Robert Mason - Chickenhawk - Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“That’s the idea. Scared shitless is the drawing.”

John nods for a while. “Okay. Okay. But what if we disconnect the gun and just tell everybody it was rigged to go off? That’ll scare them, too.”

“You think just knowing it could go off will scare them?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. I believe you’ll get a very good reaction, Bob. And I won’t have to have a heart attack.”

“It’s just a blank—”

“The noise, Bob. Inside a building?”

“Oh, yeah. Inside here. Make a helluva bang, eh?” I laugh.

“So will you disconnect the gun?”

“Well, John, what about my grade? I mean, without the booby trap, lots of the idea is just … lost.”

“No. No way it’ll affect your grade, Bob. I promise.” I nod, thinking about it. O’Connor begins to breathe regularly.

“Okay. I’ll take out the blanks. Then the gun’ll just go snap. Okay?”

“Fine, Bob. That’ll be fine.” O’Connor pats my shoulder as we walk back to the grading room. “Bob. Thanks for telling me about this. I mean, I really appreciate it.”

“No problem, John.”

I got an A for the project.

I created excuses to take off on the bike on weekends. Photographic expeditions, I said.

“Why can’t you take pictures in Gainesville?” Patience asked.

“I’ve already shot Gainesville,” I said.

“Oh.”

I was driving a friend’s car up and down streets in Melbourne Beach, looking for Mary. She told me she had moved, but all I could recall of her address was that she lived near the beach. It was three in the morning. I had a bottle of whiskey next to me and I swigged from that as I cruised up and down streets looking for her car. I stopped in front of a house and stared in the driveway, thinking I saw a Plymouth Valiant. I noticed that headlights were glaring in through the windshield. I realized I was on the wrong side of the road. I heard a car door close, and a man materialized from the glare of the lights. He was a cop. He was carrying a flashlight. He shone it on my face.

“What the hell are you doing?” said the cop.

He wouldn’t have appreciated the truth. I held my finger up to my mouth and said “Sssh” while I looked left and right. The cop followed my glances and I shoved the whiskey bottle behind my back.

The cop looked at me. “What?” the cop said quietly.

“You know of any parties going on around here?” I said.

“Parties? At three in the morning. No, I don’t. Everybody’s asleep.”

“Not these people,” I said. “It’s not really a party, they’re selling drugs.”

The cop blinked. “Drugs? You’re telling me you’re trying to buy drugs?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my job.” I nodded confidently.

“Oh,” the cop said, nodding back. He switched off his flashlight. “Where’re you from?”

“Jacksonville office,” I said.

“You have an ID?”

“You kidding? Get myself killed?”

“Guess that’s true.” The cop took his cap off, reset it to a more comfortable position. “Listen, there is a place, two blocks up and one to the left. I’ve seen some pretty scroungy-looking people going in and out of a house there. Has about five cars parked in the yard. Can’t miss it.”

I grinned, nodded vigorously. “Could be the place,” I said. I put the car in gear, looked up at the cop. “Thanks.”

The cop smiled. “Hey, anything I can do to help.” He turned to go back to his car, stopped, and said, “Be careful.”

“Thanks, Officer,” I said.

I cruised randomly until dawn glowed faintly in the east. Nobody in Melbourne Beach owned a Plymouth Valiant as far as I could see. I drove over to the beach, parked across the street from a restaurant, and watched the sun rise out of the sea. I took a swig from my bottle. I noticed movement at the restaurant, saw a girl dressed in a housecoat come out of a second-story apartment over the restaurant and get the paper. Then I saw a Plymouth Valiant parked beside the building.

I knocked on the door. The girl I’d seen opened it. She held the top of her housecoat closed with one hand.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. You might know her.”

“What’s her name?” the girl said.

“Mary. She drives a Valiant.”

The girl looked at me curiously and said, “Is your name Bob?”

“Yes.”

The girl turned and called, “Mary. There’s somebody here to see you.”

Mary thought I was a hero for finding her. She invited me to bed and gave me a hero’s welcome.

A few months later Mary had a problem. She’d lost her job, and she and her son (she was divorced) had no place to stay. Naturally, I offered to find her a place in Gainesville. Patience might not understand, though. Problem solved: Mary said she could leave her son with her parents and I thought I might be able to sneak her to Gainesville, where she could stay with friends and look for a job. When I called home and told Rosemary—a friend who shared the house with us—the plan, Patience had picked up the extension and heard me. When I got home, Patience told me she knew all about it and left immediately.

The next day, I went to Patience and told her I’d give up Mary if she’d come back. She did. I swore I was just her friend now, that Mary was in trouble and needed a place to stay until she got herself organized. That is how my girlfriend came to live in the same house as my wife. Patience tried to be nice. It seemed noble at the time, to both of us, to have Mary living with us. What did we know of normal? I was a drunken idiot. Patience figured that was normal, too. All this seemed tame compared to what was going on inside my head. Still not sleeping, feeling tired all the time. My shrink at the VA arranged for me to undergo a sleep examination at the hospital.

Living with two women (three, if you include the neutral housemate, Rosemary) isn’t easy. And in this case it was absurd. I had assumed an obligation to take care of Mary, and figured Patience ought to understand and go along with that. Patience became unreasonable: “You have nothing to do around the house except take out the garbage, and look at it!” she yelled one night. “Maggots are crawling out of the garbage can! You never do anything around here!”

I sulked (I hated it when she got this way). “That’s what you say. Mary says she thinks I do plenty around the house. That’s an objective opinion—”

Patience’s eyes open wide. “Bob, Mary is your old girlfriend—”

“I don’t want to argue about it if you have to bring up the past,” I said.

Patience walked off.

A few nights later, while Mary was confiding her troubles to me in the family room—we held hands, platonically—I saw Patience come into the kitchen. She stopped, frozen. She was trying not to go nuts and die from pain, but I saw it as spying on an innocent meeting of friends. I said, “We can see you there.” Patience’s face became ashen. She turned and went back to our bedroom.

It was as plain as day that Mary was trying to move in, but I didn’t see it. After Mary gave Patience a private triumphal look one night while I had my head on her shoulder, Patience told me Mary had to go. What a nag! But I called a friend and took Mary to stay with him and his wife.

Two weeks later my friend said his wife was getting upset and Mary had to go. Damn, Mary sure needed a lot of help. I brought Mary back. Patience, finally losing her grip, left when we arrived. The next day Patience came back, but only to get her things and to see Jack. Jack was at my sister’s, but I wouldn’t tell Patience where he was. She started screaming and ran out of the house, hysterical. I couldn’t figure out why. She must be crazy.

I went to the sleep study at the hospital. For ten nights, I slept in a small room with wires stuck all over my skull and one attached to my dick. The dick sensor would tell the doctors when I had an erection, something they were interested in knowing. I used to fiddle with the sensor while I waited to fall asleep, imagining them in the morning saying, “Jeez-oh-Pete! This guy had a hundred and twenty-eight erections last night!” At the end of the test, my shrink called me in and said that the trouble was that I did not sleep. He said this without a smile. I stared at the shrink. “I know. That’s why I come here all the time.”