I tell her I do, but as I push through the screen door, out into the furnace of a day, the truth blazes like a torch in my mind: I don’t understand any of it. Not why anybody would kill anybody for looking different. Or light fires. Or shoot a policeman. I make for the creek, looking to quench the fire burning in my mind. Next thing I know I’ve stripped down to swim.
Creek is low, and I bump my knees against the sandy bottom, but I keep right on swimming to the far bank. Push my feet into white clay, turn around. Back again.
I want it all to be over—the war; the shooting and the killing; the mobs, the riots, the fires. But I know it won’t be over. Not anytime soon. And most of all, I know there’s nothing—not a single blessed thing—I can do about any of it.
Day burns on above me, and when I lie down in my bed later that night, after a dinner where both Will’s and Frankie’s chairs sit empty, I feel the sun’s cold-fire kisses along the back of my neck and all down my arms and legs, burning me still.
I bust into tears when I wake up and see Will lying in his own bed. I run over and climb in and give him a big hug, bawling my eyes out the whole time. Will doesn’t shove me off right away. But he don’t hug me back.
He don’t have to hug me. He just has to be home.
Chapter 13
BONNIE AND CLYDE
Sadness drops like a curtain down around our stone house in the days after Kennedy’s funeral and the news of Uncle Leone. Frankie keeps to our room most of the first day, but he shows for breakfast the next, appearing his normal self though maybe his eyes are redder around the edges.
Will comes to breakfast, but he don’t eat. He barely sleeps, though he lies in bed most of the day. Sometimes he reads—a dusty book of Greek poetry. Or that Saturday Evening Post with Bobby Kennedy’s picture on the cover. Slowly I realize that Frankie is mending but Will ain’t. He may be back, but he ain’t better.
Afternoon of the third day, Will grabs that Post magazine and that blue-and-white Kennedy campaign pin off his bookshelf and carries them down to the barn. He clangs around inside until he finds a shovel, then he marches out into the meadow and buries both the magazine and the pin. Then it’s straight back up to the bedroom.
Pete and me watch from the porch. “What’d he do that for?” I ask.
“He’s saying goodbye,” Pete replies. “It’s something you do when people die. It helps with the sadness.”
“Oh,” I say. “How long you figure before Will’s done being sad?”
Pete shrugs. “A while.”
I don’t like that. I don’t want Will to be so sad. But there’s something else bothering me. Will won’t go anywhere or do anything. That includes looking for that fighter jet. Our expedition has to wait until Will feels better. That means Frankie’s story has to wait too.
“Can’t we do anything to make him feel better faster?” I ask.
Pete shakes his head. “Some things you can’t rush, Jack. This is going to take a whole lot of time.”
We ain’t got a whole lot of time. Pete turns eighteen in less than a month.
If I’m going to save Pete, I must first save Will. And to do that, I’ve got to find a way of helping him to feel better.
Dad beats me to it.
Normally Dad likes to work at whatever is ailing him until it’s fixed, the way you sand down a piece of wood so nobody gets any splinters or caulk a window to keep the winter wind from coming in. But Will’s sadness ain’t a piece of lumber or a cracked windowsill. His hero is dead. And there’s no work Dad can do that will change that.
Dad knows it. So he comes up with something different.
He crushes out the stub of his cigar and comes through the screen door to where we’re gathered in the living room.
“Everybody get your shoes on,” he says. “We are going to the movies.”
The drive-in movie theater is just outside New Shiloh.
Rows upon rows of cars are parked side by side, their dark and cooling headlights pointing toward the giant glowing screen. The night smells like roasted peanuts and popcorn.
The concession stand at the lot’s far end is an island of boards and glass and yellow light in the summer dark. It draws us boys like moths through the crowd of teenagers who sit on the hoods of old Chevys, barefoot in blue jeans and tie-dye T-shirts, eating, drinking, talking, waiting for the movie to start. Some of them smoke smelly cigarettes, and I pinch my nose as we go past.
From the big speakers at the end of the field, scratchy music begins.
“Fellas, the movie’s starting,” I tell my brothers.
“You can go back and watch with Ma and Dad,” Pete says. He keeps moving through the sea of automobiles.
Every kid in the valley is here tonight, but there’s only one he and Will care to see. I don’t care about finding Anna May Fenton. Pretty or not, she’s only a girl. This is a real, live movie—and we are about to miss it. The feature tonight is Bonnie and Clyde.
The crowd is thinning by the time we get our popcorn. Most kids have already got their hot dogs or popcorn and are returning to their cars. But Pete and Will are still searching the crowd for her.
“This is stupid,” I say. “We came to watch a movie, not hunt all over creation for—hey, look!”
Two rows down, Anna May Fenton is disappearing into the sea of automobiles. For an instant, we see her against that bright screen. She’s lovely in that electric dark.
The boy with her is anything but lovely, because it’s Everett Scott again. That big galoot we saw after getting ice cream.
“Ugh, him again.” I grimace.
“Is she really going with him?” Frankie asks.
At first nobody answers.
But then Pete says, “Hard to tell, Frankie. Maybe she is. But maybe she ain’t.” Then Pete’s face lights up, as if he’s just gotten an idea. “Say, Will, why don’t you go say hello? You still got some time before the movie starts.”
Will looks at him for a long moment. He knows what Pete’s doing. So do we all.
Down at the front of the field, the music is getting louder.
Will waits just a second longer, then without a word he wanders down the row of cars too.
Pete watches him go.
The opening credits are running on the big screen now. The movie has started.
“Can we please go back now?” I ask. I’m whining now and I know it.
“Lead the way, Jack,” Pete replies.
“Where’s Will?” asks Ma when we get back. She and Dad are sitting in the cab, windows down, waiting for the movie to begin.
“Trying to steal Anna May Fenton away from her boyfriend,” Pete says as he climbs up. “I give him good odds. Poor old Everett. If his brains were dynamite, he couldn’t blow his nose.”
“Anna May Fenton?” Ma asks. “The preacher’s daughter?”
She looks at Dad, but he ain’t paying any attention. He’s watching the movie.
Frankie and me sit on the roof of the truck. We get a good view from up there—of the screen and the cars around us. There’s a boy and a girl kissing in the one next to us. They’re in the back and all hunkered down so nobody walking by can see. Reminds me of what Pete calls the drive-in: “the passion pit.” We watch them a while, passing a greasy bag of roasted peanuts back and forth, but then Clyde shoots a man and those gunshots pull our attention back to the movie. Now our eyes are glued to that big screen that’s blazing a hole in the soft dark.
Something about the movies lets you forget where you are and go into a whole different world. You just float, and time goes by without you hardly even knowing it. You forget.
I forget about the boy and the girl next to us.
I forget about Uncle Leone’s shooting and Bobby Kennedy’s killing.
I forget about Kemper and his plan to flood our valley.
I even forget about the war. Just for a while.
The movie lays hold of me, sight, sound, even touch: under me, the truck’s cool metal trembles with each gunshot.
There are plenty of those. That Clyde, in his blue suits and wide-brimmed hat, is a real killer. But awful as he is, it’s Bonnie, his partner in crime, who is the more frightening. Cold as ice. Cruel. Beautiful—and deadly.
At last, I feel the movie coming to an end. It’s the end for Bonnie and Clyde too. On a dusty road that looks a lot like Hopkins Road, they pull over to help a man with a flat tire.