Pretty boy, p.3
Pretty Boy, page 3
“Next time we do a job,” Charley tells me later, “I’ll be my own wheelman, okay?”
“Sure, Pretty Boy, anything you say.”
“You keep calling me that, I’m going to have to teach you a lesson,” he says.
All the guys I know, Charley Floyd is the most dangerous. He’s like deep water with a strong undertow — looks okay on the surface, but underneath there lurks danger. He doesn’t want me to call him Pretty Boy, I won’t. I got a feeling, Charley Floyd is going to be the biggest name in the crime business one of these days.
Pretty Boy Floyd
Fred the Sheik and me buy new suits, silk underwear, two-tone shoes, nice dove-gray snap-brims, and a new Studebaker, fully loaded.
“We’re going kind of whole hog, ain’t we Charley?” Fred says, when I peel off the money and hand it to the salesman.
“I didn’t get into this business just so I could act poor,” I say.
“You got style, Pretty Boy.”
“Keep calling me that and I’ll hit you in the mouth.”
He throws up his hands and I throw up mine and we dance around like we’re boxing. Then he says, “I was just kidding with you, Charley.” So I let it go, his calling me that.
We hightail it out of St. Louis and stop that night in Springfield where we find a speakeasy with some hot jazz music and plenty of booze and girls. You’d have thought we were a couple of movie stars when we walked in, every eye was on us and we didn’t mind. We slipped the doorman a five spot for a table up front and it wasn’t long before we had company in the form of two dolls said their names were Annabelle and Josie. I liked the looks of Josie and gave Fred the Sheik Annabelle. We danced the foxtrot and Josie wanted me to dance the black bottom with her and I did, but mostly just watched her shake her stuff. We drank bourbon like it was good for us and ended up at a fancy hotel downtown.
“What is it you and your friend do?” Josie says as I am taking off my trousers and hanging them over the back of a chair so they wouldn’t get wrinkled.
“Do?” She’s as pretty as a picture, platinum hair and talks sort of smart. So I figure to impress her, I’ll talk pretty smart too.
“We’re in the financial business.”
“Oh, that must be very interesting.”
“Yes, it is.You’d be surprised at how much money is out there to be made.”
She sips her bourbon and watches me, then when I’m down to just my underwear she says, “Those silk?”
“Yeah, you want to feel?”
“No, I want to wear them,” she says, and reaches out for me.
There is something sweet about her that I like. I always liked the sweetness in women. Making love to somebody for the first time is always exciting. Every woman’s different and it’s like going down a new road you never been down before. Josie giggles when she comes. Seems like I was making her giggle all night long.
Next morning Fred the Sheik and me head back to Sallisaw, the sun rising behind us red as a bloodshot eye.
Ruby Floyd
Charley has been gone several weeks and he never said where he was going or when he’d be back and I am mad at him. And when at last he does comes back, driving that new car I’m even madder because I know he didn’t make enough working harvest to earn that kind of money. And even if he did, I felt he was spending it on the wrong things. He brings presents for me and Jackie and smells like another woman’s perfume and I can see there’s some lipstick on his shirt collar.
“Don’t ask,” he says, when he sees me staring at it.
“I’m your wife, Charley. I’ve got a right to ask what you been up to.”
“No, you don’t,” he says. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”
“Is that how we’re going to live our lives from now on?”
“Take it or leave it, Ruby. I’m doing what I have to do to make things better for all of us. You might want to live like some poor Indian, but I don’t.”
I slap him. It makes me mad, him calling me a poor Indian.
He rubs his cheek, says, “Fine, that’s the way you want it,” and drops the presents on the couch and walks out. I don’t see him again for three days until Daddy Walter comes and gets me and takes me down to the police station where they’ve got Charley booked on armed robbery charges.
“They think Charley and his friend robbed a payroll in St. Louis,” Daddy Walter says. I can see his eyes are full of hurt over what they say Charley did. Daddy Walter has a good reputation around Aikens and Sallisaw.
