Pretty Boy Floyd

by Larry McMurtry

“Uh-oh,” Charley said.

  Having made her point, Mamie decided to change the subject. In a way, there wasn’t but one subject left to talk about.

  “Charley, do you ever mean to change?” Mamie asked, rubbing a little milk on the mouth of one of the young goats. She dipped the end of a rag in warm milk; the nanny wasn’t being helpful. If she wanted to save the kids, she was going to have to teach them to suck.

  “Change what?” Charley asked. “I didn’t mean to start no trouble at Brad and Bessie’s. I’ll go get the girls if it’s a problem.”

  “It’s a problem, but it ain’t the main problem,” Mamie said. “What I mean is, do you intend to change your profession, or are you just gonna go on robbing banks until you get shot down?

  “Now, the banks didn’t have no mercy when it came to robbing me and your pa,” she added. “But mercy ain’t the point, or whether the bankers are crooked, or none of that.”

  “What’s the point, then?” Charley asked.

  “Death,” Mamie informed him. “That’s the point.”

  “Ma, I don’t want to talk about this,” Charley said. “I can’t do nothing about it, so why talk?”

  “You could move to California,” Mamie suggested. “Lots of folks around here are thinking of pulling up stakes and heading west. They say oranges grow on trees, out in California.”

  “Ma, I’m from Oklahoma, I’m tryin’ to get Ruby to move to Tulsa with me right now,” Charley said. “I don’t want to go no further away from here. I’d be so homesick way out in California, I’d probably die. I don’t care if the oranges do grow on trees, it ain’t as good as bein’ home.”

  Mamie sighed, and began to instruct another of the kids with the rag and the warm milk.

  “Don’t expect me to bury you, then,” she said. “When they shoot you down, don’t expect it, because I just plain ain’t up to it. Maybe Brad can bury you. I don’t want to see it.”

  Charley hadn’t expected this kind of talk when he came in the door; all he’d wanted was something to eat, and some advice from his ma about Ruby.

  “Ma, can I go take a nap?” Charley asked. “I don’t want to talk about this. It ain’t as easy to change as you might think.”

  “I agree with that,” Mamie said, dipping her rag in the milk. “Doin’ right ain’t never been easy.”

  She looked up at him, and shrugged. “Go on up and rest, son,” she said. “You look tired.”

  She watched her boy as he headed up the stairs.

  “I hope I go first … that’s all I hope,” Mamie said, to the nanny goat.

  10

  Dempsey couldn’t take his eyes off Bela Lugosi. Although his mother and father were sitting on both sides of him, holding his hands, Dempsey had never been so scared in his life. Even when the big white owl flew out of the outhouse in his face, he hadn’t been this scared. His mother knew it, too, but his daddy, who didn’t seem to be scared of Dracula at all, was watching the picture show, and not paying attention to how scared Dempsey was.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have brought him,” Ruby whispered to Charley. “It’s too scary for a little boy.”

  What Dempsey didn’t like about Dracula was his white skin, and his scary eyes, and his cape. Dempsey could easily imagine how horrible it would feel if a man like that, with white skin and sharp teeth, bit him in the neck. Then all his blood would be gone, and he’d be dead.

  Their house in Tulsa was only six blocks from the picture show, which was why they went to the movies so often. Dempsey knew the way perfectly. On Saturday afternoons, he was sometimes allowed to walk the six blocks with one of his friends to see the cowboy pictures. His mother didn’t like the cowboy pictures much; she had seen enough cowboys when she was growing up, she said.

  This night, though, Dempsey insisted on being carried home. His father tried to talk him out of it, but Dempsey was so scared that he clung to his father’s legs until his father finally agreed to carry him piggyback.

  “Dempsey, it was just a movie,” Charley said, exasperated. “There ain’t no such thing as vampires.”

  “There are, too,” Dempsey said. “I saw him.” Then he hid his face. He didn’t look up once, all the way home, for fear he’d see a bat in front of the moon, and it would be Dracula.

  “I told you! He’s too little for these scary movies,” Ruby said. She was keeping pretty close to Charley herself.

  “You told me you told me!” Charley snapped. “Shut up about it. You two can go to the movies by yourselves from now on, for all I care.”

