Red grass river, p.22
Red Grass River, page 22
“You mean you aint done all them things?” she said in a tone of disappointment. Because she wasnt smiling he couldn’t be sure if she was teasing. He couldn’t see her eyes in the shadow of her hat brim.
“I expect there’s probably a bank or two I aint robbed.”
“Not yet, anyway. Desperado like you, you’ll get around to them, I’m sure.” And now she smiled out at the road and he felt himself grinning.
“If I’m such a dangerous fella and all, how come you ridin with me way out here in the big empty where any ole thing might happen?”
“Oh I’m scared to death,” she said in a voice of mock fright. “I’m just hidin it real good. And I’m ridin with you cause you takin me to get my kids.” She looked out at the road ahead for a moment and then back at him. “I never woulda figured such a bad man like you bein scared of the police.”
“Oh yes, mam, all the damn time.”
“You are not, neither.”
They rode in silence for a time and then she said: “And I wouldnt of thought a man like yourself would hold with a man beating up on a woman.”
“I didnt say I hold with it,” he said. “I said you’da made things worse for youself if you’da killed him. My daddy raised us to know there aint never a right excuse to hit a woman.” He mulled for a moment before adding, “Unless she be looking with some other fella. But thats the only reason.” He paused again, and then: “Or if she tried to steal your money. But thats it, them’s the only two reasons. No, wait—there’s one more: if she kicks your dog. For damn sure if she kicks your dog.” He twisted his face in mock hard thought. “Or if she’s late with supper on the table, almost forgot that one. Or if she wont leave you be.” He looked sidelong at her and saw that she was trying to look put out but her smile would not be restrained.
“Yeah, I know,” she said, “It aint no excuse but whatever one you got to hand.” They both laughed.
She told him Eat Tillman was a dredge operator her daddy had brought home to supper one evening after Eat had stopped to help him get his car out of the mud. It was raining hard and the shoulder of the South Shore road had given way and he daddy’s car had sunk on its right side to midway up the wheels. Eat chained the cars together and after several tried in which he’d almost got his own car stuck, he managed to tug her daddy’s car free. They put up the cars at Bobby Raines’ shop in South Bay and got in her daddy’s skiff and went down the canal a few miles and then portaged the skiff over the canalbank and into the sawgrass channel and poled a few hours more out to the Thousand Hammocks. She said Eat started making eyes at her from the minute they were introduced. Two months later they were married and living in Indiantown where Eat had inherited a small house from his daddy who managed a trading post. That was seven years ago.
“I didnt do it cause I loved him,” she said. “I liked him well enough I guess, but what I really wanted was to get away from home and, I dont know, do somethin else. Somethin…excitin.”
They were clear of the pines now and she looked off to the savannah horizon and blew a long breath. “He’s the quiet sort, old Eat. Dont never get drunk and hardly ever raises his voice and never hit me but a few times and never once used his fist. Not till this last time, and I guess any man would at least use his fist if you took a frying pan to his head. The thing is, what he most likes to do when he aint out workin on the dredge is sit home and play his harmonica. Lord.” She rolled her eyes.
About seven months ago she’d finally got to where she couldn’t stand the boredom of Eat Tillman another day. She packed a bindle and took her shotgun and a few tools and headed off in a skiff to live in her family’s house in the Thousand Hammocks. Her parents had left it to her when her daddy got his foot bit by a gator and was left too crippled to make his living by taking hides anymore. They had moved back up to Georgia to live with kin on a farm. She’d long ago learned to hunt and trap from her daddy and she got along just fine on her own, getting whatever money she needed by selling hides every now and then to Milt Jessup’s store in Jupiter or, lately, to Dolan’s in Salerno, which was worth the longer trip because she could usually get a better price. She didnt say anything about her brother in the penitentiary and John Ashley didnt ask.
Eat didnt come looking for her. “I guess he was as glad I was gone as I was,” she said. The kids were five and four by then and she figured he could take care of them well enough. “I anyway didnt think I’d miss em all that much, truth to tell. And I didnt, not for the longest time, not till about last month. I asked Eat for em but he said no and so I stewed about it for a time and then last week I went and tried to take them anyway and thats when we had the fight.”
