Pretty boy, p.4
Pretty Boy, page 4
“You’re as beautiful as the rain,” he whispers.
He is all hardness, a force of muscle and bone.
“I can’t stand looking at you and not touching you,” he says softly, his mouth pressed against my ear. “I knew I had to get you alone, and now I got you alone and I’m not ever going to let you go.”
“Touch me,” I say. “Let me burn you up, Charley.”
“Yeah, burn me up baby.”
His hands discover all the lost places of me, his words reach into the secrets of my heart and take them out one by one and fondle them and never put them back.
And when he enters me it is like salvation itself and I cling to him, hold on tight.
Ann Chambers
Charley came around my establishment lots of times. I kept a house of girls down near Cherry and Thirteenth and he’d show up there dressed to the nines, right down to silk underwear.
“What’s a pretty boy like you having to buy a date for?” I said to him once.
“Don’t call me that,” he said soberly. He was two sheets to the wind on gin and there was this scary thing about him. He said he hated the name, Pretty Boy, that the newspapers gave him that name. I said, “It fits.”
He sulked a bit then told me to take my clothes off, but leave the lights on.
“I like to watch a woman undress,” he said. I didn’t see anything unusual in his request, lots of men are like that. But what was different was the way Charley watched, the way his eyes seemed to look into your thoughts. Made me shiver a little.
“Charley, lots of girls would give it to you for free,” I said, taking off my kimono — I had great tits and liked to show them off and I could tell when Charley saw them he thought they were great too.
“Lots of girls give it to me for free,” he said, lying on the bed in his silk shorts. “But those kind of girls aren’t always around when you need them, and besides there is a wonderful difference between those kind of girls and girls like yourself.”
“Oh really?”
“That’s right, kiddo. With girls like you, it’s always about business, straight to the point, no miscommunication. I always know what I’m getting, what I have to pay for it.”
“Should I take that as a compliment or an insult?” I said, climbing into bed with him. “Take it any way you want, I didn’t come here to talk.”
The man loved to screw. I think he screwed every girl in my establishment, sometimes two at a time. “I just love women,” he said. “Women have always been my one great weakness. I wouldn’t be surprised they’ll be the downfall of me.”
He told me later, after we’d gotten to be something of friends, he had a wife and a girlfriend. I said, gee, ain’t that enough women for you, and he said, a guy like him could never get enough of a good thing, that he was the sort of man who appreciated the pleasures life had to offer and that his time on earth might be short and he was going to enjoy every minute of it.
“Live till you die, right.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
After awhile I stopped charging him for it because I got to like him a lot.
Pretty Boy Floyd
Even when I’m with other women I still miss Ruby. I think about her and little Jackie all the time. Sometimes I think about her even more when I’m with another woman. Every time I see the snow falling or watch it rain, I get lonely for them. There’s something lonely about the snow falling or rain hitting the empty streets late at night. It’s like I’m the last guy on earth and it’s always going to be that way. I go out with other women because I hate being alone, I hate thinking about Ruby and my son being alone and a long ways away. I think I’ll go see if I can find them. I’m getting tired of getting rousted by the cops and I’m getting tired of Kansas City. I never did anything wrong, and if I did, it was because they wouldn’t leave me alone. All I ever wanted was a decent life for me and my own. What’s wrong with that?
I leave K.C. on a bus, same way I arrived. I don’t see any future for me in K.C. and I’m not sure I see a future for me anywhere. Nights without a woman, somebody to keep me company are like little deaths. I die every night.
Daddy Walter
Charley didn’t come home this time in a fancy new car. He came on a bus and walked the last three miles up to the farm. I was reading Leviticus; it’s a hard book about hard rules for living a good and righteous life. I don’t think Charley ever read the Bible.
“Daddy,” Charley says. “I sure miss this old place.”
We sit and talk while the women make him a big supper — his mother and sisters. His brothers look at Charley like he’s some sort of hero — like he’s Jesse James come back from the grave. I need to talk to my boys before they get it in their heads to follow Charley. Having one go down that road is bad enough, I don’t know what I’d do if the other two went as well.
After supper I tell Charley I need to speak to him alone and we take a walk out into the fields where we can see the evening star standing alone in the blue-black sky.
“Charley, I need you to talk to Bradley and E.W.; I need you to tell them not to get any ideas about joining up with you. Those boys get envious when they see you. You’re like the prodigal son in their eyes.”
“I’ll do it, Daddy,” he says. “I sure would hate to see either of them spend as much as a single day behind bars — it’s not a fit place for even a dog to be.”
“Lord, son, I wish you’d find it in you to turn your life around.”
“Tell the truth, I’ve come back to find Ruby and little Jackie,” he says. “I want my family back and to start over.”
It made me want to cry. He seemed so lonely, my own flesh and blood, like the apple that fell too far from the tree. Charley was always different than the rest of us Floyds. It was like he heard and saw things none of the rest of us did and it got him to dreaming about things none of the rest of us had it in us to dream about. I can’t say why. We are all of the same blood, the same bone.
