I go inside to the kitchen. The linoleum is yellowed and curled at the edges and the room smells of a thousand cooked meals. There are skeins of red dust on the sills and small quadrants of sunlight fall through the unwashed windows and lie on the floor. The room is warm and dry. Mother has let the place go. Who can blame her? Her children are all grown and gone and Daddy Walter lies in his grave. I leave fifty dollars on the kitchen table then drive to brother Bradley’s place.

  I see his children first: Glendon and Bayne, swinging on an old tire held by a rope tied around the thick branch of a gum tree. Their yellow hair is spun gold falling in their faces. Their laughter raises a racket. Chickens scratch and peck in the yard, an oily red rooster struts about. The children turn and stare at the big plum-colored DeSoto as I drive up. I park and pull the hand brake and step out.

  “It’s your uncle Floyd,” I say. “Don’t you youngsters recognize me?” They stare in frozen anticipation; they are too young to recognize anyone who has been gone from their lives for more than a week. Bradley’s wife, Bessie, comes out on the porch, says, “Lord almighty!” and runs to me and throws her arms around my neck. She smells like yeast dough; flour coats her wrists.

  “Careful Bess,” I say. “Old Bradley’s liable to think we’re up to something.”

  She blushes.

  “Go on with you, Charley. Such talk ain’t Christian.” She’s a hardshell Baptist.

  “Where’s Bradley?”

  “Down sick with a cold,” she says. “I think it’s gone into his chest.”

  Bradley’s the best of us boys. He’s got a heart of pure gold. He’s a lot more like Daddy Walter than me and E.W. or any of the girls except for maybe Rossie Ruth.

  I hand Bessie the keys to the DeSoto and tell her to take the young ones for a ride if she likes. She looks at the car and says, “Oh, I could never drive nothing that big and fancy.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Suppose I was to wreck it, Charley?

  Drive it smack into a tree or something.”

  “Why I’d just buy me another one,” I say.

  “Go on, those kids are about ready to bust.” I go in the house and start up the stairs where I know Bradley’s bedroom is. He’s lying on the bed, his eyes closed. His breathing is ragged, like something’s broken in him.

  I pull up a chair and sit next to him. His face is bloodless, his lips cracked as rain-starved earth. I can feel the fever coming off him without even touching him.

  “Bradley,” I say.

  He doesn’t open his eyes. I sit there a long time quiet.

  I remember when we were just hard-running wildcats, how Bradley helped me whip some Choctaw kids who wanted to steal our bikes. What they didn’t know was the bikes were already stolen. Bradley and me had taken them from behind the library in Aikens. We only intended on riding them down to a small lake we knew to go for a swim then take them back where we found them. I just never did like walking anyplace that I could ride if I could help it. Neither did Bradley.

  We got down to the lake and that’s where we ran into those Choctaw kids — the Dexter boys. Their daddy was a freighter and a drinker and was always getting arrested for disturbing the peace. Mostly he got arrested for fighting with the husbands of women he took up with, least that’s the way I heard Mother tell it. Back then, I didn’t know what a womanizer was, but I thought it must take a special sort of man to become one, for Mr. Dexter didn’t seem to be afraid of anything or anyone.

  One of the boys, Truck, I think his name was, weighed as much as me and Bradley put together. We were thin as sticks because we were always running and never sitting still long enough to eat much of anything; I guess that is where I got my running ways from. I was a lot faster than Bradley and a lot faster than just about any boy in the Cookson Hills. I won marbles, pennies, jackknifes, and one time a one-eared dog in foot races. Nobody could catch me. They still can’t.

  Anyway, this boy Truck said he was going to whip our white asses and take our bicycles and Bradley popped off and said, “Go ahead, redskin, give it a try.” And the next I knew everybody was socking everybody in the nose, the eye, the mouth. By the time we were wore out and had run them off, Bradley and me looked like we’d been hit by a freight train. But those Choctaw kids didn’t get our bikes.

  “Why you think we fought so hard over stolen bikes?” Bradley said, as we washed the blood off our faces. He had gotten a back tooth knocked loose and was wiggling it between his finger and thumb. “Hell, we must be the biggest fools in Oklahoma. We should have just let them have the dang bikes and then called the law on them.”

  I wanted to laugh but my mouth hurt.

  “It was your idea to go to fighting,” I said. “Yeah, I am a dang bigger fool than anybody. Look, I lost me a tooth.”

  He showed me the thing: small and bone-white with bloody pulp where it come out by the root.

  “Bradley,” I said again and he opened his eyes.

  “Oh, hey, Charley, what you doing here?”

  “Came to see how you were.”

  He blinked a couple of times and coughed and said, “I’m about all used up.”

  “I can see that.”

  Then he closed his eyes and I went back outside and stood in the yard and watched Bessie running those wild children up and down the road in the purple DeSoto. I felt like I was home again where I should be. I could smell the earth and it smelled like home.

  Emma Floyd

  I come home from town to see my son sitting at the kitchen table. I thought I’d seen a ghost the way he was sitting there in the afternoon sunlight all lit up like an angel. He didn’t move or say anything at first and I thought for a moment it wasn’t Charley but Walter and I nearly fainted.

