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A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde
A Short Story
James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster
New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi
Chapter
1
IT WAS THE year none of the seasons followed their own dictates. The days were warm and the air hard to breathe without a kerchief, and the nights cold and damp, the wet burlap we nailed over the windows stiff with grit that blew in clouds out of the west amid sounds like a train grinding across the prairie. The moon was orange, or sometimes brown, as big as a planet, the way it is at harvest time, and the sun never more than a smudge, like a lightbulb flickering in the socket or a lucifer match burning inside its own smoke. In better times, our family would have been sitting together on the porch, in wicker chairs or on the glider, with glasses of lemonade and bowls of peach ice cream.
My father was looking for work on a pipeline in East Texas. Maybe he would come back one day. Or maybe not. Back then, people had a way of walking down a tar road and crossing through a pool of heat and disappearing forever. I ascribed the signs of my mother’s mental deterioration to my father’s absence and his difficulties with alcohol. She wore out the rug in her bedroom walking in circles, squeezing her nails into the heels of her hands, talking to herself, her eyes watery with levels of fear and confusion that nobody could dispel. Ordinary people no longer visited our home.
As a lawman, Grandfather had gone up against the likes of Bill Dalton and John Wesley Hardin, and in 1916, with a group of rogue Texas Rangers, he had helped ambush a train loaded with Pancho Villa’s soldiers. The point is, he wasn’t given to studying on the complexities of mental illness. That didn’t mean he was an ill-natured or entirely uncharitable man, just one who seemed to have a hole in his thinking. He had not been a good father to his children. Through either selfishness or ineptitude, he often left them to their own devices, even when they foundered on the wayside. I had never understood this obvious character defect in him. I sometimes wondered if the blood he had shed had made him incapable of love.
He hid behind flippancy and cynicism. He rated all politicians “somewhere between mediocre and piss-poor.” His first wife had “a face that could make a freight train turn on a dirt road.” WPA stood for We Piddle Around. If he hadn’t been a Christian, he would have fired the hired help (we no longer had any) and “replaced them with sloths.” The local banker had a big nose because the air was free. Who was my grandfather in actuality? I didn’t have a clue.
It was right at sunset when I looked through the back screen and saw a black automobile, coated with dust and shaped like a shoe box, detour off the road and drive into the woods behind our house. A man wearing a fedora and a white shirt without a tie got out and urinated in front of the headlights. I thought I could hear laughter inside the car. While he relieved himself, he removed his fedora and combed his hair. It was wavy and thick and brown and shiny as polished walnut. His trousers were notched tightly into his ribs, and his cheeks looked like they had been rubbed with soot. These were not uncommon characteristics in the men who drifted here and yon through the American West during the first administration of President Roosevelt.
“Some people must have wandered off the highway onto our road,” I said. “The driver is taking a leak in front of his headlights. His passengers seem to be enjoying themselves.”
Grandfather was sitting at the kitchen table, an encyclopedia open in front of him, his reading glasses on his nose. “He deliberately stood in front of his headlights to make water, so others could watch?”
“I can’t speak with authority about his thought process, since I’m not inside the man’s head,” I replied. I picked up the German binoculars my uncle had brought back from the trenches and focused them on the car. “There’s a woman in the front seat. A second man and another woman are in back. They’re passing a bottle around.”
“Are they wets?”
I removed the binoculars from my eyes. “If wets drive four-door cars.”
“My first wife had a sense of humor like yours. The only time I ever saw her laugh was when she realized I’d developed shingles.”
I focused the binoculars back on the driver. I thought I had seen his face before. I heard Grandfather get up heavily from his chair. He was over six and a half feet tall, and his ankles were swollen from hypertension and caused him to sway back and forth, as though he were on board a ship. Sometimes he used a walking cane, sometimes not. One day he seemed to teeter on the edge of eternity; the next day he was ready to resume his old habits down at the saloon. He had gin roses in his cheeks and skin like a baby’s and narrow eyes that were the palest blue I had ever seen. Sometimes his eyes did not go with his face or his voice; the intense light in them could make other men glance away. “Let’s take a walk, Satchel Ass,” he said.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that name.”
“You’ve got a butt on you like a washtub.”
“There’s a bullet hole in the rear window of the car,” I said, looking through the binoculars again. “My butt doesn’t resemble a washtub. I don’t like you talking to me like that, Grandfather.”
“Wide butts and big hips run in the Holland family. That’s just something to keep in mind as you get older. It’s a family trait, not an insult. Would you marry a woman who looks like a sack of Irish potatoes?”
He pulled open a kitchen drawer and removed a holstered revolver that was wrapped with the belt, the loops stuffed with brass shells. The revolver was the dull color of an old Buffalo nickel. It had been converted long ago for cartridges, but the black-powder tamping rod was still in place, fitted with a working hinge under the barrel. The top of the holster had been worn smooth and yellow along the edges of the leather. Six tiny notches had been filed along the base of the revolver’s grips. Grandfather hung the belt from his shoulder and put on his Stetson. The brim was wilted, the crown sweat-stained a dark gray above the brim. He went out the screen door into the waning twilight.
