Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  “Wait! Is you the devil? You don’t fool me, Devil. I see you.”

  She reread a ballad about a “jilted gangster gal” who’d served five years at Alcatraz while her man got away to enjoy the money they’d stolen. She was satisfied with the rhythm and the rhyme—those aspects always came pretty easily to her—but she was experimenting with the moll’s vocabulary and that made the composition tricky. It felt somewhat unnatural to use phrases like “bump ’em” and “hotsquat” and “sub-gun,” so she buffered them with quotation marks; they were Suicide Sal’s words, not hers.

  “Devil, wait! I want to talk to you! Devil, don’t go!”

  And how did “Sal” feel about the perfidious “Jack”? Bonnie summoned Clyde’s mud-caked face as it had appeared in the dim light of the church, when he’d promised to return for her. The recollection made her want to howl like the crazy Negro woman next door, and she pressed so hard with her pencil that she tore a hole three sheets deep in the cheap paper.

  CHAPTER 28

  June 1932

  “This here dress is Marie’s,” Cumie said, setting a brown paper sack on the table, “but Blanche and me thought it’d suit you. Clyde brung us one to give you, but we knowed you wouldn’t want it, considering how he come by it.”

  Bonnie agreed that Marie’s day dress was perfect for the grand jury. A sober slate fabric with a frill in the cap sleeve and a floppy bow at the neck, it telegraphed sincerity and hinted at girlish charm.

  Mrs. Adams, the sheriff’s wife, washed Bonnie’s hair in her kitchen sink and set it in pin curls so it would fluff. She was confident that Bonnie would be released.

  “When you get home, you’ll have to do something about these bugs.” She pinched a few away from Bonnie’s part. “Happens to everyone in this place.”

  Bonnie knew just how to act in front of the jury. With wide eyes and a trembling lower lip, she described the evening on which she’d left her mother’s house to catch a bus to Houston, where she’d heard of a job.

  “I hated to leave home,” she said, “but you know how it is anymore. You have to keep looking.”

  Every juror nodded.

  “They had a big car,” she said.

  “Was it a Chrysler 60?” the prosecutor prompted.

  “Oh!” She shook her head, causing the ends of her hair to tremble prettily. “I wouldn’t know. I can’t tell one automobile from another. It was big and green, that’s all I remember. Scary looking, I guess, now that I think about it. I wish I’d thought so then,” she added.

  She told how the young men had offered her a ride, and how she’d decided to accept. They’d seemed like nice boys and saving carfare would allow her to buy a meal when she got to Houston. She wouldn’t have to start work the next day on an empty stomach, which would help her to do her best.

  When the prosecutor pressed her to specify where she’d been planning to stay in Houston, she claimed she’d intended to find a room when she arrived.

  “But I never did get there,” she said, turning the question to her advantage, making the jury feel the helpless position in which she’d found herself, sitting in that car, one man pointing a gun at her head while the other broke into the hardware store, driving faster than she’d known a car could go through that frightening storm, being shot at by the very police who ought to have been saving her, and being dragged through mud, even after she’d lost her shoes—shoes she’d just bought so she’d have something decent to wear in Houston.

  “But if you didn’t help them to steal the guns or drive the car, if your presence didn’t even dissuade the police from shooting at them, why did they want you along?”

  With that, the prosecutor proved himself a fool. When she answered, “I couldn’t tell you what was in those gangsters’ minds,” the members of the jury understood that they all would have wanted this girl along, useful or not.

  * * *

  The day after Bonnie came home, Emma regarded her sorry household through a scrim of cigarette smoke. Buster, at least, had a productive adult life underway. He’d been a sober, practical child and had become a sober, practical husband and father. Not so Billie’s husband, Fred, who’d been arrested for burglary two weeks after Bonnie’d been caught. No point trying to convince a judge that he’d been kidnapped. Emma let out a small snort at the thought.

