On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde

by John Gilmore

  Buck said, “There’ll be a bloodbath!”

  With a full tank of gas, and Dillard and Sophia crowded onto the backseat with Buck and Blanche, Clyde drove a back road across the Arkansas state line. He stopped just outside the town of Waldo, and said, “You two’re gettin’ out here. Let ’em out, Buck.” He then told Dillard, “Come here,” and handed him a five-dollar bill. He said, “Call the sheriff of this here town and get you a ride back.”

  Bonnie waved goodbye to the couple.

  On the hunt for the real Clyde and Bonnie—as though all we shake out are shreds of ghosts—I sought, bargained, and cajoled all I could from any source I’d tracked, no matter how distant, who could offer some kernel of truth, a view, a memory. I made contact with Billie Jean (Parker) and Blanche Barrow. I talked to W.D. Jones, who carried sadness for Sis and Bud, as he called Bonnie and Clyde. Still holding a tarnished reverence for the pair, and who was reluctant to talk until I shared with him my two conversations with Alvin Karpis. Once Public Enemy Number One, the handsome man whose intense eyes could bore into you had earned the nickname “Creepy” Karpis. He was a record-holder, having spent one of the longest terms in Alcatraz. He played a key role in the Karpis-Barker gang, one of the most notorious in American history. He robbed banks the same time as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and Clyde Barrow, though none of their paths ran necessarily parallel.

  My talks with Karpis occurred after he’d left Alcatraz, spent time at McNeil Island before his release, and his exile to Canada. He felt that while in McNeil he’d invested too much time teaching Charles Manson to play guitar—to the point, he said, of “having been conned by Charlie.” On my second chat with Karpis, the once-notorious Public Enemy Number One told me about a bank Doc Barker had once “discussed hitting,” but the bank had already been hit by Clyde Barrow.

  Karpis said, “And with Barrow’s history, he could’ve been sitting on the rock as well, or long-since fried, gassed or hanged, depending on which state caught him, if they’d ever come close to catching him. He was the slickest damn weasel you could’ve run into—only you didn’t run into Barrow since he was nowhere long enough for anyone to lay a hand on him. You’d think nobody in their fucking mind could’ve spent the amount of time running like that boy did. And fast, like a fox on fire, and a master of hit-and-run no matter how fast you’re playing it. He’s here, he isn’t, then God only knows where the hell he is. He was a fucking rumor. Was he real? Here’s a bunch of feds, barnyard lawmen, and cornfields of hicks chasing him, and you can bet some close enough to breathe on his collar, then fast as you’re on top of him, he’s gone. I say he had all he wanted. He had his guns and he knew how to get more and he had his gal—that little Bonnie gal, no bigger than a tyke (neither was Barrow much bigger than her, but you would’ve thought he was a giant, dealing out that vanishing act). He’d had a new set of wheels sometimes three times a damned day, and you have to hand it to him—nobody else was like that roadrunner in the cartoons more than Barrow, that coyote chasing up one mountain and down another and shooting from every angle, always thinking he’s got his bird, when all he’s got is himself being made a fool out of.”

  W.D. Jones listened to the Karpis rendition of Clyde with reverence, as though we were talking about a saint. Jones said, “I don’t like to be interviewed because nobody gets what I say right. They get it backwards; things I didn’t say or never woulda said but they’ve got me sayin’ it. Also you might understand the trouble with these limitation laws, though I don’t give it much mind ’cause it’s too far back—it’s old stuff that’s got nothin’ backin’ it up.” I said I understood. He said, “Well, you sound like you do, but I don’t have much to say that’s not been said by someone other than me.”

  He wanted to know more about Karpis, and I said it was one of the regrets that still stung me because of what I was involved in at the time Karpis wanted to share his life story—said he’d maybe find a writer to do it, as he wasn’t sure he had the ability to take it on.

  In time, Karpis left the country and was living in Spain where he died from an overdose of sleeping pills and booze that I’ve suspected was more intentional than mishap.

  Jones said, “I got enough fuckin’ trouble without knockin’ myself off. What’s written about me nobody’s quotin’ what I’ve said, and they pick up stuff from what others said, and from police stuff, but you understand some of that was necessary bein’ in a position to do with myself stayin’ alive after all of what happened back then, and half of ’em so far back nobody gives a hoot—especially me.”

