Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [39]
In the meanwhile the other walking bosses had surrendered their authority to Boss Godfrey who brought up the rear of the double column of convicts, walking right down the middle of the tarred and dusted road and pointing at the thin spots with his cane. As though it were the baton of a sorceror, a burst of sand would explode wherever he pointed. All day long he strolled across the countryside enveloped in a furious cloud of dust, casually inventing hot saharas with his Walking Stick.
Hour by hour and day by day the week crawled by. On Tuesday afternoon a Newcock let go with a swing of the shovel, lost his balance, spun around in a complete circle and dropped flat on his back in the ditch, his eyes rolling, his mouth open, his chest wheezing in rapid, shallow movements. Jim and Rabbit carried him to the cage truck and shoved him inside, Boss Godfrey padlocking the door.
It got hotter. The Water Boys ran back and forth with their buckets to quench the insatiable thirsts of the double column of lunatics that trotted over the lonely road, hurling sand, digging, kicking, spinning their shovel handles in their slick, calloused hands with that certain gesture, pitching and throwing, going on to the head of the line to begin all over again, yowling as they went with manic laughs of absolute glee.
Then another day would end and we would load up, the cage truck and squad trucks and tool trucks and guard trailers all forming a convoy spaced out for a quarter of a mile roaring over the side roads and the highways and the expressways of the county. Every night we pulled into Camp and dismounted. Squad by squad we lined up on the sidewalk and waited to be shaken down, standing there with our heads bared to the Captain, our clothes and bodies covered with filth, our ears ringing, our heads aching and dizzy. Then the Yard Man opened the gate and we started through. But as we counted off our voices came out as strangled croaks, our mouths and throats like dry cotton. And as we staggered into the yard we all had trouble finding the Messhall door to line up for our rice and beans. Everything was blurred, thick, shadowed and out of focus.
For we were bear-caught. All of us. The entire camp. Everybody.
After supper we dragged ourselves inside the Building, took a shower and fell into our bunks, our back and leg muscles stiff and cramped, our hands sore, our heads aching. Some men passed out completely, like logs, but others spent the night tossing, their limbs twitching as they shoveled their way through their dreams. The First Bell rang in the morning and we forced ourselves to get up, to put on our wet shoes and pants and weakly fall out into the yard and the dark chilly air to have breakfast and line up and count through the gate and then line up again, standing there waiting, dreaming, listening to the howls of Big Blue, the bloodhound. Another day began, the four squads of Gunmen loading up into the trucks, the trustees coming out later after they had helped the cooks clean up after breakfast. Again, the entire camp was out on the Road, doing battle on Bear-Caught Avenue.
All of us were there:
Ugly Red, the moonshiner; Four Eyed Joe, who is doing Time for screwing his daughter; Little Greek, the sponge diver and check artist from Tarpon Springs; Big Steve, the heist man; Rabbit, Coon, Possum, Gator and Eagle, all characters from the tales of Uncle Remus; Sleepy, the last of the Seven Dwarfs, whose six partners all got away when the cops arrived; Onion Head; Burr Head; Stupid Blondie, Stupider Blondie and Stupidest Blondie; Chief, the Blackfoot Indian, the con man and chronic liar whose true exploits are just fantastic enough to keep everyone guessing about the others; Ears, who has all of it, who looks like a taxi coming down the road with