On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde

by John Gilmore

  The two had hot-wired cars in Dallas, getting the trick down to a few-second task. They’d cracked a couple safes, stuck up a few grocery stores and service stations, Ray Hamilton joining on more than one “trip.” They roamed the roads from Dallas to Abilene, from Austin and halfway to Houston.

  One night, without Hamilton, Buck and Clyde picked up Sidney Moore, stole a Buick, and headed northwest. Buck was bragging he knew a spot in Wichita Falls for easy pickings, but when they got to Henrietta, Clyde said, “I can feel the law breathin’ on my neck in this Buick. I don’t like Buicks—cops’re always lookin’ at a Buick.”

  Sidney said nobody was looking, but Buck said he had to trust his kid brother’s “sense of smartness,” since he had a knack for “smellin’ things out like a trackin’ hound.” They quickly swapped the Buick for a Ford, then prowled the night streets looking for action.

  In a short time they found a house that seemed unoccupied. Breaking in was easy, but the score turned sour. Only a few dollars turned up. Clyde uncovered a box of jewelry and back in the car they split the booty three ways, each stuffing his pockets with trinkets.

  Sidney was nervous. “Let’s take off,” he kept saying. He wanted to get back to Dallas. Clyde drove, keeping a fast pace, but slowed as they cruised the town of Denton. Buck suggested they look around, but Sidney complained, “In this dead goddamn place?”

  Buck said, “That means somebody’s got a stash stuck up their ass.”

  “I don’t like it either,” Clyde said. “We’re the only live ones on the street.”

  Pointing to an auto garage, Buck said, “There it is, boys. That’s what we’re lookin’ for, and I tell you somethin’ sweet’s gonna happen.”

  Clyde turned onto Oak Street, eyeing the Motor Mark Garage, a lightless scene as quiet as a mausoleum. He slowly entered an alley and drove to the back of the building. Minutes later, with Sidney shining a weak flashlight, Buck managed to force the rear door. Inside the garage, they quickly made their way to the narrow office and the small, free-standing safe.

  Buck made several attempts to open the steel safe but couldn’t. Clyde tried without success. “We need a goddamn torch,” he said, but Buck claimed to have a better idea—move the safe out of the building, load it into the car and torch it open later.

  Sidney said, “You been readin’ too many funny papers. This sucker’s not big but weighs a goddamn ton.”

  “Come on,” Buck said. “We’ll rock this baby right outta here, and buy us a filly mignon.”

  The three struggled with the safe, rocking it back and forth, from edge to edge, and with much effort, cursing and sweating, managed to load the safe half into the back of the car which sunk beneath the weight. “Let’s get outta here,” Clyde said. “Dump this fuckin’ safe right here and let’s get outta here. We can’t drive with this damn barn smashin’ us to the road.”

  Buck refused to abandon the safe. He said, “We can make it, I’m tellin’ you. Leave it here and someone’s comin’ to grab what we busted our nuts over.”

  The car wobbled as they slowly drove south out of Denton. Looking into the rearview mirror, Clyde saw the car behind them. “Laws—” he said. The car kept following though Clyde drove faster. Then the car behind veered to the left to pull alongside the Ford, but Clyde pushed the gas, jumping ahead and cutting the car off. The chase continued for half a mile until Clyde swerved sharp on a turn, accidentally rammed the curb, and heard the axle snap.

  “Run!” Buck yelled, jumping from the car. Sidney dashed out in a different direction until one of the cops started shooting. Halting abruptly, Sidney threw up his hands and cried, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I give up!”

  Chasing Buck, the second cop kept yelling for him to stop until he wounded him with a bullet in the leg.

  Clyde kept running. He’d heard the shot that dropped Buck, and knew the cop was chasing him. A shot was fired, missed, and failed to slow Clyde. He ran several blocks, dashed between two houses, dropped to the ground and pushed through a screened crawl space. He quickly covered the opening with the screen, curled on his side beneath the building, and listened as the cop ran between the houses and kept going. Clyde hunched as small as he could, holding his breath, waiting.

  He didn’t sleep. Huddled beneath the house the rest of the night, he waited for dawn, and soon as the sun was up, he squeezed out from beneath the house, brushed the dust from his clothes, and walked towards the highway. He told himself he’d catch a ride or two, maybe a straight-through to Dallas. He began to whistle as he walked, his eyes shifting quickly for any sign of the law.

