Pretty Boy Floyd

by Larry McMurtry

  “Oh, have we got new evidence?” Purvis asked.

  “We have several reliable witnesses who place Floyd at the scene,” the Director said. “Unfortunately, they’re all coloreds—I’m not sure we want to put them on the stand. What time you can spare from Dillinger I want you to put on Floyd,” Hoover said. “If the man shows any fight at all, eliminate him. It will save taxpayers the cost of a trial.”

  “I thought I read in some paper about a sheriff in Missouri who claimed Floyd didn’t do it. He said he was with Floyd the night before it happened.”

  “That sheriff was drunk,” Hoover said. “I hope he loses the next election—in fact, I’m sure he will. Here’s a note from Floyd. Every word in it is a lie.”

  He handed Purvis the note Charley had given the agents in Kansas City.

  “It’s a short note, sir,” Purvis observed. “How’d we come by it?”

  “Floyd himself handed it to three of our men,” Hoover said.

  “Handed it to them?” Purvis asked, shocked. “If he handed it to them, why didn’t they arrest him?”

  “Because they were incompetents,” Hoover said. “Of course he denies his involvement.”

  “It sounds like the work of the mob, to me,” Purvis ventured. He himself didn’t smoke, and he resented the fact that the Director was letting cigar ash fall on his well-swept floor. Now it would have to be well swept all over again.

  “Charley Floyd’s just a bandit,” he said. “I doubt he’s got the brains to plan a job like that.”

  “You don’t know much about police work, I see,” Hoover said.

  Purvis had been tempted to speak when he knew he should have kept his mouth shut. Now he was in hot water, and anything he said would only make the water hotter. He decided to keep his mouth shut.

  “Let me worry about who planned the job,” Hoover said. “Pretty Boy Floyd pulled it, that’s all you need to know.”

  “Where is he now, sir?” Purvis asked.

  “He was seen leaving the house of a whore, in Kansas City,” Hoover said. “That was yesterday. We think he headed north.”

  “I wouldn’t, if I was him,” Purvis said. “It’s the middle of winter.”

  “Why would Floyd care? He’s a cold-blooded killer,” Hoover said, throwing his cigar in the wastebasket as he turned to leave.

  4

  By the time the train got to Wichita, Charley was having sneezing fits. The floor of the boxcar he ended up in was covered with oats, and the fine chaff blew everywhere while the train was moving. It got in Charley’s nose, eyes, ears, up his pants legs, and in his sleeves. He was traveling in a kind of whirlwind of oat chaff. Besides that, he was freezing. Sleet was blowing when he jumped the freight in Kansas City, and it was still blowing when they sighted Wichita. The plains were grey with sleet, as far as he could see.

  An old hobo was in the boxcar with him, wrapped up in a uniform of sacks. The old man’s long, tangled hair was so full of chaff and straw that he looked like a scarecrow. His face was yellow, as if he had jaundice; his grey eyes were as pale as the sleet.

  “I hate these damn oats,” Charley declared. He decided he was too old to be riding in boxcars, but he couldn’t say so with the ancient hobo sitting there. The old man looked to be seventy at least, and he seemed perfectly content to rock along with oat chaff blowing up his nose.

  They hit the Wichita yards at night. The hobo stayed put, but Charley slipped out, and found a fleabag hotel a few blocks from the station. He had hoped for a bath, but the shower only yielded a cold drip. He gritted his teeth and stood under it anyway, until most of the oat chaff was sluiced out of his hair and off his body. There were three empty whiskey bottles on the floor of his room, and sleet had iced over the windowpanes. All night, he could think of nothing but Ruby and Dempsey. Christmas was three weeks away. If he kept to the boxcars the rest of the way home, there was a good chance he’d freeze to death. When he did finally sleep, he dreamed of all the presents he’d take to Ruby and Dempsey. But he had left K.C. with only the two hundred dollars Lulu Ash had given him—he’d have to come up with more than that, if he wanted to have enough left over for a few months’ rent and some decent groceries for them as well.

