He Started It

by Samantha Downing

  I open my door and get out. There are no other cars around, although down the road I see a pickup truck driving away from us. ‘It’s gone,’ I say. ‘They just left us here.’

  ‘Asshole,’ Eddie says.

  Felix gets out as well, and he walks around the car. ‘We’ve got a flat,’ he says.

  ‘For the love of God,’ Portia says, climbing out of the back. ‘Please tell me someone knows how to fix it.’

  We all stare at the flat. The back tire looks like it went full speed into a rock that was sharp enough to cut glass.

  Eddie maneuvers the car off the road, just in case another comes along. Not likely. The road is empty, lined with cornfields on both sides and farmhouses behind them. That’s it. Nowhere to go, nothing to see.

  ‘I can change it,’ Felix says.

  Eddie gets out of the car. ‘So can I.’

  I’m watching Portia, who’s leaning against the car and standing on one foot. ‘What’s wrong?’ I say.

  ‘It’s my ankle. I had my feet up when we crashed.’

  ‘Let me look.’

  She brushes me off. ‘I’m fine, Mom. It’s nothing.’

  At the back of the car, Felix and Eddie unload the luggage to get to the spare tire. Felix is really good with cars. No one expects that, because he’s the kind of guy who’s always staring at his laptop, but he knows cars. He claims it’s because engines are interesting.

  Lie.

  It’s because he grew up poor and his family always had old rundown cars.

  I overhear Felix say, ‘We’re going to need to stop and get a real tire. Can’t drive across the country on this.’

  ‘Of course we can’t,’ Eddie says.

  Like he knows. My brother is a call-Triple-A kind of guy.

  I take great pleasure in watching Felix tell Eddie what to do, essentially making him a helper. Felix likes it, Eddie doesn’t. Maybe it’s weird I’m enjoying this, or maybe everyone feels this way about their siblings. A little competitive. A little vindictive.

  One day I might analyze these feelings instead of cleaning the house or something.

  ‘Take off your shoe,’ I say to Portia. ‘Let me see if it’s swollen.’

  She does and it is. We’ll need to get ice and some kind of wrap, and I give her some ibuprofen for the pain. I’m so absorbed in making this mental list – and trying to forget my hands are still shaking a little from the accident – that I don’t hear the other car. Not until I see it drive up and stop.

  A black pickup truck. Just like the one driving away from us a minute ago.

  ‘You guys all right? Need any help?’ the driver says. A young guy with yellow hair, a baseball cap, and a cigarette. The man in the passenger seat is older and heavyset with a full, greying beard. The truck is huge, with an extended cab, and a woman sits on the far side in the back. All I can see is her long auburn hair.

  ‘It’s just a flat tire,’ Felix says.

  Eddie steps forward, his shoulders squared up. ‘We’re fine,’ he says.

  ‘You sure about that?’ the older man says. He smiles at Eddie. ‘Because we’re pretty good with cars.’ Although he offers to help, no one in the truck moves to get out of it.

  ‘We’re good,’ Eddie says.

  ‘Was it you?’

  Portia.

  Up until this moment, she had been sitting in our car and resting her foot. Now she’s up and out, hobbling on one foot and giving the newcomers her best evil eye. ‘Were you the ones who ran us off the road?’

  ‘Was it us?’ the older man says. He laughs. The other two join in. ‘Honey, we were just passing by and stopped to see if we could help.’

  ‘That’s not very hospitable,’ the driver says. ‘We stop to help and you accuse us of trying to run you off the road.’

  ‘Not very hospitable at all,’ the older man says.

  Krista’s out of the car now, hands on hips and her back arched, which can’t be a good sign. She’s one of those suburban women who have never seen real trouble and think it only happens on the Internet.

  Eddie takes another step forward, his eyes never leaving the men in the truck.

  Part of me wants to watch this play out, if only for my own amusement. The other part of me steps in front of Eddie. ‘Thanks,’ I say to the older man. ‘We appreciate the offer, but we’re fine. The tire is almost changed.’ I motion to Felix, who waves with the wrench in his hand.