Charley looks a lot less sure of himself when we visit him at the jail.
“I didn’t do anything,” he tells Daddy Walter and me. “It’s all a frame-up, they got me mixed up with somebody else.”
My heart aches for him, and it aches for me and little Jackie too.
I want to curse him and hit him and make him understand what it is he’s doing to us. But he looks so pitiful locked up I just can’t be anything but sorry for him. He promises me that once things get cleared up, he’ll change.
I want to believe him. The heart is a foolish thing, and love only leads to regret in the end. I kiss his mouth between the bars.
Pretty Boy Floyd
I can’t explain how it felt to have my family see me locked up like that, Daddy Walter’s eyes full of shame. But mostly having Ruby on the other side of the bars, the deep disappointment in her eyes. I’d have given anything to walk out of that jail and go right home with her and pick up my son and stay with them forever. Even if I’d had to farm again or work the harvests or oil fields, I think I would have done it and given up the life of crime.
But the police cracked Fred the Sheik easy as an egg and he gave up Joe the Wheelman Hlavatry and Hlavatry gave them me. I never liked that son of a bitch from the first moment I met him. I don’t think he was much of a wheelman either.
When all was said and done, they gave me five years in Jeff City — the Missouri state pen. They stuck me in just seven days before Christmas. A hell of a note. I stood and watched the snow falling into the black waters of the Missouri River from my cell. It felt like it was snowing inside me.
Ruby Floyd
I get my first letter from Charley just two days before Christmas. In it he says:
Dearest Ruby,
I know I haven’t been as good a husband to you as I promised. I miss you and Jackie something terrible. This is no place for a human being to be in and certainly not at Christmas when I should be home with you and my baby boy and Daddy Walter and my mother and sisters and all the rest celebrating. I just hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me and know that I’ll do right by you once I get out. I’ve learned the error of my ways. No more robbing grocery stores for me. Daddy Walter told me a long time ago about crime not paying, he was right. It don’t. Guess what? They made me a waiter. Imagine your Charley, a waiter. All my love and give Jackie a kiss for me and tell him I love him. Your Loving & Faithful husband, Charley.
The thin sheets of paper were stained, some of the ink smeared, like maybe Charley’s tears had fallen across the words then dried again. I felt sorry for him. But I felt sorry for our son and me too. It was a hard life and the times were hard and not much work for anybody. I resented Charley for what he did to Jackie and me, how he left us in favor of a fast life. He had broken my heart just like I told him he would that first time we made love. I should have known better, but when you’re crazy for someone, everything you do is crazy too.
Daddy Walter
I can’t tell you how it hurt me to see them take my boy off to Jeff City. Cage him like a dog for five long years. Charley was a good boy. He fell in with the wrong people and that cost him, but it don’t stop the shame we all feel. I pray every night that the good Lord will see fit to take hold of him and turn him around before it’s too late — before he goes so far wrong somebody shoots him down. God, I don’t think I could stand to live to see my boy shot down.
I don’t know what sins I committed in my life to have them visited on my child, but surely God must be angry with us Floyds to shatter us like He has. I just pray that we can find the right path to walk on before it is too late.
Pretty Boy Floyd
With less than three months to go on my sentence, papers arrive from Ruby’s lawyer asking me for a divorce. Neglect is the stated cause. I guess maybe so. I don’t argue with what they say, I just sign my name: Chas. Floyd, and send them back to the lawyer. What else can I do? It hurts to think that maybe Ruby will end up going off with another man, my boy under another man’s roof, taking orders from another man. I feel black inside. Black and empty. I almost wish one of those policemen’s bullets had found me that day we were shooting it out. All that fast easy money doesn’t mean a thing if you’ve got no way to spend it. I got empty pockets and a hole in my heart, and the snow is still falling.
The last five years have seemed like one long winter. I promise myself to change when I get out. I dream of those Oklahoma hills and me in them.
I try and pray for redemption but how do you pray to a god who would curse you?
