The Devil Knows You Were in Knoxville

I take another big hit, like all the talk he’s putting down is just so much street patter, but the whole time I’m wondering to myself, how the heck does this evil cat know I was ever in Knoxville?

Stevens laughs. ”Oh, I know all kinds of things about you, my friend. Your name is Lowell George, isn’t it? You were second trombone for that lush dance orchestra that plays at the Starlight ballroom at the Van Buren Hotel. What’s its name?”

Stevens takes a big long hit. For the longest time he holds it in his lungs while keeping the burning reefer in his right hand as he flexes his wrist, like there’s a point he’s about to make as soon as he lets the smoke out of his lungs. I stare out the window at the marshmallow fog and wonder how I’m ever going to get out of this one.

“The Ray Covington Melody Makers,” I say like it was a long time ago. But he doesn’t seem to hear me. His mind is his own lungs all packed full with Harlem’s Best marijuana smoke. Stevens begins exhaling and immediately breaks into a hacking fit as he tries telling me something. “Huah, huah!,” he coughs. “But… you… can’t…huah, huah, huah, get…out of it…until, huah, huah, huah,…you get…into it!” he declares. “Huah, huah, huah! Am I right, Mister Lowell George?”

“Oh, you are most definitively right,” I answer, rejoicing that he only seems to know my alias.

I put my hand out for the stick, but instead of handing it back to me, Stevens takes another massive hit, again holding it in his lungs but then almost immediately letting it out as he turns to me and says, “Now is your name Lowell George, or is it Herbert T. Barrow of Eagle Ford, Texas?” He hands the three-quarters castigated reefer back to me with a flourish worthy of a cavalier with a big plumed hat.

“Either name works fine for me,” I say, like there’s nothing particularly amazing about this last feat of his. “But I’ve been thinking of calling myself Lawrence “T-Bone” Dupree. What do you think of it?”

“Oh, I like it,” he says. “I like it a lot. That’s a real bluesman’s name, not one anyone would associate with a bank robber and escaped convict.” (Excerpt from Friend of the Devil, available on Kindle)

The Road to Del Rio VIII: En Route to a Crime Spree with Bonnie and Clyde

Upon hearing the endless radio reports claiming that he is about to join up with Bonnie and Clyde as their criminal mastermind, Herbert does his best to flee Arkansas and then East Texas, but all he succeeds in doing, is running directly in their clutches. For several days he’s their prisoner/guest in a succession of remote abandoned farmhouses which they are using as hideouts. Though Clyde promises to let him go, that day never seems to come. They spend their days smoking marijuana and playing Clyde’s saxophone and talking about their home back in Eagle Ford. It’s not altogether unenjoyable for Herbert, who is at least grateful to not have Stevens or the Other Guy in his face.

Then one day, they pack up and drive off on one of their multi-state crime sprees. Clyde drops all pretense of ever letting Herbert go. He tries to impress on Herbert all the advantages of joining their outfit. Most of the reasons seem to involve fame and meeting girls. But Herbert refuses for a number of reasons, the first being that having already killed too many men in the war, he’s dead-set against ever picking up another weapon again.

But Clyde is adamant:

"Look at us! We’re just a couple of two-bit hoods on our last legs. With you on the team, we could rule the headlines again.”

“I don’t care,” I say. “Now I told you I ain’t packing and that’s final!”

Clyde and I stare knives at each other. But Bonnie has an idea. “You know, we can always have him carry me in and out, like a porter.”

Driving through Texas, it all seems like a skylark with lots of high-spirited talk between Clyde and Bonnie with Bonnie endlessly sneaking playful but hungry looks over at Herbert. It isn't until nightfall when they reach the Oklahoma border, that things start feeling serious. They have an evening picnic in a city park just outside Elmer, Oklahoma. After eating, Clyde decides to have a nap on one of the picnic tables. Herbert half expects Bonnie is going to try for some alley-cat action while Clyde snoozes. But instead, she becomes very serious.

For once, Bonnie doesn’t start messing with me. She sits at the end of the bench meditating on her Chesterfield, and the town lights across the field. Does it occur to her that at this moment, once she walked across the field, she could probably disappear into the city of Elmer and go back to a normal life and never get caught? But she’d never do it. Without Clyde, she’d never get the levels of excitement and drama she requires. She has to be the kind of gal that they write romance stories about, not the kind who reads them.

Bonnie crushes out her cigarette. She turns around and says to me in a low voice: “Herbert, you’d better not fuck us up tomorrow. You understand?”

