Along for the Ride

by Christina Schwarz

  * * *

  May 6, 1934

  They took advantage of their nearness to Dallas to make another visit, although this time, Henry Barrow stayed home.

  “He says I’m only encouraging you to get shot, coming out here like this,” Cumie told Clyde. “He says if we don’t show up, maybe you’ll stay away. But I told him that’d make you drive right on down Eagle Ford Road to find out what was what, and what did he think would happen then?”

  “Look at this one, Mama.” Bonnie was thrusting some new photographs in front of Emma and gushing about the fashions she was sporting in them: a fur jacket with a shawl collar and a little cap—“I’m going to get you a jacket like the one I’m wearing there, Mama. The fur is so soft, you’ll just want to pet yourself the whole goddamned day.” She’d cinched one of Clyde’s ties around her waist in another. “Myrna Loy did just like that in Movie Mirror.”

  Emma murmured the approbation that Bonnie demanded, but the pitifulness of this display pained her.

  “I’ve got a new poem for you, too.” Bonnie unfolded a thin piece of writing paper and tried to press out the creases with her red nails.

  Emma only glanced at the page of schoolgirl script, entitled “The Trail’s End,” before refolding it.

  “Read it now, Mama. I think it’s the best I’ve done.”

  “It’s too dark. I’ll read it when I get home.”

  “Then I’ll read it to you. I want to know what you think. Y’all listen,” she said, interrupting a conversation on the far side of the fire. “This is about me and Clyde.”

  It was a stout defense, elevating Bonnie and Clyde to legend, blaming the law for harassment and false accusations and the press for sensationalism, praising West Dallas—“Where the women are kin/And the men are men”—for its support. The end, however, referred to the wages of sin. Bonnie held a pregnant pause, which would have earned Miss Gleason’s approval, before pronouncing the final line—“But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Clyde said. “Why would you say that to our mamas?”

  “Why not?” Bonnie said. “It’s what we’re all thinking. Why not say it?”

  “Bonnie, you hush up…” Emma began.

  “I’m sick of being scared all the time, wondering, will it be today, tonight? Sometimes I just want it to be done. I think about lying on the divan at home, with you and Billie and Buster around me, and it just feels so restful and peaceful, like a cool, night breeze. Mama”—she gripped Emma’s arm fervently—“promise when it happens you’ll bring me home and let me lay peaceful for awhile.”

  “It ain’t gonna be peaceful. We ain’t going down without a battle, and we’ll take a few of ’em with us, like you say there.” Clyde gestured at the poem.

  “Clyde,” Bonnie frowned, refolding the paper, “that’s the talk that’s upsetting. No one wants to think about all those guns and shooting. Anyway, as long as we stay in Bienville Parish, we’ll be all right. We never see the laws there at all. You’d think they were staying away on purpose, letting us have the place.”

  “Well, then, you stay put,” Emma said.

  * * *

  May 20, 1934

  But they had to go into Shreveport. Gibsland didn’t have a dry cleaners and the pregnant Methvin cousin craved chicken salad with green grapes from the Majestic Café.

  While Henry went inside to buy lunch, Bonnie and Clyde waited in the car, soaking in the buttery sun. When a police car cruised by, the officers inside didn’t turn their heads, but Clyde knew better than to wait and see if they’d been recognized. He jackrabbited away from the curb.

  Of course, that made the cop car spin and the siren scream, and for a few minutes Bonnie shifted her gaze at least two dozen times between the V-8’s hood ornament, a straining greyhound, and the menacing eyes behind it. But the distance between them stretched steadily until the V-8 broke free. It was nothing, an incident that, had they ever seen their mothers again, they would not even have thought to mention. Obviously, they didn’t dare go back to the café for Henry, but they had a plan in case of separation: they were to meet at Ivy and Avie Methvin’s.

  “Goddamn laws owe us lunch,” Clyde said.

