Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  Clyde gets out of the car, breaks off one of the flowering twigs, and strips the blossoms off the wood with one hand. “Blue, get me a cloth.”

  Except for a wool blanket that Clyde and W.D. have been using to hide the guns, the only fabric in the car is that of the clothes they’re wearing. Bonnie bites the stitches loose along the hem of her nightgown and tears off a strip, which Clyde wraps around his stick and soaks in whiskey from a bottle in the glove compartment.

  “Yer a lucky bastard again, Boy,” he says, as he pokes the implement into W.D.’s wound. Groaning, W.D. grips Bonnie’s hand almost hard enough to break her fingers. “Bullet went clean through.” Clyde tugs the gory stick out through the exit wound. “You ain’t gonna die.”

  They examine each other, taking inventory of less severe wounds. Clyde has been hit with a ricochet in the temple and has a large bruise, but now that he’s quit driving, he doesn’t feel faint anymore. Buck has a red mark fast turning purple on his chest.

  “That happened when I was going for the stairs to get you girls,” he says. “Felt like it’d gone right into my heart, but I heard somewhere that if you got shot in the heart, you could stay alive if you held your breath. Long enough to say a few words, anyway. So I held my breath all the way up the stairs, so I could tell you goodbye, Baby.” He looks sorrowfully at Blanche, and she presses against him and cries loud and long, until she feels as cleaned out as W.D.’s wound.

  “Why did this happen?” Bonnie asks. “Why did the laws come?”

  No one has an answer. As they drive on, they are beset by their usual woes. The temperature drops and rain begins; a tire goes flat. Most worrisome, however, is W.D., who despite Clyde’s assurances and a packet of aspirin Clyde buys at a service station, seems likely to die. He lies with his head in Bonnie’s lap, shivering violently under the wool blanket, barely able to open his eyes. Once in awhile, he utters incomprehensible, slurred syllables.

  They drive toward Texas—because that’s the way Clyde always goes when they’re in trouble—and cover about four hundred and fifty miles that night, reviewing twenty times over what, along with Snowball, they’ve lost: most of the guns, Clyde’s guitar, Bonnie’s typewriter and the copies of her poems, Blanche’s purse containing the papers that make Buck and her legitimate—and identify them. At one point, W.D. rouses himself to bemoan a stash of cigars, which makes Bonnie remember the camera, still loaded with undeveloped film. They’ve left their clothes and all the pretty things Bonnie and Blanche bought at Kress’s. They do, however, have the stolen field glasses.

  “Of all things,” Blanche says with disgust, when Buck triumphantly pulls them out from under the seat.

  “But think,” Bonnie says, “of the look on Nosey’s face, when he finds out who he’s been sharing a garage with.”

  They’re somewhere in the panhandle just before dawn, when they decide to hide in a tourist court. The room, which has no running water, is filthy with nests of dust and hair along the baseboards and a blanket dotted with cigarette burns, but its stove warms them. They fill a pan, its bottom blackly encrusted, with liquid from a rusty pump and drink, which revives them all somewhat, and then they clean W.D.’s wound as well as they can with another strip torn from Bonnie’s nightgown.

  They discover that Clyde has also been hit in the chest, although his shirt button must have deflected the slug, because it has burrowed only a little ways under his skin. Bonnie digs it out with a hairpin she finds on the floor, dipped in alcohol.

  In the morning, although it’s cold and Blanche is wearing nothing but a sleeveless bit of lace-trimmed, bloodstained crepe, she’s more presentable than Bonnie in her torn nightgown, so she’s selected to walk to the grocery about twenty yards farther on down the road. While she waits for the clerk to wrap some baloney, she pages quickly through two newspapers and is relieved to find nothing on Joplin. Still, that they aren’t yet reporting the incident in Texas doesn’t mean that a manhunt isn’t underway. She’s no longer hysterical, but back in the dirty room the tears won’t quit forming and spilling. She raises her sandwich to her eyes and sponges at the tears with the bread.

  “Clyde,” Bonnie says, “why can’t we tell the laws that Blanche and Buck didn’t do anything? It’s the truth.”

  “That’s an idea.”

