Pretty boy, p.20
Pretty Boy, page 20
“Do I look that desperate?” she says, when I ask her.
“No, but I sure as hell am.”
“If I had a nickel for every guy who came in here like you,” she says, “I’d be rich.”
Charley is in the phone booth back of the place calling his brother in Oklahoma. I can see him through glass with chicken wire in it, a little light on above his head. I wonder if a guy could screw a girl in a telephone booth, what that’d be like.
“I got some good Canadian whiskey out in the car,” I tell the waitress.
“Is that supposed to turn me on or something?” she says.
“Might loosen you up a little.”
“You see this?” She shows me the third finger of her left hand that’s got a little silver wedding band on it.
“Yeah, so what?”
“My old man is the cook here. You want me to go get him and see if he’ll give his permission for me to go out back with you?”
“Forget about it. I don’t want no trouble.”
It’s starting to rain, which only makes Pittsburgh look more like a place you want to be from and not in.
I take out some cash to pay for our meal, the waitress looks at it.
“You a salesman or something?” she says. “No,” I say. “I’m a bank robber. Make
good money at it too.”
“What about your friend back there, he a bank robber too?”
“Yeah, we’re notorious. We live the high life.”
She looks skeptical, the lazy eye of hers trying to judge whether I’m telling the truth or pulling her leg, which I’d like to pull but for real.
I put a five-spot on the counter, tell her to keep the change.
“Jeez thanks,” she says. “Maybe I heard of you two — my husband reads detective magazines all the time.”
“Listen,” I say. “If I tell you who we are, I’d have to take you along as a hostage.”
“Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”
For a moment I almost think she really would want to come along. Then I think what Charley would say if I brought this dame with us. He’d probably throw us both out.
“You were to have come in yesterday, I’d probably have let you take me hostage,” she says.
“Why yesterday?”
“I just found out this morning I’m pregnant, going to have a kid.” She says this like someone who’s been given a life sentence in the state pen. She jerks her head toward the kitchen. “Al’s always wanted me to have a kid. Me, I’d just as soon travel all over the country, maybe even rob a bank or two than have a kid. I was always kinda of wild until I met Al.”
“You want to know something?”
“What?”
“You’re a lot better off right here, having the kid, trust me.”
She fills my cup with more coffee, only this time she has a lot sweeter look on her face than before.
“Hey, that stuff I said, about going out back and having a drink with me. I apologize. I’m not as bad as I come across,” I say.
“I know you ain’t. And I know you guys don’t rob banks. You’re probably traveling salesmen, probably sell Bibles or encyclopedias, right?”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say.
Funny how a little decent conversation can make you feel decent about yourself and about life in general. I tell her it’s too bad she’s married because she’s the kind of gal my mother would have approved of me bringing home to meet the family.
“Thanks, that’s a nice thing for you to say.”
She smiles and I want to kiss her, but don’t. I see her looking out the big picture window at the cars going by. I know that feeling she’s got.
Pretty Boy Floyd
We rob a bank just outside Pittsburgh and for the first time I don’t feel right about it. There was a guy wearing his work clothes and you could tell he just got off at one of the mills and was cashing his check. I told the clerk to go ahead and cash the guy’s check and give him the money and me and Rich took the rest. It made me think that maybe we were stealing the food right out of people’s mouths by robbing banks. Rich said I shouldn’t worry about it, that we weren’t stealing nothing from poor people, we were stealing from the rich guys.
“How you know for sure we’re not hurting the little guy?” I say.
“Hell, you ever seen a little guy that owns a bank, buster?”
Still, I feel funny about it for the first time, seeing how that fellow was dressed in those grimy work clothes, the soot creased in his skin from years of slaving away in the mills, his dirty hands taking the cash for the check, the look of relief when I didn’t take the few lousy bucks they paid him to break his back all week long. I think of how I’d feel if it were Daddy Walter or one of my people getting robbed of what little they had.
We drive down through the Ozarks and I’m still thinking about it and wondering why this time it got to me, and not all those times before. It’s not supposed to get to me, things like that; that sort of thinking will get me killed fast.
I look at Rich who is driving and I see a dead man. I wonder if he looks at me sometimes and sees a dead man too. We’re just two dead guys driving toward another sunset.
And another sunset after that
&
until we reach the last sunset.
23
Pretty Boy Floyd
Bradley is waiting for us outside Aikens, just like I’d asked him to do. He’s standing in the hot dust next to a weed-choked ditch. Got a straw hat knocked back on his head and chewing a stem of grass. He looks like Daddy Walter. He grins when he sees our flivver pull up and me lean out.
“Whoa boy, you ain’t changed a lick,” he says when I step out of the car. “Look it you, dressed like a damn banker, that fancy suit, those two-tone shoes. Where’s your gold watch?”
I guess maybe I do look like a swell for this neck of the woods. But I like the way a good suit makes me feel like I am somebody and not just some thug robbing banks for a living. Not just some crop-picker, either.
