A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde Read Free Page A

said.
    I had never spoken to my grandfather like that. As I walked back into the living room,
     the back of my neck was flaming, my eyes filming, my mother’s image as distorted as
     a hank of hair and skin floating in a jar of chemicals. In my absence, she had illegitimately
     crowned two kings for herself and was obviously pleased with what she had done.
    T HE WEATHER TURNED hot unexpectedly. The power went out during the night, shutting down our two electric
     fans, and within an hour the house was creaking with heat. The sun came up red and
     angry and veiled with dust at six A . M . The notion of cooking breakfast on a woodstove inside a superheated frame house was
     enough to make anyone lose his appetite, and the thought of cooking it for my cranky
     grandfather was even more irksome. But duty before druth­ers, I told myself, and poked
     kindling and newspaper through the hob into the firebox and set it aflame, then put
     the coffeepot on the lid and walked outside, hoping against hope there would be a
     cloud in the sky that had water and not half of West Texas in it.
    I followed the serpentine tracks of the four-door automobile through the trees and
     over a knoll and down a gulley humped with dead leaves. For me, it was like following
     the trail of a mastodon or a creature from ancient mythology. I didn’t care if the
     people in the car were outlaws or not. The driver and the woman who had a smile like
     a music box represented not only the outside world but defiance of convention. Rather
     than accept their fate, they had decided to change it. The two-story gabled home in
     which I had been born no longer seemed a symbol of genteel poverty but an institutionalization
     of retrograde thought and cruelty that disguised itself as love, a place where surrender
     to a merciless sun and silo owners who stole people’s land for fifty cents an acre
     at tax sales was a way of life.
    Grandfather said the notorious outlaws of our times were disenfranchised farm people,
     hardly more than petty thieves lionized by J. Edgar Hoover to promote his newly organized
     Bureau. I wondered if Grandfather would call Baby Face Nelson a lionized farm boy.
    Then I saw the whiskey bottle Raymond drank from, busted in shards on a rock. Grandfather
     had asked him not to throw the bottle out of the automobile. But if you tell a man
     like Raymond not to stick his tongue on an ice tray or to avoid lighting a cigarette
     while fueling his automobile, you can be guaranteed he’ll soon be talking with a speech
     impediment or walking around with singed hair and a complexion like a scorched weiner.
    The whiskey bottle wasn’t all I saw. On the other side of the knoll, down by the river
     bottom, was a camp complete with a lean-to, a stone-ringed fire pit, and some sharpened
     sticks that somebody had roasted meat on. Tire tracks led in and out of the trees.
     Our visitors had not only spent considerable time here but had probably buried their
     waste in our earth and had sex in the lean-to and shaved and brushed their teeth with
     water from a canteen and poured the water on the ground, conflating their lives with
     ours, without our consent.
    Who were they? In particular, who was the woman in the front seat? I sat down on the
     knoll and stared through the trees at our house. The wind had piled dust on the west
     wall to almost the window level of our dining room. Up in the Panhandle, the dust
     was stacked in mounds that reached the bottom of a windmill’s blades. Would that be
     our fate, too? Would my mother be taken away and returned to us with the lifeless
     expression of a cloth doll?
    I couldn’t bear the thoughts I was having.
    I lay down on the riverbank in the midst of our visitors’ camp and closed my eyes.
     I think I fell asleep and dreamed of the strawberry-blond girl with the beret cocked
     on her brow. I saw her smile at me, her mouth as soft and moist as a rose opening
     at sunrise. I swore I could hear wind chimes