by Kym Brunner
He checks the mirrors, switches lanes. “Was a big mistake, that’s all. One that haunts me to this day.”
My brain screams LIAR, but I keep it to myself. “A mistake? Ordering the wrong flavor of ice cream is a mistake. Killing a cop is intentional.” I might be gullible, but I’m not stupid.
“It hurts me to hear you say that, but honest to God, it was a misunderstanding. When I yelled, ‘take him,’ on that hot spring day, I meant that Henry should grab the officer closest to him so we could kidnap him. I did that a lot—kidnap, not kill. But that dumb cluck Henry thought I meant to kill the cop nearest him, so’s he did.” He shifts in his seat uneasily. “Left me no choice but to shoot mine, too.” He looks over at me, his eyes filled with pain. “Wish you could see it for yourself.”
Do it! Touch them slugs and I’ll show you!
No! I don’t want to see cops being killed.
Yes, you do. I can read your mind, remember? You’re dying to find out if he’s lying, so go on, touch them. I’ll remember that day and you watch it. Then you can judge for yourself.
I take a deep breath. There’s no denying she’s right about my being curious, but it’d be wrong to watch something so terrible. Still… I peek into my purse and unzip the side pocket. For a panicked couple of seconds, I don’t see anything in the blackness of my purse.
I’m just checking that the slugs are there, Bonnie. I’m not trying to see what happened.
Oh, okay. You do that. Meanwhile I’ll think about the time I ordered a vanilla ice cream cone instead of chocolate. I mean, since you don’t want to know and all.
Damn you, Bonnie. Okay fine, yes. I want to see what happened that day.
“I’m going to close my eyes a second,” I tell Clyde. “I’ve got a bit of a headache.”
My, my. For all the times you accuse Clyde and me of being liars, turns out you’re a pretty good one, too.
Just do it already.
I close my eyes, discreetly reaching into the side pocket. The moment my flesh touches the metal, an image of an old-fashioned car with enormous fenders and a flat right front passenger tire fills my vision. I’m sitting on the grassy shoulder next to the car, wearing a red, calf-length dress. A big white bunny is on the ground next to me, munching on a blade of grass. I reach out and pet him. “Eat all you can, Sonny Boy. Next stop is who knows when.” I shield my eyes from the sun, looking at a man with his back to me who squats alongside the car, a tire iron on the ground by his feet.
The rumbling of motorcycles makes me look down the road. Seconds later, two uniformed policemen appear, their gas tanks painted with the words “Texas Highway Patrol.” I can’t hear what they say over the rumbling of the motors, but one of the patrolmen points at the tire. The owner of the car finally stands and wipes his brow with his forearm. I instantly recognize the greased-back hair and suspenders as those belonging to Clyde. He animatedly goes through the motions of driving and pulling over, apparently telling how the tire blew. He smiles warmly, looking like an average guy who got stuck having to fix a flat.
Clyde shakes his head no, refusing the patrolmen’s offer of assistance but they insist, parking their motorbikes ten feet ahead of the car. As they’re both removing their helmets, Clyde grabs something off the front seat and turns to speak to someone in the back seat, who I hadn’t noticed before. I pull Sonny Boy onto my lap and squint into the car. A badass but completely gorgeous teenage guy nods in response to whatever Clyde told him, before leaning down and grabbing something by his feet. I glimpse the end of a rifle for a split-second before it disappears below the window level.
My stomach lurches. I don’t want to watch, but I don’t want to miss it, either. I need to know if what Clyde was saying was true, or if history had it all wrong.
As the police officers approach, Clyde raises a hand in greeting. “While it’s awful nice of you to stop, I’m sure you have more important business that needs tending to. I can change this flat in no time.”
