Ruby didn’t know if it was proper to let a total stranger carry her valise onto the train. On the other hand, there was a line of people waiting to board, so what could happen? And her little suitcase was pretty heavy. She had packed every stitch she owned, even though she knew she would only get to see Charley one time, and could only wear one dress. She had wanted to give herself choices; and, in fact, had tried on all five of her dresses before making up her mind.
“Thank you, I’m Ruby Floyd,” she said, offering the young man her hand. That was to make sure he saw her wedding ring—the wedding ring and Dempsey’s toys were the only things they had got to keep after Charley’s arrest. Ruby had hidden the wedding ring in their corn-shuck mattress—otherwise, the law would have taken it, too.
“I’m Lenny,” the young man with the cowlick said. He had a shy grin.
Even so, the fact that she was allowing a stranger to carry her suitcase made Ruby feel nervous. Then it turned out the train was so full, there were only two seats left, right together at the rear of the car. Lenny let her choose, so she took the seat by the window, and he took the seat on the aisle.
“It would be nice if you could make a wish and be home,” Lenny said, trying to be friendly. “These bouncy old trains upset my stomach.”
“I didn’t get your last name,” Ruby informed him.
“It’s Bachelor, Lenny Bachelor,” the young man said. Then he blushed. Ruby had to smile at the name.
“So you’re a Bachelor, even if you ain’t one,” she said. He blushed even redder.
“Yep, right now I’m both,” Lenny admitted. “Folks kid me about it so much, I doubt I’ll ever marry.”
“Aw, you oughtn’t to let your name stop you,” Ruby said. “Folks would forget about it, if you found a nice wife.”
Lenny grinned. “I’ve looked all over Coffeyville, Kansas, and I ain’t found one yet,” he told her. “I’m a baker, most of the time I’m covered with flour. I expect that counts against me, too.”
“Why would it, flour washes off. I’m covered with it, too, when I make biscuits,” Ruby said.
She relaxed a little. Lenny Bachelor was easy to talk to, for a stranger. Pretty soon, she relaxed a little more. The rocking of the train as it rolled south through the Missouri hills helped her relax. It had been a strain, going to see Charley. If she ever got home, she felt like she could sleep for a week; though, of course, Dempsey would never put up with her sleeping for a week.
She yawned a time or two, and the next thing she knew, the train was screeching to a stop, somewhere in Kansas. Now it was her turn to blush—to her deep embarrassment, Ruby realized she had slumped over against Lenny, and slept with her head on his shoulder.
Apparently, this embarrassed Lenny too, because he blushed again when Ruby woke up and looked at him.
“Guess you were plumb tuckered out,” he said, shyly. He had enjoyed having the pretty young woman’s head on his shoulder, even though it might look bad to her. He knew she would be shocked when she woke up.
“Why’d we stop?” Ruby asked, looking out the window trying to hide her embarrassment. “I don’t see no town.”
“Cattle,” Lenny told her. “I guess the cowboys had trouble getting them across the train track in time.”
Ruby saw that, indeed, a herd of scrawny cattle were meandering across the tracks, up ahead. Several cowboys were waving ropes at them and yelling, but the cattle didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
When Lenny Bachelor got off the train in Coffeyville, Ruby thanked him for helping with her valise, and she let him shake her hand again.
“I’m sorry I used your shoulder for a pillow,” she said.
“Aw, forget it,” Lenny said, blushing again.
Later, as the train chugged on toward Oklahoma, Ruby began to feel real lonely. She wished Lenny Bachelor had been going a little farther. He was nice, even if he did blush a lot, and having someone to talk to kept her mind off Charley.
Ruby stared out at the endless plain. The prairie grass was waving; there was a high wind that day.
Charley still had four whole years to serve. Ruby didn’t know how she would stand it.
24
Jody Turpentine, a big dumb lout from Joplin, Missouri, was the name of the guard Charley finally slugged.
“I never heard of nobody bein’ named Turpentine,” Charley said to Jerry Jennings, the day he found out Jody’s name.
“I never either, but it’s his name all right,” Jerry said. “Don’t go joshin’ him about it, he’s touchy.”
“Aw, he’s a big ugly screw,” Charley said. “I’ll josh him if I feel like it.”
“It’s your noggin he’ll crack open,” Jerry said, shrugging.
Jody Turpentine liked to pretend he played the drums. He didn’t have a drum, but he had a nightstick, and he liked to drum on the bars when he woke up the cons every morning. If he had it in for a certain con, he would stand in front of his cell and drum for ten minutes sometimes.
One of the stiffs Jody had it in for was Charley Floyd. He claimed not to care for Okies in general, which may have been true. But what was certainly true was that he didn’t like Charley. Each morning, just when Charley was hoping for five more minutes’ sleep, Jody would stand outside his cell, drumming on the bars with his nightstick. His drumming wasn’t musical, either—it wasn’t anything but noise.
“I’m gettin’ my fill of that fat turd,” Charley told Jerry several times. “One of these mornings I’m gonna yank that toothpick out of his hands and drum on him for a while.”
“I’d think over that plan, if I were you, bud,” Jerry told him. “They’ll stick you so far down in the hole, you won’t see daylight again till Groundhog Day.”
“It might be worth it,” Charley said. “He oughta leave us alone.”
“On the other hand, he’s got the club, and you ain’t,” Jerry pointed out. “You’ll get out of here sooner than later, if you just ride your own beef.”
“Ride my what?” Charley asked. He had never heard the phrase before.
“Just do your time,” Jerry explained. “You start beatin’ up guards, and it’ll be that much longer before you get to see Ruby and your boy.”
But the very next morning, Charley was seeing his wife and baby in a beautiful, happy dream: He was trying to teach Dempsey how to pitch horseshoes, even though Dempsey was so small he could barely lift one; Ruby was holding a horseshoe in both hands, waiting her turn. Charley could even see that her long, bare legs—long enough that Ruby could lock them tight around him when they made love—had a chigger bite or two, just above one of her ankles. Ruby hated shoes, and she was always barefoot, though she knew the grass was full of chiggers.
In the dream, Dempsey and the horseshoes faded out, and he and Ruby were walking down the path toward the creek, holding hands. Just off the path was a little patch of grass. If the dream had lasted even another few seconds, Ruby would have had her long legs locked around him.
But before they reached the patch of grass that had often been their little bit of Eden, Jody Turpentine planted himself in front of Charley’s cell, and began to drum on the bars with his nightstick.
“Don’t you ever wake up on time, Okie?” Jody asked.
Charley got his eyes open wide enough to see that Jody was standing there—scratching his balls with one hand, and woggling the nightstick with the other, making as much racket as he could, for no better reason than he liked to make a racket and interrupt sweet dreams.
“I’m awake,” Charley said.
“Yeah, but you ain’t up,” Jody replied. “Hustle.”
When Jody unlocked the cell, Charley waited until Jerry was out and gone down the walkway before coming out himself. Jerry had only a few months left to serve, and Charley didn’t want to involve him in any trouble. Jerry was an older man and moderate, but he didn’t like Jody either, and there was no predicting what he might do when the fight started.
Jody had reached in his pocket for a fresh
tobacco chaw, when Charley hit him, flush on the point of his jaw. Jody went down so hard he slid across the floor, and split his head open on the bars of a cell ten feet away.
“I told you to leave me be, you son-of-a-bitch,” Charley muttered, his teeth clenched as tight as his fists. Jody Turpentine was unconscious, and didn’t hear.
Four or five guards came running. They whacked Charley around pretty good, while the cons who had been shuffling off to breakfast stood and watched. Charley didn’t really feel the whacking, although he was sore from it for two or three days of the week he spent in solitary confinement. At some point, Jody Turpentine came down and drummed on the iron door of Charley’s cell until his arm wore out. Then he yelled a few insults, pissed on the door, and went away. The fact that he pissed on the door didn’t matter much, since the whole cell smelled like an outhouse anyway.
