Cool Hand Luke (23 page)

Luke had played it cool. He knew that these people would sympathize with him, that they wouldn't care what he had done nor would they bother wasting time asking what crimes he had committed. They would only see that he was a man who was being persecuted, a fugitive from the same Law which had never been on their side.

His arrival was heralded by the baying of bloodhounds approaching through the nearby groves. Then a wild apparition staggered through the jumble of shacks, right up the middle of the dirt lane that led between the yard fences and flower beds, the rusting carcasses of dead jalopies; a filthy, sweating, bewhiskered white man, naked to the waist and wearing a muddy white stripe down his pant legs, a partially healed wound and a patch of dried blood over his ear, a length of chain between his ankles that rattled and tinkled as he stumbled with quick, short desperate steps through the dust of their isolated, impoverished little world.

He was only minutes ahead of his pursuers. The guards and the hounds, the Dog Boy and the Sheriff's deputies came out of the woods in a cloud of dust, with yells and barking, instructions and questions shouted back and forth. It was obvious that Luke had reached the hamlet, hobbled straight through and left. The lawmen yelled to the Negroes out on their porches. But no one answered.

At most a head was shaken with pouting looks and a muted reply.

Nevertheless, the scent led them right up the middle of the sandy lane. They walked through the yards, looking for possible hiding places. But their search revealed nothing except frightened black faces and rolling eyeballs peering through the windows.

Everything was quiet and normal. There was a fire of lightwood kindling in a backyard beneath a big iron kettle of boiling lye soap. A broken commode rested at an angle underneath a lemon tree. Twisted sheets of rusty corrugated iron lay scattered about while another fire heated a washtub full of laundry near a line propped up by old boards. There was a rusty farm pump on the edge of a back porch which had several boards missing from the floor, a stack of concrete building blocks, a car with no wheels and no motor quietly sinking into a motionless maelstrom of sand. Flowers and vines grew everywhere, tangled over the piles of junk and over the porches, behind the chicken coops and the remains of old fences.

But Luke's trail became confused and then lost among the footprint's trampled in the sand and the complications of the various scents of the community. The dogs were led away, taken out to the nearby road and patiently circled this way and that. Eventually the scent was picked up again. With whoops and hollers the posse climbed a fence and started across an open cow pasture. And then, without warning, in the middle of nowhere at all, just like that—the trail stopped.

The dogs went round and round, yelping with confusion. Sneezing and gagging, they began scratching at their muzzles with their paws. Cursing and stamping his feet with anger, the Dog Boy realized what had happened. The Negroes had given Luke all the black pepper and all the chile powder and curry they had in their kitchens so he could sprinkle it behind him as he ran to obliterate his trail in a fine, irritating cloud.

It was more than an hour before the dogs' noses began to clear. Even then it was mainly due to the Dog Boy's skill and persistence that they were able to put the dogs out in the right direction.

All day and into the night they would find the trail and then abruptly lose it again in a cloud of spices, quite aware that Luke was hidden within a stone's throw of them, lying in the bushes somewhere and watching them, resting up for his next dash. But all they could do was persevere, patiently unraveling the snarled patterns of his escape.

After dark Luke began to use other tricks. He walked right down the middle of a highway to mix his spoor with the smell of asphalt, rubber tires and carbon monoxide. When headlights would appear he dropped flat in the ditch and covered his face so that it wouldn't be reflected in the light. But the Dog Boy caught on. Afterwards they simply followed the ditch, skipping along from one ducking place to another as though they were stepping stones in a brook.

Luke soon learned what they were doing and
switched to other tactics. Several times he climbed over a barbed wire fence, made a gigantic loop through open grazing land and then returned and recrossed the fence. Once again he would make another long, complicated curve, repeating the same pattern he made on the other side. Then he broke the pattern, running along the fence, crossing it, running a mere hundred feet or so and crossing the fence still again. Even with chains on it was far easier for him to climb over the barbed wire than for men trying to control an hysterical pack of hounds straining on their leashes.