The shorter officer replies, “Horsefeathers! We’re happy to lend a hand.” He wipes his forehead with a handkerchief, while the other policeman—the taller, older of the two—strolls toward the car, definitely trying to sneak a peek at the inside. I’m halfway to my feet, Sonny Boy clutched in my arms, yelling, “Excuse me, Officer!” but he doesn’t look my way. Instead, he continues to creep forward until he’s only a foot away from popping his head into the back seat. I’m untangling my skirt from my legs, trying to hustle over and distract the cop, when Clyde yells, “Take him, Henry!” Gunshots from an automatic rifle ring out and I scream. The tall policeman falls to his knees not five feet from me, struck in the throat. The younger one ducks, reaching for his gun. He’s too late. “That ain’t what I meant!” Clyde yells, pulling out a small handgun he had concealed in his pocket and opening fire. The cop clutches his chest, landing in the first officer’s pool of blood. Clyde yells, “Clear out—now!” I step around the two cops—the live one sucking air, groaning in pain. Clyde pulls the car up five feet and I jump into the front seat. The moment I slam the car door, my grip on the slugs relaxes and the image stops.
Oh. My. God.
But you see now what Clyde was telling you? Stupid lug Henry pumped the nosy cop full of lead, so Clyde had no choice but to off the other bleeding heart copper.
What a heartless thing to say, Bonnie, I tell her as I open my eyes. I hold a hand over my own heart, trying to catch my breath. What a horrible, horrible day that was.
“Feeling better already, Twinkle?” He looks down at the dashboard. “We’re almost on empty so we’ll need to fill up pretty soon. Grab us some supper too, while we’re at it. That ought to make you right as rain.”
Although my stomach growls in hunger, I’m a bit queasy after what I witnessed. “Sure, but we need to be quick.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, sister.” He points to a blue highway sign advertising restaurants and gas stations that are coming up at the next exit. He licks his lips. “I sure got me a mighty hankering for fried chicken.”
“Okay by me,” I reply, not that he’s asked my opinion. About anything, since we started. I hate how I’ve become so accustomed to Clyde’s rules that I’ve fallen into an almost comfortable rhythm with this dead bandit. At least he’s not racing off to rob another bank or trying to kill me. As long as I’m cooperative, I’m hoping I can come out of this alive.
Of course, if Jack were in control of his own body right now, he’d probably start yelling at me for threatening him with that wrench. He probably wouldn’t even give me a chance to explain that I only did it to save our lives. As the prairie landscape whisks past me, part of me begins to worry why Jack hasn’t switched back in over four hours. Is it because Clyde is stronger-minded than Jack? The thought saddens me. I need to test the Clydehopper theory soon to see if it brings Jack back. A shiver of fear runs up my back. Before it’s too late to bring him back at all.
“I miss my brother Buck,” Clyde says, seemingly out of nowhere. He doesn’t bother with a turn signal as he speeds toward the off-ramp. “Fried chicken got him killed.”
“Seriously?” I half-expect him to laugh and say I’m as dumb as a cow if I believed that. But when I look at him, I notice his lips are pressed together tightly and his shoulders sag.
Clyde nods. “Every time we’d get a bit of cash and hole up somewhere, I’d want fried chicken.” His lips curve up in a sad smile. “Buck joked that I had cravings worse than a pregnant woman.” He glances at me and I smile back awkwardly, knowing the story is going to eventually take a bad turn. “Anyway, Buck or his wife Blanche would sneak out and order us six fried chicken dinners to go. Bonnie and I stayed back because our pictures were in the papers an awful lot. Turns out the cops was onto how much I fancied chicken.”
“Why? What happened?” Anxiety builds in my chest, afraid to hear the rest.
He shrugs, his voice quieter now. “We was staying at the Red Crown Hotel that night, in Missouri. We ordered our meals from t
he tavern the hotel owned. I’d gotten us a bottle of some fine bourbon too, so we could all relax and have a good time. Twenty minutes later, right when we was all in the middle of supper, bullets came straight through the walls from a hundred different directions. The chicken leg I was eating got shot right out my hand.”
“That was close.” I wipe my sweaty palms on my skirt.
“Yeah, I got lucky that day, but can’t say the same for Buck. When we got up to make a run for it, he got a bullet in the side of his head. Right here.” His voice catches as he points to the spot above his ear and he quickly clears his throat.
I clutch my neck, imagining the scene. “How horrible!”
Clyde nods, his knuckles white as he grips the steering wheel. “Yeah, but that ain’t the worst of it. The bullet didn’t kill him. Somehow we managed to escape, even with Buck’s head bleeding like a faucet and Blanche blinded from glass splinters. I drove out of that two-horse town like a madman, speeding so fast and taking crazy turns up on two wheels, making the cops suck my exhaust.”
