A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde Read Free

When
     I finished, she got up from the chair and dropped her bathrobe to the floor in front
     of the closet mirror, staring at the flatness of her hips against her slip. She began
     tying a string around her waist, the way colored women do to keep their slip from
     hanging below the hem of their dress.
    “Mother, I’m in the room,” I said.
    My words didn’t seem to register. “I’ve lost so much weight,” she said. “Do you think
     I look all right? Did those people in the automobile come here in regard to your father?”
    “Why would they be here about him?”
    “He might have found work and sent word.”
    “I think they were drunk and got lost.”
    I went downstairs and set up our checkerboard on a folding bridge table we kept behind
     the couch. My mother loved to play checkers, and while she played, she smiled as though
     allowing herself a brief vacation from the emotional depression that consumed her
     life. Her hair had been dark blond when she was younger; it had turned brown with
     streaks of gray. She still bathed every day but no longer wore makeup or cut her fingernails.
     I believed that if I did not take my mother away from this house, away from the doctors
     who planned to kill thousands of her brain cells, she would end up a vegetable in
     the state asylum outside Wichita Falls.
    “Mother, what if you and I left here and went out on our own?” I said.
    “Where would we go?” she said, staring down at the red and black squares on the checkerboard.
    “Maybe Galveston or Brownsville, where the air is fresh and full of salt from the
     waves crashing on the beach. There’s no dust there’bouts. I could get a job.”
    “People are coming to take me away, aren’t they.”
    Through the kitchen door, I could see Grandfather reading his encyclopedia, which
     he did every day, one volume after the next. Behind him, out in the darkness, fireflies
     were lighting in the trees like sparks rising off a stump fire. I tried to think but
     couldn’t. “We have to fight them, Mother,” I said. “The doctors are not our friends.
     I wish they had rubber gags put in their mouths and their own machines were turned
     against them.”
    She stared at her hands. The heels were half-mooned with fresh nail marks. “I don’t
     know why I hurt myself this way or why I have the thoughts I do. I feel I’m unclean
     in the sight of my Creator. Something is about to happen. It has to do with the people
     in the car. They were here before. I saw them from the upstairs window. They took
     off their clothes out there in the trees.”
    I knew then that my mother was absolutely mad. But her mention of our visitors made
     me think once again of the driver and his rugged good looks and thick walnut-colored
     hair and toughness of attitude toward Grandfather. He was no shade-tree mechanic,
     no matter what he claimed. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
    I began hunting through a sheaf of old magazines stuck in a wood rack by the end of
     the couch. I flipped through the pages of a 1933 issue of True Detective until I came to a photo of a handsome man wearing a fedora whose expression had the
     intransigence of boilerplate. I took the magazine to Grandfather. “Does this fellow
     look familiar?” I said.
    “No.”
    “You didn’t even look. It’s the man you had words with.”
    “I think I’d know if I was talking to Pretty Boy Floyd.”
    “Same eyes, same chin, same mouth, same expression,” I said. “A real hard case.”
    “There’s only one problem. Floyd was killed last year on a farm in Ohio. Before the
     feds finished him off, he said, ‘Have at it, boys. It’s been that kind of day.’”
    Grandfather had one-upped me again. He closed his encyclopedia and removed his glasses.
     “I heard y’all talking in there,” he said. “She’ll be better off under the care of
     the state. Don’t encourage her to think otherwise. You’re not doing her a service.”
    “It’s you they ought to take away,” I