Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  “You’re lucky you didn’t have no babies,” Emma said.

  But later, Emma would wonder if a baby might have saved her daughter. A baby didn’t make you forget what you wanted for yourself, but it got in the way of those wants so often with its crying and its gurgling and its smiling and its needing to be fed and needing to be picked up and needing to be changed and needing to be rocked and needing to be soothed and needing to be carried and needing to be taught and needing… well, everything, that it made you see that there was no point in wanting for yourself. Maybe wanting for yourself was a childish dream better grown out of.

  Emma believed that Bonnie would have been a good mother—doting, energetic, fierce. But she understood her daughter well enough to know that Bonnie’s never-born children had been spared a mother who could not have found happiness in helping babies through their helplessness. And at least, Emma would think bitterly, Bonnie had had no daughter to make her suffer.

  CHAPTER 11

  At Marco’s, around the corner from the massive red courthouse, Bonnie became acquainted with a number of policemen. Laws, in her experience, were no different from the laundrymen who’d yelled their orders across the alley back when she worked over at Hargraves. Laws were just boys who wanted her to smile at them. She let them call her “Blondie” and “Doll” and “L’il Bit” and caught their jokes and tossed them back, so they could consider their cleverness duly appreciated. It amused her to keep the ball in the air.

  “Hey, Two Sugars, how come you ain’t a law? You look like one.”

  Ted Hinton always reddened when Bonnie used the nickname she’d coined for the way he doctored his coffee. “As a matter of fact, I’m considering a job in the sheriff’s office.”

  “What’s wrong with the PO?”

  “I’d just as soon get around more, do something different every day.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Too bad you can’t work for the sheriff.”

  She shrugged. “I hate anything to do with a gun. Tuna fish on white?”

  He nodded.

  He was ready, when she set the plate in front of him. “Bet you could make it in pictures.”

  “I’d hate to leave my mama and go way out there alone. But,” she added over her shoulder, “I’ll do something. And when I do, you’ll know, because I’m going to write poems all about it.”

  * * *

  Men of all sorts asked her out, producing a dime, as if that slight, silver disc was the moon. Their eyes would tell her to take note of the coin being slid under the tilted saucer, while their mouths said, “How about that dance over to the Ridgeway later on?” or “Would you like to see the picture show?”

  “Which show? The Wild Party?” She could be a blond Clara Bow; everyone said so.

  “Any show.”

  She generally went with him—any him. She hoped for love, but she wasn’t expecting it. At least going with boys gave her something to do.

  Bonnie and Emma consulted each other about her outfits and makeup, and they agreed that Emma’s answering the door added a touch of elegance. “Your beau’s here, Bonnie.”

  Usually they had fun; she wasn’t fussy. She liked a show or a dance, but she was happy to have just a walk through Fair Park or a fast ride under the stars. She wasn’t any good at judging which were nice boys, though. If they liked her and their manners were decent enough, then she went along, grateful to be asked.

  “You shountna gone with that boy,” Emma would say later, when certain ones made Bonnie cry. But she didn’t know any better than Bonnie who was nice and who would turn out to be “a disappointment,” as Emma put it, until it was too late.

  Like that fellow Tom Ketchup-and-Eggs. He’d been all right while they walked down Elm Street, quaffing the fizzy, frothy, inexhaustible cocktail of light and color, admiring the shopwindows, festooned with hats and jackets and hair tonics and wedding cakes—all the bounty of the sleek city, assessing the coming attractions at the Ritz, which advertised iced air, and the Capitol, crowned with an angel of lacy white lights. Bonnie acted clingy and cool, swaggering and simpering by turns, for the fun of it, assessing her performance by means of her reflection in every bright windowpane. He bought her pork chops and black-eyed peas at Minette’s and knew how to get into the back room afterward to drink whiskey. But when he opened the door for her at the Pantages with a flourish, she wasn’t sure if he was playing along or mocking her.

  When the movie let out, Bonnie nearly tripped over a woman—Mexican or Indian or Negro or maybe just dirty—who’d plopped herself in the middle of the sidewalk. She had a baby in her lap, and she stretched out a filthy hand palm up.

  “Oh, look at that darling!” Bonnie opened her own hand, clean and red-nailed, to her beau. “Give me two cents.”

  “Give your own money,” he said.

  She had some coins—her mother had taught her never to be without carfare—and she dug them from her purse and put them in the woman’s hard palm.

  In the streetcar back to South Dallas, where Bonnie now lived with her mother and Billie, she sang softly bits from the picture, but she knew from his sideways look what he was up to.

  They’d barely walked a block beyond the light under which the car had dropped them, when he said, “I seen you, you know.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bonnie lifted a foot to push a finger between her new T-strap and her pink toes, where a blister had begun to sting.

  “I seen you giving away food in the alley. Behind the café.”

  “So? What are you? The manager’s stooge?”

  “You’re a soft touch, ain’t you?” He reached one hand around her neck to pull her to him. Normally, she enjoyed necking, but she didn’t like him, and his fingers felt disgustingly rubbery on her skin.