And Jack couldn’t even hotwire a car.
Your fella is kind of prissy, ain’t he?
He isn’t my fella, but yeah.
I shake Bonnie from my mind. “Then what did you do? Did you get away?”
“Yeah. I got a bunch of medical supplies from a pharmacy, then Bonnie spent three days tending to them while I drove. Blanche kept wailing about not being able to see, but Buck? He never complained. We ended up camping out in the car, sleeping in the woods. I’d pour rubbing alcohol into Buck’s bullet hole and change his bandages three times a day, but it was no use. The wound started smelling bad. Oozing lots of yellow gunk too. Watching him die nearly killed me at the same time.” As we stop for a traffic light, he opens his window and spits. “You know what? I lost my taste for chicken. Let’s get something else.”
“I lost my taste for eating, period.” I hold my arm over my stomach.
The horrendous scene Clyde has described leaves me shaken. Even though I know he and his gang did terrible things to other people and they deserved major payback, I can’t bring myself to feel any enjoyment in the idea that he witnessed his brother’s grisly death. “I’m sorry about your brother. Sounds like you two were real close—like how I was with my mom. Seeing someone you love die…”
I can’t finish my sentence. Images of my mom lying in the hospital bed, weak with cancer, whir through my mind—her skin a ghastly white, an oxygen tube up her nose, fluids attached to a post dripping into an IV. A crushing pain hits my chest as I fight not to relive that emotionally crushing last day. Stop it! I tell myself. Stop right now! You’ve put this behind you now. Don’t open this wound—you don’t know how deep it goes.
But I can’t stop. I remember her asking how I was feeling when I should’ve been the one asking her! How lame was that? She was the one dying, not me! The pain rushes back like a runaway freight train. A small whimper escapes my lips. I love you, Mom. I’m so sorry I wasn’t a better listener in the end. I miss you every single day.
“Thinking about your ma?” Clyde asks quietly, as if he, too, can read my mind.
I glance over, his eyes filled with concern. Which is exactly what I didn’t need. I put both feet up on the dashboard, barefoot now from the four-hour drive. “Yeah, she was sick for a long time,” I tell him, shrugging, trying to swallow the guilt in my throat. “Breast cancer. I was fifteen.” I think about my dad then, knowing how much pain he went through, too. How he tried to help me and my sisters, but all of us were so lost without Mom, we had to grieve in our own ways.
He clucks his tongue, shakes his head. “Sad you lost your mama so young. That’s the worst pain a child can have. I loved my mother with all my heart. I can’t imagine—”
“Stop,” I manage to squeak out, despite the huge lump in my throat.
He continues as if he doesn’t hear me, “—how awful that must have been for a young girl to lose her mama at the age she needs her most. I’m really sorry, Twinkle.”
And that’s it. His kindness punctures a hole into some forbidden fragile boundary I never knew existed, the place I’ve kept my emotions stockpiled so as not to have to visit them again. “Thanks.” A whimper escapes my lips, so I do my best to turn it into a cough.
“Aw, girl. Let it out. Tell me what happened,” he says gently, causing more stress fractures in my Wall of Denial.
Leaks threaten to sprout everywhere. I bite my lip to keep from crying. Because once this wall comes down, I don’t know what will happen. The car slows, pulls to a stop. I look up and see that we’re on a residential street, out of the glaring beams of the streetlight. The oxygen in the car escapes a moment later, making me fight for each breath. “What are—gulp—you doing?”
“Shh. Nothing.” Seconds later, he unbuckles his seat belt and faces me. “Just taking a little break is all.”
I shake my head violently. “No—gulp—we have no time.” My chest tight with pain, I know now I’m facing a full-out anxiety attack—the kind that sent my dad rushing me to the hospital. I need to relax so I can breathe.
“I ain’t moving ’til you’re better, Twinkle.” He reaches out and pushes my hair away from my face in one quick motion, apparently catching Bonnie off-guard because she stays silent.
His one tiny gesture of kindness detonates that wall. Two years of bottled-up sadness erupt from me and tears spring from my eyes. I wipe them on the inside of my shirt—first my right eye, then my left—and then when it seems impossible to keep up, I close my eyes and sob loudly, keeping my shirt up over my eyes so Clyde can’t see what an ugly psychotic crybaby I am.
