Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  They had not been nearly as successful as those stories suggested. One afternoon, for instance, Clyde and a couple of accomplices were laughed out of a bank that had happened to fail the afternoon before they attempted to rob it. After that, they’d tried using Bonnie as a scout. When she entered the Farmers and Miners Bank of Oronogo, Missouri, dressed in what she considered appropriate banking clothes—a gray flannel suit, pearl gray gloves, and a maroon cloche, Bonnie realized that the browsing she’d envisioned, as one might in a dress shop or department store, wouldn’t be possible. What did one do in a bank, if one had no actual business there? She studied a portrait of a man from the last century on one wall and then the calendar beside it, decorated with a river scene. She thumbed a pad of deposit slips.

  A man in overalls turned away from the teller in his narrow cage, folding a handful of bills, so she knew there was money in the place.

  “May I help you, miss?” A young man was suddenly at her side.

  Having no experience with banks, she had no idea how odd she looked, an unfamiliar woman, without a male escort to speak for her, but she was quick enough with a satisfactory answer. “My husband was supposed to meet me. He’s looking for a place to put some money. He’s in oil,” she added. “We’re up from Texas.”

  “I see. Won’t you have a seat while you wait?” He indicated a chair on the near side of a wide, wooden desk.

  She should have accepted, she realized later. She should have sat there, smoked a cigarette, asked impatiently for the time once or twice, and then stalked out in a mild fit of pique. That’s how a Texas oilman’s wife would have behaved. But, instead, she lost her nerve, declined the offer, and with that suspicious behavior tipped off the teller, who was ready with his own pistol and a quick finger on the alarm when Clyde came in the next day. Accomplices tended to drift away after such failures.

  They tried to spring their old friend Ralph Fults from the McKinney Jail, but before they could do more than have Bonnie deliver a pack of Lucky Strikes and the message that Clyde was waiting with a car outside, the One-Way Wagon snatched Ralph out of reach. In desperation, they might have gone back to Michigan for Raymond had he not been plucked off an ice rink and returned to Texas to stand trial for the murder of Madora Bucher, as well as for two major bank robberies. It galled Bonnie to see a man she knew to be no more than a reckless braggart enjoy that kind of success, when Clyde, for all his careful plans, had not scored so well in nearly a year.

  “Probably they’re lying about what he done, the same way they lie about us,” Clyde said.

  Certainly, the authorities were wrong about Raymond’s involvement in the Bucher murder.

  “I’m not saying I like the thief,” Clyde told Bonnie, “but I’m not going to let him get the chair for something I know he ain’t done.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Emma Parker lifted the edge of her window curtain so she could see the man who was knocking before she opened her door. A strange man on her stoop made her uneasy at any time of day, especially if he wasn’t carrying a sales case, and now, being so close to Christmas, it had been fully dark for at least an hour.

  “Mrs. Parker?” He must have sensed the curtain’s movement, because he turned toward the window. His eyes drooped a little at the corners, like a hound’s. “Can I talk to you about Bonnie?” He removed a badge from his jacket pocket and held it up, so she could see it.

  Emma unlocked the door and opened it a few inches. “She in jail?”

  “No. No, she’s not. But I know she’s in trouble, and I’d like to help her. Would you let me come in?”

  Emma snorted. “Help her? You want to catch her.”

  “I’d like to persuade her to turn herself in, yes. I knew her back at Marco’s, you see. She’s a friend of mine.”

  Emma opened the door. “I didn’t know Bonnie was a friend of any law.”

  “I was at the post office then,” the man said, removing his hat and stepping inside. “Ted Hinton.” The hand he extended was warm, although he hadn’t been wearing gloves. “Two Sugars is what she called me.”

  Sitting with him on the divan, listening to him talk about how he’d always imagined seeing Bonnie onstage someday, singing songs that came out of that poetry she used to write—“I believe she’s still writing poetry,” Emma put in—or maybe even in the pictures, Emma could not help but feel that it was a shame this man had not put himself forward as a beau, back before it was too late.