She glares at me, her head quavering, eyes tear-filled and blazing, like she’s half a moment from busting out into a massive crying jag. Then she pushes herself back to her feet and hobble steps over to the other side of the picnic table and crouches down onto the bench where she can caress Clyde’s sleeping head.

She brushes her fingers against the curl of his forelock. “Oh, Daddy,” she whispers, like she could be in church.

After that they drive almost non-stop for several days, sticking mainly to back roads. Finally they reach a prosperous little town in Missouri called Munson. Seeing a grocery store with lots of cars parked in front of it, they decide it's time to swing into action: Clyde goes in first, pistol in hand, followed by Herbert carrying in a shotgun-wielding Bonnie:


“All right, this is a stick-up!” he shouts out. “Nobody move!” He walks up past all the folks with their arms up and goes to the cash desk. He sticks his pistol in the lady’s face and says, give me all your money, now! And he puts a bag on the table and the lady empties out the whole cash drawer into his bag. Even where I am, I can see the fat wad of bills. Unless they’re all ones, we’re going to be pulling all right here.

Bonnie taps my arm. I let go of her and she hop-hobbles over to Clyde, who hands her the bag. Then she hobbles over to the clerk, points her pistol in his face and growls. “Cloverine Salve! All you got!”

Once Clyde has emptied the cash drawer and taken everybody's purses and billfolds, they start their exits.  Clyde heads out first, with Herbert and Bonnie taking up the rear. I lift her and carry her up toward the door. When we get there, she taps on me to turn. I carefully rotate ourselves clockwise so Bonnie can point her pistol back at everyone lying face-down on the floor. Down at the counter, Clyde is loading a last wallet in his bag. Then he gathers it together, holding it with the same hand as the sawn-off shotgun. He nods that he’s leaving, points his guns to the ceiling and starts moving up our way. I turn and push open the door and lift and carry Bonnie outside into the parking lot. Bonnie waves her pistol in every direction as we run over to the Ford and get in. Clyde lets off the brake, gives it some gas and we’re heading up that road.

An hour after that, we rob a filling station and then a little after that, another roadside grocery store and another filling station after that. Each is a piece of cake.

Hours later, they park in a secluded spot and divvy up the loot.  Assuming Herbert is every bit as charged from the robberies as he and Bonnie are, he renews his plea to Herbert to quit being odd man out and start carrying a gun. But Herbert won't budge:

He turns back to face me. “Booger, I ain’t talking anything permanent, just long enough to tide us over and till we can get another boy.”

I don’t like the sound of this, either. I fall back into my seat and start actively thinking about being riddled with machine gun bullets.

Bonnie turns and gleams sweetly at me like I’m just a boy and she’s someone’s older sister. “Come with us, Doc,” she purrs. “It’ll be fun! Wouldn’t you like to see Missouri?”

“I’ve seen it,” I say.

“Don’t be sore, Doc. Daddy’s just crazy about you.” She pouts. “You know, sometimes I think he likes you more than he likes me.” 

(Friend of the Devil, by Brendan McNally, available on Kindle)

The Road to Del Rio VII: Dallas on Their Minds

Bonnie, Clyde, and Herbert T. Barrow all came from Dallas and even though they never got to pass through it during their several-state crime spree, in a way, they didn't have to. Dallas was always on their minds. But then Dallas has always been as much a state of mind as it is an actual place.

Dallas is one of those rare cities built on an idea rather than a piece of geography. The idea behind Dallas could be characterized by a single word: Money! It was founded by John Neeley Bryant, a "man on the make" and a civic booster looking to found a city he could boost. He and men like him built a city on the prairie, overlooking the Trinity River, a glorified creek,which was really more of a nuisance than a bona fide geographical feature. Dallas rose up on the eastern side of the Trinity, a city fueled by ambition and opportunity. Once people had money, they wasted no time acquiring the best, most up-to-date style and class that money could buy.

But Bonnie, Clyde and Herbert were all from the other side of the Trinity, from West Dallas, which stayed poor and hopeless and remains that way to this very day.  Bonnie was born in Rowena, a little town an hour or so south and west of Dallas that no longer exists. Bonnie's father died when she was little more than a    baby and her mother moved her and her younger sister to a place in West Dallas called Cement City, built around a cement plant. They were considered lower middle class, which meant mainly that Bonnie's mother managed to hold down a job and pay rent and that she aspired for better things for her daughters. Bonnie attended school and got good grades and was valedictorian for her high school class. The school she went to is still there, though it shut down decades ago.  Not so long ago, people went into the school building and found a copy of her grade card.

Clyde's family could not have been considered anything but bottom-of-the-barrel West Dallas grit. It would be wrong to call them "White Trash," because they weren't. They were hard working, hard scrabble, fierce, proud, and profoundly unlucky. They'd tried farming in a couple different places around east Texas including, finally, Teleco, south of Dallas. They finally gave up and moved to Dallas, for the same reason everyone moves to Dallas; for opportunity.

But all the Barrows could afford was Eagle Ford, a place on the Trinity that was about as close as you could get to Dallas without actually being there. But Eagle Ford was still on the wrong side of the Trinity and to this day it remains an economically depressed, crime ridden hole. For a while the Barrows lived in a canvas tent, then they managed to build a shack with a gas station, both of which are still there.

Across the Trinity River was Dallas with its skyscraper buildings, its grand hotels like the Baker and Adolphus where the rooms all had flushing toilets and hot and cold running water and the big movie houses all proudly featured something called "Air Conditioning." Dallas was where Bonnie, Clyde, and Herbert T. Barrow all felt they naturally belonged. In keeping with the Dallas ethos, Clyde always dressed impeccably, spoke perfect English and even though he could barely read or write, he handled himself so well that co-workers who'd managed to graduate from high school, often invited him home to meet their sisters. To this day, if you ask around a little, you'll find people who'll tell you their grandmothers dated Clyde a few time and that he was a cordial, well-mannered fellow.

Bonnie, for all her education and literary ambitions, was a bad girl, through and through. At fifteen, she married a hoodlum named Roy Thornton, who was gone a lot and then gone permanently when he got sent to prison. Bonnie worked in various restaurants and cafes and had enough of an engaging personality that men were continually falling for her. She reportedly also turned the occasional trick. She liked dressing well, putting on makeup and going out and having a good time, something which Dallas of the day certainly was equipped to do. Dallas had gin mills, night clubs, honkeytonks, and some very classy places for dancing to orchestras, like the Debonaire Danceland, out on Samuel Boulevard, a place where, more than once, Bonnie went to dance, and Herbert sometimes played, and where they both reminisce about while driving through Oklahoma in search of gas stations and grocery stores to rob.

Herbert was much the same as the others when it came to Dallas. He dressed for Dallas, taught himself not to talk like a hick. But instead of settling in Dallas, he went on to New York, where no one at all ever suspected he came from Dallas, let along Eagle Ford. But both places continued to define him at least in his own mind.     .

Following is an excerpt from Friend of the Devil:


Clyde Chestnut Barrow might stand only five foot two, but by the way he carries himself, you’d swear he was six foot four. It’s hard associating him with the grit boy I once knew. Everything about him shouts out ‘big city’: the silk shirts with French cuffs, the fine ties and sharply tailored suits which highlight his taut, compact frame. This Clyde has correct posture and manners, can carry on a polite conversation and knows when and when not to say ‘ain’t.’ I’m just a dumb, off-the-rack country hick compared to him. But, of course, I can read and write.

Clyde dresses like a dandy and handles himself like a gent, but there’s no mistaking that glint of menace in his eyes. It’s there when he smiles and laughs. It’s there when he says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and inquires how you’ve been keeping yourself. And it’s there when he asks if you’ll do something and you tell him it’s something you don’t want to do.

Now Clyde wants me to join the outfit.

The Road to Del Rio II: Highway 61 Crossroads, Mississippi

This is the second stop of our trip through the Southlands with fugitive bluesman Herbert T. Barrow.

Three days and nearly a thousand miles out of Knoxville, Herbert T. Barrow is driving north through Mississippi and still no sign of any cops on his trail. Are they real or just part of his hopped-up, reefered-out imagination?

Herbert's plan is to head west through northern Louisiana and keep going till he gets back home to Eagle Ford in West Dallas and then keep his head down until everything cools down enough that it's safe to start playing the joints in Deep Ellum. But it doesn't quite work out that way. A couple miles before he's supposed to make his turn, he makes the mistake of picking up a country preacher who's hitch-hiking and obviously having a difficult time of it. Suddenly, for no great reason at all, Herbert agrees to give the preacher a ride to, of all places, a crossroads just outside of Tupelo, where, he says, he was supposed to meet someone the previous midnight.

Being a bluesman, Herbert has heard the legend of the Devil at the Crossroads countless times from his

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black colleagues. It was something he considered kind of pathetic. The black bluesmen needed to make up stories about themselves to increase their 'badness.' Herbert is a staunch atheist and he detests talk about the Devil almost as much as he hates talk about God. He wonders if the legend could have gotten so far that the crossroads could now be attracting white country preachers eager to strike a deal with the Devil.

Here is Robert Johnson's original version of Crossroads.

Following is an excerpt from Friend of the Devil, right at the moment Herbert and Stevens arrive at the Crossroads:


Hillbilly boy standing in my headlights, tall, skinny, with eyes as big and wild-looking as a jackrabbit’s, and seeing him, I’m thinking, man, if he’s the Devil, then I’m Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He stands, feet slightly apart, hands half-clenched into fists, like he’s expecting a fight. But seeing how his shoulders droop, it’s obvious he already knows the outcome, because if anyone was ever born already defeated, it’s got to be him. Bet he isn’t twenty five, but life has already worn him down to a nub. Wife, kids, the work that he either can’t find, or, when he does, never pays enough to separate him from worry. And being what he is, he got used to cutting corners here and there and probably got caught at it more than once, because he’s got that same broken look as half the boys did back at Eastham Farm.

And this is the guy’s got something for Stevens that’s more valuable than gold? Shit, he don’t look like someone you’d bother crossing the street to collect money from. He’s just some poor, dumb hillbilly with nothing in his hands but his fists. Then I notice there’s something lying at his feet, something half-wrapped in a scrap of burlap, something small and inconsequential. But then why is it there and why has he elected to stand his ground directly behind it?

I'm a Man of West Dallas

I got to admit, that guy has me steamed but good. And for the next half hour or so, the whole time I’m leadfooting it up the road, bellowing curses at heaven, hell and the whole goddamn world besides. To even suggest I fink out my own cousin! I mean the nerve of that guy!

Okay, I reckon since I’ve gotten to this point, I should explain something about myself in case you all haven’t already figured it out. Sure, I may dress and act like a big- city sophisticate, but when all is said and done, what I am, sir, is a man of West Dallas.

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West Dallas isn’t the same as Dallas proper. In fact, they’re about as different as you can get. Dallas has skyscrapers with elevators, hot and cold running water and an avenue downtown lined with air-conditioned movie houses. You want water in West Dallas, you best dig yourself a well or pay fifty cents a barrel when the city truck comes by every other week. Yes, West Dallas is its white trash underbelly at the other side of the Trinity River Aqueduct. We aren’t rich or modern or respectable, but damn it, we got our code. We don’t squeal, we don’t steal from each other, and we don’t betray our kin to the laws, no matter what.

I suspect right now, my Uncle Henry Barrow is back home at Eagle Ford, head bent with sorrow, because his eldest son, Buck, has been killed, and because he knows Clyde will soon also be dead. When that day comes, he’ll hold no grudge against the lawmen that killed him because he knows his boy done wrong and had to pay the price for it and that’s just the way things are. But, at the same time, Uncle Henry ain’t going to help them get Clyde. Neither will anyone else. In Eagle Ford and the rest of West Dallas, people don’t do that. They like to put us down and call us the criminal element, but fact is, most of the folks there is perfectly law-abiding. But the folks that ain’t, well, they all conduct their business somewhere else. In shantytowns like Eagle Ford, folks have a saying that all they got is each other. So no matter what anyone does, we all keep our mouths shut and don’t tell on each other the way better folks might. As a result, the cops hate us and the good folks with money and houses and nice churches to go to all look down their noses at us. But we don’t care, because we know who we are and we’re proud.

It’s funny saying all this, being as I am someone who’s spent his whole life trying like hell to get the taint of Eagle Ford and West Dallas off him. Jazz was my ticket out and soon as I could, I taught myself to speak and dress and carry myself so that folks wouldn’t see the West Dallas in me. Heck, I got so good at it, they didn’t even know I was from Texas. I was just this well-dressed, sophisticated jazzman who knew his way around Harlem and Fifth Avenue equally.

Of course, all it took was five seconds in front of Hamer and I’m back to that same mangy, old West Dallas mutt I swore I’d stopped being. And now to have that goddamn sandwich-eater showing up offering me the crumb of redemption, all I got to do for it is help bring down my cousin Clyde. And maybe if I was one of those churchafying, respectability-craving bastards, I’d have told myself, ‘well, hell, old Clyde’s as good as dead anyway, no harm using it to improve my situation a little.’

Well, thank you, but I’m still a West Dallas man and we don’t play them games, don’t sing them songs, so goddamn all of them to hell and Oklahoma for even asking!
(Excerpt from "Friend of the Devil," by Brendan McNally)