  The safe’s stash came to less than thirty dollars. Shot through the leg, Buck was tended to medically, and then jailed with Sidney. Both had managed to unload the jewelry from their pockets before the cops had made their search. Both said they couldn’t identify the third runner. Buck kept saying, “I don’t know who the hell he was. Just some dumb kid hitchin’ a ride that we picked up. Scared the crap outta him seein’ the law on our ass.”

  Laying low at his folks on Eagle Ford, Clyde helped his father tarpaper the outhouse. He did chores and read the newspaper to the old man and Cumie, both worrying about Buck, who, along with Sidney, had been indicted and swiftly tried.

  Both pled not guilty but were convicted by a jury within minutes. The Barrows believed Clyde had been with Buck on the ride, and knew he’d escaped only by his swift thinking and “the seat of his pants.” Weeks later, Buck and Sidney were sentenced to four years each and transported to Huntsville prison. Meanwhile, Clyde was hanging around Fred Kramer’s Auto Repair, talking motors and keeping an eye on the road for signs of trouble. He knew the cops were looking for him, though he hadn’t been charged along with Buck and Sidney.

  Several times the cops cruised past the Barrows, slowing for any sign of Clyde.

  Dapper as usual, a silver watch now hooked to the end of his chain, Clyde paid a visit to an old friend, Clarence Clay, to talk about Buck’s troubles and what the prison was like. A few younger people were at the get-together, laughing and kidding, one being Buster Parker, who Clyde knew only casually. Parker’s younger sister, Bonnie, was also at the party, nineteen years old, blonde and blue-eyed, a bright, contagious smile. Buster told Clyde that Bonnie had been married to a fellow who was doing time in Huntsville prison.

  Clyde kept looking at her. She seemed alone, like she wasn’t even really at the party—fiddling with a piece of cake or looking out the window. Then he realized she was looking at his reflection in the glass. Clyde asked Bonnie if she was still married to the guy in prison. She said yes, she was, “legally,” but didn’t feel personally married at all.

  “I’ve never been married,” Clyde said. Bonnie said she knew, and Clyde asked how she knew. She said, “People talkin’ all around here. They talk about your brother and they talk about you.”

  Clyde said, “This place is sure stuffy. They could use a fan in here. I feel like I’m gonna fall over it’s so damn hot. You wanna go for a walk?”

  Bonnie said, “I have to get home to my momma pretty soon.”

  “I’ll walk you there,” he said. Together they left the party, both exiting out the kitchen door. He asked about her brother but she said, “Seems he comes and goes how he wants.”

  Clyde walked beside her, listening to whatever she said. When they reached her house, Clyde said, “I sure don’t feel like I wanna say good night to you, Bonnie.…” She asked if he’d like to come in and have a cup of hot chocolate. They went in through the back door, and Clyde stayed in the kitchen holding her left hand while she stirred the chocolate with a mixing spoon in her right hand.

  Laughing a little, she said, “You’re not very tall, Clyde. I’m a short person and you’re not a whole lot taller than me.”

  He said no, he wasn’t too tall, but said she looked no bigger than a kid, and perhaps that was just the right size for him. She was looking right into his face and he said, “I feel like givin’ you a kiss on your lips.” She sai
d she wouldn’t mind that.

  He went to her house the following night for another walk, and as they strolled along the river’s edge, Clyde threw an empty beer can into the water. He said he didn’t care about anybody but himself. “You standin’ here with me is nice,” he said, “and I care about you, but I don’t care about the rest. I don’t give them any more carin’ than that tin can I just tossed in the river. My folks—okay, I care about them, and my brothers and sisters, but I don’t care about the people out there in Dallas or everywhere else any more than thinkin’ about a bunch of squirrels in some tree.”

  Bonnie laughed a little, and squeezed Clyde’s hand. “Long as you care about me, that’s what I care about.”

  “I do care about you,” he said. “I don’t include you in all the rest of the people.”

