Pretty Boy Floyd

by Larry McMurtry

  Charley started down the street toward the car, his arms full.

  “We won’t be long,” Beulah said, as she, Rose, and Billy started across the street.

  “Take your time,” Charley said. “Tryin’ to keep up with you has worn me out. I might curl up in the car and take a nap.”

  Just as he said it, Sheriff Galliher and Deputy Castner stepped out from behind a small milk truck that was parked on the other side of the street. Both of them had pistols in their hands; Charley saw them before Billy did.

  “Just a minute, sir,” Galliher said to Billy.

  “Look out, Bill!” Charley said, dropping the packages so he could get at his pistol.

  Bill “the Killer” Miller had his mind on his new hat. He was thinking along the lines of a grey fedora—he thought he looked dignified in grey. Maybe Rose would like him better if he had a new hat.

  It wasn’t that Rose was mean; it was just that lately, he’d had a harder and harder time getting her attention. A new grey fedora might help.

  Then Charley yelled, and Billy looked up to see a tall cop aiming a pistol at him. Billy immediately yanked out his gun and fired, but he missed and hit a car. Then he felt himself falling backwards, and the sky above him began to swirl. He looked down at his stomach and saw blood on his shirt, which annoyed him. He looked up and saw Beulah, who seemed to be falling, too, blood on her face. Billy wanted to help her, but he couldn’t move. His shirt was ruined, that was for sure—all he could see when he looked down was blood. He heard guns going off, but he didn’t know who was shooting. The street rose up toward the sky, and both were swirling so fast that Bill “the Killer” Miller had to close his eyes.

  When Charley saw the deputy shoot Billy, he hit the man with three quick shots, and turned his gun on the sheriff. But as he did, the sheriff took cover behind a car. Charley shot again, and missed.

  “Stay put,” he yelled to the girls just as Billy fell, but the girls took off running, screaming at the top of their lungs. Beulah had only taken two steps, when the sheriff fired again, and Beulah went down.

  “I’m shot!” she cried, trying to get to her feet. Charley saw blood running down her cheek. He also saw that the sheriff had good cover, which meant that his own best bet was to run. People were pouring out of storefronts, wanting a glimpse of the action.

  “I’ll come back for you!” he yelled, hoping Beulah heard him.

  Then he began to run, as he had never run in his life. He ducked around an old lady, and jumped clean over the hood of a car. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the sheriff was after him—but then the sheriff bumped into Rose, and had to slow down so he could hand Rose over to some vigilante. Charley knew it was his chance—he raced two blocks in record time, digging the car keys out of his pocket as he ran. By the time he got the door open and the car started, the lanky sheriff, no lagger himself, was only a block away. Charley whirled the flivver around, and took off in the other direction.

  Out of town—fast—was where he needed to be.

  19

  The little diner was at a dirt crossroads about a mile from the Kentucky River. Smoke came out of the chimney. There were no cars in front, so Charley decided to risk it. He had been driving for nine hours, trying to stay alert, keeping on the smallest roads he could find. He needed coffee; some ham and eggs wouldn’t hurt, either.

  There was no one in the diner but an old waitress, and an even older man. The waitress was smoking a cob pipe. The old man had a devilish look in his eye; he wore the kind of cap railroad men wore.

  “When I was a boy, women didn’t stick pipes in their mouths,” he said, as soon as he had Charley for an audience.

  The waitress turned, and stared the old boy down.

  “When you was a boy, they hadn’t even invented pipes,” she told him. “You oughta stay out of other folks’ business and concentrate on growin’ some new teeth—your first batch is about all dropped out.”

  “Let ’em go, I’ll gum it. Bad as the food tastes around here, it don’t matter,” the old geezer retorted.

  “Take a stool, sonny,” the waitress said. “I ain’t had a customer that looks as hungry as you in a long time. What’ll it be?”

  “How about a pot of coffee and three eggs fried hard?” Charley said. The food smells in the diner made him feel weak from hunger.

  “Ham with the eggs wouldn’t hurt,” he added.

  “Sausage with eggs might hurt even less,” the waitress said. “I got some mighty good sausage.”

