“If Daddy had run back up that hill, Boy,” Bonnie said angrily, “he’d of been shot dead, and then where would you be, I’d like to know.”
“Weren’t you the one squealing—‘I’m shot! I can’t fight no more!’?” Clyde said. “Up to you, you would have gived up the first minute. Then we’d all be dead. I got you out of there.”
“I wish I was dead,” W.D. said.
“Soon enough,” Clyde said.
* * *
With Buck and Blanche, they’d been a whole community unto themselves, but now they were reduced to a scant family. Exiled and aimless, they circled eastward again and drifted north. When they camped out in the country, they felt like the only people left on earth, so Clyde started the trick of cutting the engine and coasting onto some driveway in town late at night, which kept the laws from getting suspicious of a car stopped overnight along the street. It was a decent trick, but parking so close to the life they’d denied themselves also made them feel bereft. They were in Minnesota, eating a watermelon they’d bought off the back of a truck, when W.D. declared his desire to go home.
Clyde spit several seeds out slowly before he spoke. “Home? We’re your home, Boy.”
“I want to go back to Texas,” W.D. repeated in the same stubborn tone he’d used that first Christmas.
“He’s scared, Bud,” Bonnie said. “We ought to take him home. Let him see his mama.”
“What if they catch him?”
“He can say we made him, held him against his will. They don’t know how long he’s been with us.”
“I ain’t gonna get caught,” W.D. said, sounding so much like his normal self that they all felt better.
They made their way steadily south, skirting Iowa and driving through Illinois, where they restocked at another armory, and then worked their way through Missouri and Arkansas to Texas. At ease for the first time since Platte City, as the thick, soft air billowed through the car and the night throbbed with humming, chirping, wing-beating insects, Bonnie knew she’d been right to persuade Clyde to bring W.D. back, right to insist they all come home.
“We gotta stop for a Coca-Cola.” She was thinking ahead to the empty bottle tossed at the door of the Star that would be their signal to meet on Chalk Hill the next day.
“Pick you up in a coupla weeks,” Bonnie said, as W.D. slid out of the car at a bus stop in Marshall.
W.D. looked older in the harsh light of the streetlamp. He did, indeed, feel he’d been held against his will, if only because what had happened in Dexfield Park had finally caused a will of his own to take a shape that he could recognize and follow. However, he nodded and waved, giving no sign that they’d repelled him.
PART 4
CHAPTER 62
When Clyde tried to lower Bonnie onto the blanket he’d spread on Chalk Hill, his injured arm gave out and he dropped her the last few inches. She tucked her permanently bent leg under the good one, so only her unscarred ankle showed. When she straightened her back, her collarbone stood out like a yoke.
Emma shook her head. “You ain’t eating enough.” She pulled her daughter’s body against her own, as if she meant to meld them, and her fingers registered the hard nubs of Bonnie’s vertebrae. “And quit cryin’.” Unwilling to unclasp her arms, Emma wiped her own tears with her shoulder. That Bonnie seemed to have no notion of her coarsened skin, her dulled hair, and yellowed teeth hurt Emma most of all. “You gotta take better care of yourself, honey.”
Cumie and Henry talked only about Buck, marveling at the number of days he’d held on in the hospital. He’d become heroic merely by staying alive under the circumstances.
“Shot six times,” Henry said proudly, “not counting the one in the head, and the doc said it weren’t even that what got him but the pneumonia.”
“He never told a word about what you and him done or where you and Bonnie was,” Cumie put in.
“They had guards there night and day. They was sure you was going to bust him out.” Henry spoke a little wistfully, as if he, too, had been expecting Clyde to swoop in and carry Buck away.
“Clyde was getting ready to bring Buck to Dallas, when we got shot up,” Bonnie said. “He knew you’d want him back with you.”
“Oh, I know he would have done it if he could,” Cumie said.
“Folks around the Bog think Clyde’s another Jesse James,” Henry said. “Even when he’s outnumbered, he manages to shoot his way out, and he saves Bonnie here, too. It’s just too bad he couldn’t save Buck. Buck never weren’t so lucky as Bud.”