  The following week they went to the movies, ate peanuts, popcorn, and shared a chocolate bar. Clyde held Bonnie’s hand, and they kissed a few times. He said little as he walked her home, but she sensed this was the one person, just her size, “small and pretty-looking,” she’d say. There was something about him that reached into her that she couldn’t clearly understand, something bound in with his smiling, self-confident manner that at the same time masked some impenetrable cloud—an idea of danger lurking, moving with him as he went.

  He was a risk-taker who spoke at times in a grandiose way, saying he’d never follow “anyone else’s route.” Yes, Bonnie said, she understood. He wasn’t stamped out for an ordinary life, or the “God-fearing” path or so-called “righteous way.” She said she knew because she sensed that in herself.

  Struggling for wages was a waste of time in a country on the brink of disaster. Clyde told Bonnie flat out that his brother Buck was a thief and he said you could say he was one himself. He’d never work “some stuff-shirt job” again, even if he got it on a “silver platter.” He’d done that, he said, “but without any platter,” and gotten fired time after time—so it was clear to him who the enemy was. There’d never be any doubt in his mind.

  Bonnie admired that and couldn’t hesitate giving her affections to Clyde. “Like you snap your finger,” Harris said. “It was that quick they got romantic, and no matter what he said she believed him. He believed everything she said. She didn’t know he’d had as much trouble with the law as he’d had, only that they were ‘sniffin’ around’ for him and eager to nail another Barrow if they could.” That didn’t appear to matter to Bonnie. Who he was—what he was—struck every chord in her.

  At the same time, some part of Clyde’s nature recognized that streak in Bonnie. You could call it wild, or something untamed. She said to Clyde, “I dreamed you were Billy the Kid, and you claimed me for the rest of my life.” Could she call it true love? Or call it “crazy love”—and did it make any difference either way?

  Her sister, Billie Jean, looking back at Bonnie’s attachment to Clyde, said the two were “like hunks of a picture puzzle that fit as though made that way, and once you got the pieces fitted there wasn’t any way they’d get taken apart, and nothin’ anybody could do about it.”

  Each evening after dark, Clyde would leave Kramer’s garage and make his way to Bonnie’s house. He’d stay late drinking coffee or hot chocolate, sometimes eating red beans and soda crackers, holding Bonnie’s hand and waiting for her mother and Billie Jean to go to sleep. Instead of heading back to his folks, Clyde began sleeping on the couch in Bonnie’s front room, using a pair of pajamas Buster had outgrown.

  In the middle of the night, Bonnie would sneak out of the bedroom she shared with her sister, and nestle under the blanket with Clyde.

  Knowing he had to get out of West Dallas if he wanted to avoid the cops, he’d leave the Parkers’ before daybreak. He gave Bonnie a small gold ring, telling her if he got put in jail, or if they wouldn’t let him go, he wanted her to know that no one else in the world mattered to him, and he’d spend every day thinking about her and every night dreaming of the day they’d be together again. He said, “So you can say it to yourself that we’re like married folks and nothin’ is ever goin’ to change it.”

  With the ring on her finger, Bonnie told him she knew she’d loved him the moment she first saw him. She’d been on dates and had boyfriends “here and there,” but she’d never been in love with “a single one of them.” She didn’t know why she married Roy Thornton, and said, “It just was the next thing that had to happen, same as when he ran off—it was the next thing that had to happen....”

  She wasn’t sorry she’d done it, marrying like she had, but told Clyde, “You’re someone I’m never gonna let go of. I’m gonna carry you in my heart same as if it’s grown that way and nothin’ else’s ever goin’ to matter.” Everything he’d told her–even the “bad” about himself, only convinced her she’d found someone she could die for. She’d found Billy the Kid and Jesse James all in the hide of Clyde Barrow, and she said, “It isn’t even any choice I could make. It’s like it’s been written on the sky.”

  One morning, Bonnie shook Clyde awake. He opened his eyes and sat up from the couch. Someone was knocking on the front door hard enough to split the wood. Emma Parker hurried into the room wringing her hands. “There’s a policeman at the back door!” she cried. “He’s got a gun in hand. They’re gonna break down the door!”

  Emma had no choice but to let both the lawmen into the house. Both rushed Clyde, who’d managed to get his feet to the floor, and told him, “You’re under arrest, Barrow!”

  “Can I put my pants on?” Clyde asked.

