“I want you to quit showing off. You shountna shown your gun back there, and you should not go up there tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m going,” he said, childishly. “And I’m getting her a present.”
* * *
Clyde got one of the boys for whom he’d signed a magazine to steal a pair of gloves from a shop in Dallas.
Trying the soft, cocoa-colored leather over her own fingers, Bonnie said, “You better tell her we had enough pennies.”
“I’ll tell her I didn’t steal ’em. That’s the truth.”
At about 6:45 p.m., when their headlights illuminated a Model T, parked on the same stretch of road just beyond Sowers, Clyde slowed slightly but drove on, as he had the previous night. Ahead of them, a deep voice called out, “Halt!” or possibly, “Look out!” Three flames leapt toward them from the ditch and silhouettes rose behind brilliant orange daggers of exploding gunpowder. At once, the windshield and all four windows shattered, and a feathery, ghostlike thing brushed against Bonnie’s ears and settled on her forehead. She screamed and waved her arms, batting back what turned out to be the material that lined the roof of the car. A tire blew out, and the car tilted and swerved, throwing Bonnie against the door.
Traveling at eighty-five miles an hour, they soon overtook another car and then stopped short in front of it, forcing it to veer off the road. Stunned, the two men inside only stared when Clyde came toward them, waving his scattergun.
“I said get out of there!”
He squeezed the trigger with the gun pressed against the driver’s window and the blast peeled the metal roof off like a candy wrapper. The men scrambled out the far side, shouting and coughing.
“C’mon, Mrs. Howard. These fellows are letting us borrow their car.”
From the passenger seat, Bonnie held the scattergun on the two men, while Clyde transferred armloads of guns from one car to the other. He laid two rifles and a BAR at Bonnie’s feet, a sawed-off shotgun on the seat beside her, and the whipit in her lap.
Unfazed by the intricacies of starting an old 4-banger, Clyde turned the key, threw the spark, and started the gas. But the motor wouldn’t catch.
“What the hell?” He tried again. “How do you start this damn machine?”
The driver shrugged.
“Want me to shoot him?” Bonnie asked. Watching the man scurry to the car and frantically jiggle the spark, she felt better than she had in weeks.
They zigzagged north toward Oklahoma on farm roads, railing against Smoot Schmid and Joe Bill, while freezing rain poured through the ripped-open roof onto their heads. They were so keyed up with adrenaline and outrage that they didn’t realize that both of them had been shot through the knees, until Clyde’s legs buckled as he tried to get out of the car to open a gate.
“Goddammit! What’s the matter with me?” He struggled to lift himself off the wet, freezing ground and back into the car.
Leaning to help him in, Bonnie saw that the water around her feet was brilliant red.
In less than an hour, Bonnie, listless from blood loss and cold, let her head fall back against the seat. This death would float her through the open roof into the star-encrusted sky.
“Pretty Boy’s people live in these hills,” Clyde said. “Someone who used to run with him told me right where.”
“You think they’ll help us?”
“They’ll be glad to. We’d sure help him, wouldn’t we?”
In the dawn light, the iced tree branches shone as if they’d been dipped in butter. The mailbox marked “Floyd” appeared where Clyde had been told it would be, and Clyde managed to pull himself to his feet on the porch and stand, propped against the wall, before he knocked. The woman who answered admitted that she was indeed Floyd’s sister-in-law. “She was just as sweet as pie,” Bonnie would report back in Dallas in December, but, in fact, her mouth was set in a line as hard as the frozen branches. She shoved a dirty towel at Clyde and told him to try a certain doctor—“yonder in the hills”—who would keep his mouth shut.
The doctor, with a wide jaw and bulging eyes, resembled a toad. He laughed, emitting a blast of boozy breath, when Clyde asked after Pretty Boy. “Little fellas like you come sniffing around every other Thursday, thinking they’re the Texas Floyd or the Tennessee Floyd. I’ll give you some advice, though,” the doctor added, as he helped them get back into their ruined car. “If you ever meet Floyd, don’t call him Pretty Boy. He’s liable to shoot you for it.”
On Christmas they drove in a wide circle around Dallas. From time to time, the city lights appeared in the distance out of the early darkness like a mirage. Around five o’clock they found an empty house north of Fort Worth, where they roasted wieners over burning floorboards and drank.
A few days later, however, Clyde managed a good score at a grocery, so on December 29, they met their mothers again on the road to Wichita Falls to deliver baskets of fruit and nuts and candy.
Emma hardly glanced at her gift. Sitting beside Bonnie on the car seat, she smoothed her daughter’s hair. Returned to its natural shade of ash blond, it softened Bonnie’s face and made her look younger.
“I just hated Christmas this year,” Emma said.
“I know,” Bonnie said. “I cried about Mitzy and Buddy all day, too.”
“All I did was worry about you, wondering where you were and what was happening to you.” Emma paused. “What will happen to you?”
The orange flashes and the explosions that had erupted around them in Sowers had just been a big show, Bonnie thought, like a thunderstorm; she hadn’t felt a thing when those bullets had gone into her legs. Her mother’s rough palm fluttered around her face, like the fabric shredded and dangling from the roof of the car. Impatiently, Bonnie brushed it away.
“Oh, you shouldn’t worry about us,” she said. “We had a lovely Christmas. We had turkey dinners in Niles, and we bought a big bunch of fireworks—Roman candles, skyrockets, cherry salutes, lady crackers, every kind—and then we went out in the country and fired them all off.”
CHAPTER 65
January 1934
That hophead Jimmy Mullen, released from Eastham, came home to Dallas with a message from Raymond Hamilton for his brother Floyd, who got in touch with L.C., who arranged a meeting with Clyde. They were finally going to spring prisoners from the Bloody ’Ham.
“Ray says they been cuttin’ brush way out, where it’s easy to get the drop on the guards.” Floyd motioned with his arm to emphasize the distance.
He was earnest and excited, still the nice boy he’d been in the third grade, Bonnie thought, not sneaky and mean like Raymond.
“You stash a couple of gats under the bridge,” Floyd was saying. “And then you park just beyond, at the edge of the fields. Raymond says you know the bridge. It’ll be easy, Ray says.”
“Ray says so, does he?” Clyde was talking to Floyd, but he was watching Jimmy Mullen, whose eyes flitted from one man to the other. “Listen, I ain’t got no tommy guns, Floyd. And if I did, like shit I’d be stashing them for convicts.”
“Well, whatever you got. Raymond says you’re bound to have plenty.”
“It ain’t Raymond I doubt, but this one.” He poked Mullen’s shoulder. “I ain’t doing it, unless he’s the one goes in there and hides the weapons.”
Mullen quivered like Jell-O. “I done enough. I ain’t never goin’ back there.”
“I know better than to trust a stoolie that won’t stick his neck out,” Clyde said. “Floyd’ll tell Raymond it’s off, cuz you won’t do it. Ray’ll understand.”
“Well, I’m not sayin’ I won’t do it. There’s no need to be tellin’ Raymond that I’m the cause of nothing. Tell you what—if Floyd here’ll go along with me, I’ll do it all right. But I won’t go if he won’t go.”
“Jesus Christ,” Clyde said when he and Bonnie were alone in the car, “they’re like a bunch of kindergartners! And it’s my goddamn plan that I fixed up with Ralph Fults, before we ran out of luck in Kaufman. The plan Ra
ymond wouldn’t be no part of, because back then he didn’t care about no cons and no prison. He cares plenty now, don’t he?”
She and Ralph had run out of luck in Kaufman, Bonnie thought, not Clyde. “I don’t like your taking orders from Raymond.”
“Raymond promised Mullen a thousand dollars to get this thing going. That hophead’s got to do more for a grand than beat his gums at me.”
“I don’t think you ought to do it. Not for Raymond Hamilton.”
“Raymond’s serving for the Bucher murder.”
“That’s got nothing to do with you. You didn’t do it.”
“Still, they might have tried to pin it on me, if they hadn’t had him.”
“Even without the Bucher murder, he’d be in there for life. Didn’t you say he got more than two hundred years for the other murders he done?”
“He’s lucky he didn’t get the chair.”
“So, you’re not doing it.”