  “Hey, Mama,” he said, and came and took the sack of groceries from my arms and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Praise God,” I said.

  We sat and talked and he told me he was doing fine and I said we’d all been reading things about him in the newspaper and he said, “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper — most of it is just a pack of dang lies.”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “Those papers are all run by yellow dog Republicans Mama and you know the Republicans has always been against the working man. That’s all I am, just a working man.”

  “Lord, ain’t it the truth.”

  But honestly, Charley didn’t look like no working man I ever knew. He was dressed fancy. Even his shoes were two different colors and he wore a silk tie. He was pretty enough to be a movie star.

  “I never saw a working man dressed like you, Charley.”

  He smiled, said, “There’s work and then there’s work” and slid some money that had been on the table over to me.

  “What’s all this?”

  “Just a little something,” he said. It was a whole lot of money.

  “I don’t need it, Charley.”

  “Go ahead, take it. That’s all honest money there. Case you’re wondering. I mean it’s not stole money.”

  “Charley, you know the thing I worry about most, don’t you?”

  He smiled in the only way a boy can smile at his mother and it near broke my heart, for we both knew what I was talking about. “They are never going to catch me Mama.

  And if they can’t catch me, there is nothing bad can happen to me.”

  “Oh, son.” I took hold of him and held him for a long time, for as long as it took to stop my tears from flowing. A mother knows things no other human can know, especially about her dark-star child.

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  The most interesting thing about life is you never know what is going to happen next. I went to Sallisaw that night because there was a roadhouse near there that had music and dancing and you could buy illegal whiskey from just about anybody there and I had a thirst for some because I’d not had any in a long time. And I had a hunger for some female company because I’d not had any since I left Ohio. I thought of poor Beulah. They say you don’t know what you got until you miss it. I guess I will miss her in the same way I miss Ruby.

  I wasn’t in the place long before this tall drink of water under a cowboy hat with his feet shoved down in high-heeled boots came over to me and said, “You Choc Floyd, ain’t you?”

  I’d not heard anybody call me that since I first left the Cookson Hills.

  “No, I’m Billy Miller,” I say, because I don’t know who the guy is.

  “You mind I sit down for a minute, I’ve got a business proposal, you might say.”

  He sure didn’t look like the law. He didn’t have lawman’s eyes.

  “Go ahead.” And so he sits.

  “My name is Birdwell,” he says. “George Birdwell.”

  “I’ve never heard of you George Birdwell.”

  “I sure have you.”

  “You got me confused with somebody else, George Birdwell.”

  “Maybe so. But I’m a man don’t mind chasing a rainbow if there’s a pot of gold at the other end of it, and what I heard about you is, you’re a rainbow chaser.”

  “A rainbow chaser, huh?” He nods.

  “Say it straight what you’re wanting from me, George Birdwell.”

  “I want to throw in with you, be partners.”

  “I look like I need a partner?”

  “From what I read about what happened up there in Ohio, I’d say you do.”

  I asked him what he read and he told me Billy Miller was killed and so was a policeman and that the two women that were with us were taken into custody.

  “One woman, you mean,” I said. “The other was shot in the head.”

  He smiles, this George Birdwell.

  “True enough, but they say she’ll live.”

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  And that’s how I hooked up with my next partner.

  George Birdwell

  I guess I knew the day I got shot in the leg by a jealous husband I wasn’t ever going to be a real good preacher. It’s mighty hard to concentrate on the Good Word when you got a woman under you and a man firing bullets at you and you don’t know whether to get up and run or keep on doing what you’d been doing until he walked in. Sin is a powerful thing. Good as it was feeling, I got up and ran, and then I packed up my wife and children and headed to Oklahoma. I had some people down that way. I wasn’t there long when I started hearing about Choc Floyd. That’s what they called him down that way; they said he got the nickname because he drank so much Choctaw Beer. His reputation was getting to be nearly as big as Henry Starr’s or Jesse James’s down that way. So I started reading everything I could on him in the papers: how he robbed dozens of banks and the law couldn’t catch him and even when they did, they couldn’t hold him.

  I don’t know why, but I got to thinking that if I couldn’t make a living as a preacher, maybe I could as an outlaw, you know, from one extreme to the other. Because in those days, there wasn’t anything in between the one or the other. About the only thing I knew about being an outlaw was that a gun is a powerful persuader (look how it persuaded me) and probably has converted more men to Jesus Christ than all the preachers in the world. So when I ran into Charley that night at the roadhouse, I took a chance he needed a new partner — his old one having been recently deceased up in Ohio.

  As it turned out, he did.

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  I tell George Birdwell that before we go to taking down any banks, there is something I have to do first.

  “Sure,” he says. “Just don’t keep me on a long rope too long is all. Man of my skills ain’t likely to stay unemployed for very long.”

  “Well, I suppose you could always take up preaching again,” I say. George told me about that period of his life. I laughed like hell when he told me about getting shot in the leg by a jealous husband.

  “Were you trying to convert her?”

