Pretty boy, p.24
Pretty Boy, page 24
“How do, mister.”
I look up and there stands what must be Arthur, for he has a sharpened ax in his hand.
“Your sister said you might be willing to carry me over to Youngstown,” I say.
“What’d make her say a thing like that?”
“Maybe because I asked her if you would.” He shakes his head doubtfully.
“I don’t think I could.”
“I’d pay you ten dollars.”
“You look kindly run down to have ten dollars cash money on you.”
I show him the money, put it in his hand. “I reckon I could take you far as the bus line in Columbiana.”
“That’s good enough.” Hope rises.
Arthur Conkle
I told this man who’d come up to our farm offering to pay me ten dollars for a ride to Columbiana to wait while I went inside and got my hat. I made sure I took hold of the keys because I could see this fellow wasn’t the sort you’d trust your car keys or nothing else to.
“Ellen, who is that man outside?” I asked my sister.
“I don’t know but he seemed nice enough,” she said. “He gave me ten dollars for a meal.”
“That fellow must have a pocketful of ten dollar bills because he gave me one to haul him to Columbiana.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“I guess I don’t have much choice.”
“Why not?”
“I think he’s dangerous and I wouldn’t want him to know that I think that. If I refuse to take him, he’ll know that.”
Ellen told me to be careful. I said, “You’re preaching to the choir” and went outside and got in behind the steering wheel and drove out onto the road. If I’d known what was going to happen in the next five minutes I’d have hid under my bed.
Pretty Boy Floyd
We get as far as the road when I see the cars coming toward us from both ways.
“You called the police on me didn’t you?” I say, reaching for my pistol.
“Hell, I ain’t even got a phone!” the man shouts.
I stick my pistol in his face and say, “I hate a liar worse than anything. I ought to shoot you.”
“Go ahead you son of a bitch!” he says.
But hell, what good would it do to shoot him? I’ll need every bullet I have. I leap from the car and begin to run. I am so damn tired of running. And yet I can’t stop. Something won’t let me. I run until my chest burns until I see Ruby behind watery eyes standing far out in that farmer’s field.
I run toward her.
Her arms are held out. “Ruby,” I call. “Ruby.”
She becomes an angel and flies away.
A dark cloud passes in front of the sun winking out my life, I think.
28
Pretty Boy Floyd
I run back toward the house, toward the outbuildings. I hear the scream of brakes and car doors slamming and men shouting. I run with their turmoil at my back, my shadow out in front of me like I’m chasing it. I wonder is this death: a man chasing after his own shadow? I have darkness inside of me and now darkness outside of me, like my soul is trying to escape before the terrible death comes to gather me up.
“Stop! Put up your hands, Floyd! Stop or we’ll shoot!”
I slip, my knee strikes a rock, I am back up, running hard, running in a crazy zigzag way. I’m not going to make it easy for the bastards.
“Stop, goddamn it!”
I jump behind a corncrib and take a look back at the men who want to take my life.
I’m all out of breath. I see men with rifles and shotguns — a thousand black eyes staring back at me. I could kill a few of them, but I couldn’t kill them all. And if I can’t kill them all, why kill any of them? I’m not a killer. I’m just a bank robber, just a fellow who has tried to make a good life for himself.
“Floyd, come on out!”
Shit, I say to that. I’m not going to make it easy for them to kill me.
I look out toward the field where I saw Ruby standing. She’s not there anymore. There’s just grass and all this open space between me and salvation. It looks like a mile across, but is probably just a few hundred yards.
Melvin Purvis
I light a cigar and tell one of my agents to take up a position on the ground with the machine gun.
“He shows his face from behind the corn crib you know what to do,” I tell him. “I don’t want to go back to Hoover empty handed.”
“Yes sir.”
It was Agent Bailey, I believe.
For a short time there was just this great silence, the sort that country has to it. I looked around and saw all these fellows with shotguns and rifles and pistols and they were all just as quiet as if they’d been in church. I don’t even think a meadowlark sang in those few moments. The sun broke over the tops of the hills and sent forks of brilliant light splaying down over their slopes. It was just like a bucolic painting you might see hanging in a church somewhere. I thought of Jesus and I thought of God and I thought this wasn’t a place even they’d want to be, its beauty and quiet aside, for there was a pallor of death everywhere. Even the air smelled like dead flowers.
It was the calm before the storm, I thought. It always gets that way. Like the night we killed John Dillinger. It was quiet that night too. It had rained some and the streets were empty of traffic and there was just the glow of the theater’s marquee awash in the wet streets, a lovely liquid red like fresh blood flowing. The other agents and I stood in doorways waiting for the show to be over and there was this absolute peaceful stillness descended over the city. I could hear the burn of my cigar.
The calm before the storm. Goddamn, it was arousing.
Ruby Floyd
Something awakened me.
I had been dreaming that Charley had come home and he was there with me and we were making love. He was just like he was the first time I met him. The really beautiful thing was, he wasn’t in any trouble, the cops weren’t after him. We were just two normal people in love and happy together and Charley was saying how happy he was as he kissed me and touched me in that way only Charley could do.