But not Charley.
Pretty Boy Floyd
It was hard hearing Daddy Walter asking me to steer my brothers straight, knowing I’d brought disgrace to the Floyd name. I was more determined than ever to do the right thing — even if it meant digging my hands into the dirt, picking cotton, working the oil fields. If I could just get Ruby and Jackie back, I promised myself I’d stay straight. It was my sister, Mary Delta, who finally told me the sorry news.
“Ruby met another man and she and Jackie moved away with him.”
It was like hearing Ruby had suddenly died. I thought maybe if I could find some honest work, put a little stake together, I could find her, talk her into coming back to me. So I went to work in the oil fields, but I didn’t stick with it any longer than I had the other times. Red was right about how once you got a taste of easy money it made it impossible to do anything else. Pretty soon, I was back in Kansas City, no Ruby and no Jackie.
I was back at doing what I knew how to do best.
I was half hoping for God to tell me I was doing wrong. But God never told me anything, or if he did, I must have been asleep.
Beulah Baird
Charley was restless as a cat when he came back to K.C.
“Where’d you go off to?” I asked him.
“Don’t ever ask me about my personal business, Beulah.” He made me take my clothes off and get in the bed with him. He was cold and shaking like a child in my arms.
If Charley would say jump, I’d ask how high. That’s how crazy I was about him.
We went to Pueblo, Colorado because Charley thought the change of scenery would do us all some good and he said he wanted to see some real mountains before he died. I said, you think you’re going to die, Charley, and he said, sooner or later.
But the cops rousted us in Pueblo too, and Charley said if I’m going to get rousted, it’s not going to be in some one-horse town like this. Two weeks later we were back in K.C., Charley still restless. The police kept picking him up on one charge and another. I’m not saying Charley never did anything to draw suspicion to himself, but he sure didn’t do what the crooked police claimed he did.
We got some real bad news not long after Thanksgiving: Daddy Walter had been killed in a fight. Me and Rose and Charley went to Sallisaw for the funeral. I guess nobody in Sallisaw ever saw anything like the three of us. I can only imagine what everybody was thinking. But I didn’t care what they thought of me. I was Charley Floyd’s girlfriend and that’s all I cared about. Let them look, let them talk.
Pretty Boy Floyd
Daddy Walter’s own neighbor, Jim Mills, killed him. I used to play doctor with Jim’s girl Shirley when we were kids. According to the testimony at the trial, Daddy threatened him with a knife after they got into an argument over some shingles. Shingles! Who the hell ever killed anybody over some damn shingles? Jim tells the jury he shot Daddy Walter in self-defense when he come at him with a knife. Tell me how it’s self-defense when it’s a shotgun against a knife? They let Jim go scot-free. He disappeared right after the trial and nobody ever heard of him again. I know a lot of folks think I took revenge on him. I’ve gotten accused of lots of things, so one more accusation doesn’t bother me. If something bad did happen to Jim Mills, maybe he deserved it.
I saw Shirley at the trial — she was pregnant, sitting with a farmboy in overalls who wore a slouch hat, his jaw fat with a chaw of plug tobacco. I wondered when she saw me did she think about those days in the corncrib when we played doctor with each other, or if all she thought about now was how her daddy had killed mine.
I remember the sun coming through the slats of the corncrib, the way her skin was pink and warm to my touch, the slight sour smell of her mouth, the rough hard cobs of corn shifting underneath us.
I remember the innocence, the sweet, sweet innocence of us there on the brink of the rest of our lives and wondered if it had led to this day, this place, this sad occasion where death overtook us and overtook the memory of that day.
Oh sweet girl, let me kiss thy innocent mouth.
& brush this death away and stroke thy hair and bring forth a new god.
Beulah Baird
Charley and Rose and me drive back to Kansas City in a snowstorm. We stop at a little grocery store to get some cheese and crackers and liquor for the trip (Charley said he knew the man ran a still and sold shine under the counter) and I say, “Charley, ain’t you coming in?” He says, “No, I hate goddamn grocery stores.”
Christmas is an unhappy time — Charley is so blue even making love doesn’t cheer him up.
“Come on, hon — don’t you want to unwrap your present?” I say. I’m wearing nothing but a big red ribbon. Charley just looks at me then looks out at the snow.
“Every time I see snow falling,” he says glumly, “it reminds me of Jeff City and every bad time I ever had.”
I do my best to get him out of the blues, but nothing works.
Rose and me go to the movies. Charley stays home.
Charley is a mystery always to me.
Ruby Floyd
I got word that Charley had come back to Sallisaw for Daddy Walter’s funeral and the trial that followed. I would have liked to have gone to visit Daddy Walter and paid my respects, but I’m with another man now and I know if Charley were to see us together he’d go crazy, maybe do something that would get him in more trouble with the law. Seems like trouble just dogs Charley.
