Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  Even Blanche laughs at this.

  “Now, y’all got to tell us your names,” Bonnie says.

  Surprisingly, it turns out that Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone are not formally acquainted, although Mr. Darby confesses to having observed Miss Stone in downtown Ruston on various occasions.

  “DD and SS, stung by a swarm of Bs,” Bonnie says.

  “What in hell does that mean?” Buck says.

  “They both got double letters. I like that.”

  “I do, too,” Darby says. “Dillard’s really my middle name.”

  “I’d like to get those names into a poem,” Bonnie says.

  “A poem?” Miss Stone’s tone is incredulous again.

  “One of hers was in the papers,” Clyde says.

  They ride for a few minutes in silence, before Miss Stone says, “My name’s really Sophronia. It’s from a poem, I believe.”

  “It’s very pretty,” Bonnie says.

  “I had to make it snappier for the radio.”

  “You’re on the radio?” Only a year or so ago, Bonnie would have wanted to know how she, too, could be on the radio.

  “It’s part of my work as a home demonstration agent,” Miss Stone says. “I tell people how they can plan their meals to stretch their budget. I provide recipes and tips, that sort of thing. It’s an essential service, times being what they are.”

  “You talk like you’re on the radio,” Buck says.

  “Let’s hear one of those recipes,” Bonnie says.

  “Well, we did make something very nice over at the high school this morning. It’s called a macaroni papoose. It’s a ham and macaroni dish. You roll the ham around the pasta. That’s the papoose. It’s something a little different.”

  “Tell it like you would on the radio,” Bonnie says.

  Miss Stone begins haltingly, but Bonnie draws her out with questions about the proportions of horseradish and cheese and nudges her on to describe a side of lima beans in tomato sauce. “You can add some bacon, but then you might as well go ahead and serve it as the main course. You can turn it into a succotash, if you’ve got some corn and some okra. The idea is to develop a few good, basic dishes and then vary those, depending on what you’ve got handy. You learn a good boiled dressing, and you can use it to make a nice composed salad out of cabbage, potatoes, beans, brussels sprouts, or what have you. And if you don’t have any meat, why you can make a perfectly delicious cutlet with some potatoes and onions and any sort of root vegetables, dip it in a little beaten egg and some cracker crumbs, and fry it up.”

  “Don’t you got nothin’ for dessert?” Clyde asks.

  “I saw something in the paper the other day I’ve been meaning to try. Have you ever had popcorn custard?”

  They get her to talk through at least half a dozen more dishes until they’re over the border into Arkansas, and Clyde turns onto a side road about six miles from the last town they’ve driven through.

  The road, its bed made of pale dirt and grayed pine needles, is too narrow for two cars to pass, but they don’t expect to meet anyone way out here. The tall pines standing straight as bars on either side line a neglected passage too far from town or railroad tracks even for tramps. As usual, Clyde drives faster than the road or the car can comfortably bear. They bounce and jangle, wincing as trees fly at them and then fall away.

  “Why are we going down here?” Darby asks.

  “Time to get rid of you,” Buck says.

  “Shut your goddamned mouth, Buck,” Bonnie says. “We’re trying to enjoy the ride up here.”

  Privately, she, too, takes some pleasure in scaring these respectable people. Back in Ruston, they have everything, but out here they’re at her mercy. She can turn Sophia Stone into nothing more than torn flesh and sticky blood, no different from one of those pieces of meat she likes to cook. Frightened by her own thoughts, Bonnie loosens her grip around the slick wooden handle of the gun in her lap.

  Clyde stops the car. “You got any money?” he asks Darby.

  Darby raises his hips to dig into his pocket, extracts a coin, and holds it out to Clyde. “I’m afraid this is all.”

  Clyde shakes his head. “You can put that away. I’m sorry for hitting you back there. I hope I didn’t hurt you too bad.”

  “Thank you for the food,” Bonnie says as Darby and Stone slide awkwardly out the door she holds open for them. “I hope we catch your program one of these days.”

  “Now turn around and don’t be watching after us,” Clyde warns. As soon as Bonnie is back inside, he pushes the accelerator. The tires spit rocks as the car shoots backward.

