Driving the King by Ravi Howard Read Free Book Online Page A

after the spring rains. A new shoot could run a foot in a day. If a patch of Alabama got covered in kudzu, people who lived on it just moved on. It wasn’t worth the time or the money to clear the land. For us it was different. We were prisoners clearing government land; as far as time, I had ten years, and some of the men on my crew would die in Kilby.
    Uly worked his machete like his old hands had never touched anything else. My job was to dig around the crown. Uly stood beside me, looking into the hole like it went somewhere.
    â€œDon’t split that root, son. All it does is make two vines instead of one.” His words came through his chewing and spitting the juice of the kudzu leaves he kept in his jaw.
    Once I got enough room underneath, I lifted and I’ll be damned if that root didn’t feel stone heavy. Withenough of the crown lifted and that top bit of root showing, Polk looped a rope through the tangles, and all the men grabbed hold of a knot and worked their feet into a good hold on an open bit of ground or a net of weed thick enough for balance. Uly called out “Ready, ready,” and he waited for us to say the same. When we got the next call, we leaned our weight in one direction and pulled that rope, over and again, each tug pulling another inch of root, knowing more would sprout in the spring. Some of those roots were twice as long as any man. I pulled with everything in me, leaning so far back until I was damn near sideways, every bit of muscle praying that the root would give before I did.
    My war gun was heavy but it sat on carriage wheels with a well-oiled axle. It was meant for moving, but kudzu was not. When I pulled on the worst of the crowns, I wondered if somebody was on the underside of the world tugging the other way. Maybe hell was somebody else’s Kilby, and the dead had their own fields for toiling where their devils smiled down on them just like the guards did on us.
    The weed was too deep for running, so they left us unchained. Two guards watched the eight of us, with shotguns full of double-aught on their shoulders and .44s at their sides. A man might end his prison time with a bullet in his back if he tried to run or a shot to his chest if he squared up to fight. I had to stop thinking about doingeither. Work was all I had to keep me from losing my right mind, so I put everything into the tangled-up vine in front of me.
    â€œHey, Showstopper, what the hell’s wrong with you?” Polk was bent next to me talking in that hard whisper, tapping his blade on the buckets nestled in the weed.
    â€œYou fill ten today, they’ll want twenty tomorrow. Ain’t no prize for pulling kudzu crown,” he said.
    â€œHell yes there is,” Uly said. “Prize for pulling crown is more crown.”
    â€œNeed something to put my mind on, that’s all.”
    â€œWhat they give you, ten years? Well, hell, you want some backbone left when you get out.”
    â€œTen years?” Uly said. He looked at Polk then. “That’s all they give Showstopper? Need to call your ass Lucky.”
    They spoke to me without straightening their backs. For a second I forgot where I was and stood up to talk. They gave me that headshake and moan that told me I had done wrong.
    â€œKeep low when you talk,” Polk said. “Captain see you talk, he might think you don’t have enough work. Lord knows we got plenty.”
    Polk told me he had come out of Chambers County and was kin to Joe Louis. But everybody I’d ever met from that corner of Alabama claimed to have some of that blood. Polk said he was raised in the boys’ camp at Mount Meigs,and he told me he was over there with Satchel Paige. It couldn’t have been true, because the years didn’t line up. That gray hair in Polk’s head had me thinking he was older than he was, closer to my father’s age than mine.
    â€œFigure I’m thirty or roundabouts,” he said.
    The hard