Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (1) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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all published instalments]

By Roger Owens

[Editor’s Note; “A Killing on a Bridge” is Roger Owens’ third novel, after “Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel” and “Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café,” which he self-published. While he’s seeking a commercial publisher for “A Killing on a Bridge,” we will be serializing it here, in instalments of approximately 2,000 words each. The novel has almost 180,000 words, so we expect to post about 90 instalments, at the rate of around two a week. So stick around. And please leave comments as we proceed, to tell us how we’re doing. Thank you much!]

Prologue

All Red Dedge wants is to run his farm, poach a little timber from the swamps, and marry Lola Bostick. But when his brother Guy tangles with the notorious Ashley Gang by running moonshine in their territory and is severely injured, his plans hit a roadblock. The Ashley Gang stands between him and his goals, but he has blood in his eye and he is not the kind of man to back down. He vows to see every one of them dead, or die trying. Their final confrontation comes on November 1, 1924, on the Saint Sebastian River Bridge.


April 1922

1910 Ford Model T 115 Cab-Top

Amion William Dedge, known as “Red” to his friends, peered anxiously through the canted windshield on the 1910 Ford Model T 115 cab-top he drove as the rain slammed down, seeking to steer the truck between the ditches.
    It didn’t help that the load of cypress logs in the back was practically dragging in the puddles it was so heavy, and the poor old Hoss—what he called the truck—was slewing every which’a way as the tires bit into the sucking mud. He knew the road from Blue Cypress swamp to the railroad well, but even with the windshield open at the bottom it kept fogging up. The side curtains that might have kept him from getting soaked quite so bad had rotted away years back.
    He’d been on the way to the village known as Vero for almost two hours, so it couldn’t be much farther. He had to lean out the side every few minutes, looking sharp to keep from going off into the weeds. If he run off the road he’d be stuck here until he could walk for help, and by then his hard-earned load of logs would sure as shootin’ be gone, stolen.
    The load was lumber he and his brother Guy had hand-cut in the swamps surrounding Blue Cypress Lake, and he was trucking it to the railroad to sell to Henry Flagler’s steam engines. Or, more precisely, the crooked railroad bulls who smuggled contraband on Henry’s trains. The logs and boards would go north for the furniture manufactories in Massachusetts and Connecticut, to be turned into the high-quality furniture so in demand in the North. Some might be sold back as far south as Atlanta or Savannah. Some might go west to Memphis or Chicago. He wouldn’t never set on any of it, that was for sure and for certain.
    Red didn’t care none about fancy furniture; all he wanted was the cash money the railroad men paid for his lumber. They paid the most for clear-cut boards and planks, which they prized for the colors that cypress took on as it aged. Whole logs like his current load earned nearly as much, and it had been raining so badly the last couple days he and Guy had forsworn cutting them in the downpour. With plenty of forswearing for the God damned rain, they had decided to haul them whole. This allowed them to haul more weight per load, but Red was beginning to regret that decision, as the nearly bald, skinny-assed tires on the old truck bit deeper into the mud with every bend in the road.
    Red wished he could roll a cigarette, but he was truly inept at it, and it was far too wet.
    Guy had stayed back at the cutting, their own secret place in the swamp where they did their personal business, which included the lumber operation as well as a small moonshine still, mainly for their own use. They had built a tiny shack, just a lean-to really, that barely kept off the rain, and didn’t stop the mosquitoes and biting flies one bit.

