He Started It

I fell asleep imagining what it would be like to be so famous they made a whole museum just for you, about you, to memorialize all that is you. I wondered if there was anything I could do, other than robbing banks, to get a museum of my own. Cure cancer, maybe. It was the only thing I could come up with.

Grandpa had talked so much about Bonnie and Clyde, I felt like I knew everything before we even got to the museum. I knew how they met, how many banks they robbed, not to mention the grocery stores and gas stations. A whole slew of robberies were attributed to them, or to their gang. Bonnie and Clyde had their own gang.

‘We should have a gang,’ I said. We were at breakfast, eating eggs and bacon and grits. Everything was drenched in butter and syrup.

Grandpa laughed. ‘You don’t need a gang, you’re already in a pack. A pack of coyotes.’

‘It’s a band of coyotes,’ I said. ‘Not a pack.’

‘See? You sounded like a yapping coyote when you said that. You’re a band of little coyotes, and you’re the toughest, meanest bunch this side of the Mississippi.’

‘We’re on the west side, you know,’ Eddie said. ‘We crossed the Mississippi.’

‘So?’ I said.

‘I’m just pointing it out.’

Like that mattered. We were little coyotes and we were going to have our own museum. Who cared what side of the Mississippi it was on?

On the way to the museum, we got lost. It was down some windy roads, away from the highway, and nestled between two other stores. Out front, there was an old car riddled with bullets. It wasn’t the car, but it was like the one they drove and then died in. Eddie thought it was the coolest thing ever until we went inside the museum.

It wasn’t what I imagined. Whatever I had conjured up in my head from all those stories Grandpa told, it was wrong. In my mental museum, there wasn’t any blood. No dead bodies, either.

Since we were close to where Bonnie and Clyde died, that’s what the museum commemorated. The ambush. The walls were covered with black-and-white pictures of their bodies, the men who shot them, and the real car. A glass case of guns was in the center of the room, and it was there I saw what Clyde’s favorite gun looked like. The Browning automatic rifle was big and heavy and not romantic at all.

‘Isn’t this fantastic?’ Grandpa said. ‘All these resources just to bring down one couple.’

Sure. Fantastic.

Especially in the back, where they had re-created the aftermath of the shootout, complete with dummies of Bonnie and Clyde. Bloodied dummies. They were slumped over each other in the shot-up car. She was twenty-three. He was twenty-five.

If that was love, it looked like an awful thing.

We weren’t the only ones in the museum. Two couples were there, on their way to Savannah, and they had stopped in to see the museum just as we had. Both of the men were police officers, so their interest was in how Bonnie and Clyde were captured. They didn’t care about love.

‘He was shot seventeen times,’ one said. ‘She was shot over twenty.’

Grandpa also left out the fact that Bonnie and Clyde weren’t just bank robbers; they were murderers. Killed at least thirteen people, according to the records.

That’s when I had enough. I went outside and sat down on a bench, feeling like I was the one who got swindled. I no longer wanted my own museum.

Grandpa came out to find me. ‘You okay?’

I shrugged.

‘They weren’t good,’ I said.

‘Ah.’ He sat down beside me. ‘You know, sometimes your grandmother wore awful clothes. It’s terrible to say, but she did. She had this one blouse with pineapples on it.’ He sighed. ‘I hated that blouse.’

‘So?’ I said.

‘Do you think I told her how much I hated that blouse?’

I shrugged. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it would’ve hurt her feelings.’

Yet he hurt her in so many other ways. Later for that.

But I knew what he was doing. I was twelve, for God’s sake, not four. ‘You lied to Grandma,’ I said. ‘So you wouldn’t upset her.’

‘That’s right. I always told your grandmother she was beautiful. And she was, even in ugly clothes.’

I stared at him. ‘People do bad things. I know that.’

‘People do bad things for the people they love. There’s a difference.’

‘That’s what Bonnie and Clyde did? Kill because they loved each other?’

He nodded. ‘I think so. Yes.’

I didn’t. In fact, I thought he was a little bit crazy for comparing pineapple blouses to shooting people.

‘Who’s up for the Bonnie and Clyde museum?’ Eddie says.

This time we aren’t lost, and won’t get lost, because we have GPS.

‘Good God,’ Portia says. She lying in the back, her foot raised and still wrapped.

‘You’re joking,’ Krista says. ‘There’s no such thing.’

‘Oh yes there is,’ I say.

‘Are you serious?’ Felix asks.

‘Of course I’m serious. Bonnie and Clyde are one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century. Don’t you know that?’ I say.

Krista turns around in her seat to face me. Her eyes are wide, the gold flecks shining. ‘I saw the movie,’ she says. ‘So romantic.’

I smile at her, nodding my head. Maybe she’ll be shocked when she sees the truth, just as I had been. Or maybe her belief in them is already so ingrained, so fully believed, that nothing will change it.

That’s how Grandpa was. You can do bad things if it’s for love.

It didn’t make sense then, but it does now.

AUGUST 13, 1999

What is your biggest accomplishment?

I’ve beat my whole family at Risk and I’ve done it more than once. And that’s no joke. Dad makes us play at least once a week. Always after dinner, always together, and no one is exempt.

The night I first beat everyone, I was accused of cheating. It’s not a win if you cheat, just like in life. Dad’s always saying stuff like that. He says people are all wrong about chess, because that game isn’t the ‘pinnacle of strategy.’ The best strategic game is Risk. Especially Secret Mission Risk, because that’s when everyone has their own mission but no one knows what it is.

That’s why we play, Dad says. The game is about making allies and keeping your word right up until you can’t. In other words, it’s about life. He says that, not me. I’d never use those words. I’d say you have to screw them before they screw you, but if I did Mom would give me a look and Dad would try to punish me, so I just keep my mouth shut. Sort of.

Still. I did win, and I’ve done it more than once. That’s skill, not luck.

Sometimes I forget Grandpa’s ashes are in the back. I’ve pushed them deep into a corner of my mind, and when they creep out, I push them back in. Ignore the ashes. Ignore him. Start talking.

‘Isn’t this fantastic?’ I say.

We’re in the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum, which looks as I remembered it except it doesn’t feel as scary.

Portia refuses to come in. She’s outside on her phone, supposedly calling someone in New Orleans who may or may not be a boyfriend. Even when she was six years old, Portia wasn’t impressed by Bonnie and Clyde or by the museum. Everything about them was too old-fashioned.