Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  He had several rifles stacked in his arms like kindling, and Blanche stopped him at the top of the stairs. “You said you weren’t bringing those in.”

  “I didn’t know you girls was going to be getting something on the second floor. What if we need them? How’re we going to get to them, if they’re down below?”

  “You said you wouldn’t need them.”

  “I don’t expect we will, but we got to keep ’em cleaned and oiled up. We can’t be tramping up and down the stairs all night, fetching them in and bringing them back.”

  “Clyde’s just trying to keep us all safe, Baby,” Buck said. He and W.D. were pulling the curtains closed over every window.

  Bonnie had forgotten that no matter how much light and air a space might potentially admit, they couldn’t enjoy it unless the place was moving at eighty miles an hour.

  Clyde and Buck clomped down the stairs, and under the living room floor, a garage door creaked open. Bonnie leaned out the window to shout: “Don’t forget the radio!”

  From the back stoop of the house next door, a man in a plaid jacket stared at their car as it pulled out of the garage nose first, gangster-style. The blue DeSoto parked in the other half of their garage belonged to him. It was prettier than a Ford V-8, Clyde admitted, but not as fast.

  Bonnie waved. We’re delightful, her gesture said. We’re not the kind of people who have to hide behind shades.

  The man raised his hand but held it still; an acknowledgment, not a greeting. Bonnie knew he thought they were the type that came to Joplin for its speakeasies and dance halls. But he was in for a surprise. They were going to be good neighbors. They were going to live like normal people.

  Resolved to keep order in the new apartment, Bonnie supervised W.D. as he stacked the guns in the front room closet. On the hangers the former tenant had left behind, she hung her dresses and Clyde’s jackets and trousers, making sure the creases lined up properly. She set W.D.’s camera safely on the dresser. He’d agreed to let her use the remainder of the roll to take pictures of the cute apartment, so she could show them to her mother the next time they got down to Dallas.

  In a couple of hours, an engine slowed outside, and the garage door creaked open again. Clyde and Buck had bought pillows and feather beds, three quilts in a peach and pink pattern, and dishes decorated with a bunch of wheat tied in a blue ribbon. They weren’t to Bonnie’s taste, but she appreciated that the men, in fulfilling their own notions of what the women would like, had done their best, so although they’d forgotten the radio, she bit her tongue.

  CHAPTER 46

  In the middle of the living room rug at two in the afternoon, Bonnie knelt before her typewriter in her nightie.

  She pieced herself together

  In a jigsaw house

  At peace in the pieces of a jigsaw house

  A piece of peace

  Now that she could sit still and think, ideas seemed to bubble up into her head like coffee in the top of a percolator. Sometimes they came so fast, they made her scalp itch. Although that might have been her latest dye job. She’d decided that a new dwelling warranted a new color and had tried a deep, almost cherry red.

  Blanche made no secret of her opinion. “It’s not a bad color, it just don’t suit your complexion.”

  If Blanche had been someone else—Bonnie’s mama or Billie or Dutchie or Nell, or any number of Bonnie’s friends for that matter—Bonnie would’ve welcomed the comment. It was just the sort of subject she liked to examine: Could she use a touch more gold or a little more chocolate? Shorter bangs?

  Blanche’s criticism, however, cut deep. In everything she did, Blanche made clear that she was Bonnie’s superior, always adjusting the ring Buck had given her; refusing beer when the rest, including Bonnie, were vying to get the most down quickest; loudly snapping out a game of solitaire when the others, including Bonnie, were playing poker, as if Blanche had decided what it meant to be a woman and had relegated Bonnie to one of the boys.

  Blanche was prettier than Bonnie. Bonnie wasn’t bad to look at, but most of her attraction came from somewhere behind her features and shone through them, the way the sun lit up the blood under her skin when she held her hand against the window. On the surface, Bonnie was cute, but Blanche’s cheekbones seemed smoothed out of marble, and her brown curls enriched her dark, dramatic eyes. On the other hand, Blanche could be sour. Bonnie liked to think she had more charm.

