Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [76]
Luke had played it cool. He knew that these people would sympathize with him, that they wouldn’t care what he had done nor would they bother wasting time asking what crimes he had committed. They would only see that he was a man who was being persecuted, a fugitive from the same Law which had never been on their side.
His arrival was heralded by the baying of bloodhounds approaching through the nearby groves. Then a wild apparition staggered through the jumble of shacks, right up the middle of the dirt lane that led between the yard fences and flower beds, the rusting carcasses of dead jalopies; a filthy, sweating, bewhiskered white man, naked to the waist and wearing a muddy white stripe down his pant legs, a partially healed wound and a patch of dried blood over his ear, a length of chain between his ankles that rattled and tinkled as he stumbled with quick, short desperate steps through the dust of their isolated, impoverished little world.
He was only minutes ahead of his pursuers. The guards and the hounds, the Dog Boy and the Sheriff’s deputies came out of the woods in a cloud of dust, with yells and barking, instructions and questions shouted back and forth. It was obvious that Luke had reached the hamlet, hobbled straight through and left. The lawmen yelled to the Negroes out on their porches. But no one answered.
At most a head was shaken with pouting looks and a muted reply.
Nevertheless, the scent led them right up the middle of the sandy lane. They walked through the yards, looking for possible hiding places. But their search revealed nothing except frightened black faces and rolling eyeballs peering through the windows.
Everything was quiet and normal. There was a fire of lightwood kindling in a backyard beneath a big iron kettle of boiling lye soap. A broken commode rested at an angle underneath a lemon tree. Twisted sheets of rusty corrugated iron lay scattered about while another fire heated a washtub full of laundry near a line propped up by old boards. There was a rusty farm pump on the edge of a back porch which had several boards missing from the floor, a stack of concrete building blocks, a car with no wheels and no motor quietly sinking into a motionless maelstrom of sand. Flowers and vines grew everywhere, tangled over the piles of junk and over the porches, behind the chicken coops and the remains of old fences.
But Luke’s trail became confused and then lost among the footprint’s trampled in the sand and the complications of the various scents of the community. The dogs were led away, taken out to the nearby road and patiently circled this way and that. Eventually the scent was picked up again. With whoops and hollers the posse climbed a fence and started across an open cow pasture. And then, without warning, in the middle of nowhere at all, just like that—the trail stopped.
The dogs went round and round, yelping with confusion. Sneezing and gagging, they began scratching at their muzzles with their paws. Cursing and stamping his feet with anger, the Dog Boy realized what had happened. The Negroes had given Luke all the black pepper and all the chile powder and curry they had in their kitchens so he could sprinkle it behind him as he ran to obliterate his trail in a fine, irritating cloud.
It was more than an hour before the dogs’