Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (15 page)

“Bonnie, shut up,” Clyde said.

“But we’re married,” Bonnie said, like she was telling a funny joke. “And have a child. So I have this crazy feeling that
I’m
supposed to be his soul mate. So I leave our son with my parents and come up here, too. And we go to a party where people get naked in a hot tub and roll around in the snow. And I meet the woman, his perfect woman, and the first thing she does is proposition me.”

Everett glanced at his daughter, to see what she understood. He couldn’t tell. She was looking straight out the windshield. She’d seen people naked in hot tubs, so she’d understand that. He looked back at the road.

“So I told Clyde about it,” Bonnie said, “thinking he’d defend my honor. And he said it was a good idea. He thought we might just move into his soul mate’s cabin and get along.” She seemed to think about this for a second, about the right way to sum it up. “So we tried to go for a mind-clearing ski,” she said finally, “and the karmic gods stole our fucking car.” She started to laugh again, the throaty start and then the giggle.

No one answered her; the only sound was her trying to stop laughing. Everett pulled quickly to the center of the road to miss a strip of black rubber truck tire.

The CB crackled on. “Continental Divide?” a voice asked.

Everett answered that he was there.

“You been shot full of bullet holes?” the man asked.

“Nope,” Everett said.

“That you reporting a stolen car?”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yeah,” the voice said. “I just seen Baby Face Nelson drivin’ it down the road. Ha. No, I ain’t seen it. I’ll keep a eye out.”

Everett thanked him and replaced the receiver.

“Why did he say Baby Face?” Anne Marie asked.

“There was a Bonnie and Clyde,” Everett told her, “not these ones, who were bank robbers. And Baby Face Nelson was a bank robber. But he didn’t like to be called Baby Face.”

In the back, Bonnie said, “My first mistake was marrying someone named Clyde.”

“I don’t recall you being real reluctant,” Clyde said.

“Do you have to talk about this
here
?” Pam burst out, and Everett was surprised. It wasn’t like Pam to burst out, especially in front of strangers.

“We have to talk about it sometime,” the woman said. “We were supposed to be talking up here. Then we got lost and I broke the ski and Clyde goes apeshit—”

“I did not go apeshit.”

“You did,” Bonnie said. “Because I’m not good at things like that. And we’re ruining our son’s life. These are the years that matter, he’s three.”

“I’m four,” Anne Marie said.

Everett rumpled his daughter’s hair. His wife was glaring out the window, with her arms crossed over her chest. He turned back to the road. Pam wouldn’t speak again, he could tell. Whatever she was thinking would bubble and ferment and grow, but it wouldn’t come out. Or it would come out where he least expected it, where it least made sense.

They were nearing the outskirts of town, the first houses. A few had decorations out: Santas and snowmen. Windows were already lit with red and green outlines, in the dim afternoon.

“Should I take you to the police station?” Everett asked, because he didn’t know what else to say.

“That would be great,” Clyde said.

“I’m sorry,” Bonnie said. “This has been a hard time.”

There was a long silence.

“What’s the little girl’s name?” Bonnie asked.

His daughter turned in her seat belt. “Anne Marie.”

“Do you have ornaments for the tree?” Bonnie asked her.

“Yes,” Anne Marie said.

“What kind?”

“Angels, and two mice sleeping in a nutshell,” she said. “And some fish. And a baby Jesus in a crib.”

“Those sound nice,” Bonnie said, her voice wistful. “We’ve never had a tree. Clyde thinks you shouldn’t cut down trees to put in your house.”

“Bonnie,” Clyde said.

Anne Marie said, “Our tree was crowding up another tree. So we made the other tree have room.”

“Would that meet your standards, Clyde?” Bonnie asked.

Clyde said nothing.

Anne Marie looked out the windshield again, trained in the prevention of car sickness. “They could help decorate our tree,” she said.

“I think they want to find their car,” Everett said.

Anne Marie turned back in her seat. “Do you want to help decorate our tree?”

“Honey, they’re busy,” Pam said.

“I would love that more than anything in the world,” Bonnie said.

“No,” her husband said.

“Baby, please,” Bonnie said. “We’ve never had a tree.”

“Leave these people alone,” Clyde said.

