Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend - Softcover

Schneider, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805092358 ISBN 13: 9780805092356

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010

Synopsis

The flesh-and-blood story of the outlaw lovers who shot their way across Depression-era America, based on archival research, declassified FBI documents, and interviews

The daring movie revolutionized Hollywood―now the true story of Bonnie and Clyde is told in the lovers' own voices, with verisimilitude and drama to match Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

Strictly nonfiction―no dialogue or other material has been made up―and set in the dirt-poor Texas landscape that spawned the star-crossed outlaws, Paul Schneider's brilliantly researched and dramatically crafted tale begins with a daring jailbreak and ends with an ambush and shoot-out that consigns their bullet-riddled bodies to the crumpled front seat of a hopped-up getaway car.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow's relationship was, at the core, a toxic combination of infatuation blended with an instinct for going too far too fast. Without glamorizing the killers, or vilifying the cops, the book, alive with action and high-level entertainment, provides a complete picture of America's most famous outlaw couple and the culture that created them.

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Schneider is the author of Bonnie and Clyde, the critically acclaimed Brutal Journey, the highly praised The Enduring Shore, and The Adirondacks, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. He and his wife, the photographer Nina Bramhall, and their son, Nathaniel, divide their time between Bradenton, Florida and West Tisbury, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER 1

EASTHAM

Fog rolls off the Trinity River in East Texas in the hours before dawn, especially in winter, and lies on the land like Vaseline. It’s thick and calm and quiet and peaceful in the fog, there where the piney woods that stretch on east into Louisiana give way somewhat abruptly to blackland prairies that spread west all the way to Dallas and beyond. She almost can’t see her hand held out of the open car door in front of her own face. It’s that thick.

And even better, surely no one can see her sitting here in this car on this dirt side road off another dirt side road, not far from the river bottoms. Sure, her leg that was burned badly a few months back still hurts and the other hip hurts even more from the rheumatism that flared up only recently. Rheumatism, at only twenty-three years old, no less. Too much sitting in cold cars. Too much sleeping in cold cars! But even with the pain, it’s a comfort to know she can’t be seen parked here in a cloud at daybreak, like a ghost in heaven. It’s chilly, this cloud on the ground, but it’s safe, and if death is like this fog it might not be so bad.

Only it’s not worth thinking about death. That’s the rule. “Let’s don’t be sad,“ she said to her mother only a few months before when the subject came up. We’re here now. We’re alive.

“Let’s don’t be sad” is what she said.

It’s like thinking about air, for God’s sake. And why think about air? Death and air. Fog, though, is good. Thick and quiet, except for now and then an occasional tick ticka tick of the steel in the car that says the sun has risen, even if she can’t see it rising.

When you’re standing in a cold ditch in fog so thick you can’t even see the car only a few yards away it’s amazing where your mind will want to wander. Standing there with a fat automatic rifle in your hand waiting, what has it been now, ten minutes, an hour? Could be either. But you don’t let your mind wander for the same reason you don’t drink much moonshine even when everyone else does. Or, rather, you don’t drink it especially when everyone else does. Even when Bonnie does. She likes it sometimes, but you know it dulls the senses, slows you down, gets you caught, gets you killed. So you don’t drink much moonshine and you don’t let your mind wander through the fog.

Where are they? Should be any minute now.

Eastham Farm, burnin’ Eastham, bloody burnin’ Eastham Prison Farm. This breakout was your idea in the first place, you and Fults thought it up together. But that was back a few years, back when you were still a prisoner on the inside. Not out here and free. Ha! FREE! As much as being on the run from the laws is freedom. Yeah, what a wonderful freedom this is: being wanted, being wounded, being hot as hell in three states, four, five states, whatever. Feels like you and Bonnie are hot as hell everywhere. Hot right in this ditch in the chilly fog a mile from the burnin’ hell. Oh they’d love to find you here, for sure.

But you weren’t thinking how it would feel to get this close to this place again when you said let’s do it. No way. And you weren’t thinking you would be here with this pathetic drug addict Mullins instead of Fults or Raymond or someone you don’t have to watch every second, someone who’s likely to turn rat just for another hit of dope.

It’s amazing what a man can force himself not to remember most days and nights, except when it creeps up. And standing here in a ditch so close to it all, to where most of it all happened anyway, some of it does creep up no matter how you fight it. Burnin’ Eastham. Burnin’ hell.

Sure, you have killed a few men, more than a few, but you’re not a killer at heart. Not according to your friends, anyway. This is not to say that you’re afraid to pull the trigger when it has to be pulled. And not to say that you don’t like the look of fear in big cops’ faces when a gun’s pointing their way. (If they’d look a little more afraid and not be reaching for their own guns all the time, you tell your friend, the trigger might not need pulling so often.) You pull the trigger, sure. It’s just that there’s no pleasure in it, even when it has to happen. So you’re not a killer, right?

