A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde

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A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde

A Short Story

James Lee Burke

Simon & Schuster

New York   London   Toronto   Sydney   New Delhi

Chapter

1

I
T WAS THE
year none of the seasons followed their own dictates. The days were warm and the air
hard to breathe without a kerchief, and the nights cold and damp, the wet burlap we
nailed over the windows stiff with grit that blew in clouds out of the west amid sounds
like a train grinding across the prairie. The moon was orange, or sometimes brown,
as big as a planet, the way it is at harvest time, and the sun never more than a smudge,
like a lightbulb flickering in the socket or a lucifer match burning inside its own
smoke. In better times, our family would have been sitting together on the porch,
in wicker chairs or on the glider, with glasses of lemonade and bowls of peach ice
cream.

My father was looking for work on a pipeline in East Texas. Maybe he would come back
one day. Or maybe not. Back then, people had a way of walking down a tar road and
crossing through a pool of heat and disappearing forever. I ascribed the signs of
my mother’s mental deterioration to my father’s absence and his difficulties with
alcohol. She wore out the rug in her bedroom walking in circles, squeezing her nails
into the heels of her hands, talking to herself, her eyes watery with levels of fear
and confusion that nobody could dispel. Ordinary people no longer visited our home.

As a lawman, Grandfather had gone up against the likes of Bill Dalton and John Wesley
Hardin, and in 1916, with a group of rogue Texas Rangers, he had helped ambush a train
loaded with Pancho Villa’s soldiers. The point is, he wasn’t given to studying on
the complexities of mental illness. That didn’t mean he was an ill-natured or entirely
uncharitable man, just one who seemed to have a hole in his thinking. He had not been
a good father to his children. Through either selfishness or ineptitude, he often
left them to their own devices, even when they foundered on the wayside. I had never
understood this obvious character defect in him. I sometimes wondered if the blood
he had shed had made him incapable of love.

He hid behind flippancy and cynicism. He rated all politicians “somewhere between
mediocre and piss-poor.” His first wife had “a face that could make a freight train
turn on a dirt road.” WPA stood for We Piddle Around. If he hadn’t been a Christian,
he would have fired the hired help (we no longer had any) and “replaced them with
sloths.” The local banker had a big nose because the air was free. Who was my grandfather
in actuality? I didn’t have a clue.

It was right at sunset when I looked through the back screen and saw a black automobile,
coated with dust and shaped like a shoe box, detour off the road and drive into the
woods behind our house. A man wearing a fedora and a white shirt without a tie got
out and urinated in front of the headlights. I thought I could hear laughter inside
the car. While he relieved himself, he removed his fedora and combed his hair. It
was wavy and thick and brown and shiny as polished walnut. His trousers were notched
tightly into his ribs, and his cheeks looked like they had been rubbed with soot.
These were not uncommon characteristics in the men who drifted here and yon through
the American West during the first administration of President Roosevelt.

“Some people must have wandered off the highway onto our road,” I said. “The driver
is taking a leak in front of his headlights. His passengers seem to be enjoying themselves.”

Grandfather was sitting at the kitchen table, an encyclopedia open in front of him,
his reading glasses on his nose. “He deliberately stood in front of his headlights
to make water, so others could watch?”

“I can’t speak with authority about his thought process, since I’m not inside the
man’s head,” I replied. I picked up the German binoculars my uncle had brought back
from the trenches and focused them on the car. “There’s a woman in the front seat.
A second man and another woman are in back. They’re passing a bottle around.”

“Are they wets?”

I removed the binoculars from my eyes. “If wets drive four-door cars.”

“My first wife had a sense of humor like yours. The only time I ever saw her laugh
was when she realized I’d developed shingles.”

I focused the binoculars back on the driver. I thought I had seen his face before.
I heard Grandfather get up heavily from his chair. He was over six and a half feet
tall, and his ankles were swollen from hypertension and caused him to sway back and
forth, as though he were on board a ship. Sometimes he used a walking cane, sometimes
not. One day he seemed to teeter on the edge of eternity; the next day he was ready
to resume his old habits down at the saloon. He had gin roses in his cheeks and skin
like a baby’s and narrow eyes that were the palest blue I had ever seen. Sometimes
his eyes did not go with his face or his voice; the intense light in them could make
other men glance away. “Let’s take a walk, Satchel Ass,” he said.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that name.”

“You’ve got a butt on you like a washtub.”

“There’s a bullet hole in the rear window of the car,” I said, looking through the
binoculars again. “My butt doesn’t resemble a washtub. I don’t like you talking to
me like that, Grandfather.”

“Wide butts and big hips run in the Holland family. That’s just something to keep
in mind as you get older. It’s a family trait, not an insult. Would you marry a woman
who looks like a sack of Irish potatoes?”

He pulled open a kitchen drawer and removed a holstered revolver that was wrapped
with the belt, the loops stuffed with brass shells. The revolver was the dull color
of an old Buffalo nickel. It had been converted long ago for cartridges, but the black-powder
tamping rod was still in place, fitted with a working hinge under the barrel. The
top of the holster had been worn smooth and yellow along the edges of the leather.
Six tiny notches had been filed along the base of the revolver’s grips. Grandfather
hung the belt from his shoulder and put on his Stetson. The brim was wilted, the crown
sweat-stained a dark gray above the brim. He went out the screen door into the waning
twilight.

The windmill was ginning furiously, the stanchions trembling with energy, a thread
of water coming from the spout, the tank crusted with dirt and dead insects and animal
hair along the rims. “The moon looks like it was dipped in a teacup. I cain’t believe
how we used to take the rain for granted,” he said. “I think this land must be cursed.”

The air smelled of ash and dust and creosote and horse and cow manure that feathered
in your hand if you picked it up. Dry lightning leaped through the heavens and died,
like somebody removing an oil lamp from the window of a darkened house. I thought
I felt thunder course through the ground under my shoes. “Feel that?” I said, hoping
to change Grandfather’s mood and my own.

“Don’t get your hopes up. That’s the Katy blowing down the line,” he replied. “I’m
sorry I made fun of your butt, Satch. I won’t do it no more. Walk behind me till we
know who’s in that car.”

As we approached the tree line, the driver of the car walked out of the headlights
and stood silhouetted against the glare, then got back in his car and started the
engine and clanked the transmission into gear. The trees were so dry they made a sound
like paper rustling when the wind blew through the canopy.

“Hold up there,” Grandfather said to the man.

I thought the driver would simply motor away. But he didn’t. He stuck his elbow out
the window and stared straight into our faces, his expression curious rather than
alarmed. “You talking to us?” he asked.

“You’re on my property,” Grandfather said.

“I thought this was public woods,” the driver said. “If there’s a posted sign that
says otherwise, I didn’t see it.”

The woman next to him was pretty and had strawberry-blond hair and a beret tilted
over one eye. She looked like a happy country girl, the kind who works in a dime store
or in a café where the truckers come in to make innocent talk. She leaned forward
and grinned up into Grandfather’s face. She silently mouthed the words “We’re sorry.”

“Did you know you have mud on your license tag?” Grandfather asked the driver.

“I’ll get right on that,” the driver said.

“You also have what appears to be a bullet hole in your back window.”

The driver removed a marble from the ashtray in the dashboard and held it against
the light. “I found this on the backseat. It was probably a kid with a slingshot,”
he said. “I saw a kid up on the train trestle with one. You a lawman?”

“I’m a rancher. The name is Hackberry Holland. You didn’t give me yours.”

“Smith,” the driver said.

“If you’ll tell me your destination, Mr. Smith, maybe I can he’p you find your way.”

“Lubbock. Or anyplace there’s work. I work on automotives, mostly. Is that an antique
firearm?”

“A forty-four Army Colt. Most of the time I use it for a paperweight. You know automobiles,
do you?”

“Yes, sir, you could say that. I see automobiles as the future of the country. Henry
Ford and me.”

“Turn left at the paved road and stay due west,” Grandfather said. “If you see the
Pacific Ocean, that means you passed Lubbock.”