  “Sorry, honey,” she said, twisting away. “The bank’s closed.” She held up her left hand and touched the ring around her fourth finger. She still wore it, even if Roy Thornton was long gone, having sold her down the river when he went up the river. That was the clever way she was thinking of describing her marriage in a poem, although the statement was more poetic than accurate, seeing as how Roy had several times wandered off from married life before he’d ended up in the pen.

  But he laughed. “The faithful little wife? I’m not buying it.” He pushed her into a doorway and pinned her between his arm and his chest, while with his free hand, he began to hike up her skirt.

  She kneed him hard, where she knew it would hurt, but although he crumpled, he didn’t release her. Instead, he dragged at her, yanking her to the ground with him.

  The idea that he thought he could take advantage of her, that he believed he was powerful enough to make her weak and scared and vulnerable, angered her even more than his pawing. The piece of razor blade she kept in her compact came easily to hand. She held it to his jugular and pressed to slit the skin, so that he grabbed at his neck in shock and pain.

  Her blisters burned as she ran, but she savored the sensation as an expression of her fury. In a block or two, however, the tears began, and she stopped, exhausted. Sniffling, she slipped off her shoes and soothed her soles with the soft dirt. He’d been too surprised to follow her. They were always surprised at what a fluffy little thing like her could do.

  CHAPTER 12

  The wooden floor at Marco’s was pale along the stretch where every waitress’s path converged, the varnish rubbed off by so many Mary Janes treading the same dozen boards. Some days, Bonnie knew that she was going to be a waitress for the rest of her life; she was going to wait and wait and wait until she died.

  “You best hang on to that job. You’re lucky you got someplace to work at,” her mother said, whenever Bonnie complained of the go-nowhere, do-nothing quality of her life, which, to her credit, was not as often as might be expected of someone with her aspirations and temperament. “And, by the way, you best quit playing Lady Bountiful with Marco’s food. He’s told me twice now that he’s had enough of it.”

  But s
he couldn’t give up the feeling she got from giving away a meal to someone that she could see didn’t have enough money to fill his hunger.

  “How many slices of chicken come on the sandwich? If butter’s extra, I don’t want none. No tea; just water for me, thank you.” Their tongues would sneak out and work around their lips as they watched other people’s food come out of the kitchen.

  “Never mind this old check,” she’d say, tearing it off the pad with the flourish of a drum majorette and stuffing it into her apron pocket. “You’re today’s lucky winner. Your meal’s on the house.”

  They’d gawk and sometimes protest but finally would look up at her with a gratitude that was almost love, adoring subjects of a generous queen. The best was snitching rolls and scraps of meat from the kitchen for the kids who came prowling around the alley.

  Marco didn’t fire her, but she lost her job all the same when Marco’s joined the other cafés and bakeries, the millinery, the hardware store, the notions shop, and the butcher that had already closed. Bonnie babysat; she cleaned some houses; she accepted a little something from the men who took her out, a thank-you for pleasure supplied. She needed money, but she wasn’t desperate for it. She was young; she had no children to feed; she lived with her mother who still had her job sewing overalls for the men who made the cement. But she was desperate in a more general way about her prospects.

  Her dreams had been grandiose and gaudy, if predictable and insubstantial. They’d tended to involve wailing jazz and fuchsia silk, armloads of red roses and dramatic close-ups. She’d practiced shuddering her shoulders in case she was called upon to weep on cue. She’d also designed a cover—powder blue—in anticipation of her first collection of poetry, with the title—Texas Treasures—and her name embossed in florid golden script.

  Although she continued to work on her poems, she’d learned to accept the fading of those bright dreams as the price of adulthood. But with the closing and shuttering, the painting over of picture windows, and the boarding ups, even her more realistic hopes had become scruffy. All around her, life was squeezing in and grinding down.

  As in that summer before high school, a discontented, wearisome feeling permeated her days, except when she could get a pop of sweet dreams. She didn’t let herself do that too often. She could see where that would get her: a spot on a street corner, like those sagging floozies, hideous Sleeping Beauties who closed their eyes and let themselves be taken by the men and the drugs and the booze in turn.

  And then her friend Barbara, who’d been supplementing her modest income from a Dallas hairdresser’s by inviting men into her bedroom, ended up with a broken arm and needed help. Bonnie and Emma agreed that at least this would be something different.

  * * *

  Mostly, staying with Barbara had been fun, like playing house, but sometimes Babs pushed too far. “Get the door, would you, Bonnie?”

  “All right,” Bonnie answered. “Although,” she said to the pot of beans she was boiling with chopped onions and a ham bone, “I don’t see why having an arm in a sling keeps a person from answering a door.”

  The caller’s hat was in his hands, and his dark, wavy hair was parted and slicked back in the way of all young men. He ran her up and down with lively brown eyes. “Hey. You ain’t Barbara.”

  “No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

  “Don’t be afraid.” He grinned and one cheek dimpled roguishly, as if his whole face were winking at her.

  “Who is it?” Barbara called from the bedroom.

  “Some boy,” Bonnie answered.

