Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  “We’ll leave early,” she promises the boys. She wants to see the caverns when the light is fresh. Millie doesn’t remember sending the postcard and hasn’t been to the tourist attraction since they first moved to the state, but she’s written detailed directions in her swirling script. They’ll go from the caverns to Albuquerque—a city with a beautiful name that Bonnie alone can spell—and by the time they reach Santa Fe, their connection to some random Saturday-night dance in Oklahoma and a couple of children whose father would never come home will have stretched so thin that it will snap in the dry New Mexican ether.

  CHAPTER 34

  The knocking awakens them at nine. Clyde instantly rolls off the bed and onto the floor, pulling on his pants.

  “The old man must have a gun,” Clyde says to Raymond, who’s crowded into the bedroom. “Check the closets. I’ll look under their bed. You answer,” he orders Bonnie. “Tell him you’ll have to wake us. Act like nothing’s wrong.”

  “But what is wrong?” Bonnie wails. “We didn’t do anything.”

  The man wearing the deputy’s star looks more fatherly than frightening, but she crosses her arms and can’t keep the tightness from her voice. “Yes?”

  “Sorry to bother you, miss. Would you tell me who that automobile belongs to?” He nods toward the V-8.

  “Oh.” She feels his authority compelling an answer. She tries to speak casually, but her heart is thudding so loudly that she can’t tell whether she’s whispering or shouting. “That’s my husband’s. I’ll get him.” She turns toward the bedroom, leaving the front door yawning, and then remembers Clyde’s instructions and turns back. “He’s still sleeping, so it may take a few minutes. You’d best wait out here.” She closes the door and quietly slips the bolt.

  She’s aghast at her lousy performance but has only seconds to chastise herself. Clyde and Ray have found the shotgun Dink keeps to scare crows and have slipped out the back. Too late, the deputy reaches for his piece and, when Clyde sends a blast of birdshot over his head, the pistol slides from his fingers.

  “Bonnie Elizabeth!”

  Through the back window, Bonnie sees her aunt, stumbling through the rows of string beans, the vines catching at her ankles.

  “Baby, c’mon!” Clyde commands from the front.

  * * *

  Beside the car, Clyde and Raymond are arguing.

  “Shoot him,” Raymond says.

  “The hell I will.”

  “Bonnie!” Aunt Millie has reached the front door. Her voice is high and weak for want of breath.

  “Get in! Get in!” When the deputy doesn’t move, Clyde takes a step toward him, his rifle raised. “Get him in!” he orders Raymond, who shoves the man into the back seat and throws himself in afterward.

  They can’t stay in New Mexico with a New Mexican hostage, so they drive back to Texas, last night’s certain escape eradicated. Soon after they cross the Texas line, a radio report informs them that near El Paso two truck drivers have found the headless body of a man police assume is Joe Johns, sheriff’s deputy of Eddy County, New Mexico, abducted earlier that morning by two men and a woman in a Ford V-8 with Texas plates.

  “It’s not fair,” Bonnie says to Johns. “They’re coming after us for killing you, when here you are, safe and sound.”

  “Get out the map,” Clyde says. “We got to get away from Odessa.”

  The map flutters on Bonnie’s trembling legs. She slides her index finger over the maze of roads, unable to orient herself, and Clyde pulls impatiently at the paper. “Do I gotta do everything?”

  “Let me drive,” Raymond says. “You think I don’t know how to drive a car?” He lunges over the seat, reaching for the wheel.

  “Get off me! You’re supposed to be watching the law!”

  “You think I’m going to jump out of a machine going eighty miles an hour?” Johns puts in.

  “I heard you were dead,” Clyde says. “Why’re you talking?”

  “You already got at least twenty years for transporting me over state lines,” the officer says stoutly. “You kill me, you’ll get the chair.”

  “He ain’t going to kill you!” Bonnie exclaims.

  But at the same time, Raymond says, “He’s already getting the chair.”

  “So I might as well kill you,” Clyde says.

  “He’s not serious.” Bonnie frowns at Clyde. “We had to take you, that’s all. So you wouldn’t turn us in.”

  “Well, as long as that’s all.”

  Johns isn’t much like the laws who wouldn’t let her into the jail to visit Clyde or those who mocked Clyde in her mother’s house. Bonnie is surprised to find that she almost likes him.

  Sometime after midnight, about a mile north of San Antonio, Clyde finally pulls off the road. “All right, you can get out here.”

  Johns creeps hesitantly from the car, like a rabbit newly sprung from a hutch.

  “You sure have caused us a lot of trouble,” Clyde says. “We didn’t do nothing to you, you know. We didn’t even do nothing in your town. In your whole state. I think you oughta give us an hour before you call us in.”

  As they drive off, Bonnie presses her face to the window, but the lawman has already been folded into the darkness behind them. “Is it true what he said about the twenty years?”

  Raymond laughs. “Probably.”

  Later, after the sun is up and they’ve nosed into a copse out of sight of the highway, the reports begin to issue from the radio. “Bonnie Parker of Dallas.” All of Texas can hear her name. “…and a woman, Bonnie Parker of Dallas.” “…a blond, petite female, Bonnie Parker of Dallas.” People who live near the border in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico can probably hear it, too.

  “Clyde.” She whispers in his ear, so she won’t wake Raymond who’s sprawled across the back. “Baby, I want you.”

  But he’s dead asleep, too, his breathing heavy and slow.

  CHAPTER 35

  They shed Raymond at last by driving him to his father’s house in Michigan. On September 3, when they dropped him at a wood frame bungalow in Bay City, fall was already insinuating itself into that part of the country. The summer blur had been wrung out of the sky, leaving behind a distilled, melancholy blue, and here and there a crown of yellow or orange betrayed the shock a tree had experienced at the advent of the cooling nights.

  Invigorated, Bonnie unfolded the Marathon map she’d found in the glove compartment of their current car and traced the red and blue veins through the hand of Michigan to Chicago, where, contrary to the shadowed scenes they’d been led to expect by The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, the sun burst off the lake and spangled in a thousand windows. Dazzled by a city that made Dallas look like a country crossroads, Bonnie sent postcards crammed with skyscrapers and crowded beaches and streets so jammed with automobiles they were being stacked twelve high. “Look where we got to,” she wrote.

  Chicago suited her style, but it made Clyde jumpy. Bonnie wanted to walk the streets, as if she and Clyde belonged among the purposeful pedestrians, but he was forever stutter-stepping, attempting to avoid contact and therefore always meeting it with a bump that made him recoil and scowl.

  So in a couple of days they were driving south and west again, their tires sizzling over freshly rolled asphalt. With every mile, the buildings became squatter and plainer and the space between them grew longer, but Bonnie kept the metropolis fizzing inside her with an elixir she sipped from a flat, brown bottle. They’d bought a boxful in the city, where a quizzical glance and a few bills were all it took to unlock a back room. The pictures had been right about that.

  They breezed through towns like Manteno and Bourbonnais, snags of mundane, dusty shops. In the evenings, Clyde parked near creeks, and they bathed in water rusty with decomposing leaves, the bronzed air above its surface effervescent with tiny insects. She made him thrash the weeds with a stick to scare off reptiles and amphibians, so he yelled “snake” when she was settling down, and in turn she shrieked to please h
im. Too late in the year for mosquitoes, too early for snow, they pulled the back seat from the car and lounged on it as if it were an outdoor divan. While she read aloud from True Detective, they drank from their brown bottles and fed each other sardines on crackers and Vienna sausages they dug out of the can with their fingers. When the sun was thoroughly extinguished and the titanic darkness blacked out all the earth except the ring around their restless, flickering fire, he played his guitar and sang “My Blue-Eyed Jane.”

  “C’mon, little show-off,” he said, when he’d had enough from the bottle, and she responded extravagantly, sure of her audience. When he was liquored up just right, he touched her with the appreciation he would have lavished on a 16-cylinder Cadillac that he was running on a clear stretch of highway, trying to coax out all she’d got.

  During the day, however, any time he wasn’t driving, his hands were on his Browning Automatic Rifles, part of a stash of weapons they’d stolen before they’d left Texas simply by raking the padlock on an unassuming National Guard Armory outside Fort Worth.

