Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  * * *

  Emma’s father was, in fact, a German, and her mother was from Louisiana, but Emma had found her own religion, Southern Baptist, by following a girl she’d admired in school. She’d met the man who would become her husband among the congregation, so she’d never doubted God’s guiding hand.

  While Charles cemented bricks into straight rows for a living, Emma liked to think she was doing much the same with her three children, laying a solid foundation—dressing them neatly, seeing they were well-fed, teaching them to love and fear God and to know right from wrong. If she was too zealous, unable simply to enjoy them, as Charles wished she would, perhaps it was because she couldn’t shake an inchoate belief that some lapse in her vigilance had allowed their firstborn, Coley, to cease to breathe at some hour of the very early morning during the sixth week of his life. She understood that each—solemn, reliable Buster; effervescent, unpredictable Bonnie; easygoing, malleable Billie—was a treasure to be cherished and guarded. As if to stamp these three babies onto the world, she’d bought each a christening gift of precious metal and had it monogrammed. Hubert Nicholas (no son of hers would be christened Buster) had a silver cup; Billie Jean, a silver spoon; and Bonnie Elizabeth, a gold bracelet.

  “B. That spells Bonnie.”

  Bonnie, only three years old, had butted in on Buster’s lesson—as usual—and understood before he did the rudiments of reading. It must have been a Sunday morning, because the bracelet was around her wrist. She stroked the engraving with the tip of her miniature finger.

  “That’s right,” Emma said, amazed. Maybe her daughter was a prodigy, like that Wonder Girl in Pittsburgh she’d read about in McCall’s, who could speak seven languages. “B E P.,” Emma said, pointing to each letter, “Bonnie Elizabeth Parker. That’s you, all right. My bonny Bonnie.”

  * * *

  The bracelet wasn’t for every day but only for special, like Sunday mornings with the big blue bow and white shoes. When they got to church, Mama wiped the toes of those shoes with a handkerchief she’d drawn across her tongue.

  Sitting in the pew, Bonnie fiddled with the gold band, opening it wide and squeezing it tight, according to the rise and fall of the preacher’s voice. Buster, bored, let his head fall to one side in church and Billie Jean sometimes cried; but Bonnie watched and listened as the preacher flung his arms and his voice around. She studied the black-ink words as they ribboned behind the square, thick finger Daddy passed over the page, like the shine trailing a snail. And whenever it came time for the singing, she sang out, so even God could hear her.

  * * *

  Most of those early years would become amorphous in her memory, as if viewed through the bottom of a drinking glass, even the day her daddy went away.

  “Daddy, don’t go!”

  She swings upside down on his forearm, her hands tight around his wrist, her ankles locked around his elbow. Her milkweed floss hair brushes his knees.

  “Let Daddy go to work,” Mama says, but she’s distracted, feeding the baby, who isn’t a baby anymore. “Big bite, Billie.”

  “No, Daddy. Stay and play.”

  She wants another yesterday.

  Yesterday was Christmas Day but warm in the way that Texas can sometimes be in the middle of winter, the cold West wind stopping to catch its breath, so that the damp air can sponge up the sun. Bonnie and Buster were after Daddy, the moment they got home from church.

  “Fly me! Fly me!” they both demanded. “Fly us!”

  “Let Daddy rest. He has to work tomorrow.” That was Mama, jiggling the baby, trying to spoil the fun. Bonnie wouldn’t let her.

  “C’mon, Daddy! Fly us!” She spun herself and toppled sideways. She couldn’t get off the ground without him.

  He thunked his bottle down and cleaned the foam from his lips with his finger and thumb. Done.

  One hand around her ankle, the other around her wrist, he spun to make her fly, around and around, the air flowing over her face like cool water, the grass and the trees blurring and blending into a river of green and gray, like Little Black Sambo’s tigers turning to butter. He dipped her low, so that her fingers brushed the blades. “My Bonnie lies over the ocean.” High until she felt that if he opened his hands, she would keep on flying. “My Bonnie lies over the sea.” But his fingers were clamped tight. “My Bonnie lies over the ocean.” Her arm would pull right off her body before he’d let her go. “Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.”

  Yesterday is done.

