Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (22) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

Thursday,
February 25, 1915

John Ashley woke to a deep, throbbing pain in his face. He tried to look around, but it hurt to move, and his right eye was dark, the whole right side of his face heavily bandaged.
    He could tell he had been given morphine, and while the pain was bad, as was typical on morphine, he just didn’t seem to care all that much. He’d tried it. He’d taken it a few times when he was injured and needed it. He ran morphine sometimes, and a man should know what his product does.
    He knew perfectly well what good ’shine did for a man, but he never drank too much. He knew what guns could do but tried never to shoot anybody he didn’t absolutely need to. A man who didn’t know what his product did was a fool, but a smuggler who used too much of his own goods was destined to fail or die.
    He tried to speak, but his voice came out as a garbled moan.

Nobody ever called John Ashley slow

    He sensed shadows crossing light, saw white walls, and wheeled tables with what looked like bodies under sheets. A man appeared on his left side, presumably because that man, John thought, a fair Latin fella with a fine black pompadour, knew he couldn’t see from his right side. Nobody ever called John Ashley slow. 

    The man’s dark eyes looked upon him with humor; he seemed pleased his subject had survived. John couldn’t say he disagreed. 

    “Whey…” he tried to ask, and the man shook his head, put a palm on his arm, and closed those dark, compassionate eyes. “Don’t try to speak, not yet. Your poor jaw has been broken; it must heal for six weeks at least. Before you can speak. Before you can eat other than through a straw.”  

    John’s eyes broadcast despair, and the doctor—John thought he was a doctor, anyway—caught his feeling. 

    “It will heal well, do not worry. However, I cannot say the same for your poor eye. Lo siento mucho. I am so sorry, my friend; it is gone.” His soft Spanish accent was soothing in a way, especially wrapped as John was in the loving arms of mother opium, and it didn’t sound all that bad. You could still see with one eye.

When he woke again John felt tired, but immensely better than before. The bandage on his face had been reduced to a cloth binding a linen patch to his right eye. Not his eye, he remembered now. Where his eye used to be. 

    That motherfucker Kid Lowe had shot him in the mouth and fucked him up good. The stupid son of a bitch. He’d been hangin’ way out that car window floppin’ like a damn rag doll. A wonder he didn’t shoot hisself. John suddenly wished he had.

John would have liked something more solid

    The doctor appeared, with a bowl of soup with a straw in it. John would have liked something more solid, but he was so hungry his stomach must have thought his throat had been cut. He sucked the soup up eagerly and nodded for more. 

    “Good! Bueno, mi Yumatito. Buen provecho!” 

    John knew enough Spanish lingo to know “eat hearty!” when he heard it. 

    It really meant something like “The soup is ready,” according to some chica whore he’d met once in Miami. She said when a Cuban mother called, “The soup is ready!” it came to mean “It’s time to eat!” 

    Why the hell Cubans called Americans “Yumas” was a mystery to all Anglos. The doctor had called him “my little Yuma.” John wondered if the doctor was a homo.

For the next eight days John took treatment and nourishment from the man he came to know as Doctor Agramonte. In those eight days, John Ashley learned a lot. 

    Aristides Agramonte had worked with Walter Reed on the Guantanamo Project, also known as the Yellow Fever Commission, where he had been instrumental in “discovering” that mosquitos carried Yellow Fever. He’d known it all along; he claimed an old physician in Havana had told him that many years ago, before the U.S. Army ever got interested. It was disastrous losses of troops in tropical climes that woke up the American government. Yellow Jack killed five times as many soldiers as the enemy did.

“I told them it was the mosquitos”

    “I told them again and again it was the mosquitos, my friend, but we had to do extensive experiments so Senor Doctor Reed could prove it to his superiors. Many men died before that, who should not have died. One of those men was Senor Doctor James Carroll, my very good friend. I do not think he planned it, but one day as we tried to get mosquitos to bite our volunteers, James allowed one to bite him. We did this every day, trying to get proof, but that one time…” He shook his head, sorrow in his eyes. 

    John thought that if Doctor Agramonte was a homo, you could do worse than have someone care about you that much. 

    “But it was James—Jessie, we called him Jessie—you know, Jessie James? He was the one who proved it. He contracted the fever. He died from it. But he saved countless lives. Countless.”

    Despite his great achievement, the Doctor was not allowed to practice in America. His colleague, Walter Reed, had had a hospital named after him in 1909, in Bethesda Maryland. Jessie Carroll was dead. Aristides Agramonte was stuck in Stuart Florida, acting as a medical examiner, undertaker, and said he also took veterinarian work when he could get it. It was a damned shame, John thought, a God damned shame. This man had likely saved his life. He determined to pay the man back if ever he could.

On the morning of the ninth day, County Deputy Fred Baker, Sheriff George Baker’s cousin, came with two other officers and dragged John out of the Doctor’s quarters like a sack of potatoes. Over Doctor Agramonte’s loud protests, sprinkled with uniquely Cuban curses, they threw him in the back of a Sheriff’s Model T and left the Doctor behind still shaking his fist and shouting, “Maricones! Hijos de putas!” 

    They carted him to the Palm Beach County Jail, in jolting agony over the marl roads, and threw him in a cell. John never saw the doctor again.
    At ten the next morning he was dragged out again, chained hand and foot, before some grizzled old asshole of a judge and the county DA, who conspired to send him back to Miami. Not to face trial for the robbery in Palm Beach, but for the murder of Desoto Tiger. And this time, young Bobby Baker was right on his ass every second. He held on to the chains running from John’s feet and hands to the one around his waist. His right hand never strayed far from the Smith & Wesson .38 Special on his right hip. 

    None of John’s family or gang could visit to try to bust him out; they were all now wanted men. They were subject to arrest, or failing that, to be shot on sight. Joe Ashley in particular had garnered the ill will of the Palm Beach County Sheriffs, seeing as how he’d been one of their own.

They wanted him to suffer

    John’s face was a mass of bruises and the patch over his right eye leaked watery blood and pus down his cheek. His body ached all over from the beating at the hands of Deputy Fred Baker, and his face was a mask of agony.
    While staying at Doctor Agramonte’s mortuary he’d been given morphine for the pain, but that had come to a screeching halt once he was dragged back to the county lockup. These Palm Beach sons of bitches wanted him to suffer. Bobby Baker must not have slept at all the three days John sat in the can. It was Bobby and no one else who brought him every meal, Bobby who brought him to the shitter. And it was Bobby who dragged him before the Judge and Bobby who dragged him back. He kept his palm on his pistol and his sharp brown eyes on John every second.
    The third morning Bobby Baker dragged him from his cell with no breakfast and said he was going to Miami. “And they are gonna hang your God damn ass, John Ashley. You’re a dead man, and I intend to piss on your grave.” 

    The pain in John’s face had subsided to a mere torture, and he was pretty sure the ribs he’d thought broken weren’t. For the first time in his life, he understood how folks could become addicted to that morphine shit. He would have paid dearly for a shot of it right now. 

    Bobby was relentless. “The great John Ashley, the King of the fuckin’ Everglades, danglin’ from a rope. For killin’ a Indian. Not for all your other robbin’ and murderin’ of innocent white folks, n’er fer talkin’ shit ’bout my Daddy, the greatest damn Sheriff ever. Nope, for killin’ a damn Indian what ain’t even barely human.” He seemed to enjoy the thought of this ignominy attaching to John Ashley and smiled to himself, patting John’s shoulder, every time he brought it up. 

    John’s escape with his father’s help had deeply humiliated Bobby Baker, and he would never, ever, trust an Ashley again.

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens