Cool Hand Luke

by Donn Pearce

  Go on Luke. What the hell. Make yourself comfortable. Go on way out so’s you can drop your britches in peace. A man’s got to have a little privacy sometimes. Right?

  Luke just smiled. Digging up a shovelful of dirt, he dropped his pants and squatted. And all the while he hung onto a small live oak bush in front of him, shaking it continuously, the hard, tough little leaves rustling audibly so that all of us down in the ditch could plainly hear the sound.

  The Walking Boss let the rifle dangle loosely in his hands as though he were thinking of something else. Switching his Stick to the same hand that held the rifle, he dug out a cigar and lit it clumsily, bending his neck down to strike a match. For a second or two it seemed as though he were vulnerable. We held our breath. But the bush kept on shaking.

  We almost jumped out of our skins when the gun went off. Neither aiming nor raising his arms, Boss Godfrey fired, the bullet ricocheting off the ground right under Luke’s bare behind. But there wasn’t the slightest reaction from Luke. There was no outcry. He didn’t even flinch. It was as though he had felt nothing, as though he hadn’t even heard.

  Are you still shakin‘ that bush, Luke?

  Yes suh, Boss. I’m shakin‘ it all right.

  Again Boss Godfrey fired. Again the bullet threw sand on Luke’s behind, bouncing off the ground and ricocheting through the bushes and trees with a vicious snarl and a delayed, spiteful echo.

  Still shakin‘, Luke?

  Still shakin‘, Boss.

  Again and again the rifle fired, the woods echoing with the shots, the air bitter with gun smoke. But the bush was still shaking. Luke finally finished. Carefully he wiped his ass with the scrap of old newspaper. Then he stood up, buttoned his pants and buckled his belt, still kicking at the trunk of the bush with his left foot. Covering his cat hole with a shovelful of dirt, he called out loud and clear.

  Comin‘ out, Boss.

  All right Luke. Sure. Come on out.

  We were aghast at this performance on the part of the Walking Boss, dumbfounded at the degree of coolness displayed by Luke. And as soon as we loaded up into the truck that night Dragline began to raise hell with his buddy.

  Man, oh man! Are you nuts? Are you out of your feeble, fuckin‘ mind? Defyin’ the Walkin‘ Boss that a-way? You’re jes askin’ to git your ass shot off. You know that? Jes a-beggin‘ for it.

  But Luke just grinned.

  What’s the matter Drag? Ain’t you got no faith? You know that man Luke there is a pretty good shot.

  Pretty good? Shit. He could shoot the tail feathers off’n a fly. But ah knows more about that Man than you do. And ah’m tellin‘ yuh. You’d better watch yore ass.

  So when Luke asked to dig another hole the very next day we couldn’t believe it. Yet the same performance was repeated, the Walking Boss firing away at Luke’s feet as he climbed up the ditch bank, a bullet cutting a strand of wire right out of his hands as he climbed the fence, three or four shots flicking sand on his bare ass as he squatted and another making the pan of his shovel ring like a bell as he returned to work, the handle slung over his shoulder. But the bush-shaking never faltered and the rattling cadence of Luke’s shackled step never stumbled nor hesitated.

  This time Dragline had nothing to say. None of us did. It was all too much for us. Flabbergasted into complete silence, we just floated along through the day, thinking of other things, dreaming our fantasies which were far easier to understand and believe than the things that were going on around us.

  The following morning we hadn’t been working more than an hour when still again Luke asked if he could dig a hole. For the first time Boss Godfrey showed some sign of being annoyed.

  God damn it to hell. Don’t you never take a crap in the mornin‘ before you check out? Didn’t they give you a pot in the Box there with you?

  Yes suh. Boss. But it’s them beans. I jes cain’t help it. It’s all them beans I been eatin‘.

  All right, damn it. Rabbit! Rabbit! Bring me mah rifle from the truck! And be quick about it!

  Pickin‘ up this here paper, Boss Kean! Boss Paul!

  Yeah. Pick it up, Luke.

  It was still early in the day. The sky was overcast, the air was damp and everyone was sluggish. Even the Walking Boss seemed lethargic and didn’t feel like playing his game. Without interfering he allowed Luke to climb the fence and go out into the bushes, turn over a clump of dirt and stick his shovel in the ground in front of him. Then the shaking of the bush began. There was silence in the air. And boredom. Everyone was doing the usual things.

  Then the bush stopped shaking.

  Luke!

  Bang. Bang. Twice the Walking Boss fired in rapid succession, his hand working the bolt back and forth in a dim blur.

  Everything was quiet, a thin blue cloud of bitter smoke hanging in the air. We stopped working and just stood there, the guards nervously holding their shotguns at the ready. Boss Godfrey climbed the fence and ran towards Luke’s shovel which was still visible, vertical in the ground. The shovel handle had been hit twice, the wood splintered, daylight visible through the bullet holes. But Luke was nowhere around.

  Waving his rifle, Boss Godfrey shouted,

  Jim! Bring up the truck! Hurry it up, damn it! Drive it on up here! Run! Damn your lazy ass! Run!

  He clambered down the ditch bank and up the shoulder to the road. Leaping into the truck, the Walking Boss roared away at top speed, headed for the nearest telephone.

  What had happened was this:

  Luke had seen a dirty old kite string wound around a stick lying in the ditch that some kid must have thrown or dropped out of a passing car. Instantly he recognized his opportunity. He called out to the guards and picked up a piece of scrap newspaper but managed to cover the ball of string and pick it up in his hand at the same time. Reaching the thicket, going out a little farther than he had ever gone before, he tied the string to the trunk of a bush in the same time it would have normally taken him to drop his pants. He kept shaking the bush as he backed away, jerking on the cord as though he were flying a kite or playing a hooked fish, unwinding the string with his left hand as he went. The string was about three hundred feet long. When he reached the end, Cool Hand dropped it, turned around and ran. It was his own private version of the Indian Rope Trick, the rifle firing a salute as he disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  When the Dog Boy and his hounds arrived they began the chase by following the string through the thicket. But the route was so simple they couldn’t believe it. There was something eerie about the way that the thin white line led through the bushes. And after all, what can you trust in this world? For instance: if they pulled the string, would the bushes explode?

  But the dogs began the hunt with straining eagerness, the posse and the Dog Boy following behind the pack in high spirits. This time it was going to be easy. And they were hoping they would be able to catch up with him alone in some isolated woods so they could fix him once and for all. At the very most Luke didn’t have more than forty-five minutes start and they knew that no man can run very fast while wearing leg shackles.

  But for the next several hours we could faintly hear the hounds barking and baying out in the woods. After a long period of silence we could hear them again, coming closer, their voices faint and far away. The day went by. We had our Smoking Period and then we had beans. Still the posse didn’t return. Yet all this time we went about our work with straight faces and in dead silence, unable to express our inner hilarity, our derision for the inept forces of the Free Men who weren’t even able to catch a man in chains.

  After we checked into the Building that night and found that there was still no word of Luke we began to grin at each other. We knew. We knew that in some miraculous way he was going to make it.

  So again, we were simply overjoyed. After the Last Bell we turned over in our bunks to smirk at the doubled mattress as Carr finished his count and reported to the Wicker Man.

  Fifty-one, Boss. And two in the bushes.

 
What? Another one? Who is it this time, Carr?

  The same one, Boss. Cool Hand Luke.

  21

  AGAIN, THERE WAS NO SLEEP. IN THE SILENCE of the Building our imaginations were roaring. We lay there with closed eyes, the inner surfaces of our lids emblazoned with that fugitive landscape across which Cool Hand was running, his legs making that quick, shortstepping gait of a Chain Man, the shackle leaping and snapping like an iron viper clinging to his heels.

  Fitfully we tossed in our bunks. It was a hot and airless night and we sweated in the dank humidity. At one end of the Building someone let go with a loud fart, one that made a moist flapping sound. Eighteen bunks away, someone answered with a high pitched, alternating note. For an hour there was the soft sound of a poker game, cards riffling, coins clinking, then the quiet tread of Carr’s shoes as he paced away another night of his sentence. Always there were the noises of a man getting up to go to the john, the squeaking of springs as a man turned over in his bunk.

  An hour or so before dawn there was a commotion outside the fence. A truck drove up. There were voices. The truck motor started again and droned its way around the Messhall, the kitchen and the laundry shed, past the woodshed and the Floorwalker’s Shack. There were rattles and bangs. A few dogs let out some brief, unenthused barks. It was quiet. There were footsteps on the porch. A voice spoke to the Wicker Man who went outside and unlocked the door, locking it again as the Dog Boy stepped into the Chute. Carr swung the gate open, the Dog Boy came in, Carr shut the gate and the Wicker Man locked it. The Dog Boy shuffled over to his bunk, pulled off his shoes and his clothes and then fell back with a sigh, throwing his arm across his eyes to shut out the light from the bare bulbs in the ceiling.

  A few of us rolled over on our sides, raising our heads and exchanging puzzled looks with other men. It looked as though they had given up. The dogs had been called off. But it wasn’t until the end of the following day that we were able to get the full story of how Luke managed to get away, piecing it together from fragments of random information.

  When the posse started out they expected to run him down in an hour, especially since he was making no attempt to lay down a false trail but instead was running in a perfectly straight line. At first they thought that he had no choice. He was in orange grove country. The ground was well cultivated and soft and his footprints were so clear and unmistakable they didn’t even need the dogs.

  But then they began to get suspicious. His traces were too definite and showed no signs of indecision. He was just running, running as hard as he could. But he was heading somewhere. He had a plan.

  The groves came to an end and they reached an area of scrub pines and palmetto bushes, approaching a place where two unimportant state roads joined together in a junction. In the apex there was a tiny hamlet of Negro shacks huddled together in a warped and sagging, unpainted heap.

  This was the same hamlet that had been attacked by a mob of white men about a year before after two teenaged colored boys had been jailed for attempting to rape a white woman. Luke knew about this place. One day the Bull Gang had worked with bush axes in the drainage ditches that ran along the road. Luke had also worked his way past the wrecked and burned remains of the cabins that had been attacked after the mob discovered that the boys had been whisked away from the county jail and taken to Raiford for protective custody. They had turned their fury on the village, terrorizing the inhabitants, firing pistols and shotguns through windows and walls, breaking into abandoned cabins where the boys had lived and smashing up the furniture. When they began to set fires the highway patrol finally interfered, dispersing the mob and dousing the flames.

  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, cros
sing 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.