Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  She let the screen bang behind her.

  CHAPTER 30

  They drove west on Eagle Ford Road, past the colossal gray towers of Cement City, past Chalk Hill Road, past the road to the house where she’d lived with her grandparents.

  “Aren’t we going back to Wichita Falls?” Bonnie asked, when it became clear that they weren’t turning north.

  “We can’t go back there,” Clyde said. “It’s way too hot.” This seemed to delight him. “We just stole four hundred and forty dollars. Didn’t you hear it on the radio?”

  “I just heard you got away.”

  Clyde frowned. “They ought to have said about the money. That’s a real piece of money. That’s not small potatoes.”

  “You should have told me. I left my case.”

  “I didn’t know, did I, until we seen what was there. They don’t publish their account books in the paper.”

  “But I need my clothes.”

  “We’ll buy new ones. With four hundred and forty dollars, we can buy whatever we want.”

  “Two-twenty,” Raymond said.

  “Fuck you, Raymond,” Clyde said, but his tone was playful. “I ain’t trying to steal your money. I’m just saying, we’ve got plenty.”

  In her mind, Bonnie saw the green case Mrs. Jancek had given her when they’d left Rowena, its edges worn and its top and bottom scratched. She’d left it propped open, its soft innards—her folded clothes—exposed, faithfully awaiting her return. She tried to concentrate on the road that ran flat and straight ahead of them. The green suitcase belonged to the old Bonnie; she wasn’t that girl anymore.

  A ways out from Grand Prairie, Clyde turned onto a grass track that led to a house with a sagging foundation and a tin roof that dipped on one side, as though the structure were cringing from a blow from the sky. The inside smelled of rotting wood, and dead flies coated the windowsills. The rooms were receptacles for objects too heavy—a wood-burning oven—or too insignificant to be carried off. Traces of other people’s lives—broken crockery, an empty lard can, a wadded baby’s dress of indeterminate color, a saucepan without a handle, a cobalt-blue bottle that retained the odor of its sticky cure, a single black shoe with the sole tearing away from the upper—had collected in the corners. In the bedroom that Clyde claimed by dropping a blanket and pillow on the floor, a family of clothespin dolls huddled in a rag, abandoned by some other Bonnie.

  “You thirsty?”

  She wasn’t, but to reward his solicitousness, she cupped her hands in the flow while he vigorously worked the pump, and she drank the water acrid with iron.

  * * *

  Raymond stayed a night and a day, sucking on Lucky Strikes, whistling disconnected phrases, and bragging about the jobs he intended to pull. Then he said he was sick of sitting around and Clyde said he was sick of listening to Raymond complain about sitting around, so Clyde and Bonnie drove Raymond back into Dallas. Returning to Grand Prairie without him, Bonnie felt elated to be getting away from Dallas with its straight streets and square front yards, its shuttered shops and closed cafés. She pressed against Clyde, tucking her shoulder into the hollow of his armpit, laying her head on his shoulder. With his arm around her, he strummed her thigh as if it were his guitar, and they flew through gentle hills of scruffy grass, past lonely clusters of compact trees, along the beckoning road.

  For two days, they slept late, curled in a blanket nest, and then moved outside to lie in the sun. They coupled when they chose, drank Coca-Cola, ate baloney and bread, and washed in the iron-steeped water. She was pliable and warm as the grass on which they lay, but what made her fully flower was the reading. Clyde had packed along three dime novels—Jesse James: Knight Errant, Jesse James’ Terrible Raid, and Jesse James’ Last Chance—their pages so swollen with humidity and frequent turning that they had burst from their cheap bindings. When he left one lying on the blanket, she began to read it aloud. At first, she meant her performance to be a joke. The novel was pulp, after all, the boy’s version of the movie magazines that she’d realized long ago depicted lives no more real than the pictures their subjects starred in. She made fun of the earnest diction, employing her elocution training to the utmost, until she detected the tentativeness in his laugh. He could scoff at the bangs and pings and thuds; he could appreciate the ridiculous formality of words like “mollification” and “altercation” and “braggadocio”; but he believed in the character.