“We brung him back,” Cumie said. “He’s right over there at the Heights.” She gestured east.
“We didn’t get no headstone, though,” Henry said. “Figured we’d wait and get one for the both of you boys.”
“What about Blanche?” Bonnie asked. She didn’t want to talk about Clyde’s headstone.
“They say Blanche’ll only get ten years,” Emma burst out. “If you was to turn yourself in, Bonnie, I bet that’s all you’d get. I’m sorry,” she added, turning to Cumie and Henry, “but I’ve got to think of my own child.”
“You know me and Henry think Bonnie oughta give herself up,” Cumie said.
“She can’t do much anyway, can she, Bud?” Henry pointed out. “She can’t even drive with that bum leg.”
“Bonnie don’t have to do nothing,” Clyde said.
“I just meant if she turned herself in, it wouldn’t make it any worse for you to… well, do what you do.”
CHAPTER 63
Bonnie hadn’t had a typewriter since Joplin, but Clyde regularly gave her pads of paper. Sitting on a lump of blankets in an abandoned farmhouse somewhere outside Dallas, she tried to make a poem about Dexfield Park, but when her memories of the morning butted up against her words, the lines seemed weightless and ineffectual.
The night before the posse came, the dark could not lie still;
The leaves sighed; the owls cried, “There’s lawmen on the hill.”
But those who hid there waiting for the cracking of the dawn,
Heard not the words of those wise birds, and they slept on.
The trouble was the literal cracking that had accompanied the dawn. She couldn’t adequately convey the explosions of the guns, the sharp whistles of the bullets, the screaming, the experience of hurling themselves from crippled car to crippled car, let alone the desperation and loss.
She crushed her aborted attempts and pushed them beneath the blankets with the black socks and the severed arm, the burning metal against her flesh, the chunk of Buck’s head breaking away, Blanche’s screams.
“How do you know,” she asked Clyde that night, “that the laws aren’t out there now?”
“I know because there ain’t no guns shooting at us. When they find us, they’ll let us know.”
But he went to the window, through which they could see only darkness, and pressed his forehead to the glass.
Clyde fancied himself a wolf, able to lead a pack, but Bonnie saw that he was more like a coyote, snatching at scraps. Or like a rabbit, poised to run even as it nibbled its blade of grass.
They were clinging as close to their families as they dared, circling Dallas and staying in a different abandoned farmhouse each night. During the day, Clyde hung around West Dallas, playing with L.C.’s motorcycle and signing copies of True Crime on the page where a version of their shootout in Joplin appeared. Bonnie, however, couldn’t share in this idyll. She was more freak than celebrity among the women of West Dallas, who tolerated their scofflaw men but did not admire her. Besides, she was a sitting duck, unable to slide out the back door if a law knocked at the front. So Clyde left her wherever they’d passed the night, and she had nothing to do but lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling, observing how the yellow-brown water stains might have been a map of the dirty paths they’d taken around the fields and along the farm roads of all those states.
Twined with her in the dark, he whispered, “Mrs. Howard, I oughta take you to the laws myself
and get you out of this mess. In ten years you’d be free. It ain’t fair what I done to you.”
She loved that he loved her too much to do right by her.
* * *
Fearing they would come for her when she was waiting in the house alone, Bonnie kept a whipit beside her. She practiced holding it in her mouth, opening her jaws as wide as she could to keep it from knocking against her teeth and gagging at the bitter taste of the metal. Even more frightening was the likelihood that Clyde would be shot dead while he was away. No one would know where to find her.
* * *
When Clyde promised a surprise to cheer her up, Bonnie expected a jar of pickled pigs’ feet, but he delivered a pair of crutches and her mother, who’d brought Buddy, now four years old, and Mitzy, nearly two, and from then on, he fetched the children for her every day he went to Dallas.
