Clyde and Bonnie Rubble, or Negligéed à vu Discharge, or, Done Away With Espray de Corpse

Bullet Surprise-winning ex-Washington Post popcorn-aisle-bedammed filmboy, novelist Stephen Hunter says Goodbye, Young Lovers, Wherever in Hell You Are to a pair who ripened at a young age into Swiss cheese thanks to a hailin’-farewell of lead awarded in a faux-slo-mo Bullet Surprise*

*As well as Special Oscars for Best Spurting Actor/Actress and Best Lead Performance, Key and Pistol Grip, Holey Artist, and Posthume Design

all their own, delivered by the gross, both in rounds, then, and then some, and in box-office 33 years later:

Clyde and Bonnie Died for Nihilism

Stephen Hunter

Route 154 seems like a road out of a Beckett landscape, a long, hot, flat, dusty strip that runs through a featureless pine forest. It comes from nowhere, it goes nowhere—connecting, on a more-or-less straight shot, Mt. Lebanon and Sailes, in Bienville Parish in Louisiana’s northwestern corner. Not much has changed in 75 years. Someone has asphalted what was once raw earth and now, of course, you may Google up a certain point and view it through the satellite’s eye, sliding through the magnifications from the comfort of your own home. What you see, no matter the height, is a ribbon of road running through a green nothingness. But in that desolate place at 9:10 a.m. on May 23, 1934, something memorable happened.

If the outer-space eye existed then, it would have presented the image of a sleek Cordoba gray Ford V-8, expertly driven, raising a shroud of dust as it roared along at nearly 70 miles an hour in the direction of Sailes. It would observe neutrally as the vehicle slowed as it approached what appeared to be an old farmer’s truck, in some distress, off the side of the road. As its occupants recognized the truck and possibly the owner—accounts differ as to his presence—they halted.

Without blinking, the satellite would chronicle the next development: Six police officers arose from the bushes at roadside, the closest 25 feet from the Ford. All six officers opened fire with a variety of high-powered weapons, including two—or was it three?—powerful Browning Automatic Rifles. One of them, Dallas Deputy Ted Hinton, fired his 20-round BAR clip, grabbed a semi-auto 12-gauge shotgun and emptied it, then snatched his .45 automatic from a shoulder holster and emptied that magazine. Twelve seconds later (or was it 16?) the lawmen had fired over 150 bullets and shells (or was it 168?) into the vehicle and inevitably its occupants.

The car was transformed into a macabre American icon, a stern message to all road desperados of what lay ahead as both John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson would learn in the next few weeks. So spectacular was the carnage of pierced metal, fractured window, and bloodstained upholstery that the vehicle itself went on national tour of carnie grounds and state fairs and even today is displayed in tacky splendor not in a museum but in a Nevada casino.

It was death for Clyde and Bonnie. Their bodies were so mutilated by high-velocity bullets that a coroner in nearby Arcadia didn’t even bother to count the holes. The autopsy pictures are easily accessible on the Internet: two scrawny bodies (“That little pipsqueak was Clyde Barrow?” a viewer asked) literally torn to shreds, frosted with blood, faces pathetically slack, eyes resolved into coin slots. And so Clyde and Bonnie entered history.

Or did they?