Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  “It’s a bunch of bunk!” Bonnie tells the rabbit. “I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. That isn’t me.”

  But who will believe her? And is the distinction between the person who would and did—Henry Methvin, to whom she refused to speak for the rest of the day—and herself great enough to matter?

  She would never have let Clyde write that letter declaring her innocence, but the possibility had remained. Now it’s gone. In a way, she feels more innocent than ever before—what Henry did was monstrous, and she’s not a monster—but at the same time, she knows she’s guiltier than she’s ever admitted. She sits sandwiched between them on the front seat, Clyde on her left, Henry on her right. To an observer, they are all one.

  CHAPTER 72

  “You gotta do what I say,” Clyde said, “not go following your own damn ideas.”

  Henry, his voice high with indignation, argued that he’d followed Clyde’s order, but Clyde refused to listen. “We ain’t killers. I oughta turn you in. Get me and Bonnie out of this.”

  Behind his spread fingers, Henry looked scared and on the verge of tears.

  “Don’t be so hard on the kid, Daddy,” Bonnie said. “He made a mistake, but what’s done is done. We just got to go forward now.”

  * * *

  They drive, not exactly forward, but in their usual zags and loops for the next five days, stopping only for a few hours in the deepest night, so that Clyde can get a little sleep. Just after midnight on the night of April 6, Clyde pulls onto the shoulder of State Road, outside the town of Commerce, Oklahoma. Rain has been sluicing against the dark windows for hours. They haven’t dared to drive anywhere near Dallas, so Sonny Boy is still with them, and the skirt of Bonnie’s red dress is covered with the fine white threads of his fur.

  Bonnie watches first, then Henry. It’s his job to wake them at dawn, but within half an hour of his watch, he falls asleep. When Bonnie awakens, the rain has stopped, and the sun, burning white behind a thick layer of gray cloud, reveals that they’re parked among heaps of black slag beside a mine. It’s much too late.

  To accommodate Sonny Boy on her lap as she slept, Bonnie had placed her whipit beside her on the seat, but it has slipped to the floor. She bends to retrieve it as Clyde starts the engine. When she sits up again, a black sedan has appeared on the road. It slows as it nears them and pulls over.

  “Fuck!” Clyde guns the engine, backing away at top speed. Behind the windshield of the other car, four eyes widen in surprise.

  For a second or two it seems they’ll escape; they’re traveling fast and the black sedan remains fixed. But then a back wheel catches in the mud, and the car slides right. Both rear wheels spin in the slickness, gouts of mud slapping against the chassis.

  As the laws—one beefy with a big white moustache, the other tall and slim—get out of the car, they appear to be laughing.

  She raises the whipit to the windshield, aiming it not at one or the other, but in the general direction of both and of their smug, unyielding car. “What’s so funny?” She’s shrieking, but it’s doubtful her voice carries beyond their own closed car.

  The laws’ first shot shatters a headlight; the second rips a long wound into the metal of the hood. Clyde slithers from the car and lifts his scattergun in one motion, but he’s slow compared with Henry, who’s running toward the other car, shouting as he goes. The big man with the moustache falls sideways, blood blooming from his neck. Then the slim man clutches his head with a grunt and sinks to his knees. In moments, Clyde has one hand on the slim man’s shoulder, the other under his arm, and is helping him to his feet, urging him forward, away from his car and toward theirs.

  “Help me,” Clyde snaps at Henry, when the man stumbles. “Put your gun down. Get him in the car.”

  From behind the slag heaps, people creep out to investigate the noise and another car comes up the road. Over the course of the next half hour, Clyde and his BAR direct a strange dance of coercion and helpfulness. With Bonnie behind the wheel and a borrowed rope around the bumper, the new car struggles to drag the Ford out of the mud, while Clyde, Henry, and four other men, including the wounded officer, who’s obviously disoriented, push, shouting instructions and encouragement at one another, until the rope breaks.

  Clyde swears wildly but doesn’t give up. He stops other cars as they appear: does anyone have a chain? Bystanders offer suggestions: “You got to back her up.” “She needs more weight in her.” “No, she needs to lighten up.” “Ain’t nobody got a board?”

