Fiction: A Killing on a Bridge (55) A historical fiction

Saint Sebastian River Bridge
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By Roger Owens

Sunday,
March 31, 1918,
3:45 PM

John Ashley had been in Raiford Correctional Institution for exactly 16 months, to the day. He had, on the advice of his lawyer Alto Adams, pled guilty to armed robbery in Palm Beach County on Thursday, November 23rd, 1916, and had been sentenced to seventeen and a half years in the state penitentiary.
    This had been a nasty surprise to both Adams and himself. It seemed that the nine kinds of hell raised by the family of Desoto Tiger and the Cow Creek Seminole Tribe had reached ears as far as Washington, and Florida Governor Park Trammell had leaned on the court to throw the book at John. Trammell was term-limited, could not run for re-election, and was looking for a job on the Federal Court. President Woodrow Wilson was the man who could give it to him, so when Wilson said lean, he leaned.
    It had taken until Thursday, November 30th, for the State to transport him to the prison, so he figured that that was the date he would consider that he had actually been incarcerated. John had a finely-developed sense of irony, and so had planned his move for this date knowing full well how much it would irk the hell out of George and Bobby Baker.
    John had been a model prisoner, and had wormed his way into the good graces of the warden, Captain J.S. Blitch of the Florida Department of Correction. Regular deliveries of top-quality British rum and gin—no cheap ’shine for John’s friends, no sir—kept John on the right side of both Warden Blitch and his boys. Wads of cash stuffed in the booze crates and a few call-girls from Jacksonville now and then got John even more scandalously special treatment—like the girls themselves.

John made friends with another bank robber

    John made friends with another bank robber, Tom Maddox, who had been in Raiford for four years. Maddox had a small network of paid-off guards, and with John’s money those guards became very well-paid indeed. It actually became a contest between the guards to get a spot on John’s payroll. Lots of them were on the take, but a customer like John didn’t come along every day. John smiled to himself, thinking back to 1915 and Harry Lee, at the Miami Jail. Here it was, that bad-boy worship working its old black magic once again.
    At this moment, John was working on a trustee road crew line, unshackled, and the scrape and crunch and rattle of shovels slinging marl and sledges breaking rocks filled the steaming air along the roadside ditch. It was early in the season but the sun was already a brutal God blazing His wrath vengefully down upon His wretched people.
    John wiped the sweat and grit from his forehead with a sleeve, then raised his slouch hat above his head to get the gang boss’s attention. Even the hat was a concession to John’s celebrity; none of the other inmates had one except John’s buddy Tom Maddox.
    Tom was currently on the other end of the line, at a spot where he could dive into the tall grass across the shallow ditch and make a getaway. The second John’s hat went up and the boss looked his way, Tom raced for the bushes, carrying his shovel so it wouldn’t betray a missing man.
    The gang boss, sitting on an ageing mare and carrying a pump shotgun, looked a question at John, but figured he knew what was up.
    “Break, Boss, need a break.” John was asking for permission to go in the bushes and take a crap.
    The gang boss, a man in his late fifties named Marcus Belvedere, was a Redbone Mississippi Cajun, marking time before retirement and his eminent return to the bayous of the Gulf coast to fish his old age away. His mix of Indian, Creole and white blood gave him the typical Redbone’s freckles, middling skin tone, and their nappy reddish hair. They tended to be lanky, spare and tough, and maybe he had been once, but Marcus was old. The heat obviously hit him hard; he sagged, the mare sagged, and he waved a languid hand at the prisoner to go ahead. The sun shone pink through the curly hairs on the back of his hands.
    As soon as John got that wave, the men in the line broke into a work chant. Most of the prisoners were black, and used to singing together. Their leader, Moses Chambers, had a deep, resonant Baptist Church singing voice, and he always called the tune. “It’s nobody’s fault but mine,” the old spiritual started, and the other men took it up.
    “It’s nobody’s fault but mine.”
    “If I die, and my soul be lost, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

