Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  “Kind of dumb, huh? I messed up on some of the rhythm.”

  “It’s not one of your best,” Clyde agreed. “For instance, there ain’t no tree.”

  But W.D. made her read it over several times slowly, while he moved his lips, memorizing.

  Finally, Clyde interrupted. “All right, you’ll get plenty of time to work on that in the car. Blue, go get us some food. W.D., you change the back tires.”

  “It’s awful cold out there,” Bonnie said.

  Clyde frowned. “Them tires need changing. We’re lucky they didn’t blow last night.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  W.D. had gone into the bathroom and the heavy stream of his pee was audible through the door.

  “I know I’m right. I don’t know why you got to question me all the time.”

  “I wasn’t questioning you. I just didn’t know if you were considering how cold it was, when you decided to send that boy out to change the tires.”

  “What difference does it make how cold it is? It’s got to be done.”

  “I don’t mind,” W.D. said. He’d wet his hair and combed it back with his fingers. He picked his coat off the floor and shrugged himself into it.

  “Where are your gloves?” Bonnie said.

  “Ain’t got gloves,” he said, pushing his hands deep into his pockets.

  “Clyde, whyn’t you lend him your gloves?”

  “I don’t want grease on them.”

  “But it’s cold.”

  “Clyde’s right,” W.D. said. “I’d ruin his gloves. I’ll be OK.”

  “Let’s get going,” Clyde said, swinging his feet off the bed. “We can’t stay here all day.”

  Bonnie, with her head wrapped in a wool scarf, squinted against the glare of the sun on the tissue of snow that brightened the gray drive and the brown grass. “You hurry up,” she said, leaving W.D. at the car. “I don’t want you freezing your fingers off.”

  As she walked toward the café, she heard the trunk open and then slam shut again. She hadn’t told him about the extra guns and neither had Clyde, she guessed. She looked back at W.D. and the consternation on his face was almost comical. “Of course, you know better than to take anything but tires out of there.”

  CHAPTER 40

  She’d been dreading Christmas Eve, knowing that, on that night when everyone else was putting the extra leaf in the table and gathering in their glowing houses to eat ham and red-eye gravy, she and Clyde would be like lost puppies on an empty, winter road. But having W.D. along had made her feel part of a little family; even sardines on the bed had been festive with that boy to show off for. And now they’d have a big Christmas breakfast and go on into Dallas and wouldn’t they all be so happy to see and love her, Lady Bountiful with her gifts? They’d know she was bestowing her very self for that hour in which she was risking her freedom to be with them.

  But the café attached to the tourist court was closed. Bonnie looked through the window of the locked door at the empty counter, festooned with dusty paper bells. They should have known it would be closed on Christmas Day.

  By the time W.D. had finished changing the tires and they’d loaded the guns back into the car, the sun had expended its full measure of winter brightness. The light through which they drove had a blue cast, like skimmed milk. They’d been on the road half an hour when she remembered the gifts she’d stored under the bed.

  “Goddammit!” Clyde spun the car in a U-turn. “I told you to leave ’em in the car!”

  “Doesn’t seem right,” he grumbled, when she’d collected them and they were driving again, “you bringing presents to your sister’s kids when I didn’t give nothing to my mama.”

  “Guess you should have thought of that before.”

  “We barely have enough money to get us some baloney sandwiches.”

  “We had money. That’s when you should have thought of it. Now it’s too late.”

  “Maybe not,” he said grimly, turning the car around again.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going to get my mama a present at that drugstore back in Temple.”

  He parked the car around the corner from the main street and twisted in his seat to shove the handle of a revolver toward W.D. in the back. “Come with me. Bonnie’ll stick with the car.”

  “What?”

  “C’mon, Dub. Nothing’s gonna happen. No one’s going to put up a fight on Christmas Day.”

  Reluctantly, the boy accepted the gun and opened the car door.

  “Hold on! Put it in your coat, for God’s sake. This ain’t the Wild West.”