  Blanche banged the carpet sweeper back into the closet and, clanking glass, began to collect the beer bottles that had sprouted like mushrooms around the chair legs overnight. Beer had been legalized in Missouri the very week they’d moved in, and for the boys it seemed almost an obligation to work their way through a case each night, while they wrenched the metal pieces of their guns apart, wiped and oiled them, and then smacked them back together in a racket of snapping and cracking that certainly carried at least some distance beyond their closed and shaded windows. When they’d finished cleaning and turned to poker, they left the weapons wherever they were, as if a pistol on a couch were no different from a splayed book, or a rifle propped against a wall might as well have been a broom. Obviously, delivery boys could not be allowed in.

  As a further precaution against what Clyde called “nose trouble,” Buck had gone that afternoon to get some Kansas plates for the Marmon, while Clyde and W.D. were off having “a look around.”

  Sighs issued from the kitchen. Silverware clinked and clanked resentfully into its drawer. A cupboard door closed with a sullen thunk.

  Blanche kept the bedroom she shared with Buck neat and didn’t leave her stockings and underthings hanging in the bathroom so much as an hour past the time when they were dry. She also picked items of Bonnie’s and Clyde’s clothing off the floor and dropped them at their bedroom door. Bonnie scooped them up, but she generally left them in a heap on the chair to be put away another time that never came. Now she pecked at a few keys to prove that she was occupied. Blanche didn’t understand that an idea had to be grabbed when it offered itself.

  Finally, Blanche stalked out of the kitchenette. “Aren’t you going to get dressed? The store’s going to close before we get there!” She tapped smartly on the glass face of her wristwatch with a pointed fingernail.

  “You’re not dressed, either,” Bonnie said.

  Blanche had turned a blue crepe evening gown into a housedress with a hem that just covered her knees. The shoulders were lace, the back low-cut. Some might have thought it tacky, but Bonnie approved of both Blanche’s attempt at elegance and her economy. She wished her mother had taught her how to sew.

  “I’ll be ready in a jiffy,” Blanche said. “You take longer.”

  Bonnie did often need time to experiment with her costume. It might take her a good five minutes to decide whether to cinch a jacket with its own belt or to use a colorful scarf or one of Clyde’s neckties.

  They would be safe together, two women, taking the bus into town, but the prospect gave Blanche another excuse to find fault with Bonnie’s newly dyed hair. People noticed redheads.

  “I hope they do,” Bonnie said, pushing her fingers against her scalp to give the style a little fluff and her head a surreptitious scratch. “We’re not going to be doing anything we don’t want people to see, remember? While we’re in Joplin, we’re living ordinary, happy lives.

  CHAPTER 47

  “Hi, Miss Betsy! Hi, Miss Blanche!” Liza was sitting on her back steps when they came out. “Where’s Snowball?”

  Blanche stiffened. Liza was only seven or eight years old, but Blanche knew that children were more observant than most people gave them credit for, and this particular child was attached to the neighbor Clyde had nicknamed “The Nose.” The Nose seemed to linger in the garage underneath their apartment, and he stood disturbingly often at his back door, staring up at their shaded windows.

  “We left him upstairs, honey. Why aren’t you in school?” Bonnie hurried over to the girl and, reluctantly, Blanche followed. Bonnie cou
ldn’t help herself when it came to children.

  “I’m sick.”

  “Well, that’s a shame. Want some Doublemint?” Bonnie pushed her fingers into her small cloth bag. “Sometimes a stick of chewing gum’ll perk you right up when you’re feeling poorly.”

  “I threw up three times last night,” the girl said, accepting the gum. “Did you hear me?”

  Bonnie laughed. “We must have slept right on through that.”

  “But your lights were on. Daddy says you don’t sleep at night. Like skunks.”

  “Who’re you calling a skunk?” Bonnie teased.

  Blanche frowned. She’d warned the others that this was going to happen.

  “Nocturny. That’s the word for people who stay up all night. We don’t get many of those around here.” The father’s worldly observation sounded cute in the little girl’s high voice and Bonnie laughed again.