I’m dying to tell him that I’m fine, that I’m always fine. That I am not a girl who cries. Which is ridiculous, given that I’m crying my guts out and can’t stop.
“My sweet, sweet girl. Look at me,” he whispers, tugging gently at my lacy shirt sleeve. When Bonnie doesn’t call out to him, it makes me wonder if it’s skin-to-skin contact that lets her speak aloud. I look into his eyes and he says, “I’m here, kitten. Tell me all about it.”
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, tramp!
I ignore Bonnie, taking several deep breaths, at last relaxing into a hiccupping mess. My lungs open and I can breathe. I begin my story by describing in aching detail how much I loved my mom. How funny, pretty, and smart she was. How she loved me unconditionally and was always there for me. And finally, how the nasty disease withered her up into a shriveled bony nothing, yet she never complained—exactly like his brother Buck.
He listens, nodding, occasionally murmuring some consoling words. I apologize for my breakdown, explaining that I’ve kept those emotions locked inside of me ever since her death. He relays the story about his own mother then, how she fretted over him, begging him to go straight but always “happier than a sheared sheep in July” to see him whenever he could arrange it. I smile at his crazy expressions, stupidly amazed at how much he loved his mom too. I guess we do have more in common than I thought. That’s when it hits me. What the hell am I doing? Spilling my guts and delaying our trip is the last thing I should be doing.
I pull it together. What troubles me most of all is that riding on top of the wave of emotions is something bigger, something scarier than grief—affection. I take a final, deep breath and with it, the horrible pain in my chest leaves, purged from my body. “Thanks, Clyde. I had no idea how much was bottled up inside of me.” I smile at him. “I’m better now. We should go.”
“We should, but not just yet,” he says, sliding closer to me. “Something I have to do first.”
I look at his eyes filled with such warmth for me. Every cell in my body wants me to grab on to him and kiss him, but I know that the moment his skin touches mine, Bonnie will blab my plan to complete a ritual to get rid of him at the deadline. That plan is my ace in the hole, the one secret I still have that’s safe. “Clyde—don’t,” I warn, pressing my shoulder up against the window, fumbling for the handle. If he touches me, I’m jumping
out of the car.
“Just trust me, okay?” He unbuckles my seat belt, his hand brushing ever so softly against my thigh, sending an electric current zipping through my body. Wanting to kiss him is wrong on so many levels. And yet I do.
“I-I’m sorry. I can’t.” I finally look down to physically see the handle, which is all the time Clyde needs to move in even closer. He wraps his arms around me and pulls me tight to his chest. My internal alarm goes into panic mode. I squirm to get free, but he’s too strong.
Bonnie blurts out, “Clyde! Tell her it’s me you want. I need to hear you say it!”
Instead of replying, Clyde gently kisses the top of my head, then my cheek, and finally tilts my face toward his. He wipes the last bit of my tears with his thumbs. “I don’t rightly know how to say this, but I’ve really taken a shine to you.” He gazes at me, his golden eyes melting into mine. “Every second I’m with you, I like you even more.”
My heart beats out of control. Is he talking to me or to Bonnie? I stop fighting and listen.
A small grin appears on his lips. “I love how you laugh, how you’re so smart, even how you’re not afraid to speak your mind. Even though I was raised to believe that a woman needs to mind what her man tells her to do, I’m coming around to the idea that it’s better when we’re true partners. So while I’m hungering for a kiss, it’s only worth it if you want to kiss me back.”
My heart races full-speed, along with my emotions. Everything about the idea of a partnership between us is wrong. When I open my mouth to tell him that, despite his sweet declaration, I absolutely should not—cannot—kiss him, Bonnie’s shrill voice butts in. “Who are you talking to, Chestnut? Me or this two-bit hussy? Because if you think—”
Gazing into Clyde’s eyes, I see his pained expression as he ignores Bonnie and waits for my answer. Even though he has all of my invariables, including being insanely handsome, I tell myself that I’m going to kiss him solely to guarantee my future. Knowing that I’m probably sealing my destiny to go to Limbo for a very long time, I nod. Clyde’s face relaxes into a warm smile and he covers my lips with his, pulling me into a passionate kiss, and best of all, drowning out Bonnie’s whiny pleas.