4
Pretty Boy Floyd
Red says Kansas City is where the real action is.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve seen about all the action I can stand. Look where it’s gotten me.”
Red’s an okay guy and my cellmate here at Jeff City. Quiet, not loud and boastful like Fred the Sheik or Joe the Wheelman.
“I used to be a baker,” he says. “All kinds of breads, rolls. But man, I hated getting up early. I got insomnia and don’t ever sleep good at night. It makes it rough, you have to get up at four in the morning to bake bread.”
Sometimes I hear him thinking up in his bunk.
“How was it you went from being a baker to a robber?” I say, after we’d gotten to know each other well enough. In the pen, you’ve got to know who you can trust. Red is the only guy I really trust in here.
“I just got tired of getting up so early with no sleep. I’m by nature a night owl. So after awhile I start looking for alternatives. Then I meet a guy who has all the answers — you know the type, don’t you, Charley?”
“Yeah, I know the type.”
“So this guy tells me he’s a stickup artist. Stickup artist! Like it’s something beautiful what he does — like he’s Rembrandt, only with a gun. But I listen and he says it’s easy money, and best of all, you can set your own hours — no more getting up at four in the morning.” Then he says, ‘Unless you want to rob a bakery.’ ”
“You sorry you did it now?”
“No. I mean, I’m sorry I got caught and all that. But to tell the truth, once you get a taste of that lifestyle, that easy money, it’s hard to think about going back to a regular job.”
I knew what he meant. When he got his walking papers he told me to look him up in Kansas City — gave me the phone number and address of his sister, said she’d know where I could find him. I wrote it down on a piece of paper. But I didn’t have any intention of going wrong again.
Alfred “Red” Lovett
I had me a flop on the second floor of the Dixon Hotel in K.C. when Charley showed up. I was a little surprised in a way that he did, after all that talk in Jeff City of how he was going to go straight once he got out of the pen. “Straight to what?” I said. His wife had divorced him while he was pulling his time. A thing like that can ruin a man and whatever good intentions he might’ve had.
There he stood when I opened the door, a cardboard suitcase in his hand and wearing his prison suit, those cheap shoes they give you. He probably had ten bucks gate money in his pockets, maybe not even that. I remember in Jeff City him telling me how he liked to dress nice. But standing there he looked like what he was — an ex-con just got out of the joint.
It was March and still cold outside and Charley had the collar of his suit jacket pulled up and no overcoat and was shivering like a wet dog.
“Don’t just stand there,” I say. He comes in, looks around.
“It’s nothing much,” I explain. “I’m still setting up some scores.”
“Jesus, Red, it’s a lot like the room we had at Jeff City.”
“Only no bars, in case you ain’t noticed.”
We have a beer and talk this and that. Then Charley says, “Were you serious about this town being a good place for a man to get some real action?”
“Why you think I’m here?” We have another beer.
“Thing you got to worry about more than anything in K.C.,” I tell Charley, “isn’t the police — they’re all on the take.”
“If not the cops, then who?”
“Guys like Blind Harry Brewer and Johnny Lazia.”
“Who are they?”
Charley’s real innocent. Even though he’s done time, he don’t know squat about how things work in a place like Kansas City. Charley’s from Oklahoma — somewhere in the sticks. I said to him the first time he told me where he was from, “I thought all they had in Oklahoma was cowboys and Indians.” He laughed, said, “Red, get real.” Tells me there were a lot of pretty tough customers come out of Oklahoma. I say, yeah, like who? And he says, the Dalton brothers and Cherokee Bill and a guy named Henry Starr and I say I never heard of them. Then he shakes his head like I’m the one who don’t know nothing.
“Blind Harry runs a big gambling setup,” I say. “And Johnny Lazia is connected to the Democratic machine and runs all the bootlegging. You want to wet your whistle, you drink Johnny’s hooch. You want to buy you a woman, you buy one of Leroy Maxey’s girls. Anything else you want, you go see Benny Portman or Solly Weissman. See, Charley, in this town, you don’t get away with or do nothing illegal that ain’t connected to one of those guys. Cops are the least of your worries.”
