Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  “Get the keys,” Clyde whispers, nodding at the jacket he’s hung from the back of the straight chair.

  Bonnie puts the jacket on over her nightgown, wraps her fingers around the keys in the pocket, and nods at Clyde. If the car is still in the garage, they’ll be all right.

  “Where are your men?” the sheriff asks Blanche.

  “In the other cabin,” Blanche answers loudly, so Clyde is sure to hear.

  She’s admitted to “men,” when they’ve checked in as one man and two women, but shifting the sheriff’s focus is a good move. Clyde and W.D. ready themselves for a rush at the door.

  But the sheriff keeps talking to Blanche. “Come out yourself, then,” he says again.

  “I’ve got to get my clothes on, don’t I?” she says, as if she’s sniping at a husband who’s rushing her toilette.

  “Can you get to the car?” Clyde whispers.

  Bonnie has hardly hopped as far as the bathroom by herself since the accident, and she’s weak and shaky from the hot day in bed and the beer on top of whatever Amytal remains in her blood, but she nods and slides across the mattress.

  Now the pounding is on their own door.

  “Come out of there!” The sheriff’s bawl issues from between the two cabins.

  “Just a minute!” Clyde yells.

  Instead of opening the door, however, he levels the BAR and squeezes the trigger. The window explodes and the bullets rip steadily through the wooden door. By now, Bonnie, in a nightgown, is standing on one bare foot in the garage. She opens the car door and shoves the key into the ignition. Behind her, W.D.’s bullets join Clyde’s and then Buck’s start up from the other cabin, like a three-part harmony. She lowers herself onto the seat and worms her way from the driver’s side to the passenger’s.

  Clyde and W.D. appear in the garage, and Clyde dives into the car and starts the engine.

  “Open the garage,” he says over his shoulder to W.D., who hesitates, knowing the police must have heard the engine and will be expecting the door to swing up. Clyde, who would rather run into a barrage of bullets than be cornered, jumps back out of the car. He lifts the garage door with his left hand, while swinging the barrel of his scattergun up with his right. A black car, bulky with armor plates, blocks their way.

  The car is made to withstand bullets, but Clyde hammers at it anyway. The horn bellows unceasingly, and then, as if succumbing to Clyde’s will, the barrier moves forward, opening a path. In the dark, beyond the cars that illuminate the cabins with their headlights, the police stand still and quiet behind their shields, as if they’ve been turned to stone by the bursting gunfire and the continuous blare of the armored car’s horn.

  “Blanche! Buck! C’mon!” Bonnie yells from her window.

  The door of the other cabin bursts open, and Buck and Blanche dash for the car. Buck fires a blast from a BAR blindly as he runs, while Blanche lugs her suitcase, leaning a little to one side to counterbalance its weight, as if she’s merely hurrying to catch a train.

  Rifles crack furiously from across the lot. Buck’s head snaps sideways, and he drops his gun. Bonnie sees what appears to be a hunk of fruit fly through the air.

  Buck’s knees give out, and Blanche screams and turns back for him, dipping to hook her left elbow under his shoulder. She doesn’t think to drop the suitcase, but drags it along in her other hand. While Clyde scoops up Buck’s gun and fires in the direction of the shots, W.D. helps Buck and Blanche shamble, the three of them like some awkward, enormous insect, the few, final steps to the car.

  “C’mon! C’mon!” Bonnie can’t get out; she can’t help; she can only urge their progress. “Get in! Get in!” W.D. and Blanche can hardly stuff Buck into the back seat, he’s so heavy and limp. He collapses between them, unable to lift his legs or unfold his body.

  A blast of gunfire causes a noxious cloud of smoke to swell around them. Before they can draw the tear gas into their lungs, Clyde throws himself behind the wheel again and drives through it. From behind them now, the laws discharge another barrage, and the back window explodes.

  “My eyes!” Blanche screams.

  Clyde wrenches the car off the road into a fallow field. He cuts the headlights but keeps up their speed, and they bounce over the rough earth into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 59

  But they could not get out of Platte City. At the far side of the field, they bumped up onto a farm road that stopped at the river. They drove up and down one road after another, searching for a bridge, but every route proved a dead end. Three of their tires were so flat they were no more than a layer of rubber on the rims. The fourth was pumped full of lead.

