Donn Pearce - Cool Hand Luke

Table of Contents

EVERY MORNING WE COUNT OFF THROUGH the gate in single file, our voices echoing out into the darkness and into the glare of the spotlights on the corners of the fence. Once again the squads are reformed and counted as we stand at a loose and sleepy attention, greeted by a new day of trucks, guns, the hounds barking from the dog pens. At the signal we load up into the cage truck, scrambling in quickly for if we are slow the last man is certain to be kicked in the ass by the Walking Boss. It is still dark and misty, the dawn barely begun. The dawn is gray; as gray as this iron world in which we live.

After all the trucks are started the whole convoy begins to pull out, bouncing and clanging over the rutted clay road that leads through the orange grove that surrounds our camp. And as we are jarred and shaken through the darkness amid the squeaking of metal and the roaring of motors, the fruit on the orange trees goes speed- ing by like the globes of distant planets dangling in outer space.

The Bull Gang is always put in the cage truck. We can look between the bars of the gate and watch the headlights of the trucks behind us as they illuminate the leaves and the fruit and dazzle our sleepy eyes. And we can see the men of the other squads huddled together in heaps beneath pieces of old canvas, trying to break the force of the chill morning wind. All the other squads are put in the back of open dump trucks behind each of which is towed a small guard trailer with an eighteen-foot tongue in which the Free Men sit to prevent anyone from jumping off. Sitting behind the windshields of their black and yellow, twowheeled chariots, the Free Men shiver in jackets and coats, their hands in their pockets, their shotguns held in the crooks of their arms and aimed carelessly upwards at the stars.

And then the miracle. Without even pulling a trigger a star is being shot out of the sky. Through the bars we watch it burning, questioning its similarities with this caged world on wheels as the round pale orbs of our faces are softly illuminated by our own cigarettes.

We doze. The dream is still clinging to us with a heavy glow. Feet are shifted. Chains rattle. Work shoes scrape on the metal floor which is bare and shiny from years of being polished by leather and fine gray Florida sand. In order to relieve a cramp, someone shifts his shoulder, the movement felt all the way down the line, transmitted through a series of tightly packed arms and shoulders wrapped in the coarse gray cloth of shirts and jackets bleached and faded by the years. But as we sit here squeezed together, we are also huddling for warmth, for some sort of reassurance and understanding which we know we can only hope to get from one of our own kind.

Cigarettes are silently rolled and smoked. We cross and recross our legs, casually and debonair, the white vertical stripes on the outside of our pant legs barely visible in the gloom, dimmed by the filth and the encrusted salt of the sweat of yesterdays labor.

When the convoy reaches the paved road the trucks begin to separate, going in opposite directions and turning off again at other junctions as each squad is taken to the different work assignments scattered all over the county. Some of us in the Bull Gang peer out between the bars, noting the direction in which we are headed and trying to guess our job for the day. Eventually, after a half hour or so, the cage truck pulls over to the side of the road as we fumble with our makings to roll up and light one last smoke. The guards dismount from the tool truck behind us and move off to their positions. When they are ready, the Walking Boss unlocks the gate and counts us as we get out and go over to the tool truck where Rabbit the Water Boy hands down the shovels, the bush axes or the yo-yos. One by one we clamber down into the ditch, stiff and clumsy at first but gradually loosening up as we go, the sun just rising over the horizon as we begin another day.

Slowly the mists begin to rise after the chill and the dampness are driven away by the sun. Later it begins to get hot and a man will pause, yelling out the prescribed formula to all the guards:

Takin it off here, Boss!

From all around us comes the permissive echo.

Yeah.

All right.

Go on, take it off.

The man drops his tool and strips off his shirt and jacket, leaving them on the edge of the road where Rabbit will pick them up and put them away in the cage truck. His tanned skin shining in its sweat, the man resumes his work, the dull monotony of the day dragging on as he digs and chops and carries.

The hours pass. But we are strictly forbidden to know the time, deliberately kept in constant suspense. There is always that haunting question. How much longer is it until Smoking Period? Until Bean Time? And how much closer are we to that Golden Daythe day of parole or release or, to some of us, the right moment for an escape?

But in spite of everything we have learned how to work with automatic unconcern, quite unaware of our own fatigue, of the fierceness of the sun, of the mosquitoes and flies. For endless hours we whisper to each other, keeping an eye open for the Walking Boss who is strolling up and down the road idly swinging his stick. He knows perfectly well that we are talking but is usually willing to tolerate our little sins if we keep them within certain limits. Our work must never falter, our lips must never move and we must dummy up whenever he approaches, slipping back to the diaphanous silence of our dream.

During Smoking Period we huddle together on the slope of the ditch, telling each other all over again the long details of our former lives. And those lives, long since dead, sound like a distant melody played on a muted saxophone. We relate the history of our adventures, our sentimental agonies. We talk about the girls we laid, the whiskey we drank, the money we stole. And we tell the story of how we almost got away with it all.

Chief will tell another of his legendary lies. Ears will recite the saga of his boyhood when his father put him in a reform school after his mother died. But only his closest friends will ever hear about his young, attractive stepmother. And only once or twice has he ever described the exact details of that drunken night when he staggered home with a pistol and shot his father dead.

Once again Koko will describe how he got three years for burglarizing $115,000 worth of jewels from a walled mansion in Palm Beach. But he is still breathless as he tells how he escaped from a camp near Lake Okeechobee and ended up with four more years for stealing a pair of overalls from a farmhouse. And how he got another five years for swiping a Model T Ford in which to make a getaway.

And Dynamite is still having that same old nightmare. Living on Death Row, the cellmate of his dreams keeps asking him with maddening repetition,

What time is it? We go down at ten oclock.

As for myself, what can I say? I too have committed my crime, the one which demonstrated my hostility towards this great, big wonderful world of ours; the one which has put me in debt to Society and which I am gradually paying off, on the installment plan. Lured by irresistible temptations and maddened by a chronic anger which had long since lost its original meaning, I too committed a felony. Does it really matter that mine happens to be larceny? As for my sentence, I have all the Time I need.