Escape from New Orleans
Under cover of darkness the three men hurried through litter-strewn streets that smelled of the night’s recent rain. The clouds hummed with the threat of electricity and violence.
Randall Hindley, Cornelius Coombs and Ephraim Gowdy made it onto the flatboat out of New Orleans with soot in their eyes, cash in their pockets and the smell of Chinese spice in their hair and on their clothes. Between his knees, Hindley clutched a burlap sack that held the dead weight of two pistols.
The other passengers ask nothing and offer nothing in return. The only agreement that exists is a complicit silence between the weary travellers. The boat creaks under the weight of an assortment of humanity as it floats slowly upriver; German, Dutch, French, Chinese. Men with speech like song. The boat stops here and there along the river to distribute wooden crates and bundles and take others on board. The passengers smoke constantly and spit overboard. At night they lay cramped and snoring beneath a star-lit sky and only the ripple of the water tells them that they are in fact moving.
On the second day a man fell overboard. Within seconds he was twenty feet from the craft. He broke the surface one last time, before disappearing, never to be seen again. Nobody said anything.
Four nights later, under a broken fingernail of moon, they alight in Baton Rouge. Here they find work on the Mississippi river, loading and unloading at trading posts, or toiling on plantations. They sleep at night in a shack on the bank, built high up on stilts. They fall asleep covered in grime, weary from honest employment, only the sound of crickets for company. They trade tobacco and other sundries with settlers along the river. From there they head east to Biloxi.
The going is hard and the dust from the road clings to their clothes and faces. In Biloxi they agree amongst themselves to steal some horses. They confer there will be no killing here. Not whilst we’re still in Louisiana. We need to keep our heads down.
It is agreed that Hindley will do the deed. They lay low in the gathering dusk and wait for their chance. Hindley is gone for fifteen minutes and just as the other two are becoming agitated, they hear the whinny of horses at the edge of an outbuilding behind the barn.
Any trouble?
None whatsoever.
They see Hindley’s luminescent green eyes laugh and dance in the darkness.
In the morning there will be seen a sticky trail of bloody footprints now coated with a layer of dust.
They head inland upon the stolen horses, one for each of them. They sleep where they can – barns, caves, in pine forests, and under stars. They ball their coats beneath their heads and pull their hats over their eyes.
They water the horses and treat them kindly. When their money is low, they steal chickens to kill and roast at camp.
If they meet other company they communicate only with their eyes.
In four months they find themselves in Atlanta. In a bar fight Hindley is shot in the thigh and stabbed in the shoulder. Coombs and Gowdy get him to a hotel and find a doctor to tend to the wounds. They return to the street and await closing time and the cover of darkness. By the time they return to the hotel eight men will be dead or dying.