Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  On the table between Bonnie and Clyde, elongated triangles of darkened wood marked the spots where those who’d sat there before had stretched out their arms, but Bonnie kept her hands in her lap. She felt half-ashamed for showing up; she would not do more.

  “Been busy?” His sneer confused her.

  She’d expected buttery blandishments, which she could resist to restore her dignity. She’d planned to hold out until he produced a measure of solid regret. That, she would readily swallow.

  But he pointed an accusing finger. “You think I don’t know what you been up to? I got eyes in West Dallas. They tell me you’re running around.”

  She recoiled, sucking in air that ignited in her head and chest. “Your talking eyes need glasses,” she spit back. “I ain’t the one didn’t do what he promised. Ohio? That’s your idea of together? Robbing train stations? That’s your idea of being good? You are a dumbbell!”

  “Better a dumbbell than a filthy little whore!”

  If one of the guards had not stepped forward, she would have scratched him until he bled.

  The apology she’d anticipated arrived two days later in a letter. “Just be a good little girl and always love me,” he begged.

  Throughout the summer and into the fall, while he was shuttled around Texas to slough off various charges, she received fulsome musings about people and places he remembered and fantasies about the fun they would someday enjoy, peppered with references to her sweetness and blue eyes. She kept them in a packet tied with a red ribbon in her underwear drawer, but she did not often send a reply. And when she did, she was careful to express no desire for future happiness with him. To do so would have been ridiculous and degrading, when he had so casually shoved any possibility of such out of reach. He may have been able to view his incarceration as fate rather than consequence, but she would not, and, in any case, fourteen years was far too long to live through letters. She went out with other men, although thus far they merely confirmed the sentence to which she, indulging her propensity for moping, condemned herself in dramatic diary entries: “life without love.”

  * * *

  Somewhat reflexively, Bonnie maintained her connection with the Barrows.

  “He didn’t get the Walls,” Cumie said bitterly in October. “They sent him to that terrible Eastham.”

  “At the Walls, they learn you shoe mending,” Marie explained. “The work out in them cotton fields is so bad at the Bloody ’Ham, we hear cons chop off their own fingers to get shut of it.”

  In July, Buck, still on the lam, married Blanche, but acceding to the wishes of his wife and his mother, agreed to surrender himself to Huntsville to finish his sentence. Bonnie ignored the sympathetic look that Blanche gave her as this information was revealed, a look that conveyed that she, Blanche, had a husband who loved her and would do what she and Texas required, so that they could live a happy life together, while Bonnie did not. Cumie, not content with meaningful glances, crowed about the workings of God. Bonnie, Cumie insisted, should not trouble herself with thoughts of Clyde, because she could do nothing for him.

  Cumie and Henry had finally established a foothold in West Dallas, a couple of lots on the dirt thoroughfare that was Eagle Ford Road to which Henry had hauled the shack. He’d added two gas pumps and a room up front from which he sold oil, tire patch kits, soda pop, pretzels, moonshine, water, and telephone calls.

  Meanwhile, Cumie had found her calling as a suppliant, and with gnat-like persistence petitioned the governor to give Clyde a pardon. On February 2, 1932, about a year and a half after Clyde had gone to Eastham, she revealed a mother’s power.

  “I’m gettin’ him out,” she said, when Bonnie came by with candy.

  “What?”

  “There’s too many new ones comin’ in, I guess. What with the way things are nowadays. They got to let the old ones out to make room.”

  “But that’s wonderful!” Bonnie managed to spit out, although her feelings were far more confused that this expression suggested.

  Cumie shrugged. “I know you’ve got some other fellow now.”

  * * *

  In mid-February, Bonnie heard, the way people did in West Dallas, that Clyde was back in town. Restless, distracted, and down, she resisted the urge to crawl over to Eagle Ford Road. On a Friday night, she was at home with her “other fellow,” wishing Andy would go on home, so she could brood over her diary, but at the same time wanting him to stay all evening, so she could pretend she didn’t care. Poor Andy; she felt sorry for him, trying to jimmy himself between her and her mood. She turned on the radio, so they could quit trying to talk. That was why she didn’t hear the knock.