  “Yeah, from a nigger’s pig,” the old man said. “I’d rather not graze on no nigger’s pig.”

  “Why not?” Charley asked. “A pig’s a pig, so far as tasty goes.”

  “Shut up tryin’ to lose me business,” the waitress snapped. “Go on home to your wife.”

  “She might take after me with a hatchet,” the old fellow reported. “I’m safer here, even if the food’s poison.”

  There were two pieces of pie on a plate behind the counter. Charley felt so hungry all of a sudden that he decided to eat his dessert while his meal was cooking.

  “Which one of them slices of pie is freshest?” he asked.

  “You crawled into the wrong hole, if you expect fresh pie,” the old man said. “That piece of pumpkin there was cooked last Thanksgiving, and that piece of vinegar pie’s been here since April.”

  “I’ll take the vinegar,” Charley said. He ate it in three bites, and it tasted fine. The waitress set the coffeepot on the counter. He helped himself to some java.

  While Charley waited for his eggs and sausage, the old man looked him over carefully, from head to toe.

  “Stop starin’ at the customers, Jake, I’ve warned you about that,” she said. “Folks don’t like to be stared at when they’re eatin’.

  “He looks like a nice boy, leave him be,” she added.

  “How would you know, you just laid eyes on him,” he said. “He could be Pretty Boy Floyd, for all we know.”

  “Yeah, and you could be Jesse James, but you ain’t,” the waitress replied.

  “I’m from Iowa,” Charley said.

  “Howdy,” the old man said. “I never met nobody from Ioway. Does it rain over there in Ioway?”

  “Why, yes, now and then,” Charley replied. The waitress plopped him down a plate of hard-fried eggs and hot sausage.

  “I guess if you can trust anybody, you can trust a fellow from Ioway,” the old man observed. “I’ve heard Ioway’s a good state.”

  “I wouldn’t move for a million dollars, I know that, “Charley said.

  “Kentucky’s full of crooks,” the man said. “I never cared for Kentucky.”

  “Why didn’t you move away, then?” the waitress asked. “All us around here would of had peaceful lives if you’d moved to a different part of the world fifty or sixty years ago.”

  “Somebody oughta take a two-by-four to your skull,” the old man said. “If I couldn’t cook no better than you, I’d at least have the decency not to go ’round poisoning folks.”

  “These are tasty eggs,” Charley said. “Real tasty sausage, too.”

  A minute after he said it, Charley suddenly lost his appetite. He couldn’t even swallow the bite of hard-fried egg he had just put in his mouth. It was as if the tasty eggs had turned to sawdust. He managed to wash the bite down, but it took two or three swallows of coffee.

  What cost him his appetite was the memory of Billy Miller lying flat on the street, a big splotch of blood spreading across his stomach. Billy wasn’t moving, either. His pistol had fallen out of his hand; his eyes looked straight up in the air.

  All the way down to Kentucky, for nine hours, Charley had pointed his mind toward the next curve in the road. He didn’t think about the deputy he had shot three times. He thought about Ruby and Dempsey; he thought about coffee and eggs. He thought about horseshoe pitching with Bradley, and his ma’s flapjacks. He drove fast, but he took care not to wreck.

  Between one bite and the next, the me
mories came. The old man kept talking, but Charley stopped hearing what he said. The waitress was looking at him funny, but he didn’t care. His mind took him back to Bowling Green. He remembered that Beulah fell. He didn’t know if she was alive or dead, or if the deputy was alive or dead, or Billy. He might be a wanted killer now; he might never see Beulah again. The day had turned sunny, just before the lawmen jumped them. He had gotten over feeling annoyed about his haircut. Then, before Billy and the girls could even get halfway across the street, the shooting started, and by the time it was over, the whole world had changed.

  Charley had one bite of sausage left. He had been taught to clean his plate, and he felt he ought to. He poked his fork into the sausage, and started to put it in his mouth, but he never got it there. His hand stopped working in midair; he put the fork down. When the waitress picked up the coffeepot and poured more hot java, he didn’t stop her, but he didn’t lift the cup, either. Everything had stopped working except his memory, and what he remembered took his appetite.