  “Hell, I guess you could say I was trying my best.”

  “I’ll get hold of you when I’m ready to roll,” I told him.

  “I’ll be waiting, Choc.”

  He looked like he ought to have had a horse tied up outside.

  “You believe in reincarnation, George?”

  “Boy that’s a hard one,” he says. “I’m a man of God and don’t hold much with pagan thoughts. Why you asking?”

  “It could be that we’re the James boys come back from the dead. Frank and Jesse.”

  “To rob again?”

  “It’s not out of the realm of possibility.”

  “Hell, you just might be on to something,” he says.

  I left him sitting there sipping his beer to contemplate the possibilities of the spirit world while I went out and drove under a sky flung with stars, some of which fell in among the hills and were forever lost.

  I had it in my mind to find Ruby. To redeem myself if I could.

  12

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  I come and go like a shadow. I don’t stray far from my people but I never stick around any one of them too long at a time in case the police are on the scout for me. I come and go in the evenings, sleep during the day. Summer is slow and hot as dog breath in Oklahoma. I read in the papers that Beulah and Rose got out of jail, pardoned for their sins. I wonder if Beulah’s all right in the head. I send out feelers to some people I still know in Kansas City and get word back the girls have returned and are staying at the Sexton Hotel. I send money, a telegram:

  Beulah, how’s the head? STOP.

  Meet me in Aikens. STOP.

  You know the place. STOP.

  Mother’s got the whole house to herself. STOP.

  You can heal here just as good as you can there. STOP.

  Charley.

  Soon as I send it I wonder if I did the right thing because I’ve got Ruby strong on my mind. I go see her kin and they tell me she’s living in Coffeyville, Kansas with the fellow she married, her and my son Jackie. Coffeyville! The only thing I know about Coffeyville is the Daltons rode in fifty years earlier and got shot to pieces trying to rob two banks at the same time. Two banks at the same time! It’s a hell of an idea that I might try myself sometime. I ask Bradley what he thinks of me going down and trying to get Ruby back.

  “You sure you want to do that, Charley? She’s a married gal now, that ought to tell you something about the way she feels.”

  “I know Ruby better than anybody. I know she loves me as much as I love her,” I say. “Love like we had can’t be broken.”

  “I think you’d just be asking for heartache.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had my heart broke. Probably won’t be the last either.”

  We sit and drink Choctaw Beer and it’s cold because Bradley’s kept it on a block of ice while I helped him do some weeding in his garden. It’s close to supper and I can hear Bessie inside telling the kids where to place the knives and forks and to fill the glasses with water.

  The sky is the color of a bullet and the sun is just beginning to melt beyond a ridge of trees that look smoky in the fading light. I can smell the river, a pungent smell of wet mud and decaying leaves. The river comes and goes free as anything. Sometimes I wish I were a river.

  “I’m wanted in seven states,” I tell Bradley.

  “I know it,” he says. “I read the same papers you do.”

  “E.W. keeps talking about wanting to join up with me.”

  “Don’t let him, Charley.”

  “No way in hell. You neither, in case you were thinking ’long them lines.”

  “I wasn’t thinking nothing.”

  Bradley’s had his share of strife. He works hard but it barely seems enough to keep him and Bessie and their kids afloat. His hands are rough and scarred from work. I feel ashamed that I’ve spent as much as three dollars on a manicure and my hands show no labor.

  “Listen, Bradley, you’d have to be crazy not to think about all that easy money. But let me tell you something, son, it ain’t as easy as it seems. Yeah, the taking is easy; it’s all the rest that can be hard on a fellow.”

  “Can I ask you something?” he says, draining the last of the beer in his bottle. “Sure.”

  “If it’s so damn tough, why do you do it?”

  “I’m good at it. Besides, I don’t know what else I could do and have this damn much fun. It’s just the running that’s hard.”

  “You was always the wild one, Charley.”

  “Oh, hell,” I say. “Let’s go in and eat some of Bessie’s chicken before you ask if you can shoot that machine gun I keep in the trunk of that fancy DeSoto.”

  “Can I?”

  We go inside and sit around the table and Bessie say prayers, then we dig in.

  A belly full of home-cooked food does wonders for the spirit.

  Ruby Floyd Leonard

  I met Leroy at a dance, just like I’d met Charley. He said I was the prettiest girl there and I liked it that he had clean hands and no dirt under his fingernails and was polite. We danced and I liked him well enough, but not nearly as much as I liked Charley the first time I danced with him. But then no man can live up to Charley in my book — even though Charley has brought as much grief into my life as he has pleasure.

  Leroy came around regular and brought me flowers and always brought Jackie a toy to play with and we’d go for rides in his motor car and go for picnics and he’d carry Jackie around on his shoulders. I liked Leroy’s easy manner, but most of all I liked it that Leroy didn’t have any big dreams of being something other than what he was.

  “I’m just a baker,” he told me when we began to get serious. “That’s all I’ll probably ever be, Ruby, just a baker.”

  “That’s okay by me,” I said. “A baker is a fine thing to be. Everybody needs bread.”

 

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