  Blanche can tell by the relief in Clyde’s voice that he really is sorry for the mess he’s gotten her and Buck into and that makes her feel a little better.

  “I could write a letter,” he says, “and say y’all were just visiting with us. You ain’t got nothing to do with our crimes. And it was me that shot that law. Buck didn’t even have hold of a rifle.”

  “That’s right,” Blanche says eagerly. “That’s nothing but the plain truth.”

  But Buck is shaking his head, reminding Blanche of a stubborn hound dog. “It won’t work, Baby. You don’t understand the laws. They don’t care about the truth. They just want to get someone. I was with Clyde when that man went down; I’m going to get the chair.”

  “I’m so sorry, Blanche.” Bonnie wraps her arms around her sister-in-law, and the two of them rock together, because there is no other comfort.

  In a few hours, W.D. lies flat out on the bed beside the women, and Buck sits on the floor, his elbows hooked around his knees and his head drooping, but Clyde is restless. He can’t stop twitching the curtain open to check the parking lot and the road.

  “Look at all them cars,” he says once or twice. And then, finally: “I don’t like the look of all them cars. Less git agoing.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Stories began to appear in the newspapers around the time they reached Great Bend. Wes Harryman, who’d left a wife and five children, and Harry McGinnis, who’d been only three weeks away from his wedding, had come to the Joplin apartment to investigate suspected bootlegging.

  “I guess you must have hit that other fellow, too,” W.D. said.

  “Wes Harryman,” Blanche said. “Harry McGinnis.”

  “Blanche, don’t,” Bonnie said, as the names swelled the list in her mind. Which one belonged to the man with the severed arm, whom she saw whenever she closed her eyes? “I wonder which one of ’em shot you, Boy,” she said. It wasn’t right the way the paper used the word “vicious,” as if Clyde had set out on purpose to kill those men. If W.D. had ended up dead, would the papers call the laws vicious?

  They applied some salve from a stolen doctor’s bag to the divot in Clyde’s chest and the hole through W.D.’s middle. It hurried the healing of the skin, but W.D. seemed to have lost something besides flesh and blood. He fingered his wound while staring out the window in a way that looked more like studying his reflection than keeping a sharp eye out for the law.

  “Leave it alone, Boy.” Bonnie lightly slapped his hand. “You have to let it scab over.”

  He took his hand away, but she could tell he wasn’t listening.

  “You don’t want a big scar to mess up that pretty belly.”

  “It’s not going to be like it was,” he said. “I been shot through. I coulda died like them other fellas did.”

  * * *

  They’d cut through Nebraska and were driving east into Iowa when the photos that Bonnie, Clyde, and W.D. had taken back in February appeared. The papers drooled over the one in which Bonnie glowered with a pistol on her hip and a cigar between her teeth. “Cigar-smoking, quick-shooting accomplice” the caption read. Bonnie recoiled at the thought that her mother—or anyone else for that matter—would believe that she’d become so coarse as to smoke cigars. By the time they reached Illinois, the papers were publishing the poem she’d been retyping on the apartment floor. She read it aloud as they drove south, and if she’d believed the typed version was an improvement over the handwritten one, that was nothing compared to the authority with which the rat-a-tat rhythm and the tough slang, which she’d learned more extensively from the pictures than from riding with Clyde, came across on the printed page. However, while the poem might have been about the wo
man with the cigar, as the papers claimed, she wasn’t Bonnie.

  CHAPTER 52

  April 1933

  “This is the one.” Clyde nods as they drive by the State Bank and Trust Company in Ruston, Louisiana, which he reasons is big enough to be full of cash but small enough to employ only one guard.

  “We’re going to rob that?” W.D.’s fingers creep to the sore spot under his shirt.

  Its stone-block façade is imposing, the front door deep in the walls of a two-story arch flanked by columns and capped with an elaborately ornamented pediment. The bank is a temple to money, and they are unlikely worshippers.

