Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  Bonnie didn’t see how Buck could keep living with that big hole in his head. But, aside from being weak from loss of blood and unsteady on his feet, he didn’t seem sick. “Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe we don’t know what a person can do without.”

  In Dexter, Bonnie felt grossly conspicuous, sitting in the mud-dappled Ford in her tattered, filthy nightgown waiting for Clyde to emerge from a clothing store, but no one paid her any attention.

  “Just my luck, he’s a marshal,” Clyde said, depositing a large parcel wrapped in brown paper on her lap.

  “Who is?”

  “The clerk. But I gave him a good story about how we were on our way to visit my mother-in-law, and my wife insisted we needed new duds. Making a big sale like this blew his wig.”

  At the other end of town, he parked in front of a restaurant. “Gimme one of them white shirts.”

  While he was inside, she examined his choices. He’d bought her a cream-colored satin nightgown, slinky and entirely unsuited to sleeping in the car or on an old blanket on the grass. She rubbed the luxurious fabric against her cheek. He’d also bought two dresses.

  She held one up to her shoulders when he came back to the car. “What do you think?”

  He was struggling with boxes and barely grunted. “I promised to bring the plates back,” he said.

  Waiting outside the drugstore next, she was ashamed for thinking about clothes and ashamed of Clyde for caring what his food was served on.

  “We ought to get Buck home to your mama,” she said, when Clyde got back in the car again.

  Clyde nodded. “If he don’t die today, I aim to try it. It’s what I promised her. Don’t know how ’til we find another car, though.”

  “Well, this is a nice town,” she said. “There’s bound to be one you’ll like somewhere around here.”

  The next day, Clyde returned the plates and came back to the meadow with more dinners, a box of groceries, a case of soda pop, another block of ice, and a pair of tweezers with which he, Bonnie, and W.D. took turns trying without success to pick a sliver of glass out Blanche’s left eye. The ice they chipped from the block with the tire iron, however, did seem to bring down Buck’s swelling.

  On the third day, Clyde and W.D. found a fresh machine, parked on a side street in Redfield with the keys in it, almost as if it had been delivered to them. Now that they could leave, W.D. couldn’t relax.

  “We ought to get going,” he said, when he and Clyde returned from the woods, where they’d set the bloodstained back seat on fire. “This place don’t feel safe. How do we know someone ain’t up there, watching us?”

  Bonnie looked back up the slope where the greens were deepening, becoming more lustrous in the soft evening light. Like Sleeping Beauty, their wounded family was protected by thickets of wild blackberry brambles and tangled, exuberant honeysuckle. It seemed impossible that anyone would wander into this place that humanity had so obviously forsaken.

  “You ought to go on yourself, W.D.,” Buck said.

  “Yes, you could get away,” Blanche said fervently, as if W.D.’s escape would bring her vicarious relief. “The laws don’t even know who you are. You could just go someplace and start your life all over.”

  W.D. frowned. “Where could I go, though? I don’t know no place but Dallas.”

  Blanche threw her arm out, sweeping the horizon. “Anywhere! Minnesota. Michigan. Montana. Go someplace where they never heard of the Barrow Gang.”

  “Any place gets a newspaper has heard of the Barrow Gang,” Bonnie said. “I bet they know about us in New York City.”

  “Montana?” W.D. said doubtfully. “I don’t know nobody in Montana.”

  “Boy means to stay with his people, don’t you, Boy?” Clyde said. “He knows you ain’t nobody if you ain’t got no people.”

  “Better to have no people than certain people,” Blanche said.

  “If he goes off by himself, who’ll take care of him, if he gets hurt?” Bonnie said. “Who’ll take him back to Dallas, like we’re fixing to take Buck?”

  The fact that Buck would not need taking back to Dallas had he not been with them hummed like wind in electrical wires, but no one said it outright.

  “Don’t worry, Boy,” Clyde said finally. “Platte City learned me. Never stay when you can go. We’re leaving first thing.”

  W.D.’s anxiety had spooked them. In silence, except for Buck, who loudly described the dinner he intended to consume the following evening, they packed the new car and prepared early to sleep. With her red and purple eyes, Blanche, sitting up so Buck could stretch out across the back seat of the new car with his head in her lap, looked worse than her husband.

