Pretty boy, p.13
Pretty Boy, page 13
“Are we going to keep moving forever? Aren’t we ever going to settle down and live like normal people?”
“Nothing’s forever,” he says.
It’s the middle of the day and Jackie’s playing with a neighbor child and there is frost on the glass. All the leaves have fallen from the trees and I look at Charley there in the wan afternoon light and he looks like some photograph taken by a sad photographer. He is the most handsome man I’ve ever met and sometimes when I look at him in these unexpected times, I crave him like crazy. I guess in that way I can understand how a dope fiend is about his dope because I feel like I’m addicted to Charley Floyd.
“Ruby —” he starts to say then turns and pulls me to him. I try not to act like I need him so bad but I can’t keep myself from letting him pull me close. He brings his mouth down on mine and it tastes all warm and smoky. I wasn’t in the mood a minute ago, but it only takes something like him kissing me to get me in the mood. I feel his hand trace down the front of me, down past my waist and it draws me into him like a magnet.
I try and talk to him because I don’t ever want to let him know how strong his hold is over me.
“Look, kiddo,” he whispers. “Now’s not the time to talk about things, okay?”
“I should go get Jackie.”
“He’s fine, he’s having fun with that kid next door. Let him have fun, Ruby. Let’s me and you have some fun, okay?”
I stop trying to pull away from him. He tells me to ask him for it.
“Charley, you know I’m not like that, to be saying things like that.” Charley can be dark as midnight when it comes to some things, but I wasn’t ever raised that way, to talk like that.
“You’re my wife, Ruby. What goes on between a man and his wife is sacred. I want to hear you say it. Say you want it. Say, ‘I want it, Charley.’ Let me hear it kiddo.”
“I’m just not that way, Charley.”
“Be that way just this once, okay? Let me hear you say it.”
I try and say it, but it comes out so low he can’t hear it.
“I can’t hear you. Say it again.”
“I want it, Charley.”
“You want what, baby?”
“I want you, Charley.”
“How do you want me?”
The light in the room seems to wrap round us.
“I want you inside me, Charley.”
He lifts me off my feet and carries me to the bed.
“You make me happy, baby,” he says, laying me on the bed. “I could never love anybody but you.”
They are words I want to hear, want to believe.
We make love in the long silence of my thoughts. I try not to think of him with other women. I try not to think of everything that has happened to this point in our lives. I try only to think of the good and not the bad. After we’re finished we lay there on the bed. Charley lights a Chesterfield and I can hear the tobacco burning.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “For what?”
“For making you say those things.”
“God, Charley, if that was the worst part of it I wouldn’t mind.”
“I can’t change, Ruby. It’s too late.”
“No it’s not, honey. No it’s not.” I want to believe that it is not too late and I want him to believe that it isn’t.
He sits up, his back a curve of hard muscle. He exhales a cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling. I watch it ascend, swirl, as though seeking escape, as though somehow desperate, and I feel a bit that way myself: like smoke seeking escape.
“I guess nobody understands what it’s like to be me, but me,” he says.
I guess maybe he’s right. Part of me wonders if it was a mistake to leave Leroy. I had it nice with Leroy. Nice in a way I didn’t have to worry, but not so nice in other departments. I don’t know if I could ever find another man like Charley, or even one like Leroy if something were to happen to Charley. A girl only gets just so many chances in life and maybe I’ve had all I’m going to get. I am like the smoke Charley exhales.
Pretty Boy Floyd
I hear the night train off in the distance. Ruby is asleep next to me. I hear the train and it makes me want to follow it. There are times when it’s good like this, when right after we make love and I’m lying there thinking how sweet life can treat you even when you don’t deserve it, that I get the most restless. When things are going to hell, I feel calm, at peace, but when things are good, I’m all shot to hell in my heart somehow, wanting to move on, to leave the good thing I got and find something else.
The night train calls my name, long and low out over the rolling hills:
Charley Floyd, Charley Floyd
Where you bound but heaven’s gates
Where you been but at hell’s doorstep
Come on Charley Floyd, stop your
Running and get on board and let
Me carry you for a while cross the
River and through the woods to a
Cold grave Charley Floyd, Charley Floyd
To a dark cold grave, Charley Floyd.
15
Pretty Boy Floyd
George is drunk on the seat beside me as we roll through the pitch-black Oklahoma night. Going to go see Ruby. I got word she saw a photograph of me and Beulah with our arms around each other and is steaming mad. It was Beulah’s idea to get our picture taken. I’m such a sucker for a pleading woman. I got my window rolled down because it smells like a gin joint inside the car and the air outside is sweet across those dark hills I can’t see.
“You better cut back on the booze,” I say to Bird. “It’s going to turn you blind.”
“Not me, Choc. I can handle it.”
We hit a bump in the road and his head lolls over to one side like he’s got strings in his neck somebody cut.
“I don’t want to get shot pulling a job and you hung over so bad you can’t watch my back.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Bird says. “We ain’t been killed yet. Hell, we ain’t even been shot.”