  Billie finally opened the door. “Clyde!”

  The name detonated an explosion in Bonnie’s chest and without a thought she was off the divan and across the room. He was leaning on crutches, and, as he put his arms around her, one crutch banged to the floor, while the other jammed against her ribs.

  The other fellow picked his hat off the table and went out the open door. Whether he was angry or sorry, she didn’t know and didn’t care.

  “What happened? Are you all right?” Bending to pick up the fallen crutch, she saw that his foot was wrapped in a grimy bandage.

  “Your poor foot! C’mere, c’mere, c’mere.” As his presence unclotted her feelings, she clung to him and pulled him along toward the divan.

  Emma stood frowning in the opposite doorway.

  “Mama, look! Clyde’s hurt.”

  “I see. That happen in the pen?”

  “We don’t want to talk about that now, Mama. Clyde’s back. He came back to me.”

  “Like a bad penny,” Clyde said.

  When Bonnie laughed, Emma smiled, because what mother isn’t happy to see her child happy? She allowed herself to hope that after nearly two years in prison, Clyde might have changed.

  CHAPTER 24

  Clyde had changed. He was dolled up like a gangster, for one thing, in a new charcoal-gray suit, kid gloves, and a silk shirt. He was still slight—even skinnier, actually, than when she’d last seen him—nevertheless, he was somehow weightier. His face had aged into a man’s, the bones and flesh solidifying. Pressed tightly against him on the sofa, Bonnie tucked her head against his chest and rubbed her cheek against the silk.

  But Clyde was glowering and sulky. “Who was that pasty fellow?”

  “He’s no one. Not now that you’re back.”

  “Where’s he live? I’d like to have a word with him.”

  “Stop it! What’s the matter with you? You come here to see me and all you talk about is some boy who has nothing to do with you.”

  “I don’t like the idea of that horn toad taking advantage.”

  “He didn’t take advantage. He’s gone now anyway.”

  “You mean you asked him for it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He reached under her dress. “Little show-off. You asked him for it, didn’t you?”

  “Not here,” she hissed. “Not like this.”

  But he wasn’t the boy who’d slept chastely on that couch two years before. He pushed at her too hard and too fast, her mama and Billie right in the next room. She yelped, but his crutch crashed again to the floor, masking her cry.

  She sobbed quietly, but the radio was playing “Night and Day,” and that made her feel better, because, after all, he was the one.

  Over the next few days, she worked on this new, hardened Clyde, who wouldn’t hold her gaze but glanced away whenever their eyes met for too long. She kept touching him, trying to tease away the carapace under which the boy she remembered must be hiding, the one who preferred hot chocolate with plenty of sugar to the stuff his father sold in Mason jars.

  They made plans on the stoop of the oil room on Eagle Ford Road, or rather he pronounced and she buttressed. The weak, spring sun wasn’t warm, but it seemed to gild the scraps of clouds overhead, and a fresh wind stirred the stale winter air.

  Clyde was going to help
his daddy expand the service station into a repair shop. He and his little brother, L.C., could make any tin can run, he boasted, and when Buck got out, they could bring him in, too. They would be the Barrow Brothers and people wouldn’t bother taking their machines no place else. “We can get some old junkers, fix ’em up and sell ’em, too.”

  It was a sure thing, she agreed, a way to make a good life from his natural-born talent. For them both, she added, squeezing his arm. The gesture or the words snagged some other, submerged Clyde. His eyes filled with tears.

  “I was scared you wouldn’t want me no more,” he choked. “After I been in that dirty place so long.”

  “I don’t care where you been,” she said, tracing his eyebrows and letting her fingertips slide over his cheekbones and onto his lips. Love hadn’t abandoned her after all. It had just gone dormant without him to spark it on. “I’ll always want you.”

