“She’s not married anymore, is she?” the judge asked.
“Nope, she left that mug—she lives alone,” Lulu said, as she got up to go.
18
“It must be the judge’s birthday,” the bailiff said, as he and Elbert Devaney walked Charley out of court, and back to the jail.
“Why else would he give you only five years?” the bailiff added.
“That’s right,” Elbert said. “Five years is easy. He coulda given you ten.”
“It was my first crime,” Charley reminded them.
“Judge Whaley figures once a crook, always a crook,” the bailiff informed him. “I’m surprised he didn’t throw the book at you.”
“You stole twelve thousand dollars,” Elbert said. “I’ve known Judge Whaley to hand out ten years to old boys who never stole but three hundred.”
“It isn’t how much, Elbert—it’s the fact that he used a gun,” the bailiff added. “That makes it armed robbery.”
“I had a gun all right, but I didn’t use it,” Charley said. “I wasn’t even the one holdin’ it.”
Elbert liked Charley, who was looking real gloomy, even though he’d drawn a light sentence. He tried to think of something to say that might lift his spirits some.
“You’ll only be ’bout twenty-five when you get out,” he said. “If you behave, they might let you out a little early, even.”
Charley kept walking down the grey corridor. He didn’t seem to hear what was being said, and his eyes had a faraway look in them. Elbert would have liked to cheer him up, but when he looked at Charley and saw the faraway look in his eyes, he couldn’t think of a single other thing to say.
19
When Billy Miller showed up at the back door of the Ash boarding house, he got a cool reception.
“I’m surprised you got the gall to come slinkin’ around here,” Lulu Ash said, looking at him coldly through the screen door.
“Why? I’m still payin’ rent, ain’t I?” Billy retorted.
“You ain’t payin’ rent, and I never heard of you,” Lulu said.
“What about my clothes?” Billy said, horrified at the thought that something might have happened to his new pin-striped suit.
“I never heard of your clothes, neither,” Ma Ash said. “Get along down the street, I don’t harbor criminals in my boarding house.
“At least I don’t harbor criminals as dumb as you,” she added.
“But what about my clothes?” Billy asked, again. He couldn’t believe his clothes weren’t still living in the Ash boarding house where he’d left them. “I had all kinds of clothes.”
“Now you’ve got no kinds,” Lulu said. “I got rid of everything you left in the room. Go to a dry goods store, if you need clothes.”
“I hear Charley’s in Jeff City,” Billy said. He was hoping that if he kept talking, Ma Ash would soften up and invite him in.
“He’s doin’ five years for being dumb enough to pull a stickup with a stupid little jackass like you,” Ma said. “Go away, I told you. I don’t want any bulls to see you slinking around my house.”
With that, she shut her door, and turned the key in its lock.
“Gosh,” Billy said, to no one. His fate seemed harsh. He had come back from Indianapolis because he was tired of listening to his sister and her husband fight. Mostly they yelled, but occasionally, things got out of hand, and they slugged each other, or broke furniture. Billy couldn’t take it. He missed St. Louis, missed the camaraderie of the Ash boarding house, missed Rose, missed Charley.
In fact, it was Charley he missed most of all.
With Charley around, life seemed to hold more possibilities. Maybe the next time they pulled a robbery, things would go off smooth.
Ma Ash had made it clear she didn’t intend to let him in, so Billy had no choice but to wander down to a barroom. It was chilly, and his overcoat had been one of the things he forgot to take to Indianapolis, he had been in such a hurry to get away. All the time he was there he had meant to go buy a new overcoat, but his sister’s fights with her husband demoralized him so much that he mainly sat around her kitchen all day, listening to the radio and playing solitaire.
“Hi, Killer,” the bartender said, when Billy walked in. “I thought you moved to K.C. or somewheres.”
“Florida,” Billy corrected. “I went to see the alligators.”
“Okay,” the bartender said, though he didn’t believe a word of it. The bartender’s name was Louie.
