The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  But by no other way.”)

  With his pistols concealed in a bag slung across his shoulder, Cortez had walked into a sheep camp near the town of Dolores on the north bank of the Rio Grande. Mistaking one Gonzales for a friend, he gave him his pistols to be reloaded. With a thousand-dollar reward on his head, one Gonzales took the pistols to a captain of the Texas Rangers. But as the reward depended upon Cortez’ conviction for murder, Gonzales’ betrayal earned him only two-hundred dollars.

  The pursuit had only begun. Cortez was taken to Gonzales, Texas, where, strangely, he was tried for the killing of the constable during the fight at the Robledo ranch; though it was already known that the constable had been killed by one of the posse. Yet feeling against Cortez was running so high, he barely missed being hanged for the shooting.

  One juror, A.L. Sanders, held out against the death penalty. Cortez was, instead, sentenced to fifty years.

  Ten days later an attempt was made to take him from his cell and lynch him; but Sheriff F.M. Fly stood off the mob. Meanwhile his brother, Romuldo, died of the wound inflicted by Morris.

  In 1902 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the verdict of guilty found against Cortez in the shooting of the constable. By then Cortez had been sentenced, in Karnes County, to be hanged for the murder of Morris.

  Eight months later the Court of Criminal Appeals threw this verdict out on grounds of prejudice.

  He was then tried in Pleasanton for the horse-theft, sentenced to two years, and the verdict again reversed.

  He was tried at Goliad, again for the murder of Morris. The jury disagreed. At Corpus Christi a jury finally found that Cortez had shot Morris in self-defense while the sheriff was making an unauthorized arrest.

  Cortez was then tried at Columbus for the murder of Glover, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He entered the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville on January 1, 1905.

  After serving twelve years and nine months he was offered a full pardon. But because of his recalcitrance before the court, the pardon was made conditional.

  “Deep regret I have always felt for the sad occurrence,” he explained to the board, “but repentance I have never felt. For I could never bring myself to the hypocritical state as to so plead to gain an end that was my just due.”

  Three years after his pardon, at the age of forty-one, Gregorio Cortez died during his own wedding ceremony. His place among American outlaws is memorable because, of them all, he was the most innocent. No other sustained the right of a man to his own life with such uncompromising dignity.

  III. The Pursuit of the Pixie-Eared Elephant

  A female elephant named Raji escaped from a circus near Lansing, Michigan, several years ago. She attacked nobody. Raji simply walked off the circus grounds and began wandering the outskirts of town. Four thousand men, women and children turned out with squirrel guns, World War II bayonets, rakes, barrel-staves, bows and arrows, BB guns, baseball bats and housebricks for The Great Elephant Hunt.

  They pelted, hacked, slashed, stoned and tore the defenseless brute all around Lansing, until someone had the simple decency to shoot her through the head.

  The lynching of Raji was scarcely more degrading to the people of Lansing than the defamation the people of Dallas worked on the bodies of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on their own killing-ground.

  Before officers had arrived to control the crowd, Bonnie’s hair had been clipped off, her bloody dress had been tom to shreds and her purse rifled. Somebody was prying off her rings and someone else was trying to cut off one of Clyde’s ears when a doctor got there. Bonnie’s last request, made to her mother, that she be brought home after she’d been killed, could not be fulfilled because of the multitude thronging the streets around the funeral home. They would have hacked the wooden casket to splinters for the sake of having souvenirs. Hot-dog and soft-drink vendors turned a pretty penny.

  Denied dignity in their lives, the press denied it to them in death as well. Thus the manner of their lives was more nearly that of two terrified foxes than that of a man and a woman. And the manner of their deaths evoked a roar of approval from the Texas press.

  Clyde Barrow apparently took to his heels long before he had gained a pursuer. For the immediate use to which he put his first car—a stripped-down speedster—was to get himself chased purely for the sake of pursuit.

  “It’s so much fun to go fast,” he told his sister, “it’s easier to run away.” A policeman had given him a whistle, so he’d stepped on the gas and a lifelong flight had begun.

