Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

They say you learn who your real friends are at times like this. Many of the prisoners have gone to great effort to hide the fact that they are here. Their families often claim they’re working “overseas” or are “on assignment.” I have no such refuge, but it’s better. I know everybody knows I’m here, and it’s a big relief. My friends do not desert me. John O’Connor, the drawing professor who almost witnessed my exploding drawing, and his wife, Mallory (my former art history teacher), come to visit several times; Joe Leps and Nikki Ricciuti visit me with their daughter Zubi; Merv Wetherley, a childhood chum who taught me to fly in high school, a bush pilot in Alaska, saw my story in Time magazine at an Eskimo trading post and comes to visit; my parents come several times. I have a picture of my mother and me together in the visiting room; it looks like the one in which we posed together on the occasion of my being a new freshman at college, except we’re both older and I’m in prison blues. Jack and his girlfriend, Wallie, come with Patience now and then. Wallie is like a daughter to Patience. Jack started going to the University of Florida when I came to prison, but dropped out. He claims he isn’t bothered by my being in jail, but I don’t see how it could not have affected him. He is very bright, but he is distracted, isn’t sure what he wants to do. He loves music and practices guitar regularly. He loves playing Ultimate Frisbee (a team sport played something like hockey except with a Frisbee). He loves Wallie, too. He does not love going to school to learn things he doubts he needs to know.

Some of the press visit, though I am not now much of a story. The local paper, the Fort Walton Beach Daily News, sent a reporter, Bruce Rolfsen, to interview me. The warden accompanied us while we walked around the camp. Rolfsen asked me how long I’d been at Eglin. I told him thirteen months and that “I’m now more than half rehabilitated.” I smiled at the warden. “In another year, I will be a hundred percent safe for society.”

The warden looked sour. He did not like jokes like that. When Rolfsen asked me what I thought about people using marijuana, I said—quoting a line from Jeff MacNelly’s cartoon strip, Shoe, “Smoking marijuana will cause your body to be thrown into jail.”

The warden didn’t like that, either, but this is a free country. The remark was printed as I said it.

Miss Reed worked every day in the commissary office and every night running the commissary line. She petitioned the administration for help and, after several months, they hired someone.

One day Miss Reed showed up with the new guy in tow. His name was Holbrook. Holbrook was quiet and nervously observant of us, the inmates. He’d gone to hack school and knew all the rules. He told us he’d worked at the FBI.

“An FBI agent?” Leone asked.

“You might say that,” Holbrook said mysteriously. Inmates are not allowed to grill hacks, so we left it at that. His nickname became Elliott Ness.

Elliott Ness was an intrusion into our comfortable relationship with Miss Reed. When he first ran the line without Miss Reed, he pat- searched Leone and Frank when they left. They were outraged: What? You don’t trust us? Elliott Ness explained that it was the rule.

Holbrook’s nickname became especially ironic when we finally got him to tell us what his job had been at the FBI. He had been a file clerk. On Miss Reed’s days on, we made jokes about Elliott Ness the wastebasket monitor, Elliott Ness the file duster. Miss Reed told us she didn’t want to hear that and to leave the poor man alone. Whatever Miss Reed said, we did. No more Elliott Ness jokes in front of Miss Reed.

At the next commissary inventory, we came up short two thousand dollars’ worth of goods. The shortages were blamed on Elliott Ness, he being the only new variable in the operation. This was a source of great mirth to Leone and Frank. After an investigative inventory, and after the dust cleared, Miss Reed told us she knew we must be stealing stuff when Mr. Holbrook was running things. “It’s not just illegal,” she said, “it’s downright nasty. That man can’t help it if he was a file clerk. He’s just trying to make a living and you guys want to hurt him for that? He could lose his job if we come up short again. You leave him alone, or you’ll answer to me.”

The next inventory was right on.

On December 27, Waterhead called me out of work. He told me my father had had a stroke. “I just talked to his doctor. He says he probably won’t make it,” he said.

I nodded, looking down at the floor, feeling the helplessness piling up. Nannie, my dad’s mother, had died three months before and I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral.

“You aren’t due for a furlough for two months. We can let you take one now, a five-day furlough, but it’ll replace the one you’ve got coming. You want to do that?”

“Of course I do. My father’s dying.”