Pretty boy, p.22
Pretty Boy, page 22
Then Beulah stirs or Rich coughs or a car backfires out on the street and Daddy Walter fades away. And every time he returns we have this same conversation.
I dream sometimes about my old partners — George Birdwell and Billy Miller. They got holes in their heads and no eyes and walk around like the ghouls you see in the picture show with Lon Chaney as the dead monster.
Sometimes the dreams choke off my air and sometimes I get hard and have to wake Beulah up and shove it between her legs — it is the only way I can get any relief. She never complains and I kiss her mouth while I’m doing it to her and taste the unpleasantness and afterwards lie next to her and smoke a cigarette and stare and stare into nothingness and realize I am a man with nowhere to turn. The world is full of people waiting to kill me. My own damn misfortune. I am too miserable to cry.
Bradley Floyd
I saw Daddy Walter standing out in the yard in the moonlight, his hands shoved down inside his coveralls. He was just standing there and I came out on the porch in my bare feet and called his name. He turned and looked my way and motioned for me to come stand in the moonlight with him and I did and he said, “I saw Choc just a few minutes ago. I’m afraid his time is near up.”
“But you’ve been dead a year,” I say.
“I know it, but the dead are privy to things the living are not, so listen to me close, boy.” He told me that Choc was about to be murdered and I asked him how and where and when.
But Daddy Walter simply shook his head and said, “It was foretold since the beginning of time. His story and mine and your’n have all been foretold — written in the book of life. Look it them stars — that’s where I live and that’s where Charley will be living soon, and you and your children and their children.”
I looked up and the stars seemed close enough I could pluck them with my fingers like they were boles of cotton. Daddy Walter touched the brim of his hat and a thousand stars fell to earth and fire lit the sky and the world spun beneath my feet.
Daddy Walter had a hole in his head where the neighbor man shot him over shingles and I could see the stars and the moon through the hole. Seeing these things caused me to shiver so hard I wanted to scream.
I went inside and wept for an hour, the cold bare floor against the soles of my feet, and cursed the sin that had been heaped on our family.
Ruby Floyd
The Professor says he wants me to dance with him in a jar of water.
“What?” I say, for I don’t understand such talk.
His eyes are crazy.
“It’s the dope,” he says, “makes me talk this way.”
His hands are clammy upon my breasts, his breath the scent of a rotted flower.
I hear the drumbeats of my ancestors who were left dying on a wintery plain shot full of holes by soldiers. Their dead faces are frozen in crooked grins as though they enjoyed somehow the murderous rapture of their killers. Their spirits cascade through time like a waterfall that washes my heart clean of everything but sin given to me unwillingly.
My son — Charley’s and mine — sleeps peacefully with innocent dreams sugarcoating his head.
“Dance with me in a jar of water,” the Professor insists.
I have the money Charley gave me pinned inside my dress. I will take the next train home because all this talk of “crime not paying” is a meadowlark with broken wings, a faux lesson sold like taffy to the curious willing to pay a dime to hear it. But my Charley isn’t any more evil than the Professor or the preacher who would sell you Jesus on a stick if he could. I think of my mother, the preacher who sold her more than just a little Jesus. And what Charley Floyd is, is twice better than what most men are and I’d rather be Charley Floyd’s wife than the dance partner of a dope fiend.
“Go to hell,” I tell the Professor.
He sits on the bed and laughs and laughs. “You’re just another tart Ruby Floyd who would sell her ass for the price of admission. Why you’ve made as much money off old Pretty Boy as I have. He’s our cash cow.
We’re a two-headed monster living in the same dream. Har, har, har. ”
The mark I leave on his cheek is pink and the shape of my hand.
That same night the train carries Jackie and me back to Oklahoma.
I vow to wait for Charley even if it takes forever.
Melvin Purvis
Mr. Hoover sends down orders that he has an empty grave needs filling in the cemetery of the doomed. Says the headstone reads: Pretty Boy Floyd, and all I got to do is fill it. Says, make sure you fill it soon, Purvis. I want old Johnny Dillinger to have company in hell.
So the FBI lists Pretty Boy Public Enemy Number One. Good, good. Kill the salty dogs, take out the trash, all that. It’s my job and I aim to see it done. I killed a lot better than that punk Charley Floyd. I write his name on a bullet and put it in my vest pocket then go eat myself a good meal because you never know what the next day will bring.
Ol’ Melvin’s on you now Pretty Boy.
Beware, beware.
Pretty Boy Floyd
I can’t stand these walls anymore. I tell the girls and Rich to get ready to roll.
“Where we going?” he says.
“I don’t know, but wherever it is there will be no more hiding.”
I give the girls five hundred dollars and tell them to go buy us a car — “Ford V–8 is what I want. Make sure you don’t get anything but a Ford V–8.”
Rose says in a smart aleck way: “Any particular color Charley?”
Soon as they leave I say to Rich, “We get on down the road a ways, I’ll buy them bus tickets back to Kansas City.”
“Good idea,” he says. “I’m ready for some new quim anyhow, ain’t you?”
“I’ve been thinking about your idea.”
“What idea is that?”
“About robbing every bank in America.”
