A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde (2 page)

W
HEN MY MOTHER’S
spells first began, she told us she had dreams she could not remember, but she was
convinced they contained information of vast importance. Behind her eyes, you could
see her drawing a rake through her thoughts, as though on the verge of discovering
the source of all her unhappiness. Her early hours seemed to be neither good nor bad;
she said morning was a yellow room that sometimes had a sunny window in it. But after
three
P
.
M
.
, when the sun began to move irrevocably toward the horizon, a chemical transformation
seemed to take place inside her head. Her eyes would become haunted, darting at the
row of poplars on the side lawn, as though a specter were beckoning to her from the
shade.

“What’s wrong, Emma Jean?” my father said the first time it happened.

“You don’t hear them?” she replied.

“Hear who?”

“The whisperers. They’re over there, by the garden wall.”

“Look at me. I’m your husband, the man who loves you. There is no one else in the
yard except you and me and Weldon.”

My mother went silent, seeming to believe now more than ever that we were her enemies,
and she could not understand the poisonous vapor that awaited her every afternoon
when the sun became a red wafer inside the dust clouds rising in the west.

After Grandfather and I returned to the house, I washed my mother’s hair in the upstairs
bathroom and dried it with the electric fan, lifting it off her neck and eyes. 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 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 tinkling in the trees. I wondered what
her name was and what it would be like to run away with her. Even more, I wondered
what it would be like to place my mouth on hers. For just a moment the world felt
blown by cool breezes and was green and young again; I would have sworn the willow
branches were strung with leaves that lifted and fell like a woman’s hair, and there
was a smell in the air like distant rain and freshly cut watermelon.

Six days later, a physician and a nurse with a scowl like a prison matron’s came to
the house in a white ambulance. They went inside and, with hardly a word, sedated
my mother and took her away to the psychiatric unit at Jeff Davis Hospital in Houston.
I suspected my mother’s next stop was Wichita Falls, where they’d blow out her light
proper.

I
STOPPED SPEAKING TO
Grandfather unless the situation gave me no alternative. I went to school and did
my homework and chores but avoided physical proximity to him. I could not even bring
myself to look into his face, out of both resentment and shame at what he had done.
Unfortunately for me, Christian charity required that I do things for him that he
could not do for himself. His ankles and the tops of his feet were a reddish-purple
color, the skin stretched so tight it looked like it was about to pop. I suspected
he had diabetes and had decided to let it take its course, regardless if that meant
blindness or amputation or the grave, which was the kind of self-destructive irrationality
that characterized most of his time on earth.

In my mind, he had become a traitor, or at best he had revealed the person he had
always been—a self-centered, unfeeling, and brutal man who made use of his badge to
indulge all his base appetites. The stories about his womanizing and drunkenness and
gambling were legendary; so were the accounts of the men who had died in front of
his revolvers. He joined the Hebron Baptist Church only after the coals of his lust
had crumbled into ash.

Ten days had passed since my mother was taken away in the ambulance. “The doctor told
me she would probably kill herself if she didn’t get treatment,” Grandfather said,
watching me from the kitchen table while I put away our dishes. “That’s why I finally
gave in. I didn’t see another door out, Satch.”

“Don’t call me that name anymore. Not now, not ever.”

“All right, Weldon.”

“The doctor is a goddamn liar.”

“You’re acquiring a personality that’s not your own,” he said. “That might be understandable,
considering what’s happened in your family, but it will cause you a shitload of grief
down the road. Be your own man, even if you don’t add up to much.”

How could anyone pack so many insults into so few words? I worked the iron handle
on the sink; the trickle that came out of it was rust-colored and smelled of mud.
Leaves were spinning in the yard, clicking against the walls and screens like the
husks of grasshoppers. I could almost feel the barometer dropping, as though another
great storm was at hand, perhaps one filled with rain and thunder and electricity
forking across the heavens. “I think I might go away,” I said.

There was a pause.

“They say the people who went to California to pick fruit have come back home. Maybe
it’s better to starve among your own people than in a Hooverville. We have a nice
house. A lot of people don’t.”

I turned from the sink. His pale blue eyes were fixed on mine. I saw no recrimination
in them, no desire to control or belittle. It was an uncommon moment, one that made
me question whether I’d been fair to him.

“I don’t think I belong here anymore,” I said.

“When you woke up this morning, your name was still Holland, wasn’t it? If people
stick together, they can always make do.”

“It’s not the same now, Grandfather.”

His eyes went away from mine. “I sold off thirty acres this afternoon. That’s part
of your inheritance, so I thought you had a right to know.”

“Who did you sell it to?”

“A man from Dallas. He tried to get it for five dollars an acre. I got him up to six-fifty.”

I already knew the mathematics of predatory land acquisition, and I was aware that
my grandfather was notorious for his poor handling of money and lack of judgment when
it came to bargaining. I also knew he wasn’t telling me the whole story. “You gave
him the mineral rights, didn’t you.”

“There’s nothing down there except more dirt.”

“Then why does a man from Dallas want it?”

“Maybe he’s going to build a golf course. How would I know? He’p me up.”

I lifted him by one arm and fitted the handle of his walking cane into his right hand.
He hadn’t bathed that day, and a smell like sour milk rose from his shirt. “I’ll walk
you upstairs,” I said.