“That’s not true, Bob,” Charley said. “I think about Ruby a lot.”
But Bob Birdwell wouldn’t relent.
“Maybe you’re better than George was about leavin’ grocery money, I don’t know,” she said. “George had a tight streak. He was only loose with money if he was spendin’ it on himself.”
Charley didn’t know what to say. When he had arrived home on Christmas Eve, Ruby hadn’t had much more food in her cabinet than he’d found at the Birdwell house. She had coffee, and she’d bought some little cupcakes with reindeer on them for Christmas, but Ruby could have used a side of beef and a fat shoat, too.
“You probably think about how nice it would be to come home and screw her,” Bob told him. “George liked to show up when he knew I’d be at my wit’s end, so I’d be more interested in screwin’ than naggin’—he never gave a thought to how I’d feel the day they brought him home dead.”
“I expect I better mosey on,” Charley said, standing up.
“Yeah—mosey on,” Bob said. “George didn’t like hearin’ the truth, and neither do you. I never cared about no man except George. I doubt Ruby’s ever cared about any man except you. When they shoot you down, it’ll be over for her—just like it’s over for me.”
“Hey, now,” Charley said—he was starting to feel awkward. “Ruby divorced me and married a baker while I was in the pen—if I was to die, I expect she’d just go marry him again.”
Bob shrugged a bony shoulder.
“She can marry till she’s blue in the face,” Bob said. “I expect I’ll bed down with somebody sooner or later myself. But I could bed down with every stiff in this county, and not miss George one bit less.”
Then she swigged down the last of her bourbon toddy, got up, and fixed herself another. Charley put on his overcoat while she stirred in the molasses.
“I ordered you a side of beef and some pork,” he said, as he put on his hat. “The butcher will be out with it next week.”
“You bandits ought to leave nice women alone—it’d be kinder if you’d just run with your whores,” Bob said bitterly, as Charley headed out the door.
9
Charley couldn’t get Bob Birdwell’s bitter words out of his mind. He knew he should leave Oklahoma and go north, as far and as fast as he could. Sooner or later he’d be spotted, if he hadn’t been already. Bob had given him a letter from Beulah when he’d arrived at the Birdwell house; Beulah, Rose, and Richetti were holed up in Cincinnati, Ohio, waiting for him to join them.
Yet Charley kept lingering, allowing himself just one more night in which to make a spaghetti supper, or cook a couple of vinegar pies for Dempsey. His nights with Ruby were ardent—and sometimes his afternoons, as well. The knowledge that Dempsey would be showing up from school at any moment seemed to inflame them.
Ruby was just as torn. She knew Charley should go, but she didn’t want him to. Every time he had left before, she’d had to work harder and harder to persuade herself that she and Dempsey would ever see him again alive. In the night, fear would come on her so strong sometimes that all she could do was cling to him, sleepless and hopeless, listening to him snore.
Another problem was money. After seeing what a pass Bob Bird-well had come to, and realizing that Ruby had not been much better off, Charley felt uneasy about going away. The job in Wichita had yielded almost fifteen hundred, but he had spent almost a thousand of it on a car and on Christmas. He knew when he finally left that he wouldn’t be seeing Ruby and Dempsey again for a while. They would need cash to help them live; he would need cash to stay on the run.
“What?” Ruby asked one night, realizing that Charley was awake.
“Nothing—go back to sleep,” Charley said.
“You’re as wide awake as I am,” Ruby said.
Charley didn’t deny it.
“Charley? Are you getting ready to leave?” she asked. That fear was in her mind every night now: in the morning, Charley would leave.
“I’m too broke to leave,” Charley told her.
Neither one of them spoke after that.
“Folks think that bank robbery is the road to riches, but it ain’t,” he added, after a time.
“But Charley … you can’t stay much longer,” Ruby said. She felt a moment of panic—Charley had told her that he’d hang if they caught him. He had tried twice already to make a deal with the Bureau, but J. Edgar Hoover hadn’t responded. Ruby didn’t hate hardly anybody, but she hated Mr. Hoover—it made her furious that Charley was Number Two on the Public Enemies list. Charley wasn’t the public’s enemy; he wasn’t anybody’s enemy.
