Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [78]
22
FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS THE RUMORS FLEW thick and fast around the Camp, filtering down to us from the powers above. There were whispers, overheard conversations, lies and wishful thinking. Guards and trustees dropped a word with total unconcern, just as you would a butt, while we poor beggars scrambled to retrieve it. Guards were always telling things to the cooks, the trustees overhearing things from the walking bosses. And whenever Rabbit took up a Store Order there was always someone who wanted to buy the local paper which was carefully examined for some small, one-paragraph item in the back pages.
Significant clues were made out of scraps of gossip, conclusions drawn from vagrant thoughts, theories projected on the basis of the thinnest news. Bit by bit we gathered it all together; the witnessed fact that a pair of overalls were known to be missing from a neighborhood clothesline. Not far away a house had been entered but only a shirt, a comb and a pair of shoes had been stolen. Simultaneously, forty miles distant, a .38 pistol, a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, a box of condoms and a bottle of Scotch had been deftly removed from a hotel room. Elsewhere a burglar had broken into a hunting lodge in Ocala in order to use a razor—the culprit’s whiskers and grime left behind in the sink as evidence. And at that very moment a girl’s bicycle was being swiped in St. Petersburg, a sports car in Palm Beach, a Shetland pony in Tallahassee.
Time and again we heard that Cool Hand had been caught—captured by a farmer, by a railroad brakeman while hopping a freight, by a thirteen-year-old boy hunting squirrels with a .22 rifle, a fat housewife who shot him in the leg while stealing chickens. They even said that he had tried to hitchhike a ride on Route 301 but the driver who picked him up turned out to be an off-duty detective who gracefully deposited him at the door of the county sheriff.
But we knew that Luke had gotten away. After two days they called off the search, the Dog Boy sullen and glowering at us for weeks afterwards. It wasn’t long before three Newcocks arrived from Raiford and they straightened out Luke’s mattress and assigned his bed to someone else. And Koko began to teach himself how to play the banjo.
Weeks passed. Then months. As we worked and ate and played we were always thinking of Luke. We imagined him out there in the Free World, lying on satin sheets, basking nude in an air-conditioned suite of rooms, drinking fine liqueurs and screwing only the most voluptuous of women, all of whom fell madly in love with him at the slightest touch.
We argued as to how he was making a living. When he first drove by he wasn’t a professional thief but a year of living with the Family had taught him the tricks of many trades. So we wondered, inventing all sorts of fantastic exploits for the greater glory of his name. We imagined that he was slyly engaged in Dipping, Boosting, Pushing, Creeping, Heisting or Hanging Paper. Since it represented the very acme of his own ambitions, Dragline firmly believed that Luke was now a Hollywood pimp. But Koko, for the same reasons, was convinced he had gone to Paris and had become an International Jewel Thief. Others insisted he was a Gigolo, a Con Artist, a Gun Runner, a member of the Syndicate. Some of us, to be sure, thought that he had simply found himself a job. But this was sacrilege. That Luke should become a Square John was too much. Not Luke. Not our very own Cool Hand.
And the Good Time rolled. After his escape was assured, we began to work with a renewed will. The guards were watchful and silent as we leaped into the mud and the bushes and the sand with a joyful frenzy, with our war cry growled and grunted up and down the line:
Maybe we’re diggin‘ and dyin’. But Cool Hand is fuckin‘ and flyin’. So go hard, bastard. Go hard.
Then all our wildest fantasies were verified once and for all. Dragline’s uncle came to visit him one Sunday and gave him a sackful of groceries and a Movie Magazine. Later, back inside the Building, he flipped through the pages of the magazine