Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [7]
Boss Godfrey is much bigger than any of us. He is nearly six feet six inches tall and weighs at least two hundred and forty pounds. Like the guards, he is dressed in the same faded green uniform of the State, a large spot of sweat showing between his shoulder blades and under each arm in a larger ring of dried salt. And like the guards, he also wears a cowboy hat, weather-beaten and out of shape with stains of hair oil showing around the band. But their hats are all various shades of gray. His hat is black.
Slowly he walked along the edge of the road from the head of the line to the rear and then back again. Gesturing with his Walking Stick, he would order the flags and the trucks to be moved up by the trustees. Occasionally he would mutter a command. Once he pointed his Stick right at me and then aimed it towards the rear of the gang.
Sailor. Drop back and catch that clump of wire grass over yonder.
Yes suh, Boss. Boss Kean! Boss Paull Gettin‘ back here and catchin’ this here wire grass!
Aw right, Sailor. Go back and git it.
After doing what I was told I walked back to my place. Boss Godfrey was again ambling towards the head of the line, his back turned to me, swinging his Stick from side to side and puffing on a cigar. Then he let go with a standard bean fart. A little one. The hungry kind. And once again I wondered about Boss Godfrey and the other guards, speculating about their reality as human beings. But all I could do was observe them askance and at a distance, assuming that they must respond to the influences of food and rest, the state of their bowels and their loves. The well-being of the Free Men is something we convicts always worry about. Just as at one time we were quite concerned with the moods of our judges. Yet to us the Free Men must always remain as flat forms, shallow silhouettes cut out and pasted against the wall of the sky.
There are the rumors. Boss Godfrey used to be a Greyhound bus driver. His family was one of the pioneers of the Florida Territory even before it was taken over from Spain. His wife ran away. He squandered away a large cattle inheritance from his father. His girlfriend is a waitress in a juke joint near Vero Beach.
But we really don’t know. We don’t know how old he is or where he lives. We don’t know where he’s from nor what he thinks or believes. All we know is that he is beginning to get a pot belly and wears sideburns and is a fantastic marksman with a rifle. He has little wrinkles on his forehead and on the back of his dark brown neck. And probably in the corners of his eyes. Yet we don’t even know that.
The other guards have eyes of men. They have isosceles triangles of blue fire. Hollow eyes of iron. Brooding rips and tears and glints of green and brown. But the Walking Boss seems to have no eyes at all, keeping them completely covered with opaque sunglasses, the kind that have a brightly polished surface of one-way mirrors.
Boss Godfrey reached the head of the advancing column. He turned around and stood a moment, watching us. Slowly he began walking back. With a covert glance I looked up from my work as he drew close to me. And there in his eyes I could see the reduced twin reflections of the Bull Gang, the guards strung out with their shotguns at various angles—over their shoulders, at high port, dangling in their hands or cradled in the crook of one arm—and we convicts herded together in the middle, our heads lowered and our eyes averted, our yo-yos flashing from side to side.
4
LATER IN THE MORNING THE COUNTRYSIDE around us began to change. Houses became scarcer. Marsh grass became more common, growing out of small ponds on both sides of us. The road was very straight, built on a high causeway of fill with steep shoulders that dropped down into drainage ditches overgrown with bushes. Our yo-yos had very little to do here and the Bull Gang began to move more rapidly