Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  “Mama, they’re too little to care about a thing like that.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do.”

  Bonnie went to the window. Chances were he wouldn’t park directly in the front of the house but would tuck their car behind another somewhere along the street.

  “I didn’t like thinking of you out there all alone on Christmas,” Emma said.

  “I wasn’t alone.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re out there somewhere; I don’t know where.” Emma motioned vaguely with one hand. “Maybe you’re in trouble.”

  The wobble in Emma’s voice caused the brick in Bonnie’s chest to slide upward so that it tore at the delicate lining of her throat. “I wanted to come so bad, Mama. I had a truck for Buddy and the sweetest little elephant for Mitzy. I wanted this to be a nice Christmas!”

  “Why didn’t you come, then, honey? We would have been glad to see you.”

  Bonnie saw again the head snapping back, the arms following, the black socks making the narrow feet look so vulnerable. “I just couldn’t, Mama. Something happened, and I just couldn’t.”

  “I don’t think it’s right that he makes you stay away from your family on Christmas.”

  “He didn’t mean to! I told you—something happened.”

  “I’ve been thinking.” Emma hesitated. She began smoothing the cushion on which Bonnie had been sitting, and then stopped herself, sorry to have been erasing the evidence of her daughter’s presence.

  “What is it, Mama?”

  “Well, a man came by, little bit before Christmas. Said you used to know him back when you was working at Marco’s. ‘Two Sugars,’ he said to tell you.”

  “Ted Hinton?” With embarrassment, Bonnie remembered how seriously he’d entertained her intention to become a singer or a poet.

  “That’s right. Apparently, he’s a deputy now. Said he was working for Sheriff Schmid.”

  “You didn’t tell him anything!”

  “What do I know to tell? I don’t know your whereabouts. Not even on Christmas Day.”

  “Seems to me Clyde was right to keep us away from here.”

  “Ted Hinton wants to help you, Bonnie!”

  “He wants me to turn on Clyde. That’s what he wants.”

  “Oh, I don’t think anyone would expect that.”

  Bonnie laughed scornfully. “Mama, you don’t know a thing about the laws.”

  Emma sniffed. “I might not know about the laws, having no reason to, but, honey, that man you’ve tied your life to is going to get caught or worse, and I know all about worse. You can’t blame me for trying to save my own daughter.”

  “Mama, you don’t understand how good Clyde is underneath. Right now, he’s getting ready to help Raymond Hamilton, who he don’t even like, because he doesn’t want a man who’s been wrongly blamed to have to suffer the way he did in that terrible Eastham.” She squared her shoulders and tipped her chin back a little, as Miss Gleason had taught her.

  “You’ve been drinking,” Emma observed.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  * * *

  Bonnie is still drinking at noon, when they give the radio to Raymond’s sister, and at eleven p.m., when they circle back to find out whether it’s been delivered to Raymond. As they make a first, experimental pass in front of the sister’s single-story side-by-side, Bonnie glimpses a red warning light in one of the back rooms.

  “It looked like the room was on fire,” she says anxiously, leaning forward and then back, trying to spot the window again.

  “On fire?” Clyde scoffs, as they cruise by a second time. “You’re just jumpy.” He’s cut the headlights, just in case, but this time the light in the back room is ordinary yellow. “You oughta lay off the sauce.”

  Leaving the car door open behind him, Clyde moves stealthily across the shallow yard, his hand inside his coat closed around the scattergun in its rubber sling.

  The front porch is a slab of concrete, nearly flush with the ground. Clyde sets a foot on it, and, as if he’s sprung a trap, from inside a woman screams: “Don’t shoot! Think of my babies!”

  A blast shatters the front window. Doubling over, Clyde runs toward the corner of the house. Feet pound the earth; the scattergun stutters; Bonnie hears a grunt and a thud. From the back of the car, W.D.’s gun answers, the blasts deafening Bonnie’s right ear.

  “Quit shooting!” Bonnie shrieks. “You might hit someone!”

