They all feel the same—invigorated and relaxed—and the car’s speed matches their mood. No one suggests they slow down when the rich sunset fades, giving way to the gloaming. No one notices the sign that says the bridge is out.
The rumble stopped; the engine screamed.
And the never-ending bounce and the rattle-tattle jounce
Of the ever-rolling road
Vanished.
Into air. Black air.
Is this what it’s like to fly?
Is this what it’s like to die?
Bonnie doesn’t remember any of the crash after the terrifying sensation of flying. Doesn’t remember smashing through the wooden barrier or the black crack in the flat, bare earth into which they fell. Or the bangs of the car against the rocks at the bottom, harsher than thunder. She doesn’t remember being flung against the door and the roof and the floor of the car, and then pinned under and pinched by searing metal that melts her flesh.
She doesn’t lose consciousness right away. Later, W.D. will tell her that she screamed and screamed. Who could blame her, with, as he will put it, “the hide gone from your hip to your ankle,” so he could see “the bone all white and wet”?
Clyde and W.D. are almost too beat up and dazed to walk, so some men who live nearby carry her up to a house. She doesn’t remember this, either. In fact, W.D. will tell her that she’d passed out by then. “All droopy-like,” he’ll say, “with your head hanging back and your arms flopping down, like you was a rag doll.”
When she comes to, she’s panicked, not knowing where she is, a sharp pain in her chest when she inhales, stinging cuts on nearly every part of her body. Her leg feels numb, like she’s slept on it funny. In some places it throbs, as if waves of fire are passing through it, but the pain is not unbearable. Not yet.
A kerosene lamp gives the room a dim glow, and she becomes aware that people move and murmur there, women and men she doesn’t know. “Daddy?”
A dark shape turns from the window and hurries to her. “He’ll be right back, Sis,” W.D. says. “You ain’t dead.”
His face, smeared with blood, shows such relief, she has to smile. “Boy.” She reaches a finger to touch his cheek. “You get shot?”
“Naw. Just glass. I’m all right.”
A car engine turns over, and W.D. runs back to the window. “Shit! One of ’em’s drove off. Let’s go.” He slides his arms under her and lifts her from the bed.
“She needs a doctor,” a woman calls after them. “He’s gone for the doctor.”
They meet Clyde coming into the yard, two shotguns and the Browning across his arms like stovewood. “Is she…?” he begins, and his loaded arms dip under the weight of his dread.
“Don’t worry, Daddy. I’m all right.” She wants to reach for his neck, to have him take her in his arms, but he has the guns.
“We got to get out of here. They must of seen all this.”
“One of the fellas drove off,” W.D. confesses.
“I heard.”
“Boy was taking care of me,” Bonnie says.
Clyde’s eyes narrow with focus. “Get her behind that bush and then come back and take one of these. I’m fixing to get us a car.”
The plant he’s indicated isn’t a bush, but the sort of brown, prickly scrub that seems to be the only vegetation that grows naturally in those flat, barren stretches of the panhandle. It’s hardly a feature one can hide behind, but W.D. lays Bonnie down awkwardly yet gently on the hard earth, well out of the weak light that issues from the front door.
“Here they come,” Clyde says.
* * *
The officers—one stringy and one stocky—are casual and confident as they get out of their car. They have no notion of what is about to happen.
Clyde steps forward, his scattergun in one hand, a shotgun in the other. “Less have your weapons.”
“What is this?”
“This is you doing what I say,” Clyde says.
W.D. steps forward with a heavy tread to show them they can’t escape. Cautiously, they slip their pistols from their holsters and drop them on the ground. W.D. bends to pick them up.
As he’s straightening himself again, more slowly than normal for a teenage boy because he’s so hurt and sore, something clicks near the front door of the house. Too jittery to distinguish the snick of a screen door latch from the cock of a gun, Bonnie gasps, which might be what causes W.D. to spin and swing his shotgun toward the house, pulling the trigger even as he turns. From inside, a woman screams.