  He fled on foot, he fled by car; he hid behind bams and slept in woods; one escape he attempted on muleback.

  When he wanted to see his kinfolk he drove past their home and threw a pop bottle, with a note concealed inside, advising them of a safe meeting-place. If the depth of a man’s fear may be measured by the violence with which he reacts when cornered, then the dread Clyde Bar-row contained literally propelled him.

  He was born on the run. His chief preoccupation thereafter was in arranging chases. Poor Bonnie.

  That Barrow’s deep dread was of women is one of those Freudian simplifications convenient to writers of introductions to books about people they never knew. This is nicely verified by another writer of introductions, Mr. John Toland, in a volume of conjectures, surmises and easy assumptions called The Dillinger Days.

  “He [Clyde Barrow],” Mr. Toland writes, “was a small twenty-three-year-old man of medium build with wavy, dark brown hair slicked down in the middle. He had pixie ears, a weak chin, soft hazel eyes . . . and homosexual tendencies.”

  Since this sounds as if Barrow was bom twenty-three-years of age with his hair parted in the middle, we wonder whether he may have parted it differently after he grew up. It’s credible that he did; as small men of medium build customarily parted their hair in the middle in this era. As well as large men of medium build.

  I can accept his having “pixie ears”—whatever they are—upon the assumption that if you have one pixie ear you’re likely to have a pair. But as tendencies are infinitely more difficult to discern than pixie ears —even by people who know the suspect intimately—one can only marvel at this hack’s presumption. Clyde Barrow might have been a latent heterosexual without even his mother knowing.

  Mr. Toland also assures us that Barrow’s drivers, Wm. Daniel Jones and Henry Methvyn, were hired “not only to assist in the robberies but to help satisfy Bonnie’s sexual aberrations.” Again one wants to ask, “Vas you dere, Sharlie?”

  Or is making love in an automobile aberrative? Nothing was commoner in the thirties; it is only the congestion of traffic on the throughways and accessibility of motels that make it less common today.

  What if Bonnie did take off into the woods with one of the kids? That still doesn’t verify Mr. Toland’s implication that Clyde was peeking from behind a bush. That Clyde was catching up on his sleep in the back seat is more likely. And when, on waking, found the front seat, a blanket and the kids missing, may have not minded greatly. Exhausted as he must have been, he was, possibly, relieved.

  “All in all,” Clyde’s sister avers, “Bonnie Parker was the answer to a sister’s prayer for a wife for a best-loved brother.” Assuming that Sis might be unperceptive about the relationship, my own inclination is still to give Bonnie and Clyde the benefit of the doubt.

  For the myth of monstrousness, so assiduously circulated by the press when the pair were being pursued, is the source of Mr. Toland’s assumption that Bonnie and Clyde were both perverted.

  This myth was assisted by fantasies contained in a twenty-eight-page confession made by W.D. Jones. W.D. asserted that he was chained to trees by Barrow in order to prevent his escape; that he feared for his life every moment with them.

  The confession was made when he was truly in fear of his life; he made it in exchange for a life sentence when charged with the murder of Doyle Johnson at Belton, Texas. Given a chance to lie himself out of the electric chair, one can hardly blame a
teenager. But that it was himself, and not Barrow, who murdered Johnson, as Clyde’s sister claims, is highly likely. After all, Clyde Barrow didn’t do all the gunning-down. W.D. did his share.

  And so did another “quiet country boy with clear blue eyes”—to employ Mr. Toland’s description of both W.D. and Henry Methvyn. Methvyn, too, escaped the chair by a repetition of W.D.’s fantasies. It is too hard to believe that Barrow was able to keep a revolver pointed, day and night, at a driver’s head, while being pursued by federal, state and municipal police all over the Southwest.

  We can assume that neither of those blue-eyed youths was any too bright. Nor was Barrow. And surely Bonnie must have been dealing with only half the deck.