  Dempsey had to be shown three times that the windows to his bedroom were locked, so no bat could get in. His shade had to be pulled down as far as it would go. Even these precautions were only enough to keep him in his bed five minutes. His parents had hardly got under the covers when Dempsey appeared, wanting to sleep with them.

  “No, bud, you kick like a mule when you’re asleep,” Charley said. “It was just a movie, no vampires are going to get you. Go back to your own bed.”

  Dempsey refused to obey. He climbed under the covers at the foot of the bed, and huddled there between his mother’s legs and his father’s. In his mind, he saw a big bat—it was just outside the window. As soon as everyone went to sleep, it would come in through the window, and bite his neck until all his blood left, and he died.

  “I’m taking him back to his bed,” Charley said. “We got a right to live our own lives, don’t we?”

  “Charley, just let him stay till he goes to sleep,” Ruby whispered. “Then we can move him.”

  Ten minutes after they moved Dempsey back to his own bed, he began to scream. Before they could get him awake enough to calm him, he began to throw up. Charley got more and more annoyed, but Dempsey was out of control, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Ruby held her son, and rocked him in the new rocking chair in their bedroom.

  “I’ll just rock him, Charley,” Ruby said. “You go on back to sleep, honey.”

  “How can I sleep with him puking?” Charley asked. “I never seen so much fuss over a damn picture show.”

  “He’s a little boy, Charley,” Ruby said. “Little boys have a right to be scared.”

  Charley raised the shade one more time to show Dempsey there was no black bat stuck to the window, waiting to get in.

  “See, bud, no bats!” he said, lowering the shade again. But while he was in the process of lowering the shade, something registered that caused him to forget about bats.

  “Turn off the light,” he said to Ruby.

  “But honey, it’ll only make him worse,” Ruby said. “Can’t we leave the light on till he’s all the way asleep?”

  Charley turned off the light himself, and went back to the window. At the end of the street, he saw the moonlight flash on the fenders of two cars. Directly across the street, he thought he saw a hat on a hedge. It was a normal hat, but it wasn’t normal for it to be on the hedge. Most likely it was the head of whichever cop was standing there watching his house.

  Fortunately, while Dempsey was puking, Charley had put on his pants and his shoes. He was nervous about getting splinters in his feet, and always put on his shoes when he got up to pace around.

  “Jesus, Ruby, it’s a raid!” Charley said, racing for the stairs. “There’s a hat on the hedge!”

  He didn’t even take time to give Ruby or Dempsey a goodbye look. If they already had the house surrounded, he’d have to shoot his way out. He kept a Tommy gun on the top shelf of the pantry, out of Dempsey’s sight. He grabbed two pistols and his overcoat out of the closet. When he slipped out the back door, he expected lights and bullhorns, but the night was quiet. He got to the car and waited a minute, a pistol in each hand—the Tommy gun he stuck in the front seat. He thought he could hear voices, but they were down near the end of the street, where he had seen the two cars parked.

  It was lucky the Tulsa house had no garage. It meant he didn’t have to start the car and back out. All he had to do was push it down th
e alley to the next street, which he did. It was so quiet he began to wonder if he had been seeing things. Maybe he was like Dempsey—only instead of seeing bats, he was seeing cops.

  Charley had no sooner had the thought than two cop cars purred past the alley, their lights off. He hadn’t been seeing things: the cops were coming. As soon as the two cop cars turned the corner toward the front of his house, Charley hit the starter and the car started quiet. He eased out of the alley and zigged a block, then went through another alley. He was four blocks away, still traveling down alleys, when he heard the sirens, back in the direction of his house.

  It made him mad—the bulls would scare Dempsey and Ruby out of their wits, coming in to catch him with horns blasting. At least it would take Dempsey’s mind off Dracula for a while. He didn’t like the idea of cops seeing his wife in her nightgown, or of his little boy being carried off to the hoosegow. But Ruby and Dempsey hadn’t done anything; the bulls couldn’t keep them long.

  Ruby could jump on him all she wanted about taking Dempsey to scary movies, but if he hadn’t taken his family to see Dracula, the evening would have turned out much worse. If they had just gone to sleep, the cops would have caught him in his bed.