“I know I can’t stay,” Charley said. “I got to pull one more job before I leave, though.”
Ruby didn’t say anything, but her heart started beating so fast, she was afraid Charley would feel it and know how scared she was. All the banks had armed guards in them now, even little small-town banks. What if they shot Charley down? What if he died in a pool of his own blood, as George Birdwell had? What would it do to Dempsey? What would it do to her?
“I want to go with you, Charley,” Ruby said, suddenly.
“Go with me where?” he asked.
“To pull the job,” Ruby said. “I want to be some help, if I can.”
Charley was so startled, he sat straight up in bed.
“Don’t you even think it, Ruby!” he said. “You think for a minute I’d let you walk into a bank and take the chance of gettin’ killed? Who’d raise Dempsey if that happened?”
“They wouldn’t shoot a woman,” Ruby ventured.
Charley lay back down, but the thought of Ruby pulling a bank job disturbed him so, he knew he would be a long time getting to sleep.
“They shot Bonnie Parker,” he reminded her. “Bonnie was a woman …
“Don’t you be talking like that. Not to me!” he demanded, a little later. “Suppose they caught you and stuck you in the pen? You got Dempsey to think of. Just don’t be talking like that, Ruby—not to me.”
Ruby didn’t answer. Charley’s tone was so harsh that she had to stifle a sob. She knew it was wrong to say what she’d said; she knew she had to think about Dempsey. But she wanted so badly to be with Charley a little longer that the words got away from her. She even had moments when she felt so scared that it almost seemed better if they were all dead—maybe they could be together, with Jesus, in heaven. It seemed to her a better prospect than just month after month of her and Dempsey being alone, worrying every night that Charley might be in trouble, or hurt, or even dying. She didn’t know if she could take many more months of worrying; she didn’t know what she might do.
Charley would be thirty years old in less than a month. Ruby herself would soon be twenty-seven; she wondered if life might get less complicated as they got older. She had her doubts, though. It seemed to Ruby that life had only gotten harder and harder as the years passed. It had begun to feel as if she and Charley were on a runaway train—a train traveling so fast that they might never be able to stop it and get off. If she thought about it too long, her stomach would start to hurt. She needed to stop thinking, even if it was only for a little while.
She touched Charley, and tried to get him to touch her. But he wouldn’t—he was silent, and remote.
Ruby finally rolled away from him, and went to sleep on her side of the bed.
10
Bob Birdwell kept flinging gasoline on the Plymouth, trying to get it to burn. Ruby and Bessie stood by in the ditch, feeling helpless. The snow in the stubbly ditch froze their feet.
“Goddamn this piss-ant car!” Bob snapped. “Why won’t it burn?”
“Don’t throw no more gasoline on it,” Bessie cautioned. “You might catch fire yourself.”
“I’m mad enough to catch fire without a match,” Bob said. “Why’d he go off and leave us the job of burnin’ his car? It’s his car—if he was so sure he wanted it burnt, why didn’t he burn it himself?”
“Charley was afraid the law would show up,” Ruby said. Bo
b’s willingness to criticize Charley annoyed her. She didn’t like to hear anybody criticize her family. Even though she and Charley were divorced, she still considered him her family.
“The law will show up, all right,” Bob agreed. “They’ll come and find three women from Oklahoma standing in the snow like idiots, tryin’ to burn up an automobile and makin’ a poor job of it, too.
“It’s the kind of dumb plan George would come up with,” she added. “George would always be drunk, at least that’s an excuse. I don’t know what excuse Charley Floyd thinks he could make for himself.”
To make matters worse, it was drizzling and freezing. The narrow road back up to Oklahoma would be slick as glass. Ruby was beginning to be sorry she had come on the job and that she had persuaded Bessie Floyd to come, too. Of course, Bessie only did it out of boredom; anything to escape her kids for a few hours seemed good to Bessie, even bank robbery in Texas. Not that Charley had let them get anywhere near the bank, or even the town, the name of which was Crum. He made Bob Birdwell drop him off at the Crum Grocery and hurry on back to the crossroads where they were attempting to burn the car.