They were all in on the break

    They were all in on the break; the song was a distraction to help lull the guard’s sharpness. John had paid them, and would keep on paying them, for their loyalty and help.
    Belvedere was not in on the break, although John’s paid informants were. The guard on duty when John ran would be in a heap of trouble, and he wanted none of his boys to get hit by the shitstorm that would erupt when the most famous outlaw in Florida escaped—again. Belvedere’s retirement to the balmy bayous of his youth just might get shot to hell.
    John stepped into the bushes on the same side of the road as Tom had ducked seconds before, the song following him into the heavy switchgrass on the other side of the ditch.
    “I got a Bible in my home,” Moses sang, and the men responded, “I got a bible in my home.”
    The shovels scraped and the sledges crashed down in time to the song. “If I fail to read, and my soul be lost, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”
    John squatted down, but he couldn’t run yet; Belvedere was still watching, and the tall, thick bunches of switchgrass would wave with his passing and give him away. That shotgun would take a man out at a hundred yards and wouldn’t even slow down cutting through the grass.
    Moses’ voice rang out clear. “My mother taught me how to read,” and it was a signal to John that Tom’s absence would soon be pointed out to Marcus, as they had planned.
    “My mother taught me how to read,” the men answered. “If I fail to read, and my soul be lost, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”
    That was the final signal, and a black hand holding a filthy soft work cap shot into the air on the end of the line away from where John crouched, in cover. The young man waving the cap called excitedly, “Boss Man, Boss Man, we’uns gots us a rabbit!”
    He would get extra privileges and food for being the first to snitch out a runner. This was just an added benefit of John’s fairly simple plan. The men in the line began to shout and cheer. “Run, white boy, run!”
    “She’iff’s dawgs’ gone get yo’ fat white ass!”
    “You’uns jus’ anotha’ nigga now, boy!” and they all laughed long and loud. Part of the plan.
    Belvedere clumsily lurched the old nag around, kicking her ineffectually in the ribs. Marcus was no rider; he’d been a boatman in the bayou most of his life. He managed to get the mare moving and when he came to the end of the line, stood in the stirrups, scanning the grass for movement, his left hand shading his eyes. When he saw none, he felt a flash of fear, like a cold wave despite the heat. If the prisoner was already too far away to see the grass swaying, he might make it clean away, and flush Marcus Meriwether Belvedere straight into the shitter.

Maddox was a hard-timer

    Maddox was a hard-timer, a three-time loser for armed robbery, and the last one had cost a bank guard his left arm when Maddox had shot him with an Army .45 and shattered the bones in his shoulder. He was scheduled to get out of Raiford State about a hundred years after the Second Coming, and the man who let him get away might just wind up taking his place. Not a chance in Hell would they ever believe he hadn’t taken money to let it happen.
    Belvedere felt real panic setting in until the young snitch called out. “I sees him Boss Man, I sees him!” pointing to the place Tom had gone to ground.
    Marcus’s eyesight wasn’t that good, and he didn’t see a damn thing, but he couldn’t say that so he answered, “Yeah! I see ’im now boy, I’ll see you get extry he’ppin’s come suppertime!” His Mississippi drawl increased with his excitement, and he eagerly urged the old mare into the ditch.
    “How far you reckon he is?” Belvedere yelled back to the boy, because he had no idea. He needed glasses, his wife had nagged him for years, but he was too damn vain to wear ’em. Made a man look weak, he thought, but right now he would have paid a pretty penny for a pair of spectacles that would let him catch Tom Maddox and save his own skin.
    The boy hollered back, “Scraight on, Boss Man, a ways out ’dere!”
    While Belvedere looked back, the mare balked at the wall of switchgrass and nearly threw him, and he cursed and kicked her some more.
    The boy looked down, shaking his head. He knew that the mare, who he had named Josey after his auntie, knew its rider was no horseman, just like he did. Part of the plan.
    “It’s nobody’s fault but mine,” Moses intoned, and the boys followed in, “It’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

He didn’t want to wind up in front a judge and jury himself

    Marcus finally coaxed the shy mare into the thick grass, which came as high as his horse’s back. It never occurred to him that, standing down on the road, there was no way the boy could have seen a man running through the brush. He just wanted to either catch or kill Tom Maddox, so he didn’t wind up in front a judge and jury himself.
    He had only moved a few yards into the tall stems, and was trying to urge the mare on. After a few minutes, no way would a running convict be so near where he’d run from, just stood to reason.
    It occurred to him he might be better to just kill Maddox outright; good riddance, the brass would think, and it would prove how serious and capable a lawman he was. He’d just have to make sure he shot him in the back, in the front wouldn’t look so good.
    Might even speed up that retirement, which beckoned more compellingly every day; he could almost see the dappled sunlight on the black water, the cypress trees looming overhead like giants, the green pond weed. Almost smell the mud and rotten trees and catfish, roasting on a small pile of coals on the little swampy island where he and Nancy used to-sky in his eyes-thump!

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens