I don’t know.
Why, honey, Lonnie said as she reached for a smoke. You know Claudette Colbert, don’t you? The movie actress? It Happened One Night?
Lottie shrugged.
Oh, honey. Ain’t you never been to the picture show before?
Course she’s been! What kind of ignorant question is that? Palmer rose unsteadily, lurching and jostling the table.
You don’t have to yell. All’s I meant was—
You think you’re somethin special, don’t you? You and your fancy magazines and your big-city airs. Palmer stood like a man in a rowboat. Hell, you think you’re better’n her, is that it?
I didn’t say that.
But that’s what you think, ain’t it?
Now you listen to me, Clint Palmer. I don’t have to take—
Palmer kicked at the magazines and sent them sprawling. Piss on you. This little girl right here is pretty as a red wagon, and she’s worth ten of your big-city swells and movie stars.
He noticed the bottle then and snatched it up, holding it to the light and drinking it dry as the others watched in openmouthed silence. Then he slammed it on the table, clipping one of the glasses and shattering glass and bottle both in a fountain of flying shards.
Fuck!
His hand was bleeding. He held it limp with his elbow raised as Lonnie Kincaide rushed from the room. Whether in anger or ministration, none was really certain. The room had fallen silent but for the muted strains of the orchestra.
Come on, Palmer said, grabbing his hat. The old man’ll be up waitin.
The moon was up now, and the two men swayed and stumbled down the lawn beneath it, cursing and laughing. When they all had reached the Buick, Lottie stopped short in the gravel.
The backseat brimmed with pans and tools, clothes and bedrolls. Lottie bent to better see. The leather satchel was there, and her father’s Bible, and the shortbread tin that held her trove of treasures.
At first she said nothing while Palmer and Buddy busied themselves wrapping the wounded hand. Only once they’d reassembled and the car was started and Palmer’s bandaged hand lay draped on the seatback behind her head did Lottie finally speak.
What’re we doin now?
Some of us is drivin, Palmer said.
Drivin where?
She felt Buddy’s glance across the seat, but Palmer responded neither to question nor to glance, and they rode back to the Palmer homestead in a long and vitreous silence.
Do you know you’re gonna see your father? the old man asked from where he stood with his foot propped on the running board, his shaggy goat’s head centered in the open windowframe.
No, why?
I thought I’d better tell you. You might run by him.
The wormwood face flexed like a balling fist as the old man leaned and spat. That’s what I heard, anyways.
The screen door slammed. Palmer and Buddy, their figures backlit by the yellow porchlight, hauled a saddle and bridle and other paraphernalia from the house. These they loaded into the backseat alongside a gasoline can and an army-surplus canteen and a box of borrowed groceries.
You could open a mercantile, Buddy said as the last items were passed off and positioned. Lottie watched as the siblings stood and faced each other for an awkward moment before embracing, Palmer’s hat levering back and nearly falling from his head.
As Palmer circled the car, the old man stepped away from the driver’s window to lay a bony hand on his son’s shoulder. He steered Palmer out of earshot, where they stood close-quartered in the darkness with their backs to the car, their conference finally ending with a shared nodding of heads and a long stream of tobacco.
She noticed they did not embrace.
As the Buick bounced through the open gate, Palmer turned and honked once and raised a hand to the receding porchlight.
New Mexico, he said before she could put the question. Your pa went on ahead. We’ll catch up with him in Santa Fe.
Fenceposts and the shadows of fenceposts ran like railroad tracks at the edge of their headlamps.
But what about his car?
Honey, that rattletrap wouldn’t make it out of Hopkins County. Palmer reached for the pack on the dashboard and tapped out a cigarette. He went and borrowed himself a new one.
Borrowed from who?
You’re wearin me out, do you know that?
He cupped the match in his bandaged hand and blew into the windscreen.
I guess you could say he borrowed it from whoever it was owned it before he borrowed it.
They entered Paris with the sunrise. The streets were empty and the fountain dry and the storefronts dark and shuttered.
