6 Catch Street Clyde

[Vinay Pettyjohn]

Ihad got with Clyde and Bonnie the night before in Dallas. Me and L. C., that's Clyde's younger brother, was driving home from a dance in his daddy's old car. Here come Bonnie and Clyde. They honked their car horn and we pulled over. I stayed in the car. L. C. got out and went back to see what they wanted. Then he hollered at me, "Hey, come on back. Clyde wants to talk to you." Clyde was wanted then for murder and kidnaping, but I had knowed him all my life. So I got out and went to his car.

He told me, "We're here to see Momma and Marie." (That's Clyde's baby sister.) "You stay with us while L. C. gets them.'' I was 16 years old and Clyde was only seven years older, but he always called me "Boy."

Them was Prohibition days and about all there was to drink was home-brew. That's what me and L. C. had been drinking that Christmas Eve and it was about all gone. Clyde had some moonshine in his car, so I stayed with him, like he said, while L. C. fetched his folks. They lived just down the road in back of the filling station Old Man Barrow run.

After the visiting was over, Clyde told me him and Bonnie had been driving a long ways and was tired. He wanted me to go with them so I could keep watch while they got some rest. I went. I know now it was a fool thing to do, but then it seemed sort of big to be out with two famous outlaws. I reckoned Clyde took me along because he had knowed me before and figured he could count on me.

Next morning, I changed two tires on that Ford Clyde had. Clyde really banked on them Fords. They was the fastest and the best, and he knew bow to drive them with one foot in the gas tank all the time. We went into town and stopped around the comer from a grocery store.

Clyde handed me an old .41-caliber thumb buster and told me, "Take this, boy, and stand watch while I get us some spending money." Later, I found out that gun wouldn't shoot because there was two broken bullets stuck inside the chamber. I had to punch them out with a stick.

I stood outside the store while Clyde went in. Bonnie was waiting in the car around the corner. After he got the money, we walked away toward Bonnie. Now, the blocks in them days was longer than they are now; and before we got halfway back to the car, Clyde stopped alongside a Model A roadster that had the keys in it. I don't know if he'd seen something over his shoulder that spooked him or what. But he told me, "Get in that car, boy, and start it." I jumped to it. But it was a cold day and the car wouldn't start. Clyde got impatient. He told me to slip over and he'd do it. I scooted over. About then an old man and an old woman run over to the roadster and began yelling, "That's my boy's car! Get out!" Then another woman run up and began making a big fuss. All the time, Clyde was trying to get it started. He told them to stand back and they wouldn't get hurt. Then the guy who owned it run up. Clyde pointed his pistol and yelled, "Get back ' man, or I'll kill you." That man was Doyle Johnson, I learned later. He came on up to the car and reached through the roadster's isinglass window curtains and got Clyde by the throat and tried to choke him.

Clyde hollered, "Stop, man, or I'll kill you." Johnson didn't move, and Clyde done what he had threatened. About then he got the car started and we whipped around the corner to where Bonnie was waiting. We piled into her car and lit a shuck out of town.

It all seemed pointless then as to why Clyde wanted that car. I've thought about it since, and I figure he must have wanted the laws to think we was in Johnson's car. Of course, he didn't have no way of knowing he was gonna have to kill Johnson.

We headed out of town toward Waco. A mile or two down the road, Clyde pulled over and said, "Boy, shinny up that pole and cut them phone wires. We don't want no calls ahead." I done it and we went on.

As I look back, cutting them phone wires was slick. That was about all you had to do to cut off the law in them days. There wasn't no two-way radio hookups like now; and when a police used them long-distance phone wires to call the next town, it run up expenses. Them was hard times and even towns didn't have much to spend. There wasn't as many laws then, either, and they just couldn't catch up with Clyde in them V8 Fords he drove. Ted Hinton and Bob Alcorn, the Dallas lawmen I come to know a year later, told me Clyde was about the best driver in the world. They said them Fords and Clyde's driving was what kept him and Bonnie free them two years. Hell, I knowed that. I rode with him. He had me drive some when he was tired, but Clyde stayed behind the' wheel when the heat was close. He believed in a nonstop jump in territory -- sometimes as much as 1000 miles --whenever it got hot behind. He and Bonnie didn't in- tend to ever be taken alive. They was hell-bent on running till the end, and they knowed there was only one end for them. Sometimes I thought Clyde liked the running. He dreaded getting caught, but he never give up robbing to work for a living. I reckon Clyde just didn't want to work like other folks. For one thing, he never liked getting his hands dirty.

