Pretty boy, p.19
Pretty Boy, page 19
“Jeez, Rose, we really are trampy,” I say as we watch the wet Missouri countryside drift away. Rain runs over the window like tears.
“It’s just the way it is, Beulah,” she says. “We’re just a couple of girls trying to get by with the gifts God gave us. What’s the difference between us and some gals who get married to the wrong guys? I mean in a way, all women are tramps, but at least we’re happy. We ain’t stuck with some guy all he wants to do is sit around and listen to the radio.”
I think of Charley, of dead cops, of wet streets and the tattoo the older sailor had on his chest — a large blue anchor out of which grew gray curly hairs. The weight of his anchor feeling like it was pressing onto me and dragging me down to the bottom of some deep, deep ocean. I knew the day would come when men would no longer want to buy us a drink or call us long distance and tell us to meet them somewhere or give us dough for dresses and perfume. Still, it didn’t make me feel any better knowing what we were, what we’d always been.
Ruby Floyd Leonard
I got two letters today: one from my ex saying that he had filed for divorce and one from Charley saying how much he missed me and Jackie. I didn’t know which one to read first, so I just picked the one on top.
Dear Ruby,
I have seen a lawyer and filed for divorce from you. I kept thinking you’d change your mind and come back to me, that you’d see that Charley Floyd doesn’t love you the way I do. But it is evident now that you aren’t coming back and never will. I guess some men are just fools and I was one of them. Just like you’re a fool for Charley Floyd. Well, all I can say is, no man ever loved you more than me, Charley Floyd included.
Your former husband,
Leroy
My darling Ruby,
You probably heard about my latest troubles — that whole business in Kansas City. What they’re saying about me isn’t true — I never done it — shot any cops. You know me. I’m a lover, not a killer. How’s Jackie? Give him a big hug and kiss for me. Me and Rich are on the lam still because the cops are never going to believe I’m innocent and if they catch us we’re both dead men, I can tell you that with all certainty. I plan on coming back to Sallisaw soon, to see you and Jackie and Bradley and E.W. and Mother. I miss you all so terribly and this ain’t no kind of life for any man. I wish to God I’d never started down the road I did. But it’s too late to have regrets now. I am going to try and find a way to get out of the country, Spain or France maybe. Rich says Italy is nice — that’s where his people come from. Maybe we’ll go there, but I mean to come and get you and Jackie and take you with me. I could start over in a new country, maybe start a little business, be a regular Joe. What do you think? Send me your reply general delivery Buffalo, New York. That’s where I’ll be soon.
All my love, Charley.
P.S.
I sure do miss all the good things a man misses with his wife and hope you feel the same. It breaks my heart to think you might find yourself another man. I don’t think I could stand the news were I to hear of it.
Both letters make me feel a little torn up inside. Why can’t love be easy? Why can’t we just find somebody and love them forever and let them love us forever? The Professor comes out of the bathroom wearing a bathrobe and smelling of bay rum. He has skinny pale legs and large ears and halitosis.
If Charley ever found out it would break his heart, just as my own is broken whenever I think about what our love did to us.
I shudder when he touches me, brings his sour mouth near mine.
Pretty Boy Floyd
I have a dream that I’m talking to Jesse James. We’re in his house in St. Joe, sitting around having coffee and I see a crooked picture on the wall. I know what’s going to happen and I want to tell him, “Jess, don’t straighten that picture, because if you do, Bob Ford’s going to shoot you through the head.” But I can’t get the words out.
He seems like a nice man, very soft-spoken, and says, “I hear you robbed more banks than me and Frank and the Youngers put together.”
How does he know?
He has a wife and two lovely children; they all have blue eyes, just like Jesse.
“She’s my cousin, you know,” he says when his wife brings us fresh-baked cookies, kisses him on the forehead and drifts away. “Lots of folks said it was wrong for me to marry my cousin. But I never did abide by what other folks thought.” He leans forward and takes a cookie and dips it in a glass of fresh goat’s milk. “And you shouldn’t either, Charley.”
I feel I’m in the presence of glory. Jess has grown a beard and wears a red cravat and carpet slippers. He has a stack of newspapers by his chairs; some are several months old, for I can see their dates.
“It’s a good thing,” he says, munching the cookie, drops of milk dew in his beard.
“What’s a good thing?” I say.
“Oh, you know, Charley. This,” he says.
But I don’t know what he means.
One of his children floats into the room, hovers there in the air between us and floats out again. I hear strange moaning from another room, then a woman crying and realize that the floating child is my own son, Jackie, and not Jesse’s boy.
I look and the picture on the wall is straight. I feel relieved, for now he won’t have to stand on a chair to fix it and have Bob Ford fire a pistol into his skull. Jesse’s wife returns only it is not his wife, but Ruby, and she comes and kisses him on the mouth and his hands run over the swell of her hips and she moans with pleasure and I can hardly stand what I’m seeing.
He looks past her, one blue eye fixed on me as if to say, See, I can have any woman I want including Ruby.
