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

I nodded. A scruffy shrimp boat was tied up next to a dock. The dock was about twelve feet above the water. The tide was out. There were a couple of buildings about fifty feet behind the docks.

“Good. Pull up there, okay?”

“Okay.”

I steered toward the dock. When we were about a hundred feet away, I put the engine in neutral and drifted. “Where you guys coming from?” Sam said. “Colombia?”

“We never left the three-mile limit,” I said.

“Oh.” Sam nodded. “Unloaded from a mother ship, I guess.”

The dock was coming up and I suddenly realized I’d never handled the Namaste under power. All I knew how to do was sail across thousands of miles of stormy seas; I didn’t know how to dock.

“John,” I called. I saw him and Chuck look up. “I don’t know how to do this. You’d better handle it.”

Chuck nodded to John.

John looked grim; the weight of the bust had broken his indomitable spirit. He came up and took the tiller like a zombie. He muttered, “I’m sorry, Bob. I’m really sorry.” I nodded and stood on the deck next to the cockpit. I looked up and down the creek. Not a sign of our shore team. They said they’d be here, in a skiff. Must have seen the intercept, boogied. Thought about that for a while. No. They couldn’t have been around; they would’ve warned us.

John put the engine in reverse and salvaged my rotten approach. Moving like automatons, Ireland and I went fore and aft and tossed our bow and stem lines up over the piers, pulled in the lines, and tied us off. We were numb, working in a dream state—at least I was. John cut the engine and put a bumper between the Namaste and the dock so she wouldn’t get marred.

Sam came to me and asked me to turn around. I stared at the nylon thing he held in his hand. “Cuffs,” he said.

“I thought they were steel,” I said.

“Naw. Everything’s plastic nowadays. Want to turn around? I have to put these on. Regulations.”

I nodded and turned around. Sam put my wrists together and cinched the nylon handcuffs tight. I watched John and Ireland being cuffed.

“Elephant luck, eh, Bob?” I said quietly.

Ireland nodded, looking forlorn, dumbfounded.

We all stood on the rear deck and stared at the dock twelve feet above the water. There was no ladder. Chuck, Rog, Sam, John, Ireland, and I stood there thinking about how we were going to get off the boat. We saw blue lights swinging through the morning mist. In a minute we saw a cop peek over the edge of the dock. “Damn,” he said. “Tide’s real low, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” Chuck said. “Give us a hand. You got help up there?”

Another cop joined the first one and looked down on us, grinning. “Shit yeah,” said the second cop. “And a bunch on the way.”

The smiley cop lay on the dock and reached down to help Chuck up. They pulled Rog up next, leaving Sam with us. By now there were about six cops standing on the dock, stomping their feet against the cold, lighting cigarettes, shooting the shit.

It was hard for them to get us up because we couldn’t grab anything to help. I said to Sam that they should’ve waited until we got on the dock to cuff us. Sam said I was right, but the cuffs couldn’t be unlocked, they had to be cut. Finally somebody agreed with me. Two cops grabbed me under my arms and Sam held his hands together like a stirrup. “Here,” he said, “use this.”

I put my foot in his hands and stood up. The two cops caught me under my arms and flopped me up on the dock the way we’d brought in my tuna. I rolled over and stood up. A cop pointed to a spot on the boards under a lamp nailed to a post and said, “Have a seat. Right there.”

I sat.

John and Ireland sat across from me. We looked at one another, eyes vacant, saying nothing.

The cops had found a ladder somewhere and tied it to the dock. They were scurrying up and down the ladder, checking out the boat.

I could hear them laughing.

The cuffs were cutting into my wrists. Handcuffs? I wondered what Patience and Jack would think if they could see me now.

“You are advised that anything you may say may be used as evidence against you. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney to be present during questioning,” the cop said. He added, shaking his head sadly, “You’re in big trouble, Mr. Mason.” The cop was a detective from the South Carolina State Police. Three other plainclothes cops sat around the table, staring. Yes. I was in big trouble. I nodded. My hands were crammed behind me, numb. I leaned against the back of the chair, but I couldn’t feel it with my fingers. We sat at a table in an office. The owner of the docks had come and unlocked the building so the cops would have a place to do some preliminary interrogation. They’d taken us into the office one at a time. John and Ireland had already been here. I wondered what they’d said.

“We know you were just a crew member,” said the detective. “Your buddy, Tillerman, said he was the captain; said you and Ireland were crew.”

I nodded. John had said that if we were caught, he’d tell them he was the captain. He wanted the responsibility. He figured it came with the job.

“You mind speaking up, Mr. Mason? We have to tape this.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“What’s right?”

“Tillerman was the captain.”

“Okay. Now.” The cop looked at his notebook. “Where’d you get the pot?”

I looked at the cop. “I don’t know.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“I told you. Tillerman was the captain.”

“I don’t mean him. Who’s he working for? Who’s the real boss?”

“I don’t know.”

The cop nodded, screwed his mouth up grimly, and leaned across the table. “Look, Mr. Mason. You’re in deep-shit trouble here. You’re looking at twenty-five years in prison. You know that?”

“Twenty-five years?”

“That’s right. Now, if I were you, I’d cooperate with us. We can’t guarantee anything, but we can tell the judge you cooperated. Could help you.”

I nodded.

“So where did you get the pot?”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, sir. I really do want to cooperate with you. I don’t know much about this kind of thing, but I think it would be smart for me to have an attorney here.”

“Don’t be stupid, Mason!” the cop yelled. “You won’t have this opportunity again. This is your chance to help us out—and help yourself. Do it and I know it’ll be easier for you. Where’s the rest of the people—the shore team?”

Good question. Probably they were still trying to figure out what happened. I could see the shore team, Dave, Mitford, Wheely, Rangy Jane, all twenty of them, each of them fumbling around trying to find their asses with both hands and missing. “Like I said, I will definitely help you gentlemen. Just as soon as I have an attorney with me.”

The cop slapped the table. “That’s about the dumbest thing you could say, Mason. Now the judge’ll know you were uncooperative when you were arrested. We got you on tape. Goes into the arrest report. Makes you look bad, Mason. He’ll know you’re protecting criminals. And for what? Don’t you think for one minute we won’t find them, your buddies. We have a hundred men out there right now. We’ll find them. We’ll get them anyway, so you have nothing to lose, everything to gain. Where are they, these shore guys?”

I stared at the cop. I had no reason to protect Dave and the band of idiots who were supposed to have the creek under control, who were supposed to clear it for us. All it would’ve taken was a simple radio call, tell us the creek was being watched. No. Their last transmission said everything was clear. John had asked; I heard him when we got to the creek.