  “Clyde, wait!” she says. “How’re they going to get back home on twenty-five cents?”

  “You’re right.”

  He speeds forward again. Dillard Darby turns his head and closes his eyes, while Sophia Stone steps to one side, readying herself to run into the trees.

  Bonnie thrusts her hand out the window, flapping a five-dollar bill. “In case you need to wire or something.”

  When neither Darby nor Stone approaches, she releases the money. It flutters to the ground, a gift from Lady Bountiful.

  CHAPTER 53

  “But it’s Mother’s Day!” Bonnie stomped her foot, driving her heel into the red Oklahoma soil.

  “We can’t risk it,” Clyde said. He and Buck were sitting on a blanket, shotguns, rifles, and pistols between them, a variety of clips and shells within easy reach. Clyde, focused on a sawed-off lever-action Winchester, didn’t bother even to glance at Bonnie as he made his pronouncement. “We’ll stop by Eagle Ford Road quick, like we did the last time, and see if Boy’s showed up, but we can’t be driving anywhere outside of West Dallas.” He swept aside a box of cardboard shells. “I hate this paper shit.” Having selected a handful of brass cylinders, he inserted them one by one into the Winchester’s magazine and snapped the lever into place.

  * * *

  Their luck had not improved since they’d lost W.D. in April, when Sophia Stone had told the Shreveport Times that Bonnie Parker swore and stank and whacked her in the head with a sawed-off shotgun. Bonnie had tossed the disgusting rag out the window, where it whooshed up in the car’s draft and then tumbled into the ditch behind them like a shot bird.

  “We should have killed them.” She’d meant it as a joke, but no one had laughed.

  They’d gone right to Dallas, expecting to find W.D. waiting for them there, but he was not.

  “It ain’t good for him to be driving around with that hole in his stomach,” Clyde said.

  “I guess he wanted to get away,” Buck said.

  “Course he wanted to get away. Those idiots were after him,” Clyde said.

  “I mean from you.”

  “From us?” Bonnie had whirled to stare at Buck over the back of the seat. “You’ve said a lot of bonehead things, Buck Barrow, but that’s the dumbest.”

  Like a hookworm, however, the distressing notion corkscrewed its way into her bloodstream. Obviously, from the start, they’d involved Boy in things he wanted to run from—the images welled up in her (the helpless feet, the rip of bullets, the thud of a body against the earth, the mangled meat of the lifeless arm, the blood seeping between his fingers)—but she’d thought the attachment binding him to her and Clyde had been stronger than any fear or horror, the way her love for Clyde rushed her past her own doubts.

  Without Boy to boss between them, Clyde and Buck had argued all the way north to Minnesota—where they’d had to cling to the outside of the car to make a getaway when a man they tried to kidnap sent a load of shot into one of Buck’s legs—and then east to Indiana—where, trapped after another botched bank robbery, Bonnie had squeezed the trigger on a BAR, releasing a spray of bullets, one of which had found its way into a bedroom and grazed the arm of a woman as she sat at her dressing table brushing her hair.

  * * *

  But Clyde and Buck were easy with each other now, united in cleaning and loading their weapons. The repeated clicks and cracks
of metal on metal made Bonnie want to scream. “Why is it you who always decides what we can risk?” With the heel of her hand, she shoved Clyde’s shoulder.

  He swayed and turned to look at her, which gave her some satisfaction, but he spoke with contempt. “You’re like a cow in a chute when it comes to your mother. You just want to go straight ahead, no looking right, no looking left, no idea what’s coming up behind you. They get a whiff of us anywhere near Dallas, where’s the first place the laws gonna go? Emma Parker’s house.” He placed the loaded shotgun on the blanket with an emphatic thrust of his arm, as if it marked her mother’s house on a map of the city.

  “You’re going to see your mama.”

  “Because she’ll know where W.D.’s at. We have to get this gang back together.” He shrugged and picked up a Colt pistol. “Besides, West Dallas is different.”

  “I can’t never see my mama again, because she don’t live in the Bog?”

  “I never said never. I said not this trip.”

  “Not last trip. Not this trip. You talk as if there’s plenty of trips. What if this is the last chance?”

