From there, we change our plates to one unscrewed from a junkyard and jump the three hundred or so miles to Sailes, Louisiana.
One hand on my belly, I feel like singing. But I won’t; we ain’t out of the woods just yet. In fact, we wait for nightfall and roll into the woods that line our soon-to-be acreage. Clyde doesn’t dare start a fire, but it’s warm enough where snuggling up with each other will do.
“Did we really do it?” I ask.
“Just ’bout. I’m going to sneak over to the house now and again to see if I spot anything funny. If not, we’ll meet Henry and make all of this ours for keeps.”
On my side, I nuzzle into Clyde’s neck. “I can’t even imagine.”
But that’s a lie. Sleeping with both eyes closed, being clean on a regular basis, not fearing flat tires or lookie-loos. Not escaping one ambush after another.
I can easily imagine all of that. Lord knows I already figured where the pigpen will go. My fingers twitch at getting inside the farmhouse. I’m lying on my right hand. I shift, pulling it out, showing Clyde my ring-less finger.
“I lost our snake somewhere back in that mud. This ol’ thing,” I say of Roy’s band, “represents all the bad from before. But your ring … our ring,” I correct, “has always given me hope of our future. It’s lousy it’s gone.”
“Bonnie, you don’t need a ring to prove the existence of a future for us.” He puts my left hand over his heart. “You can feel it whenever you want.”
I sigh, one where the breath comes out of a smile, and I slide our hands onto my tummy. “You can feel it here, too, or at least I think so. I only realized this morning as I was thinking through all that’s happened in the past few months.”
“You ain’t serious?”
I nod, vigorously. “We’re going to have that family, Clyde.”
He’s quick to say, “Let’s try for another.” Clyde switches our positions, his hazel eyes gleaming down at me.
“I don’t think it works that way when we already got one cooking.”
“Never hurts to try, darling.”
* * *
I wake with that familiar stiffness in my back from snoozing on the ground, but also with a smile. Then panic. Clyde ain’t here. Hasn’t been for a while, his body heat gone. I frantically pat the ground where he should be, as if that’ll do a dang thing. When I spot a note, scribbled on some old trash, I simper at my own theatrics.
Back soon.
It’s the first I’ve seen Clyde’s handwriting, a wild realization after all we’ve been through. All the letters he sent from Eastham were typed, now I know by someone else. Maybe Skelley. There are only eight letters in his note, but there’s an intimacy in being the first to know that Clyde loops his two o’s together.
I’ve a big smile for him when he returns. He withdraws a journal, saying, “Picked this up for you. Drove an hour each way ’cause I didn’t want anyone recognizing me ’round here. But I see you scribbling on scraps and I wanted you to have a home for your words.”
I patiently wait for him to stop yapping, then plant one on him.
I start by recopying my poem, giving it the name “The Trail’s End.” I snort at some of the stuff I’ve written, revising here and there, but I keep most of it the same, even the ending. This here captured a moment in time, and I think those moments should be preserved, even when the future takes an uphill climb.
Like how, the next day, the newspaper I’m reading puts a smile on my face.
“Nice girls don’t smoke cigars,” said Miss Bonnie Parker, companion to fugitive and murderer Clyde Barrow.
Percy came through.
Over the next few weeks, I continue to keep an eye on the headlines. Unfortunately, it’s not as redeeming. There’s gossip ’bout a lurid love affair with Raymond, ’bout the banks we’re accused of robbing but didn’t, and even how the media mocks the law for not being able to bring one smallish man and his even tinier woman to justice. Then Raymond’s name pops up again, this time ’cause he found himself back in the pen.
Clyde ha-ha’s at that, then says, “I’d like to write a letter to Henry Ford.”
“The car manufacturer?”
“The very one. I reckon I owe him some gratitude.”
I tear Clyde a clean sheet of paper and let him go at it.
Dear Sir:—
I smirk. “Ya don’t need both the colon and the dash.”
“Too late now.”
Clyde gushes to Mr. Ford ’bout what a dandy car Ford makes, how he drives ’em exclusively, praising the automobile’s sustained speed and performance.