“Kill anybody while you was gone?” he asked.
“Can it,” Billy said. “And don’t be callin’ me Killer, neither. The only person I killed was my brother, and that was an accident.”
“Accident?” the bartender said. “I thought you shot him over a dame.”
“I did,” Billy admitted. “It was just an accident we liked the same dame.”
“Where’s your big friend, the one from Oklahoma?” Louie asked. “I ain’t seen him in a while.”
“Another accident,” Billy said. “He fell down a bread chute at the bakery and busted himself all up.”
“Too bad,” Louie said. “I liked Charley. He sure could swig down them beers.”
20
Trainfare from Sallisaw, Oklahoma, all the way to Jefferson City, Missouri, was seven dollars—not counting meals—and it took Ruby almost ten months to raise it, mainly by taking in washing. On days when she slipped back twenty-five cents or so because Dempsey had to have medicine or something, Ruby almost despaired. Charley’s ma and pa had refused to help her, though his brother Bradley did slip her a nickel or a dime here and there. Her own folks were sharecroppers, and they seldom had cash money. Anyway, cotton was down, and they had no money to spare.
At night, Ruby lay alone in the bed she had shared with Charley, feeling like her heart would burst from missing him. Some nights she cried; other nights she lay in bed and looked out the window, feeling dry as dust. She knew she couldn’t take any five years without seeing her husband. As it was, every day seemed like a month, and every week like a year. She lost her appetite, and she lost weight—some days it was all she could do to work up a smile for Dempsey.
Ruby had bought a cheap, Indian rule tablet, envelopes, and stamps with her first washing money. It was three months before Charley sent her a letter, since it had taken that long for him to be sentenced and sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary. By then, she had used up practically the whole tablet writing him a letter every few days, telling him about Dempsey, about Bessie and Brad’s new baby, about the long, cold nights without him to keep her warm.
Bessie was the one person Ruby could talk to about her loneliness, and her need to see Charley. Bessie was kind. She took Dempsey whenever she could, and let him play with Brad’s and her two youngest children. Bayne and Wayne, their nine-year-old twins, would watch the little ones while Bessie and Ruby visited.
“I’d be the same, if it was Brad in the pen,” Bessie told her. “I’d lose my mind if I had to be away from Brad.”
It was Bessie who agreed to keep Dempsey for a few days, when Ruby finally saved up the seven dollars. Ruby washed and ironed all her clothes, and packed them neatly in her little valise. She had to sit on it to get it closed, it was stuffed so full.
Then the train came, and Ruby got on it. She had never been inside a train before, and was as nervous as a cat. The air smelled like cigar smoke, and it was hot and crowded. Ruby tried to find a bench where she could be by herself, but there were no empties. She barely found a seat before the train started moving, finally sitting down beside a cowboy, who politely tipped his hat when Ruby approached.
“I sure hope this train don’t wreck,” she said, thinking it would be polite to make a little conversation.
The cowboy, a man of about forty, took a long time to answer. He seemed to be considering all the reasons that might cause the train to wreck.
“It’s a pretty good ol’ train,” he said, after a few minutes. “I don’t ’spect it’ll wreck.?
??
The cowboy had a saddle propped between his legs. Ruby considered asking him where he was going, but abandoned the notion. She sat and looked out the window, wondering if Charley would look older when she saw him, wondering if he would even be glad to see her. She had sent him a picture of herself and Dempsey in one of her letters, so he wouldn’t forget what she looked like.
The cowboy got off in Welch, which was way up by the Kansas line. He didn’t say another word, but he tipped his hat to Ruby when he stood up to leave the train.
21
The sight of the Jeff City penitentiary scared Ruby so badly that she almost didn’t have the courage to go in. To her it looked like something out of a fairy story, or a bad dream: a dirty, old castle from a long time ago. The thought that Charley, her husband, was inside that dark place upset her so, that she began to shake all over. She had tried to make herself look pretty for Charley’s sake, but it was a gloomy, rainy day, and her spirits were as shaky as her legs.