  “If she turns herself in, I doubt she’d get more than two years for the kidnapping,” he said.

  Reminded that it was too late, Emma drew hard on her cigarette.

  “We know it wasn’t her idea,” he went on, “and Mr. Johns made clear that she never handled a gun.”

  “Anyone knows anything about Bonnie could tell you she’s always been scared to death of guns,” Emma snapped.

  “I believe that,” Mr. Hinton said. “She’s not the kind of girl who should be mixed up in something like this.”

  Emma felt again the welling of confusion and panic she’d experienced when her sister Millie had telephoned long-distance from New Mexico. “I’m not sure anymore what kind of girl she is.”

  “The kind that will think of her mother on Christmas, I believe.”

  Carefully, Emma made no response.

  “Can you get a message to her?”

  “I don’t know. I might could.”

  “If you speak to her,” he said, leaning to stub out his cigarette, “will you tell her Two Sugars wants to help her?”

  What a gentle-looking face he had, Emma thought. He’d a small cut just below his ear, no doubt from his razor. She almost cried to think how vulnerable they were, all of these young people with their tender feelings and hopes.

  CHAPTER 38

  December 1932

  On Christmas Eve, Clyde and Bonnie parked on the shoulder of Eagle Ford Road and waited in the drizzle for L.C. to come riding by. Staying still was nervous business—a stopped car tended to make a cop curious—and Bonnie, curled into her coat with her feet tucked under her, alternating sips from a flask with flecks of lemon peel, couldn’t quit shaking with tension heightened by the cold. She’d prayed to have a baby growing inside her by this night, but instead the hateful blood was oozing out, cooling as it pooled between her legs.

  “There he is.” Clyde tapped the horn.

  The Model T pulled over and snuffed its lights. Two doors slammed, and then L.C.’s face, carrying with it the sweet-sour scent of home brew, appeared in Clyde’s open window. He smiled big enough to crack his head in two, but his eyes had a wobbly, uncertain look. Clyde often evoked a combination of joy and worry, Bonnie noted.

  “Heard you been in,” Clyde said.

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t want you pulling shit, hear me?”

  “Hell, they drug me in just for walkin’ down the street. Half the time, they figure I’m you. Half the time, they figure I’m fixin’ to pull a job with you. Half the time, they just figure I musta done it. I’m a Barrow, ain’t I?”

  Bonnie laughed. “That’s three halves, L.C.”

  “What?” He stuck his head in farther. “How you doin’, Bonnie? You got any Baby Ruths on you?”

  As she leaned over Clyde with a candy bar that she’d tied with a red ribbon, she glimpsed a second boy, dark and bashful, lurking behind L.C. He had a cigar sticking out of one side of his mouth and was chewing on it in an obvious attempt to look older. It had the opposite effect. “Who’s your friend?”

  “This here’s W.D.” L.C. stepped back to make room for the other to come up.

  “You know me, Clyde,” the boy said, dipping his head in a sort of bow. “I’m Deacon. Tookie Jones’s boy.”

  “Well, what do you know?” Clyde said. “It’s Little Deacon Jones!”

  “That’s right,” the boy said, nodding like a hen at its corn. “Most call me W.D. now.”

  “You want to ride around with us for a bit, Dub? You want to be our lookout for a
couple, two, three days?”

  “What about me?” L.C. protested.

  “I told you,” Clyde said. “You ain’t getting’ into this. Besides, Deac’s experienced.” He gave the boy an exaggerated wink that made him blush, even in the freezing air. “C’mon in here.” He tilted his head to indicate the back seat. “Shove that stuff over and sit with us while L.C. fetches our people.”