On the main thoroughfare, a lone truck slowed at the traffic signal, and a man in the truckbed heaved a heavy bundle to the sidewalk. The Negro boy was there, catlike in the shadows, and he knelt to slice the twine and fit the morning’s headline onto the sandwich board tepeed beside him on the sidewalk.
Wait a goddamn minute, Palmer said, braking and backing the car in the empty street and angling it until the newsboy raised a hand to his eyes.
Yes, suh, big news today! the boy enthused, palming the coin that Palmer proffered and sliding the folded paper through the window.
Palmer spread the broadsheet on the steering wheel, snapping it taut. The headline was huge and black and it filled the front page in capital letters screaming CLYDE BARROW, BONNIE PARKER KILLED IN HAIL OF BULLETS.
They drove all day, pausing only to nap in the car at Denton, and they arrived with the dusk in Ardmore where Palmer cruised the darkened streets in search of a rooming house where he claimed once to have stayed.
He emerged from the main house whistling, his shadow long in the dim porchlight. He gathered up his satchel from the car and took her hand and shushed her around the back and up a wooden staircase to a single room above a garage where he closed and latched the heavy door behind them.
There was but one bed in the room with a single lamp beside it, and he switched on the light to reveal under sloping eaves a small and windowless space.
They had just the one room, Palmer said, ducking to stow his satchel under the nightstand.
I could sleep out in the car.
Don’t be silly. He patted the musty bedspread. Come and sit.
She perched beside him on the bed, the walls around them bathed in a jaundiced light from the burlap-covered lampshade.
I ain’t sleepin here with you, she told him as he bent to work his boots.
I don’t see as you got a whole lot of options.
She stood and started toward the door, but he grabbed her shirt collar and pulled her backward to the bed.
You’re hurting me!
Shhhh. You don’t want the law pokin his nose up here. Not with your daddy on the lam like he is. He held her collar and stroked her, in the manner of a man calming a dog he held by a chain. Not with me the only one knows where to find him.
She turned away as he undressed, his shadow huge on the wall before her, and then she felt him pull back the bedspread.
Come on, darlin. I won’t bite.
She didn’t move. He gripped her arm and turned her.
Look at me and I’ll prove it. Watch this.
He reached a hand into his mouth, extracting his upper teeth with gums attached. He set them on the little nightstand.
Thee? I couldn’t bite you if I wanted.
Again she tried to rise, but he wrapped his arms around her, this time working the buttons on her shirtfront.
Stop it! She fought to shrug him off, but he only hugged her tighter, kissing her wetly on the neck.
I’ll scream, she said.
No, you won’t. You’ll take your goddamn clothes off and get in bed.
She had already started to cry. He stripped her shirt, then eased her onto her back where he stood naked before her and removed her boots and dungarees.
She lay on her side now, balled and quietly sobbing. He snuggled in behind her, his body pressed against
hers and his breath hot on her neck, whispering to her that everything would be all right. That she needed to relax. That she’d thank him in the morning. Whispering to her and telling her that this was the way it was between them. Telling her that, in the world of men, this was the way it had ever been, and the way it would ever be.
PART TWO
Chapter Five
WEST OF HERE
Q: Didn’t you?
A: No.
Q: With your schoolgirl charms and your feminine wiles?
BY MR. PHARR: Objection.
THE COURT: Counsel will ask a question.
BY MR. HARTWELL: Mr. Palmer followed you over hell’s half acre looking for your father, isn’t that true? Trying to help you?
A: Help himself.
Q: You led him by the nose.
A: I done what he told me.
Q: A virtual captive, is that what you were? A prisoner?
A: That’s right.
Q: And when you tried to escape all those times, what happened?
THE COURT: The witness will answer.
A: It weren’t like that. He told me—
BY MR. HARTWELL: Move to strike.
THE COURT: The witness will answer counsel’s questions.
BY MR. HARTWELL: Surely you had many opportunities to escape from the clutches of this villainous blackguard holding you hostage?