  “Your daddy has to go to work, Bonnie.” Her mother’s words are crowding now, her hands around Bonnie’s waist, tugging. “Let go.”

  “Goddammit, I won’t!”

  Her mother’s hands jerk away, as if they’ve been burned. “Bonnie! Don’t talk that way! Charlie, really! How could your brother?”

  Daddy’s brother is Uncle Pete, who’d brought a sky-blue ribbon to tie in her hair and nickels for ice cream when he came to visit. “Now what do you say when you don’t want your peas?” He’d tilted his head when he asked a question, just the way her daddy did.

  “I won’t eat these goddamn peas!” she’d repeated, perfect in one go. His words in her fluty voice had made him laugh, so she’d said it again. His laugh was like her daddy’s, too.

  Later, the peas had glistened on her plate. She’d been amazed and impressed that he’d known they would be having peas for dinner. He’d winked at her, and she’d given the table a smart bang with the butt of her fork for attention. “I won’t eat these goddamn peas!”

  Mama and Daddy had stared at her and then Daddy and Uncle Pete had laughed their twin laughs. “I won’t eat these goddamn peas!” Daddy’d laughed some more, just like he was laughing now.

  “I won’t, goddammit! I won’t let go!”

  But he gives his arm a little shake. “Off now, monkey. Be my bonny Bonnie.” He unlocks her ankles easily with his free hand, so that her feet drop to the floor. “I’ll be home in plenty of time for some of Mama’s delicious red beans and rice.” Over Bonnie’s head she sees him wink at Mama, and Mama smiles back. Love hangs between them, shimmering like a spider’s web in the early morning.

  And then he’s gone.

  CHAPTER 4

  If only she’d napped. Then the man would not have come.

  But naps were for babies like Billie Jean and, no, Bonnie wouldn’t lie down for just ten minutes; she wouldn’t close her eyes. Bonnie wanted to play with Mama.

  “Come on, Mama. Baby needs her bath.” Bonnie emptied the chipped blue bowl of its oranges and plucked her own damp washcloth off the edge of the washstand. “Baby,” in fact, is quite clean, having been bathed half a dozen times since Santa delivered her yesterday morning.

  “Do it yourself like a big girl.” Emma frowned at the pink fabric that humped and slithered on the table. “I have to finish this.”

  Bonnie dipped the washcloth in the empty bowl and touched it to Baby’s face. “Oh, no!”

  “Ow!” Startled, Emma had poked herself with a pin and her voice was cross. “Bonnie, what is it?”

  “You didn’t remind me to test the water and it was too hot.” Bonnie rocked Baby petulantly, glowering at her mother.

  But Bonnie never stayed mad. She ducked under the table. Mama sometimes let her push the treadle with her hands. “Now? Can I push now?”

  The machine had jammed again. Emma yanked the fabric out, snipped the trailing thread with tiny scissors, and flipped the material to expose a matted snarl.

  “When can I push it?”

  “Oh, go outside and play, Bonnie, please. Mrs. Olsak needs this for New Year’s Eve.”

  “Then let me help you, Mama. I’ll make it go very fast.” Bonnie pressed the treadle experimentally and the needle whirred, furiously stabbing nothing.

  “For heaven’s sake! Go outside. Here, let’s put your coat on.”

  * * *

  This day was nothing like yesterday. The air was cold and the clouds ran together and sunk low around the steeple of the church-that-Da
ddy-was-building.

  Buster had gone down the alley, pulling the wooden wagon that had been his Christmas present. If she’d gone looking for him, then she wouldn’t have seen the man and then the man would not have come. But she wasn’t allowed to leave the yard.

  She could have stayed in the backyard, singing Christmas Baby to sleep in the wash basket, drumming on the hollow tub of the wringer, bossing a class of clothespin students into a straight line, hooking one hand around the cold iron of the clothesline post and leaning away, twirling until her palm burned from the friction and came away orange with rust. If she’d stayed in the back, she wouldn’t have seen the man and the man would not have come. But playing in the back alone got dull.

  There wasn’t much to do in the front, but people sometimes passed, and she could watch them. And, if she skipped or stood on one foot or rolled a somersault or even just waved, she could get them to smile and sometimes even stop and talk to her.