  “You haven’t slept two hours since we got here,” Bonnie said.

  “I’m afraid to sleep. What if Buck…?” Blanche couldn’t finish her sentence.

  “I ain’t going nowhere,” Buck said. “You gotta sleep, Baby, or you won’t be no help to me when we’re driving tomorrow.”

  “I’ll stay up with him,” Bonnie said. “I’ll wake you if he needs you. I can’t sleep anyway, my leg’s hurting so bad tonight.”

  Blanche, who indeed could hardly hold her head up, relented and got in the front seat, where she could lie down comfortably, and Bonnie took her place.

  For some time, they were jumpy. They were used to scurryings and rustlings, but tonight, even the trembling bleat of the screech owl disturbed them, and a rabbit’s scream made Clyde grab his gun. Finally, Blanche fell asleep, and then W.D. and Clyde slept as well. But Buck, who’d slept on and off a good deal of the day, remained awake.

  “You won’t leave him, will you?” Buck whispered.

  “You know I won’t.” Bonnie was insulted by the question.

  “I know.” He sighed. “You and me are a lot alike.”

  With that, he, too, was asleep. Bonnie was sweating between and under her thighs and in the folds where her breasts lay against her ribs. She tried to lift her legs half an inch off the seat to allow a little air to circulate. But Buck’s heavy head pinned her.

  Trapped and wakeful amid the alien noises of the night, Bonnie sat in the spongy heat and mourned the loss of the light and music that must once have spilled over the hill. She was unaware that this place she perceived as abandoned and lonely was acreage the locals knew well and traveled through, observing discarded bandages and half-burned seat cushions—not so unusual in themselves, perhaps, because hobos dropped and burned all kinds of garbage. But so bloody! A farmhand picking blackberries might feel alarmed at such a sight, which might prompt him to report it to a marshal, who was also a clothing store clerk, who’d sold several items to a man whose shirt had been covered in brown stains that could easily have been blood.

  CHAPTER 61

  When the sky lightens to the pale blue of a girl’s wash dress, laundered so many times that the color has leached away, and the sun is still only a narrow stripe of brilliance, Blanche wakens and rouses Bonnie. “How is he?”

  “I’m fine.” Buck speaks for himself. “Just dandy. C’mere, Baby. I got something for you.”

  The day is already so warm that Bonnie can’t stand the thought of putting anything over her thin nightgown. Hopping on one foot, catching her balance with the toe of the other, she advances precariously toward the small fire where Clyde and W.D., their BARs well behind them, are roasting wieners on sticks.

  “Morning, sunshine,” she says.

  Clyde smiles. “We can practically see through that nightie.”

  She shrugs. “W.D.’s seen about all there is to see by now.”

  W.D. keeps his eyes modestly averted.

  “You gotta take it, Blanche. You’re gonna need money.” Buck and Blanche are on the far side of the car, but Buck seems to have lost the ability to modulate his voice. “Listen, it’s all right. I stole it from one a them drunken soldiers. He’ll never miss it.”

  “Put that wallet back in the car,” Blanche says. “It’s W.D.’s.”

  “It ain’t. I
got it from one a them soldiers lying around out there.”

  Bonnie, Clyde, and W.D. exchange looks; this is what they expect from a hole in the head. Then Clyde stiffens, like a rabbit scenting a dog.

  At the top of the hill, the trees and bushes separate into hunters, twenty or maybe thirty of them, their rifles and shotguns tucked tight against their cheeks, ready.

  Bonnie glances over her shoulder for the poor deer or fox or rabbit. She doesn’t grasp that she’s the prey.

  “Look out!”

  As if Clyde’s shout were the signal, the guns produce a sudden storm of cracks and bangs, thuds, rips, whizzes, and thunks. Shot splatters like rain in the campfire. A hot dog explodes. When the BARs bark back, the hunters fall to the ground or dive behind trees.

  “I’m shot,” W.D. bawls. “I can’t fight no more.”

  “Goddammit, you got to!” Clyde answers. “Get in the car!”

  He supports Bonnie, half carrying and half dragging her, while she does her best to run on one leg. When they reach the car, he hurls her onto the broken glass that now litters the front seat. Blanche, glass mingled with her hair and strewn over her back, lies on top of Buck in the back seat, trying to shield his body and his broken head. The car zooms backward and jerks to a halt.