Finally his trail led directly to the edge of a large lake and stopped. The posse split up the pack and went around the lake on both sides. But when they couldn't pick up the new trail they concluded that he had merely gone up to the water's edge and then back-tracked the way he had come. But again his trail was heavily spiced, the dogs temporarily helpless, the men forced to rely entirely on their wits and imagination.

They decided that Luke had back-tracked to a brook that he had previously forded. Wading knee-deep for over a mile he then came to a railroad bridge and followed the tracks, walking on top of the ties which were new and soaked with fresh creosote, their odor strong and acid.

Time and again Luke threw them off with one ruse after the other just as they thought they were about to run him down. Still, they were persistent, prodded by the
stubborn enthusiasm of the Dog Boy who kept hitching up his pistol belt and wetting his lips with his tongue, coming up with yet one more solution to every riddle that Luke presented.

But Luke eventually beat the dogs. At two thirty in the morning his trail had been fresh and hot when it disappeared finally and forever in the backyard of a farmhouse at the stump of a live oak tree which was used for a chopping block. They could read the story spelled out by the marks on the ground. Luke had lain on his back, the shackle draped over the stump. With several awkward but powerful strokes of the axe, he had cut his own chain.

He was gone. The only evidence of his departure was a broken chain link and the dulled old axe sticking up straight, the handle silhouetted against the moonlit sky like a gesture of derision. Once again he had disappeared, wafted away in a fragrant cloud of pepper, borne up into nothingness with a sneeze.

We were beside ourselves when we heard this part. We could see it all—the dogs milling about in the yard, yelping and coughing, the chickens squawking, cattle stampeding in the pasture; voices, curses, lights put on in the farmhouse. We could just picture Luke running off through the woods, singing as he went, his legs graceful and swift. When the thin silver of the crescent moon peeked out from the clouds we knew that Cool Hand had stopped to look aloft and grin—

Yes sir,
Boss!
I see yuh up there!

So it was really our own watchful eye that he had left behind in the dust, the shining, twisted center link of his chain lying there winking up in defiance at the outraged moon-eye of Boss Godfrey.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS THE RUMORS FLEW thick and fast around the Camp, filtering down to us from the powers above. There were whispers, overheard conversations, lies and wishful thinking. Guards and trustees dropped a word with total unconcern, just as you would a butt, while we poor beggars scrambled to retrieve it. Guards were always telling things to the cooks, the trustees overhearing things from the walking bosses. And whenever Rabbit took up a Store Order there was always someone
who wanted to buy the local paper which was carefully examined for some small, one-paragraph item in the back pages.

Significant clues were made out of scraps of gossip, conclusions drawn from vagrant thoughts, theories projected on the basis of the thinnest news. Bit by bit we gathered it all together; the witnessed fact that a pair of overalls were known to be missing from a neighborhood clothesline. Not far away a house had been entered but only a shirt, a comb and a pair of shoes had been stolen. Simultaneously, forty miles distant, a .38 pistol, a thousand dollars in traveler's checks, a box of condoms and a bottle of Scotch had been deftly removed from a hotel room. Elsewhere a burglar had broken into a hunting lodge in Ocala in order to use a razor—the culprit's whiskers and grime left behind in the sink as evidence. And at that very moment a girl's bicycle was being swiped in St. Petersburg, a sports car in Palm Beach, a Shetland pony in Tallahassee.

Time and again we heard that Cool Hand had been caught—captured by a farmer, by a railroad brakeman while hopping a freight, by a thirteen-year-old boy hunting squirrels with a .22 rifle, a fat housewife who shot him in the leg while stealing chickens. They even said that he had tried to hitchhike a ride on Route 301 but the driver who picked him up turned out to be an off-duty detective who gracefully deposited him at the door of the county sheriff.

But we knew that Luke had gotten away. After two days they called off the search, the Dog Boy sullen and glowering at us for weeks afterwards. It wasn't long before three Newcocks arrived from Raiford and they straightened out Luke's mattress and assigned his bed to someone else. And Koko began to teach himself how to play the banjo.

Weeks passed. Then months. As we worked and ate and played we were always thinking of Luke. We imagined him out there in the Free World, lying on satin sheets, basking nude in an air-conditioned suite of rooms, drinking fine liqueurs and screwing only the most voluptuous of women, all of whom fell madly in love with him at the slightest touch.

We argued as to how he was making a living. When he first drove by he wasn't a professional thief but a year of living with the Family had taught him the tricks of many trades. So we wondered, inventing all sorts of fantastic exploits for the greater glory of his name. We imagined that he was slyly engaged in Dipping, Boosting, Pushing, Creeping, Heisting or Hanging Paper. Since it represented the very acme of his own ambitions, Dragline firmly believed that Luke was now a Hollywood pimp. But Koko, for the same reasons, was convinced he had gone to Paris and had become an International Jewel Thief. Others insisted he was a Gigolo, a Con Artist, a Gun Runner, a member of the Syndicate. Some of us, to be sure, thought that he had simply found himself a job. But
this was sacrilege. That Luke should become a Square John was too much. Not Luke. Not our very own Cool Hand.

And the Good Time rolled. After his escape was assured, we began to work with a renewed will. The guards were watchful and silent as we leaped into the mud and the bushes and the sand with a joyful frenzy, with our war cry growled and grunted up and down the line:

Maybe we're diggin‘ and dyin'. But Cool Hand is fuckin‘ and flyin'. So go hard, bastard. Go hard.

Then all our wildest fantasies were verified once and for all. Dragline's uncle came to visit him one Sunday and gave him a sackful of groceries and a Movie Magazine. Later, back inside the Building, he flipped through the pages of the magazine and found a glossy, eight-byten photograph which had been sent by a clandestine mail route for special delivery. We all gathered round, our mouths sagging open. Koko and Dragline went berserk with happiness. They punched each other on the shoulder, hugged each other, danced and virtually screamed their curses of endearment right into each other's grinning faces. Koko kept saying “oo-oo-oo,” over and over again, his lips pouted as though ready to whistle or ready to kiss something, his right hand shaking as though he had burned his fingers.

There he was. Seated in a night club in New Orleans, he was dressed in a dark suit, a silk tie with a big Windsor knot, starched French cuffs with sparkling gold links. Behind him was a jazz band and a stripper who was
doing her stuff. On the table were Free World butts, a lighter, a bucket of champagne, gleaming, long-stemmed glasses, a stack of green folding money casually strewn about. He had both arms spread around the bare shoulders of a blond and a brunette who cuddled up to him on either side, smiling eagerly into the camera, their bare bosoms bursting out of their evening gowns. In one hand he held up a champagne glass and in the other he held a spread hand of cards showing five aces. His handsome, barbered face wore a great big smile which seemed to be speaking to us through the handwritten words scrawled at the bottom of the photograph:

Dear Boys;
Playing it cool. Wish you were here.
Love,
Cool Hand Luke

IT SOON CAME TO BE KNOWN SIMPLY AS THE Picture—

We would come in at night, exhausted and covered with mud, with sweat and mosquito bites, our pants sopping wet and stuck with sand spurs; feeling bored, depressed, lonely, feeling our Time would never come to an end and almost ready to take the Razor Blade Route. We would sit there slumped on the floor, not allowed to sit or lie down on our bunks while wearing dirty clothes yet too exhausted to get up and take a shower. Our muscles
would be stiff and cramped, our heads aching and dizzy.

In our language, to be depressed is to have the Black Ass. Which is to remember clean clothes, shined shoes, a double bed, a world containing forks, doorknobs, clocks and chairs, to remember friends, mistakes, days of old to taste a steak, a kiss—

Then someone would begin to hum to himself, looking far away, his head leaned back against the wall, a forgotten cigarette in his fingers. A certain gleam would come into his eyes and he would get up and go over to Dragline's bunk, kneeling down on the floor beside him to whisper fervently and hoarsely—

Hey Drag. Let me look at The Picture. Come on. Lemme. Huh? Just for a few minutes. I wanna see Luke with that broad. That brunette. And that loot and that booze. And that other broad, shakin‘ her bare ass behind him.

Aw, come on Babalugats. You don't really want to look at that dirty ole picture, do yuh?