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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Wednesday,
July 19, 1922,
continued
Now, the sun was overtaking them as they headed west, winding slowly down the grove roads. The car was crowded with provisions, including plenty of rum. Two canvas duffels, tough, heavy remnants of the recent war, were strapped to the roof. These contained the tent and Red and Guy’s timber gear: the sawblades, the power take-off strap, an axe, a twenty-pound sledgehammer, some hand saws and a sharpening kit. Guy’s Parker shotgun was wrapped in a scrap of old Army blanket, the wool shiny with oil and age.
A small tool kit came with the car, and Red had figured it sufficient for any normal repairs on the car or a saw table. Guy was the one with a talent for sharpening sawblades; something, Red thought with a glimmer of hope, Guy could still do.
The trio had run south down the Old Dixie Highway from the Saint Sebastian River, where Senegal’s Palace stood on the northern bluff, hidden well back on heavily wooded private property. If they had walked out the back of Senegal’s, through about a mile of heavy woods, and come to the river, they could have looked east and across to the south side and almost see where Guy’s still had been hidden, around the last bend in the river before the bridge.
When they crossed the bridge, Guy grumbled bitterly in the back seat, his wooden leg sitting on Jenny’s bags on the cramped floor. “Best God-damned still I ever had, those rotten sons-a-bitches…”
“Dumbass” |
Red was snorting. “Told you, you silly shit, even a girl knows better. Dumbass.” He’d never heard that cussword before, and was determined to remember it.
“Okay, okay, give it a rest,” Guy retorted, leaned back against the window and closed his eyes.
“It’s you needs a rest, sweetie pie,” Jenny said, patting at Guy’s leg before she realized it was the wooden one. When she did, she just laughed, made a fist, and rapped the leg with her knuckles. “Hello!” she chortled, loudly. “Anybody home?”
They all laughed then. Red thought how Jenny might not turn out to be an anchor around their necks, but maybe a valuable addition to—what? The Dedge Gang? No, he thought as he steered the ’16 T along the graded roads towards Blue Cypress Lake. The Dedge Boys. He liked that better.
Right then, their flight was almost like a day trip, or a picnic. It seemed that maybe, just maybe, everything might work out all right.
After another hour of touring the back roads, under the trees in the long tunnels of sweet shade, Guy was snoring in the back seat. He’d popped the cork on one of the bottles of rum Senegal Johnson had provided for them, took a long pull, declared it “damn fine” and nearly as good as his own, which was high praise indeed from Guy Dedge. “One thing them fuckin’ Ashleys know how to do is make good ’shine. Ain’t but one feller in all Florida, or Georgia either, makes any better, and that’s me.”
A few more pulls and he was out, his snores mostly covered by the puttering of the engine and the scream of the cicadas in the trees, in the soft, dappled light of the afternoon.
Red turned to Jenny beside him in the front seat. “If’n you don’t mind, ma’am, I’d be obliged if I could ask you a few questions, bein’ as how we’re kind of throwing our fortunes in together an’ all.”
“Want to know what my ‘intentions’ are?” |
She looked at him from under mocking eyelashes, her head tilted down, that…way, that women do, he thought. It always made it a little hard for him to breathe when they did that, especially when the woman was as fine as Jenny.
“No, ma’am,” he replied, properly chastised, “I just figgered we’d best get to know each other.”
He began telling her about his years as a child in Mayday Georgia, just a spot in the road where the railroad crossed the logging grade, coming down from the ridge. The railroad had set up a company store there, to service the Georgia Pacific’s employees as they rode the steel streets of commerce to and from cities like Atlanta, Savannah, Columbia South Carolina, Jacksonville Florida and Chattanooga Tennessee. It was run, he said, by the cousin who had gotten part of one hand cut off in a hay bailer and was showing a girl how he did it and got part of the other cut off too.
He noticed her eyes were a very light green, like a cat he’d had as a boy on the farm, back in Mayday. He also noticed how Jenny’s generous bosom, in her pretty flower-print summer dress cut kinda low and frilly in front, caught the afternoon light and how the shadows…
“Mr. Dedge, I think you should look to the road.”
Her words brought him from his reverie at the same time his good sense caught up with him. He felt a flush of guilt. He was moonin’ at his brother’s girl!
Jenny could see perfectly well the young man was flustered; she was a working girl, after all. “Maybe we should get to your questions, Red.” She was letting him off easy.
“All right,” he said, relieved, “tell me again what guns you have.”
She looked sideways for a second, thinking. “I got the two Smith and Wesson 1905 Hand Ejectors, and about five hundred rounds for those. I got the Colt .45 autoloader, a Beretta 9 millimeter autoloader with maybe three hundred or so rounds apiece. And I got a Winchester 1907 semi-auto rifle in the .351, with two fifteen-round magazines and another six hundred shells. That would be my main weapon if I had to go against the Ashleys. Only one extra magazine apiece for the two automatic pistols though; in a real fight they’d be too slow to reload.”
