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Inhaling deeply, he slowly and thoughtfully let the bitter smoke escape from his nose and mouth in controlled wisps.
    Luke? Yeah. That son of a bitch—. If he’d a-listened to me like ah tole him—
    Dragline glanced at the Walking Boss, his voice dropping and becoming a murmur, his eyes flitting around the church yard at the ghosts flickering in the patches of sunlight and shade. Inside the shack the choir was just hitting its stride, beginning to warm up their gospel mood.
    Mumbling at first, his words slowly grew bolder as he got into the story. Accompanied by the background of folk music and the sounds of the traffic, of rattling chains and sharpened metal, Dragline sat there today and recited the song and the story of Cool Hand Luke.

6
    BUT ACTUALLY DRAGLINE BEGAN TELLING the story somewhere in the middle. Or at least it was the middle as far as I was concerned. Because I was really the one who first became aware of Luke’s existence. I recognized his heroic aspects long before he even arrived at our camp. I sensed his poetry. And I knew that he was coming to save us all.
    His arrival was heralded well in advance on the
front page of the Tampa Daily Times. The image of Luke’s face was borne on the wind to land right there in the ditch, his handsome features crinkled and gray, his somber eyes staring out of the weeds to contemplate the sunny skies above.
    It had been an unusual day, the Bull Gang assigned to one of those odd chores that the Captain invents from time to time to keep us occupied. We had had a very long ride that morning, all the way up to Mineola. Then we were lined up on both sides of Route Number Twenty-five from the pavement to the edge of the right of way. At Boss Godfrey’s signal we moved forward, bending over to pick up every scrap of trash, every cigarette package, beer can, bottle and paper bag. We walked and we bent over and we dumped our handfuls of trash in regular piles for the trustees to burn as they followed along. It was a long, hard day at full gallop, the guards following along beside and behind us. By the time we were ordered to load up into the cage truck we had reached the Polk County line, eighteen miles away.
    But along about eleven o‘clock an open red Jaguar had come roaring by, the driver wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a beret, turning his head to grin back at us as he deliberately tossed a newspaper over his shoulder. The pages separated in the wind and tumbled loosely along the shoulder of the road, rustling and crinkling as it followed the direction of the departing car. And it was my luck to be the one to come across the front page, cursing my delivery boy, bending over to grab it up along with my other
souvenirs of the tourist season. But then my eye caught the headline:
    War Hero Becomes Parking Meter Bandit
    I hesitated. This was a new type of crime to me and I was immediately intrigued. Quickly I got hold of the other sheets, folded them together as best I could without falling behind the advancing line and held the paper up in the air as I called out to the nearest guard,
    Boss Paul! Puttin‘ it in my pocket here!
    Aw right, Sailor. Put it in your pocket.
    At noon we had our beans in an orange grove. I put the newspaper in proper order and stretched it out on the ground, reading it as I ate. Some copy editor had played up the “before and after” angle. Two photographs were printed side by side; the one a formal military portrait, the kind we all sent home during the war, face scrubbed, tanned and shiny, uniform correct, hat squared, chest out and bedecked with bits of colored ribbon and metal badges—the other the picture of a drunk peering through the bars, hair dishevelled, shirt open and dirty. But instead of sticking to his role of the Scowling Criminal, the ex-soldier was smiling directly into the camera, one eye closed in a sly wink.
    I read the story and then read it again, translating it by sight as I scanned the