Buddy, the little show-off, was always first out of the car, summoning her to see a bruised shin or a “letter” he’d scribbled with brown crayon on an old page of newspaper. If there was a front porch on the house in which Bonnie was staying, he climbed around it on the outside of the railing, securing himself with a hooked elbow. He hid behind internal doors and leapt out with a shriek when Bonnie swung by. Obligingly, she screamed and chased him, ignoring her sore shoulders and learning to maneuver around corners.
Mitzy, on the other hand, was quiet and deliberate. She studied the leaves Bonnie arranged for her in patterns on the floor, touching the colors with a careful finger. While Buddy snapped the stems of five dandelions in quick succession and scattered the seeds with an exuberant blast of air and saliva, Mitzy cupped the fluff of one flower tentatively with her palm. Like a kitten, she snuggled on Bonnie’s lap, and let herself be rocked to sleep.
Bonnie ordered Clyde to buy them gifts; a wagon for Buddy, like the one Buster had had in Rowena; a baby doll for Mitzy, with a lifelike molded head and hands and a plump, cloth body zipped into a pink bunting.
One day in October, Clyde brought only Buddy and was in a sour mood. Billie hadn’t been waiting at the place they’d arranged. Clyde had ridden past half a dozen times before, finally, furious at the risk, he’d scrawled “red beens” on a scrap of paper, stuffed it in a Coca-Cola bottle, and thrown it hard against the Parkers’ front door to summon her.
“The kid’s got a tummyache, so I’ve got to risk running into some trap?”
“If she’s sick, I want to help.” Bonnie was elated at the thought. “Take me home.”
They argued, and she cried. She hit him with her crutch, and he knocked her down. Finally, comforting Buddy who’d been frightened by the scuffle, she admitted that the sheriff probably had someone watching the house. After all, her mother had told her plenty of times about Ted Hinton sniffing around.
“Them laws’ll do anything,” Clyde said. “I wouldn’t put it past that sheriff to feed them kids a few green apples his own self, just to see if he could lure us in.”
* * *
The next morning, when neither child was brought to meet him, Clyde went straight to West Dallas and spent the day with L.C. He didn’t feel like listening to Bonnie’s demands, as unrelenting and infuriating as the whir of an engine that wouldn’t turn over, or watching her tears that fell as copiously as rain. She could get along by herself for once.
It was dark when he finally drove up to the house where he’d left her. The door stuck when he tried to open it, and when he shoved it with his shoulder, some of the guns she’d heaped against it crashed and clanked against the wooden floor. She answered him finally from the dark of the farthest back bedroom, where she was hiding behind a bunker of full grocery bags.
She rose with the whipit in her hand, hopped one step toward him, and then tipped like a tree chopped in two, until her arms fastened around his neck. “I thought you’d been shot dead. I thought I’d never see you again!” She was crying—of course, she was crying, soaking his collar.
He removed the gun, which was uncomfortably cold and hard against his ear, from her hand. “Don’t hold this thing so close. I wasted the whole day, trying to get them babies for you.”
“Oh, Daddy, I’ve been so scared.” She pushed her cheek, wet and sticky with tears, against his neck. “It got dark, and you didn’t come, and I knew something awful had happened.”
“Well, nothing happened.” He unwrapped her arms. “Quit hanging on me, will ya? You’re like a goddamn shackle around my neck.”
When he released her wrists, she teetered, unbalanced and awkward. Then she reached for him again, but this time, she pushed her hand under his coat and closed her fingers around the stock of his scattergun. She yanked at it, but, attached by its rubber band, it remained close to his body. She had to bend herself to press the barrel to her forehead. “I wish I was dead.”
He jerked back so violently that he stumbled and fell. Much later, when they were tender with one another again, they considered themselves lucky that the gun hadn’t reacted to such rough treatment and killed them both.
“You kept me alive,” he said, when they’d calmed down enough to pack the car and move on to a different house. “I would’ve given up back there in Iowa. I would have stood by Buck until I was shot full of holes. But I ain’t gonna get myself killed, as long as I can save you.”