  As if Clyde has sent a telepathic message, she envisions a dark form running through the center of the block, and she slides behind the wheel and drives. But around the first corner, the vision fades, and by the time she reaches the second corner, she knows Clyde must be searching for her on the street she’s abandoned. For several teetering seconds, the car rolls forward on its own, while Bonnie demands that W.D., who knows less than she, tell her what to do. At last Clyde darts out from between two houses.

  The way he tells it, gulping air and driving fast, it was a lucky thing he’d had the scattergun ready, because they were shooting at him from every window, and the man coming around the corner of the house would’ve killed him sure, if Clyde hadn’t shot into the dark toward the sound of the footsteps.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he demanded. “Would you rather I be the one dead?”

  * * *

  The ambush hadn’t been meant for them. Apparently, Clyde Barrow didn’t rate that level of police effort.

  “Odell Chambless! What’s he got to do with it?” Clyde threw the Dallas Morning News on the carpet.

  “You oughta be happy you got that Sheriff Schmid fooled. You already got one law’s life on your hands. You don’t want another.”

  “But Odell Chambless! He ain’t in my league.”

  When, the following week, Chambless proved he’d been in jail in Los Angeles that night, the laws claimed Pretty Boy Floyd was the shooter. “Who next? Jesse James?” the Daily Morning News wanted to know. The only thing Clyde got credit for was popping some bullets from the car.

  “As if I’d ever be the one sitting in the car,” Clyde said with disgust, which Bonnie could see hurt W.D.’s feelings.

  Bonnie, however, got an honorable mention. According to the sheriff, a girl had been “riding with the hunted slayers,” “a tough, two-gun girl.”

  At first this description affronted her. “Why would they say that?” she whined, reading it for the fifth or sixth time. “I hate guns. All I did was drive the car. And what does that mean ‘as tough as the back end of a shooting gallery’? I don’t appreciate being compared to the back end of anything.”

  “I keep telling you,” Clyde said. “They see what they want to see. You oughta be happy they think you’re tough.”

  “I don’t want to be tough.” But as she reread the passage again, she began to value its admiring tone. A man with a gun was a dime a dozen, but a “two-gun girl” was extraordinary. More extraordinary even than an actress, singer, or poet.

  CHAPTER 43

  So they returned to circling Texas, driving muddy back roads under ash-gray skies, holding up grocery stores for baloney and light bread and Bonnie’s Chesterfields, pharmacies for pints of whiskey, and filling stations for gasoline. They took any cash there was, of course, but no one had much, so it only amounted to enough to pay for cabins or to give to people who let them spend the night in a spare room. Once in awhile, Clyde promised to return the money they stole, and when a feed store unexpectedly yielded more than a hundred dollars, they did indeed loop back and repay several of those they’d robbed. As W.D. observed, it made a person feel like a million bucks to hand some poor slob a wad of bills and watch his face go all slack and silly.

  Mostly, though, they felt like two cents. While no one chased them on the roads during the day, they were all three hunted in their dreams. Nights in tourist court cabins or strangers’ houses passed in patches of shifting and rearranging, sewn together with a frayed thread of sleep. They drank themselves into
unconsciousness, Clyde and Bonnie on the bed, W.D. on the floor, because a separate room for W.D. was too expensive, and, besides, the one time they’d splurged, he’d shown up at their door in the middle of the night—Clyde nearly shot him—confessing in that straightforward W.D. way that he was scared to sleep by himself. He wasn’t used to it, he explained, having never slept in a room alone in his life.

  But the floor was uncomfortable, so around two o’clock, W.D., smelling of sweat and cigars and sardines, would climb into the bed beside Bonnie. An hour or so later, Clyde, on her other side, would slide out to kneel and pray in frantic whispers, until, by stroking his bent head, she coaxed him back under the blanket. It was noon at least, by the time they slogged out of the damp and twisted sheets, depressed in the knowledge that losing half a day made no difference because they had nothing to do with themselves.