I am fevered with hatred and when he says, “Oh, look, that picture needs straightening,” and pulls free from Ruby’s embrace, I stand and wait for him to step up on the chair and when he does, his back offered up to me like a sacrifice, I pull my .45 and kill him. The explosion wakens me. Only it’s not a gunshot but a clap of thunder outside the window — a morning storm that has swept down on the city with a fury washing the streets and my dreams clean.
The radio crackles with static. Rich is staring out the window and says, “Look at them trees blow. Why hell it might be a tornado.” My mouth tastes like an ashtray and my heart is a kicking against my ribs trying to
free itself from my chest.
“I hope that storm don’t delay the girls arriving,” Rich says, turning away from the window. “I got me a large problem that needs taking care of.”
I can see from the open loose way he wears his bathrobe he has an erection.
I turn my eyes away, ashamed, for him, for me, for the whole world.
22
Pretty Boy Floyd
The sun is an orange ball of flame sinking into the dark waters of Lake Erie. Wind with the kiss of snow behind it sweeps down out of Canada where they make some of the finest whiskey I ever drank. Me and Rich try our hand at fishing — he doesn’t know shit about fishing, even how to bait a hook. The girls sit huddled in their coats drinking peach schnapps asking when can we go back to the apartment we’ve rented.
The way I see it, we’re just a couple of regular guys out with our gals fishing and acting normal, except there is nothing normal about it. I used to love to go fishing with Daddy Walter and E.W. and Bradley — just the four of us. We’d catch catfish — big brown ones had blue whiskers and slippery as eels. We’d catch a mess of them and take them back to the house and Daddy Walter would have me and Bradley drive nails through their heads to a board so E.W. could take a pair of pliers and skin them. Mother would roll the meat in flour seasoned with salt and black pepper and fry them in hot grease. My mouth still waters when I think about it.
I catch two sheepshead and a carp. The sheepshead are fragile creatures and die easily once caught. I try and explain this to Rich.
“Some creatures are like these fish,” I tell him. “They can’t stand getting caught — they can’t stand it so much, they just stop living because they’d rather be dead than caught. I’m like that too.” He is nipping on some Canadian whiskey and his face is knotted in confusion about why we’re even out here on a pier with fish poles in our hands, the weather cold enough to snow. The carp I pull in is heavy as a water-filled boot.
“That’s one big ugly son of a bitch,” Rich says, when I reel in the carp. “What we going to do with it?”
“Eat it. But before you can eat it you got to cut out the mud vein.” I run a finger along the back to show him where the mud vein is.
“I ain’t eating nothing that’s got mud in it,” Rich says bitterly.
The girls make faces — “Eew, eew, we’re not going to eat that slimy thing.”
“Then you’re just going to starve,” I say. It’s a mean joke, but I’m feeling a little mean.
The carp has a little oval mouth and its head looks way too small for its body. It has sad little white eyes and scales that shine like dimes under the autumn sky. It slips out of my hand when I take the hook out and flops around on Rich’s shoes. Rich pulls out his .45 and threatens to shoot it, until I finally toss it back into the lake and watch it swim away.
We drink the liquor to stay warm and smoke cigarettes as the girls shiver inside their coats while the wind tugs apart their new hairdos. They bitch and moan and Rich keeps threatening to shoot the next fish I catch and it all gets to be so goddamn ridiculous I want to laugh. Hell, it’s the most fun I’ve had in a year.
The only time we feel free to go out in public anymore is after the sun goes down. All day I pace around in the apartment while Rich reads True Detective and cuts out stories about us and pastes them in an album. He draws circles around the eyes of John Dillinger and blacks out some of his teeth whenever he finds a photo of him. Most of the stories about us are such lies they’re hilarious. The girls read magazines about movie stars and paint their nails and try to get us to do something with them — which ends up being mostly you know what. The girls go out alone sometimes and get their hair done and window-shop but buy little because our funds are drying up. Rich and I haven’t pulled a job in months.
We talk on and off about robbing a bank over in Canada.
“Those Mounties always get their man,” Rich says.
“How do you know?”
“That’s what everybody says.”
“Who’s everybody?”
“Everybody,” he says.
“I want to know who everybody is. You’re always saying everybody says this and everybody says that. So who the hell is everybody?”
We argue over the least little thing just to have something to do. It’s all this being cooped up that’s got us all on edge. Even the sex gets boring after awhile. Rich says to me one night when we go out to get some cigarettes and whiskey — “It’s starting to feel like I’m banging my sister, doing it with Rose.”
“You banged your sister?”
“No, I ain’t never banged my sister,” he says. “I’m just saying it’s getting to be old hat, is all. I’m about ready for something new, ain’t you?”
I have to admit I am too; it’s like eating steak every night. No matter how much you might love steak you don’t want to eat it every night.
“Maybe we should trade off,” I say. This gets Rich’s attention.
“You think they would go for it?”
“Rose might, but Beulah never would.” It takes a second for the joke to sink in. “Shit,” he says. “You’re probably right.”
I miss Ruby. The more I’m with Beulah, the more I miss Ruby.
“Let’s take a trip,” I say. “Where?”
“Aikens. Maybe rob a couple of banks along the way.”