  If Henry had paid and left the café with his bag of sandwiches, no one would have connected him with the car that had bolted. But Henry disappeared, which made an impression on the waitress who was left with four unclaimed chicken salads and three bottles of cold soda pop. She identified him in a photograph that two members of Frank Hamer’s posse—Bob Alcorn and Bonnie’s old friend Ted Hinton—showed her the next day. Sooner or later, Alcorn and Hinton guessed, Clyde and Bonnie would be on the road to Ivy and Avie Methvin’s place.

  * * *

  May 22, 1934

  But not yet. Encountering the laws in Shreveport had reminded Bonnie and Clyde to be wary, to stick to the back roads that petered out at abandoned logging camps, became marshy, mosquito-clouded trails to creeks and lakes, or climbed the ridges into stands of pines and tangled underbrush. They had their favorite spots along these routes, some halfway across the state, clearings through which the sun shone bright enough at midday to discourage mosquitoes, and they played house in these, spreading a blanket beside the car to serve as bedroom, living room, and kitchen. For an hour or so Clyde cleaned the guns, while Bonnie first fooled with the accounts, counting and rearranging stacks of bills, as she determined how much to bestow on their families and the Methvins; how much they needed for gas, food, and dry cleaning; how much they could save toward a cabin. When she was satisfied with her figures, she read over the copy she’d kept of “The Trail’s End.” The meter was off, making a few of the lines clumsy, and she wanted the poem to be perfect.

  When he tired of the guns, Clyde took his sax from the trunk. Years ago, Nell’s husband had taught him how to attach the reed and shift between octaves, and lately he’d been practicing every day, developing power in his cheeks and lungs and working out the notes. Bonnie found the process difficult to listen to; her ear kept trying to follow a tune, but just as it got going, it ran off the road.

  “Da, da, da; DA, da, DA; da, da, BRAHHH,” the instrument squawked.

  The big, black animal burst from the underbrush, so suddenly that Bonnie thought for an instant that it was death itself come for them. But when it stopped about ten feet away and stood baying, she could see it was only a dog.

  “Don’t shoot!” she cried, throwing her hands in the air to stop Clyde, who’d dropped his instrument, grabbed his scattergun, and stood aiming it at the poor creature.

  “Black Boy, what you got?” a voice sang out. Twigs snapped and leaves rustled a little distance away. “You found a squirrel?”

  “Come on over here,” Clyde said sternly. “Here’s your dog.”

  “And here’s your squirrels,” Bonnie said, as a skinny boy in a brown cap broke into the clearing.

  He stared but, like the dog, stood his ground, dropping his hand to the animal’s neck. “Quiet, Boy.”

  “What’s your name?” Clyde had lowered his gun, but his voice remained hard.

  “Robert,” the boy said. “Robert Brunson.”

  “Do you know who we are?”

  Robert shook his head.

  “C’mon, guess.”

  “Rich folk?” the boy ventured, his eyes skimming the piles of bills Bonnie hadn’t yet bothered to put away.

  “You ever heard of any bank robbers?”

  “I heard of Pretty Boy Floyd.”

  “You ever heard of the Barrow Gang? Bonnie and Clyde?”

  Robert stood silent for a moment, thinking. “Maybe.”

  “Goddammit!” Clyde stalked to the car and yanked open the back door.

  “Daddy, don’t scare him.”

  “Look at this.” Clyde produced a newspaper that detailed on the front page Frank Hamer’s mission and the huge rewards on offer for the capture of Bonnie and Clyde. He shook it in front of the boy. “Can you read?”

 
; Robert nodded. He accepted the paper and held it for some seconds—it was difficult to know whether he was reading or just allowing a decent interval to pass—and then handed it back.

  “We’re them,” Clyde said. “Bonnie and Clyde. We rob banks.”

  “Bring your dog on over here,” Bonnie said, patting the blanket beside her. “I want to pet him.”

  Together the boy and dog advanced tentatively to the blanket.

  “Clyde, take a picture of Robert and me and this pretty dog,” Bonnie said.

  “Someday,” she said confidingly to the boy, “this’ll be a story you’ll tell your grandchildren. The day you met Bonnie and Clyde. Now I’ll take a picture of just you that you can give your mama.”

