Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“Good. We need some. Like yesterday.”

We walked out the back door of the kitchen, onto the service road, and up to the clothing room. “Mason, I know you’re a capable guy, but you don’t seem to get it, you know?”

“Get what?”

“That’s what I mean. You’re all the time typing and doing your job. You’re blind to the action going on all around you.”

“Action?”

“You’ll see.”

Foster took me on a tour of my own clothing room. We went back to the three washing machines. Two guys were there washing clothes. “Now, who do you suppose these clothes are for?” Foster asked.

“I don’t know. Never cared.”

“Well, people pay for the service, Mason. Some guys don’t want their clothes washed in with all the other who-knows-what’s-in-them stuff. They want their stuff hand washed and ironed separately. We provide the service, and we all get presents from the commissary.”

I’d heard how the payment plan worked. No inmate was allowed to have more than ninety dollars sent to him in a month. Some of the richer inmates would enlist the services of poorer inmates as “shoppers.” The deal was that the shoppers would receive ninety a month, every month, half of which was theirs to keep. To earn their forty-five bucks, the shoppers had to go shopping for their benefactors. Some of the richer inmates, I was told, had as many as ten shoppers because they spent heavily in the nightly poker games. Foster and his employees were getting paid in cigarettes, ice cream, and tennis shoes. There were other services. When I moved into Dorm Five, I noticed that one inmate never made his bed or swept out his cube in the morning; he just dressed and walked out. Two guys who cleaned the dorm would come in every morning and straighten his cube up to inspection level in five minutes—made the bed, even vacuumed the carpet.

Foster called one of the laundry guys over. “Stevie. Bob here’s gonna take over for me when I’m gone.”

Stevie nodded.

“Evans says we need more rags,” Foster said.

“When?”

“I’d like to have a couple of bundles this afternoon.”

“You got it,” Stevie said.

As we walked back to the office, Foster told me the rags came from the sheets the inmates turned in every day. They washed them with lots of Clorox and ripped them to dish towel size. In time, the rags were washed again and again, eventually wearing out. They just converted more sheets.

“Doesn’t anybody ever miss the sheets?” I asked.

“Sure. Like on the largest Air Force base in the world, they notice they’re short a few hundred sheets a year out of a million.”

I nodded. “Right.”

That afternoon, Foster came to my desk to get me. He’d been cool to me since I’d arrived, but now that he’d decided to pass his operation on to me, he took to it with enthusiasm. We went back to see Stevie and got the two bundles of rags, all folded and tied and packed in mattress liners. As we walked down the service road, Foster wanted to know what I wanted the kitchen to do for me.

“Raisin Bran.”

Foster laughed. “You noticed, eh? No Raisin Bran in the serving line?”

“Right. That’s what I want.”

We gave the rags to an inmate who was waiting for them.

The next morning, I went to breakfast as usual, except that when I got in the serving line I noticed one of the inmate kitchen workers behind the coffee um nod slightly. I got a tray and scooted it along the rails. People ahead of me were asking for Raisin Bran. One guy said, “Out? How can you be out? The stuff comes in an assortment. See the box?” the inmate says, pointing behind the counter. “Says Post Assortment Pack. But you’re always out of Raisin Bran, no matter how early I get here.”

“I don’t know why,” said one of the servers. “Talk to Post’s legal department.”

When I moved in front of the cereal bin, a hand shot out beside it with a box of Raisin Bran in it. I took the box and put it on my tray. When I got to a table, I created a sensation. I told them I’d gotten the last box.

The prison population had grown—swelling to over 750 men. They were arresting so many people for drug violations that the place was getting stuffed. A dozen guys from Steinhatchee, Florida, a small fishing community, showed up one day. As a consequence of the flood of new prisoners, the prison staff converted all the recreation rooms (the former quiet rooms) into bunk rooms. The inmates sleeping in them called them aquariums because they lived behind glass. That still wasn’t enough space, so they had also installed double bunks in the cubes that were against the back walls of the sleeping sections so that two guys shared the twenty-eight square feet, the same desk, and the same chair. I’d been sent to such a cube when I first got to Dorm Five. My cube mate was seldom there, and being back against the wall, I had privacy and, compared to Dorm Three, quiet. I spent most evenings reading.

I felt someone watching me. I looked over my book and saw Johnson, the Seal, standing at the entrance to my cube. He wore a T-shirt. His arms were wiry, strong. His stomach flat. His dark eyes piercing.

I sat up. “Hi, Johnson.”