  “Do you ever get scared of the dark, Liza?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Me, too,” Bonnie said. “But when you’re a grown-up, you can stay up all night, just like it was daytime. Then it’s not scary anymore.”

  “Do you wear your boots at night?”

  “My boots?”

  “Daddy says you got bootlegs, but I ain’t seen you in boots.”

  Bonnie laughed. “Your daddy’s barking up the wrong tree, if he thinks we’re bootleggers. You can tell him we’ve had nothing but beer and that’s strictly legal, as of last week.”

  If Blanche hadn’t nudged Bonnie on with another couple of taps on the face of her wristwatch, Bonnie might have talked with the girl for half an hour. She’d lost the habit of being aware of the time.

  * * *

  Joplin’s S. H. Kress & Co. was on a smaller scale than the Kress store in Dallas but equally dolled up with ornamental stonework and brass lettering. Bonnie and Blanche twittered over milk-glass ashtrays, faceted drinking glasses, pearl-encrusted picture frames, embroidered guest towels, engraved compacts, beaded coin purses, leatherette scrapbooks, and a red kimono decorated with roses made from folded red ribbon. Cut-glass rings and earrings were only twenty cents apiece, but they looked like real gems. Bonnie and Blanche loaded their fingers and splayed them, tipping their hands to catch and release the light.

  After an hour they’d filled three baskets, and Blanche attempted to edit their loot.

  “Oh, let’s just buy everything!” Bonnie said, replacing the dish towel that Blanche had removed. It was decorated with a cross-stitched dog—“Snowball’s black brother, Eight Ball,” Bonnie had said when she’d first picked it up, which had made them laugh so hard, they had to lean against each other in the aisle. “And we need more jigsaw puzzles.”

  At the bus stop, a baby stared over his mother’s shoulder, and while Blanche sorted through the bags, organizing their purchases by rooms, Bonnie contorted her face for his amusement. Leaning over his mother’s restraining arm, he reached a soft, knuckleless paw toward her.

  “I want one of those so bad, Blanche.”

  Blanche was studying a picture frame set with pastel-colored seashells. “You got one just like it. Yours maybe has a little more blue.”

  “I wish I had a baby. Don’t you want one? I wish I could have six or seven.”

  “I can’t have children,” Blanche said, folding the paper back around the frame. “Calloway done something to me down there, I guess.”

  Calloway was the man Blanche’s mother had forced her to marry when she was seventeen.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “No, I don’t feel a thing. I wouldn’t know it, if a doctor hadn’t told me.”

  “No, I mean doesn’t it hurt here.” Bonnie pressed her hand against her chest.

  Blanche slid the mirror carefully back into the bag before she spoke. “Once in awhile.” Then she looked at Bonnie in her superior way. “But I got Buck. Buck is my man and my baby, my everything. Buck is more than enough for me.”

  Buck had left his two previous wives not long after their babies were born, so if Blanche was so devoted to Buck, maybe it was for the best that she wouldn’t have children. Bonnie wished that Clyde were all she wanted, but loving a baby was different from loving a man. It would never be wrong to love a baby too much.

  CHAPTER 48

  “Watch this.” Blanche stood at the top of the stairs, a slice of hot dog pinched between index finger and thumb. Snowball sat at her feet, head cocked toward the disk of meat. “To the car,” Blanche said. She closed her hand around the slice and thrust her chin encouragingly toward the staircase that led into the garage below. “To the car.”

  The dog tick-tocked brightly down several stairs, then turned, scampered back up, and fixed an unwavering brown eye on Blanche’s closed hand.

  “I said ‘car.’ ”

  “How is he supposed to go to the car when there is no car?” Bonnie said.

  Blanche sighed and allowed Snowball to pluck the meat from her fingers. “How am I supposed to train him, if they keep going off like this?”

  It was the eleventh day, four days beyond the period Blanche and Buck had agreed to. Bonnie had done her best to prolong an atmosphere of vacation, teasing Clyde in the evenings until he quit his obnoxious gun cleaning and took up his guitar instead. She sang with Buck, picked out the puzzle pieces that made up the sky for Blanche and W.D., and persuaded Blanche, who hated poker, to join them at the table as Buck’s lucky charm.