  W.D. kept driving, he said. “I kept drivin’ and thinkin’ it’d come to me where I was headin’.” Once he knew what he was doing, he ditched the Chevrolet and “hobo’d it back” to Dallas, thinking he’d find Clyde and Bonnie right where the laws would’ve anticipated they’d never be found. “It was like a knack someone’s got at cards and tricks like magic where the guy’s got an empty hand and next you’re seein’ he’s holdin’ up a rabbit.

  “I told his folks I’d be gettin’ back with them, but his dad and Cumie, even his sis and brother L.C. told me to go the other way. He warned, ‘Don’t find Clyde!’ They were sayin’ they knew he’d take me right along and the only place we were really headed was to the electric chair. His sis Nell said, ‘That’s what’s goin’ to happen to Clyde and Buck—my two brothers are goin’ to be executed soon as they catch them.’ His ma said, ‘They don’t kill the boys the minute they get their hands on them. You gotta follow the American Constitution and be tried by peers, and that’s the United States law and the way it’s done in Texas, so nobody gets rushed into any electric chair without bein’ tried by ordinary citizens in the Texas court of law.’

  “Nell said to me, ‘You’ve got a choice, boy, you can keep movin’ on or get hanged or fried,’ and his dad, ol’ Henry, sat lookin’ at me and rubbin’ his hands and then he said, ‘You take your pick, boy, they don’t necessarily get you hanged, but they sure got that chair juiced and waitin’ for you, ’less’n you high-tail it out of Dallas and out of the state of Texas. You get your name changed to somethin’ nobody knows and grab a little wife and go be livin’ in Nevada or Cheyenne where nobody’ll know who you are. Otherwise,’ he said, then he drew his finger across his neck.

  “I said, well, I had obligations to Clyde and Sis who were better’n any sister and brother to me, and I had to see ’em even if it was to be sayin’ so long.

  “They asked me if Blanche had ever done harm to anyone, and I had to laugh, and said she just loves Buck and has her livin’ all wrapped around his; it’s the same with Bonnie, who’s smarter with her mind than the rest of us, but she’s never done harm to someone, never done anythin’ like they’re sayin’ in the newspapers. That’s all lies. I said you read all them papers and they’re makin’ up half of what they’re sayin’ Bonnie’s done ’cause they don’t know what to be puttin’ in them papers unless they’re told by the laws, and there’s never been a single instance when Bonnie’s shot at anyone or hit ’em in the head, and she’s like Clyde’s wife, and there’s nothin’ neither wouldn’t do for the other. It’s just that Clyde’s like that cartoon put in the paper showin’ how he’s like a gopher and you never know what hole he’s goin’ in or comin’ out of, but whatever it is, it’s sure out of reach every time. I tried to tell the folks I had an honest dedication to Clyde, and I knew there were people all over who figured he was doin’ what came natural, but Bonnie wasn’t like him that way—like I said Sis was smarter, and her writin’ and drawin’ pictures, but there’s nobody smarter than Clyde at gettin’ away from the laws, and takin’ care of us who’re close. Better’n any family I’ve ever known.”

  Having successfully escaped Louisiana and Arkansas, and feeling only half-safe in Texas, W.D. did all he could to avoid being spotted. He’d raced off without knowing where he was going, other than he’d lost Clyde and Bonnie, who’d failed to find him in their pursuit. Years later he’d say, “It was t
hen that I started callin’ upon ‘mental’ resources, or I’d just get blinded in my thinkin’, and lookin’ to see if Bud was gonna catch up, but I didn’t know where the hell they’d gone. I knew at the same time I couldn’t come to any stop without the laws catchin’ me and once that would’ve happened I coulda just jumped in the lake, pulled down the window and called it a night. I knew what I’d tell the laws, though, and I had it figured.”

  He knew he could probably get away with it. To some degree it was reasonable and might’ve satisfied the law. His story was that he’d escaped from Clyde Barrow who’d held him a “prisoner” the whole time—threatened he’d track him and kill him or have him killed no matter where he ran off to or who he wound up with. “I was hopin’ I could get away with it,” he said, “since it wasn’t likely they’d get Clyde—he was too fast, too smart for ’em.”

  Twenty-Five

  I traveled from Louisiana to Memphis, from Frisco to New Orleans, then Texarkana for a visit with an old man who’d once encountered Clyde Barrow and rented a cabin to Bonnie. “I knew it was her,” he said, remembering her vividly, and the car she arrived in driven by Clyde. “That car, a couple-year-old Ford, had one nearly flat rear tire. I rapped on the window and he rolled it down. He had a hat on and round dark sunglasses. I said, ‘Your back tire’s about ready to go flat on you.’ He looked around but I said, ‘The other side, the back left tire.’ He said the car’d been ridin’ lopsided, and thanked me. The girl had rented the cabin. She had a funny little red hat on, sat up on top of her head like a candy box. The blouse she had on was shiny like black silk, only the arms were made of lace. Just lace all the way from her shoulders to her wrists, and though I’m not jeweler, the ring she wore had a pretty big stone that looked like it cost a bundle.

  “They were a married couple, she said, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Beatty. I was told they’d be stayin’ two nights, maybe three. I gave him the cabin and he drove down to it, parked right in front of it.

  “After dark, the young fellow had the car jacked up and that bum wheel off. I asked if he needed any help and he said no. Then I asked if he was any relation to Clyde Beatty, the circus lion tamer. He laughed a little and looked up at me. He said he wasn’t any relation to Clyde Beatty but said he’d seen Clyde Beatty and the lions in a picture show or a newsreel. He stood up, brushin’ at his hands, and said he’d pay me some cash to take his wheel to an all-night service station he’d spotted a few blocks south. I said I could do that. I’d drive it down there, get it fixed pronto since I knew the guy workin’ nights. Then he said, ‘You’ll get it right back?’ I told him yes. He said soon as I got it fixed he’d appreciate my puttin’ it back on his car, and he handed me a few dollars, then went into the cabin.

  “When I got to the station, I waited while the boy I knew patched the leakin’ tire, and I asked if he knew anythin’ about the Barrow gang that’d been in the papers and some wanted posters goin’ around here and there. He said he’d read about the bank robberies and stickups, and I said, ‘Well, what if he came in here? Stuck you up?’ I asked if he worried about gettin’ robbed and he said he’d get paid the same if someone pinched the sales money or not, and he’d make not a nickel more or less.

  “I wanted to tell him about the fellow at the cabin bein’ Clyde Barrow, but I didn’t. I had no proof he was a bank robber and wanted for murder, and since they’d be there maybe two days, I thought maybe I’d have a chance to find out by goin’ to the sheriff. I drove his tire back, put it on the car and left the jack and tool on the runnin’ board of the car. I didn’t want to open the car door or get at the trunk. I was right in front of the cabin and they had the blinds shut and no lights on. I could tell someone kept peekin’ out.

  “It was before dawn the next mornin’, I heard the car start up and back on out to the road, then head off goin’ north. I hadn’t seen who was in the car, and I went to the cabin, thinkin’ maybe the girl was there. But nobody was there. Both blankets were missin’ off the bed, and they’d taken one of the pillows. The towel and a washcloth was gone and so was the soap. My goin’ to the sheriff sayin’ Clyde Barrow and the Parker girl were in the cabin, and that Barrow had me haulin’ his flat tire down to the service station, then puttin’ it back on his car would’ve had me lookin’ like a damn fool goin’ in there with such a tale.”

  Next stop for me was Joplin, then back to Louisiana—a circuit of grabbing for some key from the chaos of three-fourths of a century’s American newspaper blunders and flawed information.

  No way of knowing where Clyde and Bonnie were, or when or how they’d pop up next, in which state, country or city; only splinters of fact scrambled into newspapers or magazines more fanciful than factual.

  They drove night and day, endless roads like capillaries in a vast body blazing in the summer and freezing through winter. Cold rains—invincible mud. Radiators overheating. The stink of cheap gas and burning rubber, and the smell of Bonnie’s perfume that was never cheap. She’d buy it over roadside drug counters or cosmetic slots, or in the brief shelter of a downtown store, her manner and dress so far from a clerk’s idea of a gunman’s moll.

  Bonnie Elizabeth Parker had never been a problem for me. I knew almost everything she was and how she got the way she did, and why she made the deliberate choice to spend her life, short as it was, locked emotionally to Clyde, who could walk the walk and talk the talk, and who held faithful to the little gem wedged into his life like a painless sliver. That was Bonnie.

  It took a while for me to draw a bead on Clyde, but once I got him in my sights, I believed I could see who he actually was, and what he was like: young and desperate beneath the chill of his manner, and so controlled and methodically determined that he could almost predict every turn of his life, or at least take charge of it. And though physically small, he was feared by larger, less exact men. Clyde took charge of all situations. Organized almost to the point of meticulousness, and far smarter than Pretty Boy Floyd or Baby Face Nelson or so many operating outside the law, Clyde carried a solitary view of his shrinking world. He was devoted to guns, to the oily slickness of metal, the quick snap of the firing pin on a bullet’s bottom spoke louder than his words.

  He carried a concern about going deaf, and passed this on to Bonnie. During a secret family get-together in Dallas on Dog Town Road, Bonnie told her sister she too was having hearing trouble. “All the noises I hear bump together,” she said. “What you’re sayin’ gets stirred up in all the other noises.” She asked Billie Jean to speak louder, “So,” she said, “I’ll hear your voice above the ruckus.” While the group was having their secret picnic, Bonnie asked Clyde to tell Billie Jean about a bank robbery in Minnesota.

  Clyde grinned. He said, “Buck busted out a back window and we climbed in over the broken glass, and hid until sunup.” Clyde said he slept in a swanky chair, the shotgun on his lap, while Buck lay snoring on the floor. First thing the next morning when the manager opened the door, Clyde was there to greet him. “I said, ‘Good mornin’, sir,’ and stuck the shotgun against his stomach. I told him to lock the front door up again, and open the back door.”

  Bonnie said, “I brought the car up the alley behind the bank. Blanche was on the backseat, waitin’ for the boys to come out.”

  “That man gave me no trouble,” Clyde said. “He was a pleasant fella and did what I told him. We didn’t have no mix-up except for Buck carryin’ that bag of silver change that was heavy as a hog.” Clyde said he’d snatched over fourteen hundred dollars from the safe and told the manager, ‘Now you go on and sit in that comfy chair I was sittin’ in waitin’ for you, and tell anyone comin’ out after us they’ll be gettin’ a load of buckshot.”

  Bonnie’s mother gave a nervous look as Clyde went on, saying how Bonnie scooted over so he could climb behind the wheel, Buck hardly getting the car door shut as Clyde sped out of the alley.

  “All of you know the crap that goes on in the newspapers,” Buck said, “sayin’ we shot up the town gettin’ out of th
ere, and gals were shootin’, but none of that’s what happened.”

  “They just make that up,” Bonnie said. “They get everythin’ wrong so people get excited and go buyin’ papers everywhere they see ’em.”

  “I knew it,” Cumie said. “Then y’all came straight on?”

  “Through Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma,” Bonnie said. Clyde said they had to change cars a couple times, once across the Nebraska border, then again north of the Texas line. Bonnie squeezed his hand. “We had a good time, though, didn’t we, honey?”

  Her mother said, “Bonnie, come walk with me a little ways. My legs are so stiff I can hardly bend my knees.” They strolled a short distance from the rest of the family until Emma stopped walking. Almost whispering, she said, “Honey, you still got a chance of savin’ yourself. You give yourself up before it’s too—before somethin’ awful happens to you.”

  “You mean like dyin’?” Bonnie said. “Like before I get myself shot?”

  “Yes, for the love of God,” Emma said.

  “Clyde’s name’s up, momma. He knows he’ll be shot sooner or later ’cause he’s never gonna give himself up, and he’s never gonna surrender so they can plain execute him in that electric chair. They know it. But I’ll be with him till the end, momma. I love Clyde and when the end’s comin’, I’ll be dyin’ right alongside him. I’m in as big a spot as Clyde, and my name’s up too. I know it sounds bad to you and the rest of the world, but I’m happy bein’ with Clyde no matter what comes.” She hugged her mother and said, “momma, I got some money for you.”

  Clyde also had money for Cumie. He handed her an envelope of cash while Buck doled out silver dollars to everyone in the family. The group clung together a few more minutes. Buck and Clyde made a plan of meeting across the Oklahoma line the second weekend in June. Late at night. “The bridge we’d spotted,” Buck said.