Everett turned on Broadway and stopped at the police station. He untied the rope and opened the back of the Jimmy for his passengers. Clyde didn’t get out right away. He said, in a low voice, to Pam, “Look, I’m really sorry about this. Thank you for the ride.” Then he climbed out, past Everett, and walked with what seemed like dignity into the station.

Bonnie sat on the boughs with her legs straight out, and gave Everett a forlorn look. In her fur hat, she looked like a Russian doll. She didn’t say anything, as if she knew that silence was better, that it was what he was used to. Pam had leaned forward and was talking quietly to Anne Marie in the front seat.

“Why don’t you go make your report,” Everett told Bonnie. “See what they can do. I’ll go home and unload, and then come back and get you both.”

Two things happened at once, as in a movie, one close up and one in deep focus. Bonnie broke into a brilliant, tear-sparkled smile, and Pam’s leaning form stiffened, and she half turned her head. Then she looked away again, and occupied herself more fiercely with Anne Marie. Bonnie clambered out of the back and kissed the side of Everett’s mouth for a long second. “Thank you,” she said.

Embarrassed, Everett stepped back and unlashed the skis and poles from the roof. He gave them to Bonnie, and she stood with the spiky bundle in her arms as they pulled away.

Pam said nothing as they drove. Their daughter must have felt the tension in the air. Everett whistled “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” for lack of anything more sensible to do.

At the house, he parked the Jimmy and started untying the tree. Pam pulled the boughs out of the back, dumped them on the front deck, and took Anne Marie inside. Everett carried the tree around to the sliding glass door and tugged on the handle. The door didn’t open. He thought it might be frozen and he tugged again. They never locked the doors. He went around the corner of the deck and pulled on the other sliding glass door, the one to the kitchen. It was locked, too. He rapped on the glass, and Pam came to it.

“The door’s locked,” he said, pointing to the handle.

“Say you’re not going back for them,” she said, her voice muffled by the glass.

The tree was heavy on his shoulder, and he stood it up on the deck, holding the slender trunk through the branches. He studied it. It was a fine tree. He turned back to his wife. “It’s Christmas,” he said.

“I don’t want them here,” she said through the glass. “Say you won’t go.”

“Did you lock all the doors?”

“Say it,” she said.

He sighed. The temperature had dropped when the sun went down, and it was cold outside. “I won’t go back for them,” he said. “I’ll leave them stranded and unhappy, without a tree, at Christmastime.  Are you happy?”

“They’re crazy,” she said.

“Of course they are. Now let me in.”

She unlocked the door. He carried the tree through the kitchen, set it up in the corner of the living room, and turned it until the bare side faced the wall. It looked like a lopsided bush. Anne Marie clapped her hands in approval. He showed her how to fill the reservoir in the stand with water. Then he crumpled newspaper in the fireplace, built a hut of kindling, and set it alight.

Pam called the police station to renege on the hospitality, asking them to deliver the message to the people whose car was stolen. Everett strung the lights on the tree, and lifted Anne Marie to put the angel on top. There wasn’t really a single top to the tree, but he helped her pick one. Pam moved around the kitchen, making dinner.

A stranger watching would have thought it a perfectly ordinary December night, and it was true that they talked no more than they often did. Anne Marie gamely kept up an almost professional patter, like a hostess who knows her party has gone wrong and her guests are miserable. She hung the ornaments: the two mice sleeping in the nutshell, the fish, the baby Jesus in the crib. Everett sat in the big chair between the fireplace and the kitchen, feeling the soreness from chopping and hauling set in. He wasn’t twenty-five anymore. Anne Marie sang Christmas carols to herself: “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and “Good King Wenceslas.”

With a pot of soup on the stove, Pam made a juniper swag for the mantelpiece, her slimness in jeans set off by the firelight. She cut and arranged the boughs as she had every year they had been in the house, and as her mother had every year before that. She nestled three white candles among the branches, evenly spaced, and lit them. Everett watched her, thinking about the fact that she was Clyde’s type, wondering why he still wanted to go get the outlaws, and put himself in the way of temptation.

Pam turned from the mantel with the matchbook. There was sometimes a funny, ironic smile that came over her face when she caught him looking at her, a grown-up smile, at once confident and self-deprecating. But now she looked defiant and young. It was the look Anne Marie got at bedtime, when made to choose how to spend her dwindling time: this book or that book? Staying up by the fire or having ten minutes more with her dolls? Anne Marie always delayed and evaded, and chose the longest book, the most involved game.

Pam said, “Look, if you want to go get them, just go.”

“They’ll have gone by now,” he said, with a catch in his voice.

Pam threw the burnt match into the fire, and put the matchbook in the kitchen drawer. Then she picked up and dialed the phone, watching Everett, as if waiting for him to stop her.

“I called earlier about the couple with the stolen car,” she said, in her businesslike phone voice. “Are they still there?” She waited, looking out the dark glass door she had locked him out of.

“Hi, Bonnie,” she said into the phone. “It’s Pam—from the car. We picked you up. Hi.” Her laugh sounded social, but Everett could hear the nervousness in it. “No, I don’t think I introduced myself. Do you still want to help with the tree? Everett could run down and get you.”

She paused, listening.

“Put Clyde on,” she said, and she turned away from Everett. He watched the curve of his wife’s ass as she leaned on the kitchen counter, lifting her right foot and nervously tapping the toe on the floor. “Clyde,” she said. “Please come up for dinner. Anne Marie would love to show off the tree.” The pause again. “Really, we’d love it,” she said. Then, “Good. He’ll be right down.”

She hung up the phone, and turned to Everett. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

He was not sure how to behave. Anne Marie was still decorating the lower branches of the tree, singing, “We three kings of orient are.” There were plenty of branches left for Bonnie.

“So,” Pam said. She stirred the pot on the stove with a wooden spoon, tapped the spoon against the rim, and set it on the counter. “Do you want to go get them?”

Everett pushed himself out of the chair. “Want to come along, Anne Marie?” he asked.

His daughter looked up at him. “Are you going to get those people?”

“Yes,” he said. “To help with the tree.”

Anne Marie nodded, untangling the loop of string on a tiny ukulele. “I’ll stay here,” she said.

He kissed Pam goodbye on the top of her head. Was she attracted to Clyde? He wanted to take off her clothes right now and see. He was conscious of his own breathing, and he could tell she was unsteady.

“It’s Christmastime,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He went out into the cold air. The Jimmy started up easy, and he headed in low gear down the hill toward town.

He wanted to decide, as he drove, what they were doing. He wanted to separate his impulse to be a good Samaritan from the kiss on the corner of his mouth. Bonnie did not, he was fairly sure, just want to hang angels on a tree. Clyde’s asking her to move in with his mistress had put her in a giddy, reckless mood, and Everett was the beneficiary. He wasn’t going to think about Clyde’s low, sincere apology to Pam. Or about Pam turning away on the phone to ask Clyde to come to the house. Although he found he wanted very much to think about that.

He thought instead about Anne Marie, and how the evening might work out for her. The lesson about not abandoning people was a good one. The silent, submerged unhappiness of the evening couldn’t be good for a kid, and now it was gone, dissolved by Pam’s call into the buzz of unsettled excitement.

The streets were dark and empty, the houses warm with light. He wanted to keep thinking, but he was at the station before he had sorted things out, and Bonnie was waiting on the curb. She climbed into the front seat and kicked the snow off her boots.

“Hi,” she said, and she clutched her hands in her lap. She shuddered once, from nervousness or cold. “Clyde’ll be here in a second,” she said. “He’s signing something about the car.”

“Okay,” he said.

She looked at Everett and seemed about to say something, and then she was in his arms. He gathered her up as well as he could, given her thick coat and the awkward position, and kissed her sweet face. Her cheeks were cold but her lips were warm, and she was trembling. The peacoat was unbuttoned, and he reached inside to feel the curve of her breast through her sweater.

A second later they pulled apart—the time required to sign papers measured somewhere in both their minds—and Bonnie smoothed her hair. The lighted glass door of the station opened, and Clyde walked with his long stride toward them and got in the back seat.

Everett thought there must be a smell in the car from the kiss, an electricity. But the husband said nothing, and Everett drove the outlaws back to his house. They talked about the stolen car, and the cold, and the tree. All the while, Everett felt both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything he wanted, all at once.