  “Are you okay, son?” the waitress asked. “You look peaked all of a sudden.”

  Charley just sat there. He didn’t know how to answer.

  “He ate that pie too fast,” the waitress said to the old man. “He ate it in three bites. Maybe it made him sick to his stomach.”

  “The pie had nothin’ to do with it,” the old man said, taking out a tin of snuff. “What got his stomach was that nigger pig.”

  20

  Charley made it all the way to Kansas City by keeping to the back roads. Lulu had been expecting him, much to his surprise. She was standing on the back porch of her house when Charley pulled into the alley.

  “Leave the motor running,” she said, walking out to the fence. “Get in the house, I’ll hide the car.”

  “What’s the matter?” Charley asked. At times, he forgot he might be a wanted fugitive; then there were times the thought sneaked back into his mind. Driving into K.C., he had been thinking of Lulu, and her habit of walking right up to him and unbuttoning his pants.

  That wasn’t the mood she was in when she came out to the alley and hustled him into the house.

  “What do you mean, what’s the matter?” Lulu asked, incredulous. “You killed a deputy sheriff, what do you think’s the matter?”

  The death of the deputy sheriff was one of the things Charley had a hard time remembering. The shoot-out on the street in Bowling Green had lasted all of fifteen seconds—it had been so sudden he had to strain to convince himself that it had happened at all. It didn’t connect to life—or to what had been his life.

  By the time Lulu got back from hiding his car, Charley was so upset he looked as if he was about to cry. More and more things he didn’t want to think about kept popping, unbidden, into his brain. He remembered that Billy Miller looked like someone had poured a bucket of blood on his shirt; he remembered the blood all over the side of Beulah’s face when she fell. He had to do something to get his mind off the bad memories.

  Lulu saw that the boy was a nervous wreck. He had always been shy—but this time, when she came through the door, he tried to put his hands on her.

  “None of that,” she said, giving him a stiff frown. “I’ve got a new boarder, and he’s jealous.”

  “If he’s just a boarder, what’s he got to be jealous about?” Charley asked.

  “Oh, all right then, a new boyfriend. Is that plain enough for you, Oklahoma?” Lulu said, flaring up.

  Charley’s face fell even further. He felt completely let down.

  “I guess I thought I could count on you,” he said.

  “I hid your car, didn’t I?” Lulu said. “You’re in my house, ain’t you? I could go to the pen for what few years are left of my life, for harboring a cop killer. But I’m harboring you, ain’t I?”

  Charley nodded weakly; he looked disoriented, and confused.

  Lulu snorted. “If you ain’t sure, then leave. Here’s your car keys.”

  “I’m tuckered out from drivin’,” Charley said. “I don’t want to leave, I’m sorry if I was rude.”

  “You can’t chase all over the countryside with your little floozie and come back expecting me to be a sucker for that cute grin of yours,” Lulu informed him.

  “I said I was sorry,” Charley said. He was too weak to argue. “Beulah may be dead, for all I know.”

  “No, she ain’t, haven’t you read a paper?” Lulu asked.

  “I been keepin’ to the back roads. There ain’t many paper stands along them roads,” Charley said.

  “Beulah’s in the hospital, expected to recover,” Lulu told him. “Rose was in custody for a while, but they let her go.”

  “What about Billy?” Charley asked. “He looked real bad the last time I saw him.”

  “He didn’t live—neither did the deputy,” Lulu said. “They both died, right there on the street.”

  “We wasn’t even robbin’—hell, we brought money to that town,” Charley said. “Beulah and Rose spent nearly forty dollars.”

  “The last thing I’m interested in is Beulah Baird’s shoppin’ habits,” Lulu said. “The fact is, you killed a cop. Big Carl swung, and he never killed no cop.”

  “The man had a gun pointed at me,” Charley said. “They jumped us for no reason.”

  “They jumped you because they recognized you—who give you that haircut?” Lulu asked. Charley looked numb. Annoyed as she was with him, she couldn’t hold up the stiff frown. He was a boy in trouble, bigger trouble than he knew.

  “A barber in that town where Billy died,” Charley said.

