A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde by James Lee Burke

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