  Forty miles out of Tulsa, Charley stopped at a diner and had some eggs. The news of his escape was already on the radio.

  “That Pretty Boy, he’s a slick one,” the old waitress said.

  “Ain’t he, now?” Charley replied, as he sipped his coffee.

  11

  To Ruby’s surprise, the Tulsa detective started crying while he was asking her questions. He looked at Dempsey, who was asleep in her lap by this time—they had been in the police station two hours—and tears began to leak out of his eyes. His name was Detective Jessup. He was fat, and he had a grease stain on his pants leg from having to change a tire while he was on his way to work. Ruby was mad as hops when they brought her in, but she was finding it hard to stay mad at Detective Jessup—he looked too sad.

  “Now, Bob,” the skinny detective said. “Now, Bob.” He patted Detective Jessup on the back awkwardly.

  “Bob, if you need to step out of the room a minute, that’d be fine,” the skinny detective said. His name was Flax. It was embarrassing to him that his partner had begun to shed tears while interrogating a suspect. This had been going on for over a year now, every time they hauled in some crook’s family. Bob Jessup would hold up for an hour or two, and then he’d break down.

  “Miz Floyd, if you need a ride when this is over, I’ll take you home,” Detective Jessup offered, as he turned and slowly left the room.

  “Is that allowed?” Ruby asked. She had never been inside a police station before, except to visit Charley when Bert arrested him and put him in the Sallisaw jail—she didn’t know what the rules were. This one stank of tobacco juice from several spittoons that hadn’t been emptied in a while.

  “It’s allowed,” Detective Flax said. “We brought you in, we can take you back. I wouldn’t want you to have to catch no streetcar this time of night.”

  “What happened with Bob, his boy drowned over a year ago,” Detective Flax revealed. “He ain’t been the same since. His boy was about the size of your son. I guess that’s what got him started downhill.”

  “That’s horrible, losing a child,” Ruby said. “I don’t think I could stand it.”

  At first, Ruby hated Detective Jessup. He kept his cigar in his mouth the whole time he was arresting her. The cigar smoke stung her eyes. Dempsey threw up again, this time all over Detective Flax’s shoes, but he was so busy searching the house that he didn’t pay much attention.

  Dempsey was scared at first, but then he thought it was interesting that so many policemen were in the house. At one point, there were six, plus the two detectives. At least they allowed Ruby to get dressed, but every time she said she didn’t know no Pretty Boy Floyd, Detective Jessup leaned over, blew smoke in her face, and said, “Don’t believe ya, don’t believe ya,” three or four times.

  When the police came pounding up the stairs, Ruby was so flustered that she forgot her name was supposed to be Hamilton. She recovered quickly, though, and didn’t really get mad until they insisted she come to the station. When they put handcuffs on her, Ruby’s temper blazed up.

  “This child has to go to school tomorrow!” she insisted. “I can’t be keeping him up all night just to sit around some smelly old police station.”

  “You can if you’re arrested,” Detective Flax informed her. He had noticed the vomit on his shoes, and even on one of his socks. He had searched the house up and down, and didn’t find anything except a lot of movie magazines and eight or ten issues of Police Gazette.

  “Are you gonna arrest a child?” Ruby asked. “Why would you arrest a child?”

  “Damaging personal property,” Detective Flax said. “The little brat threw up on my brogan.”

  “That’s because the Dracula bat came and nearly got all the blood out of my neck, and I was almost dead,” Dempsey told him.

  On the ride to the jail, Dempsey started telling Detective Jessup about Dracula the vampire.

  “He’s very bad, he bites people in the neck and they don’t have no blood no more,” he said.

  Detective Jessup didn’t respond to that opening, so Dempsey tried another.

  “Ever catch a snappin’ turtle, mister?” Dempsey asked him.

  “Shut up, Dempsey, he ain’t interested in listenin’ to you,” Ruby said.

  “You didn’t answer me about the snappin’ turtle, mister,” Dempsey said, confidently.

  “I’ve never caught no snappin’ turtle, but I once caught an armadillo,” the detective said.