“Go out in a blaze of glory?”
“Yeah, something like that. Why not.”
“Hell yes. I mean let’s live until we die.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking. The law is never going to give up until they shoot us down. Even if we were to turn ourselves in they’d shoot us just for the headlines.”
“We don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell, do we,” Rich says.
“No.”
The girls come back with a white V–8 roadster.
“White?” I say.
“Sure,” Rose says. “White represents purity.”
“Pure as the driven snow,” Rich says sarcastically. “Like you two. Ain’t none of us been pure as the driven snow since we were babies.”
“I resent that,” Rose says.
“Resent anything you want,” Rich says. “Jesus, you don’t have to talk to me that way.”
“Shut up and get in the car.”
We drive off into the dusky night gliding along the shores of Lake Erie where the city lights wink in the dark mean waters so eerily it makes the hair on the back of my neck raise up.
But I’ve come to accept my fate. I just want to see Ruby and my son again, one last time before they kill me . . . those men in my dreams.
I bid each moment a final good-bye. I know this will be my last trip.
Tell them Pretty Boy is coming home.
26
Pretty Boy Floyd
Fog. All we see is fog. It is like we’ve driven into a cloud. Rich says he can smell the Ohio River. I say, where? Out there somewhere, he says. The girls are asleep in the backseat. They look like exhausted angels, like the burdens of life have simply struck them into fitful repose. Rose sleeps with her head in Beulah’s lap. Rich says, look it them two. I wonder if they ever did anything nasty with each other. My mind is a million miles away.
I lose the road, find it again in the fog. I can hardly see the front end of the car.
“Slow down, Charley. We might be headed right for the river. It could be we will just drive off into the river and drown. Jesus I don’t want to have to go out that way — drowning.”
Somewhere the sun is shining, but not here, not now. Somewhere the sky is blue and perfect like the eye of my wife, but not here, not in this place.
I am trying to light a cigarette when I hit the telephone pole. One minute it’s not there, the next I bang right into it jarring the girls awake. Rose has drool on her lip, her hair is disheveled and her lipstick smeared.
“Holy moly!” she yelps sitting up. “What’d we hit?”
“Fog,” Rich says. “First we hit fog then we hit that damn telephone pole. Of all the stinking rotten luck.”
“My head hurts,” Beulah says. I turn to look at her and she has that dizzy look in her eyes like she gets ever since the cop shot her.
I climb out and check the front end and the radiator is hissing steam and piddling water. I can’t help but slap my hand down hard on the fender I’m so damn mad at myself. We sure are having a bad time of it. “Where we at?” I ask Rich. Rich is an Ohio guy, has some people living around here somewhere.
He looks around at the fog. “Paris, France?”
“Don’t be a wise guy.”
“Ohio is all I know.”
“Yeah, where at in Ohio? You’re supposed to know this country. You’re the one who’s got family down here.”
He looks dumb-faced and I want to hit him and I don’t know why except that I want to hit somebody for the dumb luck we’re having.
I look at my watch; it’s almost ten in the morning.
“I saw a sign just a ways back that said ‘Wellsville, One Mile,’ ” Beulah says.
“I thought you were asleep, how could you see anything?”
“I was just resting my eyes, Charley, that’s all.”
“Hey, if we’re near Wellsville, I know where we’re at,” Rich says.
Maybe our luck is about to change. I have to believe that it is.
“Listen,” I tell the girls. “You two are going to have to hoof it into town and find a garage. Me and Rich can’t show our faces. Get somebody to come get the car and when you get it fixed drive back here and pick us up.”
Rose rubs her cheek as though she’s had it with the lot of us. Rich and I watch them disappear into the fog, their heels clicking on the paved road.
“Let’s get those blankets and our guns and get off this road,” I say.
We climb a fence and the grass is wet and slick as we climb the hill beyond it. Somewhere in the fog we can hear cows lowing. It is like we’re in a strange dream.
“You could eat this stuff with a spoon it’s so thick,” Rich says about the fog.
“We may have to we don’t get that car fixed up in town.”
“Maybe there’s a bus station we can drop the girls off soon. I can’t hardly stand Rose running her mouth no more.” Rich is half hung over and grumpy.
We spread the blanket somewhere on the hill and sit there in the fog unable to see three feet in any direction.
“You think with those cows we’re hearing there might be a bull around?” Rich asks.
“Better make sure that machine gun is cocked and ready in case there is.”
He laughs. The whole situation is ridiculous, I know. But somehow I don’t see anything funny about it.
Edwin Harp
I got up early, like I always do and had my coffee and bread and thought about all my youngsters asleep in the other rooms and thought what a blessing children can be except when times are hard and there’s never enough to eat and the whole country is up against it. I had me a pear orchard and figured I best get up there early to pick me a peck of pears if’n we was going to have anything to eat that morning or that day. Pears may not seem like they would be good enough to sustain a family of ten, but you’d be surprised at what you’ll eat to keep the hunger from gnawing out your belly. And besides, I’ve et a lot worse than pears for breakfast.