“Let’s go,” Clyde says. “Get in the car.” He motions with his scattergun.
“He might of hurt someone,” the stocky law says. “Killed someone even.”
“Then we got to go faster. Get in.”
“Get in?”
“Don’t play dumb. Get in your goddamned car.” Clyde nudges at them with his shotgun, while keeping the scattergun trained on their chests.
When they’re closed in the back, W.D. stands over them with the gun, while Clyde picks Bonnie up. She tucks herself into him.
“I think I might be hurt bad,” she whispers, beginning to shake with shock.
They’re speeding down the road when headlights appear.
“The doctor,” one of the men says from the back, but they barrel past.
They’ve put her in front between Clyde and W.D., but she can’t sit up. At every jounce, she tips over sideways or slides toward the floor. Blackness rushes at her, not from the night outside but from inside her head. “I have to stop. I have to get out. I’m going to be sick.”
“Blue.” Clyde takes one hand from the wheel and strokes her temple. “We got to keep going.”
“I got to lie down.”
He frowns, but pulls the car over, stopping gingerly, so there’s no jolt.
“You two are going to hold her,” he tells the men in back. “You’re going to stay real still and make her comfortable.”
The laws could grab her and Clyde both as he leans in to settle her on their laps, but one puts his arm under her, cradling her head against his shoulder, and the other adjusts his legs so they support hers, being careful not to touch or even hardly look at the side that is red and raw.
“You hold her easy,” Clyde warns. “Don’t make her hurt any more than she’s got to.”
“That feel all right?” the one at her head asks.
She nods. “Your shirt smells nice.”
“My wife puts something in the wash.”
“I’d like to get me some of that,” Bonnie says. “Will you ask her what it is for me?”
“If your man there lets me go home, I sure will.”
“You can write to me care of the road,” she says. Pain has begun to pulse through her with every heartbeat.
“Shh,” the man says, as if soothing a baby. “Shh… shh.” He smooths the hair from her forehead, just as her mama would have. “You’re going to be all right.”
“She’s out,” she hears the other man say, but she’s only closing her eyes, trying to cut off the darkness that’s swelling up inside her again.
The car swerves slightly, and she groans.
Clyde’s voice sifts into the back. “You holding her right?”
“We’re doing our best,” one of the men says.
She can’t tell if it’s Head or Legs. She concentrates on breathing shallowly, so her chest won’t pinch so bad.
“You ever hear of the Barrow Gang?” Clyde says.
Legs shifts under her, and she groans again.
“Are you being careful?” Clyde says.
“I had to move a little, that’s all,” Legs says.
“Well, be careful.”
“Barrett Gang?” asks Head.
“Barrow,” she whispers. Or intends to whisper. In fact, no sound comes out.
“Not Barrett,” W.D. says. “Barrow.”
“Nope,” Head says. “Never heard of it. You?”
He’s playing with them, but Legs isn’t as quick as Head. �
�Barrow Gang?” he repeats.
“You never heard of Clyde Barrow?” W.D. is outraged.
“I may have heard of a hood by the name of Buck Barrow,” Head says slowly. “Any relation?”
Clyde laughs. “You’re putting me on, ain’t you?”
“So you’re the infamous Clyde Barrow.”
“That’s right.”
“And this here must be Bonnie Parker.”
She thrills at this proof of her fame, before the blackness overwhelms her.
Bonnie regains consciousness when the car stops, and the laws shift her back into Clyde’s arms. He carries her to a bed of clothes and blankets arranged on the seat of Buck and Blanche’s car. Blanche, her expression shifting from the crazed, drunken look of someone suddenly woken from a deep sleep to fear and dismay, stares in at her.
“Am I going to die?”
Blanche shakes her head, but the movement is tentative and slight, conveying uncertainty.
“I tied ’em up good,” Buck says. “I cut some barbed wire from a fence back there and twisted that around ’em.”