Charley’s week in solitary was kind of restful; he slept most of the time. Often, he had difficulty sleeping soundly in his own cell, because Jerry Jennings snored with the force of a locomotive most of the time. Night after night, Charley would crawl down and roll Jerry on his stomach, the only position that cut the snoring. Charley would usually get sound to sleep about dawn, a few minutes before Jody started drumming on the cell.
In the hole, Charley could think about Ruby and Dempsey all he wanted, without having to make conversation with Jerry Jennings or anyone else. It wasn’t only Ruby and Dempsey he thought of, either. Beulah Baird was much in his thoughts—he had been hoping Beulah would show up on visitors’ day, though another thing he was hoping was that she and Ruby wouldn’t show up on the same visitors’ day—or Beulah and Ma Ash, either. It had been a near miss with those two, that day in City Jail, too near a miss. Charley decided he would rather take a whacking from a few screws anytime than have Ruby and Beulah, or Beulah and Ma Ash, or any two women show up on the same visitors’ day. What if Ma Ash and his own mother showed up on the same day? He’d never be able to go back to Sallisaw, if something like that happened.
When Charley got out of solitary, he discovered that slugging Jody Turpentine had earned him the respect of cons who had never so much as looked at him before.
“The better people are getting to like you, Charley,” Jerry said. “What better people?” Charley asked. “There’s nobody in here but crooks.”
“Yeah, but there’s crooks that know what they’re doin’, and crooks that don’t know, and never will,” Jerry told him. “I’m the second kind. I doubt I could stay out of the pen a year if my life depended on it.”
Charley had noticed that Jerry didn’t seem to particularly mind being in jail.
“Say, do you like it here, bud?” he asked his cellmate.
“Naw, but I don’t care much for the outside, either,” Jerry confided.
“Why not?” Charley asked.
“Too many decisions,” Jerry said. “I pile up all them responsibilities, and the next thing you know, I get confused, and go do something like rob the store that’s right next to the sheriff’s office.”
“I thought you robbed trains,” Charley said.
“I tried, but it’s tricky,” Jerry confessed. “I wasn’t expecting the engineer to hit the brakes so sudden like. That’s how come me to fall off and break my hip.”
“You should have waited till it was stopped for the mail or something,” Charley advised. “Then you could have slipped right on and robbed it with no risk of falling off.”
“That’s how a smart crook would have done it,” Jerry said, wistful. “What I’m trying to tell you is that I ain’t a smart crook. I’m what they call mediocre.
“There’s plenty of smart crooks here in Jeff City, though,” he added.
Charley liked Jerry, and found it sad that he had already resigned himself to being a dumb crook—Jerry would be spending most of his life in a cell in Jeff City, or in another pen in another state. After all, Jerry was only thirty-five. It seemed to Charley that he could improve his technique if he tried.
“You ain’t old,” he pointed out. “You probably just need to think about a safer type of robbery.”
“Well, I’ve robbed a little bit of everything, and I’ve always got caught,” Jerry said. “I just ain’t got the knack.” He was beginning to feel forlorn from thinking too much about his own incompetence.
“Applesauce,” Charley said, though maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Jerry did prefer to be in jail, which was his business, if it was true.
“What makes you think there’s so many smart crooks in here?” he asked. If crooks were smart, it seemed to him, they’d still be on the outside.
“Why, there just is,” Jerry insisted. “There’s old boys in here who’ve robbed the biggest banks in Missouri. There’s two or three that have got away with at least fifty thousand dollars.”
Charley found that impressive. It occurred to him that since he had to be in jail anyway, he might as well be learning something.
“Point a few of them big-timers out to me, would you?” he asked Jerry.
“You bet, Charley,” Jerry said. “They got their eyes on you already. They know you’re sharp.”
“Applesauce,” Charley said, again. But he was flattered anyway.