I rousted my oldest boy Brat and told him to get on up and put on his coveralls and come with me. We each grabbed us a peck basket and headed on up to the orchard. Hell if I’d known what was waiting up there for us, I’d headed into town and begged for a handout.
Fog lay all over everything, which ain’t unusual that time of year. The cold night air comes in over the river and you got yourself a mess of fog. But we were used to it and Brat can practically walk asleep anyhow and knows the way as good as I do, so we went up there to where the orchard was. Time we got up there, the sun had burned some of the stew off and we could see two fellows sitting on a blanket.
“Why them’s tramps, daddy,” Brat said. “I bet they hopped off the train and is aiming to walk into town so the train bulls don’t get ’em and bash in their heads.”
Brat surprised me seeming to know a lot more about tramps and trains and train bulls than I would have ever give him credit for. We get lots of hobos coming through these days begging for handouts and maybe Brat’s gotten to know a few. You know how boys can be when they get a certain age.
But soon as we got close enough to them men, I could see they weren’t no tramps of any kind. They was both dressed in suits and wore neckties and one had black-and-white shoes. Seemed damn strange to me, men like them sitting up on a hill in the fog. I put the bug in Brat’s ear about not asking any questions, said we should just keep walking like nothing at all. But by then, one of the fellows said, “Hey, who are you two?”
“Why my name’s Harp,” I say. “And this is my boy, Brat.”
“Brat?” the other fellow says. “You a brat?”
“No mister, I ain’t,” Brat says.
The man sort of chuckled.
“Where you going?” the first man asked. I learned later it was Pretty Boy Floyd. I went down to Sturgis Funeral Parlor there in East Liverpool and had a look at him after they shot him and he looked about the same only a bit more peaked by then.
“Why we’re just going to pick us some pears from my orchard yonder,” I say.
“Pears? They any good, your pears?”
“Fair,” I say. “It’s been kindly a dry year this year.”
“That so?”
“Yes sir. But them pears is still okay — a little hard maybe.”
I nudged Brat to move on and we went and kept going and never did stop to pick any pears. We went on through the orchard and down the other side to Wilson’s little store and called Chief of Police John Fultz down in Wellsville and told him about these two strangers.
“What you think those men are doing just sitting up there in your pear orchard?” John says.
“Hell if I knew that I’d not need to be wasting my time calling you, now would I?” After I hung up Brat said, “Now what, daddy?”
“We go home and wait for the police to come.”
“But we ain’t picked any pears.”
“We’ll pick us some pears later.”
That’s all I had to say and I’m glad I didn’t go back up there for what happened later.
Police Chief John Fultz
I got a call from Ed Harp about two men sitting up by his orchard on a blanket. He said they were dressed like a couple of city types, suits, ties, said one had on black-and-white shoes. Said they looked shady. Somebody had robbed the bank in Tiltonsville, I figured it was the same guys sitting in Harp’s orchard. I called Homer Potts and Bill Erwin and told them to get over to my office and bring their shotguns and when they did I deputized them.
“What’s the story?” Homer said as we got into my car and drove up toward Harp’s orchard.
“Maybe nothing,” I said. “But maybe we just might have us a pair of bank robbers sitting up there on a blanket.”
“Why’d bank robbers be sitting on a blanket in Harp’s orchard?” Bill says.
“Hell, if I knew why bandits did anything they did I’d be head of the FBI,” I say.
We parked the car in Harp’s lane and started out from there, the way Ed said him and his boy went.
“Now don’t go shooting just anybody,” I told the boys.
“I ain’t shot nobody since the war,” Homer said.
“I ain’t never shot nobody,” Bill said.
“Any luck you won’t have to today, neither.”
The fog was still pretty thick, though some of it was burned off from the sun. Next thing I knew a fellow was pointing a gun at me.
Pretty Boy Floyd
I heard them grunting before I saw them and said to Rich, “Somebody’s coming up the hill.”
“Those two pear pickers?”
“I don’t know, but if it is them, I’m damn sure going to find out why they’re so interested in us.”
I had a bad feeling because nothing was going right since we left Buffalo — it seemed like everything was going against us, including the weather. Then I saw three men come out of the fog, one of them had a pistol in his belt and the other two carried shotguns so I threw down on them and told them they better stop right where they were. They seemed surprised. They always seemed surprised.
“Why we’re just on our way down to the rail yards,” the man with the pistol says when I asked him what the hell they wanted.
“You gonna shoot trains or something?”
“No, fellow, we ain’t aiming to shoot no trains. But there’s rabbits around and we sure as hell will shoot a rabbit we see one because times are tough and a rabbit ain’t a bad thing to eat you cook it right.”
You don’t have to talk to a man more than a minute to know he’s lying.
Before I knew it Rich popped off a shot at them and they scattered like quail but not before the man I was talking with jerked his pistol and started shooting back. The other two flat dropped their shotguns as they ran down the hill. I don’t know how many times we shot at each other but nobody hit anything and that was another sign things were going bad for us.
We all ran in different directions — it was every man for himself, like it usually comes down to in a gunfight. I headed up through the orchard while Rich headed off down the hill into the fog. I didn’t look back. I kept running, because that’s all I could do was run and hope it was enough.