Ford has got every other car skinned and even if my business hasn’t been strictly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.
He signs it,
Yours truly,
Clyde Champion Barrow
The next day, we mail it. It becomes normal for us to leave our woods and drive for a hundred miles in any ol’ direction before returning at the end of the day. Clyde says it’ll give folks less chances to spot our Ford on the farmland, along with giving us an opportunity to see if anyone trails us to the farm. I counter how it gives others the opening to discover us here, with all our coming and going.
I ain’t sure there is an ideal scenario of what we should be doing or how we should be acting, besides making a go at an honest life. That’s what we do, Clyde keeping his sticky fingers to himself. Of course, that means we don’t have any money coming in, but sleeping in our car or in the dirt means not having to pay four dollars a day to snooze at a tourist camp, and with only the two of us, we can make do with a loaf of bread for eight cents and a jar of apple butter for ten.
Our biggest expense is gas at ten cents a gallon. With Clyde sometimes lugging us for upward three hundred miles in a round trip, that easily costs us two dollars a day. Over sixty dollars by the time we’ll settle on our farm.
Guess that figure doesn’t seem so grand when we spent nearly half of the same amount on a Remington typewriter for me. And for Clyde, a fifty-dollar saxophone.
“You can play this thing?” I ask Clyde after he puts it in the trunk next to my typewriter. I waited in the car when he went in, not wanting to draw attention to us by having to hobble.
“Been a while. Bet it’ll be like riding a bike.”
One of those is seven bucks, and I’m tempted to ask for one, but we don’t got a place to put it yet. Soon we will, in only a couple more days, when we’re set to meet Henry at the house. Over those days, we fill our trunk with a tablecloth, costing a dollar five; bedsheets, seventy-four cents; bath towels at thirty cents each; a gas lantern, five sixty-nine; and a few wool blankets at a dollar a pop.
I keep adding it all up, almost obsessively, afraid our money will run out and Clyde’ll have to rob. It won’t, not for a while at least; our stash is over a grand. That’s most folks’ salary for a year, if you’ve got yourself a decent job. Like a schoolteacher. A college professor makes even more, more than double that. An actress—geez—she could keep rollin’ that amount higher and higher, all relative to how popular her films become.
Those were once my aspirations, and I’ll admit a touch of “what could’ve been” scratches my throat, but that life with eyes on me—either at the front of a classroom or by a camera—is for a different gal. This gal doesn’t want to be seen, ’cept by Clyde.
Sunday morning, he’s carrying me with an arm under my knees and another ’round my back. Clyde doesn’t have any hands to hold a gun, and we’re trying to show Henry some good faith, so the gun we do have is in my right hand, under a spare shirt in my lap. Through the trees is our soon-to-be farmhouse.
“I haven’t seen anyone at the house the times I checked.” Clyde sidesteps a fallen branch. “Henry’s daddy must’ve already moved on. An apartment in Arcadia is what Henry mentioned. Ain’t more than a few miles from here.”
“He get a job?”
“Not sure.”
Clyde hesitates at the last tre
e, listening, watching. “Henry’s car ain’t here yet. Unless he parked farther down.”
We creep into the clearing. I don’t like that we’re creeping.
“Think it’ll ever stop,” I whisper, “people caring ’bout us?”
He clucks. “Not sure they should. I had my reasons for what I’ve done, but it doesn’t make it right. You, Bonnie … you never shot a soul, though.”
“I shot at folks.”
“Who are living to talk ’bout it. That matters. I’m glad it’s you and not me who’s growing our bairn.” At the porch, Clyde raps a step with his foot. The step’ll hold. It’s anyone inside he’s testing. I squeeze the gun. “Should’ve left you two behind.”
I ignore him; I’m nervous enough without Clyde worrying ’bout me and our baby. “Are you sorry you killed people, Clyde?”
He climbs the steps, painstakingly slow. “I’m sorry it came to that, in all but one case. Now, quiet.” His eyes dart ’round, peering through the windows, over his shoulder, out over the yard. Clyde dips, lowering us and his hand to doorknob level.