  And here little Buddy was sick again. Emma stubbed out her cigarette and used the hem of her apron to wipe away the trail of snot that ran from his nose over his upper lip. Dallas wasn’t healthy for kids. Lighting a fresh Chesterfield, she mused, as she so often did, about what might have been if Charlie hadn’t died. Billie Jean, at least, would have been happy in Rowena, married to some farmer or railroad man, playing cards with her girlfriends, going out dancing on a Saturday night. Billie went the way the wind blew; she’d be all right, if she could get out of Dallas’s bad air.

  “You can quit giving me the look, Mama,” Bonnie said. “It’s over.”

  Emma hadn’t realized she’d been frowning at her elder daughter, who sat like a Madonna, a blue towel wrapped around her mayonnaise-coated hair, Billie’s baby, Mitzy, asleep on her lap.

  “You can lie her down, you know,” Billie said. “You don’t have to hold her all day.”

  “I want to hold her.” Bonnie stroked the baby’s fine hair. “From now on, this is all I want. I’m going to help you take care of these two darlings. They love their Auntie Bonnie, don’t they?” She wiggled her fingers at Buddy, who laughed, ran to her, and gave his baby sister a squeeze that made her emit a little sound.

  “You’ll wake her,” Billie warned. “Then you’ll be sorry.”

  “Clyde.” Emma made her contempt clear with her pronunciation. She’d stuffed down her worry and outrage all those weeks that Bonnie had been in jail, because the humiliation of that cell was punishment enough, but now that she had her daughter home again, those feelings rose into her throat like acid. “He’ll ruin you. Drag you down. Can’t you see that’s just how it is?”

  “He’s got nothing to do with me,” Bonnie said.

  She spoke so coolly, Emma was startled. It was unlike Bonnie not to spit and snap. But the light, bright girl, who had mooned over movie stars and written with such fervor in her diary, who blushed when she laughed, who would twirl spontaneously to feel the hem of her dress rise around her knees, who’d lied to her mother without an iota of compunction, had been replaced by a pale-cheeked, stern woman in a terrycloth wimple.

  “He’s nothing but a hood, and sooner or later he’s going to end up back in the pen,” Emma pressed on. “You’re not going to see him. Ever again. You hear me? You’ve got to start using your head for a change and quit letting your heart push you around.”

  In one corner of her mind, Bonnie played with the rhyme—“he swore they wouldn’t pinch him again; but he ended up back in the pen.” He’d never visited her in Kaufman. He hadn’t even bothered to let her know where he was.

  “Mother,” she said formally, “I told you. I’m not going to have anything more to do with him.” She stood up and, with as much dignity as a woman can muster with a towel around her head and a baby in her arms, stalked from the room.

  Emma frowned at the empty doorway.

  “Well, she’s crying now,” Billie said.

  “Good,” Emma said. “She ought to cry. She’ll feel better when she gets him out of her system. We all will.”

  * * *

  When Bonnie returned Marie’s dress to the Barrows, she couldn’t help but express her bitterness over Clyde’s neglect.

  “Of course, he didn’t visit you in Kaufman,” Nell said. “How could you have claimed not to have known him?”

  In fact, none of them knew where he was. He was hiding, because he was wanted for a murder in Hillsboro.

  “He didn’t do it!” Nell exclaimed, seeing the look on Bonnie’s face.

  “Of course, he didn’t do it,” Cumie repeated impatiently.

  “He wasn’t in the store when it happened,” Ne
ll explained. “He was outside in the car. Clyde’s friend Ray Hamilton is wanted, too, and he wasn’t even in the county. That’s the way the law works in this town.”

  “They have it in for my boys,” Cumie said. “That’s the trouble.”

  “Ma,” Nell said, “the trouble is that Bud goes around with crooks who carry guns. It was bound to happen. Even the judge said so.”

  “I know he shountna done none of this burglaring,” Cumie was saying. “But taking somebody’s money that like as not was took from somebody else in the first place isn’t the worst a body can do. These storekeeps feed off of people who got nothing. ‘We got to have three dollars, Miz Barrow,’ ” she said derisively. “ ‘Can’t give you no flour, no sugar, no bones without them three dollars.’ ”

  “The Buchers weren’t rich, Mama,” Nell said. “You remember Madora Bucher from over at the camp.”