“Why can’t you ever do like I tell you? I said not to hurt ’em. I said to use their handcuffs. What do you got to be so mean for?” But Clyde is already behind the wheel. He leaves the laws who’ve cradled Bonnie pinned against a tree.
* * *
They creep along back roads, crammed into the coupe. Blanche and W.D., who’s also badly hurt, are stuffed in the rumble seat with the salvaged guns, while Bonnie lies with her head in Clyde’s lap and her legs on Buck, whose own legs are on top of Blanche’s new suitcase, an unyielding rectangle of beige linen trimmed with dark brown leather.
“Can’t you do something to stop her screaming?” Blanche yells from the rumble seat. “I can’t stand it no more.”
Bonnie isn’t aware that she’s been screaming. The shrieks issue from her involuntarily, as if she’s a bellows being squeezed. At first, her raw leg looked worse than it felt, but as the shock wears off and the burned nerve endings begin to regrow, the unremitting fire in her leg consumes her. Occasionally, she dozes, exhausted by the constant and fruitless mental effort to make the pain stop, but her torturer allows her only a minute or two, before it redoubles its rage and drags her awake.
In Kansas, Clyde steals a second V-8, so they have more space, and on the third night, when Bonnie screams that she has to stop, that she can’t stand another minute of jouncing on the dirt roads when every movement adds a burst of pain, they risk a cabin in a tourist court, but only one, so that the owner won’t suspect that there are five of them.
“Let me die,” Bonnie moans as Blanche dabs salve onto the oozing, open wound.
Blanche is pretty sure that the salve and bandages are useless. “You going to let her die?” she asks Clyde in a whisper that might as well be a shout in that crowded little room. “Whyn’t you do something for her? She needs a doctor.”
Blanche expects Clyde to be angry, but he’s only resigned. “I’m driving, ain’t I?” he says. “I’ll get her a doctor. But we got to get far enough first.”
CHAPTER 56
Far enough turned out to be Fort Smith, Arkansas. Whenever she was alert enough to notice, Bonnie despised the room into which Clyde had moved her, although she knew she ought to be grateful, because without it she’d be shitting on the dirt, as she’d had to do often enough before. Or in some reeking outhouse with flies buzzing around her thighs. Although from now on, she thought bitterly, it would only be her thigh, because there wasn’t much left of the second one. The shithole in this shithole was only two steps from the bed, but that was two more than she could manage. Clyde had to carry her—jimmy his hands around her ass in a way that would once have excited her but now made her grit her teeth and squinch her eyes against the pain. Luckily, she wasn’t shitting much. The medicine took care of that.
Clyde had found a doctor and told him what he’d told the owners of the tourist court, that his wife had been burned when a camp stove exploded. Bonnie couldn’t believe that lie would fool anyone. The idea of Bonnie Parker fiddling with a camp stove, the way Blanche fussed over the hot plate in the room, warming cans of greasy, yellow chicken soup, was laughable.
“You were raving,” Blanche told her later. “Something about shitting chicken soup.”
It felt like lightning was trapped inside her flesh, burning continually, unquenchable. If she could have removed her leg and thrown it out the window, she would have done so in an instant. When the doctor lifted the sheet, the air stung like alcohol, though it was as still and fetid as air could be.
The doctor said that she would probably die, that she had to go to a hospital, that at the very least she needed a nurse. He threw away the salve Blanche had been slathering over Bonnie’s leg twice a day, explaining that it had prevented the wounds from scabbing over, dangerously increasing the risk of infection. At the time, Bonnie heard none of this, but Blanche told her every last detail later, some days after Bonnie had begun swallowing the cerulean pills that made the edges of the lightning melt into her blood where she did not mind them, where they were soothing even, a river of warm light.
“It was infection that was likely to kill you,” Blanche said. “Not the blood or the pain. Infection gets in there and just eats up your body. I’ve seen it happen before with an injury not even close to as bad as this.”
