My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (12 page)

On April 1, we left the cabins and moved into a stone apartment over a double garage near Oak Ridge Drive, in the Freeman Grove addition. It was just across the county line, south of Joplin. Bonnie and I had rented the apartment the day before but we could not move in because the people who lived there could not move out until April 1.
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When we rented the apartment, we were told it was furnished. And it was furnished when we looked at it. It had a radio and everything else except linens. In fact, we saw two radios, so we thought one of them belonged in the apartment. Afterward we were told where to find the keys to all the doors. The next afternoon we found there was nothing but bare furniture in the apartment. We would have to get a lot of things before we could even sleep there that night. We had to have linens, blankets or quilts (or both), dishes, silverware, and everything else needed to cook and serve meals.

Clyde said he would get everything we needed and asked Buck to go with him. They came back in a few hours with six or eight large feather pillows, a feather bed, plenty of sheets and pillowcases, about fourteen quilts
and blankets, several bedspreads, dishes, silverware, and a lot of other things we needed to start keeping house. The only thing they forgot was a radio. Almost everything was new except the bed. They got it for W. D. and said he would have to sleep alone from now on.
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“On April 1, we ... moved into a stone apartment over a double garage near Oak Ridge Drive.” (Photograph by Blanche Barrow, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

The apartment was nice enough for us. There were two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchenette with built-in furniture, and a small bathroom. Clyde told Bonnie and me that we could have a lot of fun dressing up the apartment and playing house. But most of the cleaning, cooking, and house-keeping was left to Blanche. Clyde and Bonnie’s bedroom was hardly ever cleaned, nor was the bed made. Bonnie seldom got up before twelve noon or one o’clock. Of course, none of us were early birds because we stayed up so late, mostly because everyone else insisted on playing cards until all hours in the morning.

I had to have something to do, so I bought myself a bunch of jigsaw puzzles. At first, everyone laughed, but I didn’t mind. I told them as soon as they worked one puzzle they would want more. And this was true! One night when Clyde had lost at poker and did not care to take any of the guns apart, he decided to help me work a puzzle. After that almost every time anyone went to town or to a drugstore for anything, he asked for more puzzles. He could hardly leave one until it was finished, day or night. Soon everyone was working them, everyone except Buck. He didn’t like them. All he got from them were headaches.
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I think Bonnie and I almost bought out Kress’s.
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Every time we went to town we came back with our arms loaded with ashtrays, glassware, small picture frames, and anything else we saw that was pretty or that we wanted or needed, plus a lot of things we didn’t need. Once we saw some twenty-cent finger rings with cut-glass sets in them and ear screws to match, but we never wore them. The rings looked real. Just for fun we bought two each. I was told later by an officer that someone identified the rings and ear screws as real diamonds taken from them in a robbery.
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They would have been very disappointed if they ever wore them and got water on them!

Often when we were tired of staying in the house, or Clyde and W. D. were out of town, Bonnie and I would go to an afternoon movie by ourselves.
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Buck would stay home. However, sometimes the three boys would go with us to a show at night. On these outings, we always drove our Marmon. It wasn’t hot and we could park it and feel safe enough to go back to it when we were ready to go home.

Buck had driven to some small town just across the Missouri-Kansas line and bought Kansas license plates for our car because Clyde thought it best not to have Texas plates on it. He said someone may get suspicious of a Texas car and investigate to see who owned it.
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All of us had a lot of fun together. But to me there always seemed to be a shadow hanging over us, like a dark cloud. But since we had come this far I tried to forget about what might happen to us. I thought worrying wouldn’t do any good anyway.

I usually ordered all our groceries by phone and had them delivered.
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Sometimes Buck went for them in the car. After April 7, when the sale of beer was legalized in Missouri, we bought a case of beer nearly every day. I didn’t care for beer myself but all the rest did. They enjoyed seeing who could drink the most. It wasn’t that I thought I was too good to drink; I just didn’t like beer or whiskey. It made me sick. I also didn’t think the
headache the next morning was worth the fun of getting drunk and making a silly fool of yourself.
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Blanche drinking whiskey from a flask near Crockett, Texas, 1931. “I just didn’t like beer or whiskey.” (Photograph by Buck Barrow, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

I always met the grocery store delivery boy
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or the laundry man from the cleaners downstairs at the front. I did not like to do that. I was sure one of them would get suspicious because they were not allowed to bring the packages upstairs to the apartment. Some of the packages were almost as big as me. One time I had to argue with the laundry man about taking some clothes up myself. I told Clyde he could just as easily stay back in one of the bedrooms if he did not want any one to see him.

“Those people are always bothered with nose trouble,” he said, “and may see too much if they come in.”

Another reason for Clyde’s concern was the fact that he had robbed one of the cleaners or laundries a few months before and he thought someone might recognize him. He wasn’t taking any chances. I couldn’t blame him for that, although he had not kept his promise to keep the guns out of the apartment and leave them in the car. But of course, he couldn’t afford to leave them in the garage, so they were kept in a large closet in the living room or just laying around in his bedroom.

