Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  “So you’re Bonnie,” Nell said.

  He had talked about her, then. Bonnie resisted an urge to smile triumphantly at Cumie Barrow.

  “He’ll get off, won’t he?” Bonnie said. “He says they try to grab him up every time someone pinches a dollar in Dallas. He says he’d be a millionaire, if he’d done a quarter what they try to pin on him.”

  “Oh, to hear him tell it, Bud don’t do nothing wrong—so long as he don’t get caught,” Nell said. “I sort of hope he don’t get off. That boy always was one for squirming away rather than taking his medicine, and it’s done him no good to get off easy.”

  “I don’t want my boys in jail.”

  “Well, of course, you don’t, Ma. But it’s his own fault he’s in there, and he’s got to take some responsibility for keeping himself out.”

  “If he gets in, maybe I can go to the governor. Get him a pardon, like I’m fixing to do for Buck.”

  “If he can get out,” Bonnie said, “I know he won’t do anything to get himself back in there.”

  “Well, I hope you’re right,” Nell said, “but he’s got to learn to say no to his own self, and he’s a hard one to say no to.”

  “If he could get himself a good job…” Bonnie began.

  “Oh, he’s had himself plenty of good jobs. But he plays hooky like a job’s no different from school and grown-up life’s no different from being a kid. He just can’t stand to trudge along every day like the rest of us.”

  “But he has me now,” Bonnie said.

  “Well, let’s hope he gets out, then,” Cumie said dryly.

  “I heard Frenchy Clause got twenty years,” Nell said.

  “Clyde isn’t anything like Frenchy Clause!” Bonnie exclaimed.

  For nearly an hour longer, the women worried the issue—the likelihood of Clyde’s release, how he might avoid further trouble—pulling it this way and that, as if they were manipulating a snarl of yarn, looking for the knot they could pick out to straighten the whole mess and roll it into a neat ball. There was nothing to be done, however, except show up at the trial.

  “I want Clyde to know I’m going to wait for him,” Bonnie said. “As long as it takes.”

  “There’s no call for it,” Cumie said. “You ain’t married to him, are you? Seems to me just about a month ago, he was going to marry that Eleanor over in Florida.”

  Bonnie raised her chin. “We may not have known each other long, Mrs. Barrow, but we are in love, and I’m not going to abandon him in his hour of need, no more than you are.”

  Marie, who’d seated herself close to Bonnie, seemed unable to keep her eyes from Bonnie’s bright hair and mascaraed lashes and the pink blush on her fingernails. “Can I sleep over to your house tonight, Bonnie? I got me a nightie.”

  “If it’s all right with your mama.”

  Cumie granted permission with a shrug. “Whereabouts is it you live?”

  “Oh, we live over in Dallas,” Bonnie said casually, well aware of the prestige this would convey to a woman stuck in the Bog. Bonnie might have started out in Cement City, but her people—who had the wherewithal to rent a house—were the sort Dallas let in. “I live with my mother.”

  And this, Bonnie thought, would tell the woman everything she needed to know about Bonnie Parker. Whatever Cumie Barrow thought of her makeup and her open disposition, the truth was that she was a loving daughter, a good girl, just like Nell and Marie.

  * * *

  Emma rose even earlier than usual the next morning, the bed she shared with Bonnie being uncomfortably crowded with the addition of that Barrow girl, and noticed that the envelope Bonnie had carelessly left among the litter of splayed movie magazines and scrapbook clippings on the table was not yet sealed. She slid the letter out and glanced at it furtively. It mooned for some lines about the prodigiousness of Bonnie’s love and protested helplessness against the power of such emotion. (As if, Emma thought, her daughter would ever choose not to abandon herself to love.) It strayed into complaints of loneliness before rallying with a paragraph of cheerleading and future plans in which Bonnie declared that she knew better than all the world, better, in fact, than Clyde himself, how “good and sweet” Clyde really was.

  In that this mixture of drama, impatience, generosity, and self-pity revealed a Bonnie her mother knew intimately, the letter was reassuring. Nevertheless, Emma felt mildly troubled as she slipped the thin pages back into the envelope. The handwriting itself caused her disquiet. Neat and buoyantly rounded, Bonnie’s was still the hand of a callow schoolgirl.

