Along for the Ride Read online

  “If they send him to the Walls, maybe it won’t be so bad with Buck there,” Cumie said, finally. “Maybe they can look after each other.”

  Bonnie nodded, refraining from reminding Cumie that Buck had been the one who’d led Clyde into trouble in the first place. “Who’s looking after Marie?”

  “Well, she’s got her daddy, but Blanche is there.” Buck’s girl had recently squeezed into the Barrows’ shack, intending to stay until Buck was released from Huntsville. “You know Blanche is a preacher’s daughter,” Cumie went on. “She knows right from wrong and Buck’ll listen to her. When he gets out, she’ll get him on the right way.”

  Bonnie had expected the Waco hearing to be like the Denton one, but, whereas in Denton, Clyde had appeared to be an innocent boy nabbed because of his unfortunate association with a scofflaw brother, in Waco, it was obvious that he was a scheming thief who’d assumed a raft of names to cover his tracks—Roy Bailey, Jack Hale, Eldin Williams, Elvin Williams. As she listened, Cumie’s sharp face wilted along the edges, like a lettuce leaf in the sun. That lawyer in Denton who’d painted Clyde as a fool was, in fact, the idiot. Clyde had gotten away with money and cars for months and had left the laws stumbling over their own feet. Bonnie’s fingers trembled for want of oxygen when the judge announced the sentence: two years for each of the seven indictments.

  CHAPTER 18

  March 1930

  “It’s only a .32,” Clyde wheedles, as if this meaningless number ought to reassure her. “I drawed you a map of Willy’s place, so you can find it.”

  Bonnie has been holding the hand he’s extended through the bars of the bullpen in both of her own. Now, with his other hand, he’s forcing the sharp edge of a folded paper between her fingers. He goes on making words—key, mother, sister, hiding place—but she can’t spare any attention for them.

  “But what do you need it for?” she whispers.

  “The One-Way Wagon might come tonight. You got to bring it this afternoon, before I get took to the Walls.”

  The fourteen-year sentence has been reduced to two, because Clyde, technically a first-time offender, is allowed to serve all seven terms simultaneously. Bonnie, who has stayed on with Mary while Clyde waits to be transported to Huntsville, runs errands for him and some of the other inmates and is happier than she’d expected. Relaying requests to mothers for fresh clothes and molasses cookies, delivering cigarettes and chewing gum, she feels stimulated and appreciated and not inclined to dwell on the months that stretch ahead.

  “But they won’t let me back in. Only one visit a day.”

  “If you hadn’t of brought your damn cousin yesterday, I could of told you then, but I couldn’t in front of her, could I?”

  “Well, how was I to know?”

  “Let’s not argue.” Gently, he rearranges their hands, so that his are now doing the holding. “We don’t want to wait no two years to be together, do we?”

  “Oh, Clyde, let’s not risk it. Let’s wait and see. You may get a pardon and be out early. Then we can forget all about this and go somewhere and be happy. I’m glad to wait, if that’s what I’m waiting for.”

  He twists his head right and then left, as if unwilling to face what she’s telling him. Then, he brings his eyes back to meet hers and renews his suit. “Baby, listen. This jail ain’t so bad, but the Walls is a prison and we don’t know what might happen to me there.” His tightened grip seems to be squeezing tears from her eyes. “Baby, you know once I’m out, we’re going to have to git anyway. They’re never going to leave me alone, whether I done my time or not. So why not go away now? We can go to Arkansas or Oklahoma. Or how about Louisiana, where they got them pretty pine trees? We can find us a little house there to have babies in.”

  He adjusts his argument as smoothly as he shifts the gears of a V-8.

  “Louisiana?”

  “You ever been?”

  She shakes her head.

  “They got moss hanging from the trees like a pack of ghosts. Don’t you want to see that?”

  “If we go there, you won’t ever do anything to get in trouble again, will you? Because I couldn’t bear that, honey. I couldn’t bear that at all, but especially not if we were so far from Dallas.”

  “You know I never will. I’ll be good, because I’ll be with you. That’s what the both of us want, ain’t it? To be together? Honey, let’s get started being happy now, as quick as we can, because who knows…”

  “Time!”

  She contracts her hand into a fist around the folded paper.

  * * *

  Bonnie walks a good portion of the distance home in a jittery state, the hand still clamped around the paper that’s jammed deep in her coat pocket. Her shoes clack and scrape on the sidewalk, sounding in her ears as if they belong to a stranger behind her, eerily keeping pace. The cold wind that was at her back, urging her on, when she was hurrying toward the jail, is now blowing in her face. She keeps her eyes down, unable to focus on anything but what rattles and bangs inside her head like a farm truck on a rough track.

  She can say the gun wasn’t where Willy said. If she can’t find it, he can’t fault her for not bringing it. Then they can go on as they were.

  But the way he shifted his gaze when he didn’t like her answer makes her uneasy, as if he might just as soon find someone else who would do what he asks. She tells herself that she ought to appreciate that he isn’t treating her like some girl who has to be shielded from danger.

  The paper has been torn from a Big Chief tablet, the kind with the lines spaced wide apart that children labor over when they learn to make their letters. Clyde has written an address in East Waco at the top, neglecting to put the a in “east.” He’s filled most of the page with a crude floor plan and drawn a large X along the inside wall of one of the two back rooms, probably a bedroom closet. The diagram is hardly necessary, the house being small and simply laid out. But at the bottom of the page, he’s included a message that induces her to do whatever he asks: “You are the swetest baby in the world to me. I love you.”

  It has been well established that Mary’s car cannot be borrowed, and before Mary will drive Bonnie to East Waco, they have to wait for the washing machine to finish slapping away at the sheets. And when the machine gives its final sigh, Mary delivers the obvious in her stolid, exasperating way: “Now we gotta wrench ’em.” Bonnie tries to get the hanging done quickly, but Mary removes and realigns every piece that Bonnie has crookedly pinned.

  “You may say ‘how high’ every time that boy tells you to jump,” Mary says as sternly as is possible with a clothespin in her mouth, “but I don’t see why I should.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The house in which Clyde’s new friend Willy had lived with his mother and sister is just like all the other houses in the neighborhood, just like Mary’s for that matter, and like Emma’s back in Dallas; the façade a small wooden square with a triangle on top.

  “Why don’t you wait in the car?” Bonnie says, feigning casualness. Near the front door, a potted red geranium has grown lopsided, reaching for the sun. Bonnie tips the pot to retrieve the key and then gives it a quarter turn to help the plant correct itself.

  The small room at the back retains a mannish smell—a hint of sweat and gasoline—although it has been recently cleaned. A worn pink and green quilt is pulled tightly over the narrow bed and the bleached white case on the pillow is stiff with freshness. The room has no closet, only hooks screwed into the wall. The mark that Clyde has drawn against the back wall denotes a trunk with a pair of broken-down boots on top. Inside is a hodgepodge of men’s things. Bonnie removes each item slowly, holding her breath in anticipation of the moment when her fingers will encounter the cold, slippery metal. An oilcan and a rubber mallet; trousers and a jacket in the pockets of which a pistol could be burrowing; smutty magazines she touches only with a finger and thumb, averting her eyes; a leather pouch of marbles and a slingshot—evidence of the former boy; an olive-green sweater, inexpertly knitted—
evidence of some woman’s interest.

  She hasn’t opened the curtains and the day is gray, the light dim. Nevertheless, she can see that nothing is left in the trunk. She sweeps her hand along the bottom, not wanting to get off easily, now that she knows she is saved.

  She won’t have to refuse him and yet she’ll run no risk. She ought to thank the Lord. But instead of the relief she might have expected, she feels only frustration. Screwing up her courage to jump recklessly over the abyss has made the prospect of trudging on as before unendurably tedious.

  Also, he will be disappointed. He won’t gaze at her with gratitude and approbation but will turn away and stare at the floor and hunker into himself. He’s put his faith in her, and she’s failed. He’ll think that she isn’t much good. Not a helpmeet for him. He may even disdain her waiting.

  She strikes the side of the trunk with her palm. This Willy Turner is an idiot, who doesn’t know where he’s hidden his own gun. Maybe it’s somewhere else in the house. She’ll do her best to find it, before she goes to Clyde and admits that she isn’t the girl he thought she was.

  She’s putting the items back into the trunk, shaking the trousers and jacket one last time, although it’s obvious from their lightness that they’re empty, when she hears Mary’s voice at the front door.

  “Bonnie?”

  “Back here.”

  “What are you doing?” Mary’s head is in the door now. There’s hardly space for both of them to stand in that little room.

  “Looking for something.” The bottom of the trunk isn’t quite flush with the floor. Bonnie pushes her fingers under it.

  “Well, what is it?” Bending to peer under the bed, Mary knocks against Bonnie.

  “If you must know,” Bonnie says with both impatience and self-importance, “it’s a gun.”

  Mary rears, as if she’s spotted a snake. “What for?”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake.” Bonnie is twisted uncomfortably. The trunk’s lid presses against her cheek, while the bottom corner cuts into the flesh of her upper arm. “So Clyde can get himself out of there.”

  “No!” The bed squeaks in alarm, as Mary sits down hard on it. “No, no, no. I’m not having anything to do with this and you ain’t either, Miss Bonnie Elizabeth Parker!”

  “I never said you had to have anything to do with it! Go back and sit in the car, why don’t you?”

  In the next room a wooden cross with a palm leaf tucked behind it stands watch over a bed covered in a white candlewick, darned in several places. Half a dozen women’s dresses and a man’s black suit hang in the wardrobe. With the press of time beginning to panic her, Bonnie shoves them this way and that along the rod, as if they are flimsy witnesses capable of choking up secrets. She searches between slips and stockings and in the toes of T-straps. She empties a window seat of an afghan, a Parcheesi board, a cylinder of Lincoln Logs, and a Brownie camera and leaves them in a jumble on the floor. She knocks the flowered seat cushions off the chairs and pulls papers out of a small desk.

  “Bonnie!” Mary has followed her from room to room, contributing to the search by glancing under each piece of furniture. “You’re messing up the house!”

  “Better they find a mess than us.”

  Mary gasps and hurries into the kitchen, where she yanks the drawers from the cabinet and dumps their contents onto the wooden table. Bonnie stirs the flour in the bin, paws through the sugar canister, and removes the bread from the breadbox. She even peers into the icebox.

  “Let’s stop now, Bonnie. We’ve looked every place a gun could be. And, honestly, I’m glad we didn’t find it. I’ve never touched a gun and I don’t want to!”

  “Wait a minute.” Bonnie, her head between the borax and the bleach in the curtained space under the sink, remembers Krause and gets to her feet.

  She nearly screams when the pistol isn’t under Willy’s pillow, and she goes to check the other beds without much hope. She’s angry with Clyde now for expecting her to do an impossible job, for suggesting with his cute, childish map that she ought to regard this grievous matter as a game of treasure hunt. She hesitates in what is surely the mother’s room, sobered by the white expanse of respectability and the stark warning of the watchful cross. Delicately, she peels the spread from the pillow and folds it neatly over itself.

  It had been so awkward to lift the pillow cleanly from the bed when she was a child too short to stand over it. Pinching the edges of the pillowcase now, she aches with tension.

  This gun is smaller than her grandfather’s, barely larger than her fist, but she recoils just the same, as she had as a child, when Krause’s pistol had threatened to swallow her with its dark, empty eye. Recalling how Dutchie had lifted it, she does likewise, sliding her palms beneath it, transferring it to the night table beside a bottle of medicine and a Bible.

  “Mary!” When her cousin appears, Bonnie nods at the head of the bed. “Help me make this nice, would you? My hands won’t quit shaking.”

  CHAPTER 20

  On the way back to the house, Bonnie and Mary keep their eyes on the road. The little gun rides between them, concealed by a fold of Bonnie’s skirt and, over that, Bonnie’s hand. As if the weapon is emitting a signal, people on the street seem to look at them as they drive by.

  At home, they test various places of concealment. Her coat pocket? Too likely to be searched. In a boot borrowed from Mary’s husband? Even in their anxious state or perhaps because of it, they can’t stop laughing when she pulls the oversized galoshes on.

  “How about here?” Bonnie tucks the piece into her brassiere. When the cold metal touches her breast, her chest caves and her shoulders curl inward.

  Mary giggles. “Yours aren’t big enough to hide it.”

  Finally, Bonnie uses the belt from one dress to hold the gun in place at her waist and wears a dress with a wider belt over it.

  She rehearses in front of the mirror, hunching to create a deep opening at the neck, surreptitiously unbuttoning another two buttons. Quickly, using one shoulder as a screen, she snakes her hand into the V of fabric between her breasts and hooks the butt of the gun with two fingers. When she draws it out, she spreads her fingers to hide the piece behind them.

  She practices, too, the look she’ll give Clyde, as she produces the weapon. “Here you go, baby,” she whispers. Or should she say nothing and just look deeply into his eyes? In a movie the very idea of inserting a pistol under her dress would have sex appeal, but in real life, it does not. The hard knot of the gun feels like an insult, a metal fist in the gut, frightening, mean, and grossly out of place. She can’t wait to get it off of her body.

  “You’re gonna get caught.” Mary has been watching Bonnie’s performance with a sick look on her face. Although the cousins are the same age, Mary often feels like a timid, following little sister when she is with Bonnie, but now she sees that Bonnie is the child, who doesn’t know enough to stop at sensible boundaries. It is one thing to have a man in jail—goodness knows, plenty of women do—but they get on with their lives and go about their lawful business on the outside. They don’t get stuck in jail, too. The kind of women who go to jail—well, they’re drunk or crazy mostly. Or whores. “Bonnie!” Mary bursts out, rushing to her cousin and shaking her by the shoulders, as if to wake her from a nightmare. “Don’t do it. You’re not that kind of person. Think what could happen.”

  Bonnie notes that throughout the shaking, the gun stays still, firmly attached to her flesh. “What if it were Buzz in there? You’d be with him, right or wrong, wouldn’t you? That’s love, isn’t it?”

  Mary frowned doubtfully.

  “I’ve got to get over to the jail while they’re still letting people in. Borrow me your car, Mary. Please.”

  Mary shakes her head. “You tell him he’s got to pay for his mistakes. That’s the right thing. That’s the only way you and him are going to be happy someday.”

  “I’ll be too late if I walk all that way again. Why doesn’t this damn town have a streetcar?”<
br />
  Mary sighs. “I’ll drive you. But I’m not going in.”

  * * *

  Bonnie has to sit very straight on the car seat to keep the barrel from poking into her breastbone. Once she’s up there with Clyde, he’ll guide her, but she has to get in on her own. She hopes the red-haired policeman who likes her is on duty.

  Despite her declaration, Mary comes into the lobby, frowning and gnawing at her thumbnail. There she stands, fingering the temperance pamphlets, obviously agonized.

  “Siddown, why don’t you?” Bonnie hisses. It doesn’t help a bit for Mary to look like she’s about to shit a fishhook.

  The top of Bonnie’s head and, in fact, all of her skin tingles, as if she’s slightly electrified.

  “You been in already.” The turnkey, not the redhead, is the one who’d been on duty that morning. “Prisoner’s allowed only one visit per day.”

  “Please, I got to go back to Dallas tomorrow. Let me see him for just a minute and I promise I won’t bother you again.”

  He lets her stand another few seconds, working his tongue at something stuck between his teeth.

  “I want to tell him goodbye.” She steadies her gaze on the guard’s eyes—which are a pretty, pale green—and tries not to look at the distasteful bulge of his tongue and the patches of brutal stubble on his jaw. “I’m going to let him know that I need a man, not a thug. I got better things to do than wait around for him to do his time.”

  “He ain’t gonna like that.” The guard lifts his brows.

  She shrugs, but takes care to keep the gesture small, so as not to shift her belts or even tighten the fabric bloused at her waist.

  He turns the visitor’s log so she can sign in her neat, schoolgirl penmanship. “I’ll let you up to his cell long enough to give him what for. But mind you make it quick. We don’t go in for torture here in McLennan County.” He grins, baring yellow teeth.