  They’re still wearing the clothes they bought two days after leaving Joplin. The dribs and drabs they’ve stolen don’t amount to enough to buy new ones, and they haven’t dared stay anywhere long enough to get what they do own cleaned. In fact, they haven’t stopped at a tourist court more than three times since they’ve left Joplin, so most of their bathing has consisted of a splash of creek water. Their hair clumps in greasy hanks, dust rings their wrists and gathers in the creases of their elbows and knees and in the corners of their eyes. They exude a sharp, cheesy odor.

  But living conditions never get Clyde down, and he’s regained his confidence. “First, we need a new getaway car. This heap’ll get us nabbed before we go two blocks.”

  Although the sedan was practically new when they’d started, they’ve been driving it hard for two weeks. The engine labors when Clyde pushes it past sixty; the front axle is cracked, and a loop of wire holds one of the back doors shut.

  As they cruise a leafy residential neighborhood, Bonnie ignores potential cars and tries instead to peek inside the grand houses they pass, which hint at rooms to let with telltale cards in front windows and too many slat-seat chairs lined up along front porches.

  “How about that one?” Clyde says, spotting a black V-8 sedan, almost identical to the one they’re driving but much cleaner, in the driveway of a large, white house. “You want to grab it, Boy?”

  When W.D. doesn’t answer promptly, Bonnie feels queasy. The driveway is short; the car close to the house. She can see again the man running in his socks, his warm feet melting a dark trail in the thin snow. “Clyde…” she begins.

  But Clyde is already braking, and his voice runs over hers. “C’mon, get out! What you waiting for? Christmas?”

  W.D. opens the door, jumps out while their car is still moving, and runs the four steps up the driveway to the parked sedan. Clyde hovers in case W.D. has to rabbit. In neutral, they slowly roll past the drive, and Bonnie twists in her seat, so that she can watch W.D. open the shiny black door and then turn with a smile and a thumb in the air, before sliding in.

  “It’s got keys,” she reports, relieved, and Clyde puts the car in gear and picks up speed.

  About a mile out of town, they turn onto a side road and slow, so W.D. can catch up.

  “Shouldn’t he be here by now?” Bonnie looks as far as she can along the road behind them. “Move your head, Buck. I can’t see.”

  A black car flies like a crow’s shadow across the mouth of the road behind them.

  “Was that him?” Bonnie says.

  “Goddammit! That boy don’t never pay attention!” Clyde grinds the gears, and the exhausted car growls its objections. Bonnie, Blanche, and Buck sway back and forward and back again, as Clyde executes an awkward, angry about-face on the narrow road.

  Another black car shoots through the intersection before they reach it. “Maybe that’s him,” Blanche says.

  “Naw, that’s a coupe,” Buck says.

  They race behind the coupe that’s chasing the sedan along the dappled, undulating, twisting roads. At intervals they glimpse the coupe, but W.D. is so far ahead that even when they crest a hill and the road lies open before them, they don’t see the sedan.

  “That moron in the coupe is making us lose Deacon,” Clyde says.

  On the far side of town, they spot arcs in the dirt where the cars have changed direction.

  “He ain’t taking the right road,” Clyde says. “He’ll have only hisself to blame if he runs smack into a police station.”

  Apparently, however, W.D. has not run into anything. He is gone.

  “Hell, I don’t know what to do,” Clyde says.

  The coupe is coming slowly toward them now. A woman drives; a man rides in the passenger seat.

  Clyde reaches his arm out the window and holds his palm up, politely asking it to stop. “Hey,” he calls to the man, who gets out, “you seen a black Ford coach out this aways?”

  Approaching their car, the man nods eagerly.

  “Why were you following it?” Clyde’s voice stiffens.

  The man’s expression tightens in response. “It’s my car.”

  Like a jack-in-the-box, Clyde opens the door and springs from the seat in one motion. He swings his .45 by the barrel sharply but with restraint, so that the butt strikes the man in the head just hard enough to make him stumble. “It ain’t yer car no more.”

  Bonnie is almost as quick as Clyde. She dashes toward the coupe, furious. W.D. is lost, and these two are to blame. The driver, cringing, fumbles with the ignition, but Bonnie locks both hands around her arm, soiling her crisp white sleeve. “Goddammit, get out of there.”