  Clyde is about to abandon the V-8 and take one of the other cars he’s waylaid when a truck comes along carrying the necessary length of chain. Even once they’re free, they can’t go far. The rain has caused mudslides all along the mine-ravaged earth, and another stuck car blocks their way. Clyde and Henry push it free, while Bonnie, her whipit in one hand and a cigarette in the other, waits in the back, guarding the injured lawman.

  Although the blood continues to trickle around his ear and into his collar, his eyes seem now to be focusing. She watches him scan their arsenal. “Impressive, ain’t it? You best tell your friends to quit coming after us, if they know what’s good for them.”

  “Am I crazy?” he whispers. “Or am I looking at a rabbit?”

  “That’s Sonny Boy. Isn’t he sweet?”

  “I’ll bet he is. There’s nothing better than a rabbit stew,” the officer says.

  “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard!” Bonnie flicks her butt out the window to free one hand so she can lay it protectively over the rabbit’s back. “He’s a present for my mama!”

  “If I gave something like that to my mama, she’d put it in a pot,” the officer says.

  “Not a white one!” Bonnie pulls Sonny Boy tight against her thigh until he squirms.

  “Meat’s all the same.” The officer shrugs.

  Bonnie shakes her head. “My mama’ll love this rabbit. I’m going to give her a whole white menagerie. She’s gonna have a white goat, a white duck, a white kitten…”

  “How about a cockatoo?” the officer asks.

  “What’s that?”

  “One of them talking birds. Like a parrot.”

  “Do they come in white?”

  “I seen a white one once.”

  “Then I’ll get her one of them, too.” Bonnie lowers the gun. They’re driving fast now, free of the mud, the mines, and the law on the ground with a bullet in his stomach.

  “You shoulda let us run,” Clyde says. “Then you wountna got yourself shot.”

  “I gotta take action when I see fit,” the law says. He wipes at his forehead and then examines his hand, as if surprised by the blood on it. “I’m the chief.”

  “The chief!” Clyde nods approvingly. “Y’all got some good shots off, you know. A couple of them bullets came real close.”

  “I’m responsible for that man you left bleeding to death back there.”

  “Oh, I reckon he’ll pull through, Chief,” Clyde says. “I been shot plenty of times.”

  “We’re going to die soon, too,” Bonnie says. “If that makes you feel any better. Not the kid.” She nods at Henry. “He’s going back home to his mama and daddy.”

  “Only thing he’s good for is getting us into trouble,” Clyde says.

  “He’s trying his best,” Bonnie says. “But me and…” She pauses. “Do you know who we are?”

  “I believe I do.”

  “What’s your name, then?”

  “Boyd. Percy Boyd.”

  “Well, Mr. Boyd, you know when the sun is down, but it’s not dark yet? You know how the edges get all soft and blurry, like someone’s put a screen in front of your eyes?”

  “I don’t follow you,” Boyd says. “Maybe it’s my head.” He reaches for the spot where the blood is beginning to coagulate in his hair, but Bonnie bats his hand down.

  “Better not touch that. Listen, I’m trying to tell you something, Percy.” She slides forward on the seat and leans into the front with her hand o
ut. “Gimme my glasses, Hank.” Henry passes her a soft leather case from the glove compartment from which she removes a pair of steel spectacles with small, round eyepieces. “These were right here in the car,” she says, “like God put them in. I didn’t even know I needed glasses until I tried these on. And now it’s like the whole world’s been cut out with a razor. Maybe that’s how you see it all the time. You got good eyes?”

  “Yes,” Boyd says, “although I’m not seeing too good right now.” He begins to lift his hand again, but Bonnie grabs it and holds it down.

  “There was a time when I thought we were going somewhere. I didn’t know where exactly. I just thought there was some place up there that we could get to and be happy.” She’s lit another cigarette and gestures with it toward the windshield. “But then Buck got killed and Blanche got hurt and locked up and W.D. got so scared he don’t want to be with us again. And then my babies, who hardly even got to be alive, died, and I’ll tell you…” She pauses to pull smoke into her lungs. “I wished I was them, dead before I lived this life. It was like dusk all the time, everything gray and dim and sorrowful. That sad time of the day, you know?” She looks expectantly at Boyd, until he nods.