“Ain’t no one deserves what they give you in there. And Raymond and me go back. We’d get Ralph, too.”
She remembered how Ralph had done his best to save her before it was too late, advising her to claim she’d been kidnapped and promising to take the theft of the guns in Kaufman all on himself.
“And Aubrey,” Clyde added. “I aimed to get Aubrey out back then, and I will get him now.”
* * *
They drive south on Sunday evening, with Floyd and Jimmy in the back seat. Jimmy has already found a fix and falls asleep before they get out of Dallas.
“Don’t see how he deserves a thousand bucks for this,” Floyd says. He’s sitting forward on the seat, his chin practically in the front, and he turns the blown-out inner tube, into which they’ve stuffed two Colt .45s and some ammunition, round and round in his hands. The floppy ring of rubber is just the sort of detritus that might end up stuck under a bridge. No guard would pay it any mind, even if he spotted it.
“That’s Raymond’s business,” Clyde says. “I expect he knew how much it would cost to get a guy that’s just been sprung back within fifty miles of this place. Leave that tube alone. You want to blow your dick off?”
By the time they finally near the prison it has been dark for hours. Their headlights illuminate only brown stubble along the side of the road and an occasional dark trunk supporting a tangle of stiff, crooked limbs. Clyde sits tensely forward, gripping the wheel with both hands. “Raymond’s got a big mouth. I wonder how many he’s squeaked to about this.”
“It’s your plan,” Bonnie reminds him. “But we don’t have to do it.”
“Makes me mad how Raymond wouldn’t do this when I wanted him to, and now he’s the one begging for it.” He’s quiet for a moment, his eyes staring steadily into the blackness ahead. “Buck shoulda come down here with me when I asked him to. If we done this, instead of going to Joplin, who knows what mighta happened?”
A year ago, that way of thinking might have snared her. If they hadn’t done this or that; if they’d turned right instead of left; if they’d left an hour earlier. Now she understands that those details wouldn’t change anything essential.
When Clyde stops the car, Floyd and Jimmy play for time, tying shoes and rechecking the weapon-filled inner tube.
“C’mon,” Clyde says impatiently. “This is the easy part.”
“I don’t see no bridge.” Floyd squints into the darkness beyond the barbed wire.
“You will. About fifty yards on. Careful you don’t slip into the gully. I ain’t comin’ to retrieve you.”
In about ten minutes, dogs begin to bark and bay in the distance. Clyde starts the engine and lets his foot play lightly over the accelerator. But the barking remains unfocused and gets no nearer, and, finally, the two stumble back out of the darkness, swearing continuously but quietly.
* * *
Bonnie, Clyde, and the now jittery Mullen spend the following day in the car, while Floyd pays a visit to his brother to let him know the guns are in place. To pacify Mrs. Hamilton, who begged Floyd to keep away from the break—“What’s the use,” she said, “of getting one out, if I just turn around and get another one in?”—they’ve agreed that Floyd’s job is now done. At night, Clyde and Bonnie take turns watching Mullen. When it’s her turn to rest, Bonnie is lulled by the cadence of Clyde’s prayers, which, for once, are not pleas and confessions but requests shot through with confidence and purpose. This time, he believes, God will be on his side.
* * *
At six a.m., they park the black V-8 just beyond the bridge in a heavy fog. The bare trees hover vaguely, a denser gray in the thick, wet grayness. Clyde and Mullen, each with a BAR tucked close to his body, thread their way through the barbed wire and disappear.
Within the hour, the damp air carries the sounds of tramping feet and coughing, hawking, spitting, and grunting—the work crews approaching. From the car, Bonnie can distinguish the peremptory tones of the guards. A horse whinnies restlessly.
The shooting begins at seven o’clock. Behind the soft screen of the fog, the BARs erupt with their clacking, rapid fire and the Colts bang-bang-bang. Bonnie answers with the horn. Here Here Here Here.
Clyde and Mullen appear first, then Raymond, then three others.
“Only Raymond and Joe,” Mullen insists in his thin, nasal voice. “The rest of you, get out of here. This ain’t your business.”
Clyde frowns. “Everyone in,” he snaps.
“Why’d you bring this machine? It’s too small.” Eastham hasn’t changed Raymond.