  “These them army boys keep for theirselves,” Clyde said, shouldering a BAR. The telltale lethal cartridge extended from its underside, like the member of a stallion or a bull. “They’re too much for the laws.”

  With a hacksaw he cut one rifle short and attached it to a sling of rubber he’d sliced from an old tire. He sacrificed the pocket of his coat to what he called his “scattergun,” because the weapon would make the laws scat like scaredy-cats, cutting the seam so that he could reach right through and grab the piece hidden under the fabric. Practicing, he fingered the gun, stroked the gun, pulled it out and held it up, stiff and ready, over and over. Inspired, he determined that they would borrow an alias from Jesse James and call themselves Mr. and Mrs. Howard.

  Bonnie was flattered by the care with which he chose a gun for her, a rifle with the back and front ends cut off. He called it a “whipit,” because, as he explained, it was supposed to be easy to whip out. But the thing was heavier and more unwieldy than it looked; the front end sagged when she held the back. He positioned her, lowering her akimbo elbows, drawing forward the chin she’d pulled back like a turtle. She felt stiff as a dummy when he was through, and her index finger trembled weakly against the trigger. When she finally managed to squeeze it, the metal pinched her skin; the bang was a slap to the head; the kick, a rebuke so sharp that she dropped the gun.

  “I don’t like it.”

  He laughed. “You’ll get used to it. You just gotta practice.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll aim and make them think I’m going to use it, but I don’t want to shoot no one.”

  “You think I do? It made me feel sick when that law crumpled up back in Stringtown. I thought I was going to black out, I got so dizzy.”

  “But it wasn’t you that killed him.”

  He shrugged. “Mighta been. Hard to know for sure. You don’t have to pull the trigger, sugar,” he said. “I don’t want you getting that sick feeling. But it’d be handy, if I learned you to load.”

  * * *

  While Clyde fooled with his guns, Bonnie played with a poem, attempting to put their most recent fresh start into words. As they drove through rain in Arkansas, she changed the title from “Fall Starts,” which sounded too much like “false starts,” to “The Start of the Fall,” which sounded ominous, and settled finally on “Starting Out in Fall.”

  “Fall was their spring,” she wrote, the letters jagged as each bump unseated her pen.

  The starting of their road.

  Under smoky skies they drove;

  A car was their abode.

  Where they would wander,

  What distance they would go,

  Was hidden in the clouds.

  Only God could surely know.

  Sometimes, if they came upon a likely looking farmhouse, they would stop and pay for a night in a bed. In the hills outside Fayetteville, they pulled in at such a place, and a passel of children darted and swooped around the car like insects around a light bulb.

  “You can touch it,” Clyde offered, and their fingertips left spots in the dust.

  “Who wants a ride?” asked Lady Bountiful.

  Of course, they couldn’t let anyone inside—there were too many guns under the blankets on the back seat—but Bonnie showed them how they could stand on the running board, a few at a time, and hold on through the open window. The children shrieked as Clyde drove them around the dirt yard, while their parents and an old man shyly waited their turn.

  Slender Mr. and Mrs. Howard squeezed onto the ends of the benches on either side of the table for a supper of squirrel and dumplings, which made Bonnie unexpectedly homesick for Krause. In exchange for the hospitality, Bonnie entertained with her impressions of Chicago.

  “You tell quite a story,” her host said, holding one hand in front of his mouth to hide his twisted teeth.

  As a token of her veracity, she took out a cigarette case she’d purchased at Marshall Fields. “Clyde, run out and get me my lighter, would you?”

  Instead, he stood up abruptly and laid two bills on the table. “We’re going.”

  Back in the car, she argued. Those people could not possibly have heard of a stray thief named Clyde Barrow, and even if they had, they’d have no desire to turn in the man who let them ride on his car and the woman who’d made them laugh and stare, and even if they did, they had no means to do so other than a mule, and it was his sudden leave-taking that would make them suspicious, not her use of his first name. And why was he always the one to say where they could stop and how long they ought to stay and what they could say?