But when those memories do creep up, you start to think about those guards and their finks, their chains and their bats. And their “trusties” who will sit on your head while the man—the “captain”—whips you with the strap. And even worse sometimes is what goes on when the guards aren’t around.

When those memories creep up....Those guys, well, they deserve whatever comes their way. At least as much as you do.

The guards at Eastham Prison Farm, some thirty miles north of the main Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, hate that fog but are pretty well used to it. Running the boys out the two miles or so to the work site from the building in dim dawn light and fog means riding closer to the jogging squad than the guards want to ride, just so they can see the boys clearly. Closer to the convicts means the convicts are closer to the guards, closer to their reins and closer to their bridles. Closer to the loaded Smith & Wesson .38s in their holsters. Closer to the shotguns, though with those right in a guard’s lap all day, he is damned well likely to get a blast off if a prisoner is stupid enough to try to come near it.

Or not. Trouble comes fast in fog. On a foggy morning just like this, in fact, an Eastham guard named John Greer rides into the middle of his squad, all fired up to give the lazy bastards a piece of his mind, and maybe a piece of the bat for milling around instead of chopping weeds. Only instead of pistol-whipping some sorry two-time loser across the side of the head as planned, it’s suddenly Greer who is pulled off his horse and passed around a circle of convicts, like some Julius Caesar, to be stabbed one at a time with homemade dirk knives. Greer doesn’t even get a single shot off and he winds up dead with no witnesses as to who exactly did it. Funny how you can have lots of killers but no witnesses at all. Not that someone at burnin’ Eastham won’t be made to pay hell for the killing of a guard.

This foggy morning another guard, whose name is Olin Bozeman, isn’t going to make that particular mistake. He’ll make a different one, which he’ll live to regret, and one of his fellow guards, Major Crowson, will make an even dumber move that he won’t live to regret because he won’t live. No, as a general rule the guards don’t ever want to be too close to a squad of felons armed with hoes and other tools, not to mention guns snuck in from outside. Guns that the guards know nothing about until the cold barrel is pointed straight at them by a man who may hate them enough to kill them or may not, but who is desperate to get out by whatever means necessary.

But Eastham guards still have to be able to count the boys as they jog along. So the thicker the fog, the closer they have to stay.

Seems like counting is most of a guard’s job most of the days. Over and over again, for fourteen or sixteen hours a day, for a few bucks’ pay to feed a family they only get to see every other night at best, and an occasional Sunday. A guard gets his breakfast before dawn in the guards’ dining room, gets his horse after breakfast from the lot boy, who has the animal all saddled up and waiting, gets his shotgun from the picket, and just about the first words he hears spoken is the trusty yelling out the number of men coming out of the tank for their squad.

“Eighteen, Boss,“ he says, or whatever the number of the day is, and they count them coming out of the door in their white suits for those that haven’t tried to run in the past and their striped suits for those that have run off and been caught.

“One, two, three, four, five, six...” until they get them all and can yell back “Eighteen,“ to let them know inside the building they got the same number outside, as if someone could get lost in the doorway. Then all day on the horse with that shotgun in one hand and the reins in another, come hot sun or come thick fog, they count those boys over and over until lunch.

The only reason the guards might run in sooner than lunch is come hail or rain. They got hail around here can kill a man once in a while, and lightning: an Eastham guard named Sye Fulsom once saw a convict get zapped right off the water wagon. Scared the shit out of the mules, literally.

On a normal day, though, it’s work the squad hard until lunch and then run them back to the building, yell “Eighteen coming in” and hear the voice come out “Eighteen, Boss” when the men are in the door again. Lunch is usually ham and beans, but it’s better than the squad is getting, and for that a guard in these times can be thankful. And maybe there’s a moment for a catnap or at least a few minutes of horizontal in the guards’ bunkhouse before it’s time to get the horse and get the shotgun. (The pistol never leaves his side. “Goes to bed with you, gets up with you, and goes to the long table with you,“ says a guard who was there. “Boy, it damn near grows into you.”) Then it’s back to “Eighteen, Boss” out the door and “Eighteen” called back in. Back out to fields in summer or the woodlots in winter for the afternoon’s work session.

That would be the afternoon and evening’s work. “Can to can’t” is what the prisoners call the workday on burnin’ Eastham, meaning the work goes “from the time they can see until they cannot.”

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About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0805092358
• ISBN 13: 9780805092356
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400