Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  She doesn’t dare even to glance at Mary and she’s mindful, as the guard moves past her to open the door, of leaving extra space between his body and hers, so he doesn’t accidentally touch the knot of steel. She follows him up the black linoleum stairs that lead to the cells, her legs as weak as new grass. At the top, he unlocks a second door.

  This is not the visitor hall and the bullpen that she’s grown used to, but the corridor between the cells themselves, the prisoners’ own territory. In response to an assault of shouts and catcalls, the guard bangs his stick against the bars of several cells.

  “Hey, Bonnie,” calls a young man to whom she’d delivered molasses cookies.

  “Hey, yourself, Jimmy.”

  Two men who stand beside Clyde at the bars fade back as she approaches.

  “I’m going back to Dallas,” she announces loudly, pressing her hand to her solar plexus. “Thanks to you, my heart is so heavy, it might as well be lead.”

  “One last kiss?”

  His eyes are on her torso. Fear fizzes painfully in her veins. She lifts her hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp or a giggle and glances at the guard, who stands only four feet away, waiting for a show. Clyde’s lips form the words, “C’mere, baby,” but her ears are buzzing so loudly, she can’t hear them.

  As she leans into the kiss, she twists and presses her shoulder to the bars, as a shield against the guard’s eager eyes. With her lips on Clyde’s, she inserts her hand furtively into her dress and draws the small gun out, splaying her fingers to cover it, just as she’d practiced. Even after all that time under her clothes, it’s still cold.

  Their fingers meet, forming a warm cradle around the cool metal.

  “Be careful,” she whispers.

  “It’s the laws that gotta be careful now.” He gives her a wink.

  The guard shifts. “That’s enough.”

  She turns obediently from the cell.

  “Time’s up,” the guard says, but though Bonnie steps back, he doesn’t lead her out but moves to stand in front of Clyde’s cell.

  He’s seen it. He’ll grab it and then her. Maybe he’ll shoot her with it. She tries to run, but her muscles and bones are soft as custard and can barely hold her upright.

  “She’s wants a man, not a thug,” the guard says to Clyde. “She tell you that?”

  Clyde makes no answer.

  “Guess you’re a loser,” the guard says. “Too bad. Pretty girl.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Back at the house, Bonnie and Mary lock the door.

  “Might just as well put our hands over our eyes,” Bonnie says, as they go from room to room, cocooning themselves behind Mary’s paper shades.

  They perch formally to wait, Mary in the rocker, Bonnie on the davenport. The afternoon sun makes gold rectangles of the shades, and Mary’s rocking squeaks in time with the tock of the clock.

  Feet scrape the road, and Mary stills, but it’s only two neighbor women, their careless voices leaping and dipping like birdsong.

  “You think they’ll wait until dark?” Mary asks, setting her rocker to squeaking again.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sure glad Buzz ain’t here,” Mary says. “I couldn’t act natural to save my life.”

  “No.”

  “I think they’ll wait until dark, don’t you?”

  Bonnie had developed a habit of picking at her cuticles when Clyde was in jail in Dallas. She’s let her fingers alone since she got to Waco, but now she starts in on them, pressing one thumbnail into the skin at the base of the other.

  “I’m sure glad Buzz ain’t here.”

  Whenever an engine flutters and tires purr on the road outside, the women look at one another and stop breathing, but every car goes on past.

  “Funny how you hardly hear that clock most days and now it’s like an ax in a woodpile,” Mary says.

  The golden rectangles turn brilliant copper and, finally, blue. It’s already night at the back of the house where the kitchen is. Mary presses on the light and for about an hour they’re ordinary girls on an ordinary evening, frying eggs and bacon, buttering slices of bread. But after they’ve washed and dried the dishes, they sink again, this time at the cramped kitchen table, clinging to that bright, familiar space.

  “I wonder when they’re going to try it,” Mary says.

  Bonnie pictures the short barrel of the little gun pressed to the neck of the guard who’d mocked Clyde. But that guard would be home by now, eating his own supper.