  “What do you think?” Clyde demanded, every time a new road appeared. “Should we try this one?”

  Bonnie guessed—yes, no, yes. Often it turned out the road wasn’t a new one after all, but one they’d already tried.

  “Christ almighty!” Clyde said. “Is that the place we passed ten minutes ago?”

  “I can’t see!” Blanche cried. “I can’t see anything!”

  Finally, the bottom of the car ground so hard against the crown of the rutted road that they had to stop.

  “Boy, get out. We got to fix these tires. Blanche, get up there and watch for cars.”

  “I can’t!” Blanche wailed.

  “You got to! What’s the matter with you?” Clyde says.

  “I told you! I can’t see!”

  “What do you mean, you can’t see?” Bonnie turned to look at Blanche.

  The scene in the back of the car was gruesome. Buck was sitting up with his eyes open, but his head seemed to be squashed in. Blood ran glistening down the side of his head and neck and had soaked through his shirt and pants. Blanche’s eyes were squeezed to slits, and she seemed to be crying gouts of blood. Her cheeks and forehead were smeared with blood she’d tried to wipe away, and blood ran down her neck into her blouse. Blood dripped from the hands she waved wildly in front of her eyes to test her sight.

  “I mean I’m blind! I can’t see nothing but black!”

  “Jesus Christ!” Clyde said. “They get you, too?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. I can’t see. I told you that!”

  “Lessee.” He helped her turn, so that she faced outward from the car. He struck a match and bent toward her face. “Look over here at me.”

  “How can I look at you, if I can’t see?”

  Buck pushed at Blanche’s back. “I got to get out! I can’t breathe! Let me out!”

  Blanche scrambled out and turned, grabbing blindly at her husband to help him out behind her.

  “God almighty!” Buck screamed, tugging at his clothes. He’d managed to seat himself on the running board. “I’m soaking wet! Get this blood off of me.”

  “It’s all blood back here!” Panic made W.D.’s voice high and quavery.

  “Boy,” Bonnie said firmly, “go in Blanche’s suitcase and get her something dry to wipe her face.”

  Blanche’s pajamas were neatly folded. Even as she shouted replies to the police, she must have been swiftly tucking the arms behind the back and matching the legs. Tentatively, almost formally, as if presenting an orb on a pillow to a queen, W.D. set a neat, blue rectangle of fabric on Blanche’s gory palms.

  Blanche’s vision was a little better with some of the blood wiped away. She could see a blurred but bright star, so close she could almost catch it.

  “Goddammit, get your hand down!” Clyde scolded. “You want to burn yourself, too? Dammit!”

  The star went out.

  “Well, best I can tell,” he said, “your eyeballs ain’t busted.”

  While Clyde was examining Blanche, Bonnie tried to look after Buck, reaching behind her seat to put her hand on his shoulder. “Does it hurt, Buck? Are you shot anyplace besides your head?”

  “It don’t hurt too bad. I’m just so thirsty.”

  “We’ll get you some water,” Clyde promised. “Soon as we can.”

  Buck sounded so plaintive, so lik
e a little boy, that Blanche instinctively bent to press her lips to his head. But the slick feel of the blood in his hair, together with the smell of it, made her gorge rise, and she vomited beside the car.

  “Goddammit. A bunch of repair kits, but no goddamn pump and no goddamn jack. What kind of an idiot drives without a goddamn pump and a goddamn jack?” Clyde slammed the trunk. “Let’s go, Boy.”

  “Get a flashlight!” Bonnie yelled after them.

  “Get something for Buck’s head,” Blanche gasped.

  * * *

  Bonnie rifled through the maps that remained in the glove compartment—sections of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, a detailed map of a single county in southwestern Kansas—no Kansas City, no Platte City, certainly nothing that would make any sense of this maze of roads that seemed to go nowhere but back to themselves again. Didn’t the people around here ever want to go no place?

