He Started It(9)

Mississippi? No. We cross diagonally through that state and into Louisiana. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief to be so far from the accident and from that pickup truck. The event was weird enough to put everyone on edge for a while.

They’re not why we crossed through Mississippi, though. We did it because it’s the same route we took the first time. Next stop: Gibsland, Louisiana. Of all the places to visit, Grandpa chose the place where the FBI caught Bonnie and Clyde—if dying in a hail of bullets can be considered getting caught.

On the way there, Grandpa told us the story of Bonnie and Clyde. He had a great voice, a deep baritone with no hint of an accent. It was the kind that should’ve been on the radio back when stories were told with voices.

“Bonnie and Clyde are one of the great love stories of the twentieth century,” he said. “They were young and wild and robbed banks in the middle of the Depression.”

He made me believe they were on a big romantic adventure, and that their exploits were harmless enough, given the time period. What did I care about banks and their money? I didn’t. And I had no reason to doubt what he said about Bonnie and Clyde. We didn’t have smartphones back then, so we couldn’t fact-check anything he said.

That night we stayed in a cabin at Black Lake, where Bonnie and Clyde had a little get-together two days before they died.

“Tomorrow,” Grandpa said, “we’re going to the Bonnie and Clyde museum.”

I fell asleep imagining what it would be like to be so famous they made a whole museum just for you, about you, to memorialize all that is you. I wondered if there was anything I could do, other than robbing banks, to get a museum of my own. Cure cancer, maybe. It was the only thing I could come up with.

Grandpa had talked so much about Bonnie and Clyde, I felt like I knew everything before we even got to the museum. I knew how they met, how many banks they robbed, not to mention the grocery stores and gas stations. A whole slew of robberies were attributed to them, or to their gang. Bonnie and Clyde had their own gang.

“We should have a gang,” I said. We were at breakfast, eating eggs and bacon and grits. Everything was drenched in butter and syrup.

Grandpa laughed. “You don’t need a gang, you’re already in a pack. A pack of coyotes.”

“It’s a band of coyotes,” I said. “Not a pack.”

“See? You sounded like a yapping coyote when you said that. You’re a band of little coyotes, and you’re the toughest, meanest bunch this side of the Mississippi.”

“We’re on the west side, you know,” Eddie said. “We crossed the Mississippi.”

“So?” I said.

“I’m just pointing it out.”

Like that mattered. We were little coyotes and we were going to have our own museum. Who cared what side of the Mississippi it was on?

On the way to the museum, we got lost. It was down some windy roads, away from the highway, and nestled between two other stores. Out front, there was an old car riddled with bullets. It wasn’t the car, but it was like the one they drove and then died in. Eddie thought it was the coolest thing ever until we went inside the museum.

It wasn’t what I’d imagined. Whatever I had conjured up in my head from all those stories Grandpa told, it was wrong. In my mental museum, there wasn’t any blood. No dead bodies, either.

Since we were close to where Bonnie and Clyde died, that’s what the museum commemorated. The ambush. The walls were covered with black-and-white pictures of their bodies, the men who shot them, and the real car. A glass case of guns was in the center of the room, and it was there I saw what Clyde’s favorite gun looked like. The Browning automatic rifle was big and heavy and not romantic at all.

“Isn’t this fantastic?” Grandpa said. “All these resources just to bring down one couple.”

Sure. Fantastic.

Especially in the back, where they had re-created the aftermath of the shootout, complete with dummies of Bonnie and Clyde. Bloodied dummies. They were slumped over each other in the shot-up car. She was twenty-three. He was twenty-five.

If that was love, it looked like an awful thing.

We weren’t the only ones in the museum. Two couples were there, on their way to Savannah, and they had stopped in to see the museum just as we had. Both of the men were police officers, so their interest was in how Bonnie and Clyde were captured. They didn’t care about love.

“He was shot seventeen times,” one said. “She was shot over twenty.”

Grandpa also left out the fact that Bonnie and Clyde weren’t just bank robbers; they were murderers. Killed at least thirteen people, according to the records.

That’s when I’d had enough. I went outside and sat down on a bench, feeling like I was the one who got swindled. I no longer wanted my own museum.

Grandpa came out to find me. “You okay?”

I shrugged.

“They weren’t good,” I said.

“Ah.” He sat down beside me. “You know, sometimes your grandmother wore awful clothes. It’s terrible to say, but she did. She had this one blouse with pineapples on it.” He sighed. “I hated that blouse.”

“So?” I said.

“Do you think I told her how much I hated that blouse?”

I shrugged. “Why not?”

“Because it would’ve hurt her feelings.”