Nobody was the wiser

They had a system. Once the weeding, plowing and planting at their farm in Gifford was done, in late spring they would sneak about to get their supplies, so nobody was the wiser about their plans, or at least the timing of them. Once stocked up, they would head off for the swamps late of an evening, making sure no one followed.
    Their favorite time was a Saturday night, when most menfolk they knew—or knew them—would have been drinkin’ right reg’lar, and were in no condition to notice their departure, let alone do anything about it. The fact they’d been drinkin’ right reg’lar too made no never mind, he thought. They were used to working, and driving, drunk. Matter of fact, they were right used to doing pretty much everything drunk. Most men they knew, other than the preachers, were the same. Most of the womenfolk didn’t care for that much, but then that’s just how the womenfolk were.
    Neither Red nor Guy had wives as yet, but there was one gal, Lola Bostick, he’d seen giving him the eye at a dance or two, what the old folks called a “hoe-down,” on account of the farmers put their hoes down and took to dancing. These days, such were more generally called “socials,” but he reckoned it didn’t matter much what you called ’em.
    Folks drank, fiddles played, people danced, couples got together or broke up, and fistfights settled scores long awaiting settling. Might have been a fence busted down by a mule last season, when the mule’s owner should’a done the fixin’ but didn’t. Might have been over a pig done got in another man’s garden and wound up on that man’s table. But it was usually over money or women, and as far as Red Dedge was concerned, wasn’t nothin’ much worth fightin’ over more than money and women.
    When Guy and Red got to the cutting, they would take to chopping down middling-sized cypress trees, nothing a man couldn’t reach around easy, as with only the two of them they couldn’t handle anything larger. After several days they would have a tidy pile of logs, and generally they would take the saw table from the bed of the truck and jack the back of the truck up and set it on a cypress stump. Then they’d put a drive strap from the back wheel to the saw drive wheel and commence to cutting boards and planks. They’d grown up doing this in North Florida and Georgia and knew it so well they could do it blind drunk, in the dark.
    Even the scrap went in the truck bed, to be sold as fuel for the boilers on Mr. Flagler’s trains. Them trains guzzled coal and wood like a drunk guzzled cheap whiskey, and in his mind, it was just one more way for poor boys to make some cash money. Times was tough. It would be a couple months before the okra, tomatoes and cane came in, a few years before the pineapples, and a pocket with hard money a’jinglin’ in it was a lucky pocket indeed.

They had a system for that too

When it came time to haul their cuttings, they had a system for that, too. One would stay at the clearing, as most of their timber was still there when they began hauling loads of it east to Vero. The other, usually Red, would drive the first loads to their hiding place near the mile marker 220, just a bit north of the village, and stash it in the woods where they hoped no one would find and steal it.
    When there was more timber to steal over by Vero than at the cutting, they would both go and then one would stay there to guard it. They’d only been hit by thieves once, but it had cost them near-about half a load of good clear cypress planks, that would have put another hundred greenbacks in their pockets. They’d had to move their cutting then, and so far, the new one had served them for over a year with no losses.
    He knew another feller, Warren Teele Zeuch, had his own cache a bit further south down the line, but Red and War T. had come to an understanding. War and his partner Floyd Kimball had been in the act of hiding their load when Guy and Red had happened down the tracks and seen them piling brush over their trailhead. Floyd had pulled a pistol but War held his arm back, and just nodded in their direction.
    “A.W., Guy,” War said, nodding. Red had a hand on Guy’s shoulder as well. Guy was older by two years but was more reckless and had less sense than Red, everybody said so. Red, or A.W. as he was sometimes known, nodded along, and while he didn’t smile, he didn’t frown neither.

Colt Peacemaker

    That old Colt Peacemaker Floyd held was beat up but would damn sure shoot; everybody knowed as how Floyd Kimball was a crack shot, too. And a damned hot-head, especially drunk, which he usually was.
    “War T., Floyd.” Red chewed a piece of cane he’d cut, then spit out the sweet fiber onto the railroad bed. The clinkers on the tracks, the rail ties, and the bushes that lined them, were all dusted with the black soot from the train smokestacks. Nasty stuff that got on everything.
    It was early in the season but already hot, and the cicadas were screaming in the brush loud enough to wake the dead.
    “Looks like y’all got a enterprise a’goin, same as us.”
    Floyd’s face scrunched up all mean-like. “What you sayin’, ‘same as you’?” The idea that the son of William Henry Kimball was the same as any cracker-ass who came along didn’t set well with him at all, although a stranger couldn’t have told a lick of difference between the four of them on a bet.
    Amion William stood well over six feet, narrow in the waist and broad in the shoulder, but folks joked that when he turned sideways you couldn’t see him no more. Guy was shorter but blockier, with black hair instead of the scarlet shock already fading away from Red’s brow.

