Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [45]
I listened to what Drag was saying as I filled my pipe again and lit it, reaching down to scratch the red bug bites on my ankle. Again I shut my eyes. Stupid Blondie was no longer sharpening yo-yos but the traffic roared by on the road as always. And the music continued; the piano, the trumpet and the banjo. Yes. There was no doubt about it. Somewhere inside someone was playing a banjo. Just like the one that Luke always played.
His mother brought it with her when she came down to visit him one Sunday with his brother and his brother’s eight-year-old son. They had written him in advance that they were coming, starting out before dawn and scheduling their three hundred mile trip so they would arrive just before visiting time at noon.
Luke was nervous Sunday morning. He hadn’t seen his mother since he left Alabama several years before. She didn’t even know about his being in trouble until after he had been sent to Raiford and then transferred to The Hard Road, when he finally wrote a letter home. So Luke paced the floor, his face shaven, his hair combed, his clean clothes for the week pulled and rubbed in an attempt to get some of the wash wrinkles out.
A group of men idled on the front porch, sitting or standing, motionless, looking out over the fence at the clay road and the orange groves, the clump of small live oak trees in front of the Captain’s Office with the picnic table and the chairs set out in the shade underneath. It was hot and only the slightest breeze stirred the Spanish moss hanging in the live oaks. Boss Godfrey was the Walking Boss in charge of the Visitor’s Park that weekend. Boss Smith sat in a chair about twenty feet away, his legs crossed, his hands discreetly folded over the pistol laying in his lap.
A new car came up the road, a well dressed woman getting out as the trustee opened the door for her and helped her take out the sack of groceries. The trustee brought the sack over to Boss Godfrey who casually poked around inside and then waved it away. Walking over to the gate, Boss Godfrey called out,
Steve!
But Loudmouth Steve was inside the Building lying down on his bunk and reading a comic book. The loiterers on the porch raised up a cry,
Hey Steve! Come on out! Your mother’s here!
Quietly some of them swore to themselves,
Damn punk. Gets a visit every week and don’t even care. Wish I had somebody out in the Free World to bring me stuff like he gets. Spoiled little prick. That’s all he is.
Then Loudmouth Steve came out, pouting as he swaggered down the sidewalk, calling out to Boss Kean sitting on the gun platform at the corner of the fence,
Comin‘ out here, Boss.
Yeah, Steve. Come on out.
Boss Godfrey opened the gate and shut it behind him as Steve walked across the grass towards his mother, turning his face and offering his cheek as she advanced to kiss him. They sat down at the picnic table, Boss Godfrey sitting backwards on a chair about six feet away, his arms folded on top of the back rest.
A little later Curly’s wife and two kids drove up from Orlando where she had had a job and had rented a house for the previous three years in order to be near the same place Curly was. Then the parents of Little Greek arrived from Tarpon Springs. But it was another half hour before a late model pickup truck came up the road covered with mud and with dust of several colors. It stopped beside the other cars and then a boy and an old woman got out on one side and a man on the other side who went over and spoke to Boss Godfrey.
Luke waited on the porch until he was called and