by John Gilmore
Seven
Clyde cruised slowly, at moments killing the headlights so the car would be swallowed by the dark. Abernathy and Turner said little as they roamed the night streets of the town. They drove past a gas station, a café, then the Gough-Lamb cleaners on Charles Street, at last pulling in outside the Baltimore-Ohio railroad office. Opening the car door, Abernathy said to Turner, “Okay, buddy, let’s get this show on the fuckin’ road.”
The robbery went swiftly, but netted less than sixty dollars.
Clyde sped to the outskirts of town, the asphalt soon turning to dirt. The roads seemed to wind and drift, one branching from the other. The car came to a stop, Clyde turning off the headlights. Shaking his head, he said, “Which of these goddamn roads is gettin’ us outta here?” Abernathy didn’t know. “It’s too dark to see,” Clyde said. “Our headlights are cuttin’ damn near across the town.”
Turner said, “Leave ’em off before anyone spots us.”
“Nobody’s gonna see us,” Clyde said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Damned if I know which way’s out.”
Abernathy said, “We’ll lay low out here. Pull off the road and we’ll wait till it gets light.” He opened the door and got out of the car. “Let me get in the back,” he told Turner. “You get in front.”
Turner climbed out, slid onto the seat next to Clyde and smoked one cigarette after the other. He finally slumped to the right with his head against the window ledge while Clyde sat staring over the steering wheel into the night.
He didn’t know when he dropped off, but when Clyde opened his eyes daylight was flooding the windshield. Turner was crumpled asleep and Abernathy was snoring. Clyde twisted around to nudge Abernathy. “Wake up,” he said. “We gotta get movin’. We’re sittin’ in the middle of someone’s property.” Clyde started the car. It grumbled, sputtered, then rolled smooth after he pushed the gas, clearing the engine. He shifted gears and made a turn on the road that looked as confusing as it had in the dark. In moments, he realized they were heading in the same direction they’d traveled the night before—heading straight past the Baltimore-Ohio office.
Turner said, “Shit, the cops’re right there!” Two uniformed officers came running out of the railroad office—looking at the three men in the car traveling past.
“Get us outta here!” Abernathy cried. “We’re in a fuckin’ trap!”
Downshifting and hitting the gas, Clyde raced ahead as the cops climbed into the police car. “They’re comin’ after us!” Turner said.
Clyde cranked for all the speed he could get, but the cops were right behind them. They almost cornered the Ford, but Clyde swerved onto a side street. The cops screeched around the same corner, firing at the car. Bullets pinged against the metal. Left side. Trunk lid. The roof of the car. Clyde pulled to the curb, grabbed the gun from Turner, threw open his door and shot at the law’s windshield. He then made a run for it.
Abernathy and Turner bolted from the car and were running. One cop chased Turner into an alley, fired a shot that missed but brought Turner to a standstill. “I’m done runnin’!” he yelled.
Clyde and Abernathy broke off in opposite directions, Clyde quickly managing to lose the cop by disappearing behind a building and climbing through a basement window. The cop then took off after Abernathy who was still in sight.
An alert went out and within an hour, Abernathy was caught on the east side of Middletown, heading north on the highway. It wasn’t until late afternoon that Clyde climbed out of the basement through the same window he’d entered. He figured he’d stroll to the railroad yards, catch a ride, but the alert for the armed holdup suspects had saturated the area, and Clyde was spotted by a cop patrolling on foot who immediately unsnapped the holster at his side.
Clyde made a dash straight at the cop, charging him and almost knocking him down. The man hadn’t yet got his gun in hand, and stumbled back, then gave chase. He later said, “I wasn’t sure if he was one of the gang but I wanted to find out, but he ran at me—almost knocked me down gettin’ past me. No one had ever done that to me—charged me like a bull. He ran faster than I could, and on a main street where he was keepin’ close with a bunch of people. Smart, knowin’ I wouldn’t fire into a crowd. He jumped around so fast like damn lightnin’ and zigzaggin’ every which way. I fired in the air and hollered at him but he outran me and ran around a corner. By the time I got to where I’d seen him, he wasn’t there. But I kept lookin’, something tellin’ me I’d get him.”
Running far enough from the cop, Clyde bought enough time to grab another car and sped off onto another street, the exhaust blowing from the car. He saw the cop still hounding him, and the cop saw the car—and saw Clyde. He raised the gun but Clyde made a screeching turn onto a narrow street, then racing ahead he suddenly found he’d plunged down a dead-end street—a stupid predicament, the cop plodding right behind him, fast cinching the distance between them. Rattled, Clyde bumped the car across a yard between two houses, almost crashing into the rear of one of them.
There was nowhere to go. He was at the edge of a hydraulic canal, with no way out. He jumped from the car to run again, but the cop was about to fire, hollering, “Halt!” The cop had the best of him, he knew it. He threw Turner’s gun as far as he could into the canal. It didn’t even make a splash. Raising his hands in the air, he turned to face the sweating and hard-breathing cop with the gun shaking in his hand. “Don’t make a move!” the cop ordered.
With a smile, Clyde said, “It’s okay. I’m not gonna give you any trouble.”
The laws at the Middletown jail pushed Clyde around as a tough, snot-nosed punk who said his name was Robert Thomas, a seventeen-year-old who’d hitchhiked from Indianapolis. “Those two guys who picked me up wanted me to drive,” he said. “Told me they were bushed. When you guys rode on us, they said you’d shoot us.”
However, the law’s records from Waco established Clyde’s identity, and he finally admitted he’d escaped from the Texas jail. He also admitted being the third member of the “gang,” as the cops put it, but maintained his age was only seventeen.
Jailed separately from Abernathy and Turner, additional charges soon mounted against Clyde. Multiple counts of car theft, interstate flight, armed robbery, burglary, and forcible recapture.
He was transported back to Waco, where Cumie was waiting. His mother told him that any chance he might’ve had for the court to be lenient had gone up in smoke. Cumie said, “There was a gun used when you escaped from here with those other fellas.”
Clyde said, “I know it. I don’t know where the boys got the gun. Surprised the hell outta me. They talked me into bustin’ out with them.”
Cumie said, “Unless the Lord sends us down a miracle, they’re gonna send you to the same place your brother’s run from, and I’m prayin’ Buck’ll see his way to comin’ and give himself up.”
“I have to see Bonnie,” Clyde told his mother. “I wrote her and I need to see her.”
His mother said, “I talked to her and she understands you were runnin’, so she knows you couldn’t come for her.” Cumie had encountered the newsmen who referred to Clyde as “Schoolboy Barrow,” and the three as “baby bandits,” and “baby thugs.” She tried to tell them that Clyde was a “good boy” who’d gotten mixed up with a bad crowd in Waco. She said Clyde had no reason to escape or be on the run, since he’d had such a short sentence to serve. Now, since he’d escaped, the court would be dead set to “bring him right down to his knees.” As God was her witness, Cumie told Clyde, “I’ll do all I can, but you’ve shoveled up yourself a pile of trouble.”
Very few would understand the inner revelations Bonnie rarely revealed in the tiny tips of an iceberg jutting through the flatness of her life: a short road paved with hardship and near poverty, a youthful marriage to a convict she’d never loved though she still couldn’t bring herself to divorce him while he was still behind bars. She told her sister, “Let Roy tell himself he has me on the outside, so he still thinks there�
�s the possibility of a life if he’s ever free,” though for Bonnie there was a blank, faceless side to that coin.
In her “heart,” which she said belonged to Clyde, Thornton had ceased to exist. The only face she could see was Clyde’s.
The seven two-year sentences handed down previously to Clyde to run concurrently now stacked up to the full fourteen years of pending imprisonment in “the Walls”—Huntsville prison—and under this threat, an exchange of letters between Bonnie and Clyde accelerated.
In April 1930, Clyde was processed into the Texas state prison system as number 63527. He learned that he would eventually be sent to Eastham farm, called “Hell’s Hole,” but due to the existing charges against him he’d remain in Huntsville to be transported to answer the multiple warrants in other jurisdictions. Clyde told a fellow prisoner, “I’d rather do my time in the Walls from all I’m told about Eastham.” The other prisoner, heavier than Clyde and over a foot bigger, said, “I bet you would, boy. Little and lookin’ like you do, Eastham’s gonna turn you inside out—if you even live that long. This joint figures the less they gotta feed, the more money’s in the boss’s pocket.”
