Driving the King by Ravi Howard Read Free Book Online

nodding toward the man at the table across from us, a Bronze Star on his lapel, “he wants to give you ten years.”
    He laid it out. Inciting a riot. Five years. Aggravated assault. Three years. Reckless endangerment. Two years. Consecutive terms that added up to ten. I had turned twenty-six years old in a field in Belgium, two weeks after V-E Day. I would turn thirty-six, if I made it, in Kilby Prison. The number got my head to shaking inside and out.
    â€œI need to fight it, then,” I told him.
    â€œSergeant Weary, I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you in front of a Ripley Street jury. They’ll give you twenty years just as sure as I’m standing here.”
    The lawyer said he couldn’t keep me out of Kilby, but he said he could save me some years if I took his advice. If the judge asked me a question, I should say “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” Don’t say a word unless His Honor invited me to. Invited. I had heard the story of a boy who had talked after the judge told him not to speak, and he got an extra year for every word. So I stood in the middle of all that quiet, waiting for His Honor to say how many years he was taking from me.
    â€œSon,” the judge said. In the wrong man’s mouth, that word came at me like venom. “Son, you got anything to say for yourself?”
    â€œNo, sir.” Calling that man “sir” was one of the biggest lies I’ve ever told.
    After he took those years, that judge kept on talking, about honor and service and whatnot. But my ears were filled with my wartime hearing, that ringing that came in the middle of everything I heard. Some days all I heard was that thin, sharp sound that was like something drilling a little deeper into my ear each time. It was on account of my gun, six tons’ worth that I had learned to use like a razor. Some called that sound an affliction, but I had learned to love it, because that was the sound of me killing men, Germans, hell-bent on doing to me what that judge had done.
    I didn’t know what came of that howitzer, but it was probably being dragged down a street somewhere on Armistice Day. I was unarmed when I jumped onto that stage. It was a fair fight with me standing between a friend and his trouble. When that judge took my years, all my hands could do was keep shaking, not from fear, but from all the fight that was still in me with nowhere to go.

Chapter 4
    T hey didn’t waste any time. I was on a work gang the day after I got off the prison jitney. That first morning they put me on a crew with seven other men, opened the west gate, and marched us to a patch of woods near Gunter Air Base. I had heard somebody say we were going to pull weeds, kudzu. The prison quartermaster handed me a shovel with one edge sharpened for chopping. When he put it in my hands, I thought the same thing any man would. How many times could I hit the jailers around me—quartermaster, guards—before the rest of them got those shotguns around? It was all that I could do to just keep my head this side of right, so I calmed myself, took my shovel, and got in line.
    The two trusties, Uly and Polk, wore vertical stripes, different from ours. Their leg guards, strips of tin bolted to rawhide, rattled when they walked, and that was the cadence we walked to. They carried their machetes ontheir shoulders, and we did the same with whatever we had, spades, saws, and knotted coils of rope. We marched, four by two, past a pair of mile markers to reach the field. Once we had hiked knee-deep into the kudzu, Uly and Polk staked off about ten square yards, and we cut the vine back to the crown and then got to work on the root.
    A full-grown stalk is as thick as my arm, and strong enough to snap a spade handle. It took a sharp end on something heavy to get through the gristle of a full-grown vine. Kudzu doesn’t grow in the winter, and we had to get a head start before the vine started running