“It ain’t locked,” he whispers, almost to himself.
He kicks the door open. In my mind, the door’s creak could make a nest of birds take flight. But inside the house, it’s as quiet as a lamb. I close my eyes to listen, to hope we ain’t the lambs on the way to slaughter.
Light casts in through the windows, motes drifting in the sun’s rays. The farmhouse is sparse, just as I remembered it, most everything crafted from wood. A table, some chairs, a wall of shelving. The last will be perfect to collect books. It’s been too long since I’ve tucked my legs under me and read for hours, without looking over the page ’cause a sound stirs me out of the novel’s world.
Clyde sets me down by the door, and it’s understood by his wide eyes I’m to stay right here. ’Cept first he grabs me by either hip and scoots me to the left so I’m not in the open doorway. I hold the gun against my outer thigh; it ready, yet hidden.
Clyde pulls his own pistol from the band of his pants and pokes his head into the kitchen at the back of the house, which is hardly more than a stove. Then he walks down the long hall, kicking open doors, four rooms in all by the sound of it. I wonder if, years from now, we could turn the smallest of those rooms into a washroom, if plumbing ever comes out this far. Electricity, too.
Fortunately, by now, I know a thing or two ’bout not having either of those. I shift my weight, putting more on my mangled side, and I realize I don’t feel as wobbly.
“Bonnie.”
I nearly topple over. “Heavens, Henry, you scared me.”
“Didn’t mean to give ya the jeepers-creepers.”
I laugh, then call, “Clyde, Henry’s here.”
He strides out, trying to appear causal-like with his gun not fully gripped at his side. But I know Clyde, I know he rivals Jesse James with the quickness he could sling a gun.
“There you are, lad.” Clyde grins. “Sense any heat on your way out to these parts?”
“None my way.”
Clyde nods. “Well, let’s get this done. What ya need from us to even up?”
Henry holds up his hand. On a ring dangling from his finger is a key. “You’ll need this and that should do it from me.”
“No payment?”
“My father said he don’t want your money. He’s got a deed for ya, says it’s up to you how to get your name on it.”
Clyde nods. I’d put money on Clyde getting in touch with Pretty Boy Floyd to “legally” change our names. That ain’t something I ever thought ’bout, but what’s it matter to me if a paper has something on it other than my own name? Buster’s real name is Hubert, after all. Billie’s is Billie Jean, but we ain’t ever use the whole thing. Maybe officially, I’ll go by Elizabeth, my middle name.
And unofficially, I’m Bonnie. To all those reading the papers, I’m half of “Bonnie and Clyde,” who after twenty-seven months of outrunning the law, secretly got a place to call our own. My daddy was a bricklayer, so he never had a reason to step onto a farm, but he’d like it here. He would’ve.
Now with the key in Clyde’s hand, Henry looks ready to be on his way, all his weight on his heels. “Where will you go?” I ask him. “Somewhere safe, I hope?”
“I’ve got someone looking out for me,” he says. His weight’s so far back, he may fall right over.
Clyde nods. “I’m glad for that.”
Henry takes a step back, out on the porch. “Should be on my way.” He’s down our steps in a flash, striding to an old pickup truck. “My father said Wednesday works if ya want to get that deed.”
My voice is singsong as I say, “Wednesday it is.”
Clyde wraps his arm ’round my shoulder as the blue truck, mostly rusted, thumps over the grass toward the gravel road. He snorts. “Methvin won’t make it far in that beater.”
“It’s no Ford,” I say cheekily.
In response, Clyde’s got me dangling over his shoulder, and he’s barreling through the house to the main bedroom. I’ve never had a dress come off so quickly. Before I know it, I’m on my back, shoes still on.
Then, Clyde takes his time, his eyes scouring all of me. I kick off one shoe, then the other, my skin practically begging to be touched by this boy. But first, I think, freeze.
The lust in his eyes, the fullness of his bottom lip, the way a strand of hair falls free. How I fist my hands into the sheets in anticipation. I want to remember Clyde—and us—this way, always.
