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

Baker nodded, smiling. He had just put the puzzle together. “Deacon, we’ll do whatever you think is best.” Baker turned to me. “We want you to start as soon as you can, Mr. Mason.”

“Okay. But I’m not sure how you go about it, you know?”

“Oh. Well, you have to apply for a job transfer. Through your counselors,” Baker said.

I guess my face dropped. I’d heard of guys trying to get job transfers for their entire stay at Eglin. Deacon said, “Don’t worry. We can get that done fast enough. You just get the blank paperwork from your counselor and bring it back here.”

I hung out in the hallway by the counselor’s office in Dorm Five, the dorm I would be going to when I got out of Three. My counselor, Mr. Josephson, whom the inmates called Waterhead, finally came down the hall after lunch. I was in a rush because I had to be back at my post before Simpson noticed I was gone. I’d waited until he drove by on the service road. Usually I didn’t see him again for an hour, but there were no guarantees. Simpson didn’t miss much, and there were so many ball-busting jobs, like digging ditches, planting trees, or shoveling gravel, that he had going on all the time, that he had plenty of fun things to keep you busy if he thought you were fucking off. I almost called Mr. Josephson by his nickname, Waterhead, because the hacks’ nicknames were what we knew them by, but I managed to say, “Mr. Josephson, can I get a form from you?” as soon as he was close to his door.

“What kind of form?”

“A job-transfer request.”

Waterhead nodded for a second. “Sure, come on in.” Waterhead was actually a very nice guy. He looked a little loopy, and he wasn’t going to give you an answer to a math problem real fast, but he was fair with the inmates, actually tried to help them. He unlocked his door with a key he kept on a recoil reel chain attached to his belt. Inside, he pulled out a big file drawer and flipped through the folders. He pulled out a form. “Here we go,” he said, handing it to me. “You realize the chances of you getting a transfer are pretty slim?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard.”

Waterhead nodded. “You have to have some good reason, Mason, not just some whim.”

“I understand. I just thought I’d try.”

“Sure. Why not?” Waterhead said. He stared at me for a minute until I realized my business was over. I said good-bye and left.

I checked my watch. I’d been gone five minutes. I walked across the camp to the clothing room as fast as I could walk. This time, I didn’t see Baker. Deacon took me to his desk in the back room, just behind the complaint window, and sat down. Sitting at a table was the blond gimpy guy, John; a short dark guy named Joe; a one-legged kid named Griffis; a guy in his sixties, Tony Abruzzo, said to be in the Mafia; and Don Foster. Joe and John and Griffis were sorting underwear into piles of small, medium, and large, while Foster talked to Abruzzo. Foster, who owned a car dealership in New Orleans, was an executive in the clothing room and didn’t have to actually work. Abruzzo was telling stories about his early days as a young hood in New York. I tried to listen in while Deacon turned on his typewriter, since I’d never been around a Mafioso before, if that is what he was.

Deacon had a typewriter, an IBM Selectric. Deacon took the form and twirled it into the carriage, began typing. I had never seen anybody type that fast in my life. Brrrrrip! and he rolled the form out, held it up, and read it through the bottom of his bifocals. “Yeah. Looks good,” he said. He told me to wait a minute, got up, and went into Baker’s office. I watched him take the form to Baker through the window next to his desk. He put the form in front of Baker, who was busy talking to Rusty. Deacon put his finger on the form where he wanted it signed. Baker glanced down, nodded distractedly and signed it. Deacon came back and handed it to me. “Okay. You’ve requested a transfer, and the head of the place where you want to work just approved it. Take it back to your counselor and get him to sign it. Do not give it to him. The usual chain-of-command bullshit could take weeks, months. Just have him sign it; then take it to the south unit manager, Mr. Thompson.”

“I give it to Thompson?”

Deacon stared at me for a second. “Yeah. Give it to Thompson. He’ll have gotten a phone call by then.”

I nodded and walked back to Dorm Five. I found George and checked to see if he’d seen Simpson yet. No, maybe he wouldn’t be coming around for another hour.

I went inside and knocked on Waterhead’s door. It was really fortunate I was getting this done during the normal working hours. Usually, after hours, the chairs in the hallway outside the office were filled with inmates waiting to see him.

“Come in.”

“I brought that job transfer request back for you to sign, Mr. Josephson.”

“Huh? I haven’t even sent it to wherever you wanted to transfer to yet,” Waterhead said.

“No need,” I said. “It’s already been approved.”

“What?”

I put the paper on his desk. He read it. “Inmate requests work transfer to the clothing room.” Waterhead looked up. “That’s it? You didn’t put down why and Mr. Baker signs it?”

“Yessir. They need a clerk real bad.”

Waterhead nodded and picked up his phone. I looked out his window and saw Simpson’s blue truck cruise by. Simpson was talking to Barnett, who was riding in the cab with him. “Larry?” Waterhead said. “I have a transfer here, from an inmate Mason. You approved his request?” He listened for a second and nodded. “Huh? Oh, nothing. I just thought this was too fast to be true, you know?” He listened for another second. “Okay. Sure, I’ll sign it. If you need a guy, you need a guy.”

After work I dropped the form off at the unit manager’s office. He didn’t say anything, just nodded and said that was all; I’d hear from them later.

After dinner, Foster came by my bunk and told me to report to work the next morning at nine.

“It’s approved?” I said.

“Sure. Baker needs you because Deacon’s leaving soon. Deacon’s going to need the time to train you. You’ll have to know how to run the clothing room. The assistant warden already signed it. You’ll see it posted on the bulletin board tonight.”

“He wants me to run the clothing room? Somebody told me you ran the clothing room,” I said.

“Naw. Deacon does. I do the receiving for the commissary.”

“Receiving?”

“Yeah, when the stuff shows up from the vendors. I check it in. I calculate the markup. I do inventories now and then. Like that.”

I was actually getting out of landscrape? I wondered what the warden would say when he found out. Maybe he’d never notice.

Baker’s office was an air-conditioned box in the middle of the clothing room fitted with five big windows. From his desk, Baker could watch the inmates who ran the clothing room line on his left and the inmates who ran the back room, where the complaint window was, on his right. He could not see Tom in the alteration shop, Timmy in the shoe shop, or the several inmates who did special washes and ironing.

Inmate clothing was washed at the Air Force laundry. The clothing room sent big rolling bins filled with dirty clothes in a blue van. The van brought back the clean laundry from the previous day when it returned. The ten or so men in the clothing room line sorted the truckload of clean clothes by laundry number and put it into the inmate boxes.

Inside the office, Larry Baker sat behind his desk and mostly talked with his inmate bosses, who sat in a couple of leather chairs which used to be in the inmate quiet rooms (which were now noisy recreation rooms).

Baker assigned me a desk next to the door at the front of the office. Actually, I shared this desk with Foster, but he seldom used it. Deacon’s desk, and presumably mine when he left, was in the issue and repair room, in sight of Baker.