I light a cigarette and think of Ruby, how she’s going to take it, seeing me with my arms around Beulah. I should have cut Beulah loose a long time ago. But now it’s too late. Last time I went over to Bradley’s to see her she tells me something that I don’t know how to exactly take.
It was a hot afternoon up there in that spare bedroom and Bradley and Bessie had gone off to town for the day so it was just me and Beulah alone. I was standing at the window in my undershirt thinking how hot it was — too hot even to make love — when Beulah said, “I’m pregnant, Charley.”
At first I thought she was joking, but I looked into her eyes and knew she was dead serious. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with tears running down her cheeks, sitting there in her slip.
“You sure?” I asked. “Pretty sure.”
“You could just be late, though?”
“I could, but I don’t think so Charley, it’s been almost six weeks.”
“Things like that can happen though, can’t they?”
“Sure, I guess so. But a woman knows. She does, Charley. Come sit on the bed with me, please.”
I wasn’t so sure how I felt about the news. In a way I was sort of pleased she might be. I loved my son and it wouldn’t be so bad to have another. But then I thought what it would be like having a son by each of them: Beulah and Ruby. The sky looked like a sheet of hot tin. Chickens scratched in the yard. Beulah’s sniffling seemed to fill the room.
I went over and sat on the edge of the bed and put my arm around her.
“You angry with me, Charley?”
“No, why should I be?”
“I mean I guess if you didn’t want it, we could do something about it.”
I thought of my kid killed before he ever took his first breath, some guy running a coat hanger up inside Beulah and poking around until she bled bloody clots.
“Hell no,” I said. “If you are, you are. That’s it. I’ll be his daddy just like I’m Jackie’s daddy.”
“Oh, God, Charley, I love you so much.”
“Thing is, Beulah, I can’t marry you. You understand that don’t you?”
She didn’t say anything for a long while then said, “Sure, I understand you can’t.”
She took my hand and placed it on her tummy and said, “Feel.” I rubbed around but it felt like it always did, round and firm. But something about doing that made me want her bad even though it was too hot for doing anything. Next thing I know we’re kissing and I have her laid back on the bed and I can’t resist her. And when I do it to her it’s the best we ever did it. And afterwards even she said it was.
“Charley, that was so nice. It’s like we were made for each other.”
But right after we’re finished, as I’m lying there, I’m thinking about Ruby again. Feeling guilty again. Wishing I was with Ruby. And when I am with Ruby, I’m thinking about Beulah. And when I’m robbing banks I’m thinking about what it would be like to live a straight life and when I’m trying to live straight, I’m thinking about robbing banks. I feel like I’m trying to live in two different worlds and can’t find any peace in either of them.
We come to the road that turns off to the farm where Ruby is staying with Jackie — her father’s place — and we turn up it only I kill the headlights as I do.
“We’re liable to run into a cow or something,” Bird says, slurring his words, as if he’d even know if we ran into a whole herd of cows. He still dances when he pisses even though the doctor gave him something for the clap. He says that’s why he’s drinking so much, to kill the pain he has when he pisses. He says it won’t go away entirely because God wants to leave him a reminder about fornicating with whores. I tell him that’s nuts. He says, “There’s a lot of stuff goes on none of us know about — God’s one great big mystery, Choc.” I tell him he’s still nuts.
I slow the car down to barely a crawl because I’ve learned to be cautious and not to trust nothing or nobody. I can see the outline of the house against the night sky: dark and lonely. Still I’m cautious. There’s enough reward money on our heads to get a man to sit up all night with a rifle hoping to get lucky.
“You got bullets in your gun?” I ask Bird. He fumbles around in his pocket and takes out his pistol. It looks big as a brick. He fools with it trying to check the chamber, slides back the slide and a shell kicks out and lands in his lap.
“Careful with that thing,” I say. “You ever see the size of a hole one of those leaves in a fellow?”
“I know if you shoot a man in his pinky finger with one of these, it will knock him off his feet,” Bird says, happy as a child.
“That’s what I’m worried about, you shooting me with that damn thing.”
I think of how Beulah said she didn’t feel anything when the police shot her in the head. I think if you got shot anywhere else but in the head, you’d feel it.
As we get closer to the house, there’s a gate we got to pass through. I notice it’s standing open. Something no farmer would do who has cows. I stop the car.
“Something’s wrong, Bird.”
“What?” He drops the gun on the floor, bends to pick it up. Somebody steps out of the shadows.
“Give it up Pretty Boy!”
I don’t wait for whoever it is to identify himself. I shove the gearshift into reverse and hit the gas hard.
Gunshots. Bullets whang off the fenders, doors, trunk; one shatters the back window, another a headlight. Bird’s hat gets shot off his head. The lane is muddy and the harder I give it the gas the more bogged down the wheels get spinning into the mud. I cut the wheel sharp.
“You going to fire that thing?” I yell at Bird, “or just let them shoot us like fish in a barrel?”
Bird sobers quick, starts tossing lead through the busted glass.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Every time he shoots his pistol, flashes of light explode inside the car. I’m yelling at him but I can’t hear what I’m saying. Slugs tear into the car but nothing hits me or Bird. Still, I get ready to bite one, hoping it won’t hurt too badly.