  His trousers were seized and the pockets searched, same with his shirt, and when he’d gotten into both, he was handcuffed and frisked again. “Let’s go!” he was told.

  “I’d like to get my feet in my shoes,” he said. One cop picked up the shoes while the other steered Clyde out the house barefoot. Bonnie was standing in the open doorway of the house, watching Clyde being loaded into a waiting wagon. He kept looking back at her, silently saying, “I love you—I love you!”

  She cried out, “I love you!”

  Confronted with several warrants for his arrest, Clyde was fingerprinted and photographed, then logged into the Dallas jail, only to be transferred to Denton to face charges for the Motor Mark burglary. “What burglary?” he said. He claimed he had nothing to do with it. “I was in West Dallas and my folks and other people’ll tell you so.”

  In support of her son, Cumie was setting out for Denton. When Bonnie learned from Cumie that additional charges were piling against Clyde, she asked Cumie if she could go with her.

  When they got to Denton, Clyde told Bonnie and his mother, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen with all this. They’re tellin’ me I’m headed to prison for a long time.” Already brokenhearted over Buck being confined in Huntsville, Cumie said it would practically kill her to have two sons in the penitentiary.

  Clyde asked Bonnie if she was going to divorce Roy Thornton, and she sighed. “My mom’s coaxin’ me to do just that, but there’s time for it. I can’t even think about that. Whatever’s goin’ to happen right now,” she said, “your mom and I are here and we’re with you.”

  By the end of February, the attempt to build a case against Clyde on the Motor Mark charge lacked sufficient evidence. The case was dropped, but Clyde’s elation at the prospect of being cut loose collapsed when told he was being transported to Waco to face charges for jobs he’d pulled earlier. Clyde told Cumie and Bonnie, “I suppose they’re gonna run me all over like chasin’ a goddamn turkey and not bein’ happy till they got my butt in Huntsville.”

  Bonnie told him she had a cousin in Waco. “Your mother and me can stay there if there’s gonna to be a trial, ’cause I’m not leavin’ you at all. We’ll be there every day,” she said, “and wherever they send you, I’ll be there. If you go to prison, honey, I’ll pack up what I’ve got and live as close as I can to wherever you are.”

  It didn’t take Clyde long to see it would go easier in Waco if he played along with the law. Facing seven fel
ony counts, and with the courts bogged down and time pressing in, he was told it would be to everyone’s advantage for a bargain to be struck. To Cumie, he said, “They’re tellin’ me to plead guilty to the burglaries, and no contest on the car theft. They wanna give me two years on each count, and work it out so that’s all the time I’ll do—those two years. If I don’t do as they say, I’ll be locked up for the whole fourteen years. You know, Mom, I’d just as soon be dead than doin’ that.” The only way he could see out was doing what they suggested, and “gaggin’ on sayin’ what they’re askin’.”

  Five

  Minding the law in a hole like Huntsville wasn’t Buck Barrow’s idea of living at an easy pace. He wrenched through each day as if dragging through a swamp, the picture in his mind of Blanche the only thing keeping him moving. He told her, “I gotta get out of here. I ain’t sleepin’ or eatin’ and pretty soon I’ll be dyin’ if I can’t get out.…”

  One brisk, cold afternoon in the middle of March, while working on kitchen duty, Buck and another prisoner walked away from the pots and pans. They got out through a side door, hot-wired a guard’s car parked behind the building, and in minutes the two men were off the prison grounds.

  Staying clear of the highway, Buck drove north to Dallas, sweating each mile of the ruts and back roads. Splitting up with his kitchen pal by dropping him off in Dallas, Buck then headed for West Dallas. He hid the car off Eagle Ford and hurried on foot to the Barrows’.

  Henry was proud of his son for “bustin’ out,” but what in the Lord’s name was he going to do? “Tell me, Buck,” he said, “what’re you gonna do, ’cause they’re after your hide for sure. Soon they’re gonna have us all locked up.”

  “Don’t worry,” Buck said. “Nobody’s gettin’ on my tail. Me and Blanche are headin’ outta Texas pronto. I’ll let you know where we are once we get there.” He changed his clothes, told Cumie he loved her, and by nightfall was driving out of West Dallas.