A: It weren’t like that.
Q: I daresay not. You stayed with him for an entire year?
A: About a year.
Q: Through town after town?
A: Yes.
Q: State after state?
A: Yes.
Q: You shared his bed the whole time?
A: Yes.
Q: While the two of you searched high and low for your father?
A: Yes.
Q: Who was, as far as you knew, alive and well and on the lam?
A: Yes.
They mostly traveled by night.
Oklahoma City, Shamrock, Amarillo. Long and flat horizons. Vast plains shrouded in dust clouds that billowed and raged and swallowed the Buick, dimming their headlamps and forcing them to the side of the road. Then, clear nights with cow towns and Okie campfires twinkling like starlight to the farthest edge of nothing.
Vega, Tucumcari, Santa Rosa. Dark canyons and low mesas. Quirts of dry lightning on the distant mountains. Hours of darkness broken by cities that rose up in bright lights and traffic and gave way again to the dark.
They swapped their license plate in McLean, and they slept in hobo camps or in motor courts, or on the ground beside the Buick. When Palmer talked to her at all, it was not of the past, but of the future; of pinto horses and grazing cattle and rolling wildflower meadows. Of a log cabin hard by a river, backset by snow-peaked mountains. Of a place where they would be law unto themselves, free and unbound by convention or disapprobation and answerable to no authority.
Their future, he told her. Together.
For their new lives he chose new identities. Clint became Jimmy, and Lottie became Johnny Rae. Palmer became Montgomery. To strangers she was his niece, or sometimes his daughter. Alone together, she was his wife.
They attended a square dance in Adrian, and a cockfight in San Jon, and outside the farming town of Milagro, drinking applejack cider with a Panhandle farm family, he bobbed Lottie’s hair with sheep shears.
Johnny Rae Montgomery! he said, laughing drunkenly, twirling her in the firelight.
Their provisions lasted until Moriarty, and their cash until Albuquerque, where Palmer learned of a roadhouse card game from which he’d returned at dawn without his belt buckle.
And so it was that Jimmy and Johnny Rae Palmer, or Clint and Lottie Montgomery, or some amalgam thereof, arrived in La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asis, the capital city of New Mexico and of the northern territories of Mexico and New Spain before it, broke and filthy and nearly starving.
Palmer popped the shortbread tin and handed her the ribbon and shook the gold tooth and the thin gold cross and chain into his palm, spreading them with his thumb.
I’ll be a minute, he told her. Why don’t you stretch your legs. He opened the door and slid from under the wheel. Mind who you talk to.
The town square by which they’d parked was green and treed with ancient elms and bustling with activity. Men in suits and hats and jet-haired women in Sunday finery, some with mantillas and old-fashioned parasols, strolled or sat on benches or picnicked on the shaded grass. A stone obelisk stood at the center of the plaza with a trellised bandstand beyond from which came the rhythmic strum and bleat of ranchera music. On the far sidewalk, in the shade of a broad portal, Indian women sat cross-legged against a mud wall hawking jewelry and beadwork and other crafts.
Lottie followed the covered sidewalk. In the storefront windows were dry goods and millinery, sundries and curios and brightly patterned blankets. A barbershop and a bakery restaurant. And at the far end of the street, a massive stone cathedral, stark and aureate in the late-morning sun.
She saw him then, on the block ahead, tall and lean in his jeans and mackinaw, adding his shuffling gait to the variegated crush of parishioners drifting slowly toward the cathedral. She surged forward, elbowing her way past shoppers and strollers, then into the street, where a car swerved and honked.
The church bells tolled. She glimpsed him again, then lost him as the crowd filled the street, jostling and murmuring, converging on the wide stone steps that led to the elevated cercado.
Daddy! she called above the heads on the stairway. Several turned, and a way was made for her to push through, ducking and dodging, until she saw him again passing under the cathedral’s towering archway.
Daddy! Wait!
She grabbed, breathless, at his coat sleeve.