The man in the backseat rolled down the glass. He was short and not over 120 pounds
and wore a suit and tie and a short-brim hat cocked on his brow the way a dandy might.
He had a long face, like a horse’s hanging out of a stall. He also had the kind of
lopsided grin you see on stupid people who think they’re smarter than you. His breath
was as rank as a barrel of spoiled fruit. “My name is Raymond. This here is my girlfriend,
Miss Mary,” he said. “We’re pleased to make y’all’s acquaintance.”

The woman sitting next to him had a cleft chin and a broad forehead and a small mean-spirited
Irish mouth; her face was sunken in the middle, like soft wax. She was smoking a cigarette,
gazing into the smoke.

“There’s a busted spar in my cattle guard,” Grandfather said. “Don’t pop a tire going
out. I’d appreciate you not throwing that whiskey bottle in my trees, either.”

“Tidy is as tidy does,” Raymond said.

Grandfather rested one hand on the bottom of the window. He let his eyes roam over
Raymond’s face before he spoke. “The man who kills you will rip out your throat before
you ever know what hit you,” he said. “I’m not talking about myself, just somebody
you might meet up the road, the kind of fellow who turns out to be the worst misjudgment
you ever made.”

“We apologize, sir,” said the woman in front, leaning across the driver so Grandfather
could see her expression more clearly. Her smile made me think of somebody opening
a music box. “We didn’t mean to bother y’all. You have a mighty nice spot here. Thank
you for being so gracious and kind.”

“No harm done,” Grandfather said.

I wanted her to say something to me, but her gaze stayed fixed on Grandfather.

The driver slowly accelerated the car, a nimbus of brown dust rising from the wax
job, our visitors’ silhouettes framed against the headlights. There was a long bright-silver
scratch on the left fender. After they were gone, I could feel Grandfather’s eyes
on me, like he was about to give me a quiz to see how dumb I was at that particular
moment. “What are you studying on, Satch?” he said.

“The car and the way they treat it don’t fit. You think they’re bank robbers?”

“If you haven’t heard, there’s no money in the bank to rob. Or in the general store.
Or in the bubblegum machine at the filling station. Where in the name of suffering
Jesus have you been, boy?”

I picked up a rock and threw it in a high arc and heard it clatter through the trees.
“Why do you have to make light of everything I say?”

“Because you take the world too seriously. Let’s go see what your mother is doing.
I bought some peach ice cream this afternoon. That’s always her favorite.”

“I heard you talking on the phone to the doctor,” I said. Suddenly you could hear
the crickets in the dark, the whistle of the Katy beyond the horizon. The dust clogged
my nostrils and throat. “You’re fixing to send her for electroshock treatments, aren’t
you.”

“The doctor raised that possibility.”

“They use electroshock when they don’t know what else to do. I think the doctor is
an ignorant man. In addition, he’s stupid and thinks meanness and intelligence are
the same thing.”

“He says electroshock is the most modern treatment for what ails her. It’s done in
a hospital. She’ll have the best of care there. It could be worse. Sometimes they
push a steel probe into the brain.”

“On the subject of care, I wonder why nobody gave her any when she was a little girl
and had to fend for herself.”

“You’re developing a hard edge, Weldon. It’s not in your nature. It’ll eat up your
youth and rob you of the wisdom that should come with manhood.”

I hate you,
I thought.

“Tell me something,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Do you ever think about forgiveness?”

“For you, Grandfather? No, I don’t. If you’ve ever sought forgiveness for anything,
I’ve yet to see the instance.”

“I’m talking about forgiveness for all of us.”

“Are you going to call the sheriff about the people in the car?”

“They’re not our business. If they come back, that’s another matter.”

“The woman in the front seat caught your eye,” I said.

“All women do. That’s the way things work. That’s why preachers are always railing
about sex. It’s here for the long haul.”

I could not take my grandfather’s proselytizing. “A stranger with a sweet smile is
the light of the world, but your own daughter doesn’t mean diddly squat on a rock.”

I instantly regretted the harshness of my words. He walked ahead of me, the holstered
revolver swinging back and forth under his arm, the windmill blades rattling in the
wind. When we entered the house, my mother was eating from the carton of ice cream
Grandfather had bought, and cleaning the spoon with her hair.