  In the oil room, Henry wiped a screwdriver fastidiously on his trousers before using it to stir a jelly glass full of the merchandise he kept hidden behind the oilcans. “Thanks for sticking by Bud,” he said formally, stepping outside and offering the glass to Bonnie. “I put a touch of Dr Pepper in, so’s it’ll taste good.”

  It did not taste good, but it had other qualities, and she sipped it greedily, enjoying the way it melted her insides. “It’s warming,” she promised, handing the glass to Clyde.

  He gulped half of it down at a go and then pulled her roughly onto his lap. “You’re what I want to warm me.” Then his cheek was slick against hers and his breath smelled thick. “I’m never going back,” he sobbed.

  Awkwardly, reaching around her body, he leaned to pull off his sock and unwrapped the bandage around his toes, or rather the grotesque, swollen, red lump where his first two toes had been.

  She made herself touch it. “Oh, poor little piggies!”

  “I told you,” he said, “plenty others done worse. A whole foot. Or a hand. You want to know? You want to know what it was like?”

  She did not. She wanted to go back to the day before the laws had taken him from her mother’s house and pretend it was yesterday. But with his raw, sloppily stitched wound exposed, she could not deny that her boy had been altered and diminished.

  “When the tilling started again, I knew I was likely to be one of them that got outta there in a box. You remember my heart? How the Navy wouldn’t let me in on account of it?”

  She nodded and put her hand to his chest, protecting that delicate organ.

  “It wasn’t working right. I couldn’t get my wind. And when you ain’t puttin’ your back into it, that’s when they beat you the hardest.”

  An ax was easy to come by. He just went over by the chopping blocks one day. No one tried to stop him.

  “It was harder than you’d think to swing it just right.”

  “Stop! Please, stop!” She covered her face with her hands.

  Clyde kept on, however, as if, once begun, he had to spew out the rest of the incident that had obviously continued to churn in his mind. “I didn’t want to get more than two, but I had to do those clean. If you don’t see it through and leave a toe or a finger hanging, they just wrap it up and send you back out. Then, when the blood starts comin’ through the bandage, they gather everyone round to see what a mess some dolt has made of hisself. I don’t know that two toes would have been enough, now that I think on it. They would probably have sent me back by now, if it hadn’t been for my ma’s begging.”

  He seemed to see the loss of his toes as a necessary sacrifice, even though, if he’d waited a single week, he would have enjoyed his freedom whole. She knew the laugh the paper would have had, if they’d paid attention: “Dumbbell Cuts Off Toes to Spite His Fate.”

  “I hate those damn guards,” she said. “I wish you could show them. But you’re done with that now. You’re never going back.”

  “No.” He was talking more to himself than to her now. “I promise I’ll die before I go back.”

  * * *

  For a few weeks, her wounded baby stayed close to home, chastened and belligerent by turns, nursing his toes and his grudges. Plenty of young men with nothing much to do stopped by, and Clyde held court. They filled each other in on who was doing what time for what crime, dissected the finer points of various models of automobiles, and robustly expressed their support for Dallas’s plan to send all unemployed coloreds back to the farms to live on the surplus wheat no one was buying. On one occasion Nell happened to be there and convinced them otherwise—she was married to a musician and had different views—but the next day they went back to their old way of thinking.

  Cumie gave only a cold nod to the boys that hung around; she hadn’t worked so hard for that pardon, she said, so Bud could stir up new trouble with that trash. Bonnie assured her—and anyone else who would listen—that Clyde wasn’t going to slide back into that old groove, because he was good inside. Nell, however, didn’t trust her brother’s insides. At the end of February, when he could limp without a cane, she announced that she was sending him to Massachusetts, where she’d arranged a job for him with a construction crew.

  “You can’t send him away!” Bonnie protested. “He just got back.”

  “You want him to start over, don’t you?” Nell said. “They’re never going to let him do that here. You know they’ll be hauling him in every time a dime gets stole in Dallas, and pretty soon he’ll figure he might as well be stealing them dimes. You got to take the long view.”