  W.D. squeezed himself onto the corner of the seat and sat crammed against the door, not daring to displace any part of the mess of blankets and papers and the couple of brightly wrapped packages. William Daniel “Deacon” Jones had admired Clyde, since the days when the Joneses and the Barrows had both camped under the viaduct, along with the rest of the flotsam that had come loose from its tenuous sharecropper moorings and washed up on the wrong side of the Trinity. Even then, W.D. had known that he could never possess the older boy’s ease and power of asserting himself. Clyde was always first in line at the round steak truck, and W.D. had seen him swipe extra baloney many times when the driver’s back was turned. He would give those slices away to the little ones at the back, more than once to W.D. himself.

  Some years later, when the Joneses had left the campground, Clyde paid W.D. a nickel to keep watch while he called on Dorothy Jean Lennert, who rented a room in Tookie’s house. Dorothy Jean sometimes gave W.D. a stick of gum out of her purse, and she told him what songs he ought to like, if he ever went to a dance. W.D. had sat on the step for awhile, wishing he were Clyde and hating him at the same time. Finally, he couldn’t stand it no more and went and threw the nickel in the river.

  “The trouble is,” Clyde was saying, “that me and Bonnie are dog tired. I wonder if you might be so kind as to keep watch later on tonight, while her and me get some sleep.”

  “Would you do that for us, W.D.?” Bonnie didn’t like a lot of the men that Clyde was friendly with. They were too loutish to appreciate her particular charms and always trying to prove how tough they were, either sneering at her or ogling her when Clyde wasn’t looking and constantly shoving at each other with their words. But a boy like this—bashful and earnest, like a worshipful kid brother—was someone she could play to, dazzle even. “We’ll get you right back to Dallas first thing tomorrow.”

  “I told you I don’t know about that,” Clyde said. “Us driving up to your mama’s house on Christmas morning. That’s just what the laws’ll be expecting.”

  “He thinks he’s that important,” she said. “Don’t you know the laws got better things to do on Christmas than to bother with us, Daddy.”

  Clyde didn’t answer.

  “Baby, you promised.” She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “We see your mama tonight; mine tomorrow. I gotta give out my presents.”

  “I told you they should meet us out here tonight.”

  “And I told you that they’re not bringing those babies out in the cold.”

  In the darkness ahead, headlights jittered. Bonnie touched Clyde’s arm.

  “Relax,” he said. “That’s my daddy’s car.”

  The lights swerved as the car pulled onto the shoulder. When the Model T’s flimsy doors flapped open, Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. got out to meet the Barrows on the other side of the damp dirt road. In a moment, Cumie and Clyde, with Marie clamped on his back, were interlocked, rocking together from foot to foot. W.D. and L.C. had drifted off, so Bonnie and Mr. Barrow, unshaven, as always, were left standing awkwardly together.

  Mr. Barrow pushed two jars at her. “Merry Christmas.”

  * * *

  Clyde, refreshed by the visit, was magnanimous as they drove away. “We’ll run you back here tomorrow morning,” he assured W.D. “You’ll be home in plenty of time to get the coal out of your stocking.”

  “I’m sure W.D. has been a good boy.”

  “Have you been a good boy, Deacon?” Clyde asked.

  “I been all right, I guess.”

  Bonnie laughed. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to get you into any trouble. We’re just going to find someplace safe to sleep and then get right back to Dallas, because I’ve got the best presents for my babies. Do you want to see?”

  “He don’t want to see no toys.”

  “I bet he does too.”

  Clyde sighed. “W.D., you want to see some baby toys?”

  “Don’t force him to take sides, Clyde. W.D., you don’t have to say whether you want to see my babies’ presents. They’re all wrapped up back there anyway.” Bonnie made a little waving motion with her hand. “I’m sorry we don’t have a gift for you.”

  “That’s OK. I ain’t never had no Christmas present.”

  “That’s the sorriest thing I ever heard. Clyde, slow down! You want the laws after us for speeding?”

  “I ain’t speeding.”