  For some time, the street was empty. Bonnie traced with a stick the crooked mortar lines that cemented the stones of her house. The Parkers’ house and the Janceks’ next door were the only two in town made of crooked rocks in shades of red and brown and yellow, pieced together like a crazy patchwork. Bonnie never tired of following their patterns and admiring the miraculous way such uneven borders could be arranged to fit perfectly together. Her fingers were cold, and her cheek, when she pressed one hand against it, was colder still and felt as slick as the pink silk Mama was sliding through her machine. She wished for someone to come, having in mind a friend of Mama’s, baby on hip and child in hand; or next-door Mrs. Jancek, carrying a plate of dulkove kolacky; or a preacher with a Bible tucked tight over his heart; or a drummer in a smart suit and a stiff hat, a heavy case stretching one arm long. Click, click, would go the latches and the case would open to reveal rows of shiny razors, lumpy sacks of coffee, brown bottles of medicine, or, Bonnie’s favorite, boxes and boxes of colored buttons.

  * * *

  The man emerges from behind the Kriegels’ house on the corner.

  For less than a second, not even long enough to fully form a thought, her heart quickens. The man wears work clothes just like Daddy’s: brown trousers and jacket, a gray cap. But then she sees that his walk is wrong—heavy, as if he’s dragging Buster’s wagon full of rocks. And his shoulders are bulky; they’re not the shoulders she rides to church on, so she’s the tallest of all with her chin on Daddy’s cap.

  This man is neither a drummer nor a preacher. He takes meaty hands from his pockets and hangs them empty at his sides. He doesn’t see her, even though she’s right there, half under the porch he’s about to walk on. She lifts her stick, a baton with which to command attention, but he doesn’t smile and nod. Instead, he stares and frowns, as if he’s angry to see her crouching there.

  She should have run at him with her stick and driven him off. She should have run into the house ahead of him and held the door shut. But she does nothing but watch as he lifts his heavy hand to knock and then raises it to remove the cap that he bunches, puny and limp, in his thick fingers.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Give Daddy a kiss,” Mama said, and Mr. Olsak hoisted her up, his big hands under her arms and around her ribcage. He held her well away from his body, as if she were a wet puppy, not tight against his chest the way Daddy would have. Inside the box, Daddy was hollow, like a jack-o’-lantern. God had scraped his insides out.

  Sears, Roebuck sent the front room clock on the train in a long box like this one, but you couldn’t get to heaven that way. You had to wait underground, where God would find you by your name carved on the flat stone.

  The walk was long behind the wagon that carried the box that held the husk of Daddy. Bonnie stepped on Buster’s heel, so Buster pulled the bow from Bonnie’s hair. Bonnie punched him in the arm. Buster punched her back. The punching felt good; it helped Bonnie to breathe. But Mrs. Jancek caught her wrist.

  “Children.” The word wasn’t scolding but plaintive, like melting ice.

  Daddy fit next to Baby Coley, who’d been Bonnie’s brother before Buster but had been too good for this earth. Bonnie kicked the toes of her white shoes into the dirt, so God would see she wasn’t that good.

  * * *

  Mrs. Jancek gave Bonnie a green cardboard case with a brass latch and a brown handle that had belonged to her daughter Jeannie, whom it was not polite to talk about. Bonnie hoped there would be buttons inside, but the case was empty.

  A man with a big stomach turned the insides of their house upside down and sideways to puzzle them into a wagon and draped the rug from the front room over the whole pile for Bonnie and Buster to sit on. They rode backward, so their eyes were on their patchwork house, until they turned the corner that set them on the road along the railroad tracks, and the place they’d lived in with Daddy was gone.

  Bonnie flexed her bracelet. It was only for special, for church and for walking to the cemetery behind the wagon with the box of Daddy on it, but Mama had forgotten to take it off and put it away. Bonnie stretched the thin gold wire and pulled it over her hand. She threw it into the road the wagon had just traveled over.

  “What’d you do that for?” Buster said.

  “So Daddy can tell which way we went.”

  Buster twisted in his seat. “Ma!”