He lowers himself on top of me in our new bedroom, in our new house, in our new life, and my heart may burst with happiness and relief.
35
Our first night, Clyde runs down the hall in his bare feet and out onto the porch. He comes back pressing on his eyes and with a mouthful of how he thought he heard something. Monday night, he does it a second time.
Tuesday night, though, we sleep straight. I wake, splayed out like a child, on a bed fitted with the sheets we purchased the other day. In days, ever since Clyde got us an armful of food from a nearby café, we haven’t ventured beyond the necessities of the water pump and the outbuilding. We’ve been content to spend our time within our four walls. I sat by the windows, daydreaming, but most of my hours have been spent in Clyde’s arms. It’s almost as if the last few years of runnin’ caught up with us all at once, and all we could manage was laying ’round.
Not today, though. Today we get ourselves clean, put on fresh clothes—a red dress with matching shoes for me—and get our butts into our car. We’ve got a deed waiting for us.
Before he turns the key in the ignition, Clyde chuckles to himself and loosens his tie. “I’m a farmer now, no need for this ol’ thing.” With that, he drapes it over the rearview mirror. “But,” he says, “Bonnie, pull up your dress and stretch out your leg.”
I raise a brow.
A dimple pops out. “I ain’t being fresh, though the thought’s crossing my mind now.”
Slowly, ’cause I ain’t sure what this boy’s up to, I do as he says, even if I struggle on account of the lack of room.
Clyde goes and presses a revolver against my inner thigh. He tapes it there, wrapping the white adhesive ’round and ’round.
I’m shaking my head. “What’d you do that for?”
“I don’t want Mr. Methvin seeing me with a gun. Good faith, like with Henry. But I’d like you to have one close by.”
I frown. “If we’re going to put all of this behind us, we should start acting like it’s behind us.”
“We will, as soon as I’ve got that deed in my hand.”
I smile at that and put on sunglasses. My arm dangles out the car. The air feels good as we get going; the day’s sure to be a hot one. I turn my hand forward and back, letting the breeze dance over my skin. “Say, when we going to get word to our families?”
“Before the bairn comes,” Clyde says. “I’d like Billie out here to help with that. Both mas, too.”
My smile grows. “I like that you’ve thoug
ht ’bout that.”
“I’ve been thinkin’ ’bout other stuff, too.”
“Like?” I prod.
“Like the last verse of our song. Don’t got that guitar yet, but I imagined the chords and how it all could go.”
“Like?”
We transition from the grass to the gravel. The main road—and by main I mean backcountry—ain’t too far off now, ’round a bend and over a hill. We’re tucked back far, real far, with only a rusted mailbox with COLE written on its side marking the start of our drive. And with the trees on either side, even that could easily be missed.
Clyde clears his throat, all dramatic-like, and my heart swells. “Thought the first line could go something like, There’ll be a time, this day, tomorrow or the one after … Where they stand up, chin out, ready to say their wrongs.”
Already, I imagine a dark melody, even more so when he sings, “Death’ll see his chance, his moment, cackling with laughter … And they’ll say, here we are, shouting it out, singing their song … Of love and loss and ups and downs, a life with one eye open … Ohh”—he draws out the word, his hazel eyes leaving the road to lock on mine, then dropping to my belly—“Oh, oh, oh, don’t be a fool, these footsteps ain’t for you.”
He swallows, and in a soft voice, I say, “I ain’t sure if that’s beautiful or horrifying. Do you think they’re going to find us, Clyde? That why you sang that?”
“All I know is, I’ve got a lot to answer for, either in this life or the next. But the life that got us here”—Clyde licks his lips—“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. It ain’t one for our li’l one to follow.”
I shake my head, knowing I’ll wish on every falling star I see that things are different from here on out. We turn onto that so-called main road and Clyde takes my hand. “But, Bonnie, I’ve said it before and I’ll sing it again … How the story ends, no one knows … But one thing’s clear, you’ll see … Bonnie and Clyde, meant to be, alive and free.” He smiles. “I don’t see any prison bars ’round us. There won’t ever be.”
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