Public Enemies (7 page)

They came from Dallas. Both the Barrow family, subsistence farmers from south of the city, and Bonnie’s mother, a West Texas widow, had joined the rising tide of rural families moving into Southwestern cities in the early 1920s. The Barrows were so poor they lived for a time beneath a viaduct. In time Clyde’s father started a scrap metal business and built a house in a poor, unincorporated area known as the Bog, just across the Trinity River from downtown. Subject to flooding, crisscrossed by railroads, its air and water polluted by cement plants and foundries, the Bog was a dusty latticework of bleak houses and lean-tos, unpaved roads and littered yards.

Dropping out of school at sixteen, Clyde became a teenage burglar, joining his older brother Ivan, known as Buck, sneaking into stores at night. The boys were a study in contrasts. Where Buck was a lethargic, monosyllabic figure who talked little and drank lots, Clyde was small, peppy, and bright, a fast talker with rosy cheeks who loved guns and played the guitar and the saxophone. In later years Dallas lawmen would remember stopping the brothers for stealing scrap metal, no doubt to help their father. According to Clyde’s sister Nell, their first arrests came after they stole a flock of turkeys from an East Texas farm; stopped by police in a truck full of hot poultry, Buck drew a few days in jail and Clyde was released.

For a time Clyde tried a series of menial jobs: messenger boy, movie usher, mirror factory worker. None lasted. By eighteen he evidenced the first signs of a powerful ego, a sense that he was entitled to something better than life in the Bog. In a telling stab at reinvention, he changed his middle name from Chestnut to Champion, hoping that “Clyde Champion Barrow” might elevate him to the status that he believed he deserved. It didn’t: he was still a two-bit burglar. He spent 1928 and 1929 ransacking stores throughout North Texas with Buck, until Buck was captured one night after a foot chase in the town of Denton.

Clyde met Bonnie Parker one night in January 1930, when he showed up at a west Dallas home where she was babysitting. A temperamental girl with a histrionic bent, Bonnie married a teenage layabout and had fallen into a depression following the breakup of their marriage. She was an avid reader of detective and movie magazines, and her diary entries portray a young woman desperate to break out of a routine of waitressing and babysitting. “Blue as usual,” she wrote one night in 1928. “Not a darn thing to do. Don’t know a darn thing.” And the day after that: “Haven’t been anywhere this week. Why don’t something happen?”
¹

The attraction between Bonnie and Clyde was immediate, but the romance was short-lived. Several nights later Dallas police arrested Clyde for burglary. When the charges fell through, he was transferred to Waco to face another set of charges. Bonnie, who was obsessed with Clyde and his exciting adventures with the law, moved into a cousin’s home in Waco. When another inmate told Clyde he had a gun at his home, Clyde persuaded Bonnie to smuggle it into the jail. Clyde and two other men used the pistol a few days later to make their escape. They lit out north, crossing Oklahoma into Missouri and driving on into Indiana, stealing cars and burglarizing stores. Police finally caught up with them in Middletown, Ohio, taking Clyde into custody following a car chase. He was returned to Waco, where a judge gave him a fourteen-year sentence in the brutal state prison at Huntsville.

He served barely two years. After bombarding Clyde with teary letters for months, Bonnie finally began dating other men, but when Clyde was released in February 1932, they were immediately reunited. Clyde avoided crime for a time, taking a construction job in Massachusetts that his sister arranged. But, complaining of loneliness, he soon returned to the Bog and began hanging around the service station his father had opened on its main thoroughfare, Eagle Ford Road. Within days he was rousted by Fort Worth police, arrested, then released. He returned home incensed. “Mama, I’m never gonna work again,” Clyde told his mother. “And I’ll never [be arrested] again, either. I’m not ever going back to that [prison] hell hole. I’ll die first. I swear it, they’re gonna have to kill me.”
²

The arrest appears to have deepened Clyde’s sense of persecution and victimization. Crime was the only avenue open to him, he rationalized; police had given him no choice. He and several partners returned to burglarizing stores. As she did throughout Clyde’s career, Bonnie took no part in these crimes, though occasionally she sat in the getaway car. On one such excursion in the town of Kaufman, Texas, Clyde was surprised by a night watchman and forced to flee; when their getaway car stalled on a muddy road, he and Bonnie stole a mule and set off cross-country. Cornered by a posse the next morning, Bonnie was arrested. Clyde got away. Bonnie languished in jail for three months before being released in July 1932. Clyde’s crimes grew more violent in her absence. He murdered a storekeeper in Hillsboro, Texas, and, after Bonnie was freed, killed a sheriff in Oklahoma.