  “He has to tell them he didn’t do it,” Bonnie broke in. But even as the words came out, she saw how foolish they were.

  * * *

  When Clyde finally showed up, they sat in the car, while Emma twitched the front curtain open and closed, as if she were sending smoke signals.

  “What do you want?”

  “Aw, baby, don’t be like that.”

  “You mean don’t let it bother me that I had to rot in jail? When I didn’t have a thing to do with it except ride along in your car? You promised you’d come back.”

  “I came back. You’re the one gave up waiting for me.”

  Clyde told her what had happened up at Hillsboro. “I was with two boys—you don’t know them. Just a couple of boys I met around. I went in the store and asked about a guitar string. I really did need one, you know. I wanted to see did they have a safe, but I wasn’t lying about needing that string.” He looked at her earnestly, holding her gaze to be sure she was giving him credit for this thin slice of sincerity.

  The proprietress turned out to be the mother of a boy Clyde had run with in the Bog, and she obviously recognized him. So he went back out to wait in the machine and sent the others in to get what they could.

  “Who woulda thought they’d use a gun with a couple of white hairs like that?”

  “What happened?”

  “Damned if I know. I heard the popping and I beat it out of there. I don’t know how they got away and I don’t care. Dumb eggs. I got to do everything myself from now on.”

  The sound of a car engine swelled suddenly behind them, and Clyde’s head swiveled.

  “They won’t be looking for you here.”

  “Course, they will. You’re my girl. Everyone knows that, don’t they?”

  “I’m not your girl,” she lied.

  CHAPTER 29

  July 1932

  They gave up promises—her demanding them and his making and breaking them—for a fresh courtship. He pursued, coaxing her into the car to pet, staying away until she itched. She lured him on, luxuriating in her powers of attraction, the tingle of the tease. But as the dewy June settled into the thickness of July, the chase dulled. Clyde proposed a change.

  “I got a little house up in Wichita Falls. How about you come on up and stay with me awhile?”

  Telling her mother would mean having to listen to her go on. So Bonnie lied again, announcing another job out of town, as she repacked her cardboard case.

  From the street, the dingy love nest near the railroad tracks was identical to her mother’s house—parlor and best bedroom in front, kitchen and second bedroom in back.

  “It’s darling.” She locked her arms around his neck. “Carry me in.”

  He did, or tried to, anyway. He swung her off her feet and supported her in his arms. But the door stuck. Giggling, she loosened her grip on his neck and leaned to turn the knob, while he battered the wood with his hip. “I’ll get you in this here house, baby, if it kills us!”

  The door opened with a jerk that sent Clyde stumbling, so that he dumped Bonnie on the floor.

  “What the fuck you making all this racket for?”

  Bonnie knew Raymond Hamilton only slightly. In school, his brother Floyd had been in her grade, and Raymond had come up a couple of years behind. He was the other man who, just like Clyde, hadn’t been in the Bucher store when the gun went off but was wanted for murder, just the same.

  Shotguns were propped against both arms of the settee and a pistol lay on the end table. Observing her take them in, Raymond began to whistle languidly, almost lewdly, “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

  Still it was not her mother’s house in Dallas, where the days sagged as limply as the pages of her magazines.

  * * *

  Clyde and Raymond had decided to unlatch a safe at a packing company.

  “No more baby stuff,” Raymond said. “No reason we can’t be like Pretty Boy.”

  While Raymond paced impatiently, Clyde chewed on the end of his pencil and composed a plan.

  “Road like a street has an a in it,” Bonnie said, glancing at one of Clyde’s pages. “Drill has two l’s.”

  “What the fuck does it matter?” Raymond said.

  “I guess it doesn’t,” Bonnie said, “if people like you are reading it.”

  “Let’s just do it,” Raymond said. “I’m sick of talking about it.”

  “We got to think this through,” Clyde insisted. He held the paper and pencil out to Bonnie. “You write it.” So she was drawn into arguments over who would drive the getaway car and how the timetable should be arranged. Between the guard who would certainly have a gun and the police who would be after them in half an hour, they would have very little time to work.