  Was her unfaltering devotion to Clyde or to herself? Was it herself or Barrow with whom she was sufficiently fascinated to expiate her life proving such devotion? Her earliest aspirations to be a tightrope walker, an actress or an operatic star, are not unusual in a little girl. Yet one wonders whether these hopeless ambitions might not have been later sustained by becoming the cynosure of multitudes. Might she not have been acting out a True Confessions epic that could end no other way than in death beside her dying lover?

  Nonetheless, devotion there was; and awesome devotion at that. What comes through is an old-fashioned loyalty you don’t get any more: the loyalty of Buck Barrow, blinded, delirious and dying, calling for someone to take Blanche to safety. The loyalty of Clyde Barrow, creeping through a battalion of possemen to find Bonnie, wounded in the brush; or W.D., himself wounded, fording a river with Bonnie on his back. Nor did either Bonnie’s family or Clyde’s ever fail to accept the pair, at any hour of the night, regardless of risk to themselves.

  Lynching a defenseless person’s name is even easier than stoning a befuddled elephant. The newspapers indulged themselves freely in making monsters out of Bonnie and Clyde. I have never seen a newspaper,magazine or book about these two that took into account their beginnings and the climate of their times.

  Neither Barrow’s forebears nor Bonnie’s had performed gallant deeds for ladies in farthingales against a background of trellised honeysuckle and the scent of magnolia. Their homes had not been pillared mansions bearing Greek entablature. Their homes had been cabins and shanties and wagons. Yet it had not been the gentlemen of the Old South, but these wilderness castaways, among whom the myth of the cavalier persisted most strongly.

  Driven out of England by Cromwell, the myth found sanctuary in the American South. And flowered its finest amid cotton-mill waste. And in those small grubby towns where Main Street was rutted by wagon-wheels; and the last gas-lamp on the outskirts looked tired all night long.

  A myth sustained, during the Civil War, not by Southern commanders and politicians, but by the Southern farmer, hillman and tradesman of the rank and file. These were the ones whose savagery in battle kept alive a myth as unreal as a dream: a dream that they were fighting and dying in defense of white-columned mansions; although their own fences were sagging and unpainted. A Quixotic belief, though their own lives were brutal and mean, that they fought to save their honor. And it was this fantasy, when the war was lost, which informed their refusal to accept defeat:

  I’m a good old rebel soldier

  And that’s just what I am;

  And for this Yankee nation

  I do not give a damn.

  I hate the starry banner

  That’s stained with Southern blood;

  I hate the pizen Yankees

  ‘N fit ’em all I could.

  Followed old Marse Robert

  For four years nearabout;

  Got wounded at Manassas

  And starved at Point Lookout.

  I cotched the rheumatism

  From fightin’ in the snow;

  But I kilt a chance of Yankees

  ’N wish I’d of kilt some mo’.

  Three hundred thousand Yankees

  Are stiff in Southern dust;

  We got three hundred thousand

  Befo’ they conquered us.

  They died of Southern fever

  And Southern steel and shot;

  I wish we’d of got three million

  Instead of what we got.

  I hate the Yankee nation

  And the uniform of blue;

  I hate the constitution

  Of this great republic too.

  I hate the Freedmen’s Bureau

  With all its mess and fuss;

  O the thievin’ lyin’ Yankees

  I hate ’em wus ’n wus.

  I cain’t take up my musket

  To fight ’em any mo’;

  But I ain’t gonna love ’em

  ’N that is sartin sure.

  I don’t want no pardon

  For what I’ve done around;

  ’N I won’t be reconstructed

  ’N I do not give a damn.*

  It was such Fight-Till-The-Last-Dog-Dies boys, some of whom had never mounted a horse before the war, who became the nuclei of the guerrilla warfare; which was to afford the tradition in which the James boys, Quantrell and Cole Younger continued to ride after the war was done.

  To what this preposterous tradition had degenerated by the nineteen-thirties may be gathered by the spectacle of Clyde Barrow bumping about a cornfield in a Ford V-8; and abandoning it to attempt an escape on a mule.

