Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I started chattering with Kurt Vierthaller, another of the A&O guys. I was bubbling over with joy and took to laughing and horsing around with Kurt, knocking the gravel off his shovel and stuff. Simpson came up behind me and said, “This isn’t a fucking lark. Mason. This is prison.” I turned around and saw Simpson glaring at me. I nodded. Simpson was telling the truth. I threw a shovelful of gravel into the drainage field, but I was laughing inside.

I heard an inmate in the hall yell to someone that our permanent work assignments were posted on the bulletin board. I breezed down the hall toward the mob crowded in front of the bulletin board next to the bathroom door. The other A&O guys were pressed around the board, reading their assignments. I heard bitching and moaning. I smiled smugly. If you had your act together, like I did, you didn’t have to depend on luck. Smart people make their own luck, suckers. I stood behind the crowd and lit a cigarette. As the inmates thinned out, I moved closer to the board. I read “Mason, Robert, 81349-071 A” in the name column and followed the little dots across from it to the job column. I read “Landscape.”

I traced the dots across the page with my finger. It was landscape, no mistake.

I went to the education building and found Mr. Gossen sitting in his office. He waved me in. “What happened?” I asked.

“The superintendent. He approves all the job assignments, Bob. The staff does the picking. His signature is just a formality. But this time he was looking for yours. He saw you assigned here and denied it.”

“Is there any recourse? Can I do anything?”

Mr. Gossen shook his head. “Not really. You can go through your counselor. If you can prove your job is bad for your health or something, they can get your job changed. You have a health problem?”

“Not unless you count going fucking nuts when I see a rake.”

Mr. Gossen smiled. “I’m sorry, Bob. We were looking forward to having you around here. Bob Haldeman used to work here.”

“The Watergate Haldeman?”

“Yeah. He wrote a book. I thought it’d be nice to have had you here, too.”

CHAPTER 26

Dorm Four is mine. I am supposed to keep every blade of grass and every leaf and every lump of dirt around Dorm Four cut, arranged, and smoothed to perfection. I have tools: a bucket, a stiff push broom, a springy leaf rake, a sharp edging tool with a new hickory handle, a nice new snippy pair of shears, and—that’s it.

I start in the morning by emptying all the butt buckets at each of the four entrances. There are cigarette and cigar butts in the sand in each butt bucket and all around each butt bucket. There are wads of stuff people who chew tobacco spit into the butt buckets, gelatinous and brown. People who use tobacco are pigs.

I curl up a piece of cardboard to scoop the sticky messes out of the sand. I make a swirl design in the sand of each butt bucket when I am finished, like you see in posh hotels. Next, I sweep two hundred yards of sidewalks and patios around Dorm Four with my broom and gather together hundreds more cigarette butts. I put all this into my bucket.

The grass is freshly mowed, so all I have to do is manicure the shrubbery beds on all four sides of the building. The beds are dirt extending eight feet from the walls. In this dirt are various kinds of plants. Some are grouped together as hedges, which I trim flat and square with my shears. Some are individual plants which I trim to shape with the care of a sculptor and from whose interiors I pluck unsightly dead leaves. The lawn attempts to intrude into these dirt beds and has to be trimmed to a definite, knife-edged boundary. I shove the edger blade through snakes of Bermuda grass shoots which are infiltrating my pristine dirt beds. When I have finished edging the grass, it is ten, time to get ready for lunch.

At eleven-thirty, I am back at my post. It is now very hot. I thought it was hot earlier, but I was wrong. It is hot now. Panhandle Florida in August and September is hot and humid enough to bake bread.

All the twigs and leaves and grass clippings I’ve trimmed are now lying, in horrible disarray, in the plant beds. I rake every inch of the dirt, leaving careful parallel marks in the sand running smartly, perpendicularly, from the walls to the grass.

Then—I’m finished? I check my new Casio watch I bought at the commissary. It’s only two o’clock. Simpson works us until three. I see Simpson driving toward me on the service road. I put my rake on my shoulder and go fetch my bucket while Simpson drives by. He nods to let me know I’m doing okay. Of course I’m doing okay. I’m good at this stuff.

I’m sensitive to the proper order of grass and leaves and twigs and dirt; Dorm Four will look like a Zen garden someday.

I notice that my predecessor, an aesthetic dullard, has let the grass grow up wildly around each and every one of the hundreds of white-painted stones that line the border of the service road and my grass. I begin working to correct the problem.