  CHAPTER 17

  Bonnie dreamed that she was talking to Clyde through the bars of a jail cell, but when he turned and walked away with a casual wave, she realized in that abrupt, unreasonable way of dreams that she was in and he was out. Forty-five minutes later, Dutchie, from whom Bonnie was borrowing a car, was also discouraging.

  “You already got a husband in prison,” she said, scrabbling in a drawer for the key with one hand, while she slipped bobby pins from her hair with the other. “Maybe you want to wait and see if this boy gets out before you love him.”

  “That wouldn’t be love,” Bonnie said.

  After she dropped Marie at school, she drove to the Criminal Courts Building and parked near the jail, making sure the car was well out of the road and its wheels were straight. She used the rearview mirror to apply a third coat of mascara, the wand trembling slightly in her fingers. “I’d like to see Clyde Barrow,” she whispered to herself, practicing. She would make them let her in. She drew her lipstick around her mouth and watched the bright ring form her demands back at her: “I want to see Clyde Barrow. You let me see Clyde Barrow.” She was not going to ask, this time; she was going to announce her intentions. They’d better let her in or it was going to be jam up for someone.

  “Clyde Barrow, please,” was what she actually managed when she got to the desk. But it seemed she’d hit the right note at last, because the policeman dragged the big record book on the desk toward him and began tracing his finger down the middle of the page.

  She was going to get in. What should she say to him? Should she kiss him or wait for him to kiss her? Would there be bars between them? She rocked from heel to toe and boosted the ends of her hair with her palms.

  “No Clyde Barrow here.”

  “Clyde Chestnut Barrow. He was here yesterday.”

  “Well, he ain’t here today,” he said with satisfaction. “I guess he went and saw some other doll when he got out.”

  “He ain’t out. Show me where it says he’s out.”

  He tipped his head to peer around her, as if she were no more than an inconveniently placed architectural feature. “Next.”

  “Please.”

  He sighed and turned a page impatiently. Then his lip curled. “Looks like your boy’s a two-time loser and Denton’s got first dibs. He stole a safe over there about a month ago.”

  Clyde might have taken a joyride or diverted a few turkeys, but to accuse him of stealing a safe was ridiculous. That the law presumed his guilt made Bonnie want to spit, and her indignation propelled her down the five flights of stairs and into the street.

  * * *

  A week later, well before nine a.m., when Clyde was scheduled to appear, Bonnie, Cumie, Nell, and Clyde’s father, Henry, arrived in Denton by bus. Denton was hardly a city compared with Dallas, but its ivory-stoned and blue-cupolaed courthouse, standing in the center of its own square, was just as imposing as Dallas’s red one. Inside the doors, Bonnie stood with Cumie and Henry—three dry leaves swept into a corner—while Nell found the courtroom in which Clyde’s case was to be heard. Bonnie sat between Cumie and Nell on the wooden bench, using their bones to prop herself up. The judge, with flowing white hair and gold-rimmed reading glasses, looked like God in The Children’s Book of Bible Tales. Please, God, Bonnie found herself praying; she could tell Cumie was praying, too, and she felt ashamed, knowing that Cumie’s prayers were focused on a higher judge.

  Cumie knew she’d l
et the boys get away from her. They’d been sweet babies, the both of them. Well, at least Buck had been easy. When she needed to, she could still recall the easeful content of a Sunday night back in those days, the baby a warm, sweet sack on her lap; Elvin and Artie, her oldest two, rolling a spool on the bare wooden floor to amuse little Nell. Henry in the armchair, his eyes closed, satisfied like a baby himself with what she’d fed him for his supper, asleep probably—he was nearly always asleep if he wasn’t standing up, except when he was on top of her. Clyde was just becoming heavy within her then.

  And then the spool had rolled close to the stove, and Nell, crawling to retrieve it, had burned herself, and her wailing made the others cry and Henry swear.