  “Let’s go!!” Bonnie urges.

  But the car won’t. Clyde has backed over a stump or a rock. He looks helplessly at the rest of them.

  “Let’s run, then!” Bonnie begins shoving at him. Clyde’s paralysis scares her even more than the guns. “C’mon! We’ve got to go!”

  “You can’t run,” he says dully. “Buck can’t run.”

  “I can too.” Bonnie says.

  “I can run,” Buck says. “But I need my shoes. Somebody get me my shoes.”

  The guns stay quiet. The only signs of the hunters are bulging tree trunks and a hat that has settled on a bush.

  “Maybe we can make it to the other car,” Clyde says.

  While Blanche pours glass from her boots before shoving her feet in, Clyde slides out of the car and instantly catches a ricochet that snaps his head sideways. He staggers, blinks, and swings his scattergun in a wide arc, emitting a flurry of bullets. With his right hand, he continues to squeeze the trigger, while with his left he tries to tug Bonnie past the steering wheel. On her other side, W.D. shoves her bad leg, which makes her yelp.

  “Where are my shoes?” Buck whines. “I got to have my shoes.”

  “I got ’em on you, Buck!” Blanche is sobbing. “I just got to tie ’em. Hold still.”

  “Leave the shoes be!” Bonnie yells.

  “Come on!” Clyde booms between sprays of bullets.

  Using W.D. as a crutch, Bonnie hobbles and hops as fast as she can toward the old bullet-tattered car.

  Blanche, too, is finally out. Moaning “not again, not again, not again,” she squats beside the car and maneuvers Buck’s arms around her neck. She helps him up and out, and he tries to run, but his feet won’t obey, so he hangs down her back, like a sack of cotton, and she hauls him forward.

  “You got my shoes on the wrong feet!”

  “Hit the car!” a deep voice shouts, and the air crackles and sings with bullets again. The old car squirms and rocks, while pieces of metal and shards of the windshield fly in all directions. Finally, the machine sinks to its knees, as its repaired tires rip open and release their air.

  Clyde’s BAR is spent; he tosses it to the ground and raises a rifle in its place. Blanche, nearly doubled over with Buck on her back, stands frozen; Bonnie and W.D., closer to the shredded car, turn back.

  “Get across the river,” Clyde yells.

  Shooting judiciously, he manages to hold back for a surprisingly long time the passel of farmers and their half-grown sons who won’t risk getting killed to catch some outlaws. Even after Clyde quits shooting and plunges down the hill himself, the posse hesitates, no one wanting to be the first to break from cover and become a target. But he’s obviously been hit; his gait is jerky, as if his right leg can hardly bear weight, and this emboldens them. Encouraging each other with yells and whistles, they follow tentatively, as if he is a wounded bear that might abruptly turn on them and charge. When he reaches Bonnie, Clyde wraps his arm around her waist—the rifle in his hand burns against the underside of her breasts—and she dangles between him and W.D., until they pull her into a thicket along the edge of the river.

  Blanche and Buck are still halfway up the slope, where Buck is slumped against a tree trunk. Blanche flits around him, tugging and prodding in vain. “Help me!” she screams. “I can’t move him!”

  Bonnie feels Clyde coiled beside her, and she wraps her fingers around his wrist, knowing it will do no good, that he will tear his hand away and charge back up the hill.

  “Help!” Blanche screams again, her desperation sharp and gleaming as a razor blade.

  W.D. looks at Clyde, waiting for an order. If Clyde wills it, he, too, will leave their cover to rescue Buck and Blanche.

  Bullets thud into the earth around them as the posse shoots randomly at the undergrowth. Buckshot crackles through the sumac branches and the pellets sizzle as they penetrate Bonnie’s chest. Across her nightgown a pattern of red polka dots rises and runs together, until the fabric is soaked in blood.

  “C’mon out of there! Give yourselves up! C’mon now.” Unlike Blanche’s piercing screams, these commands, coming from men who are uncertain and nervous, who aim first in one direction, then another, are easy to resist.