  Outside Kansas City, Bonnie tried to talk Clyde into finding them some morphine. But Clyde refused. The drink was one thing; he might be slow with the drink in him, but he could still drive and shoot. Besides, he despised hopheads; he wanted to live a real life, not some shit dream. You mean a shit real life, she said. She’d begged, he pointed out. He’d promised, she answered. Their argument would go on, like a car rolling down a mountain, until she was screaming that the hell of the chair would be preferable to this one and he was screaming that if she wanted to know what hell was she might want to try some time in a real prison and she was threatening to go home to her mother and he was threatening to take her there.

  These fights were vicious and exhausting, but they were blown up entirely with air that, once pumped out, left them essentially unchanged. The fight that involved W.D., however, was different.

  * * *

  One of W.D.’s main responsibilities was to steal license plates to disguise the cars they stole. Proud of his collection, he often played with the plates on the grass when they camped, arranging them in various patterns according to color and state and number.

  One morning in a tourist court lot, he spotted a plate he’d never seen before, bloodred with white numbers and the letters C-o-n-n across the bottom. He waited until they’d pushed their way into an Arkansas woods for the night, before leading Bonnie and Clyde to the back of the car for a surprise. “You ever seen one like this?”

  Clyde snorted, poking the metal with the barrel of his rifle. “When you put this on?”

  “This afternoon. When you told me to change the plates.”

  “I guess I oughta know better than to rely on a moron.”

  “What the hell? What’s that shit?”

  W.D. sounded tough, but Bonnie could see he was hurt. “Don’t be so nasty, Clyde.”

  “Better not call me Clyde. This idiot’s likely to slip up and blab it in front of the next law we come across. Make him suspicion us.”

  “Suspect us,” Bonnie corrected.

  “What’d I do?” W.D. said.

  “Conn?” Clyde sneered. “What the hell is Conn?”

  “It’s Connecticut,” Bonnie said.

  “Where’s that?” W.D. asked.

  “The point is, it ain’t in Arkansas. Don’t you know anything, you dumb cluck?” He dropped his rifle in the grass and began unscrewing the plate.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I’ll call you whatever the fuck I want, you dumb fuck.” With a sharp thrust, Clyde elbowed W.D., so that the boy stumbled back.

  Bonnie didn’t intend to pick up the rifle, but she found it in her hands, as she’d found the scrap of metal she’d held at little Noel’s neck after school.

  “What the hell—?!” Clyde jumped, lost his balance, and sprawled on his back. “Be careful with that.”

  “You be careful,” Bonnie said. “The last time you bullied W.D., a man ended up dead. This time that man might be you.”

  “You ain’t gonna shoot me!”

  “You ain’t gonna be mean to W.D.!” She spoke forcefully, through gritted teeth, but already she felt the limpness that always followed when fury overwhelmed her. “I’m sick and tired of it, and I’m sick and tired of you!” she said in a final burst of disgust before the gun, suddenly heavy, wobbled in her hands.

  As soon as she let the barrel dip, he was up unscrewing the plate again, and when he got it off the car, he bent it back and forth fiercely until the metal snapped in two. He threw the pieces into the woods.

  “You should have let him keep it,” Bonnie said, “for his collection.”

  “Fuck his collection and fuck you, too. I’m the one who’s sick and tired. I’m the one who drives all day and night, who gits us money so we can eat, who keeps us away from the laws. What do you do?”

  “What do I do?” she said with contempt. “What do I do? I love you. That’s what I do. And you are mistaken if you think that’s easy.”

  * * *

  The next morning, she awoke shivering in the thin light. W.D. was still asleep, rolled in a blanket beside what remained of their fire, like an enormous caterpillar. The bedding beside her, in which Clyde had turned his back to her the night before, was limp and empty. The V-8 was gone.

  She’d flown off the handle, and he’d left her stuck, like the hatchet head in the wall of the outhouse. First she was afraid, then tearful. Then she nearly kicked the smugly sleeping W.D. But she roasted two extra wieners over the breakfast fire and set them aside.

