When I was invited to write a story for A Tyranny of Petticoats, I had two ideas. One was a murder mystery — I’ve written that kind of thing before. The other was a cross-dressing, bank-robbing teen bandit on the run. I’ve never written that kind of thing before. How to choose, how to choose? As Mae West once said, I went with the evil I’d never tried before.
There’s a fine tradition of cross-dressing girls in fiction, from Alanna in Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness novels to Mary Faber in L. A. Meyer’s Bloody Jack series. I love the twists and turns, the constant tension, and the total subversion of expectations these stories offer. I hope that you find my story “Bonnie and Clyde” a worthy addition to the world of adventurous historical girls in pants!
WHEN THERE’S FOOD AROUND, A hobo jungle is like a high-school wiener roast — everybody huddled into groups, laughing and eating and talking about each other. Pretending the real world isn’t out there, just beyond the tree line and across the tracks.
This world feels as small as my little Nebraska town did, but in this ragged piece of shade on the banks of the Columbia River, I am a misfit.
I’m not the youngest — there’s a handful of teenage boys by the fire, and I’ve got Billy waiting for me way back near a thicket of huckleberries — but I am the only girl. To look at me, none would call me feminine, but I can feel the men watch as I pass.
I saw two of them at the orchard this morning. They got into a dustup because only ten pickers were hired and there were thirty of us. They’re all friends now, though, bolstered by alcohol squeezed from Sterno cooking gel.
There’s no work here and I’ve got nothing to add to the pot of mulligan stew — not even an onion — so I need to get Billy and get out. I don’t want to be around when the canned heat fuels more than just loud voices and swagger.
I don’t see Billy or his bindle, and worry rises in my throat, dry as the dust bowl winds. Billy’s just a kid and as annoying as all get-out, but we stick together.
There’s someone else back by the huckleberry thicket, though. I know him for a hoaxter as soon as I spot him, sitting on a fallen tree with his legs stretched out, deliberately nonchalant. His pants are pressed, and though his shirt’s unbuttoned at the collar, it’s clean. He’s got a hat pulled low on his forehead and the thinnest mistake of a mustache I’ve ever seen.
He thinks he’s Clark Gable in It Happened One Night.
A flash of blue and brown catches my eye before Billy catches me right in my midsection and knocks me to the dirt.
“Where’ve you been?” he cries. “I’ve been waiting!”
I bite back an uncharitable reply and hug him quick till I see Gable watching. Then I push Billy off. He’s little, but he’s twelve. When I was twelve, I was already taking care of my three sisters, before they got scattered to relatives.
He can’t replace them.
“I got something,” he says, his dirty, blond hair flopping right into his eyes.
“You need a haircut.”
He pulls it back with one hand so I can see his baby blues and the smear of dirt across his forehead. “I like it this way.” He sets his chin like Celia used to at home.
I shrug and stagger to my feet, bone weary from hard traveling.
Billy coughs but grins around it. He’s the reason we’re heading west, toward the ocean. Toward Seattle. Hopefully toward work. Away from the dust that brings on his asthma.
Billy unwraps his bindle carefully, like what he’s got there is precious.
And it is. It’s a feast. Bread and apples and cheese and something that looks suspiciously like —
“Roast beef,” Billy says proudly.
My mouth waters.
We can’t eat it here. Much as I’d like to add to the mulligan, this beef would cause a riot. I glance over my shoulder. No one’s looking — not even Gable. I wrap the food quickly and stuff it back into the bindle.
“How did you ever do it?” I whisper. The men at the orchard said times were hard. No work. No money. No food.
“I went into town just like you said,” he rattles. I try to quiet him, but there’s no hushing Billy once he starts talking. “I stood on a street corner. There’s folks everywhere. And just like you said, when I saw a lady wearing gloves, I sat down on the curb and I put my head in my hands and I told her the story you said to tell.”
“It’s your story, Billy.” I look over at Gable again. He’s studying his fingernails.
“The way you tell it is better.” Billy puts on a sad, mewling voice that makes him sound younger. “We lost our farm in . . .”— he hesitates — “foreclosure, and my pop just up and left. He fought in the War and thought he could get his bonus and find some work and feed us all, but he never came back from Washington.”
I nod. He’s doing pretty good. Laying it on a little thick.