  “If they catch him, he’ll get the chair, sure,” Mary says.

  “Mary!”

  “Well, it’s a fact.”

  “You don’t need to say it.”

  The single-minded urgency that has driven Bonnie through the day has leached away. “What if I shouldn’t have done it?”

  “Bonnie!”

  “Maybe I should have told him to do his time, pay for his mistakes. What’s two years in exchange for a happy life?”

  “Well, I told you…” Mary begins.

  “What if he doesn’t know what he’s doing? I hate this waiting!”

  Mary yawns.

  “Go on to bed, why don’t you? Sitting up’s not going to do any of us any good.”

  “Let’s both go to bed, Bonnie. It’ll make the night go faster.”

  “No, I can’t, but you go.”

  When Mary wakes with her cheek on the table, Bonnie is standing at the front room window, peeking out through the crack along the edge of the shade.

  CHAPTER 22

  The escape of Clyde “Schoolboy” Barrow, William Turner, and Emery Abernathy from the McLennan County Jail by means of a smuggled gun dominates the front page of the Waco Tribune-Herald, topping news of an accidental, fatal gunshot wound; the arrest of a radio singer; an update on a murder trial; a counterfeiting case; the discovery of four charred infant bodies; and a car wreck. A trail of stolen cars suggests that the cons are heading west. No speculation is offered as to how the gun might have found its way into the prison.

  On page six, the paper also runs a paragraph about the mysterious ransacking of a house in East Waco. No connection is drawn between the occupants, a Mrs. and a Miss Turner, and the Turner on the lam, and there is no mention of the recently swiveled geranium pot or the missing gun.

  “Must have been raccoons,” Mary giggles.

  * * *

  They keep the shades drawn all the next day and by six o’clock the gloom coupled with the sleepless night causes Mary’s chin to fall onto her chest. They lie together on Mary’s bed, where Mary closes her eyes, but Bonnie overflows with anticipation and plans. She smokes continually, lighting a new cigarette with the butt of the one she’s just finished, and spews words meant to shape her future along with the smoke.

  “He isn’t a bad boy. He just hasn’t had a chance.”

  “He’ll never be able to come back to Texas,” Mary murmurs.

  “That’s all right. I don’t mind going far away, as long as we’re together. I’m going to divorce Roy, so Clyde and I can get married, and I’ll help him start over. Maybe we’ll even change his name. His middle name is Chestnut. He could use that.”

  Mary laughs.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s a nut.”

  “All right, Chester, then. We can use my name, too. We’ll be Chester and Bonnie Parker. Mr. and Mrs. Parker, just like my mama and daddy. Clyde’s good at getting work. He’s never been fired,” she assures Mary.

  But her cousin is asleep.

  He just can’t stand to be dull, Bonnie thinks, that’s why he quits his jobs and gets into trouble, but he won’t be dull with her, so he’ll never do another thing to get the laws after him. She imagines a house with walls of colored stones and a shiny tin roof, where she writes poetry, while he sells cars. He knows all about cars and loves them sincerely. They might not give him that kind of job in Dallas, but in some small town out west they’d give a fellow a chance. She repeats Clyde
’s promises again and again to herself, papering over the image of him turning away when she’d balked at getting the gun.

  * * *

  At 9:30 p.m., knocking jerks them awake. “Yeah, this is right,” a man’s voice says, and then the knocking sounds again.

  Breathing shallowly, the women squeeze each other’s hands.

  The knocks become pounds, and the answering wallop of Bonnie’s heart threatens to toss her off the bed.

  Outside, feet scratch and shuffle; footsteps recede but then stop. When the women can no longer stand to lie still, Bonnie slides off the bed and crawls on her hands and knees to the front. Across the street, two red dots—lit cigarettes—hover above the curb. She crawls back to the bedroom, where Mary sits with her back against the headboard, chewing on her fingers. “They’re still there.”

  “I don’t want to go to jail!”

  “Oh, shush. Nothing’s going to happen to you. You don’t know anything about it.”

  “But I do! I know all about it!”