  In an hour or two, they heard an engine and the slap and scratch of twigs against metal. Clyde had returned with a gift for W.D., a camera that had been carelessly left on the back seat of a V-8 coach.

  He’d also swapped their car for the coach. It didn’t have a trunk, like the coupe they’d been driving, but the seats had more room to stretch out in.

  * * *

  “You with that gun,” Clyde said.

  They were jouncing over weedy hummocks, making their way back to the highway, so he had to hold tight to the wheel to steady the car, but she could tell he wanted his hands on her, and she wriggled in response. In the back seat, W.D. contentedly fooled with the camera, folding back the cover of the slim, black case so that the lens stretched forward on its accordion sleeve and then squeezing it back together, until it was hardly bigger than a package of cigarettes. The sun grew stronger; the new car smelled fresh; the haze that had for the last few days been furring the fields and the tips of the trees had become overnight a definite green.

  In the hours he’d spent on his own that morning, Clyde had come up with a couple of refinements for their gang. “It’ll be a like a code, see? We’ll each have a tune that means just us. Say I’ve got to call to you, but I don’t want to give out my location. I’ll make a sound like this.” He pursed his lips and blew three notes. “Then you’ll know it’s me and I want you.”

  W.D. imitated the three notes.

  “That one’s mine. You got to have your own.”

  “I’ll have Dixie,” Bonnie said and whistled the first line.

  “You can’t have no song. It’s gotta be like a bird or a creaky fence, something natural.”

  “I’ll be a creaky fence,” W.D. said. Whistling on the inhale, he produced a wheezy sound.

  “You sound like an old man walking up a hill!” Bonnie laughed.

  “This is serious. Y’all act like we’re on a picnic.”

  They were not to use their real names again, even in private, so they wouldn’t slip up in public.

  When they stopped for lunch, they bought a roll of film, and later they parked the car on a newly made road, a narrow canyon between brown-scabbed banks of wounded earth. Against a grim background of gray sky and brittle, leafless trees, they played for the camera, using the car as a prop and swapping hats.

  “Let’s see you hold that gun on me again,” Clyde said. “Make like you’re grabbing for mine.” He pulled his jacket back, exposing the hard ivory handle of his favorite pistol in the holster at his belt. Crooking her right arm, she leveled the Remington whipit and stretched her left hand in a gesture, consciously graceful�
��like Clara Bow would do—toward the pistol. For the first time in weeks, Clyde pushed his hat back on his forehead, allowing the light to bathe his face. He looked at Bonnie as if she were a new V-8.

  “Got it,” W.D. said.

  “Let’s do one of Blue and the car with a gun,” Clyde said.

  Her pose was extravagant: an elbow propped imperiously on the round headlight, fingers loose to display her bloodred nails, a foot on the fender, so her knees spread open like a man’s, the .45 hanging casually off her fiercely jutting, feminine hip.

  “Look mean,” Clyde said, but though her eyes were narrowed against the sun, she couldn’t keep from smiling.

  W.D. took his cigar from his mouth, wiped it on his trousers, and held it out to her. “Chew on this. It’ll make you look tough.”

  It was disgusting, a smelly, wet rod, but she took it between her teeth and scowled at the camera, playing the part.

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 44

  March 1933

  Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. drove with the windows open, so the car could suck in the night air. It was cool but soft and plump with moisture, promising spring. Fifteen miles south of Dallas, their headlights revealed the entrance to the farm they’d been aiming for, where Blanche had taken Buck upon his release from Huntsville to stay with her mother and stepfather. Out in the country—“away from temptation and frustration,” as Cumie put it—Buck and Blanche were going to figure out how to live straight.

  Clyde had to knock hard on the glass window of the front door four times before an old man, one side of his face pressed into folds by sleep, answered. Without a word, he jerked his thumb toward the narrow staircase on the right, before shuffling back into the room from which he’d emerged.

  “Buck!” The stairs were pinched between two walls, and the sound of Clyde’s voice boomed back at them.