  Who were Bonnie and Clyde? They were outcasts of the cotton frontier. They were children of the wilderness whose wilderness had been razed; who came to maturity in the hardest of times. Clyde might have survived to a sad old age by chopping cotton. Bonnie might have knocked about as a sharecropper’s wife or a prostitute until worn out by hard use. The two chose, instead, to give everyone a run for their lives. And, having once committed themselves, made a run which verged upon the uncanny.

  As a true desperado, Barrow never had the class of John Dillinger. Yet, when Dillinger was killed nobody doubted that he was dead. But Bonnie and Clyde created a myth of invincibility which survived their deaths. They are the only American outlaws, other than Jesse James, who achieved an aura of the supernatural.

  Kings’ Daughters Hospital in Perry, Texas, looked more like an armory than a hospital when Buck Barrow lay dying there within a locked and guarded room. The hospital corridor was lined with police, and police surrounded the hospital grounds.

  Bonnie and Clyde, crazed with pain and bleeding from their wounds, were miles away hiding in a ditch.

  Yet nurses, policemen, doctors and citizens all over town were certain that Bonnie and Clyde would come racing up the hospital drive, machine-gunning everyone in their way, fight their way up to Buck’s room, take him off his deathbed and make a getaway.

  Bonnie herself had known better than that for many months. She concluded one of her simple poems:

  Some day they’ll go down together

  They’ll bury them side by side;

  To a few it’ll be grief

  To the law a relief—

  But it’s death to Bonnie and Clyde.

  Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were not gunned down simply because they were outlaws. They were killed because their outlawry was so profitless. There are no payoffs, no kickbacks, no graft and no fees involved in rawjaw robbery. Had they had the enterprise—as others had—to arrange fake bank robberies for a percentage of the take, they might have become respectable and prosperous members of a business community.

  But their methods belonged to a time that had passed. They were bow-and-arrow people in an age of the fountain pen. One way or another they had to be disposed of.

  Ultimately they weren’t disposed of simply because they had disposed of others: they were killed because they kept getting in the way.

  * As sung by Frank Warner, The Unreconstructed Rebel, Elektra Recording jh504b.

  THE CORTEZ GANG

  THE brothers Cortez—Romuldo and Gregorio—were fanners, in the year 1901, in the Texas County called “Karnes” by the Anglo-Americans; and “El Carmen” by the Mexicans. />
  Romuldo Cortez owned two fine sorrel horses of nearly identical size and markings. But one was lame. An American neighbor, envious of Romuldo’s horses, offered to trade a mare he owned for one of Romul-do’s sorrels. Romuldo declined, but the American was persistent. He pressured Romuldo to trade; yet Romuldo would not. In a part of Texas, and in a time when Mexicans were not considered to be white men, Romuldo’s refusal amounted to arrogance.

  So Romuldo decided to trick the American. Knowing that the man drove a buggy, on certain mornings, down a certain road to town, he arranged to be astride his lame sorrel, under a big mesquite bordering a fence with the horse’s spavined leg concealed by the mesquite. When the American drove up and saw the Mexican idly eating mesquite, he stopped to resume his bargaining.

  “I would consider trading,” Romuldo conceded at last, “but I’m afraid you might renege on the deal later. ’’

  “I’m an American, not a Mexican,” the American boasted. “I keep my word.”

  The agreement was then reached that Romuldo, still astride the sorrel, would take it to the American’s home, leave it there and take the American’s mare in return. The American then drove on in his buggy, well content that he’d made a sharp deal.

  When Romuldo told Gregorio of the trick he had played, Gregorio heard with only half an ear. He was troubled because his wife had sighed in her sleep all night. Once he’d wakened her to ask her what the matter was. She did not know. All she could say that “my heart is trying to tell me something sad—what, I do not know.”

  The American who’d been out-horse-traded complained to Sheriff W.T. “Brack” Morris. Morris, forty-one, had put in twenty years as an officer of the law in Texas. He’d become sheriff of Karnes County in 1896 and, in 1901, was serving his third term. His reputation was that of a man who was fast and accurate with a revolver. It does not appear that he was vicious.

  He disregarded the complaint of the out-traded American. Horse-trading was a matter of caveat emptor: the man should have either watched out for himself or kept his mouth shut later.