Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“Spread your buttocks, please,” the hack said. While he was inspecting, he said, “How’d you locate him?”

I was standing bent over holding my butt apart thinking, Is this fucking real? “Ah, I sent a letter to the Pentagon. They forwarded it.”

“Oh. Good idea. Okay, you can put your clothes back on.”

“Thanks.”

I think I must have looked ruffled. The hack shrugged. “Just doing my job,” he said.

Since I’d gotten the commissary job, I’d started going to the commissary every night while Miss Reed and Frank and Leone ran the commissary line. I’d go in through the exit door. Miss Reed would see me and nod and unlock the door beside her. I’d go inside, say hi to Leone and Frank, and then walk through the storeroom to my office in the back. This was the only private place for me in camp. Nobody could come in here except Miss Reed or Leone or Frank. And since the line to the commissary never dwindled, they were always busy. I seldom saw them.

After a year of trying, I was finally sitting at my own desk in front of my own typewriter. It was quiet and private. No more excuses. I had my robot manuscript and I was trying to continue where I left off. I read what I wrote and I couldn’t remember how I did it. It seemed to me it was written by somebody else. I put a sheet of paper in the machine and stared at it.

Stare.

I turn on the radio and tune in the public station.

I stare at the blank page in the typewriter.

I reread the last two pages of the manuscript.

I stare at the blank page.

I put the manuscript away and write a letter to Patience, experimenting with the different type styles you can use on a Selectric by just changing the type ball.

When Miss Reed was ready to close up the place, Leone stood by the door after Miss Reed unlocked it to let them out. “What are you waiting for?” Miss Reed said to Leone.

“You’re supposed to pat-search us, Miss Reed.” Miss Reed was supposed to pat-search us every time we left the commissary. Instead she searched us randomly, which kept everybody honest.

Miss Reed nodded, smiled. Leone pulled this gag now and then. “Well, I’m not. I’ve been watching you all night. Get going.”

“Miss Reed, it’s a regulation. Who knows what all I have stashed on me? If you don’t pat-search me, I’ll pull my pants down. I’m no lawbreaker.” He laughed, adding, “Anymore.”

“Go ahead, Leone. I need a laugh,” Miss Reed said.

We all laughed and Leone and Frank left.

Miss Reed was extremely quick on the uptake with inmates and hacks. Rocky the hack once complained to her that he hated visiting-room duty because, he said, the inmate wives would stare at his bulge.

I asked her what she said to that.

“I told him maybe he needed a new wallet.”

I waited while she locked up the storeroom and the front door and then walked with her up the sidewalk beside the building.

“You’re looking pretty glum tonight,” she said.

“Am I?”

“Tried writing again, right?”

“Right.”

“Don’t worry. When you get out, it’ll come back to you.” We stopped at the sidewalk intersection where our paths separated. She would walk left, to the parking lot. I would walk right, to Dorm Five. “You haven’t got too long to go, have you?”

“Getting short,” I said. “They accepted my application for a halfway house. If I get a four-month halfway house, I’ll be out of here in May.”

“That’s only eight more months,” Miss Reed said.

“I know. I really can’t complain. What’s eight months?”

I work, eat, read, walk, have independent and extremely safe sex, and receive visitors. That’s what I do.