Going to Chicago by Rob Levandoski

stations and banks and groceries. Along the way Clyde killed at least thirteen men. There were lots of famous gangsters in those days. The way the law dogged them, and their daring escapes, made Bonnie and Clyde the most famous.
    Only three months before our own adventure to Chicago a Texas Highway Patrol officer named Frank Hamer—a real tough sonofabitch who’d tracked down and killed sixty-five outlaws in his career—ambushed Bonnie and Clyde on a country road between Sailes and Gibsland, Louisiana. Twenty after nine in the morning. Clyde was driving in his socks. Bonnie was eating a sandwich. In their big Ford V-8 they had a shotgun, a dozen pistols, three Browning automatic rifles, two thousand rounds of ammunition, and fifteen stolen license plates. Hamer and his lawmen fired continually for four minutes. After it was over they counted 187 holes, twenty-five of them in Clyde and twenty-three in Bonnie. I remember reading that the stream of fire was so thick that it slashed Clyde’s necktie in half and cut Bonnie’s dress away from her shoulders. But there was nothing in the papers about Clyde’s manhood getting riddled. A few years ago I saw a documentary on PBS that said Clyde was a homosexual and Bonnie a nymphomaniac. I didn’t know anything about that in 1934, and I doubt Gustavus P. Gillis did either.
    It was clear to me even then that Gus and Gladys were playing Bonnie and Clyde, the way kids might have played the Lone Ranger and Tonto. When I went to see Gladys in Mingo Junction in 1955 I asked her about it. “Who really knows what’s playing and what’s real,” she said. “Gus truly did want to die in a hail of bullets, I know that.”
    â€œWhy was that?”
    â€œBecause he hated being a poor dumb hillbilly with no hope of ever being anything but a poor dumb hillbilly. When he heard how Bonnie and Clyde died, he figured that was the way for him. Riddled right out of his miserable existence.”
    I brought up a subject I’d always wondered about. “Did Gus ever kill anybody? He didn’t the week we were with him.”
    Gladys laughed. “Gus never shot anything more alive than those melons in his life. He didn’t want to hurt anybody. Just himself. And it bothered him that Clyde Barrow actually killed people. ‘Clyde Barrow was a great man,’ Gus used to tell me, ‘but shooting people was his one fatal flaw.’” She watched a barge crawl up the Ohio River. “Gus was a good kid. We were all good kids.”
    That brought me to something else I’d wondered about. “How’d you feel about Will that week? The two of you seemed to hit it off. I saw you kissing in the corn.”
    She stared at the river long after the barge slid across her window. “He was a sweet boy, wasn’t he?”
    Both of us were on the brink of tears, so I changed the subject. “Did you really think you’d become a famous radio actress?”
    â€œGood lord! I’d forgotten all about that.”
    No she hadn’t. Her face said she hadn’t.
    â€œI was just playing for Gus’s sake,” she said. “I knew that wasn’t really going to happen.”
    And I didn’t think I’d be a famous dogfighter like Eddie Rickenbacker and my father, dispatching Huns into the vineyards. Of course she thought she’d be a famous radio actress.

“ Evolution of the human face—from fish to man—is shown by a series of models in the Paleontology exhibit .”
    O FFICIAL G UIDE B OOK OF THE W ORLD ’ S F AIR
    Eleven/Strictly 9 to 5
    Will woke up angry. It was already Thursday. We’d missed our first day at the World’s Fair. His minute-by-minute itinerary was in shambles. His dream was in shambles. He ate dry Wheaties out of the box and glowered at the scorched bean cans in the fire ashes.
    I woke up ashamed. Ashamed we hadn’t had the guts to escape during the night. The