  The next morning, he brushed the chaff off his overcoat and walked to a haberdashery, where he spent three dollars on a fine new tie. Choosing the tie took a while. It had stopped sleeting by the time he left the store, but the wind was icy, and the sidewalks were pocked with patches of frozen sleet. The nearest bank, a small one, was only three blocks from the haberdashery. Charley had hoped to be the first one in the door. He thought the ice storm and the freezing wind might discourage most of the locals from doing their banking that day. He hoped to lift a few hundred dollars without causing much of a stir, but his hopes were immediately dashed by a cop who had just cashed his paycheck at one of the teller’s windows.

  Charley mistook the man for a streetcar conductor, and drew his pistol before he realized his mistake. The cop saw the pistol, and turned white as a sheet. There was a young woman at the other window with twin boys, chubby as piglets and maybe three years old. The young woman spotted the drawn pistol at the same moment as the cop did, and she grabbed her twins. Both kids began to scream at once, probably because their mother had frightened them by her sudden move.

  Charley was annoyed with himself for pulling the gun so quickly. He had left his nice buckskin gloves in the hotel room, and had his hands in his overcoat pockets to keep them warm. The gun was in his right pocket, and he pulled it without thinking.

  “Now, folks, don’t get excited,” Charley said. “This is just a friendly holdup. Officer, sit down on that bench—let me have your sap first. Cold as it is, if you was to hit me with it, you might break off one of my ears.”

  The pale cop handed over his blackjack and did as he was told.

  “Oh, Lord, and it’s nearly Christmas, too,” he said, but he could barely be heard over the screaming little boys. Their mother began to get hysterical, though Charley had not done anything directly to her or her children.

  Charley didn’t even have to point the gun at the tellers, both tiny old ladies who looked as if they might be sisters. They began methodically piling bills on the counter. Charley had only planned on taking about a thousand; he could stuff that much in his pockets. But the old ladies worked so quick that he was forced to request a sack.

  “And two suckers, please, if you have suckers,” he said, glancing at the little boys.

  “What flavor?” one elderly teller asked. “We got lemon, grape, and cherry.”

  “Florence, don’t be offerin’ him suckers,” the other teller said. “He’s a bank robber. What would he need with candy?”

  “He asked for them—you heard him,” Florence replied.

  “The suckers are for our young customers, sir,” she added. “We’ve got instructions not to waste ’em.”

  Charley put a dollar on the counter.

  “That’s to replace the suckers,” he said.

  Then he walked over to the two wailing twins, and offered them each a sucker. Both boys grabbed the suckers in their fat little fists; one twin popped the sucker in his mouth without even taking off the paper wrapper.

  “Oops, you gotta take the paper off,” Charley advised. “It’ll taste a good bit better, if you do.”

  The first twin kept the sucker in his mouth, paper and all;the other twin was laboriously peeling his. The young mother stared at Charley with her mouth open, still terrified.

  “Ma’am, you can set your boys down,” Charley said. “I’m a daddy myself. I’m sorry I gave them such a fright.”

  Charley tried to pull the sucker with the paper on it out of the plump little boy’s mouth, but the child set his teeth and wouldn’t let go.

  “Say, can you tell your brother that suckers taste better with the wrapper off?” he asked the other boy.

  The boy just stared at him. Sticky red juice from the cherry sucker was already dripping down his chi
n.

  “They’re not so messy if you leave the wrapper on, I guess,” Charley said, smiling at the mother. The smile didn’t have any effect—the young woman still looked paralyzed with fear.

  Charley tucked the sack of bills under his overcoat, and handed the cop back his sap. The cop looked as if he might be about to lose his breakfast.

  “Don’t hit nobody in the ear with that—not today,” Charley said, as he went out the door.

  5

  The promoter from the road show was named Louie Raczkowski. Ruby would never have been able to spell the last name if Mr. Raczkowski hadn’t given her a card. CARDINAL ENTERTAINMENT, it read. Louie Raczkowski, Owner. Ruby studied the card carefully, hoping it would yield some clue as to what she ought to do, but it didn’t.

  Mr. Raczkowski was very tall, and so stooped that when seen in profile, his figure resembled a very large capital S. A cigarette drooped from the very corner of his mouth, and hung almost straight down. If it had fallen out of his mouth, it would have landed in his shirt pocket.