I've seen that Clyde and Bonnie movie. The only thing that ain't plumb silly the way they play it is the gun battles. Them was real enough to almost make me hurt. I've still got some lead in me from themfights with the law. When I tried to join the Army in World War Two after I got out of prison, them doctors turned me down because their X-rays showed four buckshot and a bullet in my chest and part of a lung blown away

That C. W. Moss in the movie was me, up to the end, when he let his old man turn in Clyde and Bonnie.. It was Henry Methvin that done that, not me I was in jail when that happened. The papers was right when they said Moss was a composite of me and Methvin.

Clyde drove most always, 'cause he didn't trust nobody else to drive like he could. As for me working on the car, I'd change a tire or a battery or something like that. But we'd junk a car if anything went wrong with it and get another one. I don't know how many cars I stole for Clyde. I do remember we never kept one more than a week or so, because it'd get too hot.

Now, I had been in trouble with the law before I turned out with Clyde and Bonnie. The first time was over a hot bicycle a kid got caught with. He laid a story on me. It was when I was 11 years old and selling newspapers on a Dallas street corner --newspapers I couldn't even read. I had never liked school and I dropped out after the first grade, before I learned reading and writing. Somebody else had to tell me the headlines in the papers, so I'd know what to hawk. I knowed nothing about that bicycle, and I finally convinced the law of that.

Another time,' me and L. C. got picked up in Louisiana after a car wreck. The laws took us back to Dallas to face car-stealing charges. The car we had torn up belonged to a bootlegger who had hired us to deliver his liquor. We got to pulling on a bottle and just hooked 'em with the liquor and the bootlegger's car.

I first saw Clyde Barrow under the Oak Cliff viaduct in Dallas when I was five years old. His family and my family was camped out there because we had nowhere else. Daddy had brought Momma, a daughter and five sons to Dallas from Henderson County, Texas, where he was a sharecropper. Times was hard and lots of folks was moving off farms in them days. We finally got a house in West Dallas and Daddy went to work at an iron plant. The Barrows moved into a house down the street. About a year later, Daddy, my sister and my oldest brother took sick and died of the flu. Momma, when she got herself out of the hospital and was well from the flu, supported us four boys as best she could. She done washing and took in boarders, and us kids did what we could to make a buck. Momma tried another marriage a few years after Daddy died, but he couldn't put up with us kids. Because of that, she couldn't put up with him. Momma was never one who could divide her loyalty.

Clyde run with my older brother and he used to come calling on a girl who boarded at my house. He went with her before Bonnie. He had a good job then with a big manufacturing plant in West Dallas. I was just a kid, but Clyde always treated me nice and I liked him. Then one day, his girl moved off to where her folks was in Oklahoma, and I heard he'd got her in a family way. Clyde took up with Bonnie after that.

He was pushing that Ford for all it was worth toward Waco when Bonnie said, "What you gonna do, honey? You can't go back to Dallas now. That man's shot and probably dead." He was, too, we found out later.

He was right. They was supposed to take me home to Dallas that Christmas Day. He had promised that, but I couldn't go home after Doyle Johnson got killed. I had murder on me, just like Clyde said. I was an outlaw, too, now, so I stayed with them. The robbing and the killing. never stopped, and neither did we.

I run with Clyde and Bonnie for more than eight months. That was all I could stand. I left them up in Mississippi and hitchhiked back to Texas. The law caught me in Houston. My running was over. I was in the joint when word came on May 23, 1934, that Clyde and Bonnie was killed near Arcadia, Louisiana. I've heard stories since that Clyde was homosexual, or, as they say in the pen, a "punk," but they ain't true. Maybe it was Clyde's quiet, polite manner and his slight build that fooled folks.

He was only about five feet, six inches tall and he weighed no more than 135 pounds. Me and him was about the same size, and we used to wear each other's clothes. Clyde had dark hair that was wavy. He never had a beard. Even when he didn't shave, all he had on his chin was fuzz.

Another way that story might have got started was his wearing a wig sometimes when him and Bonnie had to drive through a town where they might be recognized. He wore the wig for disguise and for no other reason.

Clyde never walked right, either. He'd chopped off his big toe and part of the second toe on his left foot when he was in prison, because he couldn't keep up, with the pace the farm boss set.

Or the story could have come from sensation writers who believed anything dropped on them and who blew it to proportions that suited their imagination.

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