  She couldn’t remember any easy times after Clyde was born. Of course, she wouldn’t say that was his fault, although he was a troublesome baby, quick to cry and hard to settle. Almost as soon as he could walk, he squirmed and ran away when she tried to dress him, and while she would have chased him had he been her first, or even her fourth, she let him go. If he wanted to go naked, let him. It wouldn’t kill him. If his feet and hands and face were filthy when he went to bed, what difference did it make? The bare mattress he slept on had long been too dirty to get clean.

  In them years they couldn’t get no money for cotton, so she had to be out all day long with Henry, turning another quarter acre, and even still they had to send the ones who were too little to work—Nell, Buck, and Bud—to her brothers, because they had to eat, didn’t they? Them were the years she finally learned to understand her husband, who was often sick and couldn’t spare even the energy it took to smile. It was plod or die, and believe you me, many a day she would just as soon died, but her body went on.

  Eventually, they’d had to give up and live under the wagon all them years in the Bog, but things were better now that Elvin and Artie had got some money out of the man that had kilt Henry’s horse, and they had the Model T truck for the junk. Even more important, Buck had sent them a letter another prisoner had wrote for him at the Walls, swearing that if God gave him another chance, he would renounce the crooked ways that had so pained his mother and father. She’d resolved to get him that pardon from the governor. But she had to concentrate on Bud now. Cumie sat tall and stern-faced on the hard bench, hoping that the judge could see that Bud had a mother who’d set him right.

  They had to sit through three other cases in which the prisoner was found guilty with discouraging speed and a startling rap of the judge’s gavel, before Clyde, looking like a child scrubbed for church with his hair slicked back behind his prominent ears and his body overwhelmed by an oversized denim shirt, was led in. The guard beside him was taller by more than a head. When Clyde scanned the room and his mouth turned up in a way that wasn’t a smile—because who could smile in this situation?—Bonnie knew it was a sign of gratitude especially for her, and she straightened her back to give him support.

  She hated the lawyer who was against them from the moment he stood up next to his table, hated him for the sure way he buttoned his coat, and for keeping his eyes on the paper from which he read, not deigning to look at Clyde. “The prosecution will show that Clyde Champion Barrow,” he droned—not even getting Clyde’s name right!—“along with his brother Marvin Ivan Barrow and one Francis Clause, both currently serving time at Huntsville”—in a wash of panic at the mention of Huntsville, she neglected to follow the thread of his words for a moment—“and removed a safe. That they carried said safe in the back of a truck, which they had also stolen, to 34 Remson Road, Dallas, where they attempted to open it. Failing in this purpose, they abandoned said safe in a field on Route 26, just north of Grapevine, thus demonstrating that they are not merely thieves but also incompetents.” A titter rippled through the room, and the hateful lawyer finally looked up from his papers and smirked.

  “He has no call to be rude,” Bonnie whispered to Nell.

  “Let him,” Nell said. “If he’s calling names, maybe he doesn’t have much else.”

  He didn’t have anything, it turned out, beyond the fact that Clyde and his brother and Frank Clause were known associates, and someone had seen a third man, slight with brown hair, in the back of the truck that had driven away too fast from a certain house in Denton.

  The judge looked over his gold-rimmed spectacles at Clyde for a long time and pulled absently at a few of the hairs in his bushy eyebrows. “I have no doubt,” he said finally, “that if you weren’t in on this, you were in on something else, but in this matter, the law is clear. There’s not enough evidence to convict.”

  Cumie lifted her hands and tilted her face to the ceiling. The face Clyde turned to his family was on the verge of tears, so Bonnie knew how afraid he’d been.

  It was done! She had to press her bottom to the bench to keep from leaping off and running to him. But the judge, who had been studying his papers, was speaking again. “You’re a popular young man. Waco’s waiting for you.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Parker decided love had carried Bonnie far enough. “You can’t run all over Texas after that boy.”

  “I’ll stay with Mary.” Bonnie’s cousin Mary was also nineteen, but she’d been married to a truck-driving Waco boy for two years. Emma often referred to Mary’s life with an irritating note of wistfulness.

  “How’re you getting down there? You’re not taking that old car. What if it breaks down again? You can’t walk back from Waco.”

  “I’m taking the interurban with Mrs. Barrow.”