Everything inside the pen was ugly, too, including the old woman who searched her, and dumped everything in her handbag out on a table. The careless way she did it made Ruby mad. All she had been allowed to bring Charley was a bottle of soda pop and some tobacco and rolling papers. The man at the little grocery next to the jail had told her that was all they’d let her bring him, and Charley even had to drink the soda pop while she was there. No factory cigarettes were allowed, but the clerk assured her that all the inmates learned how to roll their own. The old woman was pulling at her handbag like she meant to tear it apart.
“That’s my only handbag,” Ruby said. “I ain’t got no Winchester in it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“You better can the sass, if you want to see your stiff,” the old matron said. “This is a prison. We don’t tolerate no sass.”
When the visiting hour came, there were lots of visitors lined up—mostly older women, mothers whose boys were in jail. Ruby was the youngest woman by several years. The waiting room was grey, and it stunk. Ruby decided the stink must be from all the sadness: she had never been in a place where everybody was so sad. Even in the hospital the night her grandpa died, there had been a few jolly people, but there were no jolly people in the Jeff City pen.
The place where she finally got to see Charley was a big, screened-in room. She and the other visitors were herded into it, sort of like chickens. Then the prisoners began to come in, on the other side of the wire. When she realized she wasn’t even going to get to touch Charley, Ruby began to cry—she couldn’t help it. She had saved up her seven dollars just to stand in a pen and look at him through chicken wire. How was she supposed to even give him his soda pop through all that wire?
When she saw Charley, he was walking kind of funny, holding one hand behind him as if he was holding a surprise. His hair was cut close to his scalp, which made Ruby feel even sadder. Charley had always been vain about his hair, and he had reason to be—his hair had been thick and soft.
When he finally spotted Ruby, he smiled, and a little bit of life came back into his face. He came over and gave her a kiss through the screen, but he was still holding his hand behind his back, and he walked kind of awkward.
“Charley, what’s the matter with you?” Ruby asked, putting both her palms against the screen, to get as close to him as she could.
Charley looked embarrassed, which to Ruby only meant that he looked sweet.
“Got a rip in my pants that’s nearly a foot long,” Charley said, with a rueful smile. “If I don’t hold ’em together, my ass will hang out.”
“Honey, that’s awful,” Ruby said. “Won’t they even give you good pants?”
“They’re supposed to, but I’ve been holding my ass in for a week, and I still ain’t seen the pants,” Charley told her. “How’s Dempsey?”
“Fine, he misses his daddy,” Ruby said. “I left him with Bradley and Bessie—they miss you, too.”
Charley didn’t answer. He stood looking at her through the screen with sadness in his eyes, still holding his hand behind him to keep his ripped pants closed. Ruby knew from the look in his eyes that he missed them, too, more than there was any point in talking about.
Later, when she had stumbled out of the dirty old building back into the gloom of the day, the look in Charley’s eyes was the one thing Ruby remembered about the visit. The rest had been too brief, Charley and the other convicts had been let into the room with their visitors for fifteen minutes, so Ruby did get to hug Charley and kiss him, hold him close, give him his soda pop and his tobacco—but it seemed like only seconds that they could touch. Then the prisoners were taken back outside the screen again; she and Charley talked a little more, their hands pressed together against the wire. Ruby gave him what news there was, and then he was gone into the darkness of the prison with the other men. It was so brief that Ruby couldn’t accept it was over, that months would pass, or even years, before she would see her husband again. She cried so hard that she had to sit down outside the prison on the side of the road, and then she stopped crying, or caring if she could walk or not.
After a while, a car stopped beside her and an old man in a black felt hat tipped it when Ruby looked up at him.
“Need a lift to the depot?” he asked.
Ruby nodded, and got in. When the old man let her out at the train station, she thanked him. Her voice sounded like the voice of someone she didn’t know.
