Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

We stopped on the walkway and she stared at me. “Well, how often do you want me to come?”

“The truth?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to come. I’ll see you when I get a furlough. I want to work at Dorm Four and never know what’s going on outside until they tell me I can walk out of here. That’s what I want.”

Patience looked like she was going to cry. She shut her eyes and said, “I have to come, Bob. I have to. I have to see you to believe you exist.”

We started walking again. Damn, this was so complicated: other people’s feelings. It was easy for me, I didn’t have any. I was numb. Why couldn’t Patience just go numb, too? “Okay,” I said. “How about once a month?”

“Every two weeks, Bob. That’s what I need. That’s all you can do for me now.”

John and Alice were strolling toward us, John chewing on one of an endless chain of puffed-rice crackers he ate between celery stalks during the visits. Abreast of us, John said, “How you doing, Bob?”

“Fine,” I said. “Fucking fine, John.”

Sunday afternoon, after twelve hours of visiting spread over two days, I was lying on my cot trying to disappear. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up in two years.

In addition to extreme boredom and humiliation in conjunction with visiting, another of the problems of sitting with your wife for such long periods is that the subject of sex invariably rises. If you watched carefully, and God knows I had the time, you could see couples playing skillfully disguised, tender sex games: A wife turns to look out the window and brushes her hand across her husband’s lap. The husband does the same. A skirt overlaps a man’s pocket and you can see the movement of her hand when the hack is not looking—that old hole-in-the-pocket routine. These people were sex-starved and were doing things in public they’d never dream of doing normally.

There is the stump of a large oak tree in the visiting yard sawed off level with the ground that, before it had been toppled, had shielded some daring couples who, with friends on lookout, would enter into coital bliss while the hacks wandered around unaware of the fact. Eventually some actual criminal—a Christian zealot, it was said—blew the whistle on a couple of fornicators and the prison administration sent the guy to a real prison over in Tallahassee and took vengeance on the oak tree.

Well, Patience and I played these games, too, with the result that the young male malady known as “lover’s nuts’’ or “blue balls,” depending on where you’re from, struck me. It was not sexy. It was painful. The only cure I knew of was to go hide in one of the stalls in the bathroom with a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil (a popular product in camp) and work it out. If I didn’t do that, I’d have an embarrassing reaction to the water spray when I showered which was impossible either to hide or to attend because, as I mentioned, our showers were public. My great fear was that some hairy, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound, weight-shack faggot (no gays were allowed in Eglin, but who knows?) would smile and take as an invitation—trolling with live bait, if you will—my predicament. All in all, visiting was not profitable for me.

Two months later. I was sitting in one of the two park benches behind Dorm Four smoking a cigarette. Dorm Four was now perfect. I had even taken to combing tiny tree detritus from the lawns with my rake as fast as it landed, falling from the overhead and totally uncontrollable tree branches. I was having a hard time coming up with much else to do. Dorm Four could have been put in a glassed-in diorama at a museum, it was so perfect. Across from me, sitting on the other park bench behind Dorm Four, was George Allen, the caretaker of Dorm Five, which was identical to Dorm Four, right next door. George and I, both being custodians of entire dormitory grounds, had a lot in common and had taken to meeting like this daily, just before lunch, to have a smoke break and talk about new things to do to our dorms. “I saw you washing your sidewalks today,” I said to George. George smiled sheepishly. “You like it? The way it looks?” “Yeah,” I said jealously. “It looks nice while the concrete is wet—” “I know,” George said, looking exasperated. “If only there was some way to keep that wet look—”

“And, of course,” I added sharply, “these pigs get their feet wet and track up the halls and stuff. Bet that pisses off the inside cleaning crew.”

“Yeah,” George said, shrugging. “It may not work out.” He reached into his shirt pocket, brought out a pack of smokes, and leaned forward to offer one. I crushed out mine—it was short—in my five-gallon plastic bucket so as not to ruin the swirls I’d made in the sand of my butt bucket, and took a new one from George. We lighted up.

We sat and puffed contentedly for a while. George was a real skinny guy, jumpy and serious. He puffed sharply and looked over his shoulder often. “You don’t have to worry about Simpson,” I said. “He told me our dorms were the pride of the camp.”

“He did?”

No, but what the fuck. “Yes. Yesterday.”