  “What would we do?—Dempsey’s in school,” Ruby said. “It wouldn’t hurt to let him miss a few days now and then, but if it was gonna be much more than that, I don’t know.”

  Mr. Raczkowski tilted the cigarette up briefly, puffed on it, and then let it drop again, as two streams of smoke drifted out of his nostrils.

  “Our idea was to call the show ‘Crime Doesn’t Pay,’ ” Mr. Raczkowski said. “You’re Cherokee, ain’t you? It’s mainly Cherokees around here, ain’t it?”

  “Well, I’ve got Cherokee blood,” Ruby said. “Some Cherokee blood. Mostly, I’m white, though.”

  “We’ll get you a squaw dress and some squaw moccasins to wear, and we’ll get the little boy one of them toy Tommy guns. You could stand up and talk a little about how hard it is to be married to a famous robber. Maybe sing ‘Red River Valley’ at the end, and have the folks sing along with you.”

  “I sang in the church choir a few times,” Ruby said. “Folks said I had a nice voice. I guess I could learn the music, if it wasn’t too hard.”

  “Can I shoot the Tommy gun? I could pretend to be Daddy,” Dempsey chimed in. He liked the idea of being in the show already. It sounded like it would mean missing at least a little school, and he also liked the idea of a toy Tommy gun.

  “Will there be pretend G-men I could shoot at?” he asked.

  “Son, we ain’t laid out the whole program,” Mr. Raczkowski said. “We might get volunteer G-men from the audience—lots of times payin’ customers enjoy an opportunity to get up on stage themselves.

  “It’s twenty dollars a show and expenses,” he added. “We’d try to schedule you on Friday and Saturday nights, so the tyke wouldn’t miss too much school.”

  “I don’t mind,” Dempsey said. “I wouldn’t mind it even if I missed a lot of school.

  “Even if I didn’t have to go to school at all,” he added. He wanted the tall, stooped man to know that he, Dempsey Floyd, was ready to join the show at once.

  Ruby had her doubts. For one thing, she was shy. She had never much liked to get up before the public; even singing in the church choir had been hard because of her shyness. She couldn’t get near as strong a tone in her voice singing in the choir as she did when she was just warbling around the house. Of course, she never sang hymns at the house; singing hymns always made her feel a little bit guilty. Even being in church reminded her of what a sinner she had been. Many times, she and Charley had slicked up and set off for a camp meeting, only to stop someplace and make love half the night rather than go hear the preaching.

  “We’d try for a show on Friday night, and maybe two shows on Saturday—one in the afternoon to draw the kids,” Mr. Raczkowski said.

  “Would it mainly be in Oklahoma?” Ruby asked. “I lived up in Coffeyville, Kansas, for a while, but other than that I’ve never been an inch out of Oklahoma.” She didn’t think she should mention Arkansas, where she and Dempsey had lived with Charley, or Jeff City, either.

  “We might try to dip a few miles down into Texas, and maybe hit a corner of Arkansas,” the man said. “Mostly, though, we’d just work the Okie belt.”

  Ruby didn’t really want to do it. She would never have thought of herself as a show business sort of person—or as any special sort of person, for that matter. Her biggest ambition had been to be Charley Floyd’s wife. But now, Charley was who-knows-where. He was hunted, and always would be. If luck went against them, she would never even see him again—a thought she didn’t let her mind approach—not if she could keep her mind from it, anyway. It had been a while since Charley had gotten any money to her, and she didn’t like to think about how bleak Dempsey’s Christmas would be if some money didn’t turn up soon. The only thing she could do that anyone would pay for was washing laundry. It paid, but it didn’t pay much. She needed a warm winter coat badly, and Dempsey’s shoes would need resoling in another month. It was hard to see how she could turn down an offer that paid twenty dollars a show.

  “You did say plus expenses, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Plus expenses—of course,” the man said.