  “Better let him stay with me, Clyde. You don’t want to get him into trouble.”

  “I told you to quit questioning me. There ain’t going to be no trouble. Now let the boy be a man.”

  Clyde let the engine run, and Bonnie moved into the driver’s seat and rolled the window down, so that, if there were shots, she would hear them and drive to the rescue.

  “Get some crackers or something,” she called.

  She’d hardly had time to turn her collar up against the cold when Clyde stalked back, W.D. hurrying nervously beside him.

  “The idiot wouldn’t do a thing.”

  “You said I’d be home this morning,” W.D. said. “I want to go home now.”

  “All I wanted him to do was hold the goddamn gun. It’s not like I was going to make him shoot it. I doubt that old .41 could even get a bullet off anyway.”

  Bonnie laughed. “Even I can hold a gun, W.D.”

  “You said you’d take me home this morning. You said I was supposed to be a lookout. You didn’t say nothing about no robbery.”

  They were taking a circuitous route out of Temple to throw off anyone who might have guessed what Clyde had intended when he’d hovered near the clerk, whispering angrily at his sidekick.

  “I want to go home,” W.D. repeated, folding his arms and pouting like a child.

  Suddenly, Clyde jerked the wheel and stopped the car along the curb. “All right. Go on home. Take that there car and drive yourself.” He thrust his chin in the direction of a Model A parked about half a block away.

  “Look at those cute window boxes, shaped like ducks!” Bonnie pointed to the house to which the Model A obviously belonged.

  W.D. shook his head. “I ain’t gonna.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Clyde exploded. “Can’t you even steal a fucking car? Get out there!”

  W.D. obeyed. His first few steps were slow, but then he began to jog, his footprints marring the thin layer of snow. When he reached the car, he turned and made a twisting motion in the air with his fingers. The keys were in it.

  Bonnie could see his tan hat bent over the wheel. She waited, expecting to see the machine shake as the engine turned over and then slide smoothly away from the curb. But the car remained still.

  “What the fuck is he doing?”

  “You’ve said plenty of times Model As ain’t worth stealing. What’re you making him take that car for? We don’t want that old car.”

  “Fuck it!” He flung himself out and slammed the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 41

  Bonnie can’t help but think how elegant Clyde looks in his soft wool coat and flannel hat. Like a gentleman, he raps on the Model A’s window with one gloved knuckle, until W.D. folds it down. She can’t hear what Clyde says, but the boy slides quickly over, and Clyde pulls the door open and gets in.

  She feels sorry for W.D. She knows that it’s hard to think straight when Clyde is angry, that his explosions can make your fingers shake and your eyes blur. Plus, Model As are hard to start; Clyde has told her this more than once. She wills the engine to turn over. They’re lucky that, because it’s Christmas, no one’s on the street, but even so, they shouldn’t be fooling with it this long.

  Bonnie focuses so intensely on the car and the two men in it that she doesn’t see the movement at the house with the duck-shaped window boxes until the front porch is already full of people. Three men
and a woman spill down the few steps and rush across the yard toward the street. None of them wears a coat. The man in front is running in his socks. Their steps pock the white yard behind them with black prints.

  “Clyde,” she whispers, as she slides into the driver’s seat. She knows better than to shout his name.

  It’s too late to yell anyway. The man in socks is already on the running board, reaching with both arms through the open window. His head is inside the car; his arm is around Clyde’s neck, as if they are lovers, but his voice is ferocious. “Get out of my car!”

  The woman, who’s hung back on the lawn, makes a high-pitched, breathless sound. “Get… get out of there!”

  Finally, the car shakes to life, but the one man is still clamped around Clyde, and the other two are pounding with their palms on the Model A, so that the metal rings. “Get out of the car!”

  “Don’t let him take it, Doyle!” Another woman, dark haired, stands in the open doorway of the house. She holds a wooden spoon near her ear, as if it’s a hatchet she’s poised to throw, and “The First Noel” seeps out around her.