“I love you Ruby. I’ll be good to you always. We’ll have us a nice little life together. We’ll buy us a little house and raise our own food and I’ll hunt and fish and we’ll have babies and grow old together just like our folks did.”
“Oh Charley, will we really?”
“Sure we will. Why I’ve never been happier, have you?”
Then something awakened me from the dream and I felt terrible and dark inside. I went to the window and looked out. The sun was just breaking over the horizon and it was the color of a wound. A soft wind stirred the trees. I stared at the horizon hoping I’d see Charley coming up the road, but all I saw was the bloody sun rising up from the earth like it did every day and like it would do every day for all time — even after Charley and me and all of us were gone. Like it would do for Jackie and his children and their children. Like it would do eternally, and the thought of such things made me deeply sad.
I thought for a time it was just my imagination that something terrible had happened to Charley. Then I felt a sharp pain in my ribs and another in my chest and another that pierced my neck.
“Oh God, oh god!” I knew they were killing Charley.
I fell to the floor weeping and prayed my tears would find his face and give him some small comfort — like a warm rain.
Pretty Boy Floyd
Between the corncrib and the woods was only the field. All I had to do was make it across that open stretch of ground and to the woods bordering the far side and I’d have half a chance. I ran that field a dozen times in my mind as I peeked through the slats of the corncrib at the army of men waiting to kill me. I’d been in a lot of close scrapes and had lived to tell about them. That time in Bowling Green, for instance, when the cops and me and Billy Miller weren’t more than twenty feet apart and I lived to tell about it. Lots of times I should have been killed but I wasn’t. I asked myself why this time was any different and couldn’t come up with an answer. But that awful darkness stayed in me, and it never had before.
I remembered all the banks I’d robbed and I remembered the women I’d loved and the roads I’d driven down. I remembered my whole life and it didn’t seem but a blink of an eye. I asked myself, how long you expect to live anyway, Charley Floyd? I was tired of running, of being hunted.
That damn field looked longer every time I looked at it.
Through the slats of the corncrib I could also see one man calmly smoking a cigar while all the others knelt or lay on the ground or stood with their feet apart pointing their guns in my direction. But that one fellow just stood there calmly smoking his cigar. I figured he was running the show and it was him that I was most afraid of.
The woods beyond the field seemed to grow farther and farther away. I could give myself up, or try to, but I had a feeling that if I tried, that fellow smoking the cigar would make sure the only way I went anywhere was in a pine box. I was down to apples and ashes.
I took a deep breath before I took for that field. I knew it would be like trying to swim across the ocean. Fear, hope, dread. It all feels the same you think hard on it long enough.
I took a deep breath and went.
Ellen Conkle
Arthur and me were standing at the window looking out. He’d rushed in saying how there was going to be a killing.
“I was right about that fellow,” Arthur said. “I think that is Pretty Boy Floyd. Jesus Christ, Ellen, every policeman and farmer with a gun in the country is down on our road!”
I remembered how nice Mr. Floyd seemed to me, the way he chewed his food with his mouth closed, like a real gentleman. I remembered in one spare moment while I was fixing him breakfast and watching him sort of out of the corner of my eye what a handsome man he was, even though his clothes were dirty and torn. Funny what a woman thinks sometimes when she looks at a handsome man and she’s got none of her own. Funny what your mind will do if you let it get away from you.
We saw all those men out by the road with their guns aimed at the corncrib. I felt sad that they would kill Mr. Floyd and told Arthur he must do something to not let them kill him on our property.
“It’s too late for any of that. They aim to kill him and I guess by God if that is Pretty Boy Floyd, they will.” Arthur seemed feverish. “I should go get my gun and join them.”
“No! I don’t care who that man is, nobody deserves being shot down like some poor animal.”
“He is a rabid dog. He’s killed all sorts of men and robbed banks and probably raped women too! Jesus Christ Ellen what in hell’s wrong with you?”
I pulled away from the window and went into the parlor and took up our old family Bible and held it to me and prayed that there wouldn’t be any killing that day. I didn’t want to have to see that handsome man killed. I prayed God he would not let it happen.
Then I heard the crack, crack, crack of gunfire and I knew that it was too late for prayer or anything else.
Pretty Boy Floyd
For some crazy reason the old gospel song “Amazing Grace” starts playing in my head. I remember singing it on hot afternoons in the dry Baptist church in Aikens when I was a boy. My mother and Daddy Walter sang it too and so did Bradley and E.W. and all my sisters. Our voices raised as one to where it didn’t sound bad the way we sang it — Daddy Walter’s basso underneath, supporting all our voices, his hand on my shoulder. I run across the field toward the woods, that song playing in my head over and over and it feels as though my feet aren’t even touching the ground. I run with ease and I no longer hear the shouts of the angry men behind me, nor the whine of their bullets, nor naught but the voices of that spiritual as though angels were gathering round me, shielding me, carrying me to freedom.