The windmill was ginning furiously, the stanchions trembling with energy, a thread of water coming from the spout, the tank crusted with dirt and dead insects and animal hair along the rims. “The moon looks like it was dipped in a teacup. I cain’t believe how we used to take the rain for granted,” he said. “I think this land must be cursed.”
The air smelled of ash and dust and creosote and horse and cow manure that feathered in your hand if you picked it up. Dry lightning leaped through the heavens and died, like somebody removing an oil lamp from the window of a darkened house. I thought I felt thunder course through the ground under my shoes. “Feel that?” I said, hoping to change Grandfather’s mood and my own.
“Don’t get your hopes up. That’s the Katy blowing down the line,” he replied. “I’m sorry I made fun of your butt, Satch. I won’t do it no more. Walk behind me till we know who’s in that car.”
As we approached the tree line, the driver of the car walked out of the headlights and stood silhouetted against the glare, then got back in his car and started the engine and clanked the transmission into gear. The trees were so dry they made a sound like paper rustling when the wind blew through the canopy.
“Hold up there,” Grandfather said to the man.
“You’re on my property,” Grandfather said.
“I thought this was public woods,” the driver said. “If there’s a posted sign that says otherwise, I didn’t see it.”
The woman next to him was pretty and had strawberry-blond hair and a beret tilted over one eye. She looked like a happy country girl, the kind who works in a dime store or in a café where the truckers come in to make innocent talk. She leaned forward and grinned up into Grandfather’s face. She silently mouthed the words “We’re sorry.”
“Did you know you have mud on your license tag?” Grandfather asked the driver.
“I’ll get right on that,” the driver said.
“You also have what appears to be a bullet hole in your back window.”
The driver removed a marble from the ashtray in the dashboard and held it against the light. “I found this on the backseat. It was probably a kid with a slingshot,” he said. “I saw a kid up on the train trestle with one. You a lawman?”
“I’m a rancher. The name is Hackberry Holland. You didn’t give me yours.”
“Smith,” the driver said.
“If you’ll tell me your destination, Mr. Smith, maybe I can he’p you find your way.”
“Lubbock. Or anyplace there’s work. I work on automotives, mostly. Is that an antique firearm?”
“A forty-four Army Colt. Most of the time I use it for a paperweight. You know automobiles, do you?”
“Yes, sir, you could say that. I see automobiles as the future of the country. Henry Ford and me.”
“Turn left at the paved road and stay due west,” Grandfather said. “If you see the Pacific Ocean, that means you passed Lubbock.”
The man in the backseat rolled down the glass. He was short and not over 120 pounds and wore a suit and tie and a short-brim hat cocked on his brow the way a dandy might. He had a long face, like a horse’s hanging out of a stall. He also had the kind of lopsided grin you see on stupid people who think they’re smarter than you. His breath was as rank as a barrel of spoiled fruit. “My name is Raymond. This here is my girlfriend, Miss Mary,” he said. “We’re pleased to make y’all’s acquaintance.”
The woman sitting next to him had a cleft chin and a broad forehead and a small mean-spirited Irish mouth; her face was sunken in the middle, like soft wax. She was smoking a cigarette, gazing into the smoke.
“There’s a busted spar in my cattle guard,” Grandfather said. “Don’t pop a tire going out. I’d appreciate you not throwing that whiskey bottle in my trees, either.”
“Tidy is as tidy does,” Raymond said.
Grandfather rested one hand on the bottom of the window. He let his eyes roam over Raymond’s face before he spoke. “The man who kills you will rip out your throat before you ever know what hit you,” he said. “I’m not talking about myself, just somebody you might meet up the road, the kind of fellow who turns out to be the worst misjudgment you ever made.”
“We apologize, sir,” said the woman in front, leaning across the driver so Grandfather could see her expression more clearly. Her smile made me think of somebody opening a music box. “We didn’t mean to bother y’all. You have a mighty nice spot here. Thank you for being so gracious and kind.”
“No harm done,” Grandfather said.
I wanted her to say something to me, but her gaze stayed fixed on Grandfather.
The driver slowly accelerated the car, a nimbus of brown dust rising from the wax job, our visitors’ silhouettes framed against the headlights. There was a long bright-silver scratch on the left fender. After they were gone, I could feel Grandfather’s eyes on me, like he was about to give me a quiz to see how dumb I was at that particular moment. “What are you studying on, Satch?” he said.
“The car and the way they treat it don’t fit. You think they’re bank robbers?”
“If you haven’t heard, there’s no money in the bank to rob. Or in the general store. Or in the bubblegum machine at the filling station. Where in the name of suffering Jesus have you been, boy?”