  “But it’s gotten so I know what’s coming,” she goes on, “I can see it, clear as can be.”

  “What’s that?” Boyd asks.

  “Boom!” Clyde shouts suddenly, so that they all jump.

  Bonnie frowns. “That’s not the part I dwell on. I think about the part afterward. No more driving, no more hiding, no more being scared.”

  “Whyn’t you just give yourselves up, then?”

  “Mister Boyd, we’re just like everybody else. We’d rather live until we die.” She pats the seat beside her. “Let’s quit talking about this now and get you cleaned up. You put your head down right here.”

  With her right hand, she uses the hem of her nightie to dab Mercurochrome onto his wound, while with her left, she keeps a cigarette going. She binds his head with one of her old stockings. “We’ve seen a lot worse,” she says. “That’ll heal quick.”

  “I got twenty-five dollars on me,” Boyd says. “What do you say we get something to eat?” It’s now early afternoon, and they’ve driven nearly the length and breadth of Kansas.

  “I ain’t taking your money.” Instead, Clyde pulls over beside a gumball machine in some little town and, with a twist and jerk of the screwdriver he always carries, empties its pennies into a bag.

  A little farther on, they send Henry into a diner for food and soda pop. The newspaper he brings out with the lunch has already printed an account of the shootout in Commerce on the front page. Bonnie is identified as a “cigar-smoking gun moll,” and Cal Campbell is dead.

  “Sorry,” Clyde says, handing the paper to Boyd.

  “I suppose he was a good man,” Bonnie says. “The ones who get killed always are.”

  “Eight kids,” Boyd says. “And no mama.”

  “A man’s got that kind of responsibility, he hadn’t ought to be working for the laws these days,” Clyde says.

  Around one a.m., Clyde pulls a short way down a wooded road and stops the car, but Bonnie shakes her head. “It don’t look right, letting him go off with all that blood on his shirt. You give him one of yours, Daddy.”

  While Boyd changes his shirt, Bonnie selects a tie for him. They make him try one of Clyde’s jackets, but it’s too small. Bonnie insists he take Henry’s instead.

  “This is for the bus,” Clyde says, handing Boyd ten dollars.

  “Don’t forget,” Bonnie says, “go right to the doctor in the morning and get that head looked at.” She lifts the rabbit to her cheek. “Would you do me a favor? If we’re killed, would you see that my mama gets Sonny Boy?”

  “Anything else? You know the press is going to be all over me for this story.”

  Bonnie brightens. Percy Boyd can tell those reporters that they have it wrong. She and Clyde aren’t mean and dirty, the way the papers say. They didn’t intend for any of those men to get killed. If people know who she really is—

  But she can’t think how to explain it, and Clyde is impatiently tapping the steering wheel. “Tell them I don’t smoke cigars,” she says. “I never smoked a single one.”

  CHAPTER 73

  Oriented as they now were toward Louisiana, they chose an east Texas town for their next family gathering. The Barrows brought fried chicken and a pile of newspapers, one of which had published a letter from Raymond Hamilton, disavowing any connection to the Grapevine and Commerce shootings. For that, Clyde could hardly blame him, but Raymond, typically, also managed to get in a few digs about Clyde being capable of robbing only gas stations and grocery stores.

  “He’s just jealous,” L.C. said, gleefully showing off several cartoons. In one, Pretty Boy pouted that Clyde was getting all the attention, and in another, Sheriff Smoot Schmid snored while a young man with big ears and a blond woman with a cigar poked their heads out from under his bed. To be so famous as to be recognizable in the few squiggles of a caricaturist’s pen was worth being associated with the hated cigar. Bonnie regretted the loss of her scrapbook, but Henry Barrow shook his doleful head.

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “He’ll get you sure now.”

  In fact, West Dallas had heard that a Ranger named Frank Hamer had been hired specially to track down and kill Clyde and Bonnie.

  “I’m worried,” Emma said as she and Bonnie, who clung to her mother like a worn-out toddler, trailed after the sleek bunny while the others were enjoying the chicken. “They say Rangers don’t have to stay around Dallas or even in Texas but follow you wherever you go.”

