Chickenhawk: Back in the World

“Yeah. First three weeks you’re here, before they assign you your regular job? You’re an A&O. They have you washing floors, cleaning latrines, digging ditches, shit like that—seven days a week.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yeah, sure, I’m kidding. Wait until tomorrow. Unless you got a visitor, you’ll be fucking working.”

“I do,” I said. “My wife’s coining.”

“Lucky,” Fred said. “They’ll call you out of your work detail when she shows up.”

“Man,” I said. “I had this image, you know? Me with a typewriter in some lonely cell, typing away. Like in the movies.”

“Yeah,” Fred said. “You have to go to places like the one I just got out of to do that. These camps are all work camps. Everybody works. In a real prison, it’s a big deal to get a job. Mostly you hang out in your cell jerking off and smoking pot. Actually,” Fred said, “I didn’t mind it too much.”

“Why’d they send you here?”

“They send some of us to places like this when we get close to getting out. Kind of a transition zone, I guess. I’ll be outa here in six months. How long you in for?”

“I was sentenced to five years,” I said, not believing it was me speaking. “Pot smuggling.”

“How much pot you have?” Fred asked.

“Three thousand pounds.”

“You’ll do two,” Fred said.

“You think so?”

“Yeah. You’ll see. You go before the parole board in a month or so. They have guidelines set up according to how much stuff you brought in. Three thousand pounds will get you two years.”

Two years. I looked around the room. The huge fan near our end of the room was buzzing loudly, swirling hot, humid air around the crowded room. Groups of men chattered around bunks and more talked in groups out on the porch. The noise was incredible. There was absolutely no privacy. Two years of this? “How long you been in jail so far, Fred?”

“When I leave, it’ll be five years.”

“Damn.”

“Yep,” Fred said, looking distracted. “Bob. About this writing. I was wondering. You think you could look at something I wrote?”

“Sure, where is it?”

“It’s still kinda rough, you know?” Fred said. “Maybe I’ll have it ready tomorrow.”

The showers closed at eleven. I stripped down, wrapped a towel around myself, and walked down the hall. The bathroom was like the ones you see in school locker rooms and in basic training in the Army, public showers and a long row of stalls with commodes. You showered with up to six other men. They had put doors on the toilet stalls, the only concession they’d made for privacy. I showered. I’d forgotten to bring shower shoes. I could feel colonies of foot fungus migrating through the pores in my skin and under my toenails. I dried off and walked back to my bunk and dressed.

I lay in bed after the lights went out at ten-thirty and listened to the fans buzzing. I closed my eyes and begged for cosmic intervention. I needed a miracle. Someone could decide I’d had enough and call and tell the warden to let me out. Or, equally likely, a spaceship might land and take me away. I slept.

Fred was right about us having to work on the weekends. The next morning at eight, the speaker blared that all A&O inmates were to meet at the television room in Dorm Two for checkoff. Jeff and John found me on the porch of Dorm Three. We walked to Dorm Two together.

We gawked at the luxury we saw inside the dormitory. Air-conditioning. Shiny and clean aisles, carpeted floors in the sleeping sections. There were glassed-in recreation rooms where inmates played chess and checkers and cards. Each inmate had his own stall, a cube. The bathrooms were completely tiled, brilliantly clean, with private shower stalls. It was like a hotel compared to Dorm Three.

The TV room was packed with new inmates. At one end of the room, the TV, a big-screen projection model, was off, but I found myself staring at the gray screen. After a five-minute wait, a hack showed up carrying a clipboard. “Tarzan,” somebody said. Somebody else laughed. The hack ignored them. I’d already heard the story. Tarzan got his name a year before by hiding in a tree in the woods next to Dorm Five trying to catch inmates smoking pot. He’d fallen out of the tree and broken his arm.

Tarzan was a compact man, wore his tailored uniform well, and seemed to enjoy his work. I’d seen him pat-searching an inmate the night before on the porch of my dorm with cool, professional, hawklike interest. Random body searches were part of the drill at Eglin. They were looking for drugs or money. Of course you couldn’t have drugs. I was surprised that you couldn’t have more than a dollar in change on you, either.

Tarzan looked at his clipboard and called out a few names, including John’s and mine. “You men have visitors.” The inmates booed and hissed. Tarzan looked at us dispassionately, continued. “After visiting hours, report to inmate Harris and clean up the visiting room.” The inmates cheered and laughed. As we left, we heard Tarzan calling off names for the work details.