“Why the grocery store?” Bessie asked. She had never been on a criminal adventure before, and was curious about the whys and wherefores.
“Because it’s cold,” Charley said. “The easiest place to steal a vehicle is outside a grocery store on a cold day. Most folks in these small towns don’t bother to turn off the motor—they’d rather the car stayed warm.”
He must have had his technique down pat, because Bob had barely got back to the crossroads when Charley came speeding up behind her, having already robbed the bank and made his getaway. Ruby and Bessie had been left to huddle in a little shack the locals had built as shelter for kids who had to stand in the weather and wait for the school bus. There was no stove in the shack. Ruby was half frozen, and would have been altogether frozen if she hadn’t been so mad at Charley for taking Bob Birdwell to town with him, instead of taking her.
Charley had explained that it was because Bob was the most reliable driver, an explanation which did nothing to dilute Ruby’s anger. How did he know whether Bob was a reliable driver or not? Ruby was jealous—she couldn’t help it.
Charley only stopped for a minute to exchange the stolen getaway car for the automobile he had bought in Wichita. He had driven it to the crossroads himself. Bob and Bessie had come down in the Birdwell flivver.
“Burn this car, that’s why we brought the extra gasoline,” he instructed. Then he gave Ruby the name of a hotel in Lawton where she was to meet him the next night.
“Hey, where’s our money?” Bob asked, as Charley started to drive away.
“I can’t leave this money with you—it’s too fresh,” Charley said. “If the law was to come along and find you, you’d all end up in the slammer.”
“Yeah, and if the law comes and catches us burnin’ this jalopy, we’ll all be in the stir without a cent,” Bob retorted.
Charley gave them thirty dollars and drove off, throwing up a spume of snow in his wake.
He was barely out of sight before a black car came speeding up from the direction of Texas. The low bluffs of the Red River were visible to the south, only three miles away.
“I bet that’s the Texas Rangers,” Bob Birdwell said. She threw the empty gasoline tin into the back seat of the stolen Plymouth. The seats were smoldering and smoking, but most of the car was scarcely singed. A tiny flame licked out from under the hood.
“It can’t be Texas Rangers because this ain’t Texas,” Bessie said. “Texas Rangers got no right to be in Oklahoma, unless they’re visitin’ relatives or somethin’.”
“Let’s throw snowballs at the Plymouth,” Ruby suggested. “Let’s pretend we’re trying to put the fire out, instead of trying to start it.”
“You and Bessie can, I ain’t,” Bob informed them. “I wasted a lot of gasoline tryin’ to burn it, why would I want to put it out?”
“To fool the laws from Texas,” Bessie reminded her.
“If Charley had left us the Tommy gun, we wouldn’t have to fool ’em,” Bob said, crossing her arms on her chest in anger. “We could just mow ’em down.”
A little man in a blue suit and bow tie jumped out of the police car before it even stopped—he promptly ran right in front of the car, which skidded on the slick road and almost teetered into the ditch, trying to miss the little man in the bow tie. Then the little man lost his footing, and landed hard on his back. He had a frantic look about him. While still on his back, he began to yell at two lanky Texas Rangers who got out of the police car.
“That’s it, that’s the getaway car!” he yelled. “Hurry up and get the money out of it before it burns!”
Ruby and Bessie had managed to scoop a certain amount of snow onto the Plymouth, but the little flame still licked out from under the hood, and the back seat was still smoldering, making curls of smoke which streamed out of the back window and on up into the grey, drizzly sky.
The little man in the bow tie turned out to be the manager of the bank Charley had just robbed—the First State Bank of Crum, Texas. The two Rangers gingerly searched the smoking car and found nothing, except a box of candy the owner of the car had purchased to give to his wife on their anniversary. Charley had taken the keys to the stolen Plymouth with him; the Rangers were forced to use a tire iron to pry the trunk open. The trunk contained a spare tire, a pair of wire cutters, and two five-gallon jugs of moonshine. It did not contain even a nickel in cash, a fact which sent the bank manager spiraling into panic.