“How the hell they know they ain’t shooting innocent people?” Bird yells.
“Three o’clock in the morning, I guess they can figure out we ain’t innocent people,” I yell back.
If it weren’t we were about to be slaughtered, it would almost be funny. The car is going maybe fifteen miles an hour back up the lane. I can hear the tires zizzing, flinging mud clots up underneath the frame as I give it everything I’ve got.
George says he sees the shadows running after us, the flames of their rifles and shotguns lighting up the dark.
He’s yelling, “They couldn’t hit a bull in the ass!” when something hot hits me in the ankle and my whole foot goes numb: my brake foot, not my gas foot.
I must have yelped because Bird turns to me and says, “What?”
“I think they shot my foot off.”
He crawls over the seat and I crawl under him and he takes the wheel and I take the pistol and try not to think how damn much getting shot hurts. It feels like hot water is filling up my shoe.
I wonder is this it, is this the time they kill me?
Ruby Floyd Leonard
I should have known Charley would never change his ways. Somebody shows me his picture with a woman he’s got his arms around.
“He was just acting like it was nothing at all,” this friend, the wife of a guy me and Charley both knew and who I used to think was a true friend until she showed me that picture.
“They had it taken in Sallisaw. Me and Frank were there for the day and ran into them and Charley just said, ‘Hey Iris, this here is Beulah Baird.’ He had a handful of pictures taken in some studio they’d just come out of and gave me and Frank this one. I thought you’d like to know.”
It was one of those things you wanted to know but didn’t want to know and once I saw it, I couldn’t deny my jealousy, my disappointment, my fire-hot anger.
“Oh, you know Charley’s never going to change,” I say, but down deep, my heart is bitter and it is shattered.
I packed everything Jackie and me owned into two suitcases and I left all of Charley’s clothes hanging in the closet. Let whoever moves in have them. I was mad enough to burn them but I didn’t want to take the time, and we left Tulsa and moved to my daddy’s place in Bixby.
It was where Charley came looking for me on the night they ambushed him and George and shot Charley in the ankle. I guess he loved me enough to risk his life, knowing that the police were probably watching the place. It left me all torn up. How are you supposed to love a man who cheats on you but will risk his life just to see you? My heart is bitter still and the worst kind of love is the kind you can’t quit.
Bill Counts
A bunch of us looked at all that reward money the bankers placed on the head of Charley Floyd and said, “Hell if the regular law can’t catch ’em, maybe we ought to.” We knew that land as well as anybody, as well as Charley himself. Me and Erv Kelly decided to put an end to all this Pretty Boy business and put a little something extra into our pockets doing it. We’d both been law officers in the past, so it wasn’t like we were green fish or anything. Shit, we could shoot. And Erv had taken down about a dozen different bank robbers when he was sheriff of McIntosh County.
“We’ll shoot those boys like they was ducks,” Erv said.
“Hell yes,” I said. “Why not.”
So we laid an ambush for Pretty Boy and old George Birdwell. And we sat outside that farm on long dark nights and drank a little shine out of mason jars and swapped a few lies and liked to have froze our asses off waiting for them boys to show up.
Then one night they come.
And I said to Erv, “That’s sure as shit them.”
“It sure as shit is. Ain’t nobody drives up a lane in the dark with their headlights off at three in the morning but somebody that’s got a reason to not want to be noticed.”
Erv was packing a Thompson machine gun. We sort of made a joke of it before that night: “That’s a lot of gun.”
“Yeah, it’s enough gun for a couple of birds named George and Charley.”
“Pretty gun for a Pretty Boy.” Stuff like that.
We held our breath until they got close. We’d had a lot of rain lately and the lane was muddy. It would be nice they was to bog down in it. They drove up to a gate I saw too late we’d left open. The plan was, soon as somebody stepped out of the car to open the gate, we’d hit ’em. Erv said something I’d never heard come out of his mouth before when he saw them stop and start to back up: “Fuck a damn duck!”
It was a dead giveaway, that gate. They stopped and started to back up and Erv went out there and yelled at them to stop, his hands full of that tommy gun; I guess he must have felt invincible or maybe he just had gotten tired of sitting out there in the dark night after night freezing his ass off. He yelled at them to give up.
He got shot six times (this I learned later) and fell squeezing the trigger of that Thompson tearing up the ground around his feet. Time I got to him he was dead, shot about every place a man can be. Hell, I emptied my rifle and pistol and even took up the Thompson and emptied it. The other boys that were with us that night, Crockett Long,
A. B. Cooper, M. L. Lairmore, Jim Stormont and J. A. Smith, were firing too. It was like a goddamn turkey shoot.
But that automobile just kept on going with Charley Floyd and George Birdwell in it and I thought to myself standing over Erv, what a couple of lucky sons a bitches they were, and what an unlucky fellow old Erv was.
It eat me up to have to go tell his widow.
Pretty Boy Floyd
A week after the shootout, George says he needs cash and wants to rob a bank of his own since I’m laid up with a bullet in my ankle.
“Go ahead,” I tell him. “It’s a free country.”