  At night, when their shades weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood pulled low, they might have been any happy people. Bonnie, her head purring with beer, studied the faces of the men, each warm and soft in the yellowish lamplight, and loved them as husband and brothers, and when Blanche fell asleep with her head on Buck’s thigh, Bonnie took her sister’s feet into her lap. Since they’d been in Joplin, the red leatherette scrapbook into which she pasted newspaper articles about Clyde and herself had remained buried under dirty socks and shirts on the bedroom floor.

  * * *

  At breakfast on the afternoon of the twelfth day, Clyde announced that he and W.D. would not be home for supper. “You wanna go with us, Buck?” He looked sideways at his brother, as he wrapped his lips around the peas balanced on his knife. It was more command than question.

  “You can’t pull any jobs,” Blanche said quickly.

  Buck patted her hand. “I ain’t going to pull any jobs, Baby. I promise.”

  “I trust you, Buck.”

  “Even if Boy and me decide we gotta pull something,” Clyde said, “we won’t let Buck have anything to do with it. I just want him to come along with us. I want to see my brother as much as I can. We ain’t going to be here forever and who knows how much time I got?”

  “We going to see some pretty birds again?” W.D. asked. “Last time we rode around,” he told Bonnie, “I got a picture of a black and white one with red on its front. Looked just like a suit and tie.”

  * * *

  Blanche had given up complaining about the gloom, although occasionally she lifted a corner of some shade and looked up and down the road. At dinner, because it was just her and Bonnie, she sliced up the last pork chop, and they ate it cold with mayonnaise between slices of bread. Around eleven, she pushed the bed against the window that looked out over the street, raised the shade halfway, and sat cross-legged in the dark, staring out, her tooled leather purse on one knee, Snowball curled against the other, snoring softly.

  Bonnie hardly bothered to knock before coming in. “You look like you’re waiting for your date to show up,” she said, sprawling across the bed and propping her chin in her hands, so that she, too, could gaze at the empty street.

  “We been here too long,” Blanche said. “They’re pulling some job. I know it.”

  “We gotta have money, don’t we? I don’t see y’all making a contribution.”

  “You know Buck hasn’t had a chance to find any work.”

  “You seen the papers anymore? There’s no such thing as work.”

  “Clyde ha
d a chance to work. I wish to God he’d stayed in Massachusetts.”

  “No you don’t, Blanche. You wouldn’t want him all alone up there, away from his family and everybody he loves.”

  “Why didn’t you go up there? That’s what I would have done. It doesn’t matter to Buck and me where we are, so long as we’ve got each other.” Blanche cupped a hand over the clasp of her purse, protecting its official contents.

  * * *

  Finally, a car slowed in the street below and turned its headlights away. Bonnie and Blanche, with Snowball darting between their feet, were down the garage’s internal staircase before the boys had finished backing in.

  “Wait ’til you see what we got!” Clyde crowed from the driver’s seat.

  “Shhh! At least wait until Boy gets the garage shut.”

  Across the back seat, three Browning Automatic Rifles balanced butt to barrel atop a thicket of lesser rifles, pistols, magazines, boxes of bullets, and ammo belts.

  “There’s a bunch more in the trunk,” Clyde said.

  The quantity was a shock. “What’d you do? Rob a gun factory?”

  “Better than that. This here’s more United States issue. W.D. and I found another armory the other day. We got plenty for the breakout and then some. And look at this little dealie.” Clyde held up a pronged bit of metal. “This here will hold a gun steady. I’m gonna bolt it on the dash, so any one of us can get at it and blast away. The laws oughta hire me to outfit their vehicles. They’d be a lot better against guys like me, if they kept up-to-date with their weapons.”

  Buck had only gotten halfway out of the car before Blanche attacked him. Now she was pounding on his chest with the sides of her fists and crying. Playing a girl, Bonnie thought.

  “Jesus, let the man out,” Clyde said. “We’ve got to get this shit upstairs before Mr. Nose decides to go for a drive.”