  “I said we’d been in an accident,” Clyde explained, returning with a bedsheet so worn it had been cut lengthwise and the edges sewn together to make a new middle, along with a twisted cheesecloth, stained blackberry-purple.

  “An accident!” Bonnie couldn’t stop laughing.

  She ripped the sheet into strips and wound the fabric around Buck’s head as firmly as she dared, while he pawed weakly at her hands and told her to quit messing with it. She discovered that some of the blood in the car was, in fact, hers; all the moving around she’d done had reopened the scabs on her leg. So she wrapped that as well, while Clyde and W.D. pulled out the inner tubes, fished the bullets out of them, and gently abraded the rubber so each finicky little patch would stick. One tire was so shredded it couldn’t be fixed, but three and a rim were enough. Conscientiously, they left the pump and jack outside the door of the dark house from which they’d borrowed them and then made a few more stabs at finding a road that would lead them away from Platte City, but when they ended up in the same place for the fourth time, they gave up and drove the car into the undergrowth to hide until the sky lightened.

  CHAPTER 60

  All of them longed to run home to Dallas, but the laws would expect that, so Clyde turned north. They watched the road behind them for black cars approaching fast and the road ahead for black cars blocking the way. When they drove by open fields, they felt as exposed as a beetle on a tabletop and shrank from the windows, but they were even more nervous when nearing a stand of trees, where the laws could be hiding. They feared bridges most of all. Bonnie held her breath when, finally, they crossed the Platte.

  While they concentrated on getting away, they were also conscious of Buck’s every breath, and they watched him, reassessing by the minute whether he was healing or dying. Much of the time he was asleep or passed out, the good side of his head on Blanche’s shoulder or lap, the damaged side sodden with blood that continued to seep through the bandage. When they pulled into a service station for gas, they hid him under a blanket, but he awoke and began to vomit, so they had to speed away with an empty tank.

  Blanche could see pretty well out of her right eye now, although the skin around it looked as if it had been used as a chopping block, and the sun made it water. Blinking her left eye was excruciating, so she kept it closed.

  “Isn’t there something we can do for him?” Blanche begged somewhere in Missouri, when they’d listened to Buck moan steadily for nearly an hour.

  The road ran between cornfields, the stalks straight as soldiers, the leaves like arms raised in surrender.

  “We can’t stop here,” Clyde said.

  Earlier, they’d given Buck water, which he’d slurped sloppily, and then vomited up. Now Blanche kept offering him little sips of warm Orange Crush, but he turned his head away. As the sun burned higher and hotter, the blood began to stink. Buck twitched and then started to thrash, hitting out at W.D. and Blanche, who supported him on either side.

  “Please!” Blanche pleaded. “We have to do something!”

  “We can’t stop here,” Clyde said again.

  “Well, when can we stop? We can’t keep driving forever!”

  “Let’s get something to clean his wound,” Bonnie suggested.

  Except for gas, Clyde wouldn’t stop until they’d crossed into Iowa, but then he pulled in at a drugstore. The items he handed Bonnie in a paper sack were pitiful, given the intensity of the injuries they were meant to treat: Mercurochrome (“for minor cuts and abrasions,” the package read), aspirin, a pair of dark glasses, hydrogen peroxide, and a roll of bandages.

  They drove on, putting distance between themselves and the clerk who could report a man with a limp buying bandages. Blanche looked better, at least, wearing the sunglasses. She coaxed Buck to swallow an aspirin.

  Finally, on the far side of a little town, Clyde turned north again, and in a few miles, pulled off on a weedy drive that looked as if it hadn’t seen traffic all summer. Bonnie soaked a wadded strip of bedsheet in hydrogen peroxide, but when they removed Buck’s bandage, they agreed that dabbing seemed an ineffectual way to clean an actual hole in the head. Besides, none of them could bear to touch the wound. Instead, they helped Buck lie down on the seat, and Clyde poured the chemical into the hole directly from the bottle. It foamed madly and seemed to cause Buck no discomfort.

  Encouraged, Bonnie applied Mercurochrome with the bottle’s sponge applicator to the cuts that crisscrossed Blanche’s face. Outlined in the pink of the mercury solution, the wounds looked more manageable.