“Where’s Ralph?” Bonnie asks, sliding over to let Clyde get behind the wheel, and Mullen and another fellow cram in on her other side. The other three crowd into the rumble seat. They are full to overflowing, like a clown car at a circus.
“Where’s Aubrey?” Clyde asks.
“Where’s Ralph Fults?” Bonnie says again.
Raymond shrugs. Clyde looks back into the fog, but the dogs are baying purposefully now, and the sound is getting nearer. Bonnie’s afraid until the car starts rolling; then she knows they’re safe. When the sirens begin behind them, Clyde plunges into a field, and they piece together their own road, as they always do, out of tracks intended for tractors and sometimes directly over the winter-brown grass.
Clyde is angry about leaving Ralph. Raymond makes some excuse about the impossibility of Ralph’s jumping his squad without raising suspicion, but Bonnie believes he’s responsible, not wanting a man along who might displace him as Clyde’s closest partner. Clyde’s more circumspect about Aubrey Scalley, who, as a building tender, traveled the camp unsupervised, collected the guns from under the bridge, and delivered them to Raymond and Joe Palmer the previous evening.
“Aubrey’s good at being in,” Clyde says. “I guess he wouldn’t hardly know what to do with himself out here.”
They’re lucky with cars and are able to change twice, although the tank in the second one is nearly empty. The attendant at the filling station can hardly contain himself. “Didja hear the news? There’s been a big escape over at Eastham. Ten cons, I hear, or maybe a dozen, and Bonnie and Clyde’s the ones that sprung ’em. Walked right in when they was having their breakfasts and let the bullets fly!”
Joe Palmer starts to cough. He’s been coughing on and off all morning, spitting bright red spots on a handkerchief already rusty with blood.
“That’s a bad cough, mister,” the attendant says.
“We’re going to get him some hot tea with honey,” Bonnie says. “First chance we get.”
CHAPTER 66
They shed Mullen in Corsicana with the promise that he’d have his thousand dollars within the month and exchanged the little coupe for a sedan. Free of Mullen, with three in front and three in back, they were no longer clowns but a gang of bank robbers, four of whom—Raymond Hamilton, Joe Palmer, Hilton Bybee, and young Henry Methvin—have been convicted of murder.
In Rembrandt, Iowa, while Bonnie waited in a fresh car at a crossroads outside of town, the gang staged its first job. With C
lyde as driver and Henry Methvin as lookout, Raymond Hamilton and Hilton Bybee walked out of the First National Bank with a plaid suitcase full of money, as easily as if they’d had an appointment to take it. Joe Palmer was supposed to have gone inside, too, but his stomach ulcers had flared so badly, he’d been forced to stay curled on the floor in the back of the car, moaning and gasping.
“Thirty-eight hundred dollars!” Raymond gloated, counting the money, as they careened toward the Minnesota border. “What’s that divided by four?”
A siren wailed weakly behind them, too distant to be taken seriously.
“Divided by six, you mean,” Clyde said.
“How do you figure?”
“We’re a gang,” Clyde explained. “Whatever any of us gets, we divide equally.”
“You a commie?”
Clyde gave the car more gas, as he steered it smoothly around a curve. “The way I see it,” he said patiently, “a gang’s like a family.”
“And you’re the daddy!” Bybee hooted.
“If you want to be in the Barrow Gang, that’s how it works,” Clyde said. “You’ll thank me when you’re the one sick or shot.”
“What about Bonnie? What’s she done?”
“You can’t just park a car and expect it to be there when you want it,” Bonnie said. “You need someone to sit with it and make sure no riffraff drives it off.”
“Fine,” Raymond said. “I’m sick of arguing. But we keep on like this, me and Hilton may form our own gang. You shoulda seen us in there. I said, ‘Give us the money,’ and this teller, he looks like he’s about to shit his pants. He starts pullin’ the bills out of the drawer one by one, and Hilton here, he just slides his hand in and clomps onto a big stack. ‘When we say ‘money,’ he says, smooth as ice, ‘we mean all the money.’ And then that teller starts shoveling it like it’s horseshit. He can’t get it out of the fucking drawer fast enough.”
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