Clyde always wanted to keep the window blinds drawn so no one could see in. But we could hardly see out. I always tried to keep the blinds up in
our bedroom during the day because I didn’t like to be in a place where I couldn’t see out. Our bedroom faced the street on the south side. Clyde and Bonnie’s bedroom was on the north side.

One night not long after we had moved to the apartment, Clyde wanted to go to a small town near Joplin and look around for something. He wanted Buck to go with him. I didn’t want him to go any place alone with Clyde but they told me it would be okay because they weren’t going to rob anything that night, and if they did Clyde would not allow Buck to help or to have anything to do with any job he pulled. They said they would be back in a few hours, but for us to go to bed and get some sleep.

I could not keep Buck from going, even though I tried very hard. But I did not feel like having an argument with him. Anyway, he had promised me he would not help pull any job even if Clyde wanted him to. Buck did not want to go back to prison. Still, I had my doubts about what they might do.

Buck kissed me goodnight and left. We put the lights out and went to bed soon after they had gone, but I didn’t go to sleep. I lay across my bed, put a pillow on the window sill, and kept myself awake looking up and down the street. I saw the private night watchman every time he made his rounds.
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He had called at our door earlier in the month and asked if we wanted him to watch our car or to keep burglars away. We had paid him one dollar to watch our Marmon, the same amount other people in the district paid.

At the time our car had to sit on the street. There wasn’t space in the double garage under our apartment. The people who lived on the same lot as us, in the large home on the corner, used half the garage. Clyde’s stolen car occupied the other half. Later on, Buck rented a garage from a man next door to us. Before that Buck had asked the man who lived in the large home if he would switch with us—allowing us to use his half of the double garage under the apartment and him use the one Buck had rented for our car. We thought he could drive into it just as easy as he could the one he was using. But the man did not like the idea and refused to change with Buck. So Buck had to drive our car around in front of his house, the driveway to which was in back of our apartment. I don’t remember the names of any of those people.
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I had watched the man on different occasions, the one who shared the garage under the apartment. Sometimes we would be up late when he got home and drove in the garage. Clyde would be cleaning guns or with the others, playing cards or working puzzles. The man would close and lock
his car. Then he would stay for a few minutes, looking Clyde’s car over or listening, trying to catch some of our conversation. Sometimes he would close the garage door and stand outside and listen. I had told Buck and Clyde about this but Clyde said I was just imagining things, or afraid. I wasn’t afraid, just careful. I had seen these things and knew I wasn’t just trying to frighten anyone. I knew that man was suspicious of something.

As I lay there watching the night watchman that night, waiting for Buck to return, I remembered other nights when I would see him peep into the garage or sometimes just stop and listen. I wondered if he may be getting suspicious too. Maybe he wanted to know why we stayed up so late at night, or maybe he’d heard the others cleaning and snapping the guns.
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I could not go to sleep. I just lay there awake, looking out the window and checking my watch. Hours passed. Still the boys did not come back. I thought of everything that could happen to Buck. If he was lucky enough to get back safe, I was going to ask him if we could go home.

I lay there waiting and watching for him until the light began to show in the east and cars began to appear on the streets. Soon I saw a car moving along the street below. It looked like Clyde’s car but I couldn’t be sure. Then the driver turned off the lights, slowed down, and drove in the driveway. Someone got out and opened the garage door. Then the car drove in.

Bonnie had not slept much, if any, and I called her when I got up and went down to meet the boys. There was a door at the foot of the stairs that opened inside the garage. I met them with their arms full of guns and rifles. I was so glad to see Buck that I did not ask many questions, only why he had stayed away so long.

After they unloaded everything onto the divan and living room floor, they told us what they had done. They had burglarized some National Guard armory. I was plenty mad about it and told them what I thought of their promises. But it didn’t do much for me to get mad. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.

Buck handed me a pair of army field glasses. Clyde said he knew Bonnie would not care for anything like that. She would rather have a gun. So he had given the glasses to Buck for me. Clyde began showing Bonnie all the guns and told her what he could do with one of the army rifles. It could shoot twenty times without stopping, so long as you held your finger on the trigger.
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I wasn’t very pleased with the nice new field glasses they had given me. I would have liked them more if they had not been stolen from some armory.
Clyde told me Buck had nothing to do with the burglary, that he just sat in the car a block away. But I had my doubts about that. I believe Buck helped.

I cooked breakfast. We ate, and then went to bed. I told Buck our two weeks were about up and that I wanted to go home while we were still fine. He said we would go in a couple of days. He was ready to go home soon because he couldn’t make Clyde change his ways. There was no reason for us to risk staying with him.

That afternoon, after we all woke up and had eaten dinner, Clyde wanted to drive to the country and try out the new guns. So the three boys went to the country. They came back soon after dark. Clyde seemed very pleased with his new toys. They laughingly told us about one of the guns shooting so fast that they couldn’t get it to stop. They had to throw it in a small creek to stop it. That was the last time Buck went anywhere with Clyde while we were in Joplin.