“Keep looking, men—it’s got to be there,” the bank manager said. “He took over two thousand dollars, the bastard.”
Ruby wanted to smack him for calling Charley a bastard, but she kept heaping snow on the smoldering car, to impress the Texas Rangers. They were both hunching their shoulders against the cold drizzle. They had been having coffee when the alarm sounded; both were in their shirtsleeves.
“Keep looking!” the bank manager insisted, when the two Rangers stopped searching.
“Aw, can it!” the taller of the Rangers said. “We looked—it ain’t in the car.”
“Then where is it?” the manager asked. “It’s got to be somewhere.”
“It was a man robbed your bank, is that right, sir?” the second Ranger asked.
“Of course it was a man who robbed my bank,” the manager retorted.
“Well, do you see him in this crowd?” the first Ranger inquired, winking at Bessie.
“No, I don’t see him here, there’s only women here,” the bank manager said. “I’d like to know where they came from.”
“Hey, Sam, be a little more polite,” Bob Birdwell said. “We didn’t come from nowhere—we live here. What I wanna know is, what business do you got bringin’ these Texas laws onto Oklahoma soil? Governor Murray won’t appreciate it.”
“Shut up, lady, this is serious,” the bank manager said. “We’re trying to get back two thousand dollars that was taken from our bank today—it was in that car right there.”
“It was, but it ain’t at the moment,” the taller Ranger said. “My guess is, the bank robber took it with him, which would only be smart. Why go to the trouble of robbin’ a bank, if all you intend is to burn up the money? Why not just set the bank on fire and burn up all the money?”
“Ask them,” the manager said, pointing at the women. “They’re here, they must have seen which way he went.”
“He went that way,” Bessie said immediately, pointing down the road toward Texas.
Ruby was shocked that her sister-in-law could lie so easily. Of course, Charley had gone in the opposite direction.
“Then why didn’t we pass him on the way up?” the bank manager inquired.
“That’s ’cause he went through the pasture and turned west,” Bessie assured them. “There must be a feed road down south a ways. We seen him open a gate and go west.”
“Oops, damn,” the second Ranger said. “We did pass a g
ate, Lem.”
“If he’s south of here in a pasture, I expect we got him,” Lemuel, the taller of the Rangers, said. “Most of them little feed roads just peter out somewheres in a pasture. He’ll have to come back out the way he went in, most likely, unless he decides to sit out there and freeze.”
“Why, this hussy’s lying,” the little man with the bow tie said. “I don’t believe he went in any pasture. She’s probably his girlfriend.”
Again, Ruby wanted to smack the nervous little man. The thought that Charley would have his own sister-in-law for a girlfriend was an insult. Ruby realized the bank manager didn’t know Bessie was Charley’s sister-in-law; he didn’t even know that it was Charley who robbed his bank. But the mention of Charley and girlfriends was infuriating to her anyway, particularly with Bob Birdwell standing there—it was all Ruby could do to keep her hand from flying up and popping the little man with the red face and the bow tie.
The Texas Rangers looked up the long, slick road where Charley had gone. The bank manager in the bow tie was slipping and sliding on the icy road, trying to peek into the burning car.
“You sure my money ain’t under the seat?” he asked.
“No, but you’re welcome to look for yourself. You might get your eyebrows singed, though,” the younger Ranger said.
“You laws from Texas need to scat back down across that river,” Bob Birdwell reminded them. “This ain’t Texas. Governor Murray’s a personal friend of mine, and he’s gonna raise the roof when he hears you two invaded Oklahoma territory.”
“We didn’t exactly invade it,” Lem corrected. “We just kinda skidded this far on a slick road.”
“Alfalfa Bill might not see it that way,” Bob said, giving them a steely look.
“She’s got a point, Lem,” the other Ranger said. “We was in hot pursuit, which is one thing—the pursuit’s kind a cooled off, due to this drizzle.”
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