Pretty boy, p.1
Pretty Boy, page 1
Contents
Cover
Credits
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
About the Author
To my sister, Patricia, who knows the old histories
and roads once traveled
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my friend, Peggy Jackson, who took time from her own writing to edit and offer suggestions on ways to improve Pretty Boy’s looks. To my agent, Carol McCleary, for her unflagging support. To the historians who do all the hard work of digging up the bones.
1
Pretty Boy Floyd
As I lay dying, I see Daddy Walter sitting on the porch, reading a Bible sold to him by a man wearing spats. A fancy dude under a straw boater, who drove up in the yard in a red roadster, his pink face sweating. I see that red roadster parked in the yard, the sun fracturing off its chrome, the smell of leather and success rising in the heat. I see the way the Bible salesman wipes his face with a silk handkerchief, saying, “No home is complete without a good Bible” and “Since I’m real anxious to get home to my wife and children, I can offer you a special price on the last one I got left” and “Good gracious but ain’t you got a handsome young feller there.” His porcine eyes falling on me like sin.
As I lay dying, I hear grasshoppers snapping in the dry grasses, see waves of heat rising off the tarry road, hear the screech of the screen door, the hard pistol shot sound when it slaps shut.
As I lay dying, Daddy Walter says, “These are hard times, Charles Arthur.” He sips from a fruit jar some illegal shine he has left over from his last run to Ft. Smith under the hard blackness of night. “Folks like us never stood much of a chance to amount to anything but moonshiners and dirt farmers. ’Bout the only thing raised in these hills is misery and outlaws, hell and high hopes.”
As I lay dying, the sun bleeds red into my eyes and a calm settles over me.
Daddy Walter repeats stories about Belle Starr and Henry Starr and the Daltons and Cherokee Bill — all from the same hills we Floyds are from. Daddy Walter tells me again about meeting Henry Starr:
“Dark-eyed little fellow liked to wear checked suits. Spoke out the side of his mouth a lot. He got killed robbing a bank over in Arkansas. Died slow of his wounds, bled out like a pig. Let that be a lesson to you Charley. Crime don’t pay.”
As I lay dying, I hear the whispers of the men circled round me standing my deathwatch. The same sort of men I knew all my life growing up in those Oklahoma Hills — dirt-scratch simple men with simple desires. A circle of faces closing in above me, spelling my doom.
As I lay dying, I see Daddy Walter hand Mother a fold of green dollar bills she puts away in a sugar bowl top of the cupboard calling it their “rainy day money.” She is lovely in his eyes, and he in hers — they pull the harness together through the rocky ground of life and my love for them both overcomes me and fills me with great sadness.
As I lay dying, men cough and spit and hold their guns close to their chests and some avert their eyes from mine and some do not. I am a thing they have hunted, an early autumn kill like a deer or rabbit or fox. Blood bubbles in my chest turning my heart into a faulty engine. Time shifts under me, the sun shifts above me, the world is turning me loose and I feel no wings sprouting from me to fly away.
As I lay dying, I taste the widow’s kiss dry as paper on my mouth. Her name is Ruby and she was my wife until now, until a moment from now when the sun will burn me up forever. Ruby, Ruby, my heart cries out, but no words come forth and blood warm and thick spills from my lips red as a ruby.
As I lay dying, I see Daddy Walter in his small grocery store giving out credit to busted farmers and their dried-up wives, their sad-faced children. They shuffle in and out all day long, every day, except on Sunday when the “Closed” sign hangs in the door and voices rise out of the little white Baptist church, Daddy Walter’s basso holding up the very walls of everything sacred.
As I lay dying, I feel the handle of hoe and scythe burning the palms of my hands into watery blisters, the razor-sharp cotton bole refusing to give up the small fluff, the taste of dust. I see too the oil fields with their grimy-faced wildcatters, big-knuckled men with flash-fire tempers who know nothing of love and fancy cars and easy money. These men who cannot even dream of such things, whose lives extend no further than the next paycheck, stare at me in perfect repose. They are drinkers and brawlers but never dreamers. They are alive while I lay dying.
I was the dreamer, the runner after all things beyond my reach, the dandy, the dancer, the lover of countless women, the bank robber, the husband, the father, the son, the brother. I was the most wanted man in America.
Look at me now.
As I lay dying, I am again swaying to the soft seductive song of cocaine pills and high-priced liquor, and beautiful women. I am lying in hotel rooms under the blue-black color of night atop chenille bedspreads naked and faceless with naked and faceless others. From the streets below, a crescendo of traffic rises out of the madness of a world unable to satisfy itself. I hear footsteps in the hallway, unknown voices, a telephone ringing somewhere in the distance.
As I lay dying, I see Fred the Sheik with two listless but pretty girls named Dot and Ida — dope fiends. I hear their laughter as Fred the Sheik prances around the room with a lampshade on his head, his dick swinging like a small rope. I smell sex and alcohol and stale cigarettes. Dot shows me her blue breasts and her glowing blue cunt, blue because of the light of a movie marquee seeping into the room.