  Emma shook her head. She’d followed Bonnie into the bedroom and sat on the bed, while Bonnie stood in the door of their shared closet, choosing dresses. “Gallivanting all over the state after a jailbird. I don’t understand how any daughter of mine grew up to think being attached to a boy in prison was part of the normal course of life. First Roy and now you’ve got another one to treat you like a dishrag. What would your daddy say? He was a decent man, Bonnie. He had a trade. He built things. He didn’t go around stealing what other people worked hard to earn.”

  Bonnie’s recollection of her father amounted to a few indistinct images, heavily influenced by the photograph her mother kept beside her bed. Speculation as to his opinions had no bearing on her decisions. She turned to face her mother, holding a dress under her chin.

  Emma shook her head. “Not that one. The almanac says it’s going to stay chilly.”

  Bonnie chose another with long sleeves and a short, matching jacket. “I thought you liked Clyde!”

  “He’s got charm, that I grant you, and I don’t wish him ill, but that don’t mean I want him for my daughter!” Emma smoothed the sleeves of the dress Bonnie had laid beside her and folded them over the bodice. “A boy who brings the police banging into my house at all hours! A boy who’s wanted in three different towns! No, that is not the kind of boy I want for you, Bonnie Elizabeth.”

  “The laws are just lazy. They can’t be bothered to find the right person when someone is handy who’s got a little bit of a record for something he did way back when.” Bonnie held up a knit with a bold stripe.

  “That’ll travel well. You can’t tell me they picked him at random. He may not have done everything they say, but you know as well as I do, if they know who he is, he’s done plenty. I wish your daddy hadn’t died, then you’d know what a good man was and you wouldn’t have anything to do with a boy like Clyde Barrow.”

  “Times are different now, Mama. A man can’t work like Daddy did, because there ain’t no work.” Bonnie wanted to slam the drawer from which she was selecting underthings, but she kept her hands moving calmly. Only her lapse in grammar revealed her inner agitation.

  “You told me yourself, Clyde never was fired. Don’t tell me he’s stealing to survive.” Emma, sensing her advantage, pushed forward. “Bog trash like them Barrows, there’s something wrong with them. They just don’t care to raise theirselves up. As long as they’ve got enough drink, they’re happy.”

  With this declaration, Emma, who had indeed been
making inroads with her daughter, who, after all, couldn’t help but recognize that her feelings did not entirely square with her sense, stumbled.

  “Oh, Mama!” Bonnie sat on the bed beside Emma and enclosed her mother’s callused fingers in her own soft ones. “I don’t believe Cumie Barrow’s ever had a sip of alcohol in her life, and that’s more than I can say for you. Anyway, Clyde wants better. He’ll make good. I know he will, because I’m going to help him.” Bonnie had rarely given a thought to the Baptist training that had filled the Sundays of her childhood, but one of those early lessons pushed into her mind now. “I’ll be a helpmeet for him, Ma,” she said, and was herself amazed at how true and right the Bible was. What she’d long perceived as a chronicle of strange desert people and hectoring authority turned out to have been written expressly for her. She felt as if God had cupped a giant palm against her back and had given her a nudge. She had been created, she suddenly understood, to help Clyde.

  Her mother, however, was oblivious to God’s plan. “Clyde wants too much,” she said, shaking her head. “I blame the pictures. Decent living isn’t good enough for him.”

  “Oh!” Bonnie dropped her mother’s hands. “You argue one way, you argue the other!” She stood up, nearly crying now with frustration.

  “I know, honey.” Emma stood, too, and put her arms around her daughter. She wasn’t one to argue with love.

  * * *

  The Texas Electric Railway Company cars dawdled and swayed from town to town—Duncanville, Red Oak, Midlothian, Waxahachie—stopping dead at each cluster of plain brick and wooden boxes, the backs of the main streets’ false fronts. Had she been traveling with her own mother, Bonnie would have chattered. Plenty of people worthy of comment got in and out of the car, and the anticipation of seeing Mary would have spawned myriad reports of those connected with her branch of the family. Cumie Barrow, however, sat with her hands folded on the Bible in her lap, undistracted by the journey. Bonnie wondered if she was again praying.