Chickenhawk: Back in the World

I’d brought my robot book manuscript to Eglin with the intention of finishing it. I wouldn’t be allowed to publish it while I was in prison, but I visualized myself walking out the front gate with the completed manuscript under my arm—making the best of a bad situation.

Writing, however, was problematic. There was never time at the clothing room. As Deacon trained me (”No, Bob, not form twenty-eight. Form twenty-one. You really have a college education?”), I realized just how much he did there. I was expected to do the same, and I was willing, especially considering the alternative, landscape, but I still had to get a place to write. Dorm Three was a nightmare. It was the only dormitory without air-conditioning. Two giant fans buzzed constantly, men argued, laughed, talked until lights out at ten. The place was noisy beyond belief. The reading rooms—the last quiet places on camp—were now all game rooms. The library was a converted closet with no room to spare. The legal library had three typewriters, but they were restricted for use to prepare legal briefs. Inmates waited in line to type up their appeals. The one thing I could do in the noise was read. Since my robot book was going to be an adventure novel, I checked adventure novels out of the inmate library. I read Aztec, Eye of the Needle, Little Big Man, Marathon Man, The Key to Rebecca, and many others. I read John Gardner’s Art of the Novel, and learned the word denouement, which means the solution, the end, of a novel, and now had a professional writing term to use in conversations with inmates, along with suggestions to not split infinitives or leave participles dangling. My inability to write in prison applied to my letters home as well. The ones I did manage were short and essentially incoherent.

Problems at the clothing room occupied my mind. Inventory coming up in a week, need to order new shirts, socks getting low, Deacon leaving soon, and so on.

I’d been in the clothing room for three weeks when, just before Christmas, the warden discovered me. I was typing a report for the commissary because, although Foster did their receiving for them, he could not type up the reports. Foster’s big job, I observed, was operating an ancient, programmable adding machine with which he calculated the retail prices for the stuff the commissary received. It took him maybe a half hour a day to figure the twenty percent markup for the stuff on the receiving tickets, and then he handed the stack to me for typing and left to do whatever he did. I didn’t care. I liked typing, and Foster had helped me get my job. I typed. Baker was out of the office. I heard the door open, figured it was Baker coming in, kept on typing. Felt someone staring at me. Looked up. The warden. I stopped typing. The warden smiled the slightest smile and shook his head. He nodded at me sternly, turned, and walked out of the office. I watched him walk up the sidewalk toward the administration building. Baker returned. I told him the warden had been here. He was surprised; there had been no inspection. I told him that I thought he might be getting a call from the warden about me because the warden had told me he’d never let me work around a typewriter.

“Really?” Baker said, shocked. He saw his new clerk evaporating before his eyes.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you before,” I said.

The phone rang.

“Wally?” Baker said into the phone. Wally was Baker’s buddy, a counselor in Dorm One. Baker laughed his southern, good-old-boy laugh, which meant Wally had a new fuck joke.

I returned to my typing.

By dinner no one had called.

The next day, no one called. I met the warden in camp, said hello. He didn’t mention the incident. Maybe he thought I showed admirable ingenuity and spunk by sneaking past him. Maybe he knew they needed a competent clerk in clothing.

Deacon was gone the next day. I smiled when I realized he hadn’t said good-bye. That was his style.

The tall blond guy in the issue room, John, assumed that as the head of the issue room, he’d be getting the desk in that room. Deacon had used the desk, so I figured it would be mine. I walked into the issue room and saw John going through the drawers. I sat in a chair and watched him. John had been working here for almost two years. John looked up a few times, but mostly he was sorting through the stuff Deacon had left behind. We were contesting the ownership of this desk without saying a word.

“I know Deacon said you could have this desk,” John said after a while, “but I’ve got seniority. I need a place to run this room. This is going to be my desk.”