Clyde said, “I’ll kill any son of a bitch who lays a hand on me.”
The convict laughed. “That’s about what you’re gonna be doin’, killin’ one prick-sucker after the other, or else get yourself some muscle.”
Eight
Clyde’s circuit of answering charges fared poorly for the law. “Insufficient evidence to prosecute” kept cropping up, leaving Clyde only with the long prison sentence to serve. He told Cumie, “I don’t wanna spend fourteen years locked up—I’ll do the same thing as Buck, and I’ll bust out. I’ll go on the run and keep runnin’ if it takes the rest of my life.”
His mother said, “I’ll do all I can to get you outta jail sooner than they’re plannin’ on holdin’ you.”
“How you gonna do that?” he asked.
She said, “I mean by goin’ to them and pleadin’ my case.”
Clyde changed the date of his birth to make himself younger on the records, believing hard time would go easier. He also listed his middle name as “Champion” instead of his birth name of “Chestnut,” thinking it was sissified enough to have others breathing down his neck. He insisted to the board that Bonnie Parker was his wife, which allowed a greater exchange of communications between the two. She had written to him in Waco, saying, “I love you, Clyde, and no matter what happens, wherever they’re going to send you, I’m going to pack everything and be there as close to you as I can get. It’s like I told you, if you’re locked away from me, I might as well be locked up the same as you, because my life won’t mean anything without you.”
In the middle of September, Clyde was being delivered back to Huntsville when he met another young convict, Ralph Fults, riding the same prison-bound wagon. Two years younger than Clyde, Ralph had already been in and out of lockups since he was a kid. He had just spent almost a year at Eastham farm, Camp One, escaped from solitary with other prisoners, and was later captured in St. Louis. “They got special treatment for guys who wanna run,” Ralph told Clyde. “If they don’t take you behind a buildin’ and shoot your ass, they got somethin’ called a ‘tune-up,’ where they beat the livin’ shit outta you with clubs while they’re tellin’ you it’s always good for you to be learnin’ your lessons.”
Some miles north of Huntsville was the town of Weldon, and Eastham Camp Two. Ralph Fults had made his break from Camp One, where they’d housed many prisoners in solitary. Camp Two lacked solitary accommodations, but instead had small sheet-iron boxes in which prisoners were locked to roast. “In the summer,” Ralph said, “you can smell the hide of these cons cookin’ in them tin doghouses.”
Clyde’s survival at Eastham was to prove a miracle. More than once he was selected to “ride the barrel,” a form of punishment in which a prisoner’s hands were handcuffed behind them, then they were forced to stand on an upended barrel until further notice. Hours later, with legs blue from numbness, a prisoner would topple to the ground, only to be beaten for failing to do what he was told. This form of “instruction” was engineered to make “adjustments” in the prisoner’s attitudes and thinking. The alternative, of course, was suicide—or escape, which was considered by convicts to be another method of suicide.
A first escape attempt was rewarded with beatings that lasted for hours. Ralph had proved a candidate for the beating, as a reminder of an earlier escape attempt. With Clyde now as a witness, Ralph was pistol-whipped and clubbed while Clyde stood by under guard to witness the instructions. On a second escape attempt, it was understood that the prisoner would be shot. Ralph had told Clyde, “They walk you behind the buildin’, put a shotgun to the back of your neck or a pistol to your head. Then this screw comes around the other side of the buildin’ and says the prisoner made a run—even though what’s left of his head’s black as a nigger from powder and his brain’s stickin’ to the wall.”
Clyde said if he ever got out of prison he’d make it a point of coming back to Eastham, “not to be visitin’,” he said, “but blowin’ down the walls, and gettin’ as many guys outta there as I can.”
Ralph laughed. He said, “I never heard of anybody bustin’ into a prison. Once you get your ass outta here you’re gone!” Clyde said once he busted in, he wouldn’t be staying for very long.