  “Yes you are. You’re so used to driving too fast that you don’t feel it no more.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Their three bodies and the guns seemed hardly to fit into the shabby room in the tourist court, which was already crowded by its chair, night table, and double bed, under which Bonnie pushed the wrapped gifts she’d brought inside for safekeeping. It was around 3 a.m., nearly Christmas morning, by the time they were sitting on the bed eating light bread and sardines, using the thin bathroom towels as plates and drinking Mr. Barrow’s moonshine from the tooth glass.

  After dinner, Bonnie was last to use the tiny bathroom, because a woman’s upkeep was time-consuming. Being low on cash meant she had to do without Kotex. While her rag soaked, she dabbed nail polish on the end of a run and scrubbed her makeup and powder off. Then she made a few suds with the slim tablet of soap and washed her stockings.

  By the time she emerged, Clyde was already asleep. W.D., the lookout, had fit the chair into the few feet between the bed and the window and settled into it. She appreciated the way he kept his head turned away, his gaze on the narrow strip of glass between the curtains. Probably she was reflected in it, but she didn’t mind a boy like W.D. getting an eyeful of her in her slip.

  She wasn’t as good at sleeping as Clyde was, because riding didn’t wear a person out the way driving did. She wrote for awhile in her notebook, and then flicked off the light and tried to pretend, as she always did, that this room was their own bedroom in their own house, not just a place they were squatting in for a few hours. But W.D.’s shadow hunkered by the window inhibited the dream. “Are you really going to sit up all night?”

  “I guess so. Clyde said for me to watch.”

  “Well, don’t wake me unless you see Santa Claus.”

  She curled herself tightly, careful to keep to the edge of the bed so as not to touch Clyde while he slept, because he couldn’t abide the feel of someone “on him,” as he put it, in the dark, when he didn’t know what was what. She dreamed she was trying to run, but her feet wouldn’t move, and she awoke with a weight on her ankles. W.D. had slumped over the end of the bed, and his shoulders were pinning her feet to the mattress. Clyde was kneeling beside the bed with his head bowed over his clasped hands. His habitual fevered four a.m. prayers had initially alarmed and then charmed her, but she’d come to resent being awakened to witness a communion that excluded her. Gingerly, she freed her feet and turned her face to the wall.

  * * *

  “Christmas gift!” Clyde demanded, pouncing on her the next morning.

  She’d revised a poem for him that she’d composed in the Kaufman jail:

  I’ll Stay

  I’ll cling to you and love you,

  and you’ll never be alone.

  Just like the stars in heaven,

  fling round the moon at night.

  I’ll stay with you forever,

  whether you are wrong or right.

  Just like the perfume lingers,

  on a rose until it dies,

  I’ll stay with you and guide you,

  with the love light in my eyes…

  She’d rolled the page into a scroll and tied it with a ribbon like she had L.C.’s Baby Ruth bar. She
didn’t expect Clyde to notice the rhyme of “fling” and “cling,” since the words weren’t at the ends of lines, nor would he see the way she’d linked love to stars with the word “light,” but she knew he’d appreciate the theme of loyalty, the quality he most valued.

  “I got one for you, too,” she said to W.D.

  “You wrote me a poem?”

  “Last night. It’s not too good. I didn’t have much time.” She tore the page from the notebook. “Sorry, it’s not typed.”

  “You’d best read it to me,” he said. “I ain’t got much schooling.”

  “Wait ’til you hear her,” Clyde said, giving Bonnie an affectionate tap with his scroll. “She’s won prizes.”

  Bonnie pushed her shoulders back to allow for the free flow of air and read:

  He’d never a present for Christmas.

  Not a top or a bat or a ball.

  He’d never a present from Santa,

  Though good as Adam ’fore “the fall.”

  His mother’d no money for candy.

  His father lay cold in the ground.

  His sister was off with her dandy.

  His brothers were hardly around.

  He’d never a present for Christmas,

  Though he hadn’t done a wrong.

  Santa’d overlooked him,

  Thought he wasn’t worth a “song.”

  But this year will be different.

  He’ll find a gift under the tree.

  It’s this poem written just for him,

  A present for him from me.