  The two harsh cracking sounds don’t make sense on this side street in Temple among the faint notes of Christmas music. As if he can’t stand the noise, the man in socks throws his head back violently. His shoulders heave and his arms slip out of the window, limp as empty sleeves. He tips backward, away from the car, which begins to roll forward.

  “Doyle!” a woman cries, more reproachful than anguished.

  Bonnie’s hands are shaking so violently that she can scarcely grip the wheel. She puts too much pressure on the accelerator and pops the clutch, so that the car lurches forward after the Model A that’s going fast now, getting too far ahead. As she drives by, all the people who’ve come from the house are huddled over a dark lump on the ground from which protrudes a pair of legs, akimbo like a rag doll’s, that end in two narrow feet in black socks.

  A few blocks ahead, the Model A waits against the curb. Bonnie pulls over and slides into the passenger seat. Clyde and W.D. hurl themselves into the V-8.

  “That guy was choking me. I couldn’t breathe and all the time this idiot just sits there.”

  “What happened?”

  “I said I couldn’t breathe! It’s because he couldn’t start the fucking car.”

  “Did you shoot him?” She doesn’t mean to sound so stupid, but her mind can’t yet make sense of the legs and the socks.

  “I couldn’t breathe! Was I supposed to let him kill me? Is that what you want?” Clyde is gasping for breath. Although he keeps his hands on the wheel and pushes the V-8 to go faster as they shoot past the last of Temple’s houses, he’s writhing in his seat, as if still trying to escape someone’s hold.

  “I want to go back.” W.D.’s eyes are liquid and his face is a frantic red. “Take me back to Dallas. Or you can just let me out here. Someone’ll give me a ride. I have to go back.”

  W.D.’s distress calms Clyde. He frowns and shakes his head. “You can’t go back. If they catch you, they’ll try you for murder.”

  “But I didn’t shoot no one.”

  “Are you sure?” Clyde says. “You had a gun. Anyway, it don’t matter who pulled the trigger. You gotta run with us now. We ain’t going back to Dallas ’til this cools down.”

  “But what about my mama?” Bonnie says. “What about my presents for the babies?”

  “I don’t want to hear another word about them fucking toys. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Stupid! You’re the stupid one, making this boy steal a car you don’t even want.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You never wanted to go today and now you made it so we can’t. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?” She swats at his face with her left hand.

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  “You’re telling me not to be crazy? You’re the one just shot a man in his socks for no reason, no reason at all!”

  “I told you he was choking me!”

  She draws her legs up and turns, so that she’s kneeling on the seat, hanging her head and shoulders into the back, but she can’t reach what she wants. “Hand me those presents, W.D.!”

  Shaking, he passes her the packages. She’s carried them in and out of various motel rooms for weeks, and the paper, patterned with red Scottie dogs and silver lettering, is rubbed and worn along the edges. One box holds a black truck with red wheels and a bed that can be tilted to dump its cargo. The other contains a soft pink elephant. Bonnie rolls down her window and heaves the packages out. They bounce along the road behind them.

  “Fuck! What’re you doing?” Clyde brakes, and they’re all thrown forward.

  “I’m throwing the fucking toys away!” she shrieks. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Just throw everything away. His life, my life, your own life. And that man back there! You shot him, and he was only wearing socks!” She does feel crazy now. They’re speeding backward, careening slightly. The cold wind pours through the open window, whipping up the tornado inside her.

  Clyde’s mouth and eyes are set in hard, angry lines. He steers expertly with one hand, the other arm thrown over the back of the seat, so he can look out the back window, straight toward the forlorn, cheery packages.

  Bonnie is poised, waiting for him to stop to gather the boxes up. She’ll fling them out again the minute he brings them in; her arms are tingling, ready.

  But he doesn’t stop. The car thunks over the boxes, shimmying as the tires hit the smooth paper. When he’s flattened both going backward, he shifts into first and rolls over them again.

  The destruction subdues them all. The toys pulverized so deliberately and thoroughly are a simpler fact than the man in the road in his socks.

  * * *

  When they turned in at another tourist court, he told W.D. to get them some food and take his time about it.

  She expected him to be rough, but the driving had drained that out of him. He turned the light on and caressed her, as if she were some kind of flower or soft fruit, easily bruised. When they were finished, he pressed his eyes against her shoulder, and she knew he was trying to black out the memory of the afternoon.

  “Maybe it was W.D. that got him,” she suggested, smoothing his hair behind his ear with her fingertips, as if he were a child.

  “That old gun I gave him was jammed. It was me. Makes me feel sick.”

  “Maybe he isn’t dead.”

  “He shountna held on like that,” Clyde said. “What’d he want that old car so bad for?”

  * * *

  On December 27, as Bonnie waited at a lunch counter for sandwiches, she saw the house with the duck-shaped window boxes on the front page of the Houston Chronicle.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Doyle Johnson of 606 South 13th Street, Temple, died of a gunshot wound to the neck, received while he was attempting to keep two men from making off with his motorcar. Mr. Doyle’s sister-in-law, Theresa Krause, reports that the killer was wearing a tan hat. Mr. Doyle is survived by his wife, Tilda Krause Johnson, and their infant son.

  Bonnie felt her gorge rise at the sight of the words crawling like insects on the page, but she forced herself to read on, searching for a reference to Clyde or W.D. No details other than the hat identified the killer. The V-8 was not mentioned. Still, God knew who had done it, and that the women shared Bonnie’s mother’s maiden name showed that He blamed Bonnie as much as the boys.

  “Horrible, ain’t it?” said the woman behind the counter. “Nice Christmas gift for that baby.”

  Bonnie emitted a sound that was part grunt and part hum. She turned the paper facedown and started for the door on jellied legs.

  “Your sandwiches!” the woman called after her.

  CHAPTER 42

  They wove through eastern Texas like flies, occasionally lighting in tourist cabins to wash and sleep. Bonnie felt as if a brick were stuck somewhere between her chest and throat, pressing against her windpipe. She took long, steamy showers in dim bathrooms, which loosened tears that streamed down her
cheeks with the hot water, but nothing softened the brick except sips from the flask.

  Clyde, however, had put the killing aside. A few days after the new year, the Chronicle reported that Theresa and Tilda Krause had chosen some other men as Johnson’s killers, so he felt safe swinging through Dallas to do what he could for Raymond Hamilton, who was awaiting trial in the Hillsboro jail. Raymond’s sister would get a radio with a couple of hacksaw blades hidden inside its case, and Bonnie would get her visit with her mother.

  * * *

  On January 6, under a heavy gray sky that made the time of day uncertain, the V-8 turned down Lamar Street in Dallas, where the carcasses of discarded Christmas trees littered the yards.

  “Hey.” Clyde leaned across the seat, as Bonnie got out of the car. “You want to leave that.” He reached for the flask from which she’d been tippling.

  When she bent to smile at him, she had to put a hand against the doorframe to steady herself. “I’ll keep it right here.” She patted her purse. On her way up the walk, she put a scrap of lemon rind between her teeth.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he called.

  Ten minutes later, having cooed over her babies, Bonnie sat on the divan with her mother, waiting. The room was gloomy, but both of them thought it was safer not to switch on the lamp. Emma stroked the back of Bonnie’s hand with her thumb. “You hadn’t ought to stay much longer. Lamar’s a busy street. The laws are always running up and down here.”

  “We’re just setting, Mama. There’s no law against setting on the divan.”

  “We was hoping to see you on Christmas. Cumie said you was over by Eagle Ford Road. I don’t know why you would stop over there and not let me know.”

  “I know, Mama. I’d intended to.”

  “Well, your sister was upset. You know she don’t have much for them kids since Fred’s been gone, and she promised them you’d visit.” Emma had promised herself that she would not be querulous, but she had to release her emotions in some way and complaining seemed least likely to lead to an eruption of anger and tears from which neither mother nor daughter might recover.