  On the third day, the sky was brown and dusty; the Coca-Cola was cloying; the baloney was gone; and the few remaining slices of bread were dry. Clyde stood the bottles they’d emptied on a rock and blasted them one by one. Trying to escape the unrelenting explosions of gunpowder and glass, Bonnie walked across the rough, abandoned fields, knotted with black-eyed Susans and bristling with thistles. With the house out of sight behind the undulating hills, she frightened herself, imagining that everything she knew on earth had vanished. By the time she’d run back, Clyde had pulled the guns apart for cleaning and spread the pieces across their blanket-bed.

  “You’d better take me home,” she said. “I need to see my mother.”

  CHAPTER 31

  August 4, 1932

  “Maybe I oughta stay with you.” Bonnie’s hand was on the door handle, but she’d not yet twisted it to let herself out of the car at the Barrows’.

  “But you want to see your mama.” Clyde frowned. “What did we come into Dallas for?”

  “I do want to see my mama! I just… well, what’re you going to do while I’m at home?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Promise you won’t go down to Eastham.”

  “We ain’t ready for that. I’ll just lie low, I guess. But I can’t sit here. You git out and I’ll come find you in a couple days.”

  “You promise?”

  “For Pete’s sake, honey. Go see your mama and give this to mine.” He handed her a grubby envelope, thick with bills. “I’ll be back.”

  She wanted to run after his car, but when the door opened behind her, she turned to Cumie with a smile. “He’ll be back, Miz Barrow. He’s just getting a little rest, nice and safe out in the country, where it’s not so hot.”

  Cumie didn’t smile, but she opened the door wider to invite Bonnie in with one hand, while she slid the envelope into her apron pocket with the other.

  * * *

  An hour or so later, Bonnie found her own mother in her usual spot, three machines over and four up among the grid of sewers. Her ears full of the constant whir, her head bent low over the furiously punching needle, Emma started when her daughter placed a hand on her shoulder, and her line of stitches veered off the course.

  “You got time off already?” Emma reached for a stitch ripper, conscious of the circling foreman.

  “I traded with a girl,” Bonnie said. “So I could have a good long visit.”

  “That’s no way to keep a job.” Emma flicked the ripper stitch by stitch through the ruined seam. Her count would be low now. “You got to make them depend on you, not be skipping off.”

  “Ain’t you happy to see me?”

  “Course, I am.” Emma struggled to pinch the fabric in the right spot with the foot. It was nearly impossible to get the interrupted seam to line up properly. She ought to rip the whole thing and start again, but she couldn’t afford to be so conscientious.

  “You don’t look happy.”

  Emma shook her head. “I’m working. Go on home. I’ll be there soon.”

  “Can I borrow your suitcase? I want to take some things back with me, and I didn’t think to bring mine.”

  “Go ahead. I’m not going anywhere.”

  * * *

  Billie disappointed Bonnie, too. Not understanding that Bonnie had come from what might just as well have been the moon, she had no sense of the momentousness of her visit.

  Bonnie amused herself with the babies that evening and listened to talk about a neighbor with a growth the size of a melon on his hip. Whenever she heard a car, she
was tempted to look out the window, but it couldn’t yet be Clyde.

  The following night, she refused Billie’s invitation to join her out dancing, because it wasn’t too soon to start waiting. Besides, she no longer craved that kind of thrill, which, when all was said and done, was only play. When Buddy and Mitzy had finally settled into a damp sleep, Bonnie and Emma sat outside in the dark, beaten into passivity by the thick, hot air and the steady shrill of the crickets.

  A car turned the corner onto their street, and the engine growled as it built speed. Bonnie squinted, trying make out the face behind the headlights, but the car passed.

  “Does Clyde ever come there?” Emma asked.

  “Where?”

  “To Wichita Falls. Or,” Emma added drily, “wherever it is you’re at.”

  Bonnie longed to say “yes;” her mouth, her mind, her chest, even her arms and fingers—every part of her felt full to bursting with the idea of Clyde.

  “I told you, Mama,” she said, cloaking her lie with petulance, “I wouldn’t let him come anywhere near me. Not after that mess down in Kaufman.”