  “I’m just trying to keep me and Buck out of the chair.”

  “And I’m just trying to see my mama.” As she spoke, she lunged for the Winchester. It was heavier than it looked, but she knew it would be. She needed a substantial weapon through which she could explode and blow a hole in his bossy head. With her left hand, she supported the stubby barrel so that the mouth opened toward Clyde’s right ear.

  Instantly, Buck was off the blanket, wrapping his long fingers around the barrel to tug it out of her grasp. “Now, c’mon, Sis. You don’t want to do that.”

  “I could go into Dallas,” Blanche said. She’d been sitting a little away from the rest of them, observing a pair of nesting birds through the field glasses.

  “What do you mean?” Buck said sharply.

  “They’re looking for you and Clyde and the cigar-smoking gun moll, right?” she said. “Course, they know I’m with you, but they’re not on the lookout for me by myself. I bet they wouldn’t even know me if I sat down next to ’em. I could go into Dallas, round everybody up, and bring them someplace out in the country.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Emma, on the sprung back seat of a Model A touring car beside Marie Barrow, listened over the sounds of the engine coughing and the wind leaking through the crooked doors and windows to Blanche complaining to Cumie in the front.

  “L.C. can have this old motorcar when we’re done with it.” L.C., who was driving, sat up straighter. “One hundred dollars it cost me, because Nell said she was too busy to drive us. She wouldn’t even go get me these boots.”

  Cumie shook her head but didn’t comment. Emma suspected that Cumie, like Emma herself, approved of Nell’s behavior. Nell obviously understood that guilt rubbed off like soot on the innocent. Only the mothers were desperate enough and the young ones foolish enough to keep running these punishing errands. Even Henry Barrow hadn’t come.

  As far as Emma could see, one piece of dirt was just like another out here, but at a certain smudge Blanche said stop, so they pulled off and waited a good while.

  “You sure you got the right place?” Emma asked.

  Blanche, absorbed in examining the leather of her new knee-high boots, shrugged. “It’s where Clyde said. You can’t count on them being dead on time, you know. They gotta sneak their way.”

  Emma was relieved finally to see the roadster and, as they followed it along the thread of a dirt road to a creek, the familiar happy anticipation at the thought of reunion with her daughter fizzed up in her. When Bonnie, Clyde, and Buck dragged themselves out of their car, however, Emma had to make an effort not to frown and press her lips together. They’d obviously been drinking; their clothes had been slept in, and Bonnie’s breath smelled faintly of vomit. Although for Cumie’s sake, Emma felt herself softening as she watched that mother hold her boys, she could not forget how vehemently she hated Clyde, and all the other Barrows to boot, when she lay sleepless in her bed.

  Accepting $112 from Bonnie, Emma observed that Cumie got more—a few hundred, it looked like—but, of course, both her sons wanted to give her something. Blanche gave Cumie thirty dollars to deliver to Blanche’s mother, and Clyde gave Marie a wad he instructed her to spend on bedroom furniture.

  Bonnie behaved as if it were normal to have her mother snuck out to the back of some farm just to visit with her daughter. She might have been stopping by for a cup of coffee, given her conversation. She complimented Marie’s outfit—a pale blue dress with a chic short-sleeved bolero jacket, too nice, Emma judged, for any Barrow to have purchased without Clyde’s ill-gotten gains, and she asked so many mundane questions that Emma found herself in the absurd position of describing to her outlaw daughter the exact shade of green with which her new kitchen curtains were striped. Emma looked askance, too, at that Blanche, dressed in them riding britches like she was some Highland Park princess, going on like a body cared about her new boots.

  L.C. gave the supple leather a playful slap. “How’re you going to run from bullets in them?”

  “You just try and catch me!” Laughing, Blanche and L.C. tore off into the long, wet grass of the meadow.

  Everything about the way these people behaved was wrong. And wronger, still, was that Bonnie, who by nature was always in the thick of the horseplay, only watched L.C. and Blanche with eyes that seemed shadowed by their own sockets and took a long drag on her cigarette.

