Cool Hand Luke (6 page)

IT WAS ABOUT THREE WEEKS AFTER THAT when Boss Paul showed Rabbit an item in the Orlando paper about the trial of a man called Lloyd Jackson. And of course we heard all about it that night in the Building. The article repeated the story that I had found in the bottom of the ditch and went on to list the details of his army record.

The court-appointed lawyer entered a formal plea
of guilty and Lloyd Jackson was sentenced to two years at hard labor at Raiford.

Today in the church yard I lay back and remembered how it was when I was sent up from the county jail, a long chain of us handcuffed together and put into the panel delivery truck that is known as the Newcock Bus. There was that long, hot ride up to Raiford, the two lines of men facing each other, knees almost touching. Some managed to be wild and carefree, with the same horseplay and slaphappy jokes of fresh conscripts going into the army or a busload of freshmen going off to school. Others were silent and smoked in sullen brooding. Others craned their necks to peer through the wire mesh barrier that separated us from the driver and guard in order to get their last few precious glimpses of the Free World. Everyone was hot and thirsty, terrified and ashamed. The years of our Time rang in our heads like bells. The realization of the sufferings to come sat on our stomachs like heavy weights. Yet all we could do was sit there, thinking back over the past and trying once again to beat that old prisoner's game of determining at just what point we made our big mistake.

It is an ordinary day like any other when you take the Newcock Bus up to Raiford. The sun shines, the motor roars, the wheels bounce over every crack in the road. The billboards sell their beer and cigarettes and people drive by in their cars. But the big difference is when you reach for your matches and smokes and you have to drag another man's hand with your own over to your pocket and
as you strike a match and lean into the flame there are four hands framing your face.

Raiford—

Gleaming white walls set in a triple spider's web of shining, galvanized chain link fences. Long lines of men coming down the roads from the fields, haggard, in filthy wrinkled uniforms, half of them unshaved, all of them gaunt and hopeless. They limp and drag their feet, they saunter and swagger, they stroll and clump and march. But their heads turn as the truck passes by and they see the eyes peering through the small barred window in the back door. And in those lines of men you can see the faces dampened by the sour suns of years and years—faces made of mud, out of straw, kneaded by trampling battalions of misfortune.

How long has it been now since I passed through the River Gate and rolled by the railroad siding to stop in front of the Rock at that precise hour when the gangs were coming in for their supper? And the band was sitting in a pavilion in the Visitor's Park, playing a rousing military march. And voices echoed among the cells and the corridors, hands gripping the bars and the windows, faces peering down at the huddle of men in civilian clothes with dead-white faces getting the handcuffs removed from their wrists.

Newcocks! Newcocks!

Fresh meat over here!

You'll be sorr—eeeeeee!

So all of us knew just how Lloyd Jackson felt and
what he had to do during those weeks of initiation. He was tested and interviewed, photographed, fingerprinted and examined, classified, inoculated and numbered. Every morning he marched out the gate with the Eight Spot to work with a grubbing hoe in the surrounding bean fields. On Saturday night he saw the movie in the auditorium. On Sunday he saw the baseball game.

Early one morning his name was called out by the Captain of the Rock. The Turnkey let him out of the Bull Pen on G-Floor and he and two other men were escorted by a Runner to the office of the Captain of the Guard. There they played around with papers, took away all the extra prison clothing they had and loaded them up into the Hard Road Bus.

Again Lloyd Jackson was taken away, the driver stopping at the River Gate and picking up his pistol from the guard room. Then they went on, bouncing over the dips and bumps of the narrow asphalt road that goes for eleven miles to the town of Starke, and then down Route 441 through the very center of the state, passing Gainesville and then Ocala. When one of the men told the driver he had to urinate, the delivery truck was pulled over and parked on the side of the road. There was a two inch hole in the floor and they put a funnel into the hole, taking turns getting down on their knees.

Eventually the Bus left the main highway, following a narrow State road until coming to the clay road that goes through the orange groves. At the turn-off there was a small, neatly lettered white sign—

S.R.D. Camp #93.

The Bus stopped on the asphalt apron. The driver got out and stretched, walking stiffly towards one of the white-painted frame buildings. The convicts inside whispered to each other, their feet shifting awkwardly, peering out through the grated windows at the lawns, the fences, the sidewalk.

There was a long wait. Then the driver returned with a fat man wearing a Panama hat, a short sleeved sport shirt and pastel blue slacks. The fat man made continuous spitting movements with his lips as though trying to spit out an invisible grain of tobacco. In the background stood a man with deeply tanned skin and vacant eyes, on the alert and tense. In his hand dangled a pump action shotgun.

The driver looked at the guard who nodded his head. Unlocking the door, the driver stood aside and the men climbed out, awkward and stiff and blinking. At a command they lined up, trying not to look the fat man in the eye. They waited, clutching the paper bags and cigar boxes which contained their worldly goods. The Captain spat three times, producing nothing but tiny jets of air. Without looking at any of them, he read their names off a list, the men answering, careful to say “sir.”

Then the Yard Man came up, his shoulders hunched and thin, his lined and wrinkled face tight and cruel over the protruding bones of his skull. He wiggled his jaw and shifted his false teeth back and forth, staring with cold eves at the Newcocks.

I can still remember how it felt to sit there in the empty Building, looking around and waiting for something to happen. Everyone does the same thing. He sits and smokes and stares here and there, walking up and down the Building a few times between the rows of empty bunks. Without really meaning to, he counts them. Fifty-one. But he feels like a trespasser, like Goldilocks, knowing that some other man sleeps in every one of those bunks. Another man who gets tired and hungry and who worries. Another man who has committed a felony and who is building Time.

The Building is built of wood. The windows are only square holes without any glass, covered over with chain link fence material and also with fly screen. Outside there are heavy shutters propped up by sticks. The room itself is a large rectangle with an alcove on one side which has a floor of concrete and in which is located the big iron coal stove, a urinal, four toilets and the shower. The shower is in the corner, a large area partitioned off by a low curb of concrete. There is a small, cracked mirror and one faucet. There are also two wooden tables with benches, the kind they have in the parks for picnics. Directly opposite this alcove is the Wicker, the basket-turret where an armed guard sits up all night keeping watch over all the little things we do. There is no privacy whatever in the Building. Just as there are no wash basins nor cups. You drink, wash, shave and brush your teeth beneath the one faucet in the shower stall.

The Newcocks sat on the benches of the two tables.
They waited. Trustees came in from the kitchen from time to time. They took showers or went to the john. But actually they came in to size up the Newcocks and to get the latest news from the Rock.

Later the Yard Man came inside the Wicker and shoved a wad of clothes through a small slot in the screen down at the bottom next to the floor. The clothes were numbered with India ink. The pants were of the standard Raiford variety but the shirts and the jackets were of much heavier material. They were also given striped bill caps and heavy work shoes, the heels rimmed with steel. After sorting out the clothes according to the laundry numbers assigned them, they changed and shoved the things they wore back through the slot. They were each issued a big, battered tablespoon and told to keep it with them always. If they should lose it the Yard Man would issue another one. But first you must spend the night in the Box.

Later the guard was relieved by the Wicker Man whose regular job is to sit up all night with his shotgun and pistol, standing guard over the sleeping Building. He is round and immensely fat, his small eyes peering at the Newcocks over rimless glasses. He has short, tottering legs and a hard, tight mouth that has never smiled, squeezed in between his flabby jowls.

Outside, the Newcocks saw a black and yellow truck driving up with a thick crowd of convicts in the back. The guards dismounted, spreading out to the sides. At a signal the men scrambled down and lined up along
the sidewalk, heads bared to the Captain who was in his rocking chair, one foot propped up against a column of the porch, turning his head to spit with a dry puff of air.

Meanwhile the Wicker Man had come inside the Building with a sawed-off piece of broom handle. Beginning a hard, repetitious tapping on the floor, he banged the stick on each and every board to sound it for possible saw cuts. He tottered about on his clumsy legs, banging on the walls, the shutters, scraping the stick across the window mesh.

Through this noise came the shouts of the convicts as they streamed through the gate outside, counting off with booming voices that drifted over the camp like gunshots. The Newcocks sat to one side, motionless, embarrassed, smoking with the calmness one learns how to assume. One by one the gangs counted through the gate, running eagerly across the yard to open wooden lockers built against the wall of the Building outside. Some went to the Messhall door to line up. Others came running inside the Building with scraping shoes, with yells, curses and songs, shoving for standing room around the toilets, Dragline growling out like an enraged bear,

Git out'n the way, Onion Haid.

Damn Drag. Ah gotta piss don't ah?

You gotta piss? Ah'll piss right in your Gawd damn pocket in about a minute.

And then I saw him. There was Lloyd Jackson, sitting on the bench with his legs crossed, his elbow on top of the table, a butt in his fingers. His eyes were half-closed,
watching the men as they came storming in. There was a slight smile on his lips. And it was in that smile that I recognized him, remembering that far away expression that I had seen in the photograph in the paper.

The Wicker Man chased everybody outside and we all lined up in front of the Messhall waiting for the Walking Boss on duty to give us the signal to start going in.

Inside the Messhall there was a stack of aluminum plates by the door and everyone filed by a low table in the center where the trustees ladled out the string beans and rice. And at the other end there was a pan full of crude chunks of fried ham. The Newcocks were amazed. Other than the greasy, slimy fat back served about once a week, there is no meat at all up in Raiford. None. Unless you can afford to buy your own hamburgers at the Canteen. And you have to be a trustee to get to the Canteen.

After supper the rest of us checked into the Building. But the Newcocks waited outside on the porch until we had been frisked and counted and allowed to pass inside. Then Carr counted them in, tolerantly patient if they hadn't quite learned what they were expected to do.

The last one came through the Chute. Carr entered, the Wicker Man locking the outside door behind him. Then Carr swung the heavy wooden gate shut, the long iron tongue sticking through the slot into the Wicker where the Free Man locked it with a heavy padlock. Again, we were tucked in for the night.

The Newcocks huddled together at the poker table, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. But they
were ignored by the Family as we went on with our usual routines.

Since the hot water supply only lasts for fifteen minutes everyone takes a bath at the same time. At least twenty men were in the shower, wading back and forth through a pool of mud and lathered soapsuds, jostling for position under one of the five shower heads in a shuffling mass of arms and legs and bare asses, the men all twotoned, with upper bodies burned black by the sun and white as snow from the waist down.

But there is a system. And I could tell that Jackson was sitting over there observing the system.

After the showers everyone smoked and talked. But the voices were kept low, scarcely above a murmur. The Newcocks responded to this restrained atmosphere with caution. The first two whispered to themselves but Jackson said nothing at all. The radios were playing but with the volume so low that several heads were pressed close to the loudspeaker. The toilets were all occupied and other men lounged nearby, waiting for a chance to go. The smell was terrible but we were accustomed to it, the men in the showers and those writing letters at the table paying no attention.

Carr, the Floorwalker, was pacing up and down the room, rolling with his bearlike swagger, his 230-pound body rocking from side to side, his arms and shoulders swinging. But his feet were noiseless, wearing crepe soled shoes. Angrily he scowled, glaring at no one and at nothing,
moving his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, plowing right through the middle of a huddle of convicts and scattering them like October leaves.

Aw right. Let's have a little quiet in here. Otherwise a couple of you guys will spend the rest of the night out in the Gator.

I saw Jackson give a hard look at Carr, probably incensed at the idea of a convict giving orders to other convicts. Yet he gave no sign. Only his eyes moved, following Carr a few minutes and then looking at the other men.

After everyone was out of the shower and things had settled down a little bit, Carr called the Newcocks together for a talk. But we just went on with our affairs, making wallets, reading, listening to a radio, sitting in for a few hands at the poker table.