  “Think she can sit out and watch?” Raymond indicated Bonnie with a jerk of his head.

  “Why don’t you sit out and watch?” she said. “I’ll go in with Clyde.”

  “You ain’t going near this thing,” Clyde said. “It’s too risky.”

  They talked the job over so many times that she began to assume that the plans were as fantastical as the letter she was inventing for her mother about the good-looking cook and the persnickety owner at the café where she was pretending to work. But, remembering Kaufman, Bonnie waited until Raymond went for cigarettes and then slid her arms around Clyde’s neck, the way Carole Lombard had slipped hers around Clark Gable’s in No Man of Her Own. She used her most wheedling voice: “Honey, I’ve only just got you back. Why don’t you skip this one and stay with me?” Instead of picking her up and carrying her into the bedroom, as Gable had done with Lombard, he shrugged her off. “Don’t do that.”

  When her eyes filled, he softened. “It’s just that I can’t afford no doubts, sugar. You tell me I shouldn’t and it gets me worried and then I can’t concentrate. When I’m thinking about how maybe I shouldn’t be doing something, that’s when I’ll get caught.”

  “What good is it for me to know your stupid plans, if you don’t want me to tell you what I think? If you want someone who’ll sit quiet like a sack of potatoes, you got the wrong girl.”

  “Oh, Clyde,” he mocked. “I’m worried. It’s dangerous.”

  She raised her hand to slap him, but he caught her wrist. He thrust his face into hers, so that his saliva sprayed her as he spoke. “I can’t do nothing no more that ain’t dangerous, get it? I stick my head out the door, I’m liable to get snatched. If you can’t stand that, you got the wrong man.”

  “You oughta keep your head down, then,” she said, raising her other hand.

  When he caught that wrist, too, she drove forward with the whole of her body, backing him against the wall. He let her, and, when she had him pinned, he hooked his leg around hers and covered her mouth with his own.

  * * *

  On the first of August Clyde drove Bonnie into Dallas and dropped her on Eagle Ford Road. He didn’t bother to get out of the machine.

  “Switch on the radio, honey,” he said before she closed the car door. “See if we get away.”

  “Don’t, Clyde! You’ll jinx it!” The idea that he was going to do som
ething grand enough to be broadcast over the whole city made her lift her chin with pride.

  “Why didn’t you do nothing to stop him?” Cumie whined, her fingers alternately balling and smoothing the apron in her lap, as “Aunt Sammy” chirped relentlessly from the radio about the importance of sterilizing jars.

  “You think I didn’t beg him? I’m sure you told him plenty of times not to do the things he’s done.”

  “I never got no chance,” Cumie complained. “He never told me nothing.”

  “If I told him not to do it and he got caught, it’d be my fault. It would make him worry, and then he wouldn’t be concentrating on the job.” Bonnie paused. The logic that had taken her in when Clyde had delivered it sounded silly when she repeated it.

  Cumie nodded. “I guess Bud’s not a one to change. He’ll tell you whatever you want to hear and then he’ll go off and do what he was going to do in the first place. He told me pret’ near every day for a year that he was having a dandy time at school and he weren’t there maybe but once a week. Nothing I could do, short of dragging him there myself and tying him to his seat with a rope.”

  A siren sounded and they both started, recognizing WRR’s familiar introduction to a police bulletin:

  This just in. The Neuhoff Packing Company was held up by bandits at approximately twelve thirty this afternoon. Two men escaped west on Industrial Boulevard in a black Ford V-8. These men are armed and dangerous. One reported stocky. One slight with a limp. Both wearing dark suits and tan fedoras. Repeat, these men are armed and dangerous. Anyone observing them should contact the Dallas police.

  “That’s them! That’s Clyde! They got away!” Bonnie had been unprepared for the flush of pride that made her jump to her feet.

  The car rolled between the gas pumps with a crunch of gravel and a light tap on the horn. He hadn’t left her behind.

  “They want me,” Bonnie said. “So long.”