  “An armadillo?” Dempsey said, amazed. “Whoever heard of an armadillo being in the water?”

  “I wasn’t fishing in the water,” the detective said. “I was fishing in the weeds.”

  He said it with a poker face; Dempsey didn’t know whether to take the remark seriously.

  “Whoever heard of fishin’ in the weeds?” he asked, just as they got to the police station. Even before he got inside the jail, Dempsey was getting excited. Nobody in his whole school had ever been in jail; it would be something to talk about at recess.

  “If you want to catch badgers, you gotta fish in the weeds,” Detective Jessup informed him. “You won’t catch many badgers fishing in water tanks.”

  “What do you do if you catch a badger?” Dempsey asked. “Do you throw him back?”

  “Not me, I take my badgers home and teach ’em to play the ukelele,” the detective said. Even Ruby had to smile at that one, mad as she was.

  “Ain’t you ever heard a badger play the ukelele?” Detective Jessup asked.

  Dempsey had to admit he had never heard such a thing.

  “Niggers eat snappin’ turtles,” he said, in an attempt to hold his own. “I bet you didn’t know that.”

  After the conversation with Dempsey, the steam went out of Detective Jessup’s questioning. He kept it up, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  When Ruby went out of the smelly little room where they questioned her, with Detective Flax carrying a sleeping Dempsey, Detective Jessup was sitting over in the corner, crying.

  “Now, Bob,” Detective Flax said, subdued. “We gotta take this little lady home.”

  “God, I miss talkin’ to kids!” Detective Jessup sobbed, tears running down his cigar.

  12

  “Wow, that’s a gun if I ever seen a gun!” Turnip Breath said, looking at the brand-new Tommy gun Erv Kelley had just anted up for.

  Turnip Breath’s real name was Willie Locust, but he was known around Clebit, Oklahoma, as Turnip Breath, because of his habit of munching turnips the year ’round, much as sane people might eat apples.

  “You can cut ol’ Charley Floyd down like a weed, with a weapon like that,” Turnip Breath assured his boss.

  “Get out there and get that car, and be sure you wipe the windshield dry,” Erv instructed. “Folks around here been drivin’ of
f with wet windshields lately just ’cause you’re too weak-minded to finish what you start.”

  Over the cash register in the filling station, Erv had tacked the reward poster for Charley Floyd. Three thousand dollars was a goodly sum; bringing Charley in alive, if possible—dead, if necessary—would take away a little of the sting of having to relinquish the sheriffship of McCurtain County, something Erv Kelley’d had to do only a few months ago. He had been a popular sheriff, too, catching four bank robbers and a murderer in his one short term. Winning reelection would have been easy as snapping peas, but Erv gave up, and bought the filling station instead. It was lose the sheriffship, or lose Amity Bates, the cutest blonde in McCurtain County, and also one of the most resolute. Erv had not even so much as been allowed to give Amity one kiss until she had his solemn promise to give up law enforcement.

  “I ain’t about to lay awake nights for a whole lifetime, wondering if some drunk’s blown your guts out with a hogleg,” Amity declared. “I got too much pride to put up with behavior like that.”

  Since marrying Amity the previous July, Erv had discovered that his little bride had too much pride to do most of the things he had expected her to be doing—Amity had nerve storms if he even suggested doing some of those things—but she was the prize of the county in Erv’s eyes, and he was hopeful that Amity’s nerve storms would subside once she got more reconciled to married life.

  Still, all that money the bankers put up for the capture of Charley Floyd was hard to get off his mind, which was what prompted Erv to strike a deal for the purchase of the Tommy gun. If he was to drag in Pretty Boy Floyd and come marching home with three thousand dollars in his pocket, Amity’s attitude toward marriage might improve dramatically. With that kind of money to throw around, Erv would have more to look forward to than a life of wiping windshields, changing flats, and reading oil sticks.

  When Willie came back from wiping the windshield, he was eating a turnip, his third of the morning. He wanted to hold the new Tommy gun so bad he could taste it, even while eating a turnip. There were plenty of turnips in Clebit, Oklahoma, but only one Tommy gun, and the Tommy gun was right there in Erv Kelley’s filling station.