PRETTY BOY FLOYD Read online

  Praise for Pretty Boy Floyd

  “Pretty Boy Floyd possesses many of the hallmarks of Mr. McMurtry’s own fiction…. Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana give us colorful sketches of the major players in Charley’s life.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Pretty Boy Floyd is one of McMurtry’s best efforts since the celebrated Lonesome Dove… [with] female characters who are among the best in McMurtry’s canon…. Most poignantly rendered, though, is the harsh poverty of the Great Depression and the stoic acceptance of hard times…. McMurtry’s themes—bewilderment, consternation over change and acceptance of fate—are all here. So are the rollicking plot and dynamic irony that so often elevate his work to prominence.”

  —Clay Reynolds, Philadelphia Inquirer

  “The most important similarity between Pretty Boy Floyd and previous McMurtry novels … is that the novel is so good it will bring tears of pleasure to your eyes.”

  —Curt Schleier, Grand Rapids Press

  “Colorful characters armed with plenty of salty quips and putdowns … breezy reading from two wordsmiths who major in dialogue and snappy retorts.”

  —Gene Warner, Buffalo News

  “As with other McMurtry books, the peripheral characters in the novel are as interesting as Pretty Boy himself…. They give an interesting, realistic look at the hardscrabble fight for survival during the Depression.”

  —Steve Brewer, Albuquerque Journal

  “The poignant ending … is highly satisfactory.”

  —A. C. Greene, Houston Post

  “Fine teamwork … Pretty Boy Floyd is compulsively readable and hugely entertaining. All of the characters … are wonderfully drawn.”

  —Earl L. Dachslager, Houston Chronicle Sun

  “There are all the McMurtry hallmarks, at which coauthor Ossana also appears adept: the completely natural dialogue, the beautifully drawn minor characters. There’s also a poignancy to Charley’s story—a sort of underlying sadness that has permeated other McMurtry novels.”

  —Vicki Vaughan, Orlando Sentinel

  “Pitch-perfect dialogue that carries the story forward swiftly.”

  —Laura Lippman, Baltimore Sun

  “This is not a tragic book but a sad one, shot through with moments of raucous laughter and joy…. Racy and comic dialogue carry the story along with such turbulence that the quieter passages are all the more effective.”

  —John Harvey, San Francisco Chronicle Review

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY

  Sin Killer

  Paradise

  Boone’s Lick

  Roads: Driving America’s Greatest Highways

  Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present

  Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

  Duane’s Depressed

  Crazy Horse

  Comanche Moon

  Dead Man’s Walk

  The Late Child

  Streets of Laredo

  The Evening Star

  Buffalo Girls

  Some Can Whistle

  Anything for Billy

  Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

  Texasville

  Lonesome Dove

  The Desert Rose

  Cadillac Jack

  Somebody’s Darling

  Terms of Endearment

  All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

  Moving On

  The Last Picture Show

  In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

  Leaving Cheyenne

  Horseman, Pass By

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  Zeke and Ned

  PRETTY BOY FLOYD

  Larry McMurtry

  and

  Diana Ossana

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Simon & Schuster and colophon are

  registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  First Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2003

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  Designed by Colin Joh

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-671-89165-0

  0-7432-3018-3 (Pbk)

  ISBN: 978-0-7432-3018-6

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2968-5

  “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd” by Woody Guthrie © Copyright 1958 (renewed) by FALL RIVER MUSIC INC. All rights reserved.

  Used by permission.

  Front cover art, “Death on the Ridge Road,” by Grant Wood courtesy of the Williams College Museum of Art

  COLLABORATORS’ NOTE

  In 1993 we wrote, for Warner Bros., a screenplay about Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd. The screenplay is an austere form; it welcomes no longueurs. So while we were writing our screenplay, we both decided that we would like to write at more length about the life (as we imagined it) of Charley Floyd.

  We began by talking out, and then writing down, an extensive, detailed outline of the book as we envisioned it. Each day, L.M. wrote a skeletal five pages; then D.O., putting flesh onto bone, made them ten.

  The book before you is the result.

  Larry McMurtry

  Diana Ossana

  “I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks. He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be … He done a little bad thing an’ they hurt ’im, caught ’im an’ hurt him … They shot at him like a varmint, then they run him like a coyote, an’ him a-snappin’, an’ a-snarlin, mean as a lobo. An’ he was mad. He wasn’t no boy or no man no more, he was jus’ a walkin’ chunk a mean-mad. But the folks that knowed him didn’ hurt ’im. He wasn’ mad at them. Finally they run him down an’ killed ’im. No matter how they say it in the paper how he was bad—that’s how it was.”

  —MA JOAD,

  John Steinbeck

  THE GRAPES OF WRATH

  If you’ll gather round me, children,

  A story I will tell,

  About Pretty Boy Floyd, the outlaw,

  Oklahoma knew him well….

  —Woody Guthrie,

  “THE BALLAD OF PRETTY BOY FLOYD”

  He would be thirty years old forever.