  Forget the villain. I’m the peacemaker.

  The older man stares at me a bit too long. I smile and nod, smile and nod.

  ‘All right, then,’ he says. ‘Glad everyone’s okay.’

  The truck moves forward and then turns around, driving back in the direction it came from.

  ‘They turned around and came back,’ Portia says. ‘It was them.’

  No one confirms or denies that.

  ‘The Godfather,’ Portia says. ‘I swear that guy was like the Alabama Godfather.’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Eddie says. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  We all laugh. We all drink.

  A few hours have passed since our on-the-road incident. The rental has a new tire, the spare is back in place, and Krista has put makeup on her forehead. Portia’s ankle is wrapped and she’s wearing a new cheap pair of flip-flops.

  The initial horror of the event has passed, dulled by time, by alcohol, by laughter. Same as anything else. You can’t stay that tense for too long, otherwise someone is going to get hurt.

  Now that it’s over, and we’re safe, I find myself happy that Felix is here. So far, I haven’t been. He’s not supposed to be here, neither is Krista. It should’ve been just the siblings.

  Not long after our conference with Grandpa’s lawyer, Eddie called and said Krista was coming with us. ‘We’ve been married six months,’ he said. ‘I can’t just leave her to go on a road trip with you guys.’

  ‘She can’t take care of herself?’ I said.

  Eddie sighed. A big, frustrated sigh like this was all my problem. ‘Look, I know you haven’t met her –’

  ‘Whose fault is that?’

  Silence. I had never met Krista because Eddie didn’t invite any of us to the wedding. He claimed it was a last-minute decision to go to city hall right before they took a trip to the mountains, but I suspect he didn’t want us there. Maybe because he cheated on his girlfriend and married the receptionist.

  But I didn’t say any of that and he changed the subject.

  ‘Bring Felix,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘We aren’t kids anymore, Beth. I’m a married man and I’m going to bring my wife.’

  This is why I brought my husband. Because I’m a married woman and I should bring him with me. It also occurred to me that our spouses would keep things copacetic. Neutral. How bad can you really be when your spouse is around?

  So far, I’m right and wrong. Today would have been much worse without Felix around to fix the car. Then again, if neither Krista nor Felix were with us, would Eddie have been as distracted while driving? No. Yes. Doesn’t matter now. You can only do mental gymnastics for so long before you go insane.

  Louisiana

  State Motto: Union, justice, and confidence

  Mississippi? No. We cross diagonally through that state and into Louisiana. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief to be so far from the accident and from that pickup truck. The event was weird enough to put everyone on edge for a while.

  They’re not why we crossed through Mississippi, though. We did it because it’s the same route we took the first time. Next stop: Gibsland, Louisiana. Of all the places to visit, Grandpa chose the place where the FBI caught Bonnie and Clyde – if dying in a hail of bullets can be considered getting caught.

  On the way there, Grandpa told us the story of Bonnie and Clyde. He had a great voice, a deep baritone with no hint of an accent. It was the kind that should’ve been on the radio back when stories were told with voices.

  ‘Bonnie and Clyde are one of th
e great love stories of the twentieth century,’ he said. ‘They were young and wild and robbed banks in the middle of the Depression.’

  He made me believe they were on a big romantic adventure, and that their exploits were harmless enough, given the time period. What did I care about banks and their money? I didn’t. And I had no reason to doubt what he said about Bonnie and Clyde. We didn’t have smartphones back then, so we couldn’t fact-check anything he said.

  That night we stayed in a cabin at Black Lake, where Bonnie and Clyde had a little get-together two days before they died.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Grandpa said, ‘we’re going to the Bonnie and Clyde museum.’

  I fell asleep imagining what it would be like to be so famous they made a whole museum just for you, about you, to memorialize all that is you. I wondered if there was anything I could do, other than robbing banks, to get a museum of my own. Cure cancer, maybe. It was the only thing I could come up with.