  Later, the pounding is rough and impatient, produced by the side of a fist instead of knuckles, more a message of frustration than a summons.

  Mary pulls the covers over her head. “Maybe we ought to try to sneak out the back window?”

  “Maybe they got men in the yard,” Bonnie counters.

  “Do you think they do?”

  “I don’t know. We just got to sit here, Mary. Sit here until they give up on us.”

  When the men finally leave, long after midnight, Bonnie pulls her cardboard case out from under Mary’s chest of drawers. She remembers how they cornered Clyde in her mother’s house early in the morning. She’d meant to take the interurban, but the police might be staking out the stations. Her fear of being spotted and nabbed makes her feel close to Clyde, who must be fearing the same.

  At 4:00 a.m., the street is quiet, and a dense constellation of white cigarette butts along the opposite curb stands out starkly under the streetlight. Mary’s car engine growls like an alarm, but no one runs out of his house to investigate. The only other vehicle on the streets as they drive through Waco is a milk truck. They pass the courthouse, haughty on its hill with its fluted pillars and its winged statues and its crowning dome. Bonnie despises it and is glad, so glad, that he’s flouted all it stood for, its arrogant crushing of insignificant lives like theirs.

  When the streetlights end, grasslands and fields stretch out gray to meet the dark sky, against which a few trees, darker still, mass.

  “Here, Mary. This is good enough.”

  “You sure? Maybe I oughta drive you on up to Dallas.” Mary’s low on gasoline and no filling station will be open yet. Besides, she doesn’t have much money in her purse. Also, the idea of driving all that way back home alone makes her nervous. But it seems unkind, dangerous even, to dump her cousin on this empty road. Tentatively, she slows the car, waiting for Bonnie’s answer.

  “I’ll be all right. You better get on back. Buzz’ll be home today, won’t he?”

  Mary remembers that she has to get her hair done and make her husband the red-eye gravy he likes. She has to think over what she ought to talk about with him, because she certainly isn’t going to tell him what she’s done that she shouldn’t have and what she should have but didn’t, neither of which Mary is precisely sure of. Really, Bonnie got you not knowing which way was up.

  Bonnie opens the door and the chilly air swoops in.

  “Want me to stay, Bonnie? Sit here in the car and wait ’til someone picks you up?”

  “No one’s gonna stop if I’ve got a car already sitting by me. You go on.” Before Bonnie closes the door, she adds, “Thank you very much for having me. I had a lovely time.”

  Mary has to drive on a little farther to find a place to turn around. On her way back to Waco, she waves when she passes Bonnie, but the dawn is still deeply gray, and Bonnie looks up blindly, her small face gaunt in the glare of the headlights. Mary’s final view of her cousin, through the rearview mirror, is of a girl so slight the wind generated by a passing car might push her into the ditch. Her head is down and her shoulders slump; her case is beating against her knees. But she walks with a steadiness that suggests she will slog all the way to Dallas.

  * * *

  When the knocking begins again at Mary’s door the next day around noon, she hesitantly opens it. She doesn’t know where Bonnie is—that’s what she intends to say and that is the truth. But the two boys who stand on her front porch, one smoking a cigarette, the other with his hands in his pockets, are obviously not the law.

  “We’re looking for Bonnie Parker,” the boy with the cigarette says. “Her mother sent us down to pick her up.”

  “Say,” the other fellow puts in, “that must have been some party y’all were at last night. We pret’ near froze ourselves out here waiting the whole damn night for you to get home.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The road stretches long.

  My only song

  Is the clump of my feet in the dirt.

  He runs free.

  But what about me?

  I’m just the girl he left hurt.

  An egg truck pulled over, and the driver swept greasy papers and ash from the seat for her. Climbing in, her cheeks freezing, her fingers in their light cotton gloves stiff around the handle of her case, and her underarms clammy with sweat, Bonnie was acutely conscious of the difference between the person she was now and the girl who’d ridden down on the train beside Cumie Barrow, with her case tucked behind the heels of her clean shoes and her gloved hands folded in her lap. She’d been on Clyde’s side then, too, of course, but she’d also been on the side of the law. She’d been proof, along with Cumie and her Bible—to Clyde and to the court, too—of how tightly he was bound to the upright and the obedient. He may have drifted, but two determined women were reaching to pull him back.