The moment Bonnie and Clyde became “Bonnie and Clyde” came on a Saturday evening, August 6, 1932, when Clyde’s partner, Raymond Hamilton, spirited Bonnie away from her mother’s side to Clyde’s side, where she remained for the rest of her life. The couple commenced a routine they would follow for two years, disappearing for a few weeks, sometimes months, then slipping back to Dallas for clandestine family reunions. These rendezvous, at out-of-the-way roadsides near Dallas, followed a pattern. Clyde and Bonnie announced their return by tossing a bottle onto a family member’s porch, sometimes with a note inside. Word passed among family members in code; for the Barrows, the mention of “cooking red beans” meant a meeting was at hand. The families drove to the meeting point at dusk, spread blankets on the grass, and listened as Bonnie and Clyde rambled on about their latest adventures.

Their wanderings had no aim or focus. Clyde simply drove from state to state, robbing a gas station or drugstore or sometimes a bank when they ran low on cash. It makes their story a jerky, alinear narrative, a string of scattered episodes with no discernible arc. But that’s the way they lived, ricocheting across an area loosely defined by Minnesota, Mississippi, Colorado, and New Mexico, rarely staying in one place long. Unlike Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde and Bonnie made no effort to establish a permanent base until the last weeks of their lives; for months the closest they came to a home was an abandoned barn outside the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie. As their notoriety grew, they would resort to living out of their car, which was littered with guns, license plates, and food wrappers. They gave up bathing and normal hygiene. Their clothes were dirty. They smelled.

Clyde clearly aspired to be a bank robber, but his first attempts were humiliating. On November 30, 1932, he and a partner entered the bank at Orinogo, Missouri, north of Joplin. A gunfight ensued, during which Clyde’s partner managed to scoop up some loose bills. He and Clyde scrambled to the getaway car and avoided a desultory pursuit. The take came to $80.
^b
All that winter Bonnie and Clyde continued their murderous travels, killing a man in Temple, Texas, who tried to stop them from stealing his car on Christmas Day, murdering a Dallas detective who surprised Clyde one night in the Bog, taking a motorcycle cop hostage in Springfield, Missouri, when he stopped Clyde for speeding. Their notoriety, however, was limited to Dallas, where their crimes were front-page news. Outside Texas they remained all but unknown.

In March 1933 Clyde’s brother Buck was paroled from prison and, accompanied by Buck’s wife, Blanche, the brothers reunited in Joplin, where they rented a garage apartment and set to burglarizing jewelry stores. On April 13 a group of Joplin lawmen arrived at the apartment, responding to a call from a suspicious neighbor. Clyde and Buck surprised them, murdering two officers before speeding away untouched. The Joplin killings thrust the “Barrow Gang” onto front pages outside Texas for the first time. The discovery of Bonnie’s poetry and photos of Bonnie and Clyde posing with guns and cigars made Bonnie a public figure, though her real fame would be posthumous.

Two weeks later the two couples, accompanied by the teenage W. D. Jones, drove through the northern Louisiana town of Ruston, looking for a bank to rob. When W.D. stole a car, its owner, a local undertaker, and his girlfriend gave chase, forcing Clyde to take them hostage. After an all-day drive (which later served as a memorable scene in the 1967 movie), Clyde let the couple go. In the confusion, the homesick W.D. disappeared. Clyde and Bonnie finally found him on a Dallas roadside on Friday, June 9. That night the three drove to the Panhandle, heading toward a rendezvous with Buck and Blanche Barrow.

