God Bless Bonnie and Clyde

You’ve read the story of Jesse James— Of how he lived and died; If you’re still in need Of something to read Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.1

Whether the six men waited one or two nights is debated still, but the location is not. At a slight turn in what we now call Highway 154, squatting at the roots of Louisiana pines, squinting through mosquito clouds, four Texas officers and two local deputies watched for a gray-tan V-8-model Ford Sedan. Seven miles away, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow pulled away from Ma Canefield’s Cafe, where some believe they ordered two hamburgers, others say egg sandwiches, but everyone agrees they took their food to go. The lovers were then among the most coveted, if not the most wanted, of a small army of Depression era bandits—criminals with names like Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson—who emerged from dust-bowled Midwest shantytowns as soon, it sometimes seems, as the banks began to fail.

By that day, May 23, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde had been running for two years. They were 23 and 25 and in love. They had Clyde’s saxophone, Bonnie’s detective magazines, two sawed-off shotguns, two machine rifles, ten automatic pistols, and 1,500 rounds of ammunition in their gray-tan V-8-model Ford Sedan.

In the woods, the six men waited. Across the road was their lure: a truck hanging on a jack. The air that day most likely stuck to the skin, the sky would have been a hazy lemon, and Clyde should have been driving, the way he always did, fast. Inside, he and Bonnie may have talked about anything—her poetry, her mama (who she always missed), the ache in his back—or not talked at all. But one of them made a decision to stop at that truck on the side of the road, and with that, what they were—flesh, veins, chin hair, mascara, chatter, swagger—calcified. Nearly 200 shots spent across a lonely bend in the road. Then they were legend.

This place, too.

Interstate 20 leaves Dallas in a smog cloud replaced by the derricks of east Texas and then casinos of Shreveport before saddling up and over the Mississippi and into the Deep South. Easily missed along this path is a piny exhale locals call Gibsland, a town distinct from others in northwestern Louisiana only by a sign growing up from red clay: “Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum. Next Right.”

Those intrigued by this call, and a few are every day, veer off from the steady march of interstate and follow the spur through woods, across railroad tracks, and into this town, population 1,047. To the right is a one-block city park, where in summer months a gazebo gives sweaty kids shelter from afternoon storms. Just past this, a stolid brick City Hall, the fire station, and then the Gibsland Grille—where inside, Marsha can be found writing “Buttermilk Pie” on the daily specials board that hangs above a small lending library of paperback romances.

Drive half a block further up Main Street and the museum sign is hard to miss: big and yellow, with fake bullet holes puncturing the word “Ambush.” Under this awning, a man smokes Carltons beside the open door of his Chevrolet full-back truck.

Stop, and he’ll tell a story.

The afternoon I drive into Gibsland, it is winter and I am heading cross-country with my dog from Florida to Texas then back to Iowa, where I now live. I have plans to meet a friend on the Mississippi, but am one of those who can’t resist a sign like that. So I veer from I-20 and find myself here.

“See that circle there?” says the man, after tossing his spent Carlton to the ground, giving me his name—Boots—and leading me through the glass doors of what was once Ma Canefield’s Cafe. “That was the lunch counter.”

At my feet are the rusty circular footsteps of former...