  But the wagon’s wheels ground through the dirt, and the stuffing from their house jiggled and creaked in its bed, and Billie was wailing in Mama’s arms. Mama didn’t hear him, or at least she didn’t bother to turn or answer.

  * * *

  The first night was fried potatoes, lemon pie, napkins wide enough to drape over Bonnie’s head like a veil, and sleeping in a strange-smelling room with the door in the wrong place, and the next night was beans and rice on the dirt and sleeping on the mattresses they’d sat on all day. Snuggling under the wagon, peeking through the spokes at the swirling sky so thrilled Bonnie that she forgot to say her prayers, so God cracked open the sky, trying to flush her soul from her skin. Placid Billie looked around, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, but sensitive Bonnie was so undone, she couldn’t even cry, and she clung silently to her mother with a grip that would leave blue dots on Emma’s neck in the morning.

  By the third day, Emma didn’t climb on the front seat but curled with Bonnie and Buster on the folded-over rug or lay on the mattresses, under the tarp. The world as far as Bonnie could see was dirt, which changed color as the days passed from dark brown to red to gray. They bumped and juddered and swayed, until the stillness whenever they paused felt strange.

  * * *

  Finally one morning, as they were finishing their breakfast beans, the driver lifted his arm, releasing a stink from under his coat, and pointed far ahead. “There’s yer Cement City.”

  Six towers rose dark against the fresh peach of the rising sun. Emma dipped a flannel in the water left over from breakfast and washed all their faces and hands. She flattened Buster’s hair and painstakingly untangled the knots that days in the wind and nights on the mattress had tied in Bonnie’s cottony strands. She dressed Billie in a white sweater with pink rosette buttons and put on fresh stockings and Sunday shoes. Then she climbed out of the wagon bed and, carrying Billie, got back on the front seat with the driver.

  * * *

  As the sky lightened, the towers grew, and soon plumes of black smoke became visible, then tasteable. The air had a sharp, unpleasant tang to it by the time the driver finally whoaed the horse in front of a house the color of old wash water set among hard, brown winter fields.

  Almost immediately, the front door opened and a woman no bigger than a girl, with head and hands and feet protruding from a garment so shapeless it might have been a flour sack, stepped out. Limping slightly, she came down the few steps off the porch and hurried across the yard, her palms pressed to her cheeks and her head swiveling left and right on its stringy neck.

  She seemed almost to try to lift Mama off the seat, but she settled for Billie, who took up nearly the whole of her f
ront—as Mama got carefully down, keeping her good stockings well away from the splintery wagon. Then the woman had Billie with one arm and Mama pulled tight against her bosom with the other.

  “Oh, Emma!” she said. “I ain’t got room for all this junk. You shoulda sold it and took you a train.”

  Buster got out of the wagon bed in the deliberate way that he and Bonnie had taught themselves—first, rolling over on his stomach to dangle his feet as far down as they would reach and then pushing himself off the side. Bonnie had positioned herself to do the same, when a girl came banging out of the house, in two great leaps covered the length of the porch, and, not bothering with the steps, hurled herself off the edge of it. Her hair, cut straight across the jawline like Bonnie’s and nearly as pale, lifted on either side of her head like feathery wings.

  So Bonnie drew her legs under her, balanced on the backboard, and launched herself. She didn’t think to go off the side, where she might have landed on the winter-brown grass. Instead, she hit the packed dirt and pebbles of the drive and fell forward onto her knees and palms, tearing her stockings and her skin and staining her skirt with blood.

  CHAPTER 6

  If she’d kept her family in Rowena, Emma often thought, maybe Bonnie would have found a different boy, someone with whom she could have settled down and been happy. (“Happy” was a word Emma and Bonnie both used to describe a quixotic state of contentment.) But God had yanked the foundation out from under what Emma had built. What choice had she but to give up and bring her children home to Dallas?

  Well, not Dallas, exactly. Not the city east of the Trinity River with its turreted bloodred courthouse and arcaded, marble-floored hotels; its department stores selling Japanese silk and French perfume; its theaters bejeweled with lights; and its dim, cool banks in which tellers fingered bills with manicured hands; but rather the haphazard region west of the river, far enough out that their section of the metropolis was no longer called Dallas or even West Dallas, but had its own name, derived from the industrial product at its heart.