22
Charley tried to get his mind off Ruby as he walked back to his cell. He felt if he didn’t get his mind off her quick, he might go crazy. Touching her for only a few minutes and then having to walk away, back into the grey hall with the grey men, gave him the worst feeling he’d had since he arrived in prison.
Mostly, in his days of imprisonment, Charley just felt dull. For a week or two at a stretch, he would feel almost nothing; he just let the time tick away, doing no more than was necessary, feeling no more than was necessary. Sometimes he thought he had stopped being a human and had become a vegetable—his fingernails grew, and his hair grew, but nothing else happened within him. He waited, like a root, for the time when he would have a chance to see light, and live again.
But Ruby had been in his arms; he had kissed her, and he could still smell her powder. All the life they could still have together was there in her touch, in her eyes, in the feel of her arms. Walking away from Ruby was so hard it made Charley shudder. For a terrible minute or two, he thought he might crack—plenty of cons did crack, on visitors’ day. Charley wanted to turn and strangle the guard, although he knew it would just get him shot. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists as he walked. He wanted to kick something, slug somebody, let life surge up in him again. The few moments with Ruby had reminded him that he was human, a man—he wasn’t a potato. He wanted his wife.
He didn’t crack, though—not quite. His cellmate, Jerry Jennings, a Texan who had robbed a train and then had the misfortune to fall off it and break his hip, sat on his bunk, smoking. Jerry had been in the pen three years, and had never had a visitor. He was so hungry for gossip about the outside world that he started asking questions before the guard had even locked Charley in.
“Was it your ol’ lady? How’s she doin’? How’s your boy?” Jerry asked. “Did she give you any more pictures?” Charley had his picture of Ruby and Dempsey stuck on the wall right above the head of his bunk.
“She don’t have no camera,” Charley said. “She’s barely gettin’ by.”
He wished Jerry would shut up so he could grip every moment of Ruby’s visit firmly in his memory; though, in a way, keeping such a memory lit up too bright might make his time harder to serve. Part of him wanted to remember; part of him needed to forget. He was still shaky with all the pent-up feeling as it was. He wanted to sock the wall, since he hadn’t socked the guard.
“So how’s your boy?” Jerry asked, again. Charley talked so much about Ruby and Dempsey that he thought it appropriate to ask.
“She said he misses me,
” Charley told him. “Dempsey can say ‘Mama,’ and he knows his colors.”
“Oh, Lord, it makes me wish my little girl hadn’t drowned,” Jerry said. Jerry’s year-old daughter had drowned in only two inches of water. She had reached down in a bucket to retrieve her clothespin dolly, fell in, got caught, and was dead when her mama found her a few minutes later—her feet were sticking straight up out of the pail. His wife couldn’t stand the grief, and had killed herself right after the funeral.
“They oughta given you some better pants, since it was your ol’ lady come to visit you,” he added. “If it had just been some floozie, it wouldn’t have been so bad.”
Charley suddenly put both hands behind him and ripped what was left of the seat out of his pants. He kept ripping until he tore one pants leg completely off.
“Hold it, don’t be goin’ berserk!” Jerry Jennings said, alarmed. Charley Floyd had been a placid cellmate, and Jerry wanted it to stay that way.
“I ain’t berserk,” Charley said, dark. “You’ll know it if I go berserk.”
Then he threw his pants leg out of the cell.
“I expect that’s against the rules,” Jerry informed him. “If you ain’t careful, they’ll come and stuff you in solitary—then I won’t have nobody to talk to, and neither will you.”
Charley didn’t answer. He was hoping some ugly guard would come strolling by, with his mind elsewhere, trip over the pants leg, and break his fat neck.
23
“Help you with your valise, ma’am?” the skinny young man with the funny cowlick asked, smiling. Ruby had noticed him earlier, sipping coffee in the little cafe by the depot. The young man was about her age or a little older, and kept glancing at her as she sipped her coffee—that was what made her notice him in the first place.