  No one, except Clyde, wanted to get back into the car. All over the floor and seats, bandages soaked with blood and vomit coiled like intestines. W.D. complained that the smell was making him sick.

  “For God’s sake!” Bonnie grabbed at the gore with her bare hands, throwing the used bandages along with the empty hydrogen peroxide bottle into the weeds. It was hard to stay clean and organized on the road, but disposing of garbage was never a problem. She and Clyde had chucked chicken bones, shampoo bottles, broken shoes, and laddered hose all over the countryside.

  “We can’t stay here. It’s too close to the road.” Clyde flicked the butt of his cigarette into the weeds, too. Someone was going to notice the bullet-pocked car, if not the bloody and bandaged crew inside it.

  “I ain’t getting back in,” W.D. said.

  “We gotta stay together, Boy,” Bonnie said.

  “I want to quit driving.”

  “Get in,” Clyde said impatiently. “We’re just going to head back in here a ways.”

  “Then we’ll stop and everyone’ll get out,” Bonnie promised.

  The tire nearest to where W.D. stood had collapsed down to the rim, so that the machine tilted in his direction, as if extending an invitation. He got back in.

  The overgrown road seemed to run into a wood, but behind the first screen of trees the landscape opened into what had been in more prosperous times an extensive amusement park. They passed a huge concrete basin—an empty man-made lake—surrounded by a concrete deck. Beyond it, the setting sun bronzed an open-air dance floor, a motionless carousel, and an abandoned shooting gallery.

  Two months ago, Dexfield Park might have been a private fairyland. Clyde and Buck and W.D. would have fooled around in the shooting gallery, aiming at the arrested line of yellow ducks and erecting pyramids of beer bottles, while Bonnie and Blanche would have mounted the stilled carousel horses. They all would have slid into the concrete basin to listen to their own voices echo off the sides and danced on the enormous wooden floor.

  The road stopped, but Clyde bumped onto the grass and steered the car over a rise and through some trees, on the far side of which the land sloped down to a river. He stopped in a meadow on a fairly level plot. Through more trees and undergrowth, they could glimpse the water, slate-colored in the graying light.

  The diminished gang threw open the doors and hobbled into the fresh air—Bonnie, who’d effectively lost a leg; Blanche, who was nearly missing an eye; W.D., whose fingers were foreshortened; and Buck, for whom Clyde was planning to dig a grave. For dinner, they drank wat
er that W.D. carried up from the river in empty bean cans. They removed the back seat from the car and made Buck as comfortable as they could on it. They expected him to be dead by morning.

  But in the damp, gray dawn, from her nest in the front seat, Bonnie could hear Buck still breathing. Worry over his condition ought to have distracted her from her own discomfort, Bonnie thought, but her body would not be shushed. Her leg bled and burned; mosquitoes had whined around her ears for most of the night; she was hungry.

  Blanche, who had, at some point in the darkness, begged hysterically for someone to shoot her, so that she could go with Buck, had finally fallen asleep on the grass, her head on her husband’s knee. Clyde slept slumped forward, his head cradled against his beloved steering wheel. He looked fragile and young, sandy-colored whiskers sprouting halfheartedly through the dirt and blood on his cheeks and chin.

  He must have felt her looking at him, because he opened his eyes. “Blue?”

  “Yes?”

  “We forgot to pray.”

  He got out and knelt with his elbows on the seat, a position she was now incapable of assuming. She bowed her head and waited for him to finish.

  When Buck awoke, he demanded fried chicken. His head had swollen to larger than its normal size, despite the missing piece. Clyde proposed going back to town to find some ice to bring the swelling down, so they pressed mud into the bullet holes in the vehicle and then smeared more mud over the whole thing, so it looked as if they were driving nothing worse than a filthy car.

  “You ain’t going to leave us,” W.D. said anxiously, when Clyde and Bonnie got in.

  “We can’t all go into town,” Clyde said. “You got to take care of Buck and Blanche.”

  “Don’t worry, W.D.,” Blanche said bitterly. “They’re never going to leave us.”

  “Think he’s going to die?” Clyde said, as they rolled past the empty lake.