Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  Bonnie, playing messenger, drove alone the final stretch to the cluster of prison buildings. Her hands trembled on the wheel when she spotted the men in black and white, bunched in the fields like exotic herds, their mounted keepers balancing rifles crosswise on the pommels of their saddles. She passed a plot of slender headstones, arranged in rows, residue of lost men.

  “First time?”

  She delivered her lie: she was visiting her cousin. Their grandmother had taken ill; he’d want to know. She’d not intended for her voice to tremble, but it served to elicit sympathy. The guard wished the old lady well.

  Aubrey Scalley, a trusty privileged to meet visitors unsupervised, turned out to be so slight that his striped trousers gathered in folds around his waist. His thin hair had receded well back from his delicate forehead, and his narrow jaw had crowded his front teeth into a mess of overlapping angles. Despite his physical disadvantages, he carried himself with an easy, open confidence. His gaze was neither pushing nor ducking but purely patient as he waited for whatever she’d brought him.

  “Bud sent me,” she said. Clyde had told her that Aubrey would know that name.

  “Yer his sweetheart?”

  She nodded, the old-fashioned term rendering her shy. “He’s planning a party. Probably next month.”

  Aubrey shook his head. “He ain’t be needing to trouble himself for me. It ain’t hurt me none to get that one-way ticket chalked to my account.”

  Nonplussed, but embarrassed to admit she was unaware of a context he assumed a sweetheart would know, she said, “It’s no trouble.” As if the scheme were, indeed, only a party. “He wants to do it.”

  Scalley nodded sagely. “I know. He wants to scorch this place. When I got your boy that pipe, I told him, I’ll take the rap, but you got to do it yourself, or you won’t be shut of it. Well, I guess even that weren’t enough. An evil like that tends to get inside a man, and he’s got to wait for it to worm its way out. I heard of some kilt theirselves. Or done worse even, trying to get rid of it. We don’t want that for young Bud, do we?”

  “No,” she agreed. She still had no idea what he was talking about, but the answer was obvious.

  “Old Aubrey don’t need nothin’. You tell Bud never mind about that party.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she managed. “I suppose he knows best what he wants.”

  A guard opened the door, and Aubrey rose obediently. “He may want,” he said, his eyes still gentle and steady. “But has he sat down and counted the cost, whether he has sufficient to finish it?”

  She was well-versed enough in the Bible to recognize its cadence, but what he meant by the quotation she could not guess and hardly bothered to wonder. She’d played her part and escaped to tell about it. She drove away from the prison fast enough to spit gravel and was relieved to find Clyde and Ralph waiting where she’d left them.

  * * *

  “They won’t know what hit ’em.”

  Clyde’s tone startles her. Bonnie’s been enjoying the ride to Kaufman, relaxing on the Chrysler’s wool seat, letting the cool air engorged with imminent rain flow in a refreshing stream through the open window. She glances at his face and sees that it has narrowed and stiffened the way it always does when he talks about the prison. From where she sits, his eyes, focused steadily forward, appear to be empty sockets.

  “Can we go faster, sugar?” She puts a hand on his thigh to give him comfort and encouragement, and he responds with a sly smile. The muscles in his leg flex under her fingers as he forces the accelerator toward the floor and draws even with Ralph in the Buick.

  Driving soothes and steadies Clyde’s nerves like whiskey. Pushing as much gas as possible into the engine and keeping the rocking car on the uneven, dirt road consumes the whole of his concentration, leaving no room for worry or anger.

  The two cars rush headlong at the darkness, their headlights illuminating the next few feet of dust and gravel. First one, then the other, strains ahead a foot or two, then falls back. Bonnie, pressed against the seat, digs her nails into the upholstery. The wind whips around her head and the ends of her hair scratch her eyes. She closes them, exalting in the speed, savoring the unfamiliar flutter in her gut whenever the road dips. After a few minutes of speed, however, her senses adjust, and fast feels as dull as any old driving.

  “Faster, sugar,” she murmurs. “Let’s go faster.”