  Ruby didn’t want to leave her house, but it was money. Her ma and pa didn’t have a cent to spare, and times were getting worse and worse. More than half the folks that lived around the Hardgraveses had long since lost their farms to the bank—Ruby didn’t want to have to end up living on the road, like so many other families had wound up doing. Even her aunt and uncle and their six kids had given up on Oklahoma and headed out west to California, where folks said it was always warm, and there was lots of food, and plenty of work. But Ruby didn’t think she could stand being that far away from home, no matter how hard the times got.

  Bradley and Bessie Floyd might take them in, but Ruby didn’t want to impose on them, and wouldn’t unless she was desperate. In her heart was the wish that Charley would one day open the front door and step back into their lives, so she wouldn’t have to say yes to the tall man with the dandruffy hair, who kept blowing smoke out of his nose. To be fair, though, it wasn’t Mr. Raczkowski’s dandruff, or his smoking, that made her hesitate—it was the fear of having to get up before an audience of total strangers and talk about her and Charley’s life together.

  “Of course, we’d advance you a little—it’s just about Christmas,” Louie Raczkowski said. He could see that the little lady was wavering; with a bit more encouragement, she might say yes. She was a beautiful young woman, and the wife of Public Enemy Number Two. Louie thought she might prove a big draw in little towns in the red hill country where no performers of any consequence ever showed up. Mrs. Floyd and her boy might prove a smash.

  “What would you say to twenty-five dollars, payable now?” Louie said, sucking on his cigarette again. “You think about it over Christmas, and if you decide to try it, we’ll start the shows around the first of the year.”

  “I’ll try it—I guess,” Ruby said. Dempsey was pining for boxing gloves for Christmas, and if he didn’t get them he was going to be mighty disappointed. Almost anything would be better than disappointing her son on Christmas Day.

  “I hope I do good. I’d hate to disappoint you,” she added.

  “Oh, you won’t disappoint me, Mrs. Floyd,” Louie said. “We’ll try to book the first show around Sallisaw, or somewhere close by. I expect we’ll pack the house.”

  Louie Raczkowski sat down at her kitchen table, unscrewed the top from a leaky old fountain pen, and carefully wrote Ruby a check for twenty-five dollars.

  “Could you give me your dress size, please?” he asked. “And maybe your shoe size. I’ll drop by right after Christmas with some of the squaw costumes, so you can try them on.”

  When Louie Raczkowski left, Dempsey was out in the front yard mowing down pretend G-men with a pretend machine gun made from part of a crutch he and his little buddies had found in the dump.

  “Did my mama say yes?” Dempsey asked, running over.

  “You bet she did,” Louie sai
d. “You and her will be up on that stage real soon.”

  He gave Dempsey two peppermint jawbreakers as he left.

  6

  Dempsey had managed to stay awake two hours later than usual on Christmas Eve, hoping to see Santa Claus, but fatigue finally overcame him, and he fell asleep on the floor in front of the little tree. Ruby carried him back to his room, and put him to bed. Dempsey wasn’t as easy to pick up as he used to be. Once or twice, lifting him when he was in a dead sleep, Ruby put a catch in her back.

  She was wrapping the boxing gloves, when there was a knock on the door. She thought it was probably her sister, Pauline—she had said she’d drop by with a little present for Dempsey.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” Charley said, when Ruby opened the door. He had on a big white beard, and a red Santa Claus hat. “Is Dempsey still up?”

  Ruby felt the shock she always felt when she opened the door and saw Charley. Her blood stopped for a moment, and then started racing so fast through her veins that she thought she might faint. She wasn’t moving, but she knew if she did, she would stumble over her own feet.

  “Did anybody follow you?” she asked, feeling suddenly afraid.

  “Just Donder and Blitzen,” Charley said, before he kissed her. His cheeks were cold, but Ruby didn’t care. She held onto him tight, feeling light-headed.

  After he had warmed himself and kissed Ruby a bunch of times, he went back out to his car, and started carrying in presents. He wouldn’t let Ruby help, either. The whole car appeared to be full of gifts. When Charley finally got them all in the house, they seemed to fill the entire room where the little tree was set up. Charley went in and looked at the sleeping Dempsey. It was all Ruby could do to prevail upon him not to wake him.