  Grandpa had talked so much about Bonnie and Clyde, I felt like I knew everything before we even got to the museum. I knew how they met, how many banks they robbed, not to mention the grocery stores and gas stations. A whole slew of robberies were attributed to them, or to their gang. Bonnie and Clyde had their own gang.

  ‘We should have a gang,’ I said. We were at breakfast, eating eggs and bacon and grits. Everything was drenched in butter and syrup.

  Grandpa laughed. ‘You don’t need a gang, you’re already in a pack. A pack of coyotes.’

  ‘It’s a band of coyotes,’ I said. ‘Not a pack.’

  ‘See? You sounded like a yapping coyote when you said that. You’re a band of little coyotes, and you’re the toughest, meanest bunch this side of the Mississippi.’

  ‘We’re on the west side, you know,’ Eddie said. ‘We crossed the Mississippi.’

  ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘I’m just pointing it out.’

  Like that mattered. We were little coyotes and we were going to have our own museum. Who cared what side of the Mississippi it was on?

  On the way to the museum, we got lost. It was down some windy roads, away from the highway, and nestled between two other stores. Out front, there was an old car riddled with bullets. It wasn’t the car, but it was like the one they drove and then died in. Eddie thought it was the coolest thing ever until we went inside the museum.

  It wasn’t what I imagined. Whatever I had conjured up in my head from all those stories Grandpa told, it was wrong. In my mental museum, there wasn’t any blood. No dead bodies, either.

  Since we were close to where Bonnie and Clyde died, that’s what the museum commemorated. The ambush. The walls were covered with black-and-white pictures of their bodies, the men who shot them, and the real car. A glass case of guns was in the center of the room, and it was there I saw what Clyde’s favorite gun looked like. The Browning automatic rifle was big and heavy and not romantic at all.

  ‘Isn’t this fantastic?’ Grandpa said. ‘All these resources just to bring down one couple.’

  Sure. Fantastic.

  Especially in the back, where they had re-created the aftermath of the shootout, complete with dummies of Bonnie and Clyde. Bloodied dummies. They were slumped over each other in the shot-up car. She was twenty-three. He was twenty-five.

  If that was love, it looked like an awful thing.

  We weren’t the only ones in the museum. Two couples were there, on their way to Savannah, and they had stopped in to see the museum just as we had. Both of the men were police officers, so their interest was in how Bonnie and Clyde were captured. They didn’t care about love.

  ‘He was shot seventeen times,’ one said. ‘She was shot over twenty.’

  Grandpa also left out the fact that Bonnie and Clyde weren’t just bank robbers; they were murderers. Killed at least thirteen people, according to the records.

  That’s when I had enough. I went outside and sat down on a bench, feeling like I was the one who got swindled. I no longer wanted my own museum.

  Grandpa came out to find me. ‘You okay?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘They weren’t good,’ I said.

  ‘Ah.’ He sat down beside me. ‘You know, sometimes your grandmother wore awful clothes. It’s terrible to say, but she did. She had this one blouse with pineapples on it.’ He sighed. ‘I hated that blouse.’

  ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘Do you think I told her how much I hated that blouse?’

  I shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it would’ve hurt her feelings.’

  Yet he hurt her in so many other ways. Later for that.

  But I knew what he was doing. I was twelve, for God’s sake, not four. ‘You lied to Grandma,’ I said. ‘So you wouldn’t upset her.’

  ‘That’s right. I always told your grandmother she was beautiful. And she was, even in ugly clothes.’

  I stared at him. ‘People do bad things. I know that.’

  ‘People do bad things for the people they love. There’s a difference.’

  ‘That’s what Bonnie and Clyde did? Kill because they loved each other?’

  He nodded. ‘I think so. Yes.’

  I didn’t. In fact, I thought he was a little bit crazy for comparing pineapple blouses to shooting people.

  ‘Who’s up for the Bonnie and Clyde museum?’ Eddie says.

  This time we aren’t lost, and won’t get lost, because we have GPS.

  ‘Good God,’ Portia says. She lying in the back, her foot raised and still wrapped.

  ‘You’re joking,’ Krista says. ‘There’s no such thing.’

  ‘Oh yes there is,’ I say.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Felix asks.