The man pulled free, his black eyes flashing. Several of the parishioners had paused to watch, and a bottleneck quickly formed.
¿Qué quiere, joven? the man demanded, his dark brows knitting. ¿Estas pérdida?
She turned and fled, across the lawn and down the stairs and back into the roiling crowd.
Palmer sat on the fender with one foot on the wheel hub, his neck stretched and craning. He’d been smoking, and when he caught sight of her approaching, he flicked his butt to the gutter and circled the front of the car.
Let’s go, damn it.
The car was already moving as Lottie fell in beside him.
You come this close to gettin left. Where the hell’d you go?
Walkin, she said, nodding. To the church yonder.
You and your goddamn church.
The roads around the plaza were traffic-choked, and he muttered and honked and edged his way onto a side street. The block they circled was taken up by a single building; a multitiered confection of stepped walls and staggered roofs that appeared to have risen in stages from the red clay mud on which it stood, and to have melted over time and a thousand rains into the very earth of its origin.
An awning spanned the sidewalk, from the entrance doors to an idling Harvey tour bus, whose passengers leaned from the windows to haggle with the Indian women holding pottery and silver jewelry aloft as in oblation to some multilimbed deity.
Palmer parked at the curbstone. He turned to Lottie and studied her in the manner of a man estimating whether a wardrobe might fit through a doorway.
What?
Man at the pawnshop says they’s a card game upstairs. I might be a hour, or I might be longer.
I’m hungry.
Palmer leaned and straightened and counted the bills from his pocket.
All right, he said. Come on.
The lobby of the La Fonda hotel was the largest room Lottie had ever seen or had ever imagined seeing, its plastered walls and dark vigas framing a vast salon in which couches and chairs were grouped in threes and fours on a floor of polished stone. Herringboned latillas and intricately carved and painted ceiling corbels. Rugs of dazzling color and geometry. Sconces and chandeliers of amber glass and hammered tin a
nd riveted iron.
For all the tumult on the sidewalk, the lobby was cool and hushed, and their footfalls on the flagstones echoed of Spanish armor and Tewa moccasins, of Mexican huaraches and the bootheels and rowel spurs of untold generations of soldiers and ranchers and farmers who’d passed this way before them.
They found their way to a cantina off the main lobby. There a man in a vest and shirtsleeves stood polishing bar glasses, and there sloe-eyed girls in peasant blouses arranged a plankwood table with the fruits and pastelerías, the tamales and posole, of a Sunday-morning buffet.
Palmer slapped a coin on the copper bartop and ordered a Nehi.
This here is as good a place to wait as any, he told her. Once the church lets out, you can sneak yourself some grub. He took a swig from the bottle that the barman set before her. Anybody asks, you tell ’em you’re waitin on your pa, who’s gettin his hair cut, understand?
Palmer stood and straightened his pockets. The barman watched his retreating back and then took up again his sodden towel.
The cantina grew crowded as the day wore on. Men alone in ones and twos, then couples, and soon entire families streamed in from the lobby, their faces flushed and their conversations animated. They spoke in Spanish, or in English, or in some local conflation of the two. First the tables filled, then the barstools, and soon Lottie found herself surrounded by men who sat or stood in dark wool suits and some with hats and silver bolo ties smoking cigarettes or slender puros.
Bills and coins of silver crossed the bartop. The men smelled of bay rum, or of tobacco. They ordered cervezas or tequila or soft drinks for the children who clung to their pantlegs and gazed up at Lottie with dark and questioning eyes.
Although she’d finished her Nehi long ago, the barman had left the bottle unclaimed, and once, when she’d turned to watch the musicians arriving in their black, fitted suits with buckled silver edging, he’d replaced it with a full bottle.
The music when it started was a lively pulsing of guitar and fiddle with sudden bursts of brassy horns. On the worn parquet square before the bandstand, couples, some quite elderly, moved and swayed or shuffled and spun with clicking heels and swirling skirts to the shouts and claps of their fellows.
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