I picked up a rock and threw it in a high arc and heard it clatter through the trees. “Why do you have to make light of everything I say?”
“Because you take the world too seriously. Let’s go see what your mother is doing. I bought some peach ice cream this afternoon. That’s always her favorite.”
“I heard you talking on the phone to the doctor,” I said. Suddenly you could hear the crickets in the dark, the whistle of the Katy beyond the horizon. The dust clogged my nostrils and throat. “You’re fixing to send her for electroshock treatments, aren’t you.”
“The doctor raised that possibility.”
“They use electroshock when they don’t know what else to do. I think the doctor is an ignorant man. In addition, he’s stupid and thinks meanness and intelligence are the same thing.”
“He says electroshock is the most modern treatment for what ails her. It’s done in a hospital. She’ll have the best of care there. It could be worse. Sometimes they push a steel probe into the brain.”
“On the subject of care, I wonder why nobody gave her any when she was a little girl and had to fend for herself.”
“You’re developing a hard edge, Weldon. It’s not in your nature. It’ll eat up your youth and rob you of the wisdom that should come with manhood.”
I hate you, I thought.
“Tell me something,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Do you ever think about forgiveness?”
“For you, Grandfather? No, I don’t. If you’ve ever sought forgiveness for anything, I’ve yet to see the instance.”
“I’m talking about forgiveness for all of us.”
“Are you going to call the sheriff about the people in the car?”
“They’re not our business. If they come back, that’s another matter.”
“The woman in the front seat caught your eye,” I said.
“All women do. That’s the way things work. That’s why preachers are always railing about sex. It’s here for the long haul.”
I could not take my grandfather’s proselytizing. “A stranger with a sweet smile is the light of the world, but your own daughter doesn’t mean diddly squat on a rock.”
I instantly regretted the harshness of my words. He walked ahead of me, the holstered revolver swinging back and forth under his arm, the windmill blades rattling in the wind. When we entered the house, my mother was eating from the carton of ice cream Grandfather had bought, and cleaning the spoon with her hair.
WHEN MY MOTHER’S spells first began, she told us she had dreams she could not remember, but she was convinced they contained information of vast importance. Behind her eyes, you could see her drawing a rake through her thoughts, as though on the verge of discovering the source of all her unhappiness. Her early hours seemed to be neither good nor bad; she said morning was a yellow room that sometimes had a sunny window in it. But after three P.M., when the sun began to move irrevocably toward the horizon, a chemical transformation seemed to take place inside her head. Her eyes would become haunted, darting at the row of poplars on the side lawn, as though a specter were beckoning to her from the shade.
“What’s wrong, Emma Jean?” my father said the first time it happened.
“You don’t hear them?” she replied.
“Hear who?”
“The whisperers. They’re over there, by the garden wall.”
“Look at me. I’m your husband, the man who loves you. There is no one else in the yard except you and me and Weldon.”
My mother went silent, seeming to believe now more than ever that we were her enemies, and she could not understand the poisonous vapor that awaited her every afternoon when the sun became a red wafer inside the dust clouds rising in the west.
After
Grandfather and I returned to the house, I washed my mother’s hair in the upstairs bathroom and dried it with the electric fan, lifting it off her neck and eyes. When I finished, she got up from the chair and dropped her bathrobe to the floor in front of the closet mirror, staring at the flatness of her hips against her slip. She began tying a string around her waist, the way colored women do to keep their slip from hanging below the hem of their dress.
“Mother, I’m in the room,” I said.
My words didn’t seem to register. “I’ve lost so much weight,” she said. “Do you think I look all right? Did those people in the automobile come here in regard to your father?”
“Why would they be here about him?”
“He might have found work and sent word.”
“I think they were drunk and got lost.”
I went downstairs and set up our checkerboard on a folding bridge table we kept behind the couch. My mother loved to play checkers, and while she played, she smiled as though allowing herself a brief vacation from the emotional depression that consumed her life. Her hair had been dark blond when she was younger; it had turned brown with streaks of gray. She still bathed every day but no longer wore makeup or cut her fingernails. I believed that if I did not take my mother away from this house, away from the doctors who planned to kill thousands of her brain cells, she would end up a vegetable in the state asylum outside Wichita Falls.
“Mother, what if you and I left here and went out on our own?” I said.
“Where would we go?” she said, staring down at the red and black squares on the checkerboard.
“Maybe Galveston or Brownsville, where the air is fresh and full of salt from the waves crashing on the beach. There’s no dust there’bouts. I could get a job.”
“People are coming to take me away, aren’t they.”
Through the kitchen door, I could see Grandfather reading his encyclopedia, which he did every day, one volume after the next. Behind him, out in the darkness, fireflies were lighting in the trees like sparks rising off a stump fire. I tried to think but couldn’t. “We have to fight them, Mother,” I said. “The doctors are not our friends. I wish they had rubber gags put in their mouths and their own machines were turned against them.”
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