  “You’re going to go all the way to Massachusetts,” Bonnie whined to Clyde, “and leave me here?”

  “It’s Nell’s idea.” He was sullen as a child.

  “But what about fixing cars? You and L.C. and your daddy.”

  “They say we ain’t got money for the parts.”

  “You do this job Nell’s got for you,” Henry said, “and you can save it up.”

  “Slow and steady?” Clyde sneered.

  “That’s right. Like I done.”

  “Your slow and steady got you a pile of scrap,” Clyde said. “The service station was pure luck.”

  “At least I got me in a position to be ready to catch me some luck, when it came my way.”

  Clyde shook his head, a gesture that seemed to negate all the Barrows and Bonnie, too.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said. But no one took her seriously, not even herself.

  * * *

  It was his last chance to be good, but to take it, he had to stand on his own in an unfamiliar place and he wasn’t up to it. He didn’t have Nell’s focus or Henry’s stoicism or Cumie’s faith. Bonnie knew she ought to have hoped for him to stay in Massachusetts. She should have rooted for him to establish a new life and to send for her, if, having made his way, he found he couldn’t do without her, but she was overjoyed when, less than two weeks later, he’d quit and come back to Dallas. The long view, she’d found, was as gray and flat as the horizon, and she was sick of it.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 25

  April 1932

  Telling Emma she’s found some scraping sort of job in Houston, Bonnie packs her cardboard case and practically skips down the street, too excited to hide her exuberance. The purpose of the errand on which she is about to embark doesn’t trouble her. The end—the humiliation of the institution that tortured Clyde—justifies the means. And, after all, she won’t actually be stealing cars; she’s only along for the ride.

  When the blue Model A pulls over, she knows he’s been waiting for her. He reaches across the seat to pop the door and grins wide enough to perk his elfin ears. “Hey, baby, wanna ride?”

  She only has one foot on the running board when he grabs her hand and yanks her in, as he picks up speed. She tumbles into the seat, as if she’s mounting a ride at an amusement park, instead of traveling down an ordinary Dallas street, and her exultant kiss matches her mood.

  “Watch the road!” Ralph Fults says from the back.

  Their plans have expanded since yesterday. After they
get the cars in Tyler, they’re going to stop in Kaufman where Ralph has spotted a good selection of rifles and shotguns in a hardware store.

  “I don’t like guns,” Bonnie says coquettishly, producing a little shudder.

  “Aw, baby, we won’t be but five minutes,” Clyde says. “You’ll just wait in the car.”

  “You can lay on the horn if you spot the laws,” Ralph says.

  Clyde frowns. “Little place like that, there won’t be no laws. Don’t worry, sugar. Daddy’s not going to get his baby into trouble.”

  “I’m not worried.” She strokes his silk sleeve. She’s decided that Clyde looks natural in silk.

  He turns his palm up, so that her hand fits into it.

  “I like that you want me along,” she says.

  “How about me?” Ralph says. Among the members of Clyde’s newly formed Lake Dallas Gang, Ralph is Bonnie’s favorite.

  “Oh, we want you along, Ralph,” she says. She turns to grace him with a puckish expression that she knows suits her little face. “Someone’s got to hold the flashlight.”

  In Tyler, Clyde uses the screwdriver he always carries to start a Chrysler 60 parked in front of the train station. They leave the Ford and cruise around in the Chrysler, admiring its wide seats with their plush upholstery and its powerful engine, until they spot a Buick Master 6 for Ralph. Conveniently, the owner has left the keys in the ignition.

  * * *

  The fast cars and the guns that they’re now speeding to collect in Kaufman are for a raid on the Eastham Prison Farm, plans for which have preoccupied Clyde since he returned from Massachusetts. In preparation, Bonnie, Clyde, and Ralph had driven some weeks before into the enormous, empty space between Dallas and Houston, where the spring haze of pale green lay like mold on the crust of the dark brown fields and a few budding trees stood like sentinels.