  “It’s Clyde,” he called over Bonnie’s shoulder toward the bedroom. And then, more quietly, he announced himself to Bonnie alone. “Clyde Barrow.”

  CHAPTER 13

  She hadn’t even said “come in” before he entered, sure anyone’d be happy to welcome Clyde Barrow.

  “What’s cookin’?”

  “Red beans and rice,” she answered, before she realized he hadn’t meant it literally.

  He was looking for Barbara’s brother, but Bonnie and Barbara were the kind of girls who were quick to offer dinner to the kind of boy he was, even though all they could produce was a feminine portion and the two of them had to fill up on crackers and jelly after he’d gone. When he said he liked the food, Bonnie knew he was saying something else. She wasn’t much of a cook.

  He asked, could she make biscuits and gravy tomorrow, and then, doubting he would show, she feared she’d been a fool, but at eight he was at the door, smelling of soap.

  “I believe you mixed your flour with your milk before you cooked this, am I right?” He held up a little gravy on the tines of his fork.

  “That’s the way my grandma taught me.”

  “That’s the way I do, too,” Barbara said.

  “And there ain’t nothing wrong with it. Tomorrow I’ll show you how I do, though. Fry up the flour first. We’ll see which you like better.”

  Clyde’s gravy, which tasted more brown than white, was better. One night he made scrapple and greens, another night, ham hocks and red-eye gravy. He’d learned to cook in the country, he said, when he’d gone to live with his uncle.

  “We wountna had nothin’ to eat but salt pork and dry beans, if I hadn’t learnt myself to cook by thinking what my mama done back on the farm. My mama can make a good dinner out of two stones, if she has to.”

  He strummed a guitar, while Barbara and Bonnie sang:

  I hear a train comin’ down the track,

  Gonna carry me away,

  But it ain’t gonna bring me back.

  “My sister Nell’s husband plays with a band. He might be able to get us some gigs, if we practice,” he said.

  “I doubt we’ll make money that way,” Barbara laughed.

  “Who cares about any old money?” Bonnie said. “Let’s do it. Let’s do something!”

  He started to come by in the middle of the day; he seemed to have nothing to do but court her.

  “I see you don’t have a job,” she said.

  “I see you don’t, either.”

  “I would if I could get one.”

  “Not me.”

  He’d had plenty. He’d worked on the line at Brown’s Cracker and Candy Company; he’d made thirty cents an hour at Procter & Gamble; he’d cut glass.

  “I can do anything I set my mind to,” he bragged.

  He’d been sitting back, picking his teeth with a matchbook cover, but now he sat up straight. “But it don’t matter how quick you are or how many ideas you have. It’s all ‘yes, sir; sorry, sir; right away, sir’ all day long and after all that trouble back you go to the Bog with a little bit of pay packet. I can’t live that way.”

  “How’re you going to live, then?”

  “I get by all right.”

  He drove her over to White Rock Lake in a Pontiac coupe, and they parked where they could see the big, bone-white moon over the water, although they didn’t look at it much.

  “Who’s this?” He traced the black letters inside the heart inked on her thigh, R-O-Y.

  She watched his fingers, more interested in them and in the ripple of current they were sending up her leg than in the question, as she was meant to be. “Just some boy who got under my skin.”

  She raised her hips toward him, but when he pushed his hand between her legs, she grabbed his arm.

  “All these names!” she said, planting little teasing kisses inside his elbow. “You’re like a book.” With a pink nail, she underscored an ornate EBW, set over a heart with a dagger stabbed through it. “Who’s this?”

  “Just some old girl.”

  “Emily?”

  “Eleanor.”

  “Who is Anne?” She pulled her nail through the waves of blue letters. “And Grace?” Her outrage was mock, but she couldn’t deny that all those names were an affront to a girl who wanted to believe she was special.

  “I don’t even know where they are now.”

  “USN? Ursula? Eunice?” She figured he couldn’t spell.


  “That’s the US Navy.”

  “You were in the Navy?”

  “Naw. I tried to join up, but they wouldn’t let me in. Bad chest, they said. Could be my heart.”

  “I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with your heart.” She lightly scratched a Valentine on his chest.

  “Want me to put ‘Bonnie’ there?”

  “No. And I do not intend to get ‘Clyde’ inked on my other thigh.”

  Tattoos were puerile tokens. Scratching a name into flesh was hardly different from the schoolgirl’s game of writing “Mrs. Clyde Barrow,” “Bonnie Barrow,” “Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Barrow” in the margins of a notebook. She was ready to put away childish things.

  “I’ll show you where Bonnie ought to be.” Supple and strong as a cat, she overbalanced him and pinned him to the seat, her hands on his shoulders, her thighs around his hips.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Clyde! Come meet my mama!”

  Emma had stopped by Barbara’s after work.

  “Come on in, Mama. Clyde!”

  He stepped out of the kitchen, a pink apron tied around his waist, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, a wire whisk in one hand and the other cupped under it to catch the drips. Bonnie hurried back to him and took his arm, as if he needed an escort to move across the few feet of space.

  “Mama, this is Clyde.” She looked up into his face, proud as if she’d created him.