She stared out at the vista of scrub and grass. “I guess I miss em,” she said. “I mean, all of a sudden I come to have this feelin of somethin missin real bad and must be it’s them because it sure’s hell not him.” She paused and took out a pipe and tin of tobacco and packed the bowl and got it burning with the fourth match and puffed on it a few times and then looked over at John Ashley and said, “You know, I dont usually talk this much.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said—and they both grinned.
The sun was huge and pale and only slightly past its meridian when they hove into Indiantown, a hamlet sprung up around a longtime trading post. It was composed of a combination store, a grocery, a small tannery hung with drying hides of every description, a smokehouse, several boathouses, a small cafe, a few houses scattered near and about in the meager shade of scrawny oaks. A trio of men in widebrimmed fisherman’s hats stood smoking and drinking beer in front of the cafe and turned away from their conversation to watch them go by.
The air was cast in a thin haze of smoke. On the far side of the canal stood a cluster of Indian chickees—raised platform huts with open sides and roofs of palmetto fronds—and a row of dugouts along the bank where an Indian in white shirtdress and a black bowler was gutting a deer hung on a gumbo limbo branch. She directed John Ashley to drive on for another quarter-mile until he came to an abutting road and then turn onto it. The road was of raised rock and sank and ran through a stretch of marshland flanked by high pines. Then they were out of the trees again and a half-mile farther on arrived at a small shadeless house with a railed porch.
He turned into the sandy yard and shut off the motor. One of the porch posts bore the skin and rattles of a diamondback more than six feet long. A rusting old landaulet of uncertain make without canopy or windscreen stood just off the porch. Behind the house the pale green savannah extended flat as a carpet to the horizons west and south.
The children were playing in a dirt patch alongside the landaulet, the boy and his younger sister both wearing only short pants and digging with spoons and tin bowls and their faces and limbs smeared with mud. For a moment they sat gaping at the woman who stepped out of the car and smiled broadly and opened her arms wide to them. John Ashley slouched behind the wheel and rolled a cigarette. As the woman stepped toward them the children scrambled to their feet and ran around the side of the house, the boy yelling “Pa! Pa!” and the girl at his heels glancing back fearfully over her shoulder.
“No!” the woman called. “You get back here, Billy! I’m your mother, dammit!”
John Ashley lit his cigarette and reflected that unrequited affection was for certain sure one of life’s most melancholy circumstances. As the woman started after the kids, a man appeared from around the other corner of the house and she looked over and saw him and stopped as short as if she’d hit the end of a leash. The man was very large and his sleeves were rolled and his arms were blood to the elbow. He held a skinning knife in one hand and a raw length of indigo snakeskin in the other.
John Ashley came upright in the car seat. The man looked unhappy to see this woman who was yet his wife. He tossed the snakeskin onto the porch and wiped the knife on his pant leg and slipped it into a belt sheath. He glanced at John Ashley in the roadster and then shambled over to the woman and stood before her with his hands on his hips and said something to her that John Ashley couldn’t make out.
He reached under the seat and withdrew the .44 Colt and checked the loads and slipped the pistol into his waistband at the small of his back. He got out of the car and closed the door and stood leaning against it with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. The man looked at him again and then said to the woman, “I done tole you and tole you—they stayin with me. Hell, girl, you dont really want them except I do.”
“They’re my children too, Eat,” she said, her voice strained.
The man turned to the front door and called, “Billy! Rayette! Come on out here.”
The two kids came in view behind the screen door and hesitated, and then the boy pushed it open and he and his sister stepped out on the porch. “You kids,” the man said, “your momma’s still wanting you to go with her. Either of you changed you mind and wanna go, you can. Do you? Either you?”
Both kids shook their heads and the man said, “You gotta says yes you do or no you dont. Say it so she can hear.”
“No,” the boy said, glowering at his mother. He looked at his sister and nudged her and she said, “I dont wanna go with her.”
“All right,” the man said. “Get back inside.” The kids disappeared into the interior darkness. The man looked at the woman and turned up his palms. “I guess it aint nothin else to say, is there? Why dont you just quit all this anymore and go on and leave us be?”