  “He’s still a law,” Bonnie said, “and Clyde can outrun any law there is.”

  “You’re too old for that,” Emma said.

  “For what?” Bonnie narrowed her eyes, homing in for the argument.

  “For thinking you’re different from everyone else. I don’t say he ain’t run pretty good so far, but look at yourself!” She gestured to show she meant every part of Bonnie from her twisted leg to her ragged hair. “The both of you are worn down—me and Cumie can see it, even if you can’t—and them Rangers are just warming up. If men like that decide they want something, there ain’t nothing you or me or even Clyde Barrow can do about it.”

  “Well, then I guess we’ll die!” Bonnie said.

  “It’s not just you that’s suffering. It’s all of us. They won’t leave us alone. I can’t use the telephone without wondering who’s listening in. They even drug Cumie into the station for questioning. Kept her the whole afternoon and made her feel like trash.”

  “Clyde won’t stand for that.”

  “What’s he going to do?” When Bonnie was silent, Emma took her chance. “We think you should go to Mexico. The Barrows and me, we agreed. It don’t take much money to live down there, and we know you got some. You stay over the border, and they can’t touch you.”

  “But, Mama, then I won’t be able to come be your bonny Bonnie.” With her fingertips, Bonnie smoothed the wrinkles in her mother’s forehead.

  “I’d rather know you’re alive than see you dead!” Emma began impatiently to brush Bonnie’s fingers away, but thought the better of it and gathered them in a tight grip.

  “Clyde can’t live like regular people, Mama. And I guess I can’t, either. That’s just how it is.” Bonnie shrugged.

  They both cried, while Emma embraced her daughter. The integrity of Bonnie’s words comforted her, even if she hated their import. This was, at least, clear and honest thinking. But Bonnie, typically, had to ruin it.

  “We’re fixing to get us a little house, Mama,” she said, her eyes glowing in their hollow sockets.

  “A house?” Thrown off guard, Emma let herself be drawn in.

  “Yes, over in Gibsland. It’s so pretty and comfortable in Louisiana. And we’re safe there, because it’s all Methvins.”

  “Folks in Louisiana may not be like those in West Dallas.”

  “We can
trust them, Mama. They got us to thank for getting Henry out of Eastham.”

  “And for making him a fugitive.”

  Bonnie shook her head. “They don’t do nothing but help us, Mama. They invite us to all their parties, just like we’re family, and Ivy Methvin says he can find us a little house to buy with nobody knowing. When we have our place, I promise we’ll just live quiet,” Bonnie went on, blithely contradicting her argument against going to Mexico. “Clyde’ll fish and loaf, and I’ll write my poetry. We figure you’ll only be able to slip in to see us at night for the first little while, but if we stay low Texas’ll get tired of paying that Ranger. Then you and Billie and the Barrows can move to Bienville Parish, and we can all be happy. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  “It would be wonderful, darling,” Emma said, scooping up the white rabbit before he could disappear under a huckleberry bush.

  CHAPTER 74

  In May, they returned to Bienville Parish with money stolen from a bank in Iowa, a saxophone, and a nearly new V-8 with wire wheels, plucked from a driveway in Topeka. Unlike the black car with yellow wheels, this one was inconspicuous, an elegant matte gray-brown with a warm greenish undertone, the color of an unpaved road.

  During the days, they drove through the warm air deep into the piney woods, making-believe that they were searching for a house to buy, delighting service station attendants and delivery boys with Baby Ruths and peanut patties. In the evenings, as the sun lingered, they joined the various Methvin relations and friends who lived in the summer almost as Bonnie and Clyde did, picnicking daily at various spots around Black Lake and roasting their meals on campfires. Flush and famous, Clyde and Bonnie were honored guests who readily passed out five- and ten-dollar bills and entertained children with fast rides in their big car. When, one evening, a Methvin cousin, face aglow in firelight, announced that she was pregnant, Bonnie pressed her own abdomen. “So am I!” she exclaimed. It seemed possible, given how happy and replete she’d been feeling.