Cool Hand Luke

by Donn Pearce

  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 sw
inging. 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.

  Carr was growling, so low he was almost inaudible. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, his voice deliberately deep and grating, his lips pursed together, his eyes flitting around the Building so as not to miss a trick of what was going on.

  Carr laid down the law:

  There will be no Loudtalking in the Building. There will be no playing Grab Ass. The First Bell is at five minutes to eight and everyone will get on his bunk for a count. Right away. The Last Bell is at eight o‘clock. After that there will be no talking at all. The lights are never turned out in the Building. So you can read if you want to after the Last Bell. But there will be no smoking in bed. If you want to smoke you will sit up with both legs over the edge of the bunk. Anyone caught smoking while lying down will spend a night in the Box.

  In Raiford you only get one sheet. Here you get two. Every week you switch the top sheet to the bottom and turn the bottom sheet in to the Laundry Boy. Then you put the clean sheet on top. Anybody who turns in the wrong sheet will spend a night in the Box.

  The Building will not look like a Greek whorehouse. Everyone’s ass will be covered with shorts or with a towel. No one will sit on his bunk with dirty pants on. Anyone caught sitting on his bunk with his pants on will spend a night in the Box.

  Those who drop a butt on the floor or even a match, spend a night in the Box. If you buy a coke at the Juke and do not bring back the bottle—if you do any Loudtalking—if you check out in the morning without taking all your personal junk with you—you spend a night in the Box.

  If there are any questions, you see Carr.

  These Newcocks had arrived just before the men they were to replace had gone home. Therefore the Family was temporarily overpopulated and the Yard Man had had three extra bunks and mattresses brought in by the trustees. Under Carr’s supervision the new men rigged up the bunks above the top tiers of other bunks in order to form triple deckers. They tossed up the mattresses, pillows and bedding and climbed up the precarious structure to make up their beds for the night.

  And then one of them took off his shirt, revealing a large eagle tattooed in red and blue ink across the expanse of his chest. Stupid Blondie and Stupidest Blondie both crowded around, eagerly admiring the art work as the Newcock grinned. But as the new man took off his shirt he had also taken off his name. Whatever name he had used before he arrived was totally forgotten and from then on he was known to one and all as Eagle.

  Feeling a little more confident, Eagle and the other Newcock went to the Juke to buy candy bars and cokes. Jabo the Cook has the concession to the camp store which is a large wooden box filled with all sorts of Free World goodies plus a bucket of ice and a few cases of cold drinks shoved under his bunk.

  But as I glanced up over the book I was reading I could see Jackson sitting on the edge of his bunk, his head bent forward to duck under the ceiling. He had a towel wrapped around his middle and his legs were crossed. Calmly he was rolling a smoke with State tobacco, at the same time looking over what was going on in the Building.

  Squinting his eyes and cocking his head he studied the poker game in progress which is the personal concession of the Floorwalker who cuts each pot ten percent. Carr pays the dealer a certain percentage and there is no doubt in our minds that he must also pay off the Captain. Every night, for at least an hour after the Last Bell, the poker game continues, the bets made in whispers, the coins clinking quietly on top of a folded blanket, the cards rustling as they are shuffled, riffled, cut and put together.

  In other corners men were talking together in low murmurs, others writing letters home or to the lawyer or to the Parole Board, explaining how they had been completely rehabilitated and were now anxious to begin a new life. Others were reading. Some men were already asleep. Babalugats was still clowning around, imitating Donald Duck. Some were busily lacing up the edges of a new wallet, holding the needle in their teeth as they quickly pulled the five yards of leather lace through one of the punched holes. The chain stitch takes an average of forty-five minutes and the standard rate of pay is ten cents per wallet.

  I kept watching Jackson. There was something in the way he held his head and the way he held his cigarette. And I knew that he would always stay under the gun as long as he was here. He was intelligent and he was unafraid. This meant that the Free Men would be down on him from the very beginning. Not only that. There was that smile.

  The Wicker Man got out of his chair, scraping his feet as he opened the door and went outside to the porch. He took an iron rod and hit the brake drum that dangles by a piece of wire from the rafters overhead. As the gong reverberated Carr swaggered back and forth between the bunks, calling out with his low and ominous growl—

  First Bell. First Bell. Let’s git to bed.

  Everyone scurried about the room with his last minute preparations for the night. Books and magazines were borrowed, pants removed, toilets visited. In a few minutes there was quiet, everyone on his bunk, either lying down or smoking with his legs swung over the edge. But the poker game continued without interruption. Here and there bedsprings were squeaking. Shoes clumped on the floor. Chains rattled. Then silence. Again the Wicker Man went outside and hit the brake drum.

  Last Bell. Last Bell.

  Carr slowly walked up one side of the Building and back on the other, carefully counting. Then he went over to the Wicker.

  Fifty-three, Boss. And one in the Box.

  Fifty-three. O.K. Carr.

  Bunks and springs squeaked as someone rolled over. The dealer riffled the deck of cards. The silence was broken by a low unintelligible growl. Carr answered the growl with another that matched the intonation and pitch of the first.

  Gittinup.

  Yeaaaahhhh.

  A Chain Man rose from his bunk, catching up his shackles with his string and hook, wrapping a towel around his waist and moving towards the toilets with quick, short, hip-swinging steps. The shackle rattled just once as he sat himself on the throne. In a moment there were other growls.

  eeeyaaa!

  aaaah!

  GIDDYAP

  YEEAP

  Gettin‘ up, Carr.

  No. Full house.

  I turned over, moving my head so that the bunk above cast a shadow over my eyes from the light bulb on the ceiling. Then I glanced over to my right and saw Jackson still sitting where he was, legs crossed, one arm across his chest with his hand supporting the opposite elbow, his thumb and first finger holding his cigarette while the other fingers were loosely curled in a masculine gesture of the debonair.

  For a moment I tried to think back to what it was like to spend my own first night here. I remembered that the bulb was a torture to my eyes. I was conscious of the whispered giggles from the poker table, the sounds of the Wicker Man puttering in his cage, the growls for permission to get up. And there were the smells—the hot, stale air, the smell of burning coal, dirty clothes, sweat, shoes, the odor of shit. And then someone would roll over and the whole precarious apparatus of bunks would sway and creak in response.

  Someone let go with a long, delayed, incredibly loud bean fart. Carr answered,

  Yeeeaaahhhh!

  Carr laughed, which for
him is to silently snort blasts of air through his nose. The culprit sat up in bed to grin with impish victory at the assembled world. But the Wicker Man spoke up, using his Free Man’s prerogative to speak in a normal voice, which sounded like a yell in the muteness of the Building:

  THAT FELLER’S GONNA NEED A DOSE OF SALTS, AIN’T HE?

  It’s just them beans, Boss, answered Carr, placatingly.

  Then I slept, shielding my eyes with my pillow. Once I woke up and saw Carr playing solitaire at the table, the poker game broken up, the gamblers sent to bed. Again I slept until next I heard the cooks and trustees being awakened. They dressed. First the gate and then the door were unlocked, opened, closed and locked again. An hour later the Chain Men were getting their early call so they would have time to put on their pants.

  Trying to muffle the noise, they sat on the floor busily working at the involved procedure. At night they always take off their pants in such a way that one leg is turned inside out and pulled over the other. In the morning the whole thing is gradually worked beneath the ankle ring and pulled over the right leg. Then the outer pant leg is pulled down, leaving the other one in place. The left leg is reversed and pulled down over the right foot and then over the chain and then back up the left leg. After they rigged up their harness and strings they went over to the faucet to wash their faces and brush their teeth.

  I lay there for ten minutes, drowsy, reluctant to wake up. Yet I couldn’t help but be aware of the tinkle of shackles, the scrape and thud of shoes, the splatter of the water from the faucet. Then the Wicker Man got up and opened the door. I waited. Then he hit the brake drum with the iron bar. Swiftly Carr walked up and down the Building, making sure there were no sleepy heads.

  First Bell. Sheets and rolls. First Bell. Let’s go.

  The bare heels of the Family hit the floor all at once. It was pandemonium. Beds squeaked and swayed, shoes clumped, toilets flushed and gurgled, the faucet trickled as a crowd of men took their turns. All the beds were made up and personal belongings gathered together to be taken outside and stowed in the lockers. Shoe laces were tied and pockets stowed with the necessities of the day. And then the Family was gathered in a silent crowd in front of the gate, smoking and waiting, Carr blocking the exit with his body, facing the crowd with a belligerent scowl which everyone sleepily ignored.