  She’d let him drag her in instead, and now where was he? She’d sworn to Mary that he’d come for her, but she already suspected that she—like the laws—had been duped and outrun.

  * * *

  “Sit down, why don’t you? You’re wearing a rut in the floor,” her mother said, when Bonnie had gone for the dozenth time to the window Friday afternoon. “He’s not going to show up here. You said yourself he can’t come back to Dallas.”

  By Saturday, her anxiety had overwhelmed her pride, and she went to the campground to find out whether Clyde had contacted his mother.

  “Ain’t heard nothing from Bud,” Cumie said, “but who do you think stuck his head in that there door last week with a grin like I’d caught him ducking out of Sunday school?”

  Buck, incarcerated at the Walls, had been on work duty, peeling potatoes, when he’d noticed a guard’s car parked and empty outside the kitchen.

  “He was on the lookout for Blanche,” Cumie went on. “He really loves that girl. Her daddy’s a preacher, you know.”

  Bonnie acknowledged that she’d been made aware of that advantage.

  “The two of ’em went off and holed up someplace. You ain’t heard nothing from Bud, neither?”

  “I’m sure I will,” Bonnie said. “I’m sure Clyde’s fixing to get back here. He’s just got to figure out how to do it without getting caught.”

  “Well, Buck, he just drove straight on up, pretty as you please. Just stuck his head in the door and said, ‘howdy, Mama.’ ”

  Bonnie tried delicately to suggest that Clyde was less impulsive than Buck, more apt to plan and act with caution, which would explain his failing to make a beeline to his love, but she didn’t convince even herself.

  Back home her own mother was scornful and sympathetic by turns. “The Walls don’t sound so rough, if someone as simple as Buck Barrow can just walk right out. What’re you hoping for anyway?” she demanded. “Are you fixin’ to find a hole someplace in Arkansas for the two of you to crawl into?”

  Emma softened later, as she always did when Bonnie cried, and tried to transfer her daughter’s tears to her own hardened
fingers. “He’s done you a favor going off. Maybe he loves you enough to let you have a life with a future.”

  A telegram from Nokomis, Illinois, suggested otherwise: “Al wel. Be in toch sun.”

  With this primitive promise, the distance Bonnie had been feeling between herself and Clyde closed with a snap, like the clasp of a bracelet. Buoyed, she spun around Dallas, trying to convince the owners of the few cafés still open that a girl with her charm and energy would bring in regular business, so she could start a nest egg.

  But at the end of the week, she received an envelope from Mary containing a clipping from the Waco Times-Herald. The escapees had been captured in Ohio when they accidentally looped back past the train station they’d robbed, just as the crime was being investigated. “Boobs,” the newspaper called them. “Dummies.” The youngest, Clyde, was the “Baby Dumbbell,” although he was given credit for being slippery enough to make the cops work for hours to chase him down.

  Pep Schulz, the manager who’d hired her, a serious young man who supported his mother and two sisters and their families with the café’s lagging take, sympathized. How much could Bonnie mean to Clyde, Pep asked, probing her with his patient blue eyes, if he’d thrown away happiness with her in favor of a few quick jobs with a couple of thugs?

  So she didn’t run right down to Waco, as everyone expected her to. She dithered, irritated by the irony when Clyde wrote that he’d changed his middle name from “Chestnut” to “Champion”; at once touched and offended when he informed her that he’d claimed her as his wife, so they could freely exchange letters.

  She wrote pages full of underscored phrases and exclamation points, wiping her eyes on the heel of her hand, so that the ink smudged and the paper tore. She ripped up these missives and balled the pieces and smashed the balls against the table. But, one morning, faced with the prospect of another day of aching legs, plates stuck together with congealed yolk, and Pep’s yearning glances, she called in sick.