We stand around and chew the fat and once or twice a car or a truck drives past and we turn our backs pretending like we don’t want to get a face full of dust, but really so nobody can see our faces. This land is full of my people and friends, but the Feds have got all sorts of rewards out for me and you never know who your true friends are; even Jesse James got shot by his cousin for a few bucks and the glory.
I ask after the family and Bradley says they are all doing fine, says mother is fixing a big Sunday dinner. I don’t even realize it is Sunday. The land is still under the heat of an Indian summer day, quiet like a dozing dog, and the red dust coats my shoes. The land has a feel to it like I’ve never left. The only thing that’s changed is me.
We drive the back roads out to mother’s place and she throws her arms around my neck with tears running down her cheeks.
“This is Adam Richetti,” I say, introducing Adam. “He’s Italian.”
Mother greets him like he’s one of her own.
“Hope you like to eat,” she says. “You look like as though you could stand some meat on you.”
Rich acts shy, gives her that innocent face of his and says, “Yes ma’am, I like to eat about as much as anything. Us Italians are big eaters.”
Some of my sisters are there, Ruth and Rossie May with her new husband and baby, and so is E.W. He’s shot up like a weed since I saw him last.
In spite of everybody being there, the place is lacking without Daddy Walter in it. While the food is being prepared, we boys drive out to Daddy Walter’s grave. All that’s left of Daddy Walter are memories and the small white stone mother paid to have placed at the head of his grave, wind skitters through the grass grown over it. We stand and smoke cigarettes and Bradley passes around a mason jar of shine.
“Drinking’s legal now,” I say. “No need to still sip corn.”
“I know it,” Bradley says. “But I prefer it over that taxed whiskey.”
The shine is clear as drinking water and hits you like a mule kick.
“This some of yours or did you buy it off somebody?”
“Bought it off somebody,” he says. He doesn’t say who; old habits are hard to break.
“Remember when Daddy Walter ran a little shine?”
“I was with him lots of times,” Bradley says. “We’d race like hell down all these back roads, sometimes with our lights off so the law wouldn’t catch us.”
“That’s why they call it moonshine?” Rich says. “Cause you hauled it at night?”
“Yes sir,” Bradley says. “We once hit a dang cow standing in the middle of the dang road. Couldn’t see him cause there wasn’t any moon that night. Liked to have throwed us through the windshield. Wrecked the front fender of Daddy Walter’s Chevrolet, tore his bumper all to hell and busted the headlights off. We both got bumps on our heads.”
“Wrecked the cow too, I’ll bet,” Rich says, grinning over the lip of the Mason jar.
“Wrecked him hell, killed him. We ate cow for three months.”
A raven lands in a lightning-struck tree and caws down at us like he’s trying to tell us something, warn us, maybe. For a second I feel like I’m standing in that nether-world where Daddy Walter is — the sky has an odd color to it like unpolished brass and I feel like I’m shrinking.
“I sure would like to shoot that machine gun,” E.W. says.
“You weren’t supposed to notice it,” I say. “Hell, Choc, it’s right there under them blankets under the backseat.”
“Ah, go ahead and let him,” Rich says.
“I’d just as soon you not get to liking shooting machine guns,” I say to E.W., but the look of disappointment on his face causes me to relent.
“Go ahead and get it,” I say.
He comes back carrying it like some sort of precious animal, stroking its barrel.
We polish off the shine and I tell Bradley to run the jar out on the prairie, which he does and perches it on the trunk of a dead blackjack tree. I show E.W. how to take the safety off.
“Lean into,” I tell him. “She’ll jump back on you if you don’t lean into it.”
He fires a burst that chews up ground ten yards in front of the Mason jar. “Hell, son,” Bradley says. “You ain’t never going to be a good bank robber shooting like that, let me have a try.”
Bradley straddles his feet apart and leans into the Thompson and cuts loose a burst and the jar shatters, the pieces flung into the air like diamonds. He looks pleased with himself.
I take the gun from him and wrap it back in the blanket and tell E.W. to put it back under the seat.
“It’s one thing shooting jars,” I say. “It’s another shooting a man that’s shooting back at you.”
“Hell, I know it.”
“No, I doubt you do.”
“Let’s go eat some chicken,” he says.
I get a bad feeling because when I look, the raven is still perched in the tree; not even machine gun fire scared him. It’s a bad sign, I think.
Joe Prince
How I met Pretty Boy Floyd was over Cora shaking her ass. Every weekend night she’d go down to the Dew Drop Inn to shake her ass and I’d go in there to watch her shake it. I never been much good with keeping a woman, but Cora’s one I’d like to try and keep. She’s my third wife and the best looking woman in Sequoyah County. My friend Bobby Horton ribs me on how I got her in the first place.
“What’d you do, put a pistol to her head when you was sheriff to make her marry you, Prince?”
Hell I sort of feel like maybe I’m going to have to put a pistol to her head before it’s all said and done; either her head or mine, or maybe both. Ever since I met her, my life is going to hell in pieces, Cora just being one of those pieces.