  “I’ve got a room in the basement, behind the boiler,” Lulu said. “Get down there and stay down there. I’ll bring you some grub after a while. If the cops figure that out, you can squeeze up the coal chute and hoof it.”

  “How long before you can feed me?” Charley asked. “I ain’t had no grub since Kentucky.”

  “Three hours,” Lulu said. “I’ll have to wait till my beau goes off to his card game.”

  “I wish you didn’t have a beau,” Charley said. “I don’t know what to do next. I never meant to kill nobody.”

  “Meant to don’t matter now. The deputy’s dead,” Lulu said. “Scat, get on down to the basement. I’ll see you later.”

  “Got any clean clothes that might fit me?” Charley asked. “I ain’t changed in days.”

  Lulu remembered how meticulous Charley was about his appearance, almost like a woman. He wouldn’t even wear the same shirt two days in a row, if he could help it.

  “Edward’s about your size,” she said. “I’ll see if I can sneak you down some duds.”

  “Who’s Edward?” Charley asked.

  “My beau, who do you think?” Lulu replied.

  21

  “You ate enough spuds to sink a tugboat,” Lulu said.

  “Being wanted ain’t killed your appetite.”

  “I told you, I ain’t had a thing to eat since Kentucky,” Charley replied.

  He felt out of sorts. The little room behind the boiler was hot as August in Akins. Lulu’s new boyfriend’s clothes were a size too small for him—his wrists stuck out of his shirt, and his ankles stuck out of his pants. But at least they were clean.

  “I ain’t had cobbler this good in forever,” he added.

  Lulu knew Charley was disappointed because of Edward, her new stiff. Charley had no right, of course. But when had that ever stopped a jealous man from being jealous?

  In a way, his brooding touched her. He wanted her, and he wanted every other woman, too—but at least he wanted her. Lulu couldn’t find it in her to stay mad at him. She liked him a lot; probably she even loved him. But neither feeling really improved the odds against him. Charley was a wanted killer now; pussy or no pussy, life would never be the same for him again.

  “We need to think ahead, Charley,” Lulu told him. “I can’t keep you in my cellar but a few days. Where can you go hide out for a while?”

  “Why, Oklahoma,” Charley said. “Folks
in the hills will hide me. They know I ain’t bad.”

  Lulu grabbed Charley’s face with both hands and jerked him so hard, he heard his neck pop.

  “Look at me,” Lulu said. “Look at me, and listen hard. You don’t want to hear this, but you are a killer. That man died, and his name wasn’t Lazarus.”

  “Stop sayin’ that, Lulu—it was him or me!” Charley pleaded. “It was him or me.”

  “That don’t change a thing,” Lulu explained. “He’s dead, and you’re the killer. I believe you didn’t want to kill nobody, and I know you wish you hadn’t. But you did, and if they catch you, you’ll swing, just like Big Carl. You can’t fart around anymore, Charley.”

  “Why are you jumpin’ on me?” Charley asked. “I didn’t mean for none of this to happen. It just did.”

  Lulu looked at him and sighed.

  “You’ll be sorry if I lose my patience,” she said. “I ain’t jumpin’ on you. What I’m tellin’ you is, it’s time you grew up. You gotta keep your head, because if you don’t, the law will catch up with you and jerk it right off the top of your neck.”

  The only good news Charley’d had since he left Bowling Green was that Beulah was alive, and was going to be okay. But he was in a hot little basement in Kansas City, with a smelly furnace two feet away, and an old woman he should have left alone a long time ago telling him he had to be careful, when he knew it better than she did. It was when things got gloomy that Charley began to miss Ruby and Dempsey the most—and things were about as gloomy as they could get.

  “I wish I had a home to go to,” Charley said, feeling sorry for himself.

  “A home to go to? And do what?” Lulu asked.

  “Who’s this Edward?” Charley asked.

  “Don’t be changing the subject on me,” Lulu said. “Edward’s my business, not yours. Go home and do what I asked you?”

  “Go home, and be home,” Charley replied.

  “I read you got four hundred dollars out of that bank job you pulled the day before the shootout,” Lulu said. “Four hundred dollars don’t go far, when you’re wanted.”