  Someone who didn’t know Bonnie might think she was just fine. She was young enough, after all, to appear fresh and pretty no matter what the circumstances. Anyway, Emma would be the first to argue that exposure to the sun and wind was far better for the complexion and posture than hunching in the linty, clattery atmosphere of a sewing factory. But Bonnie’s eyes moved constantly, revealing her strain. When she talked to Emma, her glance kept slipping sideways over her mother’s shoulder, as if, like an animal, she sensed hidden movement in the undergrowth. She’d coarsened, too. “Shit, you scared me,” she’d said when Emma came up from behind and touched her sweet, bare neck. Emma bit her tongue. God would forgive her daughter’s profanity. Her drinking, too. Emma wondered if Bonnie got hopped up. She knew that’s what kids did.

  Like Bonnie, Emma hungered for everyday details: what they were eating, where they were sleeping, how Clyde and Bonnie were getting along with Buck and Blanche. She had no desire to hear about any robberies or shootings, but she did believe it her duty not to shy away from the worst of her daughter’s troubles. “What happened in Joplin,” she ventured, “must have been awful.”

  Bonnie, however, shrank from allowing her mother a glimpse of that horror or any other. She shook her head, rejecting the invitation. “We were just playing around in those pictures,” she offered instead. “I’ll never smoke cigars, Mama.”

  “I know that,” Emma soothed. “Come with me a minute.”

  Bonnie let her mother tuck an arm around her waist and lead her about twenty yards along the creek until they were out of earshot of the others.

  “That nice Ted Hinton’s been by two or three times,” Emma began.

  “Unless you’re warning me to stay away, I don’t want to hear about Ted Hinton.”

  “You got off in Kaufman, maybe you’d get off again. Or at least you wouldn’t have to serve too much time. And then it would be over. You’d be free. It’s not like you done any of these killings.”

  “How do you know?” Bonnie raised her chin defiantly. “I could’ve.”

  “No, you could not, Bonnie Elizabeth! I know you.”

  Bonnie closed her eyes. “If you knew me, Mama, you wouldn’t love me anymore.”

  “Don’t say that, Bonnie. It isn’t true.”

  “Mama, why can’t you understand that when Clyde dies, I want to be dead, too?”

  Overwhelmed by the hopelessness of arguing with her daughter, Emma stroked Bonnie’s dry, broken hair. “You’re coloring this too much.”
<
br />   * * *

  After Dallas, Bonnie and Clyde and Blanche and Buck tried another vacation of sorts, driving to Florida and then meandering up the Georgia coast, stopping to play on the beaches. Until Buck smashed his hand while changing a tire, he and Clyde argued over who would drive. Bonnie and Clyde argued over which cabins to rent, and Blanche and Buck argued over how much Buck drank and how loudly he talked. When Buck was sober, he tormented Clyde by predicting that W.D. would do something stupid and get himself killed or get himself caught and squeal, to which Clyde invariably responded that W.D. was a helluva lot smarter than Buck, which made Blanche argue with Clyde, which made Bonnie argue with Blanche. Mostly, though, they enjoyed themselves.

  They were halfway through North Carolina when Texas began to reel them back, and they turned west into Tennessee, then slid southwest through Alabama and Mississippi. In the evenings, through the insect blots on the windshield, Bonnie watched the road run straight and flat into the horizon until the orange hem of the sun had trailed away. In the blue-gray minutes between day and night, she pressed the vulnerable spot where her mother had embedded a splinter. She would never betray Clyde, but, despite what she’d told Emma, Bonnie did consider turning herself in to Ted Hinton. He’d cared nothing about poetry or music or acting himself, but he’d encouraged her aspirations, because of his affection for her. Now would he do what he could to save her, because he liked her? What if all she gave him was herself?

  CHAPTER 55

  June 1933

  Boy is back! Clyde crows as he delivers the news after a phone call to Cumie from Yazoo City. He wants to drive to Dallas to collect W.D. that very night.

  The following evening, sitting between Clyde and Boy, racing at eighty miles an hour up the Texas panhandle toward Oklahoma, where they’ll be meeting Buck and Blanche again, Bonnie experiences the elation of a second chance. W.D.’s return renews her confidence, and, as the warm wind pours over her face, she glories in the sweep of purple and orange across the vast Western sky as an emblem of the life they’ve chosen.