Saturday night I go down to that shitty little honky-tonk and watch Cora shake her ass for anybody willing to watch. She’s drunk half the time now that prohibition is over and drinking is legal again. Not that prohibition ever slowed her up much — she’d just find somebody had a bottle or a jar and go off with them like she went off with me one night. Neither of us planned on falling in love. I did, but I’m not certain Cora did even though she said she did.
She said that night, “Prince, you got the biggest pecker on any man I ever knew, and between you and it and this shine, I’m about deep in love.” Well, I was too.
So it’s Saturday night and I come home from a long haul of taking a load of cantaloupes over to Ft. Smith, because that’s what I do now that I ain’t sheriff anymore — drive truck over the road — and there she is shaking her ass with some swell.
The swell is wearing a suit and two-tone shoes and he and Cora are pressed up against each other like they’re Siamese twins. The music is slow and low-down, the kind of music makes you fall in love, or out of it, and the air is full of blue smoke and laughter and glasses clinking against each other. I’m drinking from one of those glasses and watching my wife dancing with some guy looks like stink wouldn’t stick to him and feeling like I need to bust his head because of the way Cora’s all up against him.
Bobby comes over and says hidey. But I’m in no mood to talk.
Cora is practically letting the guy put it to her right out on the dance floor; I feel like there’s a stove in my head.
“What cha gone do?” Bobby says seeing me watching them.
“I’m gone bust somebody’s head,” I tell him.
“Hers or his?”
“Both maybe.”
“You want, I’ll jump all over that sumbitch like he was a red-headed nigger.”
“Nah, you stay out of this, she’s my wife.”
“I think you could bust his head with no trouble,” Bobby says. Bobby is drunk and I know how brave a man can get and want to bust somebody’s head when he’s liquored up. Hell I put enough of ’em in jail to know.
Next I know I’m between Cora and the swell.
“This is my wife,” I tell the swell.
“She’s a damn good dancer,” he says. “You’re a lucky man.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that. Down here in Sequoyah County, we don’t let other men mess with our wives. Maybe that’s the way they do it wherever the hell you come from.”
I’ve seen this face before, but where I can’t say.
“I know what they do down here in Sequoyah County,” the swell says.
“Jesus Christ, Joe, don’t make a scene, huh?” Cora says. “Me and him were just dancing.”
“You stay the hell out of this, woman.” I guess I’m more mad at her than him, but you can’t just hit a woman in the mouth every time you feel like it. I’m not that kind of guy, and besides, I know it wouldn’t do any good with Cora — she’d just leave me flat out.
“What the hell you expect me to do,” she says. “Stay home all alone while you’re gone all the time?”
“I’m trying to pay the rent, goddamn it.” I sound lame and weak and I don’t want to in front of this guy, or Cora.
“How about I buy you both a drink with my apologies,” the swell says.
“Hell no, I can buy my own drinks.”
“I just dropped in for a little fun, mister.
I’m not looking for trouble.”
“Well, it’s a little too late for that,” I say, because you can’t just back down from some guy you caught mauling your wife.
Then too, everybody knows I was once the sheriff of Sequoyah County and how would it look I was just to let her shake her ass without doing something about it.
I tell the guy he’s any sort of man he’ll come with me outside so we can settle things. Cora tags along behind us. The night air feels cool and good against my hot stove of a head. Gravel crunches under our shoes. I’m trying to think of a way I can settle this without violence, because for all the shit I been through in my life, I hate violence.
“Let me explain something,” the swell begins by saying. “I’m not after your wife, I just like to do a little dancing. I used to come here all the time to dance. I even used to go down the road to the dances in Aikens. Hell, I’ve danced all over this state. I’m just a dancing fool. I don’t mean any disrespect to you or your wife.”
“That’s what you call what I seen you two in there doing, dancing?”
“Oh, go to hell, Joe Prince,” Cora says.
The swell reaches in his pocket and I reach for a sap I keep inside my coat and he says, “Whoa up, I’m just getting me a cigarette” and pulls out a pack and offers me one.
“You’re a real cool customer for somebody who dances with other men’s wives,” I say.
“No sir, I’m just having me a smoke is all,” he says.
Then somebody steps out of the shadows and I think it’s Bobby but when I see who it is steps under the pole light, I see it ain’t Bobby.
“Hey,” the man says. He’s got his hand in his coat pocket and whatever he’s got in there is the shape of a pistol. I’ve seen enough to know.
“We’re just out to have a good time,” the guy says. “No point in anybody getting in a scrap, is there?”
“You threatening me?”
“No,” he says.
The swell says, “You know who that is?”
“I don’t give a shit who that is, if he’s threatening me, we got us a problem.”
“No, he’s not threatening you. And I’m not threatening you, and surely Cora isn’t threatening you either.” He says this as calmly as anything I ever heard.
The guy with the hand in his coat pocket says, “You ever hear of Baby Face Nelson?”
“That who you are?” I say.
“No. I just wondered if you ever heard of him.”
“What is this, some sort of joke?”
The guy laughs, then the swell laughs. And pretty soon Cora is laughing.