As I lay dying I taste Dot’s salty blue cunt.
As I lay dying, a shadow falls over me; it is the shadow of a tall, well-dressed man smoking a cigar.
“Welcome to the end of the line, Pretty Boy.” His words crackle like the static on a radio. It is autumn and I am soon dead. The winter will come and wrap me in blankets of snow and eternally I will keep vigil over the seasons and all time will pass away as quickly as the blinking of an eye. A hundred, a thousand, a million years from now, I will still be keeping vigil.
As I lay dying, a fine young woman full of Indian blood bends to kiss my lips. She is tall, with cascading auburn hair and unflinching truth in her almond eyes. She says, “No man has ever been inside me” and I say, “That’s about to change.” She says, “Your words are like rain in a dry season” and I say, “There’s more to me than words, I’m a man full of dreams.” “Yes, yes,” she says. “Yes, yes,” I say.
We are parked at the edge of a cornfield under a lopsided smile of a moon. She lets me fondle her breasts and kiss her red, red lips. “You are like fruit in my mouth,” I say. “You are like a fire burning up the night,” she says. We burn each other up as something flies silent and swift through the night, its wings thrumming like a lost heart. Her heart pulsates under my hand, the firm roundness of her breasts heavy and soft and electric.
As I lay dying, the face of my son hovers near, his sweet small eyes dance on my skin. “Daddy, daddy, what have they done to you?” I reach out and he turns to air and a man kicks at my hand, a mean hateful act and says, “Sumbitch is hallucinating.”
As I lay dying, my heart flutters like a bird in the cage of my chest, wounded, trying to right itself, to fly away, its wings horribly and forever broken.
“Let’s get married,” I say. “Run off, you mean?”
“Why not?”
“Yes, why not.”
Ruby’s skin is like the silk of China, the world spins us round and round until our laughter rakes the night, until the katydids stop buzzing, until stars fall from the sky. She dissolves into me as her smoky mouth breathes my passion. My ache is long and deep and it feels as though her sex has split me in two, has sliced a chasm across my soul.
“I’m a hothead, impatient as a man can be,” I say. “You will break my heart someday,” she says. “No, never, I promise you.” She sighs and leans back and lets me nibble at the buttons of her dress, lets me kiss the curve of her breasts.
As I lay dying, an airplane drones overhead.
“Goddamn Pretty Boy, they even got cops in the air lookin’ for you,” a man’s voice says. His laughter is phlegmy. The circle of faces comes closer, fades back, comes closer again blotting out the sky. Into their strange eyes I look but find no solace, no comfort, no refuge. A kid about the age of my Jackie leans in so close his freckled nose nearly touches mine. “ ’At really him, Pa?”
“Yes son, that’s Ol’ Pretty Boy Floyd in the flesh.” Har, har, har!
As I lay dying, Ruby straddles me, lifts her dress and lowers herself onto my hardness, her bare b
“Angels blow your horns.”
“What?” she whispers throatily. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, yes, you said, ‘Angels blow your horns.’ ” I am there with her and I am somewhere else, in another place. I hold tight to her for fear I will become lost.
Our rhythm is intense, like gunfire at times.
“Oh Jesus, Charley, oh, Jesus.”
“Yes, yes!”
She is undone, out of control, grasping and clawing, lurching, biting, a dervish of auburn hair and exposed throat and dark hard breasts. I feast on her. I drive into her like a storm tearing up everything in its path. I try and rip her to pieces, to let her know my passion is a reckless thing. Our eyes glitter in that small safe light of a night where the dark is not quite dark enough to hide everything.
“Oh, Jesus, Charley.”
I like the way she says it. I like the way it sounds almost like a plea for help.
“Don’t hold anything back, Ruby. Give me everything you’ve got, I want it all, I want to own every inch of you.”
She chokes on her pleasure. I do everything I can to savage her.
Wind rakes over the corn standing in ragged thin lines like weary soldiers.
As I lay dying, I hear a justice of the peace, his hair combed over the bald rock of his head, saying, “Do you take this . . .”
“Yes, yes.”
“And do you take this . . .”
“Yes, yes, oh God, yes.”
“Then I pronounce you . . .”
“You may kiss the . . .”
Daddy Walter hunkers on his heels, his gaze adrift, then cuts his eyes suddenly in my direction.
“I’ve come to take you home, son.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Your time has come. Let’s get away from these fellers.”
Someone has brought the men sandwiches and bottles of Cocola and they eat and drink contentedly as though they’ve come on a picnic. They throw their waxed paper wrappers aside and the wind tumbles them along to snag on branches and food falls from their mouths as they chew and talk and sip their Cocolas.
“Move him out of the sun,” the man with the cigar says. “Put him up under that pear tree where there is still a bit of shade.”