The story sounded truthful enough to satisfy her. Their existence might be chaotic and dirty and sickeningly violent, but if they lived and died for that existence together it seemed, if not virtuous, at least significant and exceptional. She could still tell herself it was a love story.
CHAPTER 64
November 1933
Mitzy and Buddy were dead, killed by an egg custard tainted with salmonella. Bonnie had dyed her hair black and demanded to be taken to the funeral, until Clyde pointed out that her presence was likely to turn the sacred day of mourning into a shootout. For the last two weeks, she’d drunk as much as Clyde could deliver, and now, as she prepared for a secret birthday party for Cumie Barrow, her fingers shook, so that her Maybelline spattered in a sooty explosion around her eye.
Bonnie squinted critically at her nose and scraped with her nail at a stubborn, ugly little growth. When it had first appeared some months ago, she’d assumed it was only a pimple, but now it seemed to be permanent.
“Get a wiggle on,” Clyde said. “It’s already dark. I don’t want to keep my mama waiting.”
“What about my mama? It’s all right if she waits?”
“None of ’em should wait,” Clyde said patiently, picking her up and carrying her to the car.
The Barrows’ Model T was parked on the shoulder at the designated stretch of road about three miles outside of Sowers. Clyde drove by without slowing to make sure it wasn’t a trap.
“Some boy up front driving your mother,” Bonnie observed.
“That’ll be Marie’s latest sheik.”
Bonnie went directly for Billie, hung her arms around her sister’s neck, and keened. “My poor babies!”
Billie stood stiffly and kept her face turned away. “Stop it.”
They ate forkfuls of birthday cake out of the trunk and sang to Cumie, their voices frail against the wind, and then they stood around in the dark, shivering.
Joe Bill Francis, Marie’s beau, regarded Clyde skeptically. “Are you packing a heater?”
When Clyde obligingly opened his coat, the boy blinked.
Then Cumie and Emma began to tell how they’d put Sherriff Smoot Schmid, who’d tapped their phones, off the scent.
“I said, ‘The Howards sure are hungry for some of them red beans, Emma,’ ” Cumie began.
“And then I said, ‘Are they? I guess I better boil up a pot, then,’ ” Emma said.
Two yellow headlights, like eyes, appeared in the distance.
“Get behind the car,” Clyde snapped.
The car already stood between them and the road, but the women obediently herded together and hunched themselves. Joe Bill, however, seemed inclined to step forward, until Clyde shoved him
back.
The car slowed; the driver lowered the window and stopped. “Need a lift?”
This was generally Bonnie’s cue to say something pretty, like, “No, thanks, mister. We’re just meeting some friends.”
But Clyde opened his coat again. “We don’t need nothin’. Hook ’em.”
Even Emma and Cumie laughed when the car spit stones in frantic acceleration.
“Ain’t you got no present for your mama?” Joe Bill said.
“Oh, I don’t need no present from Bud,” Cumie protested. “Just to spend the time’s all I want. Whatever time I can git.” Her voice became tearful, and she put her arms around her son.
“I do have a present for you,” Clyde said. “We just forgot to bring it.”
“Well, never mind. It’ll keep.”
“Mama, you come back here tomorrow, and we’ll do this party over.”
“All right,” she said. “We’ll come back. But if it’s just you and no present, I’ll be just as happy.”
“We’ll be here at six o’clock,” Joe Bill said, as he got behind the wheel. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“Who’s he to be making sure of it?” Clyde said, when he and Bonnie were back in their car.
“Marie says they’re getting married.”
They rode in silence for a few minutes, before Bonnie said, “We shouldn’t go there tomorrow.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never the same place twice. It’s your rule.”
“I gotta give my mama a present.”
“You don’t have a present.”
“I’ll get one. I said I’d get one and I will.”
“If it’s something you steal, she won’t like it.”
He slammed his hand against the wheel. “Well, what do you want me to do? You know we ain’t got no money!”
Along for the Ride Page 27