Red’s head was spinning |
“Jesus, lady, what would you call a real fight?” He’d only been in one, and couldn’t imagine this beautiful girl in the midst of that firefight. Yet, he thought, he was almost sure that one of the four killed in it had been Frank Frankenfield’s wife, the one on the dark back porch popping away with some little toy, probably one of those Savage .380’s everybody was packing these days. Red remembered the shotgun blast taking out the dark form, the feminine cry of pain, of death.
“Have you ever been in a gunfight, Mr. Dedge?” Her voice was slightly mocking, and he remembered he’d actually been in two, including with Carter and Young Matthews. And come out on top.
His face went hard. “Yes ma’am, I have, and it don’t strike me as no place for a lady.”
She wasn’t impressed, and waved his objections away with a careless hand, turned back to the road ahead. “It ain’t no place for nobody with good sense, but you don’t always get a choice, now do you? Did you have any choice, Mr. Dedge?”
Red peered out to the south and west, where the country opened up to palmetto breaks with slash pines towering over them, stabbing their sharp tops at the blazing sky. Good pig and deer country. He spoke without looking at her. “No, there was no choice, not really. They was just…things that had to be done.”
She was nodding, looking ahead. “We had a gang of real bad hombres runnin’ around hittin’ stills, robbing the families, raping women, sometimes children. Weren’t no law and no law man, just us. Against men with skin like pine bark, not a lick a’ human kindness, fuck anything shits between two shoes, whether they like it or not. Probably two hooves would do, some of ’em. Anyway, they killed my uncle Bert and his new wife, so we hunted ’em for three days, then snuck in from all around, just shootin’ in the dark, askin’ no questions. Killed sem’nteen of the sons a’ bitches. They fought back, too, by God. We lost two good men that day and one of the women lost part of an arm to gangrene.”
Red shuddered at the mention of the dreaded gaseous rot, made famous by the war. “How many of you were women?”
Jenny looked bored. “’Bout half I guess. Out of around twenty of us. These bastards didn’t have no women or children, they’d rape ’em to death in no time. If we hadn’t caught them sleepin’, they’d of kilt us all right back. If we didn’t do nothin’, they’d come for us whenever they wanted to. We had no choice; it was sump’n had to be done, jus’ like you said.”
“Let me ask you,” he said, looking back over at her pretty profile. “You said you picked your…”
She smiled. “The word is ‘paramour’.”
“Paramour – who was your last one? Before Guy” |
It was her turn to look at him, the silence stretching until he squirmed. “A good friend of yours, as a matter of fact,” she said, arching her eyebrows at him. “Greyson Stikelether. You know, The Judge. He’s such a dear man, and he was helping me with the case of that Merritt boy I had to kill. Was there anything else you’d like to know, young man?”
Red’s face felt like it was on fire. “N-no ma’am,” he stuttered an answer, “no there is not.”
By four o’clock they were back at their last bootleg cutting camp, where they’d met Harlan Middleton and Skeeter Willis. The brush had grown over the clearing, but there was no missing the cut stumps, and when Guy spotted the honey pit, they knew where everything had been when they had left.
Red found the remains of the shack, which was mostly intact except for the palm thatch, which was easy enough to replace. Cut sapling poles had made a frame that had blown over, so he started setting it back upright.
Jenny dug in the boxes of food and pulled out chicken, bread and three warm beers. “No sandwiches, boys, sorry. Forgot to bring a bread knife.”
Red thought for a heartbeat, said “Hold on a minute,” and went to the car. He pulled the two duffel bags down from the roof to the ground, where they landed with a heavy, metallic clank. They were rough, mud-green canvas, thick and indestructible, with heavy carry straps and brass-reinforced grommets. Hard, sharp steel, like timber equipment or weaponry, would not penetrate or tear them. They were everywhere; it was said millions had been sold as surplus after the Great War, and you could get them for about twenty-five cents each at any thrift shop or surplus store.
Red dug around in one of them and came up with the smallest handsaw, a curved blade with tiny serrations for trimming smaller branches off of tree trunks, and brought it to her.
Sharp as a razor, thanks to Guy, it made a decent job of slicing the bread.
A frame with blades, a couple swing-arms... |
Red wouldn’t admit it, but Guy was probably right. He could build or fix just about anything.
Guy hobbled around, clearing a place for a fire and setting it up, piling dry grass in the old fire pit and leaning sticks over it in a teepee.
By the time he struck a lucifer to it, Jenny had sandwiches made and Red was cutting palmettos and palm fronds to thatch the shack.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
Red’s brigade seem well-equipped!
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