  —Michael Wallis, BIOGRAPHER,

  PRETTY BOY: THE LIFE AND TIMES

  OF CHARLES ARTHUR FLOYD

  BOOK ONE

  1925–1929

  1

  Bill “the Killer” Miller rubbed his pistol—rubbing it reassured him—as they waited for the armored car to pull up. Charley blew on his hands to warm them. An hour before, he had been at work on the second floor of the Kroger Bakery, catching hot bread trays as they came whirling down the bread chute, twenty-four loaves to the tray. If he had blown on his hands then, it would have been to cool them. Even wearing thick gloves, it was all Charley could do to handle the hot trays.

  “Stop rubbin’ that gun, you’re makin’ me nervous,” he said to Billy. “That gun’s ready to shoot. You don’t need to rub it.”

  “I
guess I know how to treat guns,” Billy said, annoyed that a big hick like Charley Floyd, a country boy with no polish, would have the gall to tell him how to pull off a robbery.

  “It’s my gun, remember?” Charley said. “The only reason I’m lettin’ you handle the firearms is because I figure I’m better at tyin’ knots. You keep the guards covered while I hogtie ’em. Then we’ll grab the money, and scram.”

  Billy Miller felt a little rueful. Only the week before, he had been the proud owner of a nickel-plated Colt .38, but he had lost it in a poker game at Mother Ash’s boarding house, where he and Charley stayed.

  “Wally Ash cheated, the rat-faced little turd,” Billy said. “Otherwise, I’d be carryin’ my own weapon. I should plug the son-of-a-bitch.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” Charley said. “If you shoot Wally, Ma Ash’ll throw us out, and the grub’s good.”

  “Who cares? We’ll have to leave anyway, once we pull this job,” Billy replied.

  “Speak for yourself,” Charley said. “I might leave, or I might not.”

  “If you don’t, it won’t be the grub that’s keepin’ you,” Billy said.

  Billy was rubbing the handle of the pistol again. He was too nervous to sit still while they waited for the armored car with the Kroger payroll in it. The Mississippi was only a few miles east, but it was so foggy that morning, Billy couldn’t have seen the water if he’d been standing on the Eads Bridge.

  “I might leave, and I might not,” Charley said again, wondering if he ought to put the headlights on. Ahead, across Chouteau Avenue, were the train yards. Now and then, he could hear a train whistle, but he couldn’t see the yards, much less downtown St. Louis a mile away to the north. In fact, he couldn’t see past the front of the car—it occurred to him that if the armored car happened to stop behind them instead of in front of them, the guards would be inside with the payroll before he and Billy even knew they were there.

  “You think you’re gonna get in Beulah Baird’s britches, that’s why you don’t want to vamoose,” Billy said, smugly. “Don’t give me that bull about the grub.”

  “Aw, applesauce,” Charley said. “I’m a married man. It’s Beulah’s hard luck that Ruby saw me first.”

  He grinned when he said it, to show Billy that he was mostly joshing. Bragging about girls while waiting to pull a robbery might be bad luck, for all Charley knew. He was new to city life, and wanted to do things the way they were supposed to be done—particularly serious things, like robbing the Kroger payroll.

  Beulah Baird wasn’t any more serious than jelly on a biscuit; not that Charley was anyone to turn up his nose at jelly on a biscuit. The minute he saw Beulah coming in from the kitchen of the boarding house with a plate of pork chops in one hand and a bowl of spuds in the other, he liked her—and the feeling seemed to be mutual.

  “Hey, pretty boy, where’d you come from?” Beulah asked immediately, to the great annoyance of her fiancé, the same rat-faced Wally Ash who had won Billy’s pistol from him in the poker game.

  “Oklahoma,” Charley said. He didn’t care to name the town, which happened to be Akins, a wide place in the road just east of Sallisaw.

  “You don’t say—I didn’t know they growed ’em as good-lookin’ as you, down in Oklahoma,” Beulah said. She then proceeded to wave her tail in his face two or three times while she was serving the spuds and pork chops. Charley noticed that her sister Rose was no mud fence, either. Rose kept the beer coming, but she couldn’t match her sister when it came to gab.

  “Being married may stop you, but it won’t stop Beulah,” Billy Miller said, remembering that he had felt a little sour when he saw Beulah take an immediate shine to such a hick. Billy would have given a pretty penny to squire Beulah Baird around himself, but the one time he had worked up his nerve to ask her out, she had turned him down flat.

  “Forget it, you’re too short,” Beulah had told him, coolly. “Ask Rose, she likes shrimpy little guys.”

  “Shut up, I think I hear the armored car coming,” Charley said. Now that they were about to be partners in crime, he thought it behooved Billy to keep his mind on the business at hand.

  “That ain’t no armored car, that’s a milk truck, the Pevely Dairy’s just around the corner,” Billy said.

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the armored car from Tower Grove Bank drove up to the curb, and stopped.

  2

  As soon as he saw the driver come around to the back of the armored car to unlock it, Charley hopped out of the flivver and walked up to the man.