A hundred times I started to write him a letter and a hundred times I threw it away. I’ve got a good man now, a baker, and he works hard and he takes good care of me and Jackie and loves us to pieces — so much so, sometimes it’s smothering. I go for walks alone in the park and sit on a bench and try not to think of Charley as I watch kids flying kites in blue skies. I love the way the paper kites sound when they snap in the wind. Mostly when I think about Charley, I think of the way things used to be between us before he went off and got in trouble. It’s easier remembering the good times than the bad.
I read what they say about him. I hear talk. But nobody knows Charley like I do. If they did, they’d know he’s a good man with a lot of weaknesses.
A flight of geese in a long dark V wing their way south. Their honking is an alarm to the heart and I look up and watch them disappear beyond a line of bare trees and realize that it feels like winter inside me and that love flies away no matter how much I try and hold onto it.
I will Charley to fly away from my heart as I watch the geese and listen to the kites snapping in the wind, then walk back to my small apartment above the bakery and to a man who loves me desperately and leaves me feeling starved.
Pretty Boy Floyd
I can hardly stand the thought of Ruby with another man. Her daddy tells me she married a baker down in Coffeyville, Kansas. It’s like she’s living in another world than me, and it feels too strange to contemplate. A baker! I wonder if he dances with her and makes her feel the way I did.
I wonder if she has given him her heart along with everything else.
I wonder does my boy call him “Daddy.”
I wonder all the time, my head too full of things not my own.
I wonder if she is with him right this moment as I am thinking about her.
Lying with this new man in a bed, her arms wrapped round him.
Christ, I hope not.
5
Pretty Boy Floyd
I decided an alias might keep the cops off my back. I told Beulah and some of the boys from now on they should call me Joe Scott. But somebody must have had a loose lip and spread it around because the cops still rousted me every chance they got. I even got rousted for the robbery at the Sears Roebuck plant. There was a heist anywhere in Kansas City, the first person they mentioned was me. I knew how Jesse James must have felt when they said he robbed every bank in three states all on the same day.
Then I get approached by some guys, who I won’t name, to take down a dick that’s been giving the whole K.C. underworld a hard time: a dick by the name of Burt Haycock. A crack detective the papers call him.
All I know is this: one morning the dick is on his way into work when a car pulled alongside him at a traffic light and some guys opened up on him with machine guns. How the hell he didn’t get killed is anybody’s guess. Of course the shooting makes all the headlines and outrages the cops to no end and my name gets mentioned around as one of the gunsels. So what’s new, I say to myself when I hear. But I figure I better clear out of K.C. quick. I’ve got no real friends but Beulah and Rose. I’m not even sure I can trust them. It gets so after awhile you don’t trust anyone.
It reminds me a little of a dame I used to go see in a cathouse in Ft. Smith. She said to me, “I used to be a good Catholic girl, went to church and confession regularly. I prayed and did penance even though I never committed any real sins. Then I went out with the wrong boy in high school and he spread it around I was a tramp. And after that, all the boys treated me like I was a tramp, and after a time, I figured if I was going to keep getting accused of something, I might as well do what they’re accusing me of, so I did, and that’s how I ended up a tramp.”
That’s how I was beginning to think, too. As long as they were going to accuse me of being an outlaw, I might just as well be a real one.
Beulah Baird
Charley is in a panic.
“They got my name down as one of the shooters of that dick,” he says, throwing clothes into a suitcase.
“But Charley, you didn’t do it, right?”
He takes the glass of hooch sitting on the dresser and tosses it back then packs some socks and underwear to go along with the clean shirts and shave kit.
“You didn’t do it, right, Charley?”
“I told you don’t ever ask me my business, Beulah. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Sure, sure, you told me.”
“Then why you asking me?”
“Where’re you going?” I say. “You planning on taking me with you?”
“Not this time, kiddo. I’ve got to travel fast and light. Besides, I don’t want you mixed up in nothing as serious as trying to kill a dick. You know what they do to cop killers, even if they just think you tried to kill one.”
His skin is flushed. Maybe it’s all the heat in the room coming from the radiator, or maybe he’s concerned the cops will bust in any minute and roust him. Or maybe the reason he’s flushed is I’m standing there with my kimono hanging open. I push up close to him and say, “Take me with you, Charley. I’ll go anywhere with you, you know that, don’t you?”
“Sure, I know it, kiddo. But . . .”
Then I take his hand and slip it inside my kimono and it’s warm and strong against my breast. A girl knows the power of her own body.
“Jesus, you got nice ones, kiddo, but this ain’t the time or place.”
“Don’t I know it, Charley, but take me with you, huh?”
I kiss him long and hard and I think maybe he’s going to change his mind because while I’m kissing him I reach for him down where he likes it best. But just as I do, we hear a car door slam outside and next thing I know Charley is running down the hallway toward the back stairs, his suitcase in one hand, his gun in the other.
I figure as long as I’m in love with Charley Floyd, I better get used to seeing him disappearing. Charley always said he was born to run.
The cops come in and ask where Charley is. I tell them he ran away. “Which way?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Dames like you,” one of the cops says. “Yeah, dames like me.”
Run Charley, run.
