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

Johnson waited impatiently by the door as we stripped. Another guard stopped at the doorway. “Thought you went home.”

“Thought so, too,” Johnson said.

I wanted to ask Johnson if he meant for us to turn in our underwear, too, but he was busy. So I just stood there in my Jockeys and waited. I wasn’t in a big hurry. I saw myself in a detached way, standing nearly naked in a place where they kept men in cages. I thought I should feel something. Fear or nervousness, something. I felt numb.

“What happened?” said the guard.

“Fucking Willy had these guys standing around next to the goddamn front door.”

“We supposed to put our underwear in the bag, too?” John asked me.

“I dunno—”

“Yeah. Everything goes in the bag,” Johnson said.

“Standing by the door?” the guard said, smiling like he was going to pop.

“Yeah,” Johnson said. “That damn nig—” He paused and looked up and down the hallway. “That damn nigger is about spacey as they come,” Johnson said.

The guard laughed. He seemed to be looking at me, so I smiled back. I knew Willy was spacey, too. Willy didn’t allow me to keep my toothbrush when we checked in—I had it in my jacket pocket—but said they’d give me another one. That’s pretty spacey, isn’t it? A toothbrush is a toothbrush—isn’t it? The guard saw me smiling and glanced at Johnson and nodded at me. Johnson turned around and saw the three of us standing naked, holding three laundry bags of stinking clothes. He jerked his head to the shelves. “Grab yourselves a set of clothes. You get one shirt, one pair of pants, pair of socks.’’ We nodded.

“Somebody’d been up shit creek if these boys had’ve taken off,” Johnson said to the guard. “And you can just damn well bet I’d be the one without the paddle.”

“I know it,” the guard said. “Jenkins has a hair up his ass when it comes to you, Roy. What’d you ever do to that man?”

I couldn’t find any pants that weren’t tom to literal shreds, and I was getting pissed about it. This is America, isn’t it? “Look at this shit,” I said to John. “These are fucking rags.”

“They’re what you get, boy,” Johnson said, irritated. “Get that shit on and let’s get out of here.”

I pulled on the most intact pair of pants I could find and rooted around the shelves for a shirt.

“The fucker had to come down and catch me one night when I was looped at the Alibi,” Johnson said. “Ever since, he’s been giving me shit for it.”

The guard shook his head, grinning at Johnson’s wild ways.

I found a shirt which had two buttons and put it on. I was trying to find some socks. The guard checked the hallway and said, “Yeah. Jenkins can be a real ball-buster about drinking,” he said.

We were all three properly dressed prisoners now, standing there in tattered blue uniforms that had been worn by hundreds of men over the last ten years or so, standing in socks, holding our bags of civilian clothes, waiting for Johnson to tell us what to do next before we dropped from exhaustion. “You got that right. I’m thinking I’ll transfer to state—” Johnson stopped when he saw the guard looking at us. He turned around. “All right. Put your bags over on that shelf. Grab a blanket and let’s get out of here,” Johnson said, pointing to a stack of gray woolen blankets on the floor. I’d missed them; thought they were cleaning rags. We each stashed our gear on the shelf and grabbed an armload of ragged blanket and clutched it to our chests. “Do we get shoes?” John asked.

Johnson shook his head like that was the dumbest question he’d ever heard in his entire life. “Naw. We’re out. They’ll give you some when you get to your cell block.”

“Well, Roy,” said the guard, “got to get moving. I’m taking the better half out tonight. Her birthday.”

Johnson nodded. “Okay, Henry. See you tomorrow.”

We followed Roy Johnson down the hall to a big steel door where he waved to somebody through the wire-embedded glass windows. He was signaling a guard who stood in a boxlike pavilion in the middle of the hub that was the central intersection of this jail. From that pavilion, a guard could watch all six wings. The door opened. We walked into the hub. The door closed.

We followed Johnson down a hallway. Inmates began hooting at us as we walked by. We looked pretty silly, dressed in our rags, and they had a terrific time letting us know that. There is only one thing lower than a prisoner in jail, and that is a new prisoner in the same jail. I noticed that the prisoners were dressed in fairly neat clothes and even had shoes. So this junk they gave us was probably just part of some initiation process.

“Hey, assholes,” somebody yelled. “Welcome to Charleston!” Hoots of laughter.

Johnson stopped at another big metal door and pushed a buzzer. A pair of eyes peeked through a small barred window. We heard the door click, watched it open. A black guard shook his head and said “I don’t know where they expect we’re gonna put these fuckers” and made a sour expression.

“Always room for one more in the federal wing, Porter,” Johnson said, laughing. We walked in through the door as the guard. Porter, waved us inside. On the other side of the door, we waited while he slammed the big door shut, watching Johnson’s face disappear in the narrowing gap. I had the strange feeling that I missed Johnson already. We’d known him longer than anyone else here. We were newborn jailbirds, and just naturally took to the first face we saw.

Porter, our new guard, motioned for us to move down the hall. One side of the hall had windows every ten feet that looked out onto a weedy chain-link-fenced exercise yard. The other side was a wall of steel bars. Four feet behind the bars, across a sort of open-air hallway, there were more steel bars with doors every eight feet, doors to dark cages with men glowering in them. Farther down the hallway, a television sitting on a wheeled stand blared into a large barred room filled with men and gray metal tables. About thirty men, dressed in the same kind of rags we wore, were sitting or lying on the tables. The guard stopped at the TV, which was beyond arm’s reach of the prisoners, and switched the channel abruptly. Men yelled and booed behind the bars. One guy said, “Hey, Porter. There’s nothing on that fucking channel.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Porter said. “I said you watch channel four. That’s what you watch.” He pushed the television farther away from the bars. “How you changing the channel, anyway?”

“Fuck you Porter,” somebody said. Porter seemed not to notice and put a key in a lock on the door of the barred dayroom and opened it. He looked at us watching him. I think we had the sort of looks on our faces that said, You mean, go in there? Us? “C’mon,” Porter said. “Get in there. Let’s go.”

We walked inside.

Porter locked the door behind us.

We stood just inside the room, each clutching a blanket against his chest, staring at the men.

The men stared at us. They were mostly black men. With our deep suntans from forty-four days of sailing, we were still lily-whites. Lily-white motherfuckers, as one man near the shower stall at the back of the room muttered. One of them, a big black guy who sat on the table nearest us, said, “What you want? Somebody to show you your fucking room?”

“Yeah,” John said, stepping forward. “Where we supposed to sleep?”

The black guy studied John quickly, probably checking his size and the general condition of his muscles. John was in great shape, as well as big, and the guy was impressed. He smiled a little and pointed over his shoulder. “Down the hall.”

“Any particular room?” John said.

“Naw. Take your pick,” the guy said. “Life’s good in the federal wing. You can do anything you want here.” He laughed. The half dozen men sitting on the table nearest the television in the hall, which was flickering, blaring about using Tide for your laundry, laughed.