“I want them kids, Eat.” Her voice was drawn to an edge. She smacked her fists on her thighs. She turned now to John Ashley who thought she looked becrazed. He was suddenly sorry he’d come out here, but there was nothing to do now but see the thing through. He stepped forward and said, “Look here Mister Tillman, everybody knows kids ought be with their momma. It’s the most natural—”
“Who the hell are you?” Eat Tillman asked, his voice utterly absent the placatory tone he’d used with his wife.
“I’m a friend of Laura’s come to help her take her children home.”
“They are home, hoss, not that it’s any your business.”
“I aint leave without them kids, Eat,” Laura said. “Not this time.”
“You sure’s hell not leavin with em,” Tillman said, looking from John Ashley to her and back to Ashley.
“You talk like some kinda hardcase,” John Ashley said. “You a hardcase, mister?” He noted now how very large Eat Tillman’s hands were, noted their scars and sizable knuckles.
“I’m all I need to be to deal with you.”
“You fixin to deal with me with that skinner?” John Ashley said, gesturing at the knife Tillman wore on his belt.
They were slowly sidestepping further out into the yard where they would have more room. Tillman withdrew the knife and half-turned and threw it end over end to impale quivering into the porch pole opposite the one with the rattlerskin.
“I don’t need no weapon,” Tillman said. “Not for you.”
John Ashley reached around behind him and brought out the Colt. Tillman’s eyes narrowed and his mouth went tight and he nodded as though confirming his own suspicions that this stranger was not a man to be trusted. For an instant John Ashley considered holding him at gunpoint while the woman snatched up the kids. How much easier it would be that way. Then he turned and held the pistol out to Laura and said, “Hold this. That’s all you do with it, hear? Just hold it.” Then he took the glass eye out of its socket and handed it to her too. “And this while you at it.” For a moment she stared at the eye in her palm like it was some object of rare imagination, and then smiled at him and put it in her overalls pocket.
He turned to Eat Tillman and said, “Winner says who gets the kids.”
Tillman was gaping at the empty eyesocket in John Ashley’s head. “I dont know I can fight a man got but one eye,” he said. “Dont seem fittin.”
“How fittin’s it gonna seem to you when that one-eyed man stomps your sorry ass whether you fight back or not?” John Ashley said.
Tillman shook his head resignedly. “All right, mister, suit yourself,” he said. He started to take off his shirt and John Ashley hooked him hard to the belly and crossed him to the jaw. The man staggered back a few steps but his eyes held their focus. His thick belly was firm as a shipping-sack of sugar and his jaw stung John Ashley’s hand. Well hell, John Ashley thought. And knew he was in for some pain.
Fifteen minutes later his fact felt overlarge and numb and his vision was blurred and every huffing breath ached in his ribs. He had thrown up his breakfast and had to spit blood constantly to keep from choking on it. Now Eat Tillman hit him in the face again and again he fell down. He saw the blue sky whirl and he rolled over and pushed up on hands and knees and rested a moment. He tasted mud and blood. The first time Tillman put him down, the man had kicked him even as he tried to get up and Laura had cursed her husband and shrieked for him to fight fair goddammit. John Ashley had told her to shut up. But Tillman had not kicked him again.
John Ashley stood up and swayed and wiped blood from his good eye. Tillman waited with fists ready, showing one swollen eye and bloated lips and an ear outsized and purple. But he could still see clearly and looked hale in contrast to John Ashley. He moved with the quickness of a truly dangerous big man.
John Ashley charged with his head down and grabbed him about the waist and tried to pull him off his feet, hoping to straddle him, pin his arms with his knees and then punch him until he couldnt punch anymore. But Tillman stood fast and hooked him hard with left and right to the ribs and kidneys and then braced himself and brought his knee up hard and John Ashley went sprawling.
He got to hands and knees and then set one foot on the ground and rested with an arm on the raised knee. And now heard Laura crying and wanted to tell her to stop it but the effort of speech was too great to muster. He tried to stand and his head spun and he fell over on his side. And then hacking and gasping began the struggle to rise again.
A gunshot shook the air and John Ashley flinched on all fours and looked up to see Laura with her arms stretched in front of her and holding the revolver in both hands and pointed at Eat Tillman. She was crying and Eat Tillman’s hands hung at his sides and he was staring at her and looking very tired. “I’ll put the next one in your teeth.” she told him. She snuffled hard.