  For miles he answered only with his driving, which was too fast for the curving, hilly, dusky road. At first, the reckless speed matched her mood, and she didn’t complain, but when their tires caught on the soft shoulder and threatened to drag them into the trees, she screamed at him to slow down. When he finally braked to execute a turn onto a side track her fingers were stiff from clutching the door handle and the edge of her seat, and her calves were sore from her cramping muscles.

  The track narrowed gradually until their car could no longer pass between the trees, and he had to stop. “How could you be so dumb?”

  She leapt on him, pinning his shoulders to the car door behind him. “The dumbest thing I ever did was go with you.”

  He clamped his fingers around her wrists and pinned her left leg with his right. Her upper arm collided with the steering wheel; his chin banged against her lip. Twisting free, she slithered over the seat into the back, but he followed. Afterward, he rolled down the clouded windows, and she lay with her head in the hollow of his shoulder, so she could look up at the stars.

  “From now on, when we’re with people, I’m Bud and you’re Sis.”

  “I’ll be Anita.”

  He shook his head. “No, Anita’s a name people would notice. Don’t you understand? We gotta be no one special.”

  To apologize for his temper, he stole a typewriter for her in Little Rock. It was set up in the window of the stationery store with a fresh ribbon and a sheet of white paper rolled into the carriage. Before the clerk was even aware that someone had entered the store, Clyde snapped the varnished lid over the machine, paper and all, and carried it out to the car.

  From then on, Bonnie spent some hours each day in her office—the back seat—composing, as well as copying all the handwritten lines in her notebooks. No matter how unsteady her desk, the keys struck the ribbon cleanly. The official-looking type seemed to change her work from girlish, personal whims into truth.

  CHAPTER 36

  By Halloween, Clyde decided they’d given Dallas plenty of time to cool, but to be on the safe side, he didn’t stop at the service station but only slowed long enough for Bonnie to heave at the door a Coca-Cola bottle with a note rolled up inside it that read “red beens and rice,” the signal that their families were to meet them on Chalk Hill.

  “It says here you done another murder,” Cumie said that
night, pulling a folded page of newsprint from an envelope and shaking it open. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Lessee that.” Clyde plucked the article from her hand.

  Authorities are offering a $200 reward for the capture of Clyde Champion Barrow, who is wanted for the brutal murder of Alfred Brown, a grocery clerk in Akron, Ohio, on October 11. Witnesses heard shots coming from the grocery around 4 pm, just before a slender, dark-haired man ran with a definite limp from the grocery and got into a waiting car, driven by a woman in a black hat. Barrow is known to travel with Bonnie Parker, 22, of Dallas, Texas. The pair is also wanted for the murder of two sheriffs’ deputies and for armed robbery of several banks in Texas and Oklahoma. They are thoroughly dangerous and will not hesitate to kill.

  Clyde whistled. “Thoroughly dangerous! I like that!”

  “Bud!”

  “That’s not us.” Bonnie, with Mitzy on her hip, crowded close to study the page. “I don’t even own a black hat.”

  “I told you so,” Cumie said to Henry. “I knew them kids wouldn’t be mixed up in something like this.”

  “I bet there never even was a woman in that car,” Bonnie said. “They like to say there’s a woman, but there usually isn’t. I’m pret’ near the only one.”

  Emma, who hadn’t seen Bonnie since August, found she couldn’t release her daughter’s hand.

  “You got my postcards, Mama? From Chicago?”

  “I couldn’t believe it when Millie telephoned me,” Emma said. “I told her that’s not possible. That’s not Bonnie. And now you done all this?” She gestured at Cumie’s pile of clippings.

  Bonnie examined the articles. “It’s not the way they make it sound.”

  There were two accounts of the kidnapping of Deputy Johns, one of the Hillsboro murder, three of the Stringtown fiasco. Two stories included mug shots of Clyde—one a boy with a wistful expression on his finely wrought features, slicked hair neatly parted in the center, and an open collar that revealed a delicate neck; the other a man with thick, wavy hair and a tie cinched below a solidified jaw, who looked as if he knew what he was doing. There were also reports of bank robberies in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri.