Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [17]
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.