  “Hold it right there, sir, this is a stickup,” Charley said. The moment he said it, he realized he wasn’t armed: Billy had the gun. All he himself was armed with was some twine for tying up the guards.

  “What? It’s so foggy I can’t hear you, son,” the guard said. He was an elderly man, a little stooped.

  “A stickup—a robbery,” Charley repeated. Then he realized he couldn’t see Billy anywhere. He didn’t know whether Billy was in the car or out of the car, pointing the gun or not pointing the gun. For all Charley knew, Billy might have skedaddled back in the general direction of Ma Ash’s boarding house, leaving him to rob an armored car with nothing but a pocketful of #3 twine.

  “Say, are you available to cover this man?” Charley asked, over his shoulder.

  “He’s covered,” Billy replied, from somewhere behind him.

  “How many of you are there, boys?” the guard asked. “I couldn’t see six feet if my life depended on it.”

  “Your life depends on openin’ the door of this car,” Charley said, trying to sound stern. He had no idea exactly where Billy Miller was. From the sound of his voice, he was somewhere behind the flivver, whereas the old, stooped guard and the armored car were directly in front of it. If Billy was fool enough to shoot, it would be anybody’s guess who he’d hit—the guard, Charley, or nobody.

  “Don’t get nervous, son,” the old guard said. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and the right way to do this here would be for me to knock on the door a few times, so’s Cecil will know there’s a commotion. He’s likely asleep, and if we wake him up sudden, he’s apt to be cranky.”

  He proceeded to rap on the door a few times with his knuckles.

  “You wasn’t supposed to let him knock on the door,” Billy Miller said. He had just bruised his shin on the rear bumper of the flivver, and realized he was slightly out of position.

  Charley found the remark irritating, coming as it did from somewhere in the fog, well behind him.

  “Get around here and help, if you know so much about it,” Charley told him.

  To the guard, he said, “Sir, I’ll take your keys.”

  “Okay,” the guard said, handing him a hefty set of keys.

  “You’re supposed to take his gun before you tie him up,” Billy cautioned. He was feeling his way around the flivver as best he could.

  “That was your job,” Charley said, getting more and more irritated. He hadn’t so much as glimpsed his partner since the robbery started.

  “I forgot it,” said the guard.

  “Forgot what?” Charley asked.

  “Forgot my gun,” the guard said. “Left it in the office. I was meaning to go back and get it right after this drop.”

  “He’s not armed, hurry up,” Charley said. Just then, he saw a hand with a pistol in it poke out of the fog. The pistol—his pistol—was cocked, and it was pointed at him, not at the guard.

  “Tie him up, I’ll shoot him if he moves,” Billy Miller said.

  “Not unless you aim to the right about six feet,” Charley said. “Right now, you’ve got me dead in your sights.”

  “I want to be on target if he tries to get the jump on you,” Billy said.

  “Uncock that pistol and help me figure out which key fits that lock,” Charley said.

  “It’s the brass key that’s round on top,” the guard said, dryly. “I never interfere with professionals, but
I can’t vouch for Cecil—he might be cranky.”

  3

  Cecil, the guard inside the armored car, was studying the sports page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when Charley swung the rear door open. Cecil wore glasses, but he had taken them off for a moment in order to squint closely at a picture of Babe Ruth, who had just been fined five thousand dollars by the baseball commissioner for misconduct. Why should they care what else the Babe did, so long as he kept hitting home runs? Cecil was certainly no athlete himself—he was pudgy, and had a fair case of acne. Charley would have guessed him to be around eighteen years old, though when questioned about the robbery by a Post-Dispatch reporter later, he claimed to be twenty-three.

  There was a shotgun propped against some money bags right in front of Cecil, but Charley reached in and grabbed the shotgun while Cecil was fumbling with his glasses.

  “Hands off, that’s company property,” Cecil said. “Who are you?”

  “Don’t expect him to give his name, he’s robbing us,” the elderly guard said.

  “Jump on down here, sir,” Charley said politely. “I guarantee you won’t be hurt.”

  Cecil was piqued at being captured so easily—in his view, it was entirely the fault of Wayne, the elderly guard. Wayne was far too lazy and easygoing to be trusted with an armored car full of valuable money.

  “Why’d you give ’em the keys?” Cecil asked, as Charley was tying Wayne’s hands behind his back with what looked like baling twine.

  “You could’ve run,” he added, when Wayne made no reply. “It’s so foggy, they couldn’t have hit you if they’d been shooting a cannon.”

  “The short fellow with the hogleg might have got off a lucky shot, that’s why,” Wayne replied. “I’ll be retiring in about six months—I don’t want no .38 slug to retire me six months early.”

  While Wayne was waiting for Charley to finish tying him up, he imagined how Gertie, his shrewish wife of forty years, might take the news that he had been shot and killed by a couple of bold young robbers. If Wayne’s pension was lost because two hooligans chose to rob the Kroger Bakery payroll on this particular morning, these boys would have more to worry about than cops. Contemplating Gertie on a rampage made Wayne shiver.