  “You think you’d want to rob banks?” Clyde asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “I could learn you like that,” Clyde said, snapping his fingers.

  “He’s a good boy,” Bonnie said. “Leave him be.”

  “Is your family hard up?” Clyde said. “Do you want some money? Here.” He grabbed a handful of bills and thrust them toward Robert. “Take as much as you want.”

  But the boy cringed, as if the money were on fire.

  “How about a shotgun?” Clyde selected one from the blanket. “This here’s a good gun, a long sight better than the one you got there.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You’d better give me your address, so I can send you these pictures when they come out,” Bonnie said. She turned the copy of her poem over and wrote what the boy told her on the back.

  “Can I write back to you?” Robert asked.

  “I wish you could, honey, but we don’t have an address. Just V-8 Ford, Some Road, USA.”

  CHAPTER 75

  May 23, 1934

  “Don’t eat that now,” Clyde says. “We’ll stop someplace after we get Henry and have a picnic.”

  So she rewraps the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich as well as she can with one hand, while with the other she keeps the Remington from sliding off her lap as he speeds around a curve. She clamps her knees around the Crush, but a splash of orange darkens her red dress. “Do you have to drive so fast?”

  It’s 9:15 a.m. Humidity hangs in the air, but the breeze streaming through the open windows is watery and cool. The gravel crunches smoothly under their speeding tires so that it sounds as if they’re driving beside a racing river.

  Bonnie plays with her glasses, nudging them off her eyes and then pushing them back again, blurring and sharpening the landscape.

  “Isn’t that Ivy’s truck?” Clyde nods at a Model A in the distance. It’s at the top of a long rise and seems to be stopped. It’s in their lane but facing toward them.

  “Must have a flat,” Bonnie says, when they’re close enough to see that the truck’s jacked up, its right wheel off the ground. She fluffs her hair out where her earpieces have caught it.

  Their acceleration slakes as Clyde relieves some of the pressure on the gas pedal. “Where the hell’s Ivy?”

  Both of them study the truck as they pull into the other lane, draw even with the engine, and idle for a moment. Something about the situation—maybe the direction the truck is facing or the absence of the driver—seems wrong.

  When the semiautomatic gunfire sizzles through the air and crashes against the door, Clyde should be gunning the engine, but instead his head falls between the spokes of the steering wheel, and the car only inches forward. A barrage of rifle fire, amounting to more than 150 slugs, cuts through Bonnie’s scream, her final exhalation.

  The V-8 continues to move, as if the pummeling bullets are forcing it on. It gains speed as it rolls down the hill, veers to the left, and finally comes to rest against the embankment, but those inside the car are unaware. Although she still holds her sandwich, Bonnie does not feel the bullets that Frank Hamer pumps into her through the rear passenger window and those he adds, just to be sure, through the windshield. She does not see the wisps of gun smoke that float around the V-8, a detail she might have referred to in a bitter poem as her and Clyde’s version of heaven, nor does she know that she has made it into the pictures, a 16-millimeter film Ted Hinton takes of the posse inspecting what will come to be known as the “death car.”

  * * *

  “What do you have to say about the way they shot your daughter?”

  Emma learned of Bonnie’s death from some eager newspaperman over the phone. She’d always believed she’d be ready for the event, but when it finally occurred, an icy blackness suffused her veins, and she fainted.

  She wanted to go to Arcadia with Buster to claim the body, but he said that the way people were mobbing the place would make her sick. “They’re treating her like a carnival attraction,” he complained. “They say there’s not even a sandwich left to eat in that town.”

  It made Emma unhappy to think that Bonnie would be pleased to be the center of so much awful attention, but at the same time, she was sorry that Bonnie could not enjoy it. “I suppose people just have to have a little excitement,” she sighed. “They can’t help theirselves.”

  “You’re not going to be able to bring her in the house,” Buster warned. “The crowds’ll knock the door down.”

  “That boy stole every bit of peace that girl could have had,” Emma said. “You tell them Barrows that he’s not getting any more of her. She’s going to be buried beside those babies that she loved, so she can watch over them. That’s what she would have wanted.”

