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'COLUMN

I by D~ vi(j
route into an Arcadia caught in a sightseers' crush the like of which it would never experience again. By car, bus, truck, train, even airplane, the curious had converged, thousands upon thousands of them. To this day I can see the crowds of milling, perspiring people, their paper plates and candy wrappers windblown along the streets of this normally neat and charming town. For my family the first stop was to see the automobile, parked (as best I can recall it now) on the dri ve ramp of a town garage (or was it the fire station?). Sightseers surrounded it on all sides, though by now, of course, the bodies had been removed. From the automobile we could move on to the next exhi1it, a crowd of people pressed in against a tall florid man in a broadbrimmed hat who stood on a sidewalk against a building wall. Some of the men in the crowd were reporters and were taking down what he was saying: "I tell you one thing- I sure ha ted to draw down on a woman." (Here was a curious difference between 1934 and 1968: though people were as fascinated by violence then as they are now, in those days lawmen were the heroes and desperadoes the villains.) The final exhibits were Clyde and_ Bonnie themselves. They lay in a funeral parlor, a makeshift one I think, at the rear of a furniture store. I had become separated from my parents and did th.is one by myself. The queue was long and unruly, and the wait almost interminable. Suddenly I was inside and then out again, with only an uncomprehending impression ofthe grisly, unreal specimens I had gazed upon. What I remember best is that it was terribly hot inside the place, and that someone whispered that Bonnie-:-the future inspirer of fashion - was wearing no pants under her dress. When I got out I went into the shadowed interior of a general mercantile store which smelled of fabrics and grains and chemical fertilizers and horse collars. There I fished around in the cooler box until I found a bottle of j\-e!.listrawberry soda. The icewater in which it had chilled felt marvelous on my wrists. As "for the bullet that I dug out of the tree, I carried it around all summer. One day in the fall I left it in my school desk during recess and somebody swiped it. I've always believed I knO\,who. But now that the movif has made heroes of Clyde and Bonnie and glorified the violence in which they lived and died, I doubt it would do much good to ask him to give it back.

TI,e day the real

e and

B011/Itie

'ere g1Jtnlted dO'lf) I~

It was 34 years ago, give a few weeks, that I actually met, in a manner of speaking, the desperadoes Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. If the circumstance that they ,vere stretched out s'afely dead on tables in a Louisiana undertaking parlor put them at a disadvantage, it was decidedly to my o,,-n advantage, considering the telTible reputations of these two who had lived and died in such depravity and misery. Of late, I have thought a lot about that incredible Wednesday the 23rd of May, 1934, that brought the desperadoes to the end of their road. When the' movie Bonnie and Clyde was shown at the International Film Festival oJMontreal, we are told, the audience greeied its violent and sordid excesses wi Lh gales oflaughter, and at the end rewarded the entire production with a mighty ovation. In the weeks since then, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker have become something akin to world folk beroes. Bonnie herself, as portrayed by Faye Dunaway, has even exerted an influence on the world of fashion (LIFE, Jan. 12).

You

see, I know about the real Clyde and Bonnie because the lawmen's ambush that killed them took place near Gibsland, La.-which is only about 15 miles from my own boyhood hometown, Minden-and because you remember very well the things that happen when you are 13, though not necessarily the most important things. I know, because I visited the site of the ambush on that very \Vednesday, and extracted from the soft bark of a pine tree, with my five-bladed bone-handled official Scout knife, it bullet tha t mE" y ,ery well have passed through tue Hesh of Clyde or Bonnie or both. I also spent haU an hour or so on my hands ana knees in the underbrush whue the Texa.:;lawman Frank Hamer and his five fellow possemen had waited to shoot at the Barrow-Parker automobile. \Vhat I hoped to find was an empty brass cartridge, or maybe a shotgun shell casing ;,till smelling of cordite. Alas, other souyenir hunters had got there first, in vast and determined numbers. There was a reason I was late on the ;,cene, and inevitably it had to do with m:,- father's sense of responsibility. In

the first place, though the ambush had taken place a little after 9 o'clock on that bright and hot morning, I did not hear about it until noontime when my father and I arrived home for lunch: I from school, with no inkling that anything was up, and he from his office, bearing the news that was electrifying our town and the world. Of course I howled for us to leave for Gibsland immediately to be in on the excitement, but Dad ruled that I had to finish ,the day's session at school. Actually, I was on solid ground in proposing that the family embark on so lurid an excursion. In those years my mother's short stories were appearing regularly in Halper's magazine and the Atlantic 1I1onthly, under her pen name Ada Jack Can-er. My father., though he was not a man of letters, had a profOllnd appreciation of her artistry and understood her need to sharpen her pencils on dramatic events of the kind we had heard about this day. She in turn never doubted that I too would someday become a writer-a journalist; she guessed-and tried always to let me shal'e the experiences on which she fed her own creative impulses. Thus it was that, when school was dismissed at 3 o'clock, the three of us set out in the old Chrysler, heading east on the Dixie Onrland Highway. And as the traffic thickened, becoming practically bumper to bumper on the approach to Gibsland, we knew that many others had , felt appetites of their own. The trap had been sprung a few miles sou th of Gihsland on a graveled and pitted secondary road at a point where it swept around a curve and into a patch of pine woods. While I searched for a car~ridge and dug for my bullet, and ,,-hi~emy father listened to a local man's descrip:ive lecture on the events of the morr..iug, mr mother strolled up the road i:l the direction from which Clyde and Bonnie had come. She was trying to discover the last glimpse that Bonnie could have had of this earth. Later she told me how lovely it was: a hazed vista. across a valley of piney woodlands and cornfields and patches of (:otton in bloom, with the red clay hils shimmering Lerond. From the talk I had picked up. I wondered if Bonnie was looking at trre scenery: in her hand as she died was a half-eaten sandwich. Fl'Om the ambush site the bullet-riddled en', with the bodies inside, had been towed to the town of Arcadia, the Bienville Parish seat, some miles to the east. Now, hours later, we followed this