The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Now that Charley was divorced Louly wanted to write and sympathize but didn’t know which of his names to use. She had heard his friends called him Choc, after his fondness for Choctaw Beer, his favorite beverage when he was in his teens and roamed Oklahoma and Kansas with harvest crews. Her mom said it was where he first took up with bad companions, “those drifters he met at harvest time,” and later on working oil patches.

Louly opened her letter “Dear Charley,” and said she thought it was a shame Ruby divorcing him while he was still in prison, not having the nerve to wait till he was out. What she most wanted to know, “Do you remember me from your wedding?” She stuck a picture of herself in a bathing suit, standing sideways and smiling over her shoulder at the camera. This way her fourteen-year-old breasts, coming along, were seen in profile.

Charley wrote back saying sure he remembered her, “the little girl with the big brown eyes.” Saying, “I’m getting out in March and going to Kansas City to see what’s doing. I have given your address to an inmate here by the name of Joe Young who we call Booger, being funny. He is from Okmulgee but has to do another year or so in this garbage can and would like to have a pen pal as pretty as you are.”

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?”