  Emma almost fainted again the next day, when Bonnie’s body arrived in Dallas. The funeral parlor had done its best to clean up the blood and piece together the ragged edges of her skin, but embalming fluid oozed from the bullet holes and so much of her flesh had been torn away that most of the mutilation was irreparable. Almost more disturbing was the discovery that souvenir hunters had hacked off her hair in random places. Still, the twenty thousand people who filed past Bonnie laid out in her pale blue negligee that afternoon were mostly well-behaved. When Emma heard that the police had had to eject an overly raucous crowd from the funeral home that the Barrows had chosen, she further congratulated herself on her decision to separate Bonnie from Clyde.

  It was well after dark by the time she and Buster could have the body to themselves and do their best to create the quiet hour that Bonnie had envisioned the last time Emma had seen her. Billie could not join them, having been jailed for allegedly shooting the patrolmen in Grapevine on April 1. Gently, Emma lifted the white veil she’d arranged over Bonnie’s face to disguise the worst of the damage. She closed her eyes and pressed her own face against a few inches of unmarred skin and imagined that under the oily smell of the makeup and the chemical odor of the embalming fluid and the sulfurous whiff of gunpowder that permeated her daughter’s hair she could still detect a trace of Bonnie’s light, girlish scent.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  In writing this novel I’ve been faithful to all the facts known about Bonnie Parker’s life and the circumstances of her crimes. But because so many details of Parker’s life are unknown—as are, of course, her emotions and thoughts—I’ve interlaced the few facts with my own inventions. Parker and Barrow’s crime spree was reported in local newspapers, and accounts in those papers are often unreliable and contradictory, as are the reminiscences of her contemporaries, which were often elicited years after the events. When my sources differed in their account of an incident, I chose the version I judged most plausible. When I encountered differing but equally plausible accounts of an event—for instance, Parker and Barrow’s first meeting—I chose the one that best fit my narrative purposes. To give the novel shape and, particularly, to keep it moving at a reasonable pace, I had to omit some interesting anecdotes and several of Parker and Barrow’s myriad robberies and kidnappings, so while my story is accurate within the limits of the paucity of facts, it’s not exhaustive. And, inevitably, I’ve made errors in fact and in judgment.

  I visited nearly all the locations I depict—from the compact, isolated West
Texas town of Rowena, where Parker was born, to the winding road south of Gibsland, Louisiana, where she was killed. Some sites had changed so much that they no longer resembled the places that Parker had experienced—the Red Crown Tavern beside a two-lane road in Platte City, Missouri, where police mortally wounded Buck Barrow, had been obliterated by Interstate 29 and acres of fast-food outlets and gas stations. When I visited the area west of Dallas once known as Cement City, where Parker grew up, the Southwestern Portland Cement plant and the housing it had built for its workers were gone, but a smaller cement plant remained and the locality retained the feel of a place on the edge, too empty to be urban, too industrial to be rural. The schoolhouse on the hill with a vaguely arabesque entry that Parker is said to have attended was boarded up and surrounded by a chain-link fence when I saw it, but the building has since been restored and the acreage across the street filled with big-box stores.

  Many buildings, townscapes, and landscapes remained very much as Parker must have experienced them. The Barrow’s Star service station and home on what was once Eagle Ford Road in West Dallas was derelict, but substantially undisturbed. The calaboose in Kemp, Texas, where Parker was first jailed, still stood; the business district surrounding the downtown square in Kaufman, where she was involved in her first burglary, had hardly changed; and, not surprisingly, the ornate courthouses in Dallas, Denton, and Waco continued to appear imposing. The site of the abandoned amusement park in Dexfield, Iowa, where Buck and Blanche Barrow were captured, was only more overgrown. Most haunting was the garage apartment that the Barrow Gang rented in the Joplin, Missouri, neighborhood, which looks from the street exactly as it did in 1933. Although the highways and the vehicles on them had changed enormously, the views out the car window of worn towns and long horizons, of soil that shifted from brown to red, of majestic banks of cloud against a brilliant blue West Texas sky endured.