“You gone have to shoot me you want them kids,” Eat Tillman said in a voice now deeply nasal.
“Just dont you hit him anymore,” she said. She looked at John Ashley and said, “Get on up and kick him in the balls if you want.”
John Ashley spat blood and sat back up his heels with his hands on his thighs. He slowly shook his head. He could not stand by himself, never mind kick anyone. She sidled over to him and held a hand to him. “Come on, baby,” she said.
John Ashley took her hand and she helped him to his feet. With an arm about each other they shuffled to the car and she helped him get in on the passenger side. Then she went around and got in behind the wheel and kept the pistol on Eat as she held out the crank to him and told him to turn the motor. He did it and the engine fired up and he handed the crank back to her and stepped away from the car.
John Ashley said, “I dont think it’s anymore need of that gun, do you?” but so battered was his mouth that she did not understand what he said and he had to repeat it before she nodded and laid the pistol on the seat.
As she backed the car around in the yard John Ashley saw the children come out of the house and go to their daddy and each one hug tightly to one of his legs while he stroked their heads and told them it was all right, there was nothing to cry about, not anymore.
Then they were rattling down the road and past the pines and then came to the crossroads and turned toward Indiantown and sent up a flutter of chickens that had wandered out from a nearby yard. As they went through the hamlet they once again drew stares. And then they were down the road and around the bend and Indiantown fell away behind them.
“Eye,” he said, and held out his hand. She gave him the glass eye and he fitted it in place and then put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes and thought of nothing at all.
After they’d driven in silence for a time she pulled over one the shoulder and stopped the car. He sat up and saw but the road ahead and behind and boundless blue sky and nothing else to see in the world but open prairie and distant hammocks and the bluegreen horizon shimmering hazily in the rising heat like a world badly imagined.
She slid across the seat and up against him and hugged his neck and kissed his battered face. He flinched and her face drew with concern and she kissed him more softly. He said he was sorry he didnt get her children back. She said she wasnt. She said that while he was fighting for her she’d come to understand that what she’d been missing wasnt the children at all but something she hadnt even known existed. What it was she’d been missing in her life was him.
She straddled him on the seat and kissed him again and then stroked his hair and looked down into his one-eyed face. Her eyes bespoke a tenderness beyond any he’d ever known. He saw then for the first time that her eyes were green. And that one of them held a tiny gold quarter-moon.
FIFTEEN
The Liars Club
LORDY, THE STORIES WE HEARD ABOUT JOHN AND LAURA! THE kinda stories no one could know were true or not except for the two of them their ownselfs. Stories about the sort of things they’d do in the house Laura was give by her daddy. They say it was way down in the Devil’s Garden, that house, down in the Thousand Hammocks where there’s nothin for miles around but sawgrass and snakes and gators, hooty owls and skeeters and frogs ranging on your ears all the night long. Nights out there just black as blindness. It wasnt any way at all to get within a mile of that house but by the twisty sawgrass channels out there where the grass was just shy of sufficient height to hide you. By the time you’d get close enough to see just a tiny bit of the house through the highground pines, a lookout up in the trees would of had you in his gunsight for a half-an-hour. They say there was getaway sawgrass channels all around that hammock that nobody but Laura knew about and the only one she ever told about them was John Ashley. It was probly the best hideout house John Ashley ever had. Them wild-ass lovebirds didnt live out there all the time, only when they wanted to be alone for a few days and nights way off where there wasnt no law of man nor God to keep em from doin whatever they felt like as loud as they felt like. Ever now and then some hunter or frogger would claim to’ve been out in that part of the glades of an early evening and from a mile away heard em howling like a couple of painters. We heard that when they first moved into the sidehouse on the Twin Oaks property Old Joe couldnt stand the ruckus they made when they went at it late at night. He said if they were going to carry on so awful loud they could damn well do it someplace where they wouldn’t keep everybody awake by it. The Ashleys liked Laura real well and everybody in the family was glad John had found him a true love and all, but we heard the whole family was bad to joke about the caterwauling John and Laura’d make out in the sidehouse.