Within a short time, Clyde was transferred back to Eastham Camp One where they could “keep a closer eye on him.” Fults believed Clyde was moved because the two had been getting too chummy, with word getting around that Clyde was bragging about somebody busting into the prison to free as many prisoners as he could.
One guard said, “The son of a bitch is crazy.” It wasn’t long in Camp One before Clyde was “bought” for a few packs of cigarettes. The prisoner who bought Clyde was called Big Ed, a six-foot-one, 210-pound mass who showed an insatiable hunger for raping younger, smaller men. Big Ed, it was said, made his arrangements with the guards to purchase Clyde for the cigarettes—the usual prison tender. Big Ed told other prisoners, “You pay for somethin’, you do whatever the fuck you like.”
For a short time, Clyde lived in a nightmare of pain, abuse, and illness from loss of weight. One day, while Clyde and a prisoner named Harry were working at a wood pile, he told Harry, “I think I’m gonna die in here. My soul’s rottin’ in me.” Harry, experienced in all matters penitentiary, muttered to Clyde that he should have a talk with a prisoner named Aubrey. He said, “Aubrey’s doin’ life and he’s got no kind feelin’s for Big Ed. You talk to Aubrey. See what advice he’s got to tell you.”
Clyde was able to slip away long enough to find Aubrey, who was already well-acquainted with the situation. He looked at Clyde and said, “You’re gonna die soon if you don’t do somethin’ about it. What do you wanna do? I hate that stinkin’ tub of lard, and he’d be no loss to anybody.” Clyde didn’t say anything. Aubrey said, “I’ll tell you what to do. You get his ass alone somewhere in that fuckin’ latrine, and we’ll take care of him.”
Clyde asked, “What’re we gonna do?”
“Well, we’re gonna kill the son of a bitch.” Aubrey said, “You got qualms about killin’ a queer son of a bitch?”
“No,” Clyde said. “How’re we gonna kill him?”
“First off, I don’t see no point in wastin’ time about it,” Aubrey said, “seein’ as what you’re goin’ through. So just go on in the crapper tonight, and use somethin’ to hit the son of a bitch in his head.”
“That’s it?” Clyde said. Aubrey said he’d take care of it from there. Clyde said, “Why’re you gonna do this?”
“I don’t mind none,” Aubrey replied. “I’d like to see a queer son of a bitch dead, wouldn’t you? I hate queer sons of bitches.”
Clyde said yeah. “What am I gonna hit him with?” Aubrey stared at him, and shrugged. Quickly, Clyde said, “I know where’s a hunk of pipe—an inch pipe maybe a foot’n’ a half long—”
“—th
at’ll do,” Aubrey said. “Now, you hit him hard like you’re gonna bust somethin’. You don’t want him gettin’ up, you know.”
That night, Clyde found Aubrey and told him he’d hidden a length of pipe in the latrine. He said, “It wasn’t easy findin’ anywhere to hide a chunk of pipe.” Later, while Aubrey watched, Clyde got out of his bunk and walked slowly out of the barracks into the latrine. The pipe was where he’d hid it, and moments later as he stood facing a urinal, Big Ed approached him from behind, unaware of the length of pipe in Clyde’s hand. The big man was already breathing hard as Clyde jerked around, swinging the pipe with all the strength left in his arm. The pipe hit hard against the left side of Big Ed’s head and across the temple.
With a groan, the man dropped to his knees, rocked back and forth for a moment, then fell forward against the floor. Quick and sure, Aubrey was right there, a freshly sharpened shank in hand. They rolled the big man over onto his back. Clyde said, “Is he already dead?”
“No—we’re fixin’ that now,” Aubrey said, and stabbed Big Ed hard in the chest, the blade sinking to almost the tape-wrapped handle. Aubrey used both hands to pull the shank out of the thick body, then straightened up. With the same shank, he quickly cut himself across the shoulder, then said, “Now get outta here and get rid of that pipe!”
With dogged determination, Clyde’s mother hounded the law to reverse her son’s sentences to concurrent status, as when he’d been first convicted, with the possibility of early parole. She was repeatedly told it was impossible, but with an almost superhuman inability to take “no” for an answer, Cumie hammered at the task relentlessly to the point where her request was taken into consideration.
