“Sure. Why not.”
Karpis nodded and went out.
I dried my face off, left the big bowl of soapy dirty water on the bureau and went across the hall to the farm boys’ bedroom. Louise wasn’t in there.
I found her in the room next door. A yellow-papered room with a big double bed with a bright yellow spread. She was packing.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “This was our room. Candy’s and mine.” She gave her attention back to packing.
“You okay, Louise?”
“I’m fine.” But she didn’t sound fine.
I went over to her, touched her shoulder. “What is it?”
“I’m an evil girl. Just like my daddy always said.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We did it. You and me. Fornicated. And Candy not even dead a day. How could I be so bad?”
“It was my fault. I made you do it.”
That wasn’t true, and we both knew it, but it made her feel better to hear it. She turned to me and put her arms around me and pressed the side of her head to my chest.
“Don’t think badly of me for it,” she said.
“I wouldn’t ever.”
“I just needed to be loved. And you were so nice. I wanted you. I had to have you.”
“You’re a beautiful girl, Louise, and I’ll never forget making love to you under the trees.”
She liked the sound of that; it was sappy and romantic, like the romance magazines she was packing with her clothes. Her and Ma Barker.
She smiled up at me and went back to her packing.
I said, “I’m going to drive you today.”
I’d decided not to spring my notion on her to flee our fellow outlaws and return her home to daddy. Not just yet.
She said, “We’re going to that tourist camp near Aurora, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“It’s kind of a nice place. Can we share a cabin there? I mean, do you want to?”
“I’d love to.”
“Hand me my scrapbook, please. Over on the dresser.”
I got it for her; it was a big fat book, bulging with clippings.
“What’s in this?” I asked her.
She laid it in the suitcase, on top of her clothes, but opened it up to show me. I saw a headline: BANK GUARD SHOT.
“It’s all Candy’s press notices,” she said, like she was talking about an actor. “I’m even in some of them.”
I leafed through it. Bank robberies, a gas station stickup, jewelry store, the Bremer kidnapping. I even found the duplicate of the clipping her father had shown me, in which she (an “unidentified moll”) was pictured, that is, sketched.
As I turned the pages, she was looking down at them with a fond, nostalgic little smile.
“Candy made his mark,” she said. “They can’t take that away from him. Or me.”
She closed the book, and closed the suitcase.
“Excuse me.” It was Karpis, peeking in.
“Change of plans,” he said. “You’re going to drive Ma. She says the Auburn’s hers, and you’re her driver, and that’s that. No use arguing with Ma.”
He smiled that smile and was gone.
“No use arguing with Ma,” Louise said, smiling a little herself, but meaning it.
“I guess I’ll see you later,” I said. “At the tourist camp.”
She put her arms around me and gave me a kiss. A long romance-magazine kiss.
And then I left.
Because there was no use arguing with Ma.
35
So Ma and I went back on the road, back pretty much the way we came—down Highway 19, turning onto 22, heading south toward Aurora. Ma couldn’t find any hillbilly music on the radio, but she did discover a fresh batch of Burma Shave signs along the way, and read them to me, haw- hawing. In between she’d hum her hymns.
