Nuts. But then Joe Young wrote her a letter with a picture of himself taken in the yard with his shirt off, a fairly good-looking bozo with big ears and blondish hair. He said he kept her bathing-suit picture on the wall next to his rack so he’d look at it before going to sleep and dream of her all night. He never signed his letters Booger, always, “With love, your Joe Young.”
Once they were exchanging letters she told him how much she hated picking cotton, dragging that duck sack along the cows all day in the heat and dust, her hands raw from pulling the bolls off the stalks, gloves after a while not doing a bit of good. Joe said in his letter, “What are you a nigger slave? You don’t like picking cotton leave there and run away. It is what I done.”
Pretty soon he said in a letter, “I am getting my release sometime next summer. Why don’t you plan on meeting me so we can get together.” Louly said she was dying to visit Kansas City and St. Louis, wondering if she would ever see Charley Floyd again. She asked Joe why he was in prison and he wrote back to say, “Honey, I’m a bank robber, same as Choc.”
She had been reading more stories about Pretty Boy Floyd. He had returned to Akins, his hometown, for his daddy’s funeral-Akins only seven miles from Sallisaw-his dad shot by a neighbor during an argument over a pile of lumber. When the neighbor disappeared there were people who said Pretty Boy had killed him. Seven miles away and she didn’t know it till after.
There was his picture again, pretty boy Floyd arrested in Akron for bank robbery. Sentenced to fifteen years in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Now she’d never see him but at least could start writing again.
A few weeks later another picture, pretty boy Floyd escapes on way to prison. Broke a window in the toilet and jumped off the train and by the time they got it stopped he was gone.
It was exciting just trying to keep track of him, Louly getting chills and thrills knowing everybody in the world was reading about this famous outlaw she was related to-by marriage but not blood-this desperado who liked her brown eyes and had mussed her hair when she was a kid.
Now another picture, pretty boy Floyd in shootout with police. Outside a barbershop in Bowling Green, Ohio, and got away. There with a woman named Juanita-Louly not liking the sound of that.
Joe Young wrote to say, “I bet Choc is threw with Ohio and will never go back there.” But the main reason he wrote was to tell her, “I am getting my release the end of August. I will let you know soon where to meet me.”
Louly had been working winters at Harkrider’s grocery store in Sallisaw for six dollars a week part-time. She had to give five of it to Otis, the man never once thanking her, leaving a dollar to put in her running-away kitty. From winter to the next fall, working at the store most of six months a year, she hadn’t saved a whole lot but she was going. She might have her timid-soul mom’s looks, the reddish hair, but had the nerve and get-up-and-go of her daddy, killed in action charging a German machine gun nest in that woods in France.
Late in October, who walked in the grocery store but Joe Young. Louly knew him even wearing a suit, and he knew her, grinning as he came up to the counter, his shirt wide open at the neck. He said, “Well, I’m out.”
She said, “You been out two months, haven’t you?”
He said, “I been robbing banks. Me and Choc.”
She thought she had to go to the bathroom, the urge coming over her in her groin and then gone. Louly gave herself a few moments to compose herself and act like the mention of Choc didn’t mean anything special, Joe Young staring in her face with his grin, giving her the feeling he was dumb as dirt. Some other convict must’ve wrote his letters for him. She said in a casual way, “Oh, is Charley here with you?”
“He’s around,” Joe Young said, looking toward the door. “You ready? We gotta go.”
She said, “I like that suit on you,” giving herself time to think. The points of his shirt collar spread open to his shoulders, his hair long on top but skinned on the sides, his ears sticking out, Joe Young grinning like it was his usual dopey expression. “I’m not ready just yet,” Louly said. “I don’t have my running-away money with me.”
“How much you save?”
“Thirty-eight dollars.”
“Jesus, working here two years?”
“I told you, Otis takes most of my wages.”
“You want, I’ll crack his head for him.”
“I wouldn’t mind. The thing is, I’m not leaving without my money.”
Joe Young looked at the door as he put his hand in his pocket saying, “Little girl, I’m paying your way. You won’t need the thirty-eight dollars.”
Little girl-she stood a good two inches taller than he was, even in his run-down cowboy boots. She was shaking her head now. “Otis bought a Model A Roadster with my money, paying it off twenty a month.”
“You want to steal his car?”
“It’s mine, ain’t it, if he’s using my money?”
Louly had made up her mind and Joe Young was anxious to get out of here. She had pay coming, so they’d meet November first-no, the second-at the Georgian Hotel in Henryetta, in the coffee shop around noon.
The day before she was to leave Louly told her mom she was sick. Instead of going to work she got her things ready and used the curling iron on her hair. The next day, while her mom was hanging wash, the two boys at school and Otis was out in the field, Louly rolled the Ford Roadster out of the shed and drove into Sallisaw to get a pack of Lucky Strikes for the trip. She loved to smoke and had been doing it with boys but never had to buy the cigarettes. When boys wanted to take her in the woods she’d ask, “You have Luckies? A whole pack?”
The druggist’s son, one of her boyfriends, gave her a pack free of charge and asked where she was yesterday, acting sly, saying, “You’re always talking about Pretty Boy Floyd, I wonder if he stopped by your house.”
They liked to kid her about Pretty Boy. Louly, not paying close attention, said, “I’ll let you know when he does.” But then saw the boy about to spring something on her.
“The reason I ask, he was here in town yesterday, Pretty Boy Floyd was.”
She said, “Oh?” careful now. The boy took his time and it was hard not to grab him by the front of his shirt.
“Yeah, he brought his family down from Akins, his mama, two of his sisters, some others, so they could watch him rob the bank. His grampa watched from the field across the street. Bob Riggs, the bank assistant, said Pretty Boy had a Tommy gun, but did not shoot anybody. He come out of the bank with two thousand five-hundred and thirty-one dollars, him and two other fellas. He gave some of the money to his people and they say to anybody he thought hadn’t et in a while, everybody grinning at him. Pretty Boy had Bob Riggs ride on the running board to the end of town and let him go.”
This was the second time now he had been close by: first when his daddy was killed only seven miles away and now right here in Sallisaw, all kinds of people seeing him, damn it, but her. Just yesterday…
He knew she lived in Sallisaw. She wondered if he’d looked for her in the crowd watching.
She had to wonder, too, if she had been here would he of recognized her, and bet he would’ve.
She said to her boyfriend in the drugstore, “Charley ever hears you called him Pretty Boy, he’ll come in for a pack of Luckies, what he always smokes, and then kill you.”
The Georgian was the biggest hotel Louly had ever seen. Coming up on it in the Model A she was thinking these bank robbers knew how to live high on the hog. She pulled in front and a colored man in a green uniform coat with gold buttons and a peaked cap came around to open her door-and saw Joe Young on the sidewalk waving the doorman away, saying as he got in the car, “Jesus Christ, you stole it, didn’t you. Jesus, how old are you, going around stealing cars?”