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

Fred, the state cop I had met the night of the bust, came down the hall with a deputy. The deputy unlocked the door and Fred said, “Come on, Mason. I’ll take you back to jail.”

Fred cuffed me, for the sake of the deputy, but took the cuffs off when he stopped at a light a few blocks from the courthouse. “Seems silly to have you cuffed when you’re a free man, don’t you think?”

“Yes. Thanks.” I reached into my shirt pocket and got a cigarette.

“How you feeling?” Fred said.

“Like I’ve been beaten to a pulp.”

“Nobody hit you, did they?”

“No,” I said. “These beatings are strictly self-inflicted.”

I didn’t have to go back to the cell. I just signed out. They gave me my wallet and my watch and my toothbrush. I walked out the glass doors. Nobody even noticed. Law: you are a crook and have to stay inside. Now you are a crook on bail: you may leave. The sun was setting. I looked up and saw my dad waving from a cab. I walked over and got in.

“I’ve got to catch a plane back to Fort Lauderdale,” Dad said. “You want to ride along?”

“Sure. I’ll have the cab take me to the bus station,” I said.

We drove to the airport. I chattered like a machine gun, telling Dad about the bust and how Dave had fucked up and on and on with an intensity arising from the relief of release, I guess. Dad nodded, but didn’t say anything. When I saw the airport signs, I said, “Well. I guess this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

My father looked at me, nodding grimly. “I’ll say.”

When he got out at the airport, I got out with him to say good-bye and to thank him for doing so much for me. I tried to hug him, something that is not done in my family. But he couldn’t. As he walked into the airport, I said, “Thanks, Dad.”

He nodded and smiled and disappeared into the airport lobby.

The cabby took me to the Charleston Greyhound bus stop at six. The clerk said the next bus to Jacksonville was leaving at eleven. I sat in the waiting room for five hours, feeling miserable. I was coming down with something. Maybe the flu. I had a fever, congestion, a cough. I wanted to sleep, but there’s nothing in a Greyhound bus station but chairs.

At three in the morning, I was in Jacksonville waiting for a bus to take me to Gainesville.

At seven, I got off the bus in downtown Gainesville and saw Patience waiting outside the station. Her face lit up when she saw me.

She ran to me and we hugged. “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

CHAPTER 21

I was knocked out of commission for a week with the flu. I believe now that it was my body’s reaction to the stress.

One by one, our friends learned I had been arrested in South Carolina. They were amazed. I just didn’t look like a smuggler, they said. I reminded them that murderers look normal, too, just to put their thoughts in perspective.

Patience wanted to quit the paper route because it was destroying the new Rabbit. We couldn’t, that was our only income. We sold the school bus for $750, which kept us alive for another month.

Jack seemed unaffected when I sold the bus, his room. He was quite stoic. Patience had said he was shocked when she told him I’d been arrested. When I got home, he was reassuring and laughed at my stories of life in a county jail. He was protecting us, I believe. He didn’t want us to feel any worse than we did.

I had a real problem concentrating. In the mornings I worked on my robot book because I believed, or hoped, that I could write and if I kept at it, I would eventually succeed. When I began to lose this conviction, Patience would remind me. If someone is working to support you by running a paper route and encourages you to stay home and plink on a typewriter, how can you not be a believer?

One afternoon my agent, Knox, called.

“Guess what?” Knox said. He sounded happy. He didn’t know I’d been arrested.

“What?” I said.

“I just sold Chickenhawk to Viking. What d’you think of that?”

My heart jumped. The title was strange to hear. I’d sent the manuscript in untitled. A week later, I’d found the basis for the title in the manuscript. It came from a conversation I’d written between Jerry Towler and me in Vietnam about the contrast between being afraid to get into the battles and how you felt when you finally got into them. A chicken before the battle. A hawk during the battle. Chickenhawk. Somebody bought my book? “What?”

“I said I just sold your book to Viking!”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch!” I yelled.

We laughed together on the phone for a while. This was really coming from behind. Knox had been trying to sell my manuscript for over nine months. I’d given up and put my energy into the robot book. Now what?

“You finish it,” Knox said. “Your editor is a guy named Gerald Howard. He thinks a December deadline is about right. That okay with you?”

“Sure. I’ve got part one finished. Two to go. I think I can do it.”

“Great,” Knox said. “They’re not paying you a whole hell of a lot for this, Bob. The advance, I mean. You’re a complete unknown, and they don’t even know if you can finish the book.”

“I understand. I don’t care how much they pay.”

“Well, the advance is seventy-five hundred total. They’ll pay you twenty-five hundred now, for the first part, and twenty-five hundred for each of the two parts you owe them upon delivery and acceptance.”

I was quiet for a while and said, “Knox. Something’s happened you should know about.”

“What?”

“I got in trouble a few weeks ago. Big trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I was arrested on a sailboat loaded with marijuana. Three thousand pounds of marijuana.”

“Jesus, Bob. When you fuck up, you don’t mess around, do you?”

“Yeah, I don’t like to do things halfway. Do you think I should tell them? Viking?”

“Ah,” Knox said, thinking. “Why don’t we just not mention it for a while? When do you go to trial?”

“Sometime in March.”

“Any chance you can get off?”

“Our lawyer says we’ll lose the trial, but we might win the appeal. Might work, he claims. I think not.”

“I’m really sorry, Bob,” Knox said. He wasn’t angry. He was concerned. We talked for a while, said good-bye. I hung up. I’m not a very excitable person, but I found that I was not able to stand still. I was overcome with joy. I began to jump up and down on the floor. Our dog, Chocolate, began to bark and dance around with me. Patience was working, Jack was in school. I jumped, hopped, and pirouetted all over the cabin. An hour later, I had found my copy of the manuscript buried in a cardboard box. I dusted it off and began reading it to see where I was.

Knox sent a thousand dollars as an advance on my advance.

Our trial was set for March. Bowling’s strategy was to have a bench trial—because, he said, we would lose a jury trial anyway—and then appeal the decision. It wasn’t what I had in mind. I imagined a jury listening to my background and seeing what led to my decision to get on the boat. Bowling said it would be pointless, that the jury had to follow the law: we were caught red-handed, the law said we were guilty as hell. I know now that a jury doesn’t have to rule against you simply because you broke the law; they can free you, declare you innocent against all evidence to the contrary, if they believe circumstances ameliorate your actions. Peer review is the cornerstone of the American legal system. I didn’t understand this then, and even if I had, I’d probably go with the team again. I was, after all, guilty. This was to be a team play, and I was one of the team.

I developed writing habits dictated by my environment. By noon, the attic was unbearable. We had insulation in the roof, but it wasn’t sealed off with plasterboard, so the heat eventually seeped past the insulation and into the attic space, which was our bedroom and my office. I wrote on a glass tabletop set on plastic milk crates. Abe Weiner had given me the tabletop when I left Brooklyn. I sat on an old telephone operator’s chair, which I’d assumed would be comfortable because telephone operators sit all day. I was wrong. They say women have more padding. I wouldn’t know, but the chair made my ass numb in a couple of hours. I had written Knox that if he sold my manuscript, I was going to buy a new chair, but I didn’t. I wrote for three hours in the morning and reviewed what I wrote in the afternoon, downstairs.