That Saturday night, Clyde was driving east on Texas Highway 203, a dirt grade rarely maintained by state construction crews. Six miles east of the hamlet of Quail, the bridge over the Salt Fork of the Red River had been destroyed. In the darkness Clyde passed the fallen danger sign at over seventy miles an hour. He didn’t see the ravine until it was too late. With no warning at all, the big Ford was suddenly airborne. It soared down the slope, rolled twice, and crashed into the sandy soil beside the shrunken river. For a moment, everything was still. Steam rose from the ruined car. Gasoline began to seep into the sand. Clyde, thrown from the wreck but unhurt, was the first to come to his senses. He pulled himself to his feet and smelled the gasoline. He realized the car could explode.

Just then two farmers, Steve Pritchard and Lonzo Cartwright, scuttled down the slope. They had seen the wreck from Pritchard’s porch above the river. Together they pulled W.D. from the backseat, groggy but unhurt. Pritchard noticed the guns and glanced at Cartwright, wondering what they had gotten themselves into. Bonnie, unconscious, was stuck in the front seat, her leg trapped by the crushed car door.

Suddenly, with an audible whoosh, the gasoline caught fire. Flames leaped all around the car and began to lap at Bonnie’s legs. She woke and began screaming. Together Clyde and the two farmers tried to pry her from the seat while W.D. gathered the guns and tossed handfuls of sand onto the fire. As they worked the flames grew higher, engulfing Bonnie’s legs, then licking at her head and shoulders. Her stockings began melting into her legs. Panicking, she screamed for Clyde to kill her. Clyde, ignoring the flames, wrapped his arms around Bonnie and, with the farmers’ help, finally managed to pull her free.

Her legs were badly burned. Clyde carried her up the slope to Pritchard’s ramshackle farmhouse, where his parents and Cartwright’s wife, Gladys, stood watching. Inside, Clyde laid Bonnie on a bed as the elderly Mrs. Pritchard inspected the burns. Bonnie’s entire leg, from ankle to hip, had been burned black, exposing the bone in several places. Her face and arms were blistered. “She needs a doctor,” Mrs. Pritchard said, quickly applying a salve to Bonnie’s wounds.

“No,” Clyde and Bonnie said in unison. “We can’t afford that,” Clyde went on. “Try and do what you can.”

Clyde stepped out onto the front porch and conferred with W.D., then ran back down to the car to retrieve their guns. The Pritchards milled about nervously, unsure what to do. Lonzo Cartwright didn’t know who these people were, but he was certain they were outlaws of some kind. When W.D. wasn’t looking, Cartwright slipped out the backdoor and ran across the fields toward a neighbor’s house, intending to call the police. “Where’d the other guy go?” W.D. asked after a moment.

“I don’t know,” Pritchard said. “He’s probably out back.”

Just then Clyde hurried up to the house, carrying a canvas bag full of guns. He, too, noticed Cartwright’s absence. “I could kick your butt for letting that guy leave,” he snapped at W.D. “Now keep an eye on these people.” W.D. pointed the shotgun at the Pritchards while Clyde knelt beside Bonnie and smoothed her hair. “Honey, I don’t know what to do about moving you,” he said.

“I can travel,” Bonnie murmured. “It’ll hurt for sure. But we can’t stay here.”

A few minutes later, headlights flashed through the woods in front of the house. “Everybody get on the floor,” Clyde ordered. He and W.D. skipped outside and disappeared into the bushes.

A car drove up to the house. Into the night air stepped the Collingsworth County Sheriff, George Corry. With him was Tom Hardy, the Wellington town marshal. Lonzo Cartwright had driven to the jail and told them of the scene at the house. The two lawmen figured they had a trio of drunken teenagers to deal with.

Clyde stepped from behind the bushes, his Browning automatic rifle trained on the two lawmen. “Raise your hands,” he shouted. He and W.D. disarmed the two men and used their handcuffs to bind them together. As they did, W.D. noticed a movement inside the house. Glancing through a kitchen window, he saw Gladys Cartwright, her four-month-old son on her hip, reaching for the backdoor. Thinking she was trying to escape, he fired his shotgun, hitting her in the hand.

As her family rushed to apply bandages to the wound—Mrs. Cartwright’s thumb would later be amputated—W.D. stalked back to the car. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. He glanced over at an old car in the weeds and proceeded to shoot out all four of its tires. Clyde walked into the farmhouse and returned to the patrol car with Bonnie in his arms. He carefully laid her on the backseat. He and W.D. shoved the officers in beside her and without another word drove off.