  “Don’t be throwing your life away,” Emma warned.

  Bonnie thought of her mother, curled like a snail around a sewing machine, afraid even to turn her head for longer than the foreman might allow. “I don’t aim to.”

  * * *

  Emma was conveniently at church when Clyde knocked the next morning. He stepped inside, but he watched the windows nervously, his hand tucked in his jacket.

  Bonnie, who’d answered with a baby on each hip, shifted the children into her sister’s arms. “Aren’t you going to say hello to Billie Jean?”

  “Hey, Billie,” he said. “We got to go, baby. It’s worse.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Clyde made Bonnie wait until they got to his mother’s; he didn’t want to tell it twice. He drove to Eagle Ford Road fast, his eyes focused ahead and his fingers tight around the wheel.

  They’d gone up to Oklahoma, he and Raymond and a fellow named Tom Dyer.

  “Don’t I know the Dyers from over to the campground?” Cumie interrupted.

  “This ain’t them Dyers.”

  Bonnie could see that Clyde was eager to puke up the whole story, as if his mama could soothe him.

  “We was driving on back to Dallas, and we come up on one of them dances scraped up from a string of lanterns under some shed and a band wearing overalls. Well, Raymond, having no more sense than a stump, says he’s got to stop. Says he ain’t had no fun since before he went to the county. And Dyer spots a flask, so it’s two against one.”

  Knowing Raymond, Bonnie was sure the three of them had had plenty of moonshine already, but she forbore mentioning this in front of Cumie.

  “I said to myself, let Raymond and Tom have their dances. Kiss some girls. Get it out of their systems. To be honest, I couldn’t take them two whining at me the whole way back to Dallas.”

  Cumie had heard on the radio about the shooting in Stringtown, Oklahoma, but she’d known Bud couldn’t have had a thing to do with that. When Henry’d looked at her, she’d scoffed. What would Bud be doing at some country dance in Oklahoma?

  She remembered how the report had described Eugene Moore: brave, hardworking, cruelly taken from a wife and two small children.

  “Why’d you have to go and kill a man that had babies?” Cumie exclaimed.

  “I told you, Ma. I didn’t kill him. It was Raymond. Or maybe it was Tom. They were shooting at us pretty bad, and there was lots of bullets zipping around. But I never aimed one shot at none of ’em.”

  Clyde waited until they’d left his mother’s house to tell Bonnie that it was too bad that Eugene Moore had had babies, but worse was that he was a law. If they caught Clyde now, he’d for sure get the chair.

  * * *

  On the way back to the Grand Prairie house, the story settled around Bonnie’s neck, and she tugged at it. Had Eugene Moore been dancing innocently with his wife or had he been surveying the crowd, looking for trouble? Had Clyde been dancing with some other girl? Had Moore said anything? Had he been angry? Where had the bullet hit? Had he died instantly or bled?

  Clyde was damned if he knew anything about the man other than that he’d been among those blasting when their car had turned over and they’d had to shoot like hell.

  “Your car turned over?”

  But he refused to piece events together for her. She let her mind slip to the children, washing their teeth and saying their prayers in that limbo before a man would come to the door to tell their mother.

  Grand Prairie wasn’t far enough for a man who’d killed a law—or even for a man who’d been with a man who’d killed a law—but Clyde turned in at the grass-covered drive. When he shut off the engine, he turned to her, his skin shiny with sweat, his eyes large and darting. “Can you make me different?”

  She thought he was begging her to reform his character, but from under the seat, he produced a bottle of hair dye. “Do you know how to use this?”

  * * *

  Clyde’s head emerged from under the pump as bright orange as a bottle of Crush. Against that hair, his skin turned sallow and his eyes dulled, so that he looked like the kind of man who could have shot a man dead just for approaching his car.

  Bonnie vomited under a pecan tree until her muscles cramped and then, spent, lay on her back, gasping, staring up at the lint gray of the flat, indifferent sky. She waited for him to find her, but, in the end, she had to go after him. She found him inside, sitting with his back against the wall, listlessly pushing his fingers through his wet hair. Beneath the waxy skin and behind the hard eyes, she saw the boy the laws had caught on her mother’s davenport, afraid and uncertain. He’d finished the two things he’d instinctively thought to do—collect Bonnie and confess to his mother—and now he was lost.

