Blood runs in a thin line from under the driver’s door and pools darkly in the street as though the automobile itself has suffered
mortal wound. Only now do the girls on the street who watched the whole thing in open-mouthed shock begin a hysterical wailing. And not until this moment does one of the young men with them realize he has pissed in his pants
.

In a late hour of the same night
…

Bo Stokes comes out of a restaurant at the north end of Biscayne Boulevard where he has dined on a superbly broiled red snapper and his thoughts now are of a particular woman he is to meet at the McAllister Hotel. She is lean and lovely with firm breasts and a pubic bush soft as a Persian kitten. He feels himself heavy in his loins as he walks along this northern portion of boulevard lit only by the narrow moon and the lights from the train depot across the street. He glances skyward to check for possibility of rain and sees none
.

A car draws up to the curb alongside and a voice calls, “Hey, Bo, wait up! Look here who wants to meet you, man
.”

He stoops slightly to look into the coupé and sees a man behind the wheel and a woman sitting by the passenger window and both silhouetted against the light from the depot. “Who’s that?” he says
.

“
It’s me, man,” the driver says. “Look here who wants to meet you.” A bare female arm extends from the interior darkness and the fingers flutter in greeting and then quickly withdraw as the woman giggles
.

Bo Stokes laughs and steps up to the car and leans one arm against the car roof and peers into the gloomy interior and still cannot make out the driver’s face nor the woman’s. “Who the hell is it?” he says
.

“
Me, man,” the driver says. “This here’s Wanda. She been wanting to meet you. She’s seen you around, you know, at the Taft. She knows Nelson. Been telling him she wants to meet you
.”

“
She has, huh?” Bo Stokes says. He grins at the woman’s silhouette, “You told Nels you wanna meet me, huh?
”

The woman nods and giggles. “Wanda, meet Bo,” the driver says. “Bo, meet Wanda.” She slides over closer to the driver and pats the seat beside her
.

“
Well now darlin,” Bo Stokes says. He opens the car door and crowds his bulk onto the seat and slides an arm around the woman’s shoulders and his hand closes on her thigh and the woman puts her hand to the back of his neck and he glances at the driver and even in the dim light sees now that he does not know him and he starts to draw back but the woman locks both arms hard around his neck and pulls him against her and the driver grabs him by the coat lapel and holds him fast and presses a pistol up under his chin and before Bo Stokes can gain the leverage to break free, before he can even believe this is happening to him—he who fought Jack Dempsey almost
even for two rounds and scored several good shots before the Mauler caught him with a right hook that brought the stellar sky down on his head—he sees an explosion of stars to surpass all imagination and where the bullet goes through the car roof it leaves a dark viscid smear
.

Laura Upthegrove pulls the door shut as Clarence Middleton wheels the car into the street and if anybody along the boulevard heard the pistol report there is no sign of it
.

“
This dress is just ruint,” Laura says as Clarence makes a right turn at the corner and heads around the block. She holds the heavy press of the dead man to her like a lover so that any who sees them might take them for such. She feels the blood seeping warmly over her breasts and down her belly, smells it ripe through the scent of cordite. “Good thing I never did like it worth a damn
.”

Clarence drives back onto the boulevard and heads north. In another hour he will be dropping Bo Stokes’ mortal remains in a canal miles off the main highway and fourteen feet deep and swarming with gators
.

Near midnight of yet the same evening
…

Nelson Bellamy is lying supine and fondling the heavy breasts of the naked woman mounted on him and rolling her hips with expert technique. The bedside lamp is lit but the woman has draped Bellamy’s undershirt over it to effect a more subdued cast of light. So engrossed are the lovers in what they are doing—and so loud is the music booming through the open window from the dance pavilion next door—that neither hears the small clack of the doorlock Joe Ashley has opened with a ring of keys appropriated from a downstairs maid. He is masked with a bandanna and holds a shotgun with cut-down barrels and the stock reduced to a pistolgrip
.

They had pulled up their masks and entered the Taft Hotel—he and Albert Miller—through the kitchen. Albert Miller put a pistol to a cook’s head and asked which room was Nelson Bellamy’s and the man said 302 without hesitation and they could see he was too frightened to be lying. Just then a maid came in from the adjoining linen room and at the sight of the key ring on her waist Old Joe smiled and said the Good Lord was making it all too easy. Albert Miller remained downstairs to hold the cooks in place as well as any other who might come to the kitchen in the interim. On the third floor landing Old Joe came on a pair of guards playing rummy, men so long without challenge they’d grown lax and dull and they sat with their cards in their hands and one asked in raised voice to be heard over the music who he was. Joe Ashley brought the cutoff up from behind his leg and cocked both hammers and the guards went still and mute. He disarmed each of them in his turn and ordered one to lie on the floor and the other to use cords off the
window curtains to bind his partner’s hands tightly behind him and tie his feet together. Joe then clubbed the untied man in the back of the head with the muzzle of the sawed-off and the man fell to his knees and clutched his head and swore vehemently and said, “What the fuck you do that for?” He started to get up and turn around and Joe hit him again, harder, squarely atop his crown. The man fell on his side and gripped the top of his head with both hands and rocked on the floor and wept with the pain and swore heatedly. Old Joe gaped and said, “Son of a bitch.” And once more hit the man in the head with the shotgun—this time behind the ear—and this time the man fell still. Blood ran in a thin rivulet from his hair and stained the carpet under his head. “Shit man, you killed him,” the tied man said. Old Joe told him to shut up. He knelt beside the bleeding man and checked his pulse at his throat and felt that he was still alive. He took the cords off another window curtain and tied the unconscious man tightly hand and foot. Then checked the first man’s bonds and found that they been left just loose enough that the men might with effort work himself free, and so he tightened them. He dragged the unconscious man around and using their belts tied the two men together back to back, each man’s hands belted to the other’s feet. He pulled off their shoes and socks and balled the socks and stuffed a pair into each man’s mouth. He studied his handiwork and picked up his shotgun and saw the conscious one watching him:

“
You try callin out or you make a fuss any other way before I come back though, I promise you’ll die
.”

Now he gently pushes the door open and the hallway light falls across the bed within. The girl ceases her pelvic gyration to look over her shoulder and she sees a masked man with a wild tangle of white hair coming toward her with darkcircled eyes glowing like coalfires in a nightwind. He motions her away and she scrabbles off the bed and against the wall where she huddles with her arms crossed over her breasts. Bellamy rises on his elbows, his cock yet upright and gleaming, and sees a shotgun muzzle two inches from his face and at the far end of the shortened barrel and the extended left arm holding it the maniacally grinning face of Joe Ashley, his bandanna mask pulled down around his neck so the man might see clearly the agent of his death. Bellamy’s erection folds
.