The air is cooler under the pear tree, but touching me, lifting me with their rough hands is like a fire through me. I bite the inside of my mouth so hard I taste blood.
I’d rather drink my own blood than give them the satisfaction of hearing me scream. Daddy Walter is there under the tree waiting.
“How did you plan on supporting a wife, Charley? You with no job and no prospects but the harvests and the oil fields, you who never liked to get your hands dirty and always talking about fancy cars and fancy clothes and lots of money.”
“I’d sell all my dreams just to be with her.”
“No you never did. You said you would, but a month or two after the shine wore off the marriage bed, those dreams came back on you like the plague and you wanted them worse than you wanted her and did anything you had to get them.”
“Never, never!”
His mouth is full of words that sting like stones.
As I lay dying, someone puts a jug to my mouth and spills water over my lips and down across my cheek and it comes to rest in the cup of my ear like tears I’ve wept.
“He about done,” a voice says. “Shit, I’d say so, the light’s going out of his eyes.”
“Well, his kind deserves what they get.”
“Damn straight.”
“Somebody should call a preacher.”
“You think it would make any difference?”
“It seems only decent.”
As I lay dying, Ruby is ripe, as they say, with child, her belly full and round and hard as a ball. I lay my head gently upon her rounded flesh and listen to the mingling sounds of life inside life, feel the little kicking thumps against her swollen tummy and understand the need to escape. Even a velvet jail is still a jail.
As I lay dying, I strangle on my own regret. As I lay dying, I see Ruby sitting, big-bellied, at the table of my people: my mother and sisters, Rossie Ruth, Ruby Mae, Emma Lucille and Mary Delta. A table of women, of givers of life. The last supper of women, I think.
“A wife’s an awful big responsibility, son,” Daddy Walter says.
“Yes sir, I know it.”
“They ain’t like a dog you get yourself. They expect certain things.”
“Yes sir, yes sir, do we need to keep talking about this?”
And in the luscious nights I plant my seed in her over and over and over again, as if she is a field I need to raise straight and true, as though I cannot rely on sun or rain or circumstance to see my seed grow and come to something, and bear something for the time of harvest.
As I lay dying, I hear the little sharp yelp of our son from the back bedroom of the little house we live in and Mother comes out with blood and mucus covering her hands, says, “A boy for you, Charley” and I know my labor has paid off.
“Yes, I can tell by the sound of him. He’s just like me, doesn’t like to be caged in.”
“He looks just like you too, Charley. A real little tough guy.”
Just like me. Ruby, eyes brimming with tears, says, “Kiss me sweetly, for we have a son, you and I — a beautiful son sprung from the seed of your harvest and the field of my love.” I kiss her sweetly and smell life all around her and gaze into the staring blue eyes of my son.
As I lay dying, I remember these things and say to you who do not know me, to you who have hunted me like a wild thing and killed me with lust and fear and awe in your hearts, that I was the same as any of you — just a man, a child who grew to become a man, who was born with the restless spirit in me just as the wind is born restless and the water is born restless and all things are born restless. And you cannot kill the wind or the water or the spirit of a man. So try if you will, but you cannot.
Fractured sunlight falls through the tree limbs, and lies upon the ground and across my face and my “grievous wounds” and I am fractured too.
“He’s near gone,” I hear a fading voice say. “Yes, sir, yes sir.”
“Lift my head up.”
It’s my only request, the only time I’ll plead with them. “Lift my head up” and someone does, his hand strong under my neck.
“What’s he looking at?”
“Don’t know?”
“I don’t see nothing what he’s looking at, do you?”
“No.”
As I lay dying, upon the far hill I see the figure of a man who stops momentarily to look back. The figure is surrounded by sunlight. It takes me a minute to realize that the figure is me. Then I watch myself go slowly over the hill and know I am following Daddy Walter.
And in the book of life, my name is writ.
2
Pretty Boy Floyd
When I see farming isn’t in the cards for me, I trade a neighbor man a few gallons of shine for a pistol.
“I hope you rob banks with it,” he says. “Goddamn bankers ain’t nothing but robbers with neckties their damn selves.”
The pistol is hot and heavy in my hand and I don’t know what is in store for me, but I know that gun fits my hand better than a hoe.
Then by providence, you could say, I meet Fred the Sheik working the harvests.
“They call me the Sheik,” he says, “because women say I remind them of Valentino.”
He’s just a kid from St. Louis, but even I have to admit, he’s as good looking as the real Valentino. We became pals fast.
One day we are picking cotton and the pistol falls out my pant leg. Fred the Sheik says, “That’s a good way to blow off your pecker, carrying a gun in your pants loose like that.”
“What would you know about it?” I ask him, brushing dirt out of the chambers, wiping off the bullets one by one on my shirttail.
“I’m from St. Louis.”
“So what?”
Then Fred the Sheik tells me how he robbed some electric company back in St. Louis and got away with almost two thousand dollars and how he’s a “two-gun” man himself.