25
For nearly a year after her visit to Charley in the Missouri State Pen, Ruby hoped that somehow she would be able to scrape up another seven dollars so she would be able to go see him again. That spring, though, it rained for thirty days and ruined the wheat farmers. Then it stopped raining, and by August the drought was so fierce that it ruined everyone else. Nobody could afford to send out their laundry. Ruby traipsed around to every store in Sallisaw trying to find work, but there was no work. She filled in two days a week at the five-and-dime, but the pay was fifty cents a day. By fall, she had given up on ever getting to visit Charley again—seven dollars was more than she was ever going to be able to accumulate. Dempsey got the whooping cough, and his medicine ate up the few dollars she had managed to save. Her parents couldn’t help her; the cotton failed, and they faced a bleak winter themselves. Her brothers set traps, and occasionally caught a possum. That, and corn mush and greens, was about all they had to eat. If they did happen to have possum, they always invited Ruby and Dempsey, though. What little they had, they shared, and the same was true of Bradley and Bessie Floyd. They had managed to keep a little garden going with water from their cistern. Ruby and Dempsey ate with them two or three times a week, regular.
The winter was a low point. Their little two-room house was drafty; Dempsey caught cold after cold. His throat would get so sore he couldn’t swallow. Ruby would have to warm milk for him until it got a little better. The doc said he needed his tonsils out, which would have to be done in a big hospital in Tulsa. There was no money for that. Some nights, with the wind howling through the house and Dempsey coughing or burning with fever, Ruby would lie in bed, sleepless, wishing she wasn’t alive. Life was just misery and struggle, and more misery and more struggle, so far as she could see. She’d had few letters from Charley, and she didn’t know if he even still remembered them—she had only seen him for an hour in almost three years. She tried to remind herself that she and Charley were still married, and that someday he would be a free man and they could be together again, and things would be swell. But in the cold nights, with Dempsey sick and coughing, Ruby stopped being able to believe that things would ever be swell—not for her, not again. She even had to beg a little cough medicine from the druggist; she had no money to pay for it.
Her memories of Charley and their happiness together had faded so badly that she could no longer use them to cheer herself up. Ruby had used those memories so much that she had worn them out. They weakened and dimmed; occasionally, one would mix for a moment in a dream. But in the daytime, as she struggled to make some sort of life for her little boy, the good times she once had with Charley came to seem unreal. Charley might never be back, and if he did return, he might be somebody she would no longer know, or no longer want. Sometimes, sh
e could still feel angry: for a selfish whim, because he wanted a fancy suit and a big car, Charley had doomed her and Dempsey to a life of loneliness and want. He hadn’t considered them, and he didn’t deserve them.
In the two years since their train ride together, Lenny Bachelor, the baker from Coffeyville, Kansas, had come to visit her three times. Each visit had been prefaced by several polite letters. Lenny had an aunt in Sallisaw, and stayed with her on his visits. The best part of Lenny’s visits was that he was sweet to Dempsey. He loved Dempsey, and Dempsey took to him right away. Lenny always brought a box of doughnuts from the bakery, and some kind of little present for Dempsey besides.
On the third visit, something happened that Ruby couldn’t undo, and she started it, not Lenny. She was just plain tired of doing without, of having no one to hold her, and no one to touch. He had gentle blue eyes, and a shy grin—he wasn’t all that shy, though, once he got started.
“I’m sure ’nough in love,” Lenny told her at the end of that visit, as he was about to leave. “I wish you was free, so we could marry.”
“Would you marry me, bad as I am?” Ruby asked, feeling guilty. It was easy to like Lenny.
“Aw, Ruby, you know I would,” Lenny said. He had tears in his eyes when he left.
Ruby wouldn’t let him even kiss her on the train platform, though. She didn’t want talk. Besides, Dempsey was with them. He hated to see Lenny go, and hung onto his leg until the last minute.
That night, Ruby expected her conscience would hurt, but it didn’t. She was alone, and it was nobody’s fault but Charley’s. She had to do the best she could, and she already knew Lenny Bachelor well enough to be sure he was a good man. She could have walked into any feed store in Oklahoma and done a whole lot worse. Besides, he had a steady job, and he was generous with what little he had. She wouldn’t have to be begging cough medicine if she was with him. Maybe he could even scrape up the money for the tonsil operation; the one time Ruby mentioned it to him, he had immediately offered to help, though eight dollars was all he had to spare at the time.
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