  ‘Of course I’m serious. Bonnie and Clyde are one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century. Don’t you know that?’ I say.

  Krista turns around in her seat to face me. Her eyes are wide, the gold flecks shining. ‘I saw the movie,’ she says. ‘So romantic.’

  I smile at her, nodding my head. Maybe she’ll be shocked when she sees the truth, just as I had been. Or maybe her belief in them is already so ingrained, so fully believed, that nothing will change it.

  That’s how Grandpa was. You can do bad things if it’s for love.

  It didn’t make sense then, but it does now.

  AUGUST 13, 1999

  What is your biggest accomplishment?

  I’ve beat my whole family at Risk and I’ve done it more than once. And that’s no joke. Dad makes us play at least once a week. Always after dinner, always together, and no one is exempt.

  The night I first beat everyone, I was accused of cheating. It’s not a win if you cheat, just like in life. Dad’s always saying stuff like that. He says people are all wrong about chess, because that game isn’t the ‘pinnacle of strategy.’ The best strategic game is Risk. Especially Secret Mission Risk, because that’s when everyone has their own mission but no one knows what it is.

  That’s why we play, Dad says. The game is about making allies and keeping your word right up until you can’t. In other words, it’s about life. He says that, not me. I’d never use those words. I’d say you have to screw them before they screw you, but if I did Mom would give me a look and Dad would try to punish me, so I just keep my mouth shut. Sort of.

  Still. I did win, and I’ve done it more than once. That’s skill, not luck.

  Sometimes I forget Grandpa’s ashes are in the back. I’ve pushed them deep into a corner of my mind, and when they creep out, I push them back in. Ignore the ashes. Ignore him. Start talking.

  ‘Isn’t this fantastic?’ I say.

  We’re in the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum, which looks as I remembered it except it doesn’t feel as scary.

  Portia refuses to come in. She’s outside on her phone, supposedly calling someone in New Orleans who may or may not be a boyfriend. Even when she was six years old, Portia wasn’t impressed by Bonnie and Clyde or by the museum. Everything about them was too old-fashioned.

 
‘I can’t believe you’ve been here before,’ Felix says. We hold hands as we walk through, which feels as odd as it sounds. ‘You never told me about this.’

  ‘Slipped my mind, I guess.’

  Felix stops when he sees the car with the bloody dummies inside. ‘Whoa.’

  Krista gasps, which makes Eddie laugh.

  ‘I knew you would freak out,’ he says. ‘They probably didn’t show this in the movie.’

  Krista shakes her head. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail and it swings back and forth, reminding me of a cheerleader. ‘I don’t remember that part,’ she says.

  Eddie looks at me and winks. I roll my eyes, because I know where we’re going next.

  Down the road a bit from the museum is the place where Bonnie and Clyde died. There’s a marker for it and everything. Grandpa thought it was great.

  ‘This is crazy,’ Felix says. The memorial looks like a tombstone, and it marks the exact place where Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-ridden car rolled to a stop.

  ‘People are crazy,’ I say.

  ‘You’re right.’

  That includes us. When we go to lunch, we eat fried bologna sandwiches in honor of Bonnie and Clyde. It was their last meal, some said. Bonnie died with half a sandwich still in her hand.

  Portia is the only one who refuses. She orders soup. ‘You guys are sick,’ she says.

  ‘I have to admit, I’m starting to wonder what I married into.’ Krista side-eyes Eddie, who shrugs.

  ‘This is a totally normal American thing to do,’ he says. ‘If it wasn’t, would there be so many Bonnie and Clyde attractions?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Eddie holds up his iced tea and we clink glasses.

  Of all the things I’ve learned since the last trip, the most important is this: You can’t fight every battle. Otherwise you end up bloodied, drained of energy, and unable to go on. Sometimes it’s better to agree and keep your mouth shut. That’s what I’ve decided to do on this trip. Otherwise we’ll never make it to the end.

  ‘You guys are so weird,’ Portia says. But she’s smiling. ‘And fried bologna is gross.’

  Not a lie.