  But they are going to have to slow down because yellow headlights appear in the darkness ahead. Bonnie braces herself for the abrupt slackening that will come the second Clyde eases up on the pedal and lets the car fall behind Ralph’s. Instead, he leans forward, trying to squeeze more speed from the Chrysler.

  “Honey. Clyde.”

  The oncoming truck is now so close that Bonnie can make out its black bulk. Its lights waver, but only slightly—there is nowhere to turn except over in the ditch. The truck’s horn blasts.

  Panic balloons in her chest, stuffing her throat. She closes her eyes and turns away from the imminent crash of metal and explosion of gasoline in which she will die.

  Then—so suddenly that she falls against the door—Clyde swerves. The truck roars by, its horn filling the night and then growing fainter. Clyde toots back and glances over his shoulder, grinning at Ralph’s car behind them.

  “Now this is an engine a man can trust,” he says, turning his attention back to the road. “I oughta write to Chrysler.”

  CHAPTER 26

  When they park the two big cars behind the Kaufman hardware store after midnight, they expect an easy job. “Five minutes,” Clyde mouths, as he and Ralph leave Bonnie with the door open and the engine running. From the car, she watches their flashlights wink in the store windows and wills them to hurry. Around her, the tender leaves fidget and whisper, anticipating a storm.

  The sharp, grotesquely loud crack turns her bones and muscles to gravy, and she slides off the seat and presses herself against the floorboards in the space meant only for feet. Not thunder, but a watchman with a gun.

  Clyde’s driving even before he slams the car door shut. They speed through the startled town that clangs with alarms and is checkered with yellow houselights, Ralph in the Buick behind them. A woman in curlers shouts at them from her stoop, her mouth a dark hole in a lopsided, yeasty doughnut face.

  “We’ve got to get off this road,” Clyde says. “They’ll have called ahead.”

  They turn hard off the main road onto a farm track and burrow into the darkness, but now the thunder finds them and a fierce rain pummels them, pounding on the metal roof, sluicing over the windshield, and making mud that grabs at the tires. The wheels fight, skid, slop, and spin, and the heavy Chrysler sinks into the mire, halting so abruptly that Bonnie’s face nearly slams into the windshield.

  Clyde jumps out and runs around the front of the car, so that for an instant he appears in the beam of the headlights, his head bowed under the force of the rain. She can’t think why he would get out of the car in the middle of a storm, until he wrenches her door open and grabs her wrist. “C’mon! Run!”

  Ralph slams his door and splashes toward them. “What do we do?”

  “We gotta run!” Clyde says. “Ain’t nothing else!”

  Bonnie sets a tentative foot on the running board.

  “No, run!” He yanks on her wrist again.

  The wavering twin yellow lights are so small in the distance that they might as well be fireflies, but they’re coming on. Another pair appears behind them, and another still.

  The hem of her skirt is caught under the seat. He tears the fabric, and they throw themselves over the banked mud that forms the shoulder of the road into the mud that is the field on the other side. Ten steps and her shoes stick so fast that her feet come out of them. They’re her best, caramel-colored Mary Janes with a two-inch heel. She bends to tug them free, but he still has her wrist and won’t stop, so she has to leave them.

  At a farmhouse, Clyde and Ralph point their guns but the farmer shrugs. He has no car, onl
y a pair of mules, on which they plod through the remaining hours of the wet night in no particular direction, until the meager light of dawn reveals the outskirts of a town and an Oldsmobile parked in a driveway.

  “That’s for us,” Clyde says. He falls awkwardly off the mule, pulling Bonnie with him, and staggers for a few seconds, his legs unsteady. Then he fishes the screwdriver from his pocket.

  Bonnie and Ralph can hardly walk; they’re so stiff and numb. Now that they’re home free, though, they can laugh quietly at each other’s halting steps and muddy faces. Ralph gives his mule a little pat on the behind, and both animals turn and start of their own accord back the way they’ve come.

  “Keys are in it!” Clyde announces, and instantly the engine rumbles.

  As they roll backward out of the driveway, a man, hoisting suspender straps over his shoulders, runs out of the front door.