  The woman obeys, stumbling beside Bonnie back to the old sedan. Clyde has pushed the man into the front seat beside him, and Bonnie does the same with the woman. The four of them are a tight fit, but the scared captives make themselves as small and still as possible.

  Before long, Clyde has built up their speed again. His tires churn the mud, and clumps knock disconcertingly against the chassis.

  “When was the last place you seen that shit hunk of metal? Did it turn here?” Clyde jams the brakes suddenly, and they all bang against the dash. Just before the car stalls out, he accelerates, and they’re thrown against the seat back, their heads jerking on their necks.

  “I… I don’t know.” The man’s voice quavers.

  “How can you not know? Shit! You were following him. You got to know which way he went.”

  “What he means,” the woman hurries to explain, “is that the car was so far ahead of us, we couldn’t see whether it turned or not. The last we saw, it was headed north. It might have turned, but it might have kept going. We just couldn’t tell. That’s why we gave up and came back. My automobile can’t reach those speeds and, frankly, I wouldn’t drive that fast, even if it did. Speeding is dangerous.”

  They hit a bump that sends them briefly into the air and come down hard, which causes the door to the glove compartment to drop open. Several heavy metal blocks fall onto the woman’s feet.

  Clyde leans over the man’s lap, which puts his eyes well below the dashboard.

  “Oh, God, watch where you’re going!” the woman screams.

  Clyde ducks down another two or three times to tease the woman, who’s nearly in tears with fright. Finally, he gathers the ammunition clips off the floor and drops them in her lap. “Hold these.”

  * * *

  They seem to have traveled every road in northwestern Louisiana, but they still can’t find W.D.

  “I oughta kill the both of you,” Clyde says, when they’ve turned and turned again. “What the hell are we driving around with you fuckers for?”

  The man lets out a little squeak.

  “Why would you do that?” the woman cries.

  “Why don’t you, Bud?” Buck puts in from the back. “Why don’t you just kill ’em?”

  “We ain’t never gonna find him or that car,” Clyde says.

  “Please,” the man says. “I don’t care about the car. Please don’t kill us.”

  “Please,” the woman says.

  “You’ll be all right if you don’t try any fucking funny business,” Clyde says.

  Bonnie can see that these people aren’t thinking of trying anything. The woman keeps glancing at the magazines of bullets in her lap, obviously afraid to touch them but at the same time
afraid that they might fall again to the floor.

  “They won’t hurt you,” Bonnie says.

  “I didn’t say that,” Clyde says.

  “I mean the clips. She’s scared they’re going to explode.”

  Clyde laughs. “Them clips are the least dangerous thing in this car.”

  Bonnie leans forward to address the man who’s rubbing the back of his head where Clyde struck him. “What do you do, mister?”

  Startled, the man says, “I didn’t do nothing except try and get my own car back.”

  “No,” the woman says. “She’s asking, what’s your line.”

  “Oh.” The man straightens himself a little in the seat. “I’m a mortician.”

  Clyde snorts. “An undertaker! Are you serious?”

  The man frowns. “Of course, I’m serious.”

  “No need to take offense,” Clyde says. “It’s just funny, that’s all. Do you know who we are?”

  The two shake their heads.

  Clyde looks so crestfallen that Bonnie laughs. “Don’t you read the goddamned paper?” She leans down and, with the barrel of the whipit she’s been holding loosely in her lap, taps the newspapers at her feet, several of which are open to the page with her cigar-smoking picture on it.

  “You’re Bonnie Parker?”

  The woman sounds so incredulous that Bonnie can’t help but put a hand to her matted hair. During the hot, tense drive, the woman’s powdered nose had moistened and her crisp, white shirt had grown limp, but the fabric gave off a clean, starchy scent that made Bonnie conscious of her own filth and decay.

  “I’m Buck Barrow.” Buck leans forward. “And this here’s my wife, Blanche. We was in Joplin, too.”

  “Be quiet, Daddy,” Blanche says. “We got nothing to do with this. They don’t need to know who we are.”

  “Maybe you’ll be the one to fix us up after the laws get us,” Clyde says. “Would you like that?”

  “Oh, no.” The man shakes his head. “I wouldn’t like that at all. You ought to live a long, long time. That’s what I hope.”