“What about the girls?”
“It might do them some good to have a little break from us. We’re probably getting to be like eating steak every night to them.”
“Steak?”
“What makes you think they’re not just as tired of us as we are of them?”
“Steak, huh? Tube steak maybe.” He grins. “Yeah, right.”
We tell the girls when we get back we’ll be gone for a while. We tell them we’re going to go do a few jobs. They want to come with us.
“You remember the last time you were with me when we tried to pull a job,” I say.
Beulah touches her head, says, “Do I ever.”
We tell them we’ll probably be gone a couple of weeks. They don’t protest all that much, especially when we give them a hundred bucks.
Next day we drive west, the sun rising out of the dark lake like it’s keeping an eye on us. By the time we get to St. Louis, the sun is sinking into the rolling hills, the last rays of light flaring across the land and we have to put the visors down.
I’m always glad to be west of the Mississippi, close to home.
Bradley Floyd
Charley calls long distance, collect, says he and Adam are heading our way and for me to keep an eye out for the law and to meet him outside of Aikens on such and such a day at such and such a time at such and such a place. It’s good to hear the voice of my brother even though he sounds weary. I can only imagine the strain he’s been under.
I read all the time where he’s killed this person or robbed some bank or taken hostages. I read where he supposedly killed all those policemen in Kansas City in a botched attempt to free some crime boss. I read where J. Edgar Hoover has issued a death warrant for him. But it can’t be Choc. It can’t be the older brother I played baseball with and went fishing with and who tried to keep everybody feeling happy by pulling pranks and joking. It can’t be that Choc Floyd.
“How’s mother and E.W. and the girls?” he says.
“Everybody is fine. Ruth got married and Flossie had a baby girl.”
“Gee, that’s good news, ain’t it,” he says. “I can’t wait to see you all.”
“How are you doing?”
“Me? Good as gold, kid. Never better.”
But I know that he’s just putting on an act. Charley never wants anybody to worry about him. All the letters he writes home talk about what it’s going to be like someday when we are all together again. And sometimes it’s not what he says in his letters, it’s what he doesn’t say that troubles me.
“Guess what?” he says. “What?”
“I had the damnedest dream the other night. I dreamt I was talking to Jesse James.”
“That is pretty strange.”
“Yeah. It got me to thinking was it possible that maybe I’m him . . . you know, maybe his spirit came back from the dead and I’m him reincarnated.”
“Jesus, I don’t know much about stuff like that,” I say. “That something you learned in the big city, that stuff about reincarnation?”
“Yeah, you really need to read more, kid.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Trying to figure out what it all means, this life and the next one.”
“You think there’s a next life after this one, Choc?”
“I’m beginning to believe there has to be.
Least I’m sure as hell hoping there is.”
There was something fatal in his voice, like a man standing on the railroad tracks with his foot trapped under the rail watching the train coming toward him.
“Maybe we can talk about it when you get here,” I say.
“Yeah, I’ll see you in a couple of days, kid.”
There is a click and he is gone and I realize that we can all be gone quick as a click, quick as a gunshot, quick as a breath.
Adam Richetti
Charley is always on me about my drinking. I ask him what it has to do with him what I do. He says he doesn’t want to get shot down dead because I’m a boozehound. I tell him we’re probably both going to get shot dead whether I drink or not. He says, “Yeah, but probably a lot sooner than later you keep it up.”
My life has come down to this: pussy and drinking, and neither one are getting the job done lately. We ain’t robbed nothing since South Bend and all we do is hang out in the apartment and sometimes go out and fish at night. Fish! Jesus H. Christ. We’re like a bunch of damn retards.
I like to draw, but I know I’m not any good at it and never could make a stinking dime doing it. I wonder sometimes why God makes people like me: people who don’t have no gifts for anything but raising hell and doing wrong. Why does he make some people like me and Charley and others like Charles Lindbergh and President Taft — guys who do great things? I don’t get it. It’s a crazy world and we’re all crazy for living in it. And maybe guys like Charley and me know that and we just do whatever the hell we want to do because we know no matter what we do, it doesn’t count for anything. We’re never going to be the President of the United States or some hero. Our fate was sealed the moment we stuck our heads out of our mommas’ cunts and looked around.
Drinking and being with women makes me feel good. Ain’t I got as much right to feel good as Lindbergh and Taft and guys like that?
We drive out of Buffalo and head for Oklahoma. There is a pair of machine guns under a blanket in the backseat. We’re what the FBI calls “armed and dangerous” and we plan on staying that way.
We stop in Pittsburgh to have a late lunch and the air is gray with smoke from the steel mills. They got three rivers running right through downtown and they all look dirty and cold, like if you were to jump in them you’d die instantly. The whole town has a stink to it.
“What do you think?” Charley says, eating a roast beef sandwich.
“About what?”
“About maybe robbing a bank here?”
“Hell, why not. It looks like the kind of
place that deserves getting some of its banks robbed.”
The waitress has a lazy eye but I ask her if she’d like to go out back with me because right now I could go for just about anything different than what I been getting lately.