All wore the same drab

    War Zeuch had his daddy’s solid frame and dark hair, while Floyd had a round face and would probably run to fat later, like his pa. Not one would have passed for anything but near-starving in any real town. All wore the same drab work pants, worn-out cotton shirts and shit-kicker farm boots, and all were caught in that historical gap between suspenders and belts, so all wore both. If pressed, they would all have claimed it to be nothing less than prudent, if’n a fellow had the sense not to have his pants fall down in front of the womenfolks, to wear “braces and belt.” them being skinny as the steel rails they stood by.
    “I mean what I mean, Floyd, an’ you know it. I seen you haulin’ lumber out the Blue, and don’t tell me you ain’t seen me just as plain. Done drove through War’s daddy’s orange grove to get here, just like you. So’s the hard-asses that hide out in the breaks don’t come ’round snitchin’ our timber, what we worked our butts off for, just like you. Now it ’curs to me we got a problem, but it don’t need to be, if’n we can work it out all fair-like.”
    Floyd made to step forward, but War threw him in a head lock and held him there, thrashing and squealing like a pig. “What you mean problem?”
    Floyd squalled. “Only problem we got is you messin’ ’round our property, and we can fix that real quick!” He began to lift the Colt and Red’s hand went to his back, where his own hog leg was stuck in his belt.
    War T. popped Floyd a good one in the eye and threw him down, the Colt now in his hand and pointed straight down. “Now A.W., he don’t mean nothin’ by it, he’s just been drinkin’.” He kicked Floyd a hard toe in the ribs, then put his foot on the boy’s right arm, holding him down without effort. “Ain’t that right Floyd? We don’t want no trouble, now do we? ’Specially with our enterprise a’goin’ on, ain’t that right?”
    Floyd subsided a bit, satisfied with glaring hatefully from the rocky roadbed at Red and Guy.
    Guy glared right back, teeth clenched.
    Blood dripped from Floyd’s cheek where the sharp stones that supported the ties and rails had cut him. Floyd was known for a temper, and awful full of himself, his daddy being one of the developers of the Vero train station and all.
    William Henry was also a significant landowner and citrus grower, although nothing to shine next to Warren T’s daddy Herman. “So, what kind of fair workin’ out you have in mind?”

.44 Smith and
Wesson Model 3

    Red relaxed his hold on his own old .44 Smith and Wesson Model 3, what his granddaddy had carried as a lawman back in Waycross Georgia after the War Between the States. He let his hand drop down empty where War T. could see it.
    “I reckon it’s like this. Y’all got your timber operation, an’ we got ours. We got every thievin’ son of a bitch from here to Palatka lookin’ to steal ever’ stick we can cut, while all y’all got to worry over is if your daddies figure out you’re makin’ drinkin’ and whorin’ money on the side, ’stead’a bustin’ yer asses in them groves. No bark-skinned bastard with good sense’d steal from you if’n he knows what’s good fer ’im, but they just might snitch, if’n they thought they could squeeze you to pay for ’em keepin’ still. You agree not to steal ours, we don’t steal yours, and we look out fer each other’s cache on the quiet.”
    He stepped towards War with his hands down, got within a pace of him, and shrugged. “What’a ya say?”
    War looked towards Guy, who kept his head down, eyes on Floyd. There’d be trouble there later, War figured, but for now it was the right deal. He looked up at Red, nodded, and spit in his palm.
    Red spit in his own, and they shook.
    “Now you boys seen we got a deal,” War said, loud so both Floyd and Guy could hear plain. “It’s good for all of us, and we expect you to keep it. We damn sure will.” He bent and helped Floyd to his feet, brushed him off like a little brother, and turned him back to the brush hiding where their trail went into the woods.
    Guy turned away, but Red watched as the two other boys made their way into the palmetto breaks, the soot shaking down and blowing in the light breeze.
    Floyd threw one last malicious look their way, eyes narrowed, and slipped into the trees without a word.
    That had been in April of 1922, and Amion William Dedge was just about to turn eighteen years old.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens