Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [1]
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 Day—the 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 o‘clock.
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.
And now my own face can be found among those paled by the shadowed height of the guard. I too am down there digging in the ditch while he stands with the shotgun jutting over his shoulder, hammered into the blue with a precise slant of malediction.
So this is the Chain Gang. Among ourselves it is most often referred to as The Hard Road, as a noun