Роберт Мейсон - Chickenhawk - Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I laughed a long while. “That’s a much better story. Teach you to lie.”

“Well, who would’ve thought that the guy you’re telling a story to twenty years ago is going to put it in a book?”

We talked all day, going over the past, projecting our futures. Jerry is one of the few guys with whom I can freely share my fears and dreams. Jerry understands about waking up in sweaty panics. He understands that it is normal to check for snipers, even in a park. He understands what it feels like to face death in combat. He seemed totally unimpressed that I was a convict. We tried to figure out where the guys in our old company were. Maybe we’d have a reunion one day. For a while I forgot where I was.

At three the hacks announced visiting was over. I walked Jerry to the door. While wives and children filed past us out to the real world, Jerry said, “You’ll be out of here before you know it. I want you to come visit us. Stay as long as you like. Martie says to leave your spiders at home, though.”

He smiled that goofy smile of his. He kind of looks like Stan Laurel when he tries to look happy. I nodded and we hugged. As I walked to the back of the visiting room, I suppressed tears. This prison life was turning me into a whimpering fool. I missed Patience and Jack. I missed Jerry. I even missed my damn spiders.

I stood in the line of inmates waiting to leave. We had to be checked off the roster and then pat-searched in the hallway before we left. I looked back at the door to the world, and Jerry was gone. When I got into the small hallway with two other inmates, a hack said I was going to be strip-searched. They strip-searched inmates at random, and this was my turn. I went into a closet-sized room with a hack and took off all my clothes.

The hack said “You have a nice visit?” while he checked the seams of my pants for whatever you can hide in the seams of pants.

“Yeah. My buddy from Vietnam.”

The hack nodded while he pulled out my pockets to check for the forbidden holes. “You have a Vietnamese friend?”

“No. He and I flew a helicopter together in the Army.” The hack was now checking my running shoes, to see if I’d stashed anything under the insoles.

“That’s great that you and your buddy are still in contact,” the hack said.

“Yeah,” I said. “We didn’t see each other for sixteen years.”

“Wow, sixteen years,” the hack said, after checking my clothes. “Okay. Hold up your penis, please.”

I reached down and held up my penis. This is standard procedure. A crook can supposedly hide stuff there. He nodded, “Fine. Now turn around and bend over.”

I nodded and did.

“Spread your buttocks, please,” the hack said. While he was inspecting, he said, “How’d you locate him?”

I was standing bent over holding my butt apart thinking, Is this fucking real? “Ah, I sent a letter to the Pentagon. They forwarded it.”

“Oh. Good idea. Okay, you can put your clothes back on.”

“Thanks.”

I think I must have looked ruffled. The hack shrugged. “Just doing my job,” he said.

Since I’d gotten the commissary job, I’d started going to the commissary every night while Miss Reed and Frank and Leone ran the commissary line. I’d go in through the exit door. Miss Reed would see me and nod and unlock the door beside her. I’d go inside, say hi to Leone and Frank, and then walk through the storeroom to my office in the back. This was the only private place for me in camp. Nobody could come in here except Miss Reed or Leone or Frank. And since the line to the commissary never dwindled, they were always busy. I seldom saw them.

After a year of trying, I was finally sitting at my own desk in front of my own typewriter. It was quiet and private. No more excuses. I had my robot manuscript and I was trying to continue where I left off. I read what I wrote and I couldn’t remember how I did it. It seemed to me it was written by somebody else. I put a sheet of paper in the machine and stared at it.

Stare.

I turn on the radio and tune in the public station.

I stare at the blank page in the typewriter.

I reread the last two pages of the manuscript.

I stare at the blank page.

I put the manuscript away and write a letter to Patience, experimenting with the different type styles you can use on a Selectric by just changing the type ball.

When Miss Reed was ready to close up the place, Leone stood by the door after Miss Reed unlocked it to let them out. “What are you waiting for?” Miss Reed said to Leone.

“You’re supposed to pat-search us, Miss Reed.” Miss Reed was supposed to pat-search us every time we left the commissary. Instead she searched us randomly, which kept everybody honest.

Miss Reed nodded, smiled. Leone pulled this gag now and then. “Well, I’m not. I’ve been watching you all night. Get going.”

“Miss Reed, it’s a regulation. Who knows what all I have stashed on me? If you don’t pat-search me, I’ll pull my pants down. I’m no lawbreaker.” He laughed, adding, “Anymore.”

“Go ahead, Leone. I need a laugh,” Miss Reed said.

We all laughed and Leone and Frank left.

Miss Reed was extremely quick on the uptake with inmates and hacks. Rocky the hack once complained to her that he hated visiting-room duty because, he said, the inmate wives would stare at his bulge.

I asked her what she said to that.

“I told him maybe he needed a new wallet.”

I waited while she locked up the storeroom and the front door and then walked with her up the sidewalk beside the building.

“You’re looking pretty glum tonight,” she said.

“Am I?”

“Tried writing again, right?”

“Right.”

“Don’t worry. When you get out, it’ll come back to you.” We stopped at the sidewalk intersection where our paths separated. She would walk left, to the parking lot. I would walk right, to Dorm Five. “You haven’t got too long to go, have you?”

“Getting short,” I said. “They accepted my application for a halfway house. If I get a four-month halfway house, I’ll be out of here in May.”

“That’s only eight more months,” Miss Reed said.

“I know. I really can’t complain. What’s eight months?”

I work, eat, read, walk, have independent and extremely safe sex, and receive visitors. That’s what I do.

They say you learn who your real friends are at times like this. Many of the prisoners have gone to great effort to hide the fact that they are here. Their families often claim they’re working “overseas” or are “on assignment.” I have no such refuge, but it’s better. I know everybody knows I’m here, and it’s a big relief. My friends do not desert me. John O’Connor, the drawing professor who almost witnessed my exploding drawing, and his wife, Mallory (my former art history teacher), come to visit several times; Joe Leps and Nikki Ricciuti visit me with their daughter Zubi; Merv Wetherley, a childhood chum who taught me to fly in high school, a bush pilot in Alaska, saw my story in Time magazine at an Eskimo trading post and comes to visit; my parents come several times. I have a picture of my mother and me together in the visiting room; it looks like the one in which we posed together on the occasion of my being a new freshman at college, except we’re both older and I’m in prison blues. Jack and his girlfriend, Wallie, come with Patience now and then. Wallie is like a daughter to Patience. Jack started going to the University of Florida when I came to prison, but dropped out. He claims he isn’t bothered by my being in jail, but I don’t see how it could not have affected him. He is very bright, but he is distracted, isn’t sure what he wants to do. He loves music and practices guitar regularly. He loves playing Ultimate Frisbee (a team sport played something like hockey except with a Frisbee). He loves Wallie, too. He does not love going to school to learn things he doubts he needs to know.