  CHAPTER 33

  “Let’s start over,” she urges. “Let’s get in the car and drive to where the laws don’t know you from Adam.”

  She chooses Carlsbad, New Mexico, which, with its pink sky and jewel-like flowers, she knows is nothing like Texas. The state’s very name suggests rebirth. She tucks the clothespin family inside Emma’s suitcase and is ready, but he melts, sliding along the wall until he’s lying full-length on the bare floor.

  “Tomorrow,” he murmurs, as his eyes close.

  * * *

  The delay is costly, at least from Bonnie’s point of view, because Raymond appears just after dawn, laughs at Clyde’s hair, and, unfortunately, approves of Bonnie’s plan. When they start west, he’s stretched out across their back seat.

  Nevertheless, on the far side of Fort Worth, Bonnie and Clyde begin to relax. Clyde takes off his shoes, so he can “feel the car,” and pushes the new V-8 to eighty. The hot wind funneling through the open windows scours them clean, and brown dust veils the road behind them. They have 475 miles of packed dirt to travel, most of it in Texas, and Bonnie lets the monotony of the brown and red earth lull her to sleep. When she awakens in New Mexico, the sky, intensely blue and dolloped with white clouds, suggests heaven, even though Carlsbad itself, which they reach by late afternoon, does not appear very different from the towns of East Texas.

  * * *

  In Millie Stamps’s airless kitchen, Bonnie remembers her aunt’s fondness for pretty, fragile things. At least a dozen flowered teacups dangle from hooks below the cabinet; whimsical pairs of salt and pepper shakers—a hen and a rooster, a white sheep and a black sheep, a turnip and a beet, a squaw and a brave—line the back of the counter; cut glass creamers and sugar bowls of various hues cover an open shelf.

  “I gotta study what I can make for y’all.” Millie picks a shred of tobacco off her tongue as she gazes vaguely around the room. “We weren’t expecting no company. Not that we ain’t thrilled to see y’all.” She frowns slightly, pulling on her cigarette. “I recall you was married to a fellow named Roy. This ain’t that fellow, I suppose.”

  Bonnie feels herself blushing, as she shakes her head, aw
are that Millie may see her as half of a damaged set, a salt that has carelessly come detached from her pepper. Millie is balancing her cigarette on the edge of a pink glass ashtray, when gunfire explodes in the back yard, followed by triumphant hoots. Bonnie, quick and clever, explains to her startled aunt that “Jimmy” and “Jack” must be practicing for the hunting they plan to do up in the mountains.

  “My tomaters!” Millie bleats, as more fat fruits burst in her garden.

  “I’ll tell them to quit.” Bonnie starts for the door.

  “You tell them boys to run into town for some ice,” Millie calls after her. “Dink, get out the churn. I bet you kids’ll love you some ice cream, Bonnie Elizabeth.”

  Ray goes for the ice, while Clyde cleans the guns. He wants to bring them into the house, but Bonnie won’t allow it. “Don’t you have any idea how decent folk live? Put them in the car when Raymond gets back.” Stopping at the Stamps’ has been a mistake. The problem is not that they haven’t gone far enough, but that they’ve brought themselves along.

  * * *

  At dinner, Bonnie, Millie, and Dink try to conduct a normal conversation, but Clyde makes the whole table jittery, turning his chair askew so he can see out the window and glancing up the drive every time he puts a forkful into his mouth. However, after the meal, when Bonnie, Clyde, and Raymond are sitting in their car with the doors open, sharing a drink from a jar, Bonnie doesn’t care if her aunt and uncle are shaking their heads inside the house. They’re like her mother, encased in cooking oil and cigarette smoke and the fussy anxieties of those who want to avoid notice. The enormous, spangled sky only reminds them that they ought to be asleep in their beds. She tips her liquor-laced head out the window, so that there’s nothing between her and the stars, and exults in the western air, which has sharpened the insects’ throb to a twang and smoothed her sticky skin.