I call out to Ruby and to my boy Jackie, for I think I see them once more there at the edge of the woods. But my voice is lost in the chorus — I once was lost but now am found . . . And I am uplifted and the fear is shed from me like old skin. My shadow is nowhere to be seen, eaten by the sun.
And I know that neither man nor bullets nor death can touch me.
I know at last I have wings. I am a young eagle flying.
Melvin Purvis
He darted out from behind the corncrib just as I suspected he would do and ran toward the field. I said to agent Bailey and the rest of them — “There he is, don’t let him reach those woods.”
There was a rippling of gunfire all down the line. The first shot hit him and spun him around. I could see the bullet had broken his right arm for it hung limply at his side. I don’t know how so many of those bullets missed him, but they did, chewing up the field around him. He righted himself and started again for the distant woods. He made about another twenty yards when another bullet knocked him down. He rose slowly, bravely and began running again, only this time he was staggering like a drunk, trying to drag the weight of himself along. I think he knew there was no way in hell he was going to make those woods even before the bullets started striking him.
There was a slight incline in the land and he made it to that before he fell again, bullets tearing up everything around him. He lay there for several seconds and I told the boys to stop shooting. Agent Bailey’s machine gun had jammed.
Then for a moment, not more, there was this awesome silence that overtook us and seemed to quench whatever violence lay in the bellies of those men. We held our breaths waiting to see what Pretty Boy would do next.
A long crow, its wings black and sharp against the sky, flew overhead and cawed breaking the stillness with the surprise of a glass shattering.
Like a phoenix, Pretty Boy rose to his knees and looked back toward us. Even at that distance I could see he’d been hit several times; there were ribbons of blood flowing from him. He knelt there in the dirt, his pistol still in his hand and I could see he was trying to get to his feet, but hadn’t the strength.
“Should we finish him, Mr. Purvis?” one of the farmers said.
“No. He’s already finished.”
Maybe it was just my imagining it, but for a pure moment it seemed like the sun shone directly onto him causing him to glow in its light and I could not help but think that something completely unnatural had happened in that moment.
Then he fell again, rolled over on his back his arms outstretched as though offering himself to the heavens and did not move.
“Let’s go gather him up,” I told the others, and we ran toward where he lay.
He wasn’t yet dead when we reached him. I asked him if he was Charles Floyd.
He looked at me and said something strange: “You say I am.”
I’m not a religious man but I’ve read the Bible enough to know that’s exactly what Jesus said when asked by Pontius Pilate if he was the King of the Jews.
“Don’t mess with me Charley. I know damn well you’re Pretty Boy.”
He offered me a half smile then said, “I guess you’ll have to find out for yourself, you’re the smart guy.”
I told Agent Bailey to go find a pay phone and call Hoover and tell him we had Pretty Boy Floyd.
I looked down into the youthful face of our prey. The sun blinded his eyes and I told some of the men to carry him over to the shade of a nearby pear tree.
I asked him about his past crimes. I asked him was he in on the Kansas City Massacre. I asked him about different banks he had robbed. All he would say was, “I wish I could see my wife and son. That is all I want.”
His wounds were grievous. I knew he was dying.
Pretty Boy Floyd
Daddy Walter kneels next to me, says, “Well, this is it, Charley. I’ve come to take you home boy.”
I ask if Ruby will be there.
“In a little while she will be, and so will Jackie and all the rest of the Floyds.”
I feel a sudden surge of joy knowing I will be with them again.
“You lived your life as well as you knew how to live it, son. Nobody is going to hold that against you. You won’t have no more worries, it’s all over, the bad part.”
“I never meant to hurt anybody.”
“No, I know you didn’t.”
“These men here shot me, Daddy Walter.”
Daddy Walter looks at them each and every one — they don’t seem to notice him. I remember they said Mary came and saw that the stone had been rolled aside and went in the cave and found two angels sitting at the head and foot of the place where the body of Jesus had been lying. Why I remember this, I don’t know, except I still believe I can escape my situation. For didn’t they find the tomb empty?
“Yes, I know they shot you, Charley,” Daddy Walter says about the men sitting round smoking cigarettes — some of them even laughing. One has a box camera and is taking pictures, says, “Smile for us Pretty Boy.”
“They did what they thought was right,” Daddy Walter says. “That’s all a man can do, what he thinks is right.”
“I don’t hold it against them that they shot me.”
“Forgiveness is a virtue.”
“I know it is, Daddy.”
“You about ready?”
“No.”
“We’re out of time, Charley. We best be going.”
And the angels said to Mary: “Why are you crying?”
“Why are you crying, Daddy Walter?”
He lifted me up as though I was nothing at all and I saw the blue sky and the darkness in me felt gone and I felt like nothing but air.
Daddy Walter and me fly toward the sun and I feel my soul aflame, the darkness gone, the light in me.
I am free of all my troubles.
29
Mamie Floyd
They sent my boy home in a baggage car — like old luggage found. I sent Bradley and
E.W. down to bring him on home, for I could not face seeing Charley coming home that way.