“Infection,” Bonnie repeated. With one open eye, she followed the movements of the finger she’d raised, letting it trace the outline of the curtained window, before she remembered what she’d meant to do with it. She pointed at Blanche. “You’re the infection. Can’t get rid of you. You’re going to kill me.”
“I don’t want to complain,” Blanche said to Buck, as she fried sausages on the hot plate, “but when a person does like I do for her all day, it just isn’t right. She’s always whining about the cooking smells, but she’s not the one who has to walk back and forth to the diner with all them plates.”
“She don’t know what she’s saying,” Buck soothed. “She’s all hopped up on them pills.”
“We’ll never get away now,” Blanche sighed.
* * *
Clyde retrieved Billie to be with Bonnie in case she died, as the doctor kept predicting, but within two weeks they were riding through the Ozarks and around Oklahoma in their usual haphazard fashion, while Clyde railed at Buck and W.D. If they hadn’t been such clucks as to steal a delivery truck—that was W.D.—and then have to return it, because, as Buck had pointed out at the time, the lettering would get them caught easy once the truck was reported stolen; and if, while driving back again, they hadn’t attracted attention by going too fast and rear-ending another truck—that was Buck—then Bonnie would still be lying in a comfortable bed with her sister to help her.
“And W.D.’d have all his fingers,” Billie, who was sweet on Boy, put in.
“As if,” Bonnie said dryly, “every job you done, Clyde, went according to plan.”
By the time they dropped into Texas, bought Billie a new dress, and put her on a bus to Dallas, they all agreed that it was best they hadn’t stayed too long in Fort Smith anyway. Hadn’t they learned their lesson in Joplin?
* * *
In Enid, Oklahoma, Clyde made a lucky find in a hospital parking lot—a medical bag stocked with vials of Amytal. He doled out the drug to Bonnie cautiously, but she got enough to maintain what the blue pills had established, a calmness and distance, the sense that though her body might be experiencing something, her mind need not bother with it. She continued to study the maps stuffed into the glove compartments of the cars they stole, but made no attempt to relate the zigs and zags with the roads on which they traveled. Instead, she focused on the bigger picture, as if she were God looking down from far above. Clyde liked the county maps that delineated farm roads and even the ruts that tractor wheels had established between the back edges of fields and the tree lines that marked the beginnings of woods. Bonnie’s favorite, however, was a map of North America, on whi
ch a meandering red squiggle ran from Mexico City to Edmonton. She let her finger wander through the white space in northern Alberta and up into the Northwest Territories. The blankness was interrupted by lakes and rivers but not a single road.
For a few weeks, cars, cash, and even enough guns to more than fill a cabin’s bathtub came easily to them, and they felt relatively safe. When Blanche cried upon reading that $250 each was being offered for the two killers of Marshal Henry Humphrey of Alma, Arkansas, Clyde comforted her with the fact that no one knew who those killers were.
“We’re famous,” Bonnie reflected later that night, in one of the Amytal-induced hazes that seemed to make things so clear, “but no one ever knows it’s us. That’s why we’re always lucky.”
Blanche, on watch, was sitting cross-legged on top of the car, examining the moon and stars through her binoculars. “If you call this lucky,” she said.
CHAPTER 57
July 1933
The Red Crown Tavern in Platte City, Missouri, had only two cabins, but they were the most darling pair, built of fancy brick with pointed roofs and little fake chimneys, like miniature versions of ritzy mansions. An internal door connected the garage to one of the cabins, which made moving the guns—and Bonnie—private. It was less convenient for Blanche and Buck, who had to exit the garage and enter their cabin through the front door, but all they had to carry was Blanche’s suitcase.
Blanche, whose picture hadn’t yet appeared in any paper and who was generally identified only as a “second woman,” had to handle all of their public dealings.
“You wanna go get us dinners, Blanche?” Clyde said. “You still got that bag of money?”
“What are they going to think when I order five dinners? I checked us in as three.”
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