  “Stay here,” Clyde whispers, pulling away from Bonnie at last. But instead of catapulting himself up the hill to Buck and Blanche, he slides feet first out of the thicket, slithers down the bank on his stomach, and disappears into the river.

  “There’s some of ’em over here!” The guns crack again, but this time the bullets come nowhere near Bonnie and W.D. They’re aimed at Buck and Blanche.

  Blanche has curled herself around Buck. “Don’t shoot him!” she cries. “You killed him already! Don’t shoot him no more.”

  Bonnie feels as if her deepest insides are being yanked up through her mouth with a hook. She gags and tastes an evil liquid on her tongue.

  “That’s it for them, I guess,” W.D. says.

  “Where’s your gun?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want your gun!” She clutches at him. “Give me your gun!”

  “Shut it, Sis! What’s the matter with you?” He grabs her hands. “I dropped it someplace. I been shot, remember?” He lowers his chin to study the holes in his chest.

  If only Blanche would be quiet, but she won’t stop screaming. “Get away from me! Don’t take him! You can’t have him! Don’t die, Daddy! Don’t die!”

  If only Bonnie had held Clyde fast. Blanche at least is holding Buck, but Bonnie, crouching like a helpless groundhog behind a bunch of sumac bushes, is going to die alone. “I need a gun.”

  “What for? You shoot from here, they’ll know where we’re at. You can’t shoot enough to stop them.”

  “I don’t want to shoot them! I want to shoot myself!”

  From the far side of the river, three whistled notes repeat over and over, sounding like no bird that ever lived. While the men of the posse, arrayed in a ragged circle around Buck and Blanche, laugh and slap each other, W.D. lifts Bonnie in his arms. Just before the plunging riverbank blocks her view, she sees Blanche twisting like a cat between two men who hold her wrists.

  “Look at them dark glasses on that she-devil,” a man shouts. “Think you’re a movie star?”

  * * *

  On the other side, Clyde, who has to squint his eyes nearly shut against the blood that flows from his forehead, has found a young man with eyes as big as hubcaps and a milk pail that jangles on its handle in his shaking hand. Clumsily, Bonnie, in her wet and bloodied satin nightgown, is tumbled over the fence and transferred from W.D.’s arms into the boy’s.

  As they reach the farmyard, a woman rushes from the house, followed by a girl with her hai
r half-braided.

  “Marnie’s on the horn! She says the Barrow Gang’s over to the park!” the woman shouts, before the screen door slams like a gunshot, and she pulls her breath in hard, as if trying to suck her words back.

  “We ain’t going to hurt you,” Clyde says, smearing blood across his face with his arm. “We just need to borrow your car. The laws have shot the hell out of us.”

  The farmers are too poor to buy gas for the two cars—a Model T and a 1929 Plymouth—in their garage, but at least the Plymouth is still on its tires. Someone siphons a can of kerosene into the tank, while the young man settles Bonnie gently on the back seat. Clyde promises they’ll leave the machine somewhere along the road, good as new, but, his left arm being useless, he loses control near Polk City and rams it into a telephone pole. They drive on with the front end smashed in, the windshield shattered and the engine complaining until they commandeer a flathead Ford about twenty miles north.

  “Can’t be helped,” Clyde says as they pull away from the wreck, and Bonnie knows he means more than the car.

  * * *

  The picture in the Des Moines Tribune covered the entire page above the fold. In a tableau of light and shadow, Blanche was the focal point. She writhed in the clutches of a fat man in a black suit, her mouth contorted, her curling dark hair falling over her forehead. Her eyes, covered by dark glasses, looked like holes in her face. Buck—to whom the caption referred as Mr. Marvin Barrow—was invisible, his position clear from the attitudes of a cluster of men bent low over the ground. Studying the photo, Bonnie rubbed her own wrists.

  The reports followed them through Nebraska, where Clyde kept off the roads, driving along the edges of fields in which the corn and wheat stood higher than the roof of the car, and into Colorado. The young man with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker was identified as Jack Sherman, a sign, Clyde insisted with admiration, that Buck was alive and doing his best to protect W.D., whom the laws still didn’t know.

  “Why didn’t you go back for him?” W.D. asked. When he got no answer, he pressed on. “It’s stuck in my head, her screaming like that. Why didn’t you do nothing?”