“Then let’s go see who we’ve got to see,” he says.
“It ain’t that simple.”
“Why isn’t it?”
I can tell Charley’s got a whole lot to learn, but looking into those serious eyes of his, I got no doubt he’s going to learn fast and be a contender.
Pretty Boy Floyd
The cops pick me up two days after I move in with Red. Red tells me it’s just a warning because I’m new in town and they want to check me out, make sure I know the score and who’s in charge. They let me go that same day. Then two days after they cut me loose, I get arrested again on a charge of vagrancy. I’m having a cup of coffee in a diner figuring out what my next move is when two detectives in plain clothes come in and take me out again in cuffs.
“You best go back to the sticks where you come from,” one of the dicks says.
“You mean some of the local boys don’t want any competition,” I say smartly. For this I get backhanded by the dick hard enough to split my lip.
“Keep talking wise guy and somebody will find your body dumped in the river.”
When I tell Red the cops want me to hit the road, he tells me they’re watching his place and maybe it’s better I find a new place to hole up in. I move my things to a rooming house on Holmes Street run by a woman named Sadie Ash who Red says has a fondness for ex-cons: “It’s like they’re stray dogs to her, or something.”
“No funny stuff while you’re staying here, Mr. Floyd,” Mrs. Ash tells me in a stern voice. She’s small with a pinched face and red hands, like they’ve been scalded from being in too much hot water. It’s not exactly the picture Red painted for me of this kindly old lady. I find out later that her two boys Willy and Wallace are pimps and petty crooks. I also learn they are dope addicts and police informers. Real beauts.
The good news is, if you could call it that, Willy and Wallace are married to a couple of good-looking sisters named Beulah and Rose and I get to look at them every night across the dinner table. I say good news because soon as I take one look at Beulah and she takes a look at me, we both know it’s all over. I’m maybe at the house a week and the next thing I know, Beulah and me are doing it in the bathroom while the boys are eating Sunday dinner with their ma.
“Oh, god, Charley!” Beulah keeps saying. I got her up against the door with her skirt hiked up over her hips and I can hear Willy and Wallace saying, “Pass the mash potatoes, Ma” and “How’s about some more of that bread, Ma” the whole time I’m shoving into Beulah. “Oh, god, Charley!” she says with her hot breath on my face.
“Pass them peas,” the boys are saying.
“Oh god, Charley, I’m coming.”
“How about some of that coffee.”
“Hurry, baby, hurry.”
“Go ahead, cut loose,” I tell Beulah.
“I am,” she says and I have to kiss her hard on the mouth so the boys and Ma don’t hear her when she cuts loose.
Grunt, grunt, bang, bang. And it’s like we’re parachuting to earth, Beulah and me, there in that small bathroom, those boys feeding their faces.
The whole world is crazy and I’m just as crazy but I don’t care anymore. Five years in the pen leaves a guy hungry for a lot of things and I’m starved to death for a woman.
A few days later, Beulah and me move in together in some walkup across town and she files for divorce from Wallace. I should have known this would ultimately bring me more trouble. Women always were for me the bearers of bad tidings.
Beulah Baird
I just knew the first time I laid eyes on Charley I had to have him. He spoke to me with his eyes and I knew everything he was saying. My husband Wallace sitting right across from us stuffing his face with Ma’s potatoes and pork chops while Charley’s hand slid up my leg under the table all the way to the top of my nylons. His hand was strong and gentle all at the same time and I wanted it there on my thigh. I thought I was going to cry out when his fingers moved higher. I had to bite the inside of my cheek. Pretty soon I excused myself from the table and next thing I know me and Charley are in the bathroom and he’s got me up against the door and no way I can resist him. Charley whispers sweet things to me as he lifts my skirt . . . it’s been forever since anybody’s whispered sweet things to me. A woman needs to hear sweet things whispered to her and Charley knew how and what to say.