  Bonnie lets her head fall back against the seat and imagines lowering herself into a tub of hot water. Maybe she’ll ask Clyde to stop at a drugstore for some bubble bath. She’s thinking about how she’ll make that request and when she ought to do it—sometimes he gets real mad about the littlest things—when the car begins to lose momentum.

  “Don’t slow down now, baby.” They can’t be more than a mile out of town.

  “Damn idiot has no gas in the tank.”

  The car lurches forward on its last drops and then the engine sputters and dies. They get out and Ralph kicks a fender, while Bonnie begins to cry, but Clyde plunges straight into the ditch that runs between the road and yet another muddy field. “Keep your gun handy,” he says to Ralph.

  Bonnie stands stubbornly beside the disabled car as Ralph splashes into the ditch after Clyde, who is already scrambling up the far side. “Let’s just go on back to that town and take another car,” she begs, wrapping her arms around herself. After being in the car, the air feels colder than ever. “I’m soaking wet and my feet are frostbitten.”

  “You want to get us caught?” Clyde’s face is masked with dirt except for white patches that encircle his red eyes. “Those bumpkins’ll be coming after us from both towns now, toting pitchforks and shotguns. They got us trapped like rats.”

  “Then I’m getting back in the car.” She opens the door. “I may as well sit down while I wait to get myself shot.”

  “No one’s getting shot,” Ralph says.

  “No,” Clyde agrees, “and we’re not caught yet. If we can hide until dark, we’ll have another chance at a car. Baby, you want I should carry you? I know your feet are awful cold and beat up.”

  She clings like a possum to his back as they slog to a network of gullies lined with thickets near an intersecting road. Lying flat on the cold mud, they squirm under a sharp tangle of twigs. Clyde slides a little pillow of grass under Bonnie’s cheek.

  The brush pins their arms; he can move his hand only far enough to cover her fingers with his own. They can hear the men already, one hawking, another cursing a twisted ankle. Her heart pounds hard enough to hurt. She concentrates on melding into the land, forcing down the panic that threatens to flush her out and send her flying into the open field.

  The men search doggedly, poking the barrels of their shotguns into the stands of brush and shuffling through the gullies. Several times, they seem to move on, only to circle back and check again. Still, hours go by, and although she’s shivering so hard that her jaw aches, she begins to hope that they might indeed make it until dark, when surely the posse will give up or, at the very least, she and Clyde and Ralph can creep away without being seen.

  “Sit tight,” Clyde hisses. “Just because we can’t see or hear them, don’t mean they ain’t close.”

  CHAPTER 27

  About ten minutes later, however, he’s the one who moves, tentatively raising his head at the sound of a car turning off the main road. The engine stops and the door slams.

  “It’s across the road,” he whispers. “C’mon!”

  “No!” She tightens her grip on his fingers. “We’ve gotta wait until dark.”

  “We may not get another chance. I’m taking it,” Clyde insists, and Ralph nods.

  So she gathers herself into a crouch and follows him, breaking from the brush and running down the hill.

  “There they are!”

  The shout sends a painful spear of adrenaline through her veins, and her legs move almost without her willing them. But Ralph turns and raises his .45.

  “What are you doing?” she screams. “Don’t shoot!”

  “I have to keep them back! I’m firing high!”

  He shoots again, while Clyde fumbles at the ignition with his screwdriver. Clyde’s fingers are inflexible as sticks, and he can barely hold on to the tool, let alone work it into the mechanism. With a crack and a thud, a bullet pierces the car’s metal body, and Bonnie instinctively drops onto her heels beside the door. Another crack and another, and Ralph screams and drops his gun. He clutches his arm, as his sleeve becomes wet and red. Blood wells out between his fingers.

  “I can’t do it,” Clyde wails. “Let’s go!”

  They run full out, directly in the path of more bullets, until the ground drops away six feet or so down to a stream. At the bottom, they crouch in the ooze.

  “This looks like where we get ours, honey,” Clyde says, his mouth against Bonnie’s ear, but his voice ripples with excitement; there is no despair in it.

