Free Red Grass River by James Carlos Blake Page A

either his increasing yearning for home.
    He often went fishing from the beach in the afternoons and sometimes thought of Bobby Baker who’d shown him the best places in the Indian River for trout and how to read the weather—taught him that when you saw sand sharks jumping between dawn and sunrise you could look for sporadic southwest winds in about five or six hours, that when the whip rays jumped in the morning you knew a northwester would soon hit and rough up and silt the water, but when the morning cobwebs were thicker than usual you could bet on good weather for fishing out on the salt.
    John Ashley felt almost friendly toward Bobby Baker in his recollections. He had always considered him a good old boy who seemed to have no lack of grit—as he’d proved on such occasions as the first-fight with his brother Bob and the attempt to arrest them that night at the waycamp, the night he’d sent him home on one leg.
    But as he cast into the gentle surf one afternoon it occurred to him that Bobby Baker wasn’t likely to forget the humiliations of Julie Morrell and being stripped of his gun and leg. It struck him and Bobby might evermore seek to get even for those public humblings. The notion that Bobby might even be pleased to see him dead came quite suddenly and made him at once melancholic and angry.
    These feelings confused him and would not dismiss. They persisted for the next several weeks and because he could not say why he felt as he did he became even more nervous and irritable. He twice in one week badly battered troublesome patrons he could easily have handled without letting blood. Aunt July gave him a reprimanding look in the first instance and a severe rebuke after the second, reminding him that she needed no additional difficulties with the police or from some young muckraker’s righteous journalistic denunciations of the whoring trade. He had thought that the fights might soothe his gloomy agitations but they did not. He ached for an action he could not name.
    One morning just a few days after Aunt July’s scolding he was walking by a bank a block removed from the Strand and chanced to look into the lobby just as a customer was receiving money at a teller’s window. He paused and watched the man tally the bills and then smile and say something to the teller who seemed a sulky young man and whoshowed not a hint of smile in return but simply nodded. The customer folded the money and put it in his coat and came out and gave John Ashley a polite smile in passing. John Ashley glanced at the bulge in the man’s coat pocket and then watched him cross the street and go into a restaurant. Then he looked back into the bank for a long moment, at the polished wood floor gleaming against the yellow sunlight slanting through the windows. He made his way back to the house by a slow roundabout route, noting carefully the lay of every street and alley as he went, stopping in at a pharmacy to buy a small package of gauze and a roll of adhesive tape. By the time he was back at the house his melancholy had lifted, his nervousness dissipated like blown smoke.
    Early the next morning after the house had turned out its last patron of the night and everyone had gone to bed and only the domestics were moving about at their housekeeping and cooking duties, he cleaned his pistol at the small table by his bedside window and then loaded it. He dressed in his white suit and from his suitcase withdrew a floppy-brimmed black felt hat and pair of overalls no one in the house had ever seen and he put them in a large paper sack together with the pistol and the gauze and the roll of tape. He descended the stairs quietly and slipped out the back door and went to the tool shed at the rear of the property. The day was cold enough to show his breath. In the shed he emptied the sack and changed from his white suit into the overalls and tucked his long hair up into the hat. He had let his hair grow nearly to his shoulders because several of the