  The posse—fifteen or twenty men—approaches with stamps and shouts. Ralph, who somehow had retrieved his gun before they bolted, suddenly stands and shoots. Bullets hit the opposite bank in return, but the footsteps cease.

  “They ain’t going to rush us,” Ralph says, grinning.

  While Ralph goes one way, sending up a shot every thirty seconds or so, Clyde drags Bonnie in the opposite direction, duck-walking along the streambed toward a church about half a mile away.

  “Stay here, baby,” he says, pushing her inside. “I’ll come back for you.”

  Alone, she looks for a place to hide and chooses the tight space under the altar, where she sits for a good while, listening to the occasional cracks of the guns. When nearly an hour goes by and the posse has not broken through the door, she begins to feel as if she’s in a womb, present, but safely removed from the hunt outside. Finally, the noises from the creek fade, and she hears in their place the scratch of claws and teeth inside the wooden walls.

  Her muscles ache. She’s thirsty and hungry. Whenever she shifts, cobwebs brush her neck and eyelids, and occasionally a bat rushes through the church, its fleshy wings beating the air, its alien, high-pitched chirps reverberating in every corner. She can endure the creepiness, but when she allows herself to imagine that Clyde’s been caught or possibly shot, doubt gnaws at her.

  At last, she unfolds herself and creeps into a chill and dripping twilight. Arms hugging her chest, she makes her numb-footed way along the overgrown dirt drive from the church to the highway. As soon as she reaches the main road, she regrets leaving the church and is about to dart back when she sees, glowing in the distance, the warm eyes of an automobile. She unclasps her arms and waves.

  She will say she’s had an accident. But then, where is her car? A fight with her husband. He’d put her out on the road, told her to walk. She will say she wants to scare him a little, let him know he can’t treat her like that. She’ll say she could sure use a ride to a telephone.

  And when she gets to the telephone, she’ll call the police. She’ll ask flat out and get it over with: Is Clyde Barrow going back to jail or is he killed?

  The car slows. She quits waving and passes a primping hand over her dirt-encrusted hair. “Hello, mister,” is on her tongue, but before she can utter the first syllable, the long barrel of a rifle pokes out the window.

  Ralph’s been caught, too. When they shove her into the calaboose, a tiny, one-room brick building, he’s sitting on the dirt floor, his arm flopping at his side, a fearsome, bloody mess.

  “This boy needs a doctor!” she shouts at the peop
le who are peering between the bars that block the single window, trying to get a look at her and Ralph, as if they’re captured animals. “You’d better get him a doctor right now!”

  There is some shuffling outside and the faces disappear.

  A new one takes their place. “I’m a doctor.”

  “You’d better fix this boy’s arm,” she demands. “He didn’t try to hit any of you, but you shot him anyway.”

  “You know what you get when you steal a man’s car?” the doctor answers coldly. “You sure as hell don’t get his help.”

  “We didn’t drive your damn machine hardly a mile. You got it back, didn’t you?”

  But the doctor has gone.

  “At least give him some aspirin!”

  Outside, they laugh at her desperation.

  “You can say you were kidnapped,” Ralph offers with a gallantry that makes her teary. “I’ll put it all on me,” he assures her. “They don’t have to know nothing about Clyde. And don’t worry. He’ll get us out.”

  * * *

  The next day, they’re both taken to Kaufman and then Ralph is transported someplace else. Clyde, as it turns out, has gotten away scot-free, while she, who was just along for the ride, is stuck in jail and may end up in some horrible place like Eastham, where she’ll have to cut off her toes.

  * * *

  “Jesus? Is that you, Jesus? I hear you, Jesus!”

  Inside her cell in the Kaufman County Jail, Bonnie leaned against the wall and pulled the writing paper the sheriff’s wife had given her into her lap. She was working on a collection of poems she called “Poetry from Life’s Other Side,” about good girls gone wrong and sweet love soured, featuring tenacious